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Helen Grund was one of Weimar Germany's most intriguing authors of fashion journalism and short prose. Her essays, published between 1925 and 1935 in the Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Darne, enriched in various ways the generic spectrum of the feuilleton and the travelogue (Reisebericht) and thus constructed a medium of expression frequently preferred by many women writers and reporters of that time. Grund's short prose could also serve as an example of the representation of a specifically feminine experience in the modern metropolis and can be read as a testimony of the German fl?neuse. (MG) In 1929, Franz Hessel published a volume of essays, Spazieren in Berlin, that became the aesthetic and artistic credo of the belated fl?neur in German literature. In one of those kaleidoscopic images, the descrip tion of Berlin's press district, the fl?neur presents himself in one of his quintessential roles: as a free-lance contributor to some of Germany's popular illustrated magazines and daily newspapers. He spends hours waiting in the reception areas of the publishing conglomerates in the hope of drawing the attention of the editors to his "charming short pieces" ("reizende kleine Sachen"; 258).1 Here is how Hessel charac terizes the group of those aspiring writers who share the same fate in the "waiting rooms" of the press: Good-looking and friendly doormen let us in with all our manu scripts and requests_Oh, we don't want to go to the serious de partments of the newspapers where they talk politics and business. We belong in the commentary section ["unter den Strich"] and in the entertainment supplements? There are many women among

This examination of the current status of feminist scholarly work on nineteenth-century German literature highlights both positive and more problematic developments. It acknowledges the work that is now being done on individual German women writers and the newer scholarship that emphasizes feminist theoretical approaches to a variety of analytical categories. It welcomes the newly emerging evidence of a growing alignment between German Studies and feminist inquiry but also pinpoints such concerns as American indifference to German topics, the continuing ambiguities in the circumscribing of feminist inquiry, the history/theory dichotomy, and the inevitable envious comparisons that must be drawn when feminist Germanists consider nineteenth-century writings by non-German women.

Women authors do not figure prominently in the annals of the history of early German literature. If their voices can be heard, they are primarily those of mystics and other religiously oriented writers. This article examines a songbook that the Strasbourg burgher Ottilia Fenchlerin commissioned a scribe to produce in 1592. It contains primarily women's songs that were composed, according to the narrative voices, by women and that explicitly address women's issues and concerns. Although they seem to continue the medieval tradition of Frauenlieder composed by male poets, both the de tailed literary analysis of exemplary pieces and comparisons with some rep resentative Middle High German women's songs and Proven?al trobairitz poetry undoubtedly created by women writers indicate that the lyrics in Fenchlerin's songbook address women's issues and concerns in a surpris ingly radical fashion without precedent in the history of German literature. (AC) In the introduction to her anthology of articles on Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages Jane Chance recently commented that "speak ing the body, for women, implies breaking a silence." Referring to

The interview with the German author Elisabeth Alexander discusses her controversial role among the generation of women authors in post-war German literature. The author talks about her own personal and intellectual development, the cultural differences between Germany and America, her relationship to Germany's fascist past, her strong but ambivalent involvement with Germany's student movement, feminism, and the Catholic church. A substantial part of the interview focuses on her own work, discussing its recurring themes of sexuality, pornography, gender trouble, men as such, and the role of women, especially mothers, in modern society. (FAL)

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Auslander, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jurg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)

Focusing on the scene of reconciliation between the heroine and her father, the article traces the epistemological, erotic, and aesthetic impact of father-daughter intimacy in Kleist's Die Marquise von O_While the protagonists rely on bourgeois notions of sexuality, daughterhood, and family bonds that allow them to ignore the libidinal dynamics at home, the reader is asked to reflect on the difficulties of distinguishing between emotions and eroticism within an intimate early nineteenth-century family. This epistemological asymmetry is paralleled by aesthetic ambiguities. By presenting father-daughter desire in the scene of reconciliation as a quotation from contemporary theater and tableaux vivants, the novel not only parodies dramatic traditions, but also reveals the erotic impact of successful theatricality. (IMKF) In 1992, the young German painter Alissa Walser made her writing debut by winning the prestigious "Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis" with a story about an intimate father-daughter relationship. While some journals praised Walser's novelette "Geschenkt" for its literary qualities and others speculated on the autobiographical aspects of a story written by a daughter of well-known author Martin Walser, the Swiss newspaper Neue Z?rcher Zeitung wondered "where a father's love ends and incest be gins."1 This seemingly simple question not only reveals the difficulties of demarcating different forms of intimacy; it also suggests that paternal love, filial tenderness, and sexual desire may be intertwined to such a degree that they can be denoted by a single, highly suggestive term: the German expression Vaterliebe. It is precisely this ambiguity that I would like to explore in my reading of Heinrich von Kleist's nineteenth-century novella Die Marquise von O....1 Kleist's story relates a young widow's unconscious impregna tion?veiling the sexual act in German literature's most famous dash?,3 her violent expulsion from and later return to her family, and her

