Volume 18, Issue 1

The article explores the truth claims of Thomas Morus’ Utopia (1516) and Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619). Therefore, the question, whether these claims are historical or philosophical, shall not be answered by prescinding from the literary and fictional character of both works. In order to this interest the utopias are correlated with the upcoming efforts of both philosophy and theology of right and their grounds in a mere natural state of men.

With his poems, which comprise more than 40.000 hexametric verses and cover a wide range of secular topics, the Neapolitan Jesuit Nicolò Partenio Giannettasio (1648-1715) represents a very distinct form of neo-Latin didactic poetry: on the one hand, Giannettasio’s poems refer to the literary models of classical antiquity such as Vergil’s Georgics and contemporary Jesuit didactic poetry such as René Rapin’s Hortorum libri. Hence, the poet from Naples claims for himself to be the natural heir of his ›Neapolitan‹ poetic predecessors Vergil, Pontano and Sannazaro. On the other hand, Giannettasio’s poetry can be regarded as a very specific instrument used to spread Jesuit doctrine. The secular topics of his poems perfectly match the scientific interests of the Societas Iesu, and at the end of the sixteenth century, it is exactly this specific form of poetry that grants its success. As the addressees of his didactic poems are highly educated aristocrats, Giannettasio tries to emulate their literary taste and arranges the scientific material in a way that resembles the baroque Kunstkammer rather than a (plain) scientific treatise. Nevertheless, Giannettasio never loses sight of the principles of the Jesuit order. All in all, Giannettasio’s didactic poems provide a unique example for the combination of scientific material, classical models, and Jesuit doctrine and for spreading a local literary microculture by means of the worldwide Jesuit network.

This paper examines the role Montesquieu’s climatological theory plays in Albrecht von Haller’s political novel Usong. It shows how the author uses this widespread knowledge about history, geography and political theory to explain and discuss different forms of government. The characters of Haller’s novel refer to Montesquieu’s theories as a means to justify their opinions regarding oriental despotism. At the same time, Usong’s character’s are confronted with contrarian views based on empirical evidence. Thus, the novel establishes a scientific discourse with immanent political consequences. Because of its dialogic elements, Usong questions and undermines traditional beliefs about the climate’s crucial influence on human behavior and political organization.

Ludwig Büchner’s popular-scientific treatise »Die Macht der Vererbung « and Theodor Storm’s novella »Der Herr Etatsrath« serendipitously appeared in consecutive issues of Westermann’s illustrierte deutsche Monatshefte between June and August 1881. For Büchner, the numerous talents and conditions associated with heredity are determined by multicausal factors, ranging from direct inheritance to education and environment. In Storm’s novella, readers witness the downfall of the family Sternow, both despite and because of inherited mathematical talent, predisposition to alcoholism, and a neglectful familial environment. Storm’s »Herr Etatsrath« not only enacts through fiction the multicausal model of heredity proposed by Büchner’s »Die Macht der Vererbung «, but also calls into question the precise nature of inheritance and fate by juxtaposing the negative effects of heredity, such as alcoholism, with positive ones, such as special cognitive abilities.

Around 1900 anthropological ›knowledge‹ is in high demand. In contrary to the Platonist-Christian tradition human being is no longer defined as a duality of ›mind‹ and ›body‹ but as pure biological and physical nature. At first glance Thomas Mann’s early writings seem to adapt this monist anthropological concept. His characters seem to be determined by their hereditary predispositions and seem to be part of an unavoidable process of ›degeneration‹. Within the scope of a close narratological reading this article shows, however, that the possession of anthropological knowledge is often not claimed by the narrator but by the fictive characters themselves. The analysis of the short novels Der kleine Herr Friedemann (Little Herr Friedemann) and Der Weg zum Friedhof (The Road to the Curchyard) exemplarily shows that Thomas Mann creates - already in his early works - a firmly modern way of writing that marks contemporary claims of anthropological knowledge as depending on perspective and as normative decisions with a limited validity.

Alfred Döblin wrote his early story Astralia while he prepared his medical dissertation about the Korsakoff’s psychosis in Freiburg 1904. The short narrative about a small man, a private scholar, who sees himself as a visionary and medium, whereas other people regard him as an insane or drunk person, can be read as a pre-exercise of the popular novella Die Ermordung einer Butterblume. The story combines two virulent discourses of the turn of the century: then current research about the neurological and psychiatric consequences of alcohol abuse like memory loss (and the neurological as well as poetological question, how memory and creativity works) - and on the other hand the ideas and practice of occultism and spiritualism. These two concurring discourses find their synthesis in this sarcastic as well as empathic pre-expressionistic story.

The paper reconstructs Primo Levi’s idea of poetry and the significance of poetry for his life and literary experience through a systematic analysis of Levi’s statements on poetry and poetical writing (sourced from interviews, public interventions and literary and theoretical texts such as the foreword to Ad ora incerta, Dello scrivere oscuro, La ricerca delle radici, Poesia e computer) as well as of the international (Italian, French and Anglo-American) debate on his work. Whilst developing a comparison of Levi’s idea of poetry with that of Italian neo-idealism (Croce) and pre-romantic thinkers (Herder, Hamann), the paper focuses on Levi’s assertions about the precedence of poetry over prose, the coexistence of rational and irrational, the ideas of clarity and communication, memory and history, and the relationship between poetry and crisis. Furthermore, it develops a critical approach to spiritualistic and psychoanalytical interpretations (De Marco, Tesio, and Mattioda). Levi’s definition of the moment of poetry as an »uncertain hour« (Coleridge) is finally explained as both the hour released from the predeterminations of logical thought and the hour of crisis.

Kurt Flash is a renowned historian of medieval philosophy with a profound knowledge of poetry. In 2011, he presented an ambitious, new prose translation of Dante’s Commedia into modern German, which he concluded with a voluminous and, at the same time, provocative »invitation to read Dante «. Though in a somewhat simplified manner, Flasch understands his own interpretation of the Commedia as taking part in the tradition of Erich Auerbach’s famous »Dante as poet of the secular world«. Dante’s epic of the afterlife is read, contrary to the current understanding of themMiddle ages, as product of a culture in the process of secularization: Flasch sees the Commedia as philosophical poetry aiming at the implementation of political ethics. Flasch views Dante as promoting the self-empowerment of man - the major point of reference is an Aristotelian philosophy that skips over the Christian scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas for the sake of thinkers like Averroes, who disconnect philosophical knowledge and religious transcendence. As critic of Dante, Flasch stands in contrast to current trends in Dante scholarship, which - for good reason - focus more on the complex interplay of theological truth and fiction than on a political message.

In the years immediately following the Second World War, three books written by German professors of Romance Philology were published in Switzerland: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach in 1946, European literature and the Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948, and Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich in 1949. Even if the subjects of these studies and the approaches of their authors are different, their aim is nevertheless the same: They want to contribute to the idea of continuity in European literature. It is certainly logical to conclude that Auerbach, banished from Germany by the Nazi authorities because of his Jewish heritage, Curtius, surviving the years from 1933 to 1945 in »inner emigration«, and Friedrich, serving as interpreter in the German army, learned the lessons of the past and evoke the heritage of literature as an antidote to ideological blindness and fanaticism. Friedrich, whose study of Montaigne’s Les Essais forms the center of the following article, is internationally known first and foremost for his bestseller Structure of modern poetry (1957), translated into thirteen languages, but also his work Montaigne, which is the first comprehensive study of Montaigne’s personality and work in German and, even today, far from being outdated. Strangely enough, the book is actually only available in the English translation by Dawn Eng. It helps the modern reader to understand not only the complex composition of Montaigne’s essays, but also their epoch-making place in French moralistic literature.

The article reconstructs the reception of Wilhelm Emrich’s book on Faust II, which was first published in 1943 and advanced with the second edition of 1957 to a reference text in literary studies. On this basis, the main lines of Emrich’s approach are analyzed in view of possible connections with national socialist ideology. The allegations against Emrich that were brought up in Kurt Mautz’s roman à clef Der Urfreund of 1996 and then spread to the broader public as well as the academic discourse are reconsidered.