Martin Kane

A Study of the Work of George Grosz and Ernst Toller

Weimar Germany and the Limits of Political Art

The Changing Roles and Identity of a Political Poet

Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Zukunftsmusik"

This volume seeks to trace the robustly critical process of historical, political and personal self-examination to be found in German literature of the 1990s. Scholars from Australia, Britain, Germany, and the USA have contributed essays which deal with a broad range of East and West German writers (Biskupek, Grass, Hilbig, Königsdorf, Maron, Mensching, Walser, Wenzel, and Wolf) as well as with general topics such as literature and the Stasi, and the response to the aftermath of unification to be found in autobiographical writing, lyric poetry, satirical fiction and cabaret texts. For all their diversity, a common thread can be discerned in these writers and the literature they have produced: a concern for the particularity of the East German experience, past and present, and a desire to explore that discrete identity - in both its positive and negative aspects - which stubbornly persisted over a decade in which the citizens of the German Democratic Republic saw themselves, their institutions, and their culture, swept up and consigned to oblivion.

East and West German Literary Responses to Unification

Legacies and Identity

Robert Atkins

Robert E. Atkins

In Retrospect and Review an international team of scholars explore East German literature, and the circumstances of its production, in the last phase of the German Democratic Republic's existence. The provocative claim of the novelist, playwright and essayist Christoph Hein, 'Ich nehme außerdem für mich in Anspruch [...] elfmal das Ende der DDR beschrieben zu haben,' serves as the starting-point for the twenty-three contributors to the volume, who consider the many and varied ways in which Hein and his fellow writers signalled and diagnosed the demise of the GDR. The fraught relationship between the state and its intellectuals inevitably forms a consistent theme in the studies of writers as diverse as Anna Seghers and Kito Lorenc, Christa Wolf and Jurek Becker, or Irmtraud Morgner and Heiner Müller. However, the process of 'retrospect and review' also reveals the innovative and independent-minded character of the culture of the GDR's later years. Several contributors trace the emergence of a strong and distinctive women's writing which increasingly and subversively imposed itself on the hitherho patriarchal literary landscape of the GDR. And in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s experimental narrative strategies take on a political role as a counter-discourse to a stubbornly inflexible political order.

Aspects of the Literature of the GDR 1976-1990

Retrospect and Review

Martin Kane

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