You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the ‘perpetrator collective’ and its legacies. The volume brings together German, English and Israeli literary and film scholars and historians addressing issues surrounding the representation of German wartime suffering from the imme...
An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s and examines shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation."--BOOK JACKET.
After Representation? explores one of the major issues in Holocaust studiesùthe intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature. As experts in the study of literature and culture, the scholars in this collection examine the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveal how writersùwhether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from the Nazi genocideùarticulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, and between the condition of life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence. What imaginative literature brings to the study of the Holocaust is an ability to test the limits of language and its conventions. After Representation? moves beyond the suspicion of representation and explores the changing meaning of the Holocaust for different generations, audiences, and contexts.
These accessible and informative essays explore the central themes and contexts of the best writers working in Germany today.
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 cent...
In her 2007 poem cycle Niemands Frau, Barbara Köhler returns to Homer’s Odyssey, not to retell it, but to take up some of the threads it has woven into the cultural tradition of the West – and to unravel them, just as Penelope, the wife of the hero who called himself Nobody, unravelled each night the web she re-wove by day. Köhler’s return to the Odyssey takes place under the sign of a grammatical shift, from ‘er’ to ‘sie’, from the singular hero to a plurality of female voices – Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso, Ino Leucothea, Helen and Penelope herself – with implications for thinking about identity, power and knowledge, about gender and relationality, but also about the corpor...
By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp a...
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a...
IT WASN’T GERMAN ENGINEERING ONLY THAT MADE THE VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE AN ICON. IT WAS A MANHATTAN ADVERTISING AGENCY, TOO. Created in 1959 by Doyle Dane Bernbach and continued through the '60s and early '70s, the campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle is considered the best of all time. More than just promoting a car, it promoted a new kind of advertising: simple, charming, intelligent and, most of all, honest. In "Ugly Is Only Skin-Deep," Dominik Imseng retraces the creation of Doyle Dane Bernbach, sneered at by the big players on Madison Avenue because of the "ethnic" background of its founders and employees, who were mostly Jewish. Readers will then learn how the agency won the Volkswagen account and how an unlikely creative team set the tone for the most admired campaign in advertising history. Finally, the book examines the evolution of the Volkswagen campaign and how it managed to convince more and more Americans that smaller was better. In fact, the Volkswagen campaign didn't only fundamentally change the ethos of advertising, it also helped trigger the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and 'post-memory' of the Holocaust both scrutinizes recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.