Contributors

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling 1
5. Part I. Anna Seghers: A Missing Piece in the Canon of Modernist Storytellers
6. 1: Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years 13
7. 2: Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers’s “The Excursion of the Dead Girls”: Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction 24
8. 3: Anna Seghers’s Rubble Literature, 1947–49 43
9. 4: Anna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic 55
10. 5: Aufbauzeit or flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers’s GDR Novels 70
11. 6: The Time of Decision in Anna Seghers 82
12. 7: Filling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers’s Conceptual Metaphors 95
13. Part II. Expressions of Modernity: Using Storytelling Unconventionally
14. 8: Storytelling and Telling Stories in Heine’s Prose Fiction 111
15. 9: Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka 122
16. 10: Synthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in “Shanghai Ghetto” 140
17. 11: American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools 152
18. 12: A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 164
19. 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 176
20. Part III. The Personal Narrative: Storytelling in Acute Historical Moments
21. 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) 189
22. 15: Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story 198
23. 16: Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred 209
24. 17: “Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen”: Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf’s Novel Kindheitsmuster 221
25. 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 234
26. 19: Storytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich 252
27. Contributors 267
28. Index 271