Wir Sind Research Articles

O rozwoju naturalnie niezrównoważonym i równoważonym sztucznie

The author presents the hypothesis that in the absence of human interference, i.e. in natural conditions, development takes place spontaneously and is basically unsustainable, and it becomes sustainable only due to anthropogenic factors, i.e. artificially. Sustainable development takes place primarily in the sociosphere. People began to balance development only when they realized that rapid economic development was reaching a critical moment because of the rapid exhaustion of fossil and non-fossil raw material resources and unlimited overconsumption. This was initially ignored. It took several decades before it was taken seriously. Then the idea of controlled, or sustainable, development appeared. Since then, actions have been taken to reduce various categories of imbalances in an increasing number of areas of activity. Since then, the idea of sustainable development has become fashionable, important and lucrative, although utopian, because sustainable development is seen as a panacea for crises, inequalities and social contradictions. The publications of Donella Meadows (Limits to growth. A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind), of Ernst U. v. Weizäcker (Wir sind dran. Was wir ändern müssen, wenn wir bleiben wollen), and of Gaya Herrington, (Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse) contributed significantly to the implementation of this idea. They indicate that appropriate actions taken by 2040 will determine the future fate of humanity. To prove the validity of his hypothesis, the author used some publications on 17 general goals and 169 tasks.

Widerständige Sprachpraxis und literarische Selbstermächtigung: Postmigrantische Perspektiven auf Ein- und Mehrsprachigkeit in Lena Goreliks Roman Wer wir sind (2021)

ABSTRACT This article analyses Lena Gorelik’s latest novel Wer wir sind (2021) in terms of cultural debates on postmigration diversity and multilin-gualism in modern Germany in recent years. The novel Wer wir sind can be read as a process of dealing with the family experience of migration, shown across generations, as well as the difficult process of learning German and settling into a culturally different context. The analysis of the novel focuses on linguistic and narratological means through which the opposition to the national concepts of monolingualism and the identity of migrants as ‘others’ is expressed. The process of learning German, the role of the German-speaking writer and multilingual identity are presented in the novel as strategies of opposition to the hegemonic national discourse. On the one hand, learning German and writing literary works in this language appear to be subversive activities in relation to oppressive cultural and social norms and acts of self-empowerment. On the other hand, literary images of linguis-tic resistance and self-determination are marked by an awareness of linguistic unattainability and uncertainty. ‘Mastering’ a language, as well as writing literature, is an ambivalent process and work in progress.

The Meme’s-Eye View of Strategic Communication: A Case Study of Social Movements from a Memetic Perspective

ABSTRACT The article argues that a memetic approach, or meme’s-eye view, could help bring together the strategic management view and the CCO-school. ‘Memes’ are understood as a second-order concept, i.e., as a reference to ‘memory traces’ in people’s minds and anchor-point of joint or collective intentionality. This view, it is argued, permits the conceptualization of communication as a resource. To illustrate, two cases are analyzed: 1) the Montagsdemos in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with its core meme Wir sind das Volk (We are the people); 2) the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ and the QAnon movement with its ‘Save the Children'-meme’. The analysis illustrates how memes endure and resurface in new and different environments. In conclusion, the article proposes that the shift to memetic population dynamics allows strategic communication-researchers to reformulate often unanswerable questions (“What does the strategic actor want?”) into more operationalizable ones (“What memes are launched? How are they constructed?”).

Kritik und Autonomie: Die Programmatik in Elfriede Jelineks Romanen und Essays (1968–1975)

While Elfriede Jelinek scholars agree that the increasing social relevance of the early novels bukolit, wir sind lockvögel baby!, Michael and Die Liebhaberinnen is vaguely linked to a social, political, cultural or aesthetic critique, the ‘programmatic’ platform, if there is one, as well as its specific textual manifestations remain largely unexamined. Likewise, the ‘programmatic’ essays Statement and wir stecken einander unter der haut as well as Die endlose Unschuldigkeit together with udo zeigt wie schön diese welt ist wenn wir sie mit kinderaugen sehen arguably demonstrate the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic perspective of the author, but their relation to the novels have only been marginally und unsystematically considered. The article discusses the programmatic potential in the novels and the essays with respect to aesthetic methods, authorial voices, and a motivic framing of characters. It is argued that the tension between critique and autonomy forms the core of a programme committed to challenging both text and reader.

GROßSTÄDTE ALS TOPOI DER MIGRATIONSKRISE IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGER LITERATUR AM ANFANG DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS

The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.

