{"title":"Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature By Florian Fuchs, Zone Books. 2023. pp. 320. $29.95 (hardback, ebook)","authors":"Bryan Klausmeyer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12464","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12464","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"439-442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141695690","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":"Transverse Disciplines: Queer-Feminist, Anti-racist, and Decolonial Approaches to the University By Simone Pfleger and Carrie Smith (Eds.), University of Toronto Press. 2022. pp. 379. $80.00 (hardcover), $80.00 (ebook)","authors":"Ervin Malakaj","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12456","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 3","pages":"415-417"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142013683","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":"Confessional: Sexuality and textuality","authors":"Robert Deam Tobin","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12439","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12439","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Bob Tobin originally wrote this essay in 2000 as the preface to his first book, <i>Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe</i>. At the time, however, only one of the reviewers of the manuscript approved of it, so he decided not to include it in the book. In the summer of 2022, when Bob was struggling with liver cancer, he remembered this essay and expressed his desire to have it published, but it was nowhere to be found in his home or office files. Fortunately, he still had the old floppy discs for the book and was able to save the document. We are honored to publish this piece posthumously in this <i>German Quarterly</i> forum that also includes ten other essays by scholars inspired by Bob's lasting legacy. A note on citations: we have done our best to fill in references where needed; where not otherwise indicated, translations are, we assume, Bob's own.</p><p><i> —The Editors</i></p><p>How did German literature become queer for me? And how did I become queer through German literature?</p><p>The first time I heard the phrase “confessional criticism” I was entranced, since the personal, the subjective, and the sexual are all bound up with the confessional. Michel Foucault sees modern discourses of sexuality emerging from the early Christian practice of confession, which he claims began the imperative of turning desire into discourse. Augustine and Rousseau both wrote confessions in which an aberrant sexuality informs new models of subjectivity. But the text that best reflects my relationship to confession, sexuality, and subjectivity is Yukio Mishima's <i>Confessions of a Mask</i>. Mishima did not look to the explanations for his desire in the long tradition of Japanese same-sex relationships, but rather turned to Europe, to Joan of Arc, to the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, to Oscar Wilde, and to depictions of Cleopatra. Mishima made no claim for the authenticity of this constructed desire, but regarded it as a mask. His coming out was not the discovery of a solid identity, but an investigation of his own construction.</p><p>I too find myself constructing a mask out of a culture, admittedly a culture much closer to mine than Europe's was to Mishima, but still not an immediately obvious choice. German might seem far from my early life and upbringing. Although there is some German blood in my veins, there are other nationalities—Polish, Scotch-Irish, English—that play at least as important a role in constituting my genetic background. We'd have to go back to my grandmother's grandfather to find German speakers in my family history. But in my own life and academic career, starting in college, German was the language that helped me express myself, organize my thoughts, name my desires, and develop my sexuality. Raised as an American speaking English, I pivoted to this foreign language, the literature written in that language (and for me, literature is often language about language), and critical language to discuss this literat","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"189-201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12439","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140997339","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":"“Reizend”: German as the language of queer autotheory in Robert Tobin's “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality”","authors":"Peter Rehberg","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12444","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12444","url":null,"abstract":"<p>German as a language has often been rejected because of its historical associations with orders and violence, only to once again be respected and admired for its capacities of philosophical precision as well as for its musical lyricism. Loving German, however, is not easy: making modern German the language of literature often presents itself as an exercise through which the violent resonances of the language are to be worked out, as is evident in, for example, the works of Hertha Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Maxim Biller. For Robert Tobin, as he shares with us in his posthumously published essay, “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality,” German meant something different altogether. Originally written as a preface to his book <i>Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe</i> (2000), the essay was ultimately not included in the publication, following some objections that were raised by the publisher, being finally rediscovered on an errant floppy disk only two months before Bob's death. Having thought the essay lost, Bob was able to start working on it again and had planned to make the text the centerpiece of a memoir-project entitled <i>Cancer Journals</i>.</p><p>I was amazed when I read in the essay that, for Bob, German became the language of gay desire, the language of his coming-out. In “Confessional: Sexuality and textuality,” Bob comments on his own journals from the early 1980s which were written during a year abroad in Munich: “I find it highly significant that my first confession about homosexuality is written in German.” One of his early remarks about homosexuality in December 1981, in a paragraph about a woman he found attractive, reads like this: “Verbunden mit dieser Frage ist warum ich athletische Männer reizend finde.” (<i>Reizend</i> is of course also the use of the word “reizend” here). Bob's first experiences as a gay man and the linguistic construction of his gay identity are written down in German.