Volume 54, Issue 2

The critique of law and judicial practice is a central theme in Karl Kraus’s oeuvre. However, it is mostly understood by scholars as – to use Robert Cover’s terms – addressing law as nomos (what law says) rather than as narrative (its normative grounding). This article claims that the narratival critique of law, which Kraus develops via Shakespeare, Goethe, and other literary sources, should not be seen as a merely aesthetic complement to his legal arguments, but rather as essential to his approach to jurisprudence and social justice. This view challenges a non-critical application of pre-given values and fixated norms, since such practice undermines contingent moral concerns and often leads to social harm. From this perspective, this analysis shows how Kraus captures and documents the historical political transition of the Habsburg Monarchy, in which criminalization was put to use as a political tool, as a liberal institution co-opted by national discourse and populist ideology.

The article discusses the hierarchical model of readers’ types outlined by Marcel Proust in his essay “Journées de lecture” and reconstructs Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetics of reading in accordance with the poems “Der Lesende” and “Der Leser” as well as the thematic relevant parts of the novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge . Based on the conclusions made thereby, it draws attention to the possibilities arising from a comparative reading of the description of the scene in which the young Marcel reads in the garden of Combray from Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann , and Rilke’s poem “Hebend die Blicke vom Buch”. Moreover, it is shown that in this short but complex poem, the German poet fulfills the ideal of a unity of reading and writing emphasized by the French author. Combining the motive of looking away from the book typical of his prose and poetry with Proust’s typical motive of the memory of a certain read, Rilke brings into being a poetic picture of reading, which triggers both the memory and the reflection, and an image of a reader that reveals his own productive reception.

This article explores Yehuda Amichai’s reflection on the meaning of language and demonstrates how his early poetry navigates between different views on the concept of ‘mother tongue.’ Building on Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay Monolingualism of the Other , it proposes a new hermeneutic frame for interpreting Amichai’s early poetry – particularly the poems collected in Shirim 1948–1962 – through the prism of monolingualism. In order to examine Amichai’s version of Derridean monolingualism, the article offers close readings of his paradigmatic poems, such as “Be-yalduti” (“When I Was a child”) and “Va-hagirat horai lo nirg‘eah bi” (“And the Migration of My Parents Has Not Subsided in Me”), that address, both directly and indirectly, the question of language. Furthermore, this article traces the influence of the experience of immigration on the development of Amichai’s poetic thinking on language. The various lyrical manifestations of this experience, such as a mediation on the meaning of the language of the mother, or the possibility to write with an accent, reveal Amichai’s growing ethical understanding of language as something that belongs to the other. Thus, I argue that Amichai’s unique monolingualism should be understood as a poetic site of negotiation between owning and dispossessing a language.

This article reviews four works representative of current field writings and attempts to define their major characteristics. First it proposes to encircle in Paysage fer (2000) by François Bon, The Change of scenery. Travels in France (2011) by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Taba-Taba (2017) by Patrick Deville, and Climats de France (2017) by Marie Richeux a common modus operandi ; then it identifies in these hybrid works a singular and original writing of the ego , made of biographical and autobiographical fragments, and finally, taking into account the contributions of geocritics, it suggests the viability of ‘egogeographies,’ kinds of own landscapes to each author that a content both testimonial and patrimonial impregnates strongly.

In 1990, Joachim Fest’s plea for the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace unchained one of the most heated architectural debates in German history, a debate that has been raging on to this day. This so-called Stadtschlossdebatte not only testifies to the remarkable revival of the Prussian legacy after German Reunification, it is also symptomatic of the difficult search for identity by the new Berlin Republic. With its prevalent rhetoric of the ‘lost’ or ‘empty center,’ the debate is particularly suitable for an analysis of the imaginary mechanisms and strategies of fictionalization that are necessary for a political community to constitute itself. By means of a rhetorical analysis of the reconstruction debate, I argue that Prussia functions as a mythological relict in our alleged society without myths. In this regard, special attention is devoted to the Schlosssimulation of 1993 by the French artist Catherine Feff. Functioning as a phantasmatic projection screen, this fake city castle is used here as a starting point for a reflection on the constitutive relation between community and fiction. The article concludes with a coda on the Wrapped Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.