Stefan George und der Algabal-Zyklus - Eine Beispielanalyse (German Edition)

Brilliant Study of Germany's Greatest Poet, Stefan George I wish to stress with some urgency that in my view this recently issued monograph on Germany's greatest poet, Stefan George, who was likewise one of modern Europe's most enigmatic and disturbing political presences, constitutes an achievement of incomparable significance in the historiography of cultural modernism. I have been occupied in studying these individuals for thirty years or more, and I can assure students that Robert Edward Norton has shed more light than admirers of Stefan George would have thought possible upon a dazzlingly talented, albeit indubitably eccentric,literary cenacle at whose center stood the masterful and charismatic visionary who was its spiritus rector.

Although George began his literary career as something of a minor Teutonic satellite on the far fringes of the French Symbolist movement we learn, for instance, that the poet became quite close, both personally and artistically, to several of the Symbolist School's leading lights, viz. Norton's monograph rests upon the author's entertaining presentation of a wide range of hitherto obscure details involving the poet's later career, when his personal pretensions began to outweigh his literary career--over which George assiduously endeavored to cast a shroud of mystery and ambiguity--as well as unlocking for us a treasure trove of hitherto obscure biographical facts and anecdotes about the disciples and associates who drifted into the orbit of George-Kreis at one time or another.

These anecdotes cover the waterfront, from uproarious and barely believable brawls that erupt out of the blue between alpha-intellects who are not what one would describe as pugilists, to grotesque tales of oddballs and geniuses who prefer to gussy themselves up in amazing couture in order to be wearing chic and appropriate threads when sallying out to attend the legendary and elaborate masqued balls that were almost a matter of routine in Schwabing-Muenchen. That custom, we learn, dictates that these people are more often than not attired in Roman-styled togas or, when feeling somewhat more daring, decked out in some gaudy purple-dyed gown that has been designed to garb a middle-aged intellectual who is impersonating the Magna Mater!

We learn also that these bright young things also hold somewhat outre "language orgies" in the course of which one of the oddest of the odd, viz. On the darker side of these affairs, the narrative presents more ominous anticipations and adumbrations of ominous types of cultic behaviors and ritual observances many of which would one day come to exert a profound and troubling influence on a less purely literary gathering of activists, viz.

We're also given numerous details about the poet's itinerary as he wandered from one associate's flat to another's he was definitely what one might call a "professional house-guest" , along with fresh discoveries about the incredible group of renowned thinkers and creative writers among whom the most talented were surely philosopher Ludwig Klages, archaeologist Alfred Schuler, poet Hugo von Hoffmansthal, and Shakespearean scholar Friedrich Gundolf , all of whom became adherents to the famous "Circles" that were so idiosyncratic a feature of cultural life in Schwabing-Munich at the dawn of the 20th century.

In closing, I repeat that I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in German culture, in the nascent proto-National Socialist scene in early 20th century Bavaria, or simply in the spectacle of some of the weirdest intellectuals ever to have come down the pike. Robert Norton's landmark biography on Stefan George and his circle truly is an exceptional book in every respect. Expansive in its inclusion of meticulous detail, this work stands as the definitive biography on George in any language to date.

He also had an important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural history. It is generally agreed that he played a significant part in the transition of German literature to Modernism, particularly in poetry.

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At the same time he was an outspoken critic of modernity. He believed that only an all-encompassing cultural renewal could save modern man. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although his artistic consciousness was formed by European aestheticism, his poetry and the writings that emerged from the poets and intellectuals he gathered around him in the George Circle are above all a scathing commentary on the political, social, and cultural situation in Germany at the turn of the century.

George, who was imbued with the idea of the poet as a prophet and priest, saw himself as the Messiah of a New Hellenism and a New Reich led by an intellectual and aesthetic elite consisting of men who were bonded together through their allegiance to a charismatic leader. Some of the values that George proclaimed, among them a glorification of power, of heroism and self-sacrifice, were seized upon by the National Socialists, and subsequently his writings and those of his circle were considered by some to be proto-fascist.

It did not help his reputation that after the Second World War much of the criticism of his works was practiced by uncritical, hagiographic George worshippers. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed and unbiased interest among scholars and critics in George and his circle.

George, Stefan 1868-1933

The wide-ranging and original essays in this volume explore anew George's poetry and his contribution to Modernism, the relation between his vision of a New Reich and fascist ideology, and his importance as a cultural critic. Poems, by Stefan Anton George. Die Entdeckung des Charisma by Thomas: Gedichte by Stefan George. Jahrhunderts German Edition by Carol Petersen. Stefan George by Horst Schumacher.

HSKulturtypen um , Sprache: In taking up a Third World theme, it marks a significant departure from what was in danger of becoming a new provincialism and can be compared with similar works by Uwe Timm and F. The play Rotter concerns the self-imposed conformity of an underprivileged figure determined to prove himself in both the Third Reich and the early years of reconstruction.

Liebe macht Tod is a variation of Romeo and Juliet. Braun, Felix — A fervent literary disciple of Hofmannsthal, Felix Braun was a minor writer associated with the Viennese cultural scene at the turn of the century his autobiography Das Licht der Welt. Geschichte eines Versuches, als Dichter zu leben gives a sympathetic and informative account of meetings with Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Wildgans, Ginzkey, Mell, Stefan Zweig, Werfel and others.

He travelled widely, living in Italy and also in exile in England. His verse dramas betray much sensitivity but little dramatic talent: Braun was also an accomplished anthologist: The collections Wir und nicht sie , Gedichte , extended and Gegen die symmetrische Welt are marked by mastery of numerous short forms and a critical dialogue with earlier German poets. The dialectic of past and present, of Utopian hope and reality is treated in manifold variations, culminating in the last volume in fragmentary forms which appear to reflect a fear of stagnation.

More recently he has widened this latter theme to embrace revolutionary change elsewhere and at different periods and developed more radical approaches to it: His continuing debt to his literary predecessors is evident in his other plays: Bodenloser Satz presents the decline of the GDR through an account of environmental pollution. Texte in zeitlicher Folge appeared in eight volumes between and Brecht, Bertolt — Brecht was one of a group of young dramatists who emerged during the early years of the Weimar Republic and whose works frequently awarded the Kleist prize created theatrical scandals by their fearless outspokenness and reluctance to conform to accepted standards.

Through collaboration with Feuchtwanger and others Brecht, with cunning and undeniable talent, kept abreast of the modern techniques of a man like Piscator. It was after the enormous success of this work, a work that the audience seemed bent on enjoying at all costs, that Brecht tended to the extremes of dogmatism which he felt were necessary to convey his social message: What makes Mann ist Mann , the Dreigroschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny — 9 such good entertainment is the plenitude of ebullient characters, rooted in a fantastic Victorian, Anglo-American or Anglo-Indian world never found in reality but culled from the legends of the roaring twenties, or the heyday of the British Raj; Brecht never ceased to admire the world of boxers, lumberjacks, colonial soldiers and gangsters, which he may, in part, have derived from the expressionist cult of vital, atavistic forces.

Brecht needed also the stimulus of collaboration, which stemmed from a sincere desire to discuss and learn rather than from paucity of invention, as the critic Alfred Kerr claimed, who sought constantly to detect plagiarism. Brecht wrote closely with Klabund, who would later give Brecht the idea for Der kaukasische Kreidekreis.

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After the burning of the Reichstag Brecht fled to Vienna; he attended the meeting at Sanary-sur-mer of exiled writers, and thence moved to Denmark, to the province of Svendborg, where he watched events in Germany most closely. Brecht continued to work relentlessly: A-Z 43 The view that Brecht, deprived of a theatre, turned his attention to formulating a Marxist aesthetic of drama, a theoretically determined system, is erroneous: His theoretical writings reflect the way in which he meditated upon his own work: The tone is light, frequently wryly humorous, often curious, but always allowing for movement and renewal; a rare intelligence is at work which questions, worries, retreats, adapts and restates.

Theatre, literature and politics, society and even landscape are discussed: The Messingkauf dialogues, a four-handed conversation piece, relate more directly to theatrical problems, and stress above all the need for lightness of touch, Spiel, and a kind of elegance in acting which contains sobriety within it. The rapier thrust is preferred to the sabre blow, the elliptical precision of Chinese art to Germanic ponderousness and an athletic form of acting to the pretentiously histrionic.

This was to be the play with which the Berliner Ensemble opened in ; it has remained in the repertoire ever since and has been staged by the leading theatres throughout the world. Every scene, and there are twelve of them, is supposed to stand as a self-contained unit indeed, in theory they should be virtually interchangeable , but a cumulative effect is undeniable, and there are moments that are conventionally dramatic, which enthral, rather than alienate, the audience.

Brecht did not approve of the reactions of the audience after the first performance: He had been forced, he A companion to twentieth-century german literature 44 claimed, to overstate the differences between the conventional theatre and his own in order that certain abuses be rectified: As early as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny he had, in fact, stressed that an overschematic differentiation between dramatic and epic was unsuitable: In he had written a conventional play—admittedly not one of his best—on Aristotelian lines, Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, which provided opportunity for splendid acting on the part of the heroine.

Brecht turned on the critics and admonished them to look at his plays as plays, without preconceived ideas or theories. Brecht utterly rejected the Christian idea of original sin: His initial concern was to show Galileo as a man determined to live, whose cunning recantation enables the truth to be heard despite the strictures of the Church. The issues are intellectual, but the play provides magnificent theatre, especially in the scene of the dressing of the Pope, the transformation of man to institution as each layer of clothing is added.

The Soviet purges sickened him, as did the American situation: There is undoubtedly a sense of isolation, but not of paralysis: The theme of goodness occupied him once again, but the basic theme concerns the rightness of giving the child or the disputed land to those best able to tend or cultivate it. The play is most successful in the portrayal of the judge Azdak, a figure compounded of the vitality and amoral zest of Baal, of Puntila and, to a lesser extent, of Galileo himself.

Brecht returned to Europe at the end of The setting up of his own Theater am Schiffbauerdamm brought little comfort: It is perhaps significant that Brecht wrote nothing of original merit for the theatre after his return to East Berlin; he adapted, produced and modified, turning his attention, amongst other things, to Waiting for Godot and Pineapple Poll. He withdrew again into poetry and wrote, in the Buckower Elegien, some of his finest. With economy, grace and sobriety he evoked a world of trees and water, silence and serenity, far from the turmoil of Berlin.

Before his premature death in he had suggested that his epitaph might contain the lines: The following editions of his work should be noted: A companion to twentieth-century german literature 46 Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter —75 Brinkmann, whose early death in a road accident on a visit to London put an end to a career which may or may not have been in the doldrums, began in association with the Cologne realists Wellershoff, Herburger, Elsner, etc.

Never political, he combined crude vitalism, linguistic virtuosity and an obsession with the surface detail of everyday life; only the last of these features, however, was taken up and developed by others e. While his poetry already seems dated and undisciplined, his final major prose work Rom. Blicke may prove to be a seminal work in its combination of verbal and photographic commentary, besides maintaining the strong German tradition of literature portraying the metropolis. Britting, Georg — Poet, playwright and writer of narrative prose, Britting started to write after the First World War he was badly wounded in He collaborated on many expressionist journals Die rote Erde, Der Sturmreiter, Der silberne Spiegel and edited his own, Die Sichel, with Josef Achmann, who contributed the graphic designs.

