Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte

What influence did denazification and reeducation have on the German relationship with democracy, the Nazi past, and the occupying powers? What ideas, value patterns, and discourses are still linked to this today? Did denazification really fail? This volume explores these questions from the perspective of cultural and literary history, examining the actors, institutions, and narratives of denazification and reeducation.

As an everyday extreme, sleep implies confusing and paradox moments: it is a natural necessity and, at the same time, a distinctly sociocultural practice, fluctuating between a loss of control and therapeutic, regenerative effects. Literature, too, reaches the limits of representability: sleep is a poetological, aesthetic liminal state that – unlike the dream – has largely been overlooked by literary studies.

This volume uses various case studies and materials to examine the phenomenon of epistolary anonymity. It discusses the relationship between public anonymity and private / non-public communication, and the porousness of the boundary between epistolary and printed communication, as well as specific strategies of anonymization in letters and the potentials of editing and exploring anonymity digitally.

This volume considers premodern discourses from philosophy and theology to demonstrate new ways of viewing the phenomenon of "rage" in medieval vernacular texts. Its chapters look at texts written between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, going beyond genre borders to reveal recurring patterns. This allows for a nuanced reading of how rage manifests in Middle High German literature, shedding light on its semantic development to the present day.

Literarische Gattungen existieren nicht einfach, sie werden gemacht. Der Band perspektiviert Gattungen und ihre wechselvollen Dynamiken daher praxeologisch: Im Fokus steht die Frage, auf welche Weise – durch welche konkreten Praktiken – maßgebliche Akteur*innen des Literaturbetriebs und der Literaturwissenschaft Gattungen produzieren, konstituieren und stabilisieren oder bisweilen zu ihrem Verschwinden beitragen.

Witch hunts were important events that shaped the people and literature of their time. Calling this to memory makes new insights possible. If we look one of the most well-researched works of literature, Goethe’s Faust, we find that this drama contains much more historical reality than previously perceived. Examining the topic of witches reveals meaningful voids in literary studies that social history receives and writes.

This study systematically examines the relationship between image and text in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s oeuvre from the perspective of poetology, book design, image technique, and image function. The first comprehensive review of Enzengerger’s book and text design activities examines them in their sociohistorical and publishing contexts, and incorporates archival materials into its extensive analyses.

In the German culture of remembrance, debates about the National Socialist past and the Second World War have changed considerably since the 2000s at the latest. Using autobiographical family literature of the following generation, this volume examines how these texts of understanding, in their medial specificity, are capable of overcoming the boundaries between personal lifeworld and public discourse.

The work examines transformations of rhetoric in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. From a problem-historical point of view, first Gottsched and his critique in Wieland’s "Agathon" are investigated, followed by an examination of Romantic rhetoric – especially with A. W. Schlegel and Schelling –, their understanding of the autonomy of art and the relationship between orality and writing.

This volume sounds out interdiscursivities between psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the works of Robert Musil. The spectrum of discourses involved shows that they form a field of tension into which the poeta doctus inscribes himself. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume trace these contexts systematically and historically, providing new insights into Musil’s remarkable poetics, situated between philosophy and scholarship.

Die Beiträge des Bandes beleuchten das Erzählwerk Adalbert Stifters, Theodor Storms und Conrad Ferdinand Meyers neu, indem sie es aus zwei theoretischen Perspektiven untersuchen, die bislang nicht miteinander kombiniert worden sind: einer ideengeschichtlichen Perspektive, die nach den weltanschaulichen und epistemologischen Horizonten der Texte fragt, und einer wirkungsästhetischen, aus der literatur- und filmwissenschaftlichen Spannungsforschung abgeleiteten Perspektive, die das Augenmerk auf die Erzeugung leserseitiger Ungewissheit durch das Erzählen legt. Leitend ist die Frage, ob und in welcher Weise die spannungsreiche Auseinandersetzung der Texte mit philosophischen, naturwissenschaftlichen und religiösen Überzeugungen der Zeit und das spannende (oder nicht-spannende) Erzählen, das sie auszeichnet, miteinander zusammenhängen.     

The conditions of writing as a cultural technique are subject to technical, material, institutional, socio-cultural, and poetological changes. Practices of writing vary historically and reflections on them vary depending on the occasion, addressee, media, and point in cultural history. This volume examines historical constellations of scenes of writing and their dynamics, going beyond the boundaries of literary and cultural-historical epochs.

This study examines the relationship between sensory perception and exoticism in German, French, and British literature written between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its starting point is the proposition that exoticism can be described as a Western European discourse that lends actual or imagined elements of a foreign region, usually outside Europe, an unusual sensory dimension.

Narrating the deed produces negotiations of the political that can be observed in narratives, dramas, and manifestos. This volume examines the specific form of the deed and its function for the political by looking at texts that were published between 1773 and 2014, producing a diachronic reading of the deed that focuses on historical constellations of the political.

What if medieval German studies scholars no longer limited their thinking and acting to "philology" and "literature," and instead understood their research as text scholarship? This book examines this question, sounds out its potential, and provides answers informed by the history of the discipline that range from synoptic readings and a non-binary understanding of poetry to the analysis of networks and narrative worlds.

This book problematizes the traditional relationship between literature, language, and nation, and places the German literature of the last century and its heterogeneity in a European context. It examines works by authors from peripheral areas of Central Europe and linguistic enclaves, by voluntary and involuntary emigrants, and by immigrants, illustrating the multifaceted nature of this literature.

This study examines the formation of self-images of East Germany in the (autobiographical) texts of Christa Wolf and Durs Grünbein. By looking at specific concepts of memory and remembering in the GDR, this book shows how these literary self-images do not attempt to form fixed identities, but are instead reflected in narrative processes of identification.

The work traces the forms, transformations, and functions of German-language poems and art in the tension between art theory, literature, and art history from 1870 to 1968, along with a view to the 1970s.

The volume explores media and literary configurations of life-world traumata. On the basis of texts that deal with traumatic experiences, the volume reveals the role of art in “processing” existential crisis situations (death, illness), fundamental social ruptures (war, Holocaust, flight), as well as the manifold forms of culpable action (denunciation, betrayal).

This work examines Gert Ledig’s depiction of the Second World War as a fundamentally traumatic event both on the front lines and in bombed out German cities. It focuses on how Ledig integrates war violence into his novels, and how he communicates this violence to readers. Extending the discussion to similar works and their reception, the author thus illuminates a hitherto neglected field of German post-war literature.

The study examines Brother Philipps’ 'Life of the Virgin Mary', the most extensively transmitted couplet poem of the German Middle Ages, discussing its reception and further dissemination in the Low German written language. Based on the example of this religious epic poem, it describes the Low German language area as a legitimate literary realm, thus going beyond an earlier preconception of mere replication in the German-speaking North.

Given Franz Kafka’s acoustic phobias and alleged indifference to music, the sound worlds and traces of music in his work have so far been examined in rudimentary fashion at best. This study presents the first systematic analysis of acoustic phenomena in Kafka’s entire body of writings, including his diaries and letters. It shows that sound shaped his work in decisive ways.

The literary circle known as Young Vienna, usually taken to include Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Felix Salten, but also Karl Kraus, drew much of its productive force from an engagement with spaces and places. This volume discusses coffee houses and theaters, the Prater and summer retreats, cinema and sound spaces all the way to Arnold Schönberg.

While there are countless studies of both Nobel Prize winning writer Elfriede Jelinek and “refusal artist” Thomas Bernhard, the connections between the two authors have never been studied in a comparative key. On the occasion of the 30^th anniversary of Bernhard’s death, this volume offers an accessible comparative examination of a broad range of topics, perspectives, and works by both writers. With an essay by Elfriede Jelinek.

In the High and Late Middle Ages, one sees a broad reliance of German on French literature in virtually all literary genres. The volume takes the examples of poetry and epic to examine the multi-layered problematic of cultural transfer between Romania and Germania and investigates how German poets developed their stylistic techniques during this period.

The volume explores the creative-interpretative world of literary translation in the Age of Goethe from the perspectives of translation history and literary scholarship. The case studies contextualize the translated texts as part of German literary history and seek to reconstruct their intrinsic notions of genre and theory.

Based on talks delivered at an international conference of the Theodor Fontane Archive in Potsdam, the essays contained in this volume discuss the theme of the fragment in the works of Theodor Fontane, Ernst Barlach, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, and others. This collection of textual and linguistic interpretation, peppered with theoretical asides and insight into writerly production, will have a lasting impact on literary scholarship.

Hermann Kurz (1813–1873) was among the founders of German historical, realistic, and social narrative in the period before the March Revolution of 1848. The study uses innovative textual interpretation to evaluate the whole continuum of his early works through all genres. It reveals Kurz’ use of a poetics derived from both contemporary literature (Schiller, Uhland, Schwab, and Mörike) and earlier works (Gottfried von Straßburg, Grimmelshausen).

The essays in this volume reveal the instability and polyphony of the term "modernity" at the time of its inception in Vienna at the end of the 19^th century, along with the dialectic between progressive and regressive tendencies. They offer a broad research perspective on the specific features and boundaries of Viennese modernity. The volume aims at a conceptual notion of modernity as it emerges from the perspective of crisis.

Beginning with the ancient tradition, this volume examines the historical development and aesthetic manifestations of the idyll and the “idyllic.” Ranging from the Arcadian locus amoenus to the social utopia of “never-never land,” it analyzes canonical literary and artistic works from the points of view of aesthetics, philosophy, and cultural studies to present models of how the concept evolved in the European context.

Without a doubt, modernism – including aesthetic modernism – has had a complex relationship with religion. Lately, this relationship has attracted new research interest from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, including research on George. Rather than representing a religious “special pathway,” Stefan George and his circle can be regarded as a model for aesthetic modernists’ intense attention to religion.

Until now, the literary historical classification of the decades from 1930 to 1960 has been largely adapted to the breaks and categories of German history. This compendium presents a wide range of methodological perspectives for examining this problem of 20^th century literary creation. A focus is placed on the consistent analysis of literary textual procedures.

This collection of correspondence between Bachmann and Celan enables new scholarly engagement with both authors. It elucidates the complex connections between their personal histories and poetry, shedding light on the ways they found literary expression for their experiences with totalitarianism. In addition, the letters are poetic texts in their own right, to be read in the context of the poets’ works as a whole.

This study refutes the notion that there could be no sense of tragedy in the Middle Ages because of the prevailing Christian worldview. The motivating force of misfortunate in the courtly epic shows clear congruities with various theories of tragedy. Using a narratological approach, the author reformulates the concept of the tragic for the field of medieval studies.

This volume explores the usefulness and limitations of the concept of literary primitivism. The individual essays propose theories of primitivism and reconstruct its historical and theoretical background. Using literary examples, they reveal the contours of literary primitivism and explain its relationship to primitivism in the visual arts. The overall picture that emerges from the analysis is of primitivism as a powerful force in the development of literary modernity.

In 1898 Wilhelm Raabe proclaimed his historical narrative Hastenbeck to be the “companion piece” to his 1888 novel Odfeld: “In the wake of the Iliad from the Duchy of Braunschweig comes the Odyssey from the Duchy of Braunschweig.” By tracing how Raabe drew on the archetypes of the heroic epic (The Iliad), the love story (The Odyssey), and the historical novel (Vergil’s Aeneid as a combination of the two great Homeric epics and as precursor for Walter Scott’s Waverley), this study weaves a complex history of the German national epic as a literary genre.

Throughout his life Ernst Jünger sought to identify a significance behind “all that happens.” These conference proceedings investigate Jünger’s search for historically and ideologically acceptable meanings to his own experience and historical experience in general. The essays examine both Jünger’s political aesthetics and his perception of language in the light of philosophical tradition and the literary conflict between the Romantic and modern.

The title ‛Varieties of Self-Invention’ denotes a project to reconstruct Romanticism as a philosophical epoch. That is why Fichte and Schelling have been brought into a new configuration with F. Schlegel and interpreted as philosophical protagonists of Romantic literature. Here the focus is on their many varieties of Romantic self-invention, which are related to the great human themes such as ‛freedom’, ‛love’‚‛God’, ‛death’ and ‛devil’. In addition, in exemplary studies the book emphasizes the central concept of infinite irony and the typical rhetorical artistic character of Romantic philosophy.

This study analyzes and interprets exemplary poems and prose texts from the extensive work of the pre-revolutionary (Vormärz) author Gottfried Kinkel (1815-1882) from a historical and functional perspective. In addition, the work provides a (works) biographical outline of Kinkel's eventful life. Based on the texts, Kinkel's development is traced from a constitutional liberal to a radical democrat, and the respective formative literary-aesthetic and social conditions for his writing are shown.

From a literary point of view, modernism is primarily a linguistic project. And lyric poetry is seen as the paradigm of modernism. Poetic texts unleash the bonds of tradition. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims "Language as art", and modernist poets around 1900 such as Arno Holz, George, Rilke, Morgenstern follow this summons, each in their own way. The present study demonstrates this process, by comparative studies of the poets' concepts of language and by literary and linguistic interpretations, principally of poems reflecting on language. Thus both the individual and collective pathways to modernism are revealed.

The contributors analyze whether and in what sense there is an indissoluble interdependence between “beauty” and “incomprehensibility” in Trakl’s work and in modern poetry in general. Does the theorem of “incomprehensibility” resolves itself in the decipherment of the underlying structures and generates poetic “beauty” through the revealed structures, i.e. through the assigned model of explication itself? Depending on the various methodological approaches, this problem is resolved in different ways. The collection intends to enrich Trakl studies with new insights and contribute to a more differentiated understanding of the specific characteristics of Trakl’s lyric poetry using a variety of perspectives.

The epochs of Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism as constructs of literary studies have become problematic. The literary discourse itself reveals phenomena of simultaneity which questions the typical ideal configuration of heterogeneous epochal structures. Using texts by Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and Moritz, the authors analyze how Enlightenment patterns of thought are developed both in literature and theoretical discourse (aesthetics).

This study examines classic modern texts – elements of a 'visionary' poetology –, which on the one hand connect with an idealistic poetics of memory, and on the other create a new tradition. Rilke's and Benjamin's poetics of memory together with Musil's critique of cognition in its essayistic and poetic formulations are also viewed in the light of Marcel Proust's theory of memory. The claim to totality at the basis of the visions of 'poetic coming of age' detected here, and the telos which they develop are illuminated critically.

This study examines classical modern texts - elements of a 'visionary' poetology -, which on the one hand connect with an idealistic poetics of memory, and on the other create a new tradition. Rilke's and Benjamin's poetics of memory together with Musil's critique of understanding in its essayistic and poetic formulations are also viewed in the light of Marcel Proust's theory of memory. The claim to totality at the basis of the visions of 'poetic coming of age' detected here, and the telos which they develop are illuminated critically.

For the relationship between Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenie on Tauris] and Grillparzer’s trilogy Das goldene Vließ [The Golden Fleece] there are two structural features of fundamental importance ‑ the evaluative opposition of the Greek and the barbaric and the reference to the genre of Greek mythological tragedy, in which that opposition has an ethnocentric function, which applies also to modern (e.g. ethnographic) transmissions of the concept of barbarism. Grillparzer’s tragic exposure of humanism stands in contrast to Goethe’s humanistic engagement with this tradition.

The volume presents an introduction to the work of the writer Leo Perutz (1882–1957). Each of the ten chapters deals with one of Perutz’ novels, from Die dritte Kugel [The third bullet] through to Der Judas des Leonardo [Leonardo’s Judas]. In addition to the textual analyses, the volume contains a hitherto unpublished novella and a comprehensive bibliography. In its approach, the volume makes a case for a way of dealing with literary texts which combines structuralist and hermeneutical traditions. Each of the chapters proceeds from a reconstruction of the structure of a text to its interpretation.

The study aims to encourage a more profound understanding of linguistic clarity by engaging in a painstaking philosophical interpretation of what was formerly known as Hölderlin's "Pindar Fragments." To this end, it begins by elaborating a realistic view of the manuscripts, from which these can be identified as a systematic key text of the first order for Hölderlin's thinking. The attempt at demystification in the name of clarity and the comparison with Plato point up Hölderlin's essential contribution to western philosophy.

Unter den vielbeschworenen "Frauen um Goethe", die als "Musen" in Goethes Werk ein poetisches Echo gefunden haben, waren gleich mehrere literarisch produktiv. Für die Dichterinnen Charlotte von Stein, Marianne von Willemer und Bettina von Arnim ist Goethe dabei nicht nur gemeinsames biographisches, sondern auch das verbindende poetologische Element: Anders als Goethes Schwester Cornelia (die den Bruder aus ihrem literarisierten Tagebuch dezidiert herausschreibt) binden sie Goethe als Mensch und als Dichter bewusst in den eigenen Text ein. Sie karikieren seine Person und parodieren seine Werke, sie spielen auf seine Gedichte an und zitieren seine Briefe, variieren vorgefundene Motive und gestalten sowohl den gewünschten als auch den kritisierten Goethe als literarisches Abbild.

Die vergleichende Untersuchung zeigt in Einzelanalysen diese dichterische Vereinnahmung Goethes in all ihren Facetten auf und weist nach, wie hinter der poetischen Auseinandersetzung mit Goethes Person und Werk das Ringen der drei so verschiedenen Autorinnen um die eigene Identität aufscheint. Die je unterschiedlichen Methoden des buchstäblichen Herbei-Zitierens, der dichterischen Einverleibung Goethes in den eigenen Text in Form literarischer Karikatur, mittels intertextueller Anspielung oder interpolierter Briefe werden so als Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Rolle als Dichterin und Frau lesbar.

With reference to Celan’s renderings of French poetry, the author discusses the poetics underlying Paul Celan’s translations and the changes it underwent in the course of time. The study concentrates not only on the well-known translations of Rimbaud's »Bateau ivre« (1958) and Valéry’s »Jeune Parque« (1960) but also pays close attention to the hitherto neglected translations of Benjamin Péret (1950), Guillaume Apollinaire (1951–1959), Jules Supervielle (1958–1968), and André du Bouchet (1968). Up to about 1960 Celan employed largely the same stylistic resources in his translations as in his own poetry. In the 1960s, however, we find a parting of the ways. The translations emancipate themselves from Celan’s personal poetic diction, becoming more ›literal‹ and ›faithful‹. This change in translation procedure is interpreted here as a consequence of an immanent contradiction in Celan’s poetics of dialogue.

This book recalls young writers who made their debut in the Third Reich or experienced their literary breakthrough in this period only, to fall victim to dictatorship, organized terror, and war as supporters, accomplices, disparagers, or opponents of National Socialism. Cross-sectional overviews and case descriptions are used to uncover the traces of this 'lost generation' and reveal their literary legacy. The result is a collection of literary ruins and biographical debris that for esthetic or political reasons amply deserve to be recovered from the collective oblivion to which they have been consigned.

This volume is an attempt to provide a first comprehensive appreciation of Hölderlin's Tower Poems (the poems of his madness). It begins by reconstructing the poetology underlying them under the headings of imagery, landscape, space, and time. In addition the interpretations cast light on the dietetic and therapeutic aspects of this subjacent poetology, which is shown to accord with a therapeutic approach to life in general. In the history of discourse Hölderlin stands in the tradition of the 'mad author', a role he must have seen as being more or less thrust upon him. Finally, his pseudonym 'Scardanelli' is interpreted as an enactment of the figure of the mad poet refracted with that of a poeta minor.

Instead of appealing to theory-formation and abstract classification, this study consciously uses close text analysis to examine secular German baroque poetry from a specifically problem-oriented viewpoint. Sensuality as a problem: the literature of antiquity agonized over the impact of eros in a way that was hardly any less soul-searching than that of later Christianity. Authors like Opitz, Fleming, Zesen, Stieler, and above all Hoffmannswaldau take their bearings from this tradition, essaying in their erotic texts a discourse on sensuality that goes beyond the musa iocosa to adumbrate positions represented in the early Enlightenment.

The interaction between the theory and practice of gender systems around 1800 is studied here with reference to the correspondence between the author Therese Huber (1764-1829) and Emil von Herder (1783-1855). How powerful were the contemporary images of men and women? Did Huber respond to them with submission or emancipation? How did she define herself within the existing order of things? To answer these questions, topics addressed in these letters (e.g. education for girls) are analyzed against the background of texts like Rousseau's »Emile«. The ambivalence of the positions represented by Huber and Herder thus becomes discernible.

The publication of the »Xenien« (1796) by Goethe and Schiller not only triggered one of the greatest scandals in German literary history; the advent of the xenion also established a form of literary dispute that systematically violated existing aesthetic and communicative norms. The history of this »accursed genre«, attempted here for the first time, also extends into the present. Other authors using the form include Hölderlin, Kleist, Herwegh, and Bobrowski. Like their predecessors these writers employed the xenion in literary disputes as well as in their adversative engagement with Weimar classicism and the reception accorded to it.

In Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), the deeply unsettling experiences of crisis in the period of revolution and war around 1800 cemented the conviction of a utopian potential inherent in the period of upheaval he was living through. In view of his deeply pessimistic analyses of current events, this conviction comes as a major surprise and calls for explication and clarification with reference to selected texts by Arnim and to contemporaneous semantics. The approach is necessarily a dual one: a diachronic analysis is required to do justice to Arnim's aesthetic adaptation of reality, and also as a supplement to the close analysis of the individual texts.

The history of the contemplation of the heavens is at the same time a history of the hermeneutics of cosmic signs. Where literary observers of the universe look up to the heavens, interpretations of the self and the cosmos are necessarily bound up with the essential issue of the readability of signs. The cosmic moment is the moment in which texts reflect their own conditions of being. In the literature of the period from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries we find reflections not only of the historically significant range of discoveries in the post-Copernican heavens, but also of the transition in aesthetic history from an aesthetics of mimesis to an aesthetics of autonomy.

The cult status of literary figures and their adulation are phenomena that have been with us since antiquity. In many ways, the 19th century continues in this tradition. But for bourgeois society the attitude to authors also takes on a specific, identity-forming significance in its own right. 19th century author adulation concentrates cultural and social forces. The study of attitudes to authors invites inquiry into the pragmatics and performativity of the aesthetic dimension, issues that have attracted substantially increased attention over the last few years.

The most enigmatic frontispiece in baroque literature is analyzed in terms of design, iconographic tradition, and in the context of the genre. This analysis produces philological evidence that the original drawing on which the engraving is based stems from Grimmelshausen himself. The frontispiece is decoded as a poetological symbol designed, in each and every detail, to justify the »Simplicissimus« and its complexity, not least by presenting it as a satirical novel that opens the book of the world in such a way that human failings can be recognized for what they are.

In the wake of Enlightenment doubt and the theodicy problem, blasphemous laughter quickly developed into a literary motif around the middle of the 18th century. The study begins by discussing the theological, anthropological, and social conditions favouring this phenomenon. Subsequently, an analysis of canonical texts from three centuries (by Lessing, Tieck, Büchner, Hauptmann, Bataille, Thomas Mann, Christa Wolf, etc.) traces the process by which the motif of blasphemous laughter 'ages' to the point of obsolescence, ultimately becoming an element in a postmodern citation game.

The once nationally and internationally prominent realist Friedrich Spielhagen (1829-1911) was decanonized and driven to the periphery of literary history in his own lifetime. Since then critical interest has ben sporadic and has often reflected the negative judgment passed on him by gatekeepers and tastemakers of his own time. Except for a very few specialists, most scholars have concentrated on his obsessively propagated >objective< narrative theory or the early novels up to »Sturmflut« (1877), when he had a quarter century of oppositional and partly satirical writing before him. Since he was not only a widely known realist and theoretician of realism, but exhibited an extensive knowledge of European, English, and American literature, today's revived interest in realism and in the international dimension of late nineteenth-century German literature suggests that he may have been chronically undervalued. This study comprehends his whole career, but leaves the theoretical efforts largely to one side as actually damaging to his creativity as a novelist, in order to accent the later novels and novellas, in which he measures the Wilhelminian Reich against his Vormärz ideals of freedom and democracy, while being driven, somewhat against his will, in the direction of Social Democracy and the harsher realism of such French writers as Emile Zola. Special attention is given to a number of thematic centres, such as the aristocracy; class identity, liberalism, and Social Democracy; the military and the dueling ethos; Jews; America; women and love; and his agonized engagement with the contemporary French novel.

Since the once prominent realist Friedrich Spielhagen (1829-1911) was decanonized in his own lifetime, critical interest had been concentrated on his obsessively propagated "objective" narrative theory or the early novels up to »Sturmflut« (1877), when he had a quarter century of oppositional and satirical writing before him. This study comprehends his whole career, but leaves the theoretical efforts largely to one side in order to accent the later novels, in which he measures the Wilhelminian Reich against his Vormärz ideals of freedom and democracy, while moving toward Social Democracy and Zolaesque realism.

This study investigates the sources influencing Lessing's idea that tragedy improves the spectator morally by arousing his or her pity. Having shown that Lessing's comments on the tragedy's effect take into account three different problems (emotional effect, moral purpose and tragic pleasure), the study then identifies the central prerequisites for Lessing's model in both the humanist tradition (rhetoric, commentaries on Aristotle, poetics), and the epistemology of the Enlightenment (Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Hutcheson, Mendelssohn).

This is the first attempt ever made to provide a comprehensive portrayal of the Deutsche Tischgesellschaft founded by Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) and existing from 1811 to at least 1834. This Berlin society contributed decisively to the 'invention of the German nation'. Prominent representatives of leading circles in society were united in a Christian German, Prussian nationalist and German nationalist ideology. Women and Jews were excluded. The speeches that have come down to us testify to a major cultural program with which Arnim and Clemens von Brentano continued the politicization of aesthetics that they initiated with »Des Knaben Wunderhorn«.

This study is the first to use detailed textual analysis to determine the position occupied by the well-known conservative-revolutionary cultural critic and novelist Frank Thiess (1890-1977) in the literary landscape of the Weimar Republic. In so doing, it casts light on the ambivalent oscillation in his works between criticism and affirmation of National Socialism, a feature typical of the so-called 'inner emigration' phenomenon. The study concentrates on his historical writings and essays, with additional reference to contemporary accounts of the war and research contributions by professional historians.

On the occasion of Hans-Georg Kemper's 60th birthday, nine literary scholars and a theologian assemble for an exchange of views on 'hermeticism', a phenomenon that by its very definition should defy any kind of access whatsoever. This makes it doubly intriguing to trace the legacy of the hermetic tradition that in the early modern age 'migrated' from theology to poetry. This is undertaken here with reference notably to texts from the 18th century and (following what is ostensibly an entirely different hermetic paradigm) the 20th century. In the process, a whole range of retrospective and anticipatory features (from pre-Biblical times to the 21st century) illustrate the complex interrelations covertly operative across what appears to be a clear caesura in the history of the concept.

Modern aesthetics is the product of a process of segregation. Works of art are something necessarily distinct from that which merely »finds the dubious acclaim of the crowd« (Schiller). All the way up to Adorno and beyond, this postulate asserted itself successfully. Any blurring of the boundaries between art and kitsch was pilloried as sacrilegious, as if art were a locus of something akin to theology. For that precise reason post-modernism has displayed provocative zest in dismantling such a categorization. Kitsch is the frank and unashamed expression of a need for emotional appeal and immediately appreciable meaning and significance. As such it cannot but represent a major provocation for an aesthetic modernism that has pinned all its allegiances to the ubiquity of absurdity, meaninglessness, loss, mourning, and melancholy.

Goethe's »Seefahrt« (1776) was written a few months after the poet's arrival in Weimar. The study has a dual aim. It shows first that the poem was a response by Goethe to Salomon Gessner's idyll »Der Sturm«, a response based on a poetological program indebted to Herder's concept of the ode form and Diderot's theory of drama. In addition, it outlines the anthropological horizons within which 18th century sea poetry developed. Goethe's poem is the presentation of a 'physical and moral' conflict. Against the background of a tradition that goes back to the 107th Psalm, it unfolds a motivic constellation of genuinely Horatian poetic inspiration and actualizes its relevance for Goethe's own life-world.

In opposition to the widely-held view that the formal idiom of Eichendorff's poetic oeuvre can be justly described as "time-less", the present study undertakes a chronological reading of Eichendorff's poetry. The advantage of this approach is that it foregrounds the dynamic nature of Eichendorff's writing and reveals the constitution of his ideas and imagery as an ongoing process.

After the Nazis' rise to power, numerous writers left Germany and went into exile. But in the subsequent decades literature in German was not only marked by the political commitment of prominent refugees. Away from the domain of public discourse there was also a great deal of reflection on the 'aesthetic' consequences of National Socialism for modern culture. In the writings on literary theory produced by authors in exile, the cultural aporias of the age were translated into an epistemological poetology bodied forth in novels by well-known and forgotten authors. The fictional designs of the exiled authors generate complex imaginary worlds pitted against a reality turned specious. As such, these works represent a dynamic enrichment of the aesthetic of modernity.

