«Studi Germanici», 25 (2024)

Leggi l’intero fascicolo / Das ganze Heft lesen

Sommario

• Frontespizio e indice, pp. 1-6

Saggi

• Im Schatten religiöser Aufklärung. Glaubenszwang und Missbrauch von Lessing bis Moritz, pp. 9-26
  Alexander Košenina

  Im Schatten religiöser Aufklärung. Coercion of Faith and Abuse from Lessing to Moritz
  Abuse cases have kept Christian churches in suspense for quite some time. However, sexual assaults in service or crimes under the pretext of religious guidance were already explosive in Goethe’s time. When Lessing mocks a sex-obsessed hermit in the Anacreontic poem Der Eremit, when a clergyman in Johann Christian Krüger’s comedy Die Geistlichen impregnates his housekeeper, or when August Gottlieb Meißner has a Bible zealot sacrifice his three children under the sign of Abraham… these are all religiously motivated assaults or crimes. The «Berlinische Monatsschrift» magazine reports on a «religious criminal» who forces rows of girls into his harem. Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel Anton Reiser is also characterised by quietist oppression and religious coercion. And in Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s novel Carl von Carlsberg, a candidate for theology is actually examined to death. Scepticism about faith and criticism of the church, for example in Kleist or Jean Paul, are direct consequences of such a dialectic of faith, which always wills good and yet produces evil.

• Literarische Experimente um die Endlichkeit des Menschen. Schillers Philosophische Briefe und Der Geisterseher, pp. 27-47
  Paolo Panizzo
  

  Literary Experiments on the Finiteness of Man. Friedrich Schiller’s Philosophical Letters and The Ghost-Seer
  The article takes a closer look at the Weltanschauungskrise, recognised by scholars as the greatest common denominator between Friedrich Schiller’s Philosophical Letters and his fragmentary novel The Ghost-Seer. The ‘crisis’ around which both works revolve is not, as often argued, a temporary «feverish paroxysm» artificially induced into a «well-organised soul» in order to consolidate  its (moral) health. Rather, it represents the literary outcome of Schiller’s encounter with the finiteness of man and the relativity of all values, and with the need for a foundation of existence without metaphysical underpinnings. Read against the background of the anthropological debate of the 18th century and the poet’s medical studies, Schiller’s ‘literary experiments’ analysed here actually reveal the concern and hubris of two different protagonists who discover not only their own absolute freedom and self-determination, but also the urgent need to take full responsibility for existence.

• Die Dinge und die Gelegenheiten. Die Bedeutung materieller Gegenstände für Goethes Lyrik, pp. 49-67
  Ernst Osterkamp
  

  Things and Opportunities. The Significance of  Material Objects for Goethe’s Poetry
  Goethe liked to combine his presents with small poems. Although these charming texts are of great importance in understanding Goethe’s concept of ‘Gelegenheitsdichtung’, most readers of his poems pay little attention to them. The essay discusses the combination of objects and poems illustrated by examples from six decades.

• «Unerforschliches Verhängnis!». The Vocabulary of ‘Fate’ in English Translations of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels, pp. 69-92
  Ritchie Robertson
  

  «Unerforschliches Verhängnis!». The Vocabulary of ‘Fate’ in English Translations of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels
  Die Elixiere des Teufels is thoroughly ambiguous. It can be read either as a narrative of redemption, in which the disobedient and criminal monk Medardus is finally reconciled with  God and the crimes of his ancestor, the painter Francesko, are expiated, or as the tale of how a fateful power recalling the ancient Nemesis remorselessly hunts down the criminal. The three published translations into English obscure this ambiguity by using the words ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’, neither of which fully matches Hoffmann’s key word ‘Verhängnis’, and by introducing the word ‘providence’, which misrepresents the novel by softening its terrifying implications. The earliest translation, by R.P. Gillies (1824), is of additional interest for the liberties it takes in representing the realia of Hoffmann’s Germany.

