A study of six modern reworkings of classic works of German literature. A "literary reworking" is a fictional work based on an earlier, usually canonical, literary work. Gundula M. Sharman considers six twentieth-century examples of this phenomenon in German literature, including Peter Schneider's Lenz as a reworking of Georg Büchner's novella of the same title, Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. as a reworking of Goethe's Werther, Wolfgang Koeppen's Der Tod in Rom, based on Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig, and three other pairs of reworkings/original works from the genres of drama, the novella, and the novel. The indebtedness of such reworkings to the original works is openly acknowledged -- often inthe title -- and this invites the reader to draw comparisons and to note contrasts between reworking and original. The twentieth-century author's interpretation and the reader's reception of the older work merge to form a subtextof the reworking, giving rise to a third narrative in the reader's imagination. The better the reader knows the literary model, the more multi-faceted the reworking appears. The purpose of each reworking is unique. One may demonstrate how much the world has changed since the publication of the original, while another argues that society has not changed at all. One may be conceived as an anti-work to the original, while another serves to endorse its message. Common to all reworkings, however, is a gain in historical depth, and in each case themes and issues arise from the relationship of reworking to original that are not immediately apparent when the reworking is considered on itsown. Gundula M. Sharman teaches in the German Department at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

This book traces shifting attitudes towards science and technology, nature and the environment in Twentieth-century Germany. It approaches them through discussion of a range of literary texts and explores the philosophical influences on them and their political contexts, and asks what part novels and plays have played in environmental debate.

"This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German "author-as-character" fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for the first time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the Goethezeit continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture." -- Book cover.

The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature, but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. ROBERT BLANKENSHIP is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

Coming to terms with the past has been a preoccupation within German culture and German Studies since the Second World War. In addition, there has been a surge of interest in adaptation of literary works in recent years. Numerous volumes have theorized, chronicled, or analyzed adaptations from novel to film, asking how and why adaptations are undertaken and what happens when a text is adapted in a particular historical context. With its focus on adaptation of twentieth-century German texts not only from one medium to another but also from one cultural moment to another, the present collection resides at the intersection of these two areas of inquiry. The ten essays treat a variety of media. Each considers the way in which a particular adaptation alters a story - or history - for a subsequent audience, taking into account the changing context in which the retelling takes place and the evolution of cultural strategies for coming to terms with the past. The resulting case studies find in the retellings potentially corrective versions of the stories for changing times. The volume makes the case that adaptation studies are particularly well suited for tracing Germany's obsessive cultural engagement with its twentieth-century history. Contributors: Elizabeth Baer, Rachel Epp Buller, Maria Euchner, Richard C. Figge, Susan G. Figge, Mareike Hermann, Linda Hutcheon, Irene Lazda, Cary Nathenson, Thomas Sebastian, Sunka Simon, Jenifer K. Ward. Susan G. Figge is Professor of German Emeritus at the College of Wooster, Ohio, and Jenifer K. Ward is Associate Provost, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle.

The nine essays in this volume deal with major achievements in the German novel since 1959. They range from the very well known, such as Brussig's Helden wie wir, an extravagant treatment of life under the Stasi and the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the much more recondite, such as Hubert Fichte's Detlevs Imitationen «Grünspan», one of the first, and most important, products of the abolition of the discrimination against gays in 1969. What is most surprising about this collection is that, in contrast to the majority of successful novels written in German before 1959, only one of these is by a clearly 'West' German author: Hubert Fichte. There is, by contrast, a surprising number who have their roots in the GDR (Plenzdorf, Wolf, Brussig, Schulze), or in Austria (Bachmann, Bernhard). This is also a period in which women writers emerge powerfully (Bachmann, Wolf, and Özdamar). Virtually all these novels aroused controversy in some quarters at the time of their publication, often for their treatment of semi-taboo, or at least uncomfortable, subject-matter. These essays, all by specialists in the relevant field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense—from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites—the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these works reframe migration and temporality, bringing into view antifascist aesthetics, refugee time, postmigrant Heimat, translational poetics, and post-Holocaust affects. With new literary texts by Yoko Tawada and Zafer Şenocak and essays by Gizem Arslan, Brett de Bary, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Deniz Göktürk, John Namjun Kim, Yuliya Komska, Paul Michael Lützeler, B. Venkat Mani, Barbara Mennel, Katrina L. Nousek, Anna Parkinson, Damani J. Partridge, Erik Porath, Jamie Trnka, Ulrike Vedder, and Yasemin Yildiz.

Containing entries on over four hundred authors of fiction, poetry and drama from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, this invaluable work of reference presents material of a range and depth that no other book on the subject in English attains. For the second edition, the entries have been updated to include the most recent works of German literature. A number of new entries have been added, dealing in particular with the East German literary scene and the changing literary landscape after reunification. In addition to basic biographical facts, the Companion offers summaries, information on involvement in literary groups and political developments, schools and movements, critical terms and aspects of the other arts, including film.

Traces literary developments in the German-speaking countries from 1900 to the present. This study of German literature in the past hundred years sets its subject clearly in the artistic and political context of developments in Western Europe during the century. It begins with the turn-of-the-century aestheticism andvisions of decay led by Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and other Austrian writers, and the quite different explosion of new artistic energy in the Expressionist and Dada movements. These movements are succeeded by the rise of Modernism, culminating in the inter-war years: the poetry of Rilke, Brecht's epic theatre, and novels by Thomas Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Musil, Doblin and Broch; the influence of Nazism on literary production is considered. The study of developments after 1945 reflects the struggle to establish a post-Holocaust literature and to deal with the questions posed by the political division of Germany. Finally, the convergence of East and West German literature after unification is addressed. Ingo R. Stoehr teaches literature at Kilgore College, Texas, and is editor of the bilingual journal of German literature in English translation, Dimension2.

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.