Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance.While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzählen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutková, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.

Introduction: The Social, Political, and Personal Dimensions of Storytelling - Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston WilliamPART I. ANNA SEGHERS: A MISSING PIECE IN THE CANON OF MODERNIST STORYTELLERSAnna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years - Christiane Zehl RomeroWho Is the Narrator? Anna Seghers's "The Excursion of the Dead Girls": Narrative Mode and Cinematic Depiction - Peter BeickenAnna Seghers's Rubble Literature, 1947-49 - Ute BrandesAnna Seghers and the Struggle to Tell Stories about the Nazi Past in the Early German Democratic Republic - Stephen BrockmannAufbauzeit or flaue Zeit? Anna Seghers's GDR Novels - Hunter BivensThe Time of Decision in Anna Seghers - Benjamin RobinsonFilling the Void with Stories: Anna Seghers's Conceptual Metaphors - Jennifer Marston WilliamPART II. EXPRESSIONS OF MODERNITY: USING STORYTELLING UNCONVENTIONALLYStorytelling and Telling Stories in Heine's Prose Fiction - Robert C. HolubModernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka - Kristy R. BoneySynthesis and Transtextuality: The Jewish Reinvention of Chinese Mythical Stories in "Shanghai Ghetto" - Weijia LiAmerican Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools - Elizabeth LoentzA Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945 - Michaela PeroutkovaChanged for the Better? Alternative Uses of the Transformative Cancer Trope in Thomas Mann's Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life - Kristen HetrickPART III. THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE: STORYTELLING IN ACUTE HISTORICAL MOMENTSProblems and Effects of Autobiographical Storytelling: Als Pimpf in Polen: Erweiterte Kinderlandverschickung 1940-1945 (1993) and A Hitler Youth in Poland: The Nazis' Program for Evacuating Children during World War II (1998) - Jost HermandToo Near, Too Far: My GDR Story - Marc SilbermanConflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred - Andy Spencer"Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen": Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf's Novel Kindheitsmuster - Luke SpringmanNarrating Germany's Past: A Story of Exile and the Return Home-A Translation of the Chapter "Above the Lake" from Ursula Krechel's Novel Landgericht - Amy Kepple StrawserStorytelling in the GDR: An Interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich - Sylvia FischerNotes on the Contributors