Michelle Mattson

Antisemitism and xenophobia in Germany after unification

Since unification, Germany has undergone profound changes, including the reawakening of xenophobic hate crime, anti-Semitic incidents, and racist violence. This book will present the most recent findings on German public opinion, private attitudes, official policies, and right wing political developments. It will examine the dimensions, sources of, and remedies to anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

Rebels Without Causes: Contemporary German Authors Not in Search of Meaning

This study looks at how the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard can help to explain why the characters in in Elke Naters’ Mau Mau (2002), Sven Regener’s Herr Lehmann (2001), and Judith Hermann’s two short story collections Sommerhaus später (1998) and Nichts als Gespenster (2003) seem largely vapid, emotionally stunted, and socially illiterate. The analysis focuses on three major theses in Baudrillard’s work: 1) In the post-modern world, we live in the realm of the hyperreal, a space in which signifiers are divorced from their connection to any signifieds. 2) Today’s society is characterized by a multiplication and saturation of exchanges that leads to a neutralization of history. 3) The human reaction to the oversaturation of images devoid of connection to the real is a pervasive and systemic melancholy. However, the article also argues that Baudrillard’s philosophies are not helpful for living in today’s world and that the features of his thinking illustrated in these novels represent an essentially paralytic ideology. (MM)

Tatort: The Generation of Public Identity in a German Crime Series

The academic study of television, as a subdivision of the study of popular culture, is rife with dissension over both televisions character and its impact. Is it merely the epitome of manipulative mass culture? Is it the locus of subversive reception strategies?1 Or is it somehow a combination of the above: the contested site for the formation of public consciousness?2 No matter where critics place television, it seems no one feels completely comfortable dealing with the subject, and virtually all of them are mired explicitly or implicitly in the struggle to legitimize their area of study. The expression of such discomfort can assume myriad aspects: from the wholesale condemnation of television production and reception as the pernicious vehicle of mass subjugation and disempowerment, to overly eager readings of television (and/or all venues of