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An Obsolete Hegemon? America’s Function in the Imagination of a (Re-)unified German Nation

Losch, Simon
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8126-0271
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1511461521619941

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Germanic Languages and Literatures.
German cultural artifacts after 1990 use the representation of America in an attempt to come to terms with and construct a German nation after the fall of the Wall. America has long been a reference point for discourses of German nationhood, often in very dichotomic terms of utopia and dystopia. The (re-)unification provided a unique historical situation in which modes of German communal identification had to be (re-)negotiated, as it brought together two different forms of social, political, and economic organization. Postmodern multiplicity and the German historic guilt seem to make modern modes such as nation impossible to hold up. This dissertation, however, looks at the persistence of German national tropes in representations of Amerika in (Eastern) German literature and film. Next to nation, the term obsoleteness grants this dissertation its specific perspective, as it unites the concept of nation in large parts of the German erudite discourse with the historical situation of the dissolution of the GDR, and the resulting personal, political, and economic situation of the former citizens of East-Germany. In the chapters divided by the two forms of media and subdivided into narratives of America as refuge and as adventure, as well as Americanization, it examines the media-specific constructions of America and how they reflect on discourses of German nationhood post-Wende. The image of America portrayed in these texts and films actually suggests the systemic unwillingness or even impossibility of a communal construction that transcends the borders of the nation. America’s position in its paradigm of the Self and the Other, however, has been shifting. Due to its medial overdetermination, it can no longer fulfill the iii nineteenth-century fantasy of the absolute Other, despite the persistence of those fantasy of adventure and refuge. Instead, I argue, it works in the dialectic incarnation of the Other that endangers the Self and as a model for the inclusion of difference and hybridity. No matter how the cultural products evaluate America and the German nation, they appear as interdependent in the formation of personal and communal identities.
John Davidson (Advisor)
Nina Berman (Committee Member)
Robert Holub (Committee Member)
Paul Reitter (Committee Member)
439 p.
Film Studies; Germanic Literature
the German image of America; post-Wende; Eastern German; the nation

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Losch, S. (2017). An Obsolete Hegemon? America’s Function in the Imagination of a (Re-)unified German Nation [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1511461521619941

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Losch, Simon. An Obsolete Hegemon? America’s Function in the Imagination of a (Re-)unified German Nation. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1511461521619941.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Losch, Simon. "An Obsolete Hegemon? America’s Function in the Imagination of a (Re-)unified German Nation." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1511461521619941

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1511461521619941
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.