German and Scandinavian Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing German and Scandinavian Theses and Dissertations by Author "Klebes, Martin"

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    “I Don’t Know My Way Around Here Anymore”: Representations of Loss of Home in Novels and Memoirs by Contemporary East German Authors
    (University of Oregon, 2025-02-24) Lehmann, Tobias; Klebes, Martin
    In this dissertation, I analyze how contemporary German-language literature by authors from East Germany expresses the theme of losing one’s home. I explore whether and how they process their experiences of loss during the Wende through their writing. To achieve this, I conduct a close reading of three novels that address the loss of home following the unification of Germany: Neue Leben and Simple Storys by Ingo Schulze, and Wie es leuchtet by Thomas Brussig. Additionally, I provide necessary context by drawing upon personal narratives from two memoirs: Zonenkinder by Jana Hensel and Eisenkinder by Sabine Rennefanz.In Neue Leben, I analyze the letters of the protagonist Enrico Türmer to his sister, his friend Johann, and his fiancée Nicoletta. These letters, written in the first half of 1990, are published and annotated by an editor who pretends to be Ingo Schulze and is interested in Türmer, who has disappeared without a trace. Wie es leuchtet is based on individual plot strands developed separately from one another, which come together in a mosaic-like arrangement, creating a snapshot of German transformation. Brussig mixes fiction with actual events and individuals, bringing to life an essential part of the loss of home in Germany. In Simple Storys, 29 seemingly uncomplicated narratives reveal the collapse of an entire world in small everyday incidents. Ingo Schulze depicts the loss of his protagonists’ home, taken by surprise by world history, with precision, humor, and empathy. For Jana Hensel and Sabine Rennefanz, unification meant less a newly acquired freedom than a state of ‘metaphysical homelessness.’ In their memoirs Zonenkinder and Eisenkinder, they describe their childhood in the GDR, which was marked by uprooting and social change. The main contribution of this dissertation is to contextualize novels about the Wende and the loss of home, allowing for comparisons and highlighting intertextual references that have not been previously analyzed in this way. This dissertation contains literary representations, symbolisms, figures, and references that have not been coherently linked and conceptualized in interdisciplinary terms in previous studies.
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    Michael Kohlhaas and the Limits of Kantian Reason, Morality, and Law
    (University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Mitzen, Lindsey; Klebes, Martin
    Kleist's work is often read within the context of his Kant Crisis. My thesis will follow in that tradition and give a close reading of Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas within the context of Kantian morality in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and Kantian legal theory in Metaphysik der Sitten. Kleist doubted that humans could really understand the world and use reason to find truth, as he indicated in one of his letters that he gave up on finding a "Schatz der Wahrheiten" or an ability to find truth in the world. Michael Kohlhaas is a novella by Kleist that deals with the question of justice in the positive law and forming moral decisions. Since Kant addressed morality within the context of Kantian practical principles or maxims in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and his philosophy of law inMetaphysik der Sitten, these two texts are particularly helpful in gaining further insight into Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas.
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    Queer Kinships and Curious Creatures: Animal Poetics in Literary Modernism
    (University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Hoffmann, Eva; Klebes, Martin
    My dissertation brings together prose texts and poetry by four writers and poets, who published in German language at the beginning of the twentieth century: Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Georg Trakl (1887-1914). All four of these writers are concerned with the inadequacy of language and cognition, the so called Sprachkrise at the turn-of-the-century. In their texts, they challenge the ability of language to function as a means of communication, and as a way to express emotions or relate more deeply to the world. While it is widely recognized that this “crisis of identity” in modernist literature has been a crisis of language all along, I argue in my dissertation that the question of language is ultimately also a question of “the animal.” Other scholars have argued for animals’ poetic agency (e.g. Aaron M. Moe; Susan McHugh), or for the conceptual link between the “crisis of language” and the threat to human exceptionalism in the intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century (Kári Driscoll). My dissertation is the first study that explores the interconnection between Sprachkrise, animality, and the phenomenological philosophy of embodiment. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology, I illustrate how Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Rilke and Trakl invoke the body as intertwined with animals in complex ways, and employ these animal figures to reconceptualize notions of language and specifically the metaphor. The authors, I argue, engage in a zoopoetic writing, as other forms of life participate as both symbolic and material bodies in the signifying processes. Moreover, I illustrate how their zoopoetic approach involve forms of intimacy and envision figures that fall outside heteronormative sexualities and ontologies, making the case for a queer zoopoetics in Modernist German literature.