GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

Recent scholarship tends to agree that Die Räuber is a play about two rebels, Karl and Franz Moor, who respectively represent the idealist and materialist strands of Enlightenment thought. What is often overlooked, however, is the brothers’ desire not merely to rebel against the status quo but also to establish new systems of authority. This article argues that Schiller's Die Räuber is primarily concerned with the problem of revolution. More than a mere rebel figure, Karl Moor seeks to replace the top-down system of authority based on the power of the law with a bottom-up system of power based on consent; similarly, Franz seeks to invert the top-down structure of law-based ethics with an egoistic system of behaviour based on desires. The drama reveals both revolutionary attempts to be doomed to failure, for neither bottom-up systems are able to escape the violence of necessity that govern all authority systems. Ultimately, the politics of Die Räuber is paradoxical: it evinces both the need for radical social transformation and the acknowledgement that such transformations are impossible. In the end, the reader is left to contemplate the gap between our desire for utopia and the limits of material reality.

Published in 1777, J. M. R. Lenz's novella Der Landprediger has been read as a document of Lenz’ own intellectual and spiritual disorientation following his banishment from Goethe's Weimar in 1776. As Marcus Twellmann and others have shown, the novella responds to the agrarian reforms initiated by Margrave Carl Friedrich in Baden, which Lenz witnessed first hand. In this article, I argue that the novella's critique of gender and its discussion of economic and social reform are inextricably intertwined. My analysis proceeds from a key insight of recent scholarship in the field of ‘literarische Ökonomik’, namely that literature and philosophy do not simply exist in opposition to economics, but rather that all three share underlying concerns and, furthermore, that culture is ‘complicit’ with the ‘establishment and solidification of modern economic paradigms’ (Gray 2008). Lenz's novella underscores this complicity in a series of episodes that foreground themes of pedagogy, love and marriage, and Enlightenment social reform. Der Landprediger can be said to align with the concerns of twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist economics, insofar as it depicts the struggles of the homo economicus as a crisis of masculinity and recognises women as economic actors in the domestic sphere.

This article asks why the radical authors Georg Büchner (1813–37) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) were particularly interested in the life and works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92). The enquiry proceeds by reading Lenz's theoretical and literary works, such as his treatise Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) and his plays Die Soldaten (1776) and Der Hofmeister (1774), through the later authors’ various writings. This article particularly focuses on all three authors’ use and analysis of observational writing for a radical, social purpose. It begins with a discussion of Lenz's stance on the imitation of nature in his writings on the theatre and how this affects his social commentary through realistic social depiction. This is followed by an examination of Büchner's use of Lenz's writings, particularly in the ‘Kunstgespräch’ section of the narrative fragment Lenz and in his play Woyzeck (1836), and then by Brecht's theoretical writing on the ‘realistic style’ (‘realistische Schreibweise’) in the history of German dramaturgy and his new approach in the adaptation of Der Hofmeister. The article concludes that Lenz's realistic style was taken up by his successors but that, especially in his depiction of and commentary on individuality, it maintains unique value in itself.

J. M. R. Lenz's Anmerkungen übers Theater (1774) present the aesthetic manifesto of the Sturm und Drang. In order to express its programmatic agenda for the modern drama, the text repeatedly attacks Aristotle's Poetics. This article reads Lenz's treatment of the Poetics not merely as a handy rhetorical foil for showcasing his own innovative dramatic theories, but rather as an integral part of the performance of the text. It turns out that there are similarities in both form and content between the two disparate treatises. By tracing the series of opposing terms that the Anmerkungen take up in succession (imitation and viewpoint; man and fate; tragedy and comedy), the analysis sets up a final reevaluation of the aesthetics of effect implicit in Lenz's treatise. Though he never mentions catharsis, this ambiguous Aristotelian terminus technicus can be a key to understanding the paradoxes of Lenz's text and revealing its potential radicality.

In the context of present mass migrations, escapes and ethnic wars, the traditional approach to origin and homeland in terms of belonging to an ethnically homogeneous nation, monocultures with one mother tongue and a strictly defined territory are subject to criticism and (re)-defining. This article presents and analyses examples of four literary works whose authors are representatives of the young post-immigrant generation in Germany: the prose texts by Saša Stanišić (Herkunft, 2020), Senthuran Varatharajah (Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen, 2017) and Katja Petrowskaja (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), and a radio play by Marina Frenk (Jenseits der Kastanien, 2017). In the selected prose works and radio play, the authors raise the issue of origin and homeland in the context of migration, globalisation, and transcultural movements. The article presents the complex processes of searching for adequate artistic expression for experiences related to disrupting family lineage continuity, loss of homeland as a country of birth, and multilingualism. The traditional patterns of stories about origin and homeland are broken and their semantics are redefined. Hybrid, open and ambiguous narrative forms replace the linearity of cause-and-effect chains. Belonging to a multitude of locations and systems, multilingualism, multi-media, and transcultural strategies are a literary alternative to nationally coded models of origin and homeland.

In the fourteenth century, a group of German-speaking settlers established a colony named Gottschee in what is now Slovenia. The results of World War II banished Gottscheers from Slovenia and they relocated to Austrian refugee camps. While some Gottscheers later moved to other European countries, a large number migrated to existing Gottscheer or German communities in North America as refugees, practising cultural traditions in large cities such as New York and Cleveland. Like other German immigrants who initially settled in large American cities, many Gottscheers moved from urban areas and assimilated, soon after arrival or a few generations later. In fact, Gottscheers are one embodiment of the collective assimilation experience of Germans who migrated to North America. Formerly, once large communities of German immigrants who contributed to both United States and Canadian society have all but disappeared. This study investigates how and why Gottscheers created discrete ethnic communities in the United States and Canada that flourished in the pre- and postwar years. It also analyses the present state of Gottscheer communities to determine why Gottscheers and their descendants may assimilate into American society.

The Captain (Der Hauptmann), directed by Robert Schwentke, was the German director's first film with a German crew and in his native language since 2003. It was screened in German cinemas in March 2018 and met with a mixed response from the press. In this article I analyse the film, with the main emphasis being on the question of identification with the film and its protagonist. I employ a number of concepts from psychoanalytic film theory to argue that The Captain has the potential to compel its audience to ask questions about human nature, for example, whether war is the only prerequisite for an individual to transform from an ‘ordinary’ person into a villain. Another question is how the audience might react to the presence of motifs which are symbolic representations of Holocaust victims. The use of such images underlines the ruthlessness of the main character of the film and strengthens the contrast between his physical appearance and his hideous crimes.