Department of German and Dutch

Modern & Medieval Languages

Department of German and Dutch

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Paper Ge 4

The Making of German Culture, 1

 MML Part 1B

This course introduces you to German culture up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, through the study of selected texts and contexts. It is the period when the foundations of modern German culture and society are laid. It saw important developments in language, religious ideas, political culture, as well as literature and German culture generally.

The number of texts has been restricted to allow you time to study them in some depth and familiarise yourself with a wide range of contextual materials, including film and the visual arts as well as written texts. They have been chosen with a view to variety (different periods, literary as well as non-literary writing) and historical importance (they have all had significant impact within the German-speaking world and often also beyond it). The related contexts are equally varied, embracing both the social, political and intellectual environments in which a given text was produced as well as longer-term historical developments and themes that still have resonance in German culture and society today.

The Nibelungenlied is simultaneously a product of court culture and a critique of it. It also illustrates how medieval texts came to be exploited for ideological ends in the modern period. Melusine deals with the transgressive sexuality of women, being a tale of sex and the supernatural about a wife who metamorphoses into a mermaid. Gryphius and von Lohenstein's plays illustrate important developments in dramatic theory and reflect the political tensions of the German-speaking world after the Thirty Years' War (not least in relation to the Muslim world). The poetry of the Baroque captures the turbulence and beauty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Luther's hymns to romance-inspired love lyric. Luther's short political treatise Von weltlicher Obrigkeit is an important text for the formation of Protestant identity in Germany and beyond.

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Teaching

In 2013-14 modules 2 and 3 in the list below will be covered in lectures in the first term. In the second term there will be lectures on modules 1 and 4. In the final term there will be four revision seminars. Lectures are supplemented by fortnightly College supervisions throughout the three terms of the teaching year. You can expect to cover 4-5 texts.

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Examination

In the three-hour examination you will be required to answer three questions; at least one of your answers must address the context. It is also possible to substitute a portfolio of essays; the requirements are the same as for the three-hour examination.

Here is a link to a recent examination question paper.

Preparation for the course

Helen Watanabe O'Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge history of German literature, 1997. Chapters 2 and 3 are general surveys of the period covered by this paper, which give an outline of some of the important social, cultural and historical contexts.

In addition, read as many of the texts for this year's topics (see 'Teaching' above) as possible before the course begins.

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Editions and Further Reading

1. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan

Gottfried’s Tristan (c.1210) is not only a gripping story involving a dragon-slaying and a love potion, political intrigue, subterfuge and a sex scandal in a British royal family, it is also one of the most artistically accomplished and thematically multilayered works of world literature. Its richness and complexity make it hard to pin down, and this in turn contributes to the fascination it has always exerted over its readers. Gottfried’s romance is the product of a court culture, and in many respects is complicit with courtly values; yet Gottfried can be critical, even cynical about the court and its representatives. So far as the main theme of love is concerned, on the one hand the author conducts a purely secular discourse, on the other he surrounds love, the lovers and also love stories with an aura of the sacred, to such a degree that critics have even spoken of a “religion of love” in Tristan or made connections with Christian mysticism. And in the domain of aesthetics, Gottfried insists on the historical veracity of his story, while at the same time demonstrating time and again how poetry has the power to create objects of pure imagination which baffle the senses and defy reason and logic.

Text

  • Recommended edition:

    Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, edition, with translation and commentary by Rüdiger Krohn, 3 vols (Reclam 4471-73).
    Excellent commentary in Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Walter Haug / Manfred Günter Scholz, 2 vols, Frankfurt 2011 (Bibliothek des Mittelalters 10, 11; consult in libraries).

  • Introductory reading:

    (read one or two of the following):
    Mark Chinca, Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan, Cambridge 1997 (Landmarks of World Literature).
    Christoph Huber, Gottfried von Straßburg: Tristan, 2nd edition, Berlin 2001 (Klassiker-Lektüren 3).
    Tomas Tomasek, Gottfried von Straßburg, Stuttgart 2007 (Reclam 17665).

