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NOT ALL GREAT WRITERS are great storytellers, especially not in the traditional sense of storytelling. In order to construct a story, a writer has to possess specific talents and a certain temperament. A good story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It must cohere to the extent that characters are consistent psychologically throughout the various phases of the story. The actions and activities of the characters must be motivated by a credible psychology, and the events must develop in a logical pattern. Elements of the story must be carefully arranged to elicit reader responses. Often suspense is a reaction storytellers seek to evoke, and for each reaction the author is trying to provoke in the audience, he or she must apply appropriate techniques. Narration must demonstrate the same type of relationship to characters throughout, and the narrator has to remain consistent in tone and level of diction. If the writer is composing a short story or a novella, we will often find a focus on one event or a series of related events, but even in cases of shorter prose fiction we count on consistency in characters and character development, logical plots, and psychological credibility. With longer prose fiction, such as novels, there are additional demands for attention to detail and development. The reader expects an exposition when new characters are introduced, or when the scene shifts from one place to another. Descriptions must be consistent from one part of the novel to another. Obviously some modernist tendencies in prose fiction play with these conventions, intentionally disappointing readers’ expectations and the norms that have become established for fiction. But even in the case of the deviation from narrative norms, the writer must display a command that allows the reader to appreciate the deviation as part of the compositional strategy. If the deviation from norms and consistency appears to result from a mistake or deficient capacity, then the writer fails to accomplish his purpose and will be considered lacking in talent.
It is quite possible to imagine a writer who is constitutionally unable to accomplish storytelling in this traditional sense, yet who is an outstanding prose stylist and insightful author. Heinrich Heine is a case in point.
MY TITLE ALLUDES TO an essay by Max Weber, published in 1919, titled “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” That essay was the expanded written version of a talk delivered almost exactly a hundred years ago, on November 7, 1917, to students in Munich in a series “Geistige Arbeit als Beruf.” Weber's essay seemed appropriate to me as an inspiration not only because of its centennial, but also, and more importantly, because it takes up issues of selecting the path of academic life as a career choice, and thus relates to my past, and quite likely to the past decisions of many of my colleagues. The latter part of Weber's essay, perhaps the most interesting from a theoretical standpoint, deals with the nature of knowledge and how it has changed over the centuries, and delves into Weber's theory concerning the disenchantment of the world with the advent of modernity. But the more relevant sections of the talk and the essay for our context are those that occur in the first half, relating to external and internal factors that confront young men and women in considering the professoriate. To his credit, Weber explores both connotations of the word “Beruf.” His audience was probably expecting him to focus on its meaning as a calling and to hear his views on the internal motivation necessary for pursuing a scholarly career. But Weber disappoints in his initial remarks by looking first at Beruf as an occupation that entails the mundane considerations of monetary compensation, workload, and career advancement (3–9).
Before I even came to consider these practical matters of the profession, I encountered as a graduating senior from the University of Pennsylvania several complicating factors to pursuing German studies as a vocation. The first was that I knew no German. In high school I had studied Spanish, and as an undergraduate I had completed the three-year language requirement by struggling through the fifth and sixth semesters of that language. The second difficulty was that I had very little familiarity with German literature or culture. My major was Natural Sciences, a composite course of instruction that demanded three semesters of mathematics and physics, and two years of chemistry (inorganic and organic), biology, and a focus on one scientific discipline with a series of courses beyond the minimum requirement.
As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked bya growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalist ideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; Europeanculture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Hoehn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters. Roger F. Cook is professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Mühlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von François, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Mühlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von François's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.
Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the "German" and the "European" in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials.
Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lützeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena.
Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities andMatt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
In its ascription of a tripartite personality to Nietzsche, my title recalls the most important book of the American Nietzsche reception, Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, which since its publication in 1950 has gone through four editions. Kaufmann's volume was important precisely because it allowed the American public to speak again of Nietzsche after he had been associated for a dozen years with the National Socialists, with war, with anti-Semitism, with immorality and barbarism, and with a system of values inimical to the American and western way of life. Kaufmann's monograph, as well as his many subsequent translations of Nietzsche's writings, removed him from the political sphere and placed him in the role of existential theorist, whose main concerns were being, art, the human mind, and creativity. Kaufmann thereby acted as an important midwife in the birth of Nietzsche as a philosopher, an event that takes place only after the Second World War. Although he was accorded the label of philosopher early on by many readers, he was rarely taken seriously by academic philosophers: in both Germany and the United States his writings were initially more attractive to creative writers and to a general public searching for alternatives to the mainstream bourgeois ethos. He dispensed life wisdom and inspiration, not academic philosophy. The works of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in German-speaking nations, and of Kaufmann in the Anglophone world, which were all widely promulgated after the war, legitimized Nietzsche's credentials in the world of abstract thought and extricated him from the political fray surrounding his writings in their initial reception. Kaufmann's book thereby represents an overcoming in its own right: Nietzsche was no longer considered the philosopher of the Third Reich — his sister was blamed for doctoring his texts and delivering him into the hands of the far right. Kaufmann assures us that he detested politics and was really apolitical, or even anti-political; he was not anti-Semitic, but anti-anti-Semitic; he was not a supporter of German nationalism, but its most vocal adversary; and any citations from his books that found their way into Nazi propaganda were simply distortions and lies.
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Edited by
Matt Erlin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA,Lynne Tatlock, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA