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This is Camden House’s general German studies series, in which numerous titles have appeared since the early 1980s. It welcomes a broad range of topics and approaches - from traditional, narrowly literary studies on one hand to forays into cultural studies and cultural history on the other, from approaches based on traditional close reading to those emphasizing theory, from feminist to postmodern to multicultural. All periods of German culture and literature are fair game, from medieval Spielmannsepen to currently emerging writers of the twenty-first century.

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253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 12 of 13

The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil's 'The Man Without Qualities'
  • Thomas Sebastian
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    14 February 2005
  • As the utopian projection of a world in which the conditional mood is preferred to the indicative, Robert Musil's ambitious novel 'The Man Without Qualities' is widely recognized as a great example of aesthetic modernism and a profound reflection on the 'postmodern condition.' Based on the new and more inclusive English translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, this study provides the English-speaking reader with a well-researched commentary that situates Musil's novel in the cultural, literary, and scientific context of the early 20th century. Revealing the novel's many philosophical underpinnings, the study analyzes the intersection of theoretical reflection and aesthetic imagination essential to Musil's programmatic move beyond realism. Thomas Sebastian explores Musil's background in experimental psychology, which he studied under the pioneering psychologist Carl Stumpf, and how it and other strains of scientific thought, including that of Ernst Mach, on whose philosophical ideas Musil wrote his doctoral thesis, are reflected in his great novel. Thomas Sebastian is associate professor of German at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Imperial Messages
  • Orientalism as Self-Critique in the Habsburg 'Fin de Siècle'
  • Robert Lemon
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 June 2011
  • In recent years a debate has arisen on the applicability of postcolonial theory to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some have argued that Austria-Hungary's lack of overseas territories renders the concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism irrelevant, while others have cited the quasi-colonial attitudes of the Viennese elite towards the various 'subject peoples' of the empire as a point of comparison. 'Imperial Messages' applies postcolonial theory to works of orientalist fiction by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka, all subjects of the empire, challenging Edward Said's notion that orientalism invariably acts in the ideological service of European colonialism. It argues that these Habsburg authors employ oriental motifs not to promulgate Western hegemony, but to engage in self-reflection and self-critique, including critique of the foundational concepts of orientalist discourse itself. By providing detailed textual analyses of canonical works of Austrian Modernism, including Hofmannsthal's 'Tale of the 672nd Night,' Musil's 'Young Törless,' and Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony,' the book not only offers new postcolonial readings of these Austrian works, but also shows how they question the conventional postcolonial and post-Saidian view of orientalism as a purely hegemonic discourse. Robert Lemon is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Oklahoma.

