German Life Writing In The Twentieth Century

"Life-writing", an increasingly accepted category among scholars of literature and other disciplines, encompasses not just autobiography and biography, but also memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, and even non-written texts such as film. Whether these were produced in diary or letter form as events unfolded or long after the event in the form of autobiographical prose, common to all are attempts by individuals to make sense of their experiences. In many such texts, the authors reassess their lives against the background of a broader public debate about the past. This book of essays examines German life-writing after major turning points in twentieth-century German history: the First World War, the Nazi era, the postwar division of Germany, and the collapse of socialism and German unification. The volume is distinctive because it combines an overview of academic approaches to the study of life-writing with a set of German-language case studies. In this respect it goes further than existing studies, which often present life-writing material without indicating how it might fit into our broader understanding of a particular culture or historical period.

Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.

Clementine Krämer, who is relatively unknown today, was a prolific German Jewish writer and leader of the women's movement who experienced at first hand the First World War and the rise to power of the National Socialists. This book makes an important contribution to the scholarship by revealing a fresh perspective on this tumultuous time.

Containing entries on over four hundred authors of fiction, poetry and drama from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, this invaluable work of reference presents material of a range and depth that no other book on the subject in English attains. For the second edition, the entries have been updated to include the most recent works of German literature. A number of new entries have been added, dealing in particular with the East German literary scene and the changing literary landscape after reunification. In addition to basic biographical facts, the Companion offers summaries, information on involvement in literary groups and political developments, schools and movements, critical terms and aspects of the other arts, including film.

Germans of the generation born just before the outbreak of World War I lived through a tumultuous and dramatic century. This book tells the story of their lives and, in so doing, offers a new history of twentieth-century Germany, as experienced and made by ordinary human beings.On the basis of sixty-two oral-history interviews, this book shows how this generation was shaped psychologically by a series of historically engendered losses over the course of the century. In response, this generation turned to the collective to repair the losses it had suffered, most fatefully to the community of the "Volk" during the Third Reich, a racial collective to which this generation was passionately committed and which was at the heart of National Socialism and its popular appeal.

This is the first English translation of an important document in the history of the black presence in Germany and Europe: the autobiography of Theodor Michael. Theodor Michael is among the few surviving members of the first generation of 'Afro-Germans': Born in Germany in 1925 to a Cameroonian father and a German mother, he grew up in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic. As a child and teenager he worked in circuses and films and experienced the tightening knot of racial discrimination under the Nazis in the years before the Second World War. He survived the war as a forced labourer, founding a family and making a career as a journalist and actor in post-war West Germany. Since the 1980s he has become an important spokesman for the black German consciousness movement, acting as a human link between the first black German community of the inter-war period, the pan-Africanism of the 1950s and 1960s, and new generations of Germans of African descent. Theodor Michael's life story is a classic account of coming to consciousness of a man who understands himself as both black and German; accordingly, it illuminates key aspects of modern German social history as well as of the post-war history of the African diaspora. The text has been translated by Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool and an internationally acknowledged expert in Black German studies. It is accompanied by a translator's preface, explanatory notes, a chronology of historical events and a guide to further reading, so that the book will be accessible and useful both for general readers and for undergraduate students.

Shows how Adler, Wander, Hilsenrath, and Klüger intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma, revealing new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature. How did German-speaking Holocaust survivors pursue literary careers in an often-indifferent postwar society? How did their literary life writings reflect their postwar struggles? This monograph focuses on four authors who bore literary witness to the Shoah - H. G. Adler, Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Ruth Klüger. It analyzes their autofictional, critical, and autobiographical works written between the early 1950s and 2015, which depict their postwar experiences of writing, publishing, and publicizing Holocaust testimony. These case studies shed light on the devastating aftermaths of the Holocaust in different contexts. Adler depicts his attempts to overcome marginalization as a writer in Britain in the 1950s. Wander reflects on his failure to find a home either in postwar Austria or in the GDR. Hilsenrath satirizes his struggles as an emigrant to the US in the 1960s and after returning to Berlin in the 1980s. Finally, in her 2008 memoir, Ruth Klüger follows up her earlier, highly impactful memoir of the concentration camps by narrating the misogyny and antisemitism she experienced in US and German academia. Helen Finch analyzes how these under-researched texts intertwine transgressive political criticism with the shadow of trauma. Drawing on scholarship on Holocaust testimony, transnational memory, and affect theory, her book reveals new perspectives on canon formation and exclusion in postwar German literature.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived.