Rezensionen Cohn und KönigGARY SCHMIDT: Between Venice and West Hollywood: The Homosexual Text in Joachim Helfer's Cohn und König Joachim Helfer's novel Cohn und König can be read as a metatext reflecting on the writing of the homoerotic in contemporary German literature. Helfer's novel negotiates the border between "das Schwule" and "das Menschliche," constructed in the German literary public sphere. Using insights from queer theory on the function of the queer as a figure for disfiguration, this essay analyzes how Cohn und König engages with different possibilities for writing male homosexuality, including the modernist tradition embodied in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and gay liberationist perspectives associated with American culture. Creating a humanist model of pederasty written against homogenized gay identities, the novel constructs its own literary abject in the banality of gay domesticity and the specter of AIDS. Abstract aus Gegenwartsliteratur - Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch/A German Studies Yearbook 4/2005 |