Horst Daemmrich – författare

Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind’s practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist’s work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term Elastizität in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who considered adaptability to be a primordial characteristic of life; Nietzsche, whose commentary on acrobats in Also sprach Zarathustra announces the Overman; and Freud, who used the term to describe the reactive, conservative nature of the instincts. Taking Elastizität and the modern notion of adaptability as its point of departure, this book explores Wedekind’s construction of space, movement and character in his plays, pantomimes, ballets and theoretical writings as a means of understanding both the structural consistencies and the ideological incongruities that permeate his fiction and nearly all layers of his works. This work also disengages Wedekind from traditional discussions of the dramatist as controversial social critic and reintroduces him into more productive discussions of his connection to nineteenth-century philosophical debates surrounding determinism, dualism and perception, on the one hand, and modern notions of risk, danger and precarity on the other.

During the interwar period America and Russia provided German travel writers with opposing visions of Germany’s future, as well as blank screens for the projections of their hopes and anxieties. The travel literature genre allowed authors and readers to approach Weimar Germany’s social issues from a psychologically safe distance. This is the first book to analyze the American and Russian travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt, and Rundt from a psychogeographic and imagologic perspective. It is a work of particular interest to researchers and students of travel literature, cultural studies, the construction and perception of the «other,» and literary psychology.

Fanny Lewald: Between Rebellion and Renunciation provides the first comprehensive account in English of the life and work of Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), tracing the way she positioned herself – sometimes precariously – between rebellion and renunciation. All genres are considered: novels and stories, autobiography, travel literature, essays, diaries, and letters. Widely recognized as one of the early German advocates of women’s right to education and work, this study places Lewald’s views on these issues in a broadly comparative cultural context. This book will, therefore, be of interest not only to specialists in German literature, but also to students and scholars of European cultural and social history, Jewish studies, and women’s studies.

Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos’ novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos’ epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.

Both the alliterative Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy (c. 1400) and the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400), a metrical romance, deal with the lives and feats of chivalric heroes and place special emphasis on the psychological effects of love. This book is a study of the motifs in John Clerk’s and the Laud-poet’s narratives and of their characterization of the Trojan War’s principal actors. Both writers used the same source, but their preferences for motifs and their attitudes toward the persons involved were often quite different. Thirteen illustrations, mainly from medieval Guido manuscripts, serve as a stimulus to those who want to know more about the medieval understanding of the Trojan War.

The study of self-realization as a primary literary theme covers a wide range of literature. The journey to self-discovery can be represented in many different forms, from novels of development to social criticism and to historical plays. It can provide the core of a basic literary form, such as a fairytale and the decision on crossroads of life. The self as a primary literary element can be identified as an axis of symmetry, similar to a central section of a wheel, which connects to all related themes. The description of space, setting, time, historical moment, and heritage shape all documentation of self-orientation. Thematic developments highlight specific appropriate locations for the unfolding story. By comparing works from different periods and examining manifestations of the theme in American, French, English, and German literature, this study traces the theme of self-realization in the coming-of-age constellation, the acceptance and the criticism of existing social conditions, the attempts to comprehend the past and the current historical conditions, and in utopian visions of the future.While literature has provided singular and unforgettable portraits of figures in works ranging from Bellow, Dickens, Fontane, Goethe, Moliere, Schiller, Grass, and Raabe to Tolstoy or Trollope, it is equally apparent that primary forms of self-realization show a high correlation of recurring patterns. Some features associated with primary thematic emphasis and resolution occur with high frequency. Figures can be conceived of as being capable of intellectual and spiritual growth. Alternately, in a moment of insight, they may persevere in their errors in judgment, the frailty of institutions, or a web of circumstances that impeded their optimal development. In such instances, the action is usually designed to convey a vision of human potential to the reader—and furthermore, raise serious questions about the apparent predetermination of existence.

The poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772-1801) exemplifies romantic ideals in his nostalgic yearning for spiritual fulfillment and, in doing so, invokes the language of authentic mystics. While romantics and mystics believe in the common goal of original union, the path toward wholeness has led them down separate roads, which, it may be argued, have converged only linguistically. This book, therefore, emphasizes the importance of examining metaphors in their respective traditions.