This collection of essays is interdisciplinary in approach and examines areas of the life and work of Eduard Mörike (1804-1875) that have hitherto been largely neglected: his complicated relationship with his brothers, his relationship with Justinus Kerner and his activities as an amateur geologist toward the end of his career as a preacher. Close examination of the role played by occultism, facets of everyday life and the history of geology open up new perspectives for research on Mörike. Pointing up the connections between mostly well-known but largely neglected details extends our knowledge of Mörike's biography and the genesis of his works and provides new approaches to interpretation. The unavoidable by-product of the undertaking is that one or two staple Mörike legends stand revealed as devoid of any substance.

Do women and men read differently? The book explores this question from a historical perspective. Drawing upon written testimonies of readings of Goethe's works by women and men, it attempts to establish whether gender difference was in fact a category with a decisive impact on the act of reading around 1800. The comparative study casts a relativizing light on allegedly typical gender-specific reading modes by demonstrating that those modes are to be found equally among men and women. In marked contrast to the ongoing debate on >compulsive reading< and the starkly exaggerated gender polarities it pivots on, it transpires that in the practice of reading other factors such as poetological concepts are of much greater relevance than gender.

Manner and mannerism are closely related, not only by their etymology. The terms allude to the pragmatics and performativity of the aesthetic. A mannerist work of art is the product of a 'mannered' act by which an artist intervenes in social and cultural constellations. The mannerist demonstrates not merely aesthetic artistry but also acts in a 'mannered' way. Thus mannerism gives us the opportunity of discussing the extent to which aesthetic concepts can be reformulated in social terms and social concepts in aesthetic terms.

The volume brings together the papers presented at a conference held at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre of Bielefeld University in 1998.

Although parody is central to the famous 'encounter with the Devil', the 'ironical German''s novel has generally been held to be anything but parodistic. But if we eschew normative thinking on genres, parodistic writing reveals itself to be highly varied in perspective. It enhances readability and at the same time enables narrative discourse to reflect on the modalities of writing and the potentialities of modern art in the face of the polarity between esotericism and epigonality. Parodistic writing refutes the traditional interpretations of Mann's novel in terms of the role of the artist, a modern-day treatment of the Faust myth, an allegory on society or on Germany. In the 'relational magic' of speech and counter-speech, Leverk|hn's compositions function as self-parodies of the novel.

This study picks up current debates about perspective and meaning in Wolfram von Eschenbach's »Willehalm«. Adapting Mika Bal's model of narratology, it concentrates on two major complexes - characters and narrator - which it treats as fluid, intersecting entities. The former, uniquely for German narrative genres of the period, emerge as three-dimensional characters whose voices converse with that of a subjective narrator moulded in an era of developing fictionality. The result is a narrative dynamic which represents a vibrant new literary hermeneutic for the vernacular.

The volume assembles papers delivered at an international conference organized in 1999 to essay a rapprochement between Romantic drama and the latest concerns of research into Romanticism. Central to the joint endeavour is the appropriate appreciation of a generic constellation frequently neglected in comparison with the contemporary 'classical' tradition, a constellation whose specific constitutive features call for adequate perspectivization in terms of literary history. The studies address the problem of the constitution of subject-matter, the theory of Romantic drama, and structures in Romantic comedy. They comprise interpretations centering on works and authors (Novalis, Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Eichendorff), consideration of the historical context of the dramas (Schiller, Kleist) and of aspects of the history of their impact (Nestroy, Keller, Hofmannsthal, Pirandello).

Meticulous analysis of works by Rolf Hochhuth (»Die Berliner Antigone«), Günter Kunert (»Ikarus 64«), Volker Braun (»Iphigenie in Freiheit«), Botho Strauß (»Ithaka. Schauspiel nach den Heimkehr-Gesängen der Odyssee«) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (»Minotaurus. Eine Ballade«) provide the basis for an inquiry into the problems of the reception of mythology in post-modernism and issues pertaining to unity, continuity and identity in modern-day German literature from east and west.

In 1821, the publication year of Goethe's »Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre«, the literary public was unsettled by a pamphlet with the same title calling into question not only Wilhelm Meister's path to Bildung but the very values and ideals Goethe himself stood for. Author Friedrich Pustkuchen (1793-1834) combined the criticisms leveled at Goethe by others before him with new arguments designed to topple Goethe from the intellectual and spiritual pedestal his fellow Germans had hoisted him onto. The warring reactions to this attack convey a vivid picture of the regard Goethe was held in in the age of Restauration. The scholarly campaign waged (then and since) against Pustkuchen in the field of Germanic Studies is documented in a lengthy annex. It reveals the Goethe research tradition in a rather curious light.

The volume sets out to make a contribution to research on German Romantic comedy. The typological section distinguishes two kinds of Romantic comedy (parabatic/illusive) and also takes account of a third category. The subsequent overview discusses comedies by Tieck, Brentano, Arnim, Eichendorff, and Platen. Special emphasis is given to theatre-historical factors. The volume closes with a brief outlook on the post-Romantic era.

Katharina Tucher, a widow from Nuremberg, wrote a spiritual 'diary' with 94 entries dating from 1418-21. In these "Revelations" she tells of her mystical visions and her many conversations with Christ, Mary and other holy persons. Because of its very private nature the work is completely unique in German mystical literature. The edition is based on Katharina's autograph.

The last book published by the Jewish author Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943?) during her lifetime was "Die Frau und die Tiere" (1938). Shortly after its publication, this collection of poems fell foul of the Nazis' November pogroms. The study is devoted to this one volume and eschews a historical/biographical approach, concentrating instead on the question of where Kolmar's poems stand in terms of literary tradition. The poetological interpretations advanced here also point up the intertextual dimensions of Kolmar's work.

This inquiry into Hölderlin's 'home' is divided into two parts. In the first, the study examines the biography of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), with special reference to his relations with his family, drawing on letters and other testimonies read against the social and legal background of the age. In the second, the author turns to Hölderlin's efforts to achieve a poetic reconciliation between his biography and his philosophical convictions. The problematic nature of this attempt is illustrated with reference to central poems like the elegy "Heimkunft" and other documents such as the programmatic epistles addressed to Casimir Ullrich von Hoehlendorff.

