Academic literature on the topic 'Nature in literature. German literature German fiction'

The article deals with the works of German science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz (1848–1910). The article provides a brief description of the main themes and directions of the writer’s work. Lasswitz was the creator of the scientific tale genre (das wissenschaftliche Märchen), in which he had set the task of building new relationships between science and literature, nature and man, the animate particle and the cosmic whole. In accordance with the spirit of the fin de siècle era the scientific tale represented a new, post-positivist ideal of knowledge. The key theme of Lasswitz’s fiction was the search for extraterrestrial civilizations.Mars became for Lasswitz a place where the intelligent extraterrestrial beings have realized an ideal society in which ethics and technology are NOT in conflict. Lasswitz was not a neo-Kantian philosopher only, he was also an active popularizer of Kant’s philosophy. He was striving to create a Kantian utopia in literature. For Lasswitz Mars became the realization of this utopia. Also Lasswitz sought to give literary embodiment to the ideas of another philosopher, Gustav Theodor Fechner. Following his philosophy, Lasswitz develops environmental and existential issues of the coexistence of intelligent plants with humans. In Lasswitz’ story for children “The Escaped Flower” (1910), one can trace how in Lasswitz’ science fiction (scientific tale) the themes of the habitability of space (Mars), science and technology of the future interact with the ideas of Kant and Fechner.

Laurens De Vos examines the ways in which director Milo Rau incorporates the poetic and aesthetic techniques of alienation theorized and pioneered by German director Bertolt Brecht for purposes similar to but distinct from Brecht’s. Like Brecht, De Vos argues, Rau exploits the “cesura between actor and character” to highlight the nature of the theatrical event for purposes that are largely social, drawing attention to systems of power, privilege, and violence. De Vos posits that unlike Brecht, however, Rau does not use these techniques to draw attention to the constructedness of the theatrical event—instead, Rau seeks to make the representation itself real, blurring the line between fiction and reality to trouble and implicate the audience.

The article is a review of and a discussion with the recent monograph by Anna Juraschek, Die Rettung des Bildes im Wort. Bruno Schulz’ Bild-Idee in seinem prosaischen und bildnerischen Werk, Göttingen 2016. Juraschek has put forward the following thesis: alongside his own specific philosophy of language expressed in his narrative works and essays, Bruno Schulz also suggests a particular philosophy of image/picture, which he develops in his visual art. This “program” is not specified and may be reconstructed only by interpreting his graphic works; it is, however, corroborated by the poetics of Schulz’ stories. Juraschek regards the “word” and the “image” in Schulz as artistic entities, and emphasizes the visual nature of his fiction and the narrative qualities of his graphic works. She points at Schulz’s crossing of the boundaries between different arts and claims that the writer criticizes the very notion of mimesis (a statement that, according to the reviewer, may be questioned). Juraschek tries to reconstruct the main sources inspiring Schulz’s idea of image/picture: the classic European painting, German literature (i.e. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Joseph von Eichendorff), as well as German philosophers and cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin. According to the reviewer, there are three points that Juraschek’s study can contribute to Schulz studies. First, the German scholar succeeds in systematizing different kinds of verbo-visual relations and interactions in Schulz’s oeuvre. Second, she fully appreciates his graphic work which thus far seems to have been undervalued, especially by Polish scholars. Last but not least, Juraschek brings to the fore some striking affinities between the ideas of Schulz and those of Walter Benjamin. As a possible background of interpreting Schulz, the philosophical writings of Benjamin are a context which certainly deserves more investigation.

