Suicide In East German Literature

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Suicide in East German Literature

Author : Robert Blankenship
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 157113574X
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Suicide in East German Literature by : Robert Blankenship

Download or read book Suicide in East German Literature written by Robert Blankenship and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature, but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. ROBERT BLANKENSHIP is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

Suicide in Modern Literature

Author : Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030693929
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Suicide in Modern Literature by : Josefa Ros Velasco

Download or read book Suicide in Modern Literature written by Josefa Ros Velasco and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential and philosophical reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies that modern fictional literature places at our disposal. They go through the review of Modern fictional literature, in the American and European geographical framework, following the rationales that modern literature based on fiction can serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and that has the potential to prevent suicide. From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since the French sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide: A Study in Sociology in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers and authors devoting their efforts to understand better the causes of suicide and to the formation of suicide prevention organizations. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide, the nature, and nuances of its modern conceptualization, to prevent suicidal behaviors. The question of what suicide means in and for modernity is not an overcome one. Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. Since the turn of the millennium, a fierce debate about the state’s role in assisted suicide has been adopted. Beyond the discussion as to whether physicians should assist in the suicide of patients with unbearable and hopeless suffering, the scope of the suicidal agency is much broader concerning general people wanting to die.

The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide

Author : Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 303128982X
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (312 download)

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Book Synopsis The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide by : Josefa Ros Velasco

Download or read book The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide written by Josefa Ros Velasco and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the continuation of the book Suicide in Modern Literature, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Considering the positive reception of this book, Ros Velasco launches the second part, entitled The Contemporary Writer and their Suicide. This time, leading representatives of various disciplines analyze the literary, philosophical, and biographical works of contemporary writers worldwide who attempted to commit suicide or achieved their goal, looking for covert and overt clues about their intentions in their writings. This book aims to continue shedding light on the social and structural causes that lead to suicide and on the suicidal mind, but also to show that people assiduous to writing usually reflect their intentions to commit suicide in their writings, to explain how these frequently veiled intentions can be revealed and interpreted, and to highlight the potential of artistic, philosophical, and autobiographical writing as a tool to detect suicidal ideation and prevent its consummation in vulnerable people. This book analyzes several case studies and their allusions to their contexts and the socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures they suffered, expressions of their will and agency, feelings of dislocation between the individual, reality, and existential alienation, and literary styles, writing techniques, and metaphorical language.

Writing in Red

Author : Thomas W. Goldstein
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139206
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing in Red by : Thomas W. Goldstein

Download or read book Writing in Red written by Thomas W. Goldstein and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the German Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its members' professional interests and enable them to act as public intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting their union membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the 1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri.

"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"

Author : Florian Huber
Publisher : Little, Brown Spark
ISBN 13 : 031653434X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" by : Florian Huber

Download or read book "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" written by Florian Huber and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK) The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II. By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death -- for themselves and for their children. "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" recounts this little-known mass event. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.

The Freest Country in the World

Author : Stephen Brockmann
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1640141545
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis The Freest Country in the World by : Stephen Brockmann

Download or read book The Freest Country in the World written by Stephen Brockmann and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world" the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans themselves has been obscured, Brockmann shows, by the now-standard description of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a triumph of Western democracy and capitalism. Brockmann first addresses the culture of 1989/1990 by looking at various media from that final year, particularly film documentaries. He emphasizes punk culture and the growth of neo-Nazism and the Antifa movement - factors often ignored in accounts of the period. He then analyzes three later semiautobiographical novels about the period. He devotes chapters to dramatic films dealing with German reunification made relatively soon after the event and to more recent film and television depictions of the period, respectively. The final chapter looks at monuments and memorials of the 1989/1990 period, and a conclusion considers the implications of the book's findings for the present day.

No Place on Earth

Author : Christa Wolf
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374517754
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (745 download)

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Book Synopsis No Place on Earth by : Christa Wolf

Download or read book No Place on Earth written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1983-09 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historical, hypothetical, but marvelously intense: a fascinating short novel by one of Europe's most consistently haunting novelist." - Kirkus Reviews

What Remains

Author : Gerald Fetz
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800734972
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis What Remains by : Gerald Fetz

Download or read book What Remains written by Gerald Fetz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.

The History of the Stasi

Author : Jens Gieseke
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1782382550
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (823 download)

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Book Synopsis The History of the Stasi by : Jens Gieseke

Download or read book The History of the Stasi written by Jens Gieseke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the Stasi. “This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the MfS.”—German History The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The “shield and sword of the party,” it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi.

