Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

Sonja Boos

Published by Cornell University Press 2015

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany

Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

Sonja Boos
Funded by: Cornell University Library

In the series Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801471957

Overview
Contents

About this book

In this an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany.

Author / Editor information

Sonja Boos is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Oregon.

Reviews

Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University:

This is an ambitious and important book. Sonja Boos displays extensive familiarity with the early cultural history of West Germany, presenting a valuable series of snapshots of intellectual life there through the mid-1960s, focusing on the engagement of public intellectuals in memory of the Holocaust. Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany offers complex and insightful analyses of these interventions.

Katja Garloff, Reed College:

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is a well-honed, meticulously researched, and theoretically grounded study of public speeches that sought to intervene into the memory culture of postwar West Germany. By considering a wide range of sources, Sonja Boos manages to establish the public speech as a genre in its own right, one that became crucial in challenging the biases and blind spots of West German Vergangenheitsbewälitgung. Indeed, Boos's book confers upon the public speech an entirely new status in the study of postwar German culture, history, and memory. From political to psychoanalytical theory, from discourse analysis to memory studies, Boos brings a range of theoretical approaches to bear in her insightful readings of the speeches at hand. The successful integration of classical rhetoric, speech act theory, and public sphere theory in Boos's theoretical framework is particularly laudable.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	ix
List of Abbreviations Open Access Download PDF	xi
Introduction: An Archimedean Podium Open Access Download PDF	1
Part I. In the Event of Speech: Performing Dialogue
1. Martin Buber Open Access Download PDF	25
2. Paul Celan Open Access Download PDF	52
3. Ingeborg Bachmann Open Access Download PDF	70
Part II. “Who One Is”: Self-Revelation and Its Discontents
4. Hannah Arendt Open Access Download PDF	87
5. Uwe Johnson Open Access Download PDF	114
Part III. Speaking by Proxy: The Citation as Testimony
6. Peter Szondi Open Access Download PDF	137
7. Peter Weiss Open Access Download PDF	159
Conclusion: Speaking of the Noose in the Country of the Hangman (Theodor W. Adorno) Open Access Download PDF	195
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	211
Index Open Access Download PDF	225

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Keywords: hannah arendt; theodor w adorno; ingeborg bachmann; martin buber; paul celan; public speeches; public rhetoric; holocaust rhetoric; postwar west germany; west german history

eBook

Published: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 9780801471957