Oder Der Research Articles

Ding/Unding (Thing/No-Thing)

Guided by a series of associations of the word Ding in Adelung’s dictionary (1774/93) with metaphysical concepts and conceptualization, this entry explores how Goethe creatively appropriated the lexeme across a long trajectory of diverse textual practices. In light of the writer’s famously unsystematic approach to metaphysical problems, it focuses on scientific and literary works, as well as key autobiographical documents, in order to trace the meandering course of his ontological thinking as it developed into a morphologically informed cosmological reconstruction of the real. Through the transformative power of metaphor in his plays and poetry, in particular, as well as through scattered reflections in letters, conversations, and travel accounts, Goethe ultimately constructed a “metaphysics of appearances” (Metaphysik der Erscheinungen) that would link certain incorporeal generative ideas, including the primal plant (Urpflanze) and the no-thing (Unding), to their corporeal manifestations. In order to frame readings of Goethe’s metaphorical cosmography as staged in the verse play Satyros, oder der vergötterte Waldteufel (1773/1817; Satyros, or the Deified Forest God) and the world-theater Faust (1809, 1832), sections 2–4 present his morphological ontology—in response to Kantian dualism—as a dualistic monism. In this context the Ding/Unding dyad is explored as the basic unit of Goethe’s ontological thinking, which refuses to privilege one of its opposing terms over the other. By reconstructing things and thingness as the intractable problem of these two mutually exclusive concepts, Goethe offers opportunities for their further philosophical reflection. Section 2 begins with a discussion of Goethe’s conversation with Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer about Kant’s thing-in-itself—not as something real, but as an instrumentality of thought marking the unbridgeable gap between noumenal and phenomenal things. By contrast, his own dualistic monism suggests that (1) there is only a single dynamic universe of things and (2) in the process of its becoming each corporeal thing must be evaluated in relation to (a) all the other corporeal things in its midst and (b) the series of ontological modes, or the kinds of incorporeal things, that constitute the vector of its completion. To analyze these propositions, section 3 focuses on Goethean science, which equipped the investigator with “the eye of the mind” to see through to the essential reality of such dynamic things as optical, chromatic, and botanical phenomena in the otherwise invisible process of their formation. Section 4 then completes the preparatory framing by considering Goethe’s meditation about the ontological status of his Urpflanze (primal plant) in the anecdote “Glückliches Ereignis” (1817; Felicitous Event). Guided by this autobiographical account of his inaugural meeting with Friedrich Schiller, which configures their seminal friendship as an antipodal relationship, we can describe Goethe’s morphological ontology as a dualistic thing-monism that relies on essential polarities to sustain its non-reductive dynamism. With this complication of Goethe’s ontological point-of-view in mind, section 4 concludes by considering Ding in some letters that further connect it with Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, which as the highest of three gradations of knowledge is adequate to the essence of things. Unlike Spinoza, however, whose geometrical method relies on the power of reason to build an ethically grounded epistemology, Goethe enlists the powers of the poetic imagination to construct a morphological ontology that is grounded in the power of negation. In this context section 5 offers readings of critical passages in Satyros and Faust that locate things on the vertiginous cosmological stage of perpetual becoming. And as section 6 argues in conclusion, the informing figures of thought in these works, including the void, allow us to situate Goethe’s Ding/Unding dyad within a lineage of philosophical and theoretical exploration that includes Heidegger’s late meditations on “Dingheit” (thingness) and “Leere” (void), as well conceptual innovations like the “virtual” in Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental materialism and the “incorporeal” in Elizabeth Grosz’s problem-oriented ontology.

