Honors and Research

From the rubble of the Second World War, the rebuilding of Germany and its future was hopeful and amorphous, but not without lingering prewar traditions. The initial interest area of my project was to examine the change, effect and strain on the family structure following the social shifts of the Second World War and its aftermath. I wanted to see how the prewar traditions interacted in the postwar era, viewing the war as a catalyst of change rather than the focal point of these narratives and the German narrative.

For my project, I came to focus on the novels Der Verlorene by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (1998) and Am Beispiel meines Bruders by Uwe Timm (2003), which are both stories of West German families narrated by a second-son with an absent first-born son as a result of the war. After examining these novels I came to the thesis that the suffering, subversion, and resilience of the families responded to the haunting specter of the father. The haunting in Der Verlorene represented the aspects of loss of home, and tradition while Am Beispiel meines Bruders shows the loss of stable masculinity, succession, and generational as well as gender struggles. The solution to overcome this haunting is via wrestling with the specter of the father, the symbol of the archaic traditions of the prewar era, to start a new narrative in the postwar world. These novels don’t fall neatly into the traditional Väterliteratur or Täterliteratur but rather in the corpus of family literature, providing the example of Germans as also victims. My project attempts to accentuate the difference of the novels, but most importantly this project gave me an opportunity for academic and intellectual growth under the superb guidance of the German Department.

This project centers around the experience of being foreign in Germany, as told by the Turkish-born author Emine Sevgi Özdamar in her short story collection Der Hof im Spiegel. After moving to Berlin as a Gastarbeiter in the 1960s Özdamar spent many years living between Turkey and Germany, not only geographically but culturally and linguistically. With this project I sought to unpack how exactly Özdamar addresses major themes of migration, integration and “in-betweenness” in her fictional work, as well as how Özdamar’s work may be understood beyond the storyworld and applied in extratextual contexts.

In my research I examined how Özdamar manipulates space, time and language to construct a new portrait of migration, one that challenges the preconceived notions of her reader. Employing a unique literary style dictated by ambiguity, multi-lingualism and devoid of a clear chronology, Özdamar encourages her reader to imagine spaces, neighborhoods and even languages that exist beyond recognizable parameters. In doing so, Özdamar takes crucial steps toward derailing the dichotomies, hierarchies and chronologies typically associated with the experience of migration.

Once upon a time, my honors project was just a wealth of questions: What actually is a Grimms fairy tale? Why do we know them? Why do we care about them? Why do I know certain ones, but not the hundreds of others that I know exist in that really big book? What worked with Little Red Riding Hood? What didn’t work with those hundreds of others that remain unknown?

Luckily, I focused this onslaught early on. I analyzed Walter Hasnenclever’s 1931 play Der Froschkönig, examined a selection of 30 poems that all alluded to the Frog Prince, and designed my own anthropologic research on the contemporary relationship with Grimms’ fairy tales. This research was funded by the Grua/O’Connell Fund and allowed me to conduct surveys with 41 students. I interviewed Americans and traveled to the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz to interview Germans.

These undertakings helped me understand, that the beloved fairy tale genre brings with it a unique trait, which enables its tales to be condensed into simpler structural elements and symbols. The poison apple is Snow White. The glass slipper is Cinderella. Authors, playwrights, advertisers and others need only insert these shortcuts into their narratives, and they instantly put their own narrative and the fairy tale in dialogue. Sometimes allusions to the fairy tale can transform a narrative into a vehicle for broad political, social, and economic critique. Other times, there might be no intention of adapting the fairy tale; yet the interplay between their narrative and the communal knowledge of fairy tale (which I called “collective memory”) and the ensuing expectations associated with fairy tales still creates a richer, multivalent piece.

The faculty of the German Department provided me this amazing opportunity to spend countless hours working with material that I love. Their constant support was integral in this endeavor. I look forward to taking what I have learned in these past nine months and applying it to my ensuing future.

