GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

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’.

Our paper contemplates wanderer figures in literature as inspiration for rethinking the academic as pedagogue and the practice of reading in the context of ongoing ecological uncertainties. Academia is permeated by performance pressure in teaching and research. By prioritising productivity, growth and speed, universities are complicit with the anthropocentric values of fossil-fuel culture. Against this we reimagine the pedagogue as a wild/rewilding wanderer who deviates from institutional norms and reads their environment differently by moving through space. For the ‘wild’ pedagogue, the seminar room becomes a mobile space where minds can wander, fostering creativity and new insights. The wanderers we discuss in texts by Wilhelm Genazino — Wenn wir Tiere wären (2011) — and Felicitas Hoppe — Pigafetta (1999) — move through space in this way. Genazino explores human/non-human relationships from a resisting space of deliberately unproductive perambulation, while Pigafetta attempts to re-mystify the planet in the era of globalisation. Both texts model close, attentive reading through the looking practices of their protagonists. By means of radical philology, which fuses poetological and hermeneutic approaches to literature, and the close reading it necessitates, we trace an imaginary path from text to reimagined pedagogical practice.

This contribution reports on the ‘Rewilding German Studies, Rewilding Pedagogies’ event held in January 2024 at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin under the title ‘Day of Dialogue and Reflection’. As well as describing the day's proceedings, we highlight the main points of discussions that emerged between the participants and give insight into the ecocritical, literary, and philosophical sources that inspired our discussions or proved to be relevant retrospectively. A main concern, as we explain, was to explore alternative routes that help to challenge academic routines and foster self-reflexive thinking about academic practices, while special emphasis was put on embodiment, space, place and collaborative thinking. We present the insights gained on the day and reflect on how these can help to revise disciplinary practice in light of the multiple ecological predicaments of the current age.

Beginning with the oratorial askesis of Demosthenes and its use of nature as a tool for the amplitude and clarity of the human voice as a ‘Vexierbild’, this article suggests that the appropriation of philology to serve a particular end (rather than being an end in itself) risks repeating the very injustice that ecocritical discourses are trying to correct due to the way they restrict the potential of what texts can tell us. To bring out ecological aspects of philology, this article pursues a notion of language that understands it to be intrinsically linked with the opening up of the potential for affiliations, as found in Aristotle, August Boeckh, and Werner Hamacher. This article emphasises language's potential for kinships rather than its ability to make decisions and judgements about the right form for our relationship with the world. It also makes a plea for a philology that is not focused on extracting immediately usable meanings from its interpretations. Instead, philology should open itself up towards linguistic ‘wildness’. By doing so, it can provide us with a model for an ethics of co-responsibility that seeks to bring about open and inclusive forms of resonance across times, places and species.

This essay examines Rainer Maria Rilke's reception of the sculptor and poet Michelangelo in the context of interest in the Renaissance around 1900, focusing first on the Stundenbuch, the Florenzer Tagebuch and the story ʻVon einem, der die Steine belauschtʼ (from the prose collection: Geschichten vom lieben Gott). Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of Artistenmetaphysik, Rilke portrays Michelangelo as a ‘superman’ (ʻÜbermenschenʼ) and a desperate seeker for God. Rilke's translation of ʻSe ʼl mie rozzo martelloʼ then shows how he uses Michelangelo's poetic self-reflection to express a poetics of transformation (‘Verwandlung’) that focuses on the concept of ‘work’. Thus, Michelangelo becomes a figure of identification and reflection for Rilke in two respects: as a poet, he refers back to Rilke himself, as a sculptor to Auguste Rodin, who in his time was often perceived as a new Michelangelo.

