Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur

The anthology focuses on the productive tension and exchange of diplomatic and artistic practices from the early modern period to the modern era. This international and interdisciplinary volume takes a look for the first time at the manifold interconnections that unfold between diplomacy as a political-legal practice and the arts.

Every human society develops neighborhoods to organize social modes of proximity and distance. This volume investigates the forms, discursive interdependencies, literary models, and aesthetic functionalization of "neighborhood" as an anthropological constant in the literature of the Middle Ages and early modern period – taking an approach that is theoretically and methodologically open and grounded in history and the social sciences.

Die vorliegende Studie perspektiviert zum ersten Mal für die literaturwissenschaftliche Forschung Überblicksanthologien zeitgenössischer Lyrik im Zeitraum 1959 bis 1989 im deutsch-deutschen Vergleich. Die Publikationen und Literaturbetriebe der Bundesrepublik und der DDR werden in ihren Verflechtungen und Differenzen analysiert. Anthologien partizipieren an Debatten des Literaturbetriebs und bestimmen literarische Entwicklungen, Kanonisierungen und Epochenmodellierungen mit. In den Blick kommen verlegerische Interessen, Kooperationen und Grenzziehungen zwischen Literaturkritik und Literaturgeschichtsschreibung und der deutsch-deutsche Literaturtransfer. Zugleich rückt mit den Herausgeber:innen eine neue Mittlerfigur ins Zentrum, das bislang eher von Autor:innen, Verlagsleiter:innen oder Lektor:innen besetzt war.  Die Arbeit plädiert damit für eine Literaturgeschichte der zweiten Reihe. Methodisch kombiniert die Arbeit Ansätze der Historischen Praxeologie mit Anleihen bei der Sozialgeschichte und der Paratextforschung. Im Projekt verbinden sich literatur-, format- und buchgeschichtliche Forschungsinteressen.

This theater-historiographical study focuses on the Frankfurt-based Verlag der Autoren from 1969 to the mid-1980s. It uses archival material to examine how theater texts were produced and marketed in the FRG’s cultural marketplace, contextualizing them within the company’s collaborative organizational structure. This reveals a cultural entrepreneurial practice at the intersection of theater as a commodity and publishing as critique.

This study is the first to systematically shed light on the role played by German-speaking authors in the right-wing, anti-liberal Europe discourse of the Weimar and First Republics. It focuses on transnational networks, media of discourse, and attempts to find orientation and fight for a position in a complex ideological web, as well as the multidimensional literary aesthetics of reflective modes of writing between fictionality and factuality.

During his lifetime, Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) was one of the leading modernist poets writing in German. Together with art patron Ida Dehmel (1870–1942), he led a glittering life as an artist. But their world went under and fell into oblivion. This volume presents the latest cultural studies, social history, and material studies perspectives on the Dehmels and their joint life’s work.

This study examines the genre history of the short one-act plays that have now faded into obscurity but were popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It analyzes the formal characteristics and contexts in which these one-act dramas were written. The open access database conceptualized for this study provides an important foundation for investigating one-act plays and includes metadata for over 2,500 one-act plays.

After the First World War, many German-speaking authors discovered their interest in China and increasingly devoted themselves to the foreign country for political reasons as well. From the perspective of the history of entanglements, the study examines the representations of China in the interwar years (1919–1937/39) in now largely forgotten texts by Alfred Döblin, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Rudolf Brunngraber, for example.

Comparisons are omnipresent in the European world travel literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, helping travelers to understand the diversity and history of the world and to establish hierarchies among objects. This volume addresses the practices used in travel accounts by Alexander von Humboldt, Adam Johann von Krusenstern, and Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, showing that comparison was central to the generation of coherent world knowledge.

For the last three centuries, prominent thinkers have been asking themselves what it is that constitutes a classic. This volume takes up this question and shows how cultural artifacts become and remain classics through transcultural circulation, i.e., through their adaptation in ever-changing media and the expansion of the cultural milieu in which they are received.

The study provides new methodological and analytical perspectives on "hidden writing styles" in National Socialism as a field of study. It includes the multifaceted forms and functions of texts critical of the Nazis, including esoteric practices of communication. It reconstructs how complex and difficult non-conformist, even partisan communication could be "beneath the Swastika" by looking at the example of the Hochland circle.

What is the relationship between literature and the sciences? What scientific insights has it adopted and which knowledge has it produced in the process? These are the kinds of research questions that this volume is the first to discuss in relation to the previously neglected field of GDR literature, which had a productive, critical relationship to the societally central "productive power of science," which was seen as "revolutionary."

In the period between 1880 and 1938, public speaking saw a remarkable rise in popularity among German-language writers. This study offers the first in-depth examination of this hitherto neglected phenomenon of writers' speeches, treating them as an independent genre with its own interdiscursive and media-specific characteristics. It does so by focussing on the intellectual role of writers within the Austro-German historical context. It comes with instructive statistics as well as web access to an index of over 1,400 speeches by 123 authors.

This volume shows how readers outside of academia apply literary texts. They relate what they have read to their lives and experiences in order to form new convictions and attitudes, or to change or discard their existing ones. Based on numerous documents relating to the first reception of nine novels from four centuries, this study is the first to demonstrate the existence, constitution, and relevance of this kind of application.

The monograph provides a model for a new history of comedy linking canonical with non-canonical works, the north and the south of the German speaking area and accounts for the predominance of translations, adaptations and music theatre. It analyses influential and successful comedies from 17th, 18th and early 19th century, which were performed and published in German in both Hamburg and Vienna in different versions. In four series of works and their versions, the positioning of comedies in theatre programs, book series and theatre literature is reconstructed along their writing and authoring strategies, institutional, cultural and mental-historical conditions.

Agents like publishers, other authors and theatre managers, institutions such as theatres, literary academies and and their prizes as well as other textual formations like poetics, reviews or cultural policy treatises are considered to reconstruct the position of texts and performances. The majority of them are translations and adaptations. The Italian and French originals as well as the context of literary production in their respective countries of origin are analysed, as well as the adaptation to the 'target literature‘.

The conflict between the individual and society is a frequent subject in Wilhelm Raabe’s novels. The volume explores this problematic in terms of deviant personality structures but also in relation to the socialized individual and the insurmountable nature of bourgeois structural arrangements. It examines the novels Abu Telfan, Stopfkuchen, and Die Akten des Vogelsangs.

