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Pathbreaking examination of the prominent 19th-c. motif with an eye toward literature as social commentary.

First comprehensive look at how today's German literary fiction deals with questions of German victimhood.

Essays examining aspects of German book history -- in relation to writers, readers, and publishers -- from the 1780s to the 1930s.

In examining Schiller's often-neglected use of gesture, this study treats his dramas as written to be performed -- not merely read.

First specialized study of Meinhof and the RAF in English, focusing on their use of language to justify extreme violence.

New essays providing a wide-ranging cultural, social, and political picture of volatile between-the-wars Vienna.

Shows that the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) forms a philosophy of dialogue and communication that is crucially relevant to contemporary debates in the Humanities.

Essays examining the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the long 19th century.Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the "e;German"e; and the "e;European"e; in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials. Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lutzeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Matt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lost novel of a "e;typical"e; German family in the waning days of the Weimar Republic.1932, the eve of the Nazi seizure of power: Germany beset with street violence, hunger, anti-Semitism, and despair; civil war threatens. The "e;typical"e; Deutsch family fights to survive. The story begins with Pitt Deutsch, inventorand self-made millionaire, whose millions evaporate in the hyperinflation, then follows Deutsch's seven children in their struggles with poverty and indignity: Klara, broken by her efforts to support the family; Susi, mistress ofa businessman, reduced to bringing home extra food; Peter, an unemployed chemist, suicidally depressed; Max, who falls in love with a Jewish woman, encountering Germany's growing anti-Semitism first hand. The two youngest brothers, unemployed and undereducated, become Nazis. Claire Bergmann's novel was positively reviewed by some of Germany's most prominent critics, including Hans Fallada and Siegfried Kracauer. Not surprisingly, given the work's democratic leanings, it was banned soon after the Nazis began to exert total control. Bergmann never wrote another book, disappearing from sight in 1935. This first English translation will find immediate interest among all readers interested in the end of Weimar and the rise of the Nazis. It is a message in a bottle from the last moment when German democracy's survival seemed possible. Richard Bodek is Professor of History at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. His book Proletarian Performance in Weimar Berlin was published by Camden House in 1997.

Leading international Kafka scholars face the challenges Kafka poses in the new millennium.Franz Kafka's literary career began in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced some of the most fascinating and influential works in all of modern European literature. Now, a hundred years later, the concerns of a new century call for a look at the challenges facing Kafka scholarship in the decades ahead: What more can we hope to learn about the context in which Kafka wrote? How does understanding that context affect how we read his stories?What are the consequences of new critical editions that offer unprecedented access to Kafka's works in manuscript form? How does our view of Kafka change the priorities and fashions of literary scholarship? What elements in Kafka's fiction will find resonance in the historical context of a new millennium? How do we compose a coherent account of a personality with so many contradictory aspects? All these questions and more are addressed by the essays in this volume, written by a group of leading international Kafka scholars. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Iris Bruce, Jacob Burnett, Uta Degner, Doreen Densky, Katja Garloff, Rolf Goebel, Mark Harman, Robert Lemon, Roland Reu, Ritchie Robertson, Walter Sokel, John Zilcosky, Saskia Ziolkowski. Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Ruth V. Gross is Professor of German and Head ofthe Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University.

Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike.After the international success in the 1990s of authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Thomas Brussig, an impressive number of new German-language novelists are making a significant impact. Some, like Karen Duve, Daniel Kehlmann, and Sasa Stanisic, have achieved international recognition; some, like Julia Franck, have won major prizes; others, like Clemens Meyer, Alina Bronsky, and Ilja Trojanow, are truly "e;emerging authors"e; who have begun toattract attention. Between them they represent a range of literatures in German, from women's writing to minority writing (from Turkish immigrants and Eastern Europe), to "e;pop literature"e; and perspectives on the former GDR and onGermany's Nazi past. This volume devotes individual essays to fifteen such writers, examining in detail a major work of each. Translated excerpts from works by Vladimir Vertlib and Clemens Meyer round out the book, which willbe of interest not only to academics and students of English and Comparative Literature in the UK, the US, and beyond, but also to the general reader, for whom titles of texts and quotations are translated. Contributors: Lyn Marven, Stuart Taberner, Anke S. Biendarra, Stephen Brockmann, Rebecca Braun, Frauke Matthes, Brigid Haines, Julian Preece, Emily Jeremiah, Valerie Heffernan, Barbara Mennel, Heike Bartel, Kate Roy, Andrew Plowman, Sonja E.Klocke, Jamie Lee Searle, Katy Derbyshire. Lyn Marven is a Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

