This thesis investigates representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War across a range of German- and Austrian-Jewish writers who belong to the second or third generation born after the Holocaust. These writers relate to the events from the position of the “nonwitness” (Weissman 2004), and in the face of major shifts in Holocaust memory since the millennium: the disappearance of the survivor and eyewitness generation entails a transition from first-hand memories of the war period to an increasingly ritualised cultural memory of the events. This transformation intersects with larger changes in Holocaust memory in the last 15 years, such as the re- and hypermediation of Holocaust memory and the emergence of a globalised Erinnerungskultur. The Holocaust has therefore emerged as a highly discursivised “floating signifier” (Huyssen 2003), which travels transgenerationally, transmedially and transnationally. Engaging with these shifts, I argue that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (Hirsch 1997) and recent trauma theory remain embedded in a biologising framework of analysis that views cultural transmission in terms of contagious inheritance. Drawing on cultural and literary theories and transnational memory studies, I develop a new approach that focuses on the Holocaust as a form of “travelling trauma” (Tomsky 2011), tracing its remediation and recycling across geographical, cultural, medial, and representational boundaries. My readings of texts by Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladimir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse explore how these authors (re-)negotiate the various travels of Holocaust memory in the age of remediation. By initiating a dialogue between the realms of theory and contemporary fiction, this thesis engages with a broad body of recent German- and Austrian-Jewish Holocaust fiction, while at the same time critically investigating key paradigms in the field of memory and trauma studies.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and reconceive the scholarly understanding of one of Óðinn’s aspects – Óðinn as a patron to a mortal hero figure. This theme runs through a number of Old Icelandic and continental Scandinavian texts, but it is most widely represented in the fornaldarsaga genre. To formalise the discussion as well as the choice of material, the concept of the Odinic hero complex was introduced, which encompasses narrative structures, imagery and other material associated in the sagas with a protagonist helped and betrayed by Óðinn. This Odinic hero narrative has been looked at on the example of three fornaldarsǫgur, Vǫlsunga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Gautreks saga, as well as learned Latin texts connected to saga literature. The analysis also relied on the evidence of saga narratives that do not explicitly demonstrate the complete Odinic hero complex, but contains significant thematic parallelism to the main sources; these secondary sources included Hálfs saga ok hálfsrekka, Ǫrvar-Odds saga and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. The findings support the notion that a number of historians of religion have proposed, that there is a clear structural connection between the Odinic hero paradigm, initiation sequences and the themes of berserkir and shapeshifting. On the other hand, the dissertation shows that this thematic unity is in many cases a younger phenomenon than usually proposed, which leads to the necessity to re-evaluate a number of fornaldarsǫgur as sources on Old Scandinavian mythology and read them from a different perspective.

Critical reception of Karoline von Gunderrode has largely ignored her work and focused on her tragic life and death. Even earlier feminist scholarship overlooked her writing because of its presumed adherence to masculine literary traditions. As part of a shift towards more discursive analyses, this dissertation traces the contradictory representations of gender in Gunderrode's body of work. I maintain that gender is the central conflict for Gunderrode primarily because her appropriation of romantic idealism contradicts her desire for self-fulfillment. As a woman writer, she adopted a masculine persona at a time when romanticism privileged the feminine. Rather than an identity as muse or in self-negating love, Gunderrode developed her masculine self through intellectual engagement with philosophy and history. She also had ambitions of becoming a poet. What she considered feminine, however, is not absent in her writing: love, the sexualized body, and nature figure significantly as subject matter and metaphor. The contemporary discourse on nature and the extensive feminist criticism of that form the theoretical framework of my analysis. Gunderrode did not explicitly question the natural complementarity of the sexes, but through close readings of a wide range of her texts I establish some of the ways that she transgressed conventional expectations of women's and men's natures. Because love exists in a complicated relationship with women's creativity and historical agency, Gunderrode utilized various strategies--such as the maternal, homoeroticism, incest, and triangular relationships--to counter the romantic ideal. Love is never portrayed within a bourgeois context of marriage and family. Women's economic and emotional reliance on men is thematized. I also discuss how Gunderrode appropriated an orientalist discourse in her gender critique. Given the complexity of Gunderrode's work, I concentrate on three themes: the conflict between creativity and female sexuality; the conflict between heroism and love for women in history; and the construction of a poetic self. Through my reading of Gunderrode's encounter with an ideal of subjectivity and its negation of women, I suggest new categories with which to explore how gender codes formed the basis for late-eighteenth-century German notions of the individual.

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 Elfriede Jelinek's investigation of Austria's and Western Europe's "obscene fantasies" through her "perversion" of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek's later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the "obscene fantasies" that lie at its heart. Chapter One examines how Jelinek depicts alienation (in the Marxist, socialist feminist, and Lacanian senses) in her 1975 novel Die Liebhaberinnen, and explores how Jelinek's depiction of alienation functions to make Die Liebhaberinnen an anti-romance. Chapter Two addresses whether Jelinek's novel Lust (1989) is a pornographic or anti-pornographic text. I investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and pornography, arguing that many other Jelinek scholars collapse the distinction between mass-cultural forms of pornography and the high-cultural pornography of Bataille and Sade, and thus fail to understand how her text is simultaneously pornographic and anti-pornographic. Chapter Three focuses on Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983), examining the development of its protagonist as a (perverse) sexual subject, and her ultimate failure to achieve a stable sexual position and how Jelinek's text perverts the genre of the Künstlerroman. It also discusses Erika's training as a pianist as a possible causal factor of her perversions and lack of sexual identity, concluding that her inability to sublimate demonstrates the similarities (and differences) between the artist and the pervert, illustrating how Jelinek's novel deviates from the traditional Künstlerroman. The dissertation argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek's most significant literary contributions, her works functioning to create a "negative aesthetics" as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms. Jelinek rejects an identificatory mode of writing and refuses to create "positive" subjects, preferring instead to produce art that is a "critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12).

This dissertation gives a first critical introduction to the dramatic works of the contemporary Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz. The dissertation's first chapter provides biographical information about the author, situates her in the Austrian post-war cultual context, and examines the specific dramatic and literary techniques that she employs for her postmodern materialist feminist plays. Of particular interest in this introductory chapter are Streeruwitz's method of postmodern citation and her staccato language because they follow an underlying principle of simultaneous affirmation and negation which is characteristic of Streeruwitz's entire works: The flow of action is at the same time disrupted and alienated as it is commented on. Most of Streeruwitz's well-crafted plays are predicated on a unique dramaturgy of violence and humor. The second and third chapter of the dissertation therefore provide a close reading analysis and interpretation of violence and humor in the dramatist's first five plays that form the "English cycle" (New York, New York, Waikiki Beach, Sloane Square, Ocean Drive, and Elysian Park). In both the violence and the humor chapter, the critical analysis of each of the five plays is preceded by extensive socio- and drama-historical background information on the phenomena of violence and humor to determine how Marlene Streeruwitz's dramaturgy is influenced by or independent of literary traditions and sociological debates. The final chapter concludes that the intersection of violence and humor (in combination with the unique stylistic devices employed by the dramatist) serves the author's intent to subvert traditional bourgeois theater standards as well as Western capitalist society's acceptance of violence as natural and necessary. Streeruwitz's plays are an assault on the audience: They send the viewer on an emotional-roller-coaster ride transversing the highs and lows of laughter and shock, enjoyment and discomfort, in order to isolate the individual spectator from the security of the theater-going mass. In this deliberately-orchestrated isolation, Streeruwitz does not only see a chance to fight against the violent potential of mass mentality, but also the possibility of genuine interaction with her art.

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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