Diese Merkwurdige Kleinigkeit Einer Vision
Download Diese Merkwurdige Kleinigkeit Einer Vision PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Diese Merkwurdige Kleinigkeit Einer Vision book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
'Diese merkwürdige Kleinigkeit einer Vision'
Christoph Hein is one of the best-known authors of the former GDR, and his works of fiction have been widely interpreted as responses to and critiques of socialist society. In this study, David Clarke undertakes a detailed analysis of all of Christoph Hein’s major works of fiction from Der fremde Freund (1928) to Willenbrock (2000) in order to explore Hein’s critique of the GDR regime, whilst also demonstrating how aspects of that critique provided a starting point for Hein’s rejection of capitalism both before and after German unification. For Hein, socialism had failed to make good its promise to create a community bound together by common values and goals, preferring instead to impose conformity upon its citizens. Capitalism, he believed, was equally unable to meet the need for community, and Hein sought to demonstrate the consequences of this state of affairs in the figure of Wörle in his first post-unification novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993). After this point, Clarke argues, Hein was nevertheless forced to re-examine his criticism of capitalism, a process which ultimately led to the more differentiated and convincing portrayal to be found in Willenbrock.
Suicide in East German Literature
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.
Christoph Hein in Perspective
Unlike many writers from the former GDR, Christoph Hein's reputation and standing - and his creativity - have remained intact despite the demise of the GDR in 1989-90. Christoph Hein in Perspective brings together essays by both established and younger scholars from Britain, Germany and the USA which together cover a wide spectrum of his work, from the early writings of the 1970s to the play In Acht und Bann of 1999 and including his speeches and essays as well as all his major prose works. There is a marked emphasis in the volume on Hein's post-Wende output, with about half the contributions focusing primarily on this period. Another feature is the diversity of perspectives from which the works are examined: historical and political viewpoints are complemented by formal and comparative studies as well as by gender-based perspectives. The volume includes additionally the first published English translation of what is for many Hein's most successful work for the stage, Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q of 1983 (‘The True Story of Ah Q'). The volume as a whole should be of interest to scholars concerned with the GDR and with contemporary German culture, to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and also the others interested in the history and culture of Germany since 1945. Six of the essays are in English and six in German.