A superb new (and complete) translation of Rilke's luminously lyrical early book of poems, with scholarly introduction and commentary.Rainer Maria Rilke is arguably the most important modern German-language poet. His New Poems, Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus are pillars of 20th-century poetry. Yet his earlier verse is less known. The Bookof Hours, written in three bursts between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke's most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-siecle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems document Rilke'stour of Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome, his hasty marriage and fathering of a child in Worpswede, and his turn toward the urban modernity of Paris. He assumes the persona of an artist-monk undertaking the Romantics' journey into the self, speaking to God as part transcendent deity, part needy neighbor. The poems can be read simply for their luminous lyricism, captured in Susan Ranson's superb new translation, which reproduces the music of the original German with impressive fluidity. An in-depth introduction explains the context of the work and elucidates its major themes, while the poem-by-poem commentary is helpful to the student and the general reader. A translator's note treating the technical problems of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that the translator of Rilke faces completes the volume. Susan Ranson is the co-translator, with Marielle Sutherland, of Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics, 2011). Ben Hutchinson is Reader in Modern German at the University of Kent, UK.

By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre.Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Modern English translations of several of the most important essays of Winckelmann, one of the fathers of art history and archaeology and a strong influence on Goethe and Schiller and Weimar Classicism.Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) has long been recognized as one of the founders of modern art history and a major force in the development of archaeology and the study of ancient Greek architecture. He also exerted an influence on the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller, for whom his description of Greek sculpture as evoking "e;edle Einfalt und stille Grosse"e; (noble simplicity and a calm greatness) became a watchword. He contributed to modern scientific archaeology through his application of empirically derived categories of style to the analysis of classical works of art and architecture, and was one of the first to undertake detailed empirical examinations of artifacts and describe them precisely in a way that enabled reasoned conclusions to be drawn about ancient societies and their cultures. Yet several of his important essays are not available in modern English translation. The present volume remedies this situation by collecting four of Winckelmann's most seminal essays on art along with several shorter pieces on the topic, two major if brief essays on architecture, and one longer essay on archaeology. Paired with thisis an introduction covering Winckelmann's life and work. David Carter is retired as Professor of Communicative English at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, and is former Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. Among his recently published translations from German are Klaus Mann's novel Alexander (2008) and On Cocaine (2011), a collection of Sigmund Freud's writings on the topic.

Explores the psychology of literary translingualism in the works of two authors, finding it expressed as loss and fragmentation in one case and as opportunity and mediation in the other.The works of translingual writers-those who write in a language other than their native tongue-present a rich field for study, but literary translingualism remains underresearched and undertheorized. In this work Tamar Steinitz explores the psychological effects of translingualism in the works of two authors: the German Stefan Heym (1913-2001) and the Austrian Jakov Lind (1927-2007). Both were forced into exile by the rise of Nazism; both chose English asa language of artistic expression. Steinitz argues that translingualism, which ruptures the perceived link between language and world as the writer chooses between systems of representation, leads to a psychic split that can be expressed in the writer's work as a schizophrenic existence or as a productive doubling of perspective. Movement between languages can thus reflect both the freedom associated with geographical mobility and the emotional price it entails. Reading Lind's and Heym's works within their postwar context, Steinitz proposes these authors as representative models, respectively, of translingualism as loss and fragmentation and translingualism as opportunity and mediation. Tamar Steinitz teaches English literature at Queen Mary and Goldsmiths colleges, University of London. She has also worked as a literary translator.

New essays from leading Goethe scholars providing testimony to the continuing, even renewed, relevance of Goethe for literary studies today.Invoking Goethe's name has become fashionable again. With new methods and technologies of reading threatening to render literature virtual and insubstantial, we have the sense that "e;Goethe's ghosts"e; - the otherwise neglected voices and traditions that, finding their most trenchant expression in Goethe, inform the Western storehouse of literature - can show us long-forgotten dimensions of literature. Inspired by the distinguished Goethe scholar Jane Brown,whose life's work has called attention to the allegorical modes haunting the mimetic forms that dominate modern literature, the contributors to this volume take a rich variety of approaches to Goethe: cultural studies, history ofthe book, semiotics, deconstruction, colonial studies, feminism, childhood studies, and eco-criticism. The persistence, omnipresence, and modalities of the "e;ghosts"e; they find suggest that more than influence or standards is at issue here. The stubborn reappearance of these revenants testifies to more fundamental issues concerning the status of literature and the task of the reader. As the contributors demonstrate, these questions acquire renewed urgency inwriters as diverse as Hegel, Adorno, Benn, Droste-Hulshoff, and Nietzsche. Each of the essays testifies to the enduring salience and presence of Goethe. Contributors: Helmut Ammerlahn, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Franz-Josef Deiters, Richard T. Gray, Martha B. Helfer, Meredith Lee, Clark Muenzer, Andrew Piper, Jurgen Schroder, Peter J. Schwartz, Patricia Anne Simpson, Robert Deam Tobin, David E. Wellbery, Sabine Wilke. SimonRichter is Professor of German Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Richard Block is Associate Professor of German at the University of Washington.

Investigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion in politics, philosophy, and culture.The eighteenth century is usually considered to be a time of increasing secularization in which the primacy of theology was replaced by the authority of reason, yet this lofty intellectual endeavor played itself out in a social and political reality that was heavily impacted by religious customs and institutions. This duality is visible in the literature and culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. On the one hand, authors such asGoethe, Schiller, and Kleist are known for their distance from traditional Christianity. On the other hand, many canonical texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- from Goethe's Faust to Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas -- are not only filled with references to the Bible, but invoke religious frameworks. Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe investigates how culture in the Age of Goethe shaped and was shaped by a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion and religious difference in politics, philosophy, and culture, enriching our understanding of the relationship between religion and culture during this foundational period in German history. Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Claire Baldwin, Lisa Beesley, Jane K. Brown, Jeffrey L. High, Elisabeth Krimmer, Helmut J. Schneider, Patricia Anne Simpson, John H. Smith, Tom Spencer. Elisabeth Krimmer is professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Patricia Anne Simpson is professor of German at Montana State University.

Focuses on the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses of "e;orientalism"e; in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day.The concept and study of orientalism in Western culture gained a changed understanding from Edward Said's now iconic 1978 book Orientalism. However, recent debate has moved beyond Said's definition of the phenomenon, highlighting the multiple forms of orientalism within the "e;West,"e; the manifold presence of the "e;East"e; in the Western world, indeed the epistemological fragility of the ideas of "e;Occident"e; and "e;Orient"e; as such. This volume focuses on the deployment -- here the cultural, philosophical, political, and scholarly uses -- of "e;orientalism"e; in the German-speaking and Central and Eastern European worlds from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Its interdisciplinary approach combines distinguished contributions by Indian scholars, who approach the topic of orientalism through the prism of German studies as practiced in Asia, with representative chapters by senior German, Austrian,and English-speaking scholars working at the intersection of German and oriental studies. Contributors: Anil Bhatti, Michael Dusche, Johannes Feichtinger, Johann Heiss, James Hodkinson, Kerstin Jobst, Jon Keune, Todd Kontje, Margit Koves, Sarah Lemmen, Shaswati Mazumdar, Jyoti Sabarwal, Ulrike Stamm, John Walker. James Hodkinson is Associate Professor in German Studies at Warwick University. John Walker is Senior Lecturer in EuropeanCultures and Languages at Birkbeck College, University of London. Shaswati Mazumdar is Professor in German at the University of Delhi. Johannes Feichtinger is a Researcher at the Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Explores the concept of "e;distant reading"e; and its application to the analysis of nineteenth-century German literature and culture, drawing on a range of approaches from the emerging digital humanities field.In nineteenth-century Germany, breakthroughs in printing technology and an increasingly literate populace led to an unprecedented print production boom that has long presented scholars with a challenge: how to read it all? This anthology seeks new answers to the scholarly quandary of the abundance of text. Responding to Franco Moretti's call for "e;distant reading"e; and modeling a range of innovative approaches to literary-historical analysis informed by theburgeoning field of digital humanities, it asks what happens when we shift our focus from the one to the many, from the work to the network. The thirteen essays in this volume explore the evolving concept of "e;distant reading"e;and its application to the analysis of German literature and culture in the long nineteenth century. The contributors consider how new digital technologies enable both the testing of hypotheses and the discovery of patterns and trends, as well as how "e;distant"e; and traditional "e;close"e; reading can complement each another in hybrid models of analysis that maintain careful attention to detail, but also make calculation, enumeration, and empirical descriptioncritical elements of interpretation. Contributors: Kirsten Belgum, Tobias Boes, Matt Erlin, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer, Lutz Koepnick, Todd Kontje, Peter M. McIsaac, Katja Mellmann, Nicolas Pethes, Andrew Piper and Mark Algee-Hewitt, Allen Beye Riddell, Lynne Tatlock, Paul A. Youngman and Ted Carmichael. Matt Erlin is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Cultural and literary historians investigate the unique literary bridge between German-speaking women and the "e;New World,"e; examining novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and photography.In a 1798 novel by Sophie von La Roche, a European woman swims across a cold North American lake seeking help from the local indigenous tribe to deliver a baby. In a 2008 San Francisco travel guide, Milena Moser, the self-proclaimed "e;Patron Saint of Desperate Swiss Housewives,"e; ponders the guilty pleasures of a media-saturated world. Wildly disparate, these two texts reveal the historical arc of a much larger literary constellation: the literature of German-speaking women who interact with the New World. In this volume, cultural historians from around the world investigate this unique literary bridge between two hemispheres, focusing on New-World texts written by female authors from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Encompassing a broad range of genres including novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and even photography, the essays include women's experiences across both American continents. Many of the primary literary texts discussed in this volume are available in the online collections of Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women (http://sophie.byu.edu/). Contributors: Christiane Arndt, Karin Baumgartner, Ute Bettray, Ulrike Brisson, Carola Daffner, Denise M. Della Rossa, Linda Dietrick, Silke R. Falkner, Maureen O. Gallagher, Nicole Grewling, Monika Hohbein-Deegen, Gabi Kathofer, Thomas W. Kniesche,Julie Koser, Judith E. Martin, Sarah C. Reed, Christine Rinne, Tom Spencer, Florentine Strzelczyk, David Tingey, Petra Watzke, Chantal Wright. Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James are both Associate Professors of German at Brigham Young University.

