'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

Reproduction of the original.

The unique perspective of the "other witnesses" included here--that of immigrant outsiders, foreigners who wrote primarily for a minority-language group in the United States--provides the reader with a new understanding of this important period of America's growth and development. Included are works by Christian Essellen, Reinhold Solger, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Theodor Kirchhoff, Udo Brachvogel, Robert Reitzel, Julius Gugler, Edna Fern, Lotte Leser, and others: plays, short stories, and poems, as well as selections from novels, essays, and memoirs. Some of the texts have never appeared in book form, and still others are published here for the first time. Introductory essays to each chapter provide background information and point the way for further research. The volume will be a welcome addition to the collections of institutional libraries, historians, and Germanists alike.

'I love the German character more than anything else in the world, and my breast is an archive of German song' So wrote Heinrich Heine in 1824, adding: 'It is likely that my Muse gave her German dress something of a foreign cut from annoyance with the German character'. Here Heine sums up the ambivalent emotions of Jews who felt at home in German culture and yet, even in the age of emancipation, foundGermany less than welcoming. This anthology illustrates the history of Jews in Germany from the eighteenth century, when it was first proposed to give Jews civil rights, to the 1990's and the problems of living after the Holocaust. The texts include short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters anddiary entries, all chosen for their literary merit as well as the light they shed on the relations between Jews in Germany and Austria and their Gentile fellow-citizens. Ritchie Robertson's lucid introduction provides the necessary historical context and his translations make available in Englishin some cases for the first time - both Jewish writers on various aspects of Jewish experience and responses of Gentile writers to the Jews in their midst. Each is introduced by a short illuminating preface.

“A valuable aid for students who want to improve their ability to read German as well as for those who would like an overview of short German fiction since the eighteenth century.” William E. Petig, Stanford University

Bitter Healing is the first anthology of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German women's writing in English translation. It goes far toward filling a major gap in literary history by recovering for a wide audience the works of women whoøwere as famous during their lifetime as Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. Like those men, they wrote in the early modern period spanning the transition from early Enlightenment to Romanticism. Edited by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, this collection assembles little-known writings by fifteen authors from various social classes, religious backgrounds, and political persuasions. They include the forgotten pietist theologian Johanna Eleonore Petersen, the radical social reformer Bettina von Arnim, the outspoken peasant's daughter Anna Luisa Karsch, the aristocrats Annette von Droste-H_lshoff and Karoline von G_nderrode, and the conservative monarchist Sophie von La Roche, among others. Their autobriographies and letters, "moral" and not so moral tales, lyrical and protest poems, plays, and fairy tales deal with religious crisis, family conflict, and harmony, mothers and daughters, wise women, romance and pain and the healing power of love, self-understanding, escape, and the magical and humorous. The variety and quality of the pieces testify to the creativity of women writers during this first peak of literary activity in Germany, the so-called Age of Goethe. The editors have provided a short biography and bibliography for each writer.

This collection moves from medieval lyrics and ballads to the Protestant hymns of the 16th century, to the great explosion of German literature with Goethe and Schiller, taking in the isolated genius of Hoelderin, and then on to late 19th-century naturalism, the post-World War I expressionists, and several notable poets in this century, including Loerke and Bertolt Brecht.