Under the Sign of Auschwitz: Melancholy in German Language Literature since 1960

这本专著将是开创性的，揭示了战后德国写作研究不足的领域，并在理论上定位自己与人文科学的主导方法相抗衡。它探讨了一些主要作家的作品，他们利用欧洲悠久的忧郁传统的某些方面来评论德国近代史(古恩特·格拉斯、沃尔夫冈·希尔德海默、W·G·塞巴尔德、彼得·维斯、英格堡·巴赫曼)。然而，这种忧郁的使用还没有被认为是战后德国文学特别反映奥斯威辛遗产的一种趋势。这种疏忽源于德国忧郁的学术联系，主要是与早期现代时期、巴洛克时期、浪漫主义和现代性危机，并在大多数战后关于德国文学中的忧郁的出版物中永久存在，这些出版物在20世纪之前就停止了他们的分析。然而，《忧郁》在20世纪下半叶持续存在，因此，对这一时期文学的深入研究将对战后和当代德国文学的研究和理解做出重要贡献。因此，它将吸引研究德国文化和思想史以及大屠杀的学者和学生。我的项目始于20世纪60年代，当时人们开始将奥斯威辛集中营理解为西方文明的一个裂痕。就在那时，亚历山大和玛格丽特·米切利希对战后德国人的病情进行了有影响力的诊断，称他们“无法哀悼”。然而，从20世纪60年代开始，德国和奥地利的主要作家从西方写作中汲取忧郁的主题，以谈论动荡过去的遗产，并提出对历史时间的政治共鸣理解。最近的文学现象W.G.Sebald在许多作品中都尊重这种1960年后的忧郁话语，然而，尽管他的忧郁写作启发了许多学术出版物，但在《奥斯威辛集中营》之后，这个词失去了历史的特殊性，主要是从精神分析的角度来看待。这有两个后果：缩小了忧郁的传统，以适应精神分析范式，与与大屠杀是世界历史上决定性事件的观点有关的独特意识形态信息相适应；忽视了主要作家将忧郁作为一种方式来讨论超越大屠杀、背离精神分析的问题。自20世纪60年代以来，没有人想过要扩大研究视野，调查忧郁作为一种更普遍的现象在德国文学中的使用，更关键的是，这种现象与大屠杀后历史的精神分析读物背道而驰，被认为是无法形容的创伤。我很有资格在这个被忽视的领域提供一些新的东西，这个领域将德国文学与当前关于记忆和历史性质的国际和跨学科辩论联系在一起，不像一本在战后背景下处理忧郁的专著(Blamberger 1985)，它批判性地利用了西方思想中无处不在的奥斯威辛。此外，我的专著建立在我已经发表的关于忧郁、德国和奥地利记忆文化的著作的主体上，以及我建议纳入的几位作家的基础上。

The monograph will be ground-breaking, uncovering an under-researched area of post-war German writing and positioning itself theoretically against dominant approaches in the Humanities. It explores the work of a number of major writers who use aspects of the long-standing European melancholy tradition to comment on recent German history (Guenter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, Ingeborg Bachmann). However, this use of melancholy has yet to be identified as a trend particular to post-war German literature which reflects specifically on the legacy of Auschwitz. This oversight arises from the scholarly association of German melancholy predominantly with the Early Modern period, the Baroque period, Romanticism, and also the crisis of modernity, and is perpetuated in most post-war publications on melancholy in German literature which stop their analysis well before the 20th century. Yet melancholy has had a sustained literary afterlife in the latter half of the 20th century, therefore a well-researched study of literature in this period will make a significant contribution to research and understanding in the field of post-war and contemporary German literature. It will thus appeal to scholars and students of German cultural and intellectual history and of the Holocaust. My project starts in the 1960s when the understanding of 'Auschwitz' as a rupture in Western civilisation first began to emerge. This was when Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich influentially diagnosed the German condition after the war as 'the inability to mourn'. From the 1960s on, however, major German and Austrian writers drew on melancholy motifs from Western writing in order to talk about the legacy of the troubled past and to put forward politically resonant understandings of historical time. Recent literary phenomenon, W.G. Sebald, has honoured this post-1960 melancholy discourse in many works, yet while his melancholy writing has inspired many scholarly publications, post-'Auschwitz' the term has lost its historical specificity and is viewed largely from a psychoanalytical perspective. This has two consequences: the narrowing of melancholy traditions to fit a psychoanalytical paradigm with a distinct ideological message pertaining to the idea of the Holocaust as a defining event in world history; neglect of the way in which major writers use melancholy as a way of discussing issues that go beyond the Holocaust and that depart from psychoanalysis. No one has thought to widen the research horizon to investigate the use of melancholy as a much more general phenomenon in German literature since the 1960s, and crucially one which flies in the face of psychoanalytical readings of post-Holocaust history as unspeakable trauma. I am well placed to offer something new on this neglected area which connects German literature to current international and interdisciplinary debates on the nature of memory and history and which, unlike the one monograph that tackles melancholy in the post-war context (Blamberger 1985), critically takes on board the omnipresence of 'Auschwitz' in Western thought. Further, my monograph builds on the body of work I have already published on melancholy, German and Austrian memory culture, and on several of the authors I propose to include.