The following three essays, written by historian Atina Grossmann, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks, are a feminist contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of multi- and interdisciplinary work in the emerging field of German Studies. Defined in the 1988 German Studies Association Guidelines for Curricular Organization at American Educational Institutions as "the interdisciplinary study of the contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political life of the German-speaking peoples in their historical and international context," German Studies has been embraced most enthusiastically by scholars trained in the discipline of German literary studies. For literary scholars, German Studies, often loosely associated with British Cultural Studies, has provided an opportunity to import Anglo-American methodologies developed over the past several decades into their own field and to address a wider range of German cultural products than was authorized by the traditional canon of German literature. German Studies has found particular acceptance among younger, U.S.-trained Germanists poised to assume leadership of the field as an older cohort of German emigres whose intellectual production was oriented towards the Federal Republic now moves towards retirement. To younger Germanists, German Studies seems to represent a new, uniquely U.S.-American perspective on "things German. " As Marc Weiner put it in his provocative letter announcing the policies German Quarterly would pursue under his editorship: "German Studies has begun to develop an identity different from that of its counterpart, (German) Germanistik, as manifested in a variety of intellectual paradigms that differ from those abroad." Despite the claims to interdisciplinarity made in the GSA Guidelines, then, Germanists have frequently considered German Studies mainly the purview of German Departments, viewing it particularly as a vehicle that would allow them to broaden curricular offerings, teach courses in English, and hence reach larger numbers of students at a time of declining language enrollments. Unlike Germanists, however, proponents of German Studies in fields like history and political science, the other core areas of the GSA, seem much more strongly committed to

Maron's novel Die Uberlauferin represents the disintegration and regeneration of an individual's sense of identity. The narrative traces the process by which its heroine breaks free from her conformist ways of thinking and acknowledges her most feared desires. Fantasy is depicted as a means for recognizing and discard- ing an authoritarian society's underlying utilitarian principles that can confine and paralyze an individual. The article analyzes the images of walls, death, and rebirth as well as the function of fantasy and memory to demonstrate the destabilizing and self-emancipatory effects of creative action. (SCA) Much attention has been devoted to German literary works that deal with the Berlin Wall in an attempt to discover anticipations of its opening or assumptions about a "German" national identity.1 The Wall itself has been ascribed varied functions; in Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (1963) it serves as a protection, but it is an obstruction in Ulrich Plenz- dorf's kein runter keinfern (1978). It becomes a barrier with no meaning in Peter Schneider's tale Der Mauerspringer (1982) and Bodo Mors- hauser's Die Berliner Simulation (1983). In Peter Schneider's Paarungen (1992) it marks difference. In East German literature the difficulty or danger in crossing over to the other (western) side of the Wall is fre- quently overcome through fantasy, as in Klaus Schlesinger's "Die Spaltung des Erwin Racholl" (1977). However, in Der geteilte Himmel and in Helga Schubert's "Das verbotene Zimmer" (1982), the heroines do gain real access to the other side, but, finding the West as decadent as they had been taught to believe, they return home. Endeavors to break down or transcend obstacles, represented by the Wall metaphor, are most often the result of a longing for autonomy. Political unity with West Germany plays a secondary role, if any at all. East German texts dealing with the Wall since the 1970s frequently depict the debilitating effects of the internalization of an authoritarian political system. In some instances this process results in psychological

Kluger's autobiography is a literary account of an Auschwitz survivor, an immigrant to the United States and a professor of German literature, weiter leben is also a metadiscourse on earlier accounts and studies of the Holocaust and the exile experience. Kluger's familiarity with international Holocaust literature and Fascism theory lends this very personal work, with its close-up descriptions of concentration camp life and insights into the experience of a Jewish woman scholar in contemporary Germany, a multi-dimensional, critical perspective and an unusual scope and depth. Kluger confronts the present with her own recollections and her generation's collective memory. (DCGL)

Originating from a panel discussion at the Germanistentag 1991 in Augsburg, my position paper highlights recent developments in feminist studies and German literature with an eye towards historicizing gender, using the example of early modern German literature. I then present a six-point proposal for feminist studies (in regard to German literature), pleading for a continued feminist revision of literary interpretations, especially of "canonical" texts, and for a reconstruction of women's role in literature in order to newly conceive and write its history. Pointing to the obfuscation inherent in the ontological pursuit of Weiblichkeit (femininity), I argue for an open, relational concept of gender in a socio-historical frame, for further critical exploration of the complex power and bonding structures of patriarchy, and for an assessment of the increasing feminization of literary studies and the entire educational-cultural sector. (B.B.-C.)

A review of the book: Schweizer Literaturgeschichte: Die deutschsprachige Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Klaus Pezold. Leipzig: Militzke. 2007. 528 pp. €44. ISBN 978-3-86189-734-7.

20th-century Austrian literature boasts many outstanding writers: Schnitzler, Musil, Rilke, Kraus, Celan, Canetti, Bernhard, Jelinek. These and others feature in broader accounts of German literature, but it is desirable to see how the Austrian literary scene -- and Austrian society itself -- shaped their writing. This volume thus surveys Austrian writers of drama, prose fiction, and lyric poetry; relates them to the distinctive history of modern Austria, a democratic republic that was overtaken by civil war and authoritarian rule, absorbed into Nazi Germany, and re-established as a neutral state; and examines their response to controversial events such as the collusion with Nazism, the Waldheim affair, and the rise of Haider and the extreme right. In addition to confronting controversy in the relations between literature, history, and politics, the volume examines popular culture in line with current trends. Contributors: Judith Beniston, Janet Stewart, Andrew Barker, Murray Hall, Anthony Bushell, Dagmar Lorenz, Juliane Vogel, Jonathan Long, Joseph McVeigh, Allyson Fiddler. Katrin Kohl is Lecturer in German and a Fellow of Jesus College, and Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German and a Fellow of The Queen's College, both at the University of Oxford.

