Leanne Dawson 
Edinburgh German Yearbook 10 
Queering German Culture

Contributions exploring the representation and reality of LGBTQ+ individuals and issues in historical and contemporary German-speaking culture.






The German-speaking lands have a long history of engagement, ranging from celebratory to horrific, with non-normative genders and sexualities, including through cultural output, language, and politics.
Queering German Culture, volume 10 of the
Edinburgh German Yearbook, foregrounds this via new analyses of a variety of LGBTQ+ cultural artifacts – archives both physical and digital, literature in the form of novels and periodicals, and film both narrative and documentary – to consider a spectrum of gender and sexual identities. Individual chapters employ a range of lenses, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial and queer theory, to analyze work by Thomas Mann, Thomas Brussig, Jenny Erpenbeck, Terézia Mora, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Fatih Akin, among others.


Contributors: Nicholas Courtman, Leanne Dawson, Kyle Frackman, Sarra Kassem, Lauren Pilcher, John L. Plews, Gary Schmidt, Cyd Sturgess.


Leanne Dawson is Lecturer in German and Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of Content

Introduction – Leanne Dawson

PART I. QUEER HISTORIES AND ARCHIVES

From Brooklyn to Berlin: Queer Temporality, In/Visibility, and the Politics of Lesbian Archives – Leanne Dawson

‘Die zarte Haut einer schönen Frau’: Fashioning Femininities in Weimar Germany’s Lesbian Periodicals – Cyd Sturgess

Based on a True Story: Tracking What Is Queer about Queer German Documentary – Kyle Frackman

PART II. QUEERING THE OTHER

The Culture of Faces: Reading Physiognomical Relations in Thomas Mann’s
Der Tod in Venedig – John L. Plews

Seeing the Human in the (Queer) Migrant in Jenny Erpenbeck’s
Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Terézia Mora’s
Alle Tage – Nick Courtman

The Transgressive Representations of Gender and Queerness in Fatih Akin’s
Auf der anderen Seite – Sarra Kassem

PART III. QUEERING NORMATIVITY

Bitter Tears and Pretty Excess in Fassbinder’s
Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant and
Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss – Lauren Pilcher

Mothers, Masculinities, and Queer Potentials: Jonathan Franzen’s Rereading of Thomas Brussig and Phillip Roth – Gary Schmidt

About the author

KYLE FRACKMAN is Associate Professor of German & Scandinavian Studies at the University of British Columbia.