Contexts

  • Court culture and cultural critique:
    C. Stephen Jaeger, Medieval Humanism in Gottfried von Strassburg’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’, Heidelberg 1977.
    Rüdiger Schnell, Curialitas und dissimulatio im Mittelalter. Zur Interdependenz von Hofkritik und Hofideal. In Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik Jahrgang 2011, Heft 161, 77-138.
    Monika Schausten, “dâ hovet ir iuch selben mite”: Höfische Jagdkunst im Spiegel klerikaler Kritik am Beispiel des Tristan Gottfrieds von Straßburg. In Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik Jahrgang 2011, Heft 161, 139-163.
  • The secular and the sacred:
    Burghart Wachinger, Geistliche Motive und geistliche Denkformen in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan’. In Der ‘Tristan’ Gottfrieds von Straßburg, ed. Victor Millet, Tübingen 2002, pp. 243-255.
    Niklaus Largier, Liebe als Medium der Transgression. Überlegungen zur Affektgemeinschaft und Habitusformung in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan’ (mit einer Anmerkung zur ‘Hohelied’-Mystik). In Norm und Krise von Kommunikation, ed. Alois Hahn / Gert Melville / Werner Röcke, Münster 2007, pp. 209-224.
  • Aesthetics:
    James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1974, repr. 2001, chapter IV.
    Mark Chinca, Metaphorische Interartifizialität. Zu Gottfried von Straßburg. In Interartifizialität. Die Diskussion der Künste in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, ed. Susanne Bürkle /  Ursula Peters, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2009) Sonderheft, pp. 17-36.

 

2. Nibelungenlied

The Nibelungenlied has been described as 'der deutscheste aller deutschen Stoffe', and not without reason. In 2003, when the dating of a newly found fragment of the medieval work caused controversy in scholarly circles, Spiegel, Zeit and FAZ all covered the skirmish with major reports and interviews. Since its written composition c.1200, the tale of the apocalyptic destruction of the Nibelungen warriors at the hands of the vengeful heroine Kriemhilt has excited huge interest. Significant manuscript changes suggest that readers took sides between the key protagonists and attempted to rid the work of its inherent, defining ambiguities. Yet these same ambiguities assisted the appropriation of the work as a national epic for a century and a half, from the Napoleonic occupation through to National Socialism; Göring famously compared the struggle for Stalingrad to the work's bloody denouement. This module explores the construction of the original work, its ideological exploitation up to the Second World War and its artistic rehabilitation after 1945. A variety of sources will be covered, including schoolbooks, opera, film, visual arts and modern museum design.

Text

  • Recommended editions: Nibelungenlied, ed. H. Brackert, 1970 (Fischer); or ed. S. Grosse, 1997 (Reclam 644).
  • Introductory reading:
    • Joachim Heinzle, , Das Nibelungenlied. Eine Einführung 1994 (Fischer)
    • Jan-Dirk Müller, Das Nibelungenlied, 2002 (Klassiker-Lektüren)

Contexts

 

3. Thüring von Ringoltingen, Melusine

Melusine (1456) — a tale about the devastating consequences of a husband's discovery of his beautiful wife's regular Saturday metamorphosis into a mermaid — is perhaps the most significant of the first batch of German prose novels that began to spring up in the fifteenth century. With 24 editions in just 120 years it was a roaring success in its own day — a period of technological innovation (printing) and literary-social change (the town as centre of literary culture). Reworkings by Hans Sachs, Tieck, Grillparzer and Zuckmayer attest to the literary world's continued fascination with sex and the supernatural from the sixteenth through to the twentieth century. In addition to these important historical contexts, the work poses questions which take the modern reader on to familiar territory: its strangely sophisticated yet raw texture and structuration pose narratological questions about how the new genre handles the demands of theme, character, cause and event, and philosophical content, whilst its concentration on dynastic developments leads to a consideration of how dominant discourses (in this case genealogy) form the categories in which we structure our knowledge.

Text

  • Recommended edition: Thüringen von Ringoltingen, Melusine, ed. H.-G. Roloff, 1991 (Reclam 1484).
  • Useful commentary and afterword in J.-D. Müller (ed.), Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, 1990 (Bibliothek der frühen Neuzeit; consult in libraries).
  • Introductory reading: Anna Mühlherr, 'Geschichte und Liebe im Melusinenroman', in B. Wachinger & W. Haug (eds), Positionen des Romans im späten Mittelalter, 1991, pp. 328-337

