German Language and Literature Commons^™

[Introduction To] Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter, Olivier Delers, Martin Sulzer-Reichel

Bookshelf

"Wim Wenders: Making Films That Matter is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to current conversations on intermediality, whether it be through his adaptations of important literary works or his filmic reinventions of famous paintings by Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth. Wenders has also positioned himself as a decidedly transnational and translingual filmmaker …

Slumming With Cindy: Class, Precarity, And Performance In Cindy Aus Marzahn’S Trash Comedy, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The restructuring of unemployment and welfare benefits under Hartz IV hit former East Germans already suffering economically since unification particularly hard, forcing many into a condition of precarity for which the governing ideology held them responsible. Frustrated in her search for suitable work, Ilka Bessin adapted the self-management model advocated by the reforms to transform her story of marginalization and failure into a comedy success as Ossi trash princess Cindy aus Marzahn. Cultivated by commercial television, Bessin’s Cindy was a product, purveyor, and critic of Germany’s neoliberal economic policies, illustrating the fraught, collusive relationship between politics and popular culture.

Learning To Live With The Other Germany In The Post-Wall Federal Republic, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

After forty years of separation, neither the West Germans nor the East Germans were prepared for the impact of reunification. But had the peoples of the two countries developed separate cultural identities to such an extent that the dissolution of the border represented merely the illusion of a return to sociocultural community? Since the collapse of the East German state in 1989 and the subsequent suturing of divided Germany in 1990, scores of books and articles have been published on the economic and political conditions that led inexorably, or less so, to the demise of the GDR, as well as …

Made In Germany: Integration As Inside Joke In The Ethno-Comedy Of Kaya Yanar And Bülent Ceylan, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

As the largest “foreign” population in Germany, Turkish immigrants have been the primary target for concerns about integration and the impact of immigration on German culture. Since the founding of the first Turkish German cabaret in 1985 by Şinasi Dikmen and Muhsin Omurca, the misconceptions and one-sided expectations associated with integration have been played, parodied, and satirized by Turkish German performers. As producers of contemporary ethno-comedy, Kaya Yanar and Bülent Ceylan appeal to mass audiences with a new approach, inverting questions of integration by creating communities through laughter in which audiences are at once in on the joke and its …

Serdar Somuncu: Reframing Integration Through A Transnational Politics Of Satire, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Founded by Şinasi Dikmen and Muhsin Omurcu in Ulm in 1985, Knobi-Bonbon is widely recognized as the first Turkish German cabaret in the Federal Republic. Dikmen and Omurcu focused on ethnic stereotypes, integration, and coexistence in their early programs, with an emphasis on the German misunderstanding of integration as cultural assimilation (Boran 202, 219). With a run of successful performances, Knobi-Bonbon established a momentum that has carried through to the present day, making Turkish German comedy a fixture on the German stage. Responding to the wave of nationalism and xenophobia that followed in the wake of unification, Knobi-Bonbon’s shows became …

Serdar Somuncu: Turkish German Comedy As Transnational Intervention, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

A reconceptualization of Germanness, combined with a reconsideration of what constitutes “Germanness” and “Turkishness” and how they are linked, is a central theme in the programs of a younger generation of Turkish German cabaret artists and comedians. As a member of the new generation of performers, Serdar Somuncu stands out, not only for his unapologetic embrace of political theater critical of both German and Turkish social politics, but also for his assertion of a right and responsibility to engage with Germany’s past, coupled with an insistence on differentiation and balanced comparison when discussing integration. After gaining notoriety through his Mein …

Minority Identity As German Identity In Conscious Rap And Gangsta Rap: Pushing The Margins, Redefining The Center, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

After rap entered the German music scene in the 1980s, it developed into a variety of styles that reflect Germany's increasingly multiethnic social fabric. Politically conscious rap assumed greater relevance after unification, focusing on issues of discrimination, integration, and xenophobia. Gangsta rap, with its emphasis on street conflict and violence, brought the ghetto to Germany and sparked debates about the condition of German cities and the erosion of civic consciousness. Alternately celebrated and reviled by the media, both styles utilize rap's synthesis of authenticity and performance to redefine the relationship between minority identity and German identity and debunk Leitkultur.

