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The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span German-speaking lands and cultures from the 18th to the 21st century, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies. The series editor is a renowned professor of German studies in the United States who penned one of the foundational texts for understanding what interdisciplinary German cultural studies can be. All ...
Among the many studies on German National Socialism that have appeared in the last forty to fifty years, one aspect has seldom been treated in detail: the cultural representations of Adolf Hitler from the late 1920s to the present. This book focuses on the image of Hitler in literature, photography, historiography, film, philosophy, theatre, and comic books by major artists and scholars such as Ernst Ottwalt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Bertolt Brecht, John Hearfield, Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Chaplin, Theodor W. Adorno, Heiner Muller, and George Tabori.
The volume examines translation of key German texts into the modern Indian languages as well as translation from the vernacular languages of South Asia into German. Our key concerns are shifting historical contexts, concepts, and translation practices. Bringing an intellectual history dimension to translation studies, we explore the history of translation, translators, and sites of translation. The organization of the volume follows some key questions. Which texts were being translated? At what point or period in time did this happen? What were the motivations behind these translations? Topics covered range from thematic nodes or clusters, e.g., translations of Economics texts and ideas into...
This study of contemporary German poetry represents the first attempt to examine comprehensively and at some length the lyric response to the unification period. It sets out to investigate, by means of close textual analysis, whether the German ‘Wende’ was also a turning-point for poetry, exploring how GDR poets responded both to the revolutionary events of 1989 and subsequently to the new, united Germany. An introductory chapter considers what is distinct about poetry as a genre, especially under censorship or amid historic change, as well as outlining the post-unification ‘Literaturstreit’. The following chapter offers a survey of the poet’s role in the GDR from 1949 until 1989. ...
This text explores how cultural life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was strictly controlled by the ruling party, the SED, through attempts to dictate the way people spent their free time. It shows how people's cultural life in the GDR developed a dynamic of its own.
In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted “to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework” of Marxism and state socialism. According to Bathrick, “the fact that some of them had been censored, hunted, questioned, and ridiculed does not belie the fact that they were also—and sometimes even simultaneously—privileged, nurtured, courted, and coddled. . . . It was precisely their function on ‘both sides’ of the power divide, as offic...
James Bond's Socialist Rivals focuses on blockbuster television series in the former Soviet bloc of the Cold War to recover a world of spy fiction entertainment that was both hugely popular and of great and deliberate political importance for the Communist regimes.
An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural Cold War. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another. The 90 Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain and illuminates multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.
This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.
‘Censorship’ has become a fashionable topic, not only because of newly available archival material from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but also because the ‘new censorship’ (inspired by the works of Foucault and Bourdieu) has widened the very concept of censorhip beyond its conventional boundaries. This volume uses these new materials and perspectives to address the relationship of censorship to cultural selection processes (such as canon formation), economic forces, social exclusion, professional marginalization, silencing through specialized discourses, communicative norms, and other forms of control and regulation. Two articles in this collection investigate these iss...