Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars’ long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area’s non-contiguous—and frequently global or extraterritorial—entanglements.

This book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another's suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.

Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars' long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area's non-contiguous-and frequently global or extraterritorial-entanglements.

New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust. In studies of Holocaust representation and memory, scholars of literature and culture traditionally have focused on particular national contexts. At the same time, recent work has brought the Holocaust into the arena of the transnational, leading to a crossroads between localized and global understandings of Holocaust memory. Further complicating the issue are generational shifts that occur with the passage of time, and which render memory and representations of the Holocaust ever more mediated, commodified, and departicularized. Nowhere is the inquiry into Holocaust memory more fraught or potentially more productive than in German Studies, where scholars have struggled to addressGerman guilt and responsibility while doing justice to the global impact of the Holocaust, and are increasingly facing the challenge of engaging with the broader, interdisciplinary, transnational field. Persistent Legacy connects the present, critical scholarly moment with this long disciplinary tradition, probing the relationship between German Studies and Holocaust Studies today. Fifteen prominent scholars explore how German Studies engages with Holocaust memory and representation, pursuing critical questions concerning the borders between the two fields and how they are impacted by emerging scholarly methods, new areas of inquiry, and the changing place of Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany. Contributors: David Bathrick, Stephan Braese, William Collins Donahue, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Katja Garloff, Andreas Huyssen, Irene Kacandes, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Sven Kramer,Erin McGlothlin, Leslie Morris, Brad Prager, Karen Remmler, Michael D. Richardson, Liliane Weissberg. Erin McGlothlin and Jennifer M. Kapczynski are both Associate Professors in the Department of Germanic Languages andLiteratures at Washington University in St. Louis.

When she was very young, Irene Kacandes knew things about her father that had no plot, no narrator, and no audience. To her childhood self these things resembled beings who resided with her family, like the ancestresses who'd thrown themselves off cliffs rather than be taken by the Turks, or the forefathers who'd fought the Trojans. For decades she thought of these cohabitants as Daddy's War Experiences and tried to stay away from them. When tragedy touched the adult life she had constructed for herself, however, she realized she had to confront her family's wartime past. Kacandes begins with what she did know: that her immigrant grandmother returned to Greece with four young children-and without her husband-only to get trapped there by the Nazi occupation. Though still a child himself, her father, John, helped feed his younger siblings by taking up any task possible, including smuggling arms to the Resistance. Kacandes painstakingly uncovers a complex truth her father chose not to tell, a truth inextricably entwined with the Holocaust, discovering, too, a common but little-told story about how the telling of such memories is negotiated between survivors and their children. Daddy's War brings new understanding to how trauma, like the revenge of Greek gods, can visit each generation and offers a model for breaking the cycle.

Everywhere you turn today, someone (or something) is talking to you--the television, the radio, cell phones, your computer. If you think some of the novels and stories you read are talking to you too, you're not alone, and you're not mistaken. In this innovative, multidisciplinary work, Irene Kacandes reads contemporary fiction as a form of conversation and as part of the larger conversation that is modern culture. Within a framework of talk as interaction, Kacandes considers texts that can be classified as "statements," that is, texts that wholly or in part ask for their readers to react-- to talk back--to them in certain ways. The works she addresses--from writers as varied as Harriet O. Wilson, Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Gunter Grass, John Barth, Julio Cortazar, and Italo Calvino--conduct their interactions in certain modes to accomplish different sorts of cultural work: storytelling, testimony, apostrophe, and interactivity. By focusing on texts within these groupings, Kacandes is able to relate the different modes of talk fiction to extraliterary cultural developments in our oral age--and to show how such interactions, however contrary to the dominant twentieth-century view of literature as art for art's sake, help to keep literature alive and speaking to us.