ABSTRACT This article analyses the multimodal poetry of Stefanie‐Lahya Aukongo (b. 1978) through the framework of neuroqueer theory (e.g. Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau), showing how her poetic practice exposes and destabilises socially constructed norms of neurotypicality. The article begins with a comparative analysis of Aukongo's prose autobiography Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete (2009) and her poetry volume Buchstabengefühle: Eine poetische Einmischung (2018), building on the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz's concept of ‘disidentification’ to show how her poetic work destabilises neuronormative language and rejects fixed subject positions. The article then offers an extended close reading of the poem ‘Ganz normal anders’, tracing its deconstruction of medicalising and neuronormative discourses. Finally, the article considers the poem's multimodal form, showing how the incorporation of an audio soundtrack enacts a neuroqueer strategy that opens up points of resistance and potentiality between the printed words on the page. Overall, the article argues that Aukongo's practice of neuroqueering operates on both a thematic and a formal level in her poems and is closely intertwined with her unsettling of other normative constructions, such as those of race, gender and sexuality. Dieser Artikel analysiert die multimodale Poesie von Stefanie‐Lahya Aukongo (geb. 1978) im Rahmen der Neuroqueer‐Theorie (u. a. Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau) und zeigt, wie ihre poetische Praxis gesellschaftlich konstruierte Normen der Neurotypikalität offenlegt und destabilisiert. Der Artikel beginnt mit einer vergleichenden Analyse von Aukongos Prosa‐Autobiografie Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete (2009) und ihrem Gedichtband Buchstabengefühle: Eine poetische Einmischung (2018). Aufbauend auf José Esteban Muñoz’ Konzept der „Disidentifikation“ wird herausgearbeitet, wie Aukongos poetisches Schreiben neuronormative Diskurse durch sprachliche Resignifikation und Ablehnung fester Subjektpositionen unterläuft. Anschließend bietet der Artikel eine detaillierte Nahlektüre des Gedichts „Ganz normal anders“, das medizinisierende und neuronormative Diskurse dekonstruiert. Abschließend wird die multimodale Form des Gedichts untersucht, insbesondere die Einbindung eines Audio‐Soundtracks, die eine neuroqueere Strategie der Widerständigkeit und Potenzialität zwischen den gedruckten Zeilen inszeniert. Insgesamt argumentiert der Artikel, dass Aukongos neuroqueere Praxis sowohl auf thematischer als auch auf formaler Ebene in ihren Gedichten wirkt und eng mit der Infragestellung weiterer normativer Konstruktionen wie denen von Rasse, Geschlecht und Sexualität verbunden ist.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the pioneering work of Germaine Krull (1897) and Trude Fleischmann (1895), two Mitteleuropean women who defied societal norms as secular, middle‐class, emancipated and queer Jewish women working in photography. The focus of this study is a re‐examination of the early nude photographic portraits they both created between 1924 and 1925. Using the lenses of recent queer and visual studies, I aim to situate the gaze of these young photographers within the broader cultural contexts of the era. This entails placing their work in dialogue with influential currents such as the ‘Neue Sehen’, while also scrutinising its reception, in the form of photomechanical reproductions, within the official medical and media spheres of the time. Ultimately, this article uncovers how queer photographic practices both decentred and redefined representations of the female nude in the dynamic — and dramatically ephemeral — cultural landscape of the 1920s.
ABSTRACT This paper examines texts by contemporary post‐migrant authors Sharon Dodua Otoo and Fatma Aydemir with regard to critical confrontation with the German literary canon. The re‐readings of Heinrich Böll's satire Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen (Otoo) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (Aydemir) engage in a creative dialogue with the authors’ texts, polemicising against a reductionist knowledge production and generating ‘epistemic frictions’ to use José Medina's terminology. The post‐migrant aesthetics are used as a resistant intervention against the Eurocentric master narrative. Otoo's and Aydemir's re‐readings seek new visions of belonging for a plural and diverse contemporary society.
