Writing The Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction

Reviewed by: Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik Gabriel S. Cooper Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955. By Jonathan Skolnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0804786072. Jonathan Skolnik’s masterful study reads German Jewish historical fiction as a popular genre of minority culture that sought to inscribe Jews into German culture and society. Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction written in German drew on the Sephardic-Jewish past and expressed a dynamic that philosopher Franz Rosenzweig dubbed “dissimilation”: an obverse movement to assimilation that affirmed a distinctive Jewish identity alongside new German identities. By reinventing Sephardic-Jewish history, Jewish writers asserted hope for integration and voiced concerns about assimilation, antisemitism, and persecution. Resonant Sephardic-Jewish themes—the vibrant Jewish culture of Islamic Spain, conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion—provided a rich source of Jewish self-understanding, through which minority cultural memory could be reinterpreted in new historical contexts. Skolnik’s book follows on the heels of recent scholarship on Jewish historical fiction by Maurice Samuels and Jonathan Hess, but it does not retread these authors’ paths. Instead, Skolnik offers valuable insights into a literature that served (among other functions) as a corrective to the project of modern, secular Jewish historiography (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Taking cues from historians Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, Skolnik addresses the interplay of history and memory in German Jewish culture, and this exchange’s effects on German Jewish identity construction. One of Skolnik’s significant contributions here is his demonstration of the idea that German Jewish historical fiction remained in dialogue with the majority culture, even as it asserted a unique German Jewish identity. The book’s first chapter examines the “first modern Jewish historical novel,” Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837). Spinoza reacted against the literary figure of Ahasuerus, an enduring representation of “Jewish history” for Europeans. Auerbach has Spinoza dream about a persecuted, unenlightened, dying Ahasuerus, signaling the triumph of secularization and rationalism embodied by the philosopher. However, the [End Page 664] novel also consciously confronts the challenge secularization posed to Judaism and Jewish identity. Auerbach situates his novel between the radical assimilationism of Karl Gutzkow and the Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, in which Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became embroiled. By identifying Spinoza as the precursor to Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment thought, Auerbach perpetuates an ideology of Jewish emancipation by claiming Spinoza for Jewish history. Spinoza thus strives to insert minority culture, which secularization threatens to marginalize, into the national narrative of German literary history. Historical fiction would serve thereafter as a model for Jewish writers concerned with Jews’ integration as Jews into German culture. In his second chapter, Skolnik interprets Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) both as a text that posits secular literature as a counterweight to the demythologizing tendencies of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and as a modern type of Jewish cultural memory. Skolnik’s compelling analysis of the “Haggadah” motif illustrates the critical role Heine envisioned for narrative in negotiating the divide between Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicism. In his “secularized Haggadah” modeled on Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott, Heine revives the Sephardic-Jewish thinker, Don Isaac Abarbanel, an ambivalent figure endowed with the cultural integration of that historical epoch, and the knowledge of how fleeting that achievement was. German Jewish writers of historical fiction learned from Heine to appropriate Abarbanel as a vehicle for expressing a range of attitudes toward the projects of (Jewish) integration and modernization. Chapter 3 treats five nineteenth-century historical novels addressed to a German Jewish public sphere, which had arisen from German Jews’ acculturation and their thriving print culture. Skolnik maintains that this minority literature sought to create a normative, stable Jewish identity compatible with the project of integration. Jewish historical fiction achieved this didactic aim through allusions to German “high” culture, often works by Goethe and Lessing. Skolnik also makes a cogent argument here for the inadequacy of existing theories of minority culture in analyzing German Jewish literature; rather than attempting to subvert the project of national identity—a strategy germane to other minority cultures—German Jewish...

This study analyses how fictional languages can be influenced by natural languages exemplified by the use of Yiddish. It shows how a fictional language can be a data source for research on historical development of Western Yiddish (WY) and its sociolinguistic situation. In contrast to the varieties of Eastern Yiddish (EY), which are still spoken today, Western Yiddish was given up during the complex acculturation process of West-Ashkenazic Jewry during the nineteenth century. As a language driven by a pejorative view of language variations and by growing antisemitism, Yiddish found its way into German fiction, where it is still used in contemporary fiction as a means of characterising Jewish figures. This article presents the main results of a corpus study on 53 of such fictional texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.The Yiddish examples in Yiddish script will be primarily quoted in their original form and then be transliterated following the YIVO romanisation system (cf. Weinreich 1968).It will be shown that reflexes of spoken WY can be found in these imitations of Yiddish. This data can be used as secondary evidence of WY structures. Furthermore, the data gives an impression of the intensity of the language contact situation between German and Yiddish. In addition it gives insights into mechanisms of how German Jews were excluded from the German ideal of aSprachnation.