Poem (Film Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

POEM is the feature-length debut for Ralf Schmerberg, a self-taught photographer and filmmaker known for his music videos of German bands Die Toten Hosen and Die Fantastischen Vier and his imaginative television commercials. Schmerberg and his collaborator, the writer Antonia Keinz, spent two years reading poetry to determine the final selection of 19 poems for the film project. The concept of creating a film devoted to visual interpretations of poetry was intriguing enough to attract big name actors, including Klaus Maria Brandauer, Meret Becker, Hannelore Elsner, Jürgen Vogel, and Hermann van Veen, as well as camera men who previously had …

Protest Song In East And West Germany Since The 1960s (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

While the title of this nine-essay anthology focuses on the protest song from the 1960s and beyond, one of key elements of the book is an examination of the legacy of the Vormärz revolutionary songs and political cabaret of the Weimar Republic in the repertoire of West-German and East-German Liedermacher. The first two chapters by David Robb offer a differentiated analysis of how the Vormärz and early twentieth-century political song traditions were adopted and adapted in the FRG and the GDR and how the resulting high/low culture blend of the political song enhanced its appeal. The third chapter, also …

Lawrence Baron. Projecting The Holocaust Into The Present: The Changing Focus Of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Projecting the Holocaust is a valuable addition to extant scholarship on Holocaust cinema and offers a refreshingly inclusive and positive take on how feature films contribute to our understanding of history. In contrast to other surveys of Holocaust cinema, Baron includes films that focus on stories of perpetrators, non-Jewish victims, the experiences of the second generation, and neo-Nazi groups. This inclusivity is also evident in Baron's position that the Holocaust is not the property of specific countries or peoples and that its representation speaks to universal concerns about human civilization as well as to particular questions about national identities.

Nelly Sachs (10 December 1891-12 May 1970), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Nelly Sachs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 on her seventy-fifth birthday, a coincidence of dates that her father had been fond of noting during Sachs's girlhood in Berlin. In her acceptance speech, Sachs made reference to her father's annual teasing every December 10 and acknowledged that the award was like a dream come true. Nelly Sachs's work was largely unknown outside Germany and Sweden when the prize was announced; she had been writing in relative obscurity for almost two decades. Two literary awards she received in Germany in 1960 and in 1965 had earned her a …

Erfahrung Nach Dem Krieg: Autorinnen Im Literaturbetrieb 1945-1950. Brd, Ddr, Österreich, Schweiz. (Inter-Lit,4) (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This fourth volume in the Inter-Lit series produced by the Stiftung Frauen-Literatur- Forschung is a collection of 18 papers from a literary studies conference held at the Universität Bremen in fall 2000. The essays examine women writers from different generations: those who were established authors prior to 1933 and whose careers were interrupted by the Third Reich, those who continued writing during the 12 years of Nazi rule, and those of a younger generation who saw the end of the war as an opportunity to break into the literary market. Although the title of the volume seems to promise a …

Literatur, Politik, Identität: Literature, Politics, And Cultural Identity (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Literatur, Politik, Identität showcases thirty-five of Leslie Bodi’s writings published between 1959 and 2001, ranging from chapter-length articles to three-page notes. Framed by an introductory essay explaining the organization of the volume, and a biographical essay and interview at the book’s conclusion, Bodi unequivocally emphasizes the links between his life and his scholarship. Bodi spent his youth and early adult life in Budapest as a multilingual, assimilated Jew with a passion for German literature and intellectual exchange. He lived through the Nazi occupation of Hungary and left Budapest after the failure of the revolution; by 1957, he was in Melbourne, …

Ariadne's Thread: Walter Benjamin's Hashish Passages, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In a letter of 1932 to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin outlines his literary ambitions; he plans four major books, one of which would have been on hashish. The others were to include the Passagenwerk, his essays on literature, and his letters. It could be said that we now have those three books, if only in the form of sprawling and gigantic ruins. The Passagenwerk has been the object of many inspired and yet hopeless projects of reconstruction; the literary essays are available in German and other languages; and letters from throughout his life have been collected and published. All can be …

Dreams Of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis And The Literature Of Vienna, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The first edition of Die Traumdeutung (translated as The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) bears a publication date of 1900, although it actually appeared in Vienna in November 1899. This is consistent with the pivotal temporality of a work that looks retrospectively into the nineteenth century and prospectively into the twentieth. In 1931, Freud said of his first and arguably most important book, "It contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. " In terms of the influence not only on his later publications, but also …

,,Wahr Spricht, Wer Scahtten Spricht": Die Angst Vor Der Unbestimmbarkeit In Der Darstellung Des Holocaust, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

