VOLUME 93, NUMBER 4, WINTER 2001

TEXTS AND DOCUMENTS

Walter Helmut Fritz
Drei neue Prosagedichte
Walter Helmut Fritz, a member of the lyrical generation of 1929 (Enzensberger, Kunert, etc.) and author of numerous volumes of fine poetry and prose, needs no introduction, all the more so since he has been featured in Monatshefte repeatedly. It should be noted, though, that what distinguishes his work is, among other things, his rich and ever-increasing output of prose poems; in fact, Fritz can be rightly said to be the most prolific as well as most consummate representative of this genre, and not only in German letters but worldwide. His "Drei neue Prosagedichte" is published here for the first time. (RG) (In German)

ARTICLES

Paul Peters
Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism
Kafka's celebrated story In der Strafkolonie has been the object of many interpretations, particularly of the theological or formalist bent: as a text on the agonies of faith, or on the agonies of writing. Even where it has been interpreted more politically, the fact that it might have had a concrete historical background (other than that of the Dreyfus case) has seldom been considered. The article proposes such a reading, identifying this background as that of European colonialism; for Kafka's text is not only replete with telltale colonial motifs, its very subject may be understood as a depiction of the "primal scene" of colonialism: the application of arbitrary violence and "overwhelming force" to subjugate an indigenous population. Bringing the classic anticolonialist analyses of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, as well as examples of imperial narrative and practice itself, into a type of interface with Kafka`s story, historical and political dimensions of this text may be disclosed which have hitherto eluded commentary. (PP)

Matthew Griffin
Image and Ideology in the Work of Heiner Müller
"Image" has emerged as a key concept in discussions of Heiner Müller's work as critics have sought to defend his work against accusations of its being ideologically suspect. The ability of Müller's images to resist the inflections of ideology has been applauded but little attention has been given to the way the author constructs his imagery. This article examines Müller's discourse on the image in texts ranging from his early lyric poetry to his theater texts of the 1970s and to the more theoretical formulations in essays and statements from the early 1980s. The theories of language and art developed here tell us that the image is as fundamental to the author's own thinking of his work as it is to our thinking of that work's relationship to ideology. (MG)

PERSONALIA

BOOK REVIEWS

INDEX VOLUME 93 (2001)