Paper Ge6

Modern German Culture (2) 1890 to the present day

MML Part IB

Module Descriptions and Reading Lists

1. Sexuality and the Unconscious

The conflict between social norms and sexual desire became a salient public issue in the period around 1900, and it lies at the heart of Freud’s project of psychoanalysis as well as the literary writing of that time. This module focuses on Wedekind’s famous drama about adolescent sexuality, Frühlings Erwachen, and Schnitzler’s equally well-known narrative representation of a young woman confronting a profound sexual dilemma, Fräulein Else. It also provides the opportunity to consider how Freud’s ideas might help us understand these literary texts on the one hand, and the senses in which Freud’s thinking should itself be viewed critically as a manifestation of the culture of his time on the other.

Primary material Frank Wedekind, Frühlings Erwachen Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else

Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse lectures 5-7 (on dreaming): lecture 5 ('Schwierigkeiten und erste Annäherungen'): pp. 101-115, particularly pp. 105-109 and 113-115 lecture 6 ('Voraussetzungen und Technik der Deutung'): pp. 116-127, particularly pp. 120-127 lecture 6 ('Manifester Trauminhalt und latente Traumgedanken'): pp. 128- 138, particularly pp. 128-135 lectures 9-11 (on the interpretation of dreams): lecture 9 ('Die Traumzensur'), pp. 148-158, particularly pp. 148-154 lecture 10 ('Die Symbolik im Traum'), pp. 159-177, particularly pp. 159-163, pp. 165- 169 and pp. 174-175 lecture 11 ('Die Traumarbeit'), pp. 178-189, particularly 178-185 (drei Leistungen der Traumarbeit) and pp. 188-189 (sekundäre Bearbeitung) lecture 20 ('Das menschliche Sexualleben'), pp. 300-315, particularly 306-15 lecture 31 ('Die Zerlegung der psychischen Persönlichkeit')

Introductory reading Elizabeth Boa, The Sexual Circus (Oxford 1987), chapter 2 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: death, femininity and the aesthetic (Manchester University Press 1992), pp. 281-90 Anthony Storr, Freud, Oxford 1989

For further study (long essay option) Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), with one of the following: a) Wedekind, Erdgeist; David Midgley, ‘Wedekind: Erdgeist’, in Peter Hutchinson (ed.), Landmarks in German Drama (Oxford: Lang, 2002), pp. 143-58; Ruth Florack, Wedekinds ‘Lulu’: Zerrbild der Sinnlichkeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995) b) Arthur Schnitzler, ‘Frau Beate und ihr Sohn’; Michael Titzmann, ‘Normenkrise und Psychologie in der frühen Moderne: Zur Interpretation von Arthur Schnitzlers “Frau Beate und ihr Sohn”’, Recherches Germaniques 28 (1998), 97-112; Silvia Kronberger, Die unerhörten Töchter: Fräulein Else und Elektra und die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Hysterie (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002) c) Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß; Andrew Webber, ‘Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß’, in David Midgley (ed.), The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993); Patrizia C. McBride, The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the experience of modernity (Evanston IL: Northwestern UP, 2006), chapter 1

Further secondary reading Andrew Webber, ‘Psychoanalysis, Homosexuality, and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, ed. Hugh Stevens (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), pp. 34-49 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London 1974) Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud and Art’, in Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)

2. Transformations of the National Idea 1890-1989

German national identity underwent profound changes between 1890 and 1989. Questions about the relationship between national identity and the state posed themselves with traumatic regularity: after 1888, with the accession of the impetuous Emperor Wilhelm II; in the Weimar Republic after 1918 and the Third Reich after 1933; after 1945 with the emergence of two German states; and in 1989-90 with the unification of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Between 1890 and 1945 German nationalism became increasingly radical and xenophobic, shaped by the ideological conflict between Left and Right and by racial thinking. After the Second World War and the Holocaust the Germans had to redefine their relationship with their past and, in both East Germany and West Germany, they forged new ideas about their identity and their role in Europe. The selection of primary material will enable students to explore political, social and cultural-historical dimensions of the development of modern German national identity in its European context.

