German Tragedy Research Articles

Officials on the Scaffold: Lutheran Martyrdom in Andreas Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien

In a reading of Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien within its political and confessional context of Silesia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, this article analyzes the transformation of the Christian martyr cult within early modern German tragedy. It argues that Gryphius used the hagiographic type of the royal martyr as a moral example and figure of governmental order. He depicted the pious Georgian martyr Queen Catharina and her devout officials as an inspiring community of civic virtue to be imitated by his fellow Silesians. This patriotic injunction of the tragedy resonates with legal concepts of public law put forward by Gryphius’ mentor, Georg Schönborner and others. The article finds that Gryphius’ martyr tragedy must be read as an aesthetic contribution to some of the legal movements decisive for German state formation around 1650.

Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...

SEMANTIC FEATURES OF TRANSLATION OF GERMAN FRAZEOLOGISMSIN HISTORICAL TRAGEDY OF RUDOLF VON GOTTSHALL “MAZEPA” IN Y. FEDKOVICH’S INTERPRETATION

The article deals with the most famous of German-speaking Mazepa-works of the nineteenth century – the historical tragedy of R. Gottschal’s "Mazepa" and its Ukrainian translation by Yu. Fedkovich. An overview of the critical reception of the German-speaking Mazepa-works proves that the work has received the greatest resonance in Ukrainian literary criticism. In addition, the historical tragedy is the only German-language work on Hetman translated into Ukrainian by Yurij Fedkovich. Among the most important factors of Y. Fedkovych's appeal to work on the historical tragedy is the Ukrainian theme from the past of our people.
 The analysis of the Ukrainian language version is based on the following criteria for the adequacy of the translation: the translation of realities, in particular, military terminology and ranks of the Cossack army; idioms; reproduction of author syntax and style; observance of the equilibrium of the original work. The article is based on the identification of priorities in the use of expressive means. 
 As a result of comparison of realities, it was discovered that most of the time Y. Fedkovych made a contextual translation or found a situational collocation that was understandable to the people. Military ranks and attributes of the Cossack army were translated with the help of hyperonymic renaming, which testifies to the priority of the principle of historical authenticity in Y. Fedkovych's approach as a bearer of language.
 It was made possible to describe the features of the creative manner and the individual author’s style of Y. Fedkovych’s translation, embodied in his interpretation of German tragedy.
 The role of the historical tragedy of R. von Gottschal in promoting the German-speaking Mazepa-works is decisive. Y. Fedkovich's translation remains the only Ukrainian-language version among a number of numerous German-language works devoted to Ivan Mazepa.

SUMMER OF DEAD DREAMS – 1945 PRUDNIK COUNTY IN THE AWARENESS OF ITS INHABITANTS. THE EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITY OF THE PRUDNIK COUNTY MUSEUM

Some years have already passed since the book Summer of dead dreams by Harry Thürk (2015) was published. Some inhabitants of Prudnik County have treated the German perception as presented in its pages and interwoven in the historicists’ motifs, as a non-fiction and as a reliable source. This is why it has become essential to take some steps to present this multithreaded post-war event more honestly. One of the museums’ functions is their multi-dimensional educational activity, achieved through exhibitions and publications. Consequently, the Prudnik County Museum in Prudnik town has undertaken the task of showing the chequered history of this region from 1945 to 1947 by: a) preparing and elaborating a permanent exhibition entitled “Seen through a net curtain. The multiculturality of Upper Silesia based on Prudnik County”; b) publishing a book of the same title which brings closer the intangible heritage of Prudnik county, seen in its traditions and folk rituals of various social and cultural groups which together form its current “ethnos”; c) publishing a collection of eyewitness accounts by people who remember the years 1945–1947. The issue of changing borders and resettlements still evokes emotions for both the Polish and German communities. Although, the Polish and German tragedy of the civilian population had different origins, the tragedy itself was the same: extermination, forcing people to abandon their homes, going into the unknown, exile, illnesses and death are the common denominators of those sad events at the end of WWII. The museum’s role is to familiarise the public with a very frequently difficult and tragic history which would be free of stereotypes and subjectivity.

Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature ed. by Simon Richter and Richard Block (review)

Reviewed by: Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature ed. by Simon Richter and Richard Block Elizabeth Powers Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature. Edited by Simon Richter and Richard Block. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Pp. 315. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571135674. Goethe studies in the United States have been much enriched in the past half century by scholars born in the Americas. Jane K. Brown ranks very high in that cohort. Especially in recent years, as theory has insinuated itself into the field, Brown has resolutely gone her own way, with deep explorations of the European literary heritage as it was transmitted and transformed by Goethe. This volume is thus a tribute both to this Goethe scholar as well as to Brown’s uncovering of the literary “ghosts” that haunt, so to speak, Goethe’s oeuvre. Among such ghosts is the tradition of allegorical representation, which has interested Brown at least since Goethe’s Faust: The German Tragedy (1986). In The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (2007), she portrayed its afterlife in drama into the late nineteenth century, when it was finally “discredited” by the mimetic principle. Most recently, Allegories of Interiority: Goethe and the Modern Subject (2014), appearing too late to be discussed in the introduction to the present volume, considers the persistence of Goethe’s ghost, especially in the writings of Melville, Freud, Norbert Elias, and Foucault. In this book Brown argues that [End Page 163] a “paradigm shift” took place in the last part of the eighteenth century, producing “a subjectivity that locates meaning within the individual,” accompanied by “a profound change in the way in which emotion was understood and represented” (Interiority 3). Goethe’s contribution was in developing “a specific allegorical technique to represent the unconscious, … and the transmission of his new style through his Romantic contemporaries to the most influential formulators of the modern notion of the unconscious” (4). This “modernized version of allegory” (9) transformed it from “a tool of moral analysis to one of psychological analysis” (17). The introduction to Goethe’s Ghosts by its editors, Richard Block and Simon Richter, is well worth reading for its elucidation of Brown’s scholarly approach. It begins with the appearance of Goethe’s Mephisto in an apartment in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Moscow on Walpurgis Night, as Margarita, serving as hostess, welcomes “the ghostly souls who rise from hell for the festive occasion” (1). The specter of Goethe’s Faust in Bulgakov’s novel is not simply a case of the persistence of literary forms of representation. Ghosts, of which there are plenty in Goethe’s own works, must have a place to inhabit. Thus, the editors introduce the metaphor of “the house of literature,” which allows them to contrast Brown’s methodology with contemporary approaches, which, while multiplying subjects and objects of study, tend to do so “at the expense of literature as literature” (2). Brown’s close reading of literary texts (erudition combined with “remarkably swift and deft analyses of passages, plots, and plays”), once the heart of literary scholarship, is contrasted with Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” (6). Moretti, seeking to account for the now “voluminous production of texts,” might contend that Brown relies on too few works, canonical ones at that (Calderon, Shakespeare!), “which she is forced to designate as representative” (10). Moretti’s method, however, “not only attenuates the participation of the reader’s subjective consciousness in interacting with textual material, [but] it [also] makes a gesture in the direction of an abandonment of subjectivity in the hopes of receiving in turn a defamiliarized and objective experience of the house of literature” (7). Such “robotic” reading, versus a “sensitive” one (8), may teach much about “the architecture of the house of literature,” but is unable “to register the presence of ghosts” (7). Still, the editors are unwilling to admit that Moretti’s method is necessarily at odds with Brown’s: “all of us [are] in the process of learning how to balance the conflicting demands of allegiance to a language and a literature against the multilinguisticality and globality of the world” (11). The editors also distinguish Brown...

‘Des Menschen Herz, o Gott! welch Elend kann es stiften!’: The Tragedies of Christian Felix Weisse

Christian Felix Weisse (1726–1804), in addition to many other works, composed ten tragedies between the 1750s and 1770s, which show a remarkable development and can be seen to mirror, perhaps even go beyond, the general development of German tragedy in the period. He begins with alexandrine tragedies in strict Gottschedian style (Eduard der Dritte, Richard der Dritte), though the latter may well show some, albeit negative, Shakespearean influence. After further tragedies in alexandrines, he changes to blank verse (Die Befreiung von Theben, Atreus und Thyest), then to prose for two ‘domestic’ tragedies, Romeo und Julie (in this case explicitly a Shakespearean adaptation) and Die Flucht, concluding his output with another prose tragedy on a subject of considerable topical interest (Der Fanatismus, oder Jean Calas) which has been claimed as a forerunner of twentieth-century ‘documentary drama’. The last two in particular deserve further critical attention.

