{"title":"Später ‘Triumph’ einer ostdeutschen Generation. Narrative der Funktionierenden Generation im Erinnerungsdiskurs um 2020","authors":"Katarzyna Norkowska","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2194179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2194179","url":null,"abstract":"Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der späte Ruhm von Helga Schubert, Helga Schütz, Irina Liebmann und Elke Erb erörtert, die mit ihren um 2020 veröffentlichten Texten einen Beitrag zum ostdeutschen Erinnerungsdiskurs leisten. Die Wortmeldungen von Autorinnen einer bis dato im öffentlichen Diskurs zu kurz gekommenen Generation sollten — so die These des Beitrags — nicht allein auf die Mechanismen des literarischen Marktes, sondern vordergründig auf die intragenerationelle Dynamik zurückgeführt werden. Unter den Angehörigen der Funktionierenden Generation (Thomas Ahbe/Rainer Gries) keime erst spät ein kollektives Bedürfnis auf, die Erinnerungen an die DDR zulassen und sich als Generation darüber öffentlich — hier im Medium der Literatur — zu verständigen.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"253 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47022323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Juno and the Pearl","authors":"Divya Menon","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2194166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2194166","url":null,"abstract":"Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–1799) plays with the Bildungsroman as a literary form. As a story of the coming-of-age of the novel itself, it is a Künstlerroman as well. When the narrator fails in his worldly aspirations, he chooses the life of a hermit. His book becomes his cloister. This essay will study Hölderlin's novel as a response to Friedrich Schiller's philosophy of freedom in and through art. In his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Schiller posits a two-fold relationship between art and freedom. Art is freedom in the ideal and allows for freedom in history. In other words, moral freedom requires aesthetic freedom as a pledge to its possibility. But in Hyperion, aesthetic freedom appears as freedom itself, absolutely and without any ‘and’. History may have yet to separate itself out from life, but art does so, making a prophet of Hölderlin's Hyperion.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"131 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43651675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Helsinki sind wir’: Sozialistische Transnationalität im Literaturbetrieb der DDR","authors":"Paweł Zajas","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2194178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2194178","url":null,"abstract":"The forced integration of European socialist states following WWII is usually viewed as a history of political misunderstandings and genuine social failures. From the early modernism and avant-garde periods onwards, socialism was also a common experience for the whole of East and Central Europe. Since the late 1950s, the densifying network of relations among culture departments of socialist parties, culture ministries of individual countries, writer associations, publishers or literary journals has resulted in thus far unknown transnational literature circulation. This article analyzes the transnational links between the GDR literary system and the literatures and literary institutions of the European Eastern Bloc. The paper aims to discuss two specific research questions. First, the international literature published in the GDR is examined statistically and regarding the prevailing concepts and practices of transnationality. Second, the transnationally networked places of socialist literature planning are presented. Documents preserved in East German archives form the basis for the research.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"236 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41819640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Over Her Undead Body: Revenant Suicide in Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine and Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart","authors":"Kaleen Gallagher","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2194177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2194177","url":null,"abstract":"The figure of the undead woman suicide features prominently in the œuvres of both Heiner Müller and Elfriede Jelinek. This article examines the significance of that figure to Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine and Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart, two plays about what kind of political action is possible in the modern media society. It argues that while Ophelia’s return from the dead is depicted as a challenge to the status quo — she stops killing herself so that she can enact change on a larger scale — Jelinek’s Ulrike is a figure who embodies modern political inertia: she cannot even manage to stay dead, much less change the world. Notably, both revenant protagonists are doubled by the postdramatic texts themselves, which can be described as both ‘undead’ and ‘suicidal’: ‘undead’, because they are subversive re-workings of previous texts, and ‘suicidal’, because they repeatedly undermine their own authority. Here again, though, the dual nature of undeadness — its capacity to represent either genuine subversiveness or mindless zombification — comes to the fore. While Die Hamletmaschine is an ‘undead’ text which aims to terrify its viewer into action, Ulrike Maria Stuart is a play which suggests that subversion is almost impossible in late capitalism.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"210 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49466656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Philology and Responsibility: The Weisse Rose Pamphlets and Classical Quotations","authors":"Constanze Güthenke","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2171027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2171027","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the use of classical quotations in the third pamphlet of the Weiße Rose. Looking in detail at their references to Cicero’s On Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, I show their careful selective citational practices and situate those in turn within some of the developments and priorities of the reception of antiquity in early twentieth century Germany. Finally, I use the case of the evaluations of the pamphlets that were commissioned from the classicist Richard Harder shortly before the arrest of the Weiße Rose members to raise questions about philological reading and responsibility.