The nation-state is a European invention of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the case of the German nation in particular, this invention was tied closely to the idea of a homogeneous German culture with a strong normative function. As a consequence, histories of German culture and literature often are told from the inside—as the unfolding of a canon of works representing certain core values, with which every person who considers him or herself “German” necessarily must identify. But what happens if we describe German culture and its history from the outside? And as something heterogeneous, shaped by multiple and diverse sources, many of which are not obviously connected to things traditionally considered “German”?
Emphasizing current issues of migration, displacement, systemic injustice, and belonging, Germany from the Outside explores new opportunities for understanding and shaping community at a time when many are questioning the ability of cultural practices to effect structural change. Located at the nexus of cultural, political, historiographical, and philosophical discourses, the essays in this volume inform discussions about next directions for German Studies and for the Humanities in a fraught era.
Notes on Contributors Introduction Laurie Ruth Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA I: Reading German Cultural History Differently 1. Finding Odysseus’s Scars Again: Hyperlinked Literary Histories in the Age of Refugees B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA 2. Between the Court and the Port, but never Part of a Nation: Friederike Brun’s Domesticated Cosmopolitanism Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, USA 3. On the Inside Looking Out: Fichte, the University, and the Psychopolitics of German Idealism Laurie Ruth Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 4. Rewriting German Literary History from the Outside in: J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello David Kim, University of California-Los Angeles, USA II: Stories of Expulsion, Exile, and Displacement 5. Looking for Heinrich Heine with Nâzim Hikmet and E.S. Özdamar Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College, USA 6. Between Times and Places: German Identity in Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s Refugee Memoirs from Spain and Portugal (31 August – 1 September 1939) Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 7. Writing Germany with Brazil: Julia Mann’s Memoirs Veronika Füchtner, Dartmouth College, USA 8. From Vienna to the Midwest: Austrian Refugees and Quaker Rescue Efforts after 1938 Bettina Brandt, Pennsylvania State University, USA 9. Keeping Time: Trauma as Intimate Alienation in Hans Keilson’s Writing Anna M. Parkinson, Northwestern University, USA III: Rewriting German Culture 10. Tracing the Continual Present: Yoko Tawada and Vilém Flusser Gizem Arslan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA 11. Mobilizing the Archive: Marica Bodrozic and Deniz Utl’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Eingewanderten Claudia Breger, Columbia University, USA 12. Constructing an “Inside”: Transcultural Laughter Communities in Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen (2017) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012) Lucas Riddle, Bowdoin College, USA 13. Screening Urban Space and Belonging in Berlin: Contemporary Berliners in Sheri Hagen’s Auf den zweiten Blick/At Second Glance (2013), Ines Johnson-Spain’s Becoming Black (2019), and Amelia Umuhire’s Polyglot (2015) Berna Gueneli, University of Georgia, USA 14. Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti or the Aesthetics of Translation: Universal Love, Mutual Benefits, and Transience Chunjie Zhang, University of California-Davis, USA 15. Clowns in Exile: Hamletmaschine and the (In)human Olivia Landry, Lehigh University, USA Bibliography Index
Laurie Ruth Johnson is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (2016).
Reviews for Germany from the Outside: Rethinking German Cultural History in an Age of Displacement
"""Germany from the Outside is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary German Studies that owes its inspiration to new approaches in postcolonial and migration studies. With its emphasis on stories of expulsion, exile, and displacement from Goethe to Heine, from Brecht to Yoko Tawada, and from Heiner Müller to Özdamar, and with essays written by leading scholars, it will have a lasting impact on international Germanistik."" --Paul Michael Lützeler, Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature, Washington University, St. Louis, USA ""Germany from the Outside forces us to question why teaching and research in German Studies continue to be haunted by the legacies of racial and ethnic nationalism, empire, monolingualism, and one-dimensional notions of mobility and exchange. This volume provides a much-needed critical vocabulary for analyzing what has been perhaps evident yet underappreciated all along: novelists, philosophers, dramatists, and filmmakers have been grappling with complex identifications, leading lives shaped by displacement, fighting against exclusion, and resisting a stable notion of Germanness. The contributors thus illuminate the diversity and plurality that emerges when we look at German cultural production from multiple positions."" --Vance Byrd, Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania, USA"
