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The article analyses problems of constructing of remembrance and memory in the literary text and the specifics of the fictive narrator and autobiographical writing in the prose of Herta Mьller and Catalin Dorian Florescu. Special attention is paid to the different aesthetic strategies in reconstruction of the past and to the theoretical discussion about similarities and differences of the terms “writing in emigration” and “postcolonial narrative”. Texts are interpreted, which reflect the forms of suffering and resistance during Ceausescus’s dictatorship and the painful concussions after 1989 in post socialist Europe.
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The article discusses the references to reading and learning to read in Baltic German memoirs. It also introduces some new sources, which are particularly valuable for containing information on everyday history. The examples represent the period from the late 18th century to the interval between the two World Wars. Despite the long period of report, as well as the social diversity and gender heterogeneity of the list of authors (e.g. Baer, Anders, Schwartz, Ostwald, Hunnius, Kentmann, Hartge, Bodisco, Taube, Staden etc.) it is notable that reading and books have often been considered worthy of discussing in memoirs. In most cases it is described how one learned to read (here the mother’s role can hardly be overestimated), adolescent reading experiences (as an important part of personality development) and the procurement of reading material. Adult reading habits can rather be deduced from indirect evidence, such as, e.g. mentions of reading to children or family, which was a popular pastime in Baltic German Biedermeier homes. The second half of the 19th century brings conscious guidance of children in the choice of reading materials, and also an accumulation of books in homes, due to improved conditions for publishing and bookselling as well as to economic growth in the Baltic provinces. University students, in addition, had access to the voluminous libraries of student corporations. The authors and texts referred to in the memoirs testify to a continuous consumption of culture, keeping in step with Germany and in touch with all fashionable and topical texts. A vital issue was the example of other family members and the availability of books to rouse and develop mental and spiritual interests in children, which was, however, done in a natural combination with other activities, without becoming an end in itself.
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The mental horizons of 19th-century Estonian national movement were largely modelled on German examples, while the building of Estonian national identity and the rise of the self-awareness of the Estonian people were made possible through the adaptation of national romantic ideology to local conditions. Up to the end of the 19th century Estonian literature largely consisted of adapted translations from German sources, many of which have not, however, been pinpointed as yet. The article was inspired by the discovery of two authors who served as literary models for Lydia Koidula. This discovery expanded our understanding of Koidula’s sources and revealed that she drew not only on conservative authors of Volksbücher and a couple of other 19th-century authors, but also on two liberal German writers – Theodor Mügge and Luise Mühlbach. Mügge’s Eduard Montague (1845) was the source text for Koidula’s story Juudit ehk Jamaika saare wiimsed Maroonlased /Judith, or the Last Maroons of the Island of Jamaica/ (1870), while Mühlbach’s Kaiserin Josephine: ein Napoleonisches Lebensbild (1861) served as the source text for Koidula’s Martiniiko ja Korsika /Martinique and Corsica/ (1869/1874). Koidula selected Mügge’s and Mühlbach’s works because of their resonance during the heyday of the Estonian national movement, which can also be termed as Koidula’s political breakthrough. Both books deal with the French Revolution, which is recounted from different viewpoints – the Old and the New Worlds, European power centres and their peripheries. A comparison of the German originals with Koidula’s adaptations leads to the conclusion that there is a notable difference in the adaptation strategies of the two texts. Mügge’s adaptation is rather close to the original text except for a few additions important for the Estonian national movement. In Mühlbach’s adaptation, however, the focus is shifted from the author’s intent in order to give a more thorough overview of the revolution, its causes and effects. Both strategies speak of Koidula’s ambition to explain the formation of a people and its actions in revolutionary times. Such identification of literary models serves to create an integral picture of the cultural and ideological environment moulding Koidula’s worldview. A comparison of the source and adapted target texts enables a better understanding of the means used by Koidula to construct her literary and ideological world. Her method was not one of servile imitation of foreign examples, but that of creative adaptation and localisation.
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The paper gives an insight into the postbiological evolution and the posthuman world in the novel “The Abolition of Species” („Die Abschaffung der Arten“, 2008) by Dietmar Dath. The term postbiological evolution refers to a human-driven evolution that in the novel leads to a world inhabited by human descendants in the form of machines and animals. It analyzes the development of the opposed civilizations of robots (the so-called Keramikaner) and human-animal hybrids (the so-called Gente). The posthuman world they inhabit is a world in which Man is no longer at the center of world history and only lives on thanks to technogenic and genetic modifications. The aim of the paper is to explore the depiction of the altered relationship of the modern humans to their biological and technological environment by analyzing the influence of the theories of postbiological life and posthumanism on the novel.
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In this introductory study opening the edition of selected reportage and travelogue texts, the authoress outlines circumstances and conditions of travelling to the Soviet Union in the interwar period, particularly to the country’s outlying regions which were, due to their remoteness, poor road and railway infrastructure and sometimes also security situation, difficult to access for visitors from abroad. She also describes the trips of four Czechoslovak authors (Julius Fučík, Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Carl Weiskopf and Jiří Weil) to the interwar Soviet Orient, sets their reflections into a broader period context, and indicates their typical motifs. The central theme here is a conflict of the exotic, the oldbackward world of traditions and customs of indigenous inhabitants, and modernity. In the perception of the authors, the modernity is a combination of three interconnected segments; the first one is a process of industrialization, converting backward regions into dynamic agrarian-industrial centers through electrification, development of transport infrastructure, and urbanization. The second segment is represented by a new organization of social relations based on social and material equality of citizens and reflected mainly in the emancipation of local nations and ethnics and also of women. The third segment is related to a group of topics which can be summarized under a Foucaultian term biopolitics. It consists mainly of a fight against illiteracy and an emphasis on education, development of a medical care system, or building of leisure and cultural institutions (clubs, cinemas, theaters). The principal tool and prime mover of the modernization process is labour which is, in a country striving to build a Communist system, not just a factor of existence, a source of subsistence, but, first and foremost, an existential factor – the meaning of life and a source of happiness and contentment – and also a medium of socialization and disciplination. It is through labour that the Soviet man or woman steps beyond his or her individual needs and interests and becomes a useful part of the society and a “new man”.
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The review of: Злочевская Алла Владимировна: Три лика мистической метапрозы ХХ века: Герман Гессе – Владимир Набоков – Михаил Булгаков. Super Издательство, Санкт-Петербург, 2016, 552 c., ISBN 978-5-00071-999-2.
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This study focuses on the poetics of historical narrative, based on a broad sample of 16th and 17th century Czech and Latin historical prose texts. It explores ways of representing space in chronicles, histories, hagiographic narratives and thematically structured historiographical prose works, and it follows the use of topographical information, detailed descriptions, vivid descriptions and ekphrases. Spatial representations can often be understood as a manifestation of what is called evidence, a rhetorical device capable of depicting absent objects as if they were right in front of the addressee’s eyes, and at the same time a method intended to lend credibility to knowledge.
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Ma da, možeš si mislit. Staneš nasred sobe, ili ostaneš samo sjediti, i kad ti je svega dosta Scotty te prenese tamo negdje gdje misliš da bi ti bilo bolje. Na vodno su Kinezi već uspjeli teleportirati foton prema – ha ha ha – vjerodostojno prenesenoj vijesti 2017. u jednom od domaćih provincijalnih listova.
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From the beginning, Brecht’s poetry is characterized by a certain ambivalence. This could well be tactically motivated, for example when it came to opening up media in order to publish the first works. Brecht cultivated this ambiguity to the end. The Buckow Elegies were written in 1953 against the background of the workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953, which was violently ended by the Soviet army. Here again intelligent behavior was required from Brecht, who on the one hand owed a lot to the GDR and on the other hand was only too aware of the totalitarian oppression of art. With the image of a flower garden, which stands for the GDR and is bordered by a wall that fulfills different functions depending on one’s point of view, he addresses this topic – eight years before a wall was actually built.
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Literature has the ability to refer to potential conflicts in societies earlier than any other media. Contemporary German-language literature reacts enthusiastically to the wars in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, in the peripheral regions of the Russian Federation and last but not least in Afghanistan. A new figure of the soldier emerged. A soldier who comes from the post-heroic society and breaks down mentally and physically in wars. So the question arises, how would people react if a war broke out in post-heroic society and not on its fringes?
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Előrebocsátom: olyan szöveg megírására vállalkozom, amelylyel senki sem lehet elégedett, a legkevésbé a megszólított és tárgyalt személyek, de én magam sem, aki az odatartozás érzése ellenére soha nem tartoztam oda a szó tényleges értelmében; ráadásul jelen sorokat nem egy elismert germanista írja, miként azt a tanulmány alanyai megérdemelnék, és ahogy ez hozzájuk méltó és az irodalomtörténet ügyét szolgálná. Azaz sem résztvevő, sem tudós nem vagyok, csupán egy erdélyi csodáló, aki annak idején sem volt sokkal közelebb a Bánsághoz, mint amennyire a mostani Rajna-vidéki lakhelye, s aki csodálata közepette magába száll, mivel ő a belső részvételt és az olvasói egyetértést sosem tette azzá, amivel ők maguk próbálkoztak: akcióvá.
