GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

{"title":"‘ZWISCHEN DEN ZEILEN’: A CLOSE READING OF STEFANIE-LAHYA AUKONGO'S NEUROQUEER POETRY","authors":"Catherine Smale","doi":"10.1111/glal.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyses the multimodal poetry of Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo (b. 1978) through the framework of neuroqueer theory (e.g. Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau), showing how her poetic practice exposes and destabilises socially constructed norms of neurotypicality. The article begins with a comparative analysis of Aukongo's prose autobiography <i>Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete</i> (2009) and her poetry volume <i>Buchstabengefühle: Eine poetische Einmischung</i> (2018), building on the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz's concept of ‘disidentification’ to show how her poetic work destabilises neuronormative language and rejects fixed subject positions. The article then offers an extended close reading of the poem ‘Ganz normal anders’, tracing its deconstruction of medicalising and neuronormative discourses. Finally, the article considers the poem's multimodal form, showing how the incorporation of an audio soundtrack enacts a neuroqueer strategy that opens up points of resistance and potentiality between the printed words on the page. Overall, the article argues that Aukongo's practice of neuroqueering operates on both a thematic and a formal level in her poems and is closely intertwined with her unsettling of other normative constructions, such as those of race, gender and sexuality.</p><p>Dieser Artikel analysiert die multimodale Poesie von Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo (geb. 1978) im Rahmen der Neuroqueer-Theorie (u. a. Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau) und zeigt, wie ihre poetische Praxis gesellschaftlich konstruierte Normen der Neurotypikalität offenlegt und destabilisiert. Der Artikel beginnt mit einer vergleichenden Analyse von Aukongos Prosa-Autobiografie <i>Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete</i> (2009) und ihrem Gedichtband <i>Buchstabengefühle: Eine poetische Einmischung</i> (2018). Aufbauend auf José Esteban Muñoz’ Konzept der „Disidentifikation“ wird herausgearbeitet, wie Aukongos poetisches Schreiben neuronormative Diskurse durch sprachliche Resignifikation und Ablehnung fester Subjektpositionen unterläuft. Anschließend bietet der Artikel eine detaillierte Nahlektüre des Gedichts „Ganz normal anders“, das medizinisierende und neuronormative Diskurse dekonstruiert. Abschließend wird die multimodale Form des Gedichts untersucht, insbesondere die Einbindung eines Audio-Soundtracks, die eine neuroqueere Strategie der Widerständigkeit und Potenzialität zwischen den gedruckten Zeilen inszeniert. Insgesamt argumentiert der Artikel, dass Aukongos neuroqueere Praxis sowohl auf thematischer als auch auf formaler Ebene in ihren Gedichten wirkt und eng mit der Infragestellung weiterer normativer Konstruktionen wie denen von Rasse, Geschlecht und Sexualität verbunden ist.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"365-383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"INTRODUCTION: SCENES OF CLOSE READING","authors":"Carolin Duttlinger,&nbsp;Dora Osborne,&nbsp;Lucia Ruprecht","doi":"10.1111/glal.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70031","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;This special issue of &lt;i&gt;German Life and Letters&lt;/i&gt; brings together former students and colleagues of Andrew Webber to celebrate his contribution to German Studies — and its many resonances beyond — on the occasion of his retirement in summer 2026. In dialogue with various aspects of his scholarship, contributors illuminate the breadth and depth of Webber's work, which ranges from his landmark study of the Doppelgänger to his most recent co-authored monograph on the films of Christian Petzold, from his central involvement with the Digital Critical Edition of Arthur Schnitzler to projects on urban cultural studies and which, methodologically, encompasses unique perspectives that draw on Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, gender, queer and performance theories; on art history and film criticism. One thread that runs through Webber's wide-ranging research is its focus on the material at hand through practices of careful close reading. This special issue pays homage to this critical practice in Webber's own work while drawing out its wider implications for German Studies today. To this end, the volume is thematically organised around acts of close reading, whether of literary or filmic texts, that are staged as acts of looking and showing. Close reading, then, takes place on various ‘Schauplätze’, to cite a term used by Freud as well as Benjamin that is central to Webber's thinking. That is, we would like to draw attention to ‘scenes’ of critical engagement which take shape in the performative dynamic of reading itself. The focus of the articles gathered here ranges from nineteenth-century literature via literary modernism and psychoanalytic methodology to twenty-first-century literature and film, echoing Webber's varied and extensive interests in these fields. They also respond to his sustained contribution to critical method. Given that Freud's ‘Schauplätze’ are as much about the unseen as they are about the seen, close reading here constitutes a politics and ethics of ‘parapraxis’, of the ways in which careful analysis enables understanding of the distortions in the field of vision and text, while being prone itself