German Studies (Theses)
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Item type: Item , Autorschaft und Inszenierung bei Wladimir Kaminer, Dmitrij Kapitelman und Kat Kaufmann(2025-05) Rompf, Hanna MariaThis thesis examines concepts and expressions of authorship in literary and non-literary works by Wladimir Kaminer, Dmitrij Kapitelman, and Kat Kaufmann. All three belong to a group of post-Soviet Jewish authors who migrated to Germany in the 1990s as “Kontingentflüchtlinge” (quota refugees), following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Since then, they, as well as others with an East and Central European migration background, writing in German, have established themselves in the German literary field and achieved a high level of visibility in broader media discourses. The study therefore addresses current trends in the German literary market. It traces how the chosen authors in their works of autofictional writing explore complex questions of identity, including a cultural heritage that is shaped by ‚triad‘ of cultures. It asks, how in doing so, these authors are contributing to a shift in memory and identity discourses and broadened perspectives on historical events, migration, and understandings of Jewish identity in the German literary field. However, the work of Kaminer, Kapitelman and Kaufmann must also be seen in the context of a literary market where an author’s migration background can serve as a valuable distinguishing feature to attract attention, yet may also lead to reductive categorization. The project explores how the chosen authors deal with this ambivalence and which other themes they incorporate into their self-presentation in response to it. What role does the cultural heritage addressed in their texts play in these authors' concepts of authorship and the performative practices they employ both within and beyond their texts? Furthermore, paratexts play a significant role in shaping the authors’ public images and the perception of their texts. In addition to being multicultural, the authors analysed are also multimedia-oriented, with their presence extending beyond literature into various media. Their media visibility includes social media activity, such as on Instagram, as well as interviews. The study shows how the authorial persona must be understood as an interplay between the strategies of the authors themselves, their publishers' marketing strategies and the interests of the literary public. Therefore, the voices of literary critics are also included in the analysis. The study is structured as follows: (1) it places post-Soviet Jewish migration in its historical, socio-cultural and literary contexts, (2) develops a methodological approach to self-presentation and performativity, and (3) provides an in-depth analysis of selected texts. These texts published between 2000 and the present, which illustrate relevant trends and developments in the individual author’s oevres as well as within the subfield of German-language Gegenwartsliteratur outlined, include Russendisko (2000) and Militärmusik (2001) by Kaminer, Superposition (2015) by Kaufmann, and Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (2016) and Eine Formalie in Kiew (2021) by Kapitelman. Drawing on theories of authorial self-representation (Jürgensen and Kaiser), paratexts (Gérard Genette) and the literary field (Pierre Bourdieu), the study combines a narratological approach with a literary-sociological perspective. Using this method, the study provides insights into the reciprocal dynamics of cultural heritage, authorship and self-representation in the current literary field.Item type: Item , „Und wer den Schmerz einmal gesehen hat…”: Neue deutsche Jugendliteratur zum Nationalsozialismus, Zweiten Weltkrieg und Holocaust im Kontext des postmemorialen Wandels(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick and the University of Groningen, 2015) Jung, Britta C.Personal and collective memories of violence and warfare are part of broader discursive processes that are subject to constant reinterpretations and remediations from the perspective of the present. Engaging with the ‘postmemorial turn’, this thesis examines representations of the ‘Third Reich’ in contemporary German youth literature. Youth literature has been unduly neglected in German memory debates even though its contemporary readership exemplifies the postmemorial turn. Investigating the specific dynamics of postmemory in a broad corpus of texts and in dialogue with the broader socio-cultural context of Germany today, the thesis analyses how individual authors renegotiate the place of the ‘Third Reich’ in German cultural memory from a transnational perspective. The analysis of specifically postmemorial techniques of representation is filtered through four thematic lines of enquiry: firstly, persecution and deportation; secondly, German everyday life and National Socialist education; thirdly (aerial) warfare and German flight; and finally generational conflict and the search for traces of the past. It demonstrates how youth literature as a distinctive system constitutes its own discursive rules within a complex, polyphonic adult memory culture. However, through underlying pedagogical principles, youth literature also projects the self-perception and values of adult culture. The thesis consists of three main parts: an overview of dominant memory discourses in Germany from 1945 to the present is complemented by the theoretical elaboration of key analytical concepts, such as postmemory, multi-directional memory and the transnational turn in memory studies. Based on this, the thesis then builds a corpus of texts classified as youth literature, highlighting the variety of postmemorial styles, approaches and themes after 1990. Finally, it provides in-depth analyses of eight exemplary novels which demonstrate that youth literature is a rich but under-researched field for the exploration of the shift towards a memory culture that requires both affective and cognitive responses to the past.Item type: Item , ,,dass gestern besser werden würde als morgen je gewesen war": Zur Kodierung von Trauma in Jan Costin Wagner's Kimmo-Joentaa-Romanen(2017) Hemmerling, JanineThis thesis investigates a series of crime novels by German author Jan Costin Wagner. The series revolves around Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa who in the course of the series tries to deal with the loss of his wife. The focus of my analysis is the encoding of trauma in the novels. The foundation is constituted by the definition of trauma that psychotraumatologists Fischer/Riedesser provide. They understand trauma as a shock that influences one’s understanding of the Self and the world around us. I claim that Wagner discusses the possibility of processing a traumatic event by implementing fragmented structures and characters in his texts. These fragments are then compensated for by structuring elements. Wagner, I conclude, thus builds up an antithetic construction and makes trauma a structuring scheme in his series. My reading is done against the backdrop of 20th and 21st century crime literature. The goal is placing Wagner within the genre that up until recently was divided between the notions of the classical and the anti-crime novel.Item type: Item , A case study approach to the language status, motivation and attitude in both an immersion and non-immersion setting at Primary Level in Ireland.(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2016) Murphy, AislingThis project is titled; A Case Study Approach to the Language Status, Motivation and Attitude in both an Immersion and Non-immersion Setting at Primary Level Ireland, and it sets out to explore and examine the status of language, the motivational factors and attitude towards language at primary level, focusing on foreign languages (in this case, French) and Irish. Second languages, mainly Irish and French are the major focus point in the schools in this study and how the schools continued to teach French after the abolishment of the MLPSI. As these areas are so intertwined the three different aspects provide an overview of the language situation within these schools. Two schools were involved in this study, one English-medium school and the other an immersion setting, in the context of a Gaelscoil (Irish-medium school). Pupils and teachers from both settings were interviewed, and another former MLPSI teacher also took part in this study.Item type: Item , "Prison-paradise"?: das internat als entwick-lungsraum in deutschsprachigen romanen nach 1968(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2015) Stiepel, Anna ElizabethThe PhD thesis at hand is entitled “Prison-Paradise? The boarding school as space for individuation in German-language novels after 1968”. It is about the literary depiction of disciplinary institutions and their speci-fic influence on the body and the constitution of the subject. The analysis is cen-tred on two main pillars: first, it aims to connect the chosen twelve contemporary novels with their historical predecessors, for example Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891) or Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel (1906), in terms of shared topoi, motifs and themes. Secondly, it uses Michel Foucault’s socio-theoretical remarks on discipline and closed institutions – like prisons, barracks, factories, hospitals or schools – published 1975 in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison to discuss the spatial and hierarchical distribution of individu-als, the regiment of time and action, the controlling and guiding function of pasto-ral power represented by archetypical teacher characters and the normative social control of peer groups. Other important works by Foucault are The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (1976) and his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1984) that complemented the pursued approach to illustrate development in the genre of school stories. Like their historical predecessors did, some of the modern school stories ex-ercise criticism on authoritarian upbringing via the depiction of school resp. boarding school as setting. This specific setting is in use in the represented sec-tarian schools as counterpart to anti-authoritarian education demanded by 1968’s student movement. In the represented non-sectarian and more liberal schools the disciplinary force is no longer with the institution, but taken over by the peer group who uses sanctioning mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion to control the subject and his/her body.Item type: Item , Magdalenas stimmen: polyphone erinnerung in Jürgen Fuchsʼ Autofiktion(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2014) Weiss, JeffreyThis thesis examines the auto-fictional text Magdalena (1998) by the East German writer Jürgen Fuchs. This auto-fiction provides an insight into the work of the East German secret police (Stasi), its internal structures, language and impact on the everyday lives of its victims. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fuchs worked as a full-time researcher in the Gauck-Behörde in order to analyse the structure of the Stasi. Magdalena is an account of his experience at this government agency. The focus of this thesis is on the form of remembrance within Fuchs’ text. The Stasi files he finds bring back memories of his time in prison. The on-going conflicts and the experienced trauma are expressed through different voices and polyphony within Magdalena, e.g. the so-called prison-voice (Knaststimme). These voices represent different identities as well as different times and perspectives but often merge and overlap, they get into conversations with each other and the inner monologues become dialogues. These dialogues fulfil the functions of self-remembrance, of avoiding self-deception, of self-assurance and self-defence. This thesis examines the characteristics of several voices of the text and combines their analysis with elements of psycho-analysis (emotion and affects, Sigmund Freud), postmodern autobiographical writing (Almut Finck, Frank Reiser), tendencies of authentic writing in East German literature (Christa Wolf) and the representation of remembrance (Jan and Aleida Assmann). This work also examines the inner struggle of the text subject about coming to terms with the past and the present. Especially the emotions hinder the text subject to deal with the past in a rational and objective manner. Moreover, the text subject needs the emotions in order to be able to keep its moral point of view. In conclusion, this thesis puts its focus on Jürgen Fuchs’ as a writer rather than his impact on the public debate in Germany before and after 1989.