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The article under studies deals with the issue of inter-national and inter-cultural relations in the Danube Monarchy, which arose as a supra-national state project after the Revolution of 1848. This conglomerate of numerous ethnic groups and nationalities, which, due to the new liberal constitution and national harmony of 1867 (despite certain conflicts and social controversies between individual powerful subjects, languages and ethnic regions), lived in relative harmony and may be regarded today as a prototype of the European Union. Besides, the article investigates the phenomena of multi- and pluriculturalism, concepts of “endogenous” and “exogenous” plurality. Particular emphasis has been laid on the issue of multilingualism, its diverse mechanisms and practices.
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In intercultural literary studies, alterity is both a formal and thematical concept. The formal aspect entails the aesthetic qualities of the text, whereas the thematic aspect encompasses everyday, structural, extraordinary, or radical facets of the Alien. This paper offers a close-reading analysis of the portrayal of alterity and its multidimensional character on the example of selected figures from contemporary German-language children’s and youth literature. In addition to that, the paper shows how specific characters critically reflect upon their own defamatory prejudice and transform it into transcultural understanding.
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Throughout the history of literature, and German literature in particular, there are repeatedly accounts of “life cycles” or “life histories” of things: efforts to narrate the trajectories of artefacts in socioeconomic cycles, which in toto elude observation and remain imperceptible. In some cases accounts are written in first person singular simulating an autobiographical perspective of things. The article proposes to call this formation autocyclography of things. Historically, the literary tradition of this autocyclography of things reaches back at least as far as the Antiquity. The paper outlines the theoretical framework and contextualises examples from German literature in a broader framework of wold literature (British it-narratives and Soviet literatura fakta). In the focus of analytic interest stands Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausens autocyclography of a toilet paper. Furthermore, the article presents examples for autocyclography of things from German Literature of the 18th and 19th century, which still wait further scolary attention: autocyclographies of a coin, a wig, a fly, a book, a coach, a toothpick, a joke and a stomach.
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In the process of secularisation that began in the 18th century in Europe, man tried to emancipate himself from religious authority and aspired to the knowledge of the intramundane reality without religious influence. However, an obstacle to secularisation remains the political factor, which persists with despotic and cruel regimes exercising violent and oppressive authority over man. The renewed return to religion observed today all over the world is due to this repressive situation where Man, in the absence of democratic transparency or political protection, is left to his own devices and has only God to return to. The present article is inspired by this observation in the dramatic text „William Tell” by the German classic Friedrich Schiller. In this text, which is set in a despotic context, there is not a single page, where God is not revealed. Drawing on the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s profound and convincing treatment of the psychological dimension of religion, this article explains the Swiss Man’ penchant and infatuation for God in Schiller’s play under the tyrannical Austrian Habsburg regime. To better demonstrate the place of God in the life of oppressed Man, Schiller considers two contexts in his historical play: the historical context of the 14th century where the Habsburgs attempt to subjugate the Swiss people and Schiller’s present context of the 18thcentury where tyranny reaches its peak in the context of the French Revolution. In „William Tell”, which is Schiller’s reaction against the throes of the French Revolution, which still resembles the political throes of the Habsburgs in Switzerland in the 14th century, the Weimar classic, Schiller tries to show in the political dimension how the return to God in the context of political violence can lead to non-violence and social peace.
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Review of: Ulrike Mascher: Stadttexte und Selbstbilder der Prager Moderne(n). Literarische Identitätsdiskurse im urbanen Raum. transcript. Bielefeld 2021. 316 S., 7 Ill. ISBN 978-3- 8394-5586-9. (€ 47,–.)
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Architecture, in the real world as well as in the fictional world of children’s literature, seems always to be connected with ideology, i.e. a system of beliefs held by a social group or society as a whole. This is shown with respect to German children’s literature dealing with famous buildings of the 20th century, namely the semi-detached house by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung that is portrayed in Hannelore erlebt die Großstadt by Clara Hohrath (1935 [1931]), the Hochhaus an der Weberwiese by Hermann Henselmann in the Berlin Stalinallee, figuring in Die Flaschenpost im Hochhaus by Annegret Hofmann and Helga Leue (1988), and the 660–680 Lake Shore Drive Apartments by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, described in Alles Bauhaus? Eine fantastische Zeitreise mit Mia und Lucas by Ingolf Kern, Werner Möller and Kitty Kahane (2019).