Science Fiction Literature in East Germany

Author : Sonja Fritzsche
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783039107391
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Science Fiction Literature in East Germany by : Sonja Fritzsche

Download or read book Science Fiction Literature in East Germany written by Sonja Fritzsche and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East German science fiction enabled its authors to create a subversive space in another time and place. One of the country's most popular genres, it outlined futures that often went beyond the party's official version. Many utopian stories provided a corrective vision, intended to preserve and improve upon East German communism. This study is an introduction to East German science fiction. The book begins with a chapter on German science fiction before 1949. It then spans the entire existence of the country (1949-1990) and outlines key topics essential to understanding the genre: popular literature, socialist realism, censorship, fandom, and international science fiction. An in-depth discussion addresses notions of high and low literature, elements of the fantastic and utopia as critical narrative strategies, ideology and realism in East German literature, gender, and the relation between literature and science. Through a close textual analysis of three science fiction novels, the author expands East German literary history to include science fiction as a valuable source for developing a multi-faceted understanding of the country's short history. Finally, an epilogue notes new titles and developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Inscription and Rebellion

Author : Sonja E. Klocke
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139338
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Inscription and Rebellion by : Sonja E. Klocke

Download or read book Inscription and Rebellion written by Sonja E. Klocke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employs research on the GDR's healthcare system along with feminist and queer theory to get at socialism's legacy, revealing a specifically East German literary convention: employment of symptomatic female bodies to either enforce or rebel against political and social norms.

Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature

Author : William Grange
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
ISBN 13 : 0810863146
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature by : William Grange

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature written by William Grange and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some authors strongly criticized attempts to rebuild a German literary culture in the aftermath of World War II, while others actively committed themselves to 'dealing with the German past.' There are writers in Austria and Switzerland that find other contradictions of contemporary life troubling, while some find them funny or even worth celebrating. German postwar literature has, in the minds of some observers, developed a kind of split personality. In view of the traumatic monstrosities of the previous century that development may seem logical to some. The Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature is devoted to modern literature produced in the German language, whether from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or writers using German in other countries. This volume covers an extensive period of time, beginning in 1945 at what was called 'zero hour' for German literature and proceeds into the 21st century, concluding in 2008. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on writers, such as Nobel Prize-winners Heinrich Bsll, GYnter Grass, Elias Canetti, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald. There are also entries on individual works, genres, movements, literary styles, and forms.

The Writers' State

Author : Stephen Brockmann
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139532
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis The Writers' State by : Stephen Brockmann

Download or read book The Writers' State written by Stephen Brockmann and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the literature produced from the very beginnings of what became the GDR through the 1950s, redressing a tendency of literary scholarship to focus on the later GDR.

They Divided the Sky

Author : Christa Wolf
Publisher : University of Ottawa Press
ISBN 13 : 0776620355
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (766 download)

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Book Synopsis They Divided the Sky by : Christa Wolf

Download or read book They Divided the Sky written by Christa Wolf and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2013-01-26 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years. The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative. Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR.

Rereading East Germany

Author : Karen Leeder
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316462390
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (164 download)

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Book Synopsis Rereading East Germany by : Karen Leeder

Download or read book Rereading East Germany written by Karen Leeder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.

The German Democratic Republic

Author : Peter Grieder
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350307327
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis The German Democratic Republic by : Peter Grieder

Download or read book The German Democratic Republic written by Peter Grieder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, concise and thought-provoking introduction to the history of East Germany which engages critically with key debates and advances new interpretations of the origins, development and demise of the GDR. Peter Grieder also offers an original conceptualization of the GDR as a totalitarian welfare state.

Anniversaries

Author : Uwe Johnson
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681372045
Total Pages : 1713 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

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Book Synopsis Anniversaries by : Uwe Johnson

Download or read book Anniversaries written by Uwe Johnson and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 1713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark of 20th Century literature about New York in the late 1960s, now in English for the first time. Late in 1967, Uwe Johnson set out to write a book that would take the unusual form of a chapter for every day of the ongoing year. It would be the tale of Gesine Cresspahl, a thirty-four-year-old single mother who is a German émigré to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and of her ten-year-old daughter, Marie—a story of work and school, of friends and lovers and the countless small encounters with neighbors and strangers that make up big-city life. An everyday tale, but also a tale of the events of the day, as gleaned by Gesine from The New York Times: Johnson could hardly foresee the convulsions of 1968, but some of the news—the racial unrest roiling America, the escalating war in Vietnam—was sure to be news for some time yet to come. Finally, it would be a tale told by Gesine to Marie about Gesine’s childhood in a small north German town, of her independent and enterprising father, of her troubled mother, of Nazi Germany (Gesine was born the year Hitler came to power) and World War II and Soviet retribution and the grimly regulated realities of Communist East Germany. An ambitious historical novel as well as a wonderfully observed New York novel, Anniversaries would take in the unsettled world of the present along with the twentieth century’s disastrous past, while vividly depicting the struggle of a loving, though hardly uncomplicated mother and a bright, indomitably curious girl to understand and care for each other and to shape a human world. Gesine and Marie are among the most memorable and engaging characters in literature, and Anniversaries, at once monumental and intimate, sweeping and full of incident, stylistically adventurous and endlessly absorbing, is quite simply one of the great books of our time.