Course Description

This new paper will be introduced in October 2013. The paper will consist of six modules, with free choice between these for the examination paper. The paper is designed to encourage contextual and interdisciplinary study, and the modules include historical documents, thought (philosophy, psychoanalysis), and visual art, alongside a set of literary texts by key authors from across the period.

Teaching

There will be three lectures for each of the six modules. Supervisions will normally be timed to fit with the lecture schedule. Students will be expected to study four of the six modules through essay work, with two supervisions for three of these and one for the fourth, plus up to three revision supervisions (i.e. a total of up to ten hours of supervision over the year).

Examination

1. Gender and Tragedy

The context of this topic is the role ancient Greek culture, as it was understood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, played in the German cultural revival of the period.  There is an intriguing contrast between the humanist attitude of Goethe and Schiller, and the more extreme, but in some ways historically more authentic, intervention of Kleist.  There are precise and challenging parallels and differences between Goethe’s Iphigenie (1787) and Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808). Goethe and Kleist both explore the boundaries of Enlightenment Reason by means of adaptations of motifs from Greek myth and the dramatic form of tragedy, and in undertaking this exploration, they imagine female protagonists as exemplars of extreme behaviour. Schiller’s essay ‘Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’ (1803, written as a preface to his ‘version’ of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Die Braut von Messina), provides a rationale for Greek Tragedy as a model for drama as it might serve in the Idealist period.  The complex issues raised by these texts suggest some of the tensions underlying the historical moment of the late Enlightenment and German Idealism. 

Primary texts

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenie (1787)
Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea (1808)
Friedrich Schiller, ‘Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’ (1803)

Recommended critical reading

Bernd Fischer (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2010), esp. Jost Hermand, ‘Kleist’s Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses’, 43-60.
Nicholas Boyle, Goethe. The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. 321-7, 447-56; vol. 2, Revolution & Renunciation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 517-532.
Helga Gallas, ‘Antikenrezeption bei Goethe und Kleist:  Penthesilea eine Anti-Iphigenie?’ in Thomas Metscher und Christian Marzahn, eds., Kulturelles Erbe zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde (Cologne: Böhlau, 1991).

2. Romanticism: Poetic Vision and Altered Sight

The German Romantics break with the enlightened belief in vision as knowledge and clarity and instead see it as enchantment, subverting realism through spectacle, illusion and dream. While they celebrate the creative power of poetic insight, they also register unease at the implications of a private vision that is susceptible to distortion. This module introduces two major Romantic novellas that engage with ambivalent vision: Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg (1802) leads us into a world where the limits between the real and the phantasmatic must remain undecidable; E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1815) showcases a protagonist who falls prey to his own visual compulsions. Addressing the uncanny obsession with eyes in Der Sandmann, Freud proposed a famous reading of Hoffmann’s text in his essay Das Unheimliche. Discussing Freud’s approach as one among other possible interpretations, the module also shows how psychoanalytic criticism responded to the Romantic predicament.

Primary material

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann (1816)
Ludwig Tieck, Der Runenberg (1804)
Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche (1919)

Recommended critical reading

Shelley L. Frisch, ‘Poetics of the Uncanny: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Sandmann’’, in The Scope
          of the Fantastic: Theory, Technique, Major Authors, ed. by Robert A. Collins and  
          Howard D. Pearce (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985), 49-55.
Alice A. Kuzniar, ‘The Crystal Revenge: The Hypertrophy of the Visual in Novalis and
         Tieck’, The Germanic Review (74/3, 1999), 214-228, esp. