This cultural history uses the glaring spatial divides within Germany in the 1970s, the Berlin Wall and the German-German border, to analyze discourses of crisis that manifest themselves around issues of space, divisions, walls, and borders. The perspective of a "transnational feminist psychogeographer" borrows from German and cultural studies, transnational feminist theory, and postcolonial critiques to allow for a reading of cultural contradictions without reducing them to either/or positions. Discussing changes in Cold War politics that characterize the 1970s in terms of a shift to postmodernity, post-Fordism, or a new stage in capitalist globalization, chapter one develops a theoretical framework for examining how 'globalized' borders appear as both permeable and permanent, fostering contradictory discourses of security and confinement. Rather than suggesting that the specific fears produced around global issues like the oil crisis and the Vietnam War vanished by the end of the 1970s, chapter two argues that the production of fear is part of a permanent, racialized, gendered, as well as specifically Western, state of emergency. Chapter three and four reread discourses of national crisis around immigration and terrorism. The mechanisms and strategies of Othering implied in these texts promote a contradictory sense of global alliances and national identity while simultaneously fostering the militarization of the borders of the nation state. Chapters five and six examine the politics of discourses of gender crises in texts and films of the New Subjectivity and in feminist texts in the 1970s. The perspective of a "transnational psychogeographer" allows me to contextualize feminisms and the crisis of the male subject within changing interpretations of gender, nation, and the West. The conclusion contends that we should rethink our understating of the 1970s as a decade between the social change of the 1960s and the conservative backlash of the 1980s to accommodate contradictory political discourses defining a divided Germany in a global context by means of creating a 'permanent state of emergency.'

This dissertation examines novels written by East German author Christoph Hein between 1980 and 2000. Hein pursues ethically-controversial topics as he addresses history and politics. I argue that Hein is not a 'chronicler without message,' as he has claimed, but rather a socially-engaged moralist who communicates his message via his protagonists' dilemmas. I consider relationships between GDR generations, history's role in discourses of East German society, minorities, gender roles, and Hein's critique of a now-unified German society. After an introduction lays out my theoretical framework, I investigate Hein's novella Der fremde Freund in chapter one. Its protagonist is portrayed in a state of abeyance, incapable of living in the present because she is still negotiating her past. In chapter two I argue that in the novel Horns Ende Hein uses multiple perspectives to interrogate the suicide of a historian and thereby succeeds in adding aspects of East German history left out of East German Marxism's official version. The protagonist of the novel Der Tangospieler, the subject of chapter three, realizes after his release from jail that he is not able to reclaim agency over his life. I argue that his psychosomatic symptoms express his inability to understand his life rationally. In chapter four, I maintain that Hein's first post-Wende novel Das Napoleon-Spiel, consisting of long letters written by a lawyer to justify his murder of an unknown man, is intended to draw the West German judicial system into question and comment on East Germans' unwarranted hopes that reunified Germany will constitute a just society. In chapter five I show that Von allem Anfang an questions linear concepts of history and memory as it represents a boy's childhood memories. In the novel Willenbrock, addressed in chapter six, an East German car dealer tries to find his place in unified Germany. Hein probes the interrelationship between newly-won wealth and the threat of losing it as he explores German xenophobia. I conclude that Hein's distinct East German perspective enables him to criticize East Germany as well as reunified Germany. In doing so, he intervenes into the social and political discourses of his time.

