Volume 141, Issue 2

Jetzt ›now‹ and bald ›soon‹ are frequently used in German to express temporal references with present and future readings, respectively. However, it is not unusual to find them combined with the Perfekt and Präteritum , which are commonly described in the literature as past tenses. Although such use of temporal deixis in Modern German is well studied, there is still little research on this topic from a historical perspective. In this paper, I attempt to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the use of the adverb nu ›now‹, ›then‹ in Old Saxon and Old High German. Textual analyses of these works reveal that the ›Hêliand‹ and the ›Evangelienbuch‹ exhibit a use of the adverb nu similar to the use of jetzt and bald in Modern German, since it was found in combination not only with the Präsens , but also with the Präteritum , and with what can be recognized as the prototype of the modern Perfekt . The analyses also show that, although nu was often used as a pragmatic marker to highlight particular passages or convey the author’s attitude in relation to a specific event, it also retained its temporal meaning, especially when combined with the past tenses, establishing the chronological sequence of the narration.

The paper explains the broad reception of the ›Kaiserchronik‹ in the German culture throughout the high and late middle ages by its ability to give a historical shape and foundation to a social identity of the medieval German nobility. This identity is based on the Chronicle’s general concept of history and worked out in its series of narratives on the one hand, and mirrored by its reception in the textual tradition on the other. The paper shows that the ›Kaiserchronik‹ ascribes to the German nobility the identity of being the teleologically destined bearer of the Roman empire and that the manuscripts preserving the text contain various reflections of the fact that this identity was actually adopted by the Chronicle’s textual community from the late 12th to the 15th century. This is illustrated by the means of the continuation of the ›Kaiserchronik‹ in its so-called C-Version (I), its contextualization within the famous Vorau codex (II), the excerpt of the Adelger episode in a Vienna codex (III), and the copy of the final parts of the Charlemagne episode in a Munich single sheet (IV). Overall, the examples demonstrate that the ›Kaiserchronikʼs‹ function of shaping and founding a social identity of the German nobility also explains in a new manner its flagrant idiosyncrasies in representing the history of the Roman emperors.

This article (re-)examines (marked) inconsistencies and incompatibilities in Middle High German heroic epic. Those contradictions may result from oral tradition, from the difficulties of transfering oral narratives into literacy, from the conditions of performing from memory, or from traditional narrative regularities of the genre. Frequently, they are striking side effects of a type of narration which is paradigmatic instead of syntagmatic, elliptic and aggregative, scenic and final, and therefore highly tolerant against contradictions of any kind. Contradictions and inconsistencies are (consciously or unconsciously) used (and imitated) as one of the constitutive stylistic features of heroic epic. In some cases, moreover, contradictions and inconsistencies are obviously part of an intentional poetics of contradiction ostentatiously accumulating and exhibiting different layers of knowledge and meaning. The textual strategies of heroic epic, in some respect perhaps of premodern narration in general, tend to favour discrepancies, contrasts, and contradiction instead of nuances, compromises, and smooth transitions.