Born Under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature

摘要

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging book which aims to explore how postwar German writers engage with the melancholy tradition stretching back beyond the early modern, baroque and Romantic eras to medieval and even Classical conceptions. Its theoretical innovation is to demonstrate the way in which German authors writing after the near-destruction of European Jewry in the death camps rework a variety of melancholy motifs to elaborate both productive and unproductive 'forms of memory work'. On the whole, Professor Cosgrove succeeds in showing that melancholy is a 'performative discourse' that 'offers the postwar German writer concerned with ethical memory many possibilities for erecting a varied and self-reflective literary language of remembrance' (4).