Germanistische Beiträge 36.2015
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- Aufklärung (German Enlightment) (1)
- Carmen Sylva (1)
- Carol I (1)
- Der Mann schläft (1)
- Diary (1)
- Enemy (1)
- Ernst Jünger (1)
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- German literature from Romania (1)
- Habsburg Bukovina (1)
Sibylle Berg develops in her novel Der Mann schläft a new, nihilistic definition of love. Nietzsche considers that modern mankind killed the god in itself, Dürrenmatt shows the absolute hopelessness of the postmodern society and Berg presents the end of all known forms of love. For her protagonist it is enough to have found someone who needs her as much as she needs him to feel save and complete. But “the man” disappears during a journey to Asia while going to buy some papers. After waiting for three month for him to return she decides to stay there for the rest of her miserable life. The novel has an interesting structure, the story is told in dozens of short scenes, not in a chronological order but reffering to the period with “the man” and without him that confers to it a certain dramatic touch.
This paper tries to present Ernst Jüngerʼs perception of „the enemy“ in his first publication, the novellike, personal report on his experiences in WW I, „Storm of Steel“, published for the first time in 1920. Interestingly his characterization of the French, English, Scottish – and a squad of Indian – Soldiers varies in the different editions of this work, which suffered six to seven revisons (the last one for editing the opera omnia in 1978). While especially the 1924 edition had a nationalistic bias, as Jünger for example mocked on French civilization, such passages were eliminated during a revison in 1934. Generally, also in the earlier editions, Jüngerʼs approach towards describing the enemy is distinguished by high respect and an outmoded chevalersque ethos of a warrioar-caste, which was in WW I already part of the historical past. Only some traces of every-day racism, typical for the German imperial age, found its way also in the last editions: the description of colonial military forces (Moroccans, Indians).
According to Arthur Rimbaud’s famous saying “Je est un autre” Max Frisch develops in his early diaries an idea of love which has to orient itself by the ban on images in the Old Testament and which, as a modern concept, has to renounce every image of oneself and the other at all. In Max Frisch’s novel Stiller the roots of this seemingly biblical belief can be found both in an aesthetic attitude towards life (as pointed out in Sören Kierkegaardʼs scriptures, especially in Entweder-Oder) and in an existentialist understanding of life (as set forth in the philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre). Max Frisch’s novel Stiller can be read as a literary experiment of achieving the ultimate goal of love and self-acceptance by radical self-negation and negation of the other.
In the novel "The Land of Green Plums" (1994) the author renders an apocalyptic image of Romania during the communist dictatorship, Timişoara representing the tragic background of the narrated events. From this perspective, language becomes for Herta Müller a way of distancing from the dictatorial system, the author managing to express, through specific processes of language, the circumstances hat generated those events. The aphorisms and the idioms used in the text express the wrong behavior and communication mechanisms of the protagonists, demonstrating the presence of the security forces and of the dictatorship. The author often appeals to repetitions to highlight the continuous threat and the repression force of the authorities. Thus, the language is for Herta Müller a form of resistance against the totalitarian regime and the only place of expressing freedom, even under the dictatorship.