Nicola Gess | Carolin Amlinger | Lea Liese (Editor)

Konversionserzählungen

Politik und Poetik des Seitenwechsels

Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 2/2023

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Pages	195
Copyright Year	2024
Series	Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift
Editor	Nicola Gess Carolin Amlinger Lea Liese
Contributions by	Carolin Amlinger Nicolai Busch Nicola Gess Lars Koch Hans Kruschwitz Lea Liese Felix Schilk Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Producer under GPSR	Felix Meiner Verlag GmbH Richardstraße 47 D-22081 Hamburg Telefon: +49 (40) 29 87 56-0 Fax: +49 (40) 29 87 56-20 E-Mail: info@meiner.de

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Carolin Amlinger | Nicola Gess | Lea Liese

Konversionserzählungen

Vergangenheit und Gegenwart literarisch-politischer Überläufergeschichten

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Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

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Wolf Biermanns Renegaten-Poetik

This article examines the interplay of renegade poetics and conversion semantics in Wolf Biermann’s autobiography Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten (2016). The autobiographical first-person narrator places himself in a line with famous renegades who legitimize his own renegade status. In the process, the concept of the renegade undergoes a rhetorical intensification into a paradox through attributive extension, modeling the courage and truthfulness of the autobiographical self. Staged orality and a colloquial tone assert the authenticity of the self. The liminal figure of the transition from belief in communism and its realization in the GDR to identification with the parliamentary democracy of the Federal Republic is reflected with close reference to the author’s own artistic-literary work. Intertextual references such as the adoption of Heinrich Heine’s poem title »Enfant perdu« for one of his own poems on the flight of Robert Havemann’s son from the Republic make the change of sides a literary motif.

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Lars Koch

Jubelräume, Verfolgungsangst, Verdacht – Affektpolitiken des Renegaten

This article understands George Orwell’s 1984, Gerd Ruge’s Metropol, and Ralf Rothmann’s Hotel der Schlaflosen as literary investigations of the emotional complexes of the renegade in the context of Stalinism. All three texts, it is argued, bring into focus different aspects of an affect space constituted by a crisis in the epistemology of enmity and a resulting hermeneutics of suspicion. While Orwell is primarily concerned with the mass psychological effects of hate, Ruge is interested in the ubiquity of fear among those who must fear being declared renegades. Rothmann’s short story, in contrast, portrays the subjectivity of an executioner who is capable of mass murder because he operates with absolute moral indifference.

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Carolin Amlinger

Retroverser Fortschritt

Rückkehr, Konversion und sozialer Wandel

Beginning with the trend toward first-person narrative perspectives in contemporary literature, this article examines the ways in which crisis-ridden presences are narrated in narratives of return. The focus is on how conversion narratives articulate a collectively shared experience of social change. Autosociobiographical novels open with a threshold narrative that follows the logic and structure of classic conversion narratives. The tripartite narrative structure of autobiographical conversion narratives, in which a turning point separates the life course into a wrong life before conversion and a right one after conversion, is used in the novels as a time-diagnostic tool to render a diffuse social threshold state representable.

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Nicolai Busch

Konversionen ins ›Exil‹

Inszenierungen des Übertretens im Umfeld Uwe Tellkamps und des BuchHaus Loschwitz

The author Uwe Tellkamp is often regarded as a ›political convert‹ who switched from conservative to (new) right-wing positions in 2018. This article first of all discusses media stagings of Tellkamp’s conversion and points to their problems. Based on socio-scientific studies, the article then discusses the relationship between conservatism and right-wing extremism in East Germany and reveals various intersections between the two ideologies, which Tellkamp reproduced long before 2018. Contrary to the assumption of a ›sudden conversion‹, the article shows which strategies of conversion and political immunization Tellkamp and his literary environment in Dresden-Loschwitz have developed for many years. The focus here is on figures of ›inner emigration‹ and ›exile‹, which are interpretated as conversions into imaginary or literary shelters.

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Lea Liese

»I hadn’t voted for anyone«

Zur Geste politischer Neutralität als ästhetischer Widerstand bei Bret Easton Ellis

Using Bret Easton Ellis’ nonfictional book White as an example, this article examines how criticism of liberalism is made plausible by the thesis of a culture war in the polarized U.S. society since the election of Donald Trump. In the U.S., identity politics are blamed for this increasing polarization. Thus, Ellis justifies his departure from liberalism with its supposed transformation into left-wing reactionism that places political correctness above freedom of speech and art. In turn, he stages himself as a neutral observer of political events and justifies his supposed objectivity as a condition for political and aesthetic freedom: he wants to be able to empathize with all points of view and regard them as equal. But in this way, he adopts – whether intentionally or not – narratives that the Alt-Right uses strategically to justify right-wing narratives of conversion and to combat progressive liberalism.

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Felix Schilk

Von der »Utopie« zur »Wirklichkeit«

Biografische und gesellschaftliche Konversionsnarrative rechter Renegaten

Right-wing renegades usually base their political lives on a conversion experience. In this article, I take a dual perspective on such conversions. On the one hand, I show how political conversions from ›left‹ to ›right‹ are narratively constructed in biographical retrospect and argue that an apocalyptic structure of the conversion narrative enables the political change of side. On the other hand, I analyse time-diagnostic narratives formulated by right-wing renegades and argue that the world views of renegades often feature dichotomously structured narratives of diremption and decadence that have stood the political change of sides. Identifying these narratives can prove to be a heuristic for testing the ideology of political movements for their susceptibility to conversion narratives and a potential drift to the political right.

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Hans Kruschwitz

Agon und Desengagement

Über liberale Mimikry und linkes Renegatentum

This article describes the liberal mimicry of the New Right and the attitude of disengagement that springs from it as an essential point of contact for leftist renegades. Using the example of a volume of stories by the writer Botho Strauß, who was originally considered more of a leftist, he shows how important set pieces of this attitude – from the rejection of the concept of progress to the pose of the aestheticist spectator – recur in his work. In addition, he outlines the extent to which Strauß’ ›aesthetic mobilization‹ against the alleged ›left-wing mainstream‹ was inspired by the latter’s reception of Foucault – and the extent to which Foucault can thus be understood as a ›bridge-builder‹ between right and left, even if he himself was not a right-winger and can hardly be claimed by the New Right.

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