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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent




Professor Susanne Rinner, Languages, Literature, and Culture, recently published The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent.  The book has been praised as "a thoughtful study of the current discourse surrounding the important role of literature in shaping cultural memory…The case of the literary representation of the German ‘1968’ is particularly interesting as it reveals a continuing preoccupation with the traumatic effects of Germany’s past” (Ingo Cornils, University of Leeds).

Looking specifically at novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Ă–zdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, Professor Rinner's book, as the publisher describes, "traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers’ understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust."
  
The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination is the ninth volume in Berghahn's Protest, Culture & Society series.