GERMAN QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Queer occultism","authors":"Ervin Malakaj","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12436","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12436","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The rise of German sexology in the nineteenth century coincides with the rise of occult discourse and practice. The former has always maintained an important status in queer German studies. Scholars have historically turned with great interest to the works of, among others, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, and Magnus Hirschfeld, in order to advance the famous Foucauldian notion that the homosexual was born in the clinic. And with good reason: early sexologists produced frameworks through which to study queer life, generated discursive strategies to define and analyze it, and turned to various forms of media engagement including scientific writing and popular pamphleteering to disseminate their work to the public. No wonder, then, that their epistemic practices and broader advocacy work take center stage in scholarship on late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century queer German studies. But when it comes to occult discourse, which has likewise presented epistemic frameworks by which to define and engage queer life, queer German studies has often been somewhat hesitant to engage it seriously.</p><p>My sense is that the occult's epistemological foundations, which directly compete with and reach beyond the purview of Enlightenment epistemologies, rendered occultism as a cultural practice too fringe, even ridiculous, to warrant serious scholarly engagement. But such a view keeps scholars from a rather sizable cultural archive replete with information about how queer people navigated their lives, defined their relation to others, and conceived of how to engage with the world on terms often radically different than those that come into view when studying the history of sexuality through sexology. Occult practitioners did not favor empiricism. They instead pursued “unreasonable” methods that drew on divination, sensing, and speculation to glean information about the world. And, in so doing, they most certainly engaged queer methods and drew participation from queer people. That occult practice and queerness have a strong connection in our times today is no secret—see, for instance, Nathan Snaza's exciting new scholarship on queer feminist esotericism and contemporary liberation movements. But the connection between queer people and occult practice has a longer history, one that is particularly rich in the German-language context around 1900.</p><p>One site for scholarly engagement on matters of queer occultism in German studies is Hans Freimark's remarkable study <i>Okkultismus und Sexualität</i> (1909). For Freimark, the rise of the occult during his time is a phenomenon directly tied to a depreciation of empiricism as a guiding mechanism by which to know the world. In his assessment, occultists provided the public what science could not: access to deeper understandings of phenomena that reach beyond the capacities of scientific tools. These phenomena pertain to various discourses on human spirituality, psychic depth, and mystical forces said t","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"222-224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12436","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141015063","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":"Fattening queer: Interventions in fat embodiment","authors":"Erin Ritchie","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12438","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12438","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Fat bodies are deviant bodies. Just like queer bodies, fat bodies and our judgment of them are tightly interwoven with prescriptive, compulsory norms that impose standards of health, body shape and function, gender, and sexuality. Fatness is judged according to unspoken norms against which certain bodies are deemed to possess too much flesh. Regardless of how these norms have been determined over time, fat bodies are always legible as different in that they do not fit into environments oriented around ostensibly normal bodies. Fatness itself is a slippery term. Just like the word queer, fat carries with it social, cultural, institutional, structural, and personal meanings, both derogatory and affirmative, that influence the ways that fat bodies interact with and in the world.</p><p>In considering these similarities, the question arises: is fat queer? In a volume of essays by queer and fat studies scholars entitled <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> (2015), Cat Pausé, Jackie White, and Samantha Murray examine how compulsory heterosexuality, a term popularized by Adrienne Rich, works to create and uphold compulsory thinness and to regulate fat bodies and subjects. Essays in <i>Queering Fat Embodiment</i> rely on queer theories and methodologies like Judith Butler's notion of gender performance and Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology to demonstrate how fat bodies are othered via heterosexual, hegemonic physical spaces and their respective orientations. Queerness, as Zoe Meleo-Erwin argues, can help us to examine and dismantle dominant conceptions of health, illness, normalcy, and pathology (108-09). Queering fat makes room for difference, interdependence, and vulnerability.