,,WER MIT den Juden kämpft, kämpft mit dem Teufel": So die Behauptung im Kommentar zu dem Film Juden ohne Maske, welcher vom Gaufilmstellenleiter Walter Böttcher im Auftrag des Reichspropagandaministeriums 1938 zusammengestellt wurde. Dieser Film sollte als Mittel der ,Volksaufkärung' über die Ziele und Beweggründe der nationalsozialistischen Politik fungieren und griff die antisemitische Fahne, die schon in der Münchener Ausstellung ,,Der ewige Jude" 1937 plakativ ausgehängt wurde, zielstrebig auf. Die Einsetzung dieses Filmes nach den Novemberpogromen im Jahr 1938 weist auf eine gezielte Taktik des Propagandaministeriums hin, vollendete Tatsachen nachträglich durch filmische Darstellungen zu rechtfertigen. Da die Nationalsozialisten die …

"Ich Suche Ein Unschuldiges Land," Reading History In The Poetry Of Ingeborg Bachmann, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In this brief monograph based on her dissertation, Leslie Morris sets out to achieve a series of aims: to contest the alleged divide between Bachmann's poetry and prose, to counter "the myth of her apolitical poetic voice" (10), to address the presence and absence of history in her poetry, and, finally, to consider how to read Bachmann's poetic ceuvre in light of historical developments in Germany and Austria in the 1980s and 1990s. In a sense, Morris is also trying to rehabilitate post-war aesthetic modemism from a reductive, binary mode of criticism that separates aesthetics and politics. Following in the …

Claiming The Victim: Tokenism, Mourning, And The Future Of German Holocaust Poetry, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

This excerpt from Nelly Sachs's poem "You Onlookers" could be read as support for the contention, reportedly made by Adolf Hitler during a table talk, that "The Jews invented conscience." This statement, although fascinating in itself for what it implies about Hitler's psyche and moral sense, becomes even more provocative if read in association with Marina Zwetajewa's puzzling proclamation, made famous by its appearance as an epigram to a poem by Paul Celan, that "all poets are Jews." The connection of Jews to both conscience and poetry has significant repercussions for the genre of so-called Holocaust lyric, so-called because it …

Ingeborg Bachmann And Christa Wolf: Selected Prose And Drama (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

As I read through the selections in Ingeborg Bachmann and Christa Wolf: Selected Prose and Drama I was reminded of the many associations and connections between the two writers that I had found so profound during my graduate school years. While works by Bachmann and Wolf have been translated and are available in English, this is the first volume to juxtapose their writings with the express purpose of highlighting the parallels between them. The editor's introduction seeks to situate the oeuvres of both authors in historical and political context and offers justification for placing the two together in one volume. …

Rose Ausländer (1901-1988): Austria-Hungary/Germany, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Rose Ausländer was born Rosalie Beatrice Scherzer on 11 May 1901 into a German-speaking Jewish family. She spent her childhood in Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, Bukovina was incorporated into Romania, and at the end of World War II was annexed by the Soviet Union. Rosalie Scherzer studied literature and philosophy at the university in Czernowitz but never completed a degree, largely because of the family's poverty after her father's death in 1920. To help alleviate this economic situation, she emigrated to the United States in 1921 with lgnaz Ausländer. …

Andreas-Salomé, Lou (1861-1937), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in 1861 into a German-speaking community in St. Petersburg, Russia. She moved to Zürich at age 19 and ultimately settled in Germany. Intellectually gifted with an inquiring and incisive mind, she studied philosophy, religion, history, and psychology, and wrote extensively on the psychology of religion, philosophy, art, femininity, and eroticism.

Verbunden Und Gebunden. Mutter-Tochter Beziehungen In Sechs Romanen Der Siebziger Und Achtziger Jahre. (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

In Verbunden und gebunden, Katharina Aulls analyzes the figuration of mother-daughter relationships in six quasi-autobiographical novels by women writers. The play on words in Aulls's title anticipates the tensions that characterize the mother-daughter relationships in these novels, tensions that are not only the stuff of fiction, but also of concrete experience in the sociology of the mother-daughter dyad.

