UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item THE REPRESENTATION OF NAZI VILLAINY IN AMERICAN COMICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ONGOING STRUGGLE OF GERMAN TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE “POST” TRUMP ERA(2022) Foster, Jordan Maxwell; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past 80 years, Nazis have been cast as the ultimate prototype for villainy in popular culture, especially in American comic books. The fetishization of Nazis in global popular culture has impeded the difficult tasks of coming to terms with the past and establishing a new transnational identity in Germany. However, recent publications, such as Freedom Fighters (2019) from DC Comics and Secret Empire (2017) from Marvel Comics demonstrate how manipulation, propaganda, fearmongering, and indoctrination powered the Nazi Party and continue to run rampant in modern-day fascist organizations. If mainstream comic books begin to consistently showcase these less sensational aspects of Nazism, they could highlight the subtle dangers of contemporary fascism, including neo-Nazism and far-right extremism, which have recently experienced a resurgence in mainstream politics all over the world. By doing so, mainstream comics could begin to emulate the sophisticated critique of works like Maus (1986) by Art Spiegelman.Item "Schweigen als Herausforderung": Silence as a Generational Challenge in the Post Holocaust Works of East German Jewish Authors Jurek Becker and Barbara Honigmann(2020) McDaniel, Jocelyn; Beicken, Peter; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how two postwar Jewish writers from the former German Democratic Republic, Jurek Becker, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Barbara Honigmann, a descendent of returned Jewish communist emigres and a second-generation writer, depicted and challenged a culture of silence, “Schweigen,” concerning Holocaust memory and Jewish identity in postwar Germanophone societies. This study emphasizes the unique East German context that influenced both authors. “Schweigen” is defined as a societal phenomenon of binary emotional trauma. Facing the inevitable "Schuldfrage" (Jaspers, 1946), many postwar Germans found it arduous to come to terms with the inhumanity of the Third Reich, while many Jewish victims suffered from the shame of survival. In the GDR, “Schweigen” was compounded by the state’s propagation of antifascism and a prescriptive cultural heritage, Kulturerbe, encompassing the abdication of guilt from the fascist past, the minimization of Jewish victimhood, and misappropriation of Holocaust memory. Becker and Honigmann, whose parents were victimized by the Third Reich, grew up in the GDR, a communist state. Foremost, their family backgrounds, generational attitudes, and perceptions of East German socialism shaped their contrasting writings concerning the cultural silencing of Holocaust memory and complexity of Jewish identity. Literary trauma theory, memory studies, and gender studies bring these (dis)continuities into focus. Five chapters are devoted to the authors’ development in the GDR and their literary responses to “Schweigen” within the limitations of East German cultural heritage. Both oeuvres are therapeutic undertakings impacted by experienced and inherited Holocaust-trauma. The analyses of Becker's life and his novels, Jakob der Lügner, Der Boxer, and Bronsteins Kinder, reveal his adoption of the humanist tradition of socialism that stands against the dangers of fascism, while dissenting from the GDR’s official cultural doctrine. In life and writing, Honigmann forsakes East German Kulturerbe by recreating her own German Jewish identity and cultural heritage. Her autofictive works reject communism and the generational assimilation of her family in favor of Jewish spirituality, feminist assertions, and multiculturalism. The comparison of both authors and their Holocaust-relevant writings likewise endeavors to counter the dual waning of Holocaust memory and East German national memory.Item The Emergence of the Fascist Aesthetic in Early German Cinema(2018) Timmons, Wendy Cassandra Ellen; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My thesis explores the development of a fascist aesthetic in German films, examining three significant, active filmmakers between 1922 and 1939 (Fritz Lang, Arnold Fanck, and Leni Riefenstahl), whose works feature an aesthetic continuity before and after 1933. Despite political differences, formal and thematic similarities exist in the works of these filmmakers, which have sometimes been discussed in the context of a “fascist aesthetic” that was initially conceptualized in the Weimar era and became increasingly instrumentalized by filmmakers during the Nazi era. While scholars have long debated the idea and substance of a fascist aesthetic, renewed debates about the concept at the contemporary moment underscore the importance of reconsidering the topic at the point of its origin. I approach the problem by contextualizing this aesthetic in the forms it takes pre- and post-1933 and emphasizing that this aesthetic is comprised of motifs and images that are contextually specific.Item "Barbarous Berlin": Narratives of Queerness, Space, Survival, and Memory in a Liminal City(2018) Joyner, Raleigh; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The intent of my work is to explore the relationships between history, space, community, and movement in and through the city of Berlin throughout the last century. I trace common threads of liminality, memory, survival, and the relationships between the urban space