AGLAJA VETERANYI AND THE MYTH OF ALL POSSIBILITIES

Author(s): Marius Mihet / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

Aglaja Veteranyi's short novel, Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, shows the boundaries of a solitude assaulted from all directions. Only within the mirror-games of an improvised stage reality did she find the outlet to transfer her anguishes. An infantile narrator gets different distancing from the limits of the language and the limits of freedom. Aglaja Veteranyi lends the narrator her own mirrors. Unable to export feelings, she is aware that they return as fears and sufferings: ”I don’t scream. I’ve thrown my mouth away”. Her destiny is, from this regard, under the sign of simulacrum. The circus is in itself a simulacrum of the world. It cannot change anything consistently in the people belonging to it. The mask of happiness becomes compulsory for the narrating self. Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta is a collection of impossibilities. Reading the story of Veteranyi one has the feeling of being captive into an orphanage that has replaced the world. The result is a tension that excludes any idea of a paradise.

Alman Yazar Heinrich Böll’ün Kisa Hikayelerinde Ii. Dünya Savaşi’nin İzleri

Author(s): Fesun Kosmak / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 66/2011

German author Heinrich Böll narrates the Second World War in his short stories and expresses the problems which people have to face after the war. As he experienced the war, Böll deeply understands how lives changed after the war. Böll, writes about people in desperate situation. The war changed lives of people from each social class negatively. However, Böll underlines the fact that it were children and elderly who were affected severely by the war. The aim of this paper is to display how the traces of war are reflected in Heinrich Böll’s “Die Botschaft” and “Mein teures Bein”.

Autobusem i tramwajem w przeszłość. Berlińskie zaszłości w twórczości Annett Gröschner

Author(s): Ewa Pytel-Bartnik / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 24/2015

This paper concentrates on the strategies of reconstructing the past as inscribed into the urban space of Berlin and discussed within the literary field. Developed by the German writer Annett Gröschner, they have been used to reexamine the history of the city – only dimly reflected in the present urban landscape. Her perspective emphasizes the distinctive spatial and architectural organization of the city, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In order to harness her dialec-tical composition of the spacing-of-the-past, Gröschner uses the map of various routes on the Berlin public transport network, some inner-city artefacts set along those lines, and also the city map with its constant modifications to create appropriate landmarks through which she [re]constructs Berlin's past-present.

Barbara Honigmanns literarische Topographie in Chronik meiner Straße (2015)

Author(s): Malgorzata Dubrowska / Language(s): German / Issue: 5/2016

The article presents the strategies of literary topographies, that the writer has included in her new work. The author of the article concentrated her efforts on grasping the performed act to sketch the topography in the text, and completed the analysis based on J. Hillis Miller, Michel Foucault and Marc Augé concept of a space.

Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie Suhrkampa. Zbigniew Herbert i jego niemiecki wydawca

Author(s): Pawel Zajas / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 5/2015

This article offers an insight into Zbigniew Herbert’s correspondence with Siegfried Unseld, the director of the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, as well as other important figures in the publishing field, such as translators, editors and, crucially, representatives of organizations dealing with foreign cultural politics. Zajas discusses material held at the Siegfried Unseld Archiv (SUA), which was purchased by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar in 2009. These materials, Zajas argues, shed light on the production of Herbert’s works in German translation, which would often become a point of reference for Polish editions, thus anticipating the composition of the ‘original’ collections. What is more, Herbert’s correspondence paints a fascinating portrait of the long friendship between the poet and the publisher – a friendship that also functions as an important interactive element in the literary field.

Begehren und Erzählen in Peter Stamms Roman Agnes

Author(s): Monika Szczepaniak / Language(s): German / Issue: 5/2016

The aim of the article is twofold. Firstly, to analyse the main character of the novel Agnes (1998) by Peter Stamm as well as his narration within the novel—a story about a woman and a love, accompanied by reflections on the process of storytelling itself and of possibilities as well as limits of contemporary love stories. Secondly, to answer questions of the significance of the man’s story for the narrator itself, for the woman, for their relationship, for the image of their love in the world of the narration as well as for the interpretation of Stamm’s novel.

