{"title":"Feminism, Disability, and a Dragon: Transcending Classification in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Mansarde","authors":"Kassi Burnett","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2116813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2116813","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Marlen Haushofer’s final novel, Die Mansarde (1969), through the critical lenses of disability studies and ecocriticism. Using these combined methods of analysis, the article uncovers a critique of species-specific bodily norms. Additionally, the article follows the protagonist’s evolution from outsider to resilient woman as she increasingly questions and eventually rejects these norms in favour of self-love and an appreciation for her own embodiment. Channelling centuries of woman-reptilian relationships, Die Mansarde sees its protagonist awaken her imaginative powers and extricate herself from the oppressive valuations tied to species-centered norms through the creation and recognition of a dragon figure; one of the protagonist’s final acts is to envision and sketch a dragon. For the protagonist, the dragon embodies defiance and resilience as a valuable, deviant, and monstrous being. She recognizes herself in this dragon as an outsider not easily classified or fit into normative categories. As the protagonist learns to accept her differences, she begins to understand herself as imperfect but valuable nonetheless, and she finally recognizes the limitations of a traditional, ableist, monological science. This article argues that in contrast to Die Wand, a cornerstone text for German ecocriticism that offers an abrupt utopic/dystopic destruction of humanity and a reconstruction of human relationships with Nature and animals, Die Mansarde offers a much subtler and slow-growing solution: that of self-love rooted in a critical understanding of species-based norms and their inherent oppression of deviant bodyminds.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"302 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47098596","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":"An axe for the rising sea: Kafka’s Anthropocene afterlives","authors":"Conor Brennan","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2116811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2116811","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the influence of Franz Kafka on contemporary writers who engage with the climate emergency, focusing in particular on the Australian writer Richard Flanagan and the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. This transnational corpus is warranted not only by the scale of the crisis, but also by Kafka’s status as a writer whose work refuses to sit neatly within the borders of a nation or ‘Nationalsprache’. The article details both writers’ direct allusions to Kafka, and — under the rubrics of ‘bounds’, ‘scales’ and ‘parables’ — identifies aesthetic techniques they adopt and adapt from his work. These include a disruption of the inside and outside of texts, the rendering of complexity in pithy or parabolic form, and a concern with the mechanisms of denial. The extent of this engagement with Kafka, I argue, suggests that his literary models are uniquely useful in the struggle to give form to the ‘Anthropocene’.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"288 - 301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44512612","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":"Deconstructing Utopia: Nature, Colonialism and Satire in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012)","authors":"Katharina Forster","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2116822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2116822","url":null,"abstract":"While there is a conspicuous link between utopian conjectures and natural space, the accelerated environmental degradation in the Anthropocene has significantly blunted the utopian appeal of ‘untainted’ nature. A similar crisis afflicts notions of utopia as ‘undiscovered’ space following Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘temporalization’ of utopian speculation. These developments complicate or make impossible literary representations of utopia as unknown or unaltered nature. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘space’ and ‘place’ as well as on Eva Horn’s reflections on an ‘aesthetics of the Anthropocene’, the paper examines how narratives of nature as utopia are critiqued and satirised in Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012). The island landscape of the South Pacific remains outside the protagonist’s narrative control, resisting attempts to abstract it by staging a ‘revenge of place.’ Representations of nature as non-descript, homogeneous and empty (or ‘space’) are confronted with the uncanny and dangerous aspects of a specific ‘place.’","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"335 - 349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47527585","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":"Perspectives on German Ecocriticism: Introduction","authors":"K. Ritson, Daniela Dora","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2141451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2141451","url":null,"abstract":"German literature has a long memory for the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. Let us consider Goethe: Goethe’s late novel Wahlverwandschaften, first published in 1809, opens in a tree nursery on a large landed estate, where the owner Eduard has been busy with the task of budding new trees, ‘frisch erhaltene Pfropfreiser auf junge Stämme zu bringen’. He stops work to survey his carefully arranged garden and then goes to join his wife, who has also been industriously engaged in landscaping improvements, noting the wellordered grounds as he passes through:","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"249 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48576169","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":"Nature and femininity in Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land — Fluid concepts in a liquid land","authors":"Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2116821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2116821","url":null,"abstract":"An allegedly unspoilt natural landscape is a crucial backbone of Austria’s national brand and yet, a look behind the façade of this ‘Goldener Landschaftsmythos’, reveals that nature plays a complex and paradoxical role in Austrian self-stylisation and culture: the very system that relies on its pristineness exploits and degrades it. Edelbauer’s 2019 novel Das flüssige Land draws on this tension and brings it into conversation with essentialist views of femininity, rejecting expectations of women as inherently connected with nature and protective of it. The female protagonist’s relationship with the Alpine landscape is fluid, ambivalent, and paradoxical and — as it oscillates between care and exploitation, connection and disdain — it invites an approach from the angle of social ecofeminism that calls for an overcoming of essentialist claims about women and nature.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"321 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45202003","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":"Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dark Ecology","authors":"Robert Craig","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2116807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2116807","url":null,"abstract":"Rainer Maria Rilke’s significance for a modern eco-poetics has attracted ever-increasing interest over the past two decades, with sophisticated ontological, phenomenological, and even ethological approaches to his animal poems, as well as such late poetic figures as ‘das Offene’ in Duineser Elegien (1923). However, many of these readings have worked from the persistent premise of a mystical — Romantically inflected or even monistic — conception of nature, grounded in an idealized (re-)union of subject and object and inner and outer spaces. By contrast, this article suggests that we can learn far more from the points of mismatch, irreconcilability, and alienation to be found in the ‘thing poetics’ of Rilke’s so-called ‘middle’ period (1902–1910). Arguing in dialogue with Timothy Morton’s call for a ‘dark ecology’ and working from Rilke’s own theoretical reflections in his Worpswede monograph (1903), I trace out the convoluted entwinements of subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and artifice across both parts of Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Morton calls for a form of ecological thought that might learn to ‘love’ the ‘non-identical’: in other words, properly and truly to recognize the ‘irreducible otherness’ within our myriad environments. My essay considers what that theoretical love might look like in the poetic practice of one of the great German-language modernists. 1 1 I would like to thank Rüdiger Görner, Christa Jansohn, and Friedhelm Marx for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"256 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45664440","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":"Ulrich Plenzdorf’s kein runter kein fern: Disability, Masculinity, and Literary Social Criticism in the Period 1976–1991","authors":"Sebastian Balling","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2095806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2095806","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I analyse Ulrich Plenzdorf’s novel kein runter kein fern, an often-overlooked text critiquing the society of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the late 1970s that focuses primarily on the theme of disability. Plenzdorf’s protagonist, a boy with a mild learning disability, is pressured to develop a masculine body to overcome his mental handicap. Analysing the story from a perspective based on Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies and Julia Hell’s Post-Fascist Fantasies, I argue that Plenzdorf is showing the GDR as a militarized, masculine society, unable to deal with disability in a humane manner. His protagonist therefore has no other choice but to cope with his disability by becoming what he calls a ‘panzermann’, that means a man whose feelings are cut off with a tank-like body. Furthermore, by drawing on a rich collection of archival materials, I show how Plenzdorf’s depiction of disability, masculinity, and GDR society caused a major literary scandal, and how he radicalized these topics in later adaptations. Reviewing this material that has not been published before, I argue that Plenzdorf widened his criticism during the Wende years and transformed his criticism of the GDR society to a criticism of the German society as a whole.