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SoSe 13: The Novel in World-War-2 London & Berlin

Gautam Chakrabarti

Kommentar

"Ihr Völker der Welt... Schaut auf diese Stadt und erkennt, dass ihr diese Stadt und dieses Volk nicht preisgeben dürft, nicht preisgeben könnt!" ("People of this world… look upon this city and see that you should not and cannot abandon this city and these people!")-- Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of Berlin during the Soviet Blockade (speech during a public meeting on 9th September, 1948) The Second World War has been one of the radically-transforming influences-if not the most-on mid/late-twentieth-century European cityscapes, nowhere more intensely than in Berlin, which was subjected to political ideologies and military manoeuvres that led to the near-total physical destruction of the city; it would be quite appropriate to observe, as Bertolt Brecht had done, after 1945, that Berlin was "ein Trümmerhaufen bei Potsdam" (a rubble-heap near Potsdam). In the proposed course, we will seek to analyse the rather ambiguous relationship of fiction and contemporary historical processes, through a comparative study of war-time novels and later ones dealing with the period, by British and German authors, who had first-hand experience of their material. We will attempt to look at war as not only the traumatic and dehumanising breach with normalcy that it is, but also as a heightened narrative of the gross exacerbation of pre-existent ethno-cultural, class-based, ideological and gendered biases that it brings about. In this context, it becomes important to look at warfare, especially in the case of WW2, as not only capable of destroying lives, built heritage and infrastructure, but also tearing asunder pre-existent norms of conduct and restraint; as will be seen in Marta Hillers' novel (if she, indeed, is the real author of Eine Frau in Berlin), war often transforms gender-stereotypes into discourses of sexual exploitation and patriarchal equalisation of the female body with war-booty. We will look at how post-1945 discourses of "shame" and "guilt", in the context of the colossal human rights' abuses, on all sides, during and soon after WW2, led to the evolution of certain kinds of literary discourses dealing with the horrors of WW2 that are still being processed within European societies; we will also look at the novel as a mode of realist evocation of societal angst and discuss how this was crucial for the time. We will study the selected novels by two British and two German writers-- cf. texts mentioned below-- and watch films based on their works, using them as reference-points for broader forays into the cultural and socio-political contexts of WW2-era London and Berlin; we will see how, despite the descriptive similarities in felt life during the Blitz over London and the Allied "carpet-bombing" of Berlin, significant variations in the experience of war emerge in the different texts, depending on authorial orientations and narrative styles. There will also be documentaries, presentations by invitees, who are involved with interdisciplinary WW2-research, and mutually negotiable field-work, if needed and/or desired. In the process, key theory-concepts of Culture Studies/Kulturwissenschaft and Comparative Literary History will be discussed and debated, locating the course within the domain of interdisciplinarity. Key Texts: Greene, Graham, The Ministry of Fear (1943); Hillers, Marta(?), Eine Frau in Berlin (1945/54/2003); Fallada, Hans, Jeder stirbt für sich allein (1947); Deighton, Len, Winter: A Berlin Family, 1899-1945 (1987); other texts will be suggested and discussed in the course of the semester. Students are advised to buy, beg or borrow these texts from someone or somewhere; it is preferable that they read, at least, one of these before the commencement of the course in April. Course Language/Unterrichtssprache: English and German Desirable (but NOT mandatory) language proficiency: Level B1 and above, for English, of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Evaluation: Interactive participation in class-activities, quizzes with mutually-negotiable frequency, verbal presentations and/or term-papers, also mutually-negotiable, and regular attendance; the last-named will factor as a positive incentive, in terms of grade-weightage for regularity, and not in a punitive sense. Schließen