Canis lupus i tajemnice ludzkiej duszy. O literackim obrazie wilka na przykładzie wybranych dzieł niemiecko‑ i anglojęzycznych

Author(s): Aneta Jurzysta / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2016

The article is devoted to the literary representation of the wolf, and the texts analysed include Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” and Mark Rowlands’ “The Philosopher and the Wolf”. In both texts the wolf becomes the mirror in which the man’s inner life is reflected, and the authors search for the answers to existential questions in the wolfish nature. “And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one.” Those words of Hermann Hesse refer to the complicated, split personality of the main protagonist and the complex nature of every man. Harry is partly a man, who desires social respect and the comforts of the middle‑class life, and shares human ideas and interests, and partly a wild beast, who mocks these vain and absurd desires, and remains untamed and impulsive. Mark Rowlands’ wolf is not only part of the author’s inner self, but a wild animal, with which the American philosopher spent 11 years of his life. The wolf companion changes completely the man’s way of thinking, becoming an inspiration for philosophical considerations over the nature of love, death, happiness and humanity, the purposefulness of human actions, the sources of despair and hope, the nature of the fear of death. The wolf ’s company makes it possible for Rowlands to find his human nature, makes him eventually become a different person: of partly human and partly wolfish nature. In both cases the wolf (being either part of a man’s personality or a real wild companion) determines the protagonists’ lives and helps them understand themselves.

Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im neuen Jahrhundert 2001-2011

Author(s): Malgorzata Dubrowska / Language(s): German / Issue: 05/2015

CONSTANCY AND CHANGE İN CĂTĂLİN DORİAN FLORESCU’S NOVELS

Author(s): Florin Cioban / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2015

Cătălin Dorian Florescu admits that he feels split between his Romanian and Swiss identities, trapped between the West and the East. The autobiographical elements he includes in his novels project this feeling on his characters, who are looking for a sense of belonging, and are trying to understand their true identities by going back to their homeland.

Czytając Elegie Rainera Marii Rilkego

Author(s): Barbara Surowska / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 19/2012

The article discusses the book Rycerz i śmierć written by Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany. The book includes essays on Reiner Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies published earlier that have been revised and updated. The poem cycle called the Duino Elegies is composed of ten separate poems written in 1912, 1913, 1915 and 1922, i.e. at the peak period of the poet’s imagination and mental activity. The reviewer provides a detailed analysis the first four chapters of the book in which three elegies written before the outbreak of the first war, and the fourth that originated when the war was raging on, are presented. The reviewer appreciates the author’s careful preparation for the book and the ambitious agenda of the author to describe in a synthetic form, for the first time in Poland, the whole cycle of Rilke’s elegies with their Polish translations along with their quality evaluation and comparison taken into consideration, as well as some presentations of German interpretations from prominent specialists in the life and the literary output of Rilke. However, the reviewer is not ready to buy all of the author’s claims and points at numerous, perhaps too numerous, errors, distortions in facts and erroneous reading of the original texts written in German, which, to a high degree, lowers the perceived quality of the discussed book.

Debata o połączeniu trzech niemieckich PEN-Clubów 1989–1998

Author(s): Monika Wolting / Language(s): Polish / Issue: IX/2013

Der ›Große Krieg‹ in den Köpfen

Traumata, Heimkehr, ›Heilung‹ und Familie bei Christoph Poschenrieder, Bettina Balàka und Elena Messner

Author(s): Neva Šlibar / Language(s): German / Issue: 1/2016

Der Gegenwartsbezug der jüngst erschienenen Romane zum Ersten Weltkrieg – untersucht werden "Der Spiegelkasten" von Christoph Poschenrieder, "Eisflüstern" von Bettina Balàka und "Das lange Echo" von Elena Messner – lässt Rückschlüsse auf die Herausforderungen zu, denen sich die jüngere AutorInnengeneration stellen möchte. Ein zentraler Aspekt ist dabei die Überwindung und Darstellung von Traumata, verbunden mit dem Dilemma, den Krieg im Kopf entweder zu tilgen oder in all seinen Gräueln und Folgen entstehen zu lassen. Den Krieg schreiben heißt für die nicht involvierten Generationen immer auch den Krieg imaginieren – in der ganzen Ambivalenz von Gedenken, Schaudern und Sich-Aussetzen.

Die Folgen der Julirevolution – Französische Zustände vor 1848 in Heinrich Heines Beurteilung

Author(s): Agnieszka Reszka / Language(s): German / Issue: IX/2013

Heinrich Heine arrived in France in 1831 full of hope for great political and social changes. However, his expectations connected with the July Revolution of 1830 were exaggerated. The new monarch (Louis Philippe) as well as the actions of bourgeois politicians disappointed him. The article below will try to show Heine’s attitude and assessment of the social and political situation in France of the 1830s and 1840s, before the February Revolution. The picture was based on Heine’s works, especially journalistic texts.

Die Funktion des Gespenstermotivs Bei Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué und Heinrich von Kleist

Author(s): Ivana S. Marinkov / Language(s): German / Issue: 6/2016

The period around 1800 represents a very interesting chapter in the several-centuries-long history of the literary representation of the ghost motif, as it marks the emergence of fantasy literature, which entailed the enrichment of the classical ghost story by the addition of the element of the uncanny, which, in turn led to the flourishing of the ghost story genre as part of the dark romanticism movement. This paper focuses on the analysis and comparison of the function of the ghost motif in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's stories The Evil Ghost of the Forest (Der böse Geist im Walde, 1812) and The Collier's Family (Die Köhlerfamilie, 1814) and Heinrich von Kleist's The Beggarwoman of Locarno (Das Bettelweib von Locarno, 1810). This comparative approach aims to determine the similarities and distinctions in the literary depiction of the ghost motif in the selected works of the two distinguished authors of ghost stories, that give an insight into the many possible ways in which the ghost motif can contribute to the central idea and message of literary works in the fantasy literature around 1800.