</p><p>In his choice of German as a language of gay desire, Bob doesn't necessarily partake of an established literary tradition. Yes, German is the language of both sexology and psychoanalysis, as well as their Marxist re-readings. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about sexuality up until Foucault and the emergence of queer theory has in many ways been a German—a German Jewish—project, and Bob, with his last book <i>Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex</i> (2015), was of course one of the important scholars who illustrated this key point. As we know, Germany was also the country of the first LGBTQ+ movement in the twentieth century, centered around Magnus Hirschfeld, and his forerunners, such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs. Yet, in these contexts, German was the language of science and politics, not of desire, highlighting the dissonance in Bob's approach to sexuality in a German linguistic context. “How did German literature become queer to me? And how did I become queer through German literature?” (Tobin, ","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"206-209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12444","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140997514","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":"Expanding trans German studies","authors":"John Harvey O'Hara","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12441","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12441","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"237-240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141002858","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 Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800 By Jocelyn Holland, Bloomsbury. 2019. pp. vi + 208. $40.95 (paperback), $144.00 (hardcover), $32.36 (ebook and PDF)","authors":"Matthew Handelman","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12423","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12423","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"285-287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141014888","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":"Robert Tobin and the longue durée of German LGBTQ+ history","authors":"Alice Kuzniar","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12435","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12435","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Back in the late 1990s when I first read these words, they opened my eyes as to why, considering my family background, I went into the field of foreign languages. Unlike many in our profession, I was not of German heritage, my parents weren't academics, and I was and still am the first in my extended family to earn a graduate degree. Studying French and German literature allowed me to escape the culturally stultifying and sexually normative confines of late 1970s Canadian suburbia. In the essay “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other” (1999), Jean Laplanche wrote about sexuality and foreignness in a way that attractively resonates with the term queer. Destabilizing claims to an abiding, undisturbed notion of the self and sexuality, Laplanche spoke of <i>das Andere</i>—the other-thing in us, the otherness of our unconscious, the enigma of sexuality. <i>Das Andere</i> is the internal otherness that we perpetually carry within us and that de-centers us and our sexuality, but that is founded by contact with an external otherness and that we seek out.</p><p>Bob Tobin's academic adventuresomeness, his search for <i>das Andere</i>, endowed his entire scholarly project—in fact, his very presence—with lightness and brightness. His intellectual curiosity and capaciousness led to enormous insights and taught us to pursue our scholarly passions and to seek out novelty; <i>Wissenschaft</i> is <i>fröhlich</i>. Bob and I were both students of Stanley Corngold at Princeton and inherited from him, back in the 1980s, a pleasure in reading against the grain, but with utmost admiration for the texts we were deconstructing. This respect, yet also subversion, are there in Bob's extraordinary contribution to the study not just of Goethe, but also of Christoph Martin Wieland, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Karl Phillip Moritz, Jean Paul Richter, and Thomas Mann, among many other authors. Bob was always a dedicated Corngold protégé—both theory junkie <i>and</i> textual reader. His thinking was brilliantly counterintuitive or <i>verquert</i>; his productive attention to ambiguity made him a fabulous reader. For example, Bob strongly argued that queer desires, which Goethe called both in and against nature, repeatedly come to represent nature itself throughout Goethe's writings, so that the seemingly diametrically opposed notions of homo- and heterosexuality, natural and unnatural, poisonous and curative, inside and outside, collapse into each other.</p><p>Starting with the observation in <i>Warm Brothers</i> that Goethe connects homosexuality to the trope of writing, Bob continued with remarkable consistency in his scholarship to link aesthetics and LGBTQ+ history, as if he were determined to archeologically reconstruct the textual nature of sexuality throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Taking inspiration from Jacques Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy,” Bob repeatedly returned to the notion of writing as a <i>pharmakon</i>, as having a","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"202-205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12435","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017204","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":"Queer print culture and German studies","authors":"Vance Byrd, Javier Samper Vendrell","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12437","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12437","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Queer people have written and read novels and scientific treatises, circulated pamphlets, found each other in classified advertisements, made albums and zines with their friends and lovers, handed out political flyers and buttons, pasted posters on walls, and created private and public archives for these often ephemeral materials. It is through print culture that queer people realized they were part of something larger than themselves. Indeed, print culture has been pivotal for creating a new vocabulary for queer sexuality and desire and has been crucial for raising key questions about identity, kinship, and citizenship. Within the German context, ephemeral handcrafted and popular printed publications have circulated throughout the twentieth century and until today, including <i>Die Freundschaft</i>, <i>Die Freundin</i>, <i>Der Kreis</i>, <i>du&ich</i>, <i>L-Mag</i>, and <i>Siegessäule</i>. These publications and many others are a testament to the diversity of voices, experiences, and positions within queer culture.