Affordances of a New Language: Abbas Khider’s Claim to Community inGerman for Everyone

Affordances of a New Language: Abbas Khider’s Claim to Community in<i>German for Everyone</i>

Wir sind noch einmal davon gekommen/The Skin of Our Teeth

Wir sind noch einmal davon gekommen/<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i>

Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity by Melanie Schiller

Reviewed by: Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity by Melanie Schiller Sean Nye Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity. By Melanie Schiller. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Pp. ix + 277. Paper $44.95. ISBN 978-1786615961. The subfield of German popular music studies continues to evolve in intriguing directions. Melanie Schiller's Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity provides an excellent addition to this field, as it places questions of national identity at the center of analyses of German popular music. In her monograph, Schiller argues effectively for an account of Germanness and national identity as the "missing middle ground" (5) between pop music research that focuses excessively on either local or transnational/global themes. Providing a historical sweep from the late 1940s to the 2000s, the book is one of the few academic studies on German popular music to bridge multiple decades and periods. Soundtracking Germany will thus be of interest to scholars of both the Cold War and post-1989 eras. Two edited collections, German Pop Music: A Companion and Perspectives on German Popular Music, are comparable examples of topics and research in this direction. Appropriately, Schiller contributed an abridged version of her fifth chapter to the latter volume. Despite this broad scope, a compelling narrative thread is maintained across Soundtracking Germany. The introduction and five chapters are similarly structured around close readings of individual songs that address national identity in original ways, while including accounts of the respective cultural, political, and musical contexts. The introduction provides the theoretical frame for these interpretations. Schiller presents a revised account primarily of Homi Bhabha's theory of the nation and narration, proposing three temporal modes in the exploration of German popular music. These include the metaphoric and metonymic modes, as well as Schiller's original theory of a melancholic mode of national identity. A perpetual postwar condition, the melancholic mode results from, as effectively summarized in the book, "the impossibility of remembering/forgetting the past, which is always [End Page 436] already constitutive to the national present" (224). In the introduction, Schiller first applies these ideas to the Teutonic rock band Rammstein, as the most commercially successful representation of "Germanness" abroad. Although Rammstein has become one of the usual suspects encountered in German popular music studies, Schiller provides an innovative interpretation of the band through a close reading of their 2011 song "Mein Land." Following the introduction, the song selections in the main chapters represent five rearticulations of (West) German identity, beginning with a popular 1948 Schlager tune about the "natives of Trizonesia," performed by Karl Berbuer, and closing with the 2004 trance-pop "Wir sind Wir" by singer Peter Heppner and DJ-star Paul van Dyk. In the selection of songs, each chapter revolves around a prominent musical genre and relevant media from the era. The five chapters thus cover Schlager, beat, Krautrock, Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), and techno/trance. In chapter 1, Berbuer's Schlager and Carnival (Fasching) in postwar Cologne represent the coalescing of the three occupation zones (Trizonesia) in a new West German identity. Schiller then pairs beat music and 1960s television in chapter 2, analyzing the indirect silencing of German identity in the live performance of "Poor Boy" by the Lords on the show Beat Club. In the third chapter, Kraftwerk's Autobahn becomes the key example, with particular attention given to the album's visual art and car culture in the context of 1970s Krautrock. In chapter 4, Schiller then turns to DAF's "Der Mussolini" (1981), considering postpunk and queer aesthetics as challenging multiple national taboos, while in the final chapter, the music video for "Wir sind Wir" allows for a close reading of German history from the perspective of 2004. The music video features multiple scenes and historical moments from across the Cold War, including the 1954 World Cup and the reunification of 1989, with Peter Heppner inserted into the scenes as a time-traveling reporter. Across the chapters of Soundtracking Germany, Schiller consistently provides careful historical analysis and thoughtful interpretations of these representative songs. While analyzing just one song per chapter across such an extended history may seem challenging, Schiller very successfully relates the details of each song to...

‘Wir sind das Volk!’ Representative Claim-Making and Populist Style in the PEGIDA Movement’s Discourse

This study examines the processes of representative claim-making in populist discourse, tying in with discursive-performative approaches to political representation, populism and social movements. The theoretical framework integrates Saward’s constructivist theory of representation and Moffitt’s approach to populism as a political style. It develops contentious repertoires, stages, mise-en-scène, scripts, audiences and constituencies as analytical categories for the study of populist claim-making processes. Focusing on the Dresden-based right-wing populist ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (PEGIDA) as a case study, the paper carries out a discourse-based analysis of PEGIDA’s claim to represent the people (‘Wir sind das Volk!’) in the movement’s early phase (2014/15). In line with the emphasis on the theatrical and symbolic dimensions of contentious politics, the analysis highlights the various performative and aesthetic strategies which PEGIDA employs to make its representative claim resonate with its audiences and constituencies. Overall, this study reveals the conceptual and analytical complexity of claim-making performances which construct the category of the people rather than simply claiming its representation.

