Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present: An Overview
- Tears That Make the Heart Shine? “Godly Sadness” in Pietism
- Poetry of the Heart as Complicity with the Logos? Female Articulations of Sadness in Goethe's Lila and Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit
- Produktive Negativität: Traurigkeit als Möglichkeitssinn um 1800
- Die Schwester Lenaus? Betty Paoli und der Weltschmerz
- “Immer wieder kehrst du, Melancholie”: Plotting Georg Trakl's Poetic Sadness
- Die Lust am Unendlichen: Melancholie und Ironie bei Robert Walser
- Melancholy Echo and the Case of Serenus Zeitblom
- Melancholy in Wilhelm Genazino's Novels and Its Construction as Other
- The Past is Another Country and the Country Is Another Past: Sadness in East German Texts by Jakob Hein and Julia Schoch
The Past is Another Country and the Country Is Another Past: Sadness in East German Texts by Jakob Hein and Julia Schoch
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present: An Overview
- Tears That Make the Heart Shine? “Godly Sadness” in Pietism
- Poetry of the Heart as Complicity with the Logos? Female Articulations of Sadness in Goethe's Lila and Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit
- Produktive Negativität: Traurigkeit als Möglichkeitssinn um 1800
- Die Schwester Lenaus? Betty Paoli und der Weltschmerz
- “Immer wieder kehrst du, Melancholie”: Plotting Georg Trakl's Poetic Sadness
- Die Lust am Unendlichen: Melancholie und Ironie bei Robert Walser
- Melancholy Echo and the Case of Serenus Zeitblom
- Melancholy in Wilhelm Genazino's Novels and Its Construction as Other
- The Past is Another Country and the Country Is Another Past: Sadness in East German Texts by Jakob Hein and Julia Schoch
Summary
AMONG GERMAN-LANGUAGE PUBLICATIONS of the last ten years, a series of deeply sad prose works, and their themes of dying, death, and loss, stand out. Autobiographical or fictitious farewells to parents include Georg Diez's Der Tod meiner Mutter (2009) and Sabine Peters's story Abschied (2003), in which a daughter chronicles the aging and death of her authoritarian father. These are joined by what Dieter Lamping terms “fiktionale Sterbegeschichten,” such as Ludwig Fels's novel Reise zum Mittelpunkt des Herzens (2006), the story of a heterosexual couple's last day together that ends with the man's death from cancer. Mariana Leky's tragicomic novel Die Herrenausstatterin (2010) is also a fictional story of dying; an analysis of the loss of love, it tells the tale of a mishandled parting from a former lover, who died in a fatal accident. At the end, the ghostly protagonist dissolves into nothing. Friederike Mayröcker's great text of mourning about Ernst Jandl, Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling (2005) is, alongside Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story: A Memoir (2011), part of an international trend toward impressive public farewells by major female authors to their deceased partners.
These existential issues of farewell form a longstanding literary tradition. They revolve around the end of a love relationship or the illness and death of partners, parents, relatives, or children. What the autobiographical examples mentioned here have in common is the focus on the “private” mourning of the writing subject and the personal working through of loss.
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- Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature and Culture , pp. 173 - 192Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012