The formation of the ideal man in the 18th Century German Enlightenment is based on the concepts of Bildung and Einbildung—the idea that one should not simply look at the world, but observe it and attempt to incorporate it into oneself. In Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers and Faust, we see three attempts at this formation. In these works, however, there is something that prevents each person from reaching this goal. In this paper, I will examine how the concepts of Bildung, formation, and Einbildung, imagination, contribute to failure in this process. Arguing that historical and biblical ownership of women creates a system in which the male gaze is an active projection on a passive female object, I will show how obsession with images and idealizations of the women in these works necessitates destruction of both the viewer and the viewed. The women in these works who become the focus of this visual attention that transforms into an unstoppable compulsion are on the receiving end of many types of expectations and desires. Whether from family, society, or religion, Emilia, Charlotte, and Margarete all face conflicting idealizations about how they should perform their roles as women. They also become objects of desire in the eyes of men. Objectification of women, sometimes literally in the form of a portrait, sometimes figuratively as a recipient of an expectant look, provides multiple canvases upon which this Enlightenment idea of Einbildung allows men to project their wishes and desires. As the women attempt to reconcile the expectations of society, male desire, and their own sensuality, the men attempt to reconcile the idealized version of women they have in their heads with reality. In this impossible process, each character is consumed by this unattainable image of what it means to be the perfect woman who demonstrates both virtue and motherhood, both demureness and desire. I will argue that the reconciliation of sensory and sensual images of women with conflicting ideological images, often created by society, perverts the process of self-creation in Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Goethe's Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers and Faust and turns it into the destruction of an enlightened self—a negative creation, which I will call consumption. I will conclude that the expectations of the male gaze are morphing from men having unattainable ideals and tearing themselves apart trying to attain them into females consuming one another in an attempt to satisfy this gaze. I will pose the problem faced by women who do not capture the gaze, which is not as safe a position as it might seem, and I will offer a possible solution to the problem of the male gaze: the female voice. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 31, 2017. / Consumption, Einbildung, Goethe, Lessing, Male Gaze, Women / Includes bibliographical references. / Christian P. Weber, Professor Directing Thesis; A. Dana Weber, Committee Member; Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe, Committee Member.

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The dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek's plays Burgtheater (1984) through Das Lebewohl (2000) and Heiner Müller's dramas Die Schlacht (1951/74) through Germania 3 Gespenster am toten Mann (1996). Drawing on Walter Benjamin's Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), I define the poetics of their contemporary theater, postdrama, and offer an analysis of political theater in postmodern media culture. The authors of postdrama expose the constructiveness and ficitionality of their texts and in this way respond to the changed patterns of perception in a culture driven by media. Jelinek and Müller reveal patterns of perception in which traits of fascism can be transported and show the mechanisms of the construction of meaning, history and subjectivity that are concealed in an image saturated culture. The playwrights' use of quotations and the construction of a postdramatic figure that is composed of inauthentic, previously used language material are important poetic strategies. The postdramatic texts move beyond the dramatic, i.e. beyond mimesis and the narrative of a plot. In this way, the writers discuss the relationship of fiction, imagination and reality, assessing a culture that obliterates the distinction between fiction and the real. Both authors create theater as a place of Eingedenken and write against the official discourses of their countries which have severed all links to a Nazi past. Jelinek's work pushes against the persistence of Austria's identity as Hitler's first victim by the annexation in 1938. Müller's writing stands in contrast to the official construction of the GDR being an anti-fascist state. With the use of quotations in a Benjaminian fashion, the dramatists reactualize the past in the present and revise the quotations by means of the new context. In this way, they bring to life hidden continuations of fascism. While Jelinek reveals via quotes the continuation of fascism in the discourses of health, tourism and politics in contemporary Austria, Müller's reworking of the past into the GDR reality exposes continual preussian and national-socialist state structures. At the same time, the two authors break out of the continuation of fascism with the postdramatic poetics. Müller brings to life past failed revolutions in order to break with the preussian-fascist heritage. In bringing the dead victims of Austrian fascism onto the stage, Jelinek cuts the continuation with fascism ex negativo. The text composition as quotations and the construction of the postdramatic figure thus means the reinterpretation of historical time and subjectivity: the collision with past figures, events and quotes in the present enables the recipient to view history as a construction; the postdramatic figure composed of quotes reveals to the recipient the construction of the subject via language as part of power discourses. The postdramatic texts of Jelinek and Müller hence elevate the recipient to the producer of meaning. S/he can interprete the past for the individual present situation beyond the official images and stories transported most dominantly by the media.

