Examines the life & work of the playwright & novelist whose literary stature places him among Boll, Grass, & Frisch as one of the leaders of postwar German literature.

Discusses Weiss's plays, fiction, autobiography, and non-fiction prose. Pp. 22-25 illuminate "Die Ermittlung", an oratorio based on Weiss's 1964 attendance at the Frankfurt war crimes trial. He used actual documents both aesthetically and politically. 18 of the defendants appear with their real names, either defending themselves with the jargon of doing their duty or totally denying their guilt. Among the charges against these Nazis were conducting medical experiments, torture, and murder. Ch. 7 (pp. 107-129) elucidates Weiss's three-volume novel "Die Ästhetik des Widerstands", about resistance to Nazism in thought and action. The characters in the novel are based on members of the Rote Kapelle resistance group. Politics and creative thinking (art) are shown as complementary, not contradictory.

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.

In a rapidly changing world, the ways in which economic forces affect both personal and global change can be difficult to track, particularly in the arts. This collection of twenty new essays explores both obscure and famous plays dealing with economic issues. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, the text moves from Marx's theories to Wall Street speculation, nineteenth century immigration issues, the excesses of the Gilded Age and the 1920s, the Great Depression, World War II and millennial economic challenges.

In this impressively wide-ranging study of all drama written in German in the period 1945-1977, Christopher Innes' aims are to identify the concerns and perceptions of dramatists working in a specific and unique social context and period and to analyse the major theatrical forms they developed or adapted to express their experience, to trace the writers' literary antecedents, their 'tradition' and to explore the critical issues raised by each stylistic innovation. Professor Innes has organized his discussion around the main forms of theatre - epic, documentary, absurdist and more traditional forms. Redefining these conceptual labels as he progresses, he analyses, in a critical and informed way, the work on the page and the stage of all the major playwrights. This study, which is complemented by photographs of key productions and accompanied by translations for all quotations, will be of particular interest to teachers and students of drama and German, as well as to a wider theatre-going public.