Alan J. Clayton
Mahler and Enzensberger in Lisbon
On May 1, 1988, Hans Magnus Enzensberger attended a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Fourth symphony in Lisbon. Two years later, the poem “Vierte Symphonie, Coliseu dos Recreois, Lissabon” appeared in the volume Zukunftsmusik. The present article analyzes the impressions generated both by the music itself and by the ninety-year-old concert hall in which it was performed. It also demonstrates the thematic links between the poem and the essay on Portugal that the author had previously published in Ach Europa! My analysis then focuses on Enzensberger’s fascination with time and, more specifically, the phenomenon of anachronism. Beginning with the publication of Die Furie des Verschwindens in 1980, the poetry concerns itself to such an extent with outmoded customs, activities, and language that there emerges an unmistakable paradigm of disappearance, the thematic and lexical elements of which this article then maps out. (AJC)
Peter M. McIsaac
Rethinking Tableaux Vivants and Triviality in the Writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Fanny Lewald
This article rethinks the trivial status of tableaux vivants to generate insights into notions of femininity, aesthetics, identity, and high and low culture between 1780 and 1850. Arguing that a gendered, high/low cultural divide has obscured the complexity originally attributed to tableaux, the essay excavates the Goethezeit thinking that accompanied tableaux. In spite of not conforming to classical aesthetic categories, tableaux were deemed capable of rendering feminine desire visible and symbolically containable in the speechless female body. With this understanding, the essay illuminates both how tableaux construct Ottilie as a figure of renunciation in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and how Johanna Schopenhauer’s Gabriele (1819) and Fanny Lewald’s Jenny (1843) interrogate feminine renunciation by varying Goethe’s device. Read in this manner, Gabriele reveals contradictions in Goethe’s notions of femininity, while Jenny’s performance as Ivanhoe’s Rebecca (1819) articulates an alternative femininity to Goethean renunciation at the same time as it mobilizes Ivanhoe’s critique of Jewish conversion and national identity for Lewald’s German cultural context. (PMM)
Cynthia Walk
Cross-Media Exchange in Weimar Culture: Von morgens bis mitternachts
The Kinodebatte, the debate over the emergence of film in the first decade of the 20th century, fostered a rhetoric of competition between theatre and film that belied the extensive crossover activity between established and new media in Germany both before the 1920s and throughout the Weimar period. This article focuses on the history of Von morgens bis mitternachts, Georg Kaiser’s play of 1912 and its later film adaptation by Karl Heinz Martin (1920), as an exemplary case of intermediality in Weimar culture. Filmic connections in the play—incorporating the urban milieu, formal conventions, and exhibition practice of early German cinema, as well as the persona of its first international star, Asta Nielsen—are extended and updated in the film through the collaboration of veteran cameraman Carl Hoffmann, whose innovative editing and special effects cinematography adapt the dramatic scenario to postwar issues and standards. (CW)
Eva Revesz
Poetry after Auschwitz: Tracing Trauma in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetic Work
Drawing on the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit in his theory of trauma formation, this article argues that Bachmann’s turn away from the lyrical genre in the 1960s may be viewed as a belated response to Theodor Adorno’s famous 1949 proclamation about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. By analyzing three poems—Früher Mittag, Exil, and the posthumously published Nach vielen Jahren from Bachmann’s early, middle, and late period respectively—the article traces the development of Holocaust imagery in her poetry in order to demonstrate how its increasing intensity gives voice to an increasingly traumatized identification with Holocaust victims. While her early poetry becomes symptomatic of repressed trauma and remains as such situated in what Lacan defines as the symbolic register, much of her late poetry—specifically Nach vielen Jahren—may be seen as exemplifying a traumatic encounter with the real. (ER)