AbstractThe two categories of »fiction« and »non-fiction« are most often conceived of – and treated as – disjointed and separate, not only in common sense but also in literary studies. This does not adequately reflect, however, the developmental trajectory of the non-fiction genre over the course of the twentieth century. After all, the popularization of expert knowledge has increasingly been effected with the help of narrative strategies which raise one crucial question: Just how much fiction can the factual nature – the dependence on facts – of non-fiction tolerate? However, as the more precise definition of the pertinent term, »fiction«, indicates, a distinction must be made between »fictionality«, on the one hand, and »fictivity«, on the other. »Fictionality«, that is to say, refers to narrative strategiesanalogous tothose of fiction, but which relate to historical facts. »Fictivity«, by contrast, refers to the representation of fictitious content. More precisely, then, the question is this: Just what degree of fictivity can the factuality of non-fiction writing tolerate? Since this question cannot be answered constructively from a quantitative but only from a qualitative point of view, we are faced with the ultimately crucial question: Just what kind of fictivity can the factuality of non-fiction tolerate?In trying to answer that question, it seems advisable to start from the structure of deductive-nomological explanation, in which a given phenomenon – the explanandum – is explained by deducing its description from regularities plus the antecedent conditions contained in them (the explanans). In the case of historical explanation, in particular, historical facts most often form the explanandum, while the antecedent conditions of the potentially explanatory regularity (i. e., of the explanans) are not historically documented. Even more specifically, the genre of biography presents a paradigmatic case of such historical explanations falling within the purview of literary studies as well. Not uncommonly, attempts to arrive at a coherent, psychologically convincing biographical portrayal are met with the problem that historically documented life events can be explained – as to their genesis or »coming about« – only by reference to ultimately fictitious – or, to take up the distinction introduced above, to ultimately fictive – assumptions regarding antecedent conditions. Literary biography may, therefore, be said to realize the desired combination of fictivity and factuality in the best possible way: namely, as fictivity in the service of factuality.To find a paradigmatic example of such a combination, one need look no further than the biography of the German chemist Clara Immerwahr, wife of the professor of chemistry, Dr. Fritz Haber, who during the First World War was in charge of German efforts to develop and deploy chemical combat agents such as poison gases. Clara Immerwahr demonstrably saw her husband’s work as a perversion of science but was completely isolated and powerless in her protest against it. Her suicide after the German gas attacks at Ypres in April and May 1915 may therefore be understood as a final and ultimate protest (attempt). There is no clear evidence for this, however, since Immerwahr’s farewell letters no longer exist. Accordingly, the path leading towards her decision to end her life has to be reconstructed using fictive assumptions (about decisive life events). This implies the following, central hypothesis: »Once a person breaks away from a religiously motivated rejection of suicide as an inadmissible interference in God’s plan, that person will, in a situation of hopeless, existential, despair, commit suicide.« In the example of a literary biography presented here, Immerwahr’s reaction to the papal encyclical of 1910 is posited as a fictive antecedent condition, for which no historical record exists. In particular, this involves the question whether Immerwahr was prompted by that experience to establish, in her own mind, the precedence of a scientific-humanistic ethos over any kind of religious ideology. That she did come to rank a scientist’s morality of a shared humanity more highly than religious dogma – particularly where self-determination over one’s own life (and the end of one’s own life) was concerned –, is, however, a highly probable developmental condition of her life story, considering its actual culmination in a highly demonstrative suicide.On the basis of this exemplary piece of biographical writing, the connection of fictivity and factuality may be considered in terms of its fundamental structures, and may be revealed as really a case of fictivity in the service of factuality. In fact, we are looking at an explanation of the »how it was possible that« type, in which the explanandum is a confirmed (historical) fact, while the antecedent condition of the explanatory regularity can only be postulated as a psychologically plausible, hermeneutically intelligible life event. It is this combination of factual effects (hence explained) and fictive conditions (thus explaining), or, otherwise put, of historical factuality and (psychologically) probable fictivity, which is meant to be captured by the term »real fiction«.Biography as a genre is particularly suitable for the elaboration of this concept of »real fiction«, because it has been seen as »fundamentally caught between facts and fiction« – between factuality and fictivity – for quite some time now. To justify the introduction of a new genre, however, the level of detail chosen must be such that it, on the one hand, allows us to apprehend the differences, in terms of literary theory, between this new model and other, established models of factuality, while at the same time giving a nuanced, structured account – one that meets the requirements of the philosophy of science– of how precisely fictivity might be said to be »in the service of factuality«. With regard to genre concepts already established in literary theory, one will have to consider the historical novel and the writing of the New Objectivity movement as well as documentary literature. In the case of the historical novel, writers’ »fictivity leeway« is much greater, since there is no requirement for a strict coherence with concrete factual explananda. As an antithesis to this, consider the writing of the New Objectivists, which is characterised by a predominance of factuality which is accompanied by a wholesale – if overgeneralised – rejection of aesthetic concerns and the demand for an unreserved critique of society and ideology. This same anti-ideological impulse also characterises documentary literature, in which the preferred narrative strategies are even fewer (being restricted to the modes of reportage, montage, etc.). The genre of »real fiction«, by contrast, is much more open and flexible, both in terms of (theoretical) content and narrative strategies. In return, however, it places significantly higher demands on the structural relation between fiction and factuality, insofar as an explanation of relevant historical facts has to be given. Thus, the concept of »real fiction« is characterised by a combination of openness (regarding its possible topics and content) with a formally concise explanatory structure. This is how »real fiction« particularizes the fictive in the service of the factual.In the end, »real fiction« can be explicated as a form of narrative explanation in the sense proposed by Danto. It is concerned with the historical explanation of developments – and in the case of biography, more specifically, with the explanatory reconstruction of a life story in ontogenetic terms. Thus, the reconstruction of fictive life events in the form of a narrative does indeed provide a causal explanation, but it does so employing narrative strategies. This permits an epistemological differentiation between »real fiction« and both explanatory narration and thought experiments, at the same time effecting a marked pragmatization (through recourse to the criterion of relevance) and a heightened flexibility of narrative strategies available. If one conceives of the combination of fictivity and narration as the source of literariness, we are ultimately confronted with a synthesis of (literary) art and science, of scientificity and literariness. Being, in the memorable phrase of Wilhelm Dilthey, a wissenschaftliches Kunstwerk (i. e., a »scientific« or »scholarly work of art«), »real fiction« is both: literature striving for the highest standards of scholarship – and scholarship given a literary form.