This study traces how an internationalist world literature of the labor movement was represented and put into practice in the Weimar Republic. It contributes to a theory of world literature, reinforces the intersectional category of class for analyzing representations of a split modernity, and opens up new perspectives on the literature of the working class for poetology, literary history, and cultural history.

Richard Schaukal was in contact with some of literary modernism’s most important protagonists. In his early creative years, he stylized himself as an independent, isolated poet. After World War I, Schaukal became increasingly visible as a cultural critic, using his letters, essays, and literary works to take a stand against the new realities. His biography offers insights into the aesthetic, social, and political developments of his time.

This volume examines the state of historical narrative at the beginning of the 21^st century with a focus on German texts. It looks at the forms and functions of novelistic narratives in both aesthetically sophisticated and popular writing, in different fictional genres. It illuminates innovations vis-à-vis the classical historical novel and today’s experience-oriented, de-hierarchized, and hybrid historical culture.

Traditional ideas of masculinity and male authority are increasingly being questioned in both media and scholarly discourse. This study contributes to that discussion through an examination of literature. Using the narrative works of Gottfried Keller as case studies, it exposes the alliance of power and masculinity as the foundation of a social order to which the oppressed and the oppressor are subjected in equal measure.

How should we understand the political dimensions of "committed literature"? Neither the notion of "commitment" nor a list of political discourses in which post-war literature was engaged fully answer this question. Only by analyzing the function of religion in staging political authorship, an area previously neglected by scholars, does it become possible to fully appreciate the political content of post-war literature.

In the years 1930–1933, the NSDAP competed with the Communist Party to win over a broad target audience: the workers. Literature was one of their weapons in this battle. The study examines the underlying premises and methods behind the popular schemata used for agitating the working class. It focuses on aspects of literary politics, book design, the history of mentalities, and reception along with a narratological analysis of literary examples.

The volume uses Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to explore the emergence of the Bildungsroman as a genre from the 18^th to the 21^st century. The nine essays focus on one central novel to outline the literary field and the semantics of genre and describe the formation of concepts of the individual, Bildung, and society as well as positioning strategies in the field, including the choice of narrative techniques and forms for reproducing meaning.

The study traces the history of utopias from 1848 to 1930 as settings for competing political visions and the impact of utopias on changing social realities. This re-evaluation of utopias also offers promising insights about a universal problem in cultural studies – namely, the relationship between literature and politics. What stories must be told to inspire people toward a better world?

In the mid 19^th century, old and new beliefs about literature crossed paths in quite varied ways. The 18 essays in this anthology explore forgotten constellations of literary communication during this period. They cast light on developments in the periodical press and the literary marketplace as well as poetics, analyzing the historical, religious, and societal functions of literature.

The idea of the middle-class nuclear family as a 'sacred' and 'natural' entity has been deeply engraved into modern discourse about families. This volume examines the origins of this narrative in the legal and literary texts of the second half of the 19th century and recent times. In addition to legal texts, it offers readings of literary examples, including Stifter, Raabe, Setz, von Düffel, and Wawerzinek.

1989 marks the end of post-war literature in Germany. Yet, where is the historical locus of contemporary literature? Unlike attempts to situate contemporary literature in terms of historical events, the present study attempts to develop a structural history based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “literary field”, thereby shedding light on the long road to the genesis of contemporary literature since the 1960s.

What is the relationship between the business and the practice of literature in the wake of the changes to its structural circumstances since the 1990s? Using texts by Bodo Kirchhoff, Andreas Maier, Norbert Gstrein, and Ernst-Wilhelm Händler, this study examines how German-language literature dealt with this issue around 2000. The study shows that literary depictions meld reflections on literary commerce and literary practice.

In recent years, there has been a revival of theoretical debates about the history of literature along with practical ventures in the field of philology. This work surveys the current status of identifiable theoretical problems and discusses new models and concepts for literary historiography.

The book traces pathways of communication by authors and publishers who fled from German speaking areas to the Netherlands after 1933, and examines their reception and continued impact in the periods before, during, and after WWII. Case examples of individual authors and publishers are brought together to create a historical fabric of biographies and reception histories that extends to our times.

Branded products opened a new poetological playing field for literature. This study shows how the works of E. Edel, T. Mann, I. Keun, W. Koeppen, and C. Kracht reflected the material, semiological, and cultural theory aspects of consumer culture and transformed them into literary devices. The volume considers a range of issues, from product catalogs to fetishization, including capitalist circulation processes and the fascination with surface. It uses close readings to open the reader’s eyes to the cultural poetological dimension in literary texts and the conditions of culture in capitalism.

The study examines literary representations of Jewish self-consciousness, highlighting the dissonances between different positions during the time of emancipation. It uses the example of German-speaking Jews during the 19th century who portrayed their existence in autobiographical narratives, and reveals how their personal and collective identities were created amidst an environment of assimilation and emancipation.

This study examines the ways that Robert Musil’s representations of gender roles and conflicts are symptomatic of the crisis confronting all existing models of masculinity as ‘The Man without Qualities’ was written. The study focuses on demonstrating the contradictions and interplay between very different texts and discourses, incl. perspectives from medicine, economics, anthropology, and intellectual history.

This collected volume aims to generate a concise theoretical presentation of the "perturbation principle" in the humanities and the natural sciences. Incorporating findings from natural scientific research, the contributors attempt to take further steps along the way to a general "theory of perturbation."

After 1945, publishing conditions for German-language writers of Jewish origin on both the East and West German literary scenes were governed – alongside economic factors – by specific sociopolitical parameters and by the culture of remembrance. For many of these writers, activities in the literary world remained rooted in key personal experiences during National Socialist rule. Using the example of two writers, Jean Améry and Fred Wander, this study explores the discourses of historical remembrance and their impact on conditions for the publication and reception of literary works. The study focuses on these two writers’ philosophy of poetics, which were based on Jewish remembrance, and on the ways Améry and Wander formulated their own political claims for remembrance.

This study presents an in-depth examination of book policies during the Nazi era in the context of modern mass media and is based on a number of published and unpublished sources. It reconstructs the policies of book sponsorship in the areas of conflict oscillating between political interests and long-standing ties with tradition, between ideological imperatives and market-based terms, between totalitarian pretenses and a modern, discerning society. At the same time the analysis documents the effects of this conflict in the occasionally contradictory policy discourses about the diversified field of literature between 1933 und 1945.

