Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands. The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behavior. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, refraction and indeed creation of these theories and practices in literature, life-writing, and other discourses and media. Contributors bring to bear perspectives from literary studies, film studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. Thus, this collection is historical in the most expansive sense, for it debates not only what historical accounts bring to our understanding of this topic. It encompasses, too, investigation of life-writing, theory and literary and documentary works and so brings to light elusive, paradoxical, underexplored – yet vital – issues in history and culture.
 

An examination of the largely forgotten anti-war writing from West Germany spurred by the Vietnam War.
 
Though the Vietnam War did not directly involve West Germany, it was nonetheless a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements in that country, and it gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. Poetry and poetic writing were key to anti-war work. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in West Germany, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of that rich artistic production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical, or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. The book also offers a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.