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GHANAIAN FOLK THOUGHT, AKAN RELIGION AND AN ETHIC OF CARE IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-23 Kyung-Ho Cha
In this article I will analyse how cosmological myths, proverbs and pictorial symbols from Ghanaian folk thought and religion are adapted in Sharon Dodua Otoo's novel Adas Raum. I will focus primarily on the idea of the transmigration of the soul, which comes from the religion of the Akan people, and on the Sankofa symbol, which stands for a certain attitude towards history. In the novel, Ghanaian
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VOCABULARY FOR AN UNTHINKABLE GRAMMAR: SHARON DODUA OTOO'S SYNCHRONICITY German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Stephanie Galasso
This article examines the eponymous notion of ‘synchronicity’ in Sharon Dodua Otoo's novella, Synchronicity: the original story. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva's notion of Black Feminist ‘poethics’, I argue that ‘synchronicity’ might serve as a ‘guide’ for the imagination that also expands significant critiques of (post)-Enlightenment notions of temporality (e.g. those by Michelle M. Wright, Rei
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OTHERTONGUES: MULTILINGUALISM, NATALITY AND EMPOWERMENT IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Áine McMurtry
Written in German by the Black British author and activist Sharon Dodua Otoo, the novel Adas Raum (2021) intervenes in contemporary debates on colonial legacies to forge ‘a critical multilingualism’ (Yildiz 2012), challenging master-narratives and tropes of founding fathers which privilege linear constructions of time and bounded concepts of nation and peoples. This article examines how Otoo foregrounds
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‘VISIONEN VOM IDEALEN GESCHICHTE-SCHREIBEN UND GESCHICHTE-MACHENʼ: EPISTEMIC (IN)JUSTICE AND INSURRECTION IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S HISTORICAL AND MEMORY ACTIVISM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Tara Talwar Windsor
This article explores Sharon Dodua Otoo's historical and memory activism and demonstrates how she challenges epistemic injustices inflicted by dominant models of cultural memory and identity in Germany, particularly in relation to its colonial history. Such epistemic injustice takes two main forms – the ongoing subjugation of subaltern (hi)stories and the under-acknowledgement of grassroots diasporic
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VON DER ‘MACHT, WELT ZU MACHEN’: RADIKALE DEMOKRATIE IN SHARON DODUA OTOOS ADAS RAUM* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Alrik Daldrup
Drawing on Jacques Rancièreʼs radical democratic concept of dissensus, my article centres on the epistemic, affective and verbal forms of resistance depicted in Sharon Dodua Otooʼs debut novel Adas Raum. In four diegetic narrative strands, a police order of the visible and the sayable damages and assimilates the characters’ lives. According to Jamika Ajalon, stories are lost in colonised space, but
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MOTHERS AND OTHERS IN FICTION BY SHARON DODUA OTOO AND OLIVIA WENZEL German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Sarah Colvin
In this article I argue that in recent novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel the trope of motherhood is engaged to evoke an emancipatory impulse that is paradoxically linked to acknowledging constraint or connectedness. Motherhood is an idea burdened by historical stereotypes, and I argue that Otoo and Wenzel use aesthetic means to subvert gendered and racialising mythologies and controlling
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BLACKNESS AND DIS/ABILITY IN THE AFROFUTURIST CHRISTMAS NOVELLA SYNCHRONICITY (2015) BY SHARON DODUA OTOO* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-13 joseph kebe-nguema
Charlie, the main character in Sharon Dodua Otoo's Afrofuturist Christmas novella Synchronicity, is a Black single mother of Ghanaian heritage working as a graphic designer in Berlin who has spent her whole life feeling the constraints of her ancestral traditions. When one day she starts losing her ability to see colours, she cannot disclose that family-specific dis/ability since it would have professional
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BETWEEN THE ORBITS: TRANSLATING SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Jon Cho-Polizzi
This paper examines theoretical and practical questions involved in the translation of Sharon Dodua Otoo's transnational and polyphonic novel Adas Raum. Using translation theory and the Benjaminian notion of a translation's ‘Fortleben’, I build on my concept of ‘conversive reading’, as well as on extensive real-time collaboration with Otoo and fellow translators to ask: How does one negotiate questions
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THE LATE ARRIVAL OF ‘DER DEUTSCHE PROUST’: TRANSLATING A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU INTO GERMAN German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Ian Ellison
Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, an unparalleled chronicle of European modernity's transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, was published between 1913 and 1927. It was not until the 1950s, however, that a complete German translation of the novel appeared. Earlier attempts did not get far: Rudolph Schottlaender's 1925 translation of the first volume was critically panned
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THE DISCREPANCIES OF THE ‘ANTHROPOZOIC AGE’ IN ERNST HAECKEL'S INDISCHE REISEBRIEFE (1882) German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Isabella Maria Engberg
In Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), Ernst Haeckel systematised the biological study of morphology along evolutionary lines and proposed that the ‘Anthropozoic Age’ should be considered the most recent paleontological time period. This article first examines Haeckelʼs early concept of the Anthropozoic Age in relation to his ambiguous use of the words ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ in his life's
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BÜCHNER, BORDERS AND THE CONVERGING OF ‘CROWDS’: JACK THORNE'S WOYZECK (2017) German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Joseph Prestwich
As an important site of cross-cultural exchange, theatre translations performed in Britain form key routes for international writers to be introduced to, and to influence, British audiences and theatre-makers. This article introduces Jack Thorne's 2017 adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London, as a case study to trace how British theatre practitioners and institutions
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VOICING VULNERABILITY: MEDIATING VIOLENCE, VICTIMISATION AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN NORA GOMRINGER'S MONSTER POETRY* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Annegret Märten
This chapter examines poetic works by the Swiss-German performance poet Nora-Eugenie Gomringer that draw on monsters as a conceptual lens to engage with experiences of vulnerable subjects, that is, those that have experienced harm or violence or are considered especially susceptible to these risks. The anthology Monster Morbus Moden (2013–17), with its initial collection Monster Poems (2013), reflects
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MICROHISTORIES OF HEIMAT IN THE THIRD REICH German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Sandra Lipner
In the Third Reich, ideas about Heimat became entwined with racial fantasies about blood and soil. This article investigates the dynamics and consequences of this development based on a study of the kinship network of Annemarie and Heinrich Brenzinger from Freiburg (Breisgau). The Brenzingers subscribed to a ‘völkisch’ worldview which conceptualised Heimat as a refuge for kinship groups connected to
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FAMILIES, SIMILARITIES AND MULTI-FAITH FUTURES: RE-IMAGINING ISLAM AND MUSLIMS IN LESSING AND NOVALIS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-06-03 James Hodkinson
In G. E Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779) Muslims are represented alongside Jews and Christians. These relationships are framed in terms of shared human morality and the shared biology of family, expressed through physical resemblance, rather than through similarities or differences of faith. Ultimately, it is the biological fact of consanguine family, not religion, which forms the basis of future
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EIN INTERVIEW MIT DEM LYRIKER UND THEOLOGEN CHRISTIAN LEHNERT: GESPRÄCH ÜBER DICHTUNG, RELIGION, NATURMYSTIK UND SEINEN LYRIKBAND OPUS 8. IM FLECHTWERK (2022). MIT ZWEI UNVERÖFFENTLICHTEN GEDICHTEN VON CHRISTIAN LEHNERT German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Hanna Bingel-Jones
This article is an interview with the writer Christian Lehnert, who is both a theologian and a distinguished German poet. Linguistic precision, the artful use of semantics from the Christian and Jewish traditions, and an associative, surprising imagery are considered the hallmarks of Lehnert's poetics. The interview examines the relationship of his poetry to theology and religion, the tension between
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PRIVATE RELIGION AS RESISTANCE IN ANNA SEGHERS’ DER PROZESS DER JEANNE D'ARC ZU ROUEN 1431 (1937) AND BERTOLT BRECHT'S 1952 STAGE ADAPTATION German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Cordula Böcking
This article will examine the representation of religion in Anna Seghers’ radio play Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 (1937) and Bertolt Brecht's subsequent adaptation of this text for the stage (1952). While religiosity is central to the identity of the medieval heroine, Seghers chooses to communicate this feature to modern audiences in a ‘lacunary’ way that sees Jeanne refusing to elaborate
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GOD IS BEAUTIFUL, UGLY, DEAD: NAVID KERMANI, FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU AND (MORE THAN) CHRISTIAN ART German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Joseph Twist
Navid Kermani's and Feridun Zaimoglu's engagements as Muslims with Christian art reveal the possibilities and limitations of aesthetic experiences of the divine beyond all doctrinal divides. Although Kermani's own research into the aesthetic dimension of Islam highlights the potential for art to offer spiritual insight, his rejection of some Christian imagery, especially of the crucifix, in his book
