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The writer, scientist, philosopher, and radical democrat Georg Büchner (1813-1837) occupies a unique place in the cultural legacy of the German-speaking countries. Born into an epoch of inevitable, yet arrested historical transition, Büchner produced a small but exceptionally rich body of work. This collection of essays in English and in German considers the full spectrum of his writings, the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote, the dramas Danton’s Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and the fragmentary narrative Lenz, as well as the letters, the philosophical lectures on Descartes and Spinoza, and the scientific texts. The essays examine connections between these works, study texts in detail, debate ways of editing them, and trace their reception in contemporary literature and film. The novel readings presented here not only celebrate Büchner on the eve of his bicentenary birthday but also insert this untimely figure into discussions of the revolution-restoration dynamic and realism in poetics and politics.
Contemporary Germany is a modern industrial democracy admired throughout the world. Many Germans believe that they live in the 'best Germany' that has ever existed. Yet there are dissenting voices: individuals and groups that reject cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiculturalism, and yearn for the more homogeneous country of earlier times. They are part of a global movement, often characterized as populist, that values tradition over innovation or constant change. In Germany, such people are routinely portrayed as reactionary or even neo- fascist. The present study seeks to provide a portrait of these individuals and their organizations. Very little has been written in English about the...
With the opening up of the East in the autumn of 1989 claims were being made, on the one hand, that German literature had never, in fact, been divided, while others were proclaiming the end of East and West German literatures as they had existed, and the beginning of a new era.
This book examines the controversial younger generation of poets who were 'born into' the established socialist state of the German Democratic Republic. Introducing an extraordinary decade of GDR poetry, it focuses on the ways in which this experience is translated into the metaphorical and linguistic structures of their texts, and the ways in which they set about breaking the literary and political boundaries which were imposed upon them, radicalizing notions of the subject, of history, of language, of the poetic enterprise itself. The volume also assesses what will remain - after the fall of the Wall, and the revelations of the 'Stasi' files - of this radical poetic project. This unique study examines the poetry of some fifty writers from both the official and the underground publishing scenes, offering them up as a case-study in the vexed negotiations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and as a contribution to the rewriting of German literary history after 1945.
Contemporary Germany is a modern industrial democracy admired throughout the world. Many Germans believe that they live in the 'best Germany' that has ever existed. Yet there are dissenting voices: individuals and groups that reject cosmopolitanism, globalization and multiculturalism, and yearn for the more homogeneous country of earlier times. They are part of a global movement, often characterized as populist, that values tradition over innovation or constant change. In Germany, such people are routinely portrayed as reactionary or even neo- fascist. The present study seeks to provide a portrait of these individuals and their organizations. Very little has been written in English about the...
This study, the first of its kind in English, sets out to analyse literature as a form of social communication by considering developments in literary theory and practice in the German Democratic Republic in the Honecker era. Attention focuses on the changes in the discourses of literary theory and literary practice in a semi-public sphere controlled by an increasingly ossified political discourse. Key developments in the 1970s, hailed by GDR theorists as the point of departure for a new kind of literary communication in society, are carefully examined. The study then contrasts these idealised views of literature as social communication with practice and theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. I...
This book deals with the intricate connection between the political structure of the East German government and cultural politics. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between the government agencies and three authors. It explores the difficulties the writers encountered in the 1960s with the government of East Germany and how their works did or did not conform to the cultural policy established by the GDR regime in 1951. The government believed that it was imperative for authors and artists to adhere to the literary policy of social realism prescribed by the East German Ministry of Culture. An author's works were expected to conform to the political ideology of Marxism. The Ministry...
If Dostoevsky claimed that all Russian writers of his day "came out from Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" then Edith W. Clowes boldly expands his dramatic image to describe the emergence of Russian philosophy out from under the "overcoat" of Russian literature. In Fiction's Overcoat, Clowes responds to the view, commonly held by Western European and North American thinkers, that Russian culture has no philosophical tradition. If that is true, she asks, why do readers everywhere turn to the classics of Russian literature, at least in part because Russian writers so famously engage universal questions, because they are so "philosophical"? Her answer to this question is a lively and comprehensive volume th...