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BOOK REVIEWS 
 

The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin 

School 

By Marco Abel 

Simone Boissonneault 

University of Cincinnati 

 

lthough integral Berlin School directors 

have been active since the early 1990s, 

only recently has this cinematic 

movement begun to receive widespread academic 

interest in the United States. With the publication 

of numerous influential articles such as 

“Intensifying Life: the Cinema of the Berlin 

School” (available online through Cineaste 

http://www.cineaste.com/articles/the-berlin-

school.htm), Marco Abel has been at the forefront 

of this increased attention. 

 While the “Berlin School” label has been 

applied to the works of directors such as Christian 

Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec, it 

remains difficult to create a definitive list of Berlin 

School characteristics: the movement as composed 

of filmmakers whose works bear distinctive personal 

style and technique. Following the thread 

developed in his previous treatments, Abel delves 

more deeply into the nature of the Berlin School, 

first contextualizing and then closely analyzing 

works of key filmmakers in an attempt to pinpoint 

unifying characteristics that define an often 

seemingly disparate body of work.  

 In order to define the Berlin School, Abel first 

examines the historical and political contexts in 

which the first group of filmmakers began to work. 

Emerging during a period of widespread 

international accolade for the German film industry 

sparked by a number of heritage films focused on 

events leading up to and following World War 2, 

the initial offerings from the aforementioned 

filmmakers differed greatly from the widely 

successful but less artistically innovative films that 

continue to define Germany directly through 

sensationalized depictions of the recent past. Abel 

argues that the “Berlin School” label, created by 

critics and sometimes applied to filmmakers who 

actively resist such classification, describes a 

“counter-cinema:” rather than meticulously 

searching for German identity in events of the 

recent past, these films instead attempt to create 

new narratives and new images for a contemporary 

Germany by distancing audiences and thus asking 

them to examine the concept of “Germany” anew. 

In his intricately constructed analyses of major 

works by all three first-wave directors, as well as the 

five directors widely viewed as the second-wave of 

the movement, Abel isolates the ways in which 

these directors, though in many ways often 

stylistically and thematically divergent, work toward 

this goal. Unlike the recent wave of historical 

drama, these films eschew oft-repeated, expected 

images of resolved events and neatly packaged 

stories to inspect a Germany characterized by 

senses of mobility and transformation which leave 

problems unresolved and questions unanswered.  

 It is through this lack of resolution and the 

“untimeliness” of the films, Abel argues, that a 

collective Berlin School “itinerary” can be 

established—through their very aesthetic 

A 



 

  

	
  
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stylization, they depict a Germany that could be, as 

opposed to a Germany that was or is. This “future 

perfect” is shown through the struggles of 

characters attempting to find something – be it 

work, a home, an identity – which, in remaining 

largely unfulfilled, depict a sense of continual 

transition. Although the directors do maintain 

distinctly divergent methods, Abel’s close readings 

of their films outline the ways in which the attempt 

to map “the very sociopolitical, economic, cultural, 

and emotional forces that have paralyzed post-wall 

Germany” is realized in an effort to create a body 

of films that, rather than purporting to speak for 

Germany, instead prompts its audience to 

reconsider what Germany is or could be.  

 
Abel, Marco. The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School. 
 Rochester: Camden House, 2013.  
 

 

Modern German Thought from 

Kant to Habermas: An Annotated 

German-Language Reader 

Edited by Henk de Berg and 

Duncan Large 

Jason Doerre 

Trinity College, Hartford 

 

t would not be an overstatement to claim 

that the German language is unsurpassed in 

producing critical, philosophical, and 

theoretical texts that are central to the disciplines of 

the humanities and social sciences. For many in the 

field of German Studies, it is reassuring to see how 

essential modern German thought is in the North 

American academy; however, this does not come 

without its pitfalls. Witnessing the re-

territorialization of such ubiquitous German 

thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to other 

disciplines, that fail to properly consider the 

historical and cultural context, often proves to be a 

painful sight for German Studies scholars. Even 

more ghastly is the thought that how these thinkers 

and their texts have been abstracted from their 

original habitat of the German language. Specious 

translations into English have led to serious 

problems of interpretation with some German 

thinkers. Notable are early inferior translations of 

Nietzsche, which Walter Kaufmann sought to 

remedy in the postwar years, or the neologisms 

James Strachey used for simple German terms in 

his standard translation of Freud’s works which 

altered their meaning in English forever (imagine if 

he had translated das Ich as “the I” instead of 

“ego”!). Henk de Berg and Duncan Large’s 

annotated German-language reader, Modern 

German Thought from Kant to Habermas is an 

excellent resource for putting the German language 

back into the study of German thought, and this 

effort alone is worthy of praise and attention. 

 Annotated German-language readers were a 

longtime staple for English-speaking students of 

German, but have all but disappeared from the 

publishing market in the last decades. This is highly 

unfortunate, because as de Berg and Large have 

proven, works such as this can still be an immensely 

effective tool for learning important but difficult 

texts. In addition to the annotated primary 

selections from the twelve chosen thinkers that 

constitute the backbone of this reader, there is also 

an introductory chapter to German thought, brief 

I 



 

  

	
  
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summaries of the life and work of each thinker, and 

condensed, but thorough, bibliographical guides for 

further reading. For the most part, the authors 

chosen for this work are seemingly predictable: 

Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, 

Freud, Heidegger, Benjamin, Lukács, Horkheimer 

and Adorno. Without question, each one of these 

figures are worthy of inclusion in an overview of 

modern German thought, but one is immediately 

left wondering why some were included, while 

other seminal figures in German thought such as 

Fichte, Weber, or Wittgenstein were omitted. 

Nevertheless, de Berg and Large do address this 

obvious imperfection in the introduction to explain 

that the final selections and exclusions depended 

upon space and copyright issues. 

 For annotated collections such as this, the true 

value lies in the quality of the annotations  and the 

authors do not fail to deliver in this aspect. The 

process of selecting which terms to annotate and 

explain with the hope of guiding the reader through 

these challenging texts will inevitably have varying 

degrees of effectiveness with different readers, since 

each user will approach these texts with a different 

set of vocabulary and philosophical knowledge. At 

times, the annotations for terminology in the essays 

seem somewhat uneven. For example, in the 

Nietzsche excerpt, there is an annotation to explain 

the term “Asketen” but on the same page there is not 

one to explain the Nietzschean term “Degenereszenz” 

and how this fits into his philosophical project (170). 

Overall, however, the annotations are highly 

thorough and informative. The authors state the 

intended audience for the book to be students of 

German, or those from related fields with a 

command of the language, or scholars who might 

not be fluent but wish to read in the original. This 

assessment is more or less accurate, but this 

reviewer would add that some of the texts 

ineluctably demand a higher level of language 

proficiency and philosophical knowledge than 

others. Selected texts by Feuerbach and 

Schopenhauer might be understandable to one, 

while those by Adorno, Horkheimer, and 

Heidegger might not be so intelligible to that same 

reader despite the guidance provided through the 

annotations. This raises the question whether or not 

it would be beneficial to organize such annotated 

readers not by chronology but by difficulty level. 

The lexical annotations are effective in clarifying 

some words and phrases that a dictionary might not 

be able to explain, and most insightful are the many 

annotations that highlight connections and dialogue 

between thinkers across time and language, which 

would otherwise not be understood by the non-

expert. For example, in a Freud piece there is an 

annotation that effectually explains his use of the 

term “Fetisch” and how Marx uses the same term 

(204). De Berg and Large also justify the 

importance of editions such as this by providing 

annotations for terminology in the texts that 

expound upon errors or misinterpretations in 

published English translations of the works.  

  Modern German Thought from Kant to 

Habermas would be especially valuable as a course 

book in a graduate-level or an advanced upper-

division undergraduate course. Still, this book also 

has much to offer to scholars who are interested in 

reading the included thinkers in the original 

language or are seeking an in-depth look at one of 

the selected texts. De Berg and Large have done 

phenomenal work thus far, and one can only hope 



 

  

	
  
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that their efforts to promote reading philosophical 

texts in the language of the Dichter und Denker will be 

fruitful. This is a positive first step, but it would be 

encouraging to see more readers such as this one. 

Even better would be a second or third volume of 

this work that contains other important thinkers not 

included in the first edition. 

 

De Berg, Henk and Duncan Large, eds. Modern  
German Thought from Kant to Habermas:  
An Annotated German-Language Reader. Rochester, 
NY: Camden House, 2012. 

