Karl Leydecker Livres

The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and fateful time in German history. Characterized by economic and political instability, polarization, and radicalism, the period witnessed the efforts of many German writers to play a leading political role, whether directly, in the chaotic years of 1918-1919, or indirectly, through their works. The novelists chosen range from such now-canonical authors as Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, and Heinrich Mann to bestselling writers of the time such as Erich Maria Remarque, B. Traven, Vicki Baum, and Hans Fallada. They also span the political spectrum, from the right-wing Ernst Jünger to pacifists such as Remarque. The journalistic engagement of Joseph Roth, otherwise well known as a novelist, and of the recently rediscovered writer Gabriele Tergit is also represented. Paul Bishop, Roland Dollinger, Helen Chambers, Karin V. Gunnemann, David Midgley, Brian Murdoch, Fiona Sutton, Heather Valencia, Jenny Williams, Roger Woods. Karl Leydecker is Reader in German at the University of Kent.

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.

This study investigates Sudermann's plays from a socio-historical and literary-historical perspective. His plays are a response to a crisis of marriage. That crisis had its roots in the Romantic period and came to a head when the conservative Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch was introduced in 1900. Of particular significance is Es lebe das Leben (1902). The manuscripts of this play reveal that here Sudermann moved from a Realist treatment of marital difficulties to an exploration of the crisis of the realist literary system and a search for a Modernist treatment of divorce. His plays on marriage, divorce, courtship and the problems of single men and women constitute a sustained attempt to modify or at times radically to challenge the presentation of marriage in the Realist literary system.