Abstract This article presents a written version of a conversation with the poet, essayist and translator Dorothea Grünzweig, conducted in October 2024 at the University of Cork. Known for her melodious word creations and sensually vivid nature imagery, Grünzweig, who lives in Finland, occupies a distinctive place in contemporary German‐language poetry. In the interview, the poet gives insight into the creative processes behind her poetics, literary inspirations and her personal relationship with the landscape and wildlife of her chosen homeland. Special attention is paid to her two most recent poetry volumes, Kaamos Kosmos (2014) and Plötzlich alles da (2020, translated into English as All there in a Flash ), in which Grünzweig contributes to a poetic reflection on the human relationship with nature, enriching this increasingly urgent dialogue in contemporary literature with new dimensions. Der Beitrag ist die verschriftlichte Fassung eines Gesprächs mit der in Finnland lebenden Dichterin, Essayistin und Übersetzerin Dorothea Grünzweig, durchgeführt im Oktober 2024 an der Universität Cork. Mit ihren klangvollen Wortkreationen und sinnlich intensiven Naturbildern nimmt Grünzweigs Dichtung einen besonderen Platz in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartslyrik ein. Im Interview spricht die Dichterin über kreative Prozesse, die ihrer multilingualen Poetik zugrunde liegen, literarische Inspirationsquellen, sowie ihre persönliche Beziehung zur Landschaft und Tierwelt ihrer Wahlheimat. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf den beiden jüngeren Gedichtbänden Kaamos Kosmos (2014) und Plötzlich alles da (2020), mit denen sich Grünzweig in ein gegenwärtig immer dringlicher werdendes poetisches Nachdenken über das menschliche Verhältnis zur Natur einschreibt und dieses um neue Facetten bereichert.
Emine Sevgi Ozdamar's Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum and Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees were both released in 2021. Both juxtapose Mediterranean islands and European capital cities, notably Berlin and London respectively, and both deal with extreme political violence. & Ouml;zdamar's narrator recalls the Armenian genocide in 1915, preceding the founding in 1923 of the Turkish nation state and a population exchange that turned the Greek/Turkish populations on Lesbos and a nearby island off the Turkish coast into monolingual communities. Ozdamar also looks back to the Second World War and the carpet bombing of Berlin, and a shoebox full of newspaper reports across the decades since then tracks episodes of politically motivated violence in Turkey. Shafak's novel looks back from the present in London to the ethnically based hostilities in the 1970s that split Cyprus into separate Greek and Turkish zones and to a murderous homophobic attack, the bodies thrown down into an old well: Cyprus is an island of missing bodies. Both novels include grotesque figures that are a mix of human and animal or of human and plant: & Ouml;zdamar's chorus of crows and a mosquito with a Berlin accent and Shafak's fig-tree narrator. Magic realist moments too serve to distance horror and mediate trauma through laughter.
This paper examines the pioneering work of Germaine Krull (1897) and Trude Fleischmann (1895), two Mitteleuropean women who defied societal norms as secular, middle-class, emancipated and queer Jewish women working in photography. The focus of this study is a re-examination of the early nude photographic portraits they both created between 1924 and 1925. Using the lenses of recent queer and visual studies, I aim to situate the gaze of these young photographers within the broader cultural contexts of the era. This entails placing their work in dialogue with influential currents such as the 'Neue Sehen', while also scrutinising its reception, in the form of photomechanical reproductions, within the official medical and media spheres of the time. Ultimately, this article uncovers how queer photographic practices both decentred and redefined representations of the female nude in the dynamic - and dramatically ephemeral - cultural landscape of the 1920s.
