Rhetoric of Ruin: 9/11 in German Literature, Film and Culture

This dissertation project examines contemporary German cultural products that reference the terrorist attacks of 9/11.In particular, the omnipresent fear of terrorism, the United States' political involvement in Iraq, the German dissent, as well as its depiction in mass media underscore the importance of the portrayal of 9/11 in contemporary German literature, film, and culture.Key to the analysis is the reflection of the relationship between reality and the political, cultural, and aesthetic representation of the terrorist attacks in German literature, film and media published between September 11, 2001 and the present.I argue that mass media serve as the driving force behind all representation and conclude that the simultaneous broadcasting of media images nullifies the geographical distance between local witnesses in New York City and contemporaries around the world.Rather than fictionally reconstructing 9/11, authors rely on the televised images as a source of information.Hence the immediacy of television supersedes literature as a locus of remembrance.The continuously ambivalent, 200-year long German-American discourse provides a larger framework for the dissertation and its effort to understand representations of the attacks from outside the United States.I encountered the notion of Amerika, the savior that came to Germany's rescue in the immediate aftermath of World War II, from a very young age.Having listened to stories told by my maternal grandmother about how the U.S. saved Germany by giving away Hershey bars, Butterfingers, and Baby Ruths, I imagined the United States to be some kind of Schlaraffenland, the land of milk and honey.Little did I know at the age of five, that this notion was only in my imagination.While growing up, I became fascinated with the impact the United States had on German life and culture.Studying in the United States, however, allowed me to see this relationship from a different perspective.Two graduate courses, led by Dr. Agnes Mueller at the University of South Carolina and by Dr. Todd Herzog at the University of Cincinnati, introduced me to an array of scholarship about the complex relationship between German and American culture from the late 19th century to early 21st century.These two courses sparked my interest in what later was to become my dissertation topic: how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were represented in German literature, film and, culture.Like many projects, this dissertation and the research conducted to write it would not have been

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