Follows the evolution of the Orient as a positive literary device in German literature and demonstrates how it was used to explore subjectivity and the possibility of wholeness.For centuries, Europe's eastward gaze has been wary if not hostile. Medieval man envisaged grotesque beings at the world's edge and scanned the steppes and straits on the immediate horizon for the Asian or Arab hordes that might swarm across them. Through the Crusades, the early modern era, and the age of imperialism, Europeans regarded the Eastern subject as requiring both "e;discovery"e; and conquest. Conveniently, the "e;Oriental"e; came to represent fanaticism, terrorism, moral laxity, and inscrutability, among other stereotypes. The list of German literary works that reinforced negative cliches about the East is long, but Orienting the Self argues for the presence in the Germanliterary tradition of a powerful perception of the East as the scene of desire, fantasy, and fulfillment. It follows the evolution of the Orient as a literary device and demonstrates how it was used to explore subjectivity and the possibility of wholeness. The five works treated in this study - Parzival, Fortunatus, Effi Briest, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and The Magic Mountain - are narratives of development in which the encounter with the East is central to the progression toward selfhood and the promise of fulfillment. Debra N. Prager is Associate Professor of German at Washington and Lee University.

Essays in this volume seek to clarify the meaning of tragedy and the tragic in its many German contexts, art forms, and disciplines, from literature and philosophy to music, painting, and history.The many catastrophes of German history have often been described as tragic. Consequently, German literature, music, philosophy, painting, and even architecture are rich in tragic connotations. Yet exactly what "e;tragedy"e; and "e;thetragic"e; may mean requires clarification. The poet creates a certain artful shape and trajectory for raw experience by "e;putting it into words"e;; but does putting such experience into words (or paintings or music or any other form) betray suffering by turning it into mere art? Or is it art that first turns mere suffering into tragic experience by revealing and clarifying its deepest dimension? What are we talking about, exactly, when we talk about tragic experience and tragic art, especially in an age in which, according to Hannah Arendt, evil has become banal? Does banality muffle or even annul the tragic? Does tragedy take suffering and transform it into beauty, as Schiller thought?Is it in the interest of truth for suffering to be "e;beautiful"e;? Is it possible that poetry, music, and art are important because they in fact create the meaning of suffering? Or is suffering only suffering and not accessible to meaning, tragic or otherwise? This book comprises essays that seek to clarify the meaning of tragedy and the tragic in its many German contexts, art forms, and disciplines, from literature and philosophy to music, painting, and history. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Stephen D. Dowden, Wolfram Ette, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Barbara Hahn, Karsten Harries, Felicitas Hoppe, Joseph P. Lawrence, James McFarland, Karen Painter, Bruno Pieger, Robert Pirro, Thomas P. Quinn, Mark W. Roche, Helmut Walser Smith. Stephen D. Dowden is Professor of German language and literature at Brandeis University. Thomas P. Quinn is an independent scholar.

