The Holocaust in Central European Literatures and Cultures

The Holocaust in Central European Literatures and Cultures

Author: Reinhard Ibler

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 3838269527

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Relating the Holocaust to poetic and aesthetic phenomena has often been considered taboo, as only authentic testimony, documents, or at least ‘unliterary’, prosaic approaches were seen as appropriate. However, from the very beginning of Holocaust literature and culture, there were tendencies towards literarization, poetization, and ornamentalization. Nowadays, aesthetic approaches—also in provocative, taboo-breaking ways—are more and more frequently encountered and seen as important ways to evoke the attention required to keep the cataclysm alive in popular memory. The essays in this volume use examples predominantly from Polish, Czech, and German Holocaust literature and culture to discuss this controversial subject. Topics include the poetry of concentration camp detainees, lyrical poetry about the Holocaust, poetic tendencies in narrative literature and drama, ornamental prose about the Holocaust, and the devices and functions of aestheticization in Holocaust literature and culture.


Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction

Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction

Author: Elisa-Maria Hiemer

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 311066741X

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The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public interested in the representation of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and World War II in literature and the arts. Besides prose, it also considers poetry and theatrical plays from 1943 through 2018. An introduction to the historical events and cultural developments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Czech, and Slovak Republic, and their impact on the artistic output helps to contextualise the motif changes and fictional strategies that authors have been applying for decades. The publication is the result of long-term scholarly cooperation of specialists from four countries and several dozen academic centres.


After Memory

After Memory

Author: Matthias Schwartz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 311071387X

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Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.


Postmodernizing the Holocaust

Postmodernizing the Holocaust

Author: Marta Tomczok

Publisher: V&R unipress

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 373701678X

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Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with “The First Splendor” by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with “The Suspected Dybbuk” by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: “Tworki” by Marek Bieńczyk and “Fly Trap Factory” by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.


Thomas Mann und Ivan Olbracht [German-language Edition]

Thomas Mann und Ivan Olbracht [German-language Edition]

Author: Olga Zitová

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 3838266633

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Zitovás literary analysis starts at the interface of Czech and German literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Thomas Mann's novel Joseph and His Brothers is set in comparative relation to Ivan Olbracht's prose texts Nikola ?uhaj loupe?ník and Golet v údolí. Olbracht translated three volumes of Mann's Joseph's tetralogy parallel to the composition of his own prose works. Zitová examines the influence of Olbracht's translation work on his own work. Zitovás literaturwissenschaftliche Analyse setzt an einer Schnittstelle der tschechischen und deutschen Literatur in der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts an. Thomas Manns Roman Joseph und seine Brüder wird vergleichend in Beziehung gesetzt zu Ivan Olbrachts in den dreißiger Jahren entstandenen Prosatexten Nikola ?uhaj loupe?ník und Golet v údolí. Olbracht übersetzte parallel zur Abfassung seiner Prosawerke insgesamt drei Bände aus Manns umfangreicher Josephs-Tetralogie. Diese Übersetzertätigkeit blieb, wie Zitová aufzeigt, nicht ohne Einfluss auf sein eigenes Schaffen. Das Buch knüpft an eine von Jirí Opelík geschriebene Studie Olbrachts reife Schaffensperiode sub specie seiner Übersetzungen aus Thomas Mann und Lion Feuchtwanger (1967) an, in der dieser tschechische Literaturwissenschaftler das Thema eröffnete. Mit Zitovás Tiefenanalyse schließt sich diese germanobohemistische Forschungslücke.


The Holocaust in Czechoslovak and Czech Feature Films

The Holocaust in Czechoslovak and Czech Feature Films

Author: Sarka Sladovnikova

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2018-11-30

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 3838211960

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Šárka Sladovníková analyzes the depiction of the Holocaust in Czechoslovak and Czech Feature Films and the relevant literary pretexts. While she charts the social and cultural framework in which the films were made and how this framework changed, she also focuses on the cinematic language, the composition of and narration in each film (e.g., the depiction of the war and the Shoah as a narratively closed versus a narratively open event), genre aspects of the films (e.g., the use of comedy and humor), convention and innovation in presenting motifs and characters (the division of gender roles, the character of the “good German”). Particular attention is paid to the portrayal of stereotypes and countertypes in the films, where already well-known images, situations, and backdrops are repeated and which meet viewers’ expectations or, in contrast, which form countertypes and countersituations that go against the grain. Many of the films analyzed are adaptations of literary works. Therefore, this book is also a contribution to the rapidly developing field of adaptation studies.


Sasha Sokolov: The Life and Work of the Russian “Proet”

Sasha Sokolov: The Life and Work of the Russian “Proet”

Author: Martina Napolitano

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2022-03-07

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 3838216199

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Martina Napolitano explores the poetics of one of the most significant Russian authors of the 20th century. Sasha Sokolov’s oeuvre represents a milestone in the development of Russian literature; his legacy can be traced in most prose and poetry appearing in post-Soviet Russia. Taking as point of departure the studies and analyses written so far and considering the new suggestions contained in Sokolov’s last published book Triptych (2011), Napolitano further examines the keystones and the theoretical framework that arise from a close reading of Sokolov’s works, trying to systematize the findings into what can be considered as a structured authorial theory of literary creation. The study demonstrates how Sokolov’s oeuvre cannot be fully understood but within the widened perspective of inter-artistic creation: in fact, the writer, a “failed composer”, as he admits, in his literary work has tried to draw natural and spontaneous connecting lines between the artificially categorized realms of art (word, sound, painting, performance). Finally, the book sets forth the first solid analysis of Sokolov’s concept of proeziia, not merely a genre nor style of his own invention, but a more significant theoretical reflection of the writer about the role and value of literature, art, creation, and finally beauty.


Comparative Central European Culture

Comparative Central European Culture

Author: Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

Publisher: West Lafayette, Ind. : Purdue University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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Rev. and expanded versions of papers originally presented at three different conferences held during 1999-2000: the 24th annual conference, American Hungarian Educators' Association (Cleveland, 1999); Central European Culture Today (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Sept. 1999); annual conference, Modern Language Association (Washington, D.C., 2000).


Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies

Author: Louise Olga Vasvári

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781557535269

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The work presented in the volume in fields of the humanities and social sciences is based on 1) the notion of the existence and the "describability" and analysis of a culture (including, e.g., history, literature, society, the arts, etc.) specific of/to the region designated as Central Europe, 2) the relevance of a field designated as Central European Holocaust studies, and 3) the relevance, in the study of culture, of the "comparative" and "contextual" approach designated as "comparative cultural studies." Papers in the volume are by scholars working in Holocaust Studies in Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and the US.