The history of aesthetics portrays the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’, i.e. between high and popular culture, as being strongly antagonistic. On the other hand crossovers to “illegitimate” forms of art, the integration of various forms of non-art and a striking appreciation of “accessory parts” or the supposedly secondary have become a programmatic element in the historic avant-garde. The anthology investigates this conflicting relationship as reflected in various current examples.

This volume investigates the conditions under which mediation of literature and canon formation take place in the present day. In the first section of the work, the mechanisms of canon formation are described from a theoretical perspective. In the second section, the authors investigate how literary institutions assess and canonize works. The third section centers around the perspective of the modern knowledge society and its media.

Students of Literary Studies will gain new insights into the theory and practice of literature mediation and canon formation in today’s literary field.

How is the continuity of family enterprises and of aristocratic and bourgeois dynasties ensured? This is the question given close attention in German-language novels at the end of the 19th century in their creation of various genealogical narrative patterns – beginning with Gustav Freytag and continued by Theodor Fontane and later by Ricarda Huch and Franz Kafka. This study reconstructs these narrative patterns by invoking the socio-anthropological category of the “house”. Here, the house is an institution which is able to create and define its own rules in order to secure its continuity.

In many aspects, James Cook’s voyages of discovery in the South Pacific are part of the revolution of knowledge of the Age of Enlightenment. However, they not only laid the geographical foundation for the modern transformation of the old world view, but also formed the prelude for the momentous encounter and interaction of cultures. Like no other traveler before him, Georg Forster provides extraordinary insight into Cook’s second journey around the world through his literary travelogue Reise um die Welt [Voyage around the World] (1777‑1780). In his travelogue Forster addresses fundamental problems of cultural encounter, which are discussed in this study in an exemplary manner.

The author’s name is associated with concepts of originality and legal codification. These conditions of reading change if the name of the author is unknown. The contributions of this volume, written from a perspective of literary, legal and religious studies, explore the intentions that were pursued in the past by publishing texts anonymously. The relationship between anonymity and authorship is discussed in a fundamental way, and anonymity is reconstructed as a concrete historical situation of texts and as a condition for their meaning and function.

During the 1930s the Vienna-born writer Emil Alphons Rheinhardt (1889–1945) lived in the town of Le Lavandou in the South France, where he made his house a hospitable meeting place for German-speaking literary exiles. In 1943, during the German occupation of France, Rheinhardt was arrested and then in 1944 deported to Dachau concentration camp, where he died shortly before the liberation. A few years ago the historian Dominique Lassaigne discovered his prison diary, which had been believed lost. Rheinhardt’s notes from the Gestapo prisons bear witness to a long-forgotten humanist who believed in the peacemaking power of culture.

This work examines the literary conceptions of “masculinity” in German and Italian dramatic texts of the late 18th century. On the basis of a historical-epistemological definition of masculinity and of contemporary theoretical models of “men’s studies” in the 20th and 21st century, the following sample texts are analyzed: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm oder das Soldatenglück, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s/Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni ossia il Dissoluto Punito and Così fan tutte o sia La scuola degli amanti.

Is the figure of the intellectual still relevant in and for society in the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st century? The essays of this book from various disciplines explore this question based on the use of the term violence from a perspective of English Studies, German Studies, history and sociology. The focus is on the period between 1968 and the present. Geographically, the essays focus on conflicts in Europe, Latin America as well as South and Central Africa.

Ideas of how love is lived and how it should be lived vary depending on the different periods. In the “bourgeois” 19th century an idea was popular which today has become quite alien that partnerships are especially desirable that have their basis in childhood. An ideal existed according to which friendships of childhood days should be the basis for erotic relationships and marriages. These studies explore which concepts of love, sexuality, and also of life, society and homeland were behind this conception and what followed from this as a consequence.

The thirteen papers in this volume span the period from the Early Enlightenment to the end of Romanticism and reconstruct the system of literature and thought of what is known as ‘The Age of Goethe’ from approx. 1770 to 1830. On the basis of a comprehensive corpus of texts from German literature, the papers illuminate not only their pre-conditions from the European Enlightenment but also the relations between literature and the theoretical discourses of (popular) philosophy, theology, medicine, anthropology and jurisprudence.

The debate on the use and drawbacks of the sociology of literature unleashed by Bourdieu’s seminal work “The Rules of Art” was mainly conducted here on an abstract level. The present volume contains a collection of papers sounding out the applicability of field theory to literary studies. The authors, from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, present theory-led textually based analyses of the present-day literature and culture business.

The volume examines the interrelationships between the history of medicine and literature from the 17th until the 19th centuries. The papers in the volume analyse these interrelationships using the styles of medical and literary texts, which show how the dimensions of knowledge and of representation determine each other – for example in the case of narrative structures in medical case histories or a diagnostic narrative stance in a novel.

Dirk Hempel opens his study with an overview of the development of literary societies in Germany, but also in other European countries and in the USA, basing his survey on recent theories from the historical and social sciences on the democratic social phenomenon of the association. In addition, he presents the first typology of the different forms of literary society. The main body of the study is devoted to an examination of numerous literary societies in 19th century Dresden. He enquires into their organisation and active members and the contents of the societies’ activities.

The South Seas play a major part in 19th century German literature and journalism, where they figure as a paradise representing the object of desire, research, and colonial conquest. This book demonstrates that literature on the South Seas displays an almost uniform repertory of exoticizing and fear-mongering stereotypes of the foreigner and things foreign that served various different purposes (esthetic standards, political aims, popularization of science). With reference to travel journals, magazine articles, adventure novels, and memoirs, the study’s focus on textual analysis and the history of discourse accentuates the shifts taking place within the heterogeneous discourse on Oceania.

With its groundings in social psychology and linguistics, this study sets out (a) to provide a theoretical characterization of national stereotypes as a topic in literary studies, (b) to cast light on the connections between national stereotypes and the concept of national character from an historical perspective, and (c) to examine examples from 16th to 19th century German and French literature with a view to identifying the functions of national topoi in literature and the way they differ according to text genre and discursive context.