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SELF-IDENTITY AND THE JEWISH BODY: ASSIMILATED GERMAN-SPEAKING JEWISH AUTHORS ON TRADITIONAL JUDAISM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-21 Yael Almog
This article investigates portrayals of traditional Judaism and observant Jews in writings by assimilated German-Jewish authors. It thus explores notions projected onto traditional Jews – and particularly the Jewish body – as elements immanent to Jewish cultural production. At the centre of the enquiry are Heinrich Heine's Hebräische Melodien (1851), Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1902)
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HUGO BALL'S RELIGIOUS CONVERSION German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-21 Deborah Lewer
This essay investigates the German ex-Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) and his 1920s work on religious conversion from Paul, Augustine and Francis to writers and poets in modernity. This intense engagement was rooted in Ball's own radical conversion, or ‘re-conversion’, to an austere form of the Catholicism of his childhood in 1920, just a few years after breaking with the Dada movement he had helped
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INFERNAL MATTER(S) AND THE POWER OF THE WORD IN FERIDUN ZAIMOGLU'S EVANGELIO German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-05-21 Margaret Littler
Feridun Zaimoglu's ‘Luther-Roman’ Evangelio (2017) concerns Martin Luther's incarceration in the Wartburg (1521–2), evoking his struggles with Satan, his translation of the New Testament into German, and the spiritual and political volatility of his world. Reception of the novel was mixed, some readers delighting in the archaic idiom that echoes Luther's own Early New High German, others disappointed
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THE GERMAN MUSEUM AND THE EARLY RECEPTION OF GERMAN LETTERS IN BRITAIN, 1800–18011 German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Oliver Puckey
The early reception of German letters in London can be better understood through a close reading of the bookseller Constantin Geisweiler's short-lived journal The German Museum (1800–1801). The 1790s have been described as an era of literary ‘Germanomania’, as numerous translations of German works appeared for the first time in English. By 1800, however, an increasingly pejorative assessment of the
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MADE BY HISTORY: HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE'S HERO AND THE ANXIETIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Jack Graveney
The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke has traditionally been associated with the notion of ‘great men’ in history and seen as a naïve personalist who concentrated agency in the hands of a select few heroic individuals. This article advances an alternative interpretation of Treitschke's historical writings, suggesting that the oft-repeated axiom ‘great men make history’ is overwhelmingly unsatisfactory
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GERMAN COLONIALISM IN EAST AFRICA AND ITS AFTERMATH IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH'S NOVELS PARADISE AND AFTERLIVES AND IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Dirk Göttsche
British author and literary scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, makes significant contributions to the memory and critique of German colonialism in East Africa and its aftermath both in Tanzania and in Germany. This study examines Gurnah's novels Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) for their representation of German imperial rule
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THE (QUEER) AESTHETICS OF JEAN PAUL'S SIEBENKÄS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Anchit Sathi
This article proposes that the eighteenth-century novel Siebenkäs contains the formulation of an aesthetic theory that embraces same-sex desire. The novel's author, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, still relatively unknown among literary scholars today, uses the myth of Narcissus as an aesthetic blueprint for the novel. In doing so, he appears to comply with the aesthetic conventions espoused by his German
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THE BOY APPEARING (AS) THE SISTER: GENDER AND SILENCE IN GEORG TRAKL* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-23 Juliette Christine Gruner
The present text is concerned with figures of unusual gender in two poetic texts by Georg Trakl, namely ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ and ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, each of which features the same violation of German grammar at a crucial point. The first text starts and ends with a scene of a boy recognising his sister's image in the mirror, which will be read as a specular identification that transgresses the
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ROOM AT THE INN? WERTHER IN WAHLHEIM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Howard Gaskill
This article examines the widespread assumption that the protagonist of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers chooses to live in ‘Wahlheim’. It is argued that this assumption cannot be reconciled with a close reading of the textual evidence. At no stage can Wahlheim be shown to be Werther's sole or main residence. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he ever resides there at all.
