GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

Proclaiming ‘every generation has its Winnetou’, German network RTL ushered in the return of Winnetou to German television in 2016 with a big-budget film trilogy, Winnetou – Der Mythos Lebt. This article analyses the Winnetou film trilogy in dialogue with Karl May's original 1893 novels and the 1960s West German westerns using the concepts of settler time and white innocence. It brings a critical focus on race that is lacking in much existing scholarship on May, showing how whiteness functions in the Winnetou franchise as a structuring principle. In the new Winnetou, the blood brotherhood between the white German Old Shatterhand and the Mescalero Apache Winnetou becomes a way of forging connections not only across cultures but across temporal lines, allowing for the imposition of settler time onto Indigenous persons and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and survival in order to centre a narrative of German innocence and reinscribe fantasies of white conquest in the American West.

Ungeduld des Herzens (1939) is the only novel published during Stefan Zweig's lifetime. Written between 1936 and 1938, the book's genesis coincided with key events in Austrian and European history, including the mass displacement of Jews from Germany and the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria with Nazi-Germany. A closer inspection of the changes from the first to the tenth and final manuscript version of the novel indicates that Zweig started out with the intention to write a psychological novella about a tragic love story. As work on the text progressed, however, Zweig added characters and plot elements which appear to comment on the political developments of the time. In this article, I will argue that the revisions Zweig made while he was re-writing the novel add an important political subtext that aligns with the ethical objectives of his later exile works.

East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's four-part documentary Piloten im Pyjama (1968) focuses on interviews with downed US bomber pilots who had been captured by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War. The documentary draws explicit connections between the American presence in Vietnam and Germany's recent Nazi past, thus creating a memorial link between East German and Vietnamese citizens. This article analyses the connections drawn between Nazism and the Vietnam War throughout the course of the documentary, ultimately arguing that the film is not simply an anti-Western condemnation of imperialism, but also a work of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg) which creates a space in which questions of responsibility, duty, and guilt can be confronted from the standpoint of a perpetrator collective.

This article explores the handling of time and care in two works by Ingeborg Bachmann: the short story ‘Das Gebell’ and the uncompleted novel Das Buch Franza. It argues that care and time are linked in the works, in a manner that echoes the thinking of Lisa Baraitser (Enduring Time). ‘Das Gebell’ offers a critique of masculinist models of time and puts forward a feminist ethics of care. Das Buch Franza points up the difficulty and ambivalence involved in care, as it traces the complex dynamic between a brother and a sister. Both texts explore the fascism that lurks beneath heterosexual relationships, in line with Karen R. Achberger's view that one theme runs throughout Bachmann's works: ‘the constant state of war’. This war is gendered in complex ways. Through her works, Bachmann complicates and enhances theories of submission and domination such as that developed by Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love), the texts themselves forming sites of protest and transformation.

The article discusses aspects of the dialectics of genius cults in the nineteenth century, using examples of Mozart's reception: the unveiling of the Salzburg memorial statue in 1842, Franz Grillparzer's texts on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his son Franz Xaver, as well as the artist's novella Der arme Spielmann. The consolidation and popularisation of genius discourse in the genius cults of post-Romanticism exerted unprecedented if latent pressure on producers of art in the period: the cults around prominent figures make great art into an unattainable exception. The article investigates how Franz Xaver Mozart and Grillparzer reacted to this dilemma.

Retrospective accounts of the life and works of Robert Burns offer us examples of how ‘genius’ functioned in the nineteenth century, not only as a concept of inspired, natural authorship but also as a way of establishing and stabilising class identity and belonging. This is particularly illuminating in Burns’ case as he was writing at a time when the working class (E. P. Thompson) was constituting itself – he and his poetry played an active part in this process of becoming self-aware. The article analyses Burns and Burns’ reception against a background of the conflicting views on literature held within the social democrat movement in the late nineteenth century, as exemplified by the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, which became a daily paper in 1895. Josef Strasser, an important contributor at this time, defined ‘genius’ in terms of its mass valency, as a class phenomenon, inverting Schopenhauer's opposition between ‘Genie’ and ‘Herdentier’. In the course of the institutionalisation of the workers’ movement and contrary to the dominant variant of the term, genius thus proves to be a deliberate effort against the threatening assimilation of proletarian culture and the bourgeoisie.

Die Rezeption des Lebens und der Werke von Robert Burns gibt ein Beispiel davon, dass ‘Genie’ im 19. Jahrhundert nicht nur ein Konzept inspirierter, natürlicher Autorschaft repräsentiert, sondern auch eine Möglichkeit darstellt, Klassenidentität und Zugehörigkeit zu etablieren und zu stabilisieren. Burns ist im Zusammenhang dieser konkurrierenden Geniebegriffe ein besonders aufschlussreicher Fall; er schrieb zu einer Zeit, in der sich die Arbeiterklasse (E. P. Thompson) erst konstituierte und hatte mit seiner Dichtung aktiv an diesem Prozess der Selbstbewusstwerdung teil. Der Artikel analysiert Burns und die Burns-Rezeption vor dem Hintergrund der kontroversen Auffassungen über Literatur innerhalb der sozialdemokratischen Bewegung im späten 19. Jahrhundert, wie sie am Beispiel der Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung, die 1895 zur Tageszeitung wurde, deutlich wird. Josef Strasser, ein Vertreter des radikalen Flügels innerhalb der Sozialdemokratie und ein wichtiger Mitarbeiter der Zeitung, definiert ‘Genie’ im Sinne seiner Massenvalenz als ein Klassenphänomen und kehrt damit Schopenhauers Gegensatz zwischen ‘Genie’ und ‘Herdentier’ um. Anders als in der zeitgenössisch dominanten individualistischen Variante des Begriffs erweist sich Genie so als Einsatz gegen die im Zuge der Institutionalisierung der Arbeiterbewegung drohende Assimilation proletarischer Kultur an die Bourgeoisie.