This article considers how trans lives are mediated across literary, painterly and filmic registers in Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography (2023). My analysis draws on Andrew Webber's development of reading practices applied to intertextual works that also exhibit interpictorial and interfilmic dynamics in his reading of a scene in Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012) that features the studied contemplation of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). I adopt Webber's reading of the surgical and theatrical space of Rembrandt's painting as a point of departure for thinking about compositional scenarios that move between modes of portraiture and performance. More specifically, I approach the process of restaging - and reimagining - the literary text as one that can also render the construction and performance of trans and nonbinary identities in Preciado's personal and political documentary. In turn, I argue that the disposition of scientific investigation as an analogue for critical cultural work frames Preciado's invitation to read closely and queerly for the material and mediated presence of trans subjects across history and a range of media: from the printed page to contemporary art cinema.
This article analyses the 'Gestus' of turning in films by Harun Farocki and Christian Petzold, in light of a central claim of Andrew Webber's esteemed theoretical work on film: that film has the power to uncover unconscious processes through which subjects come into being and are made operational for political regimes. Farocki's Leben-BRD (1990) presents a user guide to life in West Germany at the moment of unification, looping through training scenarios - from midwifery to military practice - to show that Western subjects are not born but rendered operational for political systems. My reading reveals a dialectic of manipulation and spontaneity in the film's footage of babies turning and being turned, and of factory machinery rotating and rolling, apparently independent of human intervention. I then examine bodily and mechanical turning in Petzold's Barbara (2012), co-written with Farocki, where gestures reminiscent of German Romanticism and Expressionism are coded as resistant to the performative effects of surveillance on subjectivity. The analysis draws on Webber's critical writings, Farocki's posthumous notes, and comments by Marx and Benjamin on technologies of turning that both expanded and replaced human capacities. The article thus revisits key historical turns - industrialisation, art history, the 'Wende', the digital revolution - while affirming the continuing power of filmmaking and film theory to decode the hidden operations of technological modernity.
This article analyses the multimodal poetry of Stefanie-Lahya Aukongo (b. 1978) through the framework of neuroqueer theory (e.g. Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau), showing how her poetic practice exposes and destabilises socially constructed norms of neurotypicality. The article begins with a comparative analysis of Aukongo's prose autobiography Kalungas Kind: Wie die DDR mein Leben rettete (2009) and her poetry volume Buchstabengef & uuml;hle: Eine poetische Einmischung (2018), building on the queer theorist Jos & eacute; Esteban Mu & ntilde;oz's concept of 'disidentification' to show how her poetic work destabilises neuronormative language and rejects fixed subject positions. The article then offers an extended close reading of the poem 'Ganz normal anders', tracing its deconstruction of medicalising and neuronormative discourses. Finally, the article considers the poem's multimodal form, showing how the incorporation of an audio soundtrack enacts a neuroqueer strategy that opens up points of resistance and potentiality between the printed words on the page. Overall, the article argues that Aukongo's practice of neuroqueering operates on both a thematic and a formal level in her poems and is closely intertwined with her unsettling of other normative constructions, such as those of race, gender and sexuality.
This article takes a closer look at the Boccaccio story upon which Paul Heyse based his famous 'Falken-Theorie' of the 'Novelle'. The essay then links Boccaccio to a general account of storytelling as an aid to survival amid the hostility of nature and human circumstances. The focus narrows down to the German 'Novelle', looking at Goethe (who adapted Boccaccio's genre for contemporary needs), the Romantics, Stifter and Freud. The development of the way in which the genre thematises narrative suggests that the theoretical use of the falcon is at the same time a cultural repression of what it really means. Rudolf G. Binding's hugely successful 'Novelle' Der Opfergang is an extreme (and representative) example of this. What is really involved on a more profound level is suggested by reference to