American Horror Story: Capital, counterculture, and the freak

Abstract The tagline for Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Freak Show (AHS: Freak Show) is ‘Wir Sind Alle Freaks’, a German phrase that clearly signals the show’s ‘freaktopic’ intention. ‘We are all freaks’ introduces a narrative that promises to collapse boundaries between the self and other, allowing viewers to see themselves as more like the freakish characters at the heart of Elsa Mars’ Cabinet of Curiosities than the outsiders threatening their lives. However, this invitation, combined with the narrative focus on normate characters instead invokes the countercultural appropriation of ‘freak’ as an anti-establishment rebellion. These narratives provide not a ‘freaktopia’, but rather an escape, both temporary and permanent, from ‘normative’ values for non-freakish characters, and an outright rejection of those norms. While this choice seems in some ways informed by contemporary notions of social justice, access, and inclusion, in which the ‘normative’ characters act in alliance with their underprivileged ‘freak’ peers, Ryan Murphy’s AHS: Freak Show ultimately troubles its very tagline. Through an analysis of the AHS: Freak Show’s narrative structures surrounding capital, family, and consumption, I argue that the myth of a ‘freaktopia’ collapses under the weight of its own neo-liberal dream, and is ultimately consumed by mainstream capital.

Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green

Reviewed by: Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future by Stephen Green Klaus Neumann Reluctant Meister: How Germany’s Past Is Shaping Its European Future. By Stephen Green. London: Haus, 2014. Pp. xiii + 338. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1908323682. Stephen Green, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, has had an illustrious and varied career. He served as chief executive officer and group chairman of the world’s third-largest bank, HSBC. From January 2011 until December 2013, he was minister of state for trade and investment in the first Cameron government. He is chair of the Natural History Museum in London. When it comes to the writing of German history, however, he is, in his own words, an “amateur without any claim to be an academic specialist” (321). While Green may lack training as a historian, he is exceptionally well read, as his account of some two thousand years of German history demonstrates. Drawing on historical scholarship and his knowledge of literature and music, he tries to explain fascism as well as contemporary Germany’s reluctance to assume the role of Europe’s political leader. Green is at pains to caution against interpreting the past through the prism of the twentieth century—and particularly, the years from 1933 to 1945. However, his history is Whiggish in that he is clearly interested in the past as a necessary precursor of the present. That becomes most apparent in his account of postwar Germany. Telescoping the past through the present, his narrative proceeds from Adolf Hitler via Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel. In Green’s reading, the East German experience—including the specific hopes and anxieties of East Germans—becomes a minor detour. Unsurprisingly therefore, when writing about the end of the German Democratic Republic, he only recalls the slogan “Wir sind ein Volk” as if the East German civil rights movement’s earlier “Wir sind das Volk” had no relevance for the events of 1989. Green’s history is immensely readable. It is elegantly written and has a narrative that keeps the reader’s interest alive. Yet his book is unlikely to hold much interest for scholars of German cultural studies. The culture in which he is interested is high-brow German Kultur: from J.S. Bach to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Arthur Schopenhauer to Jürgen Habermas, and from H.J.C. Grimmelshausen to Günter Grass. He wants to provide a “deeper history of the German lands” (xi), a history of ideas and mentalities that found their emblematic expressions in music, literature, [End Page 232] and painting. It is this deeper history that, in his view, is sorely needed in order to understand contemporary Germany. The author’s strong opinions and his particular brand of history will not be to everyone’s liking. This reviewer, for one, was troubled by the fact that Green’s views of Germany’s past are colored by his unadulterated admiration for the country, its people and, most importantly, its Kultur. Perhaps only a contemporary British writer could get away with statements such as “There is no culture on the planet greater than that of Germany” (xi) or “the contribution of Germany to human cultural enrichment … is unsurpassed by any of the great Eurasian cultures” (85). For all his knowledge about German Kultur, Green shows no sustained interest in what “new” cultural historians have had to say about twentieth-century Germany. He frequently refers to German “consciousness,” “social psychology,” “self-awareness,” “psyche,” and “folk memory” as if these were unproblematic categories, and as if they could be deduced from the operas of Richard Wagner, the plays of Heinrich von Kleist, and the art works of Anselm Kiefer. He concludes a section in which he discusses the writings of Heinrich Böll and the music of Hans Werner Henze, among others, by saying: “this is the story of a society which was increasingly coming face to face with its past” (267). His is largely the story of an intellectual and artistic elite; in order to understand “society,” we need social and cultural history at least as much as an analysis of contemporary classical music and Nobel Prize winning literature...

