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In society and in literature, age is often associated with positive (wisdom, life experience) or negative aspects (stubbornness, impatience). The article examines the extent to which the biological age influences social relationships, experiences and/or behavior, and the reactions of the archetypal German prankster and his interaction partners.
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The article starts by drawing attention to the historical, western discourse of the eighteenth century, addresses the topic of a newly founded reflection on age groups, provides information on genetic aspects, on new evaluations of Goethe’s early, aesthetic, reflection on age-groups, focuses on his two historical dramas ''Götz von Berlichingen'' and ''Egmont'', shows how the reflection on age groups is launched and is primarily generated by the interaction of literary figures that belong to different age groups: Götz – Georg, Götz – Karl, Egmont – Richard, Clara – Clara’s mother, Ferdinand – Ferdinand’s father, Ferdinand – Egmont. This interaction produces self-representations and interpretations of the counterpart that emerge in dependence on or in difference from certain age-group characteristics.
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The present article looks at how the contemporary discourses concerning cultural and natural heritage are literarily reworked in Judith Schalansky’s book ''An Inventory of Losses'' (Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, 2018). Schalansky’s hybrid book which consists of twelve micronarratives around natural and art objects that have been destroyed or lost over the course of time partakes in the cultural discourse on preservation, memory and intergenerational dialogue, contributing its own views on the practices of valuation of old artefacts and knowledge. The present paper focuses on the common aspects – first of all the intertwining of nature and culture – and the key differences – such as the critique on the essentialist concept of sustainability – between Schalansky’s book and the preservation discourse as it is articulated in collective texts such as the World Heritage Convention.
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''Warten bis der Frieden kommt'' is the second part of an autobiographical trilogy in which the author Judith Kerr presents both her own experiences and the historical context of the 1930s and 1940s of the past century in a literary manner. The main character Anna has to flee from Germany together with her family in the year 1933. They first arrive in Switzerland, then in France and finally in England. While in the first book we encounter a very young and partly naive nine-year-old protagonist who tries to understand and interpret the world surrounding her, in the second part we are being presented with Anna as a teenager who spent the last seven years of her life as a refugee in foreign countries. As a consequence we can observe a change of perspective from the point of view of individual and collective memory. In the following article aims to analyze to what extent the age of the main character influences the literary discourse in regard of the historical narrative.
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This article focuses on the question of “who is speaking?” in Elfriede Jelinek’s texts regarding the level of the narrator, the we-form and the “Sprachflächen”-figures. The so-called characters in her novels and plays are difficult to catch, they are less psychological figures than mere declarations of speakers. One central reference in this context is the chorus’ speech in Greek tragedy which is often an important source for her writing. In Greek tragedy the chorus had both a spatial and a metaphorical function, mediating between the protagonist and the audience. It symbolized the constant conflict between individual and community. Taking the example of Jelinek’s play ''SCHNEE WEISS'' (2018) with reference to Euripides ''The Bacchae'' this article seeks to show how Jelinek’s use of the chorus and the we pronoun deny the speaker’s location and demonstrate the non-originality of speech.
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For about twenty years Herta Müller has established a procedure in her work that is predominantly visually organized. However, she herself describes this process, which is preceded by the cutting of countless words and sentences from print media, as writing. Müller later combines these fragments in various fonts, sizes and colours, initially gathered together randomly, into new texts, guided by intuitive and visual impulses. She supplements each of these texts with a pictorial element, likewise cut out with scissors or arranged from various elements. In Müllers recently published volume ''Im Heimweh ist ein blauer Saal'' (2019), visuality acquires a new quality even for Müller’s collages: It transcends the composition and the external appearance of the collages and involves the speaking instance of numerous collages in reflections on image and idea, on sense and intellect. The relevance of the visual for the narrative is based on the idea of linking not only two media, but also two modes of cognition: that of the senses and that of the intellect. In recourse to Baumgarten’s reflections on a sensual wholeness of aesthetic experience (1750), this contribution is devoted to the aesthetic linking of narrative visualization strategies in the collages.
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The combination of science and faith is a comprehensive view of both subjective and objective reality. Through the choices that the human being makes, he not only gives the measure of his freedom but can also build his self-destruction. In the modern world, where the material occupies an increasingly important place, this self-destruction can take various forms. Through the bad decisions that people make, they can weaken the self and fall into the abyss of depression. Faith offers a counterweight to this self-destructive capacity because understanding the belonging to a more comprehensive whole, creates a much stronger individual and responsible for his own decisions. If we understand that our decisions do not only concern us, but also bring the destiny of others into the equation, the human being becomes a responsible one.
