Britische und Irische Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur / British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature – serie

This study focuses on beliefs about music current in eighteenth-century Germany. Of particular interest are the conceptual metaphors through which major writers (Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Klopstock) used music as analogy and medium for perceptions of the world in their writing. The book surveys traditional metaphors (music as harmony/disharmony, music as like/unlike language, music as structured by mathematical proportion or by rhythm) inherited from Greek and French thought and looks at ways in which these writers also assimilated and developed contemporary ideas (especially from Leibniz, the French Rationalists, Rameau and Rousseau). German writers of this epoch had a remarkably rich and varied range of ideas of music at their disposal, some of which could also be realised in multi-media genres. With the help of modern theory from several fields, the study aims to show how they deployed these resources in ways both like and unlike the practice of Romantic writers with whom they overlapped at the end of the century.

Public demand for comedy has always been high in the German-speaking countries, but the number of comic dramas that have survived is relatively small. Those which are still read or regularly performed all have a serious purpose, and this collection of fourteen essays on the most distinguished of them shows how laughter can be exploited to treat personal, moral, and social problems in a way that would not be possible in tragedy. The texts range from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century, and no fewer than half of them are by Austrian writers. The contributors show how these plays are often subversive, regularly arousing an uncomfortable, self-challenging laughter, and how they treat such widely ranging subjects as language and communication, the complications of the sex drive, the inflexibility of the Prussian mind, and the behaviour of Austrian celebrities during the Third Reich. The essays are all written by specialists in the field and were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

This study examines the life and works of the poet Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750-1819). It begins with an analysis of Stolberg’s essays on poetic expression in relation to Romantic thinking, and the impact of his poetic style on Novalis’s early poetry. Stolberg’s aesthetic education in Italy is examined as well as his challenge to the idea that classical sculpture was always the pinnacle of beauty and that the culture of antiquity was the highest form of humanity. The detection of melancholy in Greek sculpture, which arises from the transfer of anxieties about redemption from the artist to the artefact, affected his response and detracted from the beauty of the sculpture. This view amounted to an attack on Goethe and Schiller, as it identified the issue of salvation and death as a weakness in the classical paradigm. The picture of Italy that Stolberg offered was overshadowed by a crisis of confidence in the aesthetic insights both of Winckelmann and of Lessing and was also the basis for his reception of Raphael and Michelangelo. Stolberg arrived at a response to Renaissance art and artists that marginally predates the early German Romantic worship of artists in the 1790s. The book concludes with a discussion of Stolberg’s support of Romantic politics and Romantic conversions.

This volume brings together a collection of essays focusing on selected aspects of inter- and multidisciplinarity in contemporary Austrian culture. These include the connections between literature and the media, literature and the visual arts, literature and travel, and the visual arts and public space. The individual contributions deal with central figures in the Austrian arts, including Thomas Bernhard, Franzobel, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Peter Turrini and Doron Rabinovici, as well as collective ventures such as Walter Grond’s Odysseus project and the museum in progress. They analyse the impact of connections between disciplines on the cultural landscape in contemporary Austria, as well as examining the limits of such interaction between disciplines.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) absorbed the fertile ideas of the German Enlightenment, observed first-hand fresh developments in German Romanticism, and fostered one of Europe’s last great Classical movements. His insights into the human condition have endured and are as valuable now as they were when he first wrote. His characterisations of human nature remain compelling and his stylistic achievements in language continue to be admired and studied. His writing spanned many genres – poetry, prose, drama, history, philosophy – and includes a rich correspondence with Goethe. In this volume, an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars examines the many sides that Schiller displays. The contributors illuminate key facets of his ideas by organising his writing around his various vocations: his medical training; work as a poet, young dramatist, and author of literary prose; his tenure as a university professor and historian; the mutually productive partnership with Goethe; his philosophical writings; and his final years as a mature playwright. His afterlife, what Schiller has meant to Germans for two centuries, is also considered.

The German Revolution of 1848-49 offered a significant literary opportunity for all those interested in politics in general and the progress of women in society in particular. This book explores the work of a number of women who took up the challenge of breaking into the decidedly male preserve of political writing in this period. The focus is on women with very different concerns: Malwida von Meysenbug, the aristocrat who supported the democratic cause, the assimilated Jew Fanny Lewald; the housewife, musician, composer and teacher Johanna Kinkel; and the radical feminist Louise Aston. The work examines the strategies these women employed to negotiate potentially explosive issues such as the politics of the day, class, religion and gender, as well as the way traditional images like the father-child relationship are exploited to express new thoughts. Using a combination of close textual reading and thematically based analysis the book illuminates the authors’ individual works and explores underlying issues that are common to all.

