Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel prominently incorporates I Ching (Yi Jing) divination. While traditional Chinese interpretations of the I Ching have largely emphasized its ethical and philosophical dimensions, and European receptions have explored its natural-philosophical and theological aspects, Hesse's novel notably re-centers its divinatory function. His engagement with the I Ching was heavily influenced by his compatriot Richard Wilhelm's translation and the School of Wisdom which included figures such as C. G. Jung and H. G. Keyserling. In Das Glasperlenspiel, the I Ching is reimagined as a living artistic force-a source of inspiration, a catalyst for the protagonist's spiritual growth, and a pivotal thematic element. Through this integration, Hesse advocates a return to divine principles as a counterbalance to the dominance of technical and scientific rationalism and as a safeguard against moral decline.
Finn Job's Damenschach (2024) offers a reworking of Twelfth Night in a contemporary setting, thereby exploring the vitality of a work of traditional canonic culture in the current context of skepticism toward tradition. It transforms Shakespeare's comedy of cross-dressing into an inquiry into identity politics and gender fluidity which takes shape via a formal shuttling among alternative theater-historical genres: comedy, Kammerspiel, commedia dell'arte, and tragedy. The intratextual generic indeterminacy stages a broader challenge to rigid concepts of identity that is subject to questioning by the characters themselves. Furthermore, popular musical interludes offer alternative diagnoses, as do the narrative's antithetical conclusions: harmonious reconciliation versus violent sacrifice in a Girardian paradigm. This novel by an emerging author offers a variegated description of the cultural moment, drawing on a pessimistic undertone in the Shakespearean original but also sketching emancipatory prospects beyond identitarian constraints.
This article reads the image of the umbrella in Kafka's earliest novel-fragment Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) as a means of testing the limits of literary language. In addition to plotting the protagonist's precarious positionality, the umbrella Karl Ro ss mann forgets at the outset of the novel-fragment proves an overdetermined object that performs a disappearing act that would be impossible for the work's title-figure. Der Verschollene, the story of one lost to communication (verschollen), performs with its umbrella something denied the protagonist by the genre in which he appears. The umbrella that the text both emphasizes and disavows suggests the possibility that Der Verschollene is not just an Antibildungsroman, but a doomed attempt to compose a kind of Bildungsroman under erasure, an Entbildungsroman which leads not to the protagonist's integration, but to his ultimate disintegration and erasure by the very text that brings him into being.
While scholars have increasingly studied the German right's publishing strategies and literary politics, less attention has been paid to the literary texts as such. They are worth examining in detail, I argue here, because they reflect in exaggerated form a problem that troubles political novels more generally: the dwindling role of the novel in the twenty-first century. Focusing on novels by Hoewer, Zierke, Strau ss, and Schwaerzel, the article shows how these texts, by staging scenes where books have immense power, work to create the plausibility of their own efficacy. Such fantasies of literary efficacy, I suggest, are a hallmark of the political novel today across the ideological spectrum.
This paper examines the transformation in hegemonic masculinity during neoliberal crisis and the rise of global authoritarianism via Berlin School filmmaker Valeska Grisebach's Western (2017). The recent re-popularization of traditional gender roles, of productive masculine labor and domestic womanhood, signals a new era in capitalist development and unveils the continuing entanglement of gender and political economy. Rather than heralding the decline of the nation-state, the representation of transnational mobility in Western enables both the recuperation and critique of "traditional" forms of concrete, masculine domination. As I show, seemingly archaic forms of domination are historically immanent insofar as they sublimate the impersonal, abstract mechanisms of power prevalent in advanced stages of capitalism.
Heinrich von Kleist's Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811) represents a unique work among contemporary colonial narratives that grapple with the world-shattering events of the Haitian Revolution. This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the connections between German cultural production and the colonial world, as I reflect on how late-eighteenth-century colonial racial capital brought together enslaved Africans and Europeans of various national backgrounds in physical and literary spaces. Through a Black Studies approach, I argue that Kleist's Verlobung offers a valuable reading of the uprising, as it reveals the foundations of racial violence in St. Domingue and the counterrevolutionary position of whiteness as a pan-European project committed to suppressing anticolonial mass rebellion. While the titular "betrothal" between the protagonists Gustav and Toni fails, I argue that Gustav unwittingly succeeds in upholding the tacit contract to defend whiteness against the threat of Black Revolution in the colonial world.
