Leichte Verfehlungen: Roman (German Edition)

So yes, another "woman stuck in the safe but barren marriage" school of lit. But she writes with great feeling. We've read this story before; but it's HOW it's told that matters. And she can tell it. Mooning over a past love.

• Mrs Sartoris by Elke Schmitter.
• Mrs Sartoris.
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• leichte Infanterie - English translation - www.newyorkethnicfood.com German-English dictionary.
• Something Im Not!
• Leichte Verfehlungen Roman.

A dark secret involving a hit and run. Nothing new per se in the subject matter. It's an old story, and yet it's told afresh, with great confidence by a writer in command of her craft and with a sensitivity of touch and deep feeling. I might be overrating it a little, but so far I can't really fault it any way. Five stars so far. Sartoris of the title. She is married to Ernst and has a teenage daughter, Daniela. The whole book has two story strands. In the first of them, which starts the book, Margarethe talks about how one evening it was raining and she was driving and she saw a man in front of her trying to cross the road and deliberately hit him and killed him on the spot.

The police are investigating the case, but because there are no eye witnesses, they are not able to make much progress. In the second strand, our heroine describes how whenever she goes out to meet her friends and comes back her husband checks her breath discreetly because he is worried about her drinking.

To explain why, our heroine talks about her past, starting from her first love and how she fell in love with a young man who turned out to be from a rich family and how he broke her heart. She also describes how she met Ernst later and got married to him. There is a beautiful portrait of Irmi, her mother-in-law, who was one of my favourite characters in the book. Then one day she meets a man at a music concert she performs in and there is an immediate spark which leads to an affair.

Michael, her lover, gives her things that Ernst cannot and after a while, our heroine starts making long-term plans with him. Michael is very circumspect about it, though. Then one day, Margarethe tells Michael that they should leave their families, move to Venice and start life anew. Michael, after dithering a bit, agrees to it. Do Margarethe and Michael manage to get away from their families and start a new life? What about those who are left behind — the loyal Ernst, the loving Irmi and the troubled Daniela?

What about the second strand of the story in which our heroine kills someone deliberately? The answer to these questions and how the two strands get woven together in the end form the rest of the story. The first half of the story is slow-paced with beautiful sentences and is a pleasure to read.

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In the second part, the pace picks up and it becomes a page-turning thriller. And it is still a pleasure to read. The book is just pages long and Schmitter has managed to pack in so many things in those few pages.

When she starts her affair with Michael I found myself asking her: You have a wonderful, solid, loyal husband and a loving, warm and affectionate mother-in-law. Most people would kill for a mother-in-law like that. Why are you throwing all this away? I must be getting old, I think. When I read the description of the scene in which she makes her first appearance: When we got engaged, Irmi had just turned fifty, and she dazzled me. The first time she saw me, she immediately embraced me and led us into the parlor for coffee s if I were the daughter of a queen.

I totally fell in love with her. I wish she had a bigger part to play in the story.

JANA F. BRUNS. NAZI CINEMA'S NEW WOMEN. | Daniel Jonah Wolpert - www.newyorkethnicfood.com

This book is a perfect little gem. It is one of my favourite reads of the year. I hope both of them get translated into English. I will leave you with some of my favourite lines from the book. Daniela was made of feathers, light as a butterfly, with red-gold down for hair, eyes that were almost transparent, more of a delicate moth than a baby.

I always settle for the face… I had always thought that poetry was not worth much because it was hopelessly exaggerated; now my reservations were reversed: Ernst wanted a girl, which surprised me a little; I thought all men wanted a son. The animals calmed me down, in particular the huge eyes of the cows, which observed me neutrally.

In the moment when I fetched a glass of tap water and sat down beside him, as if for a great debate, and looked at him in silence, in that moment I lost the chance to make a nothing out of all this something, and make the catastrophe simply go away. What do you think about it? Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping.

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Buchner goes on to address the ques- tion of morals and artists, the special connection between literature and spirituality, and the ideal of the artist as a saint. The appendix includes a detailed research overview on romantic metaphysical influences in Mann, particu- larly from Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Other works examined include those po- lemically engaging with the ideologically-laden mystical aesthetics es- poused by Wagner and George. This argumentation offers a timely reflection on the place of religion and ethics in a remarkable case of modern Western culture, the signifi- cance of which cannot be neglected in the context of early twenty-first century global concerns with fundamentalism and Western seculariza- tion.

