Violent Transgressions, Transgressions of Violence: A Review of Recent Scholarship on Violence in German Literature

The topic of violence is certainly no stranger to literature, especially German literature. However, a discourse of violence elicited through literature has undergone many changes since even before Kant’s major contribution, Zum ewigen Frieden (Toward Perpetual Peace; 1795)—changes that have many times signaled transgression or taboo. This essay examines the role and the treatment of violence in literature as it is explored in four recent publications. From a Kantian understanding of warfare and the sublime to postmodern discourses of transgression, taboo, and the possibility of thinking toward a literature free from violence, these authors all share an interest in how acts of violent transgression are situated in contemporary discourses and how transcending violence itself may be possible through aesthetico-critical inquiry. In a sense, if such a discursive transcending of violence can exist, then we must understand this transcendence also as an act of transgression against the use of and motivations behind violence. Though it is difficult to say from their writings whether transcending violence through this model is in fact possible to achieve, it remains nevertheless an imperative for many of these authors.

Susanne Kord’s Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror is an insightful exploration of representations of gender transgression within a German cultural space on the edge of modernity. Her decidedly literary approach bridges the gaps among a variety of social sciences by capitalizing on philosophical, psychological, legal, literary, historical, sociological, and anthropological sources, among others. Her work is not only insightful, but also offers an admittedly adventurous series of case studies concerning witches, vampires, husband-murderers, infanticidal mothers, poisoners, and many of their subsequent (female) executions. In her latest monograph, The Representation of War in German Literature: From 1800 to the Present, Elisabeth Krimmer positions select authors and texts in four periods: the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and finally Yugoslavia and Iraq. Through an examination of important authors like Carl von Clausewitz, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Ernst Jünger, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek, among others, Krimmer attempts to negotiate competing representations of war as something sublime, ennobling, masculine, cathartic, transformative, and transgressive. Ultimately, she raises the question of whether or not war can be eradicated, and how that might find literary resonance. In the third volume, Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (edited by Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci), German wartime suffering and trauma are considered in full awareness of the very taboo and transgressive nature of this discourse since the end of World War II. Pitted against memory studies pervaded by a discourse of the Holocaust, German wartime suffering has been, until the 2000s, surely a touchy subject. However, in recent years this discourse has emerged not as a counternarrative to Holocaust discourse (which obviously would be insulting to both), but rather as a logical amendment to theories of loss, trauma, and memory studies that all attempt to negotiate private and public acts of mourning. Whereas the generation of 1968 might resort to accusation, recent scholarship points toward a generation that instead asks questions and carefully considers responses. The final work examined here is entitled (Be-)richten und Erzählen: Literatur als gewaltfreier Diskurs? (edited by Moritz Baßler, Cesare Giacobazzi, Christoph...