German-language Literature Research Articles

Giving space to the unknown and transcendence – Art education as guardian of the child's authentic gesture

AbstractThe main concern of this article is to introduce the concept of the authentic gesture as a vital, largely self-determined expression of the child and to make it fruitful for art education. Because of the assumed educational importance of the concept, some hints to other learning areas will also be given. This should be done from a historical and systematic perspective against the background of relevant literature, above all the German-language literature and some other important voices, in which a number of further leading ideas can be found and discussed. Explicated in this way, the concept at issue leads to the question of the unknown per se, to which art education and education in general should open itself. This means that education opens up to something that, in its material and/or social form, evades a final assessment. Something enigmatic thus comes into view, because the unknown, by definition, is beyond exact description and extern evaluation. However, in and for the modern world, it can be paraphrased with a secular approach of transcendence as an inner-psychic space which is withdrawn from instrumental intervention including educational intervention and which must be protected at all costs as a central condition of freedom and human dignity.

Mind the Gap: On the Absence of Writing Women in German-Language Literature of the Czech Lands

The absence of female writing forms a particularly striking gap in the historiography of German-language literature in the Czech Lands during the decades around 1900. Women participated significantly in the literary scene of the period but were largely forgotten. Our article will discuss the conditions and discourses that enabled women to be active in the public space but later led to their absence in literary history. Approaches are sought that make future inclusion possible again. The first step for (re-)establishing a female presence in this area is to reconstruct biographies with a focus on female-specific social realities at the time and on the interaction of cultural, social and historical factors. In the next step, attention is brought to the “minor” or “simple”, rather non-canonical literary genres that were often used by women authors at the fin de siècle.

Beziehungen des Schriftstellers Wulf Kirsten zur rumäniendeutschen Literatur

Abstract The poet and prose author, reviewer, and not least editor Wulf Kirsten (born June 21, 1934 in Klipphausen – near Meißen, also close to Dresden –, died December 14, 2022 in Bad Berka, south of Weimar) was a connoisseur of Romanian-German Poetry and its Bukovinian, Bucharest, Banat, and Transylvanian renditions. Throughout his life, he came in close contact with poets, prose authors, and literary scholars within this field. Family connections owing to his wife’s origins (whose parents came from the Hermannstadt/Sibiu area), constant travels to Romania and consistent contact with this literary phenomenon established and consolidated his knowledge and understanding of the country’s German-language literature. This is evident from statements made by the writer and cultural mediator, who was mostly based in Weimar, as well as from correspondence conducted with authors from southeastern Europe.

Kleine Literaturen und die Globalgeschichte der deutschen Literatur Zur rumäniendeutschen Literatur vor und nach 1989 in Rumänien und in Deutschland

Abstract The aim of the essay is to formulate approaches towards a global history of German-language literature from Romania and to discuss them using examples. To this end, the concept of minor literature according to Franz Kafka is utilized and linked with the concept of a global history of German literature. Emphasis is placed on the continuity in this literature despite the changes resulting from engagement with the communist system in Romania before 1989 and through the 1989 revolution in Romania. Many of the authors have emigrated and live today in Germany. Nevertheless, their works remains part of the minor literature in Germany as well.

The “Final Rays” of a Setting Sun: Lenka Reinerová and the Legacy of “Prague German Literature”

Lenka Reinerová is considered a contemporary witness of both the 20th and 21st centuries and the last German writer in Prague. Indeed, she is the last known prose writer from Prague who wrote in German and boasts a long list of famous predecessors, such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, E. E. Kisch and others. Interestingly, Reinerová did not only earn a place among the Prague German literature writers because of her mother tongue. In her memoirs, she also engages with literary and academic discourse on the German-language literature coming from Prague. The following article aims to describe this continuity in more detail.

Computerbased interpretations of literary texts: a real gain in knowledge? Theoretical preliminary considerations on a digital map of German-language literature from Southeast Europe

Against the backdrop of ongoing debates regarding the effectiveness of using digital tools for gaining insights into literary studies, the objective of this paper is to examine closely frequently questioned aspects of computer-assisted text analysis. It brings forward arguments from literary criticism and presents methodological considerations related to an ongoing project at the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philology at Transylvania University in Kronstadt.

