The primary objective of this dissertation is to underline the importance of the German reception of Negritude. Far from undermining the contribution to the reception of the Negritude movement by other European scholars, this thesis proposes that the German reception of Negritud…
The subject of the thesis is the food and drink section ("cibus et potus") of the Latin and German Regimen sanitatis literature in the Middle Ages. An introduction into the theoretical principles ("Four Humor Theory", and "Res Non Naturales") is followed by a detailed analysis o…
Western fascination with the Orient has generated many cliches that overshadow the actual experience of travelers. These cliches constitute the discourse of Orientalism, which Edward Said defined as "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special …
The following thesis is a study of Aras Ören's 1995 novel Berlin Savignyplatz. This novel moves away from the New Left's discourse on guest workers as helpless victims and toward a view that refuses to essentialize identities. The text does this by using instances of mass media …
This dissertation examines practices of embodying Black popular culture in Germany. My analysis is based on close readings of texts from a variety of media including novels, films and musical theater from West and East Germany of the 1950s to the reunified Germany of the 1990s. …
The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS) is regarded as one of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy and has been subjected to a wide variety of interpretations. In this paper I seek to open up an additional interpretative space by returning to Hegel's early theological…
The decades-long struggle to define German multicultural society takes place in relationship to state and popular assumptions about the nature of German and Western secularism. Expressions of this struggle include the "mosque debate," in which opponents sought to prevent new mos…
This is a translation of two radio plays by Günter Eich, the most celebrated author in this genre. They have been translated from the original German into English. These two radio plays illustrate Eich's examination of the limits of language in negotiating the chasm between the …
Shortly before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald made what amounts to a mission statement for his literary endeavors under the title "Ein Versuch der Restitution. (An Attempt at Restitution). In this brief address, Sebald maintains that his work can be seen as an attempt to make am…
Holocaust museums and exhibits, like other memorial institutions, express national cultures of remembrance. The Holocaust, however, is widely perceived as a unique historic event and therefore poses unusual challenges and raises aesthetic and ethical questions about how to visua…
This dissertation takes up the first truly Jewish homosexual identity, which Mordechai Jiří Langer (1894-1943) created in Prague during the 1920s. It is a study of the historical conditions--especially the exclusion of Jews by the masculinist wing of the German homosexual rights…
In my dissertation, I focus on the concept of the migrant flâneuse in the works of immigrant women writers in Germany to add to an understanding of transnational relations and globalization. I argue that in spite of a wide variety of theoretical practice, the discourse of flaner…
Else Lasker-Schuler's work, Der Malik, is an intriguing account of one character's growth from an author's persona into an independent subject situated in his own fantastic realm. I am informed by Bakhtin's notions on subjectivity and the creative process when I speak of Jussuf …
This thesis deals with the life and works of Sammy Gronemann, German Jewish Zionist lawyer and writer. It seeks to place him in the context of his times and investigate the contribution his various activities made to the diverse communities of which he was a member. He helped le…
This paper examines the question of what it means to be German. Its goal is to show a historic comparison between what was published in the 19 th -century and what has changed since the end of WWII. The basis of the first part will be, among others, Richard Wagner's article "Was…
(Sie waren einst Flüchtlinge is a collection of the biographies of nine individuals who came to Switzerland from different nations as refugees. Although each account varies dramatically in terms of its course and outcome, the common theme which runs through all of the chronicles…
The Enlightenment was an intellectual and social movement that had a profound impact on the development of Western society, yet its complexity and impact on literature are not often fully understood. The values of freedom, equality, and brotherhood as well as the rise of the rol…
The purpose of this dissertation is to reconstruct the discourse of medievalism in Western European drama between 1880 and 1920 and to explore the conditions which make possible a return to medieval sources for modern artistic inspiration. To investigate the use of medieval them…