Culture and Power in German-Speaking Europe, 1918-1989

The period in German cultural history extending from the collapse of the Central European monarchies in 1918 to the folding of the Soviet bloc in 1989 witnessed experimentation in the arts as a response to a rapidly changing political landscape, encompassing both opportunities under democracies (Weimar, West Germany, the two Austrian republics) and repression under dictatorships (the Third Reich, the GDR). Formal innovation in literature, drama, and cinema often stood in a dialectical relationship with the ethical self-understanding of cultural producers, alternately courted by power and subjected to persecution, who accrued prestige unavailable in times of consensus. Many of the greatest works of Modernism were produced in German. Yet no nation was more convulsed by political upheavals or inflicted greater suffering on its minorities and neighbors. The writings of Kafka, Mann, Musil, Bachmann, Grass, and Christa Wolf, the dramatic practice of Brecht and Müller, Critical Theory and New German Cinema all address the mid-century crisis of legitimacy. This new series welcomes proposals on all aspects of German-language culture deriving from what Eric Hobsbawm called “the age of extremes” and is especially concerned with connections across state or national boundaries, genres, and the caesura of the Holocaust.

Series editor Julian Preece has written five books for academic and trade publishers, mainly on twentieth-century German literature. His titles include Günter Grass (2018) and The Life and Works of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (2001/2004), Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation, Fantasies of the Revolution (2012) and The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband (Camden House, 2007). He has also edited more than a dozen collections and special issues of journals, including The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (2003) and more recently a volume on the contemporary film director Andreas Dresen (2017). He has been Professor of German at Swansea since 2007, where he directs the Centre for Research into Contemporary German Culture.

Series editorial advisors are Stephen Brockmann, Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and author of five books, four of which are published by Camden House, including most recently a revised edition of his Critical History of German Film (2020; originally 2010), and The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (2015), and Mary Cosgrove, Professor of German, Trinity College Dublin, author of Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Camden House, 2014) and editor of Edinburgh German Yearbook 6: Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature and Culture from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Camden House, 2012).

Call for Manuscripts Information