Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
13 - “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Toward the middle of Irina Liebmann's novel In Berlin the protagonist, a writer, experiences an unsettling vision: in the darkness the hand of her dead father appears on the typewriter while the sheet of paper in the machine is lit by a curious ghostly light. The inexplicable nature of the apparition, emphasized by the unknown source of this light, seems to be out of keeping with the prosaic material of the rest of the novel. It introduces an unexpected irrational element that runs counter to the text's overt concern with the inner conflict of the protagonist and her position in the divided city of Berlin. The encounter with the supernatural interrupts the domestic setting of the protagonist's flat, rendering her familiar home “unheimlich” (uncanny, unhomely), while the movement from darkness to light recalls the act of revelation at the root of Freud's definition of the uncanny, that troubling disclosure of secrets that ought really to have remained hidden. Structurally the encounter with her father's hand marks a pivotal moment in the novel. Up to this point the narrative has focused on the protagonist's current identity crisis; now she is exposed to memories of her own childhood and to the experience of her father's past. Through the metonymic figure of the hand, the novel reveals the protagonist's self-understanding to be shaped by the literary career of her father. Alluding at times to Liebmann's own family history, the novel explores his work as a journalist in the GDR and his subsequent expulsion from the SED.
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- Information
- Popular RevenantsThe German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000, pp. 242 - 258Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012