German Writers Research Articles

ҲЕССЕАСАРЛАРИДА МАЪНАВИЙ-МАДАНИЙ МАСАЛАЛАР ТАҲЛИЛИ(“ЧЎЛ БЎРИСИ” АСАРИ МИСОЛИДА

In the article, the author describes the life and work of Hermann Hesse, the analysis of spiritual and cultural issues in his work in artistic images. The famous German writer has a high position in world literature with his works. In The “Steppenwolf”, Hermann Hesse explores the problems of the spiritual and cultural crisis of the youth of that time through various figurative images and seeks solutions. Music and its factor played an important role in his philosophy.

Jennifer jazzSpill Ink on It

jennifer jazz Spill Ink on It New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2020. 222 pages. SMART, BITING, VIOLENT, and often perplexing, this memoir is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Beyond the authors having Antigua and matrophobia in common, jazz, like Kincaid, reveals truths in the work that others might well consider taboo. Spill Ink on It is an excellent personal, social commentary on life, spanning her early years of the 1960s through the 1980s, in the US and abroad. Divided into four sections—“Amber,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Red”— the memoir charts the development of the author from early adolescence until twenty-two years of age and zeroes in on life in New York during the 1980s. A high school creativewriting teacher advised jazz to “organize your moods into colors”—and the reader will invest in the author’s many moods. Her stories and her facility with language are compelling. She is raised with two other siblings (and later relatives from the Caribbean) in a family of women: GreatGrandmother (Granny), Grandmother (Nanny), a self-absorbed mother (“she gets flustered when I ask for advice”), and aunts. From each she learns life lessons that aid or impede her quest for an identity that suits her temperament. Always the rebel, she is an outcast at school; she drops out of a liberal arts college after the first semester, has trouble keeping a job, travels abroad in search of a man she is convinced she loves, and eschews money (read as capitalism) in general. Later in the LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI László F. Földényi Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears Trans. Ottilie Mulzet. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2020. 304 pages. LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI is a widely lauded Hungarian essayist, cultural critic, and professor at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television in Budapest. Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears gathers Földényi’s essays written between the years 1990 and 2015. According to its back cover, the collection “considers the fall-out from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies.” Whereas not all essays tackle this thesis head on, all contain at least undercurrents and passages underscoring it. Throughout, the author proves himself to be highly educated in matters of art and “high culture,” particularly German writers, artists, and thinkers. “A Natural Scientist in Reverse,” which follows an analysis of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” which recounts Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic double suicide, are two prominent examples of this. The litany of names he invokes is impressive. There is hardly a German intellectual of the last two centuries whose name does not make an appearance in one of his essays. Földényi is at his best when he sticks to his core—the history of art, literature, philosophy. Sadly, as the cover proclaims, his collection comes with a mission that upholds a long tradition of postmodernist attacks, not only on science as a way of attaining knowledge but also on modernity more generally: “[T]he physicist who declared that measurability is the last criterion of reality was the victim of a misapprehension .” (“Mass and Spirit”) “[He] projects his own conceptions and thoughts onto nature, violating it as much as scientists do.” (“A Natural Scientist in Reverse”) Building on the old sentiment that science only takes away without adding , the author leans into a yearning for a time predating modern science, when our understanding of natural phenomena and our own species was dominated by mythology—a time when people looked not to scientists but to authority, clergy, and Books in Review 104 WLT SUMMER 2020 work she declares herself androgynous and enters into a brief lesbian relationship. One of the most compelling aspects of the memoir is the author’s observations on life. Of being called the N-word she observes, “It would be the first but not last time some random antagonist would try to redeem history where I’m...

László F. FöldényiDostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by Ottilie Mulzet

jennifer jazz Spill Ink on It New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2020. 222 pages. SMART, BITING, VIOLENT, and often perplexing, this memoir is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Beyond the authors having Antigua and matrophobia in common, jazz, like Kincaid, reveals truths in the work that others might well consider taboo. Spill Ink on It is an excellent personal, social commentary on life, spanning her early years of the 1960s through the 1980s, in the US and abroad. Divided into four sections—“Amber,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Red”— the memoir charts the development of the author from early adolescence until twenty-two years of age and zeroes in on life in New York during the 1980s. A high school creativewriting teacher advised jazz to “organize your moods into colors”—and the reader will invest in the author’s many moods. Her stories and her facility with language are compelling. She is raised with two other siblings (and later relatives from the Caribbean) in a family of women: GreatGrandmother (Granny), Grandmother (Nanny), a self-absorbed mother (“she gets flustered when I ask for advice”), and aunts. From each she learns life lessons that aid or impede her quest for an identity that suits her temperament. Always the rebel, she is an outcast at school; she drops out of a liberal arts college after the first semester, has trouble keeping a job, travels abroad in search of a man she is convinced she loves, and eschews money (read as capitalism) in general. Later in the LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI László F. Földényi Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears Trans. Ottilie Mulzet. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2020. 304 pages. LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI is a widely lauded Hungarian essayist, cultural critic, and professor at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television in Budapest. Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears gathers Földényi’s essays written between the years 1990 and 2015. According to its back cover, the collection “considers the fall-out from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies.” Whereas not all essays tackle this thesis head on, all contain at least undercurrents and passages underscoring it. Throughout, the author proves himself to be highly educated in matters of art and “high culture,” particularly German writers, artists, and thinkers. “A Natural Scientist in Reverse,” which follows an analysis of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” which recounts Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic double suicide, are two prominent examples of this. The litany of names he invokes is impressive. There is hardly a German intellectual of the last two centuries whose name does not make an appearance in one of his essays. Földényi is at his best when he sticks to his core—the history of art, literature, philosophy. Sadly, as the cover proclaims, his collection comes with a mission that upholds a long tradition of postmodernist attacks, not only on science as a way of attaining knowledge but also on modernity more generally: “[T]he physicist who declared that measurability is the last criterion of reality was the victim of a misapprehension .” (“Mass and Spirit”) “[He] projects his own conceptions and thoughts onto nature, violating it as much as scientists do.” (“A Natural Scientist in Reverse”) Building on the old sentiment that science only takes away without adding , the author leans into a yearning for a time predating modern science, when our understanding of natural phenomena and our own species was dominated by mythology—a time when people looked not to scientists but to authority, clergy, and Books in Review 104 WLT SUMMER 2020 work she declares herself androgynous and enters into a brief lesbian relationship. One of the most compelling aspects of the memoir is the author’s observations on life. Of being called the N-word she observes, “It would be the first but not last time some random antagonist would try to redeem history where I’m...

Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah

Reviewed by: Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah Christian David Zeitz Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Edited by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobfirah. Berlin: Ullstein, 2019. Pp. 208. Cloth €20.00. ISBN 978-3961010363. Marketed as Erzählendes Sachbuch by Ullstein, Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum combines anecdotal criticism with critical race theory, collecting fourteen conceptually themed chapters—for example, "Arbeit," "Vertrauen," "Liebe"—by German writers, journalists, and cultural critics of color and/or with migration histories. Initiated in reaction to Horst Seehofer's renaming of the Innenministerium to Heimatministerium, the book seeks to problematize the recent positive reappropriation of Heimat: as both historical amnesia of its necropolitical place in Nazi racial imagination and policy and the not-so historical organized killing of migrants orchestrated by [End Page 225] the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU) in the name of Heimat, and as wider normalization of defining Heimat negatively in terms of antiblackness, antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. At the same time, most contributions are aimed at updating such essentialist and exclusionary ideals of Heimat, with a pointed focus on lived realities in Germany that these conceptions invisibilize and marginalize. Sasha Marianna Salzmann's contribution, which starts off the volume, is concerned with the forms of alliance-building that a shared markedness and visibility under white German representational regimes provide for marginalized identities, despite their mainstream framing as diametrically opposed: queer, Jewish, Muslim. Debunking myths of (inherently) Muslim anti-LGBTQ sentiment and antisemitism, Salzmann recounts lively discussions about everyday racism in German refugee centers between her mother, a Jewish quota refugee from the former Soviet Union, and her two roommates, Syrian Muslim refugees, and also discusses Jewish-queer-Muslim dance culture in Berlin clubs and Muslim-looking men stepping in for Salzmann in cases of homophobic microaggression. A shared sense of vulnerability and visibility across supposedly oppositional sexual, ethnic, and religious markers affords care and security networks that the state mostly reserves for the majority population. Fatma Aydemir, in her chapter on "Arbeit," remembers an incident when a fellow ethnic German intern told her that she was only invited to a job interview due to an unfair (i.e., unfair to ethnic Germans) Migrantenbonus. Aydemir deconstructs this term not as a bonus that is given to migrants, but as a bonus that migrants give to the German economic and civil system, based on the premise that they must and do work harder to challenge the hegemonic whiteness of fields like the media. The chapter effectively outlines the unacknowledged visible and invisible migrant and postmigrant labor, so indispensable to neoliberal capitalist technologies that sustain the racialized good life in the Heimat. In "Vertrauen," Deniz Utlu dissects trust issues racialized Germans have with the German state apparatus: using the NSU murders as an example, he describes a circle of suspicion (negative trust), in which the police first suspected the victims, despite indications of a neo-Nazi connection, in line with a general suspicion of migrants and racialized populations, leading the latter to suspect the police of strategically disavowing their lived knowledge of physical (and symbolic) racist violence. This leads Utlu to conclude that the state's appeal to unconditional trust on the side of migrant and racialized citizens is quasi-religious in nature and incompatible with its grounding in secular, democratic rationality. The chapters "Liebe" by Sharon Dodua Atoo and "Beleidigung" by Enrico Ippolito emphasize racism as a structural as opposed to individual problem and remind us of how difficult it can be for ethnic Germans to accept this ensuing reality of complicity. "Blicke" by Hengameh Yaghoobfirah and "Zuhause" by Mithu Sanyal are more directly inflected by cultural studies approaches: Yaghoobfirah offers a personal mediation of regimes of representation, [End Page 226] focusing on the white gaze and the intersectional politics of lookism, while Sanyal's contribution is a short yet concise genealogy of the terms Heimat and Deutsch, and proposes doing away with monocultural narratives of what (supposedly) was in favor of creating transcultural narratives of what is yet to come. In "Gefährlich," Nadia Shehadeh describes how a discursive practice that maps threat, danger, fear, and terror on Arab and Muslim bodies (as well as...