Rilke loved Venice and visited or passed through a dozen times between 1897 and 1920. He wrote extensively about the city in prose and verse between 1898 and 1908, including a cycle of poems in the Neue Gedichte and a polemical ‘Aufzeichnung’ in Malte Laurids Brigge. His letters from and about Venice have numerous lexical and imagistic echoes or prefigurations of his literary responses to the city. This article traces his interactions with Venice, his consistent hostility to tourism (and its reasons), and in particular the development of his poetic ways of seizing the city's fragile identity via a conviction that Venice's historical power, despite its precarious foundations, always underpins its surface glamour. Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, he did not regard Venice as the locus classicus of decadent decline; quite the reverse. Close readings both of canonical works and of much less familiar texts allow an elucidation of what might be called Rilke's ‘Venetian poetics’, which are closely associated with the technique of ‘aussparen’ (borrowed from painting). The failure of this technique in the context of his aborted biography of Admiral Carlo Zeno marks the end of his attempts to capture the city's essence in his creative writings.

Drawing on Celan's conception of poetry as a means of orienting the individual towards the ‘completely Other’, this paper emphasises poetry's ability to create community without reproducing exclusionary group identities. The analysis reveals a latent politics in Celan's poetry, emphasising its ability to gather disparate individuals into a community. Through close readings of each poem, I argue that in ‘Tenebrae’ and ‘Psalm’, Celan's use of inversion empties religious imagery of positive religious claims while preserving its form and structure. In ‘Tenebrae’, for example, the poem instructs the ‘Lord’ to pray to the anonymous collective ‘us’, implicitly constituting a community by using the collective pronoun. Similarly, in ‘Psalm’, Celan's inversion of traditional liturgical form creates a space for collective mourning and also subverts the positive religious content. Engaging with previous scholarship on Celan's poetics, the article offers a new perspective on the political dimensions of his work, arguing that religious imagery plays a significant role in forming political imagination through his poetry. I conclude by emphasising the importance of Celan's poetry in bringing about a community of readers, thereby suggesting that poetry can bind individuals into a collective endowed with political agency.

This article examines Döblin's use of original Chinese poetry – not only by the most famous poets of the Tang Dynasty, Du Fu and Bai Juyi, but also by the less widely known poet of the Qing Dynasty, Yuan Mei. Some of the original sources that Döblin traced through translations into German and commentaries have never been identified before. The poems are not used to emphasise an atmosphere but to form a framework for strategic and existential arguments. This becomes evident in the scene examined below, where the beautiful rebel Liang tries to assert herself against the politics and aesthetics of her adversary by means of a poem. At the same time, her poetic choice hints at her own deviant sexuality and the novel's distinct rendition of human drives and needs. Other well-known Chinese poems enhance the description of events in the emperor's palace, which enables us to construct a relevant ‘Chinese’ poetics for the entire novel – not in the strict forms of Chinese classical poetry, but simply in a new prose structure which allows the melancholy and sublimity of the underlying tone to fade in favour of a complexity that is nevertheless true-to-life.

Der Aufsatz untersucht Döblins Gebrauch chinesischer Gedichte, aus der Feder sowohl der bekanntesten Dichter der Tang-Dynastie, Du Fu und Bai Juyi, als auch des eher unbekannten Dichters der Qing-Dynastie, Yuan Mei. Einige der Quellen, deren deutschen Übersetzungen und Kommentaren Döblin dabei folgt, weist dieser Aufsatz erstmals nach. Döblin setzt die Gedichte nicht atmosphärisch, sondern im Rahmen strategisch-existenzieller Auseinandersetzungen ein. Dies wird besonders deutlich in der hier untersuchten Romanszene, bei der sich die schöne Rebellin Liang durch die Wahl ihres Gedichts gegen die politische und ästhetische Haltung ihres Kontrahenten durchzusetzen versucht. Zugleich zeigt sich in Liangs Gedichtwahl ihre deviante Sexualität und damit die dem Roman eigene Ästhetisierung von Triebstrukturen. Weitere bekannte chinesische Gedichte werden für die Darstellung des Geschehens im Kaiserpalast verwendet, wodurch sich Zeichen einer für den gesamten Roman relevanten „chinesischen“ Poetologie konstruieren lassen: Nicht in den strengen Formen der klassischen Dichtung, sondern erst in deren Neukonstruktion als Prosa, die den melancholisch-erhabenen Grundton zugunsten einer lebensnahen, jedoch komplexen Alltäglichkeit zurücktreten lässt.