There is a large pool of German novelists in whose oeuvre we may look for works of landmark significance, and at certain periods of its history German fiction is particularly rich. Yet although the novel begins to assert itself in the seventeenth century, we have to wait until the late eighteenth, and Goethe’s first major prose work, Werther, to see it truly rise to the level of other genres. The thirteen novels featured in this collection have all proved milestones in the development of the form, and there is heavy prominence given to works by Goethe himself and by Thomas Mann. Through these, as well as those by such figures as Kafka, Hesse, and Günter Grass, we can trace the development of the novel to its far more ‘self-conscious’ form, ranging through the social studies of the nineteenth to works which treat a variety of intellectual, psychological and philosophical issues in the twentieth. A second volume will cover landmarks published between 1959 and the present day. These essays, all by specialists in the relevant field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the writing of Monika Maron. Her biography charts a complex relationship with the GDR state, from initial ideological identification to sustained, radical rejection. Situating its reflections on her work against the backdrop of a changing critical landscape, this analysis takes account of the re-contextualisation of her writing necessitated by the collapse of the GDR.The author charts the development of a number of seminal themes in Maron’s œuvre. The search for an authentic form of expression in her earliest texts gave way to a focus on the writing and the rewriting of history. The demise of the political system in 1989 led to an exploration in her work of more intimate themes. Maron’s post-Wende writing makes an important East German contribution to debates on memory transmission and generational forgetting. Her most recent novels are concerned with the rupture and the ultimate refashioning of biographies in a post-GDR age.Rereading her texts in a post-Wende light, the author explores the complexity of Maron’s relationship with the state from which she emerged and demonstrates how this complexity manifests itself in her writing before and after 1989. This study offers new perspectives on Maron’s work and illuminates the significance of her contribution to contemporary German literature.

This volume, which takes its title from an international conference held at the University of Cambridge in November 2006, aims to shed new light on Schnitzler’s œuvre and his period by focusing on his as yet largely unpublished literary remains, his ‘hidden manuscripts’. Among the key topics covered in this collection are: the reconstruction of the adventurous rescue of the manuscripts from Vienna in 1938 and a description of their current locations; an overview of the author’s life, in its historical context, on the basis of such private documents as his diaries and letters; the plethora of existing variants, both published and unpublished, and their usefulness for our understanding of Schnitzler’s work, from the Anatol cycle to the ‘scandalous’ Reigen – in the light of the discovery of its original manuscript – and Schnitzler’s planned (but never completed) work on the historical figure of Emperor Joseph II; Schnitzler’s difficult relationship with one of the most influential journalists of his time, Karl Kraus, and his literary friendship with a close but hitherto neglected contemporary, Gustav Schwarzkopf; the network of intertextual references ‘hidden’ in the revolutionary monologue novella Lieutenant Gustl against the background of Hermann Bahr’s modernist theory of literature; and finally, Schnitzler’s ‘hidden legacy’ in our own epoch. This book contains contributions in both English and German.

The nine essays in this volume deal with major achievements in the German novel since 1959. They range from the very well known, such as Brussig’s Helden wie wir, an extravagant treatment of life under the Stasi and the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the much more recondite, such as Hubert Fichte’s Detlevs Imitationen «Grünspan», one of the first, and most important, products of the abolition of the discrimination against gays in 1969. What is most surprising about this collection is that, in contrast to the majority of successful novels written in German before 1959, only one of these is by a clearly ‘West’ German author: Hubert Fichte. There is, by contrast, a surprising number who have their roots in the GDR (Plenzdorf, Wolf, Brussig, Schulze), or in Austria (Bachmann, Bernhard). This is also a period in which women writers emerge powerfully (Bachmann, Wolf, and Özdamar). Virtually all these novels aroused controversy in some quarters at the time of their publication, often for their treatment of semi-taboo, or at least uncomfortable, subject-matter.These essays, all by specialists in the relevant field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

