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Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture. Heinz Antor, Sylvia Brown, John Considine, and Klaus Stierstorfer, eds. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. viii, 377 pp. $140.00 US hc.
This volume brings together several thought-provoking prisms through which the multifaceted German and Canadian cultural and literary crossroads can be viewed and studied. It is the fruit of the first of two conferences. The second, or rather twin, conference, "Refractions of Canada in European Literatures and Cultures," was held in Diisseldorf in 2003. Both initiatives represent fresh perspectives for the examination of a protracted, albeit fragmented, corpus of intercultural testimony.
The three main sections of this volume: "Diaspora and Settledness," "Jewish Experience and the Holocaust," and "Literature and Cultural Exchange," are preceded by the foreword and introduction, as well as the opus "Occupying Landscape We Occupy Story We Occupy Landscape" by western Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch. In "Occupying Landscape," the Canadian riddle "Where is here?" is intimately subsumed into the question "Who am I?" Kroetsch testifies that the Canadian story is "obsessively" rooted in the cycle; "place and how we occupy that place, shape it, are shaped by it." He begins with the enlightening words: "I am a Canadian writer. I am of German descent. We live as well as write in just such middles. That is our predicament. And our good fortune" (p. 23). This kind of refracted presence of Germany is the focus of each of the seventeen contributions to this volume.
By using wide ranges of disciplinary, methodological, and...