{"title":"Anti-Blackness, Canonicity, and (Mis-)Identification in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum","authors":"Barbara N. Nagel","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay explores the disturbing presence of anti-Black language and tropes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's recent, celebrated novel <i>Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum</i>. Drawing on Toni Morrison's classic analysis in <i>Playing in the Dark</i>, I argue Özdamar's anti-Blackness is characterized by a double-valence: on one hand, Özdamar's anti-Blackness partakes of the racializing clichés anatomized by Morrison and stakes a claim to whiteness and canonicity on their basis; on the other, this anti-Blackness is continuous with a tendency towards racialized self-mockery in the whole of Özdamar's oeuvre, as if Özdamar imagined these scenes to be produced from within Blackness and/or as a gesture of minoritarian solidarity. The text is structured by a problematic (mis-)identification with Black abjection <i>and</i> a desire for whiteness. Özdamar thus participates in both an avant-gardist tradition of transgression and a liberal logic of post-raciality in which racializing tropes are free for unlimited literary appropriation.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"91-108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.70010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482006","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":"“Ableist Fragility” and Chronic Stress in a Non-Autistic Parent Memoir from Germany1","authors":"Sonja Fritzsche","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay defines “ableist fragility” in the context of non-autistic parenting of autistic children through an analysis of Tessa Korber's memoir <i>Ich liebe dich nicht, aber ich möchte es mal können</i> (2012). Ableist fragility draws directly from the term fragility in Robin DiAngelo's <i>White Fragility</i> (2018). Informed by anti-racist and disability justice critiques of systemic ableism, the essay explores the roles explicit and implicit bias and notions of neurotypicality play in shaping parental identity and non-autistic parent-autistic child relationships. It draws connections between systemic ableism and fragility as one cause of chronic stress experienced by many non-autistic parents of autistic children. Caregiver supports focus on the child and engage less with caregiver emotional literacy, well-being, and embodied mental health. Ableist fragility functions as a starting point for non-autistic parents/caregivers and others to identify and process distress created by their own explicit or implicit ableism in an inherently ableist society.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"126-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.70011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482327","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":"Experiencing German History Through the Presence of the Personal Artifact in Thomas Heise's Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019)1","authors":"Verena R. Kick","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12497","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article shows how Thomas Heise's essay film <i>Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit</i> (2019) emphasizes the significance of personal artifacts in portraying German history. Instead of utilizing archival footage, Heise explores Germany's past through his family's personal writings created primarily during the Nazi era and in the former GDR. Drawing on Jaimie Baron's concept of the “archive effect,” which frames archival documents as experiences of reception, this analysis illustrates how Heise's approach to presenting history emphasizes the audience's response to personal artifacts. The archive effect occurs when viewers realize the temporal and intentional disparities between the family materials and the film's modern images of landscapes, ruins, and trains. As these disparities are potentially challenging for viewers, Heise bridges possible gaps using a train-related leitmotif, specific camera movements, and sound. Rather than merely conveying historical significance, these methods enable viewers to experience history through the presence of personal artifacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"144-160"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482233","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":"Authoritarianism and Child's Play in T. W. Adorno's Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe","authors":"Benjamin Beese","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Theodor Adorno wrote <i>Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe</i>, a singspiel adaptation of Mark Twain's <i>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</i>, in 1932–33. Adorno developed his critical stance towards popular entertainment's totalitarian tendencies through an engagement with childhood nostalgia. Adorno and Walter Benjamin both responded to the National Socialist rise to power by describing childhood experiences in which they apparently overcame the authority of their parents and teachers through fantasy stories. These experiences were comforting but illusory, as their allusions to popular <i>Indianergeschichten</i> suggest. Reading <i>Schatz</i> in the context of the <i>Indianergeschichte</i> genre reveals a cautionary tale against the blinding dangers of comforting fantasy narratives. In Adorno's retelling, Tom Sawyer's self-aggrandizing adventure games provide him a specious feeling of power while blinding him to society's oppression of the marginalized. The article concludes by arguing that Adorno's “Tom” project was a key moment in his development as a critical theoretician.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"109-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482189","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":"German and European Cultural Histories, 1760–1830: Between Network and Narrative By Crystal Hall and Birgit Tautz, Liverpool University Press. 2024. pp. 368. $79.20 (paperback)","authors":"Daniel L. Purdy","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"164-166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482128","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":"Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780–1850 By Sean Franzel, Cornell University Press. 2023. pp. 413. $36.95 (paperback), $125 (hardback)","authors":"Jessica C. Resvick","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 2","pages":"161-163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144482242","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":"Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing By Ina, Linge, University of Michigan Press. 2023. pp. 268. $24.95 (paperback), $70 (hardback)","authors":"Zavier Nunn","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 1","pages":"77-79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143726869","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":"Witnessing after the Human: Post-Holocaust Landscapes of Ruination and Regeneration in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah","authors":"Angelica Fenner","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12500","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay explores potential implications of the nonhuman turn in memory studies via Claude Lanzmann's documentary, <i>Shoah</i> (1985), an enduring monument to the capacity for audiovisual affordances to facilitate oral history as it relates to collectivized trauma and atrocity originating during the Holocaust. I apply a new materialist approach to the film's editing, which excerpts interviews gathered in fourteen countries and interweaves these with location footage from former extermination sites whose landscapes bear witness both to past ruination and to ecological regeneration. The resulting montage, I argue, illustrates how witnessing “after the human” remains inherently relational, situated not only between filmmaker and human subjects but also between camera and environment in a broader actor network, testifying to the capacity for nonhuman modes of perception to bring these landscapes into focus in excess of what the naked human eye can see, effectively as <i>lieux de mémoire plus-qu'humain</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 1","pages":"7-23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143726838","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":"Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film By Sophie Duvernoy, Karsten Olson, and Ulrich Plass (Eds.), Bloomsbury. 2023. 332 pp. $108 (hardback), $35.95 (paperback), $86.40 (ebook)","authors":"Sophie J. Schweiger","doi":"10.1111/gequ.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.70001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"98 1","pages":"84-86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143726904","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}