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POETICS AND POLITICS OF CLIMATE: STURM UND DRANG AND ENLIGHTENMENT-ERA CLIMATE THEORY German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Anna-Lisa Baumeister
This article investigates the ‘radicality’ of the Sturm und Drang in relation to Enlightenment-era climate theory. In the wake of Montesquieu's seminal De l'Esprit des Lois (1748), the notion of climate as a fundamental driver of human culture was popularised across Europe. It is argued that Sturm und Drang authors embraced this trend while at the same time developing their own radical climate discourse
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J. M. R. LENZ AND THE PROBLEM OF SOLDIERS: BETWEEN MODERATE AND RADICAL STURM UND DRANG IN LENZ'S MILITARY REFORMS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Ian McLean
In his essay ‘Über die Soldatenehen’ and his fragmentary writings on military reforms Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz uses the distinctly moderate discourse of physiocratic economics to the radical ends of a complete restructuring of social relations. Lenz turns the logic of the physiocrats against more moderate reform efforts and presents a model of economic circulation that emphasises the role of labour
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MANNHEIM AND COMPANY: GENDER, ECONOMICS AND MODERATE STURM UND DRANG IN J. M. R. LENZ'S DER LANDPREDIGER (1777)1 German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Mary Helen Dupree
Published in 1777, J. M. R. Lenz's novella Der Landprediger has been read as a document of Lenz’ own intellectual and spiritual disorientation following his banishment from Goethe's Weimar in 1776. As Marcus Twellmann and others have shown, the novella responds to the agrarian reforms initiated by Margrave Carl Friedrich in Baden, which Lenz witnessed first hand. In this article, I argue that the novella's
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WHAT IS RADICAL? BÜCHNER AND BRECHT READ LENZ German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Veronica Rose Curran
This article asks why the radical authors Georg Büchner (1813–37) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) were particularly interested in the life and works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92). The enquiry proceeds by reading Lenz's theoretical and literary works, such as his treatise Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) and his plays Die Soldaten (1776) and Der Hofmeister (1774), through the later authors’
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KARL MOOR'S FAILED REVOLUTION: RADICAL CRITIQUE AND MODERATE POLITICS IN SCHILLER'S DIE RÄUBER German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Thiti Owlarn
Recent scholarship tends to agree that Die Räuber is a play about two rebels, Karl and Franz Moor, who respectively represent the idealist and materialist strands of Enlightenment thought. What is often overlooked, however, is the brothers’ desire not merely to rebel against the status quo but also to establish new systems of authority. This article argues that Schiller's Die Räuber is primarily concerned
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THE LATENT RADICALISM OF ARISTOTLE AND J. M. R. LENZ German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Ellwood Wiggins
J. M. R. Lenz's Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) present the aesthetic manifesto of the Sturm und Drang. In order to express its programmatic agenda for the modern drama, the text repeatedly attacks Aristotle's Poetics. This article reads Lenz's treatment of the Poetics not merely as a handy rhetorical foil for showcasing his own innovative dramatic theories, but rather as an integral part of the performance
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THE FREEDOM OF A PLAYWRIGHT: STURM UND DRANG AESTHETIC INNOVATION THROUGH A LUTHERAN LENS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Martin Wagner
This article builds on a passage from Johann Georg Hamann's Fünf Hirtenbriefe das Schuldrama betreffend (1763) to argue that the discourse on the rules of dramatic composition in the Sturm und Drang is shaped by an implicitly Lutheran logic of Christian freedom. That means that rather than emphasising the transgression of established rules, Sturm und Drang writers, like Luther's free Christian, sought
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FILIAL DEPENDENCE AND AUTONOMY IN THE STURM UND DRANG: READING KLINGER, WAGNER AND MÜLLER WITH ROUSSEAU German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-12-27 Elystan Griffiths
The essay examines the representation of relationships between children on the cusp of adulthood and their parents in dramas by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Heinrich Leopold Wagner and Friedrich Müller (known as ‘Maler Müller’). It positions the Sturm und Drang in dialogue with the wider European Enlightenment, and especially with Rousseau's theorising of human dependence in his Discourse on Inequality