Since unification in 1990, and particularly since the late 90s, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in the 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 National Socialist 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 provides a circumspect view of German debates on the past, departing, as have recent German debates, from the tone of censorship that has so often accompanied these discussions. Instead, the idea of memory contests posits that all forms of memory, public or private, can be understood as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. The idea also captures the intergenerational dynamic of the ongoing confrontation with memory in Germany today.Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative alongside many other topics, the contributions provide a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The volume will appeal to readers with a wide variety of academic interests, including cultural history, gender studies, film, and contemporary German literature. Anne Fuchs is professor of Modern German Literature and Georg Grote is lecturer in German History, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

The Enlightenment was based on the use of reason, common sense, and "natural law," and was paralleled by an emphasis on feelings and the emotions in religious, especially Pietist circles. Progressive thinkers in England, France, and later in Germany began to assail the absolutism of the state and the orthodoxy of the Church; in Germany the line led from Leibniz, Thomasius, and Wolff to Lessing and Kant, and eventually to the rise of an educated upper middle class. Literary developments encompassed the emergence of a national theater, literature, and a common literary language. This became possible in part because of advances in literacy and education, especially among bourgeois women, and the reorganization of book production and the book market.This major new reference work provides a fresh look at the major literary figures, works, and cultural developments from around 1700 up to the late Enlightenment. They trace the 18th-century literary revival in German-speaking countries: from occasional and learned literature under the influence of French Neoclassicism to the establishment of a new German drama, religious epic and secular poetry, and the sentimentalist novel of self-fashioning.The volume includes the new, stimulating works of women, a chapter on music and literature, chapters on literary developments in Switzerland and in Austria, and a chapter on reactions to the Enlightenment from the 19th century to the present. The recent revaluing of cultural and social phenomena affecting literary texts informs the presentations in the individual chapters and allows for the inclusion of hitherto neglected but important texts such as essays, travelogues, philosophical texts, and letters. Contributors include: Kai Hammermeister, Katherine Goodman, Helga Brandes, Rosmarie Zeller, Kevin Hilliard, Francis Lamport, Sarah Colvin, Anna Richards, Franz M. Eybl, W. Daniel Wilson, Robert Holub. Barbara Becker-Cantarino is Research Professor in German at the Ohio State University.

This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned international experts on German society, culture, and politics that, together, provide a comprehensive study of contemporary Germany's postunification process of "normalization." Essays ranging across a variety of disciplines including politics, foreign policy, economics, literature, architecture, and film examine how, since 1990, and especially from the mid-1990s on, the often contested concept of normalization has become crucial to the self-understanding of the Berlin Republic. Although a "new" Germany would seem to have finally emerged, the essays in this volume demonstrate that in many ways normalization is still in question, and that perennial concerns -- notably the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR -- remain central to public political and cultural discourses and now also inflect the country's efforts to deal with the new challenges of globalization, global instability, migration, and the polarization of the world around religious, cultural, and ideological conflicts. This is the first major study in English or German of the impact of the normalization debate across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. ~~~~~~~ CONTRIBUTORS: STEPHEN BROCKMANN, JEREMY LEAMAN, SEBASTIAN HARNISCH AND KERRY LONGHURST, LOTHAR PROBST, SIMON WARD, ANNA SAUNDERS, ANNETTE SEIDEL ARPACI, CHRIS HOMEWOOD, ANDREW PLOWMAN, HELMUT SCHMITZ, KAROLINE VON OPPEN, WILLIAM COLLINS DONAHUE, KATHRIN SCHA-DEL, STUART TABERNER, PAUL COOKE ~~~~~~~~~~~~ VOLUME EDITORS: STUART TABERNER is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society and PAUL COOKE is Senior Lecturer in German studies, both at the University of Leeds.

This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effects of major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of the principal movements of the time (Junges Deutschland, Vormarz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America and Europe: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is associate professor of German at the same institution.

The essays in this volume address a topic of fundamental concern across all the disciplines engaged with the study of contemporary Germany, namely the evolving relationship between urban and rural space, the metropolitan centre and the provincial "Heimat".

Allusion to classicism - Friedrich Schiller's "Die Jungfrau von Orleans" and Bertolt Brecht's "Die heilige Johanna der Schlachtoefe" ironic reproduction - Friedrich Hebbel's and Franz Xaver Kroetz's "Maria Magdalena" fragmentation - Thomas Mann's "Der Tod in Venedig" and Wolfgang Koeppen's "Der Tod in Rom" integration - Georg Buechner's and Peter Schneider's "Lenz" quotation - Goethe's "Die Leiden des jungen Werther" and Ulrich Plenzdorf's "Die neuen Leiden des jungen W" constellation of character - Goethe's "Die Wahlverwandtschaften", Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "The Chandos Letter" and John Banville's "The Newton Letter".

The contributors to this volume treat fourteen plays of key significance in the history of German literature and show the way in which each dramatist has engaged with important social and theatrical issues of the age. Essays range from that on Lessing's Nathan der Weise (a key text in the history of 'tolerance' in Germany) to Jelinek's Krankheit oder moderne Frauen (a critique of theatrical representation, gender roles and the authority of the text), that is, from German classicism to the contemporary avant-garde. Each major movement in German literary history is represented, and the volume as a whole thus provides a partial history of German drama. The essays, all by specialists in the field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

