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This is Camden House’s general German studies series, in which numerous titles have appeared since the early 1980s. It welcomes a broad range of topics and approaches - from traditional, narrowly literary studies on one hand to forays into cultural studies and cultural history on the other, from approaches based on traditional close reading to those emphasizing theory, from feminist to postmodern to multicultural. All periods of German culture and literature are fair game, from medieval Spielmannsepen to currently emerging writers of the twenty-first century.

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253 results in Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Page 12 of 13

Recasting German Identity
  • Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic
  • Edited by Stuart Taberner, Frank Finlay
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 November 2002
  • This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identity in the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today's Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate, the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today. Contributors: Frank Brunssen, Ulrike Zitzlsperger Janet Stewart, Kathrin Schödel, Karen Leeder, Ingo Cornils, Peter Thompson, Chris Szejnmann, Sabine Lang, Simon Ward, Roswitha Skare, Eva Kolinsky, Margaret Littler, Katharina Gerstenberger, and Stuart Parkes. Stuart Taberner is Lecturer in German, and Frank Finlay is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German, both at the University of Leeds, UK.

Literature in Vienna at the Turn of the Centuries
  • Continuities and Discontinuities around 1900 and 2000
  • Edited by Ernst Grabovszki, James Hardin
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    13 December 2002
  • This book of new essays by widely-published scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Austria examines the artistic, social, political, and historical continuities and discontinuities in Viennese literature during the periods around 1900 and 2000. It takes its impetus from the idea that both turns of the century are turning points in the development of Austrian literature and history. The essays show that in both periods literature not only reflects societal conditions and political issues, but also serves to criticize them. Ernst Grabovszki's introduction sets the context of literature in Vienna in 1900 and 2000, and is followed by essays exploring the following topics bearing on the city's literature across the two periods: writing about Vienna (Janet Stewart); art and architecture (Douglas Crow); psychoanalysis and the literature of Vienna (Thomas Paul Bonfiglio); poetry in Vienna from Hofmannsthal to Jandl (Rüdiger Görner); Austrian cinema culture (Willy Riemer); Austrian-Jewish culture (Hillary Hope Herzog and Todd Herzog); Austrian women's writing (Dagmar C. G. Lorenz); Karl Kraus and Robert Menasse as critical observers of their times (Geoffrey C. Howes); and Venice as mediator between the Viennese metropolis and the provinces (John Pizer). The figures treated range from Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg, Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth, Bertha von Suttner, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in the earlier fin de siècle to Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Schindel, Robert Menasse, Josef Haslinger, Ernst Jandl, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Marlene Streeruwitz in the current period. Ernst Grabovszki teaches at the University of Vienna. James Hardin is professor emeritus of German at the University of South Carolina.

The Historical Experience in German Drama
  • From Gryphius to Brecht
  • Alan Menhennet
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    25 November 2002
  • In what is still the standard survey of German historical drama, 'Das deutsche Geschichtsdrama' (1952), Friedrich Sengle understands "historical drama" as that in which objective history is blended with an 'idea' that is the basis of its dramatic coherence and force. This idea inevitably becomes the engine of a dramatic action, inclining the theatergoer to become wholly engaged with dramatic characters in a dramatic present, rather than with 'real' figures in a historical past. Such plays (for instance Schiller's 'Maria Stuart') may remain broadly 'true to history,' but the 'experience' they afford is often not historical; that is, it may be emotionally and intellectually compelling, but it will not be historical in the sense of causing us, in our present, to become engaged with our relationship with past figures and events and their continued relevance for us. Alan Menhennet identifies and analyzes examples of German drama that are historical in the stricter sense: not only in terms of the provenance of the material, but also in that, while remaining dramatic in nature, they do convey a historical experience. By means of a critical survey extending from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, in the contexts of literary history, the philosophy of history, and German history from the Thirty Years' War to the Second World War, Menhennet provides a complement to Sengle's still-valuable study. Major figures treated include Gryphius, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Schnitzler, and Brecht. There is no competing work in English. Alan Menhennet is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. He is author of 'Grimmelshausen the Storyteller' (Camden House, 1997).