"Aus Dem Ärmel Der Mutter Hole Ich Die Harfe": Das Echo Der Mütterlichkeit In Rose Ausländers Dichtung, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Rose Ausländer (1901-1988) hat ein vielfach gebrochenes, durch ständigen Schmerz gezeichnetes Leben geführt, in dem sich mehrere Zyklen von Aufbruch und Rückkehr, Trauma mid Genesung, Verlust und Hoffnung erkennen lassen. Das Gefühl der Unsicherheit hat seine Spuren nicht nur in ihrer Seele, sondern auch in ihrer Dichtung hinterlassen - in einer Sprache, die als ihre letzte Zuflucht zu gel ten hat. Sie empfand sich als Exilantin und Waise, die Mutter und Mutterland verloren hatte und nur noch in ihrer Muttersprache, Deutsch, Schutz fand: in der Sprache also, die mit dem unsäglichen Leid ihres Volkes aufs engste verknüpft war.

Searching For The (M)Other: The Rhetoric Of Longing In Post-Holocaust Poems By Nelly Sachs And Rose Ausländer, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The post-Holocaust poems of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer demonstrate shifts toward experimentation in form and message, particularly in relation to religious belief and the expressive potential of poetic language. The experience of the Holocaust forced both authors to confront the interconnections between their Jewishness, their relationship to the German language, and their displacements as homeless exiles. They turned to poetry as a means of mediating the past in the present, and their post-Holocaust writings represent acts of both remembrance and reproduction. As victims and witnesses to suffering, devastation, and loss, Sachs and Ausländer appealed to images of the maternal …

Die Auferlegte Heimat. Else Lasker-Schülers Emigration In Palastina (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Alfred Bodenheimer's concise and thoughtful monograph is a pioneering attempt at systematically exploring the tensions between Else Lasker-Schüler's self-concept as a Jew and her relationship to the Jewish homeland. Bodenheimer examines the unresolved incommensurability between the poet's pre-1933 depictions of Israel as a kind of longed for mystical other-world and her personal encounters with the reality of Palestine during her visits and exile there from 1934 on. Else Lasker-Schüler made a total of three trips to Palestine over the last eleven years of her life and her third voyage in 1939 was to be the final one. Suspended between two …

The Literary Reputation Of Else Lasker-Schüler, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Calvin Jones's book is an ambitious attempt to combine synopsis and critical analysis in a survey of over ninety years of international Else Lasker-Schüler criticism. Although Hones is careful to point out that his is a selective rather than comprehensive review, he covers a considerable amount of material over the course of six chronologically organized chapters. In his preface Jones is particularly critical of early reviewers and scholars who allowed themselves to be influenced by the poet's self-representation rather than forming their own judgments and notes the tendency in much of the criticism, both past and present, to conflate the …

Ironie Und Modernitat Bei Arnim, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Im Friihjahr 1819 erhielt Arnim ein ihm zugedachtes Exemplar des ersten Bandes von Jacob Grimms Deutscher Grammatik. Am 14. Mai schrieb er anscheinend erfreut an den Verfasser:

Du Iieber Wirklicher Geheimer Ober-Sprachen- und Citationsrath! [ ... ] ich selbst finde mich sogar in der Vorrede mit einigem Nothwerden als ein starkes Maskulinum erwilhnt. Du schreibst mir da fast mehr guten Einfluf3 zu als ich selbst bewuf3t bin [ ... ] War das starke oder schwache Conjugation, als ein preuf3ischer General seine Leute zur Ordnung ermahnte und sagte: "Wir miissen nicht allein ordnungsliebende Soldaten sein, sondern auch sind."- Ferner, was …

Electric Affinities: Arnim And Schelling's Naturphilosophie, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

From Goethe to the present, the proper reception of the works of Achim von Amim has suffered from their illusion of dissonance. Recent criticism, however, has demonstrated structural complexity where once was seen structural confusion. This study synthesizes two trends in the post-war reception of Arnim and demonstrates, with Isabella von Agypten as example, that a fundamental electromagnetic cosmology informs Arnim's poetics.

A Tropical View Of Irony And Satire In Arnim's Isabella Von Agypten, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

The body of Arnim criticism of the past several decades stands in opposition to the reception that existed for one and one-half centuries. The reproaches of the Brothers Grimm and of Goethe set the tone for a maligning of Arnim that was not to be abandoned until the modern post-war era. The point of departure for the critical misunderstanding of Arnim lies in the apparent structural dissonance of his works; this has descouraged the audience from a painstaking reading. Recent definitions of metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, however, aid in generating a model that clarifies Arnim' s use of Romantic irony …