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing ed. by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

Reviewed by: Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing ed. by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu Cristina Plamadeala (bio) Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu, editors Camden House, 2016, xiv + 238 pp. ISBN 9781571139269, $90.00 hardcover. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi had about 180,000 informers, Romania's Securitate had 144,289, and Hungary's State Protection Authority had 7,203. They were spies. Many of them were even writers of some sort, playing their part in producing secret police dossiers, which are now part of archives that welcome curious researchers, former victims, and collaborators to peruse them. Indeed, it is a fascinating and chilling experience—the opening of a secret police file, the reading of which requires patience to understand the cryptic language employed. Interpreting such a file is a difficult task for a researcher, who, having found something similar to a time capsule, assumes the task of deciphering the message, explaining the purpose of the objects found in it, and writing the story of how it was put together, all with very few tools to guide them. The book in question adds to the tools available to help read such archival dossiers, but not only that. What can the files that the secret police agents and their informers helped produce tell us about the times when they could decide the fate of a human being, one's promotion or demotion, incarceration or prison release, right to travel abroad, and even death? How should we treat these "witnesses" of a rather recent gruesome past now, thirty years after the abrupt collapse of the regimes that made their production possible? Can these files ever deliver justice if they were created in conditions of violence, human rights violations, suspicion, discrimination, and oppression? What role can they have in understanding a nation's tumultuous history and how civilians were involved in the human rights violations of their governments? Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc tackles these questions, offering the reader an impressive, well-documented account of what it was like to live under surveillance under communism in the German Democratic Republic, Romania, and Hungary, where there was extensive collaboration with the communist regimes. Divided in three equally insightful parts, this edited volume sheds light on how these files can be read to illuminate the times and conditions in which they were produced: as "file stories" that serve as models for narrating biographies of those targeted by the police (Part I); as a means for perpetrators and victims alike to revisit their past and discern the truth, in juxtaposition with the memories that both may have of the events narrated in these files (Part II); and as the basis for aesthetic and artistic productions aimed at helping readers learn about history (Part III). How do we go about writing a biographical narrative of a person depicted in one of these files? Such a narrative is based on documents that were written decades earlier, with goals far different than the one the researcher may have in mind. If we [End Page 474] are to treat such files as life writing accounts, what are the implications of doing so? What do these files tell us about collaboration and the intricate dynamics in which the secret police's targets often fell into by acquiescing to be recruited? The first three chapters authored by Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. Petrescu, respectively, deliver convincing responses to these very questions by taking as case studies the files of several German and Romanian writers whose lives were intimately affected by being under the surveillance of their countries' secret police. The lives of German writers Paul Wiens, Sascha Anderson, and Wien's daughter Maja Wiens are under the magnifying glass in Lewis's chapter, and as the author argues, the files on these individuals shed light on these writers' habitus and identity, as defined by their at times fluctuating relation to the secret police. As these files show, collaboration with the Stasi police was not always a straightforward endeavor or a transactional process...

Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy by Karina von Tippelskirch

Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy by Karina von Tippelskirch

Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy by Karina von Tippelskirch

Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy by Karina von Tippelskirch

Current Bibliography

Current Bibliography Steve Paul and Kelli A. Larson [The current bibliography aspires to include all serious contributions to Hemingway scholarship. Given the substantial quantity of significant critical work appearing on Hemingway’s life and writings annually, inconsequential items from the popular press have been omitted to facilitate the distinction of important developments and trends in the field. Annotations for articles appearing in The Hemingway Review have been omitted due to the immediate availability of abstracts introducing each issue. Kelli Larson welcomes your assistance in keeping this feature current. Please send reprints, clippings, and photocopies of articles, as well as notices of new books, directly to Larson at the University of St. Thomas, 333 JRC, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105-1096. E-Mail: Kalarson1@stthomas.edu.] _______ BOOKS Anderson, David L. Archetypal Figures in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: Hemingway on Flight and Hospitality. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2019. [Drawing on Karl Jung’s theories, Anderson analyzes the guest/host relationship and flight elements permeating Harry’s italicized memories, reading them as a continuation of universal archetypal plots used by other canonical authors familiar to EH such as Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Victor Hugo. Traces EH’s use of hospitality and related man-on-trail (i.e. the individual pursued by death and in need of aid) plots throughout his oeuvre, devoting his greatest attention to key symbols and scenes from “Snows,” including the leopard carcass, mountain, and Harry’s death flight. Concludes that a close analysis of the italicized segments confirms Harry’s redemption as both artist and man. Includes a chronology of Harry’s life, endnotes, and index.] Elder, Robert K. Hemingway in Comics. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2020. [Exploration and compilation of the use of EH’s image and fictional persona in cartoon and graphic-novel treatments. Includes artistic inventions from around the world as well as faithful visual versions of EH’s work, such as OMS and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Heavily illustrated. Author’s encyclopedic, chronological perspective is augmented by contributed essays. See individual contributions arranged alphabetically by author under ESSAYS. Includes bibliography. Clear appeal to general, pop-culture readers in addition to EH scholars.] Emmerson, Charles. Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917–1924.New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. [History of the turbulent years as World War I ended and modernity emerged, told through a series of vignettes focused on important politicians, revolutionaries, artists, philosophers, and others of the era. Frequent references to EH throughout, covering topics including his wounding at the Italian front, marriage to Hadley Richardson, interest in bullfighting, and early journalistic career. Features a bibliography, extensive endnotes, and helpful index.] Faris, David. The Hemingway Industry. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2019. [Survey of important trends and developments in EH studies over the decades, highlighting, describing, and quoting liberally from a wealth of criticism by such well-known EH scholars as Linda Wagner-Martin, Suzanne del Gizzo, Alex Vernon, Kirk Curnutt, and Susan F. Beegel. Faris devotes a chapter to each major work (arranged chronologically from IOT to UK), briefly summing up content and commenting on its composition history and critical reception.] Feigel, Lara. The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich. New York: Bloomsbury P, 2016. [Cultural history of postwar occupied Germany, covering the experiences of American, British, and German writers and artists sent to observe the destruction and help in the reconstruction of a peaceful German society. Feigel focuses on such notables as EH, Martha Gellhorn, and George Orwell and their struggles to bring about cultural renewal amidst the bombed-out wreckage of Germany and “all-consuming pragmatism of Cold War politics.” Discusses EH’s tumultuous and competitive relationship with his third wife, Gellhorn, friendship with Marlene Dietrich, and role as war correspondent. Draws on histories, biographies, memoirs, letters, and interviews. Includes extensive notes and helpful index.] Fondazione Luca, ed. Hemingway and the Great War. Museo Hemingway e della Grande Guerra-Fondazione Luca Onlus, 2016. [Volume of essays devoted to Italy’s involvement in World War I and EH’s biographical and literary connections to the country. See individual contributions arranged...

„Przybywaj, ogniu!” Szkic o historii polskich tłumaczeń dzieł Friedricha Hölderlina

The article of Wojciech Maryjka presents the development of Polish translations of the works of the German poet, writer and philosopher, Friedrich Holderlin, whose 250th birthday anniversary falls on 20 March 2020. The author of the text provides the reasons why Holderlin evoked interest in the Polish literature rather late. He indicates a significant role of translations of Stefan Napierski dated 1937 and 1938, but he noted that also Leo Belmont had translated several of Holderlin’s poems earlier, in 1900. Further in the article, the researcher highlights the significance of the Selected Poems by Holderlin published in 1964 that had been translated into Polish by Mieczyslaw Jastrun. Maryjka also indicates the significance of the pioneer monograph of the life of Holderlin written by Zdzislaw Żygulski. Further in the study, volumes of Holderlin’s poetry are discussed, as translated by Bernard Antochewicz, Andrzej Panta, Antoni Libera and Andrzej Lam, who had been the first who translated all poems of the German poet. The author of the article did not skip other works that contributed to exploration of the works and life of Holderlin in Poland including, inter alia, the fictionalized biography entitled Holderlin by Peter Hartling, translated by Slawa Lisiecka, or the volume containing Holderlin’s letters and his Hyperion prepared by Anna Milska and Wanda Markowska.

Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society by Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew

CALDWELL, Peter C., and Karrin HANSHEW – Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. 366. Writing a survey of a nation’s history is an immense task. Writing a comparative historical survey of a divided nation is exponentially more difficult. In their history of Germany since 1945, Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew succeed in their effort of bringing together the divergent histories of postwar Germany, weaving a narrative that is approachable and informed. In the introduction, Caldwell and Hanshew trace the events that led to Germany’s division, from the rise of German nationalism in the nineteenth century to the defeat of the Third Reich. The authors end the introduction by presenting German post-1945 historiographical perspectives, intended as a tool for the reader to use while engaging with the book’s contents. The book is divided into three parts: “Divided Germany, 1945-70,” “New beginnings, 1969-92,” and “The Berlin Republic, 1990-2017.” Along with the core text, the authors provide a number of primary sources and eyewitness accounts in separate text boxes throughout the book, which enhances the authors’ narrative. Each chapter is equipped with a short bibliography. These mostly include monographs, but also memoirs and works of fiction by authors such as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf, giving the more curious of readers a broad selection of further readings. The first part of the book comprises the first 25 years of the two newly formed German states, ending with the social changes that occurred in the second half of the 1960s. Caldwell and Hanshew’s focus here on the creation of two separate Germanies is justified. The early postwar years were marked by Allied pressure and top-down decision-making, such as the introduction of the Basic Law in the West and the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the East. By the 1950s, the two Germanies⎯the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)⎯were experiencing colossal and different changes. West Germany’s economic boom of the postwar years, which ushered in a period of stability and prosperity, is discussed in detail here. The authors give a nuanced account, juxtaposing the creation of a social market economy⎯sanctioned by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and shepherded by the finance minister Ludwig Erhard⎯with less than noble practices that also facilitated it. One example given was the exploitation of ethnic German expellees from eastern Europe, who provided a pool of cheap labour, thereby lowering wages and undermining the unions’ power. The authors argue that this is indicative of a number of other “‘hidden’ sources of West Germany’s economic miracle” (p. 64), also pointing out the importance of women in German reconstruction, beyond the mythical “rubble women” that helped clear the debris after the Second World War. The postwar changes in East Germany reached even further. The uprising on June 17, 1953 and the subsequent violent crackdown by Soviet forces exposed the SED’s lack of legitimacy, while reinforcing Moscow’s willingness to prop up the East German regime. The second Berlin Crisis (1958-1962) marked another watershed moment for East Germany. While the crisis certainly represented the absolute moral bankruptcy of the East German leadership, its end also marked the beginning of the GDR’s most stable period, comprising relatively strong economic growth and a flourishing culture. But the authors contextualize this period: neither was the East German economy superior to the West, nor did East German artists and writers enjoy the same freedoms as their counterparts in the West. Similarly, the economic miracle years in the West were not devoid of dissent. The student protests and the countercultural movement that culminated in 1967 with the murder of student Benno Ohnesorg are also discussed in detail. The main point of contention for the West German youth was the older generations’⎯and to a large extent the government’s⎯refusal to effectively deal with the country’s Nazi past. The second part of the book focuses on the transition from the era dominated by the governments of Willy Brandt and Erich Honecker of the early 1970s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent...