“When I’m a Human Being”: race, bodies, and power in Disney’s adaptations of “The Frog King or Iron Henry”

In the summer of 2020, Walt Disney Theme Parks announced plans to reimagine the popular attraction “Splash Mountain” in the theme of the 2009 feature-length animated film The Princess and the Frog. As only the third Disney feature-length animated film to showcase Black characters prominently, The Princess and the Frog seems perfectly poised to replace the Song of the South—critiqued for its romanticization of race relations after the American Civil War—in the Disney parks. In this adaptation of “Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich” (“The Frog King or Iron Henry”), Walt Disney Animation Studios introduces its first Black princess. While a hardworking, self-starter princess of color is a step towards representation, the film’s portrayal of non-white characters reinforces a hierarchy of race and class which privileges the wealthy white characters while relegating characters of color to the bottom rungs of human society and into non-human bodies. This essay explores the intersection of gender, race, and class in Disney’s adaptations of the classic fairy tale “Der Froschkönig” from the Grimms’ 1812 variation and the plans to reimagine it for Disney theme parks. In conversation with adaptation studies, narrative theory, and feminist theories, this contribution interrogates the underlying messages of prejudice and -isms in The Princess and the Frog that reinforce twentieth- and twenty-first-century prejudices against people of color, women, and the working class, rendering the proposed update of the “Splash Mountain” attraction into a modernization of the problems already recognized in the current ride.

Juno and the Pearl

Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–1799) plays with the Bildungsroman as a literary form. As a story of the coming-of-age of the novel itself, it is a Künstlerroman as well. When the narrator fails in his worldly aspirations, he chooses the life of a hermit. His book becomes his cloister. This essay will study Hölderlin's novel as a response to Friedrich Schiller's philosophy of freedom in and through art. In his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Schiller posits a two-fold relationship between art and freedom. Art is freedom in the ideal and allows for freedom in history. In other words, moral freedom requires aesthetic freedom as a pledge to its possibility. But in Hyperion, aesthetic freedom appears as freedom itself, absolutely and without any ‘and’. History may have yet to separate itself out from life, but art does so, making a prophet of Hölderlin's Hyperion.

Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul

Reviewed by: Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik ed. by Gabriele Rommel, and: Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis ed. by Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul Dennis F. Mahoney Gabriele Rommel, ed. Novalis. Die Poesie des Unendlichen: Dichtungen und Texte des Universalgeistes der Frühromantik. Wiesbaden: S. Marix, 2022. 271 pp. Gabriele Rommel and Nicholas Saul, eds. Atlantis: Ein Märchen von Novalis. Halle: Coq-Art, 2022. 32 pp., 18 illustrations. Gabriele Rommel, the former director of the Research Center for Early Romanticism / Novalis-Museum at the birthplace of Friedrich von Hardenberg in Schloss Oberwiederstedt, has edited the first volume listed above within a series that hitherto has dealt largely with the writings of twentieth-century authors [End Page 204] such as Hans Fallada, Christian Morgenstern, and Stefan Zweig. Near the beginning of her well-organized introduction, Rommel provides a lengthy quote from Hermann Hesse's enthusiastic reaction to Ernst Heilborn's Novalis edition of 1901 for the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death, which rescued Novalis from decades of neglect. Clearly, Rommel hopes to make similar use of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich von Hardenberg on May 2, 2022, to encourage readers to (re)acquaint themselves with a writer and thinker who may be only a faint memory from secondary school. For this purpose, she provides an initial overview of Hardenberg's family background, education, and professional training as a lawyer and mining official in Saxony before situating him within the late eighteenth-century developments in politics, philosophy, and the natural sciences that he attempted to integrate and develop within his own writings. Rommel also provides concise introductions and overviews for each of the ensuing four sections: "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen," "Veröffentlichungen im Athenäum und in den Jahrbüchern der Preussischen Monarchie," "Zwei Roman-Projekte," and "Essay." A one-page list of primary and secondary sources concludes the volume. Given this volume's likely intended audience, it might have been better if its initial section, first published in Heilborn's edition from 1901, had either not been included or else listed in the otherwise chronological order of initial printed appearances of Novalis's writings: the Blütenstaub fragments and Glauben und Liebe oder Der König und die Königin in 1798, the Hymnen an die Nacht in 1800, the fragmentary novel projects Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen in 1802, and the speech from November of 1799, now known as Die Christenheit oder Europa in 1826. First-time readers of Novalis may become discouraged upon encountering complete or partial use of (untranslated) French within roughly 10% of the 105 notes within the so-called "Teplitzer Fragmente" written during Hardenberg's stay at this spa in the summer of 1798 due to his already worsening health. Those readers who do persist in their efforts, however, will be rewarded by encountering Novalis's major poetic, philosophical, and rhetorical works in an attractively produced and reasonably priced paperback volume. For the scholarly community, moreover, Rommel's introduction to the "Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen" clarifies their relation to the other works contained in this volume. For example, she quotes from Hardenberg's letter to Friedrich Schlegel on August 20, 1798, that "die Centralmonaden "of his meditations in Teplitz, have been "die Frauen, die xstliche Religion und das gewöhnliche Leben." These three topics make up the entire content of the ensuing "Ergänzungen zu den Teplitzer Fragmenten," which includes a first version of the fairy tale of Hyazinth and Rosenblütchen that plays a key role in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais included later in the volume. In addition, the "Studien zur bildenen Kunst" anticipate the significance of the relationship between antiquity and modernity in the fifth of the Hymnen an die Nacht, while the essay "Über Goethe"—also from the summer of 1798—documents the importance of Goethe for Hardenberg's own efforts to integrate art and science into his literary work. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis's major attempt at a novel in response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), have the advantage of being self-enclosed units, but...

