German Literature Commons^™

Terrorism As Communication In Gregor Schnitzler’S Was Tun Wenn’S Brennt (2001) And Leander Scholz’S Rosenfest (2001), Sandra Dillon

Re-visioning Terrorism

This essay explores the connection of terrorism to communication, specifically to illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in Gregor Schnitzler’s Was tun wenn’s brennt and Leander Scholz’s novel Rosenfest. One cannot deny that violence plays an important role in German narratives about terrorism; however, the main focus of the works analyzed here is communication, which the narrative structure, the role of the spectator or reader and the main characters within the novel illustrate.

Pre-Visions Of Terror/After-Images Of Love. Gudrun Ensslin, Bernward Vesper And The Roots Of West German Terrorism, Thomas J.A. Krüger

Re-visioning Terrorism

This paper examines the pre-life of West German terrorism through the recently published correspondence between Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin, Notstandsgesetze von Deiner Hand (2009). I claim that as historical and literary documents, these texts offer a unique insight into the relationship between art and the historiography of West German terrorism before its climax in the 1970s. This historiography is heading backwards into the future, while surveying the destruction and barbarism of the past, while the personal and public spheres collide. Using the concept of the after-image, the essay analyzes the narrative residue of that collision. The correspondence provides insight …

The Mirror Of Laughter: Mediation, Self-Reflection, And Healing In E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s capriccio Princess Brambilla explores a narrative realm of liminality and metamorphosis that reveals the fundamental instability of our most basic epistemological distinctions. Set during the irreverent days of the Roman carnival, Brambilla delights in a disorienting chaos of masks, costumes, dream images and hallucinations as Hoffmann pulls all the stops in a fantastical narrative of extraordinary complexity. The text unfolds a carnivalesque universe that – in the spirit of Early German Romantic irony – plays with the inescapable mediatory “distortions” brought about by the structures of human consciousness itself. Just as the carnival is a ritual of life-affirming …

Introduction: Thoughts Unfinished And Messages Undelivered, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Divine Justice And Profane Power: Benjamin’S And Kafka’S Approach To Messianism, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Intrinsically dialectical in nature, sudden messianic change and the resolute character of the law are so closely connected with one another that both concepts should be among the key factors shaping a broad understanding of global cultures today. Whether we await the coming of the messiah as the Jewish religion teaches or commemorate his having come and died as most Christian teachings hold, it appears that Walter Benjamin’s “now of a particular recognizability” (The Arcades Project 493) remains elusive, especially with respect to the correlation between the past and the future. In the spirit of temporal vectors that converge, Benjamin’s …

Des Adlers Horst - Annotated Transcription, Johanna Schopenhauer

Prose Fiction

No abstract provided.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Marketplace Vision Of Berlin, Alexander M. Schlutz

Publications and Research

This essay discusses E.T.A. Hoffmann’s late novella My Cousin’s Corner Window. On the one hand, Hoffmann’s text offers a narratological experiment on how to best represent the experience of seeing the modern city, and combines to that end Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern aesthetics. On the other hand, the text paints a portrait of the people of post-Napoleonic Berlin at a time of intense state surveillance. Hoffmann defies such state control by means of an ironic meta-narrative perspective that remains invisible to the watchful eye of the censor.

Strange Bedfellows And Their Grandchildren: German Literature As Evidence And Confession Of Reunification, Cory H. Rosenberg

Student Publications

From Hegel to Merkel, from Bismarck to BMW, German culture has defined and re-defined itself through a cycle of reaction; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Modern Germany has certainly not escaped this pattern, existing in a very deep and surprisingly present way in reaction to the collapse of the East German state and the formation of a unified Germany. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary German authors evidence this reaction in their work. As a nation at the heart of the East/West divide throughout the Cold War, Germany provides an ideal lens through which to view the shifting cultural, economic, …

Deutsch-Österreichische Beethoven-Bilder: Richard Wagner, Elfriede Jelinek Und “Der Zorn Der Schreiber”, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The article explores how Richard Wagner’s Beethoven and Elfriede Jelinek’s Das Lebewohl draw on music and musical aesthetics to signify national and cultural aspirations in Germany and Austria. As an artistic experience that transcends borders, Beethoven’s music has often provoked questions about cultural memory, “national art forms,” and collective identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German intellectual history. Though very different in nature, Wagner’s politically charged Beethoven and the monolog that Jelinek ascribes to the right-wing Austrian politician J¨org Haider show how important music and language can be when national goals and cultural politics join forces.

