'You Can ('t) Go Home Again'---
Tragisch-triumphale Stationen einer deutsch-jüdischen Lebensgeschichte:
Interview with Guy Stern (Frederick A. Lubich)
Guy Stern, one of the most respected of the twentieth-century German-Jewish
scholars who have left their mark on American German studies, fled Hitler's
Third Reich as an adolescent, returned to Europe as an American soldier and
intelligence officer, and subsequently established himself as an American
professor of German and authority on exile literature. Throughout his career he
has worked tirelessly in behalf of understanding and reconciliation between the
German people and the Jews. In this interview, originally conducted by Frederick
A. Lubich in 1996 and revised with Stern's approval in the summer of
2000, Professor Stern tells of his experiences and expresses his point of view
on German-Jewish issues of the twentieth century. It is published here for the
first time. (CLN) (In German)
Matt Erlin
Urban Experience, Asethetic Experince, and Enlightnement in G. E. Lessing's Minne von Barnhelm
Lessing's decision to begin his professional career in the modern urban center
of Berlin testifies to the city's importance for the emergence of new,
market-based forms of literary culture in the eighteenth century. The
significance of big-city life for Lessing, however, extends beyond its function
as background for his literary debut. This article demonstrates through an
analysis of his Berlin comedy Minna von Barnhelm that Lessing also
conceives the urban experience as inextricably intertwined with an Enlightenment
project of fostering tolerance and overcoming particularism. The city reveals
itself in the play as a site of social detachment, giving rise to a kind of a
self-estrangement that can open up new perspectives and create new possibilities
for action. This reading of the play also suggests that elements of Lessing's
epistemological and aesthetic theories can be linked to the evolution of new
forms of urban experience in late eighteenth-century Germany. (ME)
M. Nadeem Niazi
Rhetorical Inventio and Revolutionary Predication in Danton's Tod
This article explores the rhetoric of revolution in Dantons Tod through a
detailed examination of the play's use of resources from inventio (the topoi)
rather than elocutio (tropes and figures). It draws on Aristotle's Topics
to consider the crucial speeches of Robespierre, Danton, and St. Just with
respect to their formal parameters and routines of argument. Following a
detailed consideration of the logic of identity-politics in these speeches,
conclusions are drawn about the manner in which the main protagonists' vicious
struggle to define the nature of political identity and historical necessity is
conditioned by epistemological and metaphysical quandaries lying at the
foundation of the taxonomies and procedures given in the Topics. This
reading thus ultimately nuances our understanding of literature's power to
represent and shape beliefs about political action. (MNN)
Susan Gustafson
Watching the Subject: The Mother's Gaze in Dicken's David Copperfield and Kafka's Der Verschollene
Kafka's Der Verschollene and Dickens's David Copperfield share
paradigms of looking and being seen that are intricately connected to the main
protagonists' struggles to become subjects. Moreover, it is principally the
mother's gaze that determines the subjects' senses of subjectivity. Dickens
inverts Lacan's notion of the antinomy of eye and gaze through the depiction
of the unifying function of the mother's gaze. Self and other converge as
David mirrors and replicates the eye and gaze of his mother. In contrast,
throughout Der Verschollene Karl is forced to see himself from the point
of view of the mother (within the antinomy of eye and gaze) from a point in
which he constitutes nothing. Karl's sense of subjectivity is shattered,
fragmented, and extinguished by the annihilating looks of a series of
mother-surrogates. Although the mother's eye and gaze function centrally in
both novels, Karl finds his expunction in the mother's gaze, while David
discovers his subjective wholeness. (SG)
Michael P. Ryan
Kafka's Die Söhne: The Range and Scope of Metaphor
This article explores the "secret connection" among the three stories
which Franz Kafka refers to as Die Söhne. It is particularly concerned
with the inspiration behind the properties and implementation of this
connection. The author suggests that Kafka, inspired by Eastern philosophy's
idea of rebirth, was attempting to create a metaphor with a new range and scope:
Kafka's development of the Ungeziefer metaphor, a development
contingent upon his ordering of the stories, begins in "Der Heizer,"
comes to "corporeal" fruition in "Die Verwandlung," and
ultimately provides the metaphor's effect in "Das Urteil."
The anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner is seen as a mediator of Eastern philosophy
for Kafka, and the suggestion is advanced that Kafka's interest in
theosophy/anthroposophy was more persistent than has been previously believed. (MPR)
John L. Plews
Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Richter und sein Henker: Gluttony, Victory, and Justice
This article analyzes the use of food in Dürrenmatt's 1952 detective novel Der
Richter und sein Henker. The protagonist's gluttony in the meal scene of
the penultimate chapter is presented as Dürrenmatt's strategy to convey the
victory of social justice. Using Roland Barthes's semiotic theory, the article
maintains that food is an extraliterary language-system which is appropriated
and distorted at the literary level. In this instance, the primary linguistic
signifier of excessive eating—that denotes the human victory over the natural
world—is emptied of its original meaning to serve the ideological intention of
getting at the truth. By connecting a quantitative "victorious amount of
food" with a qualitative "just victory," Dürrenmatt convinces
the reader of the myth of "the victory of justice." Finally, by
deconstructing the food described from the perspective of its original meaning,
the article discloses the ideological distortion taken for granted by the
reader. (JLP)
Dagmar Barnouw
The Certainties of Evil: Memory Discourses of the Holocaust