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

Singing in Dark Times: Report from Berlin

Classical or Old Norse myth? German and Danish approaches to the use of myth in the modern literature at the turn of the 19th century

Abstract In the study, I provide a comparative overview of the aesthetical debate that took place at the turn of the 18th and 19th century in Germany and Denmark concerning the use of the Old Norse versus the classical mythology in literature. I discuss Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas on this topic, expressed in his work Vom neuern Gebrauch der Mythologie (1767) and especially in his dialogue Iduna oder der Apfel der Verjüngung (1796), with focus on the following question: Does the rejuvenating potential of the Norse myth as suggested by Herder in Iduna, allow any room for the classical inspirations in modern literature? Herder’s view will provide a starting point of the comparison for the cultural situation in Denmark where the University of Copenhagen announced in 1800 a prize question on aesthetics “Would it benefit Northern polite literature if ancient Northern mythology were introduced and generally accepted by our poets in place of its Greek counterpart?”. The entries in this contest represented the view of the younger generation, namely Adam Oehlenschläger, Jens Møller and Ludvig Stoud Platou. I summarize their views and examine Herder’s influence on the debate.

Perpetual Motion, Time, and Power: Christoph Ransmayr'sCoxas Novel of the Anthropocene

Christoph Ransmayr's novels are known for complex interactions with time and the reimaging of historical events. This article considers the function of historical imagination inCox oder der Lauf der Zeit(2016). The novel's fictional transposition to China of an eighteenth‐century quest for perpetual motion serves to link the control of time to the unprecedented worldly power of the Chinese emperor, but also to the decline of that power vis‐à‐vis the rise of industrial capitalism. The novel layers together the histories of perpetual motion and renewable energy, connecting both to emergent human geological agency. By framing this agency as the expression of the power of a few individuals, the novel opens spaces in which we can imagine a kind of thinking that might confront the constraints placed upon all of humanity by the actions of small groups in the past.

Einige Bemerkungen zur literarischen Intermedialität und zur filmischen Interbildlichkeit der Plastik des „lesenden Klosterschülers“ (Sansibar oder der letzte Grund von Alfred Andersch)

This article consists of four parts: the first, which briefly outlines the interdependence of literature and media such as film and photography in the context of narrative strategies related to World War II; the second is the intermedical location of "The Book Reader" as an expressionist sculpture by Ernst Barlach in the story of novel A. Andersch "Sansibar oder der letzte Grund" (relation: kaleidoscope of characters – sculpture) in the context of the concept of "Aura" by W. Benjamin, the third – cinematic interimage of the sculpture "The Book Reader" (sculpture -film relationship) and a summary of the considerations taken.