ЖАНР NATURE WRITING У НОВІТНІЙ НІМЕЦЬКІЙ ЛІТЕРАТУРІ: УЛЬРІКЕ ДРЕСНЕР, МАРІОН ПОШМАН

Ecocriticism theory has been applied to analyze the artistic features of Nature Writing, an Anglophone genre recently fi rmly established in German-language literature. The study is based on theoretical and fi ctional texts of writers Ulrike Draesner and Marion Poschmann, recognized with the German Award in Nature Writing. The issue of translating the notion of “Nature Writing” and the use of adequate names for this type of literature (“nature writing”, “green literature”, and “language landscapes”) has been considered. Poetical properties of the genre have been identifi ed, and national diff erences between the writings in Anglophone countries and Germany have been highlighted in view of said properties. With reference to literary traditions of writing about nature, the conventions of German Nature Writing have been established, and its correspondence with the well-established Anglophone theory has been determined. The German writer Ulrike Draesner has been introduced as an author and thinker, actively participating in the theoretical discourse on ecology. Her work is a creative manifestation of the “writing according to nature” programme justifi ed in her poetological lectures. It implies “reading from the book of nature”, which is not open but actively constituting itself to promote the reading of the non-linguistic, alive element, skilfully expressed by the author on the level of language. Marion Poschmann, a poet, novelist, and essay writer, understands writing as “poetry of nature” and aims to achieve such a level of impact on the reader that they change their attitude towards the environment and rethink their role in it. According to the artist, specifi c for “nature writing” is the requirement of a high artistic level as we aim to combine observation and concentration in artistic expression. A study of German-language Nature Writing highlights the immediate relevance of a number of environmental issues that this literary genre addresses. Key words: Nature Writing, writing according to nature, poetry of nature, ecocriticism, linguistic experiments, Ulrike Draesner, Marion Poschmann.

„Eine verschollen geglaubte Textsammlung ruft die Vergangenheit auf“1: Rezension zu: die bewegung der antillen unter der schädeldecke. junge rumäniendeutsche lyrik zwischen 1975 und 1980. Eine (historische) Anthologie herausgegeben von Walter Fromm, 1. Auflage, Ludwigsburg: Pop Verlag 2022. Erweiterte, kritische Neuauflage 2022 mit einem einleitenden Essay von Prof. Dr. Waldemar Fromm und einer soziokulturellen Kontextualisierung von Prof. Dr. Anton Sterbling. Reihe

Abstract The present text is dedicated to an anthology of German poetry from Romania, which was collected in 1980 but could not be published during the communist dictatorship and was subsequently published in 2022 to great success on the German book market. The anthology illustrates the fact that a modern movement parallel to the one in Germany emerged within the insular German-language literature in Romania, developing a set of very distinct particularities.

Kulturelles Erbe und Arbeit im Exil: Die deutschsprachige Literatur und der internationale Film (1933–1945)

Considering the devastating impact of Fascism and National Socialism on exiles and their literary heritage through the lens of adaptation history, this essay focuses on German-language literature in international cinema from 1933–45 and, by implication, on the role of refugees in major film industries abroad. When Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, most notable authors and filmmakers were forced to leave their homes in Germany and soon Austria. Many of them went to Paris and quite a few eventually made it to Hollywood. Several exile filmmakers sought to claim German-language literature for that ‘other Germany’ in foreign language films, but — especially after Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland — the literary canon of Germany and Austria was considered a liability by most international film producers. In desperate need of income, many exile authors actively pursued adaptations of their own works, but only rarely did their plans materialize, even for bestselling writers; Remarque, Seghers, and Werfel were among the lucky few. Max Ophuls’ effort to preserve at least a fragment of the German literary canon and ensure the survival of German culture abroad, by filming Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), was an exception. For the most part neither international film studios nor audiences were interested in German literary culture during the Hitler era unless an exile writers’ works provided useful and entertaining insights into current challenges and/or had established a wide-ranging readership.

Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler

Reviewed by: Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika by Frank Trommler Stephen Brockmann Die hellen Jahre über dem Atlantik. Leben zwischen Deutschland und Amerika. By Frank Trommler. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. Pp. 384. Hardcover €28.00. ISBN 978-3412525422. Frank Trommler’s beautifully illustrated tome is both an autobiography and a personal history of German studies in the United States over the course of the last six decades. As someone who served as president of the GSA at the moment of German reunification, who organized the humanities program of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, D.C., from the early 1990s into the twenty-first century, and who played a central role in planning the academic commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of German immigration to North America in 1983, Trommler is uniquely placed to offer insights into the ways that the field has changed. These changes are both positive and negative. When Trommler arrived in the United States from West Germany in the 1960s, “German studies” did not exist, and the most influential practitioners of Germanistik, defined primarily as the study of canonical German-language literature, formed an “old boys network” that came together every year in December for the MLA convention. That “old boys network” was, to a large extent, dominated by white, male, German-speaking immigrants from Central Europe, many of whom had fled from the predations of the Nazi dictatorship. During his first decades in the United States, Trommler witnessed the final flowering of that approach to Germanistik. At the same time, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, he fought for and helped to ensure the breakthrough of a more comprehensive, historically and politically oriented approach to the German-speaking world, one that brought historians together with literary scholars. Their most important institutional foundation was the GSA, a product of the 1970s that was originally called the Western Association for German Studies (WAGS) before its name changed to the current one in 1983. The transformation in the field also brought with it increasing diversification, as more and more women began to take on leading roles, feminist scholarship grew and flourished, and the definition of “German” was broadened to include more than just traditional ethnic Germans but also multiculturalism, hybridity, migration, etc. The field also became increasingly “Americanized,” i.e., less dominated by Germanistik [End Page 340] as practiced in Germany and Austria and more focused on its position within the US academy and in dialog with American colleagues in other disciplines such as English and history. Paradoxically, this “Americanization” of German studies was also championed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which had a keen interest in preserving the relevance of Germany and German culture for an American audience. All of those developments were always threatened by the fundamental fact that Germany is a long way away from the United States, and that the humanities generally, as well as foreign languages and cultures, including German, are relatively marginal. Even within the MLA, the English language and British, American, and Canadian literature dominate. During the Cold War, German and other foreign language fields profited from a Cold War bonus, and even after German reunification, the field of German profited temporarily from renewed interest among American college students. However, in the long run, the end of the Cold War led to declining interest in European languages and cultures, including German. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, only exacerbated this problem, and Trommler notes the way that US and European attitudes differed radically in the wake of that event: “The Americans are from Mars, the Europeans from Venus” (335–336, a reference to a book by Robert Kagan published shortly after 9/11). As a result of all these developments, as well as others, American interest in central Europe generally, and in German-speaking culture specifically, radically declined after 9/11, and it has continued to decline. Therefore, although the field of German studies has become more diversified and open, it has also become less central to US intellectual life, even within an academic setting. The field has been diversified but also, at the very same time...

The Long-Term Sequelae of Traumatic Brain Injury over 10 Years of Follow-Up-a Matched Cohort Study Based on Routine Data of a German Statutory Health Insurance Carrier.

The acute effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) are well documented, but there is no systematic quantification of its long-term sequelae in German-language literature. The purpose of this article is to compare the frequency of conditions linked to prior TBI with their frequency in the non-brain-injured population. A matched cohort study was carried out on the basis of routine data from the BARMER statutory health insurance carrier. The exposure group consisted of patients treated over the period 2006-2009 for TBI at a variety of treatment intensities, including persons with multiple organ trauma. The control group consisted of BARMER insurees without prior TBI who were matched with the patients in the exposure group for age, sex, and pre-existing diseases. Late sequelae were sought in the routine data for a period of ten years after the injury. The outcome rates of the exposure and control groups were compared with Kaplan-Meier estimators and Poisson regression. 114 296 persons with TBI in the period 2006-2009 were included in the study. The mortality within ten years of TBI was 305 per 1000 individuals. The relative mortality in the exposure group was higher than that in control individuals of the same age and sex, with an incidence rate ratio (IRR) of 1.67 (95% confidence interval, [1.60; 1.74]). Immobility, dementia, epilepsy, endocrine disorders, functional disorders, depression, anxiety, cognitive deficits, headache, and sleep disorders were also more common in the exposure group. Persons with TBI requiring high-intensity treatment displayed the highest relative incidence rates of the conditions studied over 10 years of follow-up. Persons who had been admitted to the hospital because of TBI had higher relative incidence rates for epilepsy and dementia than those who had been cared for on an outpatient basis. Adverse sequelae of TBI can still be seen ten years after the exposure. These patients die earlier than persons without TBI and suffer earlier and more frequently from associated conditions.

Fremdheitsinszenierungen der deutschsprachigen Emigrationsrepräsentationen. Wege der Integration im Roman Tauben fliegen auf

AbstractIn the German-language literature of the last twenty to thirty years, there has been a tendency to depict strangeness and integration. Through Melinda Nadj Abonji’s novel, this paper attempts to point out the phenomena that problematize integration and strangeness, which would be related to the space represented or which can be read from representations through space.

Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard by Axel Diller

Reviewed by: Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard by Axel Diller Jinsong Chen Axel Diller, Literatur Kompakt: Thomas Bernhard. Baden-Baden: Tectum Wissenschaftverlag, 2021. 238 pp. For decades, Thomas Bernhard, both as a man and as a controversial writer, has been widely discussed in literary studies. Due to the scandals he repeatedly provoked during his lifetime, Bernhard was stigmatized as a Nestbeschmutzer and an enfant terrible because of his vocalized disrespect for his country. His works were criticized by many. For instance, Peter Handke once described his books as "criminal concoctions" ("sträfliche Machwerke"); others accused Bernhard of self-plagiarism, pointing to similarities in content and structure, as well as the interchangeability of content that revisited the same motifs and themes, to suggest that the writer essentially wrote only one novel over the course of his life. In his newly published book Thomas Bernhard, Axel Diller undertakes a comprehensive examination of Bernhard's biography and literary works, concluding that Bernhard was one of the most successful Germanspeaking authors of the 20th century (204). For Diller, the performance and achievement of a writer should be judged independently of his personality. In his defense of Bernhard, Diller examines the nature and poetic construction of his prose and dramatic texts, confirming that Bernhard discovered and developed a unique literary language. Precisely because of this artistic language, Bernhard's works cannot be dismissed as "Schmähschriften eines mittlemäßigen Schriftstellers"; rather, they represent one of the great "Ausnahmeleistungen" of German-language literature since 1945 (5). The book consists of seven chapters, including an extensive bibliography, a list of figures, and an index. The introduction poses the question "Nestbeschmutzer oder Weltliterat?," which helps Diller justify and underscore Bernhard's undeniable canonical status as a "(post)moderner Klassiker" (10) in world literature, a judgment that is echoed in the concluding sentences of the final chapter where he discusses the reception of Bernhard's works (204). A helpful five-page chronological table constitutes an independent chapter (II). Placed before the three main chapters (III–V), it summarizes Bernhard's life and lists all of his works and their publication dates. The third chapter, "The Life and Works of Thomas Bernhard," occupies nearly half of the book. Drawing on Bernhard's biographical quintet, Diller extends the poeticity of Bernhard's autobiographical writings, a typical poetic [End Page 100] design of Bernhard's that prioritizes the poetic over the factual. In other words, Bernhard's prose works—both autobiographical and fictional—are intended to describe his life not with factual accuracy or precision but rather in a programmatic narrative style that helps him convey central themes that he deems important, such as isolation, death, loneliness, war, illness, anxiety, and suicide. Over the next chapters, armed with Bernhard's uniqueness of language and traumatic life experiences, Diller proceeds to examine Bernhard's dramatic and prose works. In order to demonstrate that Bernhard's works, informed by his unique literary language, are poetically and rhetorically "regelrecht virtuos" (14), Diller uses three dramas (Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige, Der Theatermacher, and Heldenplatz) and four fictional prose works (Frost, Das Kalkwerk, Holzfällen, and Alte Meister) to highlight Bernhard's dramaturgical and narrative techniques, such as exaggeration, intensive monological dialogues, and shrewd use of the comic and the absurd. Meanwhile, using the "all the world's a stage" approach, Bernhard cast artistically or philosophically active "Geistmenschen" who are isolated from their society, marked with illness, and suffering from a modern version of postwar Weltschmerz. While having no help to function within the power system in place and, therefore, unable to achieve perfection or self-realization, they deal with the loss of identity, self-extinction, and self-destruction through suicide and wrestle with loneliness and language skepticism. This exemplifies Bernhard's critique of the meaninglessness of art and of philosophy. While taking into account the techniques, content, and the structure that define Bernhard's poetry, Diller also pays attention to the linguistic quality of his writing process. This can especially be seen in his attention to the poetic and linguistic nature of his prose and dramatic texts. This is in part the result of Bernhard's preoccupation with music. A trained musician himself, Diller revealed his...

Феномен транснационализма в романах А. Хидера

In modern realities, works written by immigrant authors have become an integral part of the multinational culture of Germany. A native of Iraq, Abbas Khider is one of the most prominent representatives of the immigrant segment of German-language literature in Germany. The difficulties that arise during the integration of refugees into the multicultural European society represent a topical issue in the current context of globalization, which explains the popularity of this theme in works by immigrant writers. The subject of the article is the phenomenon of transnationalism in A. Khider’s novels. The study analyzes four works of the author – The Village Indian (2008), The President’s Oranges (2011), A Slap in the Face (2016), and Letter to the Eggplant Republic (2013). The article aims to investigate how the phenomenon of transnationalism is represented in A. Khider’s works. The research objectives were as follows: to consider and clarify the term ‘transnationalism’ in the context of modern progressive globalization; to analyze the transnational models of relations reflected in the system of images of the works under consideration; to explore the formation of the characters’ self-identification. The study is novel in that it represents the first attempt in Russian literary criticism to analyze certain features of the poetics of A. Khider’s novels, in particular the phenomenon of transnationalism as presented in the literary space created by the author. The results of the study expand the understanding of the state of modern German-language literature, with works of immigrant writers being its integral part.

The Character as a Writer in the German-Language Literature after the Second World War

The Character as a Writer in the German-Language Literature after the Second World War

Приноси на проф. Майа Разбойникова-Фратева за германистичното литературознание и за българската германистика

The paper presents the contribution of Prof. Maja Razbojnikova-Frateva to the study of German-language literature.

Немскоезичната литература в България след 2000 г. Статистика и някои аспекти на рецепцията

This article provides information on the trends in translating and publishing of German-language literature in Bulgaria between 2000 and 2022, based on several sources as well as on my own research. Then, using the reviews of three authors as an example, it points out some characteristics of the reception of German-language literature in Bulgaria, highlighting the contribution of Maya Razbojnikova-Frateva to its adequate placement in the Bulgarian cultural context after 2000.

Der Streit um Klassizität: Polemische Konstellationen vom 18. zum 21. Jahrundert ed. by Daniel Ehrmann and Norbert Christian Wolf