to the Freudian slips and slipperiness of signification. This special issue pays homage to Webber's work as a practice of attentiveness, a form of lived collegial and pedagogical sociability, sometimes even engendering a ‘sociability of style’ in the sense of a ‘site of encounter and relation’, as Polly Dickson calls it in her article on the ‘Hoffmannesque’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our introduction sets out some of the ‘Schauplätze’ of Webber's close reading, focusing on three key publications: &lt;i&gt;The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature&lt;/i&gt; (1996), &lt;i&gt;Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography&lt;/i&gt; (2008) and &lt;i&gt;Screening Work: The Films of Christian Petzold&lt;/i&gt; (2024), the latter co-authored with Stephan Hilpert. We each trace the concerns of one of these studies while undertaking a personal close reading that shows how Web","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"281-297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70031","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘AN AUSTRIAN FATE’: TRAUMA, REPRESSION AND WAR IN ADRIAN GOIGINGER'S DER FUCHS (2022)","authors":"Katya Krylova","doi":"10.1111/glal.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines one of the highest-grossing films in recent years in Austria, <i>Der Fuchs</i> (Adrian Goiginger, 2022), which focuses on the friendship of the protagonist, a Wehrmacht soldier, with an abandoned fox cub, but in the process elides more than four years of the soldier's wartime experience. The film narrative is based on the true story of the director's great-grandfather, which has subsequently also been published as a biography by the director and Walter Müller (<i>Franz: Die Geschichte meines Urgroßvaters</i>, 2024). Applying a methodology of close reading and drawing on Andrew Webber's psychoanalytically informed attentiveness to ellipses and gaps in the diegesis as symptoms of repression, I trace the blind spots and incomplete depiction of the protagonist's involvement in the Nazi war machine in Goiginger's film. Ultimately, it will be shown that the film's narrative gaps draw attention precisely to what they purport to hide, namely Austria's involvement in Nazi crimes and the country's ongoing troubled confrontation with this legacy.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"351-364"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148146977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AFTERWORD","authors":"Ina Linge","doi":"10.1111/glal.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70036","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;On behalf of the editorial board at &lt;i&gt;German Life and Letters&lt;/i&gt;, it is my great pleasure to celebrate Andrew Webber's many contributions to German Studies and beyond in this special issue. When digging through our own archives, I was delighted to find that one of his earliest publications appeared in &lt;i&gt;German Life and Letters&lt;/i&gt; in 1988. In ‘Sense and Sensuality in Musil's &lt;i&gt;Törleß&lt;/i&gt;’, as well as in his first monograph, &lt;i&gt;Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil&lt;/i&gt;, published shortly after in 1990, Webber turns towards the theme of sexuality in the works of Musil and Trakl.1 Drawing on a psychoanalytic approach, he offers an intervention into scholarship on Austrian modernism that had marginalised the theme of bisexuality and sexual conflict as merely a pretext to introduce intellectual and ethical questions, by arguing that sexuality plays an essential role within the discursive fabric and aesthetic form of Musil's and Trakl's works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I highlight this early work, and its publication in the longest-running UK-based German Studies journal, because it introduces three key aspects that have significantly shaped the field of German Studies as it stands today and that continue to shape Webber's work. First, his practice of close reading links sexuality to form. From modernist literature to the psychoanalytic case study and contemporary German film, Webber's practice of close reading shows that sexuality and questions of form and genre are intricately linked. Much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis, homosexuality and modernism, for example, shows how the psychoanalytic case study and its Doppelgänger, the literary genre of the novella, can both reproduce and structure sexual knowledge, but also unsettle and reposition cultural norms about gender and sexuality.2 This doubling of case and novella is closely related to my second point. Webber's scholarship, here and elsewhere, explores the close connection between cultural production and psychoanalysis as method. His work argues persuasively for the value of a psychoanalytically driven textual and visual analysis of cultural production. Finally, Webber's dedication to centring matters of gender and sexuality, and his early adoption of queer theory through the works of key thinkers, such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, paved the way for a theory-informed German Studies that is open to interdisciplinary exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the University of Cambridge, his research activities have provided a vital link between German Studies and interdisciplinary networks and collaborations. My own path to supervision with Andrew Webber came via the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge. When I mentioned to Jude Browne, then director of the Centre, that I was interested in pursuing a PhD project related to my MPhil dissertation on the sexological case study and life writing, she enthusiastically recommended him. For many years, he also ","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"437-442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"IN PURSUIT OF THE HOFFMANNESQUE","authors":"Polly Dickson","doi":"10.1111/glal.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article seeks to elucidate the term ‘Hoffmannesque’ — the eponymous adjective that refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann — through recourse to Hoffmann's own use of ‘esque’ words: arabesque, grotesque, burlesque, picturesque. By investigating the characteristics of ‘esque’ formulations and tracing their recurrence through Hoffmann's texts, I argue that Hoffmann proleptically anticipates the later codification of his style as the ‘Hoffmannesque’ through sustained practices of self-stylisation and repetition. Hoffmann's use of ‘esque’ words and their equivalents is programmatic in a minor key: they are deployed above all to characterise the minor forms of the mannerist. Hoffmann is presented as an author deeply invested in questions of authorship and style: one who formulates a popularly pleasing and commercially viable style at the dawn of mass culture, and for whom that style (or manner) is above all a site of encounter and relation.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"298-310"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"RELATIONAL AMBIVALENCE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY: RE-READING FREUD'S RAT MAN","authors":"Marie Kolkenbrock","doi":"10.1111/glal.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article offers a close reading of Freud's 1909 case study ‘Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose’ (‘Rat Man’). I build on Andrew Webber's observation that both psychoanalytic case studies and the literary genre of the novella use the exceptional case to confirm the norm. Arguing that Freud's text simultaneously constructs and undermines a model of drive-based non-relational masculinity, the article explores how Freud integrates the pathology of obsessional neurosis into a gendered binary in contrast to the female-coded pathology of hysteria. I show how Freud's framework neglects the patient's relational needs by reducing the patient's ambivalence to intrapsychic Oedipal hostility. By foregrounding an attachment-oriented understanding of rage and the childhood experiences of abuse that remain overlooked by Freud, the analysis demonstrates how the case both reproduces and unsettles cultural norms. Moreover, I highlight the ways in which the text is haunted by the elements of sexual violence and relational vulnerability it obscures. This produces a novella-like slipperiness through which the case escapes Freud's theoretical grasp. The Rat Man case illuminates the ongoing cultural and clinical consequences of normative constructions of drive-based masculinity.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"337-350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70033","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘EINEN FILM DREHEN’: TECHNOPOLITICAL TURNS AND THE RENDERING OPERATIONAL OF SUBJECTIVITY IN FAROCKI'S LEBEN–BRD (1990) AND PETZOLD'S BARBARA (2012)","authors":"Annie Ring","doi":"10.1111/glal.70038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70038","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyses the ‘Gestus’ of turning in films by Harun Farocki and Christian Petzold, in light of a central claim of Andrew Webber's esteemed theoretical work on film: that film has the power to uncover unconscious processes through which subjects come into being and are made operational for political regimes. Farocki's <i>Leben–BRD</i> (1990) presents a user guide to life in West Germany at the moment of unification, looping through training scenarios — from midwifery to military practice — to show that Western subjects are not born but rendered operational for political systems. My reading reveals a dialectic of manipulation and spontaneity in the film's footage of babies turning and being turned, and of factory machinery rotating and rolling, apparently independent of human intervention. I then examine bodily and mechanical turning in Petzold's <i>Barbara</i> (2012), co-written with Farocki, where gestures reminiscent of German Romanticism and Expressionism are coded as resistant to the performative effects of surveillance on subjectivity. The analysis draws on Webber's critical writings, Farocki's posthumous notes, and comments by Marx and Benjamin on technologies of turning that both expanded and replaced human capacities. The article thus revisits key historical turns — industrialisation, art history, the ‘Wende’, the digital revolution — while affirming the continuing power of filmmaking and film theory to decode the hidden operations of technological modernity.