Jerome, Roy, ed. Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 338 pp. $19.95 paperback. This collection brings together articles on postwar West German masculinity, written by a group of accomplished literature professors and psychologists from Germany and the United States. The editor, Roy Jerome, is a clinical psychologist specializing in masculinity, trauma, and violence and the overriding theme here is therapeutic: the collection intends to work through men's silence and shame about the Nazi past, in order to promote healing and shape more tolerant masculine identities in contemporary Germany. These are ambitious goals. The success of the volume, however, will be determined primarily by the reader's sympathy for neo-Freudian depth psychology, as the majority of the contributions draw heavily on psychoanalytic theory and practice. After an introductory essay that provides a brief overview of methodologies and key literary texts for German men's studies (Klaus-Michael Bogdal), the book turns to "theoretical considerations" on male identity. Here a case study by Dr. Tilman Moser, a psychoanalyst whose practice concentrates on treating psychopathologies related to National Socialism, exemplifies the volume at its most clinical. Moser uses techniques of Korpertherapie (psychomotor therapy), which prescribe physical contact between analyst and analysand, to lead the son of an SS officer through an anguished therapy session. This offers some insight into the way at least one man has come to terms with his Nazi father, but is difficult to generalize as a model for postwar male identity. A following essay on the family dynamics that lead to child abuse (Klaus-Jurgen Bruder) only weakly asserts a connection to more general constructions of German masculinity; as is often the case here, psychology trumps historical context. The second half of the volume examines postwar West German literature and offers a useful overview of themes and literary movements related to masculinity issues. The articles, again dominated by psychoanalytic interpretations, shed some light on the way subsequent generations of writers dealt with manhood and memories of National Socialism. Essays on Hans Erich Nossack (Inge Stephan) and Wolfgang Borchert (Hans-Gerd Winter) describe a range of literary conceptions of a denazified masculinity in the immediate postwar period. Other work in this section brings us into the 1990s, including a general review of homosexual imagery in West German literature after 1945 (Wolfgang Popp), the confluence of the personal and the historical/political in the vaterliteratur of the 1980s (Barbara Kosta), and a strong piece by Russell West on male identity and the father-son relationship in ex-neo Nazi Ingo Hasselbach's Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs ofa Neo Nazi (1996). …

Chapter 1. The Holocaust through Literature and Film D. Scrase Chapter 2. The Well-Utilized Survivor S. E. Cernyak-Spatz Chapter 3. Victims and Perpetrators: The Many Voices of the Holocaust T. Freeman Chapter 4. Designing Within and Around Limits: The Holocaust, Madonna, and Me L. Feldman Chapter 5. The Difficulty of Breaking the Silence: Teaching the Holocaust in a Program of German Literature and Culture D. C. G. Lorenz Chapter 6. Four Genres and One Question: Why? S. R. Cerf Chapter 7. The Holocaust and Resistance in German Literature G. Brude-Firnau Chapter 8. Inserting a Short Course on the Holocaust into German Offerings at a Small Liberal Arts College N. M. Decker Chapter 9. Teaching the Shoah in Context: A Course on Jewish German Relations K. Remmler Chapter 10. German Myths and Jewish Traumas: Teaching Postwar Cultural History 1945-1995 F. Strzelczyk Chapter 11. Witness Grete Weil: An Intensive Summer Graduate Seminar L. Nussbaum Chapter 12. A Graduate Seminar on the Holocaust and the Third Reich as Reflected in Postwar German Literature N. A. Lauckner Chapter 13. The Nazi Period, the Holocaust, and German-Jewish Issues as Integral Subjects in a German Language Course K. Doerr Chapter 14. The Holocaust in an Introductory German Literature Course: Problematic Responses as a Catalyst for Curricular Change M. Jokiniemi Chapter 15. Beyond Cultural Pedagogy W. C. Donahue Chapter 16. The Teaching (and Not Teaching) of the Disaster L. Morris Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

It would be customary, but intellectually limited to apply the key question of this symposium what remains of German literature in the second half of the twentieth century only to Belletristik in the proper sense, or only to use it to reconstruct or complete the literary canon. We also need to be concerned about what writers did when they were not writing between 1945 and 2000. Intellectuals meddle in the interests of society and historical events. Or, to put it in terms of the expressionist and activist Ludwig Rubiner's essay title, which refers admiringly to Heinrich Mann: "The Poet becomes Politically Active."2 To be sure, such intellectuals have always been around, from Walther von der Vogelweide to Georg Forster and from Ulrich von Hutten to Georg Biichner. Jacobinism and Vormarz in particular were epochs in which writers programmatically

Encounters with the Archive in German Literature of the 1990s A cursory review of the most recent belletristic publications in the German-speaking countries comes across a surprising number of texts dealing with the accumulation, preservation, and management of historical records. Some of these texts captivate this fascination with repositories in rather enigmatic titles such as Archives of Doubt, Abandoned Archives,l The Echo Sounder, or Archives of Silence.2 As these publications suggest, German writers feel that there is a need to reconstruct the past in an all-encompassing way; at the same time they seem to be uncertain about the use or impact of inventoried contents. In contrast, the well-known type of personal remembrances and subjective conjectures that we identify with the work of Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, or Christa Wolf is far less prominent. This trend suggests that German literati have entered a thematic field that is linked to current debates over cultures of memory in the German-speaking countries. Most of these new publications tell little

"The only German literature journal that presents a coherently feminist perspective and that serves as a forum for feminist voices." - Susanne Zantop, Dartmouth College.

Foreword Notes on the Contributors Wilfried van der Will M.Butler Hadubrand's 'Frageversaumnis' in the Hildebrandslied R.Evans Willehalm and Puzzat, Guillelme and Baucent: The Hero and His Horse in Wolfram's Willehalm and in the Bataille d'Aliscans Burger and 'das schwankende Wort Volk' D.Hill Moments of Emancipation: The Nineteenth-century Heroine in German Literature R.Whittle 'Apollo aber schlieblich die Sprache des Dionysus' Harmony or Hegemony in Die Geburt der Tragodie? R.Speirs Ernst Stadler in Oxford R.Sheppard Historicity and all that: Reflections on Bertolt Brecht's Die Mabnahme M.Swales 'Zwischen den Zeilen'? The Development of Dolf Sternberger's political 'Sprachkritik' from the 'Worterbuch der Regierung von Papen' to 'Ein guter Ausdruck' B.Dodd The Paradox of Simultaneity: 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung' in Paul Schalluck's Engelbert Reineke J.Klapper Authenticity and the 'Speaking Other': Gunter Wallraff's Ganz unten as an Industrial Fiction R.Burns Der parodierte Erzahler Grass: Anmerkungem zur Wirkung des Romans Die Rattin M.Durzak East German Literature and the Cold War: The Example of Erich Loest's Die Westmark fallt weiter M.Kane Was bleibt Revisited: Christa Wolf and the Fear of Transience M.Butler High and Low Literature and the German Reading Public K.Bullivant Reflections on Jewish Culture in Germany since 1945 E.Kolinsky Visiting Frau Behrens B.Taylor Reflections on German History and Anglo-Saxon Liberalism G.Minnerup The Social Dynamics of Dictatorship: Re-evaluating the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic from the 'Bottom Up' J.Grix & C.Jeffery The Impact of 1968 on the SPD W.E.Patterson Wilfried van der Will: Publications Tabula gratulatoria Index