Dávid és Jónátán

The friendship of David and Jonathan is known from the Books of Samuel in the Old Testament. The presentation of the robe, the sword, the bow and the belt is the token of covenant. David’s death lament, an elegy over Jonathan’s bow given to him was called the bow song. Gottfried Bernhard Göz, a painter and graphic artist of Moravian origin working in Augsburg captured the story in an engraving with dotting. His rococo compositions were models for several painters. The oil painting in the diocesan museum of Székesfehérvár was probably made in Göz’s workshop. The same theme features on the obverse of a 17th century silver coin recently included in the author’s collection. (The German legend reads ICH WILL DIR THUN WAS DEIN HERZ BEGEHRT – SAM. 20. V. 4) The reverse of the medal also expresses fraternity through the figures of Abraham and Lot (inscribed: WIR SIND GEBRUDER – Gen. 13. v. 8.) with well-to-do shepherds and their livestock in the background. The art of Göz, his excellent knowledge of the Holy Writ and its use in allegories of vitues help us better interpret the baroque iconography.

Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany by Damani J. Partridge (review)

Reviewed by: Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany by Damani J. Partridge Mayanthi L. Fernando Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. By Damani J. Partridge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 196. Cloth $26.00. ISBN 978-0253223692. We know the conventional story. On October 9, 1989, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched around the city center of Leipzig, many of them shouting “Wir sind das Volk”—“We are the people.” It was the largest demonstration in the GDR’s history, and it set in motion the “peaceful revolution” that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the end of the Cold War. In the dominant liberal narrative of German unification, Leipzig is part of a story of unfolding freedom. Partridge’s book tells a different story. In Leipzig, he notes, the demonstrators’ chants quickly changed to “Wir sind ein Volk”—“We are one people.” That linguistic shift, Partridge contends, did not merely signal the demand for the reunification of a fractured nation. It also signaled a transformation in the conception of citizenship from one based on universal rights—liberty, equality, justice—to one based on belonging to an essential German nation. Leipzig foretold the coming of a new Germany, not as a space of freedom but as a space of violence and exclusion. The crux of Partridge’s argument is that the freedoms offered by new German citizenship—to travel, to consume, to live private lives—are contingent on the subjection of non-Germans, increasingly targets of surveillance and policing, border control, social discrimination, and harassment. “From the perspective of noncitizens,” Partridge writes, “1989 was the beginning of a new violence” (3). Anchoring the book analytically are two key concepts. First, “exclusionary incorporation” describes a system in which “the presence of noncitizens is formally recognized but there is no chance of equal participation” (2). The liberal state cares for its citizens’ education, employment, health, and housing; noncitizens are defined by a lack of such solicitude. Patridge’s second concept of “noncitizenship” “opens up a space for thinking about how the foreign subject is incorporated into social and political life without being totally excluded” (23). Here, Partridge joins political theorists like Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion, 2008), Patchen Markell (Bound by Recognition, 2003), and Etienne Balibar (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 1991) in muddying the distinction between exclusionary and inclusionary practices of the liberal nation-state. All point to the myriad ways in which the liberal state reinforces national identity and state sovereignty by including minorities within it, though never as full citizens. Importantly, Partridge argues that exclusionary incorporation proceeds not only through formal laws and policies but also through popular culture and everyday social life. Partridge is at his best when tracing exclusionary incorporation in the everyday, giving ethnographic life to the operation of liberal citizenship in Germany. He is particularly attuned to the way that state power works through ordinary social relations and the everyday guardians of the nation-state’s boundaries—teachers, taxi [End Page 709] drivers, and other “street bureaucrats”—who maintain and manage exclusionary incorporation. In one chapter, for example, Partridge describes how relationships with Black men, and the consumption of the eroticized Black male body, allowed White German women from the East to become normatively German. Like other chapters, this one draws on multiple evidentiary sources—interviews, participant observation, films, magazines—to map the complex entwinement of race and sex, inclusion and exclusion, everyday practice and state law, as well as the shifting power relations that underpin the construction of Germanness. In contemporary Germany, formal legislation makes it almost impossible for Africans to immigrate legally. However, encounters between German women and African men in everyday spaces like dance clubs interrupt the law’s boundary drawing, giving White German women the power to make noncitizens into legal residents by entering into intimate relationships with them. At the same time, Black noncitizens remain outsiders, since “Black male bodies can be incorporated if White women see them as beautiful and if they successfully perform hypersexuality” (81). Exclusionary incorporation mobilizes the noncitizen to produce the normative citizen: the Black noncitizen’s...

