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German Literature in a New Century
While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the "new century" would achieve "normalization." The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany's new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany's new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.
The Novel in German since 1990
Diversity is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary German-language literature, not just in terms of the variety of authors writing in German today, but also in relation to theme, form, technique and style. However, common themes emerge: the Nazi past, transnationalism, globalisation, migration, religion and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and identity. This book presents the novel in German since 1990 through a set of close readings both of international bestsellers (including Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World and W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz) and of less familiar, but important texts (such as Yadé Kara's Selam Berlin). Each novel discussed in the volume has been chosen on account of its aesthetic quality, its impact and its representativeness; the authors featured, among them Nobel Prize winners Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller demonstrate the energy and quality of contemporary writing in German.
Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-speaking World Since 1500
This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.
Contemporary German Fiction
The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing by women and writing by ethnic minorities. The authors discussed include Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, Christian Kracht and Zafer Senocak. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.
Music and Literature in German Romanticism
During the Romantic era, many in Germany believed music to be the highest art form, representing the quintessence of Romanticism and able to express what could not be expressed in words. This book studies the work of composers during this period and examines the cross-over between music and literature.
German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past
Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through Günter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.
German Literature in the Age of Globalisation
Literary fiction in Germany has long been a medium for contemplation of the 'nation' and questions of national identity. From the mid-1990s, in the wake of heated debates on the future direction of culture, politics and society in a more 'normal', united country, German literature has become increasingly diverse and seemingly disparate - at the one extreme, it represents the attempt to 'reinvent' German traditions, at the other, the unmistakable influence of Anglo-American forms and pop literature. A shared concern of almost all of recent German fiction, however, is the contemporary debate on globalisation, its nature, impact and consequences for 'local culture'. In its engagement with globa...
The Language of Silence
Focusing on individual authors from Heinrich Boll to Gunther Grass, Hermann Lenz to Peter Schneider, The Language of Silence offers an analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. Exploring postwar literature as the barometer of Germany's unconsciously held values as well as of its professed conscience, Ernestine Schlant demonstrates that the confrontation with the Holocaust has shifted over the decades from repression, circumvention, and omission to an open acknowledgement of the crimes. Yet even today a 'language of silence' remains since the victims and their suffering are still overlooked and ignored. Learned and exacting, Schlant's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of postwar German culture.
Victims and Perpetrators: 1933-1945
This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today through a review and analysis of seminal developments in the current discourse on 1933 – 1945. An interdisplicinary work, this book examines questions of representing the past from the perspective of literary studies, social psychology, film studies, history, and cultural studies. Themes include transgenerational memory and remembrance, the air war and German literature, commemoration and silences, transnational reconciliation, and historical consciousness in the German present. The collected essays make clear that as the current discourse contributes toward an historically informed, differentiated understanding of individuals’ roles in the Third Reich and World War Two, victim and perpetrator identities cannot be defined as exclusive from one another. The discourse emphasizes personal over collective experience and answers questions of responsibility and guilt on the individual level.