The German experience of the Cold War was extraordinary. No other state was faced with a mirror image of itself as a member of the opposing bloc nor did any have to contend with the ri- valry and inevitable comparisons that this entailed. Offering an interdis- ciplinary approach to how Germans experienced the conflict, the case studies presented here span a range of topics, from East and West Ger- man historiography to sports and science fiction.

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He defines border regions as places which serve to separate, but also places where interaction between neighbouring entities inevitably occurs. His conclusion that the two German states were never completely divided, but rather always politically, culturally or socially connected in some way, sets the tone for what follows. The following three chapters show how both Germanys contested the Cold War through the appropriation of history.

He also contests that the Cold War directed the memory of the Nazi past sideways, not backwards, by encouraging Germans to consider their cousins in the East or West as the bearers of the guilt for the Second World War. Examining the effects of the Cold War on German politics, Quinn Slobodian offers striking insight into how the Cold War predicament pro- duced an unlikely partnership between the labour movement and conser- vative government in West Germany. The motif of the border in politics and culture is the focus of the fol- lowing chapters. Standley considers West Berlin as a tourist destination.

Andrew Plowman looks at the satirical treatment of the West German army in magazines and novels after the s. He finds that the issues of defence of the border and op- position to reform the army into a more democratic organisation were most often targeted for this satire. He not only analyses several East German films featuring the Wall, but also considers how East German actors and film crews reacted to its erection. The next two chapters address confrontation and interaction between the two German states.

In his study of East versus West German Olympic sporting rivalry, to , Christopher Young shows adeptly that both sides regarded sport as a means of demonstrating the superiority of their societal system. Each state was spurred on by the goal of humiliat- ing the other, and since unification, German medal tallies have not reached the heights that the separate German states achieved. Rosemary Stott presents analysis of West German film imports to the GDR, concluding that fluctuations in the level of such imports provide a barometer for cultural relations between East and West Germany.

Stott also states that a thaw in relations in the s only goes part of the way to explain an increase in the number of screenings of West German films in East Germany. With the majority of East Germans regularly watching West German television, viewing tastes in both Germanys converged, compelling East Germany to import more West German films.

The final chapters focus on how various forms of media represented the German Cold War experience. The SED called upon the muscular bodies of the working class hero, the victorious Soviet soldier and the anti-fascist resistance fighter. In contrast, West Germany found the image of the male hero contaminated by propaganda images from the Nazi period.

Gradually, though, a new male hero did appear in the West in the form of POWs returning from Soviet captivity. This new hero was one who had remained decent in the face of severe hardship. In a stimulating examination of East German science fiction novels, Patrick Major considers the texts and how they were or were not censored. He argues convincingly that in most cases, authors criticized present conditions in East Germany by creating future worlds where similar problems existed.

Interestingly, Major writes that censors recognized this, but still allowed the texts to be published, appar- ently to promote a limited public sphere. James Chapman rounds off the volume with his look at filmic treatment of Berlin during the Cold War. Although the editors acknowledge that a number of chap- ters focus on one German state more than the other, they state that such chapters do keep the broader interpretative framework of the Cold War in view. However, in such chapters, one does sometimes feel curious about how the other Germany approached or dealt with the matter at hand.

The comparative and interdisci- plinary nature of the volume makes it a valuable contribution to our col- lective understanding of German experiences of the Cold War. A s the editors indicate in their introduction, this volume origi- nates from a colloquium held in Swansea in July , which was centered on the theme of religion in contemporary Ger- man culture and society. The context of current Western in- tellectual discourses on religion is well known. Such discourses are often preoccupied with a continued or renewed presence of religion in public life that challenges a once prevalent view of religion and post- moder- nity as wholly incompatible.

This publication, while itself issuing from a fresh impetus to engage with questions of re- ligion and faith albeit an initially reluctant one, the editors tell us , does not, however, tackle the familiar political terrain head on. While the text is not explicitly divided into sections that cover the different faiths, the articles are the- matically linked in this way, with engagements with Judaism appearing first, followed by those with Christianity and then finally with Islam.

Several themes emerge from the papers on Judaism, some of which are expected and others less so. First, the authors demonstrate that the question of what it means to be Jewish today, and more specifically what it means to be both German and Jewish, is still significant in the cultural sphere, even if contemporary public debates about religion tend to focus on other groups. This new visibility is characterized, so it seems from the papers in this collection, by a new willingness of authors and filmmakers to ex- plore the multiplicity of Jewish identities in Germany and beyond.

