Despite increased scholarly attention, the framework within which the oeuvre of eighteenth-century German poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is being received is still very narrow. Lenz who in German literary history remained in the shadow of his famous contemporary Johann Wolfgang Goethe for much of the last two hundred years is now seen as an artist in his own right. Lenz has at the same time become a much mythologized figure for his mental illness. The relative inaccessability of Lenz' later works, as well as artistic adaptions of his biography and work contribute to a fascinating yet distorted image of Lenz. I argue that our perception of his illness plays a significant role for the critical assessment of his work as scholars continue to focus only on the short period between between 1772-1778. It is widely believed that a mental breakdown in 1778 abruptly ended his career, and consequently the reception breaks off after this point. Biographical research, however, suggests that Lenz remained active as a writer and intellectual during his later years while also struggling with episodes of his illness. In this interdisciplinary study, I examine how literary and medical research dealt with Lenz' mental illness and contributed to the prevailing myth of his sudden descent into "madness." I show how posthumous diagnoses of schizophrenia in Lenz' case are generally based on incomplete biographical data for the later part of his life. By incorporating recent research on psychoses, I suggest instead that Lenz may have suffered from manic-depressive illness which would explain the documented episodes of his later life and at the same time allow for continued creative work. I also trace the myth surrounding Lenz' illness back to the eighteenth century by locating his case within contemporary discourses of insanity. My analysis finally considers how Lenz' life and search for artistic identity were informed by the experiences of manic-depressive illness throughout his life, and traces poetic representations of illness in his dramas and prose.

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 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.