 

 

West Germany and the Global 

Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian 

Revolt 

By Timothy Scott Brown 

Amanda Randall 

The University of Texas at Austin 

 

imothy Scott Brown’s nuanced study of 

the West German “1968” aims to 

rectify the persistent reductionist 

tendency in writings about this world-historic 

conjuncture, namely, its reduction to the idea of 

“protest” represented in a “single frozen tableau—a 

decontextualized confrontation between university 

students and the police” (2). This limited framing of 

“the global sixties”—a term Brown uses 

interchangeably with “1968”—is in part due to the 

lack of critical distance among the voices that 

dominate the narrative: the veterans of the student 

movement, i.e. the 68ers themselves. A generation 

removed from the cultural-political moment in 

question, Brown (Ph.D. 2000) is personally well 

positioned to pursue this line of critical 

historiography, in which he reshapes the narrative 

to incorporate additional actors and activities—the 

underground press, visual and music artists, 

international students, transnational popular 

culture—as well as further, more abstract sites of 

confluence between the personal and the political, 

including affect, representation, subjectivity, and 

agency. 

 While West Germany’s 1968 was a significant 

movement and historical moment unto itself, in line 

with other recent studies, Brown’s treatment 

considers 1968 in the broader contexts of German-

German relations and the states’ entanglements in 

broader First World-Second World tensions. 

Moreover, he expands the analytical scope to a fully 

global scale by examining how social movements 

happening at the same time around the world 

intersected with the West German case in West 

German space. Following such transnational 

vectors as the presence of Third World university 

students in the Federal Republic and the adaptation 

of US-American protest practices and aesthetics, 

Brown reveals how a global imagined community 

of youth concerned with the common problems of 

authoritarianism and democratic legitimacy took 

shape on the ground in West Germany. 

 Brown eschews chronology for recursion in 

elaborating the complex interplay of global and 

local elements via eight thematic chapters that 

present different frames for reading 1968 across 

several parallel narrative threads. Emblematic 

figures, collectives, cultural products, and events of 

the West German antiauthoritarian movement 

emerge and recede, with each return layering new, 

multi-axial dimensions onto the standard account. 

T 



 

  

	
  
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When at times the story seems to ramble into rich 

details of heretofore unexamined elements and 

connections, icons of 1968 – Rudi Dutschke, Benno 

Ohnesorg, APO (extraparliamentary opposition), 

and so on – serve as guideposts in an artfully crafted 

narrative fabric woven from eloquent prose. The 

result is a text that is both richly structured and a 

pleasure to read, both elements that make the book 

especially appropriate for an instructional setting. 

 The first two chapters (“Space” and “Time”) 

outline the contours of the spatial and historical 

imagination of 1968. While Berlin and 1945 are 

hardly downplayed in their roles as central nodes of 

countercultural confrontation, Brown presents a 

more comprehensive map of the diverse discourses 

and actions of APO, the SDS (Social German 

Student League), and other “scenes.” In this, he 

unpacks not only the structure and logic of 

countercultural visions of West German 

authoritarianism on the one hand, and of utopian 

humanistic socialism on the other, but also how 

these countercultural collectives envisioned their 

own place in revolutionary movements—both those 

of their own national and cultural history, and those 

occurring contemporaneously in other parts of the 

globe. Brown furthermore reveals how, at the same 

time the West German student movement railed 

against the parent generation’s retreat from recent 

history, both sides mobilized revisionist 

historiographies as means of legitimating their 

respective actions and claims, and deletigimating 

those of the other. 

The modes of representing and transmitting 

the antiauthoritarian imagination are treated in the 

third, fourth, and fifth chapters (“Word,” “Sound,” 

and “Vision”). Within an overarching frame of the 

politicization of art / the art of oppositional politics, 

Brown maps the cultural productions politics 

(including journalism, literature, music, theater, and 

film) that arose from the interface of organized 

youth revolt and more loosely defined subcultures, 

as well as their respective flows in the transnational 

circulation of political aesthetics and actions, in 

particular West German borrowings from US-

American counterculture and Third World 

democratic movements. Moreover, the author 

fruitfully juxtaposes countercultural production 

with the modalities of mass culture and its 

confluence with conservative establishment 

discourse. 

The final three chapters (“Power,” “Sex,” and 

“Death”) fall under the common theme of 

organization. Together, they also trace the later 

ideological divergences and resulting decline of the 

1968 movement. Chapter six (“Power”) examines 

the subjective and collective features of 

mobilization: strategies, both theoretical and 

practical, for recruiting and forming a revolutionary 

subject, and the mechanics of protest tactics 

including mass demonstrations, art-actions, and 

other forms of “spectacle,” a concept that 

movement leaders adapted from the Frankfurt 

School criticism of consumer capitalist society. 

Chapter seven (“Sex”) considers confluences and 

dissonances between the antiauthoritarian 

movement on the one hand, and the sphere of 

sexuality, which Brown takes to encompass the 

sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and the 

movement for homosexual rights, again with an eye 

to intersections with international iterations of such 

struggles over the politics of everyday life and the 

intimately personal. 



 

  

	
  
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The last thematic chapter (“Death”) maps 

trajectories of violence and radicalization 

surrounding and stemming from the student revolt. 

With the flashpoint of authoritarian violence that 

was the murder of Benno Ohnesorg – and its recent 

conspiratorial reframing in terms of German-

German relations – having been covered 

thoroughly in previous chapters, Brown turns his 

attention here to the case of the assassination 

attempt on Rudi Dutschke in April 1968, and the 

subsequent discussions of “counterviolence” as a 

possible legitimate response of the left to this assault 

on the student movement. The bulk of the chapter 

is dedicated to the left-wing radical RAF (Red 

Army Fraction), but while Brown recounts 

Dutschke’s own valorization of Third World urban 

guerrilla tactics, he is careful not to draw a direct 

line from the theoretical debates within leftist 

student organizations and the actualization of such 

violence in RAF terrorism. Moreover, Brown leaves 

the last word on 1968 not to the RAF, but rather to 

the by then dispersed, undogmatic and pacifistic left 

scenes, who concluded the antiauthoritarian revolt 

with the TUNIX Conference (a word play on “tu 

nichts” - “do nothing”) of 1978. Organized in 

response to the German Autumn, but more 

generally to the ideological splintering of the protest 

movement in general, the conference-cum-festival 

was meant as a forum for advocating and 

actualizing a transition from protest to creativity. 

Instead of the RAF marking the death of the global 

sixties, Brown closes the chronology on a positive 

note by positing TUNIX as a bridge to new 

initiatives of the alternative movement into the 

1980s and beyond. 

While Brown is explicitly concerned with the 

dynamics of what he calls the “active international” 

within the West German antiauthoritarian 

movement, he balances this perspective with a 

thorough consideration of the problems of self-

organization and cognitive dissonance faced by the 

participants. In a country, and a world, that has 

been divided into poles of East and West, 

communist and capitalist, how does a leftist West 

German find a voice and a space for a third way? 

But even these issues, Brown reveals, are implicated 

in patterns of action and discourse that reach 

beyond the West German scene, as students pursue 

and promote a “socialism with a human face” (36). 

Brown furthermore succeeds in overcoming the 

binary of establishment and opposition, first by 

adopting a more balanced look at the dynamics of 

both sides, and second by revealing how each side 

was in fact more disjointed than the standard 

historiography would have it. 

In situating his study as a contribution to the 

presently limited Anglophone scholarship on 1968, 

Brown efficiently collates the substantial number of 

Germanophone studies already produced, 

especially in the flourish of research completed 

around the fortieth anniversary of the movement. 

However, Brown’s book is anything but a simple 

translation or transfer of that work for an 

Anglophone audience. His analytical approach is a 

unique and much needed contribution to the body  



 

  

	
  
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of knowledge of 1968, one that may serve as a 

model for further critical re-readings of other fields 

of culture in that watershed moment in West 

German and world history.  

 

Brown, Timothy Scott. West Germany and the 
Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 
1962–1978. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge 
University Press, 2013. 

 

 

Generic Histories of German 

Cinema: Genre and Its Deviations 

Edited by Jaimey Fisher 

Ervin Malakaj 

Washington University in St. Louis 

 

eneric Histories of German Cinema: Genre and 

Its Deviations contends that German film 

studies, as a discipline, has for decades 

been dominated by two primary scholarly 

approaches: 1) an interest in expounding familiar 

historical epochs and 2) an interest in auteur studies 

that trace the work and impact of individual 

directors. While recent years, in addition, saw an 

increase in the study of popular film, according to 

Jaimey Fisher’s argument in the introduction to the 

volume, little of that scholarship focuses explicitly 

on genre as a heuristic category that helps bring 

popular and art cinema into discussion with one 

another. The contributors to the volume not only 

understand the lack of focus on genre studies in 

German film studies as a cause for the rift between 

scholarship on popular and art cinema, but also 

seek to “illuminate German film studies anew” by 

adapting genre studies in order to “help develop a 

broader context in which the links and relations 

among art and auteur and popular cinema become 

clearer and more illuminating” (4). By working 

across traditional historical periods, individual 

essays in this volume seek to track the formation 

and transformation of genres in German film 

history and elucidate continuities and ruptures that 

help paint a better picture of the dynamics of film’s 

aesthetic, production, circulation, and consumption 

in the German context. In doing so, the volume not 

only addresses a lacuna in scholarship in German 

film studies, but also contributes extensively to 

genre theory, in presenting the unique case studies 

available in German film history.  

