Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015: Between Acceleration and Slowness

Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015 is an interdisciplinary volume that explores the social, psychological, and historical impact of acceleration through the medium of culture. New interpretations of modernist and contemporary works of literature, visual art, architecture, film and popular culture highlight the wide range of cultural responses to social acceleration. In so doing, they call into question dominant theories of acceleration, which can be excessively totalising and pessimistic. The volume includes original readings of works by classic modernist authors Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Peter Altenberg and Robert Walser; contemporary writers Angela Krauss, Clemens Meyer, Wolfgang Herrndorf and Karen Duve; filmmaker Christian Petzold; artists Wassily Kandinsky and Umberto Boccioni; and photographers Umbo, Gyorgy Kepes and Paul Schuitema. This exciting volume shows that cultural expressions of and responses to acceleration are varied, and offer the spaces of resistance to the ongoing onward rush of our twenty-first-century lives.