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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.

This thesis surveys the sounds of everyday street and work life to argue for a reassessment of the way historians have understood community, space, materiality and identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany and Britain. It will demonstrate that sound played an important role in the organisation of urban space and social order. Furthermore it will show how the historical subject as listener emphasises the volatility of identity, place-making and community. Sounds either defined a community through positive responses or created conflict where one group heard the sounds of another group as noise. Sound helps to define the social groups that this thesis focuses on, such as experts, intellectuals, local administrators, immigrants or factory labourers. The ephemeral nature of sound and the subjectivity of listening, however, also pull apart such neat definitions and reveal the fractures within each of these social groups. Throughout this thesis, differing reactions to everyday sounds in the conurbations of Manchester and Düsseldorf will demonstrate how communities sought to define themselves and their environments through the production and reception of sound. What emerges is a re-composition of everyday life in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century that challenges examinations of it based on images of class, sociability and culture. Düsseldorf and Manchester were substantial cities that grew during the period studied here and underwent similar processes of technological change that affected both the social order and the physical environment. This thesis demonstrates that the audibility of specific technologies, buildings and machines physically affected listeners, and that working classes, middle-class professionals and local administrators all created regimes of noise intent on controlling behaviour in streets and workplaces. One of the key tropes within studies of sound is that listening places the historical subject at the centre of their environment while seeing places them outside of it. Using this idea, this thesis will make an original contribution to a number of debates. First of all, sounds broke down visual boundaries between street and workplace and this dissertation examines how that changes historical notions of place and space. Secondly, this thesis establishes how sound exposes the lines of fracture and cohesion within and between social groups that historians of popular street culture have tried to emphasise through class relations. Thirdly, sound allows for a re-examination of the power structures in which factory labourers and immigrants worked and lived as it presents practices of listening and sound production that breathe new life into ‘histories from below’ and challenge the top-down approaches associated with governmentality. Finally, this thesis will challenge the notion of noise as unwanted sound, prevalent in the growing number of histories on urban noise by demonstrating the diversity of everyday and medical reactions to ‘noise’ and exploring the problem of ‘silence’ in negotiations of migrant and worker identity and the development of road technologies. Overall, this thesis will determine that the role of sound in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century complicates historical debates on the physical and social organisation of urban space. Different communities transformed their identities around shared listening practices and adapted their rhythms of everyday life to sounds that resonated between street and home, work and leisure.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Eine der wichtigsten Aufgaben der Kunst ist es, unser kulturelles Gedächtnis zu aktivieren, zu errinnern was ist vergessen oder absichtlich in die Vergessenheit gezwungen wurde, selbst wenn das alte Wunde bluten lasst und traumatisch erscheint. Jedes Mal ist das Element der Kritik die ausschlaggebende Komponente der künstlerischen Arbeit, sie charakterisiert nicht nur den Künstler, und die Zeit in der er/sie lebt, sondern auch den Zuschauer, genauer: wie weit ist der Künstler bereit zu gehen und wie weit sind die Zuschauer bereit ihm zu folgen, im Rückblick manchmal mehr ersteres als letzteres. In meiner Arbeit analysiere ich die Aspekte von Mythologie, Geschichte und deren sozio-politische Relevanz in den Arbeiten von Anselm Kiefer, der Künstler der mit seinen Werken unsere Wahrnehmung der Geschichte, vor allem der deutschen Geschichte, beeinflust und in Frage gestellt hat. / It is one of the major tasks of art to revive our cultural memory and to sharpen our senses, to remind whatever has been forgotten or is being purposefully given to oblivion and to predict whatever the future might have in store even if it causes old wounds bleed anew. Each time the element of critique, being one of the crucial components of artistic work, characterises not only the artist, the time he/she lives in, but also the spectator: precisely, how far the artist is prepared to go and how much the spectator is prepared to accept, in retrospect more the latter than the former. My work analyses the problems of mythology, history and their socio-political relevance on the examples of works by Anselm Kiefer, the artist whose work is irrevocably related to history, German history in the first place, the artistic means of remembrance as well as the role of mythology in our collective memory.

Concentration camp scholarship has been impacted by an ‘island syndrome’: most research limits itself to one site, focuses either on its life or afterlife, and overlooks interactions among functionaries, inmates, and local people. Central themes connected to the camps thus remain shrouded in popular misconceptions. This study breaks with historiographical orthodoxies and addresses common confusions through a new framework. Drawing on Ebensee and the Loiblpass, two forced labour outposts of the Mauthausen complex, it presents the first integrated account of the divergent factors that shaped the legacies of these sites and the fates of their subjects. A focus on Ebensee shows how gravely the local bureaucracy, relief workers, and US Army impacted on the early postwar lives of former camp inmates. Victim groups were marginalised by local and Allied actors precisely because of a broad awareness and continued survivor presence. The Loiblpass figured less prominently in the postwar lives of its surrounding communities. At the core of postwar views lay pre-1945 experiences. Living in an epicentre of territorial struggles, Loibl Valley inhabitants did not externalise a strong political agenda and instead communicated a binary ‘selective association process’. The memory of the camp prompted a positive association in socioeconomic terms; political allusions provoked a relativizing of brutality and a claim to personal victimhood. The local context and postwar dimension constitute a missing link in our understanding of these sites, their neighbouring communities, and the early postwar period more broadly. While the causal relationship between a social reintegration of Nazis and a re-marginalisation of genuine victims has thus far been viewed chiefly through the lens of federal politics, this development was already long under way—aided by all local actors—when amnesty laws encouraging the rehabilitation of former National Socialists came into effect; national and Allied policy decisions in the wake of the burgeoning Cold War only further catalysed this development from 1947 onwards.

The present dissertation investigates literary translation from a cultural perspective by comparing the translation of culture-specific words and concepts in five different translations of the novel Ein weites Feld by Günter Grass. The translations were chosen to represent three ‘small’ (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and two ‘large’ (American English, French) languages and cultures, in order to find out whether these categories are characterized by different ‘foreignizing’ or ‘domesticating’ translation methods. The main purpose of the study is to present an empirical and descriptive analysis of the concrete difficulties and possibilities connected with the process of transferring culturespecific words and concepts taken from the geographical, historical, literary and everyday context of the original work. A further aim of the study is to undertake a comparison of theory and practice of translation with regard to culture and culturespecific words. The methodological framework is taken from the historically oriented ‘Transfer’ method of the Göttingen literary translation school, where deviations from original literary texts are not seen as ‘mistakes’ in the traditional linguistic sense but as differences caused by various historical and individual factors. Above all, this study aims to focus on the translations themselves, to investigate what different solutions to cultural translation problems can tell us about the meeting between the ‘Foreign’ and the world of the translators and their prospective readership. The study’s analyses demonstrate that culture-specific words and concepts in this material are translated in a broad variety of ways, which often differ from translation to translation and therefore cannot be classified into predictable categories of translation 'strategies’. A certain pattern could be detected as far as the translation of geographical place-names and similar concepts were concerned, where the Scandinavian translators tend to preserve the original words and concepts to a greater extent than the other translators. As a contrast, the American and French translators have preserved a large number of words connected to the ‘Third Reich’ in the original form, which raises questions about the way strategies of preserving the ‘Foreign’ in translations are connected with the picture of other cultures. However, the most conspicuous result of the investigation could be found within the category of the ‘pragmatic’ decisions (Chesterman), which differ considerably in all translations as far as explanations of culture-specific phenomena within the text itself are concerned. Thus five literary translations make five different variations of the same novel. The heterogeneous translation solutions further show that the theoretical approaches within translation theory are of only limited use for describing existing literary translations in an adequate way.