Our first workshop took place at University of York in February 2019, exploring representations of 'violence elsewhere' in literature.

The workshop’s focus on Writing “Violence Elsewhere” fostered discussions of the usefulness and ethics of the term "violence", the role of emotions and affect in writing about violence, and the impact of violence on the identity and subjectivity of victims, perpetrators and those who witness.

The group discussion was followed by paper presentations from Mererid Puw Davies (German Department / School of European Languages, Cultures and Society (SELCS) UCL), Stephanie Bird (German Department/ School of European Languages, Cultures and Society (SELCS) UCL) and Joanne Leal (Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London).

See below for this workshop’s reading, paper abstracts (with audio from Joanne Leal's presentation) and bibliographies.

Michael Baumann, Wie alles anfing (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 2007), pp. 112-113

J. M. Coetzee, 'Into the Dark Chamber: the Ovelist and South Africa', The New York Times [website] January 12 1986, <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetzee-chamber.html>, Accessed 17 May 2019

David O'Gorman, 'Global Terror, Global Literature', Terrorism and Literature, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 446-468

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, ‘Bitteres Wasser’, Odessa Transfer: Nachrichten vom Schwarzen Meer, ed. by Katharina Raabe and Monika Sznajdermann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009), pp. 40-49

Alice Schwarzer, 'Silvester 2015, Tahrir-Platz in Köln', Der Shock: die Silvesternacht in Köln, ed. by Alice Schwarzer (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2016), pp. 7-39

Dr Mererid Puw Davies: 'Writing Home: Representing the Vietnam Conflict in West German Poetry around 1968'

The political, cultural and symbolic significance of the Vietnam war can barely be overstated for the global phenomenon known as ‘1968’ – and indeed, for twentieth-century Modernity. West Germany is no exception and in this respect forms an emblematic case study for an imagined German ‘Violence Elsewhere’. Of course, West Germans’ responses to Vietnam share much with international discourse; yet in addition, they are extremely distinctive and symptomatically telling about memories of totalitarianism, conflict, atrocity and their aftermath in post-war Germany. Therefore, representations of the Vietnam war in West Germany can be read as coded expressions of two others: firstly, the of Second World War and its complex, painful meanings for West Germans; and secondly, of the affective civil war which followed within the German psyche.

These issues are reflected in various ways in the West German anti-war movement’s prolific poetry, and here I introduce that essential, yet forgotten body of work with reference to selected examples. I indicate, first, how these instances are typical of West German anti-war poetry and writing more broadly, and so offer an outline of key features in that corpus more broadly. Second, I show how they relate to and rework, or arguably even replicate other, older German literary traditions. Based on this reading, I suggest therefore that the protest movements’ relationships to the past are more ambiguous and contradictory than first meets the eye. I consider how to evaluate that finding in relation to the wider phenomenon of 1968, writing and cultural memory in Germany, and their relationship to ‘Violence Elsewhere’. As part of my wider work in progress in this field, the paper will seek a theoretical idiom which seems adequate to express the complexity of the poetic positions in question.

Mererid Puw Davies is one of the Principal Investigators on the Violence Elsewhere Research Project. Her research covers modern German literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, German film and cultural studies, and comparative literature. She is interested in gender issues and women as writers and producers of culture. She has also worked extensively on violence and representation, political writing, and the complex relationships between art, literature, theory and history, especially during and after the violence and atrocities of the twentieth century. In different ways, all these interests are reflected in Mererid's current work in progress on the representation of the Vietnam War in German poetry, which offers a complex and significant engagement with ‘violence elsewhere’, which in turn, illuminates ideas about violence closer to home. Mererid is also deeply and increasingly interested in comparative approaches to the literatures and cultures of modern Europe.

Professor Stephanie Bird: ‘Representing Perpetrators in Literature’

This paper analyses what is meant by violence elsewhere. It first considers how the contemporary definition of violence has expanded from a focus on inter-subjective violence to incorporate many different types of symbolic and structural violence. This is a process which potentially detracts from the specificity of subjective violence and the particular circumstances in which such violence is carried out. Randal Collins’s study of micro-violence, which points to the difficulty in performing violence and the way in which humans are, rather, hyper-attuned to each others’ emotions to facilitate solidarity, is helpful for understanding the specific locations of violence. With these ideas in mind, the paper next explores the ways in which violence in fiction, particularly in relation to the perpetration of Nazi violence, can be considered to be ‘elsewhere’. In fiction, violence is always elsewhere because fiction operates at a different ontological level. Fiction may situate violence elsewhere spatially and temporally, but fiction also considers the question of moral proximity and distance by thematising questions of agency. The paper concludes by asking whether there is a role for realist modes of representing violence for emphasising the anger and excitement of a violent interaction.

Stephanie Bird is Professor of German Studies at University College London. She has published on topics ranging from the interaction of fact and fiction in the biographical novel, the relationship of female and national identity, and the representation and ethics of shame. As Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project ‘The Reverberations of War’ she worked on a comparative study exploring the significance of the comical in German-language cultural representations of suffering. Her latest book, Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, analyses how the comical interrogates the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and trauma. It does so by integrating a critique of dominant paradigms, such as that of trauma and of victim identity. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Klüger, Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell. She is currently Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project on the representation of perpetrators of Nazi violence, with a particular emphasis on questions of justice.

