John David Pizer - Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic

John David Pizer

Ambivalent Literary Farewells to the German Democratic Republic

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by

Irene Kacandes

Volume

John David Pizer

What is Lost

ISBN 9783110724080

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110725032

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110725100

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

My work on this book benefitted greatly from a sabbatical leave for the spring 2020 semester generously granted to me by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Louisiana State University. I had expected during this time to conduct research at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, but the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in March of that year made my stay in Germany impossible. Undoubtedly the time in Marbach would have enriched my research, but extensive internet searches had to substitute for archival work. I am indebted to the LSU and Tulane libraries for most of the material I used. A number of individuals helped shape the revisions I undertook and led to improvements in both style and substance, as well as insights I gleaned through conversation and correspondence. Among them are series editor Professor Irene Kacandes, who was also one of the manuscripts readers and made many suggestions from which I greatly benefitted. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the second, anonymous, reader of the manuscript for their suggestions. Professor Stephen Brockmann is one of the leading American scholars of GDR literature and literature written during the early years after reunification. In 2019, I invited him to be a guest speaker at an event held on the LSU campus in November commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event largely put together by my colleague at LSU, Professor Gundela Hachmann. During his stay in Baton Rouge, I had a number of enriching conversations with Professor Brockmann, and we had several email exchanges afterward that greatly benefitted my work. The staff at de Gruyter, particularly Myrto Aspioti and Stella Diedrich, as well as Marvin Ebenezer, who created the proofs and helped tremendously with that process, were of invaluable assistance. I am grateful to professional indexer Tom Norton for preparing the index, and for pointing out a number of spelling errors he discovered in the process of his work. I would also like to thank Dr. Alex Cole, a recent recipient of a PhD in Political Science at my university whose thesis focused on the politics of Gnter Grass. I had a number of illuminating exchanges with Dr. Cole while he worked on his thesis and these discussions certainly benefitted the current study. I wish to thank Professor Robert Blankenship for inviting me to give a paper at a session he put together for the annual German Studies Association conference in Portland Oregon in 2019. The session was entitled Dicht Machen: Poetry, Song, and Linguistic Play in the Works of Christa Wolf. Preparing the paper caused me to reflect on how Wolf used poetry and song throughout the course of her career to challenge the politics of the German Democratic Republic but also to mourn its ultimate demise. I also had some fruitful exchanges with the late Professor Richard Schade on Grass, both in-person and via email.

The first three chapters of this book are greatly expanded versions of articles that originally appeared in two journals and one yearbook. The first version of chapter one appeared as Imagining Resistance to the Colonization of East Germany by West Germany in Novels by Gnter Grass, Christa Wolf, and Volker Braun, in Colloquia Germanica 50.2 (2017): 205227. I would like to thank the co-editor of Colloquia Germanica, Professor Harald Hbusch, for permission to reprint. Chapter two first saw the light of day as Europe in East Berlin: Emine Sevgi zdamars Ostalgic Constructions, Gegenwartsliteratur 17 (2018): 187207. The editor of this yearbook, Professor Paul Michael Ltzeler, was kind enough both to provide permission to reprint and to provide illuminating insights into contemporary German literature in conversations we had when he paid a visit to our campus a number of years ago. The third chapter first appeared as Non-Simultaneity and its Corrective: Thomas Brussigs Ambiguous Engagement with Reunification, German Studies Review 42.1 (2019): 12339. The editor of this journal, Professor Sabine Hake, graciously allowed me to reprint material from this article.

Finally, I would like to thank my family my wife Patricia, daughter Jasmin, mother Roselle, sister Liz and her family for their forbearance while I worked on the manuscript. To them this book is dedicated.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. When I first cite the English title of a German-language work, an asterisk indicates that, as far as I am aware, the cited work has not yet been translated into English. When published translations exist of cited works of both primary and secondary literature, I provide the bibliographic information in the footnotes. I have also provided a list of Primary Works in English Translation for Further Reading. This list contains published translations of the works cited in the current study by the German-language writers of imaginative literature who are the focus of Ambivalent Literary Farewells. In those few instances where I drew upon published translations rather than providing my own translations, those works are listed in the bibliography, either primary or secondary, and not in the list of Primary Works in English Translation for Further Reading.