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5 - A Man of the Century in His Poems: Johannes R. Becher and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Life Narrative
- Edited by Katja Herges, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Contested Selves
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2021, pp 115-128
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Summary
THERE ARE FEW GERMAN AUTHORS in the first half of the twentieth century whose works and life have been called exemplary or prototypical as often as those of Johannes R. Becher. In his youth he was considered one of the most talented and radical among his fellow expressionist poets, and his personal life was certainly scandalous: Becher was not only a morphine addict with serious financial problems but also had to defend himself in court in 1910 for killing his girlfriend in what was meant to be a double suicide that he alone survived. In the mid-1920s he was widely regarded as the preeminent Communist writer of his time and was, again, subject to legal prosecution in a famous high-treason trial. Between 1933 and 1945 Becher, after fleeing to Moscow, organized German emigrant writers in their common fight against the Nazi regime. After his return to Germany, he (co)founded several important East German institutions, including the Kulturbund (Cultural Association), the journal Sinn und Form (Meaning and Form), and the Aufbau publishing house—the latter two still exist today. Becher wrote the national anthem of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and became the country's first secretary of cultural affairs. To many, he was the perfect embodiment of socialistic realism. GDR officials considered him a poet of the State (Staatsdichter). This ideologically inflected perspective, along with doubts about the literary quality of his writings, is the main reason why post-1989 scholarship has neglected Becher despite his “representative” role.
In the following it is not my goal to “correct” this perception of Becher as a socialistic realist writer or to argue that Becher's work should be remembered because of his great impact on twentieth-century literature. Instead, I will investigate the social, political, and cultural factors that gave rise to the perception of Becher as a prototypical twentiethcentury poet. Previous scholarly literature has given little thought to the possibility that Becher might himself be responsible for the notion that his life and writings are representative of his time. In contrast, I argue that Becher used a variety of strategies to project an image of himself as a prototypical writer and exemplary individual.
Curing Both Body and Soul: The Physician as Poet in the Works of Daniel Wilhelm Triller
- from Part I - Poetry
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- By Kristin Eichhorn, Paderborn University.
- Edited by Michael Wood, Johannes Birgfeld
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- Book:
- Edinburgh German Yearbook 12
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 21 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 29 November 2018, pp 19-34
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Summary
DANIEL WILHELM TRILLER (1695–1782) is one of those many authors whose work has been largely ignored owing to a generally stronger research focus within German Studies on the literature of the second half rather than on the first fifty years of the eighteenth century. Although British Empiricism was proving influential at that time on the continent as well, the first phase of the Enlightenment still tends to be interpreted as the period in which Rationalism—as introduced by philosophers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz— reigned supreme. When it comes to eighteenth-century German poetics, scholars often hold Johann Christoph Gottsched as the dominant figure of literary debate; tellingly, even until recently the epithet Literaturpapst (literary pope) has been used to refer to Gottsched in historical surveys of the period. Gottsched's role was indeed a significant one: his Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen (Attempt at Critical Poetics for the Germans, 1730) established the most important normative poetics since Martin Opitz's Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey (Book of German Poetics, 1624). Only a few decades later, however, its strict set of rules was already heavily attacked by the younger generation. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and later the Stürmer und Dränger, for instance, claimed that the individual poet—the genius—had to follow his/her nature instead of a set of general rules as Gottsched had suggested. Ironically, his polemic dismissal in the second half of the century played a pivotal role in cementing the impression of Gottsched's aesthetic leadership in the decades before. Thus a number of early eighteenth-century writers have often been categorized as “mere Gottschedians,” implying that their literary approach was not only outdated with regard to the aesthetic developments to come but also unoriginal and unworthy of scholarly attention. Even scholars like Elisabeth Herbrand, who dedicates an entire chapter to Triller in her extensive study on the fable, eventually concludes that Triller has made no relevant contribution to the development of the genre, and ultimately remains a “trivial” author. Although critics nowadays no longer apply the glib label of “minor” or “trivial” to early-century authors there is still a broad tendency in German Studies to focus on later “accomplishments” and “innovations” such as Genieästhetik or Autonomieästhetik and to value older concepts only insofar as they lead up to these inevitable teleological “goals” around 1800.