Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The German novel in the long twentieth century
- 2 Contexts of the novel
- 3 The novel in Wilhelmine Germany
- 4 Gender anxiety and the shaping of the self in some modernist writers
- 5 Franz Kafka
- 6 Modernism and the Bildungsroman
- 7 Apocalypse and utopia in the Austrian novel of the 1930s
- 8 Images of the city
- 9 Women writers in the ‘Golden’ Twenties
- 10 The First World War and its aftermath in the German novel
- 11 The German novel during the Third Reich
- 12 History, memory, fiction after the Second World War
- 13 Aesthetics and resistance
- 14 The kleiner Mann and modern times
- 15 The ‘critical’ novel in the GDR
- 16 Identity and authenticity in Swiss and Austrian novels of the postwar era
- 17 Subjectivity and women’s writing of the 1970s and early 1980s
- 18 The postmodern German novel
- Index
- Series List
16 - Identity and authenticity in Swiss and Austrian novels of the postwar era
Max Frisch and Peter Handke
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 The German novel in the long twentieth century
- 2 Contexts of the novel
- 3 The novel in Wilhelmine Germany
- 4 Gender anxiety and the shaping of the self in some modernist writers
- 5 Franz Kafka
- 6 Modernism and the Bildungsroman
- 7 Apocalypse and utopia in the Austrian novel of the 1930s
- 8 Images of the city
- 9 Women writers in the ‘Golden’ Twenties
- 10 The First World War and its aftermath in the German novel
- 11 The German novel during the Third Reich
- 12 History, memory, fiction after the Second World War
- 13 Aesthetics and resistance
- 14 The kleiner Mann and modern times
- 15 The ‘critical’ novel in the GDR
- 16 Identity and authenticity in Swiss and Austrian novels of the postwar era
- 17 Subjectivity and women’s writing of the 1970s and early 1980s
- 18 The postmodern German novel
- Index
- Series List
Summary
This is no time for ego stories. And yet human life is fulfilled or goes wrong in the individual ego, nowhere else.
Max Frisch, Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964)I have only one theme: to achieve greater clarity about myself . . . in order to be able to communicate better with other people and get on better with them.
Peter Handke, 'Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms' (1967)The polemical tone of the above quotations is unmistakable. The slightly world-weary cadences of the established writer Frisch contrast sharply with the self-confident assertiveness of the young Peter Handke, but both were responding to the pressures brought about by the growing politicisation of literature in the 1960s, particularly inWest Germany. The decade had opened with the controversial trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), and was dominated by the harrowing Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-5) and the powerful documentary theatre of Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss and Heinar Kipphardt. The decade was to be even more politicised by increasing opposition to the Vietnam War, the formation of the Auβerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) in the face of the threat to West German democracy posed by the CDU-SPD 'Grand Coalition' of 1966, and the rapid escalation of the anti-authoritarian student movement inWest German universities. It is therefore perhaps understandable that at this critical moment all social activity, including literature and art, should have been seen in starkly political terms.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel , pp. 232 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004