The department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures had a particularly productive year, with faculty further expanding their body of work and showcasing their academic expertise. This year, faculty have published three edited volumes and three full length books. The topics covered represent part of the vast range of knowledge and interests held across the department.
Adi Nester. Unsettling Difference: Music Drama, the Bible, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity.
Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2025.
Unsettling Difference challenges the major-minor pattern that has framed discussions of German Jewish difference, focusing on instances that fall outside traditional understandings of minority culture. Exploring expressions of Jewish identity and difference in biblical-themed musical dramas and their literary sources, Adi Nester argues that the issue of Jewish difference should be treated as an aesthetic question in the first half of the twentieth century, even amid the rise of pseudoscientific theories about race and blood.
Drawing on the fraught, parallel histories of opera and the modern reception of the Hebrew Bible in Germany, both significant in debates at the time about the nature of Jewish separateness, Unsettling Difference shows how this discourse troubles concepts of Jewish marginality and (non-Jewish) German dominance. Through innovative readings of key works in this tradition—Rudolf Borchardt’s poem, Das Buch Joram; Paul Ben-Haim’s oratorio, Joram; Arnold Schoenberg’s opera, Moses und Aron; Joseph Roth’s novel, Hiob; and Eric Zeisl’s opera, Hiob—Nester shows how these biblical adaptations foreground alternative notions of difference that rely on confusion, ambiguity, radical heterogeneity, excess, and repetition.
Ruth von Bernuth. The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture.
Edited by Gabrielle Anna Berlinger and Ruth von Bernuth
Detrait, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2024.
Exploring the people and contexts that imbue Jewish material culture with its meaning.
In museums, synagogues, antique stores, and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied, and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as “Jewish,” and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? Drawing from material culture studies, folklore studies, and curatorial perspectives, this collection aims to answer these questions and reveal the life histories of Jewish things. Essays consider assemblages ranging from Holocaust ephemera to religious relics and pieces of art. Each time these materials cross geographic, cultural, or social borders, their Jewishness is redefined through new dialogues about maker and user, buyer and seller, insider and outsider. Each contributor’s insight builds bridges between curators, private collectors, scholars, and archivists whose diverse perspectives inform a growing conversation in folklore, religion, and Jewish studies that places material culture at the heart of Jewish cultural and historical narratives. Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.
Richard Langston. Sex und Soziabilität: Schwule Poetik in den 1980er Jahren.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 2024.
In den 1980er Jahren wird Sozialgeschichte als Übergangsphase zu einer sogenannten »neosexuellen Revolution« geschildert, die durch Kommerzialisierung und Trivialisierung gekennzeichnet ist. Im Gegensatz dazu erkundet das Buch, wie und ob sich die deutschsprachige Belletristik riskanten Sex im Zeichen von HIV/AIDS als poetisches Mittel zur Schaffung neuer Gesellschaftsformen vorstellt. Darstellungen von Geschlechtsakten in der Gegenwartsliteratur sind der Germanistik nichts Neues. Der Geschlechtsverkehr als linguistisches, poetisches sowie philosophisches Problem ist schon seit langem ein anerkannter Forschungsgegenstand. Was aber in der Forschungsliteratur nach wie vor fehlt, ist eine poetische Antwort auf Bersanis Herausforderung: Desiderat ist eine literarische Neubewertung der Soziabilität auf dem Wege der poetischen Verarbeitung des Begehrens nach Gleichheit und Entwertung von Differenzen. Dabei stellt sich die wichtige Frage, ob die Belletristik der 1980er-Jahre sich angesichts der Risiken in den ersten Jahren der HIV/AIDS Epidemie eine solche queere Soziabilität überhaupt vorgestellt und falls ja, wie sie sich poetisch manifestiert hat. Anhand ausgewählter Texte von sowohl hetero- als auch homosexuellen Autor*innen (z.B. Fichte, Jelinek, Morshäuser und Schernikau) setzt sich das Buch mit dem (anti-)gesellschaftlichen Charakter des Geschlechtsverkehrs sowie den poetischen Bedingungen auseinander, unter denen experimentierfreudige Texte Sex in Einklang mit einer recodierten Soziabilität bringen wollen.
Richard Langston. Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment.
Ed. R. Langston & I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024.
“Kluge’s Marxism: On Zeppelins and Other Useless Technologies.” In: Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment. Eds. R. Langston & I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024. 143-150.
“Three Interviews on Artificial Intelligence.“ Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch. Vol. 9: Crisis and Astonishment. Ed. R. Langston and I. Simova. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2024. 119-135.
Children’s picture books from the Romantic period. Theatrical stages inspired by Spinoza. Scenes from the Thirty Years’ War reimagined by artificial intelligence. What narrative cannot achieve, Alexander Kluge transposes into the logic of images. The first half of the nineth volume of the “Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch” contains a compilation of Kluge’s most recent image experiments that wrestle with crisis and astonishment in the transatlantic public spheres of the twenty-first century. For Kluge, astonishment not only provokes philosophical reflection but also serves as an essential tool for critically grappling with the society of the spectacle. In addition to dialogues with Oskar Negt, Stefan Aust and painter Katharina Grosse, this volume contains scholarly essays on technology and the new space race, cinema and iconoclasm, revolution and Kluge’s aesthetic politics, and decolonialism and ecocriticism.
Priscilla Layne. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024.
Examining Afro-German artists’ use of Afrofuturist tropes to critique German racial history
The term Afrofuturism was first coined in the 1990s to describe African diasporic artists’ use of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to reimagine the diaspora’s pasts and to counter not only Eurocentric prejudices but also pessimistic narratives. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism focuses on contemporary Black German Afrofuturist literature and performance that critiques Eurocentrism and, specifically, German racism and colonial history. This young generation has, Priscilla Layne argues, engaged with Afrofuturism to disrupt linear time and imagine alternative worlds, to introduce non-Western technologies into the German cultural milieu, and to consider the possibilities of posthumanism. Their experiments in futurist and speculative narratives offer new tools for breaking with the binary thinking about race, culture, and gender identity that have been enforced by repressive ideological and state apparatuses, such as educational, cultural, and police institutions. Rather than providing escapism or purely imaginary alternatives, however, they have created a space—outer and artistic—in which their lives matter.
Priscilla Layne. The Marriage of Maria Braun.
Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2024.
The Marriage of Maria Braun is the most popular film by the enfant terrible director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the leading exponent of the “New German Cinema” of the early sixties to early eighties. It exemplifies his use and abuse of the genre of melodrama. Set in the immediate postwar period and centered around a strong female protagonist, Maria Braun (1978) was the first film in a trilogy that attempts to work through West Germany’s fraught past and the legacy of Nazi Germany through the eyes of characters marginalized by their gender, race, sexuality, or (dis)ability. Maria attempts to navigate the poverty and sexism of the immediate postwar years by making her relationships with men, including the Black American G.I., Bill, as beneficial as possible. In the end, she discovers she has been a pawn in a power game between her husband, Hermann, for whom she has been pining while he has been in prison, and her lover, the industrialist Oswald. Yet Maria is also complicit in racism and white patriarchy, a fact that scholarship on the film has barely registered. In her new reading, Priscilla Layne draws on archival research, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Critical Whiteness Studies to expand on the role of race and gender in the film.