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.

Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany
Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany

Author: Jon Hughes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 331951136X

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This book presents the first in-depth study of the German boxer Max Schmeling (1905-2005) as a national hero and representative figure in Germany between the 1920s and the present day. It explores the complex relationship between sport, culture, politics and national identity and draws on a century of journalism, film, visual art, life writing and fiction. Detailed chapters analyse Schmeling’s emergence as an icon in the Weimar Republic, his association with America, his celebrity status in the Third Reich, and his rivalry with Joe Louis as a focus for an extraordinary propaganda and ideological contest. The book also examines how Schmeling’s post-war success in business associated him with the culture of the ‘zero hour’ nation in the era of ‘economic miracle’, and how he was later claimed as ‘good German’ and moral example for a post-war generation of Germans determined to ‘come to terms’ with the past. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and representation of sport and boxing, in sports discourse and political culture, and in questions of national identity in modern German history.

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture
The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture

Author: Victoria Aarons

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-24

Total Pages: 828

ISBN-13: 3030334287

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The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.

British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime
British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime

Author: Beryl Pong

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0198840926

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Demonstrates how spatial and temporal dislocation were defining traits of the artistic response to the urban bombing campaigns of the Second World War. Studying a range of writers, as well as film, photography, and art, it argues that for civilian populations, aerial bombardment distorts the experience of time itself.

The Long Aftermath
The Long Aftermath

Author: Manuel Bragança

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1782381546

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In its totality, the “Long Second World War”—extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945—has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. Focusing on the major combatant nations—Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia—it offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and a host of other cultural forms to illuminate European public memory.

The History of German Literature on Film
The History of German Literature on Film

Author: Christiane Schönfeld

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 162892375X

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This book tells the story of German-language literature on film, beginning with pioneering motion picture adaptations of Faust in 1897 and early debates focused on high art as mass culture. It explores, analyzes and contextualizes the so-called 'golden age' of silent cinema in the 1920s, the impact of sound on adaptation practices, the abuse of literary heritage by Nazi filmmakers, and traces the role of German-language literature in exile and postwar films, across ideological boundaries in divided Germany, in New German Cinema, and in remakes and movies for cinema as well as television and streaming services in the 21st century. Having provided the narrative core to thousands of films since the late 19th century, many of German cinema's most influential masterpieces were inspired by canonical texts, popular plays, and even children's literature. Not being restricted to German adaptations, however, this book also traces the role of literature originally written in German in international film productions, which sheds light on the interrelation between cinema and key historical events. It outlines how processes of adaptation are shaped by global catastrophes and the emergence of nations, by materialist conditions, liberal economies and capitalist imperatives, political agendas, the mobility of individuals, and sometimes by the desire to create reflective surfaces and, perhaps, even art. Commercial cinema's adaptation practices have foregrounded economic interest, but numerous filmmakers throughout cinema history have turned to German-language literature not simply to entertain, but as a creative contribution to the public sphere, marking adaptation practice, at least potentially, as a form of active citizenship.

Powell and Pressburger’s War
Powell and Pressburger’s War

Author: Greg M. Colón Semenza

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-09-07

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13:

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A focused study on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematic contributions to the war effort, arguing for the centrality of propaganda to their work as film artists. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are widely hailed as two of the greatest filmmakers in British cinema history. The release of their first movie, The Spy in Black, barely preceded the beginning of World War Two, and a number of their early masterworks, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death, were produced in the service of the war effort. Through exploring the relationship between art and propaganda, this book shows that Powell and Pressburger saw no contradiction between their aesthetic ambitions and their cinematic war work: propaganda imperatives were highly conducive to their objectives as both commercial cinema practitioners and artists. Drawing on production materials from the archives of the British Film Institute, this book charts three phases in Powell and Pressburger's wartime career: from first-time collaborators who strive to reconcile popular cinematic forms with developing notions of what constitutes effective propaganda; to accomplished, and sometimes controversial, propagandists whose movies center upon Britain's relations with its enemies and allies; to filmmakers whose responsiveness to the propaganda requirements of the late war is matched by a focus, shared by the Ministry of Information, on what the post-war future would bring.

National Socialism and German Discourse
National Socialism and German Discourse

Author: W J Dodd

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 331974660X

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In this discourse history, W J Dodd analyses the ‘unquiet voices’ of opponents whose contemporary critiques of Nazism, from positions of territorial and inner exile, focused on the ‘language of Nazism’. Individual chapters review ‘precursor’ discourses; Nazi public discourse from 1933 to 1945; the testimonies of ‘unquiet voices’ abroad, and in private and published texts in the ‘Reich’; attempts to ‘denazify the language’ (1945-49), and the legacies of the Nazi past in a retrospective discourse of ‘coming to terms’ with the Nazi past. In the period from 1945, the book focuses on contestations of ‘tainted language’ and instrumentalizations of the Nazi past, and the persistence of linguistic taboos in contemporary German usage. Highly engaging, with English translations provided throughout, this book will provide an invaluable resource for scholars of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and German history and culture; as well as readers with a general interest in language and politics.

The Oxford Handbook of German Politics
The Oxford Handbook of German Politics

Author: Klaus Larres

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-07-18

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 019254943X

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Few countries have caused or experienced more calamities in the 20th century than Germany. The country emerged from the Cold War as a newly united and sovereign state, eventually becoming Europe's indispensable partner for all major domestic and foreign policy initiatives. This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of some of the major issues of German domestic politics, economics, foreign policy, and culture by leading experts in their respective fields. This book serves primarily as a reference work on Germany for scholars and an interested public, but through this broader lens it also provides a magnifying glass of global developments which are challenging and transforming the modern state. The growing importance of Germany as a political actor and economic partner makes this endeavor all the more timely and pertinent from a German, European, and global perspective.

Poetics of Politics
Poetics of Politics

Author: Sebastian M. Herrmann

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Winter

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 382536447X

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This volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural production in the United States. As recent scholarship has observed, American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transition.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this book points to the interplay between the textual and the political as a dynamic – always locally specific – that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotiating social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.