Primary Material (Short texts to be made available as a pdf document via Camtools.) Selected extracts from Lesebuch zur deutschen Geschichte, vol. 3, ed. Bernhard Pollmann, (Dortmund: Chronik Verlag, 1984), pp. 21-26, 41-6, 58-61, 63-9, 82-5, 120-9, 134-5, 150-3, 177-98, 209-11, 221-5, 229-32, 234-49, 258-60. Selected extracts from Nürnberg Laws (1935) Preamble to the Grundgesetz fur die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (23.05.1949), also articles 20-27 on ‘Der Bund und die Lander’, and 116 Preambles to Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik of 7 October 1949 and 1974 Bundespräsident Horst Köhler, Ansprache 8.v.2005, Rede vor dem Bundestag zum 60. Jahrestag der deutschen Kapitulation 1945 (http://www.bundespraesident.de/Reden-und-Interviews)

Recommended reading Stefan Berger, Inventing the Nation: Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), ch. 3-7 John Breuilly (ed.), The state of Germany: the national idea in the making, unmaking and remaking of a modern nation state (London: Longman, 1992), ch. 1, 6-12. John Breuilly, ‘The national idea in modern German history’, in Mary Fulbrook (ed.), German History since 1800 (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997), pp.556-84. William W. Hagen, German history in modern times: four lives of the nation (Cambridge CUP, 2012), Part III + IV. Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: OUP, 2011), ch. 22, 24, 31, 34, 35.

For further study (long essay option) Volker Kronenberg, ‘Verfassungs-patriotismus im vereinten Deutschland’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (28/2009) online at http://www.bpb.de/apuz/31878/verfassungs- patriotismus-im-vereinten-deutschland?p=0- Selected extracts from Peter Alter (ed.), Nationalismus: Dokumente zur Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1994). “Historikerstreit”. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, 9th edn (Munich: Piper, 1995), pp. 39-47, 62-76, 132-42. Students are also advised to consult the website of the Deutsches Historisches Museum for an illustrated account of the period (including documents): http://www.dhm.de/lemo/home.html

Further secondary reading David Blackbourn and James Retallack (ed.), Localism, landscape and the ambiguities of place: German-speaking central Europe, 1860-1930 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), Introduction and chapter 6. Peter Blickle, Heimat: A critical theory of the German idea of homeland (Rochester: Camden House, 2002). Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (1995), Introduction and pp. 69-91, 137-76, 239-61 Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (Oxford: OUP, 2008), chapters 1, 4, 10. Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen (enlarged edition, Munich: dtv, 2009) Mary Fulbrook, German national identity after the holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

3. Gender and Austrian Writing

This module focuses on the role of gender in Austrian writing after 1945. Faced with challenges of post-fascist memory and national identity distinctively different from both West and East Germany, Austrian women writers in particular were trying to break free from oppressive social and aesthetic traditions. Discussing Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben, we will look at challenges to paradigms of femininity, masculinity, sexuality and the family (both in the traditional circumscribed sense and as larger collective of the nation). Along the lines of the feminist credo that the private is always already political, we will examine the ethics that underlie these writings and attempt to shed more light on their historical and political contexts through a gendered reading of literature.

Primary material Peter Handke, Wunschloses Unglück (1972) Ruth Klüger, weiter leben (1992) Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile’, Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977), 62-76.

Introductory reading Hélène Cixous. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4. (Summer, 1976), 875-893.

Aleida Assman. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. Munich: C.H.Beck, 2006. 12-59.

Allyson Fiddler. “Post-war Austrian women writers”. – In: Chris Weedon (ed): Postwar Women’s Writing in German. Feminist Critical Approaches. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn. 1997.

Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Bruchlinien. Vorlesungen zur österreichischen Literatur 1945 bis 1990. St.Pölten-Salzburg-Vienna: Residenz, 1997. 5-15; 111-129; 254-268.

