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Iqbal and Goethe : a note
(2005)
The recourse to Goethe plays an important role in the work of Mohammad Iqbal (1873-1938), one of the few important writers from the Indian subcontinent who knew German literature. Iqbal situates his own writing in the context of western colonial expansion and the corresponding world-historical loss of power of Islam in the East. The recourse to Goethe becomes an import reference point in his work. It enables him to stylise himself as a Messenger of the East in reply to Goethe as a representative of the West. By establishing a comparative cultural constellation with his German predecessor Iqbal affirms a cultural position consisting of a mode of historical complaint and cultural revival.
No other country is influenced in its political, social and cultural structures by both western and eastern mentality such as Lebanon, and hardly any other country has such a pivotal function. In this mediator function it can be compared with a literary work, that merits its role in world literature as hardly any other piece of literature in regard to the co-operation of Orient and Occident. I am thinking of the collection of "A Thousand and One Nights", or with its original title "Alf Laila wa-Laila".
Let’s not forget that 1492, one of the first landmarks of Modernity, was both the year of the conquest of the Americas and of the fall or of the Reconquista of Granada, both of inner and outer ethnic cleansing of the nation state; that the national state was a colonial state and is now a securitarian state, that colonialism was the very form of Western Modernity, that the French Revolution itself was colonial, that the leader of the first Black revolutionary independence movement, Toussaint Louverture (Haiti), died in a French prison though inspired by the French Revolution. - No-one has access to reason as whole: there is no such thing as the whole of Reason, or Reason as a whole, or the Totality of reason. Reason is patched up of disconnected bits and pieces that reside at different addresses.
During the 1930s through the 1940s and into the 1950s, Spanish and German presentations in opposition to ardent nationalism share strikingly common aesthetic and ideological strategies supporting claims to a transnational, international space. Specific examples of common geography, identity and language in German and Spanish presentations (theater, short stories, reports, essays, speeches and poetry) in Spain and Latin America by German (Regler, Renn, Uhse), Spanish (J. Bergamin, R. Alberti, M. Aub) and Latin American (D. Rivera, P. Neruda, C. Vallejo) intellectuals, artists and activists during the 1930s through the 1950s will be explored. For example, German-speaking audiences and artists in Spain and Mexico shared a common lived and aesthetic space as Spanish-speaking audiences and artists. Further, many German presentations were translated into Spanish and visa versa. Here, presentations in “Das Wort” and “El Mono Azul” in Spain as well as “Freies Deutschland/Alemania libre” in Mexico will be referenced in developing a sense of re-definition of the concept of ‘foreign’ and ‘commonness’ beyond simply nationality (tradition, history and geography) and language. The impetus for an alternative, international and even revolutionary ‘space’ (as defined by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space) was produced in and through common Spanish and German strategies and realizations in their presentations. This Spanish-German example from the early/mid-part of the 20th century is a significant contribution to contemporary interdisciplinary discussions in the 21st century.
The Book as a landscape
(2007)
There is a long tradition of regarding landscapes as texts and texts as landscapes. Characterizing visually experienced nature as a text implies stressing its meaningfulness, its character as a message or an expression. According to an old metaphor that was highly esteemed in medieval Christian culture as well as in early modem science, nature itself is a divine message addressed to mankind, analogously to the holy scriptures, revealing the will of God as the superior "author" to those who are able to decipher the signs. As a consequence of the process of secularization, art gains authority over the signs of nature, and it is the artist who creates messages by composing the elements of the visual world. The idea of interpreting texts as landscapes seems less evident at the first moment; it implies the notion of texts and landscapes as artificial products which depend on an individual human subject's intentions.
Around 1800, aesthetic debate suddenly places music at the very top in the hierarchy of the arts, even superseding poetry: This has become a commonplace not only in scholarly discourse. The protagonists of this re-arrangement of the artistic disciplines are Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck. In their programmatic texts, they state that music is to be free and absolute and stress its metaphysical quality and its close relation to the supernatural. Furthermore, music is supposed to be no longer dependent on the other arts, and music releases the listener or the musician from prosaic everyday life. As Wackenroder writes in Die Wunder der Tonkunst, […] [a]ll sickening thoughts which, according to Wackenroder, are the illness of mankind vanish with a piece of music, making our mind sane again. Literary romanticism here recurs to a long tradition that reaches back to the classical ages in Greece and Arabia: Music is used as a remedy for curing illnesses of various kinds. In classical antiquity, Apollo is the god of music, poetry and dancing as well as the god of healing. He was also named “Iatros” (physician) or Apollo Medicus. […] Orpheus as a bard and demigod was also said to be capable of curing diseases by means of his music. […] Thus, music in history is part of treating physical illness on the one hand, but on the other hand is more and more considered to provide a remedy especially for mental deficiencies. Music is meant to improve nervous disorders and sometimes it is even prescribed as a regular medicine. As we will see in Hoffmann’s text Die Genesung, there is a connection between the ritual healing processes in the temples of Aesculapius and the setting of the forest in which the old man regains his health.