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Rewriting myths enables authors to connect new, contemporary significations to existing mythical frameworks. Washington Irving built one of the first American myths in narrative form, Rip van Winkle, on an older German folktale, which turns out to be just one of the many iterations of the myth of the Sleeper. By constellating the myth of the birth of their national identity to a mythical system, Irving legitimizes the transition from the colonial era to the post-revolutionary one as a natural stage in history, the result of historical confluences being a new, improved consciousness, the American. Through subtle dynamic characterization, Rip, the national (anti-)hero, becomes the protype for Self-Reliance, decades before it was theorized by Emerson, as well as that of American Exceptionalism, while also subverting hegemonic interpretations of the American Dream.
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The religious substratum plays a primary role in Victor Papilian's work. Present from the beginning and up to the end in his writings, the religious of mystical-Christian origin has multiple valences, being each and every time renewed and endowed with unusual means of approach: from the archaic miraculous, specific to local traditions, to the appeal to numerous biblical sources and Christian practices. All around the religious sphere is usually a mysterious, symbolic cover, which implies the gradually revelation through the (re)discovery of an ancient substratum, rooted in Romanian folk tradition and practice.
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The German Jesuit Jacob Masen published a treatise in 1650, “The Mirror of Images of Secret Truth” (Speculum imaginum veritatis occultae), to which he appended a collection of panegyric poems with the common title Jubilee Year of Symbols (Jubilaeus symbolicus). The poet dedicated 50 works to the Apostolic Nuncio Fabius Chigi, later Pope Alexander VII. The paper presents this particular collection of poems, which bear witness to the ancient custom of honouring ecclesiastical dignitaries in poetry to commemorate them. The paper discusses the circumstances in which the poems were written and the method used by the author to highlight the personal qualities and achievements of the nuncio, taking into account the formal and content means used by the writer.
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A growing number of social initiatives is feeding off the ideas of emancipatory and critical pedagogies and is looking for tools to obtain and include the sometimes essentialized voice of the child. But the still dominant definitions of autobiography, referring to the concepts of non-fiction literature and personal documentary literature, place great emphasis on forms that, due to the necessity of using more or less advanced literacy, exclude children or make their autobiographical attempts doomed to the charge of infantilism. Autobiography understood as a technique of the self, according to the dominant narratives, requires genre and narrative, writing proficiency and the ability to rationalize one’s memories. And as such, it is one of the many politics of writing, sanctioned through specific genres and power relations. In the introductory article to the issue, we draw on the framing of critical childhood studies formulated by Spyros Spyrou. We reflect on the various politics of presenting the autobiographical voice of the child and ask and conditions for reaching the child’s experience. We also outline the basic methodological assumptions for interpreting children’s autobiographies and show their social, political and historical conditions.
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In this article, I present the correspondence Emil Zegadłowicz (1888–1941) carried out between 1937 and 1939 with the so-called “Trzydziestka” [Thirty], i.e. a group of Jewish female students of Zofia Rozenfeld’s gymnasium in Warsaw who collaborated with the “Small Review”. In order to reconstruct the history of this contact, I use letters found in the archives, previously unpublished, of both the writer’s teenage correspondents and their tutor Felicja Wermusówna. The surviving letters of “Trzydziestka” are dominated by environmental motifs, but there is also no lack of reflections of a general human nature, often encountered motifs are a longing for the order of biology, nature contrasted with urbanism, pessimism flowing from observation of the immediate environment of the inhabitants of the Jewish neighborhoods of Warsaw, and a feeling of horror, generated by growing fascism and increasingly common manifestations of anti-Semitism, concern for the fate of the Jewish people, a protest against people’s indifference, the loss of the ideals of brotherhood and the glorification of Truth and Friendship.
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One of the seemingly ineradicable false claims surrounding the writing of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is the assertion that the Wallachian prince Vlad III the Impaler, also known as “Drăculea”, is the historical model for the vampire count. In fact, Stoker knew close to nothing about the man or his actions. The only work that provided him details about the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, that of William Wilkinson, inextricably mixes father and son, Vlad II “Dracul” and Vlad III “Drăculea”, thus forming one invented person out of the two rulers of Wallachia. The nickname for the son, based on that of the father, becomes, in the eyes of Wilkinson, a sort of honorary title. The few details that Stoker was able to obtain about that very “Dracula” were nothing more than a collection of very general information about this invented person. This little information became the basis for the historical background of the character of Count Dracula, which Stoker then developed from many sources. In the end, only one single element of Wallachian history was included in the novel, but it had to be central: the name “Dracula” itself.
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The novel ''Drei Kameraden'' (Three Comrades) by Erich Maria Remarque could be considered as the third and last volume of a trilogy which also includes ''Im Westen nichts Neues'' (All Quiet on the Western Front) and ''Der Weg zurück'' (The Road Back). However, because of the political changes in Germany in the 1930s, the book was published much later than originally planned and for this reason neither readers, nor literary critics acknowledged the book as part of the trilogy at that point in time. Nevertheless, in all three novels the author discusses the problem of the so-called Lost Generation and depicts the collective psychological state of young men, who inherited values that were no longer relevant in a post war world. Erich Maria Remarque depicts the reality of The Weimar Republic revealing the financial and social crisis that dominated everyday life. He raises questions about surviving in a post war era, and it is therefore that ''Drei Kameraden'' can be interpreted as a literary chronicle of those troubled times in German history.