Narrating Silence: Gerhard Roth'sAm Abgrund

Gerhard Roth's novel, Am Abgrund, appeared in 1986, in the midst of Kurt Waldheim's campaign for the Austrian presidency. The furor surrounding Waldheim's candidacy, and his eventual election, is widely believed to have set in motion the belated engagement of Austria with its National Socialist past. Moreover, the myth of Austria as the first victim of Hitler-supported by the Allies-revealed itself as a convenient way out of any real sense of responsibility for the role of Austria in the atrocities that took place from the 1930s on.1 Roth was one of a small number of Austrian writers who had already been addressing their nation's dark past when the Waldheim affair began, both directly in his journalistic contributions and more indirectly, but still pointedly, in his literary work. His monumental cycle, Die Archive des consists of seven volumes, including a photo album, three novels,acollectionofessays,andaquasi-fictionalreportbasedon thelife of aJewish remigrant who returned to Austria in 1962 after forced emigration to England in 1938. The cycle represents, as one reviewer noted, a Panoptikum of the social and psychological world of Austria since the end of the Second World War (Heyl). By means of a systematic examination of the out- and underlying spacesin the Austrian landscape, Roth exposes a profound silence in the culture, revealing the extent to which it both prevents and, paradoxically, conditions an understanding of Austrian guilt.Rothhimself hascalled Austria aReich des Schweigens, citing hisown experience as a so-called Kriegskind, born in 1942: Meine Eltern waren Mitglieder der NSDAP. Ich bin wie die meisten Menschen meines Alters in einem Raum des Schweigens herangewachsen (Weichinger 70). Roth notes a close correspondence between Austrians' vociferous affirmation of the so-called Anschluss, which was later denied, and the silence following the Nazis' defeat and the establishment of the Second Republic: Je lauter man als Nazis geschrieen hatte, desto hartnackiger verteidigte man das Schweigen in der Folge (Pichler 180). He describes the kind of silence he experiences as characteristically Austrian: andachtiges,tiefes, nachdenkliches,betroffenes,auch kein vollstandigesSchweigen, sondernein verbissenes und zugleich angstliches, aus dem mitunter-wie in einem Alptraum-ein Zahneknirschen, ein Stammeln und Raunen, ein Gewisper oder Grunzen zu vernehmen war (Pichler 180).Hence, according to Roth, postwar Austrian subjectivity cannot be imagined withouta deep silence atitscore. Asapublic intellectual, Rothhimselfhasbeenanything but silent, his outspoken critiques of his native land netting him both praise and censure.2 Criticism of his works has come from sources as disparate as Thomas Bernhard, for his photo volume on Bruno Kreisky (1981), and the FPO, for the right-wing populist figure of Hoffnungsmann in his novel, Der See, who was perceived to be a travesty of Jorg Haider (see Schutte, Unterwelten 31-32). In his work, however, Roth immediately avoids political commentary, regarding himself instead as an Analytiker, der dieses Land wie durch ein Mikroskop betrachtet und eine Diagnose versucht (Pfoser-Schewig 197). Roth, the former medical student who worked for years as a technician at the Graz data processing center, dissects his culture with the utmost precision, his scientific and technical training aligning him paradoxically with the very rationalist tradition he so thoroughly throws into question in his writing. But Roth also experiences himself as reduced to groping through the incomprehensible as he probes the darkest recesses of life. In an interview from 2011, he said to me: Wir sind genauso blind und gehorlos dem Gesamten gegenuber, wie die Gehorlosen und Blinden im allgemeinen unserer Gesellschaft sind. In fact, Roth spent time in his youth exploring the language of the blind and deaf, and it is this same interest in the ways the imperceptible can nonetheless be rendered in language and image that drives his long-standing collaboration with the patientartists at Gugging, the asylum-cum-artists' retreat outside of Vienna, which also now functions as a museum. …

La riunificazione tedesca in mostra. Musei ed esposizioni a Berlino dopo il 1989

The article aim is to analyze how Berlin museums display the peaceful revolution (the movement that caused the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of GDR) and the following German reunification. The article focuses on four different historical-museums (Deutsches Historisches Museum, DDR-Museum, Mauer-Museum, Stasi-Museum). Furthermore it examines two temporary exhibitions («Wir sind das Volk!» and «1990: der Weg zur Einheit»), that took place in Berlin in 2009/2010. Looking at the different exhibition strategy and at the slightly different historical interpretations the museums offer, the author underlines how museums and exhibitions develop heterogeneous depiction of the 1989/90 events. The museums role in building the public memory is the key-concept of the article, and this inquiry wants to represent a way to analyze it.

