Volume 44, Issue 2

While the antisemitic impact of Sessa’s popular farce Unser Verkehr (1813) is well-known to historians of nineteenth-century literature and theatre, a careful contextualization of the notorious name of one of its characters – Isidorus Morgenländer – within the orientalist discourses of the time reveals that this play has not only anti-Jewish, but also anti-romantic tendencies. The reactions to Sessa’s play confirm this bidirectionality and the enhancing effects it had.

Franz Kafka’s five-year long inner struggle for and against a marriage to his fiancée Felice Bauer is mostly perceived as a conflict between art and marriage. Against the background of a new reading of Elias Canetti’s influential essay Kafka’s Other Trial. The Letters to Felice , (1967) this article explores a different interpretation, focusing on social interactions and struggles for recognition. Kafka’s inner struggles and his Letters to Felice reflect, I argue, the ambivalences of modern love and intimacy.

The article examines the history and structure of the international bibliographical journal (internationales Referatenorgan) Germanistik from 1960 to 2009. By combining qualitative archival research and quantitative data analysis, it seeks to explore how the journal simultaneously took into account political, economic, and academic expectations; how it stimulated scholarly working practices; and how it contributed to the formation of networks within the heterogeneous field of German Studies.

As a young poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger sought to garner symbolic capital in the formative years of post-war German literature by translating Pablo Neruda. By arguing that Enzensberger uses a deharmonizing translation strategy to explore his distrust of metaphor, the article maps out coordinates for rethinking the complex relationship between Enzensberger’s poems and translations.

In 1960, two competing anthologies of modern poetry were published in an attempt to renew and internationalize German poetry: Günther Steinbrinker’s Panorama moderner Lyrik and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Museum der modernen Poesie . This essay argues that the success of Museum over Panorama was based on Enzensberger’s comparative approach to modernist poetry in the first half of the twentieth century as a “chrestomathy” (a textbook) for a “world language of poetry”. This chrestomathy also provided the blueprint for his own German-language poems, which he published the same year in a collection titled Landessprache .

Enzensberger’s sustained engagement with Latin American thinkers and literary forms was central to his attempts to shift the parameters of West German debates on literature and politics in the 1960 s. Attention to Latin American exchanges and influences challenges simplistic criticisms of his Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the novel cultural constellations that underlie Enzensberger’s genre innovation engender productive inroads into transatlantic comparative projects.

For decades, Hans Magnus Enzensberger viewed autobiographical writings with a sense of distrust and irony, while at the same time exploring themes and motifs that were closely related to experiences of the author himself. Over the past ten years, however, something has changed in Enzensberger’s approach to autobiography. This becomes most obvious in his essay entitled Tumult , published in 2014. This contribution analyzes the constitutive moments of biographical discourses for Enzensberger's artistic development since the 1950 s.

Throughout various literary and artistic periods, artists have referred to or even converted to Catholicism as a means of conjuring a certain perception of a European tradition. In doing this, they seek to create an aesthetic of romanticism and/or an idea and concept of beauty, the artist, artwork etc. After giving a brief overview of this discursive practice in modern avant-garde movements, this article focuses on early forms of literary Catholic movements, such as the French Renouveau catholique and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) , as well as Novalis’ ‘invention’ of German romanticism in his essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (Christianity or Europe) . It shows that there are a variety of parallels to be identified across these periods and places, namely, in programs, performances, rhetoric-building and group-building processes, and in cultivating an anti-bourgeois distinction, both in the texts themselves and in the positioning of the artists within the literary field. Despite accusations of being reactionary, writers and artists who elaborate a Catholic concept of art and literature aim to develop a traditionalist and anti-modern stance within (aesthetical and social) modernity.

Starting with a brief overview of the history and development of diary writing, this article examines how August von Platen’s juvenile diaries can be situated in the context of this tradition of genre. In doing so, it will be shown that von Platen employs a unique blend of the genres autobiography and diary in order to relate his ‘Bildungsgeschichte’ of homosexuality in an innovative and Rousseauian spirit of openness.

In the second and third parts of Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth) , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe portrays his liaison with Friederike Brion, a daughter of a pastor in the Alsatian town Sesenheim (as spelled in Goethe’s writing, actually: Sessenheim). Although the text was published 40 years after the events, and even though Goethe’s depiction is noticeably fictional, enthusiastic readers subsequently travelled to the real venues of the narrative in order to search for hidden traces of the love affair. In fact, the unclear status of truthfulness and accuracy of the narrative, as well as the distance in time, seem to have further stimulated the readers in their endeavor. This cultural tourism results in autobiographical (August Ferdinand Näke), fictional (Ludwig Tieck), and auto-fictional (Johann Christoph Freieisen) travel stories. In these texts, as this article will show, past events are not only uncovered and examined for conservatory purposes. Additionally, for one, the performative reenactment and literary adaption of Goethe’s idealistic and idyllic love story serves to preserve and uphold a certain image of the writer in these texts and to defend this image against alternative reception perspectives. For another, these appropriations of Goethe’s biographical episode articulate distinct and new concepts of individuality and identity. These texts of the so-called “Friederiken-Literatur” (‘Friederike Literature’) have significantly shaped the perception of Goethe’s text ever since.

In the preface to his Sieben Legenden ( Seven Legends ), Gottfried Keller claims that the seven novels published in this collection are a “reproduction” of a “rather profane narrative,” one that can be traced back to older collections of Christian legends, but which has also been significantly altered by Christian storytelling. This article examines the prerequisites for and the strategies underpinning this reproduction project and how Keller tries to uncover an original pretext and a novelistic storytelling tradition. Such a tradition, however, seems to consist in the construction of a modern narrative concept instead of the reconstruction of an old one.