‘man bedauert es, daß die stimmen nur selten, nur in ganz besonders hellen und klaren nächten zu Hören sind’: Haunted Landscapes and Holocaust Memory in Romanian German Literature

Confronting the local history of the Holocaust, ethnic German writers Franz Hodjak, Werner Söllner, and Herta Müller focus on the rural landscape and the proximity of killing to daily life in Romania, rendering innocuous agricultural activities and the beauty of the countryside—often idealized in the German culture of Heimat—uncanny and threatening. Rural tranquillity facilitates amnesia surrounding the fascist past and means that landscapes conceal historical realities. In thematizing the tension between local and international memory these authors pre-empt recent efforts by historians and cultural theorists to diversify and complicate Holocaust memory.

Linguostilistische Züge des Idiostils von H. M. Enzensberger als Marker der Postmederne

The paper presents the peculiarities of the idiosyncrasy of the modern outstanding German writer of postmodernism H. M. Enzensberger on the material of the poem «Vor dem Techno und danach». It should be noted, that the poetic speech of postmodernism differs in its «postmodern sensuality», a kind of worldview, hypertextuality, the tendency to communicate with the recipient through play. Therefore, an attempt was made to explore the idiostyle of the representative of postmodernism, as idiostyle reflects not only the individual features of speech communication of the linguistic personality, but also the general trends of a particular cultural era. It was found, that one of the features is that the author refers to the play on words in general and the game with the intelligence of the reader in particular. He constantly appeals to the addressee as an implicit interlocutor. Using a variety of tools, the author not only creates an opaque context, but also encodes information, constantly forcing the reader to participate in the decoding of hypertext. The author creates a deep subtext, using allusion. Typical of his idiosyncrasy is that the musicality of the poem is created not by rhyme but by syntax: parentheses, prolepsis, parceling and period. There is a masterful variation of not only syntactic but also grammatical and lexical means, which makes H. M. Enzensberger's individual style stylistically colorful and unique. In order to avoid stylistic monotony and to break the intonation, the author discharges homogeneous rows with parentheses and prolepsis, thus giving an expressive color to the content. In search of new means of expression H. M. Enzensberger turns to such non-traditional linguistic means as grammatical metaphor and period, through which he creates a sense of time space and reproduces the contextual antithesis. Using descending gradation, modeled authorial meaning of tokens, syntax, contextual homogeneity and allusion, the author realizes his ironic attitude to the image. Thus, in this poem the writers trace the play, hypertextuality and emotionality of the content that is inherent in postmodernism. However, paying attention to the language means that identify the idiostyle of H. M. Enzensberger, it should be noted that he tends to a limited number of language means in the poem, making them multifunctional, and to refined non-traditional language means.

