Edinburgh German Yearbook 15: Tracing German Visions of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century

This volume explores Germany's relationship with its imagined East in light of the Second World War, challenging stereotypes and ignorance and offering alternative perspectives through cultural production.

Format: Hardback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 20 September 2022
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Reconsidering the German tendency to define itself vis-à-vis an eastern Other in light of fresh debate regarding the Second World War, this volume and the cultural products it considers expose and question Germany's relationship with its imagined East. Germany has long defined itself in opposition to its eastern neighbors: its ideas around cultural prestige and its expressions of xenophobia seem inevitably to return to an imagined eastern Other. Central to the consideration of such projections is the legacy of the Second World War, the subject of fresh debate since 1989: after four decades of political antagonism and cultural disjuncture, the events of the war on the Eastern Front have been rediscovered by Western audiences and have come to occupy complex, shifting positions in the memory culture of the postsocialist states. However, German ignorance of Eastern European experiences of war and genocide, enduring stereotypes, and prescriptive ideas about remembrance have been major stumbling blocks to the emergence of a transnational memory culture considered just by all parties. Despite mass immigration to Germany from the east and intensive contact between German speakers and its cultures, German-language cultural production continues largely to represent Eastern Europe as unknown, wild, and inaccessible. By contrast, the writers and filmmakers under discussion in the present volume have worked with and against such tropes to put forward alternative perspectives. Like their works, the contributions to this volume place the conflicts and prejudices of the twentieth century into a wider historical perspective, exposing and questioning the nature of Germany's relationship with its imagined East.

Contributors: Deirdre Byrnes, Raluca Cernahoschi, Shivani Chauhan, Enikő Dácz, Olha F.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781640141193