Britting greatly admired Georg Heym; he also wrote grotesque versions of biblical themes Hiob, Kain, Jor auf der Flucht, etc. During the Second World War Britting turned increasingly to nature poetry, leaving behind the excesses of expressionism and the parodistic elements of Hamlet. Short stories also appeared: Lob des Weines, a collection of twenty poems, appeared in Britting turned to traditional themes and structures, although his imagery remained fresh and striking.

Broch insisted upon an intellectualization of the novel, on working out, by sheer intellectual effort, the troubles of the world. Theoretical essays alternated with works of imagination: Both Broch and Musil embarked upon vast novels that would encompass the problems of the age, combining rationalism and mysticism. The Schlafwander trilogy —2 , encyclopedic and polyhistorical novels, have as their concern the disintegration of values and the decay of European civilization in the period — The first, Pasenow oder die Romantik, has been compared with Fontane, but the secure ground of the nineteenth century has been left far behind: The second, Esch oder die Anarchie, portrays the insubstantiality of the existence of the small book-keeper Esch, who is able neither to escape from Europe nor to come to terms with it; the third, Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit, portrays violence and anarchic forces which destroy the narcissistic world of the heroine.

The realization of the helplessness of the word when faced by the unspeakable will be a concern of many writers in the twentieth century, especially in German-speaking countries. The fourth novel, Die Schuldlosen , treats twentieth-century themes and uses certain dates , and as points of reference: The novel is uncomfortably suspended between political allegory and romantic myth.

The character of Mutter Gisson with her Demeterlike qualities fails to convince, the symbolism being forced and obtrusive, but the description of mass psychology is masterful. The speculative study on A companion to twentieth-century german literature 48 Massenpsychologie stands comparison with the essay Masse und Macht by Elias Canetti as one of the most perceptive analyses of the relationship between the individual self and the corporate whole.

Broch, of Jewish parentage, was arrested when the Nazis invaded Austria, but was released on the intervention of writers like James Joyce. He settled in America and wrote his last novels there. The Gesammelte Schriften ten vols appeared between and reprinted ; the Kommentierte Werkausgabe 13—17 vols appeared from to His early story Tod den Toten! As a Jew, Brod became a Zionist in , and he became especially interested in the more conservative faith of his co-religionists from the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Brod emigrated to Tel Aviv in and died there in In that year his autobiography Streitbares Leben appeared, which contains enlightening references to Kafka and also to Franz Werfel, of whose conversion to Christianity see Das Lied von Bernadette Brod did not approve. He produced three volumes of war poetry, Aus meiner Kriegszeit. Gedichte , Kamerad, als wir marschierten.

Kriegsgedichte and Soldaten der Erde. A war novel, Bunker Geschichte einer Kameradschaft , was widely read it was translated into English as Pillbox Gesamtausgabe der Gedichte in Eine Auswahl der Gedichte appeared in Bronnen, Arnolt originally Bronner, — Dramatist and novelist, Bronnen was one of the most extreme of the young talented writers who made the opening years of the Weimar Republic a fascinating and often disturbing experience. His play Vatermord written in , performed in Berlin in was the first of many scandals that surrounded his name; the portrayal of brutal violence and uninhibited sexuality outraged the audience.

Die Geburt der Jugend is a chaotic description of anarchic youth; the older generation is annihilated by sexually demented adolescents. In his comedy Die Exzesse the erotic desires of the woman, Hildegarde, find satisfaction in contemplation of intercourse with a goat. Katalaunische Schlacht looks back to the war as a time of frenzied and erotic ecstasy.

Rheinische Rebellen is an overtly nationalist play; Ostpolzug , a monodrama, fuses ancient and modern in its portrayal of Alexander the Great. Bronnen worked for the film industry in the s, also the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft. His relations with the Nazis were, however, strained. His autobiography Arnolt Bronnen gibt zu Protokoll appeared in ; Tage mit Brecht posthumously in Bruckner, Ferdinand pseudonym of Theodor Tagger, — Primarily a dramatist, Bruckner achieved fame in with his play Krankheit der Jugend, a crass and naturalistic portrayal of adolescent sexuality, much indebted to Freud.

Bruckner used techniques made famous by Erwin Piscator; his greatest success was Elisabeth von England , where the stage is again split between the two realms, Catholic Madrid and Protestant London, with both antagonists praying to the same god for victory. Bruckner also turned his attention, with less success, to classical themes Timon and Pyrrhus und Andromache perf.

A very successful play was Die Rassen , one which exploits the generation conflict and also the tension between Jew and Aryan. Bruckner emigrated to America in and returned to Europe in , spending the last years of his life in Berlin. Dramatische Werke and Schauspiele nach historischen Studien were both published in An edition of Dramen appeared in Brust was helped by Kurt Wolff; he lived in isolation in Memel and moved to Cranz after the Lithuanian occupation.

Brust shares with many expressionists a predilection for crass and often shocking climaxes. Brust turned towards a portrayal of pseudoreligious experiences in a series of other plays Cordatus. He died in obscurity, isolation and poverty at the age of forty-three; the Nazis initially tolerated his writing, believing him to be an acceptable poet of East Prussian life, although later his work was condemned as degenerate.

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The Dramen — ed. Horst Denkler appeared in Since then he has written stories Ein schwarzer, abgrundtiefer See , extended and Babylon and novels which concentrate on human foibles and idiosyncrasies in domestic and professional contexts, although social and political pressures, implicitly criticized, are present in various forms. Essays Kritiken Glossen Unpolitische Betrachtungen zu Literatur und Politik demonstrate individual interests Haiti, Alejo Carpentier and more general concerns of his generation ecology, post-history, apocalypse , the latter present also in Bericht aus dem Innern der Unruhe.

Gorlebener Tagebuch , on demonstrations against nuclear power. Central to the rest of his work is his relationship to the American continent and in particular Haiti, which he visited for the first time in and where he has ancestral links. In the reportages Aus der neuen Welt. An informative document on Burckhardt is the Festschrift which appeared on his seventieth birthday, Dauer im Wechsel Burger, Hermann —89 Burger studied in Zurich, wrote dissertations on Paul Celan and contemporary Swiss literature and taught for a while at the Federal Technical University in Zurich.

His chief works, Schilten. Burger shares with the Austrian Thomas Bernhard and with other contemporary Swiss writers e. Meyer the theme of death as the ultimate threat to personal identity, which he treats with an even greater degree of linguistic virtuosity and reflective intensity. He committed suicide in Brunsloben and Menzenmang volume I and volume II, chapters 1—7 of the planned tetralogy Brenner on the scion of a cigar manufacturing dynasty in search of his childhood appeared in and Der unsichtbare Held, a Nibelungen drama, appeared in the same year.

A companion to twentieth-century german literature 54 Burte published poems in Alemannic dialect Madlee ; a further anthology appeared in Die Seele des Maien. Burte received much acclaim for his work, the Kleist prize for Wildfeber and other distinctions during the Third Reich. The sinologist Peter Kien, obsessed by his own private library, and retreating ever further into a state of solipsism, is ultimately destroyed by fire, ancient symbol of transformation.

The other characters, Pfaff, Theresa Krumbholz and Fischerle, are also utterly self-centred and convinced of their own importance. The idea for the novel came to Canetti in when he witnessed the burning of the Palace of Justice by a mob in Vienna. Canetti moved to Paris in and to London in the following year. In he published Masse und Macht, a sociological, anthropological study of crowds and power: A collection of aphorisms made between and , Aufzeichnungen, appeared in Das Geheimnis der Uhr. Aufzeichnungen — appeared in In Canetti was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.

A companion to twentieth-century german literature 56 Carossa, Hans — Son of a doctor, Hans Carossa studied medicine in Munich and Leipzig, then settled as a medical practitioner in Bavaria. Verwandlungen einer Jugend is a less successful sequel. The novel Geheimnisse des reifen Lebens uses the diary form to explore human relationships. After the war Carossa attempted to explain his situation at that time in Ungleiche Welten Further autobiographical details of his life appeared in Aufzeichnungen aus Italien ; a scattering of short stories appeared in the s.

His poetry is unassuming and traditional: In his work Carossa eschews modernist experimentation; he appealed to the educated middle-class German reader with his cultivation of humanistic values derived from Goethe. Unlike his parents Celan escaped deportation when his home was occupied by the Nazis, but awareness of the Holocaust is at the centre of his work, his approach to the problems of language and communication in general long a preoccupation of writers from the linguistic melting-pot of Central Europe and the Balkans being linked to the impossibility of conveying the extreme physical and existential exposure of the persecuted.

These, together with translations of twentyone sonnets by Shakespeare and poems by Char, Supervielle, Michaux, Yessenin, Mandelstam, Block and others, were assembled in the provisional Gesammelte Werke in five volumes. Despite the increasing number of exegeses see the Celan-Jahrbuch: He was a man of mystical tendency whose experience of the Holocaust placed obstacles in the way to religious enlightenment; the distortion and reversal of normal syntactical relationships which are a marked feature of his work are related to this central paradox.

However, he remained attached to Jewish culture, as is evident especially in late poems set in Jerusalem. Gesammelte Werke five volumes appeared in His defence of members of the Baader-Meinhof group during the seventies influenced along with Kafka the fragmentary novel Die Herren des Morgengrauens He has also produced works which owe their origin to experiences in Italy Malavita. Mafia zwischen A companion to twentieth-century german literature 58 gestern und morgen and Briganten , a play on Mayakovsky Weltmeisterschaft im Klassenkampf and radio plays.

Csokor, Franz Theodor — Csokor is known primarily as an Austrian expressionist dramatist. He worked in theatres in St Petersburg before settling in his native Vienna: After the First World War Csokor turned to historical and social problems: After Csokor fled into eastern Europe; he was finally arrested in Yugoslavia, and interned. A selection of his works, Du bist gemeint, with a foreword by Erhard Buschbeck, appeared in The Zeuge einer Zeit. Ein paar Schaufeln Erde. Czechowski, Heinz — Czechowski witnessed the destruction of Dresden, which became the subject of several poems and autobiographical sketches.

His melancholy free verse belongs to a tradition of nature poetry which originates in the eighteenth century and is imbued with an awareness of how his predecessors have responded to the same mainly Saxon landscapes and the effects on them of industrial development. In all these one can detect a movement from a positive depiction of everyday life in the GDR and a straightforward autobiographical approach to the expression of a more complex subjectivity, sceptical of conventional views of progress.

Nachtspur consists of poems and prose from to His vast epic Das Nordlicht, which took him twelve years to write, was published in The works that follow Das Nordlicht, particularly the collection of sketches Mit silberner Sichel , contain much talented writing: Dichtungen und Schriften appeared in , and Gedichte in In the following year his best-known work appeared, Ultra Violett. He travelled extensively; a collection of Novellen again, greatly influenced by Jugendstil topoi appeared in Die acht Gesichter am Biwasee. Japanische Liebesgeschichten it was reprinted in and was extremely popular.