Ren & eacute; Girard's essay 'The Plague in Literature and Myth'. The essay concludes with a short reference to the recent award-winning memoir by Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk, in which the proximity of all narrative to the reality it makes endurable is once again acknowledged. Ausgehend von der durch Paul Heyses Falken-Theorie ber & uuml;hmtgewordenen Novelle Boccaccios (Decamerone IX. 5) betont dieser Aufsatz die Rolle des Erz & auml;hlens als eine Art & Uuml;berlebensmittel angesichts der dem menschlichen Leben gegen & uuml;ber widrigen Umst & auml;nde in Natur und Geschichte. Die deutsche Novellentradition wird dann n & auml;her betrachtet, insbesondere Goethe (der Boccaccio im zeitgen & ouml;ssischen Kontext anwandte), die Romantik, Stifter und Freud. Dass die Gattung im Laufe ihrer Entwicklung das Erz & auml;hlen selbst thematisiert, deutet darauf hin, dass die theoretische Anwendung des Falken gleichzeitig als Verdr & auml;ngung seiner wahrhaftigen Bedeutung verstanden werden kann. Rudolf G. Bindings Erfolgsnovelle Der Opfergang wird als Paradebeispiel hierf & uuml;r angef & uuml;hrt. Worum es sich wiederum in Wahrheit bei dem Vorgang des Erz & auml;hlens handelt, wird durch das Heranziehen von Ren & eacute; Girards Aufsatz 'The Plague in Literature and Myth' angedeutet. Der Aufsatz spielt abschlie ss end auf Helen MacDonalds 2014 preisgekr & ouml;nten autobiographischen Bericht H is for Hawk an, in dem die Verwandtschaft allen Erz & auml;hlens mit der Wirklichkeit, die durch das Erz & auml;hlen erst ertr & auml;glich wird, wieder zum Vorschein kommt.
This article seeks to elucidate the term 'Hoffmannesque' - the eponymous adjective that refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann - through recourse to Hoffmann's own use of 'esque' words: arabesque, grotesque, burlesque, picturesque. By investigating the characteristics of 'esque' formulations and tracing their recurrence through Hoffmann's texts, I argue that Hoffmann proleptically anticipates the later codification of his style as the 'Hoffmannesque' through sustained practices of self-stylisation and repetition. Hoffmann's use of 'esque' words and their equivalents is programmatic in a minor key: they are deployed above all to characterise the minor forms of the mannerist. Hoffmann is presented as an author deeply invested in questions of authorship and style: one who formulates a popularly pleasing and commercially viable style at the dawn of mass culture, and for whom that style (or manner) is above all a site of encounter and relation.
This article examines Robert Walser's entry into what he called his 'Bleistiftgebiet' in the early 1920s, when in response to a profound crisis as a writer he began to produce manuscripts in minuscule size, the so-called 'Mikrogramme' (microscripts). Intertwining the analysis of the short prose form with Walser's reflections on the short-lived nature of public attention, my article shows how Walser aims to recover poetic attention through a precarious process of recycling poetic materials and memories. Walser managed to go on writing by using a pencil which, due to its softness and ease of use, became his preferred writing implement for his later prose sketches. The decisive switch from pen to pencil occurred as an act of opposition to the nationalism of the First World War, the prevailing bellicose masculinity and the attention economy of the publishing industry. In the domain of the pencil, Walser could experiment with an anti-mimetic, non-representative and revitalised language away from the public eye. The writer's hand plays a central role in this process: as Walser's custodian, it leads him along the 'Bleistiftweg' into the micro-province of the 'Bleistiftgebiet'. And so it is that Walser's poetics turns attention into a manual craft.
This article examines one of the highest-grossing films in recent years in Austria, Der Fuchs (Adrian Goiginger, 2022), which focuses on the friendship of the protagonist, a Wehrmacht soldier, with an abandoned fox cub, but in the process elides more than four years of the soldier's wartime experience. The film narrative is based on the true story of the director's great-grandfather, which has subsequently also been published as a biography by the director and Walter M & uuml;ller (Franz: Die Geschichte meines Urgro ss vaters, 2024). Applying a methodology of close reading and drawing on Andrew Webber's psychoanalytically informed attentiveness to ellipses and gaps in the diegesis as symptoms of repression, I trace the blind spots and incomplete depiction of the protagonist's involvement in the Nazi war machine in Goiginger's film. Ultimately, it will be shown that the film's narrative gaps draw attention precisely to what they purport to hide, namely Austria's involvement in Nazi crimes and the country's ongoing troubled confrontation with this legacy.
