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Author: Robert Blankenship
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113574X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
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.
Author: Robert Blankenship
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113574X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
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.
Author: Michael Zimmermann
Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Incorporated
ISBN: 9783631377482
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
THe nearly fifty years between the end of World War II and the reunification of Germany represent a period of intense self-reflection for the German people. Emanating from the literature of this period are the motif of suicide and its ideation of self-destruction. An examination of the motif of suicide in novels from East and West reveals the depth of and reasons for the psychic turmoil. From the collective suicidal impulse of soldiers at Stalingrad to the individual alienation experienced in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, the particular circumstances of suicide as depicted in each novel are uniquely German. Contents: Suicide in the German Novel 1945-49--Suicide in the Novel of the German Democratic Republic--Suicide in the Novel of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Author: Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030693929
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
This book analyzes the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential and philosophical reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies that modern fictional literature places at our disposal. They go through the review of Modern fictional literature, in the American and European geographical framework, following the rationales that modern literature based on fiction can serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and that has the potential to prevent suicide. From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since the French sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide: A Study in Sociology in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers and authors devoting their efforts to understand better the causes of suicide and to the formation of suicide prevention organizations. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide, the nature, and nuances of its modern conceptualization, to prevent suicidal behaviors. The question of what suicide means in and for modernity is not an overcome one. Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. Since the turn of the millennium, a fierce debate about the state’s role in assisted suicide has been adopted. Beyond the discussion as to whether physicians should assist in the suicide of patients with unbearable and hopeless suffering, the scope of the suicidal agency is much broader concerning general people wanting to die.
Author: Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303128982X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
This volume is the continuation of the book Suicide in Modern Literature, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Considering the positive reception of this book, Ros Velasco launches the second part, entitled The Contemporary Writer and their Suicide. This time, leading representatives of various disciplines analyze the literary, philosophical, and biographical works of contemporary writers worldwide who attempted to commit suicide or achieved their goal, looking for covert and overt clues about their intentions in their writings. This book aims to continue shedding light on the social and structural causes that lead to suicide and on the suicidal mind, but also to show that people assiduous to writing usually reflect their intentions to commit suicide in their writings, to explain how these frequently veiled intentions can be revealed and interpreted, and to highlight the potential of artistic, philosophical, and autobiographical writing as a tool to detect suicidal ideation and prevent its consummation in vulnerable people. This book analyzes several case studies and their allusions to their contexts and the socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures they suffered, expressions of their will and agency, feelings of dislocation between the individual, reality, and existential alienation, and literary styles, writing techniques, and metaphorical language.
Author: Thomas W. Goldstein
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139206
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In the German Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its members' professional interests and enable them to act as public intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting their union membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the 1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri.
Author: Stephen Brockmann
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640141545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Shows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world" the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans themselves has been obscured, Brockmann shows, by the now-standard description of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a triumph of Western democracy and capitalism. Brockmann first addresses the culture of 1989/1990 by looking at various media from that final year, particularly film documentaries. He emphasizes punk culture and the growth of neo-Nazism and the Antifa movement - factors often ignored in accounts of the period. He then analyzes three later semiautobiographical novels about the period. He devotes chapters to dramatic films dealing with German reunification made relatively soon after the event and to more recent film and television depictions of the period, respectively. The final chapter looks at monuments and memorials of the 1989/1990 period, and a conclusion considers the implications of the book's findings for the present day.
Author: Raymond Furness
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415150576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
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.
Author: Christa Wolf
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776620355
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.
Author: Peter Grieder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230356869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
A clear, concise and thought-provoking introduction to the history of East Germany which engages critically with key debates and advances new interpretations of the origins, development and demise of the GDR. Peter Grieder also offers an original conceptualization of the GDR as a totalitarian welfare state.
Author: Gerald Fetz
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800734972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.
