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This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.
This volume of conference papers highlights the connections between developments in technology and scientific thought since the 16th century on the one hand, and the ways in which the creative imagination of literary writers has responded to those developments on the other.
This is the second of three volumes based on papers given at the 'Fragile Tradition' conference in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the connections between cultural identity and the sense of nationhood which are to be found in literary writing, the history of ideas, and the interaction between European cultures from the late Middle Ages to the present day. It focuses particularly on the way myths of cultural identity are passed on and transformed historically; on the fashioning of various models of modern German identity with reference to the cultures of Greece, France, England and Renaissance Italy; on the reflection of 19th-century nationalism in literary writing and ideas about language; and on the ways in which cultural values have asserted themselves in relation to moments of catastrophe and abrupt political change in the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1990s.
This essay collection examines the dynamics of memory organization and the way it varies among different media and modes of discourse in post-unification Germany. German unification has put the post-war period into a historical perspective. Such a rupture raises questions concerning the appropriate commemoration, preservation and reinterpretation of the past. The processes of reorientation after unification influenced the self-perception of literary authors as well as the social role, position and status of German literature. They also affected the way writers viewed the competition in which they found themselves pitted against visual and electronic media as rival windows on the past. In the context of several debates on German literature during the 1990s the discussion revolved not only around the adequate aesthetic representation of the historical and cultural heritage but even more so around the role of literature itself in that process. The contributions look at different discourses that were and still are concerned with reinterpreting and creating new collective symbols and narrative patterns in relation to Germany's past. The volume focuses on the effects of the characteristic discourses of the press, literature and its different genres, film, the internet and memorials on the depiction and performance of memories.
Most of the chapters in this volume were delivered as papers at a conference on the same theme held at the University of Kent in April 2002. The essays collected here, by scholars from the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the US, address a topic of fundamental concern across all the disciplines engaged with the study of contemporary Germany: the evolving relationship between urban and rural space, the metropolitan centre and the provincial Heimat. The volume identifies and investigates a number of recent trends: the emergence of 'eco-literature', the renaissance of writing - in prose and verse - inspired by the new Berlin, the realignment of regional sensibilities, which is complicated by the troubled tradition of Heimat in all its literary manifestations, and the continuing disjunctions between East and West. Individual essays engage with the work of established writers (Günter de Bruyn, Hubert Fichte, Peter Handke, WG Sebald, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, and Elfriede Jelinek) and emerging talents (Georg Klein, Christof Hamann, Ludwig Laher, and Arnold Stadler).
Some years figure more keenly in the collective memory than others. This volume explores how 1968 has come to be perceived in France, Germany, Italy, U.S., Mexico & China, & how various national preoccupations with order, political violence, individual freedom, youth culture & self-expression have been reflected.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the German literary establishment considered the novel the contemptible entertainment of the uneducated. By the end of the century, the novel had eclipsed the epic poem as the most appropriate genre for depicting humankind and its preoccupations. The story of the novel's emergence as a respected and productive artistic genre is intimately bound up with the vicissitudes of the most popular of all German baroque works, Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's (1621/22-1676) Der abentheurliche Simplicissimus: Teutsch (1668/69). Between 1756 and 1785, Simplicissimus quietly found its way into bookshops three times in radically different forms, in adaptations that were not, as critics have asserted, arbitrary, but quite purposeful. This investigation discusses the ways in which this canonical text was reworked to reflect the thinking of leading - and warring - Enlightenment aestheticians. At the genre war's end, the novel emerged triumphant and Simplicissimus adaptations had been instrumental in securing the victory; the multi-faceted Simplicissimus had served as a vehicle for reifying theoretical positions in the conflicts. For, as the social and aesthetic climate shifted radically, Grimmelshausen's work not only survived, but took on new life in the most important literary campaign of the century.
This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad's reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the 'dark times' of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad's works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad's presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as 'Conrad the Jew' by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad's works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.
The writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger are a provocative commentary on the post-1945 period in Germany. Poet and essayist of international standing and frequent contributor to political and cultural debates, his work has accompanied the development of the Federal Republic from the 1950s to German unification and after. This study makes explicit the links between Enzensberger's literary imagination and the cultural and political history of Germany and offers a close reading of both Enzensberger's poetry and his seminal essays on politics and culture, proposing that they be considered as part of a single artistic project. The book argues that Enzensberger's significance lies in his sustained exploration of the relationship between literary and cultural practices and political democracy in Germany. It offers detailed analyses of Enzensberger's poetry and considers his essays on the 'consciousness industry' and on the 'constituents of a theory of the media' in the context of the political development of the Federal Republic in the half-century following 1945. Post-World War 2 essays on cinema and television, on tourism, consumption and migration, and on digital media and the future of literature are also considered and analysed. Enzensberger's work is situated as part of an ongoing critical debate between him and key intellectual figures such as Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jurgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault."
How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flâneur in Juan Goytisolo's Landscapes after the Battle (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini's Dialogue between a Prostitute and her Client (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo's The Mudrooroo/Müller Project (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.