The personal history of individuals during the World War II and post-war period is looked at through the film texts "Deutschland, bleiche Mutter", "Europa, Europa", "Peppermint Frieden" and "The Ties That Bind". These film texts are considered for the way in which the filmmakers, in autobiographical accounts of their own lives or of the main characters, have explored and recreated history through individual memory. Memories of childhood in Nazi Germany are constructed from personal remembrance and experience to form a memory of the individual that is unaccounted for in the standard institutional history.

Hilde Spiel (1911-1990) had gained a respectable literary reputation when she emigrated to England in 1936. At that time she was working on her fourth novel. It reflected her own experiences, as did most of her prose. She later turned to journalism to earn a living. Following the war she frequently returned to Austria. But even after her "final return" in 1963, she maintained strong personal and professional ties to Britain. She could never resolve the resulting dilemma of divided loyalties which she expressed in her autobiography by asking, "Which World is my World?" In exile Spiel decided to switch languages, usually producing both a German and an English version of her works. Detailed comparisons show the difficulty of making the transition to a foreign tongue and the considerable obstacles involved in eventually reversing the process. These changes also entailed significant textual revisions. In her own distinctive way Spiel confronted many of the problems germane to a woman of her generation. Her life and work were shaped by conflicting influences--literature and journalism, family and profession, her husbands Peter de Mendelssohn and Hans Flesch-Brunningen, past and present, her attachment to England and her passionate devotion to Vienna. Ultimately, she could not reconcile her image of the city's "Golden Autumn" that had produced such a wealth of cultural achievement with her impressions of present day Austria where she found provincialism and malice prevailing. Spiel's critical intelligence and sense of ambiguity define her style as a writer whose elegant and expressive language is evident even in her smallest pieces. The quality of her novels, to be sure, is not always consistent and her opinions are often controversial, even contestable, but Hilde Spiel's voice continues to deserve our attention.

Martin Buber was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. His works on philosophy and theology have had a profound influence on both Jewish and Christian religious thought. The purpose of this thesis is to examine Buber's biblical scholarship in the context of his philosophical and theological writings in order to assess how his approach to biblical hermeneutics is connected to the rest of his thinking. It is demonstrated that Buber's philosophy of I and Thou has a profound role in his understanding of the Bible and the nature of interpretation itself as a dialogue between reader and text in a way that anticipates certain post-modern notions of literary theory. In particular, Buber's dramatic work, Elijah, a Mystery Play is examined in order to evaluate Buber's hermeneutical method as it is displayed in a specific example of artistic exegesis.

<p> This dissertation explores the nature of the anthropological writings of Georg Forster (1754-94), the German world-traveler (who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage in the South-Seas 1772-75), cultural-historian and translator in the late eighteenth century, showing how his anthropology proposes an "ironic" or "sentimental" (in the Schillerian sense) mode of narration. Although many others at the time were exploring what it is to be human, my dissertation argues that Forster's anthropology concerned itself primarily with what it means to <i>write</i> about humanity when one supplements the empirical-rational method of observation with an emphasis on "self-reflexive" and "ironic" (&agrave; la Hayden White) modes of writing anthropology, or the story of humanity. This study therefore focuses on those writings gathered around three salient concepts in his anthropological understanding, to which he returns frequently: observation, narration, and translation, presented in three chapters. The thesis not only undertakes close readings of Forster's texts centering on observation, narration, and translation but, crucially, places them within the historical context of late eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological discourses in Germany. This study ultimately underscores the manner in which Forster's concepts of "sentimental" &ndash; i.e. self-reflexive, ironic, and striving towards the goal of perfectibility &ndash; observation and narration allow him to accept the fragmentary, exploratory, and temporary nature of knowledge about humanity. At the same time, his "aesthetic" &ndash; sentient and open to testing &ndash; translation allows him to engage and educate his readers' tolerance towards a provisional, composite and temporal truth in anthropology. In highlighting the self-reflexive as well as an open-to-testing attitude of Forster's anthropology, this dissertation underscores the mutual interaction between eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological modes of thought.</p>

