Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Michigan.

The Manifesto develops further the Critical Theory of Religion intrinsic to the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School into a new paradigm of the Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Theology of Religion. Its central theme is the theodicy problem in the context of late capitalist society and its globalization.

This study analyzes the work of three prominent proletarian-revolutionary dramatists at the end of the Weimar Republic. The work of Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Wolf, and Gustav von Wangenheim is looked at against the backdrop of debates among Marxist intellectuals and artists. Through a discussion of theatrical theory and close readings of individual plays, this work examines the authors' unique aesthetics and their enactment of a critical appropriation of the German literary heritage. It also investigates their attempts to transform the audience's relationship to the theatrical production from a passive-receptive to an active-critical one. This volume offers insights into larger questions of political and cultural continuity that characterized the Weimar and the postwar periods.

Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz is an examination of the gradual disintegration of Germany in the aftermath of the Great War. This study engages the seminal image of the prostitute, the commodified woman, as a central and dominant motif in Döblin's work.

Based on a variety of close readings, this book analyzes the use of ice and snow motifs in selected literary, scientific, and philosophical texts by a wide range of European authors from Johannes Kepler to Thomas Mann. The focus of the book is on German literature. While the metaphorical significance of cold imagery has been studied by various scholars, the close relationship between figurations of the cold and writing or reading has so far been overlooked. Compared with other instances of «reading the book of nature», stars or stones for example, the unstable status of snow or ice configurations also renders their literary representation problematic. This inherent tension accounts for the attraction snow and ice have exerted on authors to this day. Particular attention is paid to those texts that negotiate the close rapport between the fragile literary object and the fragile status of language and readability, thus exposing the «fragile legibility» of snow and ice motifs. This focus allows us to address more general issues, such as the shifting status of the aesthetic at the intersection of older natural history and the emergence of modern science; the apocalyptic; and the melancholic implications of cold imagery.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Gottfried Benn's poetry to appear in English. It covers the entirety of Benn's verse, from his early Morgue cycle (1912) and Expressionist poems through to the «anthropological» poetry of his middle period to the «postmodern» Phase II work after the Second World War. Against the background of the poet's theoretical writings, this study, drawing upon the classic texts of Benn scholarship, analyzes in detail the major themes of his verse and its distinctive idiom. In particular, this work focuses on Gottfried Benn's extended process of rhetorical self-fashioning, his use of classical iconography, color motifs and chiffres, his often confusing historical semantics, the seemingly self-constituting «absolute» poem, and the colloquial idiom of his late verse. The book also engages with the multiplicity of voices in Benn's work and their varied textual forms, the hermeneutically variable positions of speech that they articulate and the often contradictory notion of selfhood to which they give rise.

Pastor Martin Niemöller, popular author Ernst Wiechert, and the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer were well known in the public sphere in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the decade of the 1930s progressed each of these figures became a vocal opponent of National Socialism. In the last twenty-eight sermons delivered before his arrest in 1937 Martin Niemöller revitalized Protestant homiletic discourse as a political tool in defiance of the regime. Having protested Niemöller's imprisonment, Ernst Wiechert was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Buchenwald for three months during the summer of 1938. Wiechert chronicled his experiences in the fictional autobiography Der Totenwald (1939) - a text which marks the apex of Wiechert's literary turn from Blut und Boden Dichter to outspoken critic of Nazism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the Pastors' Emergency League and for a time pastoral assistant to Martin Niemöller, constructed a sphere of textual resistance in his prose and poetic writings composed while imprisoned in Tegel from 1943 to 1945. This study traces the emergence of cultural confessionalism as a new literary resistance paradigm that developed out of the ideological nexus of cultural Protestantism and the confessionalist trend of the Kirchenkampf. Through literary analysis of sermons by Niemöller and written texts by both Wiechert and Bonhoeffer the book demonstrates how the textual resistance strategies of the cultural confessionalists varied from the oppositional approaches of the 'innere Emigration', the political resistance, and the Christian humanist tradition.

When Germany lost its colonial empire after the Great War, many Germans were unsure how to understand this transition. They were the first Europeans to experience complete colonial loss, an event which came as Germany also wrestled with wartime collapse and foreign occupation. In this book the author considers how Germans experienced this change from imperial power to postcolonial nation. This work examines what the loss of the colonies meant to Germans, and it analyzes how colonialist categories took on new meanings in Germany's «post-colonial» period. Poley explores a varied collection of materials that ranges from the stories of popular writer Hanns Heinz Ewers to the novels, essays, speeches, pamphlets, posters, and archival materials of nationalist groups in the occupied Rhineland to show how decolonization affected Germans. When the relationships between metropole and colony were suddenly severed, Germans were required to reassess many things: nation and empire, race and power, sexuality and gender, economics and culture.

Walter Vogt, the Swiss psychiatrist and author (1927-1988), can be considered a gadfly in the Swiss medical profession and a paradox in the Swiss literary arena. This 'writing doctor' shocked the Swiss medical establishment with a scathing exposé in his 1965 novel, Wüthrich, and then continued to write prolifically until his death. He was noted for his use of the grotesque, as well as for his literary sarcasm and use of parody. Vogt's use of the diary as his main genre enhanced his popularity. He was one of the first Swiss writers with a strong commitment to preventing environmental degradation. Vogt suffered from many physical illnesses, in addition to a multitude of psychological conflicts throughout his life. He was focused on death and illness from his early adult years. This book not only looks at Vogt from a psychiatric point of view, but also at his contribution to contemporary Swiss-German literature.

This stimulating new book challenges Freud's definition of the uncanny, prevalent in the study of Gothic and Romantic fiction, by reviving the importance of uncertainty in the uncanny. Literary criticism views the uncanny as an expression of the return of the repressed. Falkenberg's expanded definition includes, but is not limited to, the psychoanalytic and instead redefines the uncanny as a cognitive and aesthetic phenomenon. Beyond offering a survey of what David Punter has called «The Theory of the Uncanny», this study places the uncanny in the context of the poetological and philosophical background of the Romantic period. In close readings of two stories that have stood at the center of the debate about the uncanny - E.T.A. Hoffmann's «Sandman» and Ludwig Tieck's «Blond Eckbert» - the author shows how these texts are constructed as uncanny phenomena in themselves. The study traces fairytale elements, framing techniques, and interdependencies between the fictional productions of the protagonists and their «dark fates» to expose how these texts confront the reader with paradoxical decoding instructions. This expanded and revised uncanny not only yields new readings of two classic German short stories, it also leads to a better understanding of the cultural soil that nourished the Romantic Movement.