Volume 49, Issue 2

At first glance, Erich Mühsam’s Psychologie der Erbtante . Eine Tanthologie aus 25 Einzeldarstellungen als Beitrag zur Lösung der Unsterblichkeits-Frage (1905) seems to be apolitical and entertaining literature, ridiculing childless and husbandless Rich Aunts (Erbtanten). But as I show in a close-reading analysis, Mühsams uses this wildly known stereotype to target the bourgeois kinship and inheritance continuities of his time. The ongoing inheritance tax debates at the turn of the century provide the necessary socio-historical context to understand the satirical implications on which – so my overall hypothesis runs – both the comedy of the text and its socio-political explosiveness are based.

The genre of the novel of the future is usually reduced to a few canonised texts in diachronic longitudinal sections. This article, instead, attempts to explore the synchronic dynamics of the genre in the interwar period using the example of the future novels by the Austrian author Walther Eidlitz, who, after his expressionist beginnings, wrote religious-mythical texts in which a counterweight is sought against the irregularly differentiating modernity. On the eve of the Third Reich, the novels Zodiak (1930) and Das Licht der Welt (1932) outline a tableau of possibilities in which the ambivalences of modernity are named and productively integrated into a future concept of leadership based on the protagonist's search for identity, a Greek-Turkish migrant, and his negotiation processes between religion and technology as well as archaic and modern living environments. 1

The article offers an analysis of transnational contacts as they developed in the GDR through cultural exchange within the Eastern Bloc and the international cultural policies of the socialist states. First, the archives of the German Writers Union are used to show how, paradoxically, the processes of transnational cooperation that began after 1956 led to a policy of isolation of the GDR. Secondly, it is demonstrated that the cultural exchange between the GDR and the socialist partners began to recover relatively quickly from the “Kahlschlag Plenum”, which took place in the late 1960 s, and that the rapidly developing interdependencies also resulted in certain innovations in the GDR’s literary scene. Finally, it is shown how the publishing cooperation between socialist publishers, which has intensified since the mid-1970s (through joint multilateral edition projects, transfer of translated literature) may be interpreted as a direct consequence of the Helsinki Final Act (1975).

In his late work, Friedrich Dürrenmatt played with ideas of ‚whiteness‘ that were central to the Swiss self-image in the 20th century. The drama Porträt eines Planeten (1970), the novella Der Auftrag (1986), and the parable Die Virusepidemie in Südafrika (1989/94) provide examples of how Dürrenmatt dealt with such templates, problematized them literarily and made them recognisable as phantasms.

In the utopian literature of the fin-de-siècle, engineers represent recurring literary characters. This article highlights their role as voices of progress ( Fortschritt ). Focussing on Theodor Hertzka’s Freiland (1889) and Theodor Herzl’s AltNeuLand (1902), it differentiates these voices of progress according to their semantic and temporal structure, as well as their use of media, thereby illuminating differences within the concept of progress.

This article provides an analysis of two dystopian novels: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Мы ( We , 1924/25) and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (1925/26). Both novels stand out by engineers as protagonists. Their respective behaviour is driven by their use of building powers, their creative fantasy, but also by their ambition to rule within a seemingly well-ordered world. However, at the diegetic level, a fundamental ambivalence between the positive understanding of the engineer’s contribution to progress and his restricted and selfish solipsism remains unsolved.

As a modernizer of agriculture, Max Eyth was a popular propagandist of technology before and after the unification of Germany in 1871. His striving for ‚progress‘ oscillated between enlightened liberal motives and commercial interests in a globalizing world shaped by colonial ideologies and practices, between trust in technical knowledge and its insufficiency. Eyth’s narrative follows familiar patterns that guarantee his public success.

Based on various representative examples, this article shows which images of the “Ingenieur” (engineer) appear in narratives written in German, focusing on the years 1900 to 1930. While a general type of engineers appears as a representative of progress and a hallmark of the time, incorporating this conception as the norm, three further models can be identified, which are embedded within conflicting constellations of normality/deviation, daily routine/emotional emphasis, and the collective/individual: the engineer as a figure who mediates the crossing of borders, the engineer as a condensation of a life felt to be deficient, the engineer as the savior of the world.

The Deutsche Rundschau (since 1874) is representing a new model of review which celebrates technical advance as a means of the unity of national culture during the German Empire through incorporating this progress into a general history of culture. For that the so called poet-engineer plays a pivotal role as he appraises the cultural value of technology. The contributions of Max Maria von Weber to the Deutsche Rundschau can teach how an aristocrat tries to make technology acceptable as a cultural issue by proving its relevance against the background of values of the Goethezeit .

The article differentiates between two meanings and functions of wonder in the horizon of faith in progress around 1900. The topos of (modern) wonders of technology proves to be more than just a rhetorical and didactic device to generate astonishment and admiration; rather, it illustrates technical works as a crucial part in a modernized concept of the history of salvation in the sense of revealing a higher truth.