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The aim of this paper is to examine sensory spaces and how social unrest can be caused and strengthened through odours, sounds, and looks. The city of Berlin and the bodies of the characters Wolfgang Pagel, Petra Ledig, and Joachim von Prackwitz-Neulohe during the Weimar Republic, described in the novel ''Wolf unter Wölfen'' (1937) by Hans Fallada, are examples of sensory spaces. The analysis focuses on how life and behaviour of these three characters are influenced by different sensorial perceptions and how their physical and emotional relationships with themselves and their relationships with the other characters and with the city develop through their sensory relationship to the world. Ultimately, the paper aims at showing that the Weimar Republic could be considered as an intervening period in which unpleasant smells, noises and looks arise and accumulate. This contributes to a greater understanding of the social and political unrest during the Weimar Republic.
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Antisemitism was a widespread phenomenon in the society of the Weimar Republic. This had an impact on literary texts. Based on the analysis of specific aspects of Fritz Namenhauersʼs historical fiction novel ''Untergang'', this paper will show how antisemitism is effective in literary texts. The paper offers at first a short overview of how antijudaistic and antisemitic elements are presented in historical fiction about the First Roman-Jewish War. The analysis then focuses on the role of the Essenes and early Christianity as well as on the literary representation of the end of the war. It concludes with an evaluation of how antisemitism operates in the text.
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The article focuses on the critical depiction of Aestheticism in the 1922 version of Bertolt Brecht’s play ''Baal''. While many scholars argue that Brecht’s 1919 version is to be preferred due to its socio-critical and more ambivalent design, I put forward the hypothesis that the 1922 revision stands out by dismissing a decadent form of Aestheticism as well as the prototypical artist that goes along with it. After a brief introduction concerning the production history of the play, I will define the notions of Aestheticism and decadent Aestheticism to provide a foundation for the following in-depth analysis of the text. The analysis will be concluded by a comparison to the 1919 version of the play. My aim is to point out the important role that the 1922 variant of ''Baal'' played for the artistic development of the young Brecht and to thus highlight the significance of this rather neglected version both for Brecht’s oeuvre and for the ambivalent – and often competing – artistic trends of the Weimar Republic.
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The social changes that took place throughout the Weimar Republic Era affected gender roles in their depth – not only the image of the New Woman arose, but at the same time the traditional image of the heroic soldier was questioned. New images of a more sensual masculinity coexisted with the old ones. Dramatic texts and theatre in particular were and are predestined spaces to try out new forms of gender roles and characters. For instance, Ernst Toller’s ''Hinkemann'' is one of the first plays to address the effects of disability caused by war on ideas of masculinity as well as individual fates. Alongside this tragic illustration of the effects of missing representation and failing identification with the hegemonic idea of masculinity Toller wrote a comedy on the same hegemonic masculinity of the war hero in the same year. In ''Der entfesselte Wotan'' an unsuccessful hairdresser manages to gain power through founding an emigration society and staging himself as the messianic leader of this company. The analysis of the two dramatic texts points out that fictional texts are an important mirror of social change and especially the theatre is the place where new concepts of gender are staged and discussed.
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The article aims to explore the way in which the aesthetical programme of the German Expressionism proves to be valid both in literature and in the visual arts. Thus, it focuses on two artists – Franz Marc and Gottfried Benn – that have never been compared with one another in an intermedial approach so far. One of the most important themes the Expressionism deals with is the self. By choosing representations of animals and nature as alternatives and symbols of a transfigured, better self in the works of Marc and Benn, the paper explores the interconnectedness between literature and arts in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century along with its aesthetic motivations and strategies.
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Literature is about fictions, yet simultaneously entwines historic events as the reformer Martin Luther is made a character of Feridun Zaimoglu’s latest novel ''Evangelio'' (2017).“If you stay true to your word, I shall stay with my affliction”: Opposed to the raw and ferocious first-person-narrator Burkhard, a catholic farmhand, Martin Luther stays at the Wartburg from the 4th of May 1521 to the 1st of March 1522, as he translates the New Testament into German. The present paper is concerned with Luther’s portrait as a historic figure in Zaimoglu’s novel. Based on guiding questions regarding the explorations of space and time, the suspenseful narrative perspective is analyzed, which, in addition to the narrator Burkhard, reaches a new dimension through a montage of Luther’s letters to Philipp Melanchthon and Georg Spalatin. Examinations of Luther’s characterization are placed in the foreground of this paper and are further illustrated through the functions and effects of focusing and antithesis as narrative strategies.
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