In August 1919, a production of James Joyce�� Exiles was mounted at the Munich Schauspielhaus and quickly fell due to harsh criticism. The reception marked the beginning of a dynamic association between Joyce, German-language writers, and literary critics. It is this relationship that Robert Weninger analyzes in The German Joyce.
Opening a new dimension of Joycean scholarship, this book provides the premier study of Joyce�� impact on German-language literature and literary criticism in the twentieth century. The opening section follows Joyce�� linear intrusion from the 1910s to the 1990s by focusing on such prime moments as the first German translation of Ulysses, Joyce�� influence on the Marxist Expressionism debate, and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce�� work. Utilizing this historical reception as a narrative backdrop, Weninger then presents Joyce�� horizontal diffusion into German culture.
Weninger succeeds in illustrating both German readers��great attraction to Joyce�� work as well as Joyce�� affinity with some of the great German masters, from Goethe to Rilke, Brecht, and Thomas Mann. He argues that just as Shakespeare was a model of linguistic exuberance for Germans in the eighteenth century, Joyce became the epitome of poetic inspiration in the twentieth.