</p><p>Standard medical discourse assesses fat according to hierarchical binary notions of success and failure. The obsession with fat has become a phenomenon in the medical world, with the World Health Organization naming “Globesity” the most threatening growing pandemic, even in the era of Covid-19 (Branca et al. xiii; Schorb 40). In 2020, the Robert Koch Institut identified 46% of German women and 60% of German men as “übergewichtig” and 14% of Germans in total as “adipostas” (“Übergewicht und Adipostas”). Yet the dominant socio-cultural urge to pathologize fat reinforces normative able-bodiedness, scorns bodily difference, and even directly undercuts fat sexuality, as study after study attempts to correlate genital dysfunction with excess adipose tissue (White). Not only are fat individuals unable to have “successful” heteronormative sex within a medical model, but medical studies utilize normative bodily expectations in attempts to prove the failure of fat individuals’ lives, evoking false correlations between their life span and overall health (White). A shortened lifespan is that of a less than ideal citizen, one who cannot continue to be a productive member of society in ways that align with neoliberal ideologies (Pausé et al. 6). In the medical paradigm, a fat life is a miser","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"233-236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12438","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141015325","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":"On the curiously queer realism of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine","authors":"Imke Meyer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12440","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12440","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Is it curious to argue that Adalbert Stifter's story collection <i>Bunte Steine</i> is queer? Published in December 1852 (and dated to 1853) in the wake of Stifter's ultimately critical stance toward the 1848 revolution, and introduced by a <i>Vorrede</i> that famously speaks of the story collection's search for a “sanfte[s] Gesez” (Stifter 12), it would at first glance seem to resist such a reading. Of course, for decades now, Stifter scholarship has highlighted different facets of his <i>œuvre</i>’s radicality (see, for instance, Geulen; Schößler; Downing, esp. 24–90; Begemann; Bischoff, esp. 232–76 and 328–51; MacLeod, <i>Fugitive Subjects</i>, esp. 107–42; Vogel; Nagel, esp. 80–88; Strowick, esp. 59–157; Jürjens, esp. 160–295; and Weitzman, esp. 25–48). But what about queer readings? In 2015, Erik Grell published an extensive piece on homoeroticism in Stifter's <i>Brigitta</i> (1844-1847). But it was Robert Tobin who, building on earlier readings (Owen; MacLeod, <i>Embodying Ambiguity</i>), first understood <i>Brigitta</i> as expressly queer in his seminal 2015 study <i>Peripheral Desires</i> (Tobin 127–33). A few years prior, two readings argued that one of the stories in <i>Bunte Steine</i>, namely <i>Kalkstein</i>, can be understood as a queer text, featuring as it does a poor minister with a fetishistic liking for exquisite linen undergarments gifted at the time of his death to his only male friend (Riley; Warmuth and Bugelnig). Is <i>Kalkstein</i> an outlier in <i>Bunte Steine</i>? And what of the story collection as a whole? Is it, too, curiously queer?</p><p>For all of Stifter's repeated mentions of “Gesez,” “Ordnung” (13), or “Gestalt” (13) in the <i>Vorrede</i>, and for all the efforts of the stories’ various narrators and characters to create order, to sort, to arrange, and to catalogue things, we soon get an inkling that in <i>Bunte Steine</i> “Ordnung,” such as it is, is a provisional state at turns threatened by forces of entropy and transgressed joyously. To wit, already in the <i>Einleitung</i> that follows the <i>Vorrede</i>, Stifter states that his story collection is “eine Sammlung von allerlei Spielereien und Kram für die Jugend” (18), whose eventual size is as yet undetermined (19). Thus, “das Kleine” (9), which can open a view toward the “sanfte Gesez,” may undermine this “Gesez” at least as much as it presumably testifies to its validity. We could therefore try to re-read what J. Halberstam enumerates as “the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant” as something that is best understood through the lens of the “low theory” Halberstam employs to grapple with queer failures and queer potentialities alike (<i>Queer Art</i>, 21).</p><p>And indeed, in <i>Bunte Steine</i>, a playful randomness, <i>ein Allerlei</i>, emerges repeatedly as the queer Other of <i>Ordnung</i>, instantiating cheeky infringements upon regimes of order. Already in the first narrative, <i>Granit</i>, we encounter a yo","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"210-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12440","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017474","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":"Democracy, mass hysteria, and human rights: Rereading Hermann Broch in the age of reemerging authoritarianism","authors":"Thomas Herold","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12425","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12425","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"249-262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017429","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 appeal of the queer right","authors":"Jennifer V. Evans","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12442","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12442","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Robert Tobin was an astute reader of texts. In &lt;i&gt;Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex&lt;/i&gt;, he summarized the long