 The volume is divided into an introduction by 

Fisher and twelve individual chapters that address 

the following genre traditions in German film 

history: the early horror film (Gerd Gemünden), the 

essay film (Nora M. Alter), the science-fiction film 

(Lutz Koepnick), the UFA musical (Eric 

Rentschler), the war film (Fisher), the crime film 

genre and the Edgar Wallace production trend 

(Sascha Gerhards), the lasting effects of the early 

horror film across historic periods (Kris Vander 

Lugt), the adaptation films of Bernd Eichinger 

(Hester Baer), the thriller (Steve Choe), the return 

of the Heimatfilm genre in the 21st century (Paul 

Cooke), the romantic comedy (Antje Ascheid), and 

the yearning for genre in the films of Dominik Graf 

(Marco Abel). In addition to the individual 

chapters, the volume is organized quasi-

chronologically, in that it is divided into three 

sections: the first section treats the 1920s and 30s 

and includes the first four chapters; the second 

section encompasses chapters 5-7 and covers the 

1940s, 50s, and 60s; and the final section, chapters 

8-12, covers the 1980s to the present. This division 

G 



 

  

	
  
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does not suggest that the individual chapters dwell 

only on particular decades when discussing a 

particular film genre—on the contrary. The 

chapters discuss genre across periods and often 

reach back to the origins of a particular genre in 

order to trace its development over time. 

 Fisher’s introduction situates the volume 

among scholarship in German film studies and US 

genre theory. He provides an overview of genre 

theory by first locating its origins in literary theories 

since antiquity that treat genre broadly, and 

secondly by expounding the influence of German 

cultural critics, especially the work of Max 

Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried 

Kracauer, upon genre theory as it developed in 

Anglophone film studies. Fisher provides an 

extensive overview of genre studies in relation to 

the developing focal points in film theory of the 

twentieth century and offers an analysis of genre 

theory in relation to auteur theory, structuralist and 

post-structuralist approaches to film studies, and, 

finally, the return to history in recent film studies. 

An insistence on traversing familiar historical 

periods in order to understand better the vagaries of 

German film history, by focusing on the genre 

theory that is laid out in the introduction, is 

executed well in the chapters of the volume. 

Koepnick’s chapter on the science-fiction film, for 

example, traces the lasting impact of Fritz Lang’s 

Metropolis on the science-fiction genre and 

compares this film and its cultural legacy to Lang’s 

earlier science-fiction production, Frau im Mond, 

which did not have the same effect on subsequent 

filmmaking. Cooke similarly discusses the return of 

the Heimatfilm in the recent decade, in his chapter, 

and traces its roots in the 1950s and 60s, offering a 

succinct history of one of the most well known 

German film genres, while in addition providing 

original readings of recent popular films. Baer’s 

approach to the quasi-genre of the literary 

adaptation film takes the career and impact of 

director and producer Bernd Eichinger as a starting 

point and shows that his stature in the film industry 

of the 1980s helped shape the famous literary 

adaptation film trends of the 1990s.  

 Choe’s chapter remains the only one in the 

volume to reach back to the sensation films of the 

1910s in order to explicate their place in the long 

history of the thriller in the German context. The 

early period (pre-1918), however, warrants its own 

study with regard to the formation of specific genres 

and its reliance upon scenarios from the western 

literary canon in, for example, the cinema of 

attraction. Nevertheless, the volume remains an 

extraordinary contribution to German film studies. 

The chapters are short, but succinct in presenting 

the complex history of familiar genres and they 

belong on the reading list of students and scholars 

alike. The volume, no doubt, will engender a host 

of inquiries into the rich history of German genre 

cinema. 

 

Fisher, Jaimey, ed. Generic Histories of German 
 Cinema: Genre and Its Deviations. Rochester: 
 Camden House, 2013.  
 



 

  

	
  
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Remembering Africa: The 

Rediscovery of Colonialism in 

Contemporary German Literature. 

By Dirk Göttsche 

Vanessa Plumly 

University of Cincinnati 

 

ven before the centennial anniversary in 

2004 marking the mass genocide that 

German colonizers perpetrated against 

the Herero and Nama in German South-West 

Africa — present-day Namibia —, activists, 

historians, and scholars were casting new light on 

German colonialism, which had been all but 

written out of German historiographies post-WWII 

and to a large extent overshadowed by German 

atrocities committed during the Holocaust under 

National Socialist rule. Over the past twenty to 

thirty years, the acknowledgement of German 

colonialism in Germany’s cultural memory, or 

rather the lack thereof, and the more recent 

integration of the subject of colonialism into 

Germany’s historical narratives have become 

fruitful topics of research initiated by anti-colonial, 

anti-racist, and postcolonial scholars and activists in 

and across disciplinary fields. Maureen Maisha 

Eggers’ (et. al) volume on theoretical critical 

whiteness Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische 

Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland (2009), David 

Ciarlo’s analysis of colonial images in Advertising 

Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany 

(2011), and Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-

Alazard’s linguistic evaluation of the German 

colonial inheritance in Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern 

spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv 

deutsche Sprache. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk (2012) 

are just a few of the more recent publications in the 

ever-expanding corpus on German colonialism and 

its legacy. Dirk Göttsche’s Remembering Africa: The 

Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German 

Literature is, therefore, a timely addition to this 

budding canon of works, which seeks to assess the 

centrality of Germany’s colonial past in more 

recent cultural texts of the literary vein.  

 Immediately striking, however, is Göttsche’s 

choice of phrasing in the title, “the rediscovery of 

colonialism,” and the employment of this phrasing 

throughout the text. Colonialism itself was a 

venture that claimed to “discover” new territories, 

among other things, but of course these territories 

had been in existence and inhabited prior thereto. 

Thus, the employment of the word rediscovery in 

the title slips precisely back into colonial language 

and its paradigms and can be interpreted as if the 

historical acts of colonialism—the repercussions of 

which never ceased to impact Germans of Color—

are something that must first be found again, rather 

than something that have always been and that 

have continued to be present; in fact, such 

remnants have been made all the more present in 

their very absence from German historiographies. 

This absent presence or silencing of colonialism, 

despite its echoing in the present, is analogous to 

the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of Afro-

Germans and Germans of Color in German 

society. While this formal aspect of the text should 

be questioned, the content of the text rectifies this 

slippage to a great extent. 

Remembering Africa attests to the fact that while 

colonial amnesia in white German discourse is very 

slowly becoming a ghost of the German past, the 

E 



 

  

	
  
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haunting specter of (German) colonialism is 

undeniably gaining visibility in the German 

literature of the present, albeit in all of its 

ambiguities/ambivalences (continuing to prompt 

fear, fascination, and desire), despite the self-

proclaimed postcolonial agendas of most of the 

authors writing in the literary genre tackled here, 

the historical novel.  

The entire monograph is an expansive and 

extremely thorough survey of approximately fifty 

German-language historical novels written by white 

German, Austrian, and Swiss authors, all of which 

approach colonialism and colonial memory and 

which can be found in the practical index located at 

the back of the text. Some are well-known 

bestsellers such as Ilja Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler 

(2006), and others are perhaps lesser-known works 

such as Hardy Krüger’s memoir Eine Farm in Afrika 

(1970), which Göttsche reads as a forerunner to 

Rolf Ackermann’s Die weiße Jägerin (2005). The 

strengths of Göttsche’s monograph undoubtedly lie 

in the transparent theoretical analysis and solid 

textual interpretations throughout. Focusing more 

specifically on various modes of narration and 

perception, cross-cultural and transcultural 

exchange among and between characters, as well as 

thematic content in relation to the construction of 

colonial memory discourses in the selected works, 

Göttsche’s main premise is that, despite their 

attempts to be anti-racist and anti-colonial in their 

content and having adopted the postcolonial 

perspective or gaze (Lützeler), the vast majority of 

these historical novels, nevertheless, return to 

exoticist tropes and topoi developed prior to and 

during colonialism and serve, in some cases as 

latent and in others as manifest, remnants of the 

persisting colonial imaginary in Germany. Göttsche 

hails Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978), one of the first 

texts on German colonialism to draw critical 

attention, as an archetype to which all future 

historical novels on the topic can be and often are 

compared. According to Göttsche, Timm’s novel 

offers up an incisive critique of colonialism via an 

interrogation of the historical documents he 

incorporates in his work.  

Beginning with an excursion into the 

theoretical underpinnings of his analysis, Göttsche 

views the evolving academic discourse of the 1970s 

and 1980s as the point of departure for a critical 

encounter with the topics of anti-colonialism, 

postcolonialism, and neo-colonialism. After briefly 

recounting the early theories of Bhabha, Said, and 

contemporary memory scholars, such as, Michael 

Rothberg, Göttsche proceeds to identify the points 

in historical remembrance that he views as having 

brought colonialism to the fore in memory politics 

in Germany — German reunification and the 

centennial anniversary of the Herero genocide, in 

addition to postcolonial work undertaken by Afro-

Germans.  

The second chapter, which forms the core of 

Remembering Africa, categorizes a large percentage of 

the texts examined and their analyses according to 

the geographical regions and countries of Africa in 

which German colonialism is being addressed in 

the novels. While this may seem like a logical way 

to divide the texts for a differential assessment, it 

also runs the potential risk of missing the overlap in 

the ways in which they are constructed and the 

manner in which each approaches the topic of 

colonialism. Göttsche, however, prevents any such 

comparative loss by referring back to texts that 



 

  

	
  
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incorporate similar themes from the differing 

geographical regions in his literary mapping of 

German colonialism in Africa.  

Also noting a renewed interest in the topic of 

European colonialism in general over the past 

decades in German literature, Göttsche chooses not 

to limit his evaluation to historical novels dealing 

solely with German colonialism. Importantly, he 

highlights the similarities and differences among the 

colonial projects of various European nations as 

well as the diversity in and among the African 

nations, which they colonized. Moreover, rather 

than trying to force a one-size-fits-all analysis, 

Göttsche points to the heterogeneity of the 

approaches taken to addressing colonialism in these 

German historical novels. This allows for a more 

nuanced reading of how memory and competing 

memories are actively produced and narrated. All 

of the aforementioned elements form the body of 

chapters three, four, and five. 

Göttsche’s discussion of transgenerational 

postmemory as outlined in chapter five in relation 

to novels such as Chirstof Hamann’s Usambara 

(2007) is particularly interesting, given that similar 

modes of memory have been employed in historical 

novels on the German Holocaust, many of which 

also examine familial inheritance in the historical 

archives of the past. Thus, transgenerational 

postmemory is utilized across the genre of the 

historical novel with regard to German cultural 

memory, regardless of the historical era or topic of 

focus. Furthermore, Göttsche analyzes novels that 

interrogate historical parallels and/or continuities 

in German history. Looking at texts that read 

colonialism in connection with other German pasts, 

including the East German author Manfred 

Gebert’s Welwitschia mirabilis (2008) that interrogates 

GDR history alongside colonial history and 

Stephan Wackwitz’s autobiographical narrative Ein 

unsichtbares Land (2003), parts of which are derived 

from his grandfather’s memoirs and comparatively 

assesses Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Göttsche 

elucidates points of convergence and divergence in 

the course of history as written into historical 

novels. 

Taken as a whole, Göttsche’s contribution to 

the field of German postcolonial memory studies in 

Remembering Africa is a meticulous and multifaceted 

monograph of fundamental value to scholars 

looking for an introductory overview of and 

comprehensive investigation into the most recent 

German-language historical novels available 

concerning (German) colonialism in Africa and the 

politics of memory as written by white German 

authors. A selection of its chapters would serve as 

excellent secondary reading material for university 

courses approaching German colonialism and/or 

cultural memory production. Moreover, the text is 

accessible to those who have no background in the 

German language, as all of the quoted citations are 

provided to the reader in English translation.  

 Nevertheless, an analysis or statement on the 

politics of memory in connection to writing from a 

position of privilege — that is to say from a place 

where white authors are able to speak and be heard 

(i.e., the reception of many of these works in 

Germany and beyond) — and also what this means 

in relation to the ambivalent content of these novels 

and the way in which it was conveyed would have 

enhanced the conclusion of this monograph. This 

would have further highlighted the colonial 

attitudes that persist in the realm of white German 



 

  

	
  
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cultural production and German mainstream 

consumption/reception and seems to be a missed 

opportunity. Instead, Göttsche maintains in his 

conclusion that: “the ‘postcolonial project,’ as 

Bhabha puts it in The Location of Culture, of critically 

rereading and rewriting colonialism (has been left) 

almost exclusively to white ‘mainstream’ authors 

from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland” (424). 

While this claim may be an accurate statement in 

reference to historical novels, Göttsche fails to 

acknowledge that cultural producers of Color in 

Germany are contributing to the “postcolonial 

project” elsewhere, most often in spheres outside of 

this genre (as it may not be the best-equipped for 

conveying the polyphony of these (hi)stories and 

their necessary critiques), such as in academic or 

theoretical essays, in lyrical poetry, in theater, in 

spoken-word performances, musical productions, 

and historical exhibitions or, as is most discernible, 

via activist protests in the public sphere that call for 

a critical engagement with German cultural 

memory as it is tied to colonialism. Although much 

more analysis needs to be undertaken in this 

broader domain, Göttsche’s book — the first of its 

kind to tackle colonialism and memory politics in 

historical novels — is a very inviting point of 

departure from which future investigations of this 

sort can and should commence, and indeed already 

have. 

 

Göttsche, Dirk. Remembering Africa: The Rediscovery of  
 Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature. 
 Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. 

Germany and the Black Diaspora: 

Points of Contact, 1250–1914 

By Mischa Honeck, Martin 

Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann 

Kevina King 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

 

ccording to the editors of Germany and 

the Black Diaspora the “historio-

graphical negligence” in regards to 

Blacks in Germany before the nineteenth and 

twentieth century is due to Germany’s “political 

and academic establishment and mainstream 

histories in which black voices are either subdued or 

reduced to freak occurrences” (4). This 

historiographical and national amnesia was first 

challenged by Black Germans themselves in 1986 

who drew great attention to their presence in 

Germany, German history and contemporary 

affairs with the publishing of Farbe bekennen: Afro-

deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte later 

published in 1992 as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German 

Women Speak Out. While the editors acknowledge 

this important work, which was of paramount 

significance in directing attention to the role that 

race played in Germany’s past, they also draw on 

various other scholarly works about Black Germans 

and understand their volume as a historiographical 

expansion of these studies. Peter Martin’s ground-

breaking work Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren: Afrikaner 

in Geschichte und Bewusstsein der Deutschen and Hans-

Werner Debrunner’s Presence and Prestige, Africans in 

Europe: A History of Africans in Europe Before 1918 are 

of particular importance for this study, since they 

along with Farbe bekennen insisted that Blackness 

A 



 

  

	
  
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be recognized in Germany from the Middle Ages 

onward. Like those works, Germany and the Black 

Diaspora not only contributes to the field of Black 

German studies and enriches German history and 

historiography, but it also advances a broader 

notion of the Black Diaspora. Much like Tina 

Campt’s work Other Germans: Black Germans and the 

Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich 

and Fatima El-Tayeb’s European Others: Queering 

Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, the editors locate 

Germany’s positioning as central to the Black 

Diaspora instead of regarding it as marginal.  

 This historical anthology aims to delineate the 

myriad encounters between white and Black people 

across the centuries, mainly in Germany, but some 

contributors also direct their focus on the German 

reception of Black Americans.  As such Germany 

and the Black Diaspora challenges the far too 

widespread assumption about Germany’s historical 

relationship with Black people, namely, that since 

Germany was a latecomer to colonization, 

Germany’s history rarely intersected with that of 

Black history or itself can be viewed as a part of that 

very history. The vast chronological span of this 

study necessitates the transnational, trans-epochal, 

interdisciplinary, and transcultural approach the 

editors and contributors take. This methodology is 

not only reflected in the various contributions to 

this book, but is also illuminated by the sources the 

contributors draw upon to shape their arguments. 

Some contributors like Paul Kaplan and Kate 

Lowe base their research on the cultural transfer of 

Black images in art history via paintings and altar 

pieces and juxtapose the real presence of Blacks in 

German lands during the Middle Ages to the 

fictitious notion, i.e. the construction, of Blackness. 

Other contributors, like Anne Kuhlmann and 

Rashid S. Pegah, base their research on the vast 

and still expanding field of court history. Their 

contributions illuminate the various roles Blacks 

played in noble courts and principalities in the 

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By drawing 

on journal entries, church, court, and military 

records, Maria Diedrich, on the other hand, 

investigates the individual life stories of former 

Black American slaves and their families and how 

they arrived in Hesse between 1782 and 1783 in 

the wake of the American Revolution. The 

approach that Mischa Honeck, Kendahl Radcliffe, 

and Robbie Aitken take in their respective 

nineteenth and twentieth century-focused 

contributions to this collection highlights the 

transatlantic entanglements between white 

Europeans and antebellum Americans (white and 

Black) and their travel to Germany and Africa, and 

reciprocally investigate African travel to Europe 

and German lands. Crucial sources here are 

newspaper, conference, and travel reports, as well 

as government documentation and personal letters. 

