830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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Yvonne Hergane‘s first novel The Chameleon Ladies can be discussed from several perspectives. On the one hand, it can be read as a generational novel, on the other hand, it can also be read as a women‘s novel in the sense of portraying the history of emancipation of four generations of women. The novel can also be seen as a historical novel, because it covers a historical period of over 120 years and describes the living conditions of four generations of women, three of them living first in Romania and then in Germany, which are also historically conditioned. The novel could therefore also be seen as part of migration literature. This article will explore this complexity of this structure.
The German-speaking Saxon minority from Transylvania, a region in Romania, has almost disappeared due to the historical events after World War II and the fall of communism in December 1989. Therefore, the literary work that was created before 1990 is often considered to be a “lieu de mémoire”, a place of remembrance, for the Saxon culture. This article deals with the question whether Maria Haydl’s short stories can be considered as such or do they show too much influence of the politically imposed writing style in order to be authentic.
The following review presents an anthology about literary presentations of space or field as a concept described by Pierre Bourdieu in Central Europe. The an-thology is conceived as a case study on the plurilingual Transylvanian town of Brașov in the first half of the 20th century and is the result of a six-year-project at the Institute for Culture and History of Southeastern Europe in Munich. The editors are Enikö Dácz and Réka Jakabházi.
Gusel Jachina is a Russian writer. Her grandfather, a former German teacher in one of the villages along the Volga River, founded by German colonists, inspired her second novel “Wolgakinder” (Children of the Volga). She presents over 20 years of eventful history as it is seen by Jakob Bach, a German teacher in the village Gnadental on the banks of the Volga. It is an opulent novel of 600 pages, written in a rather baroque style, trying to not only present historic events from the beginning of the Soviet era but to recreate the atmosphere of those years full of Ups and Downs not only for the German speaking population.
Fatma Aydemir is a young German journalist and her first novel Ellbogen (Ellbow) had an amazing success. It’s the story of four young women immigrant families in Berlin. They try to find a way to live their lives but are torn apart by the traditional way of life in their turkish or bosnian families that is not compatible with modern western lifestyle. The novel is composed of two parts, the first one dealing with their struggle to be accepted by the german society, the action of the second part takes place in Istanbul during the riots of summer 2016. The linking between the two parts is the character of one of the young women, Hazal, who kills a German student during the night of her 18th birthday. Being drunk and full of anger because she and her friends were not accepted to a well known night club she pushes the also drunk young man on the ralis of the incoming subway. She leaves her friends and runs off to Istanbul to a Facebook-friend trying to put her live together in the country of her parents. The novel doesn’t try to offer any solution for the problems of these young people only presents them in strong images.
Erwin Neustädter was a novellist and poet of the German minority in Romania, who published two novels and some poems in the period between the two World Wars. After WW II he has been inprisoned several times. I want to present in my text his report about the time in prison between 1961 and 1963. The typoscript of about 200 pages has been found after his and his wife’s death in 1995 and has been published by the family in 2015. I want to present this book to a larger audience, because it is an authentic report on the situation during the 1950s and 1960s in communist Romania, which doesn’t focus on the political aspects of detention but on the psychological ones.
The German writer Gabriele Wohmann, who passed away in June 2015 at the age of 83 wrote over 100 books (novels, short stories) essays, poems, more than 20 filmskripts being translated into 15 languages. She ist known for her sharp, ruthless view on German everyday-life and its neurotic, lonely, frustrated protagonists, especially women. But it is not a distant and unaffectedportrayal, but one out of profound sympathy. The literary critic Reinhard Baumgart, even invented the term „Wohmannisieren“. He was referring to the seemingly unspectacular flowing ofher stories, but „under the surface it rages, however“. We then refer to a short story (Flitterwoche. Dritter Tag– Honeymoon. Third day) from her latest book Eine souveräne Frau. The main theme of this narrative, as well as in numerous other texts by Wohmann, is the familial relationship disorders in everyday middle-class existences. The main problem is the inability of the protagonists to communicate in a familiar and natural waywith each other, as one might expect of newlyweds.
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Sibylle Berg develops in her novel Der Mann schläft a new, nihilistic definition of love. Nietzsche considers that modern mankind killed the god in itself, Dürrenmatt shows the absolute hopelessness of the postmodern society and Berg presents the end of all known forms of love. For her protagonist it is enough to have found someone who needs her as much as she needs him to feel save and complete. But “the man” disappears during a journey to Asia while going to buy some papers. After waiting for three month for him to return she decides to stay there for the rest of her miserable life. The novel has an interesting structure, the story is told in dozens of short scenes, not in a chronological order but reffering to the period with “the man” and without him that confers to it a certain dramatic touch.
The title Grenzfall of this crime novel is based on a pun because it means in German both “borderline case” and “border incident”. The novel refers to an incident at the border between Poland and Germany, that really happened in 1992, when two Roma from Romania were shot in strange circumstances. Kröger continues in her fiction the film script that she had written for the documentary Revision, produced in 2012, 10 years after the incident. The crime novel tries to reveal the causes that led to the violent death of the two, to disclose why German police investigations were so superficial, to present what effects all this had on the families of the two dead men, and what regional and ethnic stereotypes dominate the thinking of those involved in the action.