Volker Braun In Perspective

On the occasion of Volker Braun's 65th and GDR/German Monitor's 25th birthday an attempt is made to re-evaluate Braun's contribution to 20th and 21st century German literature. The seventeen essays of the collection, written by a truly international set of scholars, demonstrate the unique quality and breadth of Braun's writing, spanning all literary genres. But not only that, they also reveal the diversity of interpretative perspectives which Braun's oeuvre productively stimulates. They showcase an author who refuses to indulge complacently in past achievements and an opus that defies all attempts at labelling. Braun's texts, so the verdict of the contributors, are driven by an insatiable thirst for the whole story, the depth beneath the superficial, the complex truth of our human predicament; for the precise expression which is not caught up in the limitations of the dominant ideology, whatever it might be.

Critical essays on contemporary German novelist. Martin Walser (born 1927) is one of the most prolific contemporary German novelists, and one with a place in world literature. His work provides an astute critical commentary in novelistic form on postwar Germany. The present volume comprises essays by eleven Walser experts on various aspects of his writings, with concentration on the novels of the last 15 years, books such as Runaway Horse (1978), The Inner Man (1979), The Swan Villa(1980), Letter to Lord Liszt (1982), and In Defense of Childhood (1991). Parallels and influences discussed in these studies include Schiller, Richardson, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Updike, Brecht, and Walter Kempowski.

This book traces shifting attitudes towards science and technology, nature and the environment in Twentieth-century Germany. It approaches them through discussion of a range of literary texts and explores the philosophical influences on them and their political contexts, and asks what part novels and plays have played in environmental debate.

A series of five interlaced, in-depth biographical studies from across the spectrum of writers-turned-spies recruited by the Stasi.

Erstmals liegt mit Schaltstelle eine umfassende Studie zur zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Lyrik auf der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert vor. In einem breiten Spektrum an Beiträgen international renommierter Experten aus Deutschland, Großbritannien, den USA, Kanada, Italien und den Niederlanden präsentiert diese Untersuchung ausführliche Analysen zu bekannten Größen (wie Volker Braun, Ulrike Draesner, Durs Grünbein, Ernst Jandl, Barbara Köhler, Friederike Mayröcker, Brigitte Oleschinski und Raoul Schrott), eingehende Betrachtungen zur Lyrik des Körpers, zur Verwendung von Klischee-Bildern, zum Topos der Kindheit oder zur ‘neuen Schlichtheit’, sowie Beiträge zur jüngsten Generation von Dichterinnen und Dichtern, die im neuen Jahrhundert ihren Einstand gegeben haben. Untersuchungen zu individuellen Gedichtsammlungen ergänzen sich mit Abhandlungen, die Dialoge über die Jahrhundertgrenzen hinweg aufzeigen oder den Einfluß von Schlüsselfiguren wie Paul Celan und Gottfried Benn nachweisen. Zudem enthält der Band ein Interview mit Heinz Czechowski und neue Gedichte von acht führenden deutschsprachigen Lyrikerinnen und Lyrikern. Zu oft wird in Diskussionen zur Literatur in der Berliner Republik die Lyrik marginalisiert: dieser Band zeigt, daß sie im Gegenteil eine unerläßliche Rolle zu spielen hat. Für Wissenschaftler und Studierende der Germanistik, wie überhaupt für alle, die an den Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der modernen Lyrik interessiert sind, sollte diese Veröffentlichung zur Pflichtlektüre erhoben werden. Schaltstelle presents a pioneering examination of contemporary German poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century. Internationally recognised experts from Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands offer a first assessment of the paths that German poetry has taken into the new millennium. Alongside in-depth analyses of established names are broader surveys of poetry of the body, the use of cliché, theories of metaphor, the topos of childhood, the ‘new simplicity’, and contributions dedicated to the youngest generation of poets making their debut in the new century. The volume also contains an interview with Heinz Czechowski, a substantial Bibliography and new poems by eight leading poets. Poetry is too often marginalised in discussions about literature in the Berlin Republic: this volume demonstrates that it has a vital role to play at their heart.

Over the past decade and a half, Germany has experienced a period of political and cultural turbulence which many have attributed to the combined challenges of unification and globalisation. In response to growing exposure to global markets, politics and migration debates about identity have increasingly been renationalised. At the same time, there has been a notable reappraisal in Germany (and in German Studies) of the regional and global as spaces for the construction of identity. This volume sets out to explore these complex and at times contradictory trends, focusing in particular on developments in Germany since the 1970s, although chapters treating earlier periods are also included. The volume brings together British, Irish, German, Canadian and American scholars working in the field, and resulted from a conference organised by Women in German Studies at the University of Bath. The first section is primarily concerned with the specifically German concept of locality known as Heimat and its changing relationship with the global. Included are explorations of the writings of Kafka, Bachmann, Johnson, Sell, Wolf, Brinkmann and Jelinek amongst others as well as films by Schlöndorff and Steyerl. The second section focuses on the impact of the global on institutions and rituals such as commemoration, memorialisation, and architecture, which have traditionally been influential in shaping national self-images. Overall, this volume concludes that the nature of the relationship to the local has fundamentally changed under the impact of globalisation.

The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.

"Explores what postwar German representations of violence in other places and times tell us about Germany. Germany's 20th-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture especially challenging: it has made certain constructions of violence unspeakable, even unthinkable. As a result, new ways of thinking about violence in postwar German culture are needed. One such approach is critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, representations in literature, art, and film of violence in distant, imagined or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered Germans a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged or deeply encoded meanings and functions of violence in German culture. This volume explores what representations of "violence elsewhere" tell us about Germany. Its essays consider cultural products that arose from East, West, and reunified Germany and that imagine violence in Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Drawing on film, literary, gender, cultural, and postcolonial studies as well as visual culture, history, and life writing, they also introduce theoretical perspectives that are transferable beyond German Studies. As such, they allow us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities. Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone. On publication the chapter "Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized "9/11" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND"--

While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the “new century” would achieve “normalization.” The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany’s new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany’s new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies represent themselves. Hedges discusses the role of cinema in creating cultural memory within a global perspective that spans five continents. The book's innovative approach and approachable style should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects.