GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht die Darstellung lateinamerikanischer Lyrik im DEFA-Dokumentarfilm der 1970er Jahre anhand der Filme Pablo Neruda (1973) von Uwe Belz und Erinnerungen an Otto René Castillo (1979) von Karlheinz Mund. DEFA-Dokumentarfilme über die Kulturen der sogenannten „Dritten Welt“ spielten eine Schlüsselrolle bei der Wiederbelebung romantischer Topoi in der kulturellen Produktion der DDR. In beiden Filmen wird Lateinamerika zur exotischen Projektionsfläche, über die Fragen der eigenen politischen und kulturellen Identität verhandelt werden. Hierbei mobilisieren die Filme Bilder und Tropen, die romantische Topoi, wie die des Goldenen Zeitalters und des „edlen Wilden“, reproduzieren. Der Vergleich der Filme macht allerdings auch eine Verschiebung in der Art und Weise sichtbar, wie Fragen über den gegenwärtigen Zustand (und die Zukunft) des Sozialismus auf die historische und kulturelle Landschaft Lateinamerikas projiziert wurden. Pablo Neruda lässt Narrative des revolutionären Kampfes und der sozialistischen Staatenbildung wiederaufleben, die Vorstellungen von „Volkskultur“ und „Volkspoesie“ entsprechen, wie sie den Gründungsdiskurs der DDR geprägt hatten. In Erinnerungen an Otto René Castillo dominieren dagegen spätromantische Tropen von Sehnsucht und Entfremdung, die teleologische sozialistische Fortschrittsnarrative im Kontext internationaler Konflikte hinterfragen.

Libraries and archives increasingly have to face questions concerning the origins and transmission paths of their holdings. Based on acquisition records as well as private and institutional correspondence, this article traces the history of book and autograph collections formerly owned by Austrian writer and collector Stefan Zweig which are held in Britain today or were held there temporarily in the past. Investigating the provenance of these holdings not only contributes to meeting the demand for more transparency; the history of the Stefan Zweig collections within the different institutions also shows how migration and war affected material politics and awareness in libraries and archives after 1945. What was collected and handed down where? What were the collection policies and research interests these institutions had at the time and how have these changed, along with the institutions themselves and their sponsors, and what impact has this had on the Zweig collections themselves? Finally, investigating these collections’ translocations further substantiates the complex interconnectedness of private collectors, institutional acquisition policies, the commercial book trade, and literary research interests in the twentieth century.

In 1982, the East German journalist Heinz Knobloch published a volume entitled Stadtmitte umsteigen. Its title was provocative: since the construction of the Berlin Wall, it had not been possible to change trains at Stadtmitte in East Berlin, as one of the two lines functioned only as a transit route between the north and south of West Berlin. In the opening text, Knobloch invites readers to join him in an imaginary excavation of Stadtmitte station, uncovering memories of its status as an interchange and its role during the final days of the Third Reich. By exploring this text alongside Knobloch's manuscripts, GDR government files, eyewitness accounts and press material, this article expands the range of his ‘archaeological’ approach, shedding new light on Berlin's ghost stations. What Knobloch could never have imagined is that the GDR government planned to reintegrate the transit routes into East Berlin's underground network. These plans would have brought the ghost stations back to life, blocking the transit route used by the 50,000 West Berlin passengers who passed through Stadtmitte each day. The repeated deferral of these plans shows how logistical ties helped to maintain a precarious stability beneath the Iron Curtain.

This essay develops new perspectives on Nietzsche's complex relationship with Richard Wagner by including an area of conflict that is important for the overall picture but has been overlooked in research to date: the profound insult to Nietzsche's ambitions as a composer caused by the harsh, almost scathing criticism of the musician Hans von Bülow from Wagner's circle. As will be shown, there are striking parallels between Bülow's criticism of Nietzsche's composition Manfred Meditation (1872) and Nietzsche's polemical attacks (between 1887 and 1889) on Wagner. This suggests that the vehement criticism of Wagner by Nietzsche also reflects his early traumatic experience at Bülow's hands. In fact, Nietzsche uses the same harsh judgement that Bülow had directed against him to attack Wagner, especially his opera Parsifal, right down to the details of the wording. While the middle section of this article explores these astonishing connections for the first time, the contextual framework of Sections I and III focuses on the conflict-laden life situation of the early Nietzsche as well as key aspects of the tense friendship between Nietzsche and Wagner, a relationship characterised by striking ambivalences until contact was finally broken off.

This article examines Anna Maria Ortese's collection of journalistic reportages and short stories, Silenzio a Milano (Silence in Milan, 1958), and Ingeborg Bachmann's speech ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’ (17 October 1964). It focuses on their topophobic images of Milan and West Berlin, the anxious representations of these post-1945 urban landscapes. Their pathographies of 1950s Milan and 1960s West Berlin are explored by linking contemporary studies on alienation with the polarity of affective responses to space. The analysis especially resorts to Gaston Bachelard's and Yi-Fu Tuan's discourses of topoaffective polarities, that is topophobia and topophilia, as a starting point to highlight Ortese's and Bachmann's shared focus on the material, psychic and social character of peacetime Italian and West German societies. While recognising the texts’ differences in genre and degree of negativity, the article reads the complex representations of the ‘pathological’ relationality between the self and the socially constructed world in Silenzio a Milano and ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’ as topical metaphors for alienation in urban capitalism. It positions Ortese and Bachmann as critics not only of the haunted histories of Nazi-fascism but also of post-1945 European models of growth.

This article explores two stories by Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘Simultan’ and ‘Drei Wege zum See’, both of which feature in the 1972 short-story collection Simultan. Both stories deal with successful professional women, and both address communication and representation: Nadja in ‘Simultan’ is an interpreter; Elisabeth in ‘Drei Wege’ is a photojournalist. Both are cosmopolitan figures who are often on the move. Bachmann's depiction of these ‘nomadic’ female subjects is reminiscent of the work of Rosi Braidotti (Nomadic Subjects, 1994). It also has ethical implications, again calling to mind Braidotti; in Transpositions (2006), Braidotti argues for the ethical potential of non-unitary subjectivity. ‘Simultan’ addresses heterosexual models of communication, through the relationship between Nadja and Frankel. ‘Drei Wege’ also thematises heterosexuality, in addition probing questions of family, belonging and home. The stories thereby trouble unitary models of subjectivity, and normative ideals of family and gender, and put forward instructive Braidottian ‘transpositions’.

This article presents a conception of literature as self-reflection, derived from the writings of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Starting from an intertextual analysis of Hamann's statements on self-knowledge as a descent into hell that paves the way to divinisation, the article presents Hamann's intertextual writing practice (‘neuer Begriff der Gabe der Sprachen’) as oriented towards the reader's self-knowledge through satirically and theologically marked self-reference to the text (applicatio ad vitam) and the transformation of life and thought brought about by their confrontation with a multiplicity of texts that cause confusion and indicate the limits of knowledge and understanding.

This article considers how features of spoken language in three of Marlen Haushofer's works, Die Tapetentür (1957), Die Wand (1963) and Die Mansarde (1969), have been translated into English. A close reading of Haushofer's prose demonstrates how she relies on carefully constructed cadences of thought to reach an intermediate point between writing, thinking and vocalising; characteristics of spoken language and particularly modal particles are a vital means of doing this. Evoking an inner voice in this way allows Haushofer to access and verbalise that which had, in her postwar context, been deliberately repressed: a woman's true thoughts beneath an outward performance of domesticity. Haushofer's characteristic, engaging language use has met with praise, but has rarely been analysed from a translation perspective; this article seeks to draw renewed attention to this generally overlooked feature, and contribute to the fruitful intersection of translation, stylistics and gender. A comparative analysis shows that orality is translated in quite distinct ways by the three English translators, which in turn is revelatory about the function this feature played in the original texts. Lastly, I consider what is at stake when translating Haushofer, what implications this kind of analysis might have on translation practice.

This article is concerned with the long poem doggerland (2021) by Ulrike Draesner, which we read here primarily in its relationship to the temporal disorder of the Anthropocene. We explore some specific manifestations of what we term ‘Anthropocene arrhythmia’ in Draesner's text, in particular through its engagement with linearity and cyclicality. We conclude by suggesting that Draesner's use of language both produces and demands a kind of philological practice that is tilted towards recovery and creativity. Our article illustrates the ways in which this ‘reparative philology’, working at the intimate scale of a single poem, can cultivate care and attention not just to the rupture of the Anthropocene, but also to the possibilities for recovery in human and geological history, interspecies relationships and a sense of place across time.

This article brings together two texts that differ in numerous respects: the long poem farbe komma dunkel by Levin Westermann (2021) and a devotional text often known as the Bamberg Creed and Confession (Bamberger Glaube und Beichte), transmitted in a twelfth-century manuscript. Proceeding from a parallel reading, the article consists of a series of ruminations on a prominent grammatical feature shared by the poem and the confession — the I — and on a shared emotional tone involving shame and rage in the face of failure. The article offers a collaborative response to the two texts, both of which work with lists, repetitions and citations of pre-texts as a way of articulating location and emotion. The aim is to read in such a way as to combine affective responsiveness with interpretative rigour, attuned as much to the now of reading as to the historical and critical issues the texts raise. What emerges is a demonstration of the power and pleasure of literary language despite or quite possibly because of the consciousness of its precarity and, in the case of Westermann's poem, its seeming enmeshment within ecocidal forces.