Who Is This Schiller Now?
  • Essays on his Reception and Significance
  • Edited by Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Norbert Oellers
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 May 2011
  • The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) - an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist - are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonical shifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: 'Who is this Schiller?' The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel. Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
  • Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin
  • Larson Powell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 May 2008
  • Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the 'social constructivism' of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct 'identities' or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term 'the Technological Unconscious' refers both to the intersection between psychoanalysis and theories of modernism and to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and - especially - poetry by Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin from the years 1900 to 1945. In connection with these works, Powell analyzes the conceptions of 'subject' and 'system' in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. 'The Technological Unconscious' is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic 'culturalist' theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other. Larson Powell is assistant professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The Revivifying Word
  • Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe's Romantic Age
  • Clayton Koelb
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2008
  • 'What is not 'Life' that really is?' asked Coleridge, struggling, like many poets, philosophers, and scientists of Europe's Romantic age, to formulate a theory of life that explained the mysterious relation between dead material bodies and living, animate beings. Romantic intellectuals found a key to this mystery surprisingly close at hand: the process by which dead matter could come to life must be something like the process of reading. 'The Revivifying Word' examines the reanimating acts of reading that became a central focus of attention for Romantic writers. German theorists, building on the Apostle Paul's assertion that the dead letter can be revivified by the living spirit, proposed a permeable, legible boundary between the living and the dead. This inaugurated a revolution in European aesthetics, implanting the germ of an extraordinarily productive narrative idea that enriched Romantic literature for decades. Poets and novelists created a large cast of characters who crossed the boundary between death and life with the help of some form of reading: figures like Keats's Glaucus, Kleist's Elizabeth Kohlhaas, Shelley's Frankenstein (and the monster he creates), Maturin's Melmoth, Poe's Madeline Usher, and Gautier's Spirite. Clayton Koelb demonstrates that such fictions offer a nuanced consideration of the most urgent question facing any theory of life: how do material bodies come to acquire, to lose, and then perhaps to regain the immaterial intellectual/spiritual quality that defines animate beings? Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Nolten the Painter
  • A Novella in Two Parts
  • Eduard Mörike
  • Translated by Raleigh Whitinger
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 March 2005
  • When one thinks of German artist-novels and 'Bildungsromane,' works long available in translation come to mind-by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, or Grass. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled 'Maler Nolten: Novelle in zwei Teilen' (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood, and until now has never been translated into English, despite its obvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which the narrator is subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist Nolten's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating too is the mysterious trail of the 'Grenzgänger,' or border-line characters, with their hints at the dimension of 'Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves' that seems to threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful 'mastery.' Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Alberta.

German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond
  • Normalization and the Berlin Republic
  • Stuart Taberner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 January 2005
  • This book presents a comprehensive, lively account of recent developments in German fiction at a moment when-for the first time in many years-German authors are once again the subject of international attention and acclaim. It introduces English-speaking audiences to the complex dilemmas that are shaping the ways in which Germans are presently defining themselves, their difficult past, and the new 'Berlin Republic.' The theme that runs throughout the volume is the ongoing debate on German 'normalization.' In offering a wide-ranging consideration of contemporary German literature, the book complements a broad discussion of trends in present-day German politics, society, and culture with detailed readings of texts by internationally renowned figures as W. G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Marcel Beyer, Ingo Schulze, Judith Hermann, Thomas Brussig, and Bernhard Schlink, and by newer, emerging writers. Topics include the literary debates of the 1990s, the literary market and marketing, literary responses to the former East and West Germany in the age of globalization and to the Nazi past and portrayals of 'ordinary Germans,' depictions of 'German wartime suffering,' contemporary writing on 'Jewish fates' and efforts to revive the 'German-Jewish symbiosis,' and finally, the recent wave of writing about the provinces. Stuart Taberner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at the University of Leeds, UK.

