Whereas previously, in the Imperial era, the city was the site of both a bourgeois culture that celebrated individuality and subj ectivity and an equally distinct working-class culture, the 1 920s ...saw the rise of the Angestellten who could not be understood in traditional class terms, since they shared the economic dependency of workers and the social and cultural aspirations of the bourgeoisie. ... Hake seeks to reintroduce the category of "class" into the discussion of Weimar culture.
At several junctures in the five chapters of her book, as well as in her introduction and epilogue, Heidi Schlipphacke states its objective, emphasizing - each time in slightly different, nuanced ...terms - its focus on the dialectic of entrapment and escape in post-Holocaust German and Austrian literature and film. In part because of the hold the Frankfurt School of philosophers and their ethical mandate to critique Nazism still have on them, Germans and Austrians have resisted the development from modernism to postmodernism that characterizes other western European countries and the U . S . Austrian and German historicity, in other words, has prevented the turn to the non-linearity and ahistoricity endemic to the postmodern.
Kafka and Photography Bauer, Esther K.
German Quarterly,
04/2009, Letnik:
82, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
Oriented by studies on photography by Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, and Sontag, Duttlinger 's close readings of personal and fictional writings explore Kafka's preoccupation with photography ...within the social and historical context of the turn of the century. ... Duttlinger 's readings open new perspectives on Kafka's texts as well as the actual writing process.
Reading John K. Noyes's seminal essay "The Importance of the Historical Perspective in the Works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch" as a contrastive interpretation, she reveals how his emphasis on the ...historical context undermines the literariness of masochism by sometimes conflating Sacher-Masoch with his text. ... she argues, although both Deleuze and Noyes have made crucial contributions to the academic discourse on masochism, they both fail to adequately theorize masochistic aesthetics.
Other possible additions would have been the articles by Helmut Peitsch (1993) and Michael Braun (2000), both on Grass and his ideological "antipode" Martin Walser. Since a central function of Mews's ...work is to familiarize readers with secondary sources on Grass, it would have been helpful to cite page numbers of paraphrased scholarship; likewise, the convention of giving the page number for quotations in the last mention (even several sentences removed from the initial quote) is counter-intuitive.
... following the SED's embrace of cybernetics or the science of self-regulating systems as the official framework of its socialist plan in the 1960s, the GDR transforms into a science fictional ...place, and SF unfolds as a simultaneously complicit and veiled subversive literature, which is made possible by "the textual ambiguity of the fantastic" (129). ... the Steinmüllers explore the tension between SF and fantasy as well as between the collective and individual in their apocalyptic search for a "new dynamic utopia" in the last SF novel published in East Germany, Der Traummeister (274).
...the uninitiated may conflate Austro-fascism and National Socialism, which is supported by the index listing: "Austro-Fascism. Despite its shortcomings, this volume provides a fine overview of the ...discourses concerning Holocaust literature and works that deal with war. ...the author's inclusion of recent conflicts reminds us how topical the literature is and how many stories are yet to be told or are lost.
Informed by the essay collection The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature (1999), John D. Pizer examines fiction works on the Age of Goethe "at the crossroads ...between the historical novel, biography, and the Künstlerroman" (10). In this regard, this book is useful for someone interested in identifying the subgenre's principle authors - including numerous works that treat women writers from the Age of Goethe - and themes before beginning a specialized research project.
Why sympathize with a woman, who while caring for her dying husband, regrets not having spoken out against social injustice on market squares, fought amid a liberation army along borders, built ...infirmaries in Africa or schools in Brazil, when this regretting bespeaks nothing so much as lamenting the missed opportunity to become a hero? ...Mattson's extolling of "Autorbiographie" points, in fact, beyond Weigel to roots in Kant's admonition that the public use of reason always has to be free.
...in the concluding chapter, Schmitz-Burgard returns to explore issues of human dignity as depicted in Ungelegener Befund by Königsdorf. ...absolutely fixated on her love for Ivan, the narrator ...resembles other women who try to find a meaning in life through their male partners, which eventually leads her to lose her subjectivity (65).