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‘HERKUNFT IST ZUFALL’: ZU OFFENEN HERKUNFTS- UND HEIMATKONZEPTEN IN DER LITERATUR DER DEUTSCHEN POSTMIGRANTISCHEN GENERATION German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Anna Rutka
In the context of present mass migrations, escapes and ethnic wars, the traditional approach to origin and homeland in terms of belonging to an ethnically homogeneous nation, monocultures with one mother tongue and a strictly defined territory are subject to criticism and (re)-defining. This article presents and analyses examples of four literary works whose authors are representatives of the young
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THE GOTTSCHEERS: FROM A CENTRAL EUROPEAN ENCLAVE TO ASSIMILATION IN NORTH AMERICA German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-26 Derek Stadler
In the fourteenth century, a group of German-speaking settlers established a colony named Gottschee in what is now Slovenia. The results of World War II banished Gottscheers from Slovenia and they relocated to Austrian refugee camps. While some Gottscheers later moved to other European countries, a large number migrated to existing Gottscheer or German communities in North America as refugees, practising
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WHO DO WE SEE IN THE PROTAGONIST OF THE CAPTAIN (2017)? German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-26 Jakub Gortat
The Captain (Der Hauptmann), directed by Robert Schwentke, was the German director's first film with a German crew and in his native language since 2003. It was screened in German cinemas in March 2018 and met with a mixed response from the press. In this article I analyse the film, with the main emphasis being on the question of identification with the film and its protagonist. I employ a number of
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‘RECLUSION IS NO MORE POSSIBLE WHILE OUR WORLD STANDS IN FLAMES’: EMERGING POLITICAL SUBTEXTS IN THE GENESIS OF STEFAN ZWEIG'S UNGEDULD DES HERZENS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Stephan Resch
Ungeduld des Herzens (1939) is the only novel published during Stefan Zweig's lifetime. Written between 1936 and 1938, the book's genesis coincided with key events in Austrian and European history, including the mass displacement of Jews from Germany and the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria with Nazi-Germany. A closer inspection of the changes from the first to the tenth and final manuscript version of the novel
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WINNETOU, WHITE INNOCENCE, AND SETTLER TIME German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Maureen O. Gallagher
Proclaiming ‘every generation has its Winnetou’, German network RTL ushered in the return of Winnetou to German television in 2016 with a big-budget film trilogy, Winnetou – Der Mythos Lebt. This article analyses the Winnetou film trilogy in dialogue with Karl May's original 1893 novels and the 1960s West German westerns using the concepts of settler time and white innocence. It brings a critical focus
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‘ICH HATTE BEFEHLE’: MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY AND THE VIETNAM WAR IN HEYNOWSKI AND SCHEUMANN'S PILOTEN IM PYJAMA (1968)* German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-21 Lauren Cuthbert
East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's four-part documentary Piloten im Pyjama (1968) focuses on interviews with downed US bomber pilots who had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War. The documentary draws explicit connections between the American presence in Vietnam and Germany's recent Nazi past, thus creating a memorial link between East German
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‘KEINE ZEIT ZU VERLIEREN’: TIME AND CARE IN INGEBORG BACHMANN'S ‘DAS GEBELL’ AND DAS BUCH FRANZA German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Emily Jeremiah
This article explores the handling of time and care in two works by Ingeborg Bachmann: the short story ‘Das Gebell’ and the uncompleted novel Das Buch Franza. It argues that care and time are linked in the works, in a manner that echoes the thinking of Lisa Baraitser (Enduring Time). ‘Das Gebell’ offers a critique of masculinist models of time and puts forward a feminist ethics of care. Das Buch Franza
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ERMÄCHTIGUNG DES PUBLIKUMS UND ENTMÄCHTIGUNG DES KÜNSTLERS: GENIEDISKURSE DER NACHROMANTIK MIT BLICK AUF DEN FRÜHEN MOZARTKULT UND GRILLPARZER German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-06-28 Werner Michler
The article discusses aspects of the dialectics of genius cults in the nineteenth century, using examples of Mozart's reception: the unveiling of the Salzburg memorial statue in 1842, Franz Grillparzer's texts on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his son Franz Xaver, as well as the artist's novella Der arme Spielmann. The consolidation and popularisation of genius discourse in the genius cults of post-Romanticism
