Full Description
This two-volume set explores what postwar German representations and imaginings of violence in other places and times tell us about Germany.
Germany's 20th-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture especially challenging: it has made certain constructions of violence unspeakable, even unthinkable. As a result, new ways of thinking about violence in postwar and contemporary German culture are needed. One such approach is critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, representations in literature, art, and film of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered Germans a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged or deeply encoded meanings and functions of violence in German culture.
This two-volume set explores what representations of "violence elsewhere" in a variety of works and genres tell us about Germany. Volume 1, covering the immediate postwar period, 1945-2001, considers works that arose in East, West, and reunified Germany and that imagine violence in foreign lands as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Volume 2 carries the inquiry forward to the post-9/11 world of the new Federal Republic. The volumes also introduce theoretical perspectives that are transferable beyond German Studies, allowing us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities.
Contributors for Volume 1: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone.
Contributors for Volume 2: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich.
Chapter 8 of Volume 1, "Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized "9/11" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European Research Council.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND
Contents
Volume 1
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies
1. Projecting Violence Elsewhere: Remembering Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Cold War Germany - Katherine Stone
2. Watching Violence Elsewhere: Louis Malle's Viva Maria! in 1960s West Germany - Mererid Puw Davies
3. Images as Weapons: DEFA, Studio H&S, and the Global Cold War - Seán Allan
4. KriegsErklärung (Declaration of War): Volker Braun's Cold War Camera - J. J. Long
5. The Vietnam Veteran in Anna Seghers's Steinzeit (Stone Age, 1975) - Ernest Schonfield
6. "So It Has to Be Said: Hammer and Sickle Here, Hammer and Sickle There": Heynowski-Scheumann's Die Angkar (1981) and the Problem of Khmer Rouge Violence for the GDR - Martin Brady
7. Narrating Violent Agency Elsewhere in Inge Viett's Nie war ich furchtloser (Never Was I More Fearless, 1996) - Clare Bielby
8. Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized "9/11" - Katharina Karcher and Evelien Geerts
Selected Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index
Volume 2
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies
1. "Violence Elsewhere" and the Phantasmatic Scene of "Distant Suffering": Intersections of Emotional and Spatial Distance - Marie Kolkenbrock
2. War of Words/Words of War: The "Normalization" of War in the Context of Germany's War in Afghanistan (2001-2021) - Kathrin Wunderlich
3. There Is No "Elsewhere": Scales of Complicity and Implication in the Contemporary German Family Novel - Susanne C. Knittel and Sofía Forchieri
4. German Engagement with Iraqi Conflict in Sherko Fatah's Das dunkle Schiff (2008; The Dark Ship, 2015) and Der letzte Ort (The Last Place, 2014) - Joanne Leal
5. Overview Effects: Violence and Planetarity in Durs Grünbein's Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Cyrano or the Return from the Moon, 2014) - Nicola Thomas
6. Violence "Elsewhere, Within Here": Artistic Engagement in Armenian Remembrance at "Location Germany" - Lizzie Stewart
7. Encountering Violence Elsewhere at Home in Clemens Meyer's Short-Story Collection Die stillen Trabanten (2017; Dark Satellites, 2020) - Frauke Matthes
8. The Entangled Mess of the Embodied Elsewhere in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) - Francesca Lewis
9. Utopias of Restorative Justice: Speculative Fiction, Gender, and Violence in Sharon Dodua Otoo's Adas Raum (2021; Ada's Realm, 2023) - Priscilla Layne
Selected Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index