Hermann Broch, Visionary in Exile
  • The 2001 Yale Symposium
  • Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler, Matthias Konzett, Willy Riemer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    03 March 2003
  • The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch ranks with Kafka and Musil among the three greatest 20th-century Austrian novelists and belongs to the century's most gifted novelists in German from whatever country. He established his reputation with 'The Sleepwalkers', a trilogy of political and philosophical novels. His best-known work is 'The Death of Virgil', a long, challenging work in a lyrical, exuberant, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible style, a kind of cerebral stream-of-consciousness of the dying Virgil. Broch also wrote extensively about modern art and architecture, Hofmannsthal, and mass psychology. He has a special connection to Yale, as he lived the last years of his life there after having escaped Austria in 1938. The participants in the Yale Symposium of April 2001 are among the world's most prominent Broch scholars. Fourteen of their presentations have been extensively revised for this volume, which focuses on Broch as critic and as novelist and dramatist. Topics include Broch's views on kitsch and art, and on drama; his cultural criticism; his cooperation with Borgese and Arendt; his theory of mass psychology; history in his works, Ernst Kretschmer's influence on him; 'Virgil' and Celan's 'Atemwende'; Jean Starr Untermeyer's translation of 'Virgil'; guilt and the fall in 'Those without Guilt'; and Broch reception in Japan. PAUL MICHAEL LüTZELER is Distinguished University Professor of German at Washington University St. Louis and editor of Broch's collected works. MATTHIAS KONZETT is associate professor of German at Yale; WILLY RIEMER is associate professor of German at the University of Delaware, and CHRISTA SAMMONS is curator of the German collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture
  • Edited by James Hodkinson, Jeffrey Morrison
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2009
  • Islam has been a rich topic in German-language literature since the middle ages, and the writings about it not only reveal much about Islamic culture but also about the European 'home' culture. Many of the early essays in this chronologically arranged volume uncover fresh evidence of how German writers used images of Islam-as-other to define their individual subject positions as well as to define the German nation and the Christian religion. The perspectives of many contemporary writers are, however, far removed from such a polar opposition of cultures. Their experience of the German-Islamic encounter is complicated by a crucial factor: many of them emerge from Muslim migrant communities such as the German-Turkish community. The culturally hybrid origins of these writers and their expression of experiences and ideologies that cross boundaries of East and West, Christendom and Islam, strongly affect the findings of the essays as the volume moves toward the present. The texts discussed include travelogues and other firsthand encounters with Islam; reports for colonial authorities; aesthetic treatises on Islamic art; literary, essayistic, and theological writing on Islamic religious practice; the incorporation of characters, situations, and settings from the Islamic world into fiction or drama; and fictional and autobiographical writing by Muslims in German. Contributors: Cyril Edwards, Silke Falkner, James Hodkinson, Timothy R. Jackson, Margaret Littler, Rachel MagShamráin, Frauke Matthes, Yomb May, Jeffrey Morrison, Kate Roy, Monika Shafi, Edwin Wieringa, W. Daniel Wilson, Karin E. Yesilada. James Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at Warwick University; Jeffrey Morrison is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Schiller the Dramatist
  • A Study of Gesture in the Plays
  • John Guthrie
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 July 2009
  • Many aspects of the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) have attracted attention. His work as a philosopher and pioneering thinker in poetics and aesthetics and as a historian have recently been the focus of much attention. But Schiller's dramas have always held the most interest, and they continue to be performed regularly both in German-speaking lands and around the world. Schiller is a dramatist of psychological conflict rather than of abstract ideas, and he had a unique grasp of how to use the stage to that end. This study of Schiller's use of gesture begins with a discussion of the origins of the gestures he employs, viewing them in relation to his medical writings, his literary influences, theories of the theater and acting, and Enlightenment thinking in general. The study then considers the use of gesture and related aspects of stagecraft in Schiller's nine completed dramas, highlighting elements of continuity and development. It is concerned with the interpretation of gesture, often marginalized in studies of Schiller's works, and with the interrelationship between gesture and verbal text. It also considers Schiller's relationship to the theater of his day, and discusses the first performances of his plays as well as their more recent stage history in both Germany and Great Britain. Appearing in the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth, this study treats his dramas as plays written to be performed - as works that reach their fullest potential in the theater. John Guthrie teaches modern German literature and language at the University of Cambridge, where he is fellow and director of studies at Murray Edwards College.

Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature
  • Georgina Paul
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics - conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature - and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations - nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined the cultural crisis of German modernity, notably at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as a crisis of masculinity. Feminist critiques, meanwhile, have viewed cultural history as male-generated and 'phallocentric,' in need of a feminine corrective. The innovation of this book is to examine these two gendered perspectives side by side, investigating the culturally symbolic significance of gender in post 1945 German language literature via a sequence of paired readings of major, thematically related texts by male and female authors, including Ingeborg Bachmann's novel 'Malina' (1971) and Max Frisch's 'Mein Name sei Gantenbein' (1964); Frisch's 'Homo Faber' (1957) and Christa Wolf's 'Störfall' (1987); Elfriede Jelinek's 'Die Klavierspielerin' and Rainald Goetz's 'Irre' (both 1983); and Heiner Müller's 'Die Hamletmaschine' (1977) and Christa Wolf's 'Kassandra' (1983). Finally, Barbara Köhler's eight-poem cycle 'Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984-85; published 1991) is considered as offering a way past the 'impasse' of the male and female viewpoints. Georgina Paul is University Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College.

