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- Zemlinsky contra Mahler: Aesthetic Modernism, the Jewish Body, and the
Violence of Fairy Tales
Abstract: At first sight, Alexander Zemlinsky's artistic output and professional development resemble those of Gustav Mahler. This goes especially for the choices both composers made in navigating German culture and their own Jewish identity. Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) was Mahler's junior by eleven years. Like Mahler (1860–1911), he was born into a Jewish family with roots in the rural parts of the Habsburg empire. Zemlinsky was a prolific and extraordinarily diverse composer (his work was in many respects more varied than Mahler's). Zemlinsky, like Mahler, was active as a conductor as well as a composer. But to some extent, the similarities stop there. During most of his life, Zemlinsky had trouble getting his own ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- A Witness for the Prosecution: An Israeli Filmmaker's Reflections on
Adenauer's New Germany
Abstract: In the early 1960s, an Israeli journalist and Holocaust survivor, Vera Elyashiv, was invited by two German journalists to travel around West Germany and document her impressions. The resulting documentary film titled Mit den Augen einer Israeli: Beobachtungen in der Bundesrepublik (1962, Through the Eyes of an Israeli: Observations on the German Federal Republic) was screened on the German NDR television network.1 At its core, the film raised the question of whether postwar West Germany was truly a "new Germany"—disengaged and fundamentally different from its National Socialist predecessor—or whether fundamental traces of the fascist past were still impacting its social practices, culture, and political systems.The ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- "Conversations with You, Places of Freedom": Writing, Desire, and Prison
Intimacies
Abstract: where there would be none of the blockades and the self-censoring. conversations with you: places of freedom.1Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire.2Stored in the basement of the International Institute for Social History (IISH), Amsterdam, is the bequest of Gabriele Tiedemann, a German national convicted of left-wing terrorism and incarcerated in Switzerland from 1977–1991.3 The bulk of the bequest consists of hundreds of letters Tiedemann collected: those she received and copies of those she wrote to friends, political allies, and women she was incarcerated with over ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Frankfurt Stories: Narrative Economics and West German Lending to
Socialist Poland, 1969–1989
Abstract: Over the course of the 1970s, Western European and American bankers granted loans worth billions of dollars to the Polish People's Republic. At the beginning of the decade, in 1971, the socialist country's medium-term and long-term debt with the capitalist world stood at a manageable 1.2 billion dollars. By the end of 1980, that figure had reached twenty-three billion dollars (Table 1). In early 1981, the Polish government had to ask its creditors for a rescheduling of its debt. The "glut of credit" to Poland and other countries in the Soviet sphere of influence, a writer for London-based finance magazine Euromoney commented at the time, had been "supplied by banks with scant knowledge or experience of the market ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- The Protestant Spirit of the Berlin Neutrality Law: An Old-New Kulturkampf
against Religious Minorities in the Public Sphere
Abstract: The sixteen individual states of the Federal Republic of Germany enjoy so-called federal-state rights regarding education, culture, or religion.1 Between 2004 and 2007, half of the German states passed laws restricting expressions of religious identity in the public sphere. Many of them, for example, those in Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saarland, explicitly targeted Islamic practices in public office. These laws forbid all expressions of religious identity except for Christian ones (in North Rhine-Westphalia, Christian and Jewish ones2). The discrimination of non-Christians is evident in these cases since these laws privilege Christianity at the expense of other religions, such as Islam.3 ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Dismantled Monumentality: Capturing Postsocialist Erasures in Berlin
Abstract: He looked across some anonymous flat roofs at the Trade Center. Visible in the haze beyond it, like quotations from another city altogether, were the twin domes of the Gendarmenmarkt and the fortresslike Berlin Cathedral botched by Kaiser Wilhelm II, then nothing for a long way except the television tower and the massive outlines of the Charité Hospital, and finally the grim Reichstag. It wasn't the ugliness that dismayed him so much as the absence of a regular cityscape. By far the strongest impression he gained from this height was of the huge gaps separating isolated buildings of varying quality. It suddenly struck him as the height of presumption, this five-year scheme to overpaint the center of a canvas from ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European