Contexts

  • Literature in urban centres: Jan-Dirk Müller, 'Melusine in Bern. Zum Problem der "Verbürgerlichung" höfischer Epik im 15. Jahrhundert', in G. Kaiser (ed.), Literatur — Publikum — historischer Kontext, 1977, pp. 29-78
  • Myth and history:
    • Volker Mertens, 'Melusinen, Undinen. Variationen des Mythos vom 12. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert', in J. Janota and others (eds), Festschrift für Walther Haug und Burghart Wachinger, 1992, vol.1, pp. 202-31
    • Jan-Dirk Müller, 'Rationalisierung und Mythisierung in Erzähltexten der Frühen Neuzeit', in Wolfram-Studien XX (2008), pp. 435-456.
    • Stephen C Nichols, 'Melusine between Myth and History. Profile of a Female Demon', in J.-D. Müller & H. Wenzel (eds), Mittelalter. Neue Wege durch einen alten Kontinent, 1999, pp. 217-40
  • Genealogy:
    • Beate Kellner, 'Melusinengeschichten im Mittelalter. Formen und Möglichkeiten ihrer diskursiven Vernetzung', in Ursula Peters (ed.), Text und Kultur. Mittelalterliche Literatur 1150-1450, 2001, pp. 268-95
    • U. Peters, Dynastengeschichte und Verwandtschaftsbilder. Die Adelsfamilie in der volkssprachigen Literatur des Mittelalters, 1999, pp. 210-20
     

4. Martin Luther, Von weltlicher Obrigkeit

The Reformation transformed German culture and society. Not only did Protestantism redefine the relationship between the individual and God, it also redefined relationships between individuals and those who ruled over them in the political sphere. Lutheranism in particular has been held responsible for promoting obedience to authority as a central trait of the German national character, with all the historical consequences that flow from that attitude. Luther's brief treatise on the subject of temporal authority (1523) therefore repays careful reading and contextualization; if the former reveals many of Luther's key formulations as ambiguous or even slipshod, the latter shows how a text that inaugurated the whole 'magisterial' tradition of subservience to secular rulers could at the same time be used to legitimate resistance and outright disobedience to those same rulers.

Text

  • Recommended edition: Harro Höpfl, (ed.), Luther and Calvin on secular authority, 1991. Modernized German text online at www.glaubensstimme.de
  • Introductory reading: Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 1991, chs 7, 10, 19

Contexts

  • Luther's thought:
    • Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (Reclam 1578)
    • A.G. Dickens, The German nation and Martin Luther, 1974, ch. 4
    • John Witte Jr, Law and Protestantism, 2002, ch. 3
  • Contemporary political theory: the 'magisterial' versus the 'radical' Reformation:
    • Quentin Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought, 1978, vol. 2, chs 1-3
    • Michael G. Baylor (ed.), The radical Reformation, 1991
  • Disobedience: the word of God, martyrdom, and the making of Protestant identity:
    • anonymous pamphlet Eyn wahrhafftig geschicht, in: Deutsche Flugschriften zur Reformation, 1980, pp. 329-58 (Reclam 9995)
    • Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance self-fashioning, 1980, ch. 2

 

5. Women poets

A crucial problem of reading women's writing in the early modern period is the fact that their works tended to have a short shelf-life and fade very quickly from view. Even modern reprints are often difficult to find. This module examines a selection of poems by a range of female writers from the seventeenth century, the century which saw the first flourishing of modern German poetry. Most women writers wrote poems, for society considered novels and drama inappropriate for them. But there is no disadvantage here for students who have very little experience of poetry, or who even find it difficult and inaccessible: female writers themselves had sometimes read very little, for so many important authors (e.g. the classical models used by men of the time) were taboo for them. They encoded their own experience into poems, for example Margarethe Susanna von Kuntsch (d. 1718), who describes her grief at the deaths of 13 of her 14 children at various stages of their childhood.

Text

  • Edition: G. Brinker-Gabler, Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 1978, pp. 83-119 (online version at http://humanities.byu.edu/sophie/literature under 'Texts: Brinker-Gabler')
  • Introductory reading: H. Watanabe-O'Kelly, 'The early modern period', in Jo Catling (ed.), A history of women's writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, 2000

Contexts

  • The struggle for a voice: B. Becker-Cantarino, Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frau und Literatur 1500-1800, 1987
  • Motherhood: Anna Carrdus, 'Consolation Arguments and Maternal Grief in Seventeenth-Century Verse: The Example of Margarethe Susanna von Kuntsch', German Life and Letters, 47 (1994), 135-51

 

 

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Course adviser

The Department's undergraduate course adviser for this paper is Dr Cordula Böcking (e-mail cb758@cam.ac.uk).

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Links to all German papers and comparative papers with a substantial German element

 

 

 

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