 Germany and the Black Diaspora adds to our 

growing knowledge of the Black German 

experience. While specialists in the Black German 

field will not find this volume tremendously 

groundbreaking, it should be on the reading list of 

anyone interested in (Black) German history and 

(Black) diaspora studies, since this anthology offers 

the English reader a valuable first glimpse into the 

interlacement of both. 

 

Honeck, Mischa, Martin Klimke, and Anne 
 Kuhlmann. Germany and the Black Diaspora: 
 Points of Contact, 1250-1914. New York: 
 Berghahn, 2013. 



 

  

	
  
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Fiktionen und Realitäten. 

Schriftstellerinnen im deutsch-

sprachigen Literaturbetrieb. 

By Brigitte E. Jirku and Marion 

Schulz 

Lina Fisher 

University of East Anglia 

 

iktionen und Realitäten is part of the Inter-

Lit series of books concerned with post-

1945 women writers published in 

collaboration with Stiftung Frauen-Literatur-

Forschung. Jirku and Schulz have previously edited 

several volumes on different aspects of women’s 

writing, including performativity in 

autobiographical writing, and the influence of 

Ingeborg Bachmann on other writers. The present 

book offers a multi-faceted critical examination of 

the position of women writers in the German-

speaking territories from the 1950s to the present 

day. The book’s strength lies in the variety of angles 

from which this subject is explored. 

 The editors acknowledge that this is not the 

first investigation of the conditions under which 

women writers work. However, the book makes 

available vital information regarding different 

aspects of the situation of German-speaking 

authors, from inequalities in obtaining monies to 

fund writing, to biases regarding whose books are 

selected for reviews. Because of the breadth of its 17 

chapters, the book provides a useful resource for 

scholars of post-1945 German literature and its 

reception. It is also relevant to readers with an 

interest in German women’s writing, or specific 

authors whose cases are presented here, such as 

Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Friederike 

Mayröcker, Geno Hartlaub, Annemarie 

Schwarzenbach, Elfriede Gerstl or Ruth Landshoff-

Yorck. In addition, the book would be of interest to 

those engaged in research on the way in which the 

German literary environment has been affected by 

political and societal developments. Because of the 

large number of articles included in the collection, 

this review cannot comment on each of them, but 

rather aims to give an overview of pertinent points 

and the coherence of the volume. 

 The main argument presented by the editors 

in the introduction is that the work of female 

authors is valued to a smaller extent than that of 

male authors. This is clear when one considers, for 

example, writers’ yearly income disparities as well 

as the fact that major literary prizes are more often 

awarded to male authors. The different chapters 

present many facts to prove this point, but 

occasionally do so to the detriment of in-depth 

arguments. Some articles are surprisingly short and 

leave the reader wanting more details and more 

convincing conclusions. Nevertheless, the book on 

the whole manages to achieve a balance between 

case studies of specific authors and broader trends. 

 Most of the contributors are scholars of 

German literature at universities in Germany, 

Austria, Switzerland or Belgium, with the exception 

of Smith-Prei and Stehle who are North-American 

academics, and Miedtke who is the director of 

Bremen municipal library. The volume is divided 

into five sections on literature as business, 

conceptions of femininity, the literary marketplace, 

border crossings, and the media age. It is difficult to 

see a clear difference between section I, entitled 

‘Der Literaturbetrieb’, and section III, ‘Der 

F 



 

  

	
  
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Literaturmarktplatz’ as the chapters in both 

sections deal with subjects that seem to fit equally 

well into both of these categories. Closer 

examination reveals that whereas section I 

examines the business aspects of literature, such as 

sales figures, section III is concerned with the 

broader reception. Although these subjects run the 

risk of appearing rather dry to those more 

accustomed to focusing on the content of books, the 

articles in these sections in fact present interesting 

insights into the finer details of publishing 

conventions and attitudes. 

 Häntzschel’s study gives a comprehensive 

overview of the cold reality faced by women 

authors with regard to publications as well as 

reviews in the 1950s. Schneider, on the other hand, 

explains the social and political context that led to 

the formation of women-centered institutions and 

women-led publishing houses in the 1970s. 

Häntzschel’s and Schneider’s chapters thus usefully 

complement each other. Schneider’s analysis of the 

importance of the low-priced paperback for 

feminist writing and the maximization of 

established publishers’ profits is particularly 

interesting.  

 The inclusion of Miedtke’s chapter in the 

volume is unexpected as it does not examine writers 

per se, but instead presents statistics and strategies 

pertaining to the different ways in which female 

and male visitors use Bremen municipal library. 

Although the analysis of visitors’ interests and 

library staff’s careful plans regarding the laudable 

aim of gender equality among visitors is fascinating, 

some strategies could have been examined more 

critically. This applies, for instance, to the example 

of the media selection ‘for boys’ (82). Miedtke does 

not give examples of the items included in this 

selection (or, in fact, details of its impact on visitor 

numbers, which are used as an indicator of 

community engagement here), but the designation 

of certain books as more appropriate for children of 

one gender seems unfortunate when one considers 

the fact that many aspects of children’s lives, such 

as toys and clothes, are already subjected to an 

increasingly rigid binary gender system. Although 

Miedtke concedes that this selection could also be 

accessed by girls, the example itself as well as its 

inclusion in a volume otherwise concerned with the 

effects of gender-defined roles on women is 

surprising. 

 The book usefully combines examinations of 

the reception of women’s writing and case studies of 

specific authors with the investigation of practical 

issues. Examples of the latter are Miedtke’s 

contribution as well as Elisabeth Roters-Ullrich’s 

analysis of the real-life constraints faced by women 

authors. She provides a survey of the variety of 

initiatives designed to encourage development 

opportunities and collaboration among women, but 

also highlights the factors that often make it difficult 

for them to engage with these services and 

networks.  Among them are the necessity for paid 

employment and the detrimental impact this has on 

writing activities, as well as the demands placed on 

women by family life. She further notes another 

obstacle in the fact that events, prizes and projects 

of high prestige are often dominated by male 

authors. Roters-Ullrich thus paints a gloomy 

picture, but articles like hers are necessary as they 

draw attention to unequal situations. 

The collection primarily centers around 

authors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, 



 

  

	
  
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and the two chapters by Geipel and Ludwig 

examine the work of female authors in the German 

Democratic Republic. While Geipel gives an 

overview of the risks taken by dissidents, Ludwig 

analyses the role of literature in the GDR both as 

an instrument for the education of society as well as 

a site of regime-critical discussions. Her analysis of 

the tensions experienced by women writers caught 

between relative economic equality and the 

encouragement of traditional roles within the 

family, the need to connect with their readership by 

thematizing common struggles and a reluctance to 

take on an educational role, implicit permission to 

push the boundaries and pressure not to veer too 

far towards criticism, is particularly informative and 

gives a nuanced picture of GDR feminist writing. 

Rude-Porubská presents a valuable overview 

of the different expectations placed upon female 

and male translators. The translator’s invisibility 

has been a central concern of translation scholars 

during the past two decades, and Rude-Porubská 

demonstrates successfully that female translators are 

expected to be less visible than their male 

colleagues. In addition to her chapter, which 

explicitly looks at the position of female translators, 

other chapters (Schneider, Roters-Ullrich, Wedel) 

also acknowledge the importance of translated 

books for the development of feminism in the 

German-speaking territories. Translation issues are 

often ignored outside the field of translation studies, 

and the emerging interest of scholars of modern 

German literature in translation shows that this 

discipline has much to offer to literary and cultural 

theories. The references to translation demonstrate 

the depth of engagement of the present book with a 

range of fields relevant to an investigation into the 

role of women in literature. 

Not surprisingly, the section on feminism in 

the media age includes a chapter on Charlotte 

Roche’s and Helene Hegemann’s recent 

publications. Both authors have been widely 

discussed in the German- and English-language 

media, and Smith-Prei and Stehle echo Germanists’ 

increasing interest in the ways in which critics 

emphasize the physical appearance of young female 

authors and draw comparisons with their fictional 

characters. The analysis presented here adds 

another dimension to the debate by examining the 

authors’ public appearances as feminist 

performance art. 

Fiktionen und Realitäten is thus appropriately 

titled: its chapters discuss feminism in fiction and 

highlight inequalities in the German-language 

literary environment. The book references themes 

and viewpoints prevalent in German literary 

scholarship at the moment and expands upon them. 

The range of perspectives and the level of detail 

presented here make this a very useful book for 

scholars interested in a variety of aspects of 

women’s writing as well as those new to the field. 

 

Jirku, Brigitte E. and Marion Schluz. Fiktionen und 
Realitäten. Schriftstellerinnen im 
deutschsprachigen  Literaturbetrieb. Frankfurt 
am Main: Peter Lang, 2013. 