The underlying belief informing the German utopian novel in the first half of the 20th century was that technological progress would create a strong Germany and a better world. The genre-typological investigation undertaken in this study indicates that despite partial proximity on the content plane the authors of these novels hoped to bring this about by different means from those advocated by the National Socialists. The fact that their visions were not completely suppressed in the Third Reich has to do with the surprising liberality of the book market. Accordingly, the German utopian novel was able to ensconce itself in a niche and lay the foundations for postwar German science fiction.

Once feted as the bard of the wars of liberation, Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) has today been largely consigned to oblivion, and little research has been done on his immense historical significance for the history of German mentality and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles assembled here are the results of a German-American research project. In response to the discovery in the United States of 21 hitherto unknown letters by Arndt in 2003, they take a completely new approach to the discussion of Arndt's works and their reception. Historians, linguists, and literary scholars analyze Arndt's role in the awakening of German national awareness in the 19th century, discuss racism and nationalism in various European countries, examine Arndt's oeuvre in the context of European literary, cultural, and social history, and trace the reception accorded to him in Germany and the United States.

Obituaries always do more than sum up the life of someone who has just died. They fulfil various functions ranging from canonisation to propaganda, and they do so in the service of a huge variety of different interests. They also act as a forum for subtle criticism of the deceased person in question. Accordingly, necrologies come in an immense variety of genres, especially in the period extending from the beginning of their dissemination in the print medium around 1525 and their establishment in the feuilletons of the Vormärz period. Obituaries for writers are especially interesting for their high degree of self-referentiality and their significance as historical testimonies of changing concepts of authorship.

The works of Jurek Becker are paradigmatic for the study of socialist control over literary life in the GDR. The censorship-based administration of this area of social reality was effectively thrown out of joint by the ersatz publicity in the Federal Republic. Discourse and textual analysis of a wealth of unpublished archive material indicates that cooperation, conflict settlement, and power struggles between authors, publishers, the political leadership, and the State Security Service followed the same pattern. All the participants availed themselves of the core discourses on opposition and publicity to define and assert their respective stances.

This study is the first comprehensive appreciation of the largely underrated Austrian author Ferdinand von Saar (1833-1906). The textual analysis concentrates on his short stories, where he essays a discursive panorama of the late stages of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite his idealistic desire for harmony he is increasingly overtaken by destructive forces. Identity and traditional gender roles threaten to collapse, a development reflected by the topographic localization of the texts in 19th century Vienna. Saar is one of the precursors of modernity around the turn of the century. But the ambivalence in his texts also points to the anxiety triggered in the individual by this process.

In Germany, the debate about the pros and cons of advanced literary sociology sparked off by Pierre Bourdieu's basic work »The Rules of Art« has mostly taken place on an abstract level. The present volume is the first collection of essays in German to discuss the applications of field theory for the study of literature in a practical way. The essays are theory-driven but empirically-oriented researches by authors from France, England, Germany, Austria and Switzerland on examples of literature and literary life from the 17th to the 20th century. These contributions extend Bourdiean analysis in a geographical, historical and thematic sense, and constitute, where necessary, a critique and/or further development of his ideas.

Klopstock's mythological skating odes are an especially graphic instance of his role as a key poet in the literary revolution that took place in the 18th century. In their rhythmic complexion they reflect both contemporary tendencies, such as Jean Georges Noverre's theory of dance, and the reception accorded to the Old Saxon »Heliand« or the rhetorical traditions of antiquity. The semantics of rhythm advances to the status of the central element in the readability of the language of the moving body. With these odes Klopstock revolutionized the relationship between physical dynamics and poetic dynamics for generations to come.

After 1933, on a scale hitherto largely unreflected in literary research, German exiles engaged with the phenomenon of National Socialist anti-Semitism. This engagement ranged from the collection of documents to the 'dialectics of enlightenment'. The study reconstructs this historical discourse with special reference to the way it is reflected in the Zeitstück genre (topical dramas on pressing contemporary issues). In the process it inquires into the extent to which the dramatic genre imposes formal aesthetic constraints that involve a restriction of theoretical interest in anti-Semitism to a small number of constantly recurring motifs.

Bürgerlichkeit and Bürger are central concepts in (German) literary history. The emancipation of the Bürgertum (bourgeoisie/middle classes) in the modern age has in fact been identified as the prime source of the profound cultural and socio-structural changes taking place in the 18th century. However, close scrutiny of the historical circumstances has split up the apparently close-knit concept of the Bürger into a diversity of semantic and socio-structural components that appear to be anything but unified. Accordingly, traditional models operative in literary history and sociology need to be thoroughly reviewed and revised.

This study centres on the scholarly publishing house founded by Walter de Gruyter (1862-1923) in Berlin. Proceeding from a discussion of the position of this liberal publisher in the political landscape of the Wilhelmine era, searching light is cast on de Gruyter's publishing strategy, the company's links with the relevant milieu(s), and its status in the networks of the professional associations. From a variety of perspectives, all these aspects are then situated in the literary field of the period.

The study indicates the contribution made by literature in problematizing the concept of work in the face of factual discontinuities in working life. Vice versa, we see how the field of culture in the Weimar Republic was enriched by the discourse on work. Alongside literary texts, the study also examines films, a radio play, volumes of photographs, and articles on social and cultural history. In methodological terms, the book dovetails literary analysis (informed by social history) with approaches from fields as wide-ranging as social psychology, imagology, media history, and discourse analysis, and regards them from the broader perspective of cultural studies.

The educated upper-middle classes are known (in Germany) as being the sector of the populace especially prominent in propagating and mooting national(ist) ideas and political designs. But what place and status is assigned to the 'nation' when its eloquent champions reflect upon themselves? The study addresses this issue by analyzing personal testimonies of educated German citizens alive during the German empire. A methodical perspective examining autobiographies, diaries, and personal correspondence as autobiographical constructions of meaning helps to arrive at a more differentiated verdict on the national(ist) persuasions of the German upper-middle classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is now generally considered an established fact that literature and society are closely connected. But what were the conditions that made it possible to attain this insight and how has it developed into the present? The study attempts to answer these questions by tracing the emergence, around 1900, of sociological issues in connection with literature relating to (a) the genesis of a literary >field< and (b) to the correlation between aesthetic and sociological inquiries into the nature of cultural modernism observable in Germany at the time.