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"80 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46087574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Politics of Romanticism: Novalis and the White Rose","authors":"J. Raisbeck","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2171004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2171004","url":null,"abstract":"Alexander Schmorell’s and Hans Scholl’s use of Novalis’s Die Christenheit oder Europa in the fourth White Rose pamphlet of summer 1942 has previously been read as being indebted to the strength of Novalis’s oracular rhetoric. This article contextualises Schmorell’s and Scholl’s use of Novalis by clarifying how it deviates from the reception of Romanticism and specifically from the reception of Novalis in the early twentieth century. Romanticism acted — if only uneasily and reductively — as a point of identification for the development of a narrative of the cultural nation under National Socialism and has continued to be subject to a simplistic teleological narrative of how Romanticism’s elements of irrationalism, antisemitism, and nationalism led to National Socialism. In their reading of Novalis, Schmorell and Scholl are an instructive example of active reception: they re-activate the dormant political implications of Novalis’s work, which had previously been obscured by the persistent myth of Novalis. Their use of Die Christenheit oder Europa stems from the text’s fusion of ideals of a unified Christian community and Europe. Schmorell and Scholl expand on Novalis to include a vision of a pan-European confederation as an alternative to the aggressive, expansionist nationalism under the Nazi regime.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"48 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41866160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Culture in Times of Crisis: Auerbach, Czapski, Nafisi","authors":"Karolina Watroba","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2180950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2180950","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers three examples of engagement with cultural texts in times of crisis to show how the White Rose pamphlets fit into a broader tradition. The three examples are: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), written in exile in Istanbul during WWII, Józef Czapski’s Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (1948), based on lectures given to fellow inmates in a Soviet camp during WWII, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), a memoir that describes clandestine classes on English literature given by Nafisi after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The article shows how the uses to which cultural texts are put in such contexts are often ambiguous and contradictory: rather than telling an idealistic story of the redemptive power of culture in the face of political and social disasters, the aim is to articulate the role that cultural texts can play in inspiring intellectual resistance, while attending critically to the specificities of individual case studies.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"120 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43960096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Arts, Culture, and the Evolution of the White Rose Resistance","authors":"A. Lloyd","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2180945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2180945","url":null,"abstract":"This Introduction to the special issue The White Rose and the Uses of Culture addresses the role of culture and the arts in the history and reception of the Weiße Rose resistance circle. Literature, music, and the visual arts were at the centre of the student resisters’ lives: they brought and bound them together, and profoundly influenced their ways of seeing the world. They were also the subject of Professor Kurt Huber’s academic research. This essay examines some of the cultural influences on, and interests of, the core members of the resistance group and considers how their cultural engagement might better be understood as an integral part of their individual and collective decision to resist Nazism. It also provides a brief overview of the eight articles in the special issue and sets out some of the key questions they ask about the uses of culture within the White Rose resistance pamphlets and beyond.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44341349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sparta and the Abendland: The Quotations from Friedrich Schiller and Theodor Körner in the Leaflets of the Weisse Rose","authors":"K. Hilliard","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2170958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2170958","url":null,"abstract":"The article considers the quotations from Friedrich Schiller’s essay ‘Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon’ (1789), from the first leaflet of the Weiße Rose, and the unattributed quotation from a poem by Theodor Körner in the sixth and last. The political issues raised in the leaflets are brought into focus by a comparison with the avowed Spartophilia of the Nazi regime and its academic camp-followers. Arising from the discussion of the quotations, the article also considers the problematic status of the ‘Abendland’ in the discourse of the Weiße Rose, and reflects more broadly on the way the leaflets are to be read.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"28 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45480341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Laozi Through the Lens of the White Rose: Resonance or Dissonance?","authors":"Lea Cantor","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2023.2171017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2023.2171017","url":null,"abstract":"A surprising feature of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance pamphlets is their appeal to a foundational classical Chinese text, the Laozi (otherwise known as the Daodejing), to buttress their critique of fascism and authoritarianism. I argue that from the perspective of a 1942 educated readership, the act of quoting the Laozi functioned as a subtle and pointed nod to anti-fascist intellectuals in pre-war Germany, many of whom had interpreted the Laozi as an anti-authoritarian and pacifist text. To a sympathetic reader, the Laozi therefore constituted an apt reference point for critiquing National Socialism. I then introduce a complication for this wartime reading of the Laozi from the perspective of its ambiguous reception in ancient Chinese political thought. I more specifically discuss an ancient line of interpretation of the Laozi that points in the direction of authoritarianism — in stark tension with the White Rose message of passive resistance and popular revolt.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"52 1","pages":"62 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46860146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}