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Your wife in return for the secrets you never knew - A powerful literary thriller in the vein of David LynchIt is early September 2002 and Niklas Kalf, a German writer, is in New York for the first time. He has just published a biography of a Jewish-German physicist named Eugen Meerkaz, who emigrated to the USA in the late 1930s. Niklas is accompanied by his wife Liz, who is several months pregnant. The hot NY summer and the first anniversary of the World Trade Center catastrophe weigh heavily on the city. On the morning of their third day in the place, Liz is kidnapped. In return for her release her anonymous captor demands information on secret experiments that Meerkaz has supposedly condu...
Text in English & German. Heroic 20th-century Modernism saw the private home as a place to first test out utopian theories -- a place for free play and experimentation where new approaches could be put into action, on a small scale but no less radical. Here, where architecture and life are most closely interwoven, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gerrit Rietveld, Le Corbusier and even Konstantin Melnikov found the suitable space to give their visionary concepts a plastic reality. The house built by the architect Fritz Barth for his own use in his home town of Fellbach places itself in an ironic, possibly melancholic distance from this kind of heroic pathos, but still has this tradition as its background....
A compelling international thriller that explores the terrain between erotic love and death On a warm September evening in 1953 Hans Arbogast, a young travelling salesman, picks up a hitchhiker, a refugee from East Germany. As dusk falls they make passionate love in a meadow. And then she is dead, her body found nestled against blackberry brambles. Even though the evidence is inconclusive, Arbogast is tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment, all the while protesting his innocence. But Germany during the postwar years has no tolerance for scandal; all appeals are denied. For the next fourteen years he grows to inhabit his cell like a second skin, until finally a journa...
The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.
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.
Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affected the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. Fact and Fiction’s twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin’s poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Goethe’s Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.
Most of the chapters in this volume were delivered as papers at a conference on the same theme held at the University of Kent in April 2002. The essays collected here, by scholars from the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the US, address a topic of fundamental concern across all the disciplines engaged with the study of contemporary Germany: the evolving relationship between urban and rural space, the metropolitan centre and the provincial Heimat. The volume identifies and investigates a number of recent trends: the emergence of 'eco-literature', the renaissance of writing - in prose and verse - inspired by the new Berlin, the realignment of regional sensibilities, which is complicated by the troubled tradition of Heimat in all its literary manifestations, and the continuing disjunctions between East and West. Individual essays engage with the work of established writers (Günter de Bruyn, Hubert Fichte, Peter Handke, WG Sebald, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, and Elfriede Jelinek) and emerging talents (Georg Klein, Christof Hamann, Ludwig Laher, and Arnold Stadler).
Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of "memory contests," which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and p...
This volume looks at the representation of 9/11 and the resulting wars in European literature. In the face of inner-European divisions the texts under consideration take the terror attacks as a starting point to negotiate European as well as national identity. While the volume shows that these identity formations are frequently based on the construction of two Others—the US nation and a cultural-ethnic idea of Muslim communities—it also analyses examples which undermine such constructions. This much more self-critical strand in European literature unveils the Eurocentrism of a supposedly general humanistic value system through the use of complex aesthetic strategies. These strategies are in itself characteristic of the European reception as the Anglo-Irish, British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Polish perspectives collected in this volume perceive of the terror attacks through the lens of continental media and semiotic theory.