Since the 18th century, literature has played a major role in the perception of the Alps as a locus amoenus. Thereafter the Alps served as a subject functionalized in a wide variety of ways for the projection of time-bound desires, feelings, or insights. In the 20th century, by contrast, interest in the Alps has been directed more specifically toward the tensions obtaining between landscape idealization and modern mass tourism. Satire, social criticism, criticism of the appropriation of this landscape by the tourist industry, and deconstruction of media enactment are the terms of reference for an analysis of relevance both for literary criticism and cultural studies.

How did (German) literary studies function in the period of National Socialist dictatorship? What consequences did the incisive political and social changes have on the subject-matter, methodologies, and institutions of German as a university subject and its relations with its immediate environment? The articles in this volume answer these questions from differing perspectives, thus providing an image of literary scholarship in the Nazi period that is as detailed as it is empirically sound.

What began in 1921 as an amicable dining club in London is today the only international writers' association in existence. The present volume is an institutional history of the West German PEN club from the division of the all-German centre in 1951 to the reunification of Germany in 1990. The study concentrates on literary sociology and draws on conversations and ample archive material to outline the development from an elitist 'drawing-room society' in the 1950s to the prestigious and representative club that had emerged from this by the 1980s. It portrays the PEN club in all its involvements with the historical events of the age, its achievements, its self-image, and its self-delusions, personified by the club's protagonists from Kdstner, Edschmid, Neumann, and Bvll to Jens, Gregor-Dellin, and Amery. The history of the Federal Republic is eloquently reflected in the history of this fellowship of writers and the responses of its leading intellectuals to the Cold War, the building of the Wall, the Spiegel affair, the year 1968, and German unification. But frequently the really intriguing insights afforded by a close history of the PEN club derive not so much from analysis of the zeitgeist or of major historical events but reside in the illuminating, sometimes micro-historical details.

This collection assembles articles pursuing a programmatic combination of approaches from media studies and cultural studies. A critical discussion of rival approaches based on a purely technological perspective is used to fathom the potential available for a cultural slant on media analysis. This discussion involves the development of (a) concepts of 'cultural concretion' (ethnology), (b) ideas on a fundamental theory of transcriptiveness avoiding the pitfalls of mentalism (brain, language), (c) models for analyzing intermediality, (d) scenarios of 'media-technological superiority', (e) a 'rhetoric of novelty' in the history of the media, and (f) ideas on the significance of media discourse in the self-description of modern societies.

The authors of early literary modernism directed their attention at the so-called 'neglected' literary figures of the past, their works and their personal fates. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the writers emphatically rediscovered in this way around 1880. The present study examines the little discussed but very real phenomenon of 'author renaissances' with reference to Kleist and analyzes it from the dual perspective of social history and the history of evaluation. The undiminished impact of the 'Kleist myth' can thus be (partly) identified as the result of efforts largely undertaken by other writers to replace the established canon of German literature by a counter-canon of their own.

With some reference to Heine, Rosenkranz and Vischer, this study presents Prutz, Hettner and Haym as a generation of literary historians crucially influenced by Hegelianism. It thematizes the Hegel reception and the programmatic contributions of these authors in establishing an ambitious form of literary historiography. It also discusses the achievements of that historiography with reference to the studies on Romanticism proposed by these three figures. Finally, it provides an assessment of the degree of professionalism displayed by their scholarly activities and situates the three authors in the history of German studies.

Censorship as a transhistorical phenomenon is a communicative process in which ideologically motivated, authoritarian attempts to assert control over what can be publicly communicated leads to reactions on the part of culturally creative agents and their recipients. The dispute over communication, publicity and power is a 'social game' involving gambits with a common tradition from the Vormärz to the GDR, despite the major differences in political complexion. This is true of such things as legitimacy discourses on the part of censors, esthetic practices employed by authors subject to censorship, and the market opportunities open to those censored.

Careful analysis of school dramas and poetological texts by Christian Weise (1642-1708) reveals the crisis of emblematic argumentation figures and a semantics based on similarity and circularity. At the same time, Weise's attempts to move away from self-reference to difference are confronted with a change from the theatre to the printed book. Both these phenomena open up a problematic constellation that not only left its mark on late 17th century school drama but also occasioned a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the didactic ambitions and epistemological rhetoric of dramatic literature in the period between Baroque and the Enlightenment.

The articles in this volume focus on Biedermeier as an epoch in the history of literature. They inquire first whether and to what extent this period is characterized by features that are specific to it, and also whether changes are to be observed within the course of that period itself. A third central topic is the engagement with the transformation process operative in the progress from the Age of Goethe to Biedermeier on the one hand, and from Biedermeier to realism on the other.

The philosopher and historian Bernhard Groethuysen was an outstanding figure in German-French cultural transfer between the wars. At the same time, his historical works make him one of the trailblazers of the modern turn toward the history of culture and the history of mentalities. This is the first comprehensive biography of an intellectual who was both a scholar in the German tradition and a Parisian homme de lettres. It points up the links between Groethuysen's life and works and defines his place in the 20th century European history of ideas.

Drawing upon more than 500 literary and journalistic texts, this study is the first post-war discussion of the phenomenon of German enthusiasm for Switzerland across a period of 150 years. The numerous expressions of opinion on Germany's immediate neighbour are seen here as a tacit mentality-based accord on the part of the writing fraternity as to what the 'right' image of Switzerland was supposed to be. This accord was so consistent that the prevalent debating points and the changing constituents of that idealized image can be traced and reconstructed accurately throughout the period 1700 to 1850.

With more than 2,000 daily issues between 1933 and 1940, the »Pariser Tageblatt« / »Pariser Tageszeitung« is one of the key sources for research on the political, cultural, and everyday life of German exiles in France. The volume is the product of work done by an interdisciplinary Franco-German research group. It sets out to remedy the relative neglect of cultural transfer between France and Germany in the research on exile. In four chapters and a total of 20 articles, it discusses central aspects of political and cultural transfer, important personalities and journalistic institutions involved in the transfer process, and fundamental elements operative in the everyday perception of Paris and the Paris myth.

