Making Bodies, Making History

Book excerpt: In West German literature in the 1970s and 1980s bodies functioned not as victims of history nor as allegories for the nation but as sites of contested identities. Focusing on conflicts about identity in present-day Germany and on literary texts in which the body is an aesthetic construct, Leslie A. Adelson reformulates questions of embodiment and historical agency—questions that continue to haunt culture studies in general and German studies and women's studies in particular. This interdisciplinary study of history, race, gender, and nationality offers rich readings of three contemporary prose texts that challenge the suppositions of prevalent literary theory—Anne Duden's Übergang, TORKAN's Tufan: Brief an einen islamischen Bruder, and Jeanette Lander's Ein Sommer in der Woche der Itke K. Adelson's discussion of heterogeneous identities in contemporary German culture boldly explores accountability and innovation in historical process.