Avant-Garde
Abstract: As part of the German Studies Association's cooperation with the Free University of Berlin's Program for Advanced German and European Studies, it was both an honor and a pleasure to launch our winter semester 2020/21 with the GSA Distinguished Lecture by Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor in Critical and Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts on October 20, 2021. In his timely contribution, Art, Science, and the Paradox of Knowledge: Decolonizing the European Avantgarde, Professor Haakenson offered critical reflections on the European avant-garde's role in conceptualizing Western knowledge since the mid-nineteenth century. Haakenson's presentation was the ninth in our annual Distinguished ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Response to Distinguished Lecture
Abstract: I am grateful for the opportunity to read and respond to Thomas O. Haakenson's essay and contribute to a broader discussion of decolonization in the field of German studies, which is a topic long overdue to reach the pages of German Studies Review. Haakenson's thought-provoking essay discusses the decolonial potential of Dada and the avant-garde more broadly. Haakenson's essay reflects on Dada as both an art movement with a specific chronology associated with cities such as Zurich, New York, Paris, and Berlin and connected to the racialized legacies of colonialism and appropriation, as well as an artistic praxis, with techniques such as juxtaposition and obfuscation rife with critical possibilities.This is what is ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Response to Distinguished Lecture
Abstract: Haakenson's lecture challenged all of us to carefully consider the place from which we are speaking. This resonated for me because my own university, Dartmouth College, was founded in 1769 on Abenaki lands by the minister Eleazer Wheelock under the patronage of the Earl of Dartmouth. Wheelock raised the funds together with his former student, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, promising to Christianize Native American men. However, as Occom wrote, Dartmouth became quickly "too alba [white]," and those who it was intended to serve, did "never have much benefit of it."1 For almost two centuries, Dartmouth educated mostly Christian white men. It presents one of many examples of how the enterprise of the liberal arts ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- What Would It Actually Take To Deconolinize: Response to Distinguished
Lecture
Abstract: I approach Thomas Haakenson's lecture not as an art historian, but as a Black anthropologist who also engages the work of major art museums and their attempts to engage a broader public, particularly in cities such as Detroit and Berlin, where the preeminent museums are in the center of the city and simultaneously seen as White spaces.Because I knew I had to write this piece, I went back again to the "Who is Queen'" exhibit also addressed in Haakenson's lecture, to take more notes and think about it more in relation to decolonization. Again, one of my primary experiences was one of being policed. This time, I didn't even get in. Because it was cold, I brought my violin. I was meeting a friend who was already in the ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Rethinking the Relationship between German- and Yiddish-Language Culture
Abstract: Despite their linguistic closeness, German and Yiddish have most often been studied apart. Since the beginning of the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, in the late eighteenth century, German and Yiddish came to be associated with divergent and even opposed trajectories of Jewish modernity, and their relative value became the object of intense debate. Indeed, in the wake of the Haskalah, the two languages were often understood as representing either side of a series of charged dichotomies, such as West and East, Germanness and Jewishness, assimilation and dissimilation, or, at the level of script, writing from left to right and right to left, in the Latin and Hebrew alphabets. This divergence was a consequence ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the
Nineteenth-Century City by Kristin Poling (review)
Abstract: Kristin Poling's thoroughly researched study of modernizing nineteenth-century German cities explores how urban borders became sites for debating local histories, contemporary challenges, and plans for future growth. Adopting the notion of "frontier," a term the author acknowledges is often associated with claims of American exceptionalism through westward conquest and settlement, Poling argues that Germans, too, came to see the shifting edges of their cities to be frontiers for expansion and opportunity. The book's five chapters analyze the transformation of Leipzig, Oldenburg, Paderborn, Berlin, and Nuremberg, illustrating broad trends in nineteenth-century urbanization as well as local conditions making each ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation,
1811–1946 by Kristin Dickinson (review)
