Browsing by Department "German Studies"

This dissertation focuses on the fictional narratives of Eastern and Central European women authors writing in German and explores the ways in which historical and political trauma shapes their approach to narrative. By investigating the atrocities of the World War II era and beyond through a lens of trauma, I look at the ways in which their narrative writing is disrupted by traumatic memory, engendering a genre that calls into question official accounts of historical events. I argue that without the emergence and proliferation of these individual trauma narratives to contest, official, cemented accounts, there exists a threat of permanent inscription of official versions into public consciousness, effectively excluding the narratives of communities rendered fragile by war and/or displacement. The dissertation demonstrates how these trauma fictions i) reveal the burden of unresolved, transmitted trauma on the second generation as the pivotal generation between the repressive Stalinist era and the collapse of communism, ii) disrupt official accounts of events through the intrusion of individual traumatic memory that is by nature unmediated and uncensored, iii) offer alternative plural accounts of events by rejecting normal everyday language as a vehicle for narrative and instead experimenting with alternative modes of representation, articulating trauma through poetic language, through spaces, and through the body, and v) struggle against theory, while paradoxically often succumbing to the very same institutionalized language of trauma that they seek to contest. Trauma fiction therefore emerges as a distinct genre that forestalls the threat of erasure of alternative memories by constantly challenging and exposing the equivocal nature of official narratives, while also pointing to the challenges faced in attempting to give a voice to groups that have suffered trauma in an age where the term has become embedded and overused in our everyday language.

This dissertation explores the meaning of art and religion in fin-de-siècle Vienna through the symphonies of the composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and the philosophical and dramatic works of the poet Siegfried Lipiner (1856-1911). Using as a framework aesthetic discourses concerning the ability of music to be "read" as a narrative text, this study highlights the significant role of both poet and composer in the cultural and intellectual world of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. In this study, I compare and contrast Lipiner's vision of religious renewal with the redemptive narratives in the programs of Mahler's first four symphonies, which were composed during a period when the poet and composer shared a close friendship and intellectual exchange. Furthermore, I also discuss Mahler and Lipiner's works in relation to the writings of the Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1835), the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and the composer and cultural critic, Richard Wagner (1813-1883), demonstrating how the images of the heroic martyr, the Übermensch and the Volk, play a role in the re-conception of man's relationship to the divine, which is central to Mahler and Lipiner's idea of redemption. However, I also claim that the political and cultural climate of Vienna around 1900 played an important role in their interpretation of these ideas. Despite their public conversion and cultural assimilation, Mahler and Lipiner's Jewish heritage distinctly shaped their interest in artistic-religious redemption both to cope with their own personal feelings of alienation in the society in which they lived, and as a cure for the existential malaise of their time. This study demonstrates not only the significant impact of Lipiner's aesthetic-religious philosophy on Mahler's music, but also portrays their vision of redemption as an re-envisioning of man's relationship to God, which stands in contrast to the modern trend of secularism, and reflects a little-explored dimension of aesthetic and religious culture in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

This dissertation explores arguments against legal and authoritarian structures as thematized by four works of fiction from distinct periods of German history: Jacob Wasserman's Der Fall Maurizius (the Weimar Republic), Arnold Zweig's Das Beil von Wandsbek (the Third Reich), Manfred Bieler's Das Kaninchen bin Ich (post-war division of Germany), and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer (Germany after reunification). The aim of my analysis is to define how each work builds a "case" against the state. It conducts a literary analysis of each work, which it places in its own cultural and political context. It then compares this case to German theories of law to determine points at which the work is in dialogue with pressing questions of justice particular to its legal epoch: Der Fall Maurizius (1928) builds a case against the state by juxtaposing positivist and natural law, yet ultimately cannot avoid the axiomatic nature of each position; Das Beil von Wandsbek (1938-43) is a Marxist morality play whose concept of justice proves insufficient to its own implied standards; Maria Morzeck oder Das Kaninchen bin ich (1969) engages the GDR's 1961 law reform directly, yet in its development from GDR film to FRG novel softens its critique of the state by thematizing its own literary limitations; and Leben bis Männer (2001) argues against Germany's post-reunification trials of former GDR border guards, but exposes its own plea for a sympathetic view of the GDR.

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity, and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work — Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003) — provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add significant new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in the German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for creating coalitions capable of affecting social change.

This study investigates how an ambivalence surrounding men and masculinity has been expressed and exploited in Pop literature since the late 1980s, focusing on works by German-speaking authors Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert and American author Bret Easton Ellis. I compare works from the United States with German and Swiss novels in order to reveal the scope - as well as the national particularities - of these troubled gender identities and what it means in the context of recent debates about a "crisis" in masculinity in Western societies. My comparative work will also highlight the ways in which these particular literatures and cultures intersect, invade, and influence each other.

In this examination, I demonstrate the complexity and success of the critical projects subsumed in the works of three authors too often underestimated by intellectual communities. At the same time, I reveal the very structure and language of these critical projects as a safe haven for "male fantasies" of gender difference and identity formation long relegated to the distant past, fantasies that continue to lurk within our cultural currencies.

The period following the Second World War in Austria represents a unique historical situation. On the one hand, strongly conservative and restaurative trends in politics, publications, media, and social life dominated the country - at the same time, a radically new avant-garde movement emerged. What today is collectively referred to as the Wiener Gruppe was, in the 1950s, a circle of young writers, connected by friendship and collaboration with the filmmakers Kurt Kren and Peter Kubelka. These artists created experimental works that pre-empt the concept of performance art established at a theoretical level two decades later, and anticipate the re-conceptualization of the role of the reader theorized by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in the 1960s.

