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TRAUMATIC VISION(S) OF THE WAR FROM THE AIR: THE USE AND FUNCTION OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN GERMAN AND BRITISH WORLD WAR II NARRATIVES
Author(s) -
Wunderlich Kathrin
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/glal.12242
Subject(s) - parallels , german , literal and figurative language , narrative , dictatorship , representation (politics) , history , german literature , sight , world war ii , literature , democracy , aesthetics , art , linguistics , law , political science , philosophy , archaeology , engineering , mechanical engineering , physics , astronomy , politics
Comparisons between Germany and Britain during WWII remain rare and unusual as a result of the incontrovertible differences between British democracy and the National Socialist dictatorship. Recent historical studies, however, have documented significant parallels between the two countries with regard to the material and physical environment engendered by the aerial bombing campaigns that affected the civilian populations of both Germany and Britain. These studies prompt the question of whether these parallels can be traced in contemporaneous German and British literary representations of the war from the air. This article proposes to locate these parallels in the use and function of figurative language. The first part of the article argues that, in their representation of the war from the air, German and British authors tend to resort to figurative rather than literal descriptions of the sights of war, and in so doing draw predominantly on the same resource realms for their imagery. Rather than dismissing these figurations as mere hallucinations, as has been done in the past, the second part of this article reconsiders them as a precarious mode of seeing, a kind of traumatic vision, conditioned by the sensory impact of the war from the air.