Il Muro ai tempi del muro, il Muro ai tempi della Wende, il Muro oggi. Eventi, memorie, fiction, miti

This article focuses on the different identities "produced" by the Berlin Wall in the time of the construction, of the so-called Wende, of the German reunification. The interest of the subject lies in the different readings of the relationship between Oriental and Occidental German people. During the Wende there was an effort to create a single German identity ("Wir sind ein Volk"), but after the reunification came out an artificial antithesis between Ossis and Wessis in order to bring out the different biographic experiences.

Historical “Truth,” Constructed Memory: Restaging Germany’s Reunification in Thomas Berger’s Television Melodrama Wir sind das Volk. Liebe kennt keine Grenzen (We are the people. Love without limits) (2008)

Film and television are popular media for the (re)presentation of history and the depiction of momentous past events. Germany’s reunification is no exception. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany has witnessed a proliferation of media production that endeavors to historicize and aestheticize the past. This coincides with the need to forge a post-Wall identity of the new Germany. My discussion of Thomas Berger’s award winning television drama Wir sind das Volk. Liebe kennt keine Grenzen (2008) examines how reunification is presented in a mixture of fictitious elements and authentic historical reconstruction based on shared memories of this past. Following a melodramatic trajectory, the film aims at the reconciliation of German society as a people twenty years after reunification.

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n:Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff , and: "Ein förmlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus". Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musikalischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (review)

Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n: Essays In Honor of Christoph Wolff. Edited by Paul Corneilson and Peter Wollny. Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein, 2010. [xiv, 234 p. ISBN 9780981985015. $50.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Ein formlicher Sebastian und Philipp Emanuel Bach-Kultus. Sara Levy und ihr musikalisches Wirken, mit einer Doku mentensammlung zur musik - alischen Familiengeschichte der Vorfahren von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. By Peter Wollny. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Bach-Rezeption, Bd. 2.) Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 2010. [145 p. ISBN 9783765103902. i24.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. The volume Er ist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n (He is the father, we are the boys) takes its title from a statement allegedly made in 1789 by Mozart to Johann Fried - rich Doles, cantor at Leipzig's St. Thomas church, in reference to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. However, the title clearly serves a dual purpose, as the present volume serves as a Festschrift for Christoph Wolff, the highly influential scholar of the music of Bach, his sons, and, others, on the occasion of Wolff's seventieth birthday. Though lacking what would have been a valuable bibliography of Wolff's extensive scholarship, the volume is adorned with other equally reverential set pieces: a dedicatory acrostic poem by Lisa DeSiro and a closing musical tribute by Robert D. Levin. The main body of the volume consists of ten separately authored chapters, of which five are in German and five in English, focusing primarily on aspects of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's compositional thinking. In the first chapter, Uwe Wolf presents specific details of the revisions made by C. P. E. Bach in the autograph manuscript of J. S. Bach's B-minor Mass, BWV 232. In clarifying the stages of the revisions, Wolf offers information useful to the understanding of the text that appears in that manuscript, which has appeared in several facsimile editions and is available in a high-resolution scan online (available at http://www.bach-digital.de/receive /BachDigitalSource_source_00001048, accessed 15 September 2011) as well as a means toward understanding the editorial decisions that one encounters in the numerous editions of the B-minor Mass. Darrell M. Berg's article treats the process of melodic variation in C. P. E. Bach's music, examining the utilization of this technique in his formal structures and considering the resulting pieces in the context of late eighteenth-century instrumental forms. Laura Buch discusses the closely allied notion of improvisation as manifest in Bach's trios. In this she addresses both simple embellishment and the effect on the trio genre of the increasing significance of the keyboard part. Ulrich Leisinger's contribution examines musical declamation as exhibited in Bach's text setting, which, as with the previous chapters, situates Bach within the transition between baroque and modern styles. Peter Wollny's chapter on the Easter cantata Gott hat den Herrn auferwecket examines the documents associated with that compostion, in a manner which Wollny has perfected, in elucidating biographical details of the composer's professional ambitions. Paul Corneilson reviews the music composed by Bach for Johann Heinrich Michel as a means of examining the parameters in which Bach worked in composing for his Hamburg soloists while also providing musical insight into the biography of Bach's primary Hamburg copyist. Jason B. Grant describes the depiction of the the city of Hamburg in four occassional works by C. P. E. Bach which reference the city and specific sites in the city, providing insight into its citizens' attitudes toward it. Wolfram Ensslin and Tobias Rimek examine his use of pastiche and arrangements of pre-existing music as demonstrated in the chorale settings in the composer's vocal works, providing among other copious details a 25-page index of chorales and their source attributions. Christine Blanken provides valuable details of the reception of C. …

C. P. E. Bach's Evangelist: Johann Heinrich Michel

С. Р. E. Bach's Evangelist: Johann Heinrich Michel1 PaulCorneilson In precious documentation contrast little toJohann is known for Carl Sebastian about Philipp his Bach's church Emanuel tenure singers, Bach's at Leipzig, there Kapelle is where ample at preciouslittle is knownabouthischurchsingers, thereis ample documentationfor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Kapelleat Hamburg. One ofBach'smostimportant tenors inHamburg,Johann HeinrichMichel,also happensto have been Bach's most prolific copyist.2 Michelnormally sangtheroleofEvangelist in thetwentyone Passionsperformed between1769and1789,theonlyexceptions beingtheSt.Lukesettings of1771,1779,and1787,whichdo notcall fora tenorEvangelist.In addition,Michel was assignedariasin cantatasand worksthatBach composed forspecialoccasions.By analyzing the specificcharacteristics of arias (rangeand tessitura, passagework,tonality, and affective qualitiesof thevocal lines),we see howBach employed himas a soloistinHamburg.3 WhenCharlesBurney visited Bach inHamburgon Saturday, 10 October1772,hewrote: ^his paper isbased onmy presentation atthe American Bach Society meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, inMay 2010. Alonger version appears inErist der Vater, wir sind die Bub'n: Essays inHonor of Christoph Wolff , edited byPaulCorneilson andPeter Wollny (Ann Arbor: Steglein Publishing, 2010), 95-118. 2See Paul Kast, DieBach-Handschriften der Berliner Staatsbibliothek (Trossingen: Hohner, 1958) aswell asthe more recent survey inKeiichi Kubota, C.P.E. Bach: Л Study of HisRevisions and Arrangements (Tokyo: Academia Music, 2004), appendix 2,188-90. ^There is a longtradition ofsecondary literature onthesingers ofHandel and Mozart, but relatively little onthe singers of J. S.Bach, largely because there islittle documentation on their careers. Fora recent survey see Andreas Glöckner, "Alumnen und Externe inden Kantoreien der Thomasschule zur Zeit Bachs," BachJahrbuch 92(2006): 9-36;for information onthebassJohann Christoph Samuel Lipsius, seeHans-Joachim Schulze, "Studenten alsBachs Helfer beider Leipziger Kirchenmusik," Bach-Jahrbuch 70(1984): 45-52. 1 2 Bach ... M. Bachaccompanied metoSt.Catherine's church, where I heardsomevery good music, of hiscomposition, very illperformed , andtoa congregation wholly inattentive. [They probably heard theMichaelmas cantata, Ichmilden Namen des Herrn preisen , Wq245.]Thismanwascertainly borntowrite for great performers , andfor a refined audience; buthenowseems tobeoutofhis element. There isa fluctuation inthearts ofevery city andcountry where they arecultivated, andthis isnota bright period for music atHamburg. Atchurch, andinthe way home, wehadaconversation, which wasextremely interesting to me:hetoldme,that ifhewasina place,where hiscompositions couldbe wellexecuted, andwell heard, heshould certainly kill himself, byexertions toplease. "But adieumusic! now," hesaid, "these aregoodpeoplefor society, and I enjoy moretranquility andindependence here, than ata court; after I wasfifty, I gavethething up,andsaidletuseatanddrink, forto-morrow wedie!andI amnowreconciled tomysituation; except indeed, whenI meet with menoftaste anddiscernment, whodeserve better music than wecangivethem here."4 Thatsameevening, Burney also attended a concert organized by ChristophDaniel Ebeling that featuredselectionsfromBach's Passions-Cantate ,Wq 233. Several ofM. Bach'svocalcompositions wereperformed, inall which great genius andoriginality were discoverable; though they didnotreceive theembellishments, which singers ofthefirst class might havegiven tothem. M.Bachhassettomusic, a Passione, in the German language, andseveral parts ofthis admirable composition were performed this evening. I wasparticularly delighted with a chorus init, which for modulation, contrivance, andeffects, was atleast equaltoany oneofthebestchoruses inHandel's immortal Messiah. A pathetic air, uponthesubject ofSt.Peter's weeping, 4The Present State of Music inGermany, the Netherlands and United Provinces ,2vols., 2nd ed. (London: T.Becket, 1775), 2:251-52. Although itispossible that something might have been lostintranslation, the critique seems atleast plausible. Telemann had similarly complained ofthis decline inthe 1730s, following the closing ofthe Opera. However, Burney knew little German himself, and it isnot known how much English Bach knew. С. Р.E. Bach's Evangelist 3 whenhe heardthecockcrow, wasso truly pathetic as to make almost every hearer accompany thesaint inhistears.5 The ariaBurney refers tois "Wendedichzu meinemSchmerze," possiblysungbythetenor(or baritone)Carl RudolphWredenfor whomitwas originally written inthe1769 St.Matthew Passion.6 As citymusicdirector and cantorat theJohanneum, Bach was responsibleforthepreparation and performance of musicat more thana hundredserviceseach year.This includedtheQuartalstücke ("ganze Musik" or music forhighfestivals of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, andMichaelmas) andSundaycantatas ("halbeMusik"),7 as wellas Passionsduring LentandHolyWeek.The musicdirector also provided installation cantatas(Einßihrungsmusiken ,H 821) forpastors and deacons of theHamburgchurches, and musicforthemeetings ofthe"captainsofthecity militia" in 1780and 1783 (Bürgercapitains musihdn ,H 822).Bachleda groupofeight "regular" (salaried) singers anda bandoffifteen instrumentalists.8 Thismeansthatchurch music 5Ibid, 2:254-55. Burney had written toEberling inNovember 1771 andspecifically asked him tosend some ofBach's church music and any new harpsichord music. See The letters of DrCharles Burney , 1751-1784 ,ed.Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon...

