Scholarly Works - German and Dutch
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed When Being Bad is Good? Bringing Neutralization Theory to Subcultural Narratives of Right-Wing Violence(Informa UK Limited, 2020-06-02) Colvin, Sarah; Pisoiu, Daniela; Colvin, Sarah [0000-0002-2776-3185]Bringing together terrorism studies, subcultural theory, and narrative criminology, we here test the thesis that neutralization theory might be (further) developed to provide a framework for understanding stories of ideologically informed subcultural violence. Beginning with Gresham Sykes’ and David Matza’s original five neutralizations, we illustrate how actors engage them in three modes: the encultured, the subcultural, and (tentatively) the postnarrative mode. We test the first two modes in particular against narratives and narrative fragments from interviews with men convicted of right-wing violence in Germany. Our findings provide a preliminary illustration of what neutralization theory might bring to research into political violence.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed "'Der gelernte Österreicher:' Arthur Schnitzler's Ambivalent Posture of Detachment During WWI"(2018) Kolkenbrock, MEWhile Arthur Schnitzler has been rightly credited for not joining the enthusiasm at the beginning of the war, this essay will focus on the extreme ambivalence which he expressed towards both the nationalist pro-war discourse and the European pacifist movement. I will argue that Schnitzler maintained what I want to call an ambivalent ‘posture’ (Bourdieu) of detachment, which not only seems to anticipate the self-regulating codes of cool conduct of the interwar years, but also informs his poetics and his understanding of the societal function of his literature. This posture of detachment is expressed in Schnitzler’s scarce public statements and in private correspondence, and in his anthropological analysis of the war. Besides published materials, the article also takes into account some unpublished sources from the Cambridge University Library (CUL) and the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), as well as some previously unconsidered publications during the war years.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Seen and the Un-seen: Digital Life-time in Christian Petzold’s Etwas Besseres als den Tod (2011)(Informa UK Limited, 2017) Webber, AJWith his contribution to the trilogy of films for television, Dreileben (2011), Christian Petzold, the leading exponent of the Berlin School of contemporary German filmmaking, produced his first digital work, breaking with his abiding attachment to analogue. This article is concerned with the bearing that this form has upon the ontological framework of the film in question: Etwas Besseres als den Tod. In a film that is concerned, as so much of Petzold’s work, with uncertain — often uncanny — boundaries between life and death, the article asks what kind of filmic life is achieved here. Its particular concern is with how the film inhabits the temporal dimension, and how it matches up to a model of what is called here filmic Eigenzeit, or proper time.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Stylist(British Film Institute, 2017-05) Webber, AndrewItem Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed FEMALE DESIRE AND THE MIND-BODY BINARY IN FIN DE SIÈCLE FICTION BY HEDWIG DOHM, LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ AND GABRIELE REUTER(Wiley, 2016-07-01) Woodford, CIn the late nineteenth century, women writers seek to emancipate the feminine subject from the plots of a phallocentric tradition which transmitted repressive models of femininity. The short stories ‘Werde, die Du bist’ (1894) by Hedwig Dohm, ‘Eine Ausschweifung’ (1898) by Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Gabriele Reuter's Ellen von der Weiden (1900) show how women writers of the fin de siècle engaged with the binary opposition of body and mind in Western philosophy and thus with the problem of the patriarchal identification of the mind with the masculine and the body with the feminine. In stories juxtaposing male doctors with women whose gendered identity is placed under scrutiny, the authors criticise the contemporary medicalisation of female sexual desire, and they explore the gender anxiety of modernity, drawing, inter alia, on Nietzsche's critique of bourgeois morality. Analysing these works against the background of feminist theory, I argue that they powerfully reveal the connection between contemporary social discourses and women's experience of desire. Die Geschlechterstereotype der bürgerlichen Literatur, die die bestehenden Machtverhältnisse unterstützten, wurden im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert häufig in den Werken von Schriftstellerinnen in Frage gestellt. Auf der Grundlage von Analysen von Hedwig Dohms ‘Werde, die Du bist’ (1894), ‘Eine Ausschweifung’ (1898) von Lou Andreas-Salomé und Gabriele Reuters Ellen von der Weiden (1900) zeigt dieser Beitrag, wie sich Autorinnen mit der binären Opposition von Körper und Seele auseinandersetzen und darüber hinaus auch das binäre System der Geschlechter problematisieren. Unter Rückgriff auf Nietzsches Kritik der abendländischen Kultur beleuchten diese Erzählungen die Geschlechterkrise der Moderne. Durch die Figurenkonstellationen von (männlichen) Ärzten und ihren Patientinnen verweisen Dohm, Andreas-Salomé und Reuter kritisch auf die Medikalisierung der weiblichen Sexualität um die Jahrhundertwende und gehen der Frage nach, wie die weibliche Körperwahrnehmung über soziale Diskurse beeinflusst wurde.