and the individual over a 100-year period. The three periods that I particularly focus on are the Weimar era (1919-1933), the division of Germany and Berlin (1961-1989), and the reestablishment of Germany as a united country (1990-present).Item Wahrnehmung in Rom, Blicke: Rolf Dieter Brinkmanns Suche nach Identität und Selbstfindung(2018) Sitzler-Sawicki, Maria A.; Beicken, Peter U.; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Das Ziel meiner Arbeit ist die literarische Analyse und Interpretation des Textes, das Herausarbeiten von Grundthemen und Hauptaspekten, sowie Brinkmanns Suche nach Identität und versuchte Selbstfindung.Item Skandalöses Erzählen: Panizza–Bernhard–Walser(2017) Ketterl, Anja; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: SKANDALÖSES ERZÄHLEN: PANIZZA–BERNHARD–WALSER Anja Ketterl, Doctor of Philosophy, 2017 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Hester Baer Associate Professor and Head of Germanic Studies My dissertation Scandalous Narration: Panizza–Bernhard–Walser analyzes the relationship between German-language literature and literary scandal in the twentieth century. I argue that the scandalous as a mode of representation challenges binary constellations and hierarchical imbalances that define the construction of norms and deviation from them. Taking a poetological perspective, I address the relationship between representation and the scandalous in narrative texts by Oskar Panizza, Thomas Bernhard and Robert Walser. As a key element in both German cultural history and in the Western tradition more broadly, the scandal is considered a deviation from defined norms. More precisely, scholarship in literary and cultural studies conceives of the literary scandal as literature’s deliberate transgression of received norms in order to argue for the scandal’s effectiveness as a critical tool. I suggest that this understanding reinforces the binary of normativity and non-normativity that it purports to overcome. Drawing on poststructuralist theory’s conception of the scandal as a paradoxical stumbling block, I argue that scandalous narratives, that is, narratives produced through a technique of paradoxical stumbling, reveal the precarious status of the dichotomy of the normative vs. non-normative. A close reading of Oskar Panizza’s novella Ein scandalöser Fall (1893) sets up a discussion of the scandalous by analyzing the poetological implications of the ‘hermaphroditic’ body within the realm of literature, religion, and sexual pathology around 1900. In my chapter on Panizza, I show how the structural undecidability of a scandalous narration destabilizes the uneven power relations between the deviant body and representatives of both clerical and medical discourses. The scandalous dimension of deviant language is further discussed in my chapter on Thomas Bernhard within the broader framework of (anti-) psychiatric discourse. Here, I analyze the scandalous dimension of Bernhard’s exhausting narration with close attention to his novel Das Kalkwerk (1970), further considering the poetological effect of this technique in his novella Gehen (1971). On the basis of Robert Walser’s famous ‘Prosastück’ Der Spaziergang (1917), my final chapter illustrates how Walser’s use of both the zeugma as a figure of speech and a specific framing technique produces a scandalous poetics that challenges the opposition of deviant authorship and the idea of the great canonical work.Item FATIH AKIN’S LOVE, DEATH, AND THE DEVIL TRILOGY: A TRIAD OF CROSS-CULTURAL TALES(2017) Trozenski, Abigail Margaret; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tracing Fatih Akin’s directorial oeuvre, this thesis focuses on Akin’s films Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), and The Cut (2014), which comprise the Love, Death, and the Devil trilogy. Emphasizing the tropes of mobility and language, I specifically trace the thematic and cinematic links between the films as they draw upon concepts of hybridity and migration.Item Machtverhältnisse und die Problematik des postkolonialen Blicks in Uwe Timms Morenga (1978) und Gerhard Seyfrieds Herero (2003)(2016) Sellman, Eileen; Frederiksen, Elke P; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using a postcolonial methodology within a German Cultural Studies framework, this thesis applies a close reading to Uwe Timm’s 1978 novel Morenga and Gerhard Seyfried’s 2003 novel Herero. Both novels narrate the colonial experience in German Southwest Africa during the 1904-1907 Herero and Nama uprising through the eyes of a German male protagonist. I investigate how notions of the ‘other’ become ingrained in the collective cultural imaginary of a nation and manifest themselves as inherent truths used to justify methods of subjugation. I also examine the conflicts that arise due to the clash between these drastically different cultures in the “contact zone”, a term I borrow from Mary Louise Pratt. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the ways in which the natives’ use of mimicry allows for the creation of a cultural hybridity in which power relations are constantly negotiated and re-evaluated. I also problematize the difficulty both protagonists demonstrate in their quest to abandon the colonial gaze in favor of adopting a postcolonial perspective, an attempt that often appears ambivalent at best.Item Otto von Corvin - An appraisal of the man and his works(1950) Vent, Myron H.; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item Rilkes innere form; ein versuch einer existentiellen stilforschung(1941) Schweizer, Mark; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)