Gottfried Benn und das Altern (German Edition)

The trilogy presents a grotesquely imaginative retrospective on the Nazi period. The narrator of Die Blechtrommel is the dwarf Oskar Matzerath, who claims that he deliberately stopped growing on his third birthday out of protest against the corruptions of adult society under Nazism. He expresses his opposition by means of his toy drum as well as by his almost supernatural ability to shatter glass with his voice.

Despite his initial protest, however, Oskar allows himself to be co-opted by the Nazis, joining a performing group that entertains soldiers on the Atlantic front. After the end of World War II, Oskar chooses to become involved in the slick deception of the government-sponsored West Concert Bureau, which promotes collective repression of the Nazi period. With its virtuosic command of language, its innovative reworking of the picaresque tradition, and its sophisticated approach to German social history , Die Blechtrommel was a landmark in postwar German literature. Dramatists of this period were increasingly concerned with the relation between the Nazi past and the political realities of the present.

Documentary drama, using material from the war-crimes trials of —65, proliferated: The play Kaspar ; Eng. Kaspar , by Peter Handke , takes its starting point in the story of the foundling Kaspar Hauser and his gradual acquisition of language and culture, showing him being browbeaten into learning German and becoming increasingly dehumanized in the process.

Although this play did not explicitly address the question of the Nazi past, it explored the degree to which an individual can preserve the spirit of resistance in the face of overwhelming pressures. The dominant genre was lyric poetry. After the student movement died down, the young writers returned somewhat reluctantly to everyday domesticity, which they described in their poetry in affectionate detail, though also with a distinct touch of irony. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams , a sensitive portrait of his mother and her suicide.

Sentimental, nostalgic, and gently ironic , these quasi-autobiographical novels explore the problematic nature of the positive family memories still somewhat guiltily cherished by many of those who were not persecuted by the Nazis. In Flugasche Flight of Ashes , written in East Germany during the s but not published until and then in West Germany, Monika Maron depicted the tension between inner and outer reality in the attempt of a young woman journalist to present unpleasant truths about the lives of workers in the industrial town of Bitterfeld.

While she does succeed in writing an article that causes the power plant to be shut down, she herself is under threat of expulsion from the Communist Party at the conclusion of the novel. Subjectivity was not the only theme of the s, however.

The 20th century

Two vast novel projects originating in this period combine techniques of perspectivized narration with the problem of fact versus fiction that was increasingly dominating the retrospective on Nazism: The feminist movement in Germany led to the emergence of a prolific and innovative group of women writers. Women were encouraged to feel and write through their bodies rather than through conventional rationality, and the distinctiveness of feminine sensibility became a hotly debated issue.

In the last decades of the 20th century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions to other types of cultural production are characteristic of postmodernist literature. Once viewed in the light of postmodernism, however, these novels underwent a critical reevaluation. The Story of a Murderer , with its brilliant imitations of literary styles from various periods, was another work of German postmodernism that became an international best-seller.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in , writers began to explore the tensions between the economic, social, and cultural values of West and East Germany. There was intense debate about the East German experience under communism, in particular about whether the psychological need to come to terms with this experience was comparable to the soul-searching that had been undertaken after the end of World War II.

Six , set in the s and ostensibly a story about the discovery of guilt incurred by an important East German party functionary during the Third Reich. By exploring the rift between actions and desires, the novel becomes an inquiry into the responsibility of historians and writers in general. The link between the communist and the Nazi eras is established in a key scene that metaphorically brings together violence past and present. Some readers saw the tale as a self-serving portrayal of the author as a victim of communism; these readers failed to notice, however, the thread of self-critique woven into the narrative.

German literature - The 20th century | www.newyorkethnicfood.com

In it was revealed, in a further twist of irony, that Wolf herself had given information to the security police for a brief period. It was succeeded by another debate that broke out after the secret police files of several other well-known writers became available. At the same time, some members of an apparently oppositional group of East German writers, known as the Prenzlauer Berg poets after the district in Berlin where they lived, were shown to have acted as informants for the secret police.

The resulting discussions stimulated a probing reexamination of the problem of autonomous art and the relation of aesthetics to ideology. Nonetheless, Hettche succeeds in transforming this central metaphor into a multilayered analysis of postunification psychology. In these and other novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Nazi past continues to haunt German writing.

Adelaide Research & Scholarship

Linked with debates about the problem of memorializing the victims of Nazism in the form of public monuments, German-language novels of the s explicitly probe questions about how memories of the Nazi period can best be represented. Austerlitz —the story of a man who had been saved from Nazi Germany and adopted by an English couple but who has been traveling in search of the places he believes to have been way stations in his early life—has had international success as a moving, though puzzling, exploration of memory, real and imagined.

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Gottfried Benn - The Artist and Politics (1910-1934) (Paperback)

Postmodernism In the last decades of the 20th century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated readership. After reunification Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in , writers began to explore the tensions between the economic, social, and cultural values of West and East Germany.

Judith Ryan Previous page The 19th century. Page 4 of 4. Learn More in these related Britannica articles: The literary revival of the age displayed the same quality of introspective idealism as the philosophical movement. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest genius of German letters, willingly accepted the existing system of civic and social values. He regarded the disunity of his nation as an….

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Louis also cultivated the German language and literature for the first time as a source of self-conscious cultural and political identity. Under his patronage the Gospels were translated into German dialects, and the first attempts at writing German poetry with Christian and traditional themes were undertaken. As against this, it can point to an excellent original tradition of nursery and nonsense rhymes. The University of Melbourne Library. University of Queensland Library. University of Western Australia Library. This single location in Australian Capital Territory: These 4 locations in New South Wales: This single location in Queensland: E46 Z Book English Show 0 more libraries This single location in South Australia: These 2 locations in Victoria: Open to the public Book English Show 0 more libraries This single location in Western Australia: None of your libraries hold this item.

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