-PDF Download- German Literature Jewish Critics EBOOK

German Literature, Jewish Critics

Author: Stephen D. Dowden

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9781571131584

Proceedings of the Brandeis conference on Jewish Germanists who fled Nazi Germany and their impact on Anglo-American German studies. Among the Jewish academics and intellectuals expelled from Germany and Austria during the Nazi era were many specialists in German literature. Strangely, their impact on the practice of Germanistik in the United States, England, and Canada has been given little attention. Who were they? Did their vision of German literature and culture differ significantly from that of those who remained in their former homeland? What problems did they face in theAmerican and British academic settings? Above all, how did they help shape German studies in the postwar era? This unique and important symposium, which convened at Brandeis University under the auspices of its Center for Germanand European Studies, addresses these and many other questions. Among its distinguished participants--who numbered over thirty in all--are Peter Demetz (Yale, emeritus), Gesa Dane (Göttingen), Amir Eshel (Stanford), Willi Goetschel (Toronto), Barbara Hahn (Princeton), Susanne Klingenstein (MIT), Christoph König (Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach), Ritchie Robertson (Oxford), Egon Schwarz (Washington University St. Louis, emeritus), Hinrich Seeba (UC Berkeley), Walter Sokel (University of Virginia, emeritus), Frank Trommler (University of Pennsylvania), and many more. The volume includes not only the (revised) essays of the participants but also their prepared responses, transcripts of the panel discussion, and dialogue of the participants with members of the audience. Stephen D. Dowden is professor of German at Brandeis University; Meike G. Werner is assistant professor of German at Vanderbilt University.

The German-Jewish Dialogue

Author: Ritchie Robertson

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780192839107

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'I love the German character more than anything else in the world, and my breast is an archive of German song' So wrote Heinrich Heine in 1824, adding: 'It is likely that my Muse gave her German dress something of a foreign cut from annoyance with the German character'. Here Heine sums up the ambivalent emotions of Jews who felt at home in German culture and yet, even in the age of emancipation, foundGermany less than welcoming. This anthology illustrates the history of Jews in Germany from the eighteenth century, when it was first proposed to give Jews civil rights, to the 1990's and the problems of living after the Holocaust. The texts include short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters anddiary entries, all chosen for their literary merit as well as the light they shed on the relations between Jews in Germany and Austria and their Gentile fellow-citizens. Ritchie Robertson's lucid introduction provides the necessary historical context and his translations make available in Englishin some cases for the first time - both Jewish writers on various aspects of Jewish experience and responses of Gentile writers to the Jews in their midst. Each is introduced by a short illuminating preface.

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Author: Jonathan M. Hess

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-03-12

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0804774234

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies

Author: Henk de Berg

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9781571133014

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Rarely has a single figure had as much influence on Western thought as Sigmund Freud. His ideas permeate our culture to such a degree that an understanding of them is indispensable. Yet many otherwise well-informed students in the humanities labor under misconceptions or lack of knowledge about Freudian theory. There are countless introductions to Freudian psychoanalysis but, surprisingly, none that combine a genuinely accessible account of Freud's ideas with an introduction to their use in literary and cultural studies, as this book does. It is written specifically for use by advanced undergraduate and graduate students in courses dealing with literary and cultural criticism, yet will also be of interest to the general reader. The book consists of two parts. Part one explains Freud's key ideas, focusing on the role his theories of repression, conscious and unconscious mental processes, sexuality, dreams, free associations, "Freudian slips," resistance, and transference play in psychoanalysis, and on the relationship between ego, superego, and id. Here de Berg refutes many popular misconceptions, using examples throughout. The assumption underlying this account is that Freud offers not simply a model of the mind, but an analysis of the relation between the individual and society. Part two discusses the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis for the study of literature and culture. Among the topics analyzed are Hamlet, Heinrich Heine's Lore-Ley, Freud's Totem and Taboo and its influence on literature, the German student movement of the late 1960s, and the case of the Belgian pedophile Marc Dutroux and the public reactions to it. Existing books focus either on Freudian psychoanalysis in general or on psychoanalytic literary or cultural criticism; those in the latter category tend to be abstract and theoretical in nature. None of them are suitable for readers who are interested in psychoanalysis as a tool for literary and cultural criticism but have no firm knowledge of Freud's ideas. Freu

The Jew in German Literature

Author: Albert Marx Friedenberg

Publisher:

