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This study reverses the question implicit in title of Christa Wolf’s now-canonical 1990 novella Was bleibt (What remains), looking instead at what was lost during the process of German reunification. It argues that, in their work during and after the Wende, most literary authors from both East and West Germany responded ambivalently to the reunification. Many felt, on the one hand, a keen sense of loss as the GDR dissolved and an expanded Federal Republic summarily absorbed former Eastern Germany. They mourned the ideals of democratic socialism, tolerance, and internationalism that the GDR had held dear, as well as the country’s rich cultural life. On the other hand, however, they recognized that the GDR was a fundamentally corrupt surveillance state whose industry weighed heavily on the environment while failing to buoy the country’s economy. By looking at works by some of the most important authors from either side of the border, this study shows that those who unequivocally embraced the reunification were clearly in the minority.
Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Authors' Note -- Introduction -- Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration -- Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty -- Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell to Alice in the Cities -- Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion in Wrong Move -- Leafing through Wings of Desire -- Conclusion -- Filmographies -- Bibliography -- Index.
Bachmann & her critique of postwar Europe.
The history of literature about war is marked by a fundamental paradox: although war forms the subject of countless novels, dramas, poems, and films, it is often conceived as indescribable. Even as many writers strive towards an ideal of authenticity, they maintain that no representation can do justice to the terror and violence of war. Readings of Schiller, Kleist, Jünger, Remarque, Grass, Böll, Handke, and Jelinek reveal that stylistic and aesthetic features, gender discourses, and concepts of agency and victimization can all undermine a text's martial stance or its ostensible pacifist agenda. Spanning the period from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the recent wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq, this book investigates the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical challenges that confront writers of war.
This book assembles texts by renowned academics and theatre artists who were professionally active during the wars in former Yugoslavia. It examines examples of how various forms of theatre and performance reacted to the conflicts in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Kosovo while they were ongoing. It explores state-funded National Theatre activities between escapism and denial, the theatre aesthetics of protest and resistance, and symptomatic shifts and transformations in the production of theatre under wartime circumstances, both in theory and in practice. In addition, it looks beyond the period of conflict itself, examining the aftermath of war in contemporary theatre...
Explores the performance of aging in the "late style" of Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser.Demographers say that by the year 2060, every seventh person in Germany will be aged eighty or older, and every third person over sixty-five. The prediction for other Western countries is scarcely different. Indeed, the aging society is seen by some as a graver threat than even global warming, with potentially unmanageable tensions relating to intergenerational relationships, work and benefits, and flows of people. This book explores the representation and performance of aging in recent "late-style" German-language fiction. It situates the authors chosen as case studies -- G...
This book explores female-themed art films from China and Germany and seeks to illustrate how the cultural difference between the ways of representing women and narrating women's themes is shown in both countries' films, by means of analyzing two film elements: mise-en-scène and cinematography. This book analyzes female-themed art films in five topics: Marriage and Love, Birth and Motherhood, Professional Women and Housewives, Death and Despair, and Dreams and Destiny.
This study evaluates the reception of Martin Walser's novels by critics and reviewers between 1957 and 1978 in West Germany, East Germany, Britain and the USA. It demonstrates the connection between the aesthetic responses and the political positions of the critics. The novel Jenseits der Liebe is identified as both a turning point in Walser's development and as a case of inconsistent reception by critics. Walser's treatment of the political psychology of the salaried employee with its deep loyalty conflicts disturbed the critics more profoundly than the identity problems of his earlier and later heroes.
Practical strategies, a real-world emphasis and a focus on critical thinking characterizes this rhetoric, reader, research guide and handbook.
This study explores postcolonial representations of ethnic minorities and the construction of national identities in plays written by six contemporary German-speaking women playwrights, drawing on approaches of cultural and postcolonial studies, African American and other minority feminist criticism, as well as Anglo-American and German feminist scholarship. The study finds that minority characters are reduced to function as catalysts for problems of the German and Austrian community. This work will appeal to scholars in German Studies, feminist studies, and drama.