MLR, .,   tions. Part , ‘Communities across the New Media’, examines the impact (real and perceived) that cinema and radio had on social cohesiveness within and between national communities. Laura Marcus incisively analyses sociological and ethnographic studies which examined how film-going reconfigured relations between individuals and the collective. e last three chapters explore the sonic connections established between British and Russian BBC Home Service listeners, the acts of sonic citizenship carried out via the citation of It’s at Man Again catchphrases, and the polyglot nature of radio transmissions in colonial spaces (by Claire Davison, Debra Rae Cohen, and Jessica Berman, respectively). Each contributor persuasively demonstrates how the heterogeneous nature and content of radio transmissions simultaneously encouraged listening publics to feel part of an expanded community and rerouted established pathways of communal intersection. Space permitting, it would have been useful to see more contextualization of the plural forms of participation uncovered here alongside the communal visions and performative tendencies of, say, twentieth-century Nationalism and Fascism. Overall, this collection’s mapping of networks created by modernism’s diverse place-based practices and border-crossing media makes powerfully tangible how modernist communality was oen formed around acts of creative participation in ‘a rhythm of upheaval, interruption, [and] incursion’ (p. ). U  L D K Willful Girls: Gender and Agency in Contemporary Anglo-American and German Fiction. By E J. New York and London: Camden House. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Willful Girls opens with Emily Jeremiah’s clearly stated aim: she will ‘explore the depiction of girls and young women in Anglo-American and German literary texts’ (p. ). is statement indicates the lucidity of Jeremiah’s prose as she reads her chosen works through queer feminist theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s investigation of the will in Willful Subjects (Durham and London: Duke University Press ()). Ahmed remarks that, as a descriptor, ‘willfulness’ applies to those who will ‘too much, or too little, or in “the wrong way”’ (p. ). Focusing on the ontological specificity of girls and young women, Jeremiah elaborates on Ahmed’s work, which pays particular attention to the regularity with which it is women and girls who are viewed as too active, too passive, or desiring in ‘the wrong way’. Willful Girls uses literary analysis to consider how experiences of ‘becoming’ woman might be affected by the entanglement of post-feminist and neo-liberal discourses of autonomy and freedom led by consumerism. e novels under discussion are: Antonia Baum’s vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot (), Sibylle Berg’s Ein paar Leute suchen das Glück und lachen sich tot (), Rachel B. Glaser Paulina und Fran (), Kerstin Grether’s Zuckerbabys (), Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (; trans. Axolotl Roadkill ()), Zoë Jenny’s Das Blütenstaubzimmer (; trans. e Pollen Room ()), Bella Bathurst’s Special (), Elke Naters’  Reviews Königinnen () and Lügen (), Charlotte Roche’s Feuchtgebiete (; trans. Wetlands ()), Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb (), Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (), Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out (), Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals () , Sarai Walker’s Dietland (), Helen Walsh’s Brass (), and Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (). Willful Girls is divided into five chapters, plus a short Introduction and a Conclusion . e first chapter, ‘Contemporary Anglo-American and German Feminisms’, usefully outlines the theoretical framework underpinning Jeremiah’s readings, and makes the case for the comparative nature of her research. It gives a historical overview of feminism in the German, British, and American contexts in which the fictions are rooted, highlighting the contextual differences that manifest themselves in the works examined. For example, in Germany, anti-feminist discourses tend to attribute ‘blame’ to feminism for lower birth rates, whereas in the UK such concerns are less prominent (p. ). e remaining four chapters are divided by the following themes: Agency and Volition, Body and Beauty, Sisterhood and Identification, and Sex and Desire. By traversing between texts and topics, Jeremiah produces a complex and compelling analysis of her chosen works, tracing variations on themes while drawing out the overarching sense of queer transgression represented in the above-named novels. Essentially, the fictions examined in Willful Subjects are coming-of-age narratives , education novels, or Bildungsromane. Chapter , ‘Agency and Volition’, explores queer willfulness in relation to the...

