Drei neue Variationen über alte Themen (Kevin Perryman)
Kevin Perryman, born in Colchester, UK, in 1950, has been active as a poet,
translator, and editor, writing and publishing in German as well as in English.
Among other things, he can take credit for no fewer than five volumes of poetry,
again both in German and English. In 1996, Perryman, who has lived in Southern
Germany since 1973, was awarded the "Horst Bienek Förderpreis für Lyrik
der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste." His "Drei Gedichte"
are published here for the first time. (RG) (In German)
Thomas Baginski
Traumerfahrung als Erkenntnisweg: Oskar Loerkes Gedicht "Die Hand"
Although Oskar Loerke's oppositional, anti-fascist poems still occasionally
receive critical attention, his visionary, introspective poems have all but been
forgotten. Using the dreamscape evoked in the poem "Die Hand" as a
point of departure, this article seeks to discredit the notion often held by
critics that the psychological imagery of Loerke's verse frequently
illustrates the base, irrational, even diabolic contents of the subconscious
mind. This critical reading proposes, to the contrary, that the dream vision in
"Die Hand" serves rather as a poetic device through which Loerke
reflects on the various modes of perception and paths of cognition which lead to
eventual self-knowledge and artistic self-actualization. In both content and
form, the poem examines three mental states—the conscious, the pre-dream, and
the dream state—and their respective modes of perception at work within the
poet's creative universe. (TB) (In German)
Yahya Elsaghe
Die Jüdinnen in Thomas Manns Erzählwerk
The Jewish figures in Thomas Mann's literary oeuvre are
indicative, in both their distribution and their respective sets of
characteristics, of the catastrophic caesura encompassed by this œuvre. Their
distribution, i.e., the absence of Jewish characters in texts conceived after
World War II, reflects with uncanny accuracy the genocide committed during the
Third Reich. The previous shaping of Jewish characters, especially of the female
ones, from "Der Wille zum Glück" to Doktor Faustus sheds light
on a shift from an anthropological to a cultural conception of Jewishness. The
latter conception is imbued with grief and melancholy, whereas the former is
defensively dominated by a fear of total assimilation facilitated by women's
legal right to assume non-Jewish names by marrying into the ‘German'
community. Vis à vis this legal option, the representation of young and
sexually attractive Jewish women disproportionately emphasizes the stereotypical
markers of physical alterity. (YE) (In German)
Marcus Bullock
In a Blauer Reiter Frame: Walter Benjamin's Intentions of the Eye and Derrida's
Specters of Marx
Although Walter Benjamin presents many remarkable ways to approach visual modes
of experience, his writing usually discusses paintings only in a very general
manner. We find little direct discussion of how he himself contemplated
particular paintings except for some remarks made in letters to Gershom Scholem
concerning an exhibition of work by the Blauer Reiter group in 1921. These
comments prove quite valuable in clarifying our understanding of how he moves
between questions of meaning in the framed painterly production, and in the
visual spectacle of history. Benjamin's eye, penetrating its object to search
out the substance of truth, provides a provocative contrast with the manner in
which Derrida plays out his perspective over the spectral qualities of political
forces, especially where Derrida's account of Marx draws directly on Benjamin's
notion of messianism. Certainly, this contrast offers a useful insight into the
distinction between deconstruction and Benjamin's critical strategies. (MB)
Hans-Bernhard Moeller
Zur deutschen Filmkomödie der Generation nach 1968
This article deals
with the aesthetics, strategies, and traditions of recent German films. It
proposes that the contemporary German screen comedy is closer to its American
genre counterpart than it is to the 1930s and 1940s UFA comedy. Core
distinctions are modified visual approaches, subgenres such as the road movie
which evolved in the wake of rapid technological progress, and the realignment
of interpersonal relationships, the fallout of social change. Crises of personal
identity frequently generate the filmic morphology of these comedies. An
analysis of Rainer Kaufmann's Stadtgespräch (1995) arguably offers a
paradigm to validate our premises. What sort of realistic future can one expect
for such German film comedies, particularly with regard to their prospects for
European and international distribution? How can a film-production system
survive in Germany if it does not support a lively comedy genre, especially at a
time of commercial restructuring? (H-BM) (In German)
Berit Balzer
Geschichte als Wendemechanismus: Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass