GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

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.

The early reception of German letters in London can be better understood through a close reading of the bookseller Constantin Geisweiler's short-lived journal The German Museum (1800–1801). The 1790s have been described as an era of literary ‘Germanomania’, as numerous translations of German works appeared for the first time in English. By 1800, however, an increasingly pejorative assessment of the supposedly pro-Jacobin and atheistic character of German culture had entrenched itself among British critics. Geisweiler and his co-contributors responded to this through wide-ranging analyses of German literature and philosophy. Although Geisweiler's enterprise was, commercially speaking, a failure, this article argues that The German Museum was nevertheless significant for breaking out of the rigid mould of ‘Schauer-, Ritter- and Räuberromane’ that had superficially characterised earlier British interest in German culture. This article will argue that the period around 1800 was a particularly febrile one for processes of Anglo-German cultural transfer due to the consolidation of transnational networks of booksellers, printers and publishers – networks whose activities would be severely compromised following Napoleon's Continental Blockade of 1806. In the final analysis, nascent British ideas of ‘Germany’ at the turn of the nineteenth century can be more robustly historicised through a scrutinous reading of Geisweiler's journal.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke has traditionally been associated with the notion of ‘great men’ in history and seen as a naïve personalist who concentrated agency in the hands of a select few heroic individuals. This article advances an alternative interpretation of Treitschke's historical writings, suggesting that the oft-repeated axiom ‘great men make history’ is overwhelmingly unsatisfactory in capturing his stance on historical subjecthood. Rather, Treitschke's historiography is shown to evince a profound concern with ideal, structural and material factors, upon which the will of the heroic individual supervenes and without which their actions cannot be understood. This article then contextualises Treitschke's work within the historiographic landscape of nineteenth-century Germany, investigating why the construct of the heroic individual appeared uniquely appealing even as it became ever less plausible. This development is explained above all with reference to increasing historiographic narrativisation, historical constructivism and anxieties around socioeconomic change.

British author and literary scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar in 1948 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, makes significant contributions to the memory and critique of German colonialism in East Africa and its aftermath both in Tanzania and in Germany. This study examines Gurnah's novels Paradise (1994) and Afterlives (2020) for their representation of German imperial rule and its impact on Swahili society and culture and its place in the Indian Ocean universe, World War I in East Africa, the fate of askari soldiers in Weimar and Nazi Germany, and the memory and postmemory of German colonialism through to the 1960s. Gurnah's literary modelling of African experiences and memories of German colonialism is discussed in Anglo-German comparative perspective with reference to postcolonial memory discourses in contemporary German literature, including Afro-German life-writing.

This article proposes that the eighteenth-century novel Siebenkäs contains the formulation of an aesthetic theory that embraces same-sex desire. The novel's author, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, still relatively unknown among literary scholars today, uses the myth of Narcissus as an aesthetic blueprint for the novel. In doing so, he appears to comply with the aesthetic conventions espoused by his German Romantic peers, many of whom considered self-contemplation to be a prerequisite for gaining access to the Absolute, a term that designates an unconditioned totality that was dear to authors, artists and philosophers at the time. However, the article suggests that Jean Paul's true purpose is to employ the myth to subversive ends. In particular, the author builds upon the myth's homoerotic underpinnings – largely (but not entirely) forgotten in the eighteenth century – to articulate a theory of aesthetics that no longer seeks to efface homosexual desire. The aesthetic worldview that emerges from this process is one that foregrounds imitation as a fundamental building-block of queer aesthetics and that, in contraposition to some of the dominant aesthetic thinking of the age, advocates the legitimacy of an aesthetics that celebrates desire rather than suppressing it.

The present text is concerned with figures of unusual gender in two poetic texts by Georg Trakl, namely ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ and ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, each of which features the same violation of German grammar at a crucial point. The first text starts and ends with a scene of a boy recognising his sister's image in the mirror, which will be read as a specular identification that transgresses the norms of gender assignment. This transgression will be further illuminated by Lee Edelman's No Future, a text that analyses the need of the heterosexual family to reproduce itself unchanged, and Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage which discusses specular identification as a prerequisite for the possibility of speech. In reading ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, the issue of silence, which is both thematised and performed by the poem, will come to the forefront. The bi-gender figure appearing in the last lines will be understood as being dependent on this silence to appear, contrasting the way the protagonist of ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ is silenced by his family. Both these figures will therefore be read as transgressing against related, though not identical, norms of gender in ways that can only be expressed in a poetical language.

This essay follows-up on a reminiscence written by Leonard Forster for GLL in 1988. Forster was the editor of The Penguin Book of German Verse, first published in 1957. The anthology was intended for a post-war British readership, particularly in schools, that seemed, despite everything, to have preserved an affectionate admiration for German poetry. Forster's selections often appear to have served as deliberate correctives to the ideological preferences of the previous generation's National Socialist critics, some of which had also resonated with several British Germanists. Shortly after publication, Forster received a letter from ‘Bernward Michaelsen’, who objected at great (though courteous) length to many of the anthology's inclusions. Forster and fellow German scholar S. H. Steinberg judged the writer to be an elderly German schoolteacher whose conservative literary taste had been formed after World War I. Forster's equally courteous and detailed response to Michaelsen's criticisms received no answer. What they did not know (although Steinberg came close to guessing) was that Michaelsen was actually Bernward Vesper, the eighteen-year-old son of Will Vesper, a notorious National Socialist editor and poet. Bernward's political trajectory from extreme right to left after his father's death was not unique for his generation but, unknown to Forster in 1988, had long since ended in tragedy.