Jakob Hessing
Zum actzigsten Geburtstag
Jost Hermand
Zum Geleit
Paul Peters
Ergriffenheit and Kritik: or, Decolonizing Heine
Goethe's Die nateurliche Tochter depicts the emblematic eradication of a gender-bending daughter. The father figures of the play return obsessively to the issue of the daughter's (Eugenie's) potential death, recounting her masculine feats and her subsequent disappearances and reappearances. These reiterations of Eugenie's fate function much in the same way that Freud describes the purpose of repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In the play the repetitive returns to Eugenie's annihilation mark an attempt on the part of the "fathers" of the drama to master a traumatic experience: Eugenie's amorphous mix of gender identities. Her death represents the expunction of her masculinity and insures her exclusive femininity. Die nateurliche Tocher suggests that Eugenie can survive her inevitable emasculation only as a poetic image, in banishment, or in marriage. Each of these "options" represents symbolic death. Eugenie, the gender-bending daughter-son must--one way or another--die. (SEG)
Lisa A. Rainwater van Suntum
Hiding behind Literary Analysis: Heinrich Heine's Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen and Lou Andreas-Salomé's Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten
Three years after the Bündestagsbeschlüß of 1835 Heinrich Heine started work on a project which dealt with Shakepeare's female figures. Writing under censorship Heine was careful not to discuss openly his dismay in regards to political, religious, and economic issues. Shakspears Mädchen und Frauen serves as one of his many treatises, in which, writing under self-censorship, he uses irony, satire, and cryptic notions to put forth his ideas. Lou Andreas-Salomé struggled with her own form of self-censorship. Afraid of being ostracized by her male colleagues, she was wary of publicly stating her views on feminism. Using the female figures of Henrik Ibsen, she is able to discuss the roles of women and put forth a model of the New Woman. Both writers delve into the social and political issues of their time, always careful, however, to mask their ideas behind literary analysis. (LARvS)
Jost Hermand
Franz Mehrings Heine-Bild
Heine was--next to Lessing and Schiller--the German writer and poet Mehring revered most. In sharp contrast to the moralistic and anti-Semitic biases against Heine among the Wilhelminian bourgeoisie Mehring emphasized in his Heine biography and his eight articles on Heine above all the enlightened, cosmopolitan, and early socialist ideas in Heine's work. Even if some of Mehrings ideas seem to be outdated today, his defense of higher forms of culture and his political courage are definitely not. (JH) (In German)