Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900-2015 ─ Between Acceleration and Slowness

Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015 is an interdisciplinary volume that explores the social, psychological, and historical impact of acceleration through the medium of culture. New interpretations of modernist and contemporary works of literature, visual art, architecture, film and popular culture highlight the wide range of cultural responses to social acceleration. In so doing, they call into question dominant theories of acceleration, which can be excessively totalising and pessimistic.

The volume includes original readings of works by classic modernist authors Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Peter Altenberg and Robert Walser; contemporary writers Angela Krauss, Clemens Meyer, Wolfgang Herrndorf and Karen Duve; filmmaker Christian Petzold; artists Wassily Kandinsky and Umberto Boccioni; and photographers Umbo, Gyorgy Kepes and Paul Schuitema. The wide range of perspectives opened up by this volume show that cultural expressions of and responses to acceleration are varied, and offer the spaces of resistance to the ongoing onward rush of our twenty-first-century lives.

Anne Fuchs is Professor of German at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely on German cultural memory since 1945, modernist literature, contemporary German literature and German-Jewish literature. Recent books include After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (2012) and Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (2008; 2010).

J. J. Long is Professor of German and Visual Culture at Durham University, UK. He has published extensively on twentieth-century literature, particularly on writing and photography. He is the author of The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (2001) and W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (2007). His current research focuses on photography in the Weimar Republic.