• L’Ananke dello stile. Doppelleben di Gottfried Benn e la sua controversa inattualità, pp. 93-110
  Amelia Valtolina
  

  The Ananke of Style. Gottfried Benn’s Doppelleben and Its Controversial Untimeliness
  Confined by critical discourse to the margins of the poet’s body of works, whether due to its discontinuous and fragmentary nature or to its supposedly ‘occasional’ character, Gottfried Benn’s unusual autobiography has continued to challenge every hermeneutic effort with its untimeliness. After reconstructing the vicissitudes of its reception in the post-World War II European context, the essay questions the aesthetic premises of the concept of ‘Doppelleben’, to which this autobiography owes its title, thus showing how its pages, precisely in their desultory and radically irreconcilable prose, represent a confession of Style –  that is to say, a confession of Form.

• Jean Améry Receives the Lessing Prize, pp. 111-127
  Liliane Weissberg
  

  Jean Améry Receives the Lessing Prize
  In 1977, Jean Améry received the Lessing Prize of the city of Hamburg. The essay offers a history of this prize, and the context for awarding it to Améry. It further reflects on Améry’s relationship to Lessing and his understanding of the European Enlightenment, which he tried to defend as he turned against the critics of the Frankfurt School, as well as exponents of French structuralism and Post-structuralism.

• Guerra, pace e questioni interetniche nella scrittura saggistica di due intellettuali mitteleuropei. La finis Jugoslaviae secondo Alexander Langer e Peter Handke, pp. 129-149
  Gabriele Bacherini
  

  War, Peace and Interethnic Issues in the Nonfiction writing of Two Central-European Intellectuals. Finis Yugoslaviae According to Alexander Langer and Peter Handke
  The essay compares the positions taken by two of the most discussed intellectuals of the 20th century, Alexander Langer and Peter Handke, as regards the initial civil wars that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties. The pacifist ideology of the South Tyrolean political activist, who was always been equidistant between German-speaking and Italian-speaking cultures, will be measured against the aggressive pro-Serbian positions of the Nobel Prize for Literature, born in the Slovenian-speaking area of Carinthia. By comparing some passages of the works that the two authors devoted to this subject, the essay will try to interpret two opposite versions of what happened in Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1991 and 1995, which was also the year of Langer’s suicide. It will also be a good opportunity to compare Langer’s and Handke’s ideas of ‘Mitteleuropa’ and ‘essay’, a prismatic literary genre in and of itself, to which both authors inevitably had to entrust their analysis of the post-Yugoslavian and post-Habsburg complexities.

• «würklich». Zur Erfolgsgeschichte des fiktionalen Interviews, pp. 151-168
  Torsten Hoffmann
  

  «würklich». Success Story of the Fictional Interview
  Fictional interviews have been firmly anchored in cultural discourse for around twenty years and can be found in school textbooks and on television, among other places. In contemporary literature, too, the fictional interview has established itself as a new form of narrative, both in poetry lectures and in novels. Nevertheless, literary studies (following Gérard Genette’s contempt for the interview) have long struggled with the genre. Against such a background, this article first endeavours to systematically define the ‘fictional interview’, and then examines its functions. The article takes a closer look at Daniel Kehlmann’s 2006 Göttingen Lecture on Poetics, fictional conversations by Alexander Kluge (with Peter Berling, 2007) and Wolfgang Herrndorf («Die Rosenbaum-Doktrin», 2007), as well as novels by Katrin Röggla (wir schlafen nicht, 2004) and Wolf Haas (Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren, 2006).