 

 



 

  

	
  
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Religion, Reason and Culture in 

the Age of Goethe 

Edited by Elisabeth Krimmer and 

Patricia Anne Simpson 

Michelle Reyes 

Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago 

 

eligion, Reason and Culture in the Age of 

Goethe provides a new and refreshing 

perspective on the relation between 

religion and reason as it evolved during 

the German Enlightenment. The focus of this 

edited volume is threefold: it argues that this period 

was not absent of religion, but rather was infused 

with a plurality of religious beliefs and rational 

thought; it examines the various ways in which 

literature and philosophy engaged with this 

plurality, on the one hand distancing themselves 

from institutionalized Christianity, while on the 

other hand continuing to invoke a variety of 

religious frameworks; and finally, it analyzes the 

varying results of these new expressions. 

 The collection begins with an exploration of 

major Enlightenment concepts. In the first essay, 

Claire Baldwin argues that at the heart of human 

experience in Christoph Wieland’s “Gedanken über 

den Freyen Gebrauch der Vernunft” and his 

fictional biography, Peregrinus Proteus, is a 

combination of critical reason and religious desire. 

Tom Spencer, conversely, considers how Johann 

Gottfried von Herder’s philosophy reconciles 

theology, rationalist metaphysics and natural 

science in his ruminations on death and 

immortality. 

 The next section focuses on how Schiller and 

Goethe critically engaged with religion as an 

institution. Jeffrey L. High considers the political 

role of religion and its civilizing effects in Friedrich 

Schiller’s “Die Sendung Moses”, both in the past 

and the present. Elisabeth Krimmer examines how 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe renegotiates 

Immanuel Kant’s religious categories of 

“Kirchenglauben” and “Vernunftglauben” in 

Faust, while Jane K. Brown argues that Goethe 

rewrites the religious narrative of Wolfgang 

Amadeus Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte into 

more secularized forms in his works, Die natürliche 

Tochter and his “Novelle”. 

 The third section singularly addresses the role 

of Catholicism. Two of the essays are concerned 

with its iconography. Helmut J. Schneider argues 

that, on account of the lack of Anschaulichkeit in both 

Protestant and Enlightenment rhetoric, Heinrich 

von Kleist utilizes the visible power of Catholic 

imagery in a variety of his works to illumine his 

search for the meaning of life. Patricia Anne 

Simpson, conversely, ponders the new image of 

Madonna posited in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry 

and its purposes for his new “mythology”. Lisa 

Beesley provides a different perspective, exploring 

the relationship between historical and literary 

Catholic conversion narratives and madness. 

 The fourth and final section provocatively 

evaluates how traditional binaries are conflated in 

certain philosophical treaties. John H. Smith first 

considers how Gottfried Leibniz’ monadic vitalism 

is foundational to understanding Baruch Spinoza 

and then how this concept is refashioned in the 

works of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich 

Schleiermacher. Frederick Amrine goes a step 

further to argue that the philosophical thought of 

R 



 

  

	
  
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Spinoza, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Gilles Deleuze 

are deeply connected at the point of intellectual 

intuition. 

 This edited volume covers a vast amount of 

ground and incorporates many essays that are 

relevant beyond Enlightenment studies alone, such 

as High’s discussion on the historical-political stages 

of civilization and Amrine’s link to Deleuzian 

philosophy. Taken as a whole, it presents many 

literary and philosophical perspectives that promote 

new understandings of eighteenth century concepts, 

as well as of modern concepts in general. 

 

Krimmer, Elisabeth and Patricia Anne Simpson, 
Eds. Religion, Reason and Culture in the Age 
of Goethe.  Rochester, New York: Camden 
House, 2013.  

 

 

Frauen dichten anders. Deutsche 

Dichterinnen vom Mittelalter bis 

zur Gegenwart. 

Edited by Marcel Reich-Ranicki 

Renate Fuchs 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 

 

hen Marcel Reich-Ranicki died on 

September 18, 2013, his portrait 

appeared on the front pages of 

many daily papers. It was a tribute to a man who, 

having survived the Warsaw ghetto, would become 

Germany’s most prominent contemporary literary 

critic and would have an unprecedented impact on 

postwar German writing. In fact, no one 

communicated to an entire society the importance 

of literature as well as he did.  

 And so it is a gift for all to receive in the year 

2013 yet another edition of his book Frauen dichten 

anders especially because it emphasizes the 

importance of women’s writing. In the afterword, 

the editor Reich-Ranicki, addresses what he refers 

to as “risky” subject of women authors. He begins 

with the mention of Ruth Klüger’s book Frauen 

lesen anders which clearly served as an inspiration 

for the title of his own book and, at the same time, 

underlines the importance of such a “banal” fact 

that indeed women not only read differently but 

also write differently. Women, according to Reich-

Ranicki, react differently to the world around them, 

and this is precisely that “risky terrain” he 

mentions. If one were to ask whether literature and 

art were exclusively male domains, the answer 

would definitely be “no!” Unfortunately in the past, 

the number of female writers was quite small 

especially in Germany, where, in contrast with 

England, France, or Poland, it took a long time 

until the literary public sphere accepted them 

without reservations. Reich-Ranicki explains how 

in the works of numerous German female authors 

the subconscious and irrational elements dominate, 

rather than the intellectual ones. Hence, feelings 

and metaphysical worldview are in the foreground 

of their works. On one hand, one should beware of 

the tendency to assign women’s writing to some 

specific rigid category, warns Reich-Ranicki, on the 

other hand, one may not ignore all the idiosyncratic 

marks of their poetry. To end this chain of 

confusing contradictions, he contends that 

ultimately richness of female poetry is best 

demonstrated with individual poems.  

 The anthology draws together two hundred 

fifty poems from sixty-four German poetesses. 

W 



 

  

	
  
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Despite this, Reich-Ranicki forewarns, the edition is 

by no means complete. The chosen poems are to be 

merely accepted as examples or suggestions for 

further reading, and – most importantly, they must 

be understood as a form of advocacy for the poetry 

of women – “and not although, but because they 

compose poems differently.”  

 Reich-Ranicki opens his anthology with an 

anonymous poem – presumably written by a nun – 

from the 12th century entitled »Dû bist mîn«. In 

contrast with, for instance, Susan L. Cocalis’s book 

The Defiant Muse. German Feminist Poems from the 

Middle Ages to the Present. A Bilingual Anthology, 

Reich-Ranicki’s publication does include the 

earliest instance of women’s poetry even though it is 

uncertain whether the poet was indeed a woman.   

 It must be noted that only first forty-eight 

pages out of the total of two hundred forty six are 

dedicated to women authors who wrote until the 

end of the 19th century. The last author mentioned 

in that part of the book is Friederike Kempner 

(1836-1904), a German-Jewish poet from the 

Prussian Province of Posen (today Poland). If one 

were to compare poems chosen by Marcel Reich-

Ranicki with the ones proposed by Gisela Brinker-

Gabler in her book entitled Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 

16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Gedichte und 

Lebensläufe, one would see that Brinker-Gabler not 

only provides short biographical sketches, but also 

focuses much more on the years before the 1900s. 

The authors omitted by Marcel Reich-Ranicki can 

be then found in Gisela Brinker-Gabler’s book, for 

instance, Elisabeth von Branuschweig-Lüneburg 

(1510-1558), Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch 

(1651-1716), Sophie Mereau (1770-1804), Louise 

Aston (1814-1871), Louise Otto (1819-1895), Ada 

Christen (1839-1901) and several others.  

 The authors who are very well represented in 

the Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s anthology are Else 

Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Nelly Sachs (1891-

1970), Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974), Rose 

Ausländer (1901-1988), Ilse Aichinger (1921-), 

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Sarah Kirsh 

(1935-2013), just to name a few. Several poems 

from each of the authors are featured and they 

address a variety of themes, such as, love, war, 

philosophy, metaphysics, nature, urban setting, and 

the weather. To be sure a great number of 

contemporary authors are introduced, however 

there are some feminist writers missing who bluntly 

challenge oppressive gender roles and openly 

concern themselves with sexual issues. By way of 

illustration the poem of J. Monika Walther (1945-) 

“Die Frau, die Sich im Koitus mit Bewegt” might 

be mentioned. Her poems are to be found in Susan 

L. Cocalis’s publication that focuses on feminist 

poetry informed by the sensibility that the sexes are 

unreservedly equal. 

 Because of the chronological order of the 

poems, the anthology walks the reader through 

German history or that of German-Jewish writers. 

Furthermore, apart form political upheaval the 

reader is confronted with a growing self-awareness 

of the poetesses and their clear naming and labeling 

of violence they encounter or experience. For 

instance, the descriptions of domestic violence in 

the poems of Hertha Kräftner is much more 

pronounced when the author does not stylize 

herself as a victim and does not celebrate her 

powerlessness, but rather observes events in an 

unrestrained manner. The poems of women speak 



 

  

	
  
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about ill-fated love and resistance against it and 

describe how to bear up against pain. 

