Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Film ed. by Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William (review)

As a means of preserving the past, reframing the present, and exploring the human condition, storytelling is a vital process that shapes the literature that attracts us as well as our own engagement with it. Recent scholarship reveals an enduring fascination with storytelling, especially concerning its unique ability to register and process the developments of cultural history. Editors Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William connect these discourses in their volume Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond, an interdisciplinary collection of essays that probe the essence of narrative. Exploring themes of memory, exile, the Holocaust, modernism, and East German literature, the book convincingly demonstrates the lasting relevance of storytelling and storytelling traditions.

Part 1, “Anna Seghers: A Missing Piece in the Canon of Modernist Storytellers,” seeks to redress the relative dearth of scholarship on Seghers. Moving chronologically from the author’s formative college years through her exile in Mexico and experiences in West and East Germany, these essays consider Seghers’s biography, her prominent and lesser-known works, and her politically engaged storytelling. Via analytical frameworks such as narrative theory and the cognitive-literary approach, contributors illustrate the depth and complexity of Seghers’s oeuvre, challenging misconceptions that dismiss her as merely a Communist writer. Benjamin Robinson’s article on Die Entscheidung (The decision), for instance, confronts West German criticism of her works, while Peter Beicken’s analysis of “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen” (1946; “The Excursion of the Dead Girls,” 1978) focuses on Seghers’s cinematic narrative mode and blending of autobiography and fiction. Together, these essays shed light on storytelling as a means of creating order, and the volume fittingly borrows its subtitle— “For once, telling it all from the beginning”— from Seghers’s novel Transit, establishing her central role in narrative scholarship.

The kind of innovative storytelling evident in Seghers’s work is further addressed in part 2, “Expressions of Modernity: Using Storytelling Unconventionally.” Through frameworks informed by intertextuality, narrative theory, and hermeneutics, this section investigates modernism and its precursors, frequently taking a comparative view. Michaela Peroutková’s “A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945,” for example, compares portrayals of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Czech and German literary texts. Other pieces, such as Weijia Li’s “Synthesis and Transtextuality” and Boney’s “Modernist Haze,” highlight works that challenge traditional approaches to texts, topographies, and even time. These essays vary widely, but they never lose sight of the thread running through them, namely, the emphasis on alternative narrative modes.

In keeping with this focus, part 3, “The Personal Narrative: Storytelling in Acute Historical Moments,” dedicates itself to storytelling innovations. From Amy Kepple Strawser’s translation of a chapter of Ursula Krechel’s 2012 novel Landgericht (District court) to Sylvia Fischer’s interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich, these wide-ranging studies capture the spirit of what this volume sets out to accomplish. Particularly striking is the inclusion of autobiographical pieces by Marc Silberman and Jost Hermand, who problematize notions of truth as well as individual and cultural memory. In blending traditionally disparate genres of personal anecdote and scholarly writing, this section assembles a variety of storytelling modes theorized elsewhere in the text, effectively linking distinct parts into a cohesive whole.

Boney and William’s Dimensions of Storytelling emphasizes the political and social facets of storytelling and their particular salience in times of crisis. The volume’s novel approach to scholarly writing invites nuanced views that challenge conventional notions of twentieth-century German history and literature. Although the collection does not develop an explicitly feminist approach to storytelling, its emphasis on intertextual and transnational perspectives, and its focus on connections between the private and the political, offer much of interest to feminist scholars and readers, and to anyone drawn to Seghers and her era. Exploring the...