This study concerns extended attributes, i.e. adjectival or participial premodifiers taking at least one extension such as an adverbial ( a very impressive lie; der 1886 geborene Berufssoldat ). The comparisons involve English and German fiction from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and non-fiction from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus. It is found that such attributes are more frequent in German than in English and in non-fiction than in fiction. In both languages, the most frequent function of the extensions is to express degree, and adverbs are the most common extensions. Nevertheless, German shows more variation regarding both the form and function of the extensions. Apart from token frequencies, there are only small cross-genre differences.

(1954). William Eickhorst, Decadence in German Fiction. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory: Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 305-307.

Contents: Mark Orme: The 'Business Case' for Internationalisation - Elspeth Jones: Culture Change and Exchanging Culture: The Role of Languages in Internationalisation - Paul Reid: Embedding Internationalisation within the Ethos and Practice of University Teaching - Tricia Coverdale-Jones: Internationalisation in an International Context - Delia A. Jackson/Silke Engelbart: Is Sex a Laughing Matter? An Intercultural Perspective on Advertising - Sarah Ishmael/Robert Kasza: Critical Reflections on the Impact of Events to Promote Language-Learning Awareness among Secondary School Students: Are We Doing Enough? - Lu Liu/Sarah Sibley: How to Enhance International and Domestic Students' Interaction? A Case Study of the Design and Development of an International Business Module - Elzbieta Muskat-Tabakowska: Internationalisation: Teaching Grammars, Teaching Cultures - Petra Bagley: Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding through Literature: How Turkish Tea Found its Way into German Fiction - Ellie Dunn: The Translator as Intercultural Mediator: Applications for Translated Graphic Novels in the Language-Learning Classroom - Sofia Anysiadou/Robert Kasza: The Worldwise Language Advantage Programme: Using Rosetta Stone to Promote and Enhance Language-Learning Awareness among University Students and the Wider Community.

The article suggests a comparative analysis of the modernist writing and apprenticeship topics in German and Russian fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Writing is considered to be calligraphy, a writer’s craft, the character’s existence as a scriptor, a form of escapism, a (neo)mythological ritual of destruction and renewal of language and the world. Apprenticeship is explored in its connection with rhetorical culture of imitation and forms of rebellion against it, be it rebellion against the bourgeois society (R. Walser, H. Hesse, T. Bernhard) or the Soviet school and Social Realism (S. Sokolov, M. Shishkin). The literary tradition serves here as an object of imitation and/or deconstruction. This ambivalent attitude takes the form of irony, buffoonery, foolishness, schizophrenia and is rather often represented in the doppelganger motif. The study uses cultural-historical, comparative, narratological methods, leitmotif analysis, etc. The authors identifies new typological links between German and Russian literature.

Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology200078Edited by Mary W. Tannert, Henry Kratz. <i>Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology</i>. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co 1999. x + 244 pp, ISBN: 0 7864 0659 3 £40.50

Review Notices : Critical Strategies: German Fiction in the Twentieth Century. By Elizabeth Boa and J. H. Reid. London: Edward Arnold. 1972. viii + 206 pp. £3.20 (paperback £1.60)

<b>Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955.</b><i>By Jonathan Skolnik. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. xv</i>+<i>260 pages</i>+<i>17 b/w illustrations. $65.00.</i>