In the same year his second novel, Raubmenschen, was published: Dauthendey responded sensitively to the Orient and popularized the culture of the Far East: Erlebnisse aus Java and Letzte Reise appeared posthumously. His Gesammelte Werke six vols appeared in Degenhardt, Franz Josef — Degenhardt became known in the s as author, composer and performer to his own guitar accompaniment of protest songs, of which there have been numerous recordings and publications, incl.

As a novelist he is associated with the realists published by the Autoren-Edition incl. Fuchs, Timm , who aim to raise political consciousness in a wide readership by showing how political forces impinge on the lives of ordinary people. Dehmel, Richard — A student of the natural sciences, philosophy and economy, Dehmel took up writing in the Berlin of the s and reflected in his poetry the main preoccupations of the following two decades: Nietzscheanism, naturalism, impressionism, Jugendstil and a latent expressionism.

His poetry is marked by a powerful sensuality, compassion and a keen intellect. Dehmel stresses in many poems the joy to be found in sexual love, together with hope for true emancipation in the future. Dehmel also wrote plays: His work is at its best in the portrayal of sensuous love and in its sincere, humanitarian beliefs.

Although exempt from enlistment due to injuries received at school after a fall from a horizontal bar , Dehmel joined the army in he was over 50 at the time: Dehmel was in close contact with the major writers of his day; he contributed to the leading literary journals. Gesammelte Werke ten vols appeared from to a three-volume selection in A posthumous autobiography, Mein Leben, was published in In appeared Dichtungen, Briefe, Dokumente.

His awareness of the forces at work in contemporary society and of how their interaction affects individual lives underlies all his novels. In Adenauerplatz a security guard employed to watch over a shopping and business complex in an anonymous German city is forced to confront the contradictions of his position as a refugee from Chile after the fall of Allende when he is drawn into collusion with a plot by friends to burgle an international wheeler-dealer with a stake in the political status quo in South America; having become aware of the ramifications of Third World exploitation he decides to abandon his job and return to Chile.

Mogadischu Fensterplatz is a fictional treatment from the perspective of an ordinary passenger of the hijack carried out by members of the Baader-Meinhof group in Somalia in and reflects a deepening concern with Third World topics evident also in the work of Born and Timm. Die Birnen von Ribbeck , a story consisting of a single sentence seventy pages long, describes the impact of the opening of the Wall on a farm in provincial GDR made famous by a ballad of Fontane.

This work, a collection of highly charged utterances, preaches an extreme form of militant Catholicism: The publication of Part One met with little interest, the exception being Karl Wolfskehl, who looked back on it with great pleasure during his New Zealand exile. Das Werk six volumes was published in Dinter, Artur — A student of the natural sciences, Dinter became a teacher, then turned to the theatre; he became increasingly anti-Semitic and reached notoriety with a trilogy of novels published between and The first of these was much acclaimed and widely read; in crudely sensational terms it describes the poisoning of the blood of a German woman, Johanna, through once having had intercourse with a Jew.

The child born to Johanna and her husband Hermann, both blond and Germanic, is dark and of Jewish appearance. Hermann kills the Jew and returns to find that his wife has killed the child and has committed suicide. A collection of Novellen appeared in , bearing the title of the first story, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, an account of mental disturbance and, in fact, little more than a catalogue of neuroses. Wallenstein two vols , which appeared in , deals with the historical figures of the Thirty Years War but also hints at wider issues—the role of the individual during a time of massive upheaval.

Man and nature are locked in a gigantic struggle: Comparisons have been made with Manhattan Transfer and Ulysses Hans Henny Jahnn and others referred in their reviews to the Irish novelist: Biberkopf sinks from one stage of degradation to another: Babylonische Wandrung curses the sin of pride and portrays with grotesque humour the passage of the hero through the Babylon of Western civilization in a journey of selfexploration and expiation. The work appears formless a fusion of mythology, history, modern events, statistical facts and popular songs , but an inexhaustible richness cannot be denied.

In he became a convert to Roman Catholicism and after the war he returned to Paris, working in the cultural department of the French military government his son Wolfgang had been killed in the war, fighting as a French soldier. Questions are asked concerning the possibility of responsible action and the ultimate meaning of human existence. Doderer, Heimito von — Born near Vienna, Doderer enlisted in the Austrian army as a young man and became a Russian prisoner of war in Doderer studied history at Vienna University, received his doctorate in and dedicated himself to creating an epic description of the city he knew so well.

He had published a book of poems, Gassen und Landschaften, in , also a short novel, Die Bresche, in , but Doderer felt that he needed the breadth of the full-scale novel to do his subject Vienna justice. Other novels, Ein Mord, den jeder begeht , Der Umweg and Die erleuchteten Fenster , are best regarded as sophisticated detective stories and thrillers, meant for a wide readership.

The hero is one Melzer, former imperial officer, now senior official in the new republic. The years —11 and —5 are compared and contrasted. The book is felt to lack social awareness, despite the rich clutter A-Z 67 of its scenario. Doderer is concerned with a process which he calls Menschwerdung: A certain pretentiousness cannot be denied here, also much implausibility the worker Leonhard Kakabsa, for example, who experiences Latin as an almost mystical illumination.

After this epic re-creation of Vienna Doderer turned to shorter narrative forms: This novel is meant to be part of a cycle bearing the title Roman Nr. Der Grenzwald, a fragmentary part of this cycle, appeared posthumously in She made her final return to Germany in , since when she has lived in Heidelberg. She has also produced autobiographical writings, Von der Natur nicht vorgesehen , Aber die Hoffnung. Roman in Segmenten , revised version Her editorial work includes the anthology Nachkrieg und Unfrieden and Doppelinterpretationen , in which brief essays by readers and authors on poems by the latter are juxtaposed.