This project involved an in-depth analysis of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s German- language dramatic poem, Nathan der Weise (1779), as both a text and as a modern performance work. My research revealed that the controversial play makes a statement about equality across the teachings of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, as well as about the equal value of differing movements within18th century German Protestantism. The second component of my study analyzes three modern productions that were performed on stages across Germany. By staging the conflict-ridden reality of modern society, these three productions juxtapose reality with the idealized teaching associated with the legacy of Nathan der Weise. It is abundantly clear: the 21st century interpretations of the play no longer laud tolerance, rather the contemporary Nathan der Weise recognizes realities and subjects fantasies to scrutiny.

For my honors project, I wanted to examine the role of visual perception of individuals and groups in Germany and how visual perception informs perceptions of German identity.  The focus group for this study was "Black" Germans.  The goal of my project was to examine the presence and perception of blackness in Germany through the lens of German films.  I use the concept of a visual archive to investigate the ways in which blackness was and is being re-imagined and reimaged from past images.

Six films provided a spectrum of images, genres and plots, with which I could analyze historic relationships to blackness.  The films, listed with their director and release year, were: Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Keiner liebt mich (Dorris Dörrie, 1994), Schwarzfahrer (Pepe Danquart, 1992), Otomo (Frieder Schlaich, 2000), Alles wird gut (Angelina Maccarone, 1998) and Zwischen (Todd Ford, 2006).  All of the films are set in various locations throughout Germany.  I consider the films as artistic constructions using deliberate techniques to create "realities" and in relation to historical frameworks: beginning slightly before German colonialism in Africa and incorporating German civilian and military encounters with French colonial troops, African-American soldiers and media produced images of Blacks.  I use international events with nation specific significance as benchmarks of these interactions: World War I and II, the postwar period of American occupation and up into Reunification. The images that emerge identify blackness as representative of specific historical identities, as Besatzungskinder ("occupation children"), as aggressive enemies, and as refugees.  The images seldom reference the complexity of context in which these images materialize, such as the aftermath of Germany losing its colonial possessions in Africa after World War I.

This creation, consumption, utilization and reproduction of images of blackness and Black peoples and often fictionalizations that co-emerge display how the visual archive works.  The archive is embodied both physically and mentally, although itself is a figurative concept.  It has to do with how (eine Art des Sehens) and by who Blacks in Germany are viewed.  I concluded that there is a plurality of blackness and how it relates to German identities in German film or in Germany throughout its history.  Furthermore, I observe how blackness surfaces dependent on perceptions of whiteness as normal.  This in part defines the alterity of blackness in Germany, including past citizenship exclusion and marginalization if not total absence from visual archives of "Germanness."

Funding from the Grua/O'Connell Research Fund supported a research trip to Germany during Winter Break 2014, where I was able to conduct interviews, visit and conduct research at the Deutsche Kinemathek. The faculty in the German Department and staff at the libraries provided immeasurable assistance and accommodation; it has been my pleasure to undertake such a project with their feedback, critique and perspectives.

For my honors project, I wanted to examine the role of visual perception of individuals and groups in Germany and how visual perception informs perceptions of German identity.  The focus group for this study was "Black" Germans.  The goal of my project was to examine the presence and perception of blackness in Germany through the lens of German films.  I use the concept of a visual archive to investigate the ways in which blackness was and is being re-imagined and reimaged from past images.

ArheaMarshall2015

Six films provided a spectrum of images, genres and plots, with which I could analyze historic relationships to blackness.  The films, listed with their director and release year, were: Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Keiner liebt mich (Dorris Dörrie, 1994), Schwarzfahrer (Pepe Danquart, 1992), Otomo (Frieder Schlaich, 2000), Alles wird gut (Angelina Maccarone, 1998) and Zwischen (Todd Ford, 2006).  All of the films are set in various locations throughout Germany.  I consider the films as artistic constructions using deliberate techniques to create "realities" and in relation to historical frameworks: beginning slightly before German colonialism in Africa and incorporating German civilian and military encounters with French colonial troops, African-American soldiers and media produced images of Blacks.  I use international events with nation specific significance as benchmarks of these interactions: World War I and II, the postwar period of American occupation and up into Reunification. The images that emerge identify blackness as representative of specific historical identities, as Besatzungskinder ("occupation children"), as aggressive enemies, and as refugees.  The images seldom reference the complexity of context in which these images materialize, such as the aftermath of Germany losing its colonial possessions in Africa after World War I.

