Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust investigates communist Germany's attempt to explain the Holocaust within a framework that was at once German and Marxist. The book probes the contradictions and self-deceptions arising from East Germany's official self-understanding as an enlightened, modern society in which Jewishness did not constitute -difference- or otherness. The study examines East German historiography of the Holocaust, including its reflection in schoolbooks; analyzes East German concentration camp memorials; discusses the situation of Jews who remained in East Germany;...

The great and eccentric German writer Heinrich von Kleist, famous for his enigmatic dramas and novellas, read the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1801. A series of letters written around this time speak of the distress he felt as he absorbed the implications of Kantian thought. This sense of distress -- long considered important to understanding Kleist's subsequent works -- has become known to Kleist scholars as the 'Kant crisis, ' and marks Kleist's abandonment of the hope of gaining metaphysical certainty about his life. But it has never been established which texts of Kant...

This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Gunter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of...

Kudrun is an heroic epic written around 1230 second in importance only to the Nibelungenlied; it is characterized by its greater focus on female characters and a tone gentler than that of the brutal Nibelungenlied. For his translation Professor McConnell has gone back to the sole (a later and problematic) existing manuscript, found in the Ambraser Handschrift in the holdings of the Austrian National Library at Vienna.

Bertolt Brecht and the director Erwin Piscator developed epic theater in the 1920s because they found Western realism limited to the single perspective of an individual, and thus unable to confront the new realities: technological warfare, revolution, the metropolis, and the mass media, among others. The epic stage juxtaposed the old media of actors and scenery with new media, including film, photography, and electronic sound. Bryant-Bertail provides analyses of theatrical productions in the epic tradition from before, during, and after Brecht's lifetime: Hasek's The Good Soldier Schwejk/I>...

Survey of reception of German poet Holderlin in French criticism and literature, with particular attention to Heidegger and his followers.

One hundred years ago Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) enjoyed within German-speaking countries the stature of a George Eliot, and her style and thematic interests resembled those of her English contemporary. Today, however, her fame has faded, and she is mainly known only to specialists, partly because her 'canon' has shrunk to a few prose works which are more reconciliatory than critical, falsely suggesting her to be a passive, conventional writer: her 'happy endings' have diverted her readers from the critical messages beneath the surface. By close analysis of a variety of works...

Originating with Boccaccio during the Italian Renaissance, the novella, a cyclical collection of frame stories in prose, quickly inspired many imitations in Italy, France, Spain and Great Britain. However, it was not widely used in Germany until the end of the eighteenth century, when, inspired by Goethe, the genre retained the original medium but abandoned the cyclical format; it rapidly grew in popularity, dominating the nineteenth century literary scene, and became the object of much artistic speculation. The orthodox theory of the novella has sharply divided the critical establishment;...

Professor Born's book provides a phonological, grammatical, and lexical description of a German-American dialect that has never before been studied. It compares the Michigan Frankenmuth dialect with its parent dialect in central Franconia. The town of Frankenmuth was established in 1845 by an unusually homogeneous group of orthodox Lutherans bent on remaining separate from the American mainstream. The settlement history was therefore a significant factor in postponing the shift to American English in Frankenmuth until the middle of this century. This study will be of interest to scholars and...

This collection makes available for the first time in modern English translation seven novellas and short stories by the Austrian storyteller Marie Ebner-Eschenbach. The tales, redolent of the atmosphere of the vanished Habsburg Empire, include Krambambuli, Jakob Szela, Countess Paula, The Wake, The Finch, The Travelling Companion, and Countess Muschi.