Besprechungen / Reviews 265 two substantive chapters provide the historical background needed to grasp the interactions of the Habsburg monarchy’s ethnic populations in Bohemia and Moravia, Seeling provides thought-provoking readings of Meine Kinderjahre (1906), Božena (1876), «Bertram Vogelweid» (1896), and «Mašlans Frau» (1901). By consciously integrating the heteroand autostereotypes held by both «Czech» and «German» characters into her analyses of plot, gender and nationality discourses, Seeling creates a highly nuanced picture of Ebner’s multi-layered texts. The reader is invited to rethink commonly held views of Ebner and her writing regarding, for example, the role Ebner’s Czech heritage played in her life and art. Analyses which reveal previously overlooked subtleties are exciting, but they also demand a very high burden of proof. In most cases in Seeling’s monograph this burden is met. Seeling studies Ebner’s varied narrators in terms of their gendered and ethnic subject positions and by so doing can probe possible auctorial criticism of these positions. For example, she makes a solid case for seeing the third-person narrator («Erzählinstanz») of Božena as one who inhabits a male, «conservative German» subject position. Her further contention that the author («Textsubjekt») does not share this position and subtly creates a distance to the narrator in order to reveal the narrator’s deep-seated stereotypes is intriguing, but needs further proof to be entirely convincing. This reservation notwithstanding, Seeling’s work provides a stimulating basis for further studies. All three of the recent books are based on the fundamental assumption that Ebner’s entire oeuvre, created over the span of her long life, needs scholarly illumination. The authors’ conclusions, whether guided by recent theories regarding history, nation, gender, the public sphere, and/ or creativity, are valuable in and of themselves, but also because they will most certainly stimulate new scholarship. University of Kentucky Linda Kraus Worley R ANDALL H ALLE and R EINHILD S TEINGRÖVER (E DS .): After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 352 pp. $ 80. After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film is a timely and well-conceived introduction to an often overlooked area in the field of German Studies, particularly here in North America. Though German-language film has rightfully received increased attention from scholars over the past twenty-five years, as well as a place in most German Studies curricula, little attention has been paid to those artists who toil, often in obscurity, on the fringes of experimental cinema. Artists who, for the most part, remain unknown in the North American context, but whose works both influence and challenge the mainstream cinema in Europe and thus, eventually, in the United States. Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingröver aim to correct this oversight with a timely collection of essays by film scholars and art critics. An informative introduction discussing the avant-garde by Halle and Steingröver is followed by fifteen essays on topics ranging from the works of Birgit Hein, Mi- 266 Besprechungen / Reviews chael Brynntrup, and Christoph Schlingensief on the better-known end of the spectrum (relatively speaking) to the work of Elke Krystufek and Kirsten Winter on the lesser-known end of the spectrum. As Halle and Steingröver point out, «contributors […] range from some of the most established and respected scholars in the field to young emerging scholars, from critics to practitioners, and the contributions represent scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic.» (1) Halle and Steingröver structure their excellent introduction around the concept and history of the avant-garde as they relate it to experimental media practices that emerged in Germany in the 1980s. They go to great pains to link the experimentation and innovative impulses in the visual arts of the 1980s and 90s to the dynamic of the Central European avant-garde from Expressionism to Surrealism and Dada. Their approach is twofold: to situate the works and practitioners in question after the historical avant-garde, as defined by Peter Bürger, while attempting to recuperate the critical engagement with society that defined the historical avant-garde in the first place. It is the attempt to recuperate the original impulse of the avant-garde, its critical potential that is their primary interest, but also the most tenuous aspect of their project. To bolster their argument for a new understanding of the term avant-garde as something that is both historical past and dynamically ongoing they enlist a structural approach to the question of what it means to be avant-garde. This structural approach allows them to define avant-garde as an ongoing aspect of modern cultural production that overlaps with movements and concepts like experimental, underground, feminist, queer, and visionary (terms they themselves use). Following this line of argumentation it becomes possible to speak of avant-garde