"Brisk [and] forceful." Sight & Sound "Lucidly argued." Total Film Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schloendorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Julian Preece considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, in particular in respect of women's cinema and its portrayal of the ordeal of its female lead in a world run by men. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from Heinrich Boell's original novel. Preece analyses how the film continues to resonate with our contemporary moment and has influenced film-makers from the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin to the British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

In German-speaking Europe, as in other parts of the western world, questions of religious identity have been discussed with sudden urgency since the attacks of '9/11'. Nowhere was this clearer than in the heated controversy over the building of a mosque in the city of Cologne, which is the subject of Michael Hofmann's contribution to this volume. Turkish Germans have also found themselves defined by the religious background of their parents. For different reasons German Jews have faced pressure to reconnect with a religion that their forbears cast off sometimes more than a century ago. At the same time religious belief among the nominally Christian majority has been in retreat. These changes have generated poetry, drama, and fiction as well as a number of films by both well-known and emerging authors and filmmakers. Their works sometimes reflect but more often challenge debates taking place in politics and the media. The essays in this volume explore a range of genres which engage with religion in contemporary Germany and Austria. They show that literature and film express nuances of feeling and attitude that are eclipsed in other, more immediately influential discourses. Discussion of these works is thus essential for an understanding of the role of religion in forming identity in contemporary multicultural German-speaking societies. This volume contains eight chapters in English and six in German.

This Companion of specially-commissioned essays offers a comprehensive account of his life and work, providing a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's most distinctive Modernist. Contributions cover all the key texts, and discuss Kafka's writing in a variety of critical contexts such as feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Jewish studies. The essays are enhanced by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. They will be of interest to students of German, European and Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies.

New essays providing a comprehensive scholarly introduction to the great writer and thinker Canetti. The Bulgarian-born scholar and author Elias Canetti was one of the most astute witnesses and analysts of the mass movements and wars of the first half of the 20th century. Born a Sephardic Jew and raised at first in the Bulgarianand Ladino languages, he chose to write in German. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for his oeuvre, which includes dramas, essays, diaries, aphorisms, the novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fe) and the long interdisciplinary treatise Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). These works express Canetti's thought-provoking ideas on culture and the human psyche with special focus on the phenomena of power, conflict, and survival. Canetti'smasterful prose, his linguistic innovations, his brilliant satires and conceits continue to fascinate scholars and general readers alike; his challenging, genre-bending writings merge theory and literature, essay and diary entry.This Companion volume contains original essays by renowned scholars from around the world who examine Canetti's writing and thought in the context of pre- and post-fascist Europe, providing a comprehensive scholarly introduction. Contributors: William C. Donahue, Anne Fuchs, Hans Reiss, Julian Preece, Wolfgang Mieder, Sigurd P. Scheichel, Helga Kraft, Harriet Murphy, Irene S. Di Maio, Ritchie Robertson, Johannes G. Pankau, Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Penka Angelova and Svoboda A. Dimitrova, Michael Mack. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

This Companion of specially-commissioned essays offers a comprehensive account of his life and work, providing a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's most distinctive Modernist. Contributions cover all the key texts, and discuss Kafka's writing in a variety of critical contexts such as feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Jewish studies. The essays are enhanced by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. They will be of interest to students of German, European and Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies.

Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike. After the international success in the 1990s of authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Thomas Brussig, an impressive number of new German-language novelists are making a significant impact. Some, like Karen Duve, Daniel Kehlmann, and Sasa Stanisic, have achieved international recognition; some, like Julia Franck, have won major prizes; others, like Clemens Meyer, Alina Bronsky, and Ilja Trojanow, are truly "emerging authors" who have begun toattract attention. Between them they represent a range of literatures in German, from women's writing to minority writing (from Turkish immigrants and Eastern Europe), to "pop literature" and perspectives on the former GDR and onGermany's Nazi past. This volume devotes individual essays to fifteen such writers, examining in detail a major work of each. Translated excerpts from works by Vladimir Vertlib and Clemens Meyer round out the book, which willbe of interest not only to academics and students of English and Comparative Literature in the UK, the US, and beyond, but also to the general reader, for whom titles of texts and quotations are translated. Contributors: Lyn Marven, Stuart Taberner, Anke S. Biendarra, Stephen Brockmann, Rebecca Braun, Frauke Matthes, Brigid Haines, Julian Preece, Emily Jeremiah, Valerie Heffernan, Barbara Mennel, Heike Bartel, Kate Roy, Andrew Plowman, Sonja E.Klocke, Jamie Lee Searle, Katy Derbyshire. Lyn Marven is a Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.