German life writing in the twentieth century
By: edited by Birgit Dahlke, Dennis Tate, and Roger Woods
Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Rochester, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9781571133137
Description: "Life-writing", an increasingly accepted category among scholars of literature and other disciplines, encompasses not just autobiography and biography, but also memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews, and even non-written texts such as film. Whether these were produced in diary or letter form as events unfolded or long after the event in the form of autobiographical prose, common to all are attempts by individuals to make sense of their experiences. In many such texts, the authors reassess their lives against the background of a broader public debate about the past. This book of essays examines German life-writing after major turning points in twentieth-century German history: the First World War, the Nazi era, the postwar division of Germany, and the collapse of socialism and German unification. The volume is distinctive because it combines an overview of academic approaches to the study of life-writing with a set of German-language case studies. In this respect it goes further than existing studies, which often present life-writing material without indicating how it might fit into our broader understanding of a particular culture or historical period.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the purposes and problems of German life writing in the twentieth century / Roger Woods; title: Life writing and writing lives: ego documents in historical perspective / Mary Fulbrook; title: From Erlebnis to Erinnerung: rereading soldiers' letters and photographs from the First World War / Holger Brohm; title: From the physiognomy of the Great War to the dangerous moment: Ernst Junger, photography, autobiography, and modernity / J. J. Long; title: Persuasive illusions of the self: Albert Speer's life writing and public discourse about Germany's Nazi past / Magnus Brechtken; title: The shoah before the shoah: the literary technique of allusion in Elias Canetti's autobiography / Anne Peiter; title: "Ich schame mich meiner augen" (I'm ashamed of my eyes): photography and autobiographical identities in Grete Weil's Leb ich denn, wenn andere leben / Joanne Sayner; title: "Mich in variationen erzahlen": Gunter Grass and the ethics of autobiography / Rebecca Braun; title: Voyeurism? autobiographies by children of the perpetrators: Niklas Frank's Der Vater: Eine abrechnung (1987) and Meine deutsche mutter (2005) / Birgit Dahlke; title: Dismembering the past, remembering the self: an interrogation of disability narratives by Luise Habel and Christa Reinig / Pauline Eyre; title: "Schicht um schicht" - the evolution of Fred Wander's life writing project in the GDR era and beyond / Dennis Tate; title: Thought patterns and explanatory strategies in the life writing of high-ranking GDR party officials after the wende / Ute Hirsekorn; title: "Ein reines phantasieprodukt" or "hostile biography"? Gunter de Bruyn's Vierzig jahre and the Stasi files / Sara Jones.