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Christa Wolf was born in 1929 in a country that shortly thereafter had to end its existence. The famous German writer then studied, lived, and wrote in another system, which in turn was dissolved after decades. Such events have a dramatic effect on the life of an individual. The paper attempts to identify some features related to writing and identity in Wolf’s novel Nachdenken über Christa T (Reflections on Christa T.). In her texts, the author writes about her characters who encounter existential contradictions: on the one hand, there is a totalitarian system in which human beings have to survive; on the other hand, there is Wolf’s protagonist who tries to locate his or her individuality and thus create an ethic of his/her life. Christa Wolf’s analysis of identity is focused on the attempt to be authentic in a milieu that gives her few opportunities for development. Wolf’s writing describes our world. The texts written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s are still full of relevance today. By reading Christa Wolf, we discover a system full of violence, where the individual develops strategies for survival. The author suggests an existential recipe: through critical questioning and through a meticulous analysis of our own self, we are able to find a solution for ourselves and for others.
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Enttäuscht von seinem vergeblichen Bemühen durch seine Theaterstücke Einfluss auf die Gesellschaft zu nehmen, kehrte Kipphardt in seiner letzten Schaffensphase zu seiner Faszination von der Psychiatrie zurück, die ihn in seiner Jugend dazu bewogen hatte, Medizin zu studieren.1966 zeigt sich Kipphardt tief beeindruckt von Gedichten des schizophrenen Patienten Ernst Herbeck, die der österreichische Psychiater Leo Navratil in seinem Buch Schizophrenie und Sprache veröffentlicht hat. Ausgehend davon beginnt sich Kipphardt der März-Thematik zu widmen, die er in der Form des Films und auch in den drei literarischen Gattungen: Epik, Lyrik und Drama erkundet. Die erste Bearbeitung des Stoffes ist 1975 der Film Leben des schizophrenen Dichters Alexander März für das Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen (ZDF), ein Jahr später erscheint der Roman März, 1977 veröffentlicht Kipphardt weitere März-Gedichte in dem Lyrikband Angelsbrucker Notizen, die er aus der Perspektive des Schizophrenen heraus schreibt und 1980 wird das Schauspiel März, ein Künstlerleben uraufgeführt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die verschiedenen, sich widersprechenden Perspektiven auf die Geisteskrankheit analysiert, die Kipphardt in seinem Roman März vorstellt. Die Perspektive des Patienten auf seine Krankheit, die Schizophrenie, wird ergänzt durch jene des Direktors der Anstalt, einem Verfechter der biologisch orientierten Psychiatrie und jener Dr. Koflers, der die Psychose als Folge einer gestörten Beziehung des Patienten zur gesellschaftlichen Umwelt betrachtet, aber auch durch die Sichtweise der Menschen außerhalb der Anstalt.
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In Marx’s „Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie”, there are, besides prevelantly economical and philosophical discourse, also certain historical, and legal problems, and especially the question of the form of production and ownership over land in the pre-capitalist era. Laying emphasis on three such forms preceding capitalist production (as!atic, classical and german), Marx studied the classical type of production and ownership over land mainly on the basis of data on the Roman empire and law. This concept of his can be summarized in several main components, namely: that the classical type of production is characterised bu the concentration of permanent residence in the city-state, which is the basis of military organization; that the members of the community are engaged both as small farmers and soldiers; that as such they enjoyed equal rights; also, that the classical type of ownership over land is characterized by the fact that ownership over land was both state ownership and private ownership. In his work, the author, analysing the sources on the Greek state and law, published after Marx’s death, concludes that Marx’s concept of the classical form of production conforms to a considerable extent to the data on the oldest known history of Greek law. However, pointing out the non- -existence of individual private ownership over land in Greek, and especially Dorian, polises and connecting Marx’s concept of the classical form of ownership over land in the „Grundrisse’’ with the one set out in the „German Ideology”, the author is of the opinion that this dualism of form of ownership over land Marx atributed — that is, thought that it should be atributed — predominantly to the so-called secondary form of the classical type. Its main form would, at least according to Greek sources, be more characterised by collective ownership of the community, in other words, family ownership over land, accompanied by the lack of individual private ownership.
