Bücher der Reihe Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Domestic Disputes is the first monograph in German studies to offer a critical examination of the home ownership crisis in the former East Germany that resulted from unification policy, taking as its focus news media, made-for-television movies, cinematic releases, and prose fiction that depict property disputes between former East and West Germans. In the cultural productions discussed in this book, anxieties about social disenfranchisement through unification policy are dramatized in narratives in which Westerners acquire, or attempt to acquire, property in the former East Germany. Each chapter addresses a different type of narrative that has emerged to frame those anxieties, including those of neocolonial Western takeover, the engagement with difficult family histories, masculinity crises in the West, and the corporatization of home. Domestic Disputes is the first book-length study to outline the way in which homes were awarded to individuals and families as the former East Germany privatized and to offer in-depth examinations of the narratives that emerged from that social phenomenon.

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan's impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry's relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country's memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny -evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas - that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan's critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan's uncanny poetics in Resnais' film Night and Fog, Kiefer's art and Libeskind's architecture.

Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Muller. The book's cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.

This book offers a new critical perspective on the perpetual problem of literature's relationship to reality and in particular on the sustained tension between literature and historiography. The scholarly and literary works of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) serve as striking examples for this discussion, for the way in which they demonstrate the emergence of a new hybrid discourse of literature as historiography. This book critically reconsiders the claims and aims of historiography by re-evaluating core questions of the literary discourse and by assessing the ethical imperative of literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Guided by an inherently interdisciplinary framework, this book elucidates the interplay of epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concerns that define Sebald's criticism and fiction. Appropriate to the way in which Sebald's works challenge us to rethink the boundaries between discourses, genres, disciplines, and media, this work proceeds in a methodologically non-dogmatic way, drawing on hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory. In addition to contextualizing Sebald within postwar literature in German, the book is the first English-language study to consider Sebald's A uvre as a whole. Of interest for Sebald experts and enthusiasts, literary scholars and historians concerned with the problematic of representing the past.

Germans Going Global is the first monograph in English to address in depth the interrelatedness between contemporary German literature and globalization. In an interdisciplinary framework and through detailed readings of a wide variety of texts, the study shows how the challenges globalization has posed for Germany over the last two decades have been manifested and reimagined in aesthetic production. Analyses of the literary marketplace and public debates illuminate the more material sides of this development. The study also analyzes the ways in which German-language writers born between 1955 and 1975,such as Chr. Kracht,Th. Meinecke, J. Hermann, S. Berg, F. Illies, K. Roggla, J. v. Duffel, and G. Hens,respond to the pressures of globalizing factors, and how these have influenced notions of authorship and literary aesthetics. It shows how narratives dealing with the neoliberal work world, global travel, and the aftermath of 09/11 implicitly comment on contemporary debates on globalization, its socio-economic nature, and the impact for local culture. By presenting a literary history of the present, Germans Going Global deepens the reader's understanding of contemporary Germany and its cultural production.

Max Pechstein (1881-1955) is one of the most prominent German artists of the twentieth century, not least because of his crucial role in the breakthrough of German Expressionism. This long overdue biography combines the portrayal of an outstanding artistic personality with the story of an individual German who struggled through the political upheavals of his time. Pechstein's work is presented in the cultural context of museum politics and art associations, art dealers and critics, market forces and cultural trends.

Germans are often accused of failing to take responsibility for Nazi crimes, but what precisely should ordinary people do differently? Indeed, scholars have yet to outline viable alternatives for how any of us should respond to terror and genocide. And because of the way they compartmentalize everyday life, our discipline-bound analyses often disguise more than they illuminate. Written by a historian, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, The Happy Burden of History takes an integrative approach to the problem of responsible selfhood. Exploring the lives and letters of ordinary and intellectual Germans who faced the ethical challenges of the Third Reich, it focuses on five typical tools for cultivating the modern self: myths, lies, non-conformity, irony, and modeling. The authors carefully dissect the ways in which ordinary and intellectual Germans excused their violent claims to mastery with a sense of 'sovereign impunity.'They then recuperate the same strategies of selfhoodfor our contemporary world, but in ways that are self-critical and humble. The book shows how viewing this problem from within everyday life can empower and encourage usto bear the burden of historical responsibility and be happy doing so.

This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today. From different perspectives, the collected essays analyze the topic of German suffering, from expulsion, bombings, and rape during World War II - as well as the Holocaust. Themes include the generational shift in memory; German, Jewish, and Austrian identity;