Hugo von Montfort's texts revolve around the tension between the pursuit of earthly happiness and the concern for the bliss of the hereafter, which may be jeopardised by the former. This tension is reflected in the interplay between world-embracing and world-renouncing poetry, in moments of sudden change, such as staged breaks in poetry and distinctly new approaches, and is even reflected in the melodies and illumination of the manuscript. The article suggests that we should not look for a solution to this contradiction in Hugo's 'Gesamtkunstwerk', the Heidelberg Cpg 329, but rather recognise that the tension cannot be resolved, and emphasise Hugo's productive handling of this aporia. Hugo's poetry then appears not so much as a moral, autodidactic project but rather as a multi-layered poetic reflection which gains aesthetic and conceptual dynamism precisely from the aporia.
The specific two-part structure of "Herzog Ernst B", the heroic stylisation of the prologue in particular and numerous equivalences in their motifs show that the "Strasbourg Alexander" has served as a model, while the Sinbad stories are clearly the dominant source for the section on the Orient. In addition, encyclopaedic and learned geographical knowledge make the Orient appear real. A dynamic treatment of models and sources and the author's awareness of fictionality testify to his poetic creative power and expertise.
This article examines the Tristan figure as a "care receiver" in Eilhart's and Gottfried's narratives. Drawing on the paradigm of care, which is particularly productive in the social sciences and philosophical research, the study shows that the two texts design and functionalise the support of other characters for the frequently endangered protagonist in different ways. While Eilhart tends to talk about caring for Tristrant in a spirit of solidarity in order to create in his narrative the option of social recognition for his problematic protagonist, Gottfried sees care as being closer to Minne and designs options of emotional recognition for the adulterous lovers, who lack social recognition.
This essay cultivates the concept of the literary family archive. Even though the cultural practice of the Nachlass (posthumous papers) came into being around 1800, manuscripts often survive in family archives, whose owners-as heirs and descendants of a writer or a writing family-can restrict access to the materials, hand them only to privileged actors and generally have a motivation that diverges from the will of their progenitors as to how these manuscripts should be treated. As a case study for a literary family archive, my article discusses the Goethe letters in Schloss Wiepersdorf which were published in 1835 by Bettina von Arnim as Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde ('Goethe's correspondence with a child') and sold at a sensational auction in 1929. Through documents in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar, the Berlin State Library and the Morgan Library in New York City and through editorial projects around 1900, my article sketches the erratic provenance of these epistolary manuscripts from 1858 to 1929. On the basis of this example I pursue the motivations of Bettina's heirs which, while not always without contradictions, proved formative for the Arnim family archive, and I discuss various 'house philologists' (Herman Grimm, Reinhold Steig and Fritz Bergemann), who gained exclusive access to the family archive at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century. In so doing, this article reconstructs the dynamics which restricted access to the Arnim Goetheana, allowed them to circulate between Wiepersdorf and Berlin and whose losses still shape and define the materials to the present day.
The article reconstructs how Armin Mohler exploited Benn's prestige in an attempt to form a right-wing intellectual camp in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Later, Mohler portrays Benn as the quintessential fascist in order to rehabilitate a specific model of fascism, and uses this to develop a personality model for rightwing radicals with a propensity for violence. These two images of Benn can still be found today in the new right-wing circle centred on G & ouml;tz Kubitschek.
This article examines the narrative of virginity in Brother Philipp's "Marienleben" ('Life of Mary'). Virginity proves to be a processual event in which all areas of life are subject to a rigid regime of watchfulness. Practices of separation and opening calibrate Mary's life, which unfolds in the tension between purity and vulnerability, grace and proving herself.
This article is an attempt to understand the current research interest in the aesthetic effects of thingness in pre-modern literature from the perspective of the late modernist cultural situation. The modernist social functionalization of aesthetic processes has long since been used in historical cultural studies. The article seeks to understand the increased awareness of the historical possibilities of aesthetic thought, reflected in recent years in the proposals emanating from the literary discourse the 'thing' (das 'Ding') in terms of the concept of the 'agonal object'. Drawing the historical semantics of 'Ding' and 'Sache', this refers to the aesthetic practice a threefold antagonism which arises in the qualities of literary objects in late and pre-modern times. This agonal practice is so familiar today that its basic medieval concepts can be exemplified by one of the most famous, yet controversial representatives of the so-called 'Jugendbuch'. However, the aesthetic thinking patterns are by no means trivial, as the model interpretation of the assemblage of miraculous castle, bed and pillar in Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival" shows. By mirroring aesthetic objects, they enable us to discover dynamic lines of thought both within and beyond the bounds of positive visibility which show historical aesthetics to an alternative to strictly logical thinking.
Die Metapher der ,Sprache der Dinge' ist so umstritten wie produktiv: Sie lenkt den Blick auf & Auml;hnlichkeiten und Differenzen zwischen Sprache und nicht-sprachlichen semiotischen Systemen. Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt Impulse insbesondere aus den Schriften Roland Barthes' und Susanne K. Langers sowie den ,Material Culture Studies' zusammen, um Pfade zu erkunden, die Semiotizit & auml;t der Dinge beschreibbar zu machen. Eine anschlie ss ende Analyse des I. ,,Parzival"-Buches soll aufweisen, dass und wie Wolfram die Janusk & ouml;pfigkeit materieller Zeichen zum Gegenstand wiederholt-variierter Konflikte macht. Beim Versuch, die Spezifik von Wolframs Erz & auml;hlen von Dingen zu erhellen, wird sich Langers Unterscheidung zwischen diskursivem und pr & auml;sentativem Symbolismus als besonders hilfreich erweisen. The metaphor of the 'language of things' is as controversial as it is productive: it draws attention to similarities and differences between language and non-linguistic semiotic systems. This article brings together impulses from the writings of Roland Barthes and Susanne K. Langer in particular, as well as from 'Material Culture Studies', in order to explore ways of describing the semioticity of things. The following analysis of the first book of "Parzival" shows that and how Wolfram makes the Janus-headed nature of material signs the subject of repeated and varied conflicts. Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational symbolism proves particularly helpful in shedding light on the specific nature of Wolfram's narration of things.
Herman Grimm's (1828-1901) slight lyrical oeuvre did not follow the trend towards realism and was hardly noticed even by his contemporaries. The article presents and elucidates this oeuvre on the basis of the plans for a selective edition in 1855 and the references to Platen in four mostly unpublished poems. In these texts, which are addressed directly to Italy or to the lyricist who died there, the figure of Platen takes on aristocratic-heroic traits which place him high above the ridicule of his opponents, but also cast the endeavours to erect a monument to him in Ansbach in a questionable light.
