Nicole A� Thesz’s book, which covers more than this brief review communicates, stands out for its timeliness� Not only does it offer a perspective on how forceful rhetoric during difficult times shaped German society in fateful ways, but it may also fill a gaping hole in the knowledge of so many young people in the United States today who have never even heard of big names like Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Christa Wolf� Günter Grass, whose works are absolutely filled with historical allusion, belongs on this list of famous and yet unknown writers, but Thesz’s volume explains the contexts within which his works take on meaning, thus making them accessible today� Purdue University Fort Wayne Lee M. Roberts Kristy R. Boney and Jennifer Marston William (Eds.): Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond: “For once, telling it all from the beginning.” Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 290 pp. $ 95.00. In Dimensions of Storytelling in German Literature and Beyond: “For once, telling it all from the beginning,” Kristy R� Boney and Jennifer Marston William have compiled a fitting tribute to the work of Helen Fehervary, Professor Emerita of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University� The book’s subtitle, drawn from Anna Seghers’s novel Transit (1944) about a German refugee recounting his attempt to flee Nazi-occupied Europe, speaks to the book’s various and interrelated foci� Dimensions of Storytelling, divided into three sections, features essays that, 1) honor Fehervary’s significant and career-long engagement with Seghers, 2) reflect on the role of storytelling in modernity - a central preoccupation of Seghers herself, and, 3) recognize the significance of personal perspectives for telling stories about signal historical events� Part I, “Anna Seghers: A Missing Piece in the Canon of Modernist Storytellers,” features essays by prominent scholars of Seghers and East German literature� Fehervary’s achievements include her work to make known the breadth and depth of Seghers’s intellectual and artistic development across the twentieth century� It is appropriate, then, that this section covers topics that span Seghers’s life, and represents the methodological perspectives that Fehervary’s approach to Seghers’s oeuvre has helped make possible� In “Anna Seghers in Heidelberg: The Formative Years,” Christiane Zehl Romero outlines the intellectual milieu in which Seghers circulated as a university student - a group that included exiles from Eastern European countries who had fled failed revolutions, including her Hungarian husband, Laszlo Radványi� Peter Beicken examines how, in Seghers’s “Ausflug der toten Mädchen” - written Reviews 403 during her Mexican exile - the author draws on cinematic narrative strategies to craft an avant-garde “requiem” for the people and places of her childhood home, Mainz, destroyed by fascism and bombs� Ute Brandes and Stephen Brockmann turn their attention to Seghers’s immediate postwar writings� Brandes argues for reading her texts that feature stark depictions of damaged German psyches and settings - and therefore not favored by cultural authorities in Germany’s Soviet-occupied zone - as contributions to the genre of Trümmerliteratur prominent in German-language literature of that time� Brockmann, in turn, hones in on the way that Seghers’s writing, as well as her mentorship of younger writers during the late 1940s and early 1950s, supported deep reflection into the fascist legacy of the new socialist state� Brockmann’s piece shows that Seghers’s postwar work does not, as some have assumed, reinforce an East German mythos of the state’s foundation in anti-fascist resistance� In a similar vein, Hunter Bivens’ and Benjamin Robinson’s reflections on Seghers’s final novels, Die Entscheidung (1959) and Das Vertrauen (1968), counter readings of the works as blindly supportive of the East German state� Instead, both identify in these works the formal innovations through which Seghers postulated tensions between the mundanity of daily life in socialism and the transcendent time of the realized revolution� Finally, Jennifer Marston William offers an overview of the way Seghers employs “conceptual metaphors” throughout her work in order to posit meaning-making as humans’ response to “the inherent emptiness of human existence” (96)� Part II, “Expressions of Modernity: Using Storytelling Unconventionally,” comprises essays that focus on ways in which Seghers’s predecessors and contemporaries subvert or innovate narrative forms� Robert Holub argues that Heinrich Heine’s inability to tell stories according to novelistic conventions pushed him into his signature self-reflexive narrative practice� In “Modernist Haze: Topographical Textures in Paul Klee and Franz Kafka,” Kristy Boney asserts that both the artist and writer “[visualized] modern topographies as […] disrupting tangibility and continuity” (123)� However, Boney also identifies in Klee’s paintings and Kafka’s writings depictions of space that suggest the potential for emancipation, not only alienation and isolation� Kristen Hetrick’s reading of Thomas Mann’s Die Betrogene and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life, shows how these two works that feature cancer-stricken protagonists diverge from a long tradition of what Hetrick terms stories of “the transformative nature of a cancer experience” (176)� The remaining pieces in the volume’s second section focus on the way Jews’ experiences of flight and resettlement in the twentieth century shape narrative� Here, Weijia Li highlights the life of German-Jewish Chinese Studies scholar, Willy