The focus of this volume is the prose work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Albert Drach (1902-1995). The author explores Drach's critique of totalitarian culture by examining his representations of power and powerlessness, identity and difference, along with cultural processes of exclusion. Drawing on areas as diverse as psychoanalysis, the grotesque and post-colonial theory, this study identifies a significant discursive difference between Drach's shorter fictional prose and the Holocaust trilogy. Drach's highly original linguistic dexterity, his much-discussed 'protocol style', offers a sophisticated critique of the relationship between power, insubordination and capitulation. This is the first English language study dedicated to the complex prose of Albert Drach. It is of interest to students and scholars of Austrian literature, German-Jewish literature as well as Exile and Holocaust Studies.

Bringing together established and emerging scholars of old age from the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as gerontologists and medical practitioners, this open access book both showcases new scholarship and provides new methods and concepts for ongoing conversations about old age as an object of analysis in contemporary culture. Cultural policy makers and scholars alike regularly describe a “visibility crisis” of old age, a consistent erasure or repression of images of older people from public view. Co-edited by an art historian and two literary scholars with a shared interest in memory, Framing Ageing examines the in/visibility of old age from a range of disciplinary angles, including philosophy, social history, comparative literature and anthropology. In doing so, in addition to examining literary texts, this volume carries out innovative analyses of visual material including sculpture, buildings, photographs, from fine art to amateur production and commercial images. Framing Ageing addresses scholars from across the Humanities and Social Sciences who want to approach the urgent topic of old age in their work, mapping the intellectual state of the field and putting the most salient concepts in action. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Examines the heightened role of politics in contemporary German and Austrian cultural productions and institutions and what it means for German Studies. As debates about Europe, migration, resurgent nationalism, and neoliberalism intensify in Germany and Austria, politics has gained particular prominence in cultural production and cultural institutions. How does this development affect German Studies as a discipline and a practice? Volume 14 of Edinburgh German Yearbook examines political or politicized aspects of contemporary life that have become increasingly significant for culture today. The contributions gathered here offer engaging readings of contemporary literary texts (including work by Sasa Stanisic, Anke Stelling, and Timur Vermes), films (by Fatih Akin, Ruth Beckermann, and Andreas Dresen), and other forms of cultural intervention (the polemics of Max Czollek and Oliver Polak, and the activism of the left-feminist group Burschenschaft Hysteria). These encourage us to consider how communities are being (re)shaped by current political and social crises, antagonisms around memory cultures, questions of European identity, as well as challenges to the status of an assumed Leitkultur and the discourse of integration.

Investigates the function and meaning of sadness in German, Austrian, and Swiss literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh German Yearbook is the only peer-reviewed German Studies publication that each year invites scholarly contributions on a single topic of current challenge to the field. Focusing on "Sadness and Melancholy in German-language Literature and Culture," volume 6 investigates the often subversive function and meaning of sadness and melancholy inGerman-language literature and culture from the seventeenth century to the present where, arguably, it has fallen from the heights of melancholy genius and artistic creativity of earlier epochs to become the embarrassing other ofa Western civilization that prizes happiness as the mark of successful modern living. Interrogating the distinction between sadness as an anthropological constant and melancholy as a shifting cultural discourse, the contributionsexplore how different authors use established literary and cultural topoi from melancholy discourses to comment on topics as diverse as war, religion, gender inequality, and modernity. As well as essays on canonical figures including Goethe and Thomas Mann, the volume features studies of sadness in lesser-known writers such as Betty Paoli and Julia Schoch. Contributors: Per Brandt, Peter Damrau, Kristian Donko, Svenja Frank, Jens Hobus, StephenJoy, Johannes D. Kaminski, Franziska Meyer, Richard Millington, Karin S. Wozonig. Mary Cosgrove is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University ofLondon.

Uncovers the literary traditions of melancholy that inform major works of postwar and contemporary German literature dealing with the Holocaust and the Nazi period. In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods, Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity. This association, alongside the dominant psychoanalytical view of melancholy in German memory discourses since the 1960s, has led to its neglect as an important literary mode in postwar German literature, a situation the present book seeks to redress by identifying and analyzing epochal postwar works that use melancholy traditions to comment on German history in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It focuses on five writers - Gunter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Iris Hanika - who reflect on the legacy of Auschwitz as intellectuals trying to negotiate a relationship to the past based on the stigma of belonging to a perpetrator collective (Grass, Sebald, Hanika) or, broadly speaking, to the victim collective (Weiss, Hildesheimer), in order to develop a melancholy ethics of memory for the Holocaust and the Nazi past. It will appeal to scholars and students of German Studies,Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cultural Memory, and Holocaust Studies. Mary Cosgrove is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh.

Essays shedding light on the increasingly open cultural debate on the German past. Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung," or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of "memory contests," which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative, the contributions offer a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a Germanidentity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Contributors: Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Elizabeth Boa, Stefan Willer, Chloe E. M. Paver, Matthias Fiedler, J. J. Long, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Cathy S. Gelbin, Jennifer E. Michaels, Mary Cosgrove, Andrew Plowman, Roger Woods. Anne Fuchs is Professor of Modern German literature and Georg Grote is Lecturer in German history, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.