The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span German-speaking lands and cultures from the 18th to the 21st century, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies. The series editor is a renowned professor of German studies in the United States who penned one of the foundational texts for understanding what interdisciplinary German cultural studies can be. All works are peer-reviewed and in English. Three new titles will be published annually.
About the series editor:
Irene Kacandes is the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She received three degrees from Harvard University and also studied at the Free University of Berlin and Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She publishes on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics including secondary orality, rhetoric, aesthetics, trauma, witnessing, family and generational memory, experimental life writing, Holocaust testimony, and narrative theory. She has lectured widely in the United States and Europe and currently serves as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Vice President of the German Studies Association.
"[...] Ben-Horin deserves credit for attempting a rare and sustained exploration of how musical modes (opposed to exclusively visual or literary "modes”) might figure into representations of the German past. One can only hope that this book prompts further efforts within German studies and its allied fields at expanding and embracing music as a serious and culturally vital object of literary inquiry."
Simon Trevor Walsh in: Biography vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2018: 146-152
"[...] Ben-Horin´s study is a welcome contribution to the intermedial exploration of cultural memory and music. [...] Ben-Horin´s engaging study encourages us to continue to reflect on these possibilities and limitations that invariably shape the intriguing interaction between word and music."
Rolf J. Goebel in: Monatshefte, Vol. 109, No. 3, 2017, pp. 503-505
Michal Ben-Horin, Bar Ilan University , Ramat Gan, Israel and Beit Berl Academic College, Kfar Saba, Israel.
Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they `fail´ to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers´ and readers´ most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.
The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that showcase significant scholarly work at the various intersections that currently motivate interdisciplinary inquiry in German cultural studies. Topics span all periods of German and German-speaking lands and cultures from the local to the global, with a special focus on demonstrating how various disciplines – history, musicology, art history, anthropology, religious studies, media studies, political theory, literary and cultural studies, among others – and new theoretical and methodological paradigms work across disciplinary boundaries to create knowledge and add to critical understanding in German studies broadly. All works are in English. Three to four new titles will be published annually.
Examines that which bypasses verbal signification and is therefore absent from collective memory. More specifically, this book looks at German and Austrian writers, who turned to music in order to develop appropriate modes to respond to the catastrophe of World War II.
Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they 'fail' to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers' and readers' most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.
"[...] Ben-Horin deserves credit for attempting a rare and sustained exploration of how musical modes (opposed to exclusively visual or literary "modes") might figure into representations of the German past. One can only hope that this book prompts further efforts within German studies and its allied fields at expanding and embracing music as a serious and culturally vital object of literary inquiry."
Simon Trevor Walsh in: Biography vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2018: 146-152
"[...] Ben-Horin's study is a welcome contribution to the intermedial exploration of cultural memory and music. [...] Ben-Horin's engaging study encourages us to continue to reflect on these possibilities and limitations that invariably shape the intriguing interaction between word and music."
Rolf J. Goebel in: Monatshefte, Vol. 109, No. 3, 2017, pp. 503-505
Michal Ben-Horin, Bar Ilan University , Ramat Gan, Israel and Beit Berl Academic College, Kfar Saba, Israel.
Über den Autor
Michal Ben-Horin, Bar Ilan University , Ramat Gan, Israel and Beit Berl Academic College, Kfar Saba, Israel.rn
Klappentext
Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience that escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their works invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they 'fail' to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers' and readers' most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.
