Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement: New Directions in German Studies Laurie Ruth Johnson Bloomsbury Academic

Germany from the Outside

Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement

Germany from the Outside

Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement

Description

The nation-state is a European invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. As a consequence, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the inside-as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him or herself “German” necessarily must identify. But what happens if we describe German culture and its history from the outside? And as something heterogeneous, shaped by multiple and diverse sources, many of which are not obviously connected to things traditionally considered “German”?

Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, Germany from the Outside explores new opportunities for understanding and shaping community at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. Located at the nexus of cultural, political, historiographical, and philosophical discourses, the essays in this volume inform discussions about next directions for German Studies and for the Humanities in a fraught era.

Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Laurie Ruth Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

I: Reading German Cultural History Differently

1. Finding Odysseus's Scars Again: Hyperlinked Literary Histories in the Age of Refugees
B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

2. Between the Court and the Port, but never Part of a Nation: Friederike Brun's Domesticated Cosmopolitanism
Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, USA

3. On the Inside Looking Out: Fichte, the University, and the Psychopolitics of German Idealism
Laurie Ruth Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

4. Rewriting German Literary History from the Outside in: J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello
David Kim, University of California-Los Angeles, USA

II: Stories of Expulsion, Exile, and Displacement

5. Looking for Heinrich Heine with Nâzim Hikmet and E.S. Özdamar
Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College, USA

6. Between Times and Places: German Identity in Albert Vigoleis Thelen's Refugee Memoirs from Spain and Portugal (31 August – 1 September 1939)
Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

7. Writing Germany with Brazil: Julia Mann's Memoirs
Veronika Füchtner, Dartmouth College, USA

8. From Vienna to the Midwest: Austrian Refugees and Quaker Rescue Efforts after 1938
Bettina Brandt, Pennsylvania State University, USA

9. Keeping Time: Trauma as Intimate Alienation in Hans Keilson's Writing
Anna M. Parkinson, Northwestern University, USA

III: Rewriting German Culture

10. Tracing the Continual Present: Yoko Tawada and Vilém Flusser
Gizem Arslan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

11. Mobilizing the Archive: Marica Bodrozic and Deniz Utl's Unterhaltungen deutscher Eingewanderten
Claudia Breger, Columbia University, USA

12. Constructing an “Inside”: Transcultural Laughter Communities in Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017) and Olga Grjasnowa's Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012)
Lucas Riddle, Bowdoin College, USA

13. Screening Urban Space and Belonging in Berlin: Contemporary Berliners in Sheri Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick/At Second Glance (2013), Ines Johnson-Spain's Becoming Black (2019), and Amelia Umuhire's Polyglot (2015)
Berna Gueneli, University of Georgia, USA

14. Bertolt Brecht's Me-ti or the Aesthetics of Translation: Universal Love, Mutual Benefits, and Transience
Chunjie Zhang, University of California-Davis, USA

15. Clowns in Exile: Hamletmaschine and the (In)human
Olivia Landry, Lehigh University, USA

Bibliography
Index

Product details

Published	Apr 18 2024
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	368
ISBN	9781501375897
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Series	New Directions in German Studies
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Germany from the Outside is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary German Studies that owes its inspiration to new approaches in postcolonial and migration studies. With its emphasis on stories of expulsion, exile, and displacement from Goethe to Heine, from Brecht to Yoko Tawada, and from Heiner Müller to Özdamar, and with essays written by leading scholars, it will have a lasting impact on international Germanistik.

Paul Michael Lützeler, Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, USA
Germany from the Outside forces us to question why teaching and research in German Studies continue to be haunted by the legacies of racial and ethnic nationalism, empire, monolingualism, and one-dimensional notions of mobility and exchange. This volume provides a much-needed critical vocabulary for analyzing what has been perhaps evident yet underappreciated all along: novelists, philosophers, dramatists, and filmmakers have been grappling with complex identifications, leading lives shaped by displacement, fighting against exclusion, and resisting a stable notion of Germanness. The contributors thus illuminate the diversity and plurality that emerges when we look at German cultural production from multiple positions.

Vance Byrd, Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania, USA