Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany

Sonja Boos is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Oregon.

Introduction: An Archimedean Podium Part I. In the Event of Speech: Performing Dialogue 1. Martin Buber 2. Paul Celan 3. Ingeborg Bachmann Part II. "Who One Is": Self-Revelation and Its Discontents 4. Hannah Arendt 5. Uwe Johnson Part III. Speaking by Proxy: The Citation as Testimony 6. Peter Szondi 7. Peter Weiss Conclusion: Speaking of the Noose in the Country of the Hangman (Theodor W. Adorno) Bibliography Index

"This is an ambitious and important book. Sonja Boos displays extensive familiarity with the early cultural history of West Germany, presenting a valuable series of snapshots of intellectual life there through the mid-1960s, focusing on the engagement of public intellectuals in memory of the Holocaust. Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany offers complex and insightful analyses of these interventions."-Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University "Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is a well-honed, meticulously researched, and theoretically grounded study of public speeches that sought to intervene into the memory culture of postwar West Germany. By considering a wide range of sources, Sonja Boos manages to establish the public speech as a genre in its own right, one that became crucial in challenging the biases and blind spots of West German Vergangenheitsbewalitgung. Indeed, Boos's book confers upon the public speech an entirely new status in the study of postwar German culture, history, and memory. From political to psychoanalytical theory, from discourse analysis to memory studies, Boos brings a range of theoretical approaches to bear in her insightful readings of the speeches at hand. The successful integration of classical rhetoric, speech act theory, and public sphere theory in Boos's theoretical framework is particularly laudable."-Katja Garloff, Reed College