Schonfeld, Christiane, ed. Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 270 pp. $59.00 hardcover. Commodities of Desire consists often essays that document and analyze the prostitute figure in German literature and film from approximately 1890 to 1930. The essays emphasize how literary and filmic texts exist as part of contemporary social, cultural, political, and legal contexts, displaying, enforcing, and/or undermining prevailing ideologies. Tackling works by both well-known (Schnitzler, Wedekind, Brecht) and lesser-known (Bohme, Hartleben) authors, these scholars offer a comprehensive view of the treatment of prostitution in artistic products of the period. Schonfeld's contextualizing introduction traces the evolution of the prostitute from counterexample of moral behavior in medieval through early modern literary texts to "madonna of sexual liberation" in expressionist works (5). She justifies her decision to focus on 1890-1930 by reference to industrialization and urbanization, phenomena that led to an upsurge in the number of registered prostitutes in Germany and Austria, an increased interest in the Prostitutionsfrage in the political arena, and more literary and artistic representations of prostitutes. Analyzing how fin-de-siecle pseudo-scientific and sociological texts construct the prostitute, Schonfeld shifts the emphasis from frequently (Weininger, Ferrero, Lombroso) to rarely invoked authors (Franz Seraph Hugel, Julius Kuhn, Robert Hessen, among others). In her synopsis of the social and legal predicament faced by female sex-workers, she presents fascinating details (that prostitutes were forbidden to go to the zoo, for example) and underscores the double standard on prostitution. A tacitly acknowledged necessity for men, prostitution was nevertheless a criminal offense for women, who could be forced to submit to invasive medical examinations and experimental treatments for sexually transmitted diseases. The essays vary greatly in quality, though all are well signposted and all, even those that seem to lose their sense of argument and dissolve into summary and description, offer new and suggestive ideas about modernist literature. Barbara Hales' and Alan Lareau's essays are notable because each limits its analysis to only one or two works and is therefore more attentive to textual detail. Hales explores the connection between female sexuality and criminality, drawing our attention to how the criminal woman is invariably sexualized in psychological and sociological treatises and demonstrating how that sexualization is carried over into popular entertainment in two Weimar street films, Die Strasse and Asphalt. …

(1819,1821), Johanna Schopenhauer's (17661838) first novel, and wrote to his son August: "Es ist gut, sehr gut."' In Kunst und Altertum he describes the style as "sehr anmutig verarbeitet," the descriptions and the plot as "alles [...] nach dem Wirklichen gezeichnet," and the implementation of tragic form as "sehr wohl gelungen" (WA 41: 5-7). Profitable in the marketplace and beloved by its readers, the novel inspired a new genre in German literature, the feminine novel of resignation or "Entsagungsroman."2 Thematically, Gabriele resonates with Goethe's own ruminations about "Entsagung" central to many of his later works (Wahlverwandtschaften, W M. Wanderjahre), and it also corresponds to his expectations of female protagonists: "Epische, halbepische Dichtung verlangt eine Hauptfigur, die bei vorwaltender Thiitigkeit durch den Mann, bei fiberwiegendem Leiden durch die Frau vorgestellt wird" (WA 41: 5). Indeed, Gabriele, considered to be a paradigmatic novel of feminine resignation, seems to endorse the most traditional views of women and patriarchy because the idealized heroine submits, sacrifices, and suffers all for the sake of duty. Yet, despite Goethe's plaudits for the novel, his praise of Gabriele's moral character and her seeming conformity to the societal expectations of women, he nevertheless cautions against using the novel as an educational model for young women. He writes: Eine sorgsame Mutter [fragte]: ob sie dieses Buch mit ihren Tbchtern lesen k6nne? Dabei kam Folgendes zur Sprache: Erziehung heiBt: die Jugend an die Bedingungen gewbhnen, zu den Bedingungen bilden, unter denen man in der Welt uberhaupt, sodann aber in besondern Kreisen existiren kann. Der Roman hingegen stellt das Unbedingte als das interessanteste vor, gerade das griinzenlose Streben, was uns aus der menschlichen Gesellschaft, was uns aus der Welt treibt, unbedingte Leidenschaft; fiir die dann bei untibersteiglichen Hindernissen nur Befriedigung im Verzweifeln bleibt, Ruhe nur im Tod. Dieser eigenthiimliche Charakter des tragischen Romans ist der Verfasserin sehr wohl gelungen. (WA 41.2, 7)

Introduction: Writing under Weimar 'Neue Sahclichkeit': The Career of an Idea Poetry for Everyday Use? The Theatre as Political Community The Novel I: Representing the Times The Novel II: Paths of Disillusionment Remembering the War The City and the Country Technology versus Humanity Epilogue Bibliography Index

