GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

As an important site of cross-cultural exchange, theatre translations performed in Britain form key routes for international writers to be introduced to, and to influence, British audiences and theatre-makers. This article introduces Jack Thorne's 2017 adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, performed at the Old Vic Theatre in London, as a case study to trace how British theatre practitioners and institutions frame and utilise German texts and playwrights to construct an image of German (theatrical) culture in Britain. I will focus on institutional practice in the first instance, tracing how the Old Vic Theatre framed this production as appealing to two different ‘crowds’ and how Woyzeck relates to the Old Vic's stated institutional aims. This will be combined with performance and textual analysis that draws out the ways in which the production thematises borders and cultural difference. While theatre in translation can be seen as a bridge between different national cultures, I ultimately argue that this Woyzeck adaptation highlights, and indeed propagates, divisions between British and German (theatrical) cultures.

This chapter examines poetic works by the Swiss-German performance poet Nora-Eugenie Gomringer that draw on monsters as a conceptual lens to engage with experiences of vulnerable subjects, that is, those that have experienced harm or violence or are considered especially susceptible to these risks. The anthology Monster Morbus Moden (2013–17), with its initial collection Monster Poems (2013), reflects poetically on how female subjects and their bodies, which are conventionally represented as weak, are simultaneously and paradoxically considered dangerously non-normative and in need of policing. Gomringer explores how this paradox emerges from the interplay of textual and media surfaces, institutional logic and intersubjective power imbalances. The author employs an experimental mix of intertextual, intermedial and performative strategies that draws attention to the embodied and culturally iterative nature of such subject constructions. Putting emphasis on visualising and voicing victimisation, these works can be seen to probe to what extent a monstrous poeticisation of such experiences might shift stereotyping scopic regimes that produce the conditions for the widespread sexual violence against women or curtail reproductive freedoms. This experimentation, this article argues, seeks to establish awareness around the potential mobility of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ that has also been raised in recent feminist discussions.

In the Third Reich, ideas about Heimat became entwined with racial fantasies about blood and soil. This article investigates the dynamics and consequences of this development based on a study of the kinship network of Annemarie and Heinrich Brenzinger from Freiburg (Breisgau). The Brenzingers subscribed to a ‘völkisch’ worldview which conceptualised Heimat as a refuge for kinship groups connected to their locality through lineage. While völkisch groups assisted the Nazi regime in amplifying a fascistic discourse which predated the dictatorship, they also influenced the culture of the Third Reich according to their own ideas. The Nazi regime accepted their activities as part of a transformation of society which required civil engagement. A contrasting reading of Heimat is found in the letters of the Jewish members of this kinship network who were forced from their homeland. It is further elucidated by émigré writers who carefully avoided the völkisch aspects of the Heimat narrative and employed alternative definitions of belonging. By historicising the concepts of Heimat contained in the family collection of the Brenzingers, this article sheds light on the narrowing of the Heimat discourse in Nazi Germany and recovers some of the marginalised voices that resisted it.

In G. E Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779) Muslims are represented alongside Jews and Christians. These relationships are framed in terms of shared human morality and the shared biology of family, expressed through physical resemblance, rather than through similarities or differences of faith. Ultimately, it is the biological fact of consanguine family, not religion, which forms the basis of future human relationships. The Early Romantic Novalis, by contrast, sketches a figurative, interfaith family in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801). This accommodates Christians and Muslims within a universal model of ‘aesthetic’ human religiosity, which nonetheless allows each faith to maintain distinctive, even mutually conflicting beliefs, and thus envisions a more pluralistic unity. Modelling interfaith relationships around familial similarities offers a tempting alternative to the mutual alienation and ‘othering’ of critical Orientalism, although this approach can fixate upon normative characteristics and deflect attention from the distinctiveness of differing faiths. Both writers locate their Muslim characters within differing trajectories of historical progress: for Lessing, humanity's future is grounded in a common humanity rooted in shared biology, with Islam rendered incidental or obscure, whereas Novalis envisions a pluralistic, multi-perspectival future, marked by shifting, re-imaginable familial relationships, within which Muslims can retain core aspects of their faith.

The theologian imagines the imaginative life of the Christian – a life of enviable vividness – through a tactful gesture towards the limits of his own religious imagination. We are drawn to picture the fervent believer in the bodily expression of his devotion, in which a mental image of God as man provides grist for his spiritual longing and a bridge between earthly and divine. But the devotion of the Christian – for whom this bridge is no imaginative tool, but a reality – surpasses imagination.

