830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur
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Origin of the German Novel
(1927)
This contribution was prompted by events in East Germany that ultimately led to German unification. Many forces contributed to the collapse of the GDR as a separate state, the final and most visible was the mass exodus via Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Communist regime resisted change when change was taking place in most of East Germanys neighbors to the east and southeast. But an ever increasing number of increasingly restless citizens insisted on it and, not given a chance to change matters by improving the system, effected the most radical change of all: they swept away an unresponsive, cynical and calcified government.
The reading of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" that I propose on the following pages is based on two assumptions that are derived from widely divergent approaches to Kafka's writings. The first is the offspring of psychological interpretation and recognizes that homologous unconscious strategies are operative in the "Letter to his father" and Kafka's tale. Josef Rattner, writing about the "Ur-Situationen", the "primal situations" that Kafka experienced as a child and which produced in him his most basic psychological attitudes (Rattner calls them Grundhaltungen), concludes: "Kafka's life is an incessant attempt to cope with his father-experience. His father is at the base of his anxiety of life and his crippling hypochondria. … Sadism and masochism are distinctive features of Kafka's works."
"The death of the Emperor Frederick Il in 1250 marked a tuming point in German affairs. When in 1212 the young King of Sicily had taken Germany by storm, driving north his Welf rival Otto IV of Brunswick and securing the support of the German princes, it had seemed that a new golden age had begun. Walther von der Vogelweide at last received his "lêhen", and praised his new patron as "der edel künec, der milte künec". ln Aachen a crusade was proclaimed for the liberation of Jerusalem. Comparisons were made with the Emperor's grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa. The house of Hohenstaufen was again in the ascendency. But these high expectations were always unrealistic. Frederick's crusading vows became a thom in his flesh; his enemies held him to them, but obstructed him as he sought to fulfil them. Much of his energy was taken up in a dual struggle against insurgency in his restive Lombard states, and against the bitter invective of the papal propagandists. Although Innocent lll had been the prime sponsor of the young Emperor, Honorius III became alan·ned at the prospect of a union of the crowns of Sicily and the Empire, and Gregory IX and Innocent IV became determined to break the power of the Hohenstaufen dynasty once and for all. The popes did not have it all their own way. For the most part, the German princes remained loyal, pleased to have an emperor who interfered so little in their affairs. Frederick‘s policy of diplomacy and compromise attracted more sympathy than that of the Pope who refused to meet and treat with him. His early death, however, left his son Conrad IV in a weak position from which he was unable to recover, and within twenty years the last Hohenstaufen rulerwas deposed. The impact of these events on the intellectual climate in Germany was immense. After Frederick's death, there was an upsurge in apocalyptic preaching, and much of the literature of the period was diffused with a sense of nostalgia. It is in this light that we must read the account of the life of Frederick II which is offered by the Viennese patrician, Jansen Enike. Enikel‘s Universal Chronicle ('Weltchronik') recounts the history of the world from Adam to Frederick. It was written about 1272, just four years after the death of Conradin, the last of the Staufen line. Enikel was probably born in the 1230s, and his own lifespan exactly coincided with the years of Hohenstaufen decline. His account ol Frederick's life has limited value as history, but casts an interesting sidelight on the confusion of impressions which had gathered in popular lore. In keeping with the rest of his chronicle, it is anecdotal, falling naturally into ten sections of differing lengths, most of which are to some extent self-contained units. Together, these fill over thirteen hundred lines, making Frederick Enikel's most comprehensively treated post-biblical protagonist; only Moses and David are dealt with at greater length."
Research has contended youth is an "invention" of the 18th century. This thesis does not contest the fact that youth was already known and accepted as a stage in life even earlier. Certain basic anthropological patterns of youthfulness, for example nonchalance, instability, recklessness, exaggeration, bashfulness looking forward to the future and the ability to make friends have been rhetorically implied, repeated and cited as a matter of course since the time of Aristoteies. The pointed thesis that the concept of youth only arose in the 18th century accentuates that youth as an autonomous way of life is a characteristic of the Modern Age.
Böll on Joyce, Joyce on Böll : a gnomonical reading of Heinrich Böll's "Die schönsten Füße der Welt"
(1998)
It is my contention - but not my whole argument, as we shall soon see - that this shift or new departure can be attributed in part to Böll's introduction to the work of James Joyce, an event that took place at or around the time when Böll began travelling to Ireland in 1954. Indeed, as if in corroboration of this assumption, the earliest mentionings of Joyce that I have found occur in the second and third episodes of Böll's popular travelogue „Irisches Tagebuch“, published in 1957. It is worth noting, however, that neither of these two comments is formulated in a way that would presuppose more than a superficial knowledge of Joyce's works. And later, too, we find only the occasional allusion to or mention of the lrish writer in Böll's literary work. Nor does Joyce or his œuvre figure prominently in Böll's countless essays and interviews on writers and writing. Even in the short article „Über den Roman“ of 1960, which is devoted to the modern novel and would provide the natural occasion for an acknowledgement of this kind, Böll refers neither to „A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man“ nor to „Ulysses“, not to mention „Finnegans Wake“.
This paper discusses the profile of German Studies in the context of interdisciplinary intercultural area studies, as it has been developed during the last decades at universities in the United States, particularly at the University of California at Berkeley. In its first part, it deals with the institutional history of German Studies, in the second, with the underlying cultural theory, and in the third, with its hermeneutic practice.