The A companion to twentieth-century german literature 68 poetological reflections present in the introductions and epilogues to these volumes are continued in the Frankfurt lectures Das Gedicht als Augenblick der Freiheit He also provided libretti for popular operettas: Dorst, Tankred — Dorst served in the army at the end of the Second World War, was a POW until , then studied German literature, art and drama in Munich, where he has continued to live.

His plays since the early s are the result of a close working partnership with his wife Ursula Ehler. He then collaborated with the director Peter Zadek on the television film Rotmord , based on this play, and on the revue Kleiner Mann— was nun? The film scenario Sand , radio play , which explores the motives for a political murder in , was followed by A-Z 69 Eiszeit , on an old man who can be identified as the unrepentant Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; with his stubborn will to live he is contrasted with his would-be assassin who commits suicide.

The late s were occupied with the Merz cycle, an extensive chronicle in various media of a middle-class family between the late s and the present consisting of Auf dem Chimborazo , play, radio play and television film , Dorothea Merz , novel and television film , Klaras Mutter , story and television film , Die Villa , play , Mosch , film , Fragment einer Reise nach Stettin , radio play , Die Reise nach Stettin , scenario and Heinrich oder die Schmerzen der Phantasie , play and radio play , which together form a vivid panorama of German history.

Karlos first performed is a version of the material made famous by Schiller in Don Carlos. Fernando Krapp hat mir diesen Brief geschrieben presents a woman between two constrasting men, Herr Paul , first performed a conflict between progress and stasis with surreal effects, as a young entrepreneur attempts to dislodge an old couple Paul and his sister from his new business premises.

Wie Dilldapp nach dem Riesen ging is another play. A Werkausgabe has been in progress since He returned to Vienna in and again took up legal practice. His prose works include the autobiographical Z. Drach can thus be associated with Lind, Hilsenrath and Tabori as an advocate of black humour in order to expose persecution in general and that of the Jews in particular.

Late works are Ja und Nein: Oktoberlicht portrays a day in the life of a middle-aged woman who visits her scattered family after a stay in hospital; in Wer verteidigt Katrin Lambert? Eingeschlossen , in which Jesus and Prometheus confront one another as a social worker and an atomic physicist who have become the inmates of a mental hospital, represents a significant departure from the naturalism of her previous work.

For A-Z 71 many years he, together with Frisch, represented contemporary drama in German to the rest of the world. Early influences consisted of the theology absorbed at home—he was, especially in his early years, exercised by theological problems in what he recognized as a post-religious age and therefore approaches existentialism—and the plays of Thornton Wilder and Brecht. In the course of his career his work was marked by consistency of theme and a formal development towards ever greater emphasis on the grotesque, prompted by his early realization that the anonymity of the forces which control human fate nowadays cannot be reconciled with the traditional conception of tragedy: In the context of the breakdown of ideological confrontation in the late s, the play appears unwittingly prophetic.

His other writings include two volumes of Theaterschriften und Reden , , Der Mitmacher.

A Werkausgabe in thirty volumes appeared in , Gesammelte Werke eight volumes in and Das dramatische Werk seventeen volumes in A Werkausgabe in seven volumes appeared in E Edschmid, Kasimir pseudonym of Eduard Schmid, — Edschmid studied Romance languages in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Strasbourg; he rapidly associated himself with the young writers of expressionism and became a tireless propagator and theoretician of that movement. In a famous lecture 13 December he described the expressionists thus: Er sieht nicht, er schaut.

Er schildert nicht, er erlebt. Er gibt nicht wieder, er gestaltet. Er nimmt nicht, er sucht. Nun gibt es nicht mehr die Kette der Tatsachen: Nun gibt es die Vision davon. In later life he wrote on expressionism again Lebendiger Expressionismus ; his diary Tagebuch —60 also contains reminiscences. Ehrenstein, Albert — Born in Vienna, son of Hungarian Jewish parents, Ehrenstein was discovered by Karl Kraus, who published his poems and grotesque prose sketches in Die kackel. Ehrenstein is known, however, primarily as a lyric poet; Der Mensch schreit is a collection of expressionist verse, pacifist, dynamic and urgent in tone: Ehrenstein went to Switzerland during the First World War; he led a restless life afterwards, travelling through Europe and Asia in an attempt to find and cherish the finest manifestations of human civilization.

In the s other collections of poetry appeared: Ehrenstein fled to New York, where he died in a hospital for the poor in Gedichte und Prosa ed. Eich also achieved prominence in the s as the principal contributor, along with Ilse Aichinger, whom he married in , Ingeborg Bachmann and Wolfgang Weyrauch, to the renaissance of radio drama, composing some fifteen plays within the decade.

George, Stefan [WorldCat Identities]

In his treatise Negerplastik appeared, containing illustrations of African masks and statues. Einstein pleaded for a new three-dimensionality, finding in African carvings a sense of spatial structure similar to that created by cubism. Jahrhunderts sought to combine the assessment of primitivism with social awareness. Einstein identified with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and fought with them; he returned to France, but was interned when the German armies invaded.

Unable to return to Spain because of his previous involvement he committed suicide at Gave de Pau. A companion to twentieth-century german literature 76 Eisenreich, Herbert —86 Eisenreich lived in Vienna and Upper Austria, except for a period of war service, four years as a writer for the newspaper Die Zeit and the radio in the Federal Republic and a stay in France. These and his novels show him to have been the last representative of a tradition of Austrian social fiction which reached its zenith in the work of Joseph Roth and Heimito von Doderer.

