Interest in Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) has suffered from an impression of the complexity of his works and of the narrowness of his focus: on 'The Germans and their Eastern European neighbours'. The current study re-examines aspects of Bobrowski's 'Sarmatian' works, especially their chronological development, but places them within the wider context of the whole of his oeuvre. It looks at the long period of development before he discovered his 'theme' in the early 1950s and examines his development after Sarmatische Zeit and Schattenland Strome, seeing the volume Wetterzeichen as moving...

Writing against Boundaries. Nationality, Ethnicity and Gender in the German-speaking Context presents a series of essays by prominent scholars who critically explore the intersection of nation and subjectivity, the production of national identities, and the tense negotiation of multiculturalism in German-speaking countries. By looking at a wide spectrum of texts that range from Richard Wagner's operas to Hans Bellmer's art, and to literature by Aras Oren, Irene Dische, Annette Kolb, Elizabeth Langgasser, Karin Reschke, Christa Wolf, to contemporary German theater by Bettina Fless, Elfriede...

This study offers new perspectives on Wolfgang Koeppen, a writer too often consigned to the margins of post-1945 literary history. Examining the interaction of the personal and the social in Koeppen's writings, this book demonstrates that the politics of his works are inherent to their form. Through a series of close readings, the book explores the positive and negative aspects of liminality, a dominant trope in Koeppen's works. Stressing the thematic and formal continuities of his oeuvre, the first section illustrates how his protagonists perpetually establish a space for themselves 'in...

As Brecht's Galileo observed, a country which needs heroes is unfortunate indeed - words which suggest that a society's need for heroes is always a function of its shortcomings. By examining the role that heroes and heroism have played in German literature and culture over the past two centuries, the essays in this volume illuminate and contour both a flawed German society in need of heroes and the flawed but essential heroes brought forth by that society. Beginning in he era of the anti-Napoleontic Wars of Liberation, advancing to the challenging situation Germany faced at the end of World...

Despite all the assertions towards the end of the twentieth century that the literary subject had expired along with the author, the wave of autobiographies published in German after the Wende was a clear indication that, on the contrary, life stories were very much alive. In this study, Owen Evans examines the work of eight authors - Ludwig Harig, Uwe Saeger, Ruth Kluger, Gunter de Bruyn, Gunter Kunert, Christoph Hein, Grete Weil and Monika Maron - who all published personal texts after 1989 dealing either with life in Nazi Germany or the GDR, and in some cases both. By means of close...

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 marked the end of East Germany's socialist regime and a new beginning for a unified German Federal Republic. Cultural historians agree that the event caused one of the deepest rifts in time and thinking seen by an entire generation of Germans-a rift that left its mark on the psyche of every citizen, challenging notions of the personal and the political, and crashing traditional understandings of the individual and the collective self. In this bold rethinking of the question, Cheryl Dueck goes beyond the social, political, and psychological...

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'....

In response to the silence that continues to shroud Austria's historical past, Austrian literature after 1950 wants to retrace an untold history that left its marks in mental schemata and cultural cliches. The question how literature can refer to the facts silenced by a political unconscious, the question of literary reference and reality description, lies at the core of Austrian literature since the 1950's. This book traces the development of contemporary Austrian fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s, showing how the Vienna Group's literary reductionism led to gesture of mere pointing in...

This study explores Heinrich Böll's 'aesthetic thinking', as it is expressed in the author's disparate and voluminous writings on literature. Böll's work in this field is situated in the multi-faceted context of social, political, and cultural developments in post-war Germany, and is shown to be an important adjunct to the novels and stories which were honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature.
An understanding of Heinrich Böll's 'aesthetic thinking' can illuminate the writer's fiction in an intriguing way. In particular, Böll's defence of the 'rationality of poetry' raises issues...

Mallorca läßt zunächst einmal nicht an deutschsprachige Schriftsteller als Exilanten des Dritten Reiches denken. Doch verschlug es einige von ihnen auch dorthin, so Albert Vigoleis Thelen, Harry Graf Kessler, Franz Blei, Karl Otten, Marte Brill, Erich Arendt, Klaus Mann und Herbert Schlüter. Einmal auf der Insel angelangt, verbrachten sie ihre Exilzeit dort unter unterschiedlichen Umständen und verließen Mallorca spätestens 1936, als der Spanische Bürgerkrieg anfing und sie sich gewissermaßen wieder auf der falschen Seite befanden. Ihre Inselerlebnisse haben sie z.T. auch literarisch...