Death Writing In Postwar German Literature

The relationship between death,war and literature is inextricably linked,and the impact of the two world wars on the writing of death in German literature has led to a change and a transcendence in the traditional development of German literature in the post-war period.The situation in the literary field is not only a reflection of the writers’ personal ethics of life and death and the way they deal with death anxieties,but also of the cultural mentality of the times and of the individual’s position in the ethical and moral context of society.The first part of the thesis explores the ethical reasons for writing about death through a chronological examination of the cultural transformation of the post-war German-speaking world,and finds that the theme of writing about death in post-war German literature shows a progression from denial,fear and longing to confronting death head-on.This change in thinking reflects the ethical path of thinking about life when confronting forgetfulness with cultural memory,as well as reflecting on and asking questions about changes in the social and cultural mentality.The tortuous process of rebuilding cultural order in post-war German literature on the ruins of the war and the Holocaust reflects the changes in the post-war social and cultural mentality,mainly characterised by the concept of death,and is not only a reflection of the basic process of individual awareness,confrontation and reflection on death,but also the evolution of human civilisation’s understanding of death.The problem of existentialism manifests itself on an aesthetic level in the death dilemma caused by Enlightenment modernity and its suppression of reflection on life,while post-war literature draws aesthetic resources from existentialist philosophy and Romantic ideas to respond to the crisis of the present.The rethinking of the urban cemetery and the ageing of life reflects the comprehensive acceptance and integration of the poetic habitat and the Romantic aesthetic ideal in the literary field;the metaphors of death such as night,sleep,trains and snow show the diverse development of aesthetic modernity;the new appearance of the image of death and the motif of the devil’s pact show that the post-war literature has re-examined death and revitalised the folklore tradition;the development of death such as absurdity,grotesqueness and melancholy and the development of the aesthetic style of death.The development of the aesthetic style and the aesthetic power it contains reflects the subversion and rescue of aesthetic modernity from the instrumental malpractice of Enlightenment modernity.On the basis of the clarification of ethical themes and aesthetic expressions,the thesis discusses how narrative strategies strongly support the literary expression of death and life consciousness.In the literary space opened up by death consciousness,post-war literature dissects the heart through the contrast between shadow and mirror image,resisting the intrusion of death anxiety and the crisis of sameness through selfawareness and reflection;in the eternal theme of exile and homecoming,travel literature echoes the literary wave of spatial turn,realising the return of death in utopian wanderings;post-war literature cuts through the perspectives of returning veterans and children,capturing the universality and Through narrative experiments such as fragmentation,collage and concrete poetry,literature uses the power of language itself to break through the silence and write about the unspeakable experience of death,responding to the spiritual crisis raised by the age of disorder.The various features of the writing of death in post-war German literature epitomise post-war German literature as a whole.The conclusion discusses the possibilities of moving from darkness and death to light and rebirth in the context of the narrative patterns and development of death writing.