This creation, consumption, utilization and reproduction of images of blackness and Black peoples and often fictionalizations that co-emerge display how the visual archive works.  The archive is embodied both physically and mentally, although itself is a figurative concept.  It has to do with how (eine Art des Sehens) and by who Blacks in Germany are viewed.  I concluded that there is a plurality of blackness and how it relates to German identities in German film or in Germany throughout its history.  Furthermore, I observe how blackness surfaces dependent on perceptions of whiteness as normal.  This in part defines the alterity of blackness in Germany, including past citizenship exclusion and marginalization if not total absence from visual archives of "Germanness."

Funding from the Grua/O'Connell Research Fund supported a research trip to Germany during Winter Break 2014, where I was able to conduct interviews, visit and conduct research at the Deutsche Kinemathek.  The faculty in the German Department and staff at the libraries provided immeasurable assistance and accommodation; it has been my pleasure to undertake such a project with their feedback, critique and perspectives.

For my honors project I produced an annotated English translation of Gottfried Benn’s 1948 poetry collection Statische Gedichte. This late collection was important in rehabilitating Benn’s reputation following years of disgrace under both National Socialist and Allied occupying rule. It also heralded a new period in Benn’s work, less exemplary of his early graphic Expressionism and more concerned with reflection on the course of history and the significance of art. Although a number of the 44 poems had been translated individually, this is the first complete translation of Statische Gedichte into English. In my commentary, I locate the collection within the larger context of Benn’s work and thought, as well as elucidating obscure or outdated points of reference in the poems. My translation attempts to walk a fine line, maintaining fidelity to the spirit of Benn’s original while crafting English texts that operate with poetic integrity in their own right.

Das Prestige der Reiche : Geostrategische Konstellationen, interkulturelle Wahrnehmungen und die Gründung einer deutschen Kolonie im heutigen Qingdao, 1987-1914

At Bowdoin I focused my studies in three areas: German, Economics and Chinese. When it came time to decide on a topic for my Honors Project I wanted to combine my areas of interest as much as possible. As I had long been interested in German international relations, I settled on a more historical tack: German Colonialism in China.

I started my research in my junior year while studying abroad in Hong Kong. As well as improving my Chinese, during my time in Asia I traveled to the German colonial city of Qingdao, where I visited historical sites and collected materials for my research. Upon returning to Bowdoin I also secured a grant to travel to the German Federal Archives in Berlin, where I spent a week leafing through diplomatic dispatches and 19th-century news articles. Combining my three major types of sources--primary documents from Qingdao, archival material from Berlin, and academic papers--the outline of my work was clear: German Colonialism in China was very different from European colonialism in other areas.

While the Imperial Navy had long desired an East Asian coaling station, Germany's decision to occupy Qingdao was not a part of an overarching strategy of Pacific dominance; instead, it was an opportunistic move that took advantage of favorable geostrategic conditions in the region. Sino-German relations were also unique; the Germans were more concerned with securing their global geopolitical position than dominance on the Chinese mainland, and even had a grudging respect for Chinese history and cultural achievements. The Chinese, for their part, considered the Germans to be a better sort of foreigner than the Brits, Russians, and Japanese, and this mutual respect persisted after the colony's occupation by the Japanese during WWI.