Die Natur in den „Psalmen“ von SAID im religiösen Kontext

Author(s): Anna Dabrowska / Language(s): German / Issue: 05/2015

The “Psalms” of SAID refer to the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, and at the same time they exceed far beyond the scope of three great monotheistic religions. The thesis of this article is as follows: the vision of nature presented by SAID is contrary to anthropocentric perspective that is dominant in three great monotheistic religions (in the framework of the relation between man and another elements of creation). The relation between God, man and other elements of creation cannot always be reconciled with the principles of these religions. The lyrical subject hopes, that the man becomes more integral part of the world and doesn’t have the privileged status among the other elements of creation. Not only does the lyrical subject distance itself from the anthropocentric and theocentric perspective, but also it creates its own, poetically supra-denominational image of God created from the spirit of nature.

Die schlaue Katze und andere erlebte Episoden

Author(s): Wieslaw Stawinski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 2/2015

Review of: Wiesław Stawiński - Die schlaue Katze und andere erlebte Episoden Erwin Zabel Spica Verlag 2014 127 ss. ISBN 978-3943168-63-1

Die Seele Ist Unter Allen Giften Das Stärckste: Karl-Heinz Otts Roman “Endlich Stille“

Author(s): Kenan Öncü / Language(s): German / Issue: 67/2011

Novalis who is the most important author of German Romance said that the soul is the most effective among poisons. The soul is not poisonous from the beginning. It is the human who makes the soul poisonous or the most poisonous. This may be connected with some reasons such as extreme perfectionism, excessive conscience, obsession, incurable or fatal physical diseases. The phonemenon which poisoned the soul of main figure of the novel named as “Endlich Stille” of contemporary German author Karl-Heinz Otto is also at a loss for word “No” which caused the death of a human consciously. Besides, he bases his action on Spinoza’s saying “whoever maintains a virtuous life instead of committing crime although he knows it to be the way to happiness is a fool” and it denotes to what extent he poisoned himself.

Društvo bez elite

Author(s): Fra Mislav Jozic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 1-2/2015

Kod naturalista, osobito onih koji su bili pod utjecajem filozofa i kritičara imenom Hippolyte Taine, vladalo je mišljenje da čovjeka i u antropološkom i u ontološkom smislu determiniraju tri odrednice: naslijeđe, sredina i trenutak. Naslijeđe označava genetski materijal koji čovjek baštini svojim podrijetlom, koji neposredno vuče od svojih roditelja i praroditelja, sredina je čovjekovo socijalno okruženje, ambijent koji ga odgaja i koji mu oblikuje prve misli, a trenutak je onaj povijesni moment u kojem se čovjek zatekao od svoga rođenja do svoje smrti. Time bi čovjek, prema naturalističkom shvaćanju, bio u potpunosti određen situacijom svoga vremena, te bi se vrlo jednostavno na temelju općih odrednica moglo predvidjeti – ne prorokovati – na koji će način čovjek reagirati ili kako će okončati svoj život.

Duke Sokağındaki Ölü Kızıl Derili

Author(s): Heinrich Böll / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 82/2015

İrlanda polisi otomobili durdurmak için, elini kaldırdı. Polis belki bir kralın ya da bir şairin torunu, bir azizin en son yeğenidir. Belki de sokakta kanunu korur görünen polisin evinde, yastığının altında duran, özgürlük savaşından kalma başka bir tabancası vardır. Onun burada yaptığı iş, aslâ annesinin ona beşiği yanında söylediği ninnilerin anlattığı şeylerden birisi olmadı: izin kâğıtlarındaki numaraların, otomobillerin numarasına uyup uymadığına, kâğıt üzerindeki solgun fotoğrafın sahibinin canlı yüzüne benzetip benzemediğine bakmak. Kanun-dışı, kaçak tabancayı, kalçasında sallayıp duran beylik tabancasından daha çok seven, kıral soyundan gelme birisi, bir şair torunu, bir azizin en son yeğeni için bu ne zırva, ne alçaltıcı bir iş!

Duvardan Gelen Sesler (Bir Radyo Oyunu)

Author(s): Heinrich Böll / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 82/2015

Böll, Heinrich 1965 “Duvardan Gelen Sesler”, (Çev.: Sedat Veyis Örnek), Türk Dili Dergisi, Mart, Cilt XIV, 469-473.