Talking Like a Book: Exception and the State of Nature in Benjamin and Molière

Walter Benjamin confides to his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal that “I sometimes think about writing a book on French tragedy as a counterpart to my Trauerspiel book,” noting that his “plan for the latter had originally been to elucidate both the German Trauerspiel and the French tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” However, to do so “something must be added” that the book he wrote failed to supply. The aim of this essay is twofold: to reconstruct what Benjamin might have said about French classical tragedy and to identify the mysterious addition. Why does the effort to “elucidate” the two forms “in terms of their contrastive nature” demand a supplement? What would the supplement have been, and how might it illumine Benjamin's own project as well as tragedy and Trauerspiel? My hypothesis is that Benjamin remains silent on these points because he was temperamentally and philosophically unable to think them through. Benjamin's focus on tragedy is itself an indicator of this psychic resistance. Benjamin clearly assumed that, whatever deeper features of German tragic drama a contrast with the French version might bring to light, Trauerspiel constitutes a sovereign law unto itself, whose wider metaphysical as well as historical authority needs no argument. As a result, his interpretation of the nature of French tragedy inevitably would have confirmed his core theses about the German baroque, a fact that in turn draws attention to what Benjamin truly needed to add to both accounts: the perspective of comedy.I propose, then, to counter Benjamin's argument by exploring the ways in which comedy challenges the underlying metaphysics to which tragedy appeals. To this end, I argue that the greatest tragedy of the French classical age is its greatest comedy, Molière's Dom Juan, ou le festin de pierre. Reading Molière's play alongside French and German tragedy reveals not only how deeply both versions of the “mourning play” are implicated in the political ideology of royal absolutism but also the availability of a quite different model of social and political association grounded in the historical ontology of modernity against which absolutism sets its face. In addition to opening new sightlines on seventeenth-century tragedy and comedy alike, the result raises questions about the metaphysics underlying both Benjamin's thought and the tradition of critical theory from Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Weber down to Benjamin's rivals and epigones, Adorno, Schmitt, and Agamben.

Marriage – A Tragedy: German Women Dramatists and the Politics of Genre

Aristotle's Poetics identified tragedy as the most accomplished literary genre and declared only the writer of tragedy a truly writer. Until the twentieth century, literary critics followed his lead. Women were explicitly discouraged from writing tragedies, both by their male mentors and by the widely held assumption that tragedy by definition required the force and knowledge of a man, with the result that women's tragedies were considered essentially inadequate. Although the meaning and importance of tragedy have since evolved, the traditional genre hierarchy and the corresponding exclusion of women writers from the literary history of tragedy persist. While many German intellectuals – salient among them Gottsched, Goethe, and Nietzsche – envisioned the great German tragedy, few actually produced notable examples (Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Schiller's Maria Stuart ranking among the few popular and critical favourites). Thus it is no disgrace that German women dramatists were not recognized for their contribution to the tragic genre. Yet the systematic exclusion of women's tragedies from critical consideration raises questions. Major critical works on German tragedy have consistently ignored texts by women. Benno von Wiese's Die Deutsche Tragodie von Lessing his Hebbel (1952) mentions not one tragedy written by a woman in its entire 720 pages. And this lack of interest continues, as evident in Hellmut Flashar's recent collection of essays Tragodie. Idee und Transformation (1997), a volume equally devoid of any discussion of female authors. Robert Heitner's German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment (1963) does mention Luise Gottsched's Panthea, albeit without missing the opportunity to disqualify women categorically from the genre:

Goethe's 'Faust': The German Tragedy

Goethe's 'Faust': The German Tragedy

Goethe's "Faust." The German Tragedy (review)

Goethe's "Faust." The German Tragedy (review)

Benjamin Bennett: Goethe's Theory of Poetry – ,Faust' and the Regeneration of Language. Jane K. Brown: Goethe's ,Faust' – The German Tragedy

Article Benjamin Bennett: Goethe's Theory of Poetry – ,Faust' and the Regeneration of Language. Jane K. Brown: Goethe's ,Faust' – The German Tragedy was published on January 1, 1987 in the journal arcadia (volume 22, issue 1-3).

