Examines the creation, context, and significance of the first and only East German feature film about homosexuality. It took forty years for East Germany's state-run studios, DEFA, to produce a feature film about homosexuality: Coming Out. The film's story seems radically ordinary today: a young teacher, Philipp, is gay but cannot accept the truth about his sexuality. He starts a relationship with a fellow teacher, Tanja, but falls in love with a man he meets, Matthias, whose confidence in his own self-understanding is alluring for him as well as a challenge. Acclaimed director Heiner Carow created a film that shows the difficulties, both internalized and external, that queer people faced in East Germany. In a quirk of history, Coming Out premiered in German theaters on November 9, 1989, the very night on which the Berlin Wall was opened, which meant the film was initially overshadowed, to say the least, by the earthshaking political events. Yet it remains a popular film and is regularly screened around the world, including prominently at queer film festivals. Kyle Frackman's book examines the film in both the late East German context of its creation and the international context of its reception. The book will be published in both paperback and Open Access form.

The first scholarly collection in English or German to fully address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres and in social, political, and cultural context. The cinema of the German Democratic Republic, that is, the cinema of its state-run studio DEFA, portrayed gender and sexuality in complex and contradictory ways. In doing so, it reflected the contradictions in GDR society in respect to such questions. This is the first scholarly collection in English or German to fully address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres (from shorts and feature films to educational videos, television productions, and documentaries) and in light of social, political, and cultural contexts. It is also unique in its investigation of previously unresearched subjects, including films and directors that have received little scholarly attention and nonconformist representations of gender and sexual embodiments, identifications, and practices. The volume presents the work of leading scholars on the GDR and allows students and scholars to examine East German film with respect to the acceptance, rejection, or nuanced negotiation of ideas of proper male and female behavior espoused by the country's brand of socialism. Contributors: Muriel Cormican, Jennifer L. Creech, Heidi Denzel de Tirado, Kyle Frackman, Sebastian Heiduschke, Sonja E. Klocke, John Lessard, Larson Powell, Victoria I. Rizo Lenshyn, Reinhild Steingroever, Faye Stewart, Evan Torner, Henning Wrage. Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Faye Stewart is Associate Professor of German at Georgia State University.

New essays by leading scholars examining today's vibrant and innovative German crime fiction, along with its historical background. Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. Duringthe 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of their time. German crime fiction has thus always been a curious case; rather than follow the established rules of the genre, it has always been interested in examining, breaking, and ultimately rewriting those rules. This book assembles leading international scholars to examine today's German crime fiction. It features innovative scholarly work that matches the innovativeness of the genre, taking up the Regionalkrimi;crime fiction's reimagining and transforming of traditional identities; historical crime fiction that examines Germany's and Austria's conflicted twentieth-century past; and how the newly vibrant Austrian crime fiction ties in with and differentiates itself from its German counterpart. Contributors: Angelika Baier, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Kyle Frackman, Sascha Gerhards, Heike Henderson, Susanne C. Knittel, Anita McChesney, Traci S. O'Brien,Jon Sherman, Faye Stewart, Magdalena Waligorska. Lynn M. Kutch is Professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Todd Herzog is Professor and Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

In this study, the author examines works of German-language literature and film from the nineteenth and twentieth century in order to chart a certain kind of otherness. Common to all of the examined cultural products are aspects of gender, sexuality, a notion of home or belonging, and pressures of abjection. Other elements of identity include race and disease. The characters in the analyzed works encounter both mutual dependence and abhorrence, which complicate their experiences in space and time. This analysis demonstrates that acceptance and belonging are difficult to attain, particularly in the fraught power dynamics in these works. This book includes discussions of works by Frank Wedekind, Robert Musil, Kutlug Ataman, and Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss.

Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture. The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics. Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts - archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary - to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by ThomasMann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terezia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others. Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess. Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state. Classical music in the German Democratic Republic is commonly viewed as having functioned as an ideological support or cultural legitimization for the state, in the form of the so-called "bourgeois humanist inheritance." The largenumbers of professional orchestras in the GDR were touted as a proof of the country's culture. Classical music could be seen as the polar opposite of Americanizing pop culture and also of musical modernism, which was decried as formalist. Nevertheless, there were still musical modernists in the GDR, and classical music traditions were not only a prop of the state. This collection of new essays approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, presenting the work of scholars in a number of complementary disciplines, including German Studies, Musicology, Aesthetics, and Film Studies. Contributors to this volume offer a broad examination of classical music in the GDR, while also uncovering nonconformist tendencies and questioning the assumption that classical music in the GDR meant nothing but (socialist) respectability. Contributors: Tatjana Boehme-Mehner, Martin Brady, Lars Fischer, Kyle Frackman, Golan Gur, Peter Kupfer, Albrecht von Massow, Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Jessica Payette, Larson Powell, Juliane Schicker, Martha Sprigge, Matthias Tischer, Jonathan L. Yaeger, Johanna Frances Yunker Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Larson Powell is Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

New essays by leading scholars examining today's vibrant and innovative German crime fiction, along with its historical background. Although George Bernard Shaw quipped that "the Germans lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels," there is a long tradition of German crime fiction; it simply hasn't aligned itself with international trends. Duringthe 1920s, German-language writers dispensed with the detective and focused instead on criminals, a trend that did not take hold in other countries until after 1945, by which time Germany had gone on to produce antidetective novels that were similarly ahead of their time. German crime fiction has thus always been a curious case; rather than follow the established rules of the genre, it has always been interested in examining, breaking, and ultimately rewriting those rules. This book assembles leading international scholars to examine today's German crime fiction. It features innovative scholarly work that matches the innovativeness of the genre, taking up the Regionalkrimi;crime fiction's reimagining and transforming of traditional identities; historical crime fiction that examines Germany's and Austria's conflicted twentieth-century past; and how the newly vibrant Austrian crime fiction ties in with and differentiates itself from its German counterpart. Contributors: Angelika Baier, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Kyle Frackman, Sascha Gerhards, Heike Henderson, Susanne C. Knittel, Anita McChesney, Traci S. O'Brien,Jon Sherman, Faye Stewart, Magdalena Waligorska. Lynn M. Kutch is Professor of German at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Todd Herzog is Professor and Head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

From Weimar to Christiania is a new compilation of graduate student work in the fields of German and Scandinavian Studies. Resulting from research presented at a unique graduate student conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, these essays utilize a wide variety of disciplinary approaches and represent an ambitious and successful effort to connect related yet distinct fields. This anthology is aimed at scholars within the broad areas of German and Scandinavian Studies. All of the contributions speak to an appreciation of cultural studies as a diverse collection of theoretical tools, which provide the historian, political scientist, and literary and film scholars gathered here with the means to contextualize and investigate cultural productions, situations, and environments. From Weimar to Christiania delivers compelling research that expands bodies of knowledge in northern European studies.