A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall by Hans von Trotha

Reviewed by: A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall by Hans von Trotha Patrick Müller Hans von Trotha. A Sentimental Journey: Laurence Sterne in Shandy Hall. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2018. Pp. vi + 141. €17. Although 2018 was, of course, a major Sterne year, the publication of this book has come most unexpectedly. These days, Sterne is definitely not an obvious sujet for any German writer, either in academia or belles lettres. This curious, slim volume does, in [End Page 234] fact, incorporate aspects of both perspectives, but first and foremost it must be read as an unorthodox jeu d'esprit, an essay about a man whose mind is, for the author, an object of fascination but not one for close academic scrutiny. Von Trotha is known to readers interested in British culture as the author of a short history of English landscape gardens titled Der englische Garten: Eine Reise durch seine Geschichte (The English Garden: A Journey through its History). A Sentimental Journey is, then, not strictly a book for scholars or academics, but enjoyable enough despite having no new insights to offer for Sterne adepts. The book follows Wagenbach's usual format, a smallish yet very handsome volume in the usual red linen binding. The print on the spine fades easily, a problem with which Wagenbach readers are also familiar. The title might be thought somewhat misleading: the text meanders between biographical observations, travelogue, reflections about art, stylistic investigations, and fictional reconstructions, as, for example, of Sterne's time at Shandy Hall, a device used to evoke the magic that the place holds for von Trotha. It is, therefore, digressive in character, a device that naturally reflects the author's admiration for Sterne. Von Trotha's sentimental journey takes us from London's National Portrait Gallery to Yorkshire and Shandy Hall, and leads us finally to Germany and the echoes there of Sterne's international fame in the country's gardening culture. He has been to all the places worth visiting in England if one wishes to write about Sterne, beginning with fascinating observations about the portraits of Sterne in the NPG. He moves on to British Sterneans, for example, Geoffrey Day, whose manic urge to collect Sterneana is chronicled in one of von Trotha's digressions. And he reads the sources worth reading, other than those strictly scholarly—Johnson, Woolf, and the like—those one would read when writing about Sterne the way he does. His analysis of Sterne's work, which unavoidably takes issue with Thackeray's damning account, is one for the uninitiated reader who wishes to be introduced to Sterne's difficult texts. Consequently, A Sentimental Journey is also a book on how to read Tristram Shandy, along with the Bramine's Journal and the Sermons. In quoting the new, monumental German translations by Michael Walter, von Trotha again highlights the intricacies of reading Sterne in a language other than his own, rendering even more successful his endeavor to interest readers in Sterne's ludicrous literary curiosity cabinet with its labyrinthine network of digressions, allusions, and loose ends. In fact, von Trotha's enthusiasm in reconstructing the eighteenth-century cult of Sterne is infectious and should perpetuate our own fascination with Sterne. For modern—or rather, younger—readers, the elegant, perhaps somewhat oldfashioned prose of von Trotha makes it simply a pleasure to read. With its naïve yet refreshing approach, this well-written book does perhaps help scholars to step out of their comfort zone and enjoy the fresh breeze of unconventionality that blows pleasantly from this essayistic enterprise. It is to be hoped that one effect of this sentimental journey will be to attract a young generation of German academics and general readers to Sterne. Maybe such a book would then no longer come out of the blue. This might, however, be wishful thinking. [End Page 235] Patrick Müller Dresden Copyright © 2020 W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, Kellye Corcoran, Melanie Holm, J. T. Parnell, David Venturo, and Donald R. Wehrs

Kant on Laws by Eric Watkins

Reviewed by: Kant on Laws by Eric Watkins Paul Guyer Eric Watkins. Kant on Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xv + 297. Cloth, $99.99. Kant on Laws is a collection of papers that Eric Watkins published from 1997 to 2018, "lightly rewritten," as he says, and accompanied with a new Introduction that states the general thesis that Kant has a univocal conception of law that applies to both laws of nature and the moral law. "Kant's most generic conception of law… includes two essential elements: (1) necessity and (2) the act of a spontaneous faculty whose legislative authority prescribes that necessity to a specific domain through an appropriate act" (2). These conditions are satisfied by both laws of nature and the moral law. They differ, however, in that laws of nature apply ultimately to objects that are given to us through intuition—appearances—while the moral law applies to actions that we are to perform as rational agents: theoretical laws are to tell us how nature is, the moral law tells us how nature ought to be. Thus, Watkins writes that Kant "recognizes that 'necessity' comes in different forms, depending on the kind of law at issue. Though 'necessity' might well mean 'determination' (in the sense of 'natural necessity') in the case of laws of nature, in the case of the moral law, it amounts to 'necessitation' or 'obligation' in the case of human beings" (2–3). That is, although no empirical objects have any choice about complying with the laws of nature, human beings do have the freedom to choose whether or not to conform to the moral law (in their choice of particular maxims), so the moral law obligates us without it being necessarily true that we will always, or ever, satisfy those obligations. The papers are grouped in five parts. The first part, "Kant's Concept of a Law," contains two papers, "What is, for Kant, a Law of Nature?" (2014) and "Kant on Transcendental Laws" (2007). The second part, "The Laws of Mechanics," begins with a paper on Kant's general principles of experience such as the universal law of causality (2010), and then contains three papers on Kant's more specific laws of physics: "The Argumentative Structure of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" (1998), "The Laws of Motion from Newton to Kant" (1997), and "Kant's Justification of the Laws of Mechanics" (1998). The second of these is of particular interest because it shows that Newton's three laws of motion were significantly revised by eighteenth-century German writers such as Wolff, Maupertuis, and Euler, and thus that Kant was by no means trying just to provide an a priori foundation for Newton's laws, but was also himself revising them. The third part of the book, "Teleological Laws," includes a 2008 paper on the "Antinomy of Teleological Judgment" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (previously published only in German) and a 2014 paper on "Nature in General as a System of Ends," which discusses the third Critique's culminating attempt to unify the laws of nature and the laws of freedom or moral law. Part four, on "Laws as Regulative Principles," includes two papers, "Kant on Rational Cosmology" (2000) and "Kant on Infima Species" (2013), which provide a more detailed account of Kant's derivation of the regulative principles of homogeneity, specificity, and continuity, and of the "maxims" that nature allows no chance, "blind necessity," leaps, or gaps, than one usually finds. The final part, "The Moral Law," includes two recent papers, "Autonomy and the Legislation of Laws in the Prolegomena" (2018) and "Kant on the Natural, Moral, Human, and Divine Laws" (2013). The first of these suggests that Kant's conception of our autonomy in imposing theoretical law upon nature in the 1783 Prolegomena prepares the way for Kant's discovery of moral autonomy in the 1785 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. The second argues that the Critique of Pure Reason argues for our theoretical "assent" to even if not "cognition" of the existence of God, while Kant's "moral theology" adds only moral predicates to our conception of God rather than Kant's sole...