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The increased momentum of feminist discourse revolving around female normativity was accompanied by a new perspective on masculinity and the ideals by which it is constructed. The thesis of the article is that this new orientation has been taken up in recent years, especially by so called quality TV series. Taking the series Babylon Berlin as an example, it is shown that televisual seriality approaches this social discourse with particular sensitivity and thereby allows the deconstruction of myths surrounding ideal masculinity. The interference between formal narrative structure and the transformation of gendered common knowledge – that is clearly pointed out in the analysis – qualifies the television series as an educational object for teaching German. Therefore, the essay ends with explicit suggestions for the use in the classroom with the purpose of negotiating social discourses through literary-aesthetic education and to enable a critical-operational reception.
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The ontological essence of the Faustian tragedy is the impossibility of being oneself without crossing out the general outline of ethics. This tragedy postulates both the being’s bidimensionality and the idea that God and Evil are two intertwined concepts, as Mephistopheles – the symbol of malignity in all its dimensions – acts as a moral trigger, in the sense that the bad consequences of his actions/words/proposals determine the salvation of Faust. Mephistopheles also obliges Faust to confront the limits of existence (physical, social, ethical). The knowledge – pleasure duality thus becomes the main feature of the Faustian character.
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The 1960 German edition of Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was the very beginning of the reception of Gombrowicz’s oeuvre in Germany. Together with the writings of Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz and Bruno Schulz, the German reception of Gombrowicz’s work largely affected how the entire Polish post-WWII literature has been discussed. Rudolf Richter (1894-1974) debuted with his translation of Ferdydurke in Germany. Richter’s further translation work has not only turned out to be prolific but also essential in creating the literary Polish Wave in Germany. The article is based on the hitherto unknown sources from the estates of Gombrowicz, Richter and the German editor Günther Neske. It presents the contexts of how the translation and publication of Ferdydurke came about.
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The article presents the issues related to the philosophy of law that can be found directly or indirectly in the novel by B. Schlinek entitled The Reader. The article is problematic in nature, and the reason for interpreting the novel from a philosophical and legal perspective was the fact that the author claims that writing is for him “the second life”. In the first place, he considers himself a lawyer, a constitutionalist. The first problem concerns the situation of the accused in court and establishing the facts and narration(s), which in itself is an interesting issue for legal scholars – it concerns getting to know the facts in the process of applying the law. The second problem concerns the settlement of crimes committed by the totalitarian regime. In turn, the third problem is related to the broad sense of the punishment, the issue of the perpetrator’s identity and changing circumstances of action – changes taking place in the social system in which the perpetrator functions, as well as his own personality. So what is responsibility?
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The works of Stefan George reflect the influence of the French Symbolism in Germany, creating a new form in German lyrics. Born on the 12th of July 1868 in the village of Büdesheim, near the town of Bingen on the Rhine, where now a memorial museum is open for the public, George was a controversial poet and translator. Since he was a teenager, he started writing mainly poems and fragments of dramas, also being preoccupied with translating. While living in France, he visited the circle of Mallarmé, attending his famous Tuesday meetings, and personally met Verlaine, declaring that Paris was a place “where one was enthusiastic about poetry”. When he returned to Germany, he started translating from the works of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, which had an important influence on his own creations. With the Blätter für die Kunst literary magazine, issued in 1892, George marked the beginning of the reaction against Naturalism, imposing new aesthetic forms in German literary language. The most important symbolist themes and motifs to be found in his poetry are: the nature, autumn, death, the use of colours (white, yellow, grey), the description of strong fragrances and also of the city, the gardens or the park.
