Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
0.7
0.3
Journals
Humanities
Special Issues
Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975
share announcement

Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 July 2019) | Viewed by 14524

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Erin McGlothlin

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
Interests: Holocaust literature and film; German-Jewish literature; narrative theory; the graphic novel; autobiography
Dr. Corey Twitchell

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Languages & Philosophy, Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT 84720, USA
Interests: Holocaust literature and film; German-Jewish literature; Kafka; German cinema and film history; narrative theory

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

It is our pleasure to announce a special issue of Humanities on German Jewish writing from 1945-1975. We invite contributions that reevaluate German Jewish cultural production in the first three decades following the end of the Holocaust. The goal of this special issue is to explore a period in German Jewish history characterized primarily by the work of authors, artists, etc. who in many cases experienced multiple geographic displacements as the result of exile, war, genocide and other aspects of the violence and trauma enacted by the Nazis and their allies. The earlier postwar period—in contrast to both the prewar period, which featured Kafka, Wassermann, and Zweig, and the more recent post-Wall resurgence in Jewish writing in German—has not generally be seen as a distinct literary phenomenon or cultural milieu and thus has not received adequate critical recognition. Many Jewish writers in the early decades following the Shoah, such as Jean Améry, Edgar Hilsenrath, and Jakov Lind, wrote in German but lived abroad, unable or unwilling to return to or settle in German-speaking countries. Other writers, such as Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Fred Wander, and Jurek Becker, made—sometimes only temporarily—homes in either the Federal Republic or the German Democratic Republic. Their experience of postwar German culture was one of unease or dissatisfaction, making their engagements in the German-language cultural sphere and their efforts to lead a public career as Jewish authors writing in German often difficult or even untenable. We seek to contribute to the conversation generated by recent scholarship at the intersection of German Studies, Jewish Studies, and Holocaust Studies that probes the complex interconnectedness between the German and the Jewish prior to, during, and after World War II. This special issue will endeavor to explore specifically the tenacity of this interconnectedness in the early decades of the postwar period—a period in which German Jewish writing struggled for expression and definition in spite of its lack of geographical coherence. The issue thus aims to re-historicize the literary and artistic output of German-speaking Jewish authors, taking into account the political and social conditions that shaped this production, i.e. an early postwar culture that tended towards silence with regard to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. We solicit contributions that explore a variety of genres, including, but not limited to, theater, radio plays, short stories, as well as novels and poetry. The special issue also endeavors to investigate the ways in which, on a formal level, postwar German Jewish literature performs its displacement and radical decenteredness. For this reason, we welcome not only literary-historical analyses but also contributions that employ narrative theory or other methodological perspectives.

Dr. Erin McGlothlin
Dr. Corey Twitchell
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Postwar German-Jewish literature and culture
  • Holocaust literature

Published Papers (4 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

11 pages, 221 KiB  
Article
‘Once Upon a Time in Marseille’: Displacement and the Fairy Tale in Anna Seghers’ Transit
by Rebekah Slodounik
Humanities 2019, 8(4), 173; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040173 - 1 Nov 2019
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3919
Abstract
Written in 1941, while she was living in exile in Mexico, and published in 1944 in Mexico and the United States, Anna Seghers’ novel Transit replicates on a formal level an experience of displacement, statelessness, and exile. In the following analysis, I examine [...] Read more.
Written in 1941, while she was living in exile in Mexico, and published in 1944 in Mexico and the United States, Anna Seghers’ novel Transit replicates on a formal level an experience of displacement, statelessness, and exile. In the following analysis, I examine Transit as a text of forced migration. Several features of the novel attempt to produce an experience of displacement: the narrative situation, the incorporation of descriptions that place the events of World War II into a longer history of forced migration, and the use of references to the genre of the fairy tale. The descriptions that engage with past forced migration and displacement attempt to universalize the historical specificities of the time period, whereas the references to fairy tales generate a sense of timelessness associated with this genre. Through these strategies, Seghers’ novel itself attempts to displace time. Seghers situates Transit within a long history of forced migration and exile, in which the categories that are often used to define and divide populations—such as nationality, ethnicity, and religion—are in flux. By emphasizing the role of mistaken identity, Seghers destabilizes the concept of immutable identities in a period of upheaval and transition. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975)
13 pages, 242 KiB  
Article
“Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries
by Arvi Sepp
Humanities 2019, 8(4), 168; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040168 - 23 Oct 2019
Viewed by 3329
Abstract
This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. [...] Read more.
This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975)
14 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
Writing the Displaced Person: H. G. Adler’s Poetics of Exile
by Helen Finch
Humanities 2019, 8(3), 148; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030148 - 3 Sep 2019
Viewed by 4087
Abstract
This article discusses the work of the Prague Jewish writer H. G. (Hans Günther) Adler (1910–1988) as an important contribution to the poetics of German-Jewish displacement in the wake of World War II. It demonstrates the significance of Adler’s early response to questions [...] Read more.
This article discusses the work of the Prague Jewish writer H. G. (Hans Günther) Adler (1910–1988) as an important contribution to the poetics of German-Jewish displacement in the wake of World War II. It demonstrates the significance of Adler’s early response to questions of refugee status, displacement and human rights in literature. The article argues that Adler’s work can be seen as providing in part a response to the question raised by Hannah Arendt, Joseph Slaughter and other recent theorists of literature and human rights: what poetic form is adequate to give literary expression to the mass displacements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century? Adler’s short story ‘Note of a Displaced Person’ and his lengthy novel The Wall demonstrate the role that modernist poetics of fragmentation, in particular the legacy of Kafka, can have in bearing witness to this experience. They also demonstrate that the space of exile and displacement provides Adler with a vantage point from which to comment on the rights catastrophe of the twentieth century. Adler’s work develops a theological understanding of the crisis of displacement, a crisis that can only be resolved by restoring a relation between the divine and the human. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975)
9 pages, 236 KiB  
Article
Foreign Stories and National Narratives: Yiddish and Fictionality in Jurek Becker’s Jakob the Liar and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber
by Emma Woelk
Humanities 2019, 8(3), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8030143 - 21 Aug 2019
Viewed by 2649
Abstract
This article uses two examples of postwar German Jewish literature to explore the way in which these literary reflections on fictionality can also serve to subvert and complicate the national narratives that were developed in East and West Germany. The novels explored here, [...] Read more.
This article uses two examples of postwar German Jewish literature to explore the way in which these literary reflections on fictionality can also serve to subvert and complicate the national narratives that were developed in East and West Germany. The novels explored here, Jurek Becker’s Jakob the Liar (1969) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1977), directly thematize storytelling and specifically, storytelling in the context of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Both also share an interest in the intersections between German and Yiddish narrative traditions and reflect on the ways in which the latter was coopted by the former in the decades following the Second World War. Ultimately, this article argues that these two novels of lying create spaces in which the foundational myths of both German states are called into question. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Revisiting German Jewish Writing & Culture, 1945-1975)
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-4
Back to TopTop