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Folk Fiction: Yiddish and the Negotiation of Literary Legacy in Germany after 1945
Abstract
Following the Holocaust, when Eastern European Yiddish-language culture was all but
destroyed and millions of Yiddish speakers were murdered, the language took on newsignificance
in German culture. Whether it be as a symbol of proletarian solidarity in East German
theater or as part of West German literary engagement with American Jewish culture,
Yiddish shows up all over postwar German literature and performance. Building on scholarship
from German Studies, Yiddish Studies, and cultural and political history, the following
study connects the study of Yiddish in German literature after 1945 both to discourses
from the early 20th century and to broader discussions on German identity and literary
legacy in the postwar era. I am primarily interested in the reinvention of the folk
tradition following the Nazi era and the creation of a usable literary past at a time
in which the German political and geographic present was in flux. This dissertation
explores these issues by looking at the ways in which German-language authors on both
sides of the Berlin
Wall, and those writing after its fall, relied on Yiddish to negotiate national literary
identities. By looking at the diverse body of texts that do this and the ways in which
these works were received, this dissertation demonstrates that the presence of Yiddish
language and culture in German literature after 1945 was used to create spaces in
which foundational narratives could be reshaped and new identities defined.
Type
DissertationPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10358Citation
Woelk, Emma (2015). Folk Fiction: Yiddish and the Negotiation of Literary Legacy in Germany after 1945.
Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10358.Collections
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