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Thomas Mann's short stories from the beginning of the 20th century bring into discussion the problem of aestheticism, as was also emphasized by literary criticism, but also a certain perspective on a neoclassical ideal. The epic of small dimensions (the sketch, the story, the short story) characterizes the beginning of the 20th century, being focused on social observation, psychological analysis, symbolism and the fantastic. "No one remains unchanged after going through a process of self-knowledge", says Thomas Mann. Thus, in his writings he attempts a deepening, a highlighting of everything that self-knowledge means and produces.
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When talking about the author Alfred Gong, we must start from the Bukovina group, to which the author belonged. His birth in 1920 places him in the second generation of German-speaking Jewish authors from Bukovina, who were born not in the Habsburg monarchy but in the Kingdom of Great Romania. The Romanian socio-political environment brought the young Arthur Liquornik values as well as pain and suffering. On the one hand, he was taught the knowledge and depth of a folklore that he would later have wished to deepen in Romance studies at Chernivtsi University. On the other hand, Romanian politics meant recurrent persecution, which put him and his acquaintances in danger. Just as for Paul Celan, alienation, homelessness and attempts at refuge are not only literary motifs and themes for Alfred Gong, but also personal experiences. Alfred Gong experienced the exile and the feeling of horror before "tomorrow" several times and on several levels. This work attempts a twofold analysis. On the one hand, this work presents the exile experience of Alfred Gong. Second, it looks at European urban topoi to see to what extent these topoi can be seen as both cities of exile and places of transition. Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna, Lesum are the cities that compose a literary map of refuge and exile.
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This essay is an attempt to portray the Hindenburg O.S. in Upper Silesia as an autobiographical place in the works of the German writer Werner Heiduczek. The space of the town, which he discovered in his childhood and early adolescence, runs through various literary texts that gradually add to and transform the vision of this place. The life on the border of cultures and historical events was his personal experience that contributed to his perception of the hometown and the region.
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Post-anthropocentric tools are needed to think about relations between humans and more-than-human others. In order to meet the challenges of the interspecific entanglements and interdependencies of a postmodern world, alternative models of collectivity must be designed from scratch with heterogeneous actors in mind. In Saša Stanišićʾs narrative Fallensteller [Trapper] and Olga Tokarczukʾs novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, human and more-than-human protagonists engage in extraordinary relationships with each other. These are analyzed here based on Gesa Ziemer’s theoretical work on complicities as ‘multispecies complicities’. This new perspective on more-than-human collaborations aims to go beyond literary studies to explore multispecies collectives.
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Building upon previous research on Tudor Vianu’s aesthetics, the current article delves into the issue of art and the artist, a central theme in the aesthetic systems of the early 20th century (as exemplified by the Romanian critic T. Vianu) as well as in the literature of that epoch. The applied analysis concentrates on Thomas Mann, for whose work these issues were of major concern. The dialogue is explicit: the German author was of great interest for the Romanian theorist (Vianu was awarded his doctorate in Tübingen in 1923) and so we consider worth examining the shared standpoints regarding art in their approaches and the European concern of the time for the artist. The Künstler(figur) is discussed here based on Vianu’s aesthetics, but with an applied focus on Thomas Mann’s ambivalent artist protagonists (Tonio Kröger, Gustav Aschenbach, Adrian Leverkühn etc.), their identity and symbolism.
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Based on the documents of the Hamburg Denkmalschutzamt (Monument Protection Office), the article retraces the political process between 1956 and 1982, which led to the erection of a Heinrich-Heine-Statue on the Rathausmarkt (Town Hall Market).
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This paper seeks to highlight the ways in which the visual image of the cover prepares the imminent reader for their encounter with the work.
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This paper will discuss Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, published in 1983, through the analysis of which we will single out some of the main features of postmodernist art, referring to the texts of the most authoritative literary theorists, including Frederic Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Ihab Hasan and others. We will pay attention to Bernhard’s attitude towards art and the place it occupies in the culture of late capitalism, as well as his view of the political scene in Austria of that period. In terms of form, we will focus on linguistic means specific only to Bernhard, but also on fragmentation and a special model of the narrator that are characteristic of the entire postmodern literature.
