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In a recent podcast Kateryna Mishchenko asked whether she, as a Ukrainian author, has the right to participate in German discourses, and whether she can do so through the German language. This refers both to the public debate on the 'Krieg in Europa', following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and, inextricably linked to it, memory discourses on the Holocaust and World War II. This article discusses Mishchenko's perspective on the war in Europe in literary and non-literary texts in comparison to that of Katja Petrowskaja. Petrowskaja moved to Berlin in 1999 and made a name for herself with her family history Vielleicht Esther (2014). Both authors can be regarded as prominent voices within a post-Soviet exile community in Berlin. The article asks how contemporary authors from Ukraine who find themselves exiled in Germany are contributing to a politicization of the German literary field, and what role their contribution to a transnational memory of the Holocaust and World War II plays within this process, drawing on Hannah Arendt's understanding of refugees as a transnational avant-garde in her essay of 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German literature has a long memory for the relationship between people and the environments they inhabit. The novel is narrated in flashbacks by his protagonist Eschenbach from a tidal island of Germany's North Sea coast. Let us consider Goethe: Goethe's late novel I Wahlverwandschaften i , first published in 1809, opens in a tree nursery on a large landed estate, where the owner Eduard has been busy with the task of budding new trees, "frisch erhaltene Pfropfreiser auf junge Stämme zu bringen". [Extracted from the article]

I had started my PhD with Hamish Reid a few months previously just up the road in Nottingham, and Ian organised a symposium on matters GDR. I first met Ian Wallace in Loughborough in 1990, shortly after the Wall had fallen. Ian was not the only British-based researcher on the GDR in the 1970s, but he led the way in creating a space for engagement with the GDR that was absent the usual political baggage. [Extracted from the article]

Yoko Tawada (1960) is for good reasons one of the prime examples of contemporary German exophonic literature. She is a very successful writer in Japanese and in German and provides in her Germanophone writings an ethnography of the German Weltansicht, as Wilhelm von Humboldt famously called languages, or of the German language mindset. This article focuses on her poetry volume of 2010, Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik, to demonstrate how exophonia can bring us to develop an acute awareness of the ways language structures shape our patterns of thinking. Coming from a very differently organised language, Japanese, Tawada comments in playful ways on the implications of German, and compares it to Japanese. This enables her to be very creative and to make Germans see their language with new eyes. Translingual writing, even though also present in a real mixing of languages in Tawada, appears here as a way to understand how much our ideas are shaped by our linguistic structures, and that there are alternative world views. It thus contributes greatly to a relativization of one's own perspective and helps to open up to difference and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early work of Stefan George is famously dominated by an aesthetics of the surface, in which the weight given to the appearance and texture of objects within the poems, as well as the poems and collections as objects, turns language itself into material, with acoustic and visual 'textural' or surface qualities. Through experiments in syntax, word-formation and orthography, words are understood as a medium, as things to be cut to size and rearranged on a page in a direct reworking of the fine and decorative arts; and yet the processes of creation, that is, writing, are masked from us, the poems presented as a finished product. The questions of process are central to a discussion of translation of Shakespeare's Sonnetts, and it is George's translation or 're-working' ( Umdichtung) that forms the basis of my paper. Previous accounts of the translations have evaluated effects of surface according to their proximity to the original. Yet this model of 'faithfulness' does not take into account the kinds of reorganising that these very effects allow; taking my cue from George's systematic flattening out of hypotactic structures from the English, in which syntactic elements are freed from a fixed hierarchy to be reordered at will, I make the case for a more general 'poetics of parataxis' in the translations which serves as a continuation of the valorisation of surface to be seen in, for instance, the Hymnen. When formal similarities are understood not as mere lubrication for the carrying over of 'meaning' from one language to another, 'original' and 'translation' can stand side by side in a spatial as opposed to hierarchical relationship. The translations thus offer a commentary on the process of translation, of writing itself, forming a concretisation of George's desire to rejuvenate the German language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his