Reviewed by: Der Streit um Klassizität: Polemische Konstellationen vom 18. zum 21. Jahrundert ed. by Daniel Ehrmann and Norbert Christian Wolf Mattias Pirholt Daniel Ehrmann and Norbert Christian Wolf, ed. Der Streit um Klassizität: Polemische Konstellationen vom 18. zum 21. Jahrundert. Paderborn: Brill-Fink, 2021. 332 pp. Harmony and order are keywords repeatedly used to describe the nature of both the classical and classicism. Klassizität refers to transhistorical qualities that warrant continuity and stability, constants in the flux of time. Johann Joachim Winckelmann's notion of the "stille Größe und edle Einfalt" of the Greeks has been regurgitated for the last two and a half centuries, but it draws on a much longer tradition, stretching back to the Renaissance and even to the classical age itself. Leon Battista Alberti's demand for pictorial dignity and grace and Polykleitos's canonical theory of symmetry and proportion point to an almost unalterable, comfortable, and sometimes oppressive ideal. Against this backdrop of age-old consensus, the overarching ambition of Ehrmann and Wolf's edited volume is to emphasize the polemic nature of the classical, is more than welcome. Tracing the presence of Klassizität from the late eighteenth century to today, the book's thirteen contributions, including the editors' initiated introduction, describe a continuous and fierce battle both within the classical tradition and between classicism and anti-classicism. As Helmut Pfotenhauer claims in the book's first chapter on Karl Philipp Moritz's anticlassicist classicism, "Klassizismus ist per se Streitkultur." In this battle, the combatants—be it Goethe, Hölderlin, Handke, or Jelinek—are not always quite clear about which side they are on. Somewhat pointedly, one could perhaps argue that it is not important whether you defend or oppose classicism, as long as you engage in the fight. As Ehrmann explains in his long essay, "Polemik als Konstellation," polemics are less a matter of quarreling individuals with clear intentions and goals and more a question of constellations determined by their specific situatedness in time and space. Thus, the battles between classicism and anticlassicism address not only or not primarily "kanonischen Formen vergangener Epochen, sondern verhalten sich stets auch in spezifischer Weise zu zeitgenössischen Diskursen und Medienentwicklungen, grenzen sich von diesen ab und provozieren wiederum Reaktionen auf die eigenen Positionierungen." Arguably, Ehrmann's chapter, which traces the evolution of these polemic constellations from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s, functions as the theoretical and thematic foundation of the array of readings of two hundred years of Germanlanguage literature (with a chapter on the French avantgarde by Susanne Winter). The rest of the chapters zoom in on specific periods (e.g., Dirk Rosen on Junges Deutschland and Bernadette Grubner on the GDR era), specific writers (e.g., Harald Gschwandtner on Handke and Bernhard and Wolfgang Riedel on Grünbein), or specific texts (e.g., Kathrin Rosenfield on Hölderlin's Sophocles translations and Uta Degner on Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart). As is often the case with collections such as this one, the richness of material and perspectives make the book into a somewhat motley entity. Depicting the two-hundred-year-long [End Page 187] biography of a particular concept, or set of concepts, it becomes apparent that the authors often mean very different things when they say Klassik, Klassizismus, or Klassizität. While some, Pfotenhauer, for example, focus on classicism in the narrower sense of the word, that is, on the eighteenth-century conception of classical, primarily Greek, art and literature, others, Gschwandtner and Degner, among others, address the oppressive presence of a national canon, Goethe's, in particular. Some contributions hardly address Klassizität at all. Michael Bies's chapter on Goethe and Kathrin Rosenfield's on Hölderlin are both excellent interpretations of Goethe's concept of Handwerk and Hölderlin's famous translations of Sophocles, but the battles they zoom in on are not really between classicism and anticlassicism. Both texts are convincing and thought-provoking studies, but they significantly widen the scope of the book as a whole. Furthermore, one or two possible topics remain underdeveloped. Schiller plays a surprisingly small role in the various discussions of the German classicist tradition, whereas Grillparzer...

The Representations of Ageing (Old Age) in German-Language Literature

The relevance to study the representations of ageing is conditioned by the necessity to understand the variety between generations, differences in age psychological attitudes and increased life expectancy, in particular in European countries. All this is reflected in fiction. The aim of this work is to outline the main features of artistic representations (indirect, «secondary» prototypes and images) of ageing (old age) in German-language literature of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, especially during modernism, postmodernism and the formation of modern society. The twentieth century in the literature is characterized by the development of such directions as modernism and postmodernism. The last one was originated as an ideological signpost associated with a certain unity of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches. The concept of a human in these theories was marked by skepticism on the world caused by The First and The Second World Wars, sarcasm, irony, despair and hopelessness about the absurdity of the world. In the hieratic works of the twentieth-century German-language literature, representations of old age and gerontological motives were very rarely central. Therefore, in social, physical and psychological dimensions, the ageing process has become richer over time. Artistic representations of the elderly were mostly stereotyped. Since the early twentieth century the problem of depicting the elderly has acquired existential sense, postmodern view on human life, the search for human sense of life, human loneliness in society, the role of an individual in the periods before, during and after the two World Wars.

Georg Weerth (1822-1856), romancier heinéen, pour le 200 e anniversaire de sa naissance

Heine was not a novelist, but he nevertheless appears to be the “great critical realist” (G. Lukács) of the 1820s-1850s in German-language literature, because of his critique of the “art period” (“Kunstperiode”). The poet and novelist Georg Weerth (1822-1856), who was born two hundred years ago and died in the same year as Heine, explicitly considered him to be his source of inspiration, both for his poetry and for Schnapphahnski, his only completed novel. It was published in 1848-1849 in the feuilleton of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung edited by his friends Marx and Engels, and it corresponded to the political line they had laid down in their Manifesto of the Communist Party.