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Thunecke, Jorg, ed. Deutschsprachige Exillyrik von 1933 bis zur Nachkriegszeit. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.379 pp. $31.00 paperback This 21-essay volume consists of the proceedings from the first ever international symposium dedicated solely to German-language exile poetry, held at the London Goethe Institute in June 1996. In his brief introduction, Jorg Thunecke focuses primarily on the specific challenges faced by exile poets, as opposed to authors of prose and drama, in particular exile poets' paradoxical relationships with the German language. The theme of language crisis is a recurrent one throughout the volume, featuring most prominently in Manfred Durzak's essay, "'Der Worte Wunden': Sprachnot and Sprachkrise im Exilgedicht." In this essay, Durzak also addresses the methodological dilemma of weighing the importance of historical versus aesthetic value in the study of exile poetry, which he asserts has been a central question in the study of exile literature since the late '60s. Thunecke, however, does not himself engage in the debate of historical versus aesthetic value, nor does he explicitly delineate what, for the purpose of this volume, qualifies as exile poetry. This bone of contention is, however, picked up by several contributors, most notably Helmut Mussener and Wolfgang Emmerich. In his essay on German-language exile poetry in Sweden, Mussener disqualifies numerous "exile authors" (authors forced to flee Nazi-occupied territories) whose poems failed to satisfy certain thematic or aesthetic criteria. According to Mussener's restrictive definition, authors whose exile works do not show a marked departure from their earlier work, or who fail to address certain typical themes (such as National Socialism, loss of homeland, estrangement from the native language, or the influence of their new surroundings) are not exile poets. In his essay "Exillyrik nach 1945," Wolfgang Emmerich espouses the inclusive concept of"delayed" exile and exile literature, extending the exile period long past the traditional cut-off date of 1945 to include the literary production of a younger generation who did not write or publish until after 1945, and authors with unusual biographies, such as Jewish survivors from Czernowitz/Bukowina (Paul Celan and Rose Auslander among others) whose exile began post-1945. Thunecke's inclusion of several essays that challenge the notion that the parameters of exile poetry should be contained within a limited span of years and specific geographical spaces and thematic constellations suggests that his understanding of exile poetry is an inclusive one. … |
