Authors: Arlene A. Teraoka
ISBN-13: 9780803244313, ISBN-10: 0803244312
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Date Published: December 1996
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Arlene A. Teraoka is an associate professor of German at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is the author of The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller.
East, West, and Others is the first work to examine the Third World in German literature from World War II to the present. Arlene A. Teraoka investigates how prominent post-World War II East and West German authors have portrayed the Third World. She discusses the persistent stereotypes of race, culture, and sexuality in texts by authors whose careers were shaped by concerns with Third World politics. Those writers include Anna Seghers, Peter Weiss, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heiner Müller; East Germans Claus Hammel and Peter Hacks; and the documentary West German writers Max von der Grün, Günter Wallraff, and Paul Geiersbach.
Teraoka demonstrates the continuing German need to construct a postwar identity freed from the fascist past and the conflicts and clichés that inevitably mar this dream of the self. Whether authors project a champion of humanity who upholds Enlightenment ideals or a fragmented European protagonist paralyzed by guilt, all negotiate between the forces of rationality and prejudice, universality and difference, solidarity and helplessness.
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | Race, Revolution, and Writing: Caribbean Texts by Anna Seghers | 7 |
Ch. 2 | "World Theater" vs. "European Periphery": Third World Paradigms in Peter Weiss and Hans Magnus Enzensberger | 27 |
Ch. 3 | Solidarity and Its Discontents: Latin American Revolutions in East German Drama | 79 |
Ch. 4 | "The Roman Learns the Alphabet of the Negro": The "Third World" Voice of Heiner Muller | 105 |
Ch. 5 | Talking "Turk": On Narrative Strategies and Cultural Stereotypes | 135 |
Conclusion | 163 | |
Notes | 171 | |
Works Cited | 209 | |
Index | 243 |