For further study (long essay option)

Ilse Aichinger. “Aufruf zum Misstrauen” (1946)

Ingeborg Bachmann. “Undine geht” (1961)

Further secondary reading

Dagmar C. G. Lorenz. “Austrian Authors and the Dilemma of National Identity at the End of the 20th Century”. In: MAL 29/3-4, 1996.

Ruth Klüger. “Frauen lesen anders.” In: Ruth Klüger. Frauen lesen anders. Munich: dtv 1996.

Andrea Reiter. “’Ich wollte, es wäre ein Roman.’ Ruth Klügers feminist survival report.” Forum for Modern Language Studies (2002) 38 (3): 326-340.

Elizabeth Boa. “Reading Ingeborg Bachmann”. – In: Chris Weedon (ed): Postwar Women’s Writing in German. Feminist Critical Approaches. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn. 1997.

Georg L Mosse. “Introduction”. The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity. OUP, 1996. 1-16.

Georgina Paul. “The Post-1945 Crisis of Enlightenment and the Emergence of the “Other” Sex.” Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009. 35-66.

Sigrid Weigel, Die Stimme der Medusa: Schreibweisen in der Gegenwartsliteratur von Frauen (Dülmen 1987).

4. Contemporary German Memory Work: Text and Image The contemporary culture of the German-speaking countries is intensely concerned with the imperatives and problems of the work of memory, and this module will explore these concerns through a combination of textual and visual material. When cultural memory work is under greatest pressure to create appropriate archives and achieve adequate testimony, it reaches for varied combinations of material and of media, and not least for combinations of pictures and words. The module will consider issues of contemporary memory culture through the work of a writer who is also profoundly concerned with images – W. G. Sebald, and two artists who are also profoundly concerned with words and texts – Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Through the complex historical layering that they achieve in their works, we will see both the possibilities and the limitations of memory culture in the shadow zone after dark times. Primary material W. G. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten (1992) Anselm Kiefer, e.g. Besetzungen; Mohn und Gedächtnis; Shulamith and Margarete images; Volkszählung Gerhard Richter, e.g. Reichstag; October 18, 1977 (see http://www.gerhard- richter.com/art/) Introductory reading/viewing Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past’, in David Midgley and Christian Emden (eds), Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-speaking World since 1500, pp. 19-37. Corinna Belz, Gerhard Richter Painting (documentary film, 2011, available in Faculty Library) J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), especially pp. 109-29. Andrea Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), especially pp. 87-131.

For further study (long essay option) W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn (1995), Luftkrieg und Literatur (2003); Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), especially ‘Todesfuge’; images by Thomas Demand (http://www.thomasdemand.info/images/photographs/). Herta Müller, Atemschaukel (2009)

Further reading/viewing Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long (ed.), W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), especially pp. 163-78 (Carolin Duttlinger, ‘A Lineage of Destruction’). Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (eds.), W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), especially pp. 205-18 (Maya Barzilai, ‘On Exposure’). Sophie Fiennes, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (documentary film on Kiefer, 2010, available in Faculty Library) Martin Henatsch, Gerhard Richter, 18. Oktober 1977: Das verwischte Bild der Geschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1998) Linda Hutcheon, Irony and the Power of the Unsaid [on Anselm Kiefer] (Newfoundland: Memorial University, 1993), available in the West Room of the University Library, classmark 1997.8.5248. Anselm Kiefer, with texts by Werner Spies (Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2004) Lise Patt and Christel Dillbohner (eds), Searching for Sebald: Photography after W. G. Sebald (London: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007) Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965-2004 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004) Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) David C. Ward, ‘Ghost Worlds of the Ordinary: W. G. Sebald and Gerhard Richter’, PN Review 152, 29.6 (July/August 2003), 32–36.