video, avant-garde comics, avant-garde rock and the like; forms that for historical reasons would have been impossible in the days of the historical avant-garde. The obvious danger inherent in this line of argument is a dissolution of the term avant-garde to the point of meaninglessness or, perhaps even worse, aligning it with the standards of affirmative culture as one begins to speak of avant-garde advertising and avant-garde business practices. While the authors fully acknowledge these dangers, they are also unwilling to fully forgo them as they seek to revitalize the critical impulse of forms of cultural production once embodied by the avant-garde movements. Whether the practitioners and works written about in the individual chapters truly embody something of the original critical impulse of the avant-garde is for readers to decide, but the arguments put forth are formidable and undermine any notion that critical, self-reflective cultural production has ceased completely. There seems to be life, at least on the fringes. The essays in the collection fall into two groups. The first consists of eight essays loosely grouped under the heading «Contexts.» These essays give introductions and overviews of local and regional developments in image production and filmmaking. The second set of seven essays is grouped under the rubric «Case Studies» and highlights significant practitioners and their works. These essays focus on Bjørn Melhus, Christoph Schlingensief, Michael Brynntrup, Christoph Girardet, Matthias Müller, Kirsten Winter, Heinz Emigholz, Elke Krystufek, and their respective works. Of particular interest in the «Context» section are essays by Thomas Elsaesser and Randall Halle. Elsaesser, a longtime proponent of engaged, critical filmmaking, uses Besprechungen / Reviews 267 the work of Harun Farocki to reflect on the status of film and the image in contemporary society. In the process, he documents a process whereby radical filmmaking migrates from the cinema to the modern museum. Halle builds on a similar problematic, but focuses on the web and the resulting dematerialization of what he calls «expanded cinema’s» interventions in cyberspace. A must read for any young critics hoping to do scholarship on web-based art forms. Three essays in the «Case Studies» section also stand out: Alice Kuzniar’s essay on Bjørn Melhus, Robin Curtis’s contribution on Michael Brynntrup, and Larson Powell’s essay on Kirsten Winter. Kuzniar provides an excellent introduction to the work of Bjørn Melhus, an artist whose entire oeuvre is infused with images from American mass media - film and TV in particular. Though Melhus has been well received in the United States, with extended stays as well as exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles, he has yet to find a place on syllabi in American universities. Yet his work is an ongoing reflection upon his confrontations with American popular culture as a foreigner and the role it plays in identity formation. Robin Curtis’s essay «From the Diary to the Webcam: Michael Brynntrup and the Medial Self» provides another much needed introduction to a German artist who deserves more recognition in the United States. Through a discussion of the autobiographical form, Curtis discusses Brynntrup’s self-conscious construction of self as a medial entity. Larson Powell focuses on the work of Kirsten Winter and traces an interesting phenomenon typical of the trajectory of many experimental filmmakers: a move away from the broad, global problematic of attacking the institution of art and mainstream image making to a more local focus on the operation of perception and visual perception in particular. On the whole, the essays in this collection offer important contributions to an often-overlooked area of scholarship in German Studies and provide excellent introductions to artists and media practitioners whose works deserve more critical attention. After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian and Experimental Film is an indispensible acquisition for those working in the area of contemporary visual arts and film in the Central European and German-speaking context. University of Kentucky Jeff Rogers T ILLMANN K REUZER : König Kind? Literarische Figuren zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts in Werken der realistischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009. 231 pp. € 22. The question Tillmann Kreuzer poses in the title König Kind? refers to his observation that in contemporary German juvenile novels, spanning in the present study the period from the 1970s to 2003, the child protagonist contends with all the harsh realities that beset adults. Thus, «problem-oriented» realistic novels abandon fantasies of children’s sovereign abilities to overcome tragedy, injustice, and abuse. Authentic themes of personal, familial, and social conflicts, such as divorce, economic hardship, and death in the family would contrast with the former trend of the «anti-authoritarian» movement in German children’s literature, which invested the child protagonists