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"186 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45778987","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":"(Licht)Bilder aus dem Off. Mehrfachbelichtetes Shoah-Erinnern in Graphic Memoirs","authors":"Gudrun Heidemann","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2095809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2095809","url":null,"abstract":"Fotografien werden in Comics gemeinhin handwerklich abstrahiert, wodurch es zu einer medialen Abkühlung (McLuhan) und Remediation (Bolter, Grusin) kommt. Wenn (Licht)Bilder als Zeitzeugnisse Graphic Memoirs in den Innenseiten von Front- und Rückencover rahmen, so provozieren diese Aufnahmen aus dem Off eine performative Rezeption im blätternden Nachvollzug, um einen Abgleich mit dem Nachgezeichneten in der eigentlichen Narration vorzunehmen. Dieses Verfahren ist Rutu Modans Das Erbe und Karin Bachers/Tyto Albas Tante Wussi gemeinsam. Modans Bildherstellung durch Acting-Painting geht zudem auf Fotografien zurück, die sich in exakten Nachzeichnungen minimierter Posen und Gesten niederschlägt, während Tyto Alba Kunststile der 1920er/30er Jahre aktualisiert. In beiden Fällen wird durch die grafischen Variationen gleichermaßen ein mehrfachbelichtetes Shoah-Erinnern ins Bild gesetzt, womit samt der verbalen Erzählung die Nachgeneration eine ebenso vage wie wahre Familiengeschichte Shoah-Überlebender performativ vergegenwärtigt.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"224 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43064939","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 vanquished Heroes of Europe — Stefan Zweig’s Poetics of Defeat in The World of Yesterday","authors":"Stephan Resch","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2095801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2095801","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘victor in defeat’ (Donald Daviau) has long been a key concept in Stefan Zweig scholarship. This reversal of the traditional hero narrative has been applied to understand how Zweig constructs his historical biographies, drawing on both his understanding of history and his convictions about the moral responsibilities of the writer. It has also been used to demonstrate how Zweig values defeat as a means for moral development in his novellas and dramas. This essay argues that Zweig’s poetics of defeat can be equally applied to his autobiography. Through their shared values of humanism, supranationalism and pacifism, the individuals remembered by Zweig form a heroic collective in their seemingly impossible fight against nationalism and fascism. The World of Yesterday thus needs to be read as a cornerstone of Zweig’s Historiography of Tomorrow, a new way of writing history, which the author proposes in the last years of his life.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"148 - 160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46890512","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":"‘Schüttelt ab die — Europäer!’: Radikale Kolonialismuskritik im Gedicht ‘Audubon’ von Ferdinand Freiligrath","authors":"Robert Rduch","doi":"10.1080/00787191.2022.2095800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2022.2095800","url":null,"abstract":"Der vorliegende Aufsatz ist ein Beitrag zur Ergänzung der Materialbasis für eine künftige postkoloniale Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Es wird in ihm auf das Gedicht ‘Audubon’ (1833) von Ferdinand Freiligrath als ein seltenes Beispiel radikaler Kolonialismuskritik aus der ersten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts hingewiesen. Eine überblicksartig dargestellte Rezeptionsgeschichte des Frühwerks des Dichters bildet den Hintergrund für die Analyse und Interpretation, in denen nachgewiesen wird, dass Freiligrath in ‘Audubon’ die koloniale Gewalt der Europäer in Amerika eindeutig verurteilt. Damit wird ein literaturhistorisches Klischee, der junge Freiligrath sei ein unpolitischer Autor gewesen, korrigiert. Als das wichtigste Rezeptionszeugnis gilt das Gedicht ‘Antwort aus Amerika an Freiligrath’ (1844) von Dr. Angmarset, das hier auch analysiert und interpretiert wird. Während Freiligrath die Vertreibung der Indianer aus ihren Gebieten und die Zerstörung der amerikanischen Natur allegorisch als destruktive Handlung gieriger Raupen darstellt, rechtfertigt eine hybride Indianerfigur bei Angmarset die Kolonisierung als eine von Indigenen begrüßte Zivilisierung der Wildnis.","PeriodicalId":53844,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD GERMAN STUDIES","volume":"51 1","pages":"137 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49019849","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}