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy

History and Historicity in Act II of Faust, Part II

JANE K. BROWN History and Historicity in Act II of Faust, Part II THE FOLLOWING COMES from a just-completed book, entitled Faust. The German Tragedy, which reads Faust as an extended meditation on Germany's place in the European tradition. In the preceding chapters the fundamental action of the play is seen as a series of attempts to integrate "spirit" ("Geist") or the ideal, symbolized by light, fire, or gold, with "world" (sometimes "nature") or the real, embodied in the principle of water. In Act I this effort is structured as a series of descents in search of gold, the Mothers and, finally, the past. Act II continues this pattern. If Act I was an effort to conjure Helen through the forces of fire, Act II is the attempt to conjure her from the water. At bottom it deals with the same problem as Act I, how to generate a graspable rainbow, to bring up creative force or spirit from the depths to validate appearances. Now that we have moved into the realm of myth and art—now that we are in some sense inside the allegories created in Act I—this attempt will be more successful. Act I characterized the goal in terms of fire, gold, myth, imagination, antiquity, and the beginnings of time. In Act II water imagery will predominate over fire; this represents a significant shift in focus. The emphasis will no longer be on the descent and the buried treasure, but on the ascent, on the continuity between lower and upper worlds, on how to go from spirit to concrete form. This is where both Faust and Emperor/Pan failed in Act I. The emphasis will appear to be less on creating art than on creating life; but we understand, of course, that the fundamental identity of art and Nature in the play makes the distinction spurious. Furthermore, both art and Nature have become, through the process of descent in Act I, projections of the seeking human mind. At least Acts II and III, if not IV and V as well, are continuations of the "show" begun with Faust's descent to the Mothers. It is a "show" created by Faust and stage-managed by that experienced director Mephistopheles. 70 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA The act begins with a series of "plunges" which indicate that it begins in the equivalent of the realm of the Mothers, at the end of Faust's descent. The curtains open to reveal Faust in the state of unconsciousness into which he had plunged at the end of Act I. But he has also returned to his study, which the audience has not seen since before Faust's departure into the world. He—and we—have thus plunged back into his past. Faust's old robe is still there, Wagner is still there, the student Mephisto led on is still there as well. As the travellers proceed to the Classical Walpurgis Night the act slips into a much deeper abyss: Erichtho's prologue takes us back to the origins of the Roman Empire in the fateful battle of Pharsalus, fought between Caesar and Pompey in 48 B.C. Erichtho is the witch Pompey consulted before the battle; the poet of whom she complains is Lucan, who portrays her most dreadfully indeed in his epic, Pharsalia. Lucan is important here, because he identifies the Thessalian setting both as a land of witchcraft and also as the cradle of history.1 Here Erichtho mediates the transformation of the historical world into a poetic or spirit world by reporting that the fires change color from red to blue (spirit fires burn blue). But this transformation plunges us even deeper into the abyss of time, into the prehistorical world of mythology. This is, in fact, mythology at its very oldest levels, for the sphinxes identify themselves as the oldest of mythological creatures, too old ever to have seen Helen. The relative antiquity of the sphinxes is especially significant. It may seem obvious to us, but it was a new idea in the eighteenth century. The first significant periodization of ancient art was made by JJ. Winckelmann in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums...

Benjamin's Politics

Abstract Benjamin began to turn increasingly to Marxism from 1924 on. What this means is that the democratic revolutionary transformation of the bourgeois world became a decisive element of his philosophical perspective, and that he turned to Marx and the Marxists for theoretical support. In a sense, the turn did not benefit his work: he was never again able to achieve the coherence of his early writings, and a new heterogeneity and uncertainty entered his research. It could be said, following Adorno's unstated position implicit in his critical letters, that Benjamin's later works are not up to the philosophical level of The Origin of German Tragedy.

The Problem of Identity in German Tragedy Between 1770 and 1808

The Problem of Identity in German Tragedy Between 1770 and 1808

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment—A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724–1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment—A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724–1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment, A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724-1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment, A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724-1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment: A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724-1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment: A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies, 1724-1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment: A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies. 1724-1768

German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment: A Study in the Development of Original Tragedies. 1724-1768