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Günter Grass is Germany's best-known and internationally most successful living author, from his first novel The Tin Drum to his recent controversial autobiography. He is known for his tireless social and political engagement with the issues that have shaped post-War Germany: the difficult legacy of the Nazi past, the Cold War and the arms race, environmentalism, unification and racism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999. This Companion offers the widest coverage of Grass's oeuvre across the range of media in which he works, including literature, television and visual arts. Throughout, there is particular emphasis on Grass's literary style, the creative personality which inhabits all his work, and the impact on his reputation of revelations about his early involvement with Nazism. The volume sets out, in a fresh and lively fashion, the fundamentals that students and readers need in order to understand Grass and his individual works.
This collection of essays considers fundamental philosophical questions from a variety of perspectives, taking as point of departure the standpoint of Classical German thinkers Kant and Hegel with their focus on epistemic, moral, and aesthetic values as central to achievement of a meaningful human life, both as an individual and in the context of human society and culture, nature, and the universe as a whole. From this vantage point, the relationship of poetry and philosophy comes into play, and central ethical questions are raised regarding the practice of life in relation to human rights and the rights of other species.
This book reads messianic expectation as the defining characteristic of German culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. It has long been accepted that the Expressionist movement in Germany was infused with a thoroughly messianic strain. Here, with unprecedented detail and focus, that strain is traced through the work of four important Expressionist playwrights: Ernst Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and Franz Werfel. Moreover, these dramatists are brought into new and sustained dialogues with the theorists and philosophers of messianism who were their contemporaries: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem. In arguing, for example, that concepts like Bloch’s utopian self-encounter (Selbstbegegnung) and Benjamin’s messianic now-time (Jetztzeit) reappear as the framework for Expressionism’s staging of collective redemption in a new age, Anderson forges a previously underappreciated link in the study of Central European thought in the early twentieth century.
This volume presents a new approach to the political engagement of three major West German authors, Uwe Johnson, Günther Grass and Martin Walser. Whereas analysis of intellectuals' participation in the political upheaval of the late 1960s has tended to focus on speeches written in response to contemporary events, this book examines works of fiction for the way in which authors reflected upon their engagement in a more contemplative medium. Examination of these literary reflections reveals a mismatch between writers' confidence as public intellectuals and their private anxiety. Beginning with a survey of intellectual engagement until the late 1960s, the present volume moves onto a theoretica...
Given German history and Germany's current substantial non-citizenship population, it is hardly surprising that multiculturalism with its treatment of "the other" is as controversial there as in the US. Sixteen papers derived from an unspecified conference co-hosted by the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown U., Berlin's Humboldt U., and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation address: theorizing comparisons; gender and race; American studies in Germany; German studies in America; and multiculturalism in the transatlantic sphere. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"The only German literature journal that presents a coherently feminist perspective and that serves as a forum for feminist voices."_Susanne Zantop, Dartmouth College
This collection of essays centers on women writers who negotiated, interrogated, and challenged the gender ideology of separate spheres through their advocacy and representations of female Bildung. The term Bildung encompasses an individual's entire moral, spiritual, behavioral, emotional, political and intellectual development. The contributors analyze works of fiction, memoirs, autobiographies, letters, the periodical press, and conduct and cookbooks from the mid-1700s to circa 1900 that confront the separate spheres paradigm and promote women's educational and personal development. They examine women's writing and reading practices, moral and gender philosophies, political activism, and w...
Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction. Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed t...
Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people
Critical essays on contemporary German novelist. Martin Walser (born 1927) is one of the most prolific contemporary German novelists, and one with a place in world literature. His work provides an astute critical commentary in novelistic form on postwar Germany. The present volume comprises essays by eleven Walser experts on various aspects of his writings, with concentration on the novels of the last 15 years, books such as Runaway Horse (1978), The Inner Man (1979), The Swan Villa(1980), Letter to Lord Liszt (1982), and In Defense of Childhood (1991). Parallels and influences discussed in these studies include Schiller, Richardson, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Updike, Brecht, and Walter Kempowski.