The Revivifying Word
  • Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe's Romantic Age
  • Clayton Koelb
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2008
  • 'What is not 'Life' that really is?' asked Coleridge, struggling, like many poets, philosophers, and scientists of Europe's Romantic age, to formulate a theory of life that explained the mysterious relation between dead material bodies and living, animate beings. Romantic intellectuals found a key to this mystery surprisingly close at hand: the process by which dead matter could come to life must be something like the process of reading. 'The Revivifying Word' examines the reanimating acts of reading that became a central focus of attention for Romantic writers. German theorists, building on the Apostle Paul's assertion that the dead letter can be revivified by the living spirit, proposed a permeable, legible boundary between the living and the dead. This inaugurated a revolution in European aesthetics, implanting the germ of an extraordinarily productive narrative idea that enriched Romantic literature for decades. Poets and novelists created a large cast of characters who crossed the boundary between death and life with the help of some form of reading: figures like Keats's Glaucus, Kleist's Elizabeth Kohlhaas, Shelley's Frankenstein (and the monster he creates), Maturin's Melmoth, Poe's Madeline Usher, and Gautier's Spirite. Clayton Koelb demonstrates that such fictions offer a nuanced consideration of the most urgent question facing any theory of life: how do material bodies come to acquire, to lose, and then perhaps to regain the immaterial intellectual/spiritual quality that defines animate beings? Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond
  • Normalization and the Berlin Republic
  • Stuart Taberner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 January 2005
  • This book presents a comprehensive, lively account of recent developments in German fiction at a moment when-for the first time in many years-German authors are once again the subject of international attention and acclaim. It introduces English-speaking audiences to the complex dilemmas that are shaping the ways in which Germans are presently defining themselves, their difficult past, and the new 'Berlin Republic.' The theme that runs throughout the volume is the ongoing debate on German 'normalization.' In offering a wide-ranging consideration of contemporary German literature, the book complements a broad discussion of trends in present-day German politics, society, and culture with detailed readings of texts by internationally renowned figures as W. G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Marcel Beyer, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Thomas Brussig, and Bernhard Schlink, and by newer, emerging writers. Topics include the literary debates of the 1990s, the literary market and marketing, literary responses to the former East and West Germany in the age of globalization and to the Nazi past and portrayals of 'ordinary Germans,' depictions of 'German wartime suffering,' contemporary writing on 'Jewish fates' and efforts to revive the 'German-Jewish symbiosis,' and finally, the recent wave of writing about the provinces. Stuart Taberner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at the University of Leeds, UK.

The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti
  • Out of the Shadows of a Husband
  • Julian Preece
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    02 April 2007
  • The Viennese playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Veza Canetti was born in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in 1963 in London. Part of the avant garde in 1920s Vienna (where she met her future husband and Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti), from 1932 she wrote radical short stories drawn from everyday life for the Vienna 'Arbeiter-Zeitung.' After censorship under the so-called Corporate State reduced her opportunities for publication, she disguised her critique in irony and humor, but from then on published little. Until 1990, when her first novel, 'Yellow Street,' was finally published, Veza was known only as her husband's muse and literary assistant. As more of her writings appeared, critics became convinced that it was he who was responsible for her decline into obscurity, notwithstanding his protestations of support and admiration. This biography tells a more nuanced story, presenting Veza's literary career against the background of her troubled times, drawing on Elias's unpublished papers to assess their literary partnership, showing how their early writings constituted a private dialogue on topics as diverse as feminism and Jewish identity and how several key themes in his work are anticipated in hers. Julian Preece is Professor of German at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Who Is This Schiller Now?
  • Essays on his Reception and Significance
  • Edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 May 2011
  • The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) - an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist - are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: 'Who is this Schiller?' The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel. Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

