University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 312
Trim: 6½ x 9¾
978-1-61148-345-1 • Hardback • May 2010 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
Heidi Schlipphacke is associate professor of German at Old Dominion University.
In keeping with the trend in culture studies that directs attention to the history of feeling, this study scrutinizes affect and its role in creative nostalgia. The focus is on the peculiar conditions that obtain in postwar Germany and Austria….Schlipphacke’s analysis of the expression of this dilemma in selected works of Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelink, Tom Tykwer, Robert Menasse, and Birgit Vanderbeke is subtle and ingenious….She has presented a lucid and sophisticated analysis of a dynamic thematic complex too often viewed as static….Nostalgia after Nazism nevertheless offers a provocative, detailed, and well-argued study of shifts in the creative processing of nostalgia in postwar, post-fascist German and Austrian culture.
— Book Reviews
In Nostalgia After Nazism Heidi Schlipphacke skillfully draws on postcolonial and postmodern theories in addition to recent work on nostalgia to frame her discussion of select works by the Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse, the German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, and the German writer Birgit Vanderbeke. . . .Schlipphacke has chosen texts 'that engage in especially complex ways both formally and thematically with the confrontation with recent history and the emotions that accompany such a confrontation'. Her analysis, which itself is complex, is lucid and thought- provoking. Th e author provides a model for connecting theory and literature as well as a model for us teaching and reading a literature that is so rooted in Austria’s fascist history beyond that country’s borders.
— The Journal of Austrian Studies