"Wir sind doch keinen Barbaren": Music, Musicality and Cultural Politics in Aragon's "Le Droit romain n'est plus"

"Wir sind doch keinen Barbaren"Music, Musicality and Cultural Politics in Aragon's "Le Droit romain n'est plus" Aparna Nayak-Guercio Introduction In Philosophy of Modern Music Theodor Adorno writes: "All forms of music [. . .] are sedimented contents. In them survives what is otherwise forgotten and can no longer speak in a direct manner" (42). These "sedimented contents" are understood affectively, both at the personal level and at the collective level, be it in the form of popular or folkloric music or in "high" forms. Simon Critchley explains that "Music places us, locates us, within time and within a culture" (192). Beyond the artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical realms, then, music can also be seen as a cultural marker of national belonging. The boundary between poetry and music, between the linguistic and the musical has never been decisive, given that they each affect and modify each other. Writing about Adorno, Andrew Bowie affirms that [. . .] the best metaphors employed to talk about music do make us understand music better and [that], conversely, great music can reveal aspects of verbal art which may otherwise remain concealed. [. . .] If one makes the hermeneutic assumption that what we understand is the living, changing historical world that we articulate in language and not just statements that are supposed to represent that world, the distinction between metaphor and literal meaning ceases to be absolute, and we also become able to understand how music can affect our understanding of verbal language. (Bowie, 255-6) Music, then, not only influences our comprehension of language, but it can also be used in language, literally as well as metaphorically, to articulate "the living, changing historical world." The short story "Le Droit romain n'est plus" by Louis Aragon is a prime example of [End Page 21] such an attempt, and it can be read as a moment of transition between his Resistance poetry and his immediate post-war work, music being the link between the two. Music is a conspicuous part of Aragon's semantic field as manifested by his literary texts of the 1940s. Within this context, this article will explore three related facets of music in the period of the Nazi occupation of France: the importance of music in the cultural politics of the occupiers, the role of music in Louis Aragon's wartime writings, and finally the role of intermediality— that is to say, the participation of one medium in another, or in this case of the musical dimensions of a literary text—in Aragon's short-story, "Le Droit romain n'est plus." Music, Cultural Politics, and Nationalism In the course of the 19th century, particularly after the Franco-Prussian war, characterizing Germans as barbarians was a topos in French popular and political discourse.1 For example, in 1917 the Ministry of Public Instruction distributed Après trois ans de guerre to children at the end of the school year; this pamphlet served to explain the origins and progression of the war and to maintain a strong sense of patriotism among schoolchildren. In this text, Germany is characterized as the digne héritière des Molochs barbares.2 As we shall see in the discussion of Aragon's short story, the pivotal retort by the German judge to the résistants, "wir sind doch keinen Barbaren" underscores the continued use of the barbarian / civilised opposition during the Occupation and drives this topic into the forefront. In occupied France, cultural politics, especially the control of cultural production, played an important role in the agenda of the occupiers. It served to refute the image of Germans as barbarians by portraying them as civilized and refined. Music was the keystone of this plan.3 For the Nazi regime, occupation meant seizing political, economic, and social control in France; simultaneously, there was a clear understanding of the importance of cultural products and a concerted effort to control them. Indeed, Hitler visited the Paris Opera the very day after the Armistice was signed (Porcile, 28). Less than a month after the start of the Occupation, the need for well-defined cultural politics was proposed (Schwartz, 89). Shortly thereafter, a September 1940 report by the Propaganda Abteilung states: [End Page 22] Pour l'Allemagne...