Schiller the Dramatist
  • A Study of Gesture in the Plays
  • John Guthrie
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    15 July 2009
  • Many aspects of the works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) have attracted attention. His work as a philosopher and pioneering thinker in poetics and aesthetics and as a historian have recently been the focus of much attention. But Schiller's dramas have always held the most interest, and they continue to be performed regularly both in German-speaking lands and around the world. Schiller is a dramatist of psychological conflict rather than of abstract ideas, and he had a unique grasp of how to use the stage to that end. This study of Schiller's use of gesture begins with a discussion of the origins of the gestures he employs, viewing them in relation to his medical writings, his literary influences, theories of the theater and acting, and Enlightenment thinking in general. The study then considers the use of gesture and related aspects of stagecraft in Schiller's nine completed dramas, highlighting elements of continuity and development. It is concerned with the interpretation of gesture, often marginalized in studies of Schiller's works, and with the interrelationship between gesture and verbal text. It also considers Schiller's relationship to the theater of his day, and discusses the first performances of his plays as well as their more recent stage history in both Germany and Great Britain. Appearing in the 250th anniversary of Schiller's birth, this study treats his dramas as plays written to be performed - as works that reach their fullest potential in the theater. John Guthrie teaches modern German literature and language at the University of Cambridge, where he is fellow and director of studies at Murray Edwards College.

Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970–2010
  • John D. Pizer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 August 2011
  • The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East and West rebelled against the postwar hagiography, taking up a tradition of imaginatively engaging with the giants of the period, casting them in major roles in their works in order to critique the nation's past and its present, a tradition that has been carried on by more contemporary writers. This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German 'author-as-character' fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the 'Goethezeit' continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture. The book will be of interest to both scholars of the 'Goethezeit' and of contemporary German literature and culture. John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.

Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture
  • Edited by James Hodkinson, Jeffrey Morrison
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 December 2009
  • Islam has been a rich topic in German-language literature since the middle ages, and the writings about it not only reveal much about Islamic culture but also about the European 'home' culture. Many of the early essays in this chronologically arranged volume uncover fresh evidence of how German writers used images of Islam-as-other to define their individual subject positions as well as to define the German nation and the Christian religion. The perspectives of many contemporary writers are, however, far removed from such a polar opposition of cultures. Their experience of the German-Islamic encounter is complicated by a crucial factor: many of them emerge from Muslim migrant communities such as the German-Turkish community. The culturally hybrid origins of these writers and their expression of experiences and ideologies that cross boundaries of East and West, Christendom and Islam, strongly affect the findings of the essays as the volume moves toward the present. The texts discussed include travelogues and other firsthand encounters with Islam; reports for colonial authorities; aesthetic treatises on Islamic art; literary, essayistic, and theological writing on Islamic religious practice; the incorporation of characters, situations, and settings from the Islamic world into fiction or drama; and fictional and autobiographical writing by Muslims in German. Contributors: Cyril Edwards, Silke Falkner, James Hodkinson, Timothy R. Jackson, Margaret Littler, Rachel MagShamráin, Frauke Matthes, Yomb May, Jeffrey Morrison, Kate Roy, Monika Shafi, Edwin Wieringa, W. Daniel Wilson, Karin E. Yesilada. James Hodkinson is Assistant Professor of German at Warwick University; Jeffrey Morrison is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature
  • Georgina Paul
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • Rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, modernity tends to privilege masculine-connoted characteristics - conscious subjective agency, rational control and self-containment, the subjugation of nature - and has generated a conceptualization of human subjectivity emphasizing these qualities. Yet the costs of this conception of human selfhood are high, and at modernity's most acute moments of historical crisis writers and artists can be seen turning to feminine-connoted figurations - nature, tradition, myth and spirituality, intuition, relationality, flux. In recent decades studies have examined the cultural crisis of German modernity, notably at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as a crisis of masculinity. Feminist critiques, meanwhile, have viewed cultural history as male-generated and 'phallocentric,' in need of a feminine corrective. The innovation of this book is to examine these two gendered perspectives side by side, investigating the culturally symbolic significance of gender in post 1945 German language literature via a sequence of paired readings of major, thematically related texts by male and female authors, including Ingeborg Bachmann's novel 'Malina' (1971) and Max Frisch's 'Mein Name sei Gantenbein' (1964); Frisch's 'Homo Faber' (1957) and Christa Wolf's 'Störfall' (1987); Elfriede Jelinek's 'Die Klavierspielerin' and Rainald Goetz's 'Irre' (both 1983); and Heiner Müller's 'Die Hamletmaschine' (1977) and Christa Wolf's 'Kassandra' (1983). Finally, Barbara Köhler's eight-poem cycle 'Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984-85; published 1991) is considered as offering a way past the 'impasse' of the male and female viewpoints. Georgina Paul is University Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College.

