Abstract:Johann Friedrich Löwen is generally considered to have written the first history of the German theatre, though scholars rarely discuss his role as a historian and are typically drawn instead to his program for establishing a national theatre. This article will examine his contributions to the historiography of the German theatre in the eighteenth century. His Geschichte des deutschen Theaters represents a substantial break in how German theatre historiography was written and conceptualized, as he favoured an actor-centred narrative instead of a catalogue of plays and playwrights, setting genre trends that would be felt for decades. In a move unexpected for a dedicated reformer of the theatre, however, Löwen depicts the history of German actors in a resoundingly negative light. Such an approach reveals that Löwen views the creation of historical narratives not only as a means for recording the past, but also for attesting to the urgency of theatre reform.
{"title":"The Art of Acting Up: Johann Friedrich Löwen and the Genesis of German Theatre Historiography","authors":"Matthew Feminella","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Johann Friedrich Löwen is generally considered to have written the first history of the German theatre, though scholars rarely discuss his role as a historian and are typically drawn instead to his program for establishing a national theatre. This article will examine his contributions to the historiography of the German theatre in the eighteenth century. His Geschichte des deutschen Theaters represents a substantial break in how German theatre historiography was written and conceptualized, as he favoured an actor-centred narrative instead of a catalogue of plays and playwrights, setting genre trends that would be felt for decades. In a move unexpected for a dedicated reformer of the theatre, however, Löwen depicts the history of German actors in a resoundingly negative light. Such an approach reveals that Löwen views the creation of historical narratives not only as a means for recording the past, but also for attesting to the urgency of theatre reform.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"76 1","pages":"190 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86514107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Christian Petzold’s Transit confronts viewers with a series of traditional binaries: individual and social, past and present, image and word, local and global, waiting and acting, and subjection and sovereignty. Its audiovisual and narrational strategies for negotiating these polar categories and relating them to the characters’ narratives introduce questions of what it means to be human within the hierarchies of deservingness that constitute not only international politics but also our intimate, personal interactions. Exploring Georg’s varied responses to the suffering of others, the film implicitly intervenes in debates about the politics of compassion and juggles questions such as those posed by Judith Butler as to how we might create a world that is inhabitable for everyone. The film asks what it means to exist in relation to others at both micro (social, interpersonal, ethical) and macro (political, governmental, legal) levels and what it means to lose those others. Ultimately, I argue, Transit is an elegy that functions as a kind of literal Trauerarbeit, an affective labour in which viewers remember the past but are afforded no reassurance that the present is better.
{"title":"Waiting to Be Human: The Cruel Optimism of Christian Petzold’s Transit","authors":"Muriel Cormican","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.1","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Christian Petzold’s Transit confronts viewers with a series of traditional binaries: individual and social, past and present, image and word, local and global, waiting and acting, and subjection and sovereignty. Its audiovisual and narrational strategies for negotiating these polar categories and relating them to the characters’ narratives introduce questions of what it means to be human within the hierarchies of deservingness that constitute not only international politics but also our intimate, personal interactions. Exploring Georg’s varied responses to the suffering of others, the film implicitly intervenes in debates about the politics of compassion and juggles questions such as those posed by Judith Butler as to how we might create a world that is inhabitable for everyone. The film asks what it means to exist in relation to others at both micro (social, interpersonal, ethical) and macro (political, governmental, legal) levels and what it means to lose those others. Ultimately, I argue, Transit is an elegy that functions as a kind of literal Trauerarbeit, an affective labour in which viewers remember the past but are afforded no reassurance that the present is better.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"3 1","pages":"141 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90100375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev002
Wilhelm Hemecker, Nicolas Paulus
{"title":"Barbara Beßlich. Das Junge Wien im Alter: Spätwerke neben der Moderne","authors":"Wilhelm Hemecker, Nicolas Paulus","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73459333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev003
T. Nagl
{"title":"Erica Tortolani and Martin F. Norden, editors. Refocus: The Films of Paul Leni","authors":"T. Nagl","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75415214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Elfriede Jelinek’s 2009 play, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel), concerns the 1945 massacre of approximately 180 Jewish men in the eponymous town of Rechnitz. Like much of Jelinek’s oeuvre, the play brings Austria’s fraught relationship with its National Socialist past into question, for which the Rechnitz massacre is an analogy. In the postdramatic appropriation of the Greek chorus that dominates her work, Jelinek crafts a distinctive pastiche of (often creatively [mis]appropriated) intertextual imagery to decidedly satirical effect. The diametric contradiction between the intertextual motifs of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch and T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man” in Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) poses a double standard and a fundamental aporia. On the one hand, the perpetrators’ weakness is applauded, while on the other, the massacre victims are derided for being too weak to prevent their own deaths. Such a contradiction signals Jelinek’s trademark postdramatic satire, and in turn the duplicitousness she posits as inherent to the myth of Austrian non-participation in the Holocaust.