One of the ghosts hanging over Martin Walser's controversial 1998 speech in acceptance of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was that of his novel Ein springender Brunnen, published that year. The Frankfurt speech and the novel shared parallel concerns about the past and its role in the present; but as radically different kinds of speech acts, the two works elicited largely different reactions. Whereas the novel met with widespread praise as a major work of contemporary German literature, the speech proved extremely controversial, leading to denunciations of Walser as a cryptofascist "rechtsextremistischer Intellektueller."1 Although such reactions were probably unfounded, they reflected difficulties in the speech that set it apart in a negative way from the novel, showing it to be an unsuccessful attempt at shedding light on discussions of the German past. In what follows, I explore some of the historical and political implications of the novel and the speech and the problematic interconnections between the two. In Ein springender Brunnen Walser addressed himself autobiographically to the problem of German history during the Third Reich. Ein springender Brunnen tells the story of Johann, a Catholic boy who, like Walser, was born in 1927 in a small town on Lake Constance. Like Walser's own father, Johann's father is a failure in business, but he exercises a powerful aesthetic influence over his son prior to his premature death in the mid-1930s. Like Walser, the fictional Johann volunteers for the German army at the end of WWII. Explaining in a 1998 Spiegel article why he joined the Wehrmacht, the real-life Walser asserts "dass ich die Leute damals, die sich gedruckt haben, verachtet habe," and he admits that even young men who volunteered for the Flak were considered cowards; the fictional Johann, one of whose friends joins the Flak, thinks: "Warum denn das? Zur Flak meldeten sich Feiglinge, Druckeberger. Wer sich zur Flak meldete, gestand dadurch, dass er nicht an die Front wollte [...]."2 Both Walser and his fictional character Johann are briefly taken prisoner by the Americans at the end of the war; like Walser, Johann then returns to his home town to finish his high school education. Both Walser and his protagonist are readers and admirers of Friedrich Nietzsche. Each of the novel's three main sections begins with a programmatic-philosophical chapter entitled "Vergangenheit als Gegenwart." The first section deals with Johann at age five, shortly before the Nazi rise to power; the second section covers Johann's life as an eleven-year old boy entering puberty and receiving his first communion in 1938, one year before the outbreak of WWII; and in the novel's final section Johann is a seventeen or eighteen-year old soldier in late 1944 and 1945, shortly before and shortly after the end of the war. In the three programmatic chapters, an unidentified narrator-- presumably Johann at an older age looking back on his previous life-wrestles with the problem of gaining access to the past. "Wenn etwas vorbei ist, ist man nicht meter der, dem es passierte" (9), declares the narrator in the second sentence of the novel, suggesting that, if this is an older Johann speaking, there is an unbridgeable gap between present-time narrator and past-time story. Toward the beginning of the first chapter, he asserts, "Die eigene Vergangenheit ist nicht begehbar" (9), and yet the novel is nothing if not a walk through one man's past. From the very onset, the narrator suggests that the project of the novel is impossibly quixotic. The novel's very existence, however, contradicts his claims. What people may think of as the objectively true past, the narrator claims, is in fact a construction which they have created for their own purposes in the present. Every past, inasmuch as it is told in the present, is therefore at least partly a fiction. "Geschichte" as history is always also "Geschichte" as story. In the final chapter, the narrator goes so far as to insist that "Die Vergangenheit als solche gibt es nicht" (281). …

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USACCII text omitted) Among those representations of the Holocaust in literature, painting, cartoon, and film that share the characteristic of mixing the sublime with the profane and hence opposing Theodor Adorno's famous statement that writing a poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric, there is in Germany a group of texts and films in which Nazi atrocities are represented within the context of German mythology and the German fairy-tale tradition. The fictionalization of such a largely unrepresentable historical event as the Holocaust and its aftermath is, of course, problematic. If writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, what is writing fairy tales after 1945, particularly fairy tales in the context of the Third Reich and the Holocaust? In her recent book The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust Ernestine Schlant argues that West German literature has largely remained silent about the topic of the Holocaust.1 The silence about the Holocaust that may pervade the works Schlant analyzes is, however, shattered in quite a few other works of art in Germany, not only in textual representations of Nazi atrocities that make use of the fairy tale, but also in the work of artists and filmmakers such as Anselm Kiefer and Hans-- Jurgen Syberberg, the two enfants terribles "of an otherwise reputable culture", as Andreas Huyssen has pointed out.2 Although Schlant briefly discusses GUnter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, she ignores the fact that a close reading reveals it to be a text in which there is definitely no silence about Nazi atrocities (69-71). Although it is true that the persecution of Jews and their elimination in concentration camps is not a central theme in this novel, it is in its entirety a text about the persecution of another minority group that the Nazis considered artfremd, the physically and mentally handicapped, exemplified by the dwarf Oskar Matzerath. I want to explore the use of fairy tales in Die Blechtrommel and Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi and der Friseur in the context of the Nazis' ethnic cleansing. Questions this essay attempts to answer are: what makes Hilsenrath's use of fairy-tale material more provocative than Grass's, so that German publishers rejected the manuscript until 1977, six years after its original appearance in the US; and what links Hilsenrath's and Grass's texts to some of the satiric paintings and photographs of Anselm Kiefer? The fairy tale in Germany in the 20th century is an ideal genre for showing how history determines the uses and abuses of fiction and how then this very fiction can be used in different ways to represent history. The tales of the Brothers Grimm had become politicized during the years of the Weimar Republic as progressive writers and conservatives fought over their legacy.3 For the Nazis the fairy tales became the prime vehicle in supporting their Aryan policies. As a consequence, the entire field of Volkskunde became ideologically polluted far into postwar Germany. Following this abuse of folklore in support of the Nazis' racist and imperialist ideology, in 1945 the Allied Forces briefly banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany because they associated the horrors expressed in many a fairy tale with violence in the death camps.4 Such postwar authors as Arno Schmidt, Gunter Grass, Edgar Hilsenrath, Rolf Hochhuth, most recently Ingo Schramm, and filmmakers like Alexander Muge, Volker Schlondorff, and Helena Sanders-Brahms have all re-claimed the German fairy-tale tradition for their works in order to exploit the artistic potential of the connection between this genre and the Third Reich. In tales like Hansel and Gretel, Daurerlings Wanderschaft, Vom Fischer and seiner Fru, and Frau Holle they see ways of speaking the unspeakable. It seems that through two of its attributes, its violence and its unreality, the fairy tale lends itself to a representation of just that-extreme political violence and the victims' loss of reality. …