Abstract: Kristin Dickinson's first book DisOrientations looks at the longue durée of Turkish-German interrelations by focusing primarily on (Ottoman) Turkish and German literature and translations, while at the same time eloquently juxtaposing and tracing connections between a dizzying array of texts and authors linked to multiple geographies and temporalities. Analyzing in particular (Ottoman) Turkish literature and translations to and from European languages (French and German) in the period from 1811 to 1949, Dickinson elegantly exposes the disorienting and destabilizing processes involved in such intellectual and literary endeavors. That is, on the one hand, these processes distort ideas of national "originality" or ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and
Visual Culture, 1850-1930 ed. by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson (review)
Abstract: This volume, edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson, uncovers both the practices of ethnic othering and the resistance mechanisms in these processes, as they emerged within the visual and design arts. Although the essays concentrate on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1920s, during which period the arts were heavily influenced by the rise of ethnography and anthropology, the authors extend their discussion on the creation of racial inequalities and systems of domination backwards and forwards in time. At the intersection of academic works related to postcolonialism, race, the history of ethnography and anthropology, Orientalism, and memory studies, these essays reflect on the complex ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the
Approaching Post-Witness Era ed. by Charlotte Schallié, Helga Thorson,
and Andrea Van Noord (review)
Abstract: After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era is an ambitious volume that seeks to meet the educational challenges encapsulated in its title. Largely successful in their goal, the editors present a range of contributions, both creative and scholarly, that address the vital concerns for those undertaking Holocaust education today. These studies cover three broad thematic areas that the editors label "critical Holocaust education," "Global connections," and education in a "Time of Transition"—an acknowledgment that this work will soon be undertaken in a postwitness era.Each of these themes is fruitfully explored throughout the six sections of the volume beginning with ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)Entanglements Between
Africa and East Germany During the Cold War ed. by Eric Burton et al.
(review)
Abstract: This edited volume, comprised of fourteen chapters and an introduction, contributes significantly to our understanding of the still understudied links between East Germany and the Global South. Unlike other recently published essay volumes dedicated to the topic of socialist internationalism, including Comrades of Color (ed. by Quinn Slobodian, 2015), the present title focuses exclusively on the relationship between the GDR and Africa (namely Angola, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, and especially Mozambique) in the aftermath of the continent's decolonization. The volume pursues a two-pronged approach. First, it examines how political, social, and cultural entanglements between the GDR and Africa have ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the Economics of an
Eastern German Subculture by Aimar Ventsel (review)
Abstract: In his essay "Alles in Laufnähe. Vom Leben in mittelgroßen Städten," Martin Büsser, the by-now deceased German pop critic, stated that if one wants to experience something exciting in middle-sized cities, this "something" has got to be created by oneself: "Therefore there are islands in middle-sized cities, where togetherness is affirmed by familiarity, community spirit, and a DIY-ethos that one would not find in any metropolis of the world." (in Fur immer in Pop, 2018, p 18, my trans.) His thorough, if not necessarily uncritical, praise of German medium-sized cities might well have been the starting point for the most recent book by anthropologist Aimar Ventsel. With Punks & Skins United: Identity, Class & the ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir (review)
Abstract: The centennial of the Bauhaus in 2019 was marked by a wide-ranging array of events that circled the globe and considered the experimental school of art, architecture, and design from almost every conceivable angle. Not surprisingly, Harvard University hosted an exhibition and related events, including tours and workshops, that introduced the Bauhaus and its premises to a new generation of Harvard students. In part because key figures associated with the Bauhaus, including its founding director Walter Gropius, eventually taught and also built at Harvard, the collections of its Busch-Riesinger Museum include the most impressive holdings of Bauhaus-related material located outside of Germany. The continued strength of ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer (review)
