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Speaking the Taboo
Wolfgang Hilbig is a writer who is widely acknowledged as one of the most important to have emerged from the former GDR. In this study, the first in English, Paul Cooke explores the interplay of aesthetic and social ‘taboos’, as defined by the official discourse of the GDR, in a cross-section of Hilbig’s critical writing, poetry and prose. The protagonists in Hilbig’s texts suffer from a profound crisis of identity due to the disparity between the state’s official presentation of life in the East and their own experience. Cooke argues that through their exploration of the ‘taboo’, i.e. that which is excluded from the state’s official discourse, Hilbig’s characters attempt to break through the banal rhetoric of the ruling elite in order to realise an authentic sense of self.
The Poet’s Role
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. ...
Cityscapes and Countryside in Contemporary German Literature
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).
Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics
Popular dissent, such as street demonstrations and civil disobedience, has become increasingly transnational in nature and scope. As a result, a local act of resistance can acquire almost immediately a much larger, cross-territorial dimension. This book draws upon a broad and innovative range of sources to scrutinise this central but often neglected aspect of global politics. Through case studies that span from Renaissance perceptions of human agency to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the author examines how the theory and practice of popular dissent has emerged and evolved during the modern period. Dissent, he argues, is more than just transnational. It has become an important 'transversal' phenomenon: an array of diverse political practices which not only cross national boundaries, but also challenge the spatial logic through which these boundaries frame international relations.
Heterotopia
Considers the uses and dangers of utopian thinking in the postmodern world
The Powers of Speech
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...
Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State
Their literary culture destroyed, they were rebuked for compliant service to the discredited state; and some were reviled for collaborating with the East German secret police, the Stasi.
Breaking Boundaries
This book examines the controversial younger generation of poets who were 'born into' the established socialist state of the German Democratic Republic. Introducing an extraordinary decade of GDR poetry, it focuses on the ways in which this experience is translated into the metaphorical and linguistic structures of their texts, and the ways in which they set about breaking the literary and political boundaries which were imposed upon them, radicalizing notions of the subject, of history, of language, of the poetic enterprise itself. The volume also assesses what will remain - after the fall of the Wall, and the revelations of the 'Stasi' files - of this radical poetic project. This unique study examines the poetry of some fifty writers from both the official and the underground publishing scenes, offering them up as a case-study in the vexed negotiations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and as a contribution to the rewriting of German literary history after 1945.
Vorausgeworfene Schatten
Kaum jemand hat vorausgesehen, daß die DDR nach dem Entzug ihrer entscheidenden äußeren Stütze, des sowjetischen Imperialismus, so rasch und so vollständig zusammenbrechen würde. Im augenöffnenden Rückblick aber auf bedeutende Literatur, die im SED-Staat entstanden ist, wird sichtbar, daß dieses jüngste Ereignis seine Schatten schon sehr früh vorausgeworfen hat, spätestens seit dem 17. Juni 1953. Der Autor berücksichtigt in dem Band von den drei Schichten der DDR-Literatur, der kritisch-experimentellen, der Konform- und der Kompromißliteratur, einzig und allein die erste, oberste und schmalste, denn nur in dieser wird die Wirklichkeit der DDR und des "real existierenden Soziali...
schliff - Wasser
Ozean oder "holy water" – der im Schwinden begriffene Grundbaustein des Lebens ist Thema in der schliff-Reihe Elementarwelten. "Wasser weiß zu reden" (Ingeborg Bachmann): Insbesondere in der Literatur besitzt das flüssige Element eine Symbolkraft, die so eigenwillig ist wie die Gezeiten und so wandlungsfähig wie seine Aggregatzustände. Als lebensnotwendiges Prinzip durchdringt Wasser alles Sein. Es garantiert Leben sowie Vielfalt in der Natur und regelt die anthropogene Ökonomie von Körper und Geist. Gleichzeitig kennt das Wissen um die Notwendigkeit des Wassers für das menschliche Leben seine technisch-kulturelle Kehrseite im Umgang mit dem Element selbst: Staudämme werden errichtet, um der Gewalt des Flüssigen zu trotzen, und Schiffe gebaut, um es zu beherrschen. Mal faszinierend, mal bedrohlich weist Wasser eine Ambivalenz auf, die sich seit der Antike durch die Literaturgeschichte verfolgen und heranziehen lässt, um die Tiefen und Untiefen von Kulturen und ihren Herrschaftsformen zu durchmessen. schliff N°14 versammelt literarische und literatur-/kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge sowie bildkünstlerische Arbeiten zum Thema "Wasser".
