Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, 145) - Hardcover

Cosgrove, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571135561 ISBN 13: 9781571135568

Publisher: Camden House, 2014

Synopsis

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 - Günter 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

Review:

(D)etailed and cogent . . . . Throughout the study, textual analysis is enhanced by careful attention to the literary, political, and cultural context, and by details drawn from archival material about the writers' knowledge and discussion of melancholy traditions. Cosgrove's strident engagement with earlier critical reception is particularly noteworthy, not least as her study responds to a lack of scholarly interest in post-war Holocaust memory and melancholy, an association that she shows to be worthy of further attention. . . . The monograph is an original and serious work which provides a highly detailed perspective on post-war writing about the poetics of remembrance after the Holocaust. As such, it makes an important contribution to the extensive body of recent criticism on post-war German memory culture. MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW (The book's) greatest contribution is to emphasize the variety of traditions at play, in particular Christian, Greek, and Renaissance modes of melancholy discourse beyond the better-known psychological and medical definition of the term, most notably as derived from Freud. . . . Recommended. CHOICE

About this edition

• Publisher: Camden House
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1571135561
• ISBN 13: 9781571135568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 244