For the last three hundred years, fictions of the vampire have fed off anxieties about cultural continuity. Though commonly represented as a parasitic aggressor from without, the vampire is in fact a native of Europe, and its -metamorphoses, - to quote Baudelaire, a distorted image of social transformation. Because the vampire grows strong whenever and wherever traditions weaken, its representations have multiplied with every political, economic, and technological revolution from the eighteenth century on. Today, in the age of globalization, vampire fictions are more virulent than ever, and...

King Rother, a twelfth-century bridal-quest epic, occupies an important place in the history of German literature. The earliest surviving and structurally most sophisticated of the so-called minstrel epics, verse narratives once assumed to have been recited by itinerant minstrels before a courtly audience, it has its roots in German folklore and documents the transition from orality to the culture of the book. The text belongs to the subgenre of the perilous bridal quest, in which the disguised wooer deceives the bride's father and abducts her with her consent. This simple quest structure is...

Over the long nineteenth century, German book publishing experienced an unprecedented boom, outstripping by 1910 all other Western nations. Responding to the spread of literacy, publishers found new marketing methods and recalibrated their relationships to authors. Technical innovations made books for a range of budgets possible. Yearbooks, encyclopedias, and boxed sets also multiplied. A renewed interest in connoisseurship meant that books signified taste and affiliation. While reading could be a group activity, the splintering of the publishing industry into niche markets made it seem an...

In 1848 Richard Wagner began what would become the largest stage work of his career, the Ring of the Nibelung. In preparation for the task he composed an overview of the Nibelung myth designed to lead to a drama; he then composed the verse "libretto" Siegfried's Death. Although he abandoned the idea of a single opera on Siegfried in favor of the huge project that developed out of it in the succeeding years -- the Ring cycle -- he did consider the two early documents important enough to include them in his collected works. The present volume seeks to inform the English-speaking reader in three...

Brecht's Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) gives a compelling documentary picture of life in Nazi Germany. Close readings of individual scenes are accompanied by a detailed analysis of their role within the play's overall structure. Contrary to the assumption that it is a work of Aristotelian realism, Brecht is shown to employ covert alienation devices that are an integral part of his literary campaign against Third Reich Germany. This first study in English on the subject of Brecht and fascism offers a corrective to the overconcentration on the play's...

Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of -Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, - or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of -memory contests, - which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as...

Since the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, the literary reputation of this complex and unique writer has risen to the point that he is now regarded as a major European figure. Bernhard emerged in the 1960s as one of Austria's major writers, challenging the popularity of such established writers as Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass on the German literary scene. His idiosyncratic prose consists of a tragic-comic blend of themes such as suicide, madness, and isolation combined with highly satirical and histrionic invectives against culture, tradition, and society. As a skillful impresario of...

Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) was one of the great German-Jewish writers of the 20th century, a major figure in the German avant-garde before the First World War and a leading intellectual during the Weimar Republic. Doblin greatly influenced the history of the German novel: his best-known work, the best-selling 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, has frequently been compared in its use of internal monologue and literary montage to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer . Doblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels, but in this genre, he offered a surprising variety of...

Few works of the middle ages can boast the staying power' of the 'heroic' Nibelungenlied and few have generated more controversy both among scholars and the educated public. The Nibelung theme has been ubiquitous over the past 150 years in a wide spectrum of literary and as well as non-literary endeavors. It was used by Friedrich Hebbel as the basis for one of his best psychological dramas, by Wagner, along with the Old Norse analogues, for Die Ring des Nibelungen, and by the film maker Fritz Lang for his 1920s Expressionist masterpiece, Die Nibelungen. Its heroes provided suitable models for...

Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival expands and transforms the Arthurian tradition into a grand depiction of the medieval cosmos around 1200. Standing between clerical and chivalric cultures and articulating the interests and values of both, Wolfram produced the most popular vernacular work in medieval Germany and one of the most vibrant of the High Middle Ages. The brilliance, boldness, and astonishing originality of Parzival, along with the allure of its elusive author and his enigmatic grail, have continued to fascinate modern audiences since the nineteenth century. And in the late 20th...