ОСЦИЛЛЯЦИЯ ОБРАЗА: СМИ И В.Г. ЗЕБАЛЬД О ПИСАТЕЛЕ (У) П. ХАНДКЕ

This article investigates reception of the figure of Austrian writer Peter Handke (b. 1942), the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2019, within discourses of actual German culture (in «literary» and «mass media» contexts) in parallel with his own understanding of the Writer’s Mission, its aims, ideals, and complications. Being a Writer as a way to get through the totality of «invalid communication» («verhinderte Kommunikation») in the real world is the most important topic of Handke’s own literary creation: beginning with «The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick» (1970), «Slow Homecoming» (1979), «Repetition» (1986), «The afternoon of a writer» (1987) and ending in his later texts. Besides the above mentioned works of Peter Handke, the present paper analyzes three essays on his work written by a world famous German writer and literary scholar W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), who took close to his heart the described topic as well (especially the tradition of Linguistic Scepticism going back to the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein). The paper also considers a number of publications in the German press in October 2019 dealing with Peter Handke being awarded the Nobel Prize and the heated debate that followed.

The study of the translations of a work of german writer anna seghers into uzbek

The study of the translations of a work of german writer anna seghers into uzbek

МОСКОВСКОЕ ВДОХНОВЕНИЕ КРИСТЫ ВОЛЬФ

This article deals with the attitude of the German writer Christa Wolf to Russia and the Russian people, expressed in her work "Moscow diaries. Who we are and where we come from." Russia occupied a special place in the heart of the German writer. She quite objectively valued our country, noticed not only advantages, but also disadvantages. Notes of her trips to Russia allow us to see how our country has changed over the past thirty years. This work provides an opportunity for both Germans and Russians to look at Russia from a different perspective, to appreciate the cultural heritage, literature, openness and sincerity of the Russian soul, as well as the political situation.

Snöfrid aus dem Wiesental: Daoist Themes in a German Children's Book

Snöfrid aus dem WiesentalDaoist Themes in a German Children's Book Timo Dittrich (bio) The German writer Andreas Schmachtl, well known for his children's books starring small animals—notably a little white mouse called Tilda Appleseed, whose stories are now an animated TV series—recently published a new series, Snöfrid aus dem Wiesental (Snöfrid of Meadow Valley) (2015; 2016; 2017).1 Click for larger view View full resolution The books feature a furry creature that resembles a marmot and is about knee high. Its name Snöfrid designates the species, but because Snöfrids are so rare, it also serves as his personal name. The creature lives in the far north of the planet, in an area called Meadow Valley on the slopes of a mountain under a rock. Snöfrid spends his days enjoying life, eating oats, and foraging for berries. Occasionally he helps himself to some milk in the nearest human village. [End Page 199] Many aspects of this creature resemble Daoist themes, especially those related to immortals or transcendents (xian 仙). Many stories in ancient China, notably collected by Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343) in his Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳 (Traditions of Divine Transcendents; trl. Campany 2002), tell about their endeavors: they usually lived as hermits removed from society, were immune to heat and cold, exercised magical powers far beyond those of mere mortals, and interacted in often rather eccentric ways with ordinary society. These characteristics also apply to Snöfrid. He lives on a remote mountain, withstands the cold, displays power over animals and the elements, and interacts with others without any status constraints. In addition, he also embodies various other Daoist themes, such as a closeness to nature, free and easy wandering, sitting in forgetfulness, and more. It is not entirely surprising that Daoist themes are essential in a children's book. After all, in the Daoist classics, children are as close to the natural state as is humanly possible, able to be active for long hours without tiring and open to free and clear perception, quite free from societal constraints. A case in point in a modern context is the experiment run by the Washington Post: one of the world's top violinists played at 7:51 a.m. on a Friday morning in the arcade of a Metro Station in Washington, DC while dressed as a street performer. Of the 1,097 passers-by, only seven listened for more than a minute, two appreciated the skill and stayed as long as they could, while one person recognized the performer and stayed for the rest of the performance. No one stayed for more than nine minutes. And yet, each and every child who walked past wanted to stay on and listen. While the adults were too busy, the children exhibited an unperturbed curiosity, open to the wonders of life (Cline 2015, 180). The Hermit Life Snöfrid, too, has this quality. He is a little furry animal, about a foot tall who lives as a hermit under a boulder on a mountainside, a good distance from the nearest human village. He enjoys nothing more than to be left alone and rarely encounters anyone, not even another Snöfrid, who are generally quite rare (Schmachtl 2015, ch. 1). The hermit life echoes the proto-Daoist tradition of the masters of methods (fangshi 方士), forerunners of the school of Numinous Treasure [End Page 200] (Lingbao 靈寶) who stayed away from society to pursue the path of immortality. Living far away from society, they were "unlike any other class of being" (Campany 2009, 49), quite like the Snöfrids. However, as Robert Campany points out, if they really had nothing to do at all with society, how come we know about them? In ancient China, stories about them circulated in society and were collected by people who were either practitioners of the arts of transcendence or had seekers in their family. In his preface to the hagiographies about immortals, Ge Hong mentions that he, too, collected existing works (Campany 2002, 99). In that sense, a historical claim is made, namely that these aren't simply his inventions. The same holds true for the older Liexian zhuan 列仙傳 (Arrayed Biographies...