Nolten the Painter
  • A Novella in Two Parts
  • Eduard Mörike
  • Translated by Raleigh Whitinger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2005
  • When one thinks of German artist-novels and 'Bildungsromane,' works long available in translation come to mind-by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, or Grass. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled 'Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Teilen' (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood, and until now has never been translated into English, despite its obvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which the narrator is subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist Nolten's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating too is the mysterious trail of the 'Grenzgänger,' or border-line characters, with their hints at the dimension of 'Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves' that seems to threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful 'mastery.' Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Alberta.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism
  • Paul Bishop, R. H. Stephenson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    24 November 2004
  • This book argues that Nietzsche's polemics against the 19th-century reception of Goethe and Schiller should not obscure his own more positive evaluation of Weimar classicism, as has generally been the case. The authors uncover the continuing influence of Weimar classicism at the very heart of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory, which in turn became the cornerstone of his epistemological and moral concerns. The book takes as its starting point the view that 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' has a single, coherent message that it identifies with what Goethe called 'the gospel of beauty.' A hitherto unappreciated unity of plot, style, and argument is thus revealed in both 'Zarathustra' and Nietzsche's philosophical 'oeuvre' as a whole, showing how he participates in a 'perennial aesthetic.' In this connection Nietzsche's statement in 'The Gay Science' is revealing: 'I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful ? then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.' The book provides an overview of related scholarly literature; discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic theory in 'The Birth of Tragedy'; recounts the composition of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and offers an interpretation of its 'aesthetic gospel'; a concluding chapter explores historical continuities in aesthetic theory. By demonstrating the constitutive function of the aesthetics of Weimar classicism in his philosophy, this book opens up a fresh and original perspective on Nietzsche. Paul Bishop is Professor of German, and R. H. Stephenson is William Jacks Professor of German Language and Literature, both at the University of Glasgow.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
  • Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin
  • Larson Powell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 May 2008
  • Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the 'social constructivism' of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct 'identities' or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term 'the Technological Unconscious' refers both to the intersection between psychoanalysis and theories of modernism and to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and - especially - poetry by Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin from the years 1900 to 1945. In connection with these works, Powell analyzes the conceptions of 'subject' and 'system' in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. 'The Technological Unconscious' is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic 'culturalist' theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other. Larson Powell is assistant professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970–2010
  • John D. Pizer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2011
  • The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East and West rebelled against the postwar hagiography, taking up a tradition of imaginatively engaging with the giants of the period, casting them in major roles in their works in order to critique the nation's past and its present, a tradition that has been carried on by more contemporary writers. This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German 'author-as-character' fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the 'Goethezeit' continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture. The book will be of interest to both scholars of the 'Goethezeit' and of contemporary German literature and culture. John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.

Schiller's Literary Prose Works
  • New Translations and Critical Essays
  • Edited by Jeffrey L. High
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2008
  • Friedrich Schiller was a dramatist and poet for the ages, an important aesthetic theorist, and among Germany's first historians. But he left few works of literary prose behind - seven short tales and fragments, almost all from early in his career - and although they include some of his most resonant in his own time, they are largely overlooked today. Several of the pieces - which include The Ghost-Seer, A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History, The Criminal of Lost Honor: A True Story, A Curious Example of Female Vengeance, Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt, Play of Fate: A Fragment of a True Story, and Haoh-Kiöh-Tschuen - have never before appeared in English translation. But they are a seminal link in the evolution of the then-nascent German novella. They exhibit the anthropological curiosity and moral confusion that made Schiller's first drama, The Robbers, a sensation, demonstrating an original artistry that justifies consideration of scholars and students today, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of his birth. New translations of the seven works appear here together with introductory critical essays. Contributors: Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Otto W. Johnston, Gail K. Hart, Dennis F. Mahoney; Translators: Francis Lamport, Ian Codding, Jeffrey L. High, Ellis Dye, Edward T. Larkin, Carrie Ann Collenberg. Jeffrey L. High is associate professor at California State University Long Beach.

Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Violence, Identity, Nation
  • Steven Howe
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2012
  • Heinrich von Kleist is renowned as an author who posed a radical challenge to the orthodoxies of his age. Today, his works are frequently seen to relentlessly deconstruct the paradigms of Idealism and to reflect a Romantic, even postmodern, perspective on the ambiguities of the world. Such a view fails, however, to do full justice to the more complex manner in which Kleist articulates the tensions between the securities of Enlightenment thought and the anxieties of the revolutionary age. Steven Howe offers a new angle on Kleist's dialogue with the Enlightenment by reconsidering his investment in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Where previous critics have trivialized this as intense but fleeting and born of personal identification, Howe here establishes Rousseau's importance as a lasting source of inspiration for the violent constellations of Kleist's fiction. Taking account of both Rousseau's critique of modernity and his later propositions for working toward the Enlightenment promise of emancipation, the book locates a mode of discourse which, placed in the historical context of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, sheds new light on the political and ethical issues at play in Kleist's work. Steven Howe is Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. He is co-editor, with Ricarda Schmidt and Seán Allan, of 'Heinrich von Kleist: Konstruktive und Destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt' (forthcoming, 2012).