{"title":"“Hollow Men” and Übermenschen : The Aporia of Competing Intertextual Motifs in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)","authors":"Isabel Hellig","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Elfriede Jelinek’s 2009 play, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel), concerns the 1945 massacre of approximately 180 Jewish men in the eponymous town of Rechnitz. Like much of Jelinek’s oeuvre, the play brings Austria’s fraught relationship with its National Socialist past into question, for which the Rechnitz massacre is an analogy. In the postdramatic appropriation of the Greek chorus that dominates her work, Jelinek crafts a distinctive pastiche of (often creatively [mis]appropriated) intertextual imagery to decidedly satirical effect. The diametric contradiction between the intertextual motifs of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch and T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man” in Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) poses a double standard and a fundamental aporia. On the one hand, the perpetrators’ weakness is applauded, while on the other, the massacre victims are derided for being too weak to prevent their own deaths. Such a contradiction signals Jelinek’s trademark postdramatic satire, and in turn the duplicitousness she posits as inherent to the myth of Austrian non-participation in the Holocaust.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"86 1","pages":"175 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73097674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev001
Arndt Niebisch
{"title":"John Zilcosky. The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka","authors":"Arndt Niebisch","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86442933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev004
Sonja Fritzsche
{"title":"Lars Schmeink and Ingo Cornils, editors. New Perspectives on Contemporary German Science Fiction","authors":"Sonja Fritzsche","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.rev004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76664322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article explores Anna Seghers’s use of nature and pastoral writing in her exile tale “Das Ende” (1945). I argue that, by writing a story in which villagers and nature work together to hunt and rid Germany’s war-torn landscape of Zillich, a former concentration camp guard, Seghers engages critically with German traditions of Heimat writing to “reclaim” the style as a productive mode to depict the monumental task of rebuilding Germany after the Second World War. Much of Anna Seghers’s postwar and exile works reflect in literature what she viewed as the responsibility of writers to contribute to the re-education and denazification of the German people during and following the war. “Das Ende” is no exception; it seeks to understand how fascism permeated the minds and hearts of ordinary Germans, and the work Germans must undertake to overcome such indoctrination.
{"title":"Reclaiming Heimat, Uprooting National Socialism in Anna Seghers’s “Das Ende”","authors":"Lucas Riddle","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.2.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.2.2","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores Anna Seghers’s use of nature and pastoral writing in her exile tale “Das Ende” (1945). I argue that, by writing a story in which villagers and nature work together to hunt and rid Germany’s war-torn landscape of Zillich, a former concentration camp guard, Seghers engages critically with German traditions of Heimat writing to “reclaim” the style as a productive mode to depict the monumental task of rebuilding Germany after the Second World War. Much of Anna Seghers’s postwar and exile works reflect in literature what she viewed as the responsibility of writers to contribute to the re-education and denazification of the German people during and following the war. “Das Ende” is no exception; it seeks to understand how fascism permeated the minds and hearts of ordinary Germans, and the work Germans must undertake to overcome such indoctrination.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"159 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86209904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article analyzes the relationship between Turkish German literature and medicine by focusing on Güney Dal's İş Sürgünleri (1976; published in German translation as Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört, 1979). In his first novel, Dal documents the 1973 Ford strikes in Cologne in a style reminiscent of social realism. What sets Dal's writing apart, however, is the inclusion of the story of a guest worker, Kadir, whose breasts grow due to the hormones given to him by the doctor at the factory to treat his peptic ulcer, a common problem among labour migrants in the 1960s and 1970s that was referred to as "Gastarbeiterulcus." Due to the language barrier between doctors and newly arrived guest workers, misdiagnosis of the condition was prevalent in the early 1970s. At the time Dal was writing his novel, debates revolved around the psychosomatic causes of the illness, which was interpreted as an "Entwurzelungsreaktion" by many experts. With the "paradigm shift" after the discovery of Helicobacter pylori by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren in 1983 and the standardization of antibacterial treatment in the late 1980s, this theoretical framework to explain the ailment was partially abandoned. The medical debate of the time constitutes the actual kernel of Dal's novel, despite the fact that the novel seemingly centres on the strike. In addition to unsettling the discourses that medicalize the labour migrant's body during the Anwerbestopp period, Dal's scrupulous attention to and modernist depiction of the illness, the impossibility of communication between patients and doctors, and Kadir's subsequent psychological breakdown undermine the novel's social realism from within and pave the way for the author's later experimental works in which psychosis and miscommunication play a central role.