5. Transnational Texts: Turkish-German Literature and Film of the 1990s-2000s

One in five residents of Germany today have a “background of migration”. This is reflected in the expansion of German-language literature and film over the past quarter of a century to include narratives of migration and life in post-migrant Germany. Literature and film by Turkish-German artists have had a key role to play here and in this module we will focus on two significant texts by Turkish-German artists. Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998) – a semi- autobiographical novel which traces the sexual, political and aesthetic experimentation of a young female guest worker moving between Turkey and Germany in the 1960s – and Gegen die Wand (2004) by Fatih Akin, a filmmaker whose cinematic work of the 2000s provoked the assertion that ‘The new “German” Cinema is “Turkish”’. Students will be introduced to the debates on representation and belonging which have accompanied much Turkish-German cultural production, with particular respect to theories of ‘hybridity’ and ‘third space’ which entered the German context from postcolonial theory around this time. As well as gaining an overview of the history of Turkish-German texts and film, students will explore the potential and limits of the above theoretical concepts when it comes to analysing the resignifications of German language, identity, and space in these transnational texts.

Primary Material

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Brücke vom goldenen Horn (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998).

Fatih Akin, Gegen die Wand (2004).

Leslie A. Adelson, ‘Against Between – Ein Manifest gegen das Dazwischen’, in Text und Kritik, 9.6: Literatur und Migration ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold (2006), 36-46.

Robert Young, Colonial Desire (London: Routledge, 1995). Chapter 1.

Introductory Reading

Rob Burns, ‘Turkish-German Cinema: From Cultural Resistance to Transnational Cinema?’, in German Cinema Since Unification, ed. by David Clarke (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 127–49; And/Or: Deniz Göktürk, ‘Turkish Women on German Streets. Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema’, in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. by Myrto Konstantarakos (Exeter/Portland: Intellect, 2000), 64-76.

Moray McGowan, ‘Brücken und Brücken-Köpfe: Wandlungen einer Metapher in der türkisch-deutschen Literatur’, in Die andere Deutsche Literatur. Istanbuler Vorträge, ed. by Manfred Durzak and Nilüfer Kuruyazýcý (Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 2004) pp. 31 – 40.

Kein Nghi Ha, Hype um Hybridität. Kultureller Differenzkonsum und postmoderne Verwertungstechniken im Spätkapitalismus (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2005). Chapter 1.

For further study (long essay option)

Fatih Akin, Auf der anderen Seite (2007). Film.

Sehan Derin, Ben Annemin Kiziyim – Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter (1996). Film.

Aslı Ozge, Auf Einmal (2016). Film. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Seltsame Sterne Starren Zur Erde (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003).

Zafer Şenocak, Der Erottomane: Ein Findelbuch (Berlin: Babel, 1999).

Yüksel Yavuz, Kleine Freiheit (2003).

Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995) and the Kanak Attak movement (www.kanakattak.de).

Further Secondary Reading

Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Daniela Berghahn (ed), Turkish-German Dialogues on Screen, special issue of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 7.1 (2009).

Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).

Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007).

Seyhan Derin and Angelica Fenner, ‘“She's Got Her Own Way of Asserting Herself”: Interview with Seyhan Derin’, Women in German Yearbook, 22 (2006), pp. 43-61.

Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (eds), Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (New York: Berghahn, 2012).

Jim Jordan, ‘More than a Metaphor: The Passing of the Two Worlds Paradigm in German-language Diasporic Literature’, German Life and Letters, 59.4 (2006), 488- 499.

Karin Lornsen, ‘The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn’, in Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media, ed. by Gaby Pailer et al (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 201-17.

Gözde Naiboğlu, Post-Unification Turkish German Cinema: Work, Globalisation and Politics Beyond Representation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Helmut Schmitz, (ed), Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur und Film: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), Introduction and Section III on Turkish-German Literature and Film.

Beverly M. Weber, ‘Work, Sex, and Socialism: Reading Beyond Cultural Hybridity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn’, German Life and Letters, 63.1 (2010), 37-53.

Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).