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New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust.
How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.
In a novel set against a transforming Berlin, an artist confronts a diagnosis of breast cancer. Going to openings and parties, setting up a studio and breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Noora is living the post–art school life in Berlin when, in 2005, she's diagnosed with breast cancer. Vaguely restless, until now she's been neither happy nor unhappy, but her entry into what she calls “Cancerland” forces her to question the assumptions by which she lived her life so far. Uneasily, she realizes that the “relationships of the soul” she and her friends value over everything else might not be as indelible as family, after all. In this sharp and picaresque first novel, conceptual artist Annette Weisser depicts the transformation of Berlin from the frontier city of the cold war to an international art hub as an analog and backdrop to the chaotic, corporeal transformation Noora undergoes through cancer and its treatments. Written in the casual, associative style of a female coming-of-age novel, Mycelium examines German trauma, art school dramas, and the inevitable parsing into winners and losers that her generation undergoes as they enter their mid-thirties.
Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.” In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapi...
It is 2007 and Austria is in the grip of a sinister epidemic: Indigo Syndrome. Children are the carriers, and anyone who comes near them is afflicted with severe headaches, nausea, and vertigo. These Indigo children are sent away to the Helianau Institute in Styria, in the mountainous heart of the country, a protected zone where they cannot affect the wider population. There, one of the teachers, Clemens Setz, witnesses students being taken away in strange masks. They never come back. When Setz tries to find out what is going on, he swiftly loses his job, but he doesn't give up trying to uncover Helianau's dark secrets. Fourteen years later, in 2021, former Indigo child Robert Tatzel notices an article in the newspaper about his old teacher: Clemens Setz has just been acquitted in a brutal murder trial. But Tatzel harbours resentments against Setz from his days at Helianau, and decides to investigate. Set in a world uncannily familiar and yet entirely strange, Indigo is part thrilling detective story, part post-modern puzzle. Clemens J. Setz has written a novel that will change the way we read novels, and change the way we look at the world.
A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
Second volume of the biennial publication of the Duke German Jewish Studies Workshop, making available important new research and considering the definition and development of the field of German Jewish Studies. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University, the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. It publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies and serves as a venue for introducing new directions in the field, analyzing the development and definition of the field itself, and considering the place of German Jewish Studies within the disciplines of both German Studiesand Jewish Studies. Additionally, it...
Studies the extent to which seventeenth-century devotional poetry moves beyond specific confessional and ecclesiastical frameworks, and argues that John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton turned to verse to articulate a radical idea of religious devotion as distinct from the established church.
This volume, which grew out of a conference of the same name held at Bowling Green State University in March 2006, represents new scholarly perspectives on the way in which the Holocaust is remembered in history, literary studies and theatre. It is a response to changing representations of the Holocaust across generations, disciplines, and in various cultural and national contexts. The contributions address the following questions: How do historians, artists, scholars, and teachers negotiate the language of the Holocaust as survivors die, leaving future generations to respond to the dictum: Never again? How do children and grandchildren of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders transmit the dif...
During the 1970s todays Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, BMBWF) supported the founding of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University in California. These foundings were the initial incentives for the worldwide `spreading' of similar institutions; currently, nine Centers for Austrian and Central European Studies exist in seven countries on three continents. The funding of the Ministry enables to connect senior scholars with young scholars, to help young PhD students, to participate in and to benefit from the scientific connection of experienced researchers, and to get in touch with the national scientific community by `sniffing scientific air', as the Austrians like to say. Furthermore, it aims to avoid prejudices, and to spread a better understanding and knowledge about Austria and Central Europe by promoting scientific exchange.