A new and wide-ranging view of the confluence, since the 1990s, of the fields of contemporary literature and popular music in Germany.In Germany the decade beginning in the mid-1990s brought an unprecedented "e;confusion of the spheres"e; of literature and popular music. Popular musicians "e;crossed over"e; into the literary field, editors and writers called for contemporary German literature to become more like popular music, writers attempted to borrow structural aspects from music or paid new attention to popular music at the thematic level. Others sought to raise their profiles by means of performance models taken from the popular music field. This book sets out to make sense of this situation. It argues for more inclusive and detailed attention to what it calls "e;musico-centric fiction,"e; for which it discerns intellectual precursors going back to the 1960s and also identifies examples written since the turn of the millennium, after the would-be death of "e;pop literature."e; In doing so, it focuses on fiction and paratextual interventions by authors including Peter Handke, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Rainald Goetz, Andreas Neumeister, Thomas Meinecke, Matthias Politycki, Frank Goosen, Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, Thomas Brussig, Karen Duve, and Kerstin Grether. Andrew Wright Hurley is Senior Lecturer in German and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state.Classical music in the German Democratic Republic is commonly viewed as having functioned as an ideological support or cultural legitimization for the state, in the form of the so-called "e;bourgeois humanist inheritance."e; The largenumbers of professional orchestras in the GDR were touted as a proof of the country's culture. Classical music could be seen as the polar opposite of Americanizing pop culture and also of musical modernism, which was decried as formalist. Nevertheless, there were still musical modernists in the GDR, and classical music traditions were not only a prop of the state. This collection of new essays approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, presenting the work of scholars in a number of complementary disciplines, including German Studies, Musicology, Aesthetics, and Film Studies. Contributors to this volume offer a broad examination of classical music in the GDR, while also uncovering nonconformist tendencies and questioning the assumption that classical music in the GDR meant nothing but (socialist) respectability. Contributors: Tatjana Bohme-Mehner, Martin Brady, Lars Fischer, Kyle Frackman, Golan Gur, Peter Kupfer, Albrecht von Massow, Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Jessica Payette, Larson Powell, Juliane Schicker, Martha Sprigge, Matthias Tischer, Jonathan L. Yaeger, Johanna Frances Yunker Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Larson Powell is Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Reveals Ann Tizia Leitich, American correspondent for Austrian newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, as an important cultural mediator between the two countries.After the First World War, Vienna was overrun by jazz, Hollywood movies, and Fordism; its citizens were both fascinated and appalled by the waves of American ideas and products. To make sense of the American phenomenon, readers turned to Ann Tizia Leitich, the New York-based correspondent for Vienna's prominent daily Neue Freie Presse and other newspapers. Rob McFarland tells the story of Leitich's escape, occasioned by a personal crisis, from Austria to America in 1921, and of her rise as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist. By the early 1930s, she had met President Coolidge, Senator Sol Bloom, the writer Upton Sinclair, and the critic H. L. Mencken. Her devotedreaders - including the novelist Stefan Zweig and the Austrian chancellor Ignatz Seipl - sought in her witty, insightful descriptions of the United States some American vitality to invigorate their own moribund culture and economy. Chronicling Leitich's career as a journalist, cultural historian, and novelist and providing close readings of her writings about America, this book reveals her as an important cultural mediator between Austria and America. Rob McFarland is Associate Professor of German at Brigham Young University.

Essays examining representations of disaster in German and international contexts, exploring the nexus between disruption and recovery through narrative from the eighteenth century to the present.Destroying human habitat and taking human lives, disasters, be they natural, man-made, or a combination, threaten large populations, even entire nations and societies. They also disrupt the existing order and cause discontinuity in our sense of self and our perceptions of the world. To restore order, not only must human beings be rescued and affected areas rebuilt, but the reality of the catastrophe must also be transformed into narrative. The essays in this collection examine representations of disaster in literature, film, and mass media in German and international contexts, exploring the nexus between disruption and recovery through narrative from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics include the Lisbon earthquake, the Paris Commune, the Hamburg and Dresden fire-bombings in the Second World War, nuclear disasters in Alexander Kluge's films, the filmic aesthetics of catastrophe, Yoko Tawada's lectures on the Fukushima disaster and Christa Wolf's novel Storfall in light of that same disaster, Joseph Haslinger and the tsunami of 2004, traditions regarding avalanche disaster in the Tyrol, and the problems and implications of defining disaster. Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Yasemin Dayioglu-Yucel, Janine Hartman, Jan Hinrichsen, Claudia Jerzak, Lars Koch, Franz Mauelshagen, Tanja Nusser, Torsten Pflugmacher, Christoph Weber. Katharina Gerstenberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. Tanja Nusser is DAAD Visiting Associate Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati.