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This study examines the interpretive possibilities in the shorter fiction of Post-War German literature. The corpus includes works by Rolf Hochhuth, Friedrich Durrenmatt and Martin Walser. The historical framework of the theory of the novella and short story provides a basis for a discussion of genre, extended to include the coordinates of metaphor and metonymy. With the exception of one text designated as a novel, these works demonstrate interlocking and restricted motif complexes, repetitive and parallel structure and the integration of most narrative components. They project a tenor of hermetic plurality from a vehicle of abbreviated and truncated referential discourse. They use myth and intertextuality to show general principles to be extrapolated from specific contexts. Metafiction complements the theme of the subject not at one with itself. A partial resolution to the incertitude of existence, rendered according to Freud and Lacan, is offered through the emerging role of women as a stabilizing factor.

Wolfgang Koeppen’s three post‐war novels have often been called a trilogy, purely based on their publication in rapid succession in the early 1950s. This study establishes a connection between the works by looking at their roots in Irish, Anglo‐American, French and German modernism, and shows up links between Wolfgang Koeppen, James Joyce, E.E. Cummings, Charles Baudelaire and Thomas Mann. This comparative analysis concludes, by integrating socio‐political factors of life in West Germany after World War II, that Koeppen transcends the modernist tradition – the fact that modernism has become tradition, i.e. it has become “classic”, in contradiction to being “modern”. Koeppen’s texts do not only allude to and build on classic texts and refer to stylistic and narrative modernist elements such as stream‐of‐consciousness and sketching a fragmented society in turmoil; the very act of recurring to myths and texts of the Western canon in order to depict the disaffected individual is an almost post‐modern one.

No description available.

No description available.

From introduction: Wenn ich mir neben anderen sozial-psychologischen Theorien· auch die Theorie Freuds zunutze mache, so geschieht das nicht nur um der Textgerechtheit und der Nachprüfbarkeit willen, sondern auch aufgrund der überlegung, daß der Nossacksche Held, als "bürgerlicher Held"⁵²) , in mehr oder minderem Maße krank- und wahnhafte Züge haben wird, denn seine Bürgerlichkeit ist schon beim ersten, auffassenden Lesen der Texte kaum rnehr zu bezweifeln. Sein verstockter Individualismus ist hingegen, um noch einmal Adorno anzuführen, auch wieder nicht rückhaltlos verwerflich, ist dieser doch, "sowohl Produkt desDrucks", wie "das Kraftzentrum, das ihm widersteht".⁵³)

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This thesis takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars and interpreters of Joseph Roth’s work that his writing can be divided into two periods: an early “socialist” phase and a later “monarchist” phase. In opposition to this view, a reading of Roth’s novels is put forward in which his desire to make sense of post-Habsburg Central Europe provides the underlying logic, thus reconciling his early novels with Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. The first chapter addresses the common contention that the transformation in Roth’s work is the result of a deep identity crisis. An alternative reading of the relevance of Roth’s identity to his work is offered: namely, that Roth’s conviction that identity is multivalent explains his rejection of both nationalism and other “solutions” to the problems of post-war Europe, a sentiment that finds expression in his early novels. The interpretation of these novels, which represent Roth’s early attempts to give literary form to contemporary reality, is the focus of the second chapter of the thesis. In the third chapter Radetzkymarsch is analyzed as a historical novel in the terms first proposed by Georg Lukács, as a novel which facilitates the understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past. Paradoxically, it is the historical form that most effectively captures and illuminates the complex reality of Roth’s contemporary times. The fourth and final chapter demonstrates that Die Kapuzinergruft is not simply an inferior sequel to Radetzkymarsch, a nostalgic evocation of an idealized lost Habsburg world and condemnation of the 1930s present, but rather continues the dialogue between past and present begun in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel, written before and in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany, it is not Roth but his narrator who takes flight from reality, behaviour that Roth condemns as leading to the repetition of mistakes from the past and the failure to prevent the ultimate political catastrophe.