Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond: For once, telling it all from the beginning

Description

While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University. Frontcover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling Part I. Anna Seghers: A Missing Piece in the Canon of Modernist Storytellers 1: Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years 2: Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers’s “The Excursion of the Dead Girls”: Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction 3: Anna Seghers’s Rubble Literature, 1947–49 4: Anna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic 5: Aufbauzeit or flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers’s GDR Novels 6: The Time of Decision in Anna Seghers 7: Filling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers’s Conceptual Metaphors Part II. Expressions of Modernity: Using Storytelling Unconventionally 8: Storytelling and Telling Stories in Heine’s Prose Fiction 9: Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka 10: Synthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in “Shanghai Ghetto” 11: American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools 12: A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 13: Changed for the Better? Alternative Uses of the Transformative Cancer Trope in Thomas Mann’s Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life Part III. The Personal Narrative: Storytelling in Acute Historical Moments 14: Problems and Effects of Autobiographical Storytelling: Als Pimpf in Polen: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung 1940–1945 (1993) and A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis’ Program for Evacuating Children during World War II (1998) 15: Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story 16: Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred 17: “Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen”: Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf’s Novel Kindheitsmuster 18: Narrating Germany’s Past: A Story of Exile and the Return Home—A Translation of the Chapter “Above the Lake” from Ursula Krechel’s Novel Landgericht 19: Storytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich Notes on the Contributors Index