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About This Guide
This Research Guide will help you find German language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- German related programs at Boston University
New Books -- Recent Acquisitions
Kairos by
Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos--an unforgettably compelling masterpiece--tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: "The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck's work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies." In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: "Hofmann's translation is invaluable--it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once 'loyal' and 'beautiful.'"
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PT2665.R59 K3513 2023Publication Date: 2023
The Wounded Storyteller: the traumatic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann by
E. T. A. Hoffmann's classic tales of Gothic horror and fantasy are presented in a new translation accompanying the beguiling drawings of Natalie Frank E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was one of the greatest German Romantic authors of fantasy and a pioneer in the genre we now call Gothic horror. His innovative stories explore ideas of madness, genius, doppelgängers, artificial intelligence, and the boundaries between realities and dreams. Artist Natalie Frank and leading fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes have joined forces in this lavishly illustrated volume of five of Hoffmann's most influential tales: The Golden Pot, The Sandman, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, The Mystifying Child, and The Mines of Falun. In addition to offering fresh translations, Zipes introduces the project and sheds light on how Hoffmann's lifetime of personal traumas shaped his writing. Frank's richly rendered gouache and chalk pastels reveal Hoffmann's worlds in full-page drawings and marginalia. Pivotal scenes of transformation, courage, love, desire, and betrayal are illustrated through a feminist lens, focusing on strong, self-aware female characters. A foreword by novelist Karen Russell delves into the influence the tales had on her own literary career and the ways in which she emulates Hoffmann today. The Wounded Storyteller will introduce Hoffmann's timeless work to a new generation of readers.
Call Number: Mugar Folio PT2361.E4 Z47 2023Publication Date: 2023
Modeling Motherhood in Weimar Germany: Political and Psychological Discourses in Women's Writing by
Reveals how socialist discourses and psychoanalytic ideas shaped the modern models of motherhood envisioned by left-wing and socially critical women writers working in the Weimar press and literary spheres. Women's experiences and opportunities in the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) were shaped by tensions between advances in women's rights and widespread adherence to conservative notions of gender roles and women's maternal duty. This book explores these tensions, which were particularly pronounced on the political left, by analyzing socialist and socially critical women writers' interventions in contemporary debates on gender and women's role in society. For women in Weimar Germany, writing represented a subversive medium through which they could individualize reproductive politics and imagine modern models of mothering. Relatable and aspirational mothering practices and mother figures feature in the literary and journalistic texts examined in this book. Theoretical and instructional works (by Alice Rühle-Gerstel and Henny Schumacher) and examples from the Social Democratic women's magazine Frauenwelt demonstrate how women writers adopted and adapted emerging psychological ideas to position their texts as modern and authoritative. A close analysis of critically neglected didactic texts (by Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Maria Leitner, Elfriede Brüning, and Else Kienle) and socially critical popular fiction (by Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, and Gabriele Tergit) exposes how women writers envisaged models of motherhood and family that were compatible with their political beliefs and modern lifestyles. This book reveals a pragmatic discourse that advocated progressive policies regarding reproductive choice and the rights of single mothers while leaving notions of women's maternal nature and duty largely unchallenged.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2023
Tales That Touch: migration, translation, and temporality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture by
Cultural texts born out of migration frequently defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Instead of corralling them into identity categories, whether German or otherwise, the essays in this volume, building on the influential work of Leslie A. Adelson, interrogate how to respond to their methodological challenge in innovative ways. Investigating a wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that touch upon "things German" in the broadest sense--from print and born-digital literature to essay film, nature drawings, and memorial sites--the contributions employ transnational and multilingual lenses to show how these works reframe migration and temporality, bringing into view antifascist aesthetics, refugee time, postmigrant Heimat, translational poetics, and post-Holocaust affects. With new literary texts by Yoko Tawada and Zafer Şenocak and essays by Gizem Arslan, Brett de Bary, Bettina Brandt, Claudia Breger, Deniz Göktürk, John Namjun Kim, Yuliya Komska, Paul Michael Lützeler, B. Venkat Mani, Barbara Mennel, Katrina L. Nousek, Anna Parkinson, Damani J. Partridge, Erik Porath, Jamie Trnka, Ulrike Vedder, and Yasemin Yildiz.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
The Mind in Exile" Thomas Mann in Princeton by
A unique look at Thomas Mann's intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United StatesIn September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as "the greatest living man of letters," Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann's journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
Beards and Texts: Images of masculinity in medieval German literature by
A study of beard motifs in medieval German poetry. Beards make frequent appearances in medieval German poetry--as esteemed markers of majestic wisdom or as hilarious props for undignified manhandling. In Beards and Texts, Sebastian Coxon traces this preeminent symbol of masculinity through four major poetic traditions across the twelfth and sixteenth centuries--Pfaffe Konrad's Rolandslied, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm, 'Sangspruchdichtung', and Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2022
