The following article is concerned with the life and the literary work of Margareta Klopstock, a figure commonly overshadowed by her more prominent husband. Previous research has usually interpreted Margareta Klopstock’s contributions to Der Messias as mere assistance work (›Hilfsarbeit‹) and labeled her Hinterlaßne Schriften (posthumously 1759) as epigonal. This study, in contrast, argues for an understanding of her marriage as a literary cooperation and attempts the very first systematical description of the author’s work as a devotional poetics in its (...) own right. Via transcription and dictation, Margareta Klopstock was not only, and in various ways, involved in her husband’s writing; more crucially, she created a space of literary-critical resonance for F. G. Klopstock’s works, and made efforts to introduce Der Messias into the anglophone sphere. In turn, typical for her own writing are relations to enlightenment theology and contemporary English literature (Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Samuel Richardson), to Der nordische Aufseher (polemics against the freethinkers), and women’s religious education. Thus, the article shows that the verdicts of secondariness gravely underestimate both the historical significance of Margareta Klopstock and her literary legacy. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin’s treatise »The Life of Students« (1914/15) is not only an insightful document of the youth culture movement, but also an important philosophical contribution to the discussion on the idea and task of the university. In his critique of the contemporary university, the 22-year-old student develops the counter-concept of a future university that, rejecting all heteronomous functionalizations, finds its purpose in radical and risky intellectual work. This vision is rooted in the strict dichotomy of study and career, the origins (...) of which lie in German educational idealism around 1800, and in the concept of creative Eros that refers back to Plato. The promise is to restore the productive synthesis of spirit, Eros and youth under the sign of the youth movement.After a commentary on this little-noticed work (I.), the article outlines the contemporary context and the basic lines of the history of ideas between Kant, Fichte and Nietzsche, to which Benjamin refers with his concept (II.). The focus, however, is, following the concept of constellation research, on the critical comparison with the university concepts that have been developed between 1917 and 1923 by Max Weber, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (III.–V.). Although it was not a debate in the true sense, the reconstruction of this constellation in the history of ideas nevertheless allows to analyze the contradictions and deficits, but also the cognitive potential and the possible topicality of Benjamin’s treatise in a broader context. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der Literatur ist lange über Sinn und Funktion des wirkungsvoll inszenierten Spiels der Ringe in Lessings 1767 erschienenem Lustspiel Minna von Barnhelm sowie der Ringe, die im Zentrum der von Nathan erzählten Parabel im 1779 verfassten Drama stehen, debattiert worden. Allerdings fehlt bisher eine eingehende Erörterung der Frage, inwiefern die jeweiligen Ringe eine vergleichbare Rolle in den beiden Werken haben. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht das Lustspiel und das dramatische Gedicht, um zu zeigen, dass die jeweils verhandelten Ringe als Erinnerungs-Zeichen verstanden (...) werden sollen und dass die Vielschichtigkeit der Ring-Thematik eine grundsätzliche Ambivalenz in Lessings Verständnis von Erinnerung an den Tag legt. Jeder Ring stellt dementsprechend sowohl eine Wiederkehr zu vergangenen Wirklichkeiten und Versprechen dar als auch jene historischen Brüche und Veränderungen, die eine solche Wiederkehr verhindern. Darüber hinaus repräsentieren die Ringe der beiden Dramen den von Aleida Assmann geschilderten und sowohl emanzipatorischen als auch schwierigen Übergang von einem von der Memoria-Tradition geerbten und auf dem Prinzip einer Rückholung archivierter Inhalte basierenden Gedächtnismodell hin zu einem modernen Erinnerungsmodell gegenwartsbasierter Umformung und Erneuerung (Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses [1999]). (shrink)

The themes of will and willing form a central but so far largely overlooked level of discourse in Hartmann’s Gregorius. At the heart of this discourse is the opposition between human and divine will, which is negotiated in terms of the tension between controllability and uncontrollability. To this end, Hartmann’s legendary romance takes recourse to a narrative pattern characteristic of, among others, the Latin legend of St. Brendan. Structuring the text and plot of Gregorius, it serves to present the protagonist’s (...) voyages on the water as a surrender to the will of God. When the protagonist decides to leave the monastery island, however, the pattern is conspicuously deviated from. It is through this deviation that the second instance of incest emerges as a personally attributable result of the protagonist’s attitude toward his creaturely will – which requires correction – rather than as guilt in the moral-theological sense. In Hartmann, a quasi-mystical theology of the will is molded into a narrative. In clear contrast to its French source, his adaptation thus reflects on the limits of human self-determination and controllability from an immanent perspective, the relationship to the world, as well as a transcendental perspective, the relationship to God. The prologue and Gregorius’s tablet suggest that Hartmann’s legend also deals with uncontrollability on a meta-level, as it ponders the problem of how the transcendent can be represented through narrative. (shrink)

The article argues that narrative research with an interest in the social imaginary should focus on the fictional doubling of the communicative situation. With reference to an exemplary text from postmigrant literature, it is shown how, in an asymmetrical situation, narrative apostrophe is used to challenge dominant groups and to encourage reflection on their social positionality.

This article examines the widespread diagnosis of a »crisis of rhetoric« around 1800 from the hitherto largely neglected perspective of the sermon. Four exemplary cases are used to show how rhetoric continues and transforms itself. Franz Theremin reaffirms the function of rhetoric and represents the largely unbroken continuity of rhetorical knowledge in 19th century homiletics and preaching practice. Johann G. Fichte develops the format of a philosophical sermon supposed to serve precisely as a propaedeutic of critical philosophy, which is in (...) itself anti-rhetorical. Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher develops a new conception of the sermon and also a highly influential conception of religion from the problem of the communicability of religious knowledge. Karl P. Moritz proclaims a religion of art in the form of a sermon and narrates the comical failure of this proclamation, thus exposing the very limits of a sacralization of art. Through these four case studies we can gain a more precise understanding of the »crisis of rhetoric« and envision an interdisciplinary research on the sermon in which literary studies and theology would cooperate closely. (shrink)

The article deals with the polemical procedures in the constitution of the bourgeois-literary public sphere in the mid-18th century, exemplified by the work of the philosopher, literary critic and Lessing’s successor at the Berliner Literaturbriefe Thomas Abbt. His public-constitutive polemical practice is realized as theological polemics, as polemical classicism, as considerations about publicity and with a constant reflexive shift from strategic or ethical points of view. The theoretical basis of the study is a concept of polemics as a variable, non-dialogical (...) and public mode of speech with epistemic, aesthetic and political productivity and a strong reflexive tendency. (shrink)

Robert Walser’s short prose of the Berlin years is examined with respect to the acoustic performance of its characters. In the two volumes of Aufsätze and Geschichten, Walser shows a paradoxical poetic ideal of written orality which relates to his later narrative style in the decade of 1910. Although the Berlin prose is explicitly marked as textual and narrative, the foregrounded scene mostly contributes to a soundstage, that introduces acoustic effects of voices, talking modes, etc., so that telling is transformed (...) into voicing. (shrink)

The blank verse as ›unbound‹ verse has been the object of lively discussions about the freedom of poetry since its emergence in the Renaissance. The basis of these discussions is the status of rhyme. Its absence opens up new possibilities of representation. Against the fetters of rhyme, blank verse is increasingly stylised as a form of freedom in the 18th century, according to the thesis presented here. This article focuses on the discourses on tragic blank verse throughout Europe up to (...) 1800. It examines which poetological potentials are attributed to the form and the historical and political ideas associated with the rhymeless but classical verse. (shrink)

The article starts with a reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s aesthetics as a paradigmatic example of the logical-semantic aesthetics tradition following Leibniz, which has been marginalized in Germany. It ends with perspectives for a future reconstruction of post-Hegelian aesthetics in the light of the semantic problem that became virulent in the analytical philosophy of language and in linguistics in the early 20th century. As a result, a continuity becomes visible between the allegedly idealistic 19th century and the theoretical developments in the (...) wake of the linguistic turn that emphasize the irreducible linguistic character and sign structure of semantics. (shrink)

Günter Grass entschied sich bereits 1956 unter dem Eindruck von Adornos Analyse der Kultur nach dem Zivilisationsbruch Auschwitz für eine asketische, »graue« Sprache als Maßstab der Dichtung – eine Maxime, die für Paul Celan zu grundlegenden Entscheidungen für die Skelettierung seiner lyrischen Sprache führte. Der Austausch zwischen dem Autodidakten Grass und seinem »Lehrer« Celan hatte andererseits fundamentale Bedeutung für die Konzeption von Hundejahre als episches Korrelat zum Sprachkosmos des Lyrikers. Als »kommunizierende Gefäße« sind sie durch einen gemeinsamen Code miteinander verbunden, (...) den dieses Essay zu entschlüsseln versucht. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Schnitzler-Forschung hat gezeigt, dass die medizinischen und die literarischen Schriften des Schriftsteller-Arztes eng verflochten sind. Dennoch haben pharmakologische Problemstellungen, wie sie für die ärztliche Praxis der Moderne grundlegend sind, bislang nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit bei der Auseinandersetzung mit Schnitzlers Werk erfahren, obwohl sie dort immer wieder zentral werden. Ausgehend von einem Fund im Archiv des Pharmakonzerns Bayer – die Firma nahm Anstoß an der Verwendung des Schlafmittels Veronal in Fräulein Else – liest dieser Aufsatz Schnitzlers Novelle erstmals vor dem Hintergrund (...) der ›Veronal-Kultur‹ des frühen zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Dabei erweist sich, dass Fräulein Else auch eine Intervention in die Public Health-Diskurse seiner Zeit beinhaltet. (shrink)

Since antiquity, Western thinking about art has known and cultivated the myth of the artist as a unique (male) individual who produces marvellous things. This myth is fed, among other texts, by the Naturalis Historia (Natural History) of the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 AD). The last five volumes of this encyclopaedia are an essential source for our knowledge about ancient painting, sculpture, etc. Plenty of anecdotes deal with the value of artworks, with problems of mimesis and aesthetic judgement, (...) artistic rivalry, the relationship between artist and beholder, artist and political ruler, etc. For centuries, these minimal narratives have been repeated, retold and adapted to changing situations and interests, triggering theory and history of art. What has not been realised, however, is that they also open the way to a concept quite different from the well-known understanding: to art as a complex reciprocal exchange of gifts between more than two agents. Analysing two of the pertinent anecdotes (NH 35.86-87 and NH 35.140), the paper attempts to show the significance of agonistic gift giving in this art discourse. (shrink)

The question of how literary fiction is used for political and ideological propaganda involves both textual and contextual comparative analysis. Using recent discussions of the literary genre of prophecy, Mehtonen explores the case of a hitherto unexplored anonymous fictional publication from 1770, which became a literary sensation and was soon translated from German into Danish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Dutch. Mehtonen shows how this narrative – about the 106-year-old Swiss hermit Martin Zadeck, who presented on his deathbed in 1769 a (...) prophecy about the coming of a powerful united Northern Europe – was closely attached not only to emerging ideas of Europe and its transoceanic expansion after the Seven Years War (1756–1763), but also to topical trends in the utopian fiction of the nobility and military networks in the Northern European monarchies. Mehtonen concludes that the seemingly simple prophecy by Zadeck, often catalogued as »devotion literature«, in fact addressed multiple audiences and even clashing worldviews. The monarchic and colonialist ideas of the narrative appealed to royalist patriots; the legendary and mythological layers were immediately evident to readers familiar with the Rosicrucian and Hermetic underpinnings; the millenarian vision pleased the eschatological mindset of proponents of religious awakening movements; and, ultimately, the Zadecksche Gattung was food for enlightened critiques and philosophies concerning superstition. (shrink)

Der Beitrag nimmt Erich Auerbachs Postulat einer transnationalen Ideengeschichte als Ausgangspunkt, um aktuelle Potenziale einer ideenhistorisch geprägten Literaturwissenschaft zu prüfen. Einerseits ausgehend von der sozialgeschichtlichen bzw. sprachkritisch geprägten Neuausrichtung der Ideengeschichte, wie man sie mit dem Schlüsseljahr 1969 und den Namen Foucault und Skinner in Verbindung bringen kann, und andererseits vor dem Hintergrund ihrer kulturwissenschaftlichen Expansion lotet der Artikel die Möglichkeiten einer Ideengeschichte aus, die sich wieder stärker der Interpretation von Bedeutung, von Ideen als geistigen Tatsachen zuwendet. Dazu schlägt er (...) einen topisch-rhetorischen Begriff der Texthandlung vor, der es dem Leser gestattet, sich dem Autor als dem eklektischen Nutzer und Neuarrangeur verfügbaren Wissens zu nähern. Die Literaturwissenschaft könnte sich auf diese Weise als hermeneutisches Leitverfahren der Ideengeschichte empfehlen, mit dem der Stellenwert eines souveränen Lesersubjekts auch angesichts zur Unübersichtlichkeit neigenden Text-Kontext-Formationen aufrechterhalten werden kann. (shrink)