Full Description
Examines ideas of violence in German culture after 9/11 through the lens of "violence elsewhere" - exploring works and discourses about violence in distant locations or times.
Following the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, in postwar Germany thinking or speaking about that extreme violence seemed distinctively difficult - even perhaps, at times, impossible. Yet we can learn about understandings of violence in this period in novel ways by exploring images and constructions in German culture of faraway violence, as shown in the recent volume Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany, 1945-2001.
As of September 11, 2001, violence came to appear transnationally, spectacularly mobile in new ways. Consequently, Violence Elsewhere 2 explores ideas about "violence elsewhere" in German-language culture since 2001. Here, "elsewhere" can mean not only distant places; it may also be violence perceived as foreign, or in the past. Simultaneously, this work suggests that the idea of 9/11 as a watershed in thinking about violence is more complex than meets the eye.
Here, nine essays consider classic literary forms like poetry and prose fiction, from the short story to the intergenerational German family novel to Black feminist speculative fiction. Contributors examine, too, philosophy, performance and multimedia art, political and other forms of public discourse, and film. Topics include, amongst others, the "war on terror," slow environmental violence, the Armenian genocide, portrayals of refugees and migrants, legacies of colonial violence, space travel, and the persistent resonance of the German past.
Contents
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
