German Text Crimes

Download or read book German Text Crimes written by Tom Cheesman and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: German Text Crimes offers new perspectives on scandals and legal actions implicating writers of German literature since the 1950s. Topics range from literary echoes of the “Heidegger Affair” to recent incitements to murder businessmen (agents of American neo-liberal power) in works by Rolf Hochhuth and others. GDR songwriters’ cat-and-mouse games with the Stasi; feminist debates on pornography, around works by Charlotte Roche and Elfriede Jelinek; controversies over anti-Semitism, around Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser / The Reader and Martin Walser’s lampooning of the Jewish critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; Peter Handke’s pro-Serbian travelogue; the disputed editing of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Nachlaß; vexed relations between dramatists and directors; (ab)uses of privacy law to ‘censor’ contemporary fiction: these are among the cases of ‘text crimes’ discussed. Not all involve codified law, but all test relations between state power, civil society, media industries and artistic license.