Pregnancy, Purity, and Body Autonomy in “New Originals” of “Rapunzel”

This article looks at adaptations and retellings of the fairy tale “Rapunzel,” beginning with the Grimms' own edits obscuring Rapunzel's sexuality, to expose how adaptations of this tale echo the evolution of societal attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality. Retellings of the tale are analyzed as “new originals” in their own right. Adaptations and remediations from the Grimms' first and second editions, including translations and film adaptations such as Rapunzel oder Der Zauber der Tränen (1988) and Tangled (2010), are used to explore how these new versions build on originals while injecting their own “flavors” and carrying the social values of their times and places. Reading fairy‐tale retellings as a continuous process of adaptation from “new originals” provides insight into social norms and values while discerning relevant, recognizable, and universally adaptable aspects of a tale.

The Kings of the Corona Crisis: The Impact of the outbreak of Covid‐19 on Small‐scale Producers in Hungary

SummaryThe Covid‐19 pandemic has fundamentally reshaped our lives. Its effects on the sales and use of marketing channels of small‐scale Hungarian producers are addressed here. Based on the level of proximity, sales channels were classified into three types. Due to local regulations concerning restrictions on movement, it was only impersonal (online) channels that survived, or the opposite type, i.e. very personal ones involving the face‐to‐face meeting of producers and consumers in the private spaces (mostly homes) of one of the parties. Results from the survey of 136 producers reveal that 60 per cent suffered an economic loss due to loss of sales, while 10 per cent increased their sales. Successful producers were those lucky enough to be operating within the fresh fruit and vegetable sector, within which consumer demand increased significantly. The parallel use of several sales channels before the virus outbreak increased subsequent chances of success by increasing the probability that some of the channels would remain operational. Furthermore, successful producers had invested a lot of work pre‐Covid into maintaining private relationships with their customers; a situation that proved vital during times of restrictions. Also, the former moved fast, and were open enough to learn and make use of the opportunities modern technology offered them.

An English Clockmaker in Eighteenth Century China: Christoph Ransmayr’s Novel Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit

In his latest novel Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit (2016), Christoph Ransmayr, best known for his Ovid-pastiche Die letzte Welt (1988), depicts eighteenth Century China. While the famous English clockmaker James Cox (1723–1800) is at its centre, the book is not a historical novel, but rather a piece of fanciful fiction, based on facts, about the strategic, political and philosophical significance of time itself.

Il perpetuum mobile del desiderio Cox di Christoph Ransmayr e la raffigurazione letteraria del cosmopolitismo settecentesco tra esotismo e vanità

The article sets out to analyse Christoph Ransmayr’s latest novel Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit (2016) in the light of recent criticism. The complex relationship between 18th-century cosmopolitanism and its fictional adaptation features prominently in the novel. Our focus is upon the making of characters’ identities, the literary and visual techniques of narration (especially intertextual allusions and ekphrasis), and the coalescence of time, decay and desire as displayed in the novel.

« Le Roi-grenouille ou Henri-de-fer» et l'histoire éditoriale des "KHM"

Considéré par les Grimm comme l’un des contes les plus beaux et les plus anciens, « Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich » a néanmoins connu des modifications importantes entre la première édition des KHM, en 1812, et la dernière en 1857. Cet article montre que les auteurs ont développé un certain nombre d’éléments en fonction du projet, lui-même évolutif, qu’ils entreprennent en publiant leur recueil. En accentuant la dimension morale du récit, son caractère enfantin, et en supprimant les allusions sexuelles, les Grimm cherchent à rapprocher le texte du modèle de conte décrit dans la préface du recueil. Si ce conte, stratégiquement placé en tête d’ouvrage, peut paraître emblématique des KHM, il l’est aussi devenu par le travail de réécriture des auteurs.
 Mots clés:Contes, Grimm, roi -grenouille, génétique, histoire éditoriale, comparaison

Taming Foreign Speech: Language Politics in Shadow Plays around 1800

This article examines three German (shadow) puppet plays from the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period—Achim von Arnim's Das Loch, oder: das wiedergefundene Paradies, Christian Brentano's Der unglückliche Franzose oder der Deutschen Freiheit Himmelfahrt and Ludwig Tieck's Hanswurst als Emigrant—through the lens of an aesthetic dissemination theory posited by Georg Jacob, the German founder of Turkology. While Jacob stressed the structural analogies between Turkish and German shadow plays, this article examines whether such a comparison is fruitful, and explores its limits in the face of the emergence of German nationalism.