In the Shadow of Empire
  • Austrian Experiences of Modernity in the Writings of Musil, Roth, and Bachmann
  • Malcolm Spencer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2008
  • Austria was not the only European country whose old order disintegrated in the early twentieth century, giving way to the crisis of modernity, nor the only country whose literature bears the marks of this crisis. But modernity's onset was experienced differently in Austria: in the words of Karl Kraus, it served as 'laboratory for the fall of world civilization.' This book examines the crisis as reflected in fiction written by Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Ingeborg Bachmann between 1920 and 1970. After examining the elusive concept of modernity, Malcolm Spencer looks at the responses of the three authors to the central themes of modernity: fragmentation, nationalism, the end of empire, and ambivalence. Chapters on Musil examine his understanding of the 'ancien régime' in Austria and his analysis of the ideological stage of modernity. Spencer then considers Roth's more negative reaction, showing the post-imperial novel 'Radetzkymarsch' to be a nostalgic response to the collapse of Habsburg Austria and the rise of fascism. The final chapter looks again at the end of empire, not in the work of writers who lived through it, but through that of one who experienced it as a historical and cultural legacy: Ingeborg Bachmann. Malcolm Spencer is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis
  • Transformation beyond Measure?
  • James R. Hodkinson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    03 December 2007
  • The great poet and polymath Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis, was long seen as representing a particular brand of German Romanticism, embodying a predilection for the mystical and the irrational and a longing for death. Yet 20th-century scholars debunked that myth and arrived at a view of the poet as one who produced a unified, precociously modern body of work in which human systems of individual and collective being as well as knowledge and its disciplines exist as fictional structures, as represented possibility rather than fixed truth. As such, all being and knowledge could and should be subjected to the ironic play of Romantic poetry, which sought to renew the individual and the world it inhabited. Hardenberg's work has come in for particular criticism for idealizing women, thus denying the living, expressive female subject; the conservative social roles it ascribes to women are also cited. Although more recent critics have discerned an empowered female subject in Novalis, this is the first balanced, book-length study of gender in Novalis in English. It concludes that Hardenberg's Romantic writing began to be successful in reinventing the 'fiction' of female identity, and goes further to reveal his extensive interaction with women as intellectual equals. James R. Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Warwick, UK.

Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany
  • Edited by William Niven, James Jordan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 July 2003
  • The cultural history of 20th-century Germany, more perhaps than that of any other European country, was decisively influenced by political forces and developments. This volume of essays focuses on the relationship between German politics and culture, which is most obvious in the case of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, where the one-party control of all areas of life was extended to the arts; these were expected to conform to the ideals of the day. But the relationship between politics and the arts has not always been one purely of coercion, censorship, collusion, and opportunism. Many writers greeted the First World War with quite voluntary enthusiasm; others conjured up the National Socialist revolution in intense Expressionist images long before 1933. The GDR was heralded by writers returning from Nazi exile as the anti-fascist answer to the Third Reich. And in West Germany, politics did not dictate artistic norms, nor was it greeted with any great enthusiasm among intellectuals, but writers did tend to ally themselves with particular parties. To an extent, the pre-1990 literary establishment in the Federal Republic was dominated by a left-liberal consensus that German division was the just punishment for Auschwitz. United Germany began its existence with a fierce literary debate in 1990-92, with leading literary critics arguing that East and West German literature had basically shored up the political order in the two countries. Now a new literature was required, one that was free of ideology, intensely subjective and experimental in its aesthetic. In 1998, the author Martin Walser called for an end to the author's role as "conscience of the nation" and for the right to subjective experience. This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany. William Niven and James Jordan are readers in German at the University of Nottingham Trent.

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's 'The Tin Drum'
  • Peter Arnds
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    06 August 2004
  • In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter Grass, a prominent and controversial figure in the ongoing discussion of the German past and reunification, finally gained recognition as Germany's greatest living author, a writer of international importance and acclaim. Grass's 1959 novel 'The Tin Drum' remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter Arnds offers a completely new reading of the novel, analyzing an aspect of Grass's literary treatment of German history that has never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials as 'life unworthy of life,' their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois paradigms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular culture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these 'asocials,' for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that Grass creates in the novel an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a 'Stunde Null,' that putative tabula rasa in 1945. Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University.

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