Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-226). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1990. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-226).

Inaug.-Diss.--Köln. / Vita. Bibliography: p. [iii-iv].

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgetown University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 329-359). Also available on the Internet.

<p> Austrian author and public official Heinrich Joseph von Collin (1771/1772&ndash;1811) composed anti-Napoleonic poetry in the early nineteenth-century in an effort to motivate his German-speaking contemporaries to support liberal efforts to resist the foreign aggression and local tyranny posed by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769&ndash;1821). Though Collin enjoyed international fame during his lifetime, today he is neglected by the general reading public in Germany and Austria, as well as by scholars who specialize in the literature of his age. </p><p> The following chapters explore the historical discourses in the nationalist and patriotic elements of Collin&rsquo;s literary work, as well as his concept of duty, and contrast these discourses with the understanding of these terms in the German-speaking world after World War II.</p>

While debates over the memory and representation of the National Socialist past have dominated public discourse in Germany over the last forty years, the literary scene has been the site of experimentation with the genre of the autobiography, as authors developed new strategies for exploring their own relationship to the past through narrative. Since the late 1970s, this experimentation has yielded a series of autobiographical novels which focus not only on the authors' own lives, but on the lives and experiences of their family members, particularly those who lived during the NS era. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between two waves of this autobiographical writing, the Väterliteratur novels of the late 1970s and 1980s in the BRD, and the current trend of multi-generational family narratives which began in the late 1990s. In a prelude and three chapters, this dissertation traces the trajectory from Väterliteratur to the Generationenromane through readings of Bernward Vesper's Die Reise (1977), Christoph Meckel's Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (1980), Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979), Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (2003), Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), and Barbara Honigmann's Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004). I read these texts as examples of genealogical writing, in which protagonists seek to position themselves in relation to their family histories through the construction of family narrative. The formal similarities between the two trends - (inter)textual dialogue, hybridity of prose style, vignette or essayistic structure - cast their underlying differences into greater relief. While the author-narrators of Väterliteratur seek to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the question of the father's complicity in Nazism, the authors of Generationenromane allow for greater nuance in categories such as victim and perpetrator. In both cases, however, the subjectivity of the individual protagonist shapes his or her engagement of the family past, as they seek to negotiate between personal family relationships and public discourses of collective memory in contemporary Germany.

This dissertation investigates the imagination of the Jewish table in German and German-Jewish letters. Examining ethnographic, iconographic and literary depictions of the Jewish table from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, I argue for its significance as a key site in the German imagination of the Jews, a locus of fantasies regarding the nature of Jewish religious practice, social community and corporeal difference. The work of the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, I identify a wealth of fantasies concerning the alimentary behavior of the Jews that have existed in German letters since at least the early sixteenth century. Then, I argue that these various myths of Jewish eating and drinking persisted well into the modern period, experiencing a covert afterlife in literary texts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Two broader conceptual aims of the dissertation are to argue for the significance of the table motif in the social, religious and aesthetic contexts and to draw attention to the typically neglected topic of food themes in literature. The dissertation begins with a study of the Jewish table as it was imagined in polemical ethnographies of the Jews written in the German language from the early sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century. Based on my reading of these sources, I identity four main features to the imagination of the Jewish table in the early modern period. Jews supposedly refuse to eat with Christians out of hatred and fear of fraternization with them. They exhibit immoderate behavior at table and lack a proper code of alimentary ethics. They eat copious amounts of garlic and exude a foul stench, the foetor judaicus, as a result. Most damningly, they consume the blood of innocent Christian children in their Passover Seder meals. Against this background I turn my attention to the modern period and show how literary (con)texts become the medium in which authors--Jews and non-Jews alike--receive and reinterpret these myths of the Jewish table. In Chapter 2, I analyze two distinctive table cultures of the turn of the nineteenth century, the Jewish salon and the Christian-German Table Society, and argue that participants used the idea of table fellowship as a microcosm for imagining Jewish-German social relations at large. In Chapter 3, I juxtapose Heinrich Heine's defiant materialist stance and cryptic celebration of Jewish cuisine in Der Rabbi von Bacherach with Wilhelm Raabe's evocation of Jewish appetite in Der Hungerpastor. Chapter 4 focuses on the resurgence of the blood libel at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze a trio of German and German-Jewish fictions from the fin de siècle that feature the fantasy space of the Jewish table and in some cases invoke the myth of ritual murder, including Arnold Zweig's Ritualmord in Ungarn, Theodor Herzl's Altneuland and Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut.

Inaug.-Diss.--Breslau. / Lebenslauf. A shortened version of the original typewritten thesis (Breslau 1932)--Vorbemerkung, p. [v.]. Includes bibliographical references.

Habilitationsschrift--Innsbruck.

Inaug.-Dis.--Halle. / Lebenslauf. "Literatur": 1 l.