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DAS GENIE IM SCHAFFEN NIETZSCHES German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-06-23 Sebastian Kaufmann
The article aims to show the central importance of Friedrich Nietzsche to notions of genius in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand, it considers the influence of idealised representations of Nietzsche (for example, in Thomas Mann and Gottfried Benn) as a genius marked by loneliness, illness, and finally madness. On the other hand, it seeks to trace the significance of ‘genius’ within
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NACH DEM SCHICKSAL: NAPOLEON BEI HEINE UND TOLSTOJ German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-06-18 Jan Niklas Howe
The article uses the contrast between Heinrich Heine and Tolstoyʼs descriptions of Napoleon to explore the paradigm shift from artistic to political figures in nineteenth-century models of genius. Departing from a brief sketch of five fundamental elements of eighteenth-century genius aesthetics, it outlines how poetic genius (personified by Goethe) is succeeded by political genius (Napoleon) in Heine's
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SCHATTEN- UND LICHTSEITEN DER GENIETHEORIE OTTO WEININGERS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-06-18 Jacques Le Rider
Is it possible to separate the wheat from the chaff in Otto Weiningerʼs (in)famous Geschlecht und Charakter and to analyse its theory of genius without taking into consideration the antifeminist and antisemitic context of the work as a whole? This article argues that it is not: Weininger's theory of genius is central to his misogynistic and antisemitic cultural critique. He uses genius as the unassailable
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‘ES IST EINE DESOLATE IDEE, GENIE WERDEN ZU WOLLEN’: ZUM BÖRSENWERT DES BEGRIFFS GENIE BEI NESTROY German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-06-18 Arno Dusini
In his farces, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy seizes on prevailing stereotypes of genius, treating the concept with an irony that contributed to its critical revision in his day. Drawing on the theories of Michail Bachtin, the article examines how genius – as a term and as a series of (con)figurations – features in Nestroy's works, differentiating between its chronotopic, polyphonic and dialogic dramaturgical
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‘SCHÖNE JUGENDLICHE MÄDCHENKÖPFE’: GENDER AND ‘GENIE’ IN LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ’S MENSCHENKINDER German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-05-27 Marlen Mairhofer
In her essay ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ (1899) Lou Andreas-Salomé compares women to trees: both produce their ‘fruit’ unintentionally. This comparison seems to allow very little scope for active female creativity, let alone ingenuity. Closer inspection, however, reveals a more differentiated view of questions of gender and creativity. By bringing biology together with psychology and outlining the differences
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INTRODUCTION: PRE-ROMANTIC AND POST-ROMANTIC GENIUS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-05-26 Deborah Holmes
‘Genius’ is an eye-catching, resonant expression to include in any title, be it of a book, film or exhibition, whether factual or fiction, popular or scholarly. Its fascination persists in academia despite repeated announcements of its demise as a term in serious critical debate. Generations of influential thinkers have sought to discredit and deconstruct it, presenting it as an ahistorical means of
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ERNST TOLLER SPEAKS AT THE WORLD CONGRESS OF WRITERS IN NEW YORK, 8–10 MAY 1939 German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Karina von Tippelskirch
This article investigates Ernst Toller's last public speech, ‘How Can Culture Survive Exile?’, which he delivered at the World Congress of Writers on 9 May 1939, in New York City. I first discuss the context of the speech, the writers’ congress, which took place alongside the World's Fair in New York and was organised under the auspices of the American PEN Centre and its president, Dorothy Thompson
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TWO POEMS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Albert Ostermaier
Guest editors' note Greatly impacted by Toller, Albert Ostermaier engages, in these poems, with two primary themes of this Special Number: emigration and exile; and Toller's final difficult days and death in New York City's Mayflower Hotel. With thanks to Albert Ostermaier and Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reprint and translate these two poems from Herz Vers Sagen, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, pp. 72–3
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THE VIEW FROM 1933: ERNST TOLLER'S EINE JUGEND IN DEUTSCHLAND AS EXILE LITERATURE – ON THE FINAL AMENDMENTS BEFORE PUBLICATION OF THE BOOK EDITION German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Peter Langemeyer