Confrontation with the pain, whether due to social 

circumstance, war, or persecution, can be 

countered with hope. The poem “Masada” by 

Daniela Danz (1976-) speaks to that effect when it 

describes the last stand in the First Jewish Revolt 

against Rome, which took place on the 

mountaintop of Masada, the site of a palace-fortress 

completed by Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.E.). 

Rather than allow themselves to be taken prisoners 

and thus enslaved, the Jews chose to commit mass 

suicide so that when the Romans entered the 

fortress, they found only seven survivors. The poem 

lends itself to a feminist interpretation, as many of 

those who died were women and children.  

 The anthology ends with the poem “nebel” by 

Nadja Küchenmeister (1981-) who treats the theme 

of deeply unhappy love. Reich-Ranicki not only 

begins the anthology with the love poem but also 

closes it with the poem on the same topic. If one 

were to compare both pieces of poetry, one could 

see how the approach to the theme has progressed.    

 With the “Literary Quartet,” a television show 

launched in 1988, Marcel Reich-Ranicki set out to 

interest a larger public in reading, and he indeed 

turned critical literary cogitation into a popular 

pastime by reaching millions of viewers. Let us 

hope his edition of poems written by women will 

reach millions of readers of both genders. 

Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, Ed. Frauen dichten anders. 
 Deutsche Dichterinnen vom Mittelalter bis zur 
 Gegenwart. Frankfurt am Main:  Insel Verlag, 
 2013. 
 
 
 

Ghetto Voices in Contemporary 

German Culture: Textscapes, 

Filmscapes, Soundscapes. 

By Maria Stehle 

Kevina King 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

 

he notion that Germany has changed 

drastically since unification and is ready to 

be a global player again rests on a 

conception of a fundamentally new Germany, one 

that has left its Nazi past and Cold War division 

behind, and emerged into a new era as a peaceful and 

multicultural nation. Maria Stehle, in Ghetto Voices in 

Contemporary German Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, 

Soundscapes interrogates this notion and reveals the 

tensions between such views and the realities of a 

country that still struggles with “racist discrimination 

[defining] understandings of space and belonging” (3). 

She illuminates these issues by examining cultural 

products that engage with the trope of the “ghetto”, 

and uses the problematic and contested term as a 

“political and highly rhetorical term” (12). To be 

clear, the depictions from the mid-1990s to the early 

twenty-first century in film, fiction, and music that 

Stehle draws on in her work have to be understood as 

“reactionary” or as efforts “to connect German 

cityscapes to images of global cities: the ghettos of the 

world” (2). Some depictions, “respond to the 

experience of exclusion with defiance,” while others 

“deconstruct the idea of the ghetto and instead 

develop a vision of a multicultural, transnational 

cityscape” (2). Stehle frames her analyses of these 

German “ghettos” theoretically by using Arjun 

Appadurai’s concepts of “mediascape” and 

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“ethnoscape”, while focusing on cultural productions 

made by minorities to describe the complex process of 

how these “ghettos” are in constant flux and 

contestation, but still correlate to their  fictional 

“image circulation” and their “social realities” (3).   

 Stehle’s first chapter following the introduction 

focuses on two literary works by Feridun Zaimoglu 

from the 1990s: Kanak Sprak (1995) and Koppstoff (1999). 

Both written within a “political landscape in flux . . . 

Zaimoglu’s texts offer commentary on this [German] 

project of national redefinition; beyond a national 

identity,” (20) and, as Stehle asserts, reflect German 

“cityscapes” as territories that have to be claimed and 

owned in order to respond to racially motivated 

exclusion.  She argues that Zaimoglu’s protagonists do 

not necessarily project racism out of the “ghetto,” but 

that the “ghetto” in his texts serves various functions, 

all related to the creation of space, investigating “how 

borders of the ghetto are defined, who defines them, 

and who defends them in late 1990s Germany” (56). 

 The second chapter illuminates the importance 

of what is perceived as the “ghettocentric films of the 

1990s and the early-twenty-first century” (66). Not 

dismissing these films as mere confirmations of 

stereotypes of the urban spaces in other cities could 

lead to a helpful understanding of the need for a 

“transnational circulation of cinematic images” (67). 

In this chapter Stehle analyzes six films in which she 

identifies similarities in events and conflicts. Kurz und 

schmerzlos (1995), Dealer (1999), Kanak Attack (2000), 

Ghettokids (2002), Knallhart (2006), and Chiko (2008) are 

all examples of the importance of this genre, since it 

offers, as she delineates, “a range of perspectives on 

the politics of space, identifications, and representation 

in the ghetto; in spite of their rather similar topics, 

they depict many different Germanys” (120).  

 The last chapter of this work discusses how 

various German hip-hop and rap music artists “create 

ghetto soundscapes” (129). Stehle investigates artists 

such as Ecko Fresh, Bushido, Cora E, Samy Deluxe, 

Lady Bitch Ray and King Orgasmus to complicate the 

different perspectives and meanings of “ghetto.”  

While the authors and directors Stehle analyses in the 

previous chapters depicted the “ghetto” as an 

imagined or real physical place, the artists in Stehle’s 

third chapter rarely define the “ghetto” as “a physical 

or actual ghetto. Their descriptions of the physical 

space of the ghetto often serve a different function: the 

ghetto is a public space to own and to control, but it is 

also a concept to collapse, reverse, and deconstruct” 

(175).   

 With the question of space and belonging is at 

the core of her study, Stehle convincingly argues for a 

consideration of the “ghetto” as a challenge to 

provincialism, racism and nationalism that employs 

transnational and transcultural frameworks to actively 

create alternative spaces for the so-called other. She 

successfully combines Arjun Appadurai’s “scapes” by 

contextualizing these discussions within a 

contemporary German cultural scene that reflects 

Germany’s problematic political and social 

developments. The real accomplishment of this work, 

however, is that Maria Stehle has managed to 

elucidate the complex overlapping of racialized, 

gendered, and classist exclusions.  A “ghetto” voice 

not only bears, but also perpetuates a response to a 

stratified system “entrenched in national narratives” 

(185). 

 

Maria Stehle. Ghetto Voices in Contemporary German  
 Culture: Textscapes, Filmscapes, Soundscapes. 
 Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 
 



 

  

	
  
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Translingual Identities. Language 

and the Self in Stefan Heym and 

Jakov Lind. 

By Tamar Steinitz  

Simone Stirner 

University of California, Berkley 

 

amar Steinitz’s work Translingual 

Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan 

Heym and Jakov Lind, makes an 

important contribution to the critical 

reception of the two modernist writers and to the 

study of translingual literature and the 

phenomenon of translingualism in general. What 

links the two authors Heym and Lind is their 

decision to write in a language other than their 

mother tongue, choosing English rather than 

German as a means for artistic expression. Both 

Heym and Lind fled Nazism. Exile for them did not 

only encompass a geographical move but a move 

from one language to another and with that a 

crossing over into a new linguistic identity. In close 

engagement with a number of works by the two 

authors, Steinitz explores the nature and 

consequences of this linguistic switch. Her main 

focus in this investigation is, however, less the 

linguistic aspect of the works, but rather what she 

sees as the psychological effects of the translingual 

shift – a schizophrenic, fragmented condition in 

Lind’s case and a “productive doubling of 

perspective” in the work of Heym (81). 

 The introduction gives a brief, yet dense and 

multi-faceted overview of the phenomenon of 

translingualism and its discussion in literary 

criticism, philosophy, and psychology. It situates the 

two lesser known writers next to other examples of 

translingual authors including Vladimir Nabokov 

and Joseph Conrad and sets up a theoretical 

background for what will be a driving argument for 

the rest of the study: language constructs individual 

consciousness. Adopting a new language therefore 

involves a move towards a new discursive identity 

(3). The first chapter investigates the 

autobiographical writing of the Austrian Jakov Lind 

(1927-2007). Building on the notion of 

schizophrenia, Steinitz analyzes how Lind’s 

“creation of a false self in a foreign language, 

becomes a coping strategy throughout his life” (57). 