<p> In December 1911, the public exhibition of Kandinsky's Komposition V shattered the world of Western illusionism as audiences knew and understood it - or so the traditional tale goes. Yet the relative abruptness with which abstraction supposedly shocks the art world not only presents a misleading impression; it in effect creates a great riddle. If the Western art world spent centuries organized under a unifying goal of perfecting imitation, why would it now so suddenly turn its back on its institutional underpinnings by challenging, negating, or exploding the principles it had worked so hard to develop? This project responds by rejecting the presuppositions of the riddle and arguing against the traditional narrative, claiming instead that the invention of abstract art in the 1910s was neither abrupt nor unprecedented, but was already being described, theorized, or created in the 19^th century, only in literature rather than painting. Through close reading and literary analysis, I present three moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist's Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Howards Ehrenged&auml;chtnis" (1821), and Gottfried Keller's Der gr&uuml;ne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write at three different decades, speak through three different genres, and conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a 19^th-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early 20^th century. With such images in circulation well before 1911, this study features the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments essential for abstract artworks to "speak for themselves" in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions involving need, spectatorship, and the self-awareness of the artist. Thus by conceptualizing abstract images in their writing, these three 19^th-century German authors also produce necessary components of the theoretical grounding required for the 20^th-century birth of abstract art.</p>

<p>It is received wisdom that Britain and France played the leading role in overseas expansion in the eighteenth century while the German lands lacked both a central political authority and colonies of their own. We know from the work of scholars such as Susanne Zantop that German intellectuals were fascinated by encounters with non-European cultures, and German genres of travel writing, popular drama, and the philosophy of history all manifest an obsession with thinking about forms of cultural difference. In many cases, such efforts are wrought with ambivalence. The German world traveler Georg Forster is torn between the passionate admiration for a paradise-like Tahiti and the judgment of Tahiti as uncivilized. August von Kotzebue, Germany's most popular playwright around 1800, wrote dramas set in the New World and other exotic locales. In his Bruder Moritz (1791, Brother Moritz), the protagonist seeks to educate the child-like Arabs at the same time as he criticizes his aunt's racial condescension as lacking empathy. In Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, sympathy for the slaves in European colonies is accompanied by a belief in European cultural superiority. In all these examples, there is more at stake than the fantasies of German colonial rule that Zantop called our attention to a decade ago. My dissertation targets precisely the equivocal nature of the German colonial imagination around 1800 and suggests a different reading strategy.</p> <p>Postcolonial scholarship has critiqued the ways in which visions of European cultural and racial superiority supported the expansion of colonialism. Recently, scholars have also foregrounded how European culture gave rise to a critique of colonial atrocity. My dissertation, however, stresses the co-existence of both Eurocentrism and the critique of colonial violence and understands this seeming contradiction as a response to the challenge from cultural and colonial difference. I identify emotion or the mode of sentimentalism as the channel through which the alleged cultural otherness questions both colonial violence and European superiority with universal claims. In my analysis, non-Europeans are not only the colonized or the oppressed but also regain their agency in co-constructing a distinct vision of global modernity. </p> <p>The dissertation concerns itself with both canonical works and popular culture. I first explore Georg Forster's highly influential travelogue Reise um die Welt (1777/1778, A Voyage Round the World), documenting the interplay between Enlightenment anthropology and the impact of South Pacific cultures. Kotzebue's cross-cultural melodramas imagine different orders of love, sexuality, and marriage and challenge the noble form of bourgeois tragedy as theorized by Friedrich Schiller. Contested by Immanuel Kant, Herder's universal history inaugurates a new logic of organizing different cultures into an organic ongoing process of historical development and, at the same time, articulates cultural relativism as a paradigm shift. My reading strategy through cultural and colonial difference unearths the pivotal roles which the impulses from the non-European world played in the construction of German culture around 1800.</p> <p>By acknowledging both Eurocentrism and anticolonial critiques in these German texts, this dissertation stresses the impact of cultural otherness on the architecture of German thought through sentimentalism and provides both historically and theoretically differentiated understandings of the German colonial imagination in the global eighteenth century.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0544. Adviser: Andrea Golato. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-183) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0575. Adviser: Marc Weiner.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Depts. of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4669. Adviser: William W. Rasch.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 7, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3870. Adviser: William Rasch.