Was bleibt? Ex-Territorialisierung in der deutschsprachigen Prosa seit 1945

Abstract

Philipsen, Bart, Clemens Ruthner, and Daniel de Vin, eds. Was bleibt? Ex-Territorialisierung in der deutschsprachigen Prosa seit 1945. Tubingen: Francke, 2000. 183 pp. $25.00 paperback. A colloquium held at the University of Louvain in 1997 brought together a diverse group of European scholars who are studying changes and developments in German-language prose during the latter half of the twentieth century. In introducing the anthology of essays that grew out of that conference, Bart Philipsen describes the various historical and political rifts during this time as cultural determinants. While a response within the culture to very different historical and political disruptions and developments seems to have been the principal formative influence on the bulk of German-language literary production, Philipsen also suggests that these circumstances offer a basis for considering diverse literature within a shared context. Relations between artist and political system, including the several political manifestations arising in Central Europe between 1933 and the close of the century, have been determined by historical particulars and have differed from one another accordingly. Even so, the editors of this volume and the participants in the colloquium find that responses to tumultuous political circumstances by authors of diverse ideological affliations bear noteworthy similarities, and they seek with varying degrees of success to create a vocabulary that will articulate the common ground. Territorial affinity, in tandem with the repeated necessity in post-war Central Europe to redefine that affinity, emerges as the organizing principle for this study. It is an ambitious project that with each new literary investigation tends to challenge its own central thesis. Its contributors explain and affirm their choice of vocabulary by broadening the inclusiveness of territoriality; while on the other hand, because of that inclusiveness, the study runs the constant risk of robbing its own terminology of meaning. While territoriality in the geopolitical sense of the word has clear associations for the reader, bringing to mind also literary reflections of historical contexts (exile literature, GDR and post-GDR literature), the contributors venture far beyond these more obvious connections to include the blurry Austrian-German and Swiss-- German demarcations (as derived from considerations of Albert Drach, Brigitte Kronauer, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, and others), as well as gender-specific territoriality proposed in studies of Christa Wolf, Gabriele Wohmann, and GDR children's literature for girls. …