In this dissertation, I outline the socio-political situation in Austria during the years following World War Two in Chapter One and discuss the key concepts and works which are relevant for the understanding of experimental literature and film in Chapter Two and Three. I demonstrate that the radical experimentation of postwar experimental authors and filmmakers draws attention to the materiality, visuality, and performativity of their works and establishes experimental literature and film as individual art forms: writing-as-writing and film-as-film. In conclusion, I argue that their works represent an implicit critique of language, culture, and society in the context of the "grand narratives" or the "invisible structurations" supporting a post-World War Two Austrian society.

In this dissertation, I will outline the socio-political situation in Austria during the years following World War Two in Chapter One, and discuss the key concepts which are relevant for the understanding of experimental literature in Chapter Two and Three. I will demonstrate that the radical experimentation of postwar experimental authors and filmmakers draws attention to the materiality, visuality, and performativity and establishes experimental literature and film as individual art forms: writing-as-writing and film-as-film. In conclusion, I argue that their works represent an implicit critique of language, culture, and society in the context of the "grand narratives," the "invisible structurations" which support society.

This dissertation argues that the metaphor of integration, which describes the incorporation of immigrants into the national body, functions as a way to exclude "Muslim" immigrants from German national identity, as these groups are those most often deemed "un-integratable" (unintegrierbar). By looking at cultural products, I explore how the spatial metaphor of integration is both contested and reproduced in a variety of narratives.

One of the recurring themes in integration debates focuses on finding a balance between multiculturalist strategies of population management; the regulation and enforcement of the third article of the German Basic Law, which guarantees gender parity; and the public religious life of conservative Islamic social movements like Salafism, which demand gender segregation as a tenet of faith. Discourses of women's rights as human rights and identity politics are the two most frequent tactical interventions on the integration landscape. My dissertation explores how identity, performance and experience of gendered oppression manifest in the autobiographical novels of Turkish-German women, comic books, journalistic polemics, activist video and the activities of the social work organization Projekt Heroes. Reading a broad array of cultural products allows me to explore the tension between the metaphor of integration and the reluctance of some to reenvision German national identity, with specific attention to how this tension plays out in space and place. Through literary analysis, participant-observation and interviews, I explore how the language of integration shapes the space of the nation and limits what the space of the nation could become. I argue that the tone of integration debates over the past decade has become increasingly shrill, and propose that limited and strategic silence may offer potential as a political strategy for reenvisioning modes of immigration incorporation.

It is received wisdom that Britain and France played the leading role in overseas expansion in the eighteenth century while the German lands lacked both a central political authority and colonies of their own. We know from the work of scholars such as Susanne Zantop that German intellectuals were fascinated by encounters with non-European cultures, and German genres of travel writing, popular drama, and the philosophy of history all manifest an obsession with thinking about forms of cultural difference. In many cases, such efforts are wrought with ambivalence. The German world traveler Georg Forster is torn between the passionate admiration for a paradise-like Tahiti and the judgment of Tahiti as uncivilized. August von Kotzebue, Germany's most popular playwright around 1800, wrote dramas set in the New World and other exotic locales. In his Bruder Moritz (1791, Brother Moritz), the protagonist seeks to educate the child-like Arabs at the same time as he criticizes his aunt's racial condescension as lacking empathy. In Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, sympathy for the slaves in European colonies is accompanied by a belief in European cultural superiority. In all these examples, there is more at stake than the fantasies of German colonial rule that Zantop called our attention to a decade ago. My dissertation targets precisely the equivocal nature of the German colonial imagination around 1800 and suggests a different reading strategy.

Postcolonial scholarship has critiqued the ways in which visions of European cultural and racial superiority supported the expansion of colonialism. Recently, scholars have also foregrounded how European culture gave rise to a critique of colonial atrocity. My dissertation, however, stresses the co-existence of both Eurocentrism and the critique of colonial violence and understands this seeming contradiction as a response to the challenge from cultural and colonial difference. I identify emotion or the mode of sentimentalism as the channel through which the alleged cultural otherness questions both colonial violence and European superiority with universal claims. In my analysis, non-Europeans are not only the colonized or the oppressed but also regain their agency in co-constructing a distinct vision of global modernity.

The dissertation concerns itself with both canonical works and popular culture. I first explore Georg Forster's highly influential travelogue Reise um die Welt (1777/1778, A Voyage Round the World), documenting the interplay between Enlightenment anthropology and the impact of South Pacific cultures. Kotzebue's cross-cultural melodramas imagine different orders of love, sexuality, and marriage and challenge the noble form of bourgeois tragedy as theorized by Friedrich Schiller. Contested by Immanuel Kant, Herder's universal history inaugurates a new logic of organizing different cultures into an organic ongoing process of historical development and, at the same time, articulates cultural relativism as a paradigm shift. My reading strategy through cultural and colonial difference unearths the pivotal roles which the impulses from the non-European world played in the construction of German culture around 1800.

By acknowledging both Eurocentrism and anticolonial critiques in these German texts, this dissertation stresses the impact of cultural otherness on the architecture of German thought through sentimentalism and provides both historically and theoretically differentiated understandings of the German colonial imagination in the global eighteenth century.