What happened around 1900 to universal semantic systems like aesthetics and ethics when German society underwent a radical change from a stratificational to a functional form of social differentiation? Drawing on the aesthetic persuasions of various philosophies operative at the time, the study discusses the thought configurations on which the universal claims of aesthetic and moral communication builds. Taking the debate on trash and pulp as an example, it shows how most of the participants in the debate used the discourse on art for the homogenization, definition, and prioritization of their own milieu constructs. The booksellers trading in cheap literature were the only ones to respond in line with the new functional differentiation of society, exploiting art as a medium for the formation of a hierarchy within the economic system.

The volume addresses methodological questions raised by a sociological and socio-historical approach to literary history and tests them in ten studies on the theory and practice of the historiography of literature written in German. Jörg Schönert examines problems of genre theory and genre history raised by satire and detective fiction and analyses text corpora by J. H. Campe, J. K. Wezel, H. v. Kleist, B. Auerbach, G. Keller, K. E. Franzos and F. Wedekind. The author sees the book as documenting an important position taken up in the “Methods debate” conducted since the 1970s.

The book sets out to draw on the evidence about the creative approaches of authors documented in their manuscripts as a source for achieving a better understanding of those authors. The core thesis is that in the 18th century Klopstock, Hamann and Herder were instances of a focus shift in the creative process away from the work itself and toward the author, and that since then writing has been imbued with an ambivalence between author-centered and work-centered approaches. In author-centered writing, literature and language are freed of external purposes and serve the inner renewal of the author and the like-minded reader. Philological editing has long been dominated by the work-centered approach and has only recently accommodated author-related aspects, notably in the text-genesis approach.

The study examines the factors favouring the establishment of an audience for exile literature in Switzerland and the German states in the first half of the 19th century. In the Vormärz period and the 1848 revolution, various Swiss publishers printed writings by German refugees set on influencing the political developments in their home land. Accordingly, the conservative forces within the German Confederation looked on Switzerland as a 'hotbed of revolution' and did their best to thwart the smuggling of 'subversive' literature. The study analyzes the relations between the agents involved and furnishes important initiatives toward a social history of exile literature in the Vormärz period.

What kind of identity would be appropriate to a form of cultural studies turning wholeheartedly and explicitly to new aesthetic, media-oriented and culture-sociological phenomena and developments without at the same time forfeiting its traditional concerns and the degree of reflective sophistication it has achieved? At the methodological level there have been two main barriers militating against this: (1) the serious breach in the relationship between hermeneutic theory and modernism, and (2) the limitations of traditional category-formation exposed by the complexity of modernistic genre concepts. The aim of the present study is to localize and, if possible, reduce the problems connected with this.

Little research interest has been directed so far toward the way in which interviews represent a specific form of documentary literature. The study looks at a large, but entirely assimilable collection of texts qualifying as interview literature, stemming from autobiographical accounts by 'ordinary' East German citizens and reflecting life in the GDR and in post-GDR East Germany up to 1995. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the interview genre is a source of personal testimony which, like diaries or letters, can be of major and immediate value for many branches of scholarship.

The book rests on advanced concepts central to systems theory and semiology, i.e. Niklas Luhmann's theory of the structural link between consciousness and communication and C.S. Peirce's triadic theory of signs. Emphasis is placed on the structural similarities between these theories, notably in the triadic models they advance, similarities observable both in autopoiesis and semiosis. The reason for this emphasis is the new light it casts on venerable and fundamental issues in the theory of science and philosophy, notably the debate about world, truth and subject.

The study attempts to reconstruct Goethe's views on aesthetics prior to the period of Weimar classicism. Here we find very early indications of a tendency toward autonomy in his theory of art and literature. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the literary field, Goethe's paradigmatic theoretical writings are subjected to an intertextual microanalysis and at the same time related both to the immediate circumstances of their genesis and artistic points of reference on the one hand and to European contexts on the other. This provides a broader backdrop against which both the specific and the representative aspects of Goethe's non-systematic aesthetic thinking can be usefully reviewed.

The volume inquires into the formal aspects and the achievements of genealogical thinking in the Middle Ages and early modern age with reference to art history, early German studies and the history of science and ideas. Central to the endeavour is a reconstruction of a thought-form enabling contemporaries to organize and assure the availability of knowledge in all kinds of areas and use it to legitimize and demonstrate power.

Despite the progress it made in the 80s and early 90s, research on aphorism still suffers from a lack of clarification in terms of literary history. The present studies thus set out to contribute to a history of German-language aphorism in the 20th century. The subjects discussed are expressionist aphorism, aphorism in the period of National Socialism, and minor literary forms situated on the cusp between lyric poetry and aphorism in post-1945 literature.

The study examines 216 memoirs on the Second World War by former German combatants, published mostly in West Germany between 1945 and 1961. The aim is to describe the attitudes identifiable in them on subjects such as National Socialism and military action. The inquiry reveals regularities in the selection and processing of perception and of the valuations implicit in them. Conclusions are drawn on the way in which biographical features of the 200 authors correlate with certain thematic elements in their texts, thus elaborating components of an author-text system allowing for a distinction between 'typical' and 'coincidental' features.

This volume brings together the proceedings of a symposium to mark the retirement of Eda Sagarra from the Chair of German (founded 1776) at Trinity College Dublin. It addresses the themes of her major research field, the 19th century as an epoch of literary, social and cultural history. The 'difficulties' of cultural memory of an era which - with varying emphases - has been characterized as the century of liberty, of ideologies, of sciences, of historicism or of realism, are examined from a variety of perspectives in the light of postmodern deconstruction of both literature and history.

Proceeding from a constructivist understanding of the term 'nation', this volume containing the papers delivered at the Stuttgart colloquium on »German-French Perception Patterns and the Concept of National Identity in the 18th and 19th Centuries« re-views the question of the 'image' of otherness and the foreign conveyed by literature. From a sociological, literary and historical perspective the articles examine German and French texts from the period between the Enlightenment and the Vormärz to elucidate the relations between national stereotypes, awareness and representation of otherness, and identity formation.

What is it that prompts a basically heterogeneous set of members to form into one as-sociation with a single programmatic aim? Why can the equally heterogeneous artistic products by those members still be perceived as a 'wholehard' socio-historical facts pertaining to these groups to the 'soft' aesthetic structures linking the various different programs and works at the intersection of the common interdiscursive elements common to them. The model is exemplified with reference to the period 1843 to 1924 and the following societies: »Glocke«, »Bergwerk«, »Stürmerkreis«, »Charonkreis« and »Werdandi-Bund«.