The Writing of War. French and German Fiction and World War II (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2005 883 also takes issue with Andreas Huyssen's critique of Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur. Ward's valid commentary on self-erasure and self-reflexivity does not, however, in itselfoffera counter-argumentto Huyssen's reading, which concerns the metaphysical view of history in Sebald's prose. John Beck and Massimo Leone offertwo readings of the interdependence of travel and reading/writing in Sebald's texts. But it is John Zilcosky's superb analysis of Sebald's uncanny travels that deserves special mention here: he shows how Sebald overturns thefort/da game as the master trope oftravel writing by staging our inability to get lost. Martin Klebes opens the next section with an exploration of Sebald's use of Kafka in Schwindel. Gefuhle. While Russell Kilbourn analyses the role of architecture and cinema in Austerlitz, Carolin Duttlinger, drawing on trauma theory, examines the role of photography in the same novel. Trauma is a central concern of the final section: Wilfried Wilms offersa critique of Sebald's Luftkrieg essay by considering how the traumatic experience of the bombings could have been addressed in the post? war period. Jan Ceuppens leaves the framework of Freudian trauma theory behind in favour of a Derridean analysis of haunting and repetition in Die Ausgewanderten. The volume closes with Maya Barzilai's excellent reading of the gendering of history in Sebald's writing. Analysing male bonding and the corresponding spectral female figure, Barzilai shows that the feminization of the Jewish past 'exposes, reinterprets and perhaps even reinstates certain racial and sexual stereotypes' (p. 204). There is not one poor article in this volume. Many of the contributions open new avenues of investigation or, alternatively, advance established debates. Apart from a couple of very minor errors (the acknowledgements mention 1993 as the publication date of Die Ausgewanderten; and the chronology fails to include Logis in einem Landhaus, published in 1998), the volume is carefully edited and beautifully produced. The range of essays is wide in scope and thematically coherent. Together with their contributors the editors have set a new standard for the rapidly evolving scholarship on Sebald. This will be an indispensable volume foryears to come. University College Dublin Anne Fuchs On their Own Terms: The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction. By Helmut Schmitz. Birmingham: Birmingham University Press. 2004. x + 34i PP- ?i995- ISBN 1-902-459-37-7. Helmut Schmitz's book on representations of National Socialism in post-unification German fiction is timely and thought-provoking. The scope is impressive?there are chapters on Ortheil's Abschied von den Kriegsteilnehmern, Schlink's Der Vorleser, Berkewicz'sEngel sindschwarz und weifi,Beyer's Flughunde, Harig's Weh dem, der aus der Reihe tanzt, Walser's Ein springenderBrunnen, Wellershoff 'sDer Ernstfall, Forte's Der Junge mit den blutigenSchuhen, Grass's Im Krebsgang, and Sebald's Austerlitz? and individual close readings are insightful. For colleagues teaching literary options on the Berlin Republic, this volume will provide a much-needed reference work towards which we can direct students. Those of us making our own contribution to the fieldwill findit equally stimulating and a pleasure to read even as we kick ourselves for not having got there first. A substantial introduction summarizes current theories of collective memory and outlines Schmitz's two prime concerns: the shift towards a 'historicization' of the Nazi period in contemporary portrayals, including a greater emphasis on individual experience, and the absence of the voice of Germany's Jewish victims in the literature of the perpetrator nation. These concerns, and the book's focus, are summed up in the pertinent and well-formulated question which defines the introduction: 'How 884 Reviews far does the literary construction of a German perspective obscure or facilitate an engagement with the interdependence of perpetrator and victim history, or make it possible to experience this difference?' (p. 16). Thus the scene is set. The rest of the book is divided into sections: 'Historicisation', 'Perpetrators', 'Hitler Youth Memories', 'War Memories', and 'Victim Perspective'. This structuring principle is beneficial in so faras it makes it possible to define differentcategories of recent writing on the Nazi past and set each of them in the broader context of debates...

Decadence in German Fiction

The aim of the study is to typologize the translation of the names of pre-metric units of length in Russian and German fiction by identifying common semantic transformations. The scientific novelty of the study lies in examining pre-metric units of length in the genetic, semantic and functional aspects. At the genetic level, the role of the anthropometric factor in the formation of such names is confirmed. At the semantic level, the commonality of transformational processes in the history of education and functioning of the vocabulary under consideration is investigated. At the functional level, translation techniques are analyzed in relation to the words selected for analysis in a broad literary context. A comprehensive study of this kind, combining the importance and mutual influence of all these levels, is being carried out for the first time. As a result, the commonality of semantic transformations in the sphere of the vocabulary in question (from the metonymic process, which virtually forms this lexical group, to the metaphorical process defining their new, abstract meaning) and, in particular, its inclusion in the processes of phraseologization are confirmed. The study also reveals how and to what extent the variety of translation modes reflects the semantic nuances of the vocabulary under consideration.

German Fiction, 1964