GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

This article deals with Ernst Toller's involvement in the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, an organisation founded in 1935 to help artists and intellectuals who had fled the Nazi regime to the US. It thus highlights the last months of Toller's life. As a member of the board of directors of the Guild, he was involved in important initiatives such as the allocation of grants to writers in exile. The article examines individual cases, e.g. the awarding of a scholarship to Hermann Borchardt, with whom Toller was involved in a plagiarism dispute, and the debate over awarding a scholarship to Bodo Uhse, in which he opposed the Guild chairman and attempted to dispel political reservations about Uhse. These cases illustrate how solidarity-based action was organised in exile and was both supported and undermined by aesthetic, political, economic, and personal interests. Taking Toller and other members of the Guild as examples, the paper shows how power structures inevitably formed and had an effect within the group, which aimed to organise and support the entire German-speaking emigration; and how, therefore, the practice of solidarity between emigrants led to a ‘hopeless secondary competition amongst themselves, in the midst of the more general one’ (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951).

The Weimar Republic opened up a new chapter for society within the borders of what was then called Germany. Ongoing financial difficulties due to the Treaty of Versailles overshadowed and stalled the development of the newly formed republic. But the democracy was not doomed to fail from the beginning. The search for orientation and perspective in a radically changed political, social, economic and cultural environment is reflected, for example, in the works of Ernst Toller. A closer inspection of his autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland from 1933, translated into English under the title I Was a German and published simultaneously in England and the United States only one year later, offers insight into his thinking and his writing. It is well designed to fit the purpose of democratic education through literature – but without simply telling its readers how they should think – and illustrates the various searches for a new beginning characteristic of the period, i.e. the longing for a new, non-totalitarian form of community.

This article examines Toller's experiences in exile, with particular attention given to the genre of letters. Based on his correspondence from exile, the paper aims to trace the disparity in Ernst Toller's experience of life away from his homeland, focusing on his time in New York but also comparing it to the other locations: London and Hollywood. The editing of his letters has shown that Toller's experience of exile differed greatly from that of other German expatriates. There is no evidence that New York became a new home to him; neither topography nor people are described in detail. He hardly ever writes about his everyday life, and neither the content nor the style of his letters shows any significant difference from those written before his exile. This may of course be due to the fact that Toller's life was a succession of extreme situations: war, imprisonment, political persecution and separation. In conclusion, the article also discusses the Briefe aus dem Gefängnis, published in 1935, and argues that, not least because of their publication context and their paratext, they also sit within the context of the exile experience and represent an engaged commentary on the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany.

During his first trip to the US in 1929 Ernst Toller was impressed by the Newsreel cinemas of William Fox. In his words – ‘die Zeitung ist lebendig geworden’ – the films were a sort of ‘living newspaper’. He tried to write such a ‘Living Newspaper’ in his first radio play Berlin, letzte Ausgabe! (1930), as well as in one of his last texts for the stage which was found among his literary remains: ‘Forget Europe!’ is a short concept paper he wrote for Hallie Flanagan's Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the late 1930s. This article compares the different conceptions of the FTP's ‘Living Newspaper’-plays with Toller's own ideas about bringing the news to the stage. Reflecting on Toller's poetics, I trace why the exiled author ultimately failed to finish his ‘Living Newspaper’ for the FTP.

This essay examines the musical dimension in Else Lasker-Schülerʼs lyrical compositions. In three sections, each headed with a motto from Georg Traklʼs poem ʻAbendlandʼ (which was dedicated to Lasker-Schüler), this exploration suggests an ʻelective affinityʼ in the two poets’ treatment of poetic language. Central to the argument is a discussion of Lasker-Schüler's rarely considered poem ʻLeo Kestenbergʼ, in which intrinsic musicality is matched with explicit references to musical themes and motifs. The essay argues, with particular reference to Bachelard and Zwetajewa, that music and poetic spaces are interrelated in Lasker-Schülerʼs poems. It shows how musically conditioned her treatment of language was: in her poetry, music is the sound-image of poetic imagination. Rather than apply the over-used concept of ʻintermedialityʼ to Lasker-Schüler's poetry, the essay demonstrates what poetic phenomenology entails if or when word and music interact in a generic fashion, forming what could be termed ʻpoetic correlativesʼ. Whilst much of Lasker-Schüler criticism centres on the pictorial dimension in her work, this essay contributes to redressing the balance.

Scholarship has paid scant attention to affinities between the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt and that of Heinrich von Kleist. Both were, at different times, fascinated by the aftermath of the French Revolution and its influence on the shape of contemporary Europe. Humboldt's essays of the 1790s plead the cause of individual ‘Bildung’ against the hegemony of an interventionist state. His verdict on the new French constitution is ultimately pessimistic as he denies that history permits successful and sudden reversals of political structures. Kleist sees the Revolution as betrayed by Napoleon's ascendancy. His first work on his tragedy Penthesilea is dated between 1805 and 1806 in Königsberg, where he would have had ready access to Humboldt's publications. The calamitous defeat of Prussia in October 1806 overshadowed the play's completion in 1807. It is in this climate of the disintegration of a traditional order that Kleist invents the Amazon state as the tragic sequel to a revolution. Suppressing all individual freedom, it is the opposite of what Humboldt imagined a state should be, thus suggesting we may find in Humboldt's political thought a hitherto neglected source for Penthesilea.