Wolfhart Spangenberg (1567-1636?) is the anonymous author of the "EselKönig" ("King Ass") (1625), the most vitriolic known satire against Rosicrucians, Pansophists and Paracelsists, movements which gained considerable currency in the early 17th century. The present study examines Spangenberg's motives and objectives and relates the "EselKönig" to his earlier satirical writings "Des Flohes Strauß mit der Lauß" ("The Flea's Combat with the Louse"), "Lob der Mucken" ("In Praise of Gnats"), and "GanßKönig" ("King Goose").

The study introduces a concept that makes it possible to give a more precise description of literary stances in the transitional phase from modernism to post-modernism. Modernity is understood here as the expression of a paradoxical state. Rationally, unitary notions central to the modern age (metaphysical, subject-related, linguistic) no longer appear tenable; in terms of the sheer practical necessities of life they are however indispensable. Thus modern authors have gone in search of visions of totality susceptible of being pressed into service as coping strategies, both aesthetically and in terms of Weltanschauung. These quandaries are delineated here with detailed reference to the work of Alfred Döblin (up to 1933), concentrating not only on his most successful novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz" but giving equal attention to his almost totally neglected early works.

One of the central concerns of contemporary German studies is the question of the relationship between cultural and literary alterity. What potentialities and limitations are there for the aesthetic representation of cultural difference in the literary artwork? The present volume takes up the discussion by examining the treatment of Haiti in Kleist's "Verlobung in St.Domingo", Anna Seghers' "Karibische Geschichten", Heiner Müller's "Der Auftrag", Hans Christoph Buch's "Die Hochzeit von Port-au-Prince" and Hubert Fichte's "Xango".

The study begins by advancing an interpretation of "Vor dem Sturm" that emphasizes the construction of the work and hence the artistic and spiritual unity and cohesion for which it is remarkable. The focus then shifts to the poetological ideas set out in "Vor dem Sturm", particularly in the debate on 'genuine' and 'false' Romanticism and the prominent status accorded to Hölderlin as a representative of Romanticism in Fontane's historical novel, despite the latter's relative obscurity in the period in which it is set (1812/1813). The 'poetic realism' of late Fontane stands revealed as a synthesis between Realism and Romanticism. Section three of the book situates Fontane's views on Romanticism and Hölderlin within the history of Hölderlin's reception in Germany.

This study is based on the current understanding of parody as an ironic and metaliterary type of intertextuality. The affinity between parody and irony asserted in Early Romantic literary theory validates the application of the term to Goethe's subtle novel. By presenting an intertextual solution to the enigma of the names, the study reveals the secret target of the narrator's parodic wit to be the newly converted Friedrich Schlegel whose recent publications had just carried over previous attacks against Goethe's Classicism from the realm of art into the fields of language theory and literature. The book shows how Goethe appropriated his opponent's polemical language to retaliate with an ironic evocation of his charges and recommendations in the guise of a romantic novel.

This volume analyzes and reflects upon the specific content, aesthetics, and media used in the correspondence that took place between the members of Vienna’s literary circle. Its chapters make use of new approaches from epistolary studies, presenting the full spectrum of forms of expression in long-distance media. They examine letters, postcards, telegrams, pneumatic post, and even telephone communication from the Young Vienna period and beyond.

The study proceeds from an inquiry into Thomas Mann's position with regard to tradition and the conviction that this question can only be answered by analyzing the way in which meaning is constituted in his novels (here "Doktor Faustus"). It transpires that the multi-tiered structure is a reflection of Thomas Mann's relationship to the Schopenhauer-Wagner-Nietzsche 'triad', more specifically to the concept of culture to be found in early Nietzsche. This places warring claims about Mann's status as a 'traditional' or 'modern' author in a new perspective.

The present collection of conference papers focuses on a notorious lacuna in research on autobiography, as autobiographies by women have in the past been neglected to an unconscionable degree. The papers employ a variety of approaches and many of them draw upon new source material. Their subject is autobiography narratives by women between the 17th and 20th centuries, with specific reference to development and changes in the areas of life portrayed, in stylistic and narrative patterns and publication routines. The studies concur in concluding that female autobiography centres around discussion of and reflection upon the relations between and the way these have changed in the course of history. The volume thus provides new insights on the general theory and history of autobiography as a genre.

The Buddenbrooks may be the biggest eaters but they are not the only ones. All Thomas Mann's novels contain important meal scenes. Eating is not just the intake of food for survival purposes. It is a cultic act. The references and allusions are immense in their raduis - Plato's "Symposium", the Last Supper, eros and redemption. From Christian Buddenbrook, the suffering hero who can't get a morsel past his lips, to Joseph the Provider in the "Joseph" tetralogy the eating habits of Mann's protagonists symbolize the problems they have stomaching the outside world and keeping their inward selves under control. Eating is something they all make a meal of - guzzlers and ascetics alike - and sacrifice is the order of the day. The book serves up the secret menu underlying this consuming passion.

The volume is largely made up of papers presented at a symposium devoted to the works of Hermann Lenz (1913-1998). Its reflects the broad spectrum of responses aroused by Lenz' books both in the field of German studies and more generally. The articles focus on the author's early lyrical and narrative works, his place in German literary history and features of his personal style. In an annex the volume also includes the text of Lenz' short story "Rebellen-Stammtisch" (Backroom Rebels).

