Monatshefte
Volume 94, Number 2, Summer 2002 Table of Contents
Texts and Documents
Günter Kunert
Aus dem Big Book
Günter Kunert needs no introduction; he has been featured repeatedly in “Texts and Documents.” The notes—observations, considerations, reflections, etc.—here published for the first time are excerpts from his “unendliche Notizengeschichte,” or Big Book, as he likes to label this monumental work in progress. Someday, he will, drawing on it, put together “etwas Bibelartiges,” he says. We all shall, I trust, be looking forward to this publication. (RG) (In German)
Articles
Ernst Ralf Hintz
The Psychology of Paradox in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliûr
Abstract:
Literary scholarship predicates a renewed interest in psychology on an essential differentiation: from a modern perspective, the inner person as likely to deviate from the external person—the internal from the external persona, whereas from a medieval viewpoint, one expects congruence. Konrad exploits the threat of deviation to employ the psychology of paradox as a rhetorical device in Partonopier und Meliûr—a work permeated with paradoxical themes. This study evaluates the significance of the traditional medieval understanding of paradox in Konrad’s work by juxtaposing Partonopier’s individual belief in Meliûr to that of his unbelieving family and society. Only when he succumbs to the fears of the unbelieving world does he doubt what his lady professes to be with what she truly is, and must atone for his lack of faith. (ERH)
Christoph Steppich
Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Wace’s Brut: Secondary Sources for Hartmann’s Erec?
Abstract:
The Erec of Hartmann von Aue [HE] contains a list with names not found in the much smaller rosters of “Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table” in the surviving manuscripts of Erec et Enide of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann’s French source. The article suggests that this “expanded list” in HE is neither a later interpolation nor the product of Hartmann’s own free imagination, but an early compilation of names from pre-existing texts. Although some of this onomastic material seems irretrievably flawed in the only surviving almost complete manuscript of HE, it becomes evident, by close text comparison, that probably more than a dozen of the names can be traced to the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth and/or Wace’s Brut, the majority of them to a guest list for Arthur’s coronation, offered in both works. But was it really Hartmann who first incorporated these names into the Erec story? (CJS)
Lilian Friedberg
“Verbrechen, die ich meine. . .”: Manners of Death as Thickly Descriptive Translation of Todesarten
Abstract:
Since the 1995 publication of the “Todesarten”-Projekt, Bachmann scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the Todesarten, but the topic of the term’s translation has yet to be addressed. Because existing translations leave realms of socially significant data unaccounted for, they fall short of the mark in representing the density of allusion in Bachmann’s use of “Todesarten.” In attempting to replicate the distinct quality Bachmann lends the term, they eliminate the traces of discourses and established codes speaking through it. Against the backdrop of medical and forensic implications inherent in the terms “manner of death” and “Todesart,” I apply a “thickly descriptive” approach and argue for “Manners of Death” as a translation. Reading the texts in the context of then-current political developments and discourses, this analysis inaugurates, through translation, a re-reading of the source text that focuses less on the way that people in this society die and more on through what agency they are killed. (LF)
Julia Hell
The Melodrama of Illegal Identifications, or, Post-Holocaust Authorship in Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl
Abstract
This article explores post-Holocaust authorship in Uwe Johnson¹s monumental novel published between 1970 and 1983. The argument revolves around the novel’s narrative voice. Close readings of this hybrid voice trace it to a form of feminine masquerade that is related to a crisis of public authorship. The article then traces the (illegal) identifications involved in this feminine masquerade. The overall goal of the project is an investigation into the connection between post-fascist masculinity, authorship, and the possibility of writing under the gaze of the other. (JH)
Book Reviews
Andress, Reinhard, Protokolliteratur in der DDR. Der dokumentierte Alltag (Thomas C. Fox)
Atkins, Robert and Martin Kane, Retrospect and Review: Aspects of the Literature of the GDR 1976–1990 (Karl-Heinz Schoeps)
Berbig, Roland, unter Mitarbeit von Bettina Hartz, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine (Frederick Betz)
Bower, Kathrin M., Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer (Jennifer Bjornstad)
Budde, Bernhard, Aufklärung als Dialog. Wielands antithetische Prosa (Monika Nenon)
Carr, Gilbert J., Karl Kraus / Otto Stoessl. Briefwechsel 1902–1925 (Leo Lensing)
Denham, Scott, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (Richard J. Rundell)
Dowden, Stephen D., ed., A Companion to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (Richard Koc)
Downing, Eric, Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction (Peter C. Pfeiffer)
Dyck, Joachim und Jutta Sandstede, Quellenbibliographie zur Rhetorik, Homiletik und Epistolographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Sabine Mödersheim)
Eberhardt, Otto, Eichendorffs Taugenichts. Quellen und Bedeutungshintergrund. Untersuchungen zum poetischen Verfahren Eichendorffs (Egon Schwarz)
Eldridge, Richard, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (James M. McGlathery)
Eshel, Amir, Zeit der Zäsur. Jüdische Dichter im Angesicht der Shoah (Kathrin Bower)
Fischer, Barbara, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori. Zur deutsch-jüdischen Rezeption von Nathan der Weise (Peter R. Erspamer)
Grawe, Christian und Helmuth Nürnberger, Fontane-Handbuch (Frederick Betz)
Greiner, Bernhard, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Experimente zum “Fall” der Kunst (Dirk Oschmann)
Gross, Steffen W., Felix Aestheticus. Die Ästhetik als Lehre vom Menschen. Zum 250. Jahrestag des Erscheinens von Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Aesthetica (Heinrich Clairmont)
Lau, Jörg, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Ein öffentliches Leben (Reinhold Grimm)
Lehmann, Annette Jael, Im Zeichen der Shoah. Aspekte der Dichtungs- und Sprachkrise bei Rose Ausländer und Nelly Sachs (Kathrin Bower)
Lorey, Christoph and John L. Plews, eds., Queering the Canon. Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture (Thomas Freeman)
Lutze, Peter C., Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (Richard Langston)
Martens, Lorna, The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic (Margy Gerber)
Menges, Karl, Regine Otto und Wulf Koepke, Herder Jahrbuch/Herder Yearbook 2000: Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert (Martin Kagel)
Müller-Zettelmann, Eva, Lyrik und Metalyrik. Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtkunst (John Pizer)
Reimer, Robert C., Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens (Gerd Gemünden)
Rock, David, Jurek Becker. A Jew who became a German? (Thomas Jung)
Sauermann, Eberhard and Hermann Zwerschina, Georg Trakl: Sämtliche Werke und Briefwechsel, Innsbrucker Ausgabe (Laura A. McLary)
Schönfeld, Christiane, ed., Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature (Patrice Petro)
Spalek, John M. and Sandra H. Hawrylchak, Lion Feuchtwanger. A Bibliographic Handbook (Guy Stern)
Widdig, Bernd, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Christian Rogowski)
Books Received
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