Moderne Mysterien: Carl Friedrich Bahrdts ,Deutsche Union‘ zwischen Geheimnis und Öffentlichkeit (Mit einigen Anmerkungen über Schillers Don Karlos)

Abstract The government ban of the Bavarian secret society of the Illuminati in 1785 and Frederick William III's succeeding to the Prussian throne in 1786 marked a changing of the political atmosphere in Germany, giving rise to a wave of conservatism, especially in Prussia. Taking the Order of the Illuminati as model, in 1786 the enlightened theologian Carl Friedrich Bahrdt founded in Halle the “Deutsche Union”, a correspondence society with the aim of recruiting liberal-thinking authors, of seizing the German editorial market, and of promoting the formation of an enlightened public opinion. Analyzing archival sources and Bahrdt's works (from the Briefe über die Bibel im Volkston to Zamor, oder der Mann aus dem Monde), the essay singles out the ideological fundamentals of the media politics of the secret society in the light of Bahrdt's conception of a rational Esotericism (vernünftige Esoterik); it highlights the concrete and intellectual differences from and similarities to the previous experience of the Illuminati; it focuses a wide concept of Illuminatism, which can also be interpreted as a modern media theory. At the end, the article demonstrates to what extent Illuminatism influenced the German classical literature of the 18th century by re-reading Schiller's Don Karlos (1787). (GP; in German)

Beyond Law and Justice: Revenge in Jean Améry

How can we conceive of justice after Auschwitz? This question informs all of Jean Améry's writings. While Améry is famous for his defense of ressentiments and for problematizing the demand of forgiveness put on survivors after the war, I argue that a consideration of his reflections on revenge are indispensible for reaching a fuller understanding of his complex engagement with individual and collective notions of justice after Auschwitz. In his essay collection Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966), Améry is quick to dismiss the idea of revenge. However, the protagonist of Lefeu oder der Abbruch (1974), a Holocaust survivor, indulges in a fantasy of vengeance, followed by the fantasy of being brought to trial for his quest for justice. Relegating both revenge and the court to the realm of the imaginary, Améry depicts them in their failure to bring about justice and foregrounds the survivor's struggle to be heard by his or her community. I demonstrate that Améry—in dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, and Simon Wiesenthal—is not primarily interested in the contours of justice as a juridical concept as much as he is renegotiating the terms of justice, community, and remembrance after the war.

The Boxers in Contemporary Chinese and German Fiction: Mo Yan and Gerhard Seyfried

Germany’s colonial adventures in China have emerged increasingly over the last decade from a century of silence and neglect by historians, and in the wake of this revival the literary potential of this epoch has once more been exploited. Gerhard Seyfried’s novel Gelber Wind oder Der Aufstand der Boxer (Yellow Wind or The Boxer Uprising, 2008) has 640 pages and is exhaustively researched.1 What is claimed on the dust-jacket, that Seyfried’s work is ‘the first great historical epic in German on the Boxer Uprising’, is simply false. In the years immediately following the defeat of the Boxers in the late autumn of 1900 there was a spate of German fiction on this theme, the most popular of which, Elisabeth vonHeyking’s Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten (Letters That Did Not Reach Him) was reprinted no less than forty-six times after its publication in 1903.2 While Seyfried avoids all mention of these predecessors in his foreword and wholly omits them from the bibliography at the end of the book, I shall argue later that his novel may be read – in part – as imitating this earlier tradition. In 2001 the eminent Chinese novelist Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, had already produced a novel of almost equal length entitled Tanxiang xing (The Sandalwood Torture) which is set at the time of the bloody conflicts with Boxers in Shandong Province, focusing on the city of Gaomi.3 In the following I shall examine what guises well-documented events assume in two texts that enjoy all the privileges and freedoms of fiction and the advantages of historical distance, enquiring into the literary enactment of the alien Other. But first some brief preliminary considerations on the genre of historical novels are in order.