As a German major and History minor particularly interested in urban and architectural history, I designed a project that not only merged my two academic interests but also integrated my experiences studying abroad in Berlin. While there, I came across the ruined portal of a former train station, the Anhalter Bahnhof, and was immediately intrigued by its mysteriousness. I questioned the significance of the space to the city, and wondered why the ruins stood, without any obvious signage, largely unacknowledged and anonymous to the average passer-by.

My honors project, however, is not just an architectural history of the Anhalter Bahnhof. Rather, I examine the historical and cultural significance of the train station and consider it within the larger context of Berlin’s dynamic urban landscape as well as its social, cultural and political history. More specifically, I investigate how the station achieved an iconic status during various temporal “nodes” of the 20th century: pre-Wall Berlin, post-Wall Berlin and the Weimar Republic, and I argue that the privileged pieces of its historical narrative are inherently interconnected. Today, the void left by the station’s demolition exists as an open space in which different stratum of the past and present intersect and interact, a space that has and still exists in a constant state of transition.

I was fortunate enough to receive the Grua/O’Connell Research Award for this project, which allowed me to return to Berlin during my senior year to gather primary materials from state archives and museums as well as conduct interviews with Berlin historians. Without the generosity of Peter Grua and Mary O’Connell, and the individuals who aided me with my research in Berlin, this project would not have been possible.

My honors project focuses on literary depictions of gender relations during the Weimar Republic in Erich Kästner’s novel Fabian: die Geschichte eines Moralisten (1931).  I argue that the Weimar Republic blurred traditional gender roles and created a diversified gender spectrum as a result of the trauma and social upheaval induced by the First World War. Literary characters show how, in the Weimar Republic, men assume feminine traits and women take on masculine traits.

The central male characters I discuss in this project are reactive, in that they are generally more passive; they wait for the female characters to take the initiative and then respond to the women’s actions. These male characters appear cautious rather than bold. They feel threatened and unsure of themselves. They seem to have internalized some sort of danger, and it manifests as a form of paralysis. The changing gender dynamics are only one part of what these men find threatening, and thus they do not only react cautiously to new, masculinized femininity, but rather to all aspects of the changing society. Wary and uncertain in stark contrast with the bold and glitzy backdrop of modernity, these men appear as wayward figures who are waiting in limbo for orders that will never come. They are unsure of how to make independent decisions in unfamiliar situations, but are also unable to show weakness and ask for help.

This phenomenon of reactive masculinity emerges, I would contend, because the men are victims of their time, haunted by the effects of World War One and ill at ease in the rapidly changing society. Emerging from the aftermath of the First World War, the Weimar Republic developed in a climate of anomie. Over the course of the war, social norms had crumbled, which left an opening for rewriting gender scripts. While men tended to see the disorder in anomie, women often saw opportunity in the social restructuring and became bolder, actively striking out to better their financial situations. Girls matured in a climate that allowed them to conceive of themselves as individuals with agency rather than as appendages of the collective family unit. Men reacted to the independent, masculinized femininity of the emancipated woman with a hesitant, feminized masculinity. Popular novels of the time period, such as Kästner’s Fabian, both documented and exaggerated these changes in character types.

2005

Adnan Prsic, "Kanak Sprak und Kultur: Feridun Zaimoglus Weg vom Ethnographen zum Pop-Star"
Elizabeth Davidson, "From Euripides to Sophocles: Hofmannsthal Creates His Own Voice"
Ted Reinert, "Andreas Dresen and Tom Tykwer: Eastern and Western Filmmaking Traditions in Post-wall German Cinema"
Whitney Schrader, "Ostalgie : remembering youth and childhood in the GDR"
Bretton McEvoy, "Imperialism, memory suppression and the Snow-White Goose: the quest for balance in W. G. Sebald's post-Holocaust world"

2004

Kyle David Staller, "Icarus Transformed: Cultural Constructions of Civil Aviation in Germany"
Hanny Studer, "Amerika: Ausgangspunkt-Fluchtpunkt-Sehepunkt. Charaktere in der Schweizer Literatur"

