Osman Durrani Livres

The 27 chapters of this volume reveal that there is scarcely an area of public activity in present-day Germany that has not been shaken to foundations by the upheavals of unification, a process which began suddenly and, for many people, unexpectedly in November 1989. By this time the two postwar German states, the 'Federal' and the 'Democratic' Republics, had been in existence for just over 40 years. As barriers in western Europe were removed and the Common Market became the European Community, the two German states appeared to be moving away from one another instead of converging…Although for historical reasons there have always been greater regional variations in such matters within the German-speaking world than in relatively uniform nation-states, the contrasts between 'East' and 'West' Germany had, by 1989, probably become sharper than those which distinguished the Federal Republic from the majority of other neighbouring states in western Europe… This volume aims to show that

This book examines four pivotal works by leading twentieth-century German novelists to reveal the intimate connections between literary fiction and social reality. The moral and political disorientation of Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, the cultural sterility and stifling bureaucracy of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, the paralysing effect of a nation's past in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and the latent violence underpinning Gunter Grass's controversial study of the sexes in The Flounder: each text contains a wealth of material on the social, intellectual and moral climate in Germany at the time of writing, and places uncomfortable home truths before the modern reader.

The aim of this study is to fill a gap in the interpretation of Goethe's «Faust» by providing the first full-length analysis of the poet's linguistic and thematic borrowings from the Bible and from Christian religious tradition written - in contrast to much of the earlier work in this field - from a non-sectarian point of view. It takes the form of a commentary on the drama, in which religious themes are identified and discussed with the object of determining their functions in Goethe's work. Inevitably, close attention is paid to earlier «Faust» scholarship, and the author has endeavoured to reappraise some of the major controversies in «Faust» criticism in the light of his own findings.