Jean Amérys Ethik der Erinnerung: Der Körper als Medium in die Welt nach Auschwitz by Sylvia Weiler (review)

Reviewed by: Jean Amérys Ethik der Erinnerung: Der Körper als Medium in die Welt nach Auschwitz by Sylvia Weiler Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Sylvia Weiler, Jean Amérys Ethik der Erinnerung: Der Körper als Medium in die Welt nach Auschwitz. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. 448 pp. Jean Améry’s 100th birthday in October 2012 occasioned new scholarship about him and his work and publications of earlier writings, including the book publication of Sylvia Weiler’s dissertation, which had been submitted in 2008 at the Free University of Brussels. Austrian-born Holocaust survivor and anti-Fascist Jean Améry, a philosopher, literary author, and public intellectual, chose Brussels as his place of residence and begun to publish in German presses only after initial hesitation. His essays on the Shoah did earn him respect in post-1945 Germany and Austria—less so his fiction—but similar [End Page 152] to Günter Anders, his contributions to the Shoah and memory debates were eclipsed by others, especially by the members of the Frankfurt School. An “Ehrengrab,” a grave site for distinguished Austrians, was dedicated for him at the Vienna Central Cemetery. Weiler’s far-reaching study adheres to the systematic structure of a dissertation. It guides the readers safely from one topic to the next, but on the other hand, it makes the critical narrative less appealing than necessary. In more than four hundred pages Weiler examines Améry’s multifaceted work, which includes essays, critical and journalistic pieces, and narrative prose—youthful fiction such as the novel Die Schiffbrüchigen and later works like Lefeu oder der Abbruch. In addition to exploring Améry’s ideological development and his intellectual positions vis-à-vis prominent post-Shoah critics including Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who experienced Nazi persecution but not the reality of the camps, the book traces the circumstances of the author’s socialization, his changing conceptions of his Jewishness, and his significance in the European, particularly German-language, memory discourse. Intertextualities are scrutinized as well, for example the literary models Améry chose for his narratives, such as Proust for his 1945 novel fragment. Proust, according to Weiler, inspired the topic of the body as the primary medium of remembrance. In his famous collection of essays, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966), Améry conveys immediate and intense impressions of the physical experience of torture and deprivation that eclipse any heroic notion such as the often-mentioned triumph of the spirit in the face of adversity. As it were, Améry reveals a keen awareness of the body as prison, which manifests itself in different ways, through pain, sickness, and aging. Weiler explores as a central theme the “ethics of remembrance,” which initiates a comparative analysis of Adorno, Arendt, and Améry. With reference to Enzo Traverso, who asserts that the former two authors were able to “think” or imagine Auschwitz, Weiler maintains that Améry would have objected to such a notion. She adds that neither Arendt nor Adorno accorded the Holocaust, the death camps, and torture the same significance as did Améry, who had experienced them firsthand. Yet she agrees with Traverso, who observes that beginning with the 1960s the former German-Jewish exiles living in Germany had a monopoly on how to interpret the Holocaust. Améry, on the other hand, who found himself in a somewhat marginal situation within the debates of that time, articulated the lack of regard for the victims’ narratives and analyses. Weiler suggests examining perhaps the two most important postwar intellectuals, [End Page 153] Adorno and Améry, in depth as complimentary as well as contradictory models. The central issue in Weiler’s book is Améry’s ethics of remembrance. The analysis of the far-reaching implications of this aspect of Améry’s oeuvre is intended to show that with its philosophical, social, and political dimensions, this author’s approach could serve as a framework for a comprehensive Holocaust interpretation. Weiler convincingly argues that Améry’s transdisciplinary oeuvre deserves renewed attention and a central place in the Holocaust discourse. In clear and persuasive prose Weiler presents complex intellectual discussions as well as descriptive passages...