This study addresses the problems raised by the ambivalent comments about or portrayals of the Jews to be found in the writings of Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Fontane and the early Thomas Mann. Why was it that these supposedly tolerant and liberal-minded men could use the language and images of antisemitism in their non-fiction and fiction? The book considers the question within the context of the unequal German-Jewish relationship in the period before, during and after Jewish emancipation. This study exposes the problematic way in which liberal-minded Germans thought about and treated the Jews in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The twelve essays in this volume deal with major achievements in German short prose published between 1810 and 1978. Most of the texts studied are Novellen, and there is a concentration on the first half of the nineteenth century, the period in which this form flourished in Germany. The works covered range from Goethe’s Novelle, a title straining for exemplary status, to Walser’s Ein fliehendes Pferd, the best example of Novelle form in the late twentieth century, as important for its social and psychological commentary as for its subtle characterisation and skilful arrangement of motifs, features in which the Novelle has tended to excel. The earliest landmark is seen as Kleist’s strange ‘chronicle’ Michael Kohlhaas, which showed German writers a completely new way of telling a story, and this is followed by essays on works which all attempted something new in the history of short fiction. Authors dealt with include Eichendorff, Heine, Büchner, Grillparzer, Droste-Hülshoff, Keller, Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, and Kafka. These essays, all by specialists in the relevant field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

This volume focuses on twelve women writers from the Middle Ages to the present day who have made a major contribution to German literature. It includes portraits of Mechthild von Magdeburg, the medieval nun who ushered in the tradition of mystical writing in German; Sophie von La Roche, whose masterly novels and other writings had a far-reaching impact on the culture of the late Enlightenment; Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, one of the greatest nineteenth-century poets; and Christa Wolf, author and prominent public intellectual who produced many key works of East German literature. The essays place the writers in the context of their period, and examine how their position as women affected what they wrote and the reception of their texts.The volume is based on a series of lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge by members of the Department of German and guest speakers. All the contributors are experts in the fields they address.

This book examines the defining trends in German politics, history and thought between the Napoleonic wars and 1848, and reflects on how they shaped the verbal and visual satire of the age.Taking issue with the idea that German satire before 1848 is too fragmented for a coherent large-scale study, the author draws widely on the spheres of literature, history and philosophy to inform his work. In particular, he focuses on the all-important notion of the world order, of what constitutes the rightful path of history and of mankind – a question with which German thought at the time was profoundly concerned. Whether clothed in the garb of orthodox theology or post-Enlightenment philosophy, various (and often conflicting) ideas as to the proper way of the world were fundamental in shaping satirical word and image in the first half of the nineteenth century.Drawing on a wide range of satirical print and polemic, the author traces these ideas through the rise and fall of Napoleon, the ideological battles of Hegelianism and Christianity, the growth of German liberalism and the evolution of Germany’s national figure, der deutsche Michel. In doing so, he throws new light on an interesting and often neglected corpus of German art and literature.The book is richly illustrated with over 100 contemporary prints, 16 of them in colour.

Louise von François (1817-1893) was a German realist writer whose work appeared in several editions during her lifetime and was translated abroad. Her most famous novel, Die letzte Reckenburgerin, attracted significant critical attention from her contemporaries and was regarded as one of the most innovative novels of the century. Her other prose fiction, however, is less well known. In the context of the ongoing re-assessment of nineteenth-century women writers, this book evaluates the thematic preoccupations and narrative technique of François’s creative work as a whole. Through a study of ten representative texts, most of which have not been subject to detailed literary analysis in the past, the author considers François’s powerful portrayals of female self-reliance, and seeks to elucidate aspects of her most cherished convictions, which centred on values of honour and duty, and on a vision of a more equitable and decent society.

The contributions to this volume explore eleven key developments in the external history of the German language, that is, the combination of social, political and cultural circumstances which influenced the language and its speakers. Some of these ‘landmarks’ are individuals or groups of people who have exerted influence over the language: Charlemagne, Luther, the early modern grammarians and lexicographers. Others are studies of particular periods, places or groups which have not found their place in more narrative accounts: standardisation in the nineteenth century, the role of Low German, the state of German at the Stunde Null in 1945. An overarching theme is the role of deliberate intervention in the development of German, whether it took the form of education, prescriptivism, purism or political manipulation. The essays, a number of which were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge and all of which are by specialists in the field, combine to provide a history of the German language in its social context.

This is the first complete bibliography of the writings of Yvan Goll (1891-1950), the French-German poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and translator. The first part gives full details of Goll’s publications during his lifetime, and includes books and pamphlets, contributions to periodicals, newspapers and anthologies, books and journals edited by Goll, translations by Goll, and his published letters. The second part makes it possible to trace the dissemination of Goll’s work, with posthumous first publications, posthumous reprints in periodicals and anthologies, translations of Goll’s works by others (into twenty languages) and musical collaborations and settings. A comprehensive index of titles or first lines allows the user to trace single works through the various sections; there are also indexes of writers translated by Goll and letters by recipient.This bibliography documents the huge scope of the writings of an author who wrote in three major languages and published in many countries. It contains a wide range of references to texts hitherto unknown, many of them items in journals and newspapers, and is by far the most reliable source to date of what Goll actually wrote.