Until German unification in 1990 the study of post-1945 German film focused on the films of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and largely ignored the film culture of DEFA in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This dissertation addresses selected DEFA films of the immediate post-war period to 1966 under Soviet and German socialism. A striking attribute of many of these films is their reliance upon strong-willed and persistent female protagonists, who successfully raise issues of consequence while providing a model for the ideal worker (Arbeiterin or Arbeiter ) under socialism. The prominent female figures featured in the films of this study represent women under socialism as they interface with paid labor (Erwerbsarbeit ). The filmic characters of these films evolve from idealized figures leading a way out of the ruins of war to complex worker-individuals interacting with the accepted model of work and career (for both sexes) in the GDR. Filmmakers were not content to merely provide examples of the GDR's constitutional commitment to equality for women in the workplace and in society; they made films about women in their workplaces in order to amplify the worker experience of emancipation they believed was possible. This study contains film and cultural analysis for several films that have not received significant treatment including Bürgermeister Anna (Mayor Anna) directed by Hans Müller, Frauenschicksale (Destinies of Women) directed by Statan Dudow, and Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers) directed by Konrad Wolf. It also illuminates women's entry into the workplace in better-known films such as Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us), Konrad Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven), and Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones) directed by Frank Beyer. The importance of the female figures of DEFA film, especially in this early period, represents a contribution to the study of DEFA film, representation of working women in GDR, and the discussion of gender in the context of the Cold War.

This dissertation investigates the influence of GDR writer Gabriele (Kachold) Stötzer's visual and performance art on the texts published in her 1992 volume of experimental prose, grenzen los fremd gehen. Born in 1954, Stötzer is loosely associated with the experimental writers of the Prenzlauer Berg “Szene.” In the 1980s in Erfurt, she established the Künstlerinnengruppe, a performance group that focused on self-expression in the private spaces of apartments and self-made studios—painting, posing for photographs, creating amateur films, weaving, making pottery, and sewing clothes. I maintain that this coalition of women fashioned an indirect defiance to the GDR State by operating in arenas the Stasi did not conceive as political. As well, I argue that the techniques of bricolage—the spontaneous use of materials at hand—she devised to express that defiance that are employed in the group's visual art performances, are also central to Stötzer's textual production. Stötzer tosses together sentences built upon consonant and vowel sounds that play on meanings; she rejects the steps of revising and editing; and she uses “materials at hand”—especially the body. She uses those techniques to represent her wrenching experience of incarceration at the age of twenty-four and her ongoing discontent with the GDR. Stötzer eschews any optimistic view of the intact individual within socialism and reveals instead in her writing an exasperated figure that lacks crucial freedoms. In Chapter One I outline the prescribed tenets of socialist realism and their implementation in GDR practice and how Stötzer's texts resist them. In Chapters Two and Three I trace Stötzer's biography and her artistic production—especially with the Künstlerinnengruppe, showing how her art has always been informed by elements of bricolage. In Chapter Four I provide analyses of eight texts from grenzen los fremd gehen, particularly emphasizing their relationship to her visual and performance art. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that Stötzer's creative potential was catalyzed in very particular ways by the circumstances that reigned in the waning days of the GDR, so that her more recent post-Wende texts no longer display the experimental qualities that brought her acclaim before 1989.

This study reintroduces the early-twentieth-century Austrian author Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932) and situates his literary oeuvre at the intersection of literature, religion, and popular culture. This once widely popular satirist, fantasist, and occultist, most commonly remembered for his best-selling novel Der Golem (1915), has received only limited attention from the scholarly community in recent decades. But Meyrink's philosophical essays demonstrate contemplative interaction with questions of spirituality in the scientific and industrial age worthy of further consideration, and these topics, although obscured, are also manifest in his fiction. A practicing occultist highly revered for his esoteric knowledge, Meyrink recognizes the turn-of-the-century occult revival as a justifiable reaction to religious concerns generated by the crisis of modernity, as well as an integral element of European popular culture. In implementing his vast knowledge of esotericism, Meyrink purposefully manipulates occult material in his fantastic works with the result that he effectively demonized certain spiritual notions otherwise deemed essential to attaining spiritual enlightenment. Disenchanted with what he perceives to be the trivialization of occultism initiated by the melding of this brand of spirituality and popular culture, Meyrink's fiction demonizes esotericism by shrouding occultists and their rituals in negative, demonic, and monstrous imagery. In so doing, Meyrink depicts the serious ramifications of unsound and ill-fated occultist practices. Meyrink wishes to send his readers a spiritual message cautioning them against falling victim to erroneous teachings and fraudulent spiritual guides during a time when these risks rapidly increased due to the growing popularity of occultism in Europe. Yet, despite their obvious criticisms of popular occultism, Meyrink's works also promote the benefits of esotericism in the modern era. In a display of the tensions inherent in cultural modernism, Meyrink's seemingly regressive representation of esotericism is actually an attempt to showcase religious currents as progressive belief systems better suited to serve the needs of a scientifically and technologically advanced society.

