The Health Humanities in German Studies

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), where she also holds an appointment in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

Foreword
Stefani Engelstein
Boundaries and Interdisciplines: Where Health Humanities Meets Literature & Science in German Studies

Introduction
Stephanie M. Hilger
Intersections: Health Humanities and German Studies

PART I: Medical Readings/Reading Medicine

Katharina Fürholzer
“Verschlungen sitze ich / neben der Sprache:“ Aphasic Poetry between Medicine and Metaphor

Anita Wohlmann and Katharina Bahlmann
The Totality Trap of Reading Illness: Unica Zürn’s The House of Illnesses

Amanda Sheffer
Dr. Max Liebermann’s Vienna: Diagnosis, Gender, and Criminality in Historical Crime Fiction

Madalina Meirosu
Teaching “Outbreak Narratives” during the COVID Pandemic

PART II: Graphic Medicine

Marina Rauchenbacher
Comics from the German-Language Realm and Health Humanities: An Overview

Katja Herges
Disability and Embodiment in Contemporary German Comics

Priscilla Layne
Drawing on Pain: Depicting Disability and Trauma in Mikael Ross’ Graphic Novel Der Umfall

Elizabeth Nijdam
“Thinking in Comics:” Representing Autism Spectrum Disorder in Autobiographical Graphic Narrative

PART III: Disability

Anne Waldschmidt
Disability = Behinderung? The Conceptual History of a Social Category in Germany from a Disability Studies Perspective

Heidi Hausse
A New View of an Old Prosthesis: Creating a Digital 3D Model of a Sixteenth-Century Iron Hand

Heike Bartel
Rewriting Illness from the Turkish German Margins: Eating Disorders in Narratives by Renan Demirkan and Yade Yasemin Önder

Alec Cattell
Teaching at the Intersection of German Studies and Disability Studies

PART IV: Race

Gabi Kathöfer
Work, Disability, Race: Toward an Intersectional, “Unsettling” Analysis of German Settler Colonialism

Julia Roos
The Post-1945 Eugenics Consensus and the Persecution of Germans of Color in the Third Reich: A Legal Case Study

Heikki Lempa
Tea, Race, and Ethnicity: Medical Knowledge of the Others in the German Lands, 1700-1830

PART V: Gender

Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio
Suspicious Body Parts and Endangered Femininity: Western Medical Knowledge about Female Genitalia and Practices of Genital Cutting in the Early Modern Age

Benjamin R. Davis
Establishing a New Order?: Queer Performativity, Embodied Precarity, and the Pathologization of the Transgressive Body in Melusine (1456) and Fortunatus (1509)

Joela Jacobs and Bastian Lasse
Making Intersex Identity ILLegible: Oskar Panizza’s “Ein scandalöser Fall”

Necia Chronister
Reading as a Trans-Corporeal Act

PART VI: Trauma

Eleoma Bodammer
Death by Despair: Destroying Health in Schiller’s Die Räuber

Allison Schmidt
The Bodies Kept the Score: Two Case Studies on Health and Violence after the Great War

Anke Pinkert
Refracting War Violence: Psychiatric Discourse in the Soviet Occupation Zone
and the Early East German State

PART VII: Animals and the Environment

Brian McInnis
The Animals among Humankind: Fables of Reason in Johann August Unzer's Medical Weekly Der Arzt

Nicole Thesz
Dangerous Bodies: Witches in German Fairy Tales and the Literary Imagination

Davina Höll
“Vollkommene Organismen:” The Beginnings of a Literary Imagination of the Microbiome