Professor Joanne Leal: 'German engagement with Iraqi conflict: Sherko Fatah’s Das Dunkle Schiff (2008) and Der letzte Ort (2016)'

This paper explores whether two novels by Sherko Fatah, Das dunkle Schiff (2008) and Der letzte Ort (2014), expand on the range of literary engagements with post-9/11 terrorism and violent conflict, including in relation to their depiction of the terrorist subject, and it does so by approaching this topic from two related angles It investigates how Fatah represents the impact of violence on the formation of self in relation to other, how it affects the way in which the individual constructs and engages with an idea of community, and its consequences for his division of a world into an ‘us’ to which he belongs and a potentially hostile ‘them’. This is done with reference both to those who perpetrate terrorist violence and those who become its victims. The former are largely the focus of Das dunkle Schiff and the latter of Der letzte Ort, although this perpetrator/victim binary is one troubled by both texts. It also considers the potential of empathy in relation to narrative as it manifests in both novels, asking specifically whether story-telling can act to counter violence by enabling mutual understanding and creating community. Story-telling is understood here as encompassing both the narratives we construct about our own lives and communicate to ourselves and others, and literary narrative, and I am interested in the way stories function for characters within the texts, as well as whether, on a meta-level, they engage the reader in an empathetic encounter with the other.

Joanne Leal is Professor of German Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She undertakes research in the area of twentieth and twenty-first century German literature and film. She works on gender and sexuality in German film and literature and on the representation of significant social issues in the contemporary German novel, including migration, social exclusion and Islamophobia. She is also interested in constructions of the family in literature, film and other visual media and has recently co-edited the volume Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory with Silke Arnold-de Simine (Bloomsbury, 2018).

You can listen to Joanne's paper below:

Mererid Puw Davies, 'Writing Home: Representing the Vietnam Conflict in West German Poetry around 1968'

Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], selected and trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993)

Klaus Briegleb, [1968], Literatur in der antiautoritären Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993)

Mererid Puw Davies, Writing and the West German Protest Movements: The Textual Revolution (London: imlr books, 2016)

--, ‘“Viet Nam wird zur Hure gemacht”’: Women, Victimhood and the Vietnam Conflict in West German Writing’, in German Life and Letters, 64 (1) (2011), pp. 95-107

--, ‘West German Representations of Women and Resistance in Vietnam, 1966-1973’, in Warlike Women and Death: Women Warriors in the German Imagination since 1500, ed. by Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Columbia SC: Camden House, 2009), pp. 229-49

Erich Fried, und VIETNAM und (1966), in Fried, Gesammelte Werke, eds Volker Kaukoreit and Klaus Wagenbach, 4 vols (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1998), pp. 361-400

Michael Geyer, ‘Cold War Angst: The Case of West German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons’, in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1068, ed. by Hanna Schissler (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 376-408

Ulla Hahn, Literatur in der Aktion: Zur Entwicklung operativer Literaturformen in der Bundesrepublik (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1978)

Wilfried Mausbach, ‘Auschwitz und Vietnam: West German Protest Against America’s War During the 1960s’, in America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, ed. by Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Mausbach (Washington DC and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 279-98, p. 291

Charlotte Ryland, ‘Re-Membering Adorno: Political and Cultural Agendas in the Debate about Post-Holocaust Art’, in German Life and Letters 62, (2), (April 2009), pp. 140-156

Friedrich Schiller, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’ (1795), in Sämtliche Werke, 5 vols, ed. by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser, 1962), pp. 694-780

Arlene A. Teraoka, East, West and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996)

Stephanie Bird, ‘Representing Perpetrators in Literature’

Pierre Bordieu, ‘Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power’, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 159-197

Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)

Slavoj Zizek, Violence. Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008)

Joanne Leal, 'German engagement with Iraqi conflict: Sherko Fatah’s Das Dunkle Schiff (2008) and Der letzte Ort (2016)'

Petra Fachinger, ‘Fatal (In)Tolerance? The Portrayal of Radical Islamists in Recent German Literature and Film’, Seminar, in A Journal of Germanic Studies, 47 (5), (2011), pp. 646-60

Michael C. Frank, ‘“Why do they hate us?” Terrorists in American and British Fiction of the Mid-2000s’, in Terrorism and Literature, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 340-60

Tim Gauthier, 9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness (Lanham-Boulder-New York-London: Lexington Books, 2015)

Richard Jackson, ‘Sympathy for the Devil. Evil, Taboo, and the Terrorist Figure in Literature’, in Terrorism and Literature, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 377-94

Michael König, ‘Literary Accounts of Terrorism in Recent German Literature: An Attempt at Marginalization?’, in Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Michael C. Frank and Eva Gruber (Amsterdam-New York, 2012), pp. 155-74

Hanif Kureishi, ‘The Word and the Bomb’, The Word and the Bomb (London: Faber, 2005), pp. 3-11

Daniel O’Gorman, ‘Global Terror, Global Literature’, in Terrorism and Literature, ed. by Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), pp. 446-468

Hansjörg Bay, ‘Migration, postheroisch. Zu Sherko Fatahs Das dunkle Schiff’, in Niemandsbuchten und Schutzbefohlene. Flucht-Räume und Flüchtlingsfiguren in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. by Thomas Hardtke, Johannes Kleine and Charlton Payne (Göttingen, V&R Unipress, 2017), pp. 23-37

Carsten Gansel, ‘Von der Primärerfahrung zur medialen Konstruktion? “Soldatische Opfernarrativ”, 9/11 und Terrorismusdarstellung, in der deutschen (Gegenwarts)Literatur’, in Poetiken des Terrors. Narrative des 11. Septembers 2001 im interkulturellen Vergleich, ed. by Ursula Henningfeld (Heidelberg, 2014), pp 159-77

Heinrich Kaulen, ‘Heilige Kriger: Fundamentalistische Gewalt im Spiegel der Gegenwartsliteratur’, in Kriegsdiskurse in Literatur und Medien nach 1989, ed. by Carsten Gansel and Heinrich Kaulen (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 263-74