The study examines autobiographies of non-exiled writers after the war as testimonies to a 'crisis of biography' sparked off by the National Socialist dictatorship. The reflection on biographical narrative manifest in the experimental approaches taken and the recent research discussion on this subject both call for a systematic review of the theoretical foundations of autobiographic narrative. The differing constructions of identity and individuality are all traceable to the vitalist model of biography common to the writers in question. The sudden awareness of the problems involved in talking about one's own life had the effect of problematizing the conventions and typical structures of the genre. Ultimately most of the writers belonging to the right-wing conservative camp before 1933 engaged in a radically self-critical reckoning with their own past.

The volume analyzes writers as intellectual figures in public discourse. The first section is devoted to the origins of the term 'intellectual' and the theory of intellectualism since the late 19th century. Part two looks at the concrete roles of writers as intellectuals during the Cold War. It contains studies on the intellectual consequences of Stalinism in the GDR, the two German PEN centers, the emergence of the concept of 'commitment' (Engagement) in West and East Germany, and on prominent individual authors like Johannes R. Becher and Kasimir Edschmid.

Theoretical debate has declared the author obsolete. In practice, however, certain usages of the author concept are repeatedly demonstrated as being legitimate. This discrepancy suggests that theoretical reflection on the author fails to do justice to central forms of the scholarly approach to literature. The articles in this volume take both systematic and historical perspectives on this controversial term in an attempt to accurately reconstruct the history of the concept and to analyze the problem constellations generated by it in practice. The discussion also extends to non-literary media such as film, music, art, and hypertexts.

Following the volumes »Literature and Crime« (1983, STSL 8) and »Crime Narrated« (1991, STSL 27) the articles assembled here examine discourses serving the social construction of deviation, criminality, and justice/jurisdiction together with typical constellations of the way these have been representeed by the (mass) media in the 20th century. In addition, theoretical articles on the connection between 'transgression' and 'order' on the basis of recent research into the representation of crime and crime-fighting institutions in Germany and the United States are joined by contributions on the criminological, juridical, and political discourses of the present to assist in placing the case studies in their systematic and historical context.

The study takes up the ongoing discussion on the material aspects of communication and the relationship between scriptural and pictorial media. It proceeds from the thesis that the typographic arrangement of script conveys meaning above and beyond the 'imaging of language'. The volume divides into three sections: section one sets out a semiotic theory of typography, section two outlines the systematics of typographic practice, and the final section discusses the development of typography as a system of expression and meaning in selected historical contexts from the book typography of the classical age (in Germany) to 20th century art and advertising typography.

With analyses of the diaries of Haller, Gellert, Lavater, La Roche, von der Recke, Goethe, Leisewitz, Lichtenberg, etc., and taking full account of culture-historical aspects, the media, and mentality, the study traces the contribution made by the diary genre to the two central developments of the 18th century: individualization and the spread of written culture.

The late 18th century saw the emergence of German women writers in the field of travel writing. Underlying their efforts was a gender-specific code of rules that restricted them both stylistically and in terms of subject-matter. The study inquires into the external and internal conditions imposed on travel and travel writing as undertaken by German women writers and points up the very considerable differences between those obtaining for their male counterparts and also for women writers from other countries. A biographical and bibliographic annex provides background information on the German women writers referred to.

Until well into the present century, and in the face of all existing statistics, there was a widely held belief reflected in scientific writings, literature, journalism and accepted folk knowledge that poison was a murder weapon almost excusively used by women (the 'weaker', 'gender determined' sex). The present study is discourse-theoretical and interdisciplinary in design. It draws on collections of causes célèbres, court records, scientific texts etc. pertaining to cases of killing by poison from various periods to show that (and how) such stereotypic ideas about women achieved currency, legitimation and self-perpetuation as a result of a constant, circular process of exchange and reference between the sources they stemmed from.

"Sign and Time" identifies crucial components of the 19th century conception of realism and reconstructs their interplay in narrative texts written between 1840 and 1910. Selective analyses of texts by Storm, Fontane etc. are undertaken with a view to highlighting what they have to tell us about the history of discourse(s). Semiologically, realism is notable for the way it plays off the linguistic against the graphic, metonymy against metaphor, and rails against the hazards of visual kinds of imagination. This can be interpreted as a response to the increasing competition from other media, more precisely as a species of literary self-referentiality in the face of the advent of film and the attendant awareness of the psychological and evocative limits necessarily imposed on this kind of literature.

The study examines the thoroughgoing re-evaluation of the foundations of human knowledge that set in around the year 1830. Of crucial significance in structural terms is the relation between ideas on the soul and natural science. In the context of the 'atomization' of knowledge following the collapse of Romantic nature philosophy, Herbart, Lotze and Fechner developed strategies for a 'concentration' of all branches of knowledge in a unified model not only accelerating the modernization process but also fulfilling a compensatory function. Their debates on the origins and processing of knowledge represents a highly influential redefinition of the epistemological function and cultural relevance of the aesthetic.

Various literary magazines for women started appearing in the late 18th century in German-speaking countries, at least ten of them written and published solely by women. By going public in this way, these authors were flying in the face of the widely held late-Enlightenment tenet that a "woman's place is in the home". This study is the first to tell us who these women were, how they justified their actions in their magazines, what conditions they published their periodicals under, what they had to say and how their women readers responded.

In the last few years, education and nationalization, marginalization and re-integration of religious, social and ethnic groups have been accorded special attention in the research undertaken by a number of different disciplines. In the form of a dialogue between literary and historical studies, the present volume reflects on modernization processes from a historical perspective and attempts to trace the emergence of the corresponding conceptual instruments between 1850 and 1918. The volume assembles the contributions to a colloquium held in 1995 in honor of Wolfgang Frühwald's 60th birthday. The first group of papers centers around the problem of the construction of Nation and of the identity of the 'educated classes' via language and aesthetic anthropology. The second group gravitates around education and denomination from the angle of literary studies and social history.