Until now it has in the main only been possible to identify the changes that Toller made to Eine Jugend in Deutschland during his exile by comparing the two book editions. This showed that Toller's edits were restricted to the paratexts. The two complete text versions that have recently been rediscovered – one typescript in the Bavarian State Library in Munich and one copy in the Berner Tagwacht, which
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ANTI-FASCISM AND FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS: ERNST TOLLER'S QUEENS COLLEGE AFFAIR1 German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Lisa Marie Anderson
The countless public speeches Ernst Toller gave during his six-year exile from Nazi Germany included a particularly controversial one in 1938 at the newly founded Queens College, in New York City. The controversy stemmed from the fact that it almost did not take place: two days after receiving what he understood to be an invitation to speak at a symposium, Toller learned that the college could not
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INTRODUCTION: ERNST TOLLER IN EXILE German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Christiane Schönfeld,Lisa Marie Anderson
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AN UPDATED CHRONOLOGY OF ERNST TOLLER'S LIFE AND WORKS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Irene Zanol,Lisa Marie Anderson,Christiane Schönfeld
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‘TAT UND ARBEIT, STATT PUBLICITY UND TRÄUMEREI’: ERNST TOLLER AND THE AMERICAN GUILD FOR GERMAN CULTURAL FREEDOM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Irene Zanol
This article deals with Ernst Toller's involvement in the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, an organisation founded in 1935 to help artists and intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime to the US. It thus highlights the last months of Toller's life. As a member of the board of directors of the Guild, he was involved in important initiatives such as the allocation of grants to writers in
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SEARCH MOVEMENTS: LITERATURE AND POLITICS BETWEEN THE WARS AND A CASE STUDY OF ERNST TOLLER'S I WAS A GERMAN (1934) German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Stefan Neuhaus
The Weimar Republic opened up a new chapter for society within the borders of what was then called Germany. Ongoing financial difficulties due to the Treaty of Versailles overshadowed and stalled the development of the newly formed republic. But the democracy was not doomed to fail from the beginning. The search for orientation and perspective in a radically changed political, social, economic and
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ERNST TOLLER'S FILM PROJECTS German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Christiane Schönfeld
This article examines Ernst Toller's ambivalent relationship to film as a medium and to cinema as a place of mass entertainment. It focuses particularly on Toller's own film projects and his hope for cinema as an effective contributor to the public sphere, while tracing his time in Hollywood as an exile from Nazi Germany. Toller had two film scenarios in his luggage when he moved to New York – ‘Betsy
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ERNST TOLLER'S LIVING NEWSPAPERS AND THE FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Michael Pilz
During his first trip to the US in 1929 Ernst Toller was impressed by the Newsreel cinemas of William Fox. In his words – ‘die Zeitung ist lebendig geworden’ – the films were a sort of ‘living newspaper’. He tried to write such a ‘Living Newspaper’ in his first radio play Berlin, letzte Ausgabe! (1930), as well as in one of his last texts for the stage which was found among his literary remains: ‘Forget
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PROTECTING THE PUBLIC SPHERE(S): THE CAMPAIGN FOR PETER-PAUL ZAHL German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-01-04 Catriona Corke
Peter-Paul Zahl was a writer, printing press owner, and from 1972 to 1982 a prisoner suspected of belonging to the Red Army Faction (RAF). During the late 1970s, a number of prominent authors risked their reputations to campaign on his behalf. They did not argue that Zahl was innocent of violent crime, but instead protested that he had been handed an excessive prison sentence on account of his left-wing
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FREEDOM TIME: TEMPORAL INSURRECTIONS IN OLIVIA WENZEL'S 1000 SERPENTINEN ANGST AND SHARON DODUA OTOO'S ADAS RAUM German Life and Letters Pub Date : 2022-01-23 Sarah Colvin
Anthony Reed has developed the concepts of ‘racial time’ and ‘freedom time’ to explore the aesthetics of possibility in Black experimental writing in the USA. Here I build on that thinking, on Michelle Wright's concept of Epiphenomenal time, and on Priscilla Layne's exploration of Afrofuturist temporal aesthetics in Wenzel's dramatic work, to discuss how Wenzel and Otoo as contemporary European novelists