Die abgelegte Zeit is the surviving fragment of a novel which originally had the title Sieger und Besiegte and presents from the standpoint of the efforts of a number of characters to adapt to the situation after the Second World War in the spirit advocated by a resigned and conciliatory Austrian general in the theory of retreat he devises in the last weeks of the war. Elsner, Gisela —92 Elsner achieved fame and notoriety at a stroke with the award of the Formentor Prize for her first novel Die Riesenzwerge The gruesome, grotesque effects conveyed here by mainly concentrating on the meal rituals of the petty bourgeois family can be related to the distanced distortions evident in the work of Grass, Jakov Lind and the early Peter Weiss rather than to the Cologne realists Wellershoff, Herburger, Born with whom she was initially associated.

They are less manifest in her later novels, but she remained primarily a satirist of contemporary social and domestic mores in the Federal Republic, viewed from the committed standpoint of a member of the West German Communist Party. In Der Nachwuchs the narrator is a repulsive child treated as a pet by its parents and forced to make a late discovery of the world beyond the confines of the stuffy family house; narrator, family and neighbours appear, as in Die Riesenzwerge, in the same jaundiced light.

In the following novels the satire becomes more psychologically penetrating and socially specific: Das Windei covers forty years in the lives of a couple determined to maintain an affluence they have been brought up to take for granted by means of a shady construction business which ends in bankruptcy. Ende, Michael —95 Ende is the most prominent recent author of stories which aim to appeal to children and adults. His international success is based on Momo and Die unendliche Geschichte , both of which have been filmed.

In the second the framework narrative set in the real world and the core narrative set in the realm of fantasy are indicated and separated by red and green scripts until after the passing of a critical point which reverses the debilitation of fantasy which had threatened the central child figure. Engelke, Gerrit — From a working-class background, Engelke, apprenticed to a house-painter, turned early to poetry and in approached Dehmel for encouragement: With Kneip Engelke became quickly befriended; after enlistment in the outbreak of the war found him writing his novel Don Juan in Denmark Engelke grew closer to Lersch.

An enthusiastic proclamation of a higher humanity pulsates throughout much of his work. A selection of his poems appeared in a volume entitled Schulter an Schulter Engelke was killed near Cambrai on 13 October ; he is buried close to the spot where Wilfrid Owen was to die two weeks later. Rhythmus des neuen Europa appeared in reprinted Engelmann, Bernd — After service at the front Engelmann was confined to Dachau and other camps until He offered an alternative view of German history in the Deutsches Antigeschichtsbuch Wir Untertanen , covering the period from the Middle Ages to , Einig gegen Recht und Freiheit on the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and Trotz alledem on German radicals during the last two hundred years.

He has lived as a free-lance writer or as a lecturer in Norway which inspired some bleak nature poems , Rome and the USA. Enzensberger is a polemicist schooled in the dialectic of Hegel, Marx and Adorno, to the last of whom he owes insights developed in the essays collected in Einzelheiten two volumes and , which rigorously analyse the West German media. His journalism has been collected in the volumes Politik und Verbrechen , Politische Kolportagen , Deutschland, Deutschland unter anderem , Palaver , Politische Brosamen , the seven travel reports Ach Europa!

The collections of poems Zukunftsmusik and Kiosk continue the process of growing scepticism and distance from earlier certainties, spiced with metaphysical wit. Diderots Schatten assembles all the writings on the French sage who has long been admired by Enzensberger. Enzensberger has been a key figure in the intellectual life of the Federal Republic from its foundation and his influence far transcends the reputation he has gained from his contribution to any single genre, even poetry.

Occasionally derided as a chameleon figure he has demonstrated by his polemical talent, his wit, his cosmopolitanism, his versatility in several media and his ability to take a broad view of social and political developments and to assess their implications in a pragmatic spirit unusual in the German left, that, as in the days of Heinrich Heine, there is a place for positive subversion.

A visit to Italy turned his attention to questions of artistry rather than politics: As Dramaturg in Weimar —14 Ernst wrote a series of historical plays including Demetrios , Canossa , Brunhild and Ninon de Lenclos After the patriotic tone in his writing became more pronounced, and his conservative stance more extreme; the basic human problems, Ernst believed, were revealed more clearly in rural, even feudal, society than amongst the urban proletariat. His literary reputation is founded on his prose rather than his dramas: The hero of the first, one Hans Werther, rejects social and political pre-occupations and finds fulfilment in marriage and agriculture.

Most well-known are the collections of Novellen: His essays including Der Weg zur Form advocate restraint and order in writing and a hierarchical ideal in society. The attempt to rescue the verse-epic Das Kaiserbuch —8 , and Der Heiland was largely unsuccessful. His Gesammelte Werke now largely unread appeared between and in twenty-one volumes.

The second novel, Alraune. Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens , was immensely popular a girl is born from the seed of an ejaculating victim of the hangman implanted in a certain Alma Raune in a nearby hospital: Ewers considered himself the herald of a fantastic Satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade: Der Fundvogel is a sensational account of an enforced sex change.

Ewers was appointed to the Dichter-Akademie, but the Nazis, finding his earlier writings incompatible with visions of Nordic health, prohibited further writing and pronounced Ewers degenerate. His work is primarily of interest in the link that it provides between decadence, Satanism and National Socialism. Gesammelte Werke eight vols appeared in Seltsame Geschichten were published in Fallada became instantly famous with Kleiner Mann, was nun? The protagonist Pinneberg attempts to defend his private happiness between the middle classes on the one hand and the proletariat on the other, dreading redundancy and the threat of impoverishment: Fallada, an alcoholic, wrote at a frantic pace to provide himself with funds; during the Third Reich he turned to idyllic romances and folksy legends.