Lurid tales of the criminal use of hypnosis captured both popular and scholarly attention across Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, culminating not only in the invention of fictional characters such as du Maurier's Svengali but also in heated debates between physicians over the possibilities of hypnotic crime and the application of hypnosis for forensic purposes. The scholarly literature and expert advice that emerged on this topic at the turn of the century highlighted the transnational nature of research into hypnosis and the struggle of physicians in a large number of countries to prise hypnotism from the hands of showmen and amateurs once and for all. Making use of the 1894 Czynski trial, in which a Baroness was putatively hypnotically seduced by a magnetic healer, this paper will examine the scientific, popular and forensic tensions that existed around hypnotism in the German context. Focusing, in particular, on the expert testimony about hypnosis and hypnotic crime during this case, the paper will show that, while such trials offered opportunities to criminalize and pathologize lay hypnosis, they did not always provide the ideal forum for settling scientific questions or disputes.

A number of recent studies consider how the style of a text is recreated by a translator, and what issues this raises for the study of the translated text and its reception, and for both stylistics and translation studies more generally. But the changes that translation makes to perspective and structures of narrative in the text have rarely been studied. In this article I suggest how one might consider changes of this nature that have come about when the works of the Nobel-Prize-winning German-Romanian writer Herta Müller were translated into English, and the possible effects of such changes on the construction of fictional minds by the English reader. These changes are of particular importance in this case because the novels deal with repression of various types – in the community and the family, by the state – and focus especially on the disjunction between thinking and speaking, and the uncertainty of what others are thinking. Considering how specific aspects of narrative perspective change when these novels are translated raises potentially interesting questions both for the study of translation and for the study of narrative.