Kermani's book is made up of a set of attempts towards an understanding of a religious and cultural other: the energetically and sometimes grotesquely visual Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox, of central and southern Europe. Through describing the experience of viewing works of Christian art, Kermani, a Muslim, enters into its aesthetic life – a life that is not detached from belief, but intertwined with it. Thanks to this book and his other writing and speeches, Kermani has become a key representative of a varied body of contemporary German thought which has critically examined ideas of religious dialogue and toleration, particularly since the first decades of the twenty-first century when a straightforward picture of secularisation showed itself to be inadequate.2 What distinguishes the work of Kermani from the philosophically, politically and sociologically oriented approaches which characterise this thought is his emphasis on the aesthetic and imaginative aspects of belief. It is these aspects that this special number of German Life and Letters wishes to address. The following articles draw on 250 years of German literature, across prose fiction, poetry, drama and the essay, to examine the way writers have drawn on the imagination – or have made demands on their readers’ imaginations – in presenting and exploring religious difference. In so doing, they challenge simplistic notions of dialogue – between religions, within them, or between believers and the secular world. By bringing attention to the imagination, the articles foreground the creative and transformative potential of both art and religion, as well as the limits and dangers of the imagination in acts of interreligious engagement.

This special number thus contributes to the growing field of literature and religion within German Studies. In its focus on the imagination it throws down a challenge to the model of interreligious dialogue which seeks to find commonalities or parallels, a feature seen in initiatives such as the ‘House of One’, a multi-religious place of worship in Berlin Mitte, which explicitly calls on the doctrinal similarities of the three monotheistic faiths, scriptural overlaps and shared figures.3 This emphasis is often unhelpfully simplistic. It presupposes not only a similar attitude to the alleged commonalities, such as scripture, but also towards what a religion is, and where the boundaries of each religion, or what counts as religious, might lie.

This article will examine the representation of religion in Anna Seghers’ radio play Der Prozess der Jeanne d'Arc zu Rouen 1431 (1937) and Bertolt Brecht's subsequent adaptation of this text for the stage (1952). While religiosity is central to the identity of the medieval heroine, Seghers chooses to communicate this feature to modern audiences in a ‘lacunary’ way that sees Jeanne refusing to elaborate on the details of her belief throughout the play. The protagonist's faith creates a distance from contemporary listeners and spectators as well as from characters within the text, but when absolute commitment to her private belief results in Jeanne's execution, this moves the people at large to rebel against their oppressors. Thus Seghers’ Jeanne emerges as a figure of political resistance who draws on her private faith to bring about social change. In Brecht, the voices that move Jeanne to withstand oppressive forces are revealed to be those of the people rather than an expression of the divine. For Seghers and Brecht, the twentieth-century relevance of Jeanne's characteristic religiosity, depicted differently by each author, lies in the political transformation which it can inspire both within the text and outside it.

Navid Kermani's and Feridun Zaimoglu's engagements as Muslims with Christian art reveal the possibilities and limitations of aesthetic experiences of the divine beyond all doctrinal divides. Although Kermani's own research into the aesthetic dimension of Islam highlights the potential for art to offer spiritual insight, his rejection of some Christian imagery, especially of the crucifix, in his book Ungläubiges Staunen: Über das Christentum (2015), suggests this potential has limits which are not only matters of subjective taste but also epistemological barriers that are difficult to overcome. However, some of Kermani's interpretations lead to a syncretic understanding of Christian and Islamic ideas and aesthetics, pointing towards new notions of the divine. Similarly, Zaimoglu's series of contemporary icons featuring Jesus and other Biblical figures opens up spiritual possibilities beyond religious divides through their ambiguous links to Christianity and Islam. This distinction between an experience of the divine across religious boundaries and its failure can be theorised through Jean-Luc Marion's understanding of the ‘icon’ and the ‘idol’ respectively, whereby the former returns the viewer's gaze and unleashes a destabilising openness to the sacred, whereas the latter involves the dominant gaze of the viewer and reinforces what they already know.

This article investigates portrayals of traditional Judaism and observant Jews in writings by assimilated German-Jewish authors. It thus explores notions projected onto traditional Jews – and particularly the Jewish body – as elements immanent to Jewish cultural production. At the centre of the enquiry are Heinrich Heine's Hebräische Melodien (1851), Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1902) and Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927). These writings construct speakers or narrators who endeavour to depart from traditional Judaism while at the same time questioning the feasibility of this effort. Following this dynamic, the article proposes that Anthony Giddens’ notion of self-identity can elucidate the pre-occupation with the body in modern German-Jewish literature. This preoccupation illustrates individuals’ internalisation of social norms as well as their active rewriting of these same norms.

This essay investigates the German ex-Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) and his 1920s work on religious conversion from Paul, Augustine and Francis to writers and poets in modernity. This intense engagement was rooted in Ball's own radical conversion, or ‘re-conversion’, to an austere form of the Catholicism of his childhood in 1920, just a few years after breaking with the Dada movement he had helped found in Zurich in 1916. In letters, books, his edited diaries and essays such as ‘Die religiöse Konversion’ of 1925, Ball wrestled with the phenomenon of conversion. He traced it in religious culture, monasticism, psychiatry and politics. This article explores Ball's imaginative emphasis on the condition of chaos that precedes resolution into ‘order’ in the convert. It considers his model of conversion not only as salvific but also as remedial and therapeutic. Further, it interrogates his connection of conversion with the breakdown of language in mysticism and in Dada. Ball's intensive study of the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and others provided much of the epistemological ground for this work. More provocative was his imagined possibility of collective national ‘conversion’ to Catholicism – for the whole of Germany.