Suicide In East German Literature

Author : Robert Blankenship
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 157113574X
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suicide in East German Literature written by Robert Blankenship and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature, but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

Author : Michael Zimmermann
Publisher : Peter Lang Pub Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9783631377482
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suicide in the German Novel, 1945-89 written by Michael Zimmermann and published by Peter Lang Pub Incorporated. This book was released on 2002 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THe nearly fifty years between the end of World War II and the reunification of Germany represent a period of intense self-reflection for the German people. Emanating from the literature of this period are the motif of suicide and its ideation of self-destruction. An examination of the motif of suicide in novels from East and West reveals the depth of and reasons for the psychic turmoil. From the collective suicidal impulse of soldiers at Stalingrad to the individual alienation experienced in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, the particular circumstances of suicide as depicted in each novel are uniquely German. Contents: Suicide in the German Novel 1945-49--Suicide in the Novel of the German Democratic Republic--Suicide in the Novel of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Author : Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030693929
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Suicide in Modern Literature written by Josefa Ros Velasco and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the social and contextual causes of suicide, the existential and philosophical reasons for committing suicide, and the prevention strategies that modern fictional literature places at our disposal. They go through the review of Modern fictional literature, in the American and European geographical framework, following the rationales that modern literature based on fiction can serve the purpose of understanding better the phenomenon of suicide, its most inaccessible impulses, and that has the potential to prevent suicide. From the turn of the 20th century to the present, debates over the meaning of suicide became a privileged site for efforts to discover the reasons why people commit suicide and how to prevent this behavior. Since the French sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim published his study Suicide: A Study in Sociology in 1897, a reframing of suicide took place, giving rise to a flourishing group of researchers and authors devoting their efforts to understand better the causes of suicide and to the formation of suicide prevention organizations. A century later, we still keep on trying to reach such an understanding of suicide, the nature, and nuances of its modern conceptualization, to prevent suicidal behaviors. The question of what suicide means in and for modernity is not an overcome one. Suicide is an act that touches all of our lives and engages with the incomprehensible and unsayable. Since the turn of the millennium, a fierce debate about the state’s role in assisted suicide has been adopted. Beyond the discussion as to whether physicians should assist in the suicide of patients with unbearable and hopeless suffering, the scope of the suicidal agency is much broader concerning general people wanting to die.

Author : Florian Huber
Publisher : Little, Brown Spark
ISBN 13 : 031653434X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" written by Florian Huber and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK) The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II. By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death -- for themselves and for their children. "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" recounts this little-known mass event. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.

Author : Josefa Ros Velasco
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 303128982X
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide written by Josefa Ros Velasco and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the continuation of the book Suicide in Modern Literature, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Considering the positive reception of this book, Ros Velasco launches the second part, entitled The Contemporary Writer and their Suicide. This time, leading representatives of various disciplines analyze the literary, philosophical, and biographical works of contemporary writers worldwide who attempted to commit suicide or achieved their goal, looking for covert and overt clues about their intentions in their writings. This book aims to continue shedding light on the social and structural causes that lead to suicide and on the suicidal mind, but also to show that people assiduous to writing usually reflect their intentions to commit suicide in their writings, to explain how these frequently veiled intentions can be revealed and interpreted, and to highlight the potential of artistic, philosophical, and autobiographical writing as a tool to detect suicidal ideation and prevent its consummation in vulnerable people. This book analyzes several case studies and their allusions to their contexts and the socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures they suffered, expressions of their will and agency, feelings of dislocation between the individual, reality, and existential alienation, and literary styles, writing techniques, and metaphorical language.

Author : Thomas W. Goldstein
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139206
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing in Red written by Thomas W. Goldstein and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the German Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its members' professional interests and enable them to act as public intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting their union membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the 1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri.

Author : Stephen Brockmann
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1640141545
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Freest Country in the World written by Stephen Brockmann and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows that while the GDR is generally seen as - and mostly was - an oppressive and unfree country, from late 1989 until autumn 1990 it was the "freest country in the world" the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. Stephen Brockmann's new book explores the year 1989/1990 in East Germany, arguing that while the GDR is generally seen as - and was for most of its forty years - an oppressive and unfree country, from autumn 1989 until the autumn of 1990 it was the "freest country in the world," since the dictatorship had disappeared while the welfare system remained. That such freedom existed in the last months of the GDR and was a result of the actions of East Germans themselves has been obscured, Brockmann shows, by the now-standard description of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a triumph of Western democracy and capitalism. Brockmann first addresses the culture of 1989/1990 by looking at various media from that final year, particularly film documentaries. He emphasizes punk culture and the growth of neo-Nazism and the Antifa movement - factors often ignored in accounts of the period. He then analyzes three later semiautobiographical novels about the period. He devotes chapters to dramatic films dealing with German reunification made relatively soon after the event and to more recent film and television depictions of the period, respectively. The final chapter looks at monuments and memorials of the 1989/1990 period, and a conclusion considers the implications of the book's findings for the present day.

Author : Gerald Fetz
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800734972
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book What Remains written by Gerald Fetz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.

Author : Sonja E. Klocke
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139338
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inscription and Rebellion written by Sonja E. Klocke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employs research on the GDR's healthcare system along with feminist and queer theory to get at socialism's legacy, revealing a specifically East German literary convention: employment of symptomatic female bodies to either enforce or rebel against political and social norms.

Author : Danuta Wasserman
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198834446
Total Pages : 857 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Oxford Textbook of Suicidology and Suicide Prevention written by Danuta Wasserman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 857 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the authoritative Oxford Textbooks in Psychiatry series, the new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Suicidology and Suicide Prevention remains a key text in the field of suicidology, fully updated with new chapters devoted to major psychiatric disorders and their relation to suicide.