My second interest involves questions of identity and memory in Modern German Literature. In my PhD dissertation, I examined the function of stones in the creation of a language of testimony and memory. Specifically, I focused on the melancholic poetics in the works of Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) and W.G. Sebald (1944–2001). Bernhard and Sebald dealt with the fallout of modernity and the civilizational disasters following the rise of the Third Reich and World War II, and how to process this and express it in words. The stone repeatedly appears in their works as a basic element in the language of memory and the discourse of testimony. Using different narrative strategies, each author uses the language of various stones, as well as the geology of the stones, to create a bleak and sorrowful literary language – a melancholic language – which is at the same time a poetics of memory, a testimony, and an introduction to cultural criticism.

yossi.brill@lmu.de

Areas of Interest

Contemporary Mizrahi literature, Jewish communities in the East, German post-war literature

Historical Periods of Interest

19th through 21st centuries CE

Positions

2015

Lecturer for Hebrew (Judaistik), Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich

 

2007 – 2015

Research Assistant, The Documentation Center of North African Jews during World War II, Ben Zvi Research Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

 

2010

Head of the Cultural Program, Goethe-Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

 

Education

2019

PhD in German Literature, School of Cultural Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel (thesis title: “Wonderstone – Mourning Stone: Stones and Melancholy in the Literature of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald”)

2009

MA (magna cum laude) in German Studies, DAAD Center for German Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

2007

BA in History, German Language & Literature, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Awards and distinctions

2015

Marcel Reich-Ranicki Research Fellowship, Minerva Institute for German History, Tel Aviv University, Israel

2014

Scholarship from the Scholarship Foundation of the Republic of Austria for Research Stay in Thomas Bernhard Archive, Gmunden, Austria