The ethnological and anthropological significance of animals is common to all cultures and periods. Given this fact, the book essays a comparative study of the animal figures in the works of a representative of Chinese literature - Pu Songling (1640-1715) - and those found in the works of a German-speaking writer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924). The first chapter establishes the basic characteristics of the animal figures of the two authors and then proceeds to place these in the broader context of categories such as the grotesque, metamorphosis, animal parable and animal comparison, with copious reference to the different cultural and literary traditions. Jianming Zhou undertakes detailed textual analyses and comparisons with a view to illuminating Kafka`s approach to Pu`s work and the development of his style in the portrayal of animals and humans. In so doing he suceeds in pointing up the influence of Pu Songling on Kafka and thus opening up new perspectives for intercultural comparative research on Kafka`s work.

This study interprets the correspondence between Goethe and Zelter in the period 1799 to 1832 as an autobiographical and anthropological text. From the first letters exchanged to the final years in which posthumous publication of the correspondence is envisaged, the two highly dissimilar partners in this dialogue handle the exchange of letters as a form of its own right. In the author's resistance to the experience of old age and death, the art of living and the art of writing become identical. The question of the extent to which it is possible to transform biology into biography forms the culmination of this correspondence, which from the outset was its own favoured subject.

Historical narratives represent about a third of the total output of Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910). In this study his characteristic concern to recreate the past in narrative terms is examined against the background of the structural models operative in Raabe's hermeneutic view of history. The interest evinced by Raabe in Germany's development towards a nation-state frequently takes the form of a narrative emphasis on illiberal deviations from the course of history in Western Europe as a whole. This mole-like burrowing down into the innermost strata of the historical development of a specific (German) mentalité is frequently combined with anthropological aspects of a history of the collective unconscious. There thus emerges a modern perspective on (German) history which is equally remarkable for the innovative aesthetic means employed in its communication.

Uwe Johnson's "Anniversaries" ("Jahrestage") is a project in narrative appropriation of the past by an individual subject. The problem of memory justifies a comparison with Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu". The method applied to making this process of understanding itself understandable is the hermeneutic reconstruction of the evolution of the text from its documentary sources, published here for the first time, and an interpretation of the narrative techniques employed. In ten separate analyses the chapters or 'anniversaries' stand revealed as experimental recountings of biographically acquired insights. In contrast to the customary classification of the work as realistic, it becomes evident that what "Anniversaries" does is to use the formal repertory of classic literary modernism to recount history in story form and in this way to challenge established historiography to rethink its position.

The interpretation of the "Monstretragoedie", the first version of 'Lulu', opens up a completely new perspective on Frank Wedekind's (1864-1918) famous work. Recourse to hitherto undiscovered French sources and an examination of sexual discourse at the time it was written, reveal the long-suppressed text as a radically modern piece of theatre. In comparison with the "Monstretragoedie" the familiar plays "Erdgeist" and "Die Büchse der Pandora" - still misleadingly lumped together as the 'Lulu-Tragödie' and subjected here to consistent philological editorial analysis for the first time as separate entities - stand revealed as mere products of an enforced accomodation to audience tastes and censorship.

This volume inquires into the evolution of narrative prose structures in a period in which traditional idealisms had proved obsolete and a generally inchoate intellectual climate and debilitating material conditions were prevalent for most creative writers. The emphasis here is on the frequently experimental approach to narration in that period, with particular attention being paid to prose techniques springing from an acute awareness of differentialism and hence largely characterised by a fundamentally ironic stance. Alongside the editor's introduction the volume contains articles on narrative prose works by Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tieck, Schefer, Louise Brachmann, Arnim, Eichendorff, Alexis and Heine.

This study pursues two aims. First it presents the hitherto little-known and academically neglected first Zagreb edition of Yvan Goll's (1891-1950) extensive poem "Paris brennt" in a synoptic comparison with the two later, much-abridged and obviously (and characteristically) modified versions (in French and German). In addition, Goll's text with its avant-garde eclectic combination of futurist, cubist, surrealist and zenithist elements is an ideal vehicle for a more searching discussion of some of the most important literary techniques of modernism, notably montage and simultaneity.

This is the first publication of the documents pertaining to the divorce proceedings leading to the dissolution of the unhappy second marriage of Elisabeth Keller (1787-1864), the mother of the Swiss novelist and poet Gottfried Keller. They provide hitherto largely undocumented insights into the writer's formative years and make it imperative to challenge a number of unfounded and exaggerated claimes made notably by Adolf Muschg in his influential essay "Gottfried Keller" (1977) and Gerhard Kaiser in his ambitious interpretation of Keller's oeuvre "Das gedichtete Leben" (1981), both suggesting that Keller's mother was pathologically possessive and deprived her son of his independence and his capacity for achieving personal happiness.

Das Buch vereint zwei Gegenstandsbereiche der Literatur und Ästhetik um 1800: die anthropologische Frage nach dem neuen, ganzen Menschen und dem Zusammenhalt von Leib und Seele, nach den Sinnen und ihrer ästhetischen Produktivität; es ist dies auch die Frage nach den literarischen Formen, in welchen dieser ganze Mensch sich exemplarisch zu konstituieren vermag.(u.a. im Drama, Aphorismus).

Zum anderen geht es um die Vorbilder der Kunst, insbesondere der antiken Plastik, welche seit Winckelmann entfaltet wurden. Sie fungieren als Evidenzverheißungen für die Vergöttlichung der Menschennatur. Kunstliteratur ist das Medium, in dem sich solche ästhetischen Versprechen artikulieren. Literarische Anthropologie, ästhetische Theorie und die neu aufbereiteten Sinn-Bilder schließen sich hier also zusammen. Das Buch geht dem nach in Beiträgen zu Lichtenberg, Heinse, Moritz, Hölderlin, Schiller, Goethe und Jean Paul.

Nach der verdienstvollen und materialreichen Arbeit von Christine Touaillon (1919) erfolgte eine gezielte Hinwendung zum deutschen Roman von Frauen um 1800 erst wieder im Zusammenhang der literaturwissenschaftlichen Frauenforschung seit etwa 1980. Der vorliegende Band ist das Ergebnis einer Zusammenführung derjenigen WissenschaftlerInnen, die in den vergangenen Jahren zu dem thema gearbeitet haben und hier neue Untersuchungen vorlegen.