The role of fiction in propagating and updating antisemitic stereotypes in modern Germany is widely acknowledged. Few would deny that the popular image of the Jew was fixed in popular imagination more by the novels of Gustav Freytag and Wilhelm Raabe than by antisemitic polemics such as Wilhelm Marr's Der Sieg des Judenthums fiber das Germanenthum or by Hitler's Mein Kampf Even the racist, volkisch and paranoid trilogy of novels by Arthur Dinter probably exerted more influence than political tracts. Dinter and Freytag are taken here as the two poles which tacitly define the range of fictional Jewishness. Dinter portrayed "the Jew" as irredeemably vile.1 Freytag poses greater difficulties. Beginning in the 1880s, Freytag spoke out against antisemitism, raised his stepson (from his third wife) as a Jew, and regarded himself a stalwart liberal. Nevertheless, George Mosse and Hans Mayer have convincingly argued that Freytag's Soll and Haben perpetuated negative stereotypes about Jews and upheld the "good Jew" versus "bad Jew" dichotomy so characteristic of German literary representations of Jewishness.2 While historians have analyzed the "Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus," scholars in Germanistik appear to have neglected the literary counterparts to this anti-antisemitic organization.3 My contention in this essay is that several non-Jewish authors created positive Jewish characters and narratives. While these works exerted less influence than Freytag or Dinter, it would nevertheless be imprudent to dismiss them as aberrations. The authors discussed here may not have been famous, but neither were they unknown scriveners without readers. These works take the "Jewish Question" as their principal subject. Additional works could expand the discussion considerably; this essay does not present a thorough analysis of pro-Jewish themes in German literature. Rather, it is an invitation to scholars in German studies to undertake a more systematic investigation of pro-Jewish themes -an able doctoral candidate would find plenty to write about. My use of the term philosemitic is qualified in several ways. First, I do not claim that these authors were free from all anti-Jewish prejudices; it seems difficult to imagine a 19t-century German Christian who would fit that description. When determining the presence or absence of literary antisemitism, those who argue that the text rather than the author should be the decisive factor make the better case.4 Second, the texts display ambivalence, both confuting and perpetuating Jewish stereotypes. The minimizing of distinctively Jewish realia and the trivializing of antisemitic impulses tended to denude these works of fictional power. I pass no judgment here on the effectiveness of philosemitic elements, only on their existence. Third, I am aware that the very acceptance of a "Semitic essence" may be considered inherently antisemitic. Recent scholarship indicates that various authors assumed a "Semitism" notwithstanding widely divergent views as to what "Semitism" entailed overemphasis on the topic being the constant in this discourse. Zygmunt Bauman has fruitfully employed the neologism "allosemitism" to characterize this phenome non.5 I agree that Jewishness was a heavily weighted construct. But when positive elements dominate, I would contend that the work has a philosemitic valence, in other words, that it is justifiably called philosemitic. Finally, I accept that the term philosemitism is both place- and time-specific. Religious conversion, the balancing of political tradition and reform, and the endless debate between Hebraism and Hellenism loomed large in British representations of the Jew, but played only a minor role in German fiction. While political emancipation, economic embourgeoisement and intellectual Bildung were critical themes for the contemporaries of Lessing, they no longer appear as critical themes for pro-Jewish German authors by the end of the 19th century. What themes drew the attentions of philosemitically inclined authors in Imperial and Weimar Germany? …

Del Caro, Adrian, and Janet Ward, eds. German Studies in the Post-Holocaust Age: The Politics of Memory, Identity, and Ethnicity. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2000. 244 pp. $55.00 hardcover. Paperback edition, 2003. 262pp. $21.95. German Studies, the editors of this volume assert, is in crisis. Enrollments in German majors and German courses are in decline and the number of K-12 students learning German has dropped precipitously. To readers of this journal, the alarm has been heard before. The editors argue, however, that the way out involves embracing the multi-ethnicity of German-speaking literature and facing the cataclysm of Germany's twentieth-century legacy, particularly the Holocaust. They also urge more English-language courses and greater inter-disciplinarity within a German Studies curriculum. The essays, selected proceedings of a symposium held at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995, suggest the possibilities of a post-Holocaust German Studies. The symposium was also meant to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the death camps and the end of the vicious war in Europe unleashed by Nazi Germany. As in many volumes of collected essays, the contributions are of unequal quality and design, ranging from Walter Sokel's astute reflections on Heidegger's understanding of Being and Kari Grimstad's informative narrative about Germanistik in Canada to essays that rarely stray outside a predictable post-Holocaust canon. There are twenty-three essays in all and they are divided into four sections: cultural philosophy and ideologies of identity; post-Holocaust identity debates; poetry and images after Auschwitz; and sites of meta-German multiplicity. The latter category mainly refers to the special relationship of German literature and German studies outside the Federal Republic. Of the twenty three contributors, eighteen are from the field of German literature proper, three are historians, one is a political scientist and one is a novelist. Seven of the contributors teach at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Of the eighteen Germanists, only one teaches in the Federal Republic of Germany. The distribution of contributors means that German studies is largely read through the interpretive prism of German departments in North America. Because the essays tend to be short, many of them might be described as either translations of German debates for American audiences or interventions in these debates. Representative of the first genre is Andreas Michel's clear presentation of the controversial position of the GermanJewish patriot and historian Michael Wolfsohn, who consciously eschews a hyphen in his self-attribution; or Thomas Hollweck's resume of the debate over unification among leading German intellectuals. …

This collection of twenty-three essays sets its sights on the points of queerness, marginality, and alterity already present within the German canon and introduces further difference and deviation in the form of openly gay German literature in order to promote the always-ongoing shift in cultural representation. Queering the Canon provides new analyses, from queer perspectives, of texts by authors whose names are familiar to canonical lists, including Goethe, Schiller, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Reinig, and Elfriede Jelinek. It also makes welcome room for discussions of literary works that have seldom received scholarly attention.