satirical novel, 'Hans Kiekindiewelts Reisen in alle vier Welttheile' (1794), A. G. F. Rebmann turns to the question of slavery in the Atlantic world to test his eponymous character's commitment to freedom, which had been born in revolutionary Europe. Placing Hans in St. Domingo during the Haitian Revolution, Rebmann not only provides one of the most nuanced explorations of that uprising by a German writer, but launches a stinging critique of European colonialism. This novel, by one of the most prominent liberal writers in 1790s Germany, demonstrates a global perspective among progressive Germans during the Age of Revolution. Rebmann insists that a seemingly foreign question - the rights of Black slaves - is of central importance to the foundational ideas that are at stake for Germans too. There was an appreciation in Germany that a limited focus on domestic concerns and politics as the revolution raged in France could not do full justice to the ideals which many German liberals professed. Even without colonies and slaves of their own, Rebmann argued, Germans must take seriously the question of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visit of Sebald's narrator to the Suffolk home of Michael Hamburger is a central episode of 'The Rings of Saturn'. It draws on the real life acquaintance between Sebald and Hamburger and in part pays homage to the poet whose work Sebald greatly respected. But the narrator also perceives 'Wahlverwandtschaften und Korrespondenzen' with the German-Jewish émigré, even claiming a similarity of experience which could be called 'narratophilic' (Santner). This essay explores how Sebald negotiates between his admiration for Hamburger and his desire to understand a biography at once so similar to and different from his own. It also shows how Sebald's complex and unresolved depiction of Hamburger in his prose provides a model for artists and directors who have returned to this episode more recently. Tacita Dean, Frank Wierke, Grant Gee and Katie Mitchell are both fascinated and challenged by the German author's legacy and like Sebald must negotiate between personal investment and objective understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to re-evaluate the neglected German-language writer Juliane Déry (1864-1899) by using published sources and unpublished letters. Looking at the interplay between success and failure that characterized her life and reception helps to shed a different light on a number of assumptions regarding Déry's biography and work. Given the fact that Déry lived and wrote as an exile in the German language and in various European cultural centres, my interpretation revolves around the hypothesis that she lived in a state of masquerade. I illustrate my interpretation with the analysis of her play 'Es fiel ein Reif' and the novella 'Ru▒land in Paris'. I demonstrate how she challenged unequal gender and class standards of her time and how her personal and literary struggle against restrictive definitions of identity based on exclusion and prejudice anticipates more recent theories of cultural hybridity and a utopian vision of a Europe without national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bis heute ist es den Deutschen nicht überzeugend gelungen, einen verbindlichen gesellschaftlichen Konsens über den angemessenen Umgang mit nationalsozialistisch belasteten Wörtern und Wendungen herzustellen. Einsehbar wird diese Problematik am Fall von 'Jedem das Seine', einer jahrtausendealten Gerechtigkeitsformel, die ab dem 18. Jahrhundert den Wahlspruch Preußens repräsentierte, seit 1938 jedoch, als die Nationalsozialisten den Ausdruck in das Haupttor des Konzentrationslagers Buchenwald einschmiedeten, zu einer Todesformel mutierte. Ungeachtet dieser begriffsgeschichtlichen Zäsur wurde die Wendung nach 1945 jahrzehntelang in ahistorisch profaner Bedeutung weiter benutzt, zuletzt vor allem von der Werbeindustrie. Zwar zeichnet sich seit den 1990er Jahren in der Öffentlichkeit ein zunehmend kritischer Umgang ab, der jener Pervertierung im Kontext des Holocaust Rechnung trägt, gleichwohl belegt dieser Fall exemplarisch, dass die Aufarbeitung des lexikalischen NS-Erbes in Deutschland immer noch beträchtliche Defizite aufweist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While publications on all aspects of Holocaust literature continue to abound in German Studies, the study of German-language poetry written during the Holocaust in situations of internment has been surprisingly marginalized, particularly in comparison to the multitude of publications on poetry written 'after Auschwitz'. Guided by John Frow's reflections in Genre, who views texts as performances of genre and, ultimately, as bearers of discursive power, this article explores the reasons for the imbalance by tracing uses of the term Holocaust Poetry in West Germany and by illustrating perceptions and readings of German-language poetry from the Holocaust. The article engages with current research on poetry written in the camps to illustrate the various modalities and combinations that constitute the hybrid nature of poetic texts, especially of those produced by prisoners in the Theresienstadt transit camp between 1941 and 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]