Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8
result(s) for
"Germany History 1945-1955 Fiction."
Sort by:
The tin drum
The autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.
Book
Revolting Families
Revolting Families places the literary depiction of familial and intimate relations in 1960s West Germany against the backdrop of public discourse on the political significance of the private sphere. Carrie Smith-Prei focuses on debut works by German authors considered to be part of the “new” and “black” realism movements: Dieter Wellershoff, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Gisela Elsner, and Renate Rasp. Each of the works by these authors uses depictions of neurosis, disgust, vertigo, or violence to elicit a reaction in readers that calls them to political, social, or ethical action.
Revolting Families thus extends the concept of negativity, which has long been part of post-war German philosophical and aesthetic theory, to the body in German literature and culture. Through an analysis of these texts and of contextual discourse, Smith-Prei develops a theoretical concept of corporeal negativity that works to provoke socio-political engagement with the private sphere.
eBook
In another time : a novel
In 1931 Germany, bookshop owner Max meets concert violinist Hanna and fall in love, but Hanna is Jewish and Hitler is coming to power; in 1946 outside Berlin, Hanna wakes up in a field with no memory of the past ten years.
Book
Legal Tender
At first glance, romance seems an improbable angle from which to write a cultural history of the German Democratic Republic. By most accounts the GDR was among the most dour and disciplined of socialist states, so devoted to the rigors of Stalinist aesthetics that the notion of an East German romantic comedy was more likely to generate punch lines than lines at the box office.
But in fact, as John Urang shows inLegal Tender, love was freighted as a privileged site for the negotiation and reorganization of a surprising array of issues in East German public culture between 1949 and 1989. Through close readings of a diverse selection of films and novels from the former GDR, Urang offers an eye-opening account of the ideological stakes of love stories in East German culture. Throughout its forty-year existence the East German state was plagued with an ongoing problem of legitimacy. The love story's unique and unpredictable mix of stabilizing and subversive effects gave it a peculiar status in the cultural sphere.
Urang shows how love stories could mediate the problem of social stratification, providing a language with which to discuss the experience of class antagonism without undermining the Party's legitimacy. But for the Party there was danger in borrowing legitimacy from the romantic plot: the love story's destabilizing influences of desire and drive could just as easily disrupt as reconcile. A unique contribution to German studies,Legal Tenderoffers remarkable insights into the uses and capacities of romance in modern Western culture.
eBook
The aftermath : a novel
Hamburg, 1946. In the British Occupied Zone, thousands of Germans are wandering the rubble, lost and homeless and Colonel Lewis Morgan is charge with overseeing the rebuilding of their devastated city. He is stationed in a grand house on the River Elbe; his wife and their only surviving son will soon be joining him there. But when Lewis meets the German owners of the house, he cannot bring himself to throw them out into the streets. Instead, he insists that the two families live together. In this charged atmosphere, parents and children alike will be forced to confront their true selves as enmity and grief give way to passion and betrayal, their deepest desires, their fiercest loyalties, and the transforming power of forgiveness.
Book
Mussolini
The new edition of this award-winning biography contains fresh insights into one of history's most intriguing figures. By emphasizing the impact of political and social upheaval in shaping Mussolini's image, Bosworth skillfully juxtaposes his subject's renowned brutality against his inner compassion. Mussolini never fails to grip.
eBook
Devastation road
After waking up in a German field at the end of World War II, a man with only flashes of his memory intact searches for his identity while getting caught up in a flood of displaced people, including a teenager with whom he forms an unlikely alliance.
Book
Post-fascist fantasies : psychoanalysis, history, and the literature of East Germany
Post-Fascist Fantasies examines the cultural function of the novels of communist authors in East Germany from a psychoanalytic angle. Various critics have argued that these socialist realist fictions were monolithic attempts to translate Communist dogma into the realm of aesthetics. Julia Hell argues to the contrary that they were in fact complex fictions sharing the theme of antifascism, the founding discourse of the German Democratic Republic. Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek's work on the Communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement. She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, in the GDR's effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.
By focusing on the unconscious fantasies about post-fascist body and post-fascist voice that suffuse the texts of Wolf and others, Hell radically reconceptualizes the notion of the author's subjective authenticity. Since this notion occupies a key position in previous literary-historical accounts of East German culture, Hell's psychoanalytic approach problematizes the established literary model of an \"authentic feminine voice\" that gradually liberates itself from the GDR's dominant ideological narrative. Far from operating solely on a narrowly political level, the novels of Wolf and others were intricate family sagas portraying psychic structures linked in complex ways to the GDR's social dynamics. Hell traces this link through East German literatrure's dominant narrative, a paternal narrative organized around the figure of the Communist father as antifascist hero.
eBook