This dissertation argues that the interpretive framework from which Fontane's Effi Briest is commonly approached limits discussion to metropolitan core culture and fails to address Fontane’s path-breaking accomplishment. After outlining limitations of some prominent approaches to Effi Briest in chapter one, my next four chapters explore alternative reading strategies that instead situate the novel in the imperial context of the new German state inflected by transnational relations and problematize the tendency to see Germany as a space territorially and culturally homogenized and stable. Chapter two reads the novel through Foucault’s notion of heterotopia to demonstrate Fontane’s heterotopic strategies as a counter-model to the monolithic mapping of novelistic space. In chapters three and four I use Bakhtin’s chronotopic strategies to show how Fontane “fuses together” fictional time and space into a productive force for depicting society in motion and change. I demonstrate how this “spatial turn” breaks with the traditional time-paradigm and opens up space for polyphony and dialogism. Chapter five discusses Fontane’s Wanderungen contrapuntally to draw attention to Fontane’s counter-strategies, which break with the master narrative in favor of small-scale ones, to show their relevance for Effi Briest. The rest of my dissertation focuses on the novel’s Eastern Pomeranian/Kessin-based chapters. Chapter six addresses the spatial arrangement of Hinterpommern from the viewpoint of the ruling elites. Chapter seven treats Kessin as a hybridized “third space” that both resists the dominant and represents an unstable and ambiguous alternative to paralyzing dichotomies of opposites. I also look into Hinterpommern as a contested space between Germans and Poles—and their competing claims over the Kasubians, inhabitants of the strategically important Baltic area. In chapter eight I show how the Polish margins impinge on Fontane’s fictional representation of Prussia and are articulated in both the content and structure of Effi Briest. In chapter nine I discuss Fontane’s representation of Polish/Slavic-hyphenated characters in terms of their different responses/resistance to anti-Slav/Polish prejudices and measures. In revealing the creative and transformative powers of margins this dissertation models alternative ways of approaching canonical writers and contributes to the transnationalization of German studies in particular and cultural studies in general.

This dissertation investigates the literary landscape in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The first chapter provides the historical context and examines the different generations of authors growing up in the GDR. The term 'Wenderoman' is coined through the historical event of the opening of the Berlin Wall, also referred to as turning point or change, and subsequently followed by the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. The second chapter demonstrates how the assimilation of East German people into the free market economy has been interpreted by scholars such as Paul Cooke in the context of Postcolonialism. This theoretical framework allows for a study of the patterns and structures that guide this new fictional genre within Wende-literature. In the prototypical Wenderoman viable individual identities are created by taking its main protagonist/s through the historical Wende which also provides the context for a personal Wende. The GDR Secret Police, whether in the background or foreground of the plot, is an essential element in the plot, as is a major city, generally Berlin. Each chapter, from chapters three to seven, provides an analysis of a Wenderoman according to these categories. Chapter eight concludes that one of the most important consequences of the Wende is the requirement to create a German history and identity which accepts responsibility for Nazism (the GDR by and large repudiated any such responsibility) and GDR state repression (West Germans do not see this as a common German heritage). The reverse side to this is that West Germans must accept East Germans' positive evaluations of aspects of their GDR past, just as East Germans must accept both the positive and negative consequences of a market economy and democracy. Coming from very different angles to the definition of German identity, East and West Germans define themselves in very different ways in Wenderomanen.