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"396-418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"F IS FOR FALCON: THE TRUE STORY OF THE ‘NOVELLE’","authors":"Michael Minden","doi":"10.1111/glal.70027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70027","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article takes a closer look at the Boccaccio story upon which Paul Heyse based his famous ‘Falken-Theorie’ of the ‘Novelle’. The essay then links Boccaccio to a general account of storytelling as an aid to survival amid the hostility of nature and human circumstances. The focus narrows down to the German ‘Novelle’, looking at Goethe (who adapted Boccaccio's genre for contemporary needs), the Romantics, Stifter and Freud. The development of the way in which the genre thematises narrative suggests that the theoretical use of the falcon is at the same time a cultural repression of what it really means. Rudolf G. Binding's hugely successful ‘Novelle’ <i>Der Opfergang</i> is an extreme (and representative) example of this. What is really involved on a more profound level is suggested by reference to René Girard's essay ‘The Plague in Literature and Myth’. The essay concludes with a short reference to the recent award-winning memoir by Helen Macdonald, <i>H is for Hawk</i>, in which the proximity of all narrative to the reality it makes endurable is once again acknowledged.</p><p>Ausgehend von der durch Paul Heyses Falken-Theorie berühmtgewordenen Novelle Boccaccios (<i>Decamerone</i> IX. 5) betont dieser Aufsatz die Rolle des Erzählens als eine Art Überlebensmittel angesichts der dem menschlichen Leben gegenüber widrigen Umstände in Natur und Geschichte. Die deutsche Novellentradition wird dann näher betrachtet, insbesondere Goethe (der Boccaccio im zeitgenössischen Kontext anwandte), die Romantik, Stifter und Freud. Dass die Gattung im Laufe ihrer Entwicklung das Erzählen selbst thematisiert, deutet darauf hin, dass die theoretische Anwendung des Falken gleichzeitig als Verdrängung seiner wahrhaftigen Bedeutung verstanden werden kann. Rudolf G. Bindings Erfolgsnovelle <i>Der Opfergang</i> wird als Paradebeispiel hierfür angeführt. Worum es sich wiederum in Wahrheit bei dem Vorgang des Erzählens handelt, wird durch das Heranziehen von René Girards Aufsatz ‘The Plague in Literature and Myth’ angedeutet. Der Aufsatz spielt abschließend auf Helen MacDonalds 2014 preisgekrönten autobiographischen Bericht <i>H is for Hawk</i> an, in dem die Verwandtschaft allen Erzählens mit der Wirklichkeit, die durch das Erzählen erst erträglich wird, wieder zum Vorschein kommt.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"311-322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70027","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148147090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ROBERT WALSER'S ‘BLEISTIFTWEG’: POETICS OF ATTENTION AS CRAFT","authors":"Anne Fuchs","doi":"10.1111/glal.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines Robert Walser's entry into what he called his ‘Bleistiftgebiet’ in the early 1920s, when in response to a profound crisis as a writer he began to produce manuscripts in minuscule size, the so-called ‘Mikrogramme’ (microscripts). Intertwining the analysis of the short prose form with Walser's reflections on the short-lived nature of public attention, my article shows how Walser aims to recover poetic attention through a precarious process of recycling poetic materials and memories. Walser managed to go on writing by using a pencil which, due to its softness and ease of use, became his preferred writing implement for his later prose sketches. The decisive switch from pen to pencil occurred as an act of opposition to the nationalism of the First World War, the prevailing bellicose masculinity and the attention economy of the publishing industry. In the domain of the pencil, Walser could experiment with an anti-mimetic, non-representative and revitalised language away from the public eye. The writer's hand plays a central role in this process: as Walser's custodian, it leads him along the ‘Bleistiftweg’ into the micro-province of the ‘Bleistiftgebiet’. And so it is that Walser's poetics turns attention into a manual craft.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 3","pages":"323-336"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148146978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"ACROSS LANGUAGE BORDERS: WRITING INTEGRATION AND BELONGING IN KINDERTRANSPORT DIARIES","authors":"Monja Stahlberger","doi":"10.1111/glal.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The diaries of six Kindertransport refugees who fled Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria to Britain in 1938 and 1939 offer unique insights into how language use reflects negotiations of identity and belonging. Moving beyond traditional concepts of bilingualism, a translingual framework reveals how these young refugees navigated between German and English in their diary writings. Through close textual analysis, this research identifies various linguistic strategies including code-switching, the borrowing of words and phrases, script-switching between Sütterlin and Latin script, and gradual syntactic changes. These practices demonstrate how the refugees developed fluid, hybrid forms of expression that reflected their evolving cultural identities. While some diarists explicitly discussed language challenges, others displayed unconscious linguistic adaptations that signalled their integration process. Rather than shifting from writing texts entirely in German to writing entirely in English, these young refugees developed dynamic linguistic repertoires that allowed them to express complex experiences of displacement and belonging. Their diaries thus serve as valuable historical documents that show not only personal narratives, but also the intricate relationship between language use, identity formation and cultural adaptation in forced migration contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":54012,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS","volume":"79 2","pages":"129-147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2026-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glal.70018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}