AbstractThe article opens with a distinction between three kinds of “clairvoyance” phenomena. 1) A faculty of seeing/hearing things which are normally outside the reach of the clairvoyant's five senses (like being able to read sentences from a book although it is closed), but which do not extend beyond the domain of our common reality. 2) A “higher” faculty, which consists in seeing/hearing entities like spirits of the dead, angels, demons, etc., and occasionally in having a personal contact with them. 3) A “highest” faculty, of a noetic (“gnostic”) character, which extends beyond the first two and consists in being able to have acess to some sorts of “ultimate realities”: the visions thus imparted to the subject bear on ontological mysteries that concern, for example, the divine world, the cosmos, the hidden sides of Nature, etc. The author bestows the name “magic eloquence” on the narratives of visions pertaining to that third kind of clairvoyance, which are documented in the literature of Christian theosophy (see Jacob Boehme's and Swedenborg' vivions, for instance) and of animal magnetism. After presenting a few examples of magic eloquence chosen in the literature of animal magnetism in the first half of the 19the century, the article discusses the interpretations thereof put forward in the same period by a number of representatives of some German romantic Naturphilosophen who were both interested in animal magnetism and influenced by Christian theosophy. Their interpretations were based, on the one hand, upon the theosophical version of the myth of Fall and Reintegration; on the other hand, upon the “traditional” tripartition spirit/soul/body. On that basis, they constructed a series of heuristic tools successively, around notions like “ethereal light-substance”, “ganglionic system”, and Nervengeist. In the latter, they eventually came to see the cornerstone of the “physicopsycho-spiritual” structure (made of five constitutive elements) of the human being as they imagined it. Moreover, if considered as such, the Nervengeist appears to be the key for understanding the physico-spiritual procedures that undergird the production of magic eloquence. Finally, after presenting a few relevant examples in the literature of fiction inspired by animal magnetism, and some considerations devoted to the continuation of magical eloquence in later spiritual movements, the article draws a parallel between two anthropological “constructs” of the “soul” – namely, by the Naturphilosophie discussed above; and by psychoanalysis.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES the role that the case history plays in distinguishing criminal from noncriminal. It focuses on a remarkable moment in the development of the criminal case history: the ambitious but short-lived series Außßenseiter der Gesellschaft——die Verbrechen der Gegenwart (Outsiders of Society——the Crimes of Today), published in Germany in 1924-25. In a project without precedent in German literature, the series enlisted the talents of some of Germany's and Austria's most important novelists and journalists to write book-length studies of recent sensational criminal cases. The topics covered in the series ranged widely,from the confidence schemes of the impostor who called himself Freiherr von Egloffstein, to the Hitler-Ludendorff trial, to the career of the serial killer Fritz Haarmann. Though it existed for only a little over one year, the Outsiders series——which ultimately ran to fourteen volumes——occupies a crucial role in documenting the ways in which criminality was understood in Weimar Germany. Aside from the presence of an all-star cast of writers, the significance of the Outsiders series lies in its rethinking and reworking the aims and possibilities of the genre of the criminal case history. The series sought to intervene in the tradition of crime narratives (especially the case study as exemplified in the Pitaval, the archive of criminal cases that enjoyed widespread popularity in Europe from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century) in order to question the nature and effects of the genre. If narrative is one of the primary techniques by which the criminal and the noncriminal are distinguished, then the crisis of narration that is a central characteristic of modernist literature would naturally precipitate a crisis of this mechanism of distinction when brought to bear on the discussion of criminals. When the belief in the ability to narrate a life story comes into doubt, the belief in the ability of a narrative to separate criminal from noncriminal and to reconstruct the events that lead to a crime also fall under suspicion. Turning their attention precisely to the relationship that Michel Foucault would later concentrate on——that between the criminal and his examiners——these studies repeatedly show the criminal to be the object of juridical, medical, journalistic, popular, and literary attention. The diverse group of contributors to the series reflects the hybrid nature of this crossover project, which brings a combination of reportage, fictional techniques, and scientific analysis to bear on an area that is usually the domain of legal and medical specialists. At the same time, the series incorporates medical texts and trial documents into what often reads like a fictional narrative. This multivalence is precisely what the series aims to attain as it demonstrates the impossibility of clearly locating causality and guilt, seeking instead to map the connections and contradictions between the various discourses that endeavor to make the criminal visible as a distinct and deviant individual. In so doing, it develops a genre that would become increasingly popular over the course of the twentieth century,the nonfiction documentary crime novel.

In modern times German authors have made ample use of the Job-theme. The study examines the transformations that the story of Job has undergone in German narrative and dramatic works from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Der neue Hiob (1878) to Fritz Zorn's Mars (1977). The most striking feature of these works lies in their diverse characterization of the Job-figure. As a mythical figure he remains synonymous with the sufferer, but he may be characterized as patient or impatient, humble or arrogant, innocent or guilty, rich or poor, courageous or cowardly; he may be a Jew or a Christian, a Nazi or an anti-Nazi, a believer or an agnostic. The authors have retained most of the characters included in the Old Testament story. The Job-figure usually has a wife (who doubts and despises God), a number of children (who die in an impending disaster), and several friends (who accuse him of wrong-doing). Concerning the plot, most writers have excluded any prologue in heaven. The suffering of the Job-figure (usually brought on by the loss of loved ones, by physical pain and by mental agony) is always central to the story. More often than not, however, the modern Job-figure exhibits a form of impatience and impiety once misfortune has struck. A theophany (literal confrontation with God) does not occur, but a divine agent may be provided in the form of a dream or a vision, or indirectly by nature. An epilogue (the restoration of Job's health, possessions and children) is usually omitted, but some authors imply a renewal of Job, so as to suggest a purpose for and a hope after his arduous trials.
Arts, Faculty of
Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of
Graduate