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018) Kolkenbrock, METhe article examines the intersection between Gothic elements and the theme of infection in two narrative texts by the Viennese doctor-writer Arthur Schnitzler. It argues that the re-emergence of the Gothic in modernist literature draws from the popularized scientific discourses of bacteriology around 1900 and their metaphorical imagination of germs as invisible invaders and enemies. The theme of infection functions as a Gothic trope, which is used to negotiate the experience of increasingly blurred boundaries between self and ‘other’. Schnitzler’s texts reveal how the fear of infection becomes metaphorically linked to the protagonists’ loss of their secured sense of self within the normative boundaries of a bourgeois masculinity.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Passing for Children in Cate Shortland’s Lore(Berghahn Books, 2017-01-01) Webber, Andrew JThis article is concerned with the 2012 feature, Lore, made in Germany by Australian director Cate Shortland, and based on the story of the same name by Rachel Seiffert. Focusing on a group of siblings and their odyssey across Germany at the end of the Second World War, the film explores questions of identity constitution and subversion in the transitional ground between childhood and adulthood, in particular as this is registered in bodily experience. The three main sections of the article focus on the family archive (not least through the medium of photography), structures of double identity (in particular around the figure of the German Jew), and aesthetic strategies of representation (especially framing and mirroring). Through these steps, the article probes the ethical, aesthetic and political stakes involved in representing the passing of children through the violence of history in what the director calls “grey zones.”Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Language as a force for good in the work of Herta Müller(Wiley, 2018-01) Shopin, P; Shopin, Pavlo [0000-0002-8022-5327]Herta Müller creates sophisticated metaphors to convey her vision of language and its relationship to suffering and subjugation. With reference to both her fiction and non‐fiction, this essay explores how she uses the idea of forceful language. It delineates how the trope of force illuminates the power of language. I analyse the metaphorical conceptualisation of forceful language that makes survival possible through resistance to social oppression. Language is understood as a force that provides support and protection to the author and her characters. The metaphorical image of force enables Müller to represent language as a means by which to lighten the burden of oppression, to put up resistance, and to help the victims of persecution cope with their suffering and survive.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Wirkung und Scheitern der symbolischen Funktion in Arthur Schnitzlers Flucht in die Finsternis(De Gruyter, 2017-05) Kolkenbrock, ME; Lukas, W; Scheffel, MSchnitzlers 1931 erschienene „Wahnsinnsnovelle“, wie er sie provisorisch in seinem Tagebuch nannte, begleitet den Sektionsrat Robert durch eine Art Übergangszustand von noch relativ geistiger Gesundheit in einen Zustand vollständigen Realitätsverlusts, der ihn schließlich zum Mörder seines Bruders werden und in den eigenen Tod gehen lässt. „Die Aufzeichnungen, die man in seiner Reisetasche fand, wurden dem Gericht übergeben und auszugsweise veröffentlicht. Der Fall in all seiner Düsterkeit lag so klar wie möglich: Verfolgungswahn, wer konnte daran zweifeln?“ So fasst der Erzähler die Ereignisse aus Flucht in die Finsternis zusammen und verspricht damit offenbar einen repräsentativen Charakter des Dargestellten im Sinne einer Fallgeschichte. Da wir wohl generell von einem literarischen Text erwarten, dass er über eine individuelle Krankengeschichte hinausgeht, ist dies allein noch nicht weiter bemerkenswert. Auch Marianne Wünsch bemerkt im Zusammenhang mit ihrer Untersuchung der Erzählung: „Unser Text muss also mehr erzählen als eine bloße Krankengeschichte: aber was?“Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Trope of Silence in the Work of Herta Müller(Taylor & Francis, 2018-04-03) Shopin, P; Shopin, Pavlo [0000-0002-8022-5327]With reference to Herta Müller’s fiction and non-fiction, my essay explores how the trope of silence is engaged to make sense of more abstract concepts. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, I argue that Müller uses silence as a means to personify phenomena and to realize the communicative potential of the environment. Such personification necessitates that language and meaning become inherent in the nature of things. Müller humanizes the world when she ascribes to its inanimate entities the ability to keep silent. Silence can also metonymically stand for the mental states of those keeping silent or for their complex social actions; it serves as a central reference point for trauma, fear, guilt, suffering, writing, and collaboration. In Müller’s works, metaphor and metonymy can interact and contribute to the understanding of silence. The author consistently highlights the figurative meaning of silence by estranging the trope linguistically and conceptually. Silence refers to the absence and failure of (but also implies the potential for) language and communication; and its use as a trope brings to the fore the search for meaning, expression, and social interaction.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Movement and embodiment in Klopstock and Goethe(Wiley, 2017-10-01) Lee, CLPoetry is both physical and mobile: it moves us, and moves in us. This essay focuses on the role of the moving body in the work of Klopstock, with a brief excursus into Goethe's poetry. Klopstock conceived of poetry as a kind of dance, and his innovations in prosody consisted of an intensification of the physical dimension of poetry. He consistently challenged the assumption underlying dualistic philosophies: namely, that the physical and the metaphysical, the tangible and the intangible, are ultimately separate. In his work, it is precisely the substance and weight of language which allows poetry to spin into the realms of the spiritual. His theory and practice is, therefore, thoroughly in tune with the premises of the modern notion of embodied cognition.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Responsible Philology. Editing the 'Kaiserchronik' in the Digital Age(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017-09-01) Chinca, M; Young, CJ; Chinca, Mark [0000-0002-3993-3698]; Young, Christopher [0000-0002-3259-5542]This essay considers the problem of normalized orthography in critical editions of Middle High German texts. Whether the orthographical conventions that crystallized in nineteenth-century philology present a reliable picture of medieval manuscript spelling is a question that has long been debated by editors and historians of the German language. It becomes all the more urgent, however, now that digital reproductions afford direct access to manuscripts. Drawing on their experience of producing both a digital and an analog print edition of the Kaiserchronik, the authors of this essay advocate a print spelling from which a certain amount of scribal variation is filtered out, but always in such a way as to respect and reflect the writing system of the medieval manuscript. They also suggest that this practice, although its results and emphases are very different from the orthographies of Lachmann, Benecke, and Grimm in the nineteenth century, nonetheless shares with its predecessors the conviction that any representation of scribal writing practices in the typographical medium of print must bring its readers into contact with some aspect of the historical linguistic reality. This, the authors contend, is one of the main tasks for a responsible editorial philology in the digital age.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Transformation of the Lives of Others: Space, Sensuality and Spectator Complicity in Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen(Oxford University Press, 2018-10-01) Wickerson, EHThis article reads von Donnersmarck’s film $\textbf{Das Leben der Anderen}$ in the light of Kafka’s story $\textbf{Die Verwandlung}$, suggesting that the works bear a striking and as yet unnoticed similarity on the level of story, while diverging significantly in terms of $\textbf{plot}$. The aim of the comparison is to explore notable aspects of this similarity through the presentations of $\textbf{space, sensual experience}$, and $\textbf{spectator complicity}$, while raising wider points about the functions and capabilities of $\textbf{different media}$. I propose the concept of $\textbf{erlebtes Zeigen}$ in my reading of Das Leben der Anderen as a contrast to Kafka’s use of $\textbf{erlebte Rede}$. I question just how it is that such a similar story may be told to such different effect.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed <em>Unerhört?</em> Prisoner Narratives as Unlistened-to Stories (and Some Reflections on the Picaresque)(Project MUSE, 2017) Sarah Colvin; Colvin, Sarah [0000-0002-2776-3185]This article asks how life narratives told by marginalized people get heard (or not), with reference to prison writing from East Germany and the Federal Republic. Without claiming that captivity is the same in all places, times, and political situtations, I borrow Primo Levi's articulation of a narrative problem—the ‘unlistened-to story’—to explore what makes a story worth listening to, and why some stories get heard whereas others are inaudible. Because stories of literary picaros overlap in content and structure with prisoner life stories, I reflect on what the picaresque might tell us about the cultural conditions of audibility.