Abstract: The iconic, red-haired protagonist of one of Germany's biggest international box-office successes of all time, Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt (1998), is an exemplary neoliberal subject according to Hester Baer. Not only is Lola flexible, entrepreneurial, and able to effectively self-optimize, carrying over skills she learns in one of her video-gamelike frenzied excursions through Berlin from one life to the next, she is also literally driven by her quest for money. Thus, the film, Baer argues in her new book German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, embodies German state-funded cinema under neoliberalism on an intra- and extradiegetic level, whereby profit is the key motive of both the film industry as well as human ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and
Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William (review)
Abstract: The Tender Gaze is an ambitious scholarly and political project. By developing the tender gaze as a theoretical and analytical approach, the coeditors set the stage for a collection of essays that explore applications of the concept in German film and literature. The tender gaze, "an empathetic encounter with others" (3), is a tool to uncover the ways in which narrative, power, and politics are intertwined, within films, performances, and texts and in the process of reception. It further, as Muriel Cormican states, "acknowledges representation as always already implicated in power structures while simultaneously using representation to question those power structures" (39). This definition connects the tender gaze ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and
Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida (review)
Abstract: In Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema, Leila Mukhida engages with theory by German Jewish intellectuals Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Alexander Kluge, emphasizing "points of intersection and divergence in their writing, points that emerge from their shared disenchantment with the domestic output of the German film industry" (8) in order to examine the political aesthetics of postunification German and Austrian cinema. The book foregrounds the importance of medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scène for close readings of contemporary film. In dialogue with a number of works by these neo-Marxist thinkers, who have interrogated ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Lyn Marven,
Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy (review)
Abstract: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century sheds light on current thematic and form-based developments in German-language short story writing and fills the void created by a lack of recent academic publications on the genre. Fifteen years lie between its publication in 2020 and that of the most recent edition of Leonie Marx's important theoretical work Die deutsche Kurzgeschichte.But what exactly constitutes a short story' This is a central issue the volume seeks to address. One of the masters of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe, defined the short story in his famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) as a story to be read continuously without interruption achieving a "unique or single ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Die Wiederkehr der res publica. Zu literarischer Repräsentation einer
Abstract: Der Titel dieses Bandes Wiederkehr der res publica ist die zentrale These, die in vierzehn interdisziplinären Aufsätzen (ohne thematische Unterteilung) als Basis den demokratisch-republikanischen Staat für das Gemeinwohl analysiert. Die Ansätze in den sorgfältig recherchierten und dokumentierten Beiträgen (von fünf in der Schweiz, vier in Polen, zwei in Irland und je eine Person in Großbritannien, Italien und Deutschland tätigen Germanisten) sind weit gefächert und zeigen, dass Konflikte ein wichtiger Bestandteil der res publica sind. Die Hälfte der Essays setzt sich mit Deutschschweizer Literatur, Kultur und Politik auseinander, was "kein Zufall" sei, da sich die Eidgenossenschaft nicht nur selbst rühme, "die ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
- Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market
Forces in the German Literary Field ed. by William Collins Donahue and
Martin Kagel (review)
Abstract: In 1913, Kurt Wolff of the newly established Kurt Wolff Verlag offered something of a confession to Karl Kraus, with whom he would soon form a professional relationship: "I for my part consider a publisher to be . . . a kind of seismographer, whose task is to keep an accurate record of earthquakes. I try to take note of what the times bring forth in the way of expression and, if it seems worthwhile in any way, place it before the public" (Alexander Wolff, "How Kurt Wolff Transformed Pantheon into a 20th-Century Publishing Powerhouse"). While it may be rarer today to encounter this kind of sentiment among the gatekeepers of German literature, Wolff's statement nonetheless points to the fundamental role that the ... Read More
PubDate: 2022-06-27T00:00:00-05:00
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