Contrary to received opinion, the Thirty Years' War was not widely perceived by contemporaries as a political phenomenon. In the series of prints by Hans Ulrich Franck and the monographer CR (Christian Richter) on which the present study concentrates, the major concern is a moral evaluation of war and warfare. The central thesis of the study is that we are confronted here with a pictorial version of 'edifying' literature designed as an instrument of deterrence. As the biblical motto "Be mindful of thine end" used by Franck suggests, these series stand in a late medieval memento mori tradition to which not only the ars moriendi sub-genre but also the "Dance of Death" motif and the extensive literature on death, dying and consolation may be reckoned.

The "Pariser Tageblatt", later to become the "Pariser Tageszeitung" (1933-1940), occupies a very special place in the history of the European press in that it was the only daily newspaper by and for German exiles. With reference to the Feuilleton section of this paper the study draws upon archive material to examine the very varied ways in which editorial, economic and aesthetic priorities and constraints can affect and influence the practice of literary reviewing. The approach combines perspectives relating to the history of communicative forms, the sociology of literature and literary criticism. The study is thus in a position to develop a multiple angle on literary reviewing a) as a journalistic institution in the cultural force field of German emigration in France, b) as an economic factor on the literature market, and c) as aesthetic discourse for and with a literary public. This multiple viewpoint gives the study pilot status in the field of the analysis of literary communication in the exile context.

The study is designed as a contribution a) to the theory underlying the history of ideas and concepts, b) to the analysis of the term Bildung, and c) to research on Goethe. Taking its bearings from the ideas of Luhmann and Koselleck, it proposes a new concept, that of historico-semantic componential analysis, allowing the reconstruction of the connections between the term in question and other contemporary concepts, and a historical definition of the place occupied by Bildung in the triad formed by meaning, function and problem-reference. Central to the examination of the term Bildung exemplifying the procedure proposed is a discussion of Goethe's autobiographical "Dichtung und Wahrheit", a text that in the 19th and 20th centuries has enjoyed the status of an exemplary portrayal of an individual's progress towards and attainment of Bildung.

Augsburg's "Allgemeine Zeitung" was a product of the famous Cotta publishing house of Stuttgart. As an economic enterprise it had to ensure its profitability while at the same time living up to the high standards of reporting it had set itself. The restrictions on the free expression of opinion operative in the Vormärz period made it imperative for the editiors to cooperate with the censorship authorities. This study breaks new ground in showing just how close the contracts between editors and censors actually were. The book combines a social history of the censors with a description of the everyday activity of a team of editors caught up between censorship and the aim of producing a 'liberal' newspaper. For the first time the links are traced between the economic situation of the Augsburg periodical - its sales figures, distribution structure and business profile - and the press policy of the Bavaria authorities and the development this underwent in the years 1815 to 1848.

The present study sets out to reformulate problems posed by the socio-historical explanation of literature by regarding them in terms of systems theory. It shows how, under the pressure of emergent 'exclusive individuality', traditional ideas and formulations are reinterpreted and pressed into service to perform new functions. Three works from Goethe's early period - the "Pastorbrief", "Götz" and "Clavigo" - are subjected to thorough analysis and a new reading of them is proposed. It becomes apparent that previous interpretations have themselves adopted the coordinates of Enlightenment and Empfindsamkeit, thus missing the opportunity for socio-historically motivated reinterpretations and denying these works much of their specifically historical thrust.

An international team of literary and social historians investigate here diverse forms of formal and informal censorship practices. In this context censorship designates a complex and tension-filled relationship between the spirit of innovation and the conservative forces of the status quo. Culture connotes not just the production of texts for the book trade and the theatre, but any kind of sanctioned attempt to control public opinion. The chronological framework is designed to highlight the culturally and politically eventful years between Weimar Classicism and Weimar Republic (1787-1933) which saw the evolution of a pan-German cultural identity. Two concluding essays on the American reception of the Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933, and censorship practices of the Cultural Ministry of the former GDR round out the historical picture, demonstrating the continuity of control mechanisms.

This is the first detailed socio-historical study of Heinrich Mann's novel "Der Untertan" (available in English translation in Penguin Books under the title "Man of Straw"). Completed in July 1914 and published in an edition of 100,000 in November 1918, Mann's powerful settlement of accounts with the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie occupies a strategic and controversial position in the debates about continuity and change from the German Empire (1871-1918) through the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. No historian, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler has written, could have described the growth and development of radical German nationalism as penetratingly as H. Mann does in "Man of Straw". In addition to the considerable diagnostic value of the novel, Alter's study also analyses the symptomatic importance of H. Mann's literary and political development from the Wilhelmine Empire until the triumph of National Socialism in 1933 and sees this development in the context of the problematical history of German liberalism. The failed revolution of 1918/19 brings to light H. Mann's difficulties in confronting the full import of his own diagnoses: he is loath to admit that the 'middle' class (which since the 18th century had delegated itself to represent the whole of 'humanity' against the feudal-aristocratic order) was now more than ever a class itself. Mann convinced himself in the 1920s and early 1930s that the 'authoritarian personality' he had diagnosed in the "Man of Straw" had proved to be an historical aberration in the history of the German middle classes. Accordingly National Socialism, too, was anomalous in the course of German history. As a temporary throw-back to anachronistic conditions, H. Mann believed, National Socialism had no future in Germany.

The Paul Zsolnay publishing house was established in Vienna in the late fall of 1923. It was Austria's leading literary publisher in the years between the two World Wars and focused on literature from abroad alongside works in German. The present study draws on material from the extensive company archives. It describes the establishment of the firm, the development of its publishing program, the production conditions prevailing, the intensive relations between publisher and authors, and the interconnections between literature and politics up to the end of the War. The appendix contains a complete listing of the works published by Zsolnay between 1924 and 1945.

In einem ersten, theoretischen Teil enthält diese Studie eine ausführliche Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen Forschungsentwicklungen auf den Gebieten der Biographischen Forschung, Alltagsgeschichte (Oral History) und Interviewforschung. Insbesondere wird die Bedeutung des Interviews als einer literarischen Gattung eingehend erörtert. In einem zweiten Teil finden die Erkenntnisse aus der theoretischen Grundlegung Anwendung bei der Dokumentation, Kommentierung und Analyse von etwa 260 Interviewzeugnissen zum Erlebnis des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Das Erzählmaterial schließt sich ansatzweise zusammen zu einer einzigartigen Form der Geschichtsdarstellung, in der Aufbau und Inhalt primär festgelegt sind durch die Perspektive subjektiver Kriegserfahrung.