What Crowe shows explicitly — that narratives drawing on the heritage of Christianity in Germany tend to display an element of internal secularization — is ech- oed more or less directly in the other articles in this section. While the group of texts Schalk analyses arguably differ substantially enough in terms of genre and converge sufficiently on a thematic level to warrant parallel discussion, doing so neutralizes the potential for the author to adequately examine the part played by narratives of social and political transcendence in the post-socialist literature that, it seems to me, do re- side there.

The final five papers in the volume deal with Islam in contemporary German culture and here again—as in the essays on Judaism—the diver- sity of identities in a postmodern world becomes a central theme. Exam- ining the ways in which various critics have tried to conceptualize the role of Islam in a globalized world, Monika Shafi rightly criticizes a ten- dency to identify Islamic culture with Arab culture in a negative way. Yet as a whole, the work goes well beyond ob- vious or generalist representations of religion.

While minor inconsisten- cies in certain arguments have been highlighted here, these should not detract from the impressive contribution this volume makes both to cul- tural criticism in German studies and to a sincere and serious engagement with religion in contemporary Germany and beyond.

Fundamentally, the volume earnestly questions the possible conditions for the transcendence of religious differences while not undermining distinctions that individu- als and groups draw between themselves and others on the basis of reli- gious identifications. Mattson seeks to examine how the individual remembers and reflects on past events and how these reflections influ- ence present-day moral responsibility.

In her first chapter Mattson looks at the way individuals position themselves both diachronically and synchronically in history and in the world in general through their memories. She draws on the theories of several well-known scholars of memory, such as Halbwachs and Nora, in order to establish the connection between individual and collective mem- ory. Mattson highlights the importance of examining the interplay be- tween characters and the ways in which their surroundings shape their acts of memory. The author goes on to discuss feminist ethics, focusing specifically on how relationships and caring for other people influence the individual as a moral being; furthermore, she elucidates how the in- terconnectedness of individuals impacts their relationships and shapes their thought processes.

Although she concedes that there remain many different ways of looking at postwar morality, her book provides a solid launching point for future discussions about individual and collective memory and how they shape our morality.

"leichte Infanterie" in English

Not only are there ambiguities of purpose for the cinema, but also, contrary to popular assumptions, cinema was not employed solely as a tool for recognisably direct propaganda. Joseph Goebbels realised that cinema entertainment and escapism was a far more potent means of establishing a sense of cohesion and so- lidifying normative values for the Nazi regime than any direct didactic messages that espoused an overtly national socialist worldview. To this end, by the time the main German film studios of Terra, Tobis and UFA had been merged under the sole body of UFI by the Reichsministerium in , the 'dream factory' was in full swing offering extravagant revue films and melodramas starring a cast of familiar faces.

Bruns' stated aim is to take a step away from an exegesis and critique simply based on the films featuring her triumvirate of stars and undertake an analysis of their roles within the contexts of the industry in which they found themselves. Her critiques of pre- vious scholarship that fails to adequately place the films and their stars within a broader cultural and historical context of the German film indus- try under the Nazis are well-made.

The book is divided into four main chapters. After a concise and well -argued introduction, Bruns opens her work with an analysis of the workings of the film industry under the Reichskulturkammer. To this end, Bruns identifies her as a star whose effusive character lent itself to the purposes of the state in that it allowed for a ready conflation of her personal identity with the star on the screen.

Accordingly, her domesticity was, one cannot help but feel, retroactively shored up by press releases about her plans for mar- riage, children and a homey Hungarian kitchen In the third chapter, Bruns turns her attentions to the Swedish-born Zarah Leander. The paradoxical position of such an aloof personality in an ideological atmosphere so hostile to the concept of privacy yielded its share of tensions.

This ten- sion, Bruns claims, was at least as productive as it was destructive within the ideological space of Nazi cinema. Starting with her creation as a screen myth, Bruns traces her establishment as the strong and sensual female lead, exempt from the conscriptions of entertaining at the front or with other such public vulgarities.

Bruns is quite emphatic that Leander, earning vast sums of money and exceptionally prolific on screen, was a key ally of National Socialism despite her unquiet self-exile to Sweden in This chapter stands out as the most nuanced and insightful of the three, simply by virtue of the fact that Bruns deftly employs her brand of reception theory. Jana Bruns offers a new and insightful contribution to the growing field of study of the role and nature of cinema during the Third Reich.

Not- withstanding, her book is well-written, closely-argued and accessible.