Jazz in German-language Literature

The project provides the first comprehensive account of Jazz in German-language literature and combines text interpretations with contextual connections to cultural, political, and social events and trends influencing the literary representation of Jazz during the 20th century. In its mixture of systematic and historiographic methods derived from analtyic methodology, the project will look at literature that presents Jazz thematically (such as the genre of the Jazz novel) or formally (e.g., with respect to style or the materiality of language). The main corpus consists of literature written in the German language in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from the mid-1920s (e.g. Felix Dörmann, Jazz, 1925; Hans Janowitz, Jazz, 1927) up to recent works (e.g. Katja Henkel, LaVons Lied, 2003; Hansjörg Schertenleib, Der Glückliche, 2005). Despite the rise of relevant primary and secondary literature since the 1990s, there still exists no serious effort to perceive and acknowledge Jazz in German-language literature as a topic of its own that crosses nations, literary periods, and generic boundaries. The fact that German-language literature is still unchartered for its thematic and formal relationship to Jazz is all the more regrettable given both the historically impressive amount of contributions and recent research on European areas such as the Scandiavian countries and Italy. The project promotes the international discourse of Jazz in Literature in general and of Jazz in European Literature in particular by presenting the first survey of relevant literature from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Intended to communicate the results to a broader public as well, the project undertakes an original research in order to highlight a neglected aspect of the influence of North-American culture on Europe.