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When historical events are re-evaluated from the point of view of the current period, it can make the individual think of different possible causes and consequences. With such an approach, the history is constructed with its alternatives. Thus, the uchronia/alternate history, which is essentially a subgenre of the science fiction in literature, emerges. Ucronia, in the most general sense, suggests a possible history by presenting different perspectives on events that took place in world history. Stefan Köhler's novel Deutschlands Rückkehr, published in 2021, reconstructs the Second World War as Uchronia, drags Adolf Hitler on a different adventure. In this study, first of all, general informations about the uchronia will be given, then Köhler's novel will be examined as an example of this genre. Thus, the traces of the transformed history in the novel will be revealed. It is aimed to contribute to field studies by examining with a text-based method the coming together of fiction and history and the literarization of history.
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The paper aims to capture one of the multiple hypostases of Romania as a kingdom, under the political, cultural and diplomatic guide of the members of the Romanian dynasty. The most noble of these hypostases remains that of an European cultural crucible, a soul project of the first queen of Romania, Elisabeta, who wanted to increase the influence of her country of adoption by transforming it into an European cultural epicenter. The effort, the imagination, the talent, but especially the chosen way in which Queen Elisabeta decided to represent Romania and support it, has a material form also: the Jugendstil box, where almost 200 Austrian poets have encapsulated their respect and their admiration for the Royal Family and Romania, leaving a political and cultural seal on Romania's position on the map of Europe. In this box there is also the tribute of the writer Rainer Maria Rilke.The purpose of this work is to draw the borders of this cultural dialogue between Queen Elisabeta and the writer Rainer Maria Rilke and to show the communicational product of the two cultures, Romanian and Austrian. What are the fundamental creative matrices that have been exchanged? What perspectives and visions, themes, literary reasons, beliefs and literary instruments have been discussed and enriched? But, even more important, how are depicted these souvenirs of friendship in the personal work of the two writers?As a research methodology, it will be opted for the diachronic course of the cultural dialogue between the two writers, comprising the manuscripts sent as a tribute by Rainer Maria Rilke to Queen Elisabeta through the Jugendstil box, the possible mentions in correspondence or memoirs and not least, the work will opt for a comparative analysis of a selection of poems pertaining to the two writers. Based on some matrical elements, which are the basis of the creation belief of the two writers, the selection of works will be analyzed comparatively, emphasizing both the similarities and the differences between the stylistic tools and visions, and, more importantly, the way in which the cultural dialogue between the two writers contributed to the modeling of their individual poetic art and cultural perspectives.
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The most recent research in the theory of authorship has been used to put forward an original idea about the collective creativity of the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). It is stated that according to Bertolt Brecht scholars, there still does not exist a definition for the “collective creative work process” (Nadia Dimassi). At the same time, Brecht never concealed his creative principle, highlighting in his theoretical texts how important collective creative collaboration was for his work. Moreover, this specific principle is particularly important for understanding the creative phenomenon of the talented German artist. It is established that the concept of collective artistic creation manifests modernist qualities in his creativity, namely lyrics. Brecht believed that one isolated artist’s depiction of the modern world in its extraordinary complexity was insufficient and dubious. It has been established that Brecht’s concept of collective creation developed in several directions: throughout his life, his creative work involved friends and peers whose knowledge and skills he particularly valued, including his numerous beloved women. The artist was, thus, convinced that art was a collective affair. In addition, it is known that Brecht did not consider creative texts as being complete. For him, they were temporary versions in a constant state of creation. A particular moment of development came with their staging. Brecht had a particular attitude towards existing literary material – he believed he was a craftsman as far as texts were considered, so he developed his own “poetics of plagiarism”. A comparison with “Wagner’s total work of art” revealed intermedial aspects of artistic products created by Bertolt Brecht. The artistic specificity of the “Brecht machine” has been summarized, and the principles of its operation have been identified.
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