• E-Mail- und Chat-Roman als Spielformen des Briefromans, pp. 169-187
  Ruth Florack
  

  E-mail and Chat Novels as Forms of the Epistolary Novel
  Drawing on the traditional genre of the epistolary novel, e-mail and chat novels react to the radical change that the Internet means for communication. Three examples – consisting exclusively of e-mails or chats written by a woman and a man – are used to examine the extent to which such novels not only open up new themes, but also develop innovative narrative styles. The love story in D. Glattauer’s successful/renowned novel Gut gegen Nordwind (2006) thrives on the anonymity of the virtual medium, while J. Zeh and S. Urban link the possibilities and limits of new media with current socio-political debates in their latest bestseller Zwischen Welten (2023). More experimental is S. Varatharajah’s novel Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen (2016), which reflects on the experience of civil war refugees in the shape of a Facebook conversation between a student from Kosovo and a Ph.D. student from Sri Lanka.

• La città di Svea: appunti su una cartografia letteraria della città di Stoccolma, pp. 189-210
  Giovanni Za

  The City of Svea: Notes on a Literary Cartography of the City of Stockholm
  This article aims to analyse portrayals of the city of Stockholm in recent Swedish literary production. Drawing on a multidisciplinary reading which takes into consideration interpretations spanning from city planning to architecture and to political and social sciences within the framework of Stockholm’s history, the research aims to use a geo-critical methodology, within which space and literature are bonded by mutual influence. Materials used in this paper range from Per Haman’s Cigarett (1991) to Hassan Loo Sattarvandi’s Still (2008) and include the city’s strategic and urban planning, as well as its visions, over the years. The interpretation of such diverse evidence gives rise to the reaffirmation of a real and imagined nature of Stockholm, to the separation between centre and outskirts and to the productive intersection of Geography and Literature.

Ricerche

• La letteratura ‘alemanna’ negli epistolari italiani (allo scorcio del Settecento), pp. 213-235
  Giulia Puzzo

  ‘Alemannic’ Literature in Italian Letters (at the End of the 18th Century)
  The paper is the result of research carried out at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome (Leopardi e la cultura germanofona in Italia. 1781-1840), which arose from the observation that the idea of German-speaking literature prevalent in late 18th-century Italy significantly influenced the way Italian authors analysed the features of modern societies. The article aims to trace the opinions on German literature emerging from the correspondence of Italian scholars at the end of the 18th century. Epistolary networks have always played an important role in the processes of literary mediation, which oft begins with the exchange of impressions, news, enthusiastic or critical opinions. This is even truer in the case of the Italian-German mediation at the end of the 18th century, where the dissemination of ‘Alemannic’ Literature was mostly entrusted to the ventures of individuals. Correspondence led to several publications in newspapers and literary periodicals; frequently, and encouranged by their authors, the letters themselves were transformed into journalistic pieces or published in their entirety.

• Die Jahre der Berliner Malerin Martha Musil in Rom (1897-1906), pp. 237-256
  Gesine Bey
  

  Berlin Painter Martha Musil’s Years in Rome (1897-1906)
  The essay is devoted to the early life of Berlin painter and portrait artist Martha Musil, later partner of Austrian writer Robert Musil. She trained in Rome from 1897 to 1906 while married to Roman merchant Enrico Marcovaldi. Her membership in the German Artists’ Association «Deutscher Künstler-Verein zu Rom» is documented for the first time, and her lessons with the Italian painter Giacomo Balla in Rome can be dated. During this time she created self-portraits and a female nude study, exhibiting works at the «Esposizione Internazionale di belle arti in Roma» in 1906. Balla’s portraits of Martha are discussed. After Robert Musil’s death while in his exile in 1942 and the end of World War II, Martha decided to return to Rome, following a stay in the United States and despite regaining her Austrian citizenship in 1947. She spent the last two years in Rome, passing away in 1949 in the apartment of her son Gaetano Marcovaldi.

Osservatorio critico della germanistica

• Osservatorio critico della germanistica, pp. 257-345
  a cura di Maurizio Pirro

Abstracts

• English Abstracts, pp. 347-351

Hanno collaborato

• Le autrici e gli autori, pp. 353-354

Ultimo aggiornamento 17 Marzo 2025 a cura di Luisa Giannandrea