2003

Todd Buell, "Locke and Lessing, from the theorist to the dramatist : the interconnectedness of enlightenment tolerance"
Bethany Dittmar, "Identity and community : two generations of Afro-Germans through their poetry, prose, and performance"
Maggie Fritz-Morkin, "Localizing and vocalizing within the ether : place, parenthesis, and dialogue in Paul Celan's Atemwende"
Mark Lutte, " Translating Otto Emersleben's In den schründen der Arktik : a perspective on Karl May, Robert Peary and the presentation of historical identity"
Colleen Mathews, "The theme of liminality in Ilse Aichinger's imaginative writing, 1948-1957 : from novelist to dialogist"
Emilie Schlegel, "...und da ging etwas Großartiges in mir vor.": Agency and the New Woman in Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen"

2002

Paul DeLuca, "The return of the repressed: the postwar crisis of German identity and the global virus of national socialism"
Katherine Grote, "Lola's Berlin: investigating Tom Tykwer's millennial portrait of the city"
Margaret Magee, "From reluctant to committed witness: the 1933-1945 diaries of Viktor Klemperer"
Lindsay Pettingill, "Wir woll'n die Eisbärn seh'n: East German identity and sport in Pepe Danquart's documentary Heimspiel"
John Yost, "Dürrenmatt's Emmenberger as composite portrait: Nazi physicians as sadistic careerists"

2001

Christine DeTroy, "Retrieving the past: the role of memory and the Holocaust in the novels of W.G. Sebald"
Catherine Kelley, "Perfect justice?: four works by Dürrenmatt"
Kirsten Partenheimer, "Coming of age in GDR Society: Brussig's Helden wie wir and Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee"
Miriam Platzer, "Living out loud: identity and Heimat in works by Alev Tekenay, May Ayim, Zehra Cirak, Fatima El-Tayeb, and Angelina Maccarone"
Russell Sherwood, "Battling voices: R.W. Fassbinder's self-referential reading of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz"
Barbara Thurston, "Documentary to melodrama: Max Färberböck's film adaptation of Erica Fischer's Aimèe und Jaguar"

2000

Dessislava Dimitrova, "The role of justice and death in Dürrenmatt's criticism of the post- World War II society"
Andrew W. Gould, "The reception of Beethoven from Weimar through to the Third Reich and into exile: wrestling the composer away from the Nazis"
Lisl K. Hacker, "Bearing witness: a thematic study of Grete Weil's Meine Schwester Antigone and Generationen as counterworks"
Christopher Henry, "Oskar and Owen : John Irving re-creates Gunter Grass"
Anand Mahadevan, "Switching heads in India and Germany : an analysis of Thomas Mann's Die vertauschten Köpfe as a cross-cultural text"
Donald H. Wells, "Feelin' blue: post-modern malaise and dysfunction in Judith Hermann's Sommerhaus später"

1999

Claire Adams, "Fantasy and protest: East and West German feminist literature from the 1970s."
Peter Dorthe, "Deviancy and irreducibility in Weimar film"
Warren Gasper, "Identity splits and splinters: interventionist dialectics in Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, and Christa Wolf"
Jason Roswig, "Final doom versus the perpetual round: a comparative mythological examination"

1998

Megan Allen, "Killing combinations: intersections of modernity and gender in Ingeborg Bachman's Simultan"
Markus Kamm, "Liebe, Ehe und Patriarchat bei Bachmann, Böll und Fassbinder"
Ryan Naujoks, "Max Frisch in America: the search for identity in a foreign land"
Adrienne I. Weiner, "Peepholes: a dramatic adaptation of The Trial by Franz Kafka"

1997

Hiram Andrews, "Faber's Entschluß anders zu leben: the role of Hermes and Hermes-Baby in Homo faber"
Brendan Matz, "Framing the post-war landscape: literary form and the Holocaust in the work of Max Frisch"
Sarah Titus, "Humor as critical space: Doris Dörrie's Männer and Keiner liebt mich! "