Аспекти перекладу фразеологічних єдностей в творі "Копійчаний роман" Б. Брехта

The article analyzes communicative and pragmatic orientation of linguistics. The binary character of Ukrainian and German has established. The term scientific and „Scientific and technical terminology” has considered. The meaning, varieties of lexical system as a part of language have characterized. The orign mechanisms of the process and development of phraseology in national languages have outlited. The views of scientists on understanding the problem of phraseology as a system have elucidated. The types of phraseological unities, their using in language and artistic text have determined. The pragmatic potential of translated phraseological unities in the drama „The Threepenny Opera” by the German classic B. Brecht has founded. The review of the philosophical and poetic ideas of German writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has made. Quantitative and qualitative characterization has substantiated. The dominant types of phraseological unities in the examples given from the book „The Threepenny Opera” by B. Brecht have revealed. The „concept individualized language characters” has explored. Attention is paid to the peculiarities and theoretical foundations of „epic theater”.

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

Multilingualism and melodrama in Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own:Stories from My Life Sarah Staes Introduction This article1 focuses on Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own: Stories from my Life, an impressive compilation of (auto)biographical texts written throughout her literary career for very different occasions and published in 2015 by Random House. Not only does the compilation map out a significant part of Cisneros's personal trajectory, but it also displays the evolution of the cultural, social and linguistic self-consciousness of her authorial 'posture,' a concept developed by Jérôme Meizoz. As we will see, the collection foregrounds important events in the development of Cisneros as a Chicana author, topics that were already well known by those who read the poetry and fiction she published throughout her 40-year career: her growing up as a migrant, middle-class subject, the desire to write and live independently that clashed with the married life that her Mexican father had in mind for her, the discovery of and love for Mexican culture, the challenges of living between cultures and languages, and the increasing importance of her role as a canonical writer, feminist and cultural mediator. To both support and stress these motives, Cisneros displays the same particular multilingual strategies used in her other works, which have already been described in detail by Ernst Rudin (1996), Lourdes Torres (2007), María López Ponz (2009), María Laura Spoturno (2010) and An Van Hecke (2017) amongst others. Rather than identifying them, we aim to analyze how the (sometimes scarce, sometimes abundant) references to Spanish throughout the English texts increase the level of theatricality and sentimentalism described by Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976) as characteristic of melodrama. It is our hypothesis that this textual "melodramatic mode," which appeals to her readers' emotions and the image Cisneros constructs of herself outside the text, facilitates identification with her bicultural subjectivity rather than overcoming Mexican-American dualisms. [End Page 144] Multilingual situations vs. multilingual strategies in the U.S. Multilingualism has long been a common practice for human beings and societies. Two centuries ago, however, the relativist2 view of languages determining thoughts and the romantic myth of monolingualism started to extend deep into the foundations of the emerging modern nation-states. Individuals were said to have a singular primary language, an innate 'mother tongue,' as described by Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813. This 'true language' was supposedly part of a common identity shared by fellow citizens of monolingual, homogeneous territories. The monolingual paradigm became the "theoretical foundation for territorialized, nation- and ethnicity-based language/identity" (Lvovich 520). The binary view of 'native' vs. 'foreign' persists, although this historical construct has been under pressure ever since its rather artificial implementation, as Yasemin Yildiz shows in her groundbreaking book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012). Describing the trajectories of five 20th- and 21st-century German writers, who in their literary productions attempt to reimagine "the identitarian force of language" (Yildiz 6), Yildiz labels their critical endeavors to challenge and overcome the limiting functioning of the monolingual paradigm 'the postmonolingual condition' (Yildiz 4). Aiming to move beyond their 'native' language, these modern multilingual writers can be categorized as 'translinguals,' a term coined by Steven Kellman in The Translingual Imagination (Kellman 16). These examples serve to demonstrate the tension between the still active monolingual paradigm and a fragmented cultural and linguistic reality which nowadays gains more visibility due to globalization, mass migration and common economies. In recent decades, interdisciplinary studies on the relationship between multilingualism and identity, culture, history and society have approached the monolingual paradigm with skepticism, actively unmasking the myth of monolithic, stable identities (Meylaerts 1). Scholars have come to agree that the relationships between a multilingual's languages and his/her sense of self must be approached carefully, taking into account that the connection between language and sense of self is not exclusively reserved for the 'mother tongue' and considering every case as an individual trajectory (Lvovich 520–521)3. Of special interest for the purposes of this research paper is the situation of the Chicano community in the United States, as Sandra Cisneros is internationally considered...