The First World War in German Narrative Prose

The First World War in German Narrative Prose
Author: Charles N. Genno
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 1980-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487597444

This collection of eight essays in honour of the distinguished Canadian Germanist G.W. Field treats themes in German narrative prose of the First World War, the pre-war era, and the earliest of the Weimar Republic. The aim of the book is not to present a comprehensive study of the field, but rather to shed new light on specific problems. The essays are organized in the historical sequence of the events and situations to which they are related. The topics include discussions of the concept of war as presented by Robert Musil in Der Mann hone Eigenschaften; the treatment of war as a catalyst by the Expressionist writers Carl Sternheim and Leonhard Frank; the preservation of values in the face of war as dealt in Hesse's Demian; and an exploration of the effects of war on the individual and social values in the works of Salomo Friedländer and Alfred Döblin. An essay on H.G. Well's Mr. Britling Sees It Through helps to clarify the ways in which the reaction of German writers to the war may be viewed as specifically German by providing an outsider's point of view. The final chapter, a survey of the most recent literature on the topic, shows how much World War I lives on in the minds of German writers as the great turning point in German political and cultural history.

German Literature and the First World War: The Anti-War Tradition

German Literature and the First World War: The Anti-War Tradition
Author: Brian Murdoch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317128443

The period immediately following the end of the First World War witnessed an outpouring of artistic and literary creativity, as those that had lived through the war years sought to communicate their experiences and opinions. In Germany this manifested itself broadly into two camps, one condemning the war outright; the other condemning the defeat. Of the former, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front remains the archetypal example of an anti-war novel, and one that has become synonymous with the Great War. Yet the tremendous and enduring popularity of Remarque’s work has to some extent eclipsed a plethora of other German anti-war writers, such as Hans Chlumberg, Ernst Johannsen and Adrienne Thomas. In order to provide a more rounded view of German anti-war literature, this volume offers a selection of essays published by Brian Murdoch over the past twenty years. Beginning with a newly written introduction, providing the context for the volume and surveying recent developments in the subject, the essays that follow range broadly over the German anti-war literary tradition, telling us much about the shifting and contested nature of the war. The volume also touches upon subjects such as responsibility, victimhood, the problem of historical hiatus in the production and reception of novels, drama, poetry, film and other literature written during the war, in the Weimar Republic, and in the Third Reich. The collection also underlines the potential dangers of using novels as historical sources even when they look like diaries. One essay was previously unpublished, two have been augmented, and three are translated into English for the first time. Taken together they offer a fascinating insight into the cultural memory and literary legacy of the First World War and German anti-war texts.

The Representation of War in German Literature

The Representation of War in German Literature
Author: Elisabeth Krimmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139488376

The history of literature about war is marked by a fundamental paradox: although war forms the subject of countless novels, dramas, poems, and films, it is often conceived as indescribable. Even as many writers strive towards an ideal of authenticity, they maintain that no representation can do justice to the terror and violence of war. Readings of Schiller, Kleist, Jünger, Remarque, Grass, Böll, Handke, and Jelinek reveal that stylistic and aesthetic features, gender discourses, and concepts of agency and victimization can all undermine a text's martial stance or its ostensible pacifist agenda. Spanning the period from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the recent wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq, this book investigates the aesthetic, theoretical, and historical challenges that confront writers of war.

German Expressionist Prose

German Expressionist Prose
Author: Augustinus P. Dierick
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1987-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442638265

An extreme sensitivity to gathering social crisis, an accompanying angry enthusiasm for artistic experimentation and renewal – this compelling mix in German art, poetry, and drama of the period 1910 to 1925 continues to draw both scholarly attention and intense popular interest. In this book Augustinus Dierick focuses on another significant but hitherto neglected medium of German Expressionist thought – short narrative prose – in order to illuminate and evaluate the contribution of that genre to one of the twentieth century's most powerful artistic movements. Dierick's study includes a thorough analysis of the works of a broad range of Expressionist prose writers, from those of such specialists in the genre as Edschmid, Heym, Benn, Loerke, Frank, Sternheim, Ehrenstein, and 'Mynona' to the shorter prose works of such major figures as Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, Max Brod, and Franz Werfel. Dierick isolates the thematic obsessions common among Expressionist writers: the pathos of the self in confrontation with nature and with God, the tension between self and the institutions of bourgeois society, and the attractions and dangers of eroticism. Throughout Dierick stresses the interrelationship between themes and their formal expression. He examines many apparent excesses in style and tone, many aberrations in structure and generic characteristics, and identifies them not as needless experimentation but as a necessary result of the attempt to find appropriate forms for extreme situations and complex ideas. Dierick's analysis makes clear that Expressionist prose has an intrinsic artistic value and, because of certain nuances and different accents, must be included in any estimation of the nature and importance of Expressionism as a whole.

Bitter Witness

Bitter Witness
Author: Linda F. McGreevy
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Bitter Witness is an intensive, factual study of Otto Dix's war-related art. It is the first book to place Dix's etching cycle, Der Krieg, alongside numerous paintings and drawings in the perspective of his war experience on two fronts from mid-1915 to 1918's finale. It includes a full history of the war, the Weimar Republic's socio-political upheavals, and the Nazi years, following Dix and his colleagues, including Kaethe Kollwitz, through the artistic movements and events in the first half of Germany's most turbulent century.

The Vanquished

The Vanquished
Author: Robert Gerwarth
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374282455

An "account of the continuing ethnic and state violence after the end of WWI--conflicts that more than anything else set the stage for WWII"--Provided by publisher.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture
Author: Eva Kolinsky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 1999-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139825534

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state. Newly written and researched by experts in their respective fields, individual chapters trace developments in German culture - including national identity, class, Jews in German society, minorities and women, the functions of folk and mass culture, poetry, drama, theatre, dance, music, art, architecture, cinema and mass media - from the nineteenth century to the present. Guidance is given for further reading and a chronology is provided. In its totality the Companion shows how the political and social processes that shaped modern Germany are intertwined with cultural genres and their agendas of creative expression.