Karen Leeder Knihy

This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.

Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield. Introducing Draesner's major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner's reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students. This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women's writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.

This book examines the controversial younger generation of poets who were 'born into' the established socialist state of the German Democratic Republic. Introducing an extraordinary decade of GDR poetry, it focuses on the ways in which this experience is translated into the metaphorical and linguistic structures of their texts, and the ways in which they set about breaking the literary and political boundaries which were imposed upon them, radicalizing notions of the subject, of history, of language, of the poetic enterprise itself. The volume also assesses what will remain - after the fall of the Wall, and the revelations of the 'Stasi' files - of this radical poetic project. This unique study examines the poetry of some fifty writers from both the official and the underground publishing scenes, offering them up as a case-study in the vexed negotiations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and as a contribution to the rewriting of German literary history after 1945.

73 Autoren unterschiedlicher Generationen illuminieren den großen Dramatiker aus vielfältigen Perspektiven in teils eigens für diesen Band geschriebenen Gedichten. Günter Kunert attestiert ihm „Viel Lust an Frauen. Und Genuß am Streit“, Volker Braun fragt, „Brecht, ist Ihnen die Zigarette ausgegangen?“ und Wolf Biermann sinniert beim Anblick von Brechts Grab „Wie nah sind uns manche Tote, doch/Wie tot sind uns manche, die leben“. Dazu halten Heinrich Böll, Heiner Müller, Thomas Brasch, Hanns Eisler, Paul Celan u. v. m. Zwiesprache mit Brecht und seinem Schaffen. 160 Seiten. Lesebändchen. Fester Einband.

Neue Forschungsergebnisse zu Rilkes lyrischem Spätwerk. Der vorliegende Band konzentriert sich auf jene Texte Rilkes, die zwischen 1922 und 1926 - nach den »Duineser Elegien« - entstanden sind. Diese Periode umfasst »Die Sonette an Orpheus«, Rilkes Gedichte in französischer Sprache, die Valéry-Übersetzungen, den lyrischen Briefwechsel mit Erika Mitterer, aber auch eine große Anzahl einzelner Gedichte, die sich thematisch um Landschaft und Figuren wie die Magiergestalt gruppieren lassen. »Nach Duino« vereint nun Aufsätze, denen eine breite Palette kritischer Ansätze und Methoden zu Grunde liegt. Das Spektrum reicht vom close reading über gattungstheoretische Überlegungen bis hin zu Untersuchungen intertextueller Beziehungen, einzelner Motive und Topoi.