This article offers a close reading of Freud's 1909 case study 'Bemerkungen & uuml;ber einen Fall von Zwangsneurose' ('Rat Man'). I build on Andrew Webber's observation that both psychoanalytic case studies and the literary genre of the novella use the exceptional case to confirm the norm. Arguing that Freud's text simultaneously constructs and undermines a model of drive-based non-relational masculinity, the article explores how Freud integrates the pathology of obsessional neurosis into a gendered binary in contrast to the female-coded pathology of hysteria. I show how Freud's framework neglects the patient's relational needs by reducing the patient's ambivalence to intrapsychic Oedipal hostility. By foregrounding an attachment-oriented understanding of rage and the childhood experiences of abuse that remain overlooked by Freud, the analysis demonstrates how the case both reproduces and unsettles cultural norms. Moreover, I highlight the ways in which the text is haunted by the elements of sexual violence and relational vulnerability it obscures. This produces a novella-like slipperiness through which the case escapes Freud's theoretical grasp. The Rat Man case illuminates the ongoing cultural and clinical consequences of normative constructions of drive-based masculinity.
This paper examines texts by contemporary post-migrant authors Sharon Dodua Otoo and Fatma Aydemir with regard to critical confrontation with the German literary canon. The re-readings of Heinrich B & ouml;ll's satire Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen (Otoo) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (Aydemir) engage in a creative dialogue with the authors' texts, polemicising against a reductionist knowledge production and generating 'epistemic frictions' to use Jos & eacute; Medina's terminology. The post-migrant aesthetics are used as a resistant intervention against the Eurocentric master narrative. Otoo's and Aydemir's re-readings seek new visions of belonging for a plural and diverse contemporary society.
Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of killjoy activism, I explore how Antje R & aacute;vik Strubel's Blaue Frau employs a killjoy poetics that refuses to brush over violence, asymmetry, injury and force. Instead, the novel intervenes in affective textures of happiness and reconciliation, and forms activist and ecological networks of resistance. I build on Ahmed's thinking, on Sarah Colvin's notion of vitalising aesthetics, on Brigitte Bargetz's engagement with affective politics, and on contemporary ecofeminist ideas to discuss how Strubel's novel as a piece of European writing dwells on microscopic remnants of trauma and resistance. Against a dominant politics of ignoring and forgetting, the novel turns its protagonist's body into a literary archive of political materialisations of power, resonating with Ann Cvetkovich's account of unnoticed traumas and bad feelings. Strubel's novel unites a network of killjoys and complainers who confront structural violence and the failures of the dominant trauma discourse in present-day Europe with 'klare Ansagen'. The killjoy network never stands still and continuously expands. These structures of increasing interconnectedness are similar to the beautiful intensities that can be found in nature's boundless forms. The glistening on the Baltic Sea or the vastness of mycelial networks perform aesthetic resistance to the stasis of the political sphere.
Uwe Timm's autobiographical story Alle meine Geister, published in 2023, describes how Timm became an author. The story unfolds through explicit and implicit reflections on the nature and art of oral and written storytelling, against the backdrop of the author's apprenticeship and self-employment as a furrier in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Timm develops central points of his poetics by reference to two important texts in German-language cultural and literary history. The first is Walter Benjamin's essay 'Der Erz & auml;hler' (1936), in which Benjamin deals with oral narration in everyday life from the perspective of narrative theory and locates the origin of narration in the artisanal environment. In his memoirs, Timm repeatedly emphasises the interconnections between craftsmanship and storytelling by depicting the craft workshop as a social place of storytelling and the craftsperson as an artist. Second, Timm refers implicitly to E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'Des Vetters Eckfenster' (1822), in which Hoffmann connects narrative productivity and visual perception. In this context, Timm engages with the topos of the window view, which stimulates the viewer's imagination, and with the genesis of narrative from a remembered, imagined or actual image.