Published: 1907

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

German Literature Between Faiths

Author: Peter Meister

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9783039101740

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Religion is a central concern of German literature in all centuries, and the canon looks different when this perspective is acknowledged. For example, Goethe's fascination with evil is difficult to disentangle from the Holocaust, Moses Mendelssohn is as profound as the playwright who portrayed him, and «Princess Sabbath» deserves to be numbered among Heine's more enchanting lyrics. This essay collection posits, and tests, the hypothesis that German literature at its best is often an expression or investigation of Judaism or Christianity at their best; but that the best German literature is not always the best-known, and vice versa. Asking whether the New Testament is anti-Jewish (and answering in the negative), essayists range through the German centuries from The Heliand to Kafka and Thomas Mann.

Jewish Writers, German Literature

Author: Timothy Bahti

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

By any account, German-speaking Jews have made among the greatest contributions to world culture in this century--one thinks of Wittgenstein and Husserl in philosophy, Freud in psychoanalysis, Kafka in fiction, and Paul Celan in poetry. Yet most Jews were exiled from German-speaking lands (when they were not murdered there), and they have never been integrated within German culture as such. The poet Nelly Sachs, who won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for her poetry on the Holocaust, and the critic Walter Benjamin are two such German- Jewish writers: born just over a century ago in Berlin and exiled from Germany in the 1930s, both were acclaimed after World War II (Benjamin posthumously), yet neither, to this day, is anything but an outsider to German literature. The present collection of essays addresses the uneasy relationship between Jews who are masters of the German language and the German literary tradition that still cannot accept the otherness of Jewish writers. After a biographical and historical introduction by the volume's two editors, individual chapters are devoted to Sachs, to Benjamin, to their comparison, and to Sachs in an international context. Topics explored include the Jewish themes and motifs in Sachs's distinctive verse-dramas; the limits of poetic metaphor with respect to representations of the Holocaust; the relationship of Benjamin's theories of dramatic language to Sachs's verse- dramas; and Benjamin's theories of language, imagery, and gesture in the contexts of Western philosophy, German literature, and Jewish thought. Before now, no work in any language has brought Sachs and Benjamin scholarship together under a single cover. Looking at these two internationally known and celebrated authors together reconfigures both the ways we understand them-- neither just "Jewish writers," nor indifferently German authors--and the ways we understand German literature. Timothy Bahti is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan. Marilyn Sibley Fries was Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile

Author: Egbert Krispyn

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-03-01

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0820334901

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In contrast to the sometimes overly generous treatment of German writers forced into exile by Hitler's fascist regime, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile applies the strict aesthetic and historical standards of literary criticism, putting aside any special pleading for their anti-Nazi political views. This critical approach leads to two important conclusions: that the emigrant writers' sacrifices and opposition to Hitler's Germany, however courageous, were ultimately futile and that the literature they produced was largely an aesthetic failure, due in part to the very nature of the exile experience. Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile includes a brief description of literary life in the Third Reich, but then concentrates on the United States as the scene of the exile's greatest activity after the outbreak of World War II. Krispyn concludes that the exiles' failure to achieve their political and artistic aims constitutes an important political case history within the larger history of Nazi Germany. Artistic and intellectual activities seem powerless to oppose terror, and the turn of the creative mind to political ends seemingly undermines the aesthetic force of creation.

Melancholy Pride

Author: Mark H. Gelber

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-07-24

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 311095608X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study focuses on the emergence of a modern Jewish national literature and culture within the parameters of Zionism in Vienna and Berlin at the turn of the last century. Prominent figures associated with early modern Zionism, including Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Martin Buber, were also writers and literary or cultural icons within the Central European, Germanic-Austrian cultural environment of the fin-de-siècle. More important, Cultural Zionism promoted young Jewish literary and artistic talent as part of its ideology of a modern Jewish Renaissance. A corpus of German-language Jewish-national poetry and literature, as well as mechanisms for its dissemination and reception, developed rapidly. Most of this literary and cultural production has been forgotten or suppressed. Productive, if often unlikely, partnerships between Jewish national poets and artists and Central European cultural figures and movements were forged in this context. Facets of Central European cultural life, which were somewhat oppositional to traditional Jewish culture were received, absorbed, or transformed within Cultural Zionism. For example, the relationship of German racialist thought and German-nationalist fraternity life to early Jewish-national expression is a largely unknown chapter of early Jewish-national cultural history. The same can be said for the impact of feminist, counter-culture, and bohemian circles in Berlin on Cultural Zionist personalities and their work.