Heinrich Heine has long been recognized as an early admirer of Goethe's Divan. In Die romantische Schule, he issues an enthusiastic endorsement that helped popularize Goethe's late poetry in the ...French-speaking world, and in his own poetic production, above all in Buch der Lieder, he repeatedly orients himself eastwards in terms of settings and designs. This article considers the language of flowers in Traumbilder I, the allegorical resonances of the Orient in the famous 'Fichtenbaum' poem, and the mirroring of Goethe's Hafiz in the concluding poems of Nordsee II, 'Fragen', 'Der Phönix', and 'Im Hafen'. Throughout the cycles of his collection, Heine embarks on West-Eastern voyages after Goethe.
The article considers Goethe's engagement with the doctrines of Franz Joseph Gall, the founder of phrenology. Using the sketch of their first face-to-face meeting in the Tag- und Jahreshefte of 1805 ...as a guide, it argues that Goethe views phrenology through the lens of his scientific methodology and reshapes it accordingly, when needed. In particular, he seeks to render Gall's account of the skull as the brain's imprint into a phenomenon worthy of extensive observation and description but still open to interpretation. Moreover, Goethe immediately relates Gall's anatomical structuring of the brain to the concept of metamorphosis, thus paving the way to integrating organology into his morphology. On occasion, Goethe also succumbs to the allure of the skull that craniology has created, such as when he agrees to give material self-evidence in the form of a face mask.
The writer, scientist, philosopher, and radical democrat Georg Büchner (1813-1837) occupies a unique place in the cultural legacy of the German-speaking countries. Born into an epoch of inevitable, ...yet arrested historical transition, Büchner produced a small but exceptionally rich body of work. This collection of essays in English and in German considers the full spectrum of his writings, the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote, the dramas Danton's Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and the fragmentary narrative Lenz, as well as the letters, the philosophical lectures on Descartes and Spinoza, and the scientific texts. The essays examine connections between these works, study texts in detail, debate ways of editing them, and trace their reception in contemporary literature and film. The novel readings presented here not only celebrate Büchner on the eve of his bicentenary birthday but also insert this untimely figure into discussions of the revolution-restoration dynamic and realism in poetics and politics.
Between 1791 and 1793, Goethe became increasingly concerned with the upheaval unfolding to the West of Weimar, responding to it with a series of plays, Der Groß-Cophta, Die Aufgeregten, and Der ...Bürgergeneral, which transpose the revolution to rural Germany and transform it into comedy. Contemporary audiences as well as modern critics have by-and-large shunned the plays. This article makes a case for a reassessment, arguing that the comedies may be provincial in setting, schematic in script, and minimalistic in cast but pointedly identify the imagination as the primary force pressing for political change. Goethe's comedies of the revolution respond to this constellation by dethreefold—nouncing revolutionary fantasies as a scam created by demagogues to fool the gullible; by exposing the theatricality inherent in the revolutionary undertaking; and by branding the apostles of liberty as tyrants in waiting. As Goethe, in each play, pits the lord of the land against a contender, he not only catalogues the sources of sovereign authority but also establishes a disturbing parallel between the sovereign and the con-artist, thus pointing to the foundation of sovereignty in fiction.
KAFKA'S LITERARY COMMUNITIES Fortmann, Patrick
The Modern language review,
10/2009, Letnik:
104, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In the winter of 1911–12 Franz Kafka developed a programmatic concept of community against the backdrop of a double frame, formed, on the one hand, by Martin Buber's Cultural Zionism and Itzhak ...Löwy's Jewish folk culture and, on the other, by the opposing outlooks of Max Brod and Karl Kraus on German-Jewish literature. Kafka responded to these encounters with two sets of texts, each constructing community by way of literature, as a community based on the circulation of writing in the 'Schema für kleinere Litteraturen' as well as a community resting on performance and speech in the 'Einleitungsvortrag über Jargon'.