Damals bei uns daheim and Heute bei uns zu Hause are little more than autobiographies. The Russians elected Fallada as mayor of Feldberg in Mecklenburg two years before his death. Fallada is a powerful story-teller who succeeds best when describing the narrow, sentimental world of the petite bourgeoisie: Fels, Ludwig — Of working-class origin, Fels has more successfully than any other contemporary social realist, with the possible exception of Kroetz, encapsulated in his poetry and prose the sadness, frustration, anger and disorientation of the under-class in the urban environment.

Fels relies on experience and an unidealistic identification with his characters. Bleeding Heart is a novel on the ego-trip of a desperately jealous man set in Tangier. Sturmwanderung and Die Hochzeit von Sarajewo are plays, the latter set in the Bosnian civil war. Feuchtwanger, Lion — Dramatic critic, playwright and novelist, Feuchtwanger made his reputation in the s with a series of historical novels. He helped Bertolt Brecht with Trommeln in der Nacht originally called Spartakus and collaborated with him on Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England; Brecht in turn helped him to revise his Warren Hastings, Gouverneur von Indien written , published and, some twenty years later, wrote with him Die Gesichte der Simone Machard.

A Jew himself, Feuchtwanger described as early as in Die Geschwister Oppenheim the sufferings and tribulations of his fellow Jews in Germany. He fled to France and also visited the Soviet Union; he became co-editor with Brecht and Willi Bredel of the anti-fascist literary review Das Wort, published in Moscow. His plays, mostly Old Testament and historical dramas, have not proved successful, apart from those written in collaboration with Brecht.

Together with others, Feuchtwanger founded the Aurora publishing house in New York at the end of the war to bring out works in German for the reviving German market. In he was awarded the Nationalpreis der DDR. His Gesammelte Werke appeared from —48; the Gesammelte Werke twenty vols from on, with a sixteen-volume edition appearing in Fichte, Hubert —86 The illegitimate son of a Jewish father, Fichte spent part of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, an experience which formed the basis of his first novel Das Waisenhaus He then trained as an actor, but also worked on the land in North Germany and Provence before becoming a professional writer in Hamburg.

Here he remained until his death, except for extensive journeys in South America and the Caribbean in connection A-Z 85 with his later anthropological works. Nossack, Der Untergang and references to the ritual practices of AfroAmerican religions. These form the subject of the following works: Xango accompanied by a photographic volume with the same title , dealing with Bahia, Haiti and Trinidad, and Petersilie , on Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Miami and Grenada, which develop the preoccupation with abnormal sexual practices and psychopathology reflected in his earlier work.

What was completed of the planned nineteen parts of the cycle of novels Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit appeared between and Der kleine Hauptbahnhof oder Lob des Strichs, 3. Glossen set in Berlin this volume is not to be published until , 4. Glossen set in Rome, Greece, Egypt, Morocco , 6. Der Platz der Gehenkten set in Morocco , 7. Roman der Ethnologie set in Brazil , unnumbered volumes: Forschungsbericht set in Belize , Psyche.

In addition there are volumes of Paralipomena: These are assembled in a sixteen-volume cassette. Flake turned to traditional writing after the war and sought to promote understanding between France and Germany: In the s Flake embarked upon a Badische Chronik; he also wrote essays on French literary figures, his best being on the Marquis de Sade , whose preface attempts to explain that it is necessary to describe the perverse in order fully to appreciate the norm.

An autobiography appeared in Es wird Abend. The Werke five vols appeared from to In she met Bertolt Brecht, who had the most far-reaching influence upon her work. More sober is Pioniere in Ingolstadt , a hard-boiled portrayal of the effect on the young girls of the town of the arrival of a troop of soldiers. Avantgarde is a thinly-veiled portrayal of Brecht. Her play on Charles I, Karl Stuart, was first published in The Gesammelte Werke three vols appeared in , a four-volume edition in Flex had also A-Z 87 published two volumes of poems before the war and a historical tragedy in verse, Klaus Bismarck , dealing with an ancestor of the Prussian statesman Flex had been a private tutor to the Bismarck family.

This was reprinted in Riga as late as May Gesammelte Werke two vols appeared in He was famous for short stories concerning the lives of North German fishermen his father having been one: Schullengrieper und Tungenknieper , Fahrersleute and Nordsee He reached a wide readership with his novel Seefahrt ist not! Much of his writing is in Plattdeutsch, particularly the Hamborger Janmooten His plays, Cilli Cohrs and Doggerbank posthumously, , are less successful.

Fock also published a collection of Plattdeutsche Kriegsgedichte —15 , many of them humorous: Das schnellste Schiff der Flotte. Die besten Geschichten Gorch Focks appeared in The West German training-ship for young cadets is named after him. Erinnerungen is an informative and sympathetic document. In Fontana contributed poems to a collection by A companion to twentieth-century german literature 88 E. Rheinhardt entitled Die Botschaft. Fontana turned increasingly to the novel: In appeared Der Weg durch den Berg, a novel dealing with the building of the St Gotthard pass; another novel dealing with the advantages and disadvantages of modern technology the use of gas is Der Atem des Feuers In his later years Fontana devoted himself to theatre criticism.

In he published Wiener Schauspieler, a portrayal of famous actors and actresses from Mitterwurzer to Maria Eis. A selection of his writings, Mond im Abendrot, was published in In Kaspar Hausers Tod analogies to the situation in Germany in anti-terrorist campaign are indicated in the funeral of the famous foundling murdered in Forte is also the author of numerous plays for radio and television in which everyday subjects are treated with original use of these media.

In Der Artist im Moment seines Absturzes a play within a play shows actors coming to terms with their roles as a German writer and his wife in exile in Paris in Das Muster is a chronicle novel on how two families, Italian and Polish, settled in Germany and became linked.