Ladies, Whores, And Holy Women: A Sourcebook In Courtly, Religious, And Urban Cultures Of Late Medieval Germany, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Sarah Westphal-Wihl

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

The Biopolitical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political, Ross G. Shields

Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects

It is a tenet of post-structuralist theory that discursive series fail in their attempts to constitute themselves as totalities. A system can fail in two distinct ways—from Kant’s dynamic and mathematic failures of reason, to Jacques Lacan’s equation of the two failures of language with the two failures (male and female) of sex. Biopolitical theory offers the most recent account of failure and collapse, now on the geopolitical scale. Given that the biopolitical subject too is sexed, this thesis asks the question: How does biopolitics fail? Franz Kafka’s aborted novels offer a premonition to a possible answer.

Scraping Down The Past: Memory And Amnesia In W. G. Sebald's Anti-Narrative, Kathy Behrendt

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Vanguard anti-narrativist Galen Strawson declares personal memory unimportant for self-constitution. But what if lapses of personal memory are sustained by a morally reprehensible amnesia about historical events, as happens in the work of German author W. G. Sebald? The importance of memory cannot be downplayed in such cases. Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, a concern for memory needn’t ally one with the narrativist view of the self. Recovery of historical and personal memory results in self-dissolution and not self-unity or understanding in Sebald’s characters. In the end, Sebald shows how memory can be significant, even imperative, within a deeply anti-narrativist outlook …

Faust And The Faustian (Fall 2010), Robert D. Tobin

Syllabi

Faust—the scholar who makes a deal with the devil in order to achieve knowledge, love and power—is one of the great myths of modernity. Faust makes his deal with the devil because he despairs of living in the ivory tower and wants to effect real, positive, change in the world. This course thus gives us a chance to think critically about their own desires to “challenge convention and change the world.” Clark University’s Motto, “Challenge Convention and Change the World,” comes directly out of the Faustian tradition, as does the very conception of a socially activist research university.

A photo …

Collected Literary Works Of Helene Weichardt, Helene Weichardt

Prose Fiction

No abstract provided.

The Cultural Memory Of German Victimhood In Post-1990 Popular German Literature And Television, Pauline Ebert

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation analyzes the representation of Germans as victims of the Third Reich and the Second World War in post-1990 German memory. After unification, there no longer were two states that could each blame the other as the heir of National Socialism and this past had to be renegotiated. The claim that many Germans had been victims became central as evidenced by the vast number of popular literature, commercial cinema and television programs of this subject. I argue with Wulf Kansteiner (2006) that to understand collective memory, we should explore mass media representations. As the majority of highbrow artifacts do …

Die Darstellung Der Evangelischen Kirche Als Eine Neue Familie In Erich Loests Nikolaikirche, Beth A. Roberts

Honors Projects

Throughout the end of the 1980s the Lutheran Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) experienced a surge of attendance and social activism in an otherwise secularized society. Research shows that the church was the sole island of dissent within the communist GDR. St. Nicolas Church in the city of Leipzig became the prototype of social involvement; visionary pastors opened their doors to every citizen and provided a space for congregations to voice concerns, organize interest groups, and plan peace protests. The construction of an open environment in which citizens could speak and interact gave rise to a greater sense …

The Pride And Prejudice Of The Western World: The Iconicity Of The Great Books, Solibakke Ivan Karl

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

This article examines controversies arising from the perception of the instruments of cultural memory and the logic of their transmissibility. On the one hand, we have a carefully selected, temporally and geographically orchestrated body of texts, the Great Books, which are an enduring testament to the authority of Western intellectual artifacts. On the other hand, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever locates a furtive transformation of collective memory in the informal practices exemplified by oral narrative and public discourse. Not only do both models rely on archives as a functional instrument of collective identity, but they also value them as institutions circumscribing …