</p><p>Our contribution to this forum builds upon our collaborative work on print and visual culture. We just finished editing <i>Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community</i> (University of Toronto Press). In this forthcoming volume, we wanted to expand traditional histories of printed objects, material and visual culture, publishing, and reading to show how queer people have told others about their desires, built coalitions and community, fought against oppression, and imagined different ways of being in the world since the late eighteenth century. Queerness can be found <i>everywhere</i>, but the volume is by no means comprehensive. It provides a sample of different sources, topics, and methodologies we can use to study and teach about queer material and print culture. It was very important for us that we include the voices of professors, librarians, archivists, and activists writing about print culture and queer communities, and that we acknowledge that some printed materials are collected and archived by institutions while others are not. Finally, we wanted to highlight how necessary this work is for teaching. The study of queer print culture offers students the opportunity to go into special collections and the archive, to find themselves reflected in historical materials, and to gather and share these histories with other queer community members.</p><p>Queer print culture thus expands the horizon of what we can achieve in queer German studies. Teaching and researching queer print culture forces all of us to grapple with diverse identities, histories, experiences, and politics. If we do not include queer voices and study queer texts we run the risk of misrepresenting how printed materials and cultural objects have been created, shared, and appreciated. When we turn to these otherwise understudied materials it helps us fill in gaps and silences that have been excluded from the historical record, such as th","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"228-232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12437","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141016800","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":"Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the queer ecology of sericulture","authors":"Kyle Frackman","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12433","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12433","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 2000 and early 2001, Robert Tobin's book <i>Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe</i> appeared and began to reach university libraries and bookstores. At the time, I was about to complete an undergraduate degree in German studies at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota after having fled Alaska for the intellectual, social, and sexual freedom that only somewhere else could provide. Thanks to sympathetic and open-minded professors, my exploration of German literature, history, and culture included examinations of queer sensibilities to be found in works including those of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, August von Platen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Mann, Christa Winsloe, G.W. Pabst—and Goethe. Tobin's <i>Warm Brothers</i>, which joined a couple of other innovative titles that had recently been published, including <i>Queering the Canon</i> and <i>Outing Goethe & His Age</i> (Lorey and Plews; Kuzniar), updated the study of German literature while pushing the field of gay and lesbian studies into queer studies in ways I found exhilarating. These titles put me on the road to the kind of queer media studies I discuss below, using queer sexuality and gender as a way into the medial worlds of historical figures and the eras in which they lived. One of the figures to whom <i>Warm Brothers</i> introduced me was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), who was the classicist founder of a periodical in Latin, nationalistic enthusiast of <i>Großdeutschland</i>, but also an activist for queer rights and liberation. Ulrichs's appearances in <i>Warm Brothers</i> are not extensive, but the context the book provided gave me an intriguing presentation of the roles Ulrichs played in the early articulation of non-normative gender and sexual identities. For years since then, I have wanted to know more about this person who had inspired such fearful homophobic loathing in numerous readers including none other than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Tobin 197; Marx and Engels 325).</p><p>Although Ulrichs's influence came primarily through the spread of his publications and eventually their citation by others, there remains much to be discovered about the ways in which Ulrichs's and his contemporaries’ extratextual activities contributed to the development of gender and sexual theories (Frackman). Public awareness of Ulrichs and his legacy has ebbed and flowed over the years (Sigusch; Stack). Various scholars have explored the role he played in the nineteenth-century articulation of non-normative gender and sexuality, which included influencing—and inspiring—other well-known figures like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Carl Westphal as well as the British writer Edward Carpenter (Pretsell; Oosterhuis 139; Lehmstedt 60). Ulrichs's writings, most prominent of which was his twelve-volume series of short books or pamphlets, <i>Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe</i> (1864–79), developed a congenitally determined system of gender and sexuality orga","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"214-217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12433","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141015521","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}