Aesthetics of Violence in Uwe Timm's Rot and Friedrich Christian Delius's Mein Jahr als Mörder1

This essay examines how two novels written in the spirit of 1968 incorporate potential violent acts into narrative in ways that reflect the nonviolent principles of Autoren Edition and Hannah Arendt's ideas on the relation between violence and political action. The authors of these novels join...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The German quarterly 2013, Vol.86 (1), p.43-59
Main Author: Baker, Gary L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This essay examines how two novels written in the spirit of 1968 incorporate potential violent acts into narrative in ways that reflect the nonviolent principles of Autoren Edition and Hannah Arendt's ideas on the relation between violence and political action. The authors of these novels join art and terror by recounting purely fantasized acts of violence that become aesthetically reified in narrative form. This essay asserts that Timm's Rot and Delius's Mein Jahr als Mörder acknowledge the place of violence in the public realm of politics but displace it to the sphere of aesthetics and narrative in order to grant it a political legitimacy that it otherwise does not possess for peaceful social change.
ISSN:0016-8831
1756-1183
DOI:10.1111/gequ.10167