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The inspiration for this article came from Jüri Talvet’s observation that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s „Faust” and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s „Kalevipoeg” show some remarkable similarities in their philosophical structure and plot. This article therefore aims to compare these two masterpieces by using Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s understanding of tropes. While allusion and intertextuality studies typically focus on a limited number of similarities between two texts, Bloom’s anxiety of influence theory helps to apprehend both texts as a whole. This objective is achievable with two constraints. Firstly, making such a comparison requires us to widen our understanding of tropes. In this analysis, tropes do not signify limited transfers of meaning (from one word to another), but the full transformation of a text’s meaning. The background to this article lies in the hypothesis that large chunks of ¬„Kalevipoeg” can be read as tropes that are derived from the verses of „Faust”. ¬Secondly, this kind of analysis cannot focus on the style, genre or semantic nuances of both works, but only on the general picture: the stories and their protagonists. The anxiety of influence theory shows that the change of meaning from one work to another can be described by means of two kinds of tropes: limiting and repeating ones. In this article, the limiting tropes of irony, metonymy and metaphor can be used to depict the change of meaning from „Faust” to „Kalevipoeg”. The story of an intellectual who makes a pact with the devil, seeks absolute love and wishes to accomplish godly deeds becomes a story of a mythically strong hero who has no choice, never finds true love and achieves predestined greatness. According to Bloom, this is only half of the comparison. In a follow-up article, I will show how the repeating tropes of synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis can be used to demonstrate that the fate of these different protagonists is in fact somewhat similar.
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This article is a sequel to “Struggle over the ages I: Reading Kreutzwald’s “Kalevipoeg” as opposite in meaning to Goethe’s “Faust”” (Parksepp 2023). The pair of articles aims to exemplify how Harold Bloom’s and Paul de Man’s complementary views on rhetoric and tropes help to reveal the differences and similarities between Goethe’s and Kreutz¬wald’s masterpieces. The objective of the first article was to describe how, according to the anxiety of influence theory, the limiting tropes of irony, metonymy and metaphor can be used to depict the change in meaning from “Faust” to “Kalevipoeg”, whereas this article shows how the Bloomian recurring tropes of synecdoche, hyperbole and metalepsis define ways in which the Estonian national epic recreates the meaning of Goethe’s grand tragedy. Underneath all the stylistic and genre conventions lies a story of two opposite protagonists with a similar fate. Both Faust and Kalevipoeg commit crimes, although the full tragedy of Gretchen is reduced to a synecdoche: an episode where Kalevipoeg meets an island maiden whose death he causes by accident. Both protagonists get help from the devil or hell, but Mephistopheles’ and Faust’s imaginative paper money finds a hyperbolical counterpart in the later work: Kalevipoeg defeats the devil and brings real treasures out from the underworld. However, a Bloomian metaleptic reversal of history occurs in the final episodes of both works. The salvation of Faust raises questions; one could argue that it is an example of Aristotle’s deus ex machina method, where the fate of Faust’s soul does not follow from the plot. By comparison, the final scene of “Kalevipoeg” seems more logical. Although the deceased national hero is briefly cheered in heaven, he is still sent to hell as a gatekeeper. Even on a white horse his disabled body is a gruesome reminder of his blood guilt. His wrongdoings and evil deeds are not forgotten as in “Faust”, where the protagonist is saved from hell due to his eternal drive. Even the prophetic final lines of “Kalevipoeg” include a warning taboo: with the return of the mighty Estonian hero, evil will also be set free. Therefore, on a rhetorical level, it can be argued that the end of “Kalevipoeg” is more refined and fulfils the Bloomian trope-reversing trope of metalepsis. Rhetorically, the ending of “Kalevipoeg” can be read as an original to the closing scene of “Faust”, where the interrogation of good and evil (the hero and the devil bound together at hell’s gate) is replaced with an idea of good always prevailing over evil (an all-powerful heaven with Mater Gloriosa just waiting for Faust). Of course, this is only one point of view, but it shows how Bloomian ideas can be used methodically to analyse great works of literature. It also raises the objectively unanswerable question of why great works of literature survive over the ages.
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