struggle within the German-speaking world to surface male-male longing, noting that some of the same tensions within the masculinist and emancipation movements continue to shape the “architecture of our most intimate desires” (Tobin 249). More recently, together with Peter Rehberg and Ivan Raykoff, he immersed himself in the playfulness of the Eurovision song contest, arguing that its strong association with LGBTQ+ communities served as a barometer of a nation's liberal values (Tobin, “Eurovision”). And yet, whereas in 2013 and then in 2020 Turkey and Hungary respectively objected to what one official called “the homosexual flotilla” dominating the song contest, the backlash against drag performers and trans masculinities and femininities today suggests the goal post has moved closer to the mainstream (Walker and Garamvolgyi). The tensions around queer and trans identities within the European Union vexed Bob in what turned out to be his final writing, on the impact of the self-made Italian philosopher Julius Evola, a central figure in conservative and far-right circles during and after World War II who networked with the homosexual rights movements of the 1920s. Bob left us with a warning: not to make facile assumptions linking same-sex sexuality to progressive values.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Evola was a staunch critic of the Enlightenment. He advanced an alternative to the race science of the Nazis and yet was also embraced by them and by Mussolini. He believed in a lost Northern culture whose descendants first built Atlantis and then Rome. He gave lecture tours and was friendly with leaders of core gentlemen's clubs in Berlin and Vienna, which included members of the conservative circles that supported Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the postwar period, Evola's illiberal and antidemocratic thinking made him the perfect person to serve as intellectual guide for a post-Nazi far-right conservativism. He became part of a group calling themselves Traditionalists, who rejected modernity, egalitarianism, democracy, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, materialism, and bourgeois values. Alain de Benoist, the founder of the French neo-fascist &lt;i&gt;nouvelle droite&lt;/i&gt;, lauded Evola in an interview in 2003. Even Trump's erstwhile standard bearer Steve Bannon cited Evola in a 2014 visit to the Vatican.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Evola's mysticism and interest in medieval asceticism struck a chord not only with this small band of right-leaning illiberals; they were also attractive to the New Age and fantasy set, a group that fuels a particular contingent of those on the far right today. We might think of the self-proclaimed QAnon Shaman Jake Anjeli from the Capitol Riot and his infamous Norse tattoo, which also graces the cover of Evola's own book for Italian youth. Or Giorgia Meloni, who cut her teeth in the Italian Social Movement neo-fascist Hobbit camps which drew explicit","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"218-221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12442","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141018106","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":"Mädchen in Uniform’s queer proliferations","authors":"Barbara Mennel","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12443","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12443","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"225-227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141017869","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":"Plants, Places, and Power: Toward Social and Ecological Justice in German Literature and Film By Maria Stehle, Camden House. 2023. pp. 186. $99.00 (hardcover), $29.95 (e-book)","authors":"Doris McGonagill","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12432","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12432","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"278-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140663969","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":"Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World By Beate I. Allert, Christopher R. Clason, Niall A. Peach, and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (Eds.), Purdue University Press. 2023. pp. 282. $49.99 (paperback, ebook, PDF), $99.99 (hardcover)","authors":"Elizabeth Millán Brusslan","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12429","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"281-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140664194","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":"Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin By Bettina Stoetzer, Duke University Press. 2022. pp. 352. $28.95 (paperback)","authors":"Rebecca Jordan","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12422","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12422","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"275-277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140665683","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":"Assembly and Its Other in German Romantic Literature and Thought: The Inexhaustible Gathering By Robert E. Mottram and Christopher R. Clason (Eds.), Liverpool University Press. 2022. pp. 240. $130.00 (hardcover)","authors":"Bryan Norton","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12427","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gequ.12427","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"288-290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140667058","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}