Lind’s autobiographical writing in a newly adopted 

language is an attempt to create a unified self, to 

artistically forge a new, unbroken identity. Yet, 

according to Steinitz, the “psychic split initially 

caused by traumatic and repressed events” proves 

resilient and cannot be overcome (57). The writing 

of Stefan Heym (1913-2001) exhibits a different 

way of responding to the challenges of 

translingualism. In her reading of Heym’s novel 

The Crusaders, Steinitz arrives at the conclusion 

that Heym – as opposed to Lind – manages to 

overcome the psychological, translingual split by 

freeing himself from any national identification and 

assuming the positive role of a mediator between 

nations, cultures, and languages instead. The third 

chapter places Stefan Heym next to Jakov Lind and 

examines different ways of authorial self-fashioning 

(e.g., The Writer as Madman, The Writer and 

Truth, The Writer as Translator) that reflect the 

writers’ relation to language. This comparative 

analysis confirms for Steinitz the conclusions of the 

previous chapters: “Heym, unlike Lind, is able to 

T 



 

  

	
  
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split his self between two languages and cultures 

without, by and large, suffering a crisis of identity, 

as his identity is not bound with nationality or with 

language: it is bound with an idea and an ideal” 

(130). The fourth chapter continues this 

comparative approach, now focusing on the way in 

which both authors rework the figure of the 

Wandering Jew that reflects, in Steinitz’s eyes, their 

own translingual trajectories. Again, Heym and 

Lind emerge as two opposite models. In Lind’s 

work, Steinitz recognizes the Wandering Jew as a 

disintegrative figure; in Heym’s work he appears as 

a figure of redemption. This opposition between the 

positive/productive and negative/destructive effects 

of translingualism, which Steinitz identifies on 

various levels in the writings of Lind and Heym are, 

for her, not particular merely to the authors in 

question, but can be read more widely as 

archetypes: “translingualism as loss as opposed to 

translingualism as an opportunity, and 

fragmentation versus mediation” (187).  

  While these models are convincing in and of 

themselves and open up new and productive 

perspectives on translingualism, the way they map 

perfectly onto the two authors might, in the end, 

bring to light some limitations of the study. Steinitz 

does not problematize these models or elucidate 

how the authors may challenge this neat opposition. 

Can the picture really be that black and white? Is 

there nothing in Heym that complicates the image 

of the mediator between languages and cultures, no 

instance where traces of the experience of a loss 

surface? And with regard to Lind, are there no 

moments in his work where new opportunities 

emerge from within the experience of loss and 

fragmentation? Lind’s autobiography “fails to 

reveal a real self”, according to Steinitz (57), yet this 

conclusion is drawn from the content of the work 

only and does not, for instance, engage with the 

complexities of its language. Admittedly, Steinitz 

specifically notes that her focus lies on the 

psychological effects of the move to a new language 

and not on the linguistic aspects of the two authors’ 

writings. In a study that focuses on translingual 

identities, however, the absence of engagement with 

the linguistic and stylistic dimensions of the works is 

to my mind a shortcoming, despite the author’s 

disclaimer. The fact that the linguistic dimension 

can contribute significantly to an understanding of 

the translingual aspects in a given work is proven by 

Steinitz herself. Her discussion of Lind’s Travels to 

the Enu convincingly shows how the German 

language underlies and influences the English 

narrative tale by way of intertextual relations to a 

German work (104). In the context of the study as a 

whole, however, such a language-centered analysis 

remains the exception. Thus, while the content of 

the narratives might support Steinitz’s reading of 

Heym and Lind as two opposing models with 

respect to the translingual condition, the question of 

whether the picture she draws is also supported by 

the language of the texts remains open.  

 Steinitz takes a psychologically informed 

approach to translingualism. This is revealing as it 

places the question of subjectivity, linguistic 

identity, and trauma productively in the centre of 

the discussions of this phenomenon. Yet at times, 

the pathologizing of the authors’ conditions seems 

forced. Steinitz insists on the concept of the 

“psychic split,” a medical state that is not the result 

of a conscious, willed act, but rather the effect of 

conditions outside of a subject’s control. This 



 

  

	
  
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acknowledges the fact that historico-political 

circumstances violently triggered the shift from 

German to English in both authors. Lind’s move to 

another language is, in this sense, “an expression of 

a psychic split caused by the trauma of war and the 

loss of family and home” (22). At the same time, 

however, the concept of the “psychic split” seems to 

undercut the agency embedded in the move from 

one language to another. The implied passive 

suffering of the subject risks obstructing the 

understanding of the translingual move as an 

active, political choice taken by the author. 

 This being said, Steinitz’s study offers new 

ways of thinking about Stefan Heym, Jakov Lind, 

and translingualism in general. It is convincingly 

informed by a historical and biographical 

contextualization of the authors and draws on a 

wide range of theoretical positions to support its 

arguments without overly “theorizing” the object of 

her study. Steinitz manages to draw attention to 

Heym and Lind, whose work has largely and 

unjustly gone unnoticed by critics. It constitutes an 

important contribution to the scholarship on the 

two authors. And finally, in moving beyond the 

national paradigm, Translingual Identities joins the 

emerging strand of modernist studies that 

challenges this still pervasive national mode, 

creating an awareness for the interstices, the 

moments of border-crossing and literary transfer 

within modernist literature not only on a 

geographical scale, but also in the realm of 

language.  

 

Steinitz, Tamar. Translingual Identities: Language 
and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind. 
Rochester: Camden House. 2013. 

 

 

Huck Finn: nach Mark Twain. 

Graphic Novel 

By Olivia Vieweg  

Alex Hogue 

University of Cincinnati 

 

t first glance, Olivia Vieweg’s 

translation of Mark Twain’s novel The 

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into 

German and adaptation into a graphic novel points 

to a universality of appeal among great works of 

literature. Vieweg’s adaptation, however, is not 

merely a retelling of a classic story. Rather, she 

accomplishes the feat of relocating the story to 

Germany and in doing so, skillfully adapts the 

critiques of the antebellum South in Twain’s novel 

to the reunified East.  

 Vieweg’s Huck Finn is set in Halle an der Saale 

in 2013, twenty-three years after reunification, a 

timeline that adds to the applicability of the story 

for modern times, given Twain’s original setting of 

the mid-1880s, some twenty years after the end of 

the American Civil War. This parallel is 

strengthened by the way Vieweg adapts the social 

criticisms of Twain’s time to contemporary 

Germany. While Twain’s book is full of American 

Southern regionalisms, the language of Vieweg’s 

characters reflects youth culture and slang more 

than regional dialect, but is diluted with enough 

standard German to be intelligible to any reader.  

 In the graphic novel, Finn is under the care of 

a widow in the city who sends him to school, helps 

him learn to read, and lovingly cares for him as if 

he were her own. Finn’s father, the only surviving 

A 



 

  

	
  
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member of his family, and is described by Finn as 

“jetzt fast fünfzig Jahre alt, hatte fettige Haare und stank 

fürchterlich. Sein Gesicht hatte keine Farbe … Es war so 

weiß, dass man allein vom Anblick krank werden könnte” 

(27). While he is initially sober, he soon returns to 

the bottle and to his abuse of Finn.  

 Juxtaposed to Finn is the Asian prostitute Jin, 

who works at a brothel called Mississippi. The 

analog for the escaped slave Jim in Twain’s work, 

Jin flees the brothel when she learns that the owner, 

Maik, is planning to sell her to another brothel in 

Köln. While Finn’s motivations to run away center 

on his boredom in the care of the widow and his 

fear of his father, Jin’s are for her own safety and to 

gain her freedom. The comparison of human 

trafficking in the sex trade to slavery in the 

American South is a telling one, and combined with 

parallels in the stories’ timelines, as well as the fact 

that Halle was the site of several legal battles against 

the sex trade in the early to mid 2000s underscores 

the critiques of racism and human trafficking 

present in both the late nineteenth and early 

twenty-first centuries.  

 Along their way from Halle to Hamburg, Finn 

and Jin come into the company of the Krüger 

family, who with their yoga, plentiful organic food, 

and open hospitality make Finn feel that this is the 

family he had been missing his whole life. Jin, 

however, is further objectified by the male members 

of the Krüger clan, and leaves them to try and 

rebuild the raft she and Finn had been using. Finn 

soon learns of the Krüger’s thirty-year feud with a 

neighboring family, the Schäfers. When the two 

families finally come to an all-out gunfight over two 

members of their families who have fallen in love, 

Finn escapes and is reunited with Jin. Just as in 

Twain’s novel, the feuding families serve to 

reinforce the critiques of entrenched and 

unquestioned beliefs. Neither family remembers 

how the feud began, but both readily kill members 

of the other without question.  

 Vieweg’s Huck Finn skillfully and successfully 

adapts Mark Twain’s novel to the German 

contemporary context, and in doing so loses none 

of the story’s original satire, thoughtfulness, or 

meaning. The picaresque tale is particularly well 

suited to the graphic novel format, which conveys 

elements of Twain’s narrative visually in a muted 

palette of reds and browns, which underscores the 

bleakness of the societal elements that the story 

critiques. Vieweg’s work, like Twain’s, serves to 

remind the economically and socially powerful that 

just because positive change has occurred, even 

twenty years later, the circumstances of life for all 

have not necessarily improved as much as one 

would like to believe. 

 

Vieweg, Olivia. Huck Finn: nach Mark Twain. Graphic  
 Novel. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 2013.