Kristy Kristy Boney & Jennifer Marston William 
Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond 
For once, telling it all from the beginning

Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance.






While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century’s darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, ‘for once, telling it all from the beginning, ‘ is a translation of the phrase ‘einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen, ‘ from Seghers’s exile novel
Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state.


Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William.


Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.

Table of Content

Introduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling – Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William

PART I. ANNA SEGHERS: A MISSING PIECE IN THE CANON OF MODERNIST STORYTELLERS

Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years – Christiane Zehl Romero

Who Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers’s ‘The Excursion of the Dead Girls’: Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction – Peter Beicken

Anna Seghers’s Rubble Literature, 1947-49 – Ute Brandes

Anna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic – Stephen Brockmann

Aufbauzeit or
flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers’s GDR Novels – Hunter Bivens

The Time of Decision in Anna Seghers – Benjamin Robinson

Filling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers’s Conceptual Metaphors – Jennifer Marston William

PART II. EXPRESSIONS OF MODERNITY: USING STORYTELLING UNCONVENTIONALLY

Storytelling and Telling Stories in Heine’s Prose Fiction – Robert C. Holub

Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka – Kristy R. Boney

Synthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in ‘Shanghai Ghetto’ – Weijia Li

American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools – Elizabeth Loentz

A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 – Michaela Peroutkova

Changed for the Better? Alternative Uses of the Transformative Cancer Trope in Thomas Mann’s
Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer’s
Get a Life – Kristen Hetrick

PART III. THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE: STORYTELLING IN ACUTE HISTORICAL MOMENTS

Problems and Effects of Autobiographical Storytelling:
Als Pimpf in Polen: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung 1940-1945 (1993) and
A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis’ Program for Evacuating Children during World War II (1998) – Jost Hermand

Too Near, Too Far: My GDR Story – Marc Silberman

Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred – Andy Spencer

‘Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen’: Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf’s Novel
Kindheitsmuster – Luke Springman

Narrating Germany’s Past: A Story of Exile and the Return Home-A Translation of the Chapter ‘Above the Lake’ from Ursula Krechel’s Novel
Landgericht – Amy Kepple Strawser

Storytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich – Sylvia Fischer

Notes on the Contributors

About the author

STEPHEN BROCKMANN is Professor of German with courtesy appointments in English and History at Carnegie Mellon University.