This study of 1930s German fiction adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on the depiction of crowds in literature. Whereas previous surveys on the topic have predominantly focused on the crowd as a revolutionary phenomenon judged on the basis of class perspectives, or as a feature of mass society, this investigation deals specifically with reactions to the crowd in its incarnation as a manifestation of and symbol for political fascism. Drawing on a number of contemporaneous theoretical treatises on crowds and mass psychology, it seeks to demonstrate that war, extreme socio-political upheaval and the rise of Nazism produced intense multidisciplinary engagement with the subject among German-speaking intellectuals of the period, and examines the portrayal of crowds in works by selected literary authors in this context. Exploring the interplay between literature and concurrent theoretical works, the thesis asks how writers used specific possibilities of fiction to engage with the theme of the crowd at a time when the worth of art was often questioned by literary authors themselves. In doing so, it challenges the implication of earlier criticism that authors uncritically appropriated the findings of theoretical texts for fictional purposes. At the same time, it becomes clear that although some literary crowd portrayals support a distinction between the nature of theoretical and literary writing, certain crowd theories are as imaginative as they are positivistic. Extrapolating from textual comparisons, the thesis thus challenges the view held by some authors that knowledge produced by theoretical enquiry was somehow truer and more valuable than artistic responses to the politics of the age.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2007.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4721. Adviser: Claudia Breger. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 22, 2008).

In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.

Bibliography: pages 186-197.
This dissertation aims to place Hans Grimm's uncompleted epic, Kaffernland, eine deutsche Sage (Kaffraria, a German Legend) within the context of the historical discourse of the nineteenth-century as it has been challenged by presentday critical historiography. Central to Grimm's text is the problematic relationship between fiction and historical reality. It reproduces historical documents and relies on the scientific aura of a bourgeois realist discourse to present itself as having reference to an extra-textual reality. These truth-claims are examined with Roland Barthes' structuralist techniques. I locate Grimm's text within an intertext dominated by the ideologies of German nationalism, colonial space and fate. His portrayal of mid-nineteenth century political questions is shown as a contradictory amalgam of partisanship for both the bourgeoisie and the small peasantry, of romantic anti-capitalism and pro-imperialism. The authoritarian narrative discourse affirms Britain's colonial subjugation of the Xhosa and negates Xhosa resistance. I focus on speaking positions in the text and the power of the colonizer's practice of designating and signifying. The rhetoric of the text is seen as a continuation of politics against Britain's exploitation of the British German Legion and of German missionary work in British Kaffraria. Grimm reproduces and embellishes the mythology of the German Legion as saviours of Kaffraria and Germany. He inverts history to re-make the negative record of the German Military Settlement. I show how mythic signs and a moralizing discourse stimulate an envisaged pre-World War I readership to recognize Kaffraria as a German colony and to reflect on how, in its own times, Germany can be regenerated through acquiring colonial space. The mythological discourse is also viewed in the light of the text's attempts to manifest the external factual reliability and inner truth of bourgeois realism. While Grimm deploys the literary conventions of the modern novel, as an epigone he draws on the forms of legend, saga and epic cultivated in the nineteenth century. He alludes to the Icelandic saga also to legitimize a claim to Xhosaland. This first book of the epic, presented as complete, attains a measure of cohesion through techniques of parallelism and contiguity. The text parallels the fate of the German and Xhosa nations and simultaneously signifies the Xhosa as destroyers of Xhosaland and the cattle-killing movement of 1856-57 as a diabolical plan. I see this mythologization of history as the ideological justification for the expropriation of the Xhosa and show that Grimm's colonialist fiction is in fact a colonizing discourse.