David E. Wellbery is LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, University of Chicago. Judith Ryan is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Anton Kaes is Chancellor Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dorothea von Muecke is Professor of German Literature at Columbia University.
The essays making up this new history of the literary and
philosophical culture of the people of the German lands (and of
Germans abroad) are of an unfailingly high standard. Many are
noteworthy contributions to scholarship and criticism. The
ingenious plan of the book permits a variety of style and approach,
while strong editing has resulted in exemplary clarity and
pithiness of expression. Well conceived, eclectic, lively, and
informative, this New History gives us a model overview of what
German literature and thought looks like from the twenty-first
century.
*J M Coetzee, author of Elizabeth Costello and Doubling
the Point*
An enticing and authoritative review of German literature from its
most splendid high points to a most horrible nadir and its
aftermath. This book well documents how -- in a remarkable post-war
process of moral regeneration -- German literature struggles to
come to terms with what happened.
*Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All*
Harvard's New History of German Literature is an encyclopedic
browser of incomparable quality for Germanophiles and Germanophobes
alike. In a series of brief, penetrating essays, it retells
thirteen centuries of German history through a broad spectrum of
literature by both obscure and famous authors. For modern readers
ready to tackle the riddle of modern Germany with real hope of
solving it, here is the guide.
*Steven Ozment, author of A Mighty Fortress: A New History of
the German People and The Bürgermeister's Daughter*
How German is German literature? The New History gives us a fresh
and unconventional picture of the main figures and movements of a
literature which remained in the church and cloister longer than
Italian, French, and English literature, and became revolutionary
in the middle of the 18th century. It is very encouraging that in a
period of isolationism of culture and society such an ambitious
project is possible.
*Michael Krüger, author of The Cello Player*
This New History of German Literature is simply the best overview
of the subject available to the English-speaking reader. Selecting
as its stepping-stones not a canon of biographies or a mere
literary chronology but key dates chosen with intelligence and
originality, it covers a dozen centuries of writings in German,
from some of the earliest babblings in the language (the charms of
Fulda) to the last accomplished works of a modern classic (W. G.
Sebald). Erudite, quirky, vastly informative and hugely
entertaining, it makes one wish for a bevy of forthcoming companion
volumes.
*Alberto Manguel, author of Stevenson under the Palm
Trees*
The range spanned by the essays included in this volume is unusual,
both in mere chronological terms and thanks to the diversity of
approaches chosen by the authors; the best of scholarship has been
made easily accessible even to the non-specialized reader by the
contributors themselves and the highly innovative presentation of
their texts. This volume is a brilliant achievement.
*Saul Friedlander, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews and
Probing the Limits of Representation*
What is truly extraordinary about this collection of 200 essays is
that it succeeds masterfully in distilling the essence of the
German literary and intellectual legacy, spanning well over 800
years. Each only several pages long, the essays limn not just the
great names, such as Hegel, Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, Freud, and
many more but also literary works, themes, historical moments,
pieces of music, etc. Leading specialists, scholars, and critics
offer a wide variety of contributions covering, from the 13th
century onward, such varied topics as early German sagas, Nazi
cinema, theatrical premiers, and the Yiddish Renaissance. The
coverage actually stretches all the way to the 21st century with a
single piece, an essay about W. G. Sebald, who died in 2001.
*Library Journal*
A New History of German Literature actually delivers far more than
its title suggests. It consists of some 200 short essays by an
international team of contributors, including not only literary but
also political and social historians, critics of art, music, and
film, philosophers, theologians, and many others. Each essay takes
a significant date in the last thirteen centuries--publications,
conjunctions, revolutions, catastrophes--and offers an exegesis
that illuminates a major figure or phenomenon. The result adds up
to a series of dazzling glimpses of transcendence, a sequence of
microcosms, tantalizingly brief but almost always to the point. It
is a monument to American scholarship. No review could do justice
to the richness of this encyclopedic work, which is presumably not
intended to be read from beginning to end, but to be dipped into
and sampled at leisure...This book is a veritable banquet...By
insisting that each essay be highly selective, capturing only the
essential physiognomy of its subject with minimal biographical or
critical ballast, the editors have accomplished the seemingly
impossible: to make a book of a thousand pages seem effortlessly
concise...[A] celestial feast of the mind...The moment has surely
come for European intellectuals to set about reviving European
culture before it is too late. Europeans need books like A New
History of German Literature to remind us of what we have already
lost, and Americans need them as an example of what can and must
still be preserved.
*New Criterion*
A New History of German Literature is large: In just over a
thousand pages it winds its way over a thousand years of history,
across different genres, disciplines, and cultures, from the
tenth-century magical formulas written in alliterative Old High
German to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz...[A] stunning
intellectual achievement...One can only wish that its absorbingly
fresh account of literature and the interpreting process--'here and
now,' as Wellbery puts it with infectious enthusiasm in his essay
on Goethe's Faust--will reach the broadest possible audience.
*Bookforum*
Monumental...The book is a treat, arranged chronologically and
vigorously cross-referenced, allowing the intrepid to jump among
Thomas Bernhard's rejection of an inherited past, vegetarian
utopias, Wilhelm Busch's comic precursors, 'rubble literature,' the
rather emo reception of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elfriede
Jelinek, and The Easter Play of Muri.
*Voice Literary Supplement*
Compelling reading...[A] most impressive volume.
*Harvard Review*
[A New History of German Literature] carries a powerful charge of
enthusiasm, even of proselytizing commitment to the things it
presents...In arguing for German literature vis-à-vis an imagined
audience of receptive nonspecialists, it argues for literature as
such.
*Times Literary Supplement*
This attractive thousand-page volume serves up 1300 years of German
literary history like tapas. A New History of German Literature
makes for compulsive browsing, and it will entertain and engage
readers from a wide array of backgrounds. All quotations from
German are accompanied by translations. Each entry comes with a
short bibliography listing primary texts, published English
translations of the primary texts, and a few choice items of
scholarship...The book is comprehensively indexed. All in all, it's
an instructive and delightful feast.
*Literary Imagination*
The table of contents reveals about 250 short chapters, each
located in a specific year. This was done to facilitate what Walter
Benjamin described as a 'tiger's leap into the past,' in which the
singularity of a literary event is decisive while what is typical
is left to one side. The consequence is the fracturing of the
received canon into a kaleidoscope of magical moments...As an
editorial achievement, this volume sets uniformly high and
innovative standards.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
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