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A study of women's writing in the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Austria and Switzerland, 1945-1990.
For all four, Kosta demonstrates, autobiography is at once a process of remembering and working through national and personal trauma, a task of mourning and healing, and an act of self-invention.
Spanning almost the entire twentieth century, from the 1920s to the 1990s, this book gives voice to both Jewish and non-Jewish women writers from German-speaking countries who were silenced during the Nazi years. Discussions on gender, patriarchy, and fascism are brought to bear on the works of Nelly Sachs, Anna Seghers, Elisabeth Langgässer, Ingeborg Drewitz, Luise Rinser, Grete Weil, Christa Wolf, and others. The book also includes an autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor's experience. In light of recent political events in Europe, this book is particularly relevant. Contributors include Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Ruth Dinesen, Elke P. Frederiksen, Gertraud Gutzmann, Robert Holub, Ritta Jo Horsley, Ruth Kluger, Helga Kraft, Sara Lennox, Elke Liebs, Dagmar Lorenz, Elaine Martin, Richard McCormick, Renate Möhrmann, Monika Shafi, Guy Stern, and Margaret Ward.
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.
This is the first book to examine this crucial relationship between politics and culture in Germany, not only during the Nazi and Cold War eras but in periods when the effects are less obvious.
Arnim, Bettina von ; Hugo, Adèle ; Wolf, Christa ; Mill, John Stuart ; Thackeray Ritchie, Anne ; Shortridge Foltz, Clara.
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This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the...
The Man in the Pulpit is a courageous autobiographical novel by the distinguished and widely praised German novelist Ruth Rehmann. Its narrator, like Rehmann herself, is a middle-class citizen of West Germany in the 1970s—more than a quarter century after the horrors of the Nazi years. Prodded by questions from her children, the narrator begins to reexamine her childhood and the father—a stern, imposing Lutheran minister—who dominated it. Her memories lead her to a fresh, painful understanding of how her father (who died in 1940) tragically reconciled himself to the moral and political outrages of National Socialism. The father’s moral compromises stand in large measure for the failu...
How should we understand the relation of the Holocaust to the broader historical processes of the century just ended? How do we explain the bearing of the Holocaust on problems of representation, memory, memorialization, and historical practice? These are some of the questions explored by an esteemed group of scholars in Catastrophe and Meaning, the most significant multiauthored book on the Holocaust in over a decade. This collection features essays that consider the role of anti-Semitism in the recounting of the Holocaust; the place of the catastrophe in the narrative of twentieth-century history; the questions of agency and victimhood that the Holocaust inspires; the afterlife of trauma in literature written about the tragedy; and the gaps in remembrance and comprehension that normal historical works fail to notice. Contributors: Omer Bartov, Dan Diner, Debòrah Dwork, Saul Friedländer, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anson Rabinbach, Frank Trommler, Shulamit Volkov, Froma Zeitlin