GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS最新文献

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.

This article examines the widespread assumption that the protagonist of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers chooses to live in ‘Wahlheim’. It is argued that this assumption cannot be reconciled with a close reading of the textual evidence. At no stage can Wahlheim be shown to be Werther's sole or main residence. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he ever resides there at all.