'The Fate of the Young Man Reading in the Church': Literary Sacramentalism in Alfred Andersch's Sansibar oder der letzte Grund

The role of Ernst Barlach's sculpture Lesender Klosterschüler (‘Studying Monk’) in Alfred Andersch's Sansibar oder der letzte Grund (Flight to Afar) has been interpreted as an existential symbolic attempt through the aesthetic representation of the act of reading critically to reclaim a past victimised by National Socialist ideological control. However, there is a definitive theological theme in the text functioning as a concurrent reclamation strategy that criticises both the failures of the Confessing Church to confront Nazism while offering a means of redemption from the past. This essay explores the religious symbolism, evoked by the reflections and interactions of the novel's main characters with the figure of ‘Studying Monk’ and will also show how these signifiers serve as a type of literary sacramental Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘coming to terms with the past’) that attempts to both reconfigure and restore the past.

A 200th Anniversary of Academic Psychiatry

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article PerspectivesFull AccessA 200th Anniversary of Academic PsychiatryHolger Steinberg, M.D.Holger SteinbergSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Oct 2011https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.11010024AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Official announcement of Heinroth's appointment as Associate Professor for Mental Therapy at the University of Leipzig on Oct. 21, 1811.October 21 is a birthday for academic psychiatry (1, 2). On that date in 1811, the administration of King Frederick August I in Saxony ruled that an associate professorship for “mental therapy” would be established at the kingdom's university in Leipzig and that Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843) would be appointed, as declared in the document displayed here (Leipzig University School of Medicine archives, A IV 14, volume 2).Because of its profitable mining and textile industry, Saxony was one of the economically most advanced areas in central Europe. Moreover, since 1806, French liberalism had nurtured cultural, scientific, and political ambitions for social reforms. In 1810, young professors succeeded in demanding better career opportunities, which led to realignment of existing professorships in medicine at Leipzig University and establishment of new ones. The new chair for mental therapy hence was part of a larger project supervised by minister Gottlob Adolph Ernst von Nostitz und Jänkendorf, responsible for the Saxon penal, social, and health care institutions (3). He was the head of a social conservative philanthropic movement aimed especially at reforming mental health care. He also initiated the first two Saxon mental asylums, established at Sonnenstein and Waldheim in 1811. To secure specialist training for the future doctors at these institutions, the minister regarded it necessary to establish a chair in Leipzig dedicated particularly to the complex issues of mental illness and specialized cures and treatments for the insane. Owing to the Napoleonic Wars, which affected Leipzig in the Battle of the Nations, the chair could not be supplemented by the erection of a university psychiatric hospital. Also, establishment of a chair dedicated especially to psychiatry did not act as a model for other universities at that time. Chairs for psychiatry were not set up there before the 1840s. The distinction between academic psychiatry on the one hand, regarded as elitist, and institutions for mental health care on the other, which is manifest in Germany until the present day, emerged.In Leipzig, neurological and psychiatric issues had been taught more or less regularly since the 1750s, but not before 1806 had this constancy been guaranteed—by Heinroth (2), one of the “cadre of ambitious, able people aiming to make a…career and a name” through psychiatry, as Porter described them for the time before and around 1800 (4). Heinroth may have chosen to become a medical pastor to integrate a calling for theology into medicine. The issue of whether madness was a philosophical, pedagogical, theological, or medical problem was ended around 1800, when the first dedicated mental asylums were placed in medical custody. These doctors for the insane followed two different approaches, which fought each other fiercely, especially in Germany. There was the moral, psychosocial approach, most prominently represented by Heinroth, who connected mental illness with sin (5), versus the brain-anatomical, organic approach (6).Heinroth's associate professorship was never upgraded to full professorship. Although he repeatedly tried to achieve that, in 1819 he was made full professor only of medicine in general, not of “mental therapy” (Landesregierung Geheime Kanzlei 6111, volumes V–VII, Saxon State Archive, Dresden, Germany). Supported by the medical faculty, he also became doctor in charge at the town's largest care institution in 1813. This housed mentally ill inmates, whom he used for clinical demonstrations for the maximum benefit of his students. Heinroth became known through his Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens oder der Seelenstörungen und ihre Behandlung (Textbooks of the Disturbances of Mental Life) (7), which became a reference work in psychiatry in the first half of the 19th century.Address correspondence to Dr. Steinberg (holger.[email protected]uni-leipzig.de).The announcement is reproduced by permission of the Archives of the Leipzig University School of Medicine. Image accepted for publication March 2011.