Tonn, exiled in Shanghai from 1939 to 1949� Beyond serving as an important source of China expertise for Western 404 Reviews readers, Tonn wrote fictional works in which he merged Western and Eastern myths - a project, Weijia-Li points out, that aligned with larger discourses theorizing syntheses “between the Orient and Occident” (144)� Elizabeth Loentz’s work on “American Children Writing Yiddish: The Published Anthologies of the Chicago Sholem Aleichem Schools,” offers a rich account of Yiddish-language instruction and production in secular Yiddish schools in Chicago from 1912 to 1977� Through her study of assignments, written in Yiddish, in which students tell stories about the schools’ influence on their own lives, Loentz charts a transition in the political and social role of the institutions, from a site for expressing progressive politics and Jewish unity, to Jewish “Americanization” and an emphasis on a nostalgic, Jewish past� Michael Peroutková’s essay on “A Literary Depiction of the Homeland of Jews in Czechoslovakia and East Germany after 1945” showcases, through an analysis of stories about Jewish survivors of World War II by the German writer Jurek Becker and the Czech writer Lenka Reinerová, how the Jewish experience was repressed in both socialist states� Part III, “The Personal Narrative: Storytelling in Acute Historical Moments,” features autobiographical and scholarly reflections on the intersections between individuals’ experiences and crafting stories� Here, Jost Hermand describes the personal and political contexts that motivated him to recount his experiences with the Hitler Youth� Marc Silberman presents what he terms an “intellectual autobiography,” detailing the development of his own research in GDR literature within the larger context of the history of East German studies (198)� Andy Spencer and Luke Springman write about the way personal histories of World War II shaped storytelling in East Germany� In “Conflict without Resolution: Konrad Wolf and the Dilemma of Hatred,” Spencer posits that the filmmaker Konrad Wolf’s political conviction, galvanized by his experience fighting for the Soviet Army against the hated Germans, shaped his postwar work� Springman, in “Bleibt noch ein Lied zu singen”: Autobiographical and Cultural Memory in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster,” argues that Wolf, in her novel about remembering childhood in fascist Germany, shows the significance of “everyday rituals,” such as songs, in shaping “individual and collective memories” (222)� Rounding out the third section is Amy Kepple Strawser’s English translation of the first chapter in Ursula Krechel’s 2012 novel Landgericht - the story of a Jewish lawyer returning to Germany after exile during World War II, and Sylvia Fischer’s interview with Eberhard Aurich and Christa Streiber-Aurich about their careers in the GDR’s cultural field� Overall, Dimensions of Storytelling comprises a rich collection of essays that showcases Fehervary’s scholarly interlocutors as well as her legacy as a professor and mentor� It will be of interest to scholars of East German literature, Reviews 405 twentieth-century German literature, and those who wish to gain insight about the contours of German Studies in the U�S� University of Kansas Marike Janzen Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (Eds.): Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018. 296 pp. $ 90.00. Scholars of East Germany have increasingly turned their attention to issues surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality to open new perspectives on foundational topics like consumer goods, labor, and the relationships between state and society� But so far, questions about gender and sexuality have not been widely applied to East Germany’s film productions, made by the state-sponsored film corporation DEFA� This scholarly omission seems even more surprising when one considers the substantial role that DEFA films play in scholarship on East Germany more generally� Therefore, Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation, edited by Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart, provides a welcome and insightful first look at how film readings centering around gender and sexuality can lend new perspectives to particular films and also to East German studies more broadly� The volume’s twelve contributions (which began as presentations at the 2015 Summer Film Institute at the DEFA Film Library) cover different decades, approaches to cinema, and theoretical methods� They also embrace the full range of the DEFA catalogue� Popular feature films are studied alongside documentaries, amateur films, and experimental shorts� Even scholars closely familiar with DEFA will likely discover new films in this volume� The contributors develop similar themes across the volume, like gender roles ( John Lessard, Larson Powell), queer relationships (Stewart, Frackman), and the influence of the state and politics on personal lives (Sonja E� Klocke, Jennifer Creech and Sebastian Heiduschke)� Other crucial topics (like the effects of gender in the workplace or moving beyond binary frameworks) are the focal points of individual chapters by Muriel Cormican and Evan Torner� Underlying this strong thematic discussion is also a consideration for change over time� The roughly chronological organization of the chapters shows that issues of gender and sexuality were confronted much more directly in East Germany’s later decades� Several contributors focus on Der Dritte (The Third, 1972), so this film offers the best example of the kinds of insights provided in this volume� In terms of the 406 Reviews