Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany: The Literature of Inner Emigration

By John Klapper

Book Overview

An innovative, critical, historically informed, yet accessible reassessment of writers who remained in Nazi Germany and Austria yet expressed nonconformity - even dissent - through their fiction.

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Studies of literary responses to National Socialism between 1933 and 1945 have largely focused on exiled writers; opposition within Germany and Austria is less well understood. Yetin both countries there were writers who continued to publish imaginative literature that did not conform to Nazi precepts: the authors of the so-called Inner Emigration. They withdrew from the regime and sought to express theirnonconformity through camouflaged texts designed to offer sensitized readers encouragement, reassurance, and consolation.
This book provides a critical, historically informed reassessment of these writers. It is innovative inscope, in its use of little-known sources, in placing authors and texts in a detailed social and political context, and in analyzing seminal topoi and tropes of oppositional discourse. One of the most extensive studies of the topic in German or English, it provides a state-of-the-art text for literary historians, scholars, and students of German literature, but also, thanks to its accessibility and translation of all material, serves as an introduction for English-speaking readers to this poorly understood group of writers. Two contextualizing chapters are followed by chapters devoted to Werner Bergengruen, Stefan Andres, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Gertrud von le Fort, Reinhold Schneider, Ernst J nger, Ernst Wiechert, and Erika Mitterer.

JOHN KLAPPER is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, UK.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1640140549
• ISBN13: 9781640140547
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Camden House (NY)
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"