摘要:本文以格内·达尔的《İş ss rg nleri》(1976;德文译本为《Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört》，1979年出版)。在他的第一部小说中，达利以一种让人想起社会现实主义的风格记录了1973年福特在科隆的罢工。然而，让达利的作品与众不同的是，书中包含了一名外来工卡迪尔(Kadir)的故事，他的乳房之所以变大，是因为工厂的医生给他注射了治疗消化性溃疡的激素。消化性溃疡是20世纪60年代和70年代农民工普遍存在的问题，被称为“胃溃疡”。由于医生和新来的外来工之间的语言障碍，在20世纪70年代早期，这种疾病的误诊很普遍。在达利写他的小说的时候，争论围绕着这种疾病的心身原因，许多专家将其解释为“Entwurzelungsreaktion”。随着1983年Barry J. Marshall和J. Robin Warren发现幽门螺杆菌后的“范式转移”，以及20世纪80年代后期抗菌治疗的标准化，这种解释疾病的理论框架部分被抛弃。当时的医学争论构成了达利小说的真正核心，尽管小说似乎以罢工为中心。达利对疾病的谨慎关注和对疾病的现代主义描述，病人和医生之间不可能的沟通，以及卡迪尔随后的心理崩溃，除了扰乱了在Anwerbestopp时期将劳工移民的身体医疗化的话语外，还从内部破坏了小说的社会现实主义，为作者后来的实验作品铺平了道路，其中精神病和沟通不端发挥了核心作用。
{"title":"Gastarbeiterulcus and Realism in Güney Dal: A Gastrointestinal Account of \"Gastarbeiterliteratur\"","authors":"Mert Bahadır Reisoğlu","doi":"10.3138/seminar.59.1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.59.1.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes the relationship between Turkish German literature and medicine by focusing on Güney Dal's İş Sürgünleri (1976; published in German translation as Wenn Ali die Glocken läuten hört, 1979). In his first novel, Dal documents the 1973 Ford strikes in Cologne in a style reminiscent of social realism. What sets Dal's writing apart, however, is the inclusion of the story of a guest worker, Kadir, whose breasts grow due to the hormones given to him by the doctor at the factory to treat his peptic ulcer, a common problem among labour migrants in the 1960s and 1970s that was referred to as \"Gastarbeiterulcus.\" Due to the language barrier between doctors and newly arrived guest workers, misdiagnosis of the condition was prevalent in the early 1970s. At the time Dal was writing his novel, debates revolved around the psychosomatic causes of the illness, which was interpreted as an \"Entwurzelungsreaktion\" by many experts. With the \"paradigm shift\" after the discovery of Helicobacter pylori by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren in 1983 and the standardization of antibacterial treatment in the late 1980s, this theoretical framework to explain the ailment was partially abandoned. The medical debate of the time constitutes the actual kernel of Dal's novel, despite the fact that the novel seemingly centres on the strike. In addition to unsettling the discourses that medicalize the labour migrant's body during the Anwerbestopp period, Dal's scrupulous attention to and modernist depiction of the illness, the impossibility of communication between patients and doctors, and Kadir's subsequent psychological breakdown undermine the novel's social realism from within and pave the way for the author's later experimental works in which psychosis and miscommunication play a central role.","PeriodicalId":44556,"journal":{"name":"SEMINAR-A JOURNAL OF GERMANIC STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"24 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88677392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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