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Dilthey, Gadamer, and Facebook: Towards A New Hermeneutics of the Social Network(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015-01-01) Craig, RThis article offers a rereading of aspects of the twentieth-century German hermeneutic tradition, with a specific emphasis on Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It aims to show how we could re-evaluate their work's relevance in relation to twenty-first-century cultures of online social networking, and with particular reference to Facebook. Dilthey's methodological conception of the human sciences finds, it argues, a contemporary instantiation in the increasingly unsettling possibilities of interpersonal ‘objectification’ and ‘identification’ within this virtual context. The article suggests, in turn, how Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics could invite a fruitful rethinking of both the digitally mediated self and her social network.Item Restricted Accepted version Peer-reviewed “Ist die Schwarze Köchin da? Jajaja. . .”: Mimesis and Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel(University of Wisconsin Press, 2016-03-20) Craig, RMDie Blechtrommel (1959) has inspired widely divergent readings, not least in respect of the aesthetic grounds that the novel offered for the social hope in the wake of Auschwitz. This article re-visits it against the backdrop of Grass’s own recognition of the postwar author’s—personal and collective—sense of complicity; and in that connection it considers how Die Blechtrommel embodies the dialectic of hope and despair more broadly characteristic of Grass’s sense of postwar literary and political engagement. Its contention is that Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of “Mimesis,” as it is developed in Dialektik der Aufklä-rung (1944) andÄsthetische Theorie (1970), can provide a compelling account for Grass’s aesthetic and ethical achievement. The article examines the senses in which Oskar embodies the dynamic of Mimesis, staking as he does a subversive ethical claim for his notorious drumming and sing-shattering. It then turns to showing how Grass’s portrayal of the “bodily” reveals it as a meeting point of complicity, shame, and guilt—but also a faintly utopian site for a new social order. By thinking through these insights precisely with Mimesis in mind, we might begin to do justice to the elusive moment of hope in Grass’s work. (RC)Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed From Student Riots to Feminist Firebombs: Debates about “Counterviolence” in the West German Student Movement and Women’s Movement(University of Nebraska Press, 2016-12-01) Karcher, KatharinaDrawing on theories of political violence and postcolonial feminist thought, this article analyzes discussions about violent resistance in strands of the student movement and women’s movement in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the late 1960s, Rudi Dutschke and other leading thinkers in the anti-authoritarian wing of the student movement argued that counter-violence in the form of symbolic attacks against property was a legitimate response to state repression and violence. In the 1970s, the militant feminist group “Red Zora” adopted and adapted this notion of counter-violence to fight for the cause of women. The article shows that discussions about counter-violence have developed and changed as a result of debates within the two movements, and in response to broader social and political developments. Although both concepts of counter-violence have reflected and reinforced existing patterns of discrimination and marginalization, they sparked critical debates about the scope and limits of political protest.Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed The Imaginary Life of Nineteenth-Century Virtuosity(J.B. Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag, 2013) Ruprecht, LuciaNineteenth-century virtuosity can be understood as a form of subjection under a musical law whose power could only be broken by hyperbolic responses of self-annihilating over-fulfilment of this law's relentless demands. Such excesses of the Romantic imagination (Hoffmann, Heine, Lyser, Andersen) had to be domesticated in Realism's responses to virtuosity (Stifter, Grillparzer).Item Open Access Uses of the Past in Twelfth-Century Germany: The Case of the Middle High German Kaiserchronik(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2016) Chinca, Mark; Young, Christopher; Chinca, Mark [0000-0002-3993-3698]; Young, Christopher [0000-0002-3259-5542]AbstractDespite its broad transmission and its influence on vernacular chronicle writing in the German Middle Ages, the Kaiserchronik has not received the attention from historians that it deserves. This article describes some of the ideological, historical, and literary contexts that shaped the original composition of the chronicle in the middle of the twelfth century: Christian salvation history, the revival of interest in the Roman past, the consolidation of a vernacular literature of knowledge, and the emergence of a practice of writing history as “serious entertainment” by authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Godfrey of Viterbo. Placed in these multiple contexts, which have a European as well as a specifically German dimension, the Kaiserchronik emerges as an important document of the uses of the past in fostering a sense of German identity among secular and ecclesiastical elites in the high Middle Ages.Item Open Access Metaphorical Conceptualization of Destructive and Destructible Language in the Work of Herta Müller(University of Wisconsin Press, 2016) Shopin, Pavlo