{"title":"Worldliness, Jewish Purpose, and the Non-Jewish Jewish Narrator in Olga Grjasnowa's Der verlorene Sohn (2020)","authors":"S. Taberner","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.4.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.4.4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The worldliness that characterizes the literary fiction of the self-identified Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa can be understood as an expression of \"Jewish purpose\" (Adam Sutcliffe), entailing solidarity with other persecuted minorities rooted in the Jewish experience, and especially Jewish suffering. This article focuses on Grjasnowa's Der verlorene Sohn, in which a Muslim child is taken from his family and brought to St. Petersburg. The article explores the depiction of Islamophobia in Imperial Russia and how seemingly extraneous allusions to anti-Semitism in fact underpin a broader critique of the Enlightenment's unfulfilled promise. Subsequently, it is argued that the narrator can be construed as a \"non-Jewish Jew\" (Isaac Deutscher), with a Jewish identity that is expressed through social and ethical commitment rather than belief. Finally, the article explores tensions inherent in Jewish purpose—including the perennial worry that Jews may be required to elide their particularity for the sake of universal values.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"53 1","pages":"424 - 445"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88120604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Katrin Sieg. Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum","authors":"Stephan Jaeger","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.4.rev005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.4.rev005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91149328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rick McCormick. Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch","authors":"Christine Korte","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.4.rev004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.4.rev004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"22 4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80961699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multidirectionality and Collaborative Practice: Reggae and Dancehall Music between Germany and Jamaica","authors":"Christoph Schaub","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.4.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.4.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Against the backdrop of the global circulation of reggae and dancehall music, the article argues that the emergence of these genres in Germany resulted from multidirectional collaborations among musicians in Germany, Jamaica, and other places. Focusing on Gentleman and Seeed, Germany's two most successful reggae artists, the article examines specific aesthetic forms and cultural practices as sites of multidirectionality and collaborative practice, such as the riddim, the feature song, the use of Jamaican Patois, and the journey to Jamaica. In the German case, the global dissemination and appropriation of Jamaican popular music resulted in the formulation of heterogeneous visions of transnational communities related to collaborative musical practices. At the same time, the article explains Gentleman's and Seeed's appropriation of this Black popular music culture as responses to their experiences in postwall Germany.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"61 12 1","pages":"405 - 423"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78381410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time Kept and Lost: On the Complexity of the Thematization of Old Age in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Monolog","authors":"Pedro Querido","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.4.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.4.2","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay proposes to reassess the importance of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's radio work Monolog (first broadcast in 1964) in the German writer's oeuvre by studying its manifold and complex thematization of old age. The protagonist's self-imposed solitude and yearning for disembodiment are interpreted in the light of theories of aging that are based on both chronometric and \"lived\" time. This close reading of old age in Monolog duly takes into account the medium for which it was written and is informed by both Hildesheimer's previous radio art and his evolving world view.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"46 1","pages":"386 - 404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74152224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming Queer In/Human in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (2017)","authors":"Francesco Albé","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.3.1","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the way in which Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s novel Außer sich (2017) blurs the boundaries between the human and the inhuman to challenge normative notions of humanity as clearly gendered. Focusing primarily on the protagonist’s transgender body, I analyze the textual instances in which inhuman entities (animals, parasites, objects) disrupt ambiguously gendered anatomies, materializing their dehumanized position under normativity. Drawing on the theorizations of queer inhumanism by Dana Luciano, Mel Y. Chen, and Eunjung Kim, I show how the novel turns the inhuman into an instrument of resistance against the coercive logics of the human through what I term “becoming queer in/human.” By letting the inhuman suspend the prerogatives of human morphologies, “becoming queer in/human” allows for alternative ontologies beyond the binary to become possible. In activating the productive potential of confusion, the narrative opens up the human and its genders to rearticulation, contributing to contemporary German debates in envisioning a different future for the transgender subject.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"8 1 1","pages":"231 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89976953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chronic Crisis Novels and the Quest for “the Good-Enough Life”: Kathrin Röggla’s die alarmbereiten, Kristine Bilkau’s Die Glücklichen, and Thorsten Nagelschmidt’s Arbeit","authors":"A. Fuchs","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.3.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.3.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the literary engagement with chronic crises as the prevailing condition of the early twenty-first century. Chronic crisis narration dislodges the narrative modes and epistemological frames of modern crisis scenarios: crisis no longer designates the experience of a decisive tipping point after a climactic build-up but rather an enduring state of extremity, requiring uninterrupted resilience. The chronic crisis novel experiments with anthropologically inflected modes of narration to articulate the subjective and social experience of precarity, exhaustion, and the depletion of resources. However, by aesthetically reclaiming precariousness as the domain of relationality and pleasure, this genre also explores the idea of the “good-enough life” as a viable alternative to the middle-class expectation of the good life.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":"328 - 348"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75778961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: In Touch with the In/Human","authors":"Maria Roca Lizarazu, Simone Pfleger","doi":"10.3138/seminar.58.3.intro","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.3.intro","url":null,"abstract":"In the introduction to the GLQ special issue Queer Inhumanisms, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen critically interrogate how an emphasis on the “human as standard form” results in the unjust dehumanization of queer subjects. They underscore that while “liberal-humanist values” (188) promise inclusion, the very notion of the human is bound up with norms of behaviour, ability, health, rights, citizenship status, and political and social agency, which result in the dehu manization and regulation of some bodies as well as practices of exclusion and marginalization. As such, the human is a relational category that emerges from its engagement with those deemed inhuman; or, rather, the inhuman functions as the foil to produce and bolster a particular notion of humanness with its very specific configuration—that of the white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian, educated subject of a certain socio-economic and citizenship status— through various discursive-material practices . The need to complicate the human as the focus of analysis and the “ground of any epistemology” (Luciano and Chen 189) and theorize alternative ways of being and relating has been highlighted in recent years by critical race, queer, disability, and animal studies scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Mel Y. Chen, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Jasbir K. Puar, and Dinesh Wadiwel, to name just a few. Their various critiques of the human and the Enlightenment project of humanism link humanness to productivity, autonomy, and the ability to manifest normative bodily features and identity markers. Indeed, the normatively human operates as the point of reference against which bodies are measured; it constantly produces subjects and ways of being in the world that do not fit this mold and are cast as disposable, replaceable, and unworthy of care. That the human is inextricably tied to, even predicated on, various dehu manized and inhuman others also affects our ways of knowing, thinking, and articulating, which are steeped in the very thing that scholars and activists are trying to break free from, such as “ the protocols of human knowledge produc tion” ( Muñoz, “Sense” 209). This means that there is a looming danger in the critiques of reproducing the very categories that many thinkers are trying to","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"13 1","pages":"221 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84637983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}