Wer ist adorno in der vorleser

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What enabled so many everyday Germans to kill Jews with emotional and psychological impunity? Hannah Arendt suggests that a failure in thinking can account for this behavior. But I argue that Bernhard Schlink exposes Arendt's theory as limited and flawed in his novel The Reader. To prevent everyday people from committing atrocities, what is needed is an ability to read-to others, an ability to access the interior of the other. This theory of reading-to sheds new and very different light on Schlink's novel.

Literary research, essentially is a process of meeting between literary works and researchers. In this case, it is necessary to pay attention to the…

This article argues that the recent literary and essayistic works of Bernhard Schlink represent a reckoning with the 1968 generation— a generation to which Schlink belongs, but as one of the " silent majority " who made their way without getting involved in the student unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s� Schlink takes issues with the 1968 generation for its supposedly moralising attitude to the Nazi past, calling implicitly for the historicization of Nazism� His recent work therefore shares views of the 1968 generation typical of others such as the historian Götz Aly, and is part of a wider deconstruction of 1968 noticeable in Germany in recent times� Colloquia Germanica vol. 48, nr. 1–2 (2015)

This paper examines the nature of our relationships with one another and asks in what sense and to what degree we are our “brothers’ keepers”. In raising these questions, I use a work of fiction, The Reader (1995) by Bernhard Schlink to see how our sense of responsibility for another is based on our memories of the past and extends to the present and the future. As the novel deals with post-war second generation’s attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust, it raises many questions such as, “How do we integrate our historical grievance into our collective biography?” Looking into the personal relationship between two main characters in the novel, I first challenge the stereotypical images of perpetrators and suggest the act of recognizing inhumanity in all of us, or “the banality of evil” as an alternative to our tendency to normalize the terrible and demonize the ordinary. Second, I discuss the limitations of law in relation to the female character’s secret illiteracy. In lieu of legalism and moral mediocrity, I present what Solzhenitsyn referred to as “higher human possibilities”, which appeal to human dignity prior to human rights. Lastly, I discuss the role of the humanities in recovering the sense of the divine in us and nurturing global citizens, who should be neither spineless cosmopolitans nor narcissistic nationalists. I conclude this paper by suggesting re-defining our “home” as a way to include our vulnerability and transcend the generational guilt or victimhood.

The study of the relationship between cinema and literature (and more specifically, of film adaptations) is a problematic field. Whether from the point of view of literary studies, cinema studies or translation studies, no theoretical model seems to be able to do justice to all stances and, inevitably, the result will draw criticism. This paper does not aim to provide an ultimate solution to this conundrum, but rather to analyse a specific cultural product in its various (and equally valuable) manifestations: the German novel Der Vorleser, the English translation thereof and its film adaptation The reader by director Stephen Daldry. The purpose is to examine the context in which the product (or rather products) come into being and to look at the specific characteristics presented by the novel and the film as manifestations of different media. For the sake of brevity, the English translation will only be commented upon rather tangentially as the main focus is on how the original German text has been transposed into the film.

World War II is one of the key events in the first half of 20th century, the impact of which was of so great a consequence that it still becomes a site of strife for imaginative productions to reflect their anxieties. Atonement and the Reader are the samples of such productions with the focalization of authorship in the former and readership in the latter, covering a span of almost 50 years. Therefore, three factors become of importance in connecting these novels together: 1. Authorship 2. Readership 3. History, namely World War II. The present study aims at inspecting the bifocal functioning of authorship and readership within a slice of history, World War II, through the eyes of the mentioned novels in order to achieve a different perspective of the event and the consequences that befell its aftermath.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates how much the forest was used by medieval writers as a symbolic space where critical events take place deeply affecting their protagonists. The forest motif can be found in the works of St. Augustine as well as in Dante’s Divina Commedia, and then in a plethora of other texts. Here I examine more closely the symbolic meaning of the forest as a mysterious, dangerous, yet also spiritual location in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Titurel (ca. 1220) and then in two fifteenth-century prose novels, Thüring von Ringoltingen’s Melusine (1456) and the anonymous Fortunatus (1509). Each time we recognize how much the poets placed their central figures one in the forest where their life takes a major turn. Recognizing this intriguing function of the forest as a metaphor and symbol, we can employ the modern interest in and fascination with the forest as a refuge from the destruction of the natural environment through modern civilization as segue to attract students to the study of medieval literature once again.