Examines, then employs the metaphor of cultural impact in an effort to understand how culture works in the German-speaking world. How to gauge the impact of cultural products is an old question, but bureaucratic agendas such as the one recently implemented in the UK to measure the impact of university research (including in German Studies) are new. Impact isseen as confirming a cultural product's value for society -- not least in the eyes of cultural funders. Yet its use as an evaluative category has been widely criticized by academics. Rather than rejecting the concept of impact, however, this volume employs it as a metaphor to reflect on issues of transmission, reception, and influence that have always underlain cultural production but have escaped systematic conceptualization. It seeks to understand how culture works in the German-speaking world: how writers and artists express themselves, how readers and audiences engage with the resulting products, and how academics are drawn to analyze this dynamic process. Formulating such questions afresh in the context of German Studies, the volume examines both contemporary cultural discourse and the way it evolves more generally. It links such topics as authorial intention, readerly reception, intertextuality, andmodes of perception to less commonly studied phenomena, such as the institutional practices of funding bodies, that underpin cultural discourse. Contributors: David Barnett, Laura Bradley, Rebecca Braun, Sarah Colvin, Anne Fuchs, Katrin Kohl, Karen Leeder, Jürgen Luh, Jenny McKay, Ben Morgan, Gunther Nickel, Chloe Paver, Joanne Sayner, Matthew Philpotts, Jane Wilkinson. Rebecca Braun is Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, & Celtic Studies at the National University of Ireland in Galway and Lyn Marven is Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool.

A literary and cultural study combining social and political analysis along with a close reading of Turkish-born writer Emine Sevgi +zdamar in order to present the current situation of the Turkish minority living in modern Germany. The ten essays and conclusion include an interview and work sample from +zdamar's critically acclaimed over, followed.

A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it.

The Inability to Love borrows its title from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 landmark book The Inability to Mourn, which discussed German society’s lack of psychological reckoning with the Holocaust. Challenging that notion, Agnes Mueller turns to recently published works by prominent contemporary German, non-Jewish writers to examine whether there has been a thorough engagement with German history and memory. She focuses on literature that invokes Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. Mueller’s aim is to shed light on pressing questions concerning German memories of the past, and on German images of Jews in Germany at a moment that s ideologically and historically fraught.

Authors and the World traces how four core 'modes of authorship' have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. 'Modes of authorship' are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu's literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.

Memories are not static or frozen, remaining in particular sites or places, within and belonging to particular groups, cultures or nations; rather, memory travels. Broadly speaking, memory has travelled because of the demographic displacements brought about by modernity’s extremes – slavery, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide – and also because of the trade, travel and migration made possible by globalisation. Whether social movement is violent, exilic, migratory, emancipatory or oppressive, it is accompanied by memory. With the movement of people, memories of modernity’s histories and postmodern legacies meet, correspond and often become mutually constitutive. Even where memories compete with each other for cultural dominance, mutual dialogue and recognition is implicit if not explicit. Memories travel through and across cultures and national boundaries, a process increasingly facilitated by mass media technologies. This collection explores a range of case studies of transcultural memory as well as theorising the mobility of memory as it travels. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal parallax.

Since culture, the media and the arts deal with the perception and the processing of catastrophe, what kind of social knowledge does this process produce and how does it contribute to the sustainable development of societies? The book seeks to understand how societies and cultures deal with disaster and the rhetorical means they resort to in order to represent it. It is situated on the cusp between the response to natural catastrophe, the renewed awareness of human vulnerability in the face of environmental hazard and irresponsible policies and the social role of traditional knowledge and humanistic ideas for the preservation of human communities. It aims to be diverse, in disciplinary allegiance and cultural situation, and relevant, by bringing together articles by well-known scholars and policy makers to jointly discuss the possibilities of reframing hazard for the future, so that one may learn from restored behavior instead of repeating the mistakes of the past.

Bringing together approaches from cultural and urban history, as well as German studies and political theory, Clare Copley's probing study reflects on post-unification responses to iconic Nazi architecture to reveal insights into power, legitimacy and memory politics in the Berlin Republic. Analysing public debates, physical interventions into the buildings and the structuring of the memory landscapes around them, the book demonstrates that the politics of memory impact not just upon the built environment of the post-dictatorship city, but upon the way decisions about it are made. In doing so, Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin makes the case for conceiving of a specifically 'post-authoritarian' governmentality and uses the responses to constructions like Goering's Aviation Ministry, Tempelhof Airport and the Olympic complex to explore its features.

This book is the first full-length study of the museum object as a memory medium in history exhibitions about the Nazi era, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Over recent decades, German and Austrian exhibition-makers have engaged in significant programmes of object collection, often in collaboration with witnesses and descendants. At the same time, exhibition-makers have come to recognise the degree to which the National Socialist era was experienced materially, through the loss, acquisition, imposition, destruction, and re-purposing of objects. In the decades after 1945, encounters with material culture from the Nazi past continued, both within the family and in the public sphere. In analysing how these material engagements are explored in the museum, the book not only illuminates a key aspect of German and Austrian cultural memory but contributes to wider debates about relationships between the human and object worlds.

The Echo of Die Blechtrommel in Europe presents an overview and analysis of the critical reception of Günter Grass’s classic novel throughout Europe. Starting from the reviews on its first publication in Germany in 1959, it follows the reception of its translations in Poland, Italy, the UK, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland and Sweden. Press reviews for the general public form the main object of research in this volume. The articles reveal the different roles played by religious, political and ideological matters in the reception of the novel in the respective European countries. The articles, written by specialists from the countries under study, also reveal national differences and resemblances in the institutions of literary life in Europe.