GERST 4100 - Senior Seminar: Writing in/from Exile

(LA-AS) Satisfies Option 1.

Fall. 4 credits.

Prerequisite: any German course at the 3000-level or equivalent or permission of instructor. Taught in German.

E. Siegel.

‘Literature of the Exile’, written between 1933 and 1945 by authors who had fled Germany (e.g., Seghers, Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, Zweig, Lasker-Schüler), provided most of the enduring works of this time period. But how is writing even possible when writers are cut off precisely from the audience they want to reach? How did authors manage the publication and distribution of their works (e.g., venues for publication, use of other media, political organization)? What topics and problems are addressed (e.g., failure of the ‘German-Jewish symbiosis,’ alienation, memory, im/possibility of hope)? What reasons spoke for or against a return (and to which Germany)? What did the encounter between returning authors and those who had stayed in Germany (‘inner emigration’) look like? The course will also address writing in exile as a historical phenomenon, reaching from Ovid and Dante to the early works of Herta Müller.