The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti
  • Out of the Shadows of a Husband
  • Julian Preece
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    02 April 2007
  • The Viennese playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Veza Canetti was born in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in 1963 in London. Part of the avant garde in 1920s Vienna (where she met her future husband and Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti), from 1932 she wrote radical short stories drawn from everyday life for the Vienna 'Arbeiter-Zeitung.' After censorship under the so-called Corporate State reduced her opportunities for publication, she disguised her critique in irony and humor, but from then on published little. Until 1990, when her first novel, 'Yellow Street,' was finally published, Veza was known only as her husband's muse and literary assistant. As more of her writings appeared, critics became convinced that it was he who was responsible for her decline into obscurity, notwithstanding his protestations of support and admiration. This biography tells a more nuanced story, presenting Veza's literary career against the background of her troubled times, drawing on Elias's unpublished papers to assess their literary partnership, showing how their early writings constituted a private dialogue on topics as diverse as feminism and Jewish identity and how several key themes in his work are anticipated in hers. Julian Preece is Professor of German at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism
  • Paul Bishop, R. H. Stephenson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    24 November 2004
  • This book argues that Nietzsche's polemics against the 19th-century reception of Goethe and Schiller should not obscure his own more positive evaluation of Weimar classicism, as has generally been the case. The authors uncover the continuing influence of Weimar classicism at the very heart of Nietzsche's aesthetic theory, which in turn became the cornerstone of his epistemological and moral concerns. The book takes as its starting point the view that 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' has a single, coherent message that it identifies with what Goethe called 'the gospel of beauty.' A hitherto unappreciated unity of plot, style, and argument is thus revealed in both 'Zarathustra' and Nietzsche's philosophical 'oeuvre' as a whole, showing how he participates in a 'perennial aesthetic.' In this connection Nietzsche's statement in 'The Gay Science' is revealing: 'I want to learn more and more to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful ? then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.' The book provides an overview of related scholarly literature; discusses Nietzsche's aesthetic theory in 'The Birth of Tragedy'; recounts the composition of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and offers an interpretation of its 'aesthetic gospel'; a concluding chapter explores historical continuities in aesthetic theory. By demonstrating the constitutive function of the aesthetics of Weimar classicism in his philosophy, this book opens up a fresh and original perspective on Nietzsche. Paul Bishop is Professor of German, and R. H. Stephenson is William Jacks Professor of German Language and Literature, both at the University of Glasgow.

German Memory Contests
  • The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990
  • Edited by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, Georg Grote
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2006
  • 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 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung,' 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 ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative, the contributions offer 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. Contributors: Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Elizabeth Boa, Stefan Willer, Chloe E. M. Paver, Matthias Fiedler, J. J. Long, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Cathy S. Gelbin, Jennifer E. Michaels, Mary Cosgrove, Andrew Plowman, Roger Woods. 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. Winner of the 2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award.

The Decline and Fall of Virgil in Eighteenth-Century Germany
  • The Repressed Muse
  • Geoffrey Atherton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 February 2006
  • In the early modern period, the culture of Rome, with Virgil as its greatest figure, was the model for emulation. The age of Louis XIV compared itself to the Augustan age, and Dryden hailed Virgil as 'my Divine Master.' But in 18th-century Europe, a general shift occurred in favor of Greece, a trend that was most pronounced in Germany. Winckelmann, the spokesman for philhellenism, extolled Greek art and dismissed all Roman art as derivative and Virgil as second rate and incapable of understanding true beauty. Yet he nonetheless remained indebted to Virgil for his view of Greek art, although he failed to recognize it. The export of Winckelmann's new view of Virgil and more generally Roman culture - shared to varying extents by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and the brothers Schlegel - to the rest of Europe in the 19th century, particularly to the English-speaking world via Coleridge and Matthew Arnold] soon made it the reigning dogma: indeed it formed the point of departure for Virgil scholarship in the 20th century. This, however, did not prevent German poets from using Virgil, although neither they nor later scholars called attention to it. Virgil became a repressed muse, and has a continued, unexamined presence in the epic and idyll of Klopstock, Wieland, Goethe, and Novalis. Geoffrey Atherton's comparative investigation of the relation of modernity to antiquity through Virgil and his twofold reception represents a new perspective on this issue. Geoffrey Atherton is assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at Connecticut College.

