GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

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.

University teaching in a context of escalating planetary crisis requires new approaches to pedagogical encounter. Reconceptualising the university classroom as a potential refuge from polycrisis, we identify symptoms and effects of the academic-industrial complex and ‘fast academia’ in our practice, and we develop ways to take refuge from these effects so as to resist or undo them. These paths of resistance include: conscious deceleration and willed slowness as method and ethos; greater openness to the specificities of place and to the interaction of place and learning; a loosening of goal orientation; and closer attention to non-human life-forms and to possibilities for interspecies co-existence in a mode of ‘wild diplomacy’. We draw on Baptiste Morizot's reflections on enforestment and tracking, which foreground reciprocal relationships between places and the creatures, including humans, who move and cohabit within them, and we activate these reflections to reconfigure pedagogical dynamics both within and outside the classroom. We elaborate an ethos of enforestment with reference to three examples from our practice: the wolf seminar, the woodland class and a walk in the woods. In each instance, the realities of ecological relation are determinedly confronted and acknowledged, not as theme, topic, or object of study, but as the very ground of academic practice.

This article argues that vast histories of war and displacement in the twentieth century are connected to the small and almost unnoticeable lives of insects, and that philology has much to gain from paying attention to insect worlds. We examine two case studies: the work of the German entomologist Otto Hecht and his wife, Rose Caro Hecht, and the lay entomology of the German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and his letter exchange with geneticist Richard B. Goldschmidt. Drawing on the cultural-theoretical work of Walter Benjamin, our analysis sheds light on the entanglement of entomological and philological labour and a recurrent interplay of intimacy and violence in both. We develop an approach which takes seriously the eros of intellectual pursuits and the endless curiosity that drives the study of words and insects, but which also shows how these encounters with the very small intersect with incomprehensibly large-scale political violence in the twentieth century. We playfully suggest that the method we develop in this article constitutes a form of ‘insect philology’.