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Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book's cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.

Explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times. Germany's twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for the postwar German states. This volume approaches that challenge through critical analysis of \"violence elsewhere,\" that is, constructions of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of \"violence elsewhere\" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged meanings and functions of violence in German culture. The essays in this volume explore selected, emblematic works from East, West, and, later, unified Germany, which imagine violence in, for example, Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective \"other\" German state and in the German past. Drawing on fields including cultural, literary, film, visual, and gender studies, it introduces multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic of violence elsewhere that may be transferable beyond German studies too. As such, the volume allows us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities, and to look beyond binary notions of \"here\" and \"elsewhere,\" \"self\" and \"other.\" It thus expands our understanding of what German culture is and could be. Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone. Chapter 8, \"Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized \"9/11\" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European Research Council. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

This chapter takes its cue from Ian Wallace's pioneering work on the poet Volker Braun and focuses on Braun's most recent collection of poetry Auf die schönen Possen (2005) to read it as a 'poetry of lateness'. This involves analysing themes of old age, illness, death and epitaph as well as reading it against theories of 'late style' as set out especially by T.W Adorno and Edward Said. I argue that the collection offers individual and collective reorientation through an aesthetic of 'catastrophe' (in Adorno's sense), which at once recognises a personal and historical lateness but also articulates a form of resistance against it. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Bodenloser Satz was one of the most significant literary products of the period of Glasnost leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Braun's indictment of the GDR's political system and economic policy is conveyed through a narrative illustrating their destructive consequences for the landscape and their alienating effect on the people. His images of physical displacement and loss of territory not only reflected the ideological disorientation in East Germany but also anticipated the disenfranchisement of the intelligentsia in the winter of 1989-90. Since reunification they have remained a vehicle for critique of instrumental rationalism and the marginalisation and injustices associated with global capitalism. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The GDR was and is - even two decades after its demise - the fixed point in Volker Braun's life's work. Indeed, his life and work can neither be separated from each other, nor from the East German state. The three reflect each other in Braun's texts as a 'Life/Work/GDR', in a range of dissolves between fiction and reality, including auto fiction. His writing is, however, less a fictional embellishment of biographical experience than an imaginative experimentation with different positions in society. In Hinze-Kunze-Romzan, Braun represents the key dilemma of institutional stagnation, presenting it as something which can be overcome by force of will, in the form of a universalised Eros. In contrast, Braun's texts after the Wende seek to come to terms with the loss of this projection, which implies both self-denial and a reduced form of life.

Volker Braun's slim volume Das Mittagsmahl (2007) may be viewed as an autobiography - or rather a fictionalized autobiography; one could also call it a chronicle or a memory book. The volume attempts to reconstruct the contradictory character of Erich Braun, Volker Braun's father, who died a 'hero's death' in WWII, when the son was barely six years old. Written in the first person singular, Braun's text narrates his memories from two levels: from the perspective of a young child, as well as from the perspective of the mature author who spent his formative years in the GDR and had to make adjustments to find his place in the FRG. Working to unearth the truth about those wartime years and about his father's thinking, Braun probes deeply into memory - his own, his mother's, his relatives' - and the way it roots him in the past, in the present, and in the future. Analysing the father-figure, Braun questions himself, his own historical and political consciousness. Less interested in blaming than in understanding the generation of his father, Braun poses hard questions about responsibility, about trauma - national, social, familial, and personal - and about the long pall it casts over both space and time.

Volker Braun's documentary drama Guevara oder der Sonnenstaat (1975) challenges political and literary-historical manifestations of East German humanist internationalism. In particular, his protagonists are embedded in debates on the political efficacy of Expressionist and Socialist Realist iterations of the New Man. With recourse to Ernesto \"Che\" Guevara's hombre nuevo and biographical accounts of Tamara Bunke (a.k.a.Tania), he intervenes in those debates to articulate new, revolutionary subjectivities, anticipating more sophisticated articulations of the inter- and transnational German subjects that find literary expression beginning in the 1980s.

This contribution offers a portrait of Volker Braun the poet, from his early commitment to socialist ideals - at a time when he measured himself against the benchmark of German classical poetry - to the years of mourning that followed the political dislocation of 1976 in the GDR. The accent is placed on Braun's capacity to give memories of the past as well as direct experiences of attachment and friendship a societal dimension that transcends their individual quality. With all hope of internal political renewal gone after 1989, Braun continues his indefatigable search for meaning. Incisive and ironic, he penetrates deeply into the disarray of the contemporary world, demystifying events and language, standing out as a critical voice of European stature. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Tumulus, published in 1999, is a collection of only twelve texts which Volker Braun wrote between 1988 and 1997. The Latin title - meaning 'hill of the dead' or 'sepulchral mound' - sets the tone. Braun' s theme is the death of political ideas, states, empires and, on a very personal level, the death of his mother. By quoting Pliny, Brecht, Büchner and Kafka, Braun places his poems in historical contexts which enable him to expose the cyclical nature of history and the relevance of the past to the present. One might say that Tumulus is a harbinger of themes that will preoccupy the author at the turn of the century. Against the backdrop of the late Roman Empire - a new theme in Braun' s texts - the author focuses on urgent global problems and the author's personal responsibility in a rapidly changing, chaotic world. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]