German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour

Author: Stephen Brockmann

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9781571134103

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The 'zero hour' of the title was 1945, when Germany had to confront total devastation, the crimes of Nazism, the onset of the Cold War, & the division of the country. It was a time of intense intellectual debate, here reviewed through the mediums of literature & literary discourse.


Representing the "good German" in Literature and Culture After 1945

Representing the

Author: Pól Ó Dochartaigh

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1571134980

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Essays analyzing postwar literary, cultural, and historical representations of "good Germans" during the Second World War and the Nazi period. In the aftermath of the Second World War, both the allied occupying powers and the nascent German authorities sought Germans whose record during the war and the Nazi period could serve as a counterpoint to the notion of Germans asevil. That search has never really stopped. In the past few years, we have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural representations of this "other" kind of Third Reich citizen - the "good German" - as opposed to the committed Nazi or genocidal maniac. Such representations have highlighted individuals' choices in favor of dissenting behavior, moral truth, or at the very least civil disobedience. The "good German's" counterhegemonic practice cannot negate or contradict the barbaric reality of Hitler's Germany, but reflects a value system based on humanity and an "other" ideal community. This volume of new essays explores postwar and recent representations of "good Germans" during the Third Reich, analyzing the logic of moral behavior, cultural and moral relativism, and social conformity found in them. It thus draws together discussions of the function and reception of "Good Germans" in Germany and abroad. Contributors: Eoin Bourke, Manuel Bragança, Maeve Cooke, Kevin De Ornellas, Sabine Egger, Joachim Fischer, Coman Hamilton, Jon Hughes, Karina von Lindeiner-Strásky, Alexandra Ludewig, Pól O Dochartaigh, Christiane Schönfeld, Matthias Uecker. Pól O Dochartaigh is Professor of German and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Christiane Schönfeld is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.


German Culture, Politics, and Literature Into the Twenty-first Century

German Culture, Politics, and Literature Into the Twenty-first Century

Author: Stuart Taberner

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781571133380

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This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned international experts on German society, culture, and politics that, together, provide a comprehensive study of Germany's postunification process of "normalization." Essays ranging across a variety of disciplines including politics, foreign policy, economics, literature, architecture, and film examine how since 1990 the often contested concept of normalization has become crucial to Germany's self-understanding. Despite the apparent emergence of a "new" Germany, the essays demonstrate that normalization is still in question, and that perennial concerns -- notably the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR -- remain central to political and cultural discourses and affect the country's efforts to deal with the new challenges of globalization and the instability and polarization it brings. This is the first major study in English or German of the impact of the normalization debate across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. Contributors: Stephen Brockmann, Jeremy Leaman, Sebastian Harnisch and Kerry Longhurst, Lothar Probst, Simon Ward, Anna Saunders, Annette Seidel Arpaci, Chris Homewood, Andrew Plowman, Helmut Schmitz, Karoline Von Oppen, William Collins, Donahue, Katharine Schödel, Stuart Taberner, Paul Cooke Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society and Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in German Studies, both at the University of Leeds.


Opera After the Zero Hour

Opera After the Zero Hour

Author: Emily Richmond Pollock

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0190063734

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'Opera After the Zero Hour' argues that newly composed opera in West Germany after World War II was a site for the renegotiation of musical traditions during an era in which tradition had become politically fraught.


Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic

Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic

Author: John David Pizer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-08-02

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 3110725037

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This study reverses the question implicit in title of Christa Wolf’s now-canonical 1990 novella Was bleibt (What remains), looking instead at what was lost during the process of German reunification. It argues that, in their work during and after the Wende, most literary authors from both East and West Germany responded ambivalently to the reunification. Many felt, on the one hand, a keen sense of loss as the GDR dissolved and an expanded Federal Republic summarily absorbed former Eastern Germany. They mourned the ideals of democratic socialism, tolerance, and internationalism that the GDR had held dear, as well as the country’s rich cultural life. On the other hand, however, they recognized that the GDR was a fundamentally corrupt surveillance state whose industry weighed heavily on the environment while failing to buoy the country’s economy. By looking at works by some of the most important authors from either side of the border, this study shows that those who unequivocally embraced the reunification were clearly in the minority.


Rereading East Germany

Rereading East Germany

Author: Karen Leeder

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1316462390

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This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.


Art of Suppression

Art of Suppression

Author: Pamela M. Potter

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0520282345

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This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the NazisÕ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other Òenemies of the stateÓ was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.


Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic

Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic

Author: Stuart Taberner

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1571133933

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An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s and examines shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation."--BOOK JACKET.


Juli Zeh

Juli Zeh

Author: Necia Chronister

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-23

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 3111352242

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This volume casts a critical light on one of Germany’s bestselling and most controversial authors. Juli Zeh’s literary work is not only widely read in Germany, but also featured on high school and college syllabi both in Germany and abroad. In recent years and in the wake of the Covid 19 lockdowns, Zeh’s output has only increased, though her most recent work, Unterleuten (2016), Über Menschen (2021), and Zwischen Welten (2023; co-written with Simon Urban), has evolved away from the literary and philosophical thought that informed her more nuanced earlier work and towards a more conservative representation of contemporary social dynamics. While her work continues to garner prestigious awards, Zeh herself, who is an honorary judge at the Brandenburg constitutional court and a seemingly omnipresent public intellectual, has taken increasingly libertarian positions in recent political debates -- whether about Germany’s public health measures in response to the pandemic, or the country’s role in the Ukraine war. This volume traces the development and broad impact of Zeh’s writing while reflecting on the responsibility of the scholars who read and teach it to confront her ambiguous and sometimes troubling politics.


The Writers' State

The Writers' State

Author: Stephen Brockmann

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1571139532

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Examines the literature produced from the very beginnings of what became the GDR through the 1950s, redressing a tendency of literary scholarship to focus on the later GDR.