Bøker av Matthew Philpotts

Fresh perspectives on the cultural history of the German Democratic Republic, exploring the nation's dialogue with the German past.Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh German Yearbook encourages and disseminates lively and open discussion of themes pertinent to German Studies, viewed from all angles but with particular interest in problems arising out of politics and history. No other yearbook covers the entire field while addressing a focused theme in each issue. Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, volume 3 re-directs current debates on memory and tradition, opening up fresh perspectives on the cultural history of the GDR and exploring how the nation's cultural discourses entered into a productive but often problematic dialogue with the values of the past and with the German cultural inheritance. Topics include the compositional engagement with musical heritage; industrial design and cultural politics; the establishment of antifascist monuments and their use as sites of resistance; constructions of a cultural heritage in architecture; the influence of cultural politics on literary scholarship; continuities and breaks with tradition in visualand literary culture; and engagement with the past in the works of Konrad Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, and Anna Seghers. Contributors: Leonie Beiersdorf, Julian Blunk, Dara Bryant, Helen Finch, Carola Hahnel-Mesnard, StacyHartman, Elaine Kelly, Heather Mathews, Katharina Pfutzner, Matthew Philpotts, Larson Powell, Tim Rei, Marianne Schwarz-Scherer, Laura Silverberg. Matthew Philpotts is Lecturer in German at the University of Manchester, and Sabine Rolle is Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.

Covers the history of the legendary literary journal, "Sinn und Form". This study is organised in seven anatomical categories: founding conception; cultural-political context; institutional infrastructure; role of editors; networks of contributors; text and composition; and, readership and reception.

In this study the author elaborates a comparative framework for analysing literary texts from the Third Reich and the GDR in terms of the extent of assent and/or dissent expressed through them towards the National Socialist and SED regimes. The author maps out areas of similarity and difference in the workings of cultural policy in the two dictatorships. In the second part of the study, Günter Eich¿s work for the Nazi radio system and Bertolt Brecht¿s cultural activities in the GDR act as case studies to illuminate the patterns of interdependent assent and dissent generated under the conditions of dictatorship.