Other Germanies

Questioning Identity in Women's Literature and Art

Edited by Karen Jankowsky & Carla Love

Subjects: German Culture
Series: SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
Paperback : 9780791434505, 318 pages, October 1997
Hardcover : 9780791434499, 318 pages, October 1997

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Table of contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Karen Jankowsky and Carla Love

PART I
DEFINING AND ERASING THE MARGINS: OVERCOMING ETHNICITY?

Encounters with the Other in German Cultural Discourse: Intercultural Germanistik and Aysel Özakin's Journeys of Exile

Ülker Gökberk

Reinventions of Turkey: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Life is a Caravanserai

Margrit Frölich

Rethinking Germanness: Two Afro-German Women Journey "Home"

Erin Crawley

PART II
EXPLORING CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS: POSTMODERN STRATEGIES

Is Female to Nation as Nature is to Culture? Bozena Nemcová , Libuse Moníková , and the Female Folkloric

Katie Trumpener

Between "Inner Bohemia" and "Outer Siberia": Libuse Moníková Destabilizes Notions of Nation and Gender

Karen Jankowsky

Ethno-Documentary Discourse and Cultural Otherness in Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia

Shanta Rao

Amputation, Dismembered Identities, and the Rhythms of Elimination: Reading Pina Bausch

Heidi Gilpin

Deconstructing Identity: Eva-Maria Schön's Origin of Species

Barbara C. Buenger

PART III
CONFRONTING GERMAN HISTORY: CONSTITUTING AN IDENTITY IN FASCISM, STATE SOCIALISM, AND IN THE UNITED GERMANY

German National Identity and the Female Subject: Gerlind Reinshagen's German Trilogy

Angelika Czekay

Pièces d'identité : Piecing Together Mother/ Daughter Identities in Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou

Janice Mouton

Patterns of Self-Destruction: Christa Wolf's What Remains and Monika Maron's Flight of Ashes

Sylvia Kloetzer

Coda: When American Feminists Cross Borders

Edited by Karen Jankowsky and Carla Love

Artist Biographies

Contributors

Index

Explores notions of personal and cultural identity, and offers an introduction to the work of women in literature, film, dance, and visual art in Germany.

Description

This book introduces American audiences to Germany through the perspectives of members of various ethnic groups within the newly unified country and through the mediation of feminist scholars, documenting the artistic contributions to German cultural identity of ten women writers, filmmakers, dancers, and visual artists.

The work of these artists is presented in various ways: as an opportunity for Germans to explore their own repressed identities, as a portrayal of the complex histories of cultural change which foreigners bring into Germany, as the work of piecing together a minority identity in Germany, as a portrayal of the marginalization of women in the construction of the nation, and as the interpenetration of Eastern and Western European cultures.

These artists subvert the process of forming a singular cultural identity by calling into question the creation of a unified personal identity. They represent, for example, the fragmentation of identity through images of amputation, the arbitrary construction of identity through games of chance, the struggle within the writing self to resist censorship in East Germany, and the protest against a culturally imposed identity based on racial categorization.

The volume's eleven articles address issues of multiculturalism, national and personal identity, and avant-garde art, and reflect on the various ways gender and culture interact in the German context.

Karen Jankowsky is Assistant Professor in the Deparment of German and Slavic Studies at Wayne State University. Carla Love is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Reviews

"I found the multiplicity of vantage points. ..stimulating. The objects of analysis are not only culturally diverse, they also originate in a variety of disciplines—literature, theatre, art, film, dance. " — Susan Derwin, Department of German, University of California, Santa Barbara