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Günter Grass's 'The Tin Drum'
  • Peter Arnds
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    06 August 2004
  • In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter Grass, a prominent and controversial figure in the ongoing discussion of the German past and reunification, finally gained recognition as Germany's greatest living author, a writer of international importance and acclaim. Grass's 1959 novel 'The Tin Drum' remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter Arnds offers a completely new reading of the novel, analyzing an aspect of Grass's literary treatment of German history that has never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials as 'life unworthy of life,' their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois paradigms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular culture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these 'asocials,' for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that Grass creates in the novel an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a 'Stunde Null,' that putative tabula rasa in 1945. Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University.

Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s
  • Edited by David Robb, David G. Robb
  • With contributions by Annette Bluhdorn , Eckhard Holler and Peter Thompson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    01 September 2007
  • The modern German political song is a hybrid of high and low culture. With its roots in the birth of mass culture in the 1920s, it employs communicative strategies of popular song. Yet its tendencies toward philosophical, poetic, and musical sophistication reveal intellectual aspirations. This volume looks at the influence of revolutionary artistic traditions in the lyrics and music of the 'Liedermacher' of east and west Germany: the rediscovery of the revolutionary songs of 1848 by the 1960s West German folk revival, the use of the profane 'carnivalesque' street-ballad tradition by Wolf Biermann and the GDR duo Wenzel & Mensching, the influence of 1920s artistic experimentation on 'Liedermacher' such as Konstantin Wecker, and the legacy of Hanns Eisler's revolutionary song theory. The book also provides an insider perspective on the countercultural scenes of the two Germanys, examining the conditions in which political songs were written and performed. In view of the decline of the political song form since the fall of communism, the book ends with a look at German avant-garde techno's attempt to create a music that challenges conventional cultural perceptions and attitudes. CONTRIBUTORS: DAVID ROBB, ECKARD HOLLER, ANNETTE BLüHDORN, PETER THOMPSON. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the Queen's University of Belfast.

German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour
  • Stephen Brockmann
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    06 August 2004
  • In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, German intellectuals and writers were forced to confront perhaps the most difficult complex of problems ever faced by modern intellectuals in the western world: the complete defeat and devastation of their country, the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship, the onset of the Cold War, and ultimately the political division of the nation. To a large extent these debates took place in literature and literary discourse, and they continue to have pressing relevance for Germany today, when the country is rediscovering and exploring this previously neglected period in literature and film. Yet the period has been neglected in scholarship, and is little understood; for the first time in English, this book offers a systematic overview of the hotly contested intellectual debates of this period: the problem of German guilt, the question of the return of literary and political émigrés such as Thomas Mann, the relevance of the cultural tradition of German humanism for the postwar period, the threat of nihilism, the politicization of literature, and the status of German young people who had been indoctrinated by the Nazis. Stephen Brockmann challenges the received wisdom that the immediate postwar period in Germany was intellectually barren, characterized primarily by silence on the major issues of the day; he reveals, in addition to attempts to obfuscate those issues, a German intellectual-and literary-world characterized by an often high level of dialogue and debate. Stephen Brockmann is professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of the 2007 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies/Humanities.

The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
  • Checking in to Tell a Story
  • Bettina Matthias
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    16 August 2006
  • As the bourgeois concept of 'home' became problematic after important changes in German-speaking society during the 19th century, many fiction writers chose the literary setting of the hotel to explore the status of the individual and the notions of public and private. As social microcosms, hotels are fitting experimental settings for literary inquiries into the tension between the individual's quest for a place in the world and the technocratic rationalism of modern life. The book has two parts, the first establishing the cultural and theoretical context and the second providing analyses of literary works set in hotels. A brief history of commercial hospitality and a chapter establishing the theoretical framework of the hotel as a paradigmatic, ambivalent, semi-public, and stage-like modern space lead to readings of texts by Schnitzler, Zweig, Werfel, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, and Vicki Baum. BETTINA MATTHIAS is associate professor of German at Middlebury College.

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