Monika Maron In Perspective

In diesem Band werden zum ersten Mal die Ansichten von 12 Forschern zum Œuvre der Berliner Autorin Monika Maron (1941) zusammengebracht. Die Beiträge entstanden im Rahmen eines internationalen Symposiums anlässlich des 60. Geburtstages der Autorin, das Ende März 2001 an der Universität Gent stattgefunden hat. Junge wie etablierte Wissenschaftler haben Einzelanalysen und Übersichtsartikel verfasst, die zusammen das gesamte Œuvre von Flugasche bis Pawels Briefe umspannen und zugleich einen Ausblick auf die Zukunft ermöglichen. Die gemeinsame ‘dialogische’ Ausrichtung der präsentierten Einblicke äußert sich darin, dass jeweils mit eigener Akzentsetzung die Grenzen des Textes nach außen hin überschritten werden. Dabei werden nicht nur die vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Text und Zeit, sondern auch die bisher viel weniger thematisierte Bedeutung anderer Texte sowie die diversen Arten der Rezeption untersucht. Methodologisch reichen die Ansätze von der traditionellen Hermeneutik über historische Fragestellungen, Diskursanalyse und Rezeptionstheorie bis hin zu Überlegungen zur Ethik der Ästhetik. Eine umfangreiche Bibliographie, in der eine möglichst umfassende Übersicht über Verbreitung und Rezeption von Marons Werken geboten wird, schließt den Band ab. Monika Maron in Perspective dokumentiert so, in den Beiträgen wie in der Bibliographie, den heutigen Stand der Forschung und liefert zudem zahlreiche Impulse zu einer weiteren Auseinandersetzung mit dem Werk.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the writing of Monika Maron. Her biography charts a complex relationship with the GDR state, from initial ideological identification to sustained, radical rejection. Situating its reflections on her work against the backdrop of a changing critical landscape, this analysis takes account of the re-contextualisation of her writing necessitated by the collapse of the GDR. The author charts the development of a number of seminal themes in Maron's oeuvre. The search for an authentic form of expression in her earliest texts gave way to a focus on the writing and the rewriting of history. The demise of the political system in 1989 led to an exploration in her work of more intimate themes. Maron's post-Wende writing makes an important East German contribution to debates on memory transmission and generational forgetting. Her most recent novels are concerned with the rupture and the ultimate refashioning of biographies in a post-GDR age. Rereading her texts in a post-Wende light, the author explores the complexity of Maron's relationship with the state from which she emerged and demonstrates how this complexity manifests itself in her writing before and after 1989. This study offers new perspectives on Maron's work and illuminates the significance of her contribution to contemporary German literature.

In his testimony on his survival in Auschwitz Primo Levi said "our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man". If language, if any language, lacks the words to express the experience of the concentration camps, how does one write the unspeakable? How can it then be translated? The limits of representation and translation seem to be closely linked when it comes to writing about the Holocaust – whether as fiction, memoir, testimony – a phenomenon the current study examines. While there is a spate of literature about the impossibility to represent the Holocaust , not much has been written on the links between translation in its specific linguistic sense, translation studies, and the Holocaust, a niche this volume aims to fill.

Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate – an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age. Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.

The fifteen essays in this volume reflect the diversity of German studies in Britain and Ireland today. The German language itself is the focus of four studies, covering historical aspects of German and Yiddish, language pedagogy and controversial contemporary issues, such as the rise of Anglicisms in German and the language of second- and third-generation immigrants. Traditional literary philology is also well represented in six essays on prose writers and dramatists from the nineteenth century to the present day, but it is a traditional philology that has been much modified and enriched by the cultural and historical perspectives evident in the remaining five essays. These include psychoanalytical and contextual studies and embrace the historical development and elaboration of mass media technologies from radio to public-access cable TV.

Some authors strongly criticized attempts to rebuild a German literary culture in the aftermath of World War II, while others actively committed themselves to 'dealing with the German past.' There are writers in Austria and Switzerland that find other contradictions of contemporary life troubling, while some find them funny or even worth celebrating. German postwar literature has, in the minds of some observers, developed a kind of split personality. In view of the traumatic monstrosities of the previous century that development may seem logical to some. The Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature is devoted to modern literature produced in the German language, whether from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or writers using German in other countries. This volume covers an extensive period of time, beginning in 1945 at what was called 'zero hour' for German literature and proceeds into the 21st century, concluding in 2008. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on writers, such as Nobel Prize-winners Heinrich Bsll, GYnter Grass, Elias Canetti, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald. There are also entries on individual works, genres, movements, literary styles, and forms.

Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of "memory contests," which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative, the contributions offer a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Contributors: Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Elizabeth Boa, Stefan Willer, Chloe E. M. Paver, Matthias Fiedler, J. J. Long, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Cathy S. Gelbin, Jennifer E. Michaels, Mary Cosgrove, Andrew Plowman, Roger Woods. Anne Fuchs is Professor of modern German literature and Georg Grote is Lecturer in German history, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.