Alexander Stephan

The ongoing discussions about globalization, American hegemony and September 11 and its aftermath have moved the debate about the export of American culture and cultural anti-Americanism to center stage of world politics. At such a time, it is crucial to understand the process of culture transfer and its effects on local societies and their attitudes toward the United States. This volume presents Germany as a case study of the impact of American culture throughout a period characterized by a totalitarian system, two unusually destructive wars, massive ethnic cleansing, and economic disaster. Drawing on examples from history, culture studies, film, radio, and the arts, the authors explore the political and cultural parameters of Americanization and anti-Americanism, as reflected in the reception and rejection of American popular culture and, more generally, in European-American relations in the American Century.

The German Encounter with American Culture After 1945

Americanization and Anti-Americanism

Therese Hörnigk

The New Sufferings of Young W. and Other Stories from the German Democratic Republic

Das siebte Kreuz : Welt und Wirkung eines Romans

Anna Seghers

Deutsche Exilschriftsteller in den Akten amerikanischer Geheimdienste

Im Visier des FBI

Christa Wolf

Pól Ó Dochartaigh

This volume brings together papers by scholars from Germany, the USA, France, England and Ireland given at the first International Feuchtwanger Conference, held in Los Angeles in 2003. Some of Lion Feuchtwanger's novels from his exile in the United States are analyzed here, as are the lives of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and their contacts in the German émigré world in California. In addition, two papers focus on aspects of Bertolt Brecht's and Alfred Döblin's lives as emigrants in California. This volume is of interest to students of exile studies, of German refuge in the USA and of modern German literature.

Feuchtwanger and the European émigrés in California

Refuge and reality

In recent years Culture Studies, Anthropology, German Studies, History, Political Psychology, and other fields have used the concept of 'exile' in close connection with terms like migration, border crossing, identity, and transnationality. Views of a homogeneous culture and of centricity collide with ideas like multiculturalism, pluralism, creolization, and the globalization of differences. A transit-culture, inhabited by the flaneur and the nomad, is supposed to have replaced citizenship in a nation. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the experience of those writers, artists and intellectuals who were driven out of Germany and Europe by the Nazis was in many ways unique. This book investigates the exile experience in a theoretical and comparative way by exploring the possibilities and limitations of concepts like diaspora, de-localization, and transit-culture for understanding the lives and works of German and Austrian refugees from Nazi persecution. It revisits the interaction of the exiles with the culture of their host countries in light of recent debates about migration and identity studies and it analyzes texts, paintings and other methods of artistic expression which connect the experience of the refugees of 1933 with postmodern notions of de-localization, hybridity, and marginalization.

New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees

Exile and Otherness

This collection of High Modernism among Austrian and German writers includes:--Pogrom and a selection from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig--"The Murder of a Buttercup" and a selection from Berlin Alexanderplatz (recently cited as one of the 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time in a survey that was reported in The Guardian, and made into a landmark multipart television series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder) by Alfred D÷blin--Selections from Jew Snss and The Oppermans by Lion Feuchtwanger--A selection from The Seventh Cross and "Excursion of the Dead Girls" by Anna Seghers>

Early 20th Century German Fiction: A. Döblin, L. Feuchtwanger, A. Seghers, A. Zweig

Alexander Stephan

About

Books

Join the club