New essays on poetical and theoretical responses to the Holocaust's rupture of German and European civilization. Crisis presents chances for change and creativity: Adorno's famous dictum that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric has haunted discourse on poetics, but has also given rise to poetic and theoretical acts of resistance. The essays in this volume discuss postwar poetics in terms of new poetological directions and territory rather than merely destruction of traditions. Embedded in the discourse triggered by Adorno, the volume's foci include the work of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Other German writers discussed are Ilse Aichinger, Rose Auslander, Charlotte Beradt, Thomas Kling, Heiner Muller, and Nelly Sachs; concrete poetry is also treated. The final section offers comparative views of the poetics of European literary figures such as Jean Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, and Danilo Kis and a consideration of the aesthetics of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. Contributors: Chris Bezzel, Manuel Braganca, Gisela Dischner, Rudiger Goerner, Stefan Hajduk, Gert Hofmann, Aniela Knoblich, Rachel MagShamhrain, Marton Marko, Elaine Martin, Barry Murnane, Marko Pajevic, Tatjana Petzer, Renata Plaice,Annette Runte, Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, Michael Shields, Peter Tame. Gert Hofmann is a Lecturer in German, Comparative Literature, Drama, and Film and Rachel MagShamhrain is a Lecturer in German, Film, and Comparative Literature, both at University College Cork; Marko Pajevic is a Lecturer in German at Queen's University Belfast; Michael Shields is a Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant's critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tubingen School concreatively adopted Kant's philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant's philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the "chorismos" between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant's critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tubingen School concreatively adopted Kant's philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant's philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the "chorismos" between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein... all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg's real-life romance with "the model of beauty and sweetness," Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. "The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is fiction!" exclaims Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of "wrestling with death," of electricity machines and exploding gases is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the little Stechard girl: "Something is found that was lost for a long time." Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house... and then? Colored with Lichtenberg's humorous, enlightening meditations on life, death, and everything in-between, Hofmann works a subtle magic in this unusual fable-of-awakening about the transience of human attachments and the resilience of the human spirit.