Kammerer, Herald. Nur um Himmels Willen keine Satyren ... Deutsche Satire and Satiretheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts im Kontext von Anglophilie, Swift-Rezeption and asthetische Theorie. Heidelberg: Winter, 1999. 353 pp. and 6 illustrations. DM 88.00 paperback. This book, a 1998 dissertation from Munich University, distances itself from the dominant scholarship in German literature on satire, which has mainly relied on "official" definitions of satire claiming normative and didactic intentions for the satirical writers. After providing a careful outline of the current research on satire, both in German and in Anglo-American contexts, Kammerer shows that this "official" approach involves a contradiction. In eighteenth century Germany, Jonathan Swift was considered the exemplary satirist and while he was admired greatly for his individualism, wit, humor, and spleen despite his uncompromising sharpness and aggressive tone, his contribution to the theory of the genre remained ignored in the scholarship of Germanistik. Satire in German literature was conceptualized only in unifying pedagogical terms, as if addressed to the society as a whole, or reduced to the service of the Enlightenment's education program without ever taking laughter, pleasure, or specific sensory aspects into account. Because of their fixation on normative and didactic purposes, German definitions and theories of satire have, according to Kammerer, neither done justice to Swift's path-breaking use of this genre, nor to the praxis of German satirists whose work also exceeds such unnecessary narrow boundaries. Kammerer develops his own pragmatic approach to satire inspired by Swift and a sensualist aesthetic that is increasingly gaining attention in eighteenth-century studies. He focuses on three German texts: Jonathan Karl Wezel's novel Belphegor (1776), Gottfried August Burger's Munchhausen (1788), and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Ausfuhrliche Erklarung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche (1794-99). The first part of the book offers a detailed report on the German scholarship on satire that he then contrasts to Anglo-American literary approaches. Against the dominant model of satire in German scholarship, interpreted as a means to transmit bourgeois ideology while addressing the public sphere as defined by Kosellek, Habermas, and Vierhaus, Kammerer argues that satire rather works within an individualistic anthropology as suggested by Hobbes, or as described in the work of Locke, where the notion of society has different connotations. Whereas Kosellek, Rabener, Riedel, Waser and others claim that the satire is non-political ("Anspruch auf Uberparteilichkeit" [27]) and altruistic ("allgemeine Menschenliebe"), the same authors take issue with the aggressive tone of satires which does not fit this norm. Also the entry for satire in Zedler's UniversalLexikon (vol. 34, 1742) includes warnings against satires that do not keep to the expectation of public peace. …

Bullivant, Keith, Geoffrey Giles, and Walter Page, eds. Yearbook of European Studies - Annuaire d'Etudes Europeennes. Vol. 13. Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 373pp. $30.50 paperback. The cover of this volume is adorned by a cartoon that depicts the European nations, embodied by their soldiers, engaged in vicious combat. A German soldier, dressed in World War I garb, dominates the pictures, lashing out at his neighbors and poking his rifle into the face of Russia. The cartoon cleverly captures the focus of this edition which investigates Germany's conflicted relationships with Eastern Europe in its historical and political contexts. A topic of such complexity and scope is best addressed with an interdisciplinary approach, and the volume's contributors represent both a broad range of disciplines (history, German, Slavic, Judaic Studies) and nationalities. The concise introduction by Bullivant and Giles provides a brief overview of German-East European relations since 1945 and links it to the different issues addressed in the sixteen articles. While the politics of the Cold War severed the formerly tight connections between Eastern and Western Europe, the planned 2005 entry of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Estonia into the European Union can allow for a much-needed (re) integration. This integration, as the authors point out, will be a difficult process given the economic imbalance as well as the painful historical memories and cultural differences. The volume is divided into three subheadings, "Historical Perspectives: Ethnic and Cultural Identity in the Borderlands," "German Literature and Eastern Europe: Changing Mentalities," "Germany and Eastern Europe: Before and After 1989" followed by a name index. Each article is preceded by a short abstract, a useful device in a collection of such diversity. Unfortunately, no (historical) maps are included. The essays are of uniformly high quality, and they follow, for the most part, a descriptive approach. To counter the "select few" procedure usually required by editions, I will list the articles' topics before highlighting specific themes. The five articles in part one examine different aspects of German-Polish relationships (Volker R. Berghahn, Richard Blanke), the role of the so-called Volksdeutschen during World War II and the Holocaust (Doris L.Bergen), anticommunism and (West) German Identity using articles in the F.A.Z. from 1949 to 1952 (Martin Andree and Daniel Fulda) and "Eastern Europe and the Notion of `Frontier' in Germany to 1945" (Alan E. Steinweis). A similar variety also characterizes part two. Jurgen Lieskounig analyzes the depiction of Poles in Gustav Freytag's enormously influential novel Soil and Haben, Alice Freifeld describes the "De-Germanization of the Budapest Stage," Walter Pape delineates the perception of Moscow and Russia in select examples of German literature, and Anna Campanile addresses the importance of (landscape) memories in Johannes Bobrowski's poetry and prose. …