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.

After the Dresden Bombing
After the Dresden Bombing

Author: A. Fuchs

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-11-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0230359523

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Anne Fuchs traces the aftermath of the Dresden bombing in the collective imagination from 1945 to today. As a case study of an event that gained local, national and global iconicity, the book investigates the role of photography, fine art, architecture, literature and film in dialogue with the changing German socio-political landscape.

German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust
German Women's Life Writing and the Holocaust

Author: Elisabeth Krimmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-20

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1108658563

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This important study examines women's life writing about the Second World War and the Holocaust, such as memoirs, diaries, docunovels, and autobiographically inspired fiction. Through a historical and literary study of the complex relationship between gender, genocide, and female agency, the analyzes correct androcentric views of the Second World War and seek to further our understanding of a group that, although crucial to the functioning of the National Socialist regime, has often been overlooked: that of the complicit bystander. Chapters on army auxiliaries, nurses, female refugees, rape victims, and Holocaust survivors analyze women's motivations for enlisting in the National Socialist cause, as well as for their continuing support for the regime and, in some cases, their growing estrangement from it. The readings allow insights into the nature of complicity itself, the emergence of violence in civil society, and the possibility of social justice.

A literature of restitution
A literature of restitution

Author: Jeannette Baxter

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1526102048

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This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics. Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays – from Sebald’s carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about ‘genre’, from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision – all suggest that the ‘attempt at restitution’ constitutes the very essence of Sebald’s understanding of literature.

Holocaust as Fiction
Holocaust as Fiction

Author: W. Donahue

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-01-19

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0230115462

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Holocaust as Fiction seeks to explain and critically evaluate the extraordinary success of Schlink's internationally acclaimed novel, The Reader , the widely read "Selb" detective trilogy, and two popular films based closely on his work.

German Narratives of Belonging
German Narratives of Belonging

Author: Linda Shortt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1351565699

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Since unification, German culture has experienced a boom in discourses on generation, family and place. Linda Shortt reads this as symptomatic of a wider quest for belonging that mobilises attachment to counter the effects of post-modern deterritorialisation and globalisation. Investigating twenty-first century narratives of belonging by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, Angelika Overath, Florian Illies, Juli Zeh, Stephan Wackwitz, Uwe Timm and Peter Schneider, Shortt examines how the desire to belong is repeatedly unsettled by disturbances of lineage and tradition. In this way, she combines an analysis of supermodernity with an enquiry into German memory contests on the National Socialist era, 1968 and 1989 that continue to shape identity in the Berlin Republic. Exploring a spectrum of narratives that range from agitated disavowals of place to romances of belonging, this study illuminates the topography of belonging in contemporary Germany.

Contemporary German Fiction
Contemporary German Fiction

Author: Stuart Taberner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-06-21

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1139464159

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The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. Contemporary German Fiction focuses on the debates that have shaped the politics and culture of the new Germany that has emerged from the second half of the 1990s onwards and offers the first comprehensive account of key developments in German literary fiction within their social and historical context. Each chapter begins with an overview of a central theme, such as East German writing, West German writing, writing on the Nazi past, writing by women and writing by ethnic minorities. The authors discussed include Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Christa Wolf, Christian Kracht and Zafer Senocak. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

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.

World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction
World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction

Author: Jan Lensen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1000350053

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World War II in Contemporary German and Dutch Fiction: The Generation of Meta-Memory offers a comparative study of the construction of World War II memory in contemporary German, Flemish, and Dutch literature. More specifically, it investigates in what ways the large temporal distance to the historical events has impacted how literary writers from these three literatures have negotiated its meaning and form during the last decades. To that end, this book offers analyses of nine novels that demonstrate a pronounced reflexivity on the conditions of contemporary remembering. Rather than a dig for historical truth or a struggle with historical trauma, these novels reflect on the transmission, the narrative shapes, the formation processes, and the functions of World War II memory today, while asserting a self-conscious and often irreverent approach toward established mnemonic routines, practices, and rules. As the analyses show, this approach is equally articulated through the novels’ poetics, which are marked by a large formal diversity and a playfulness that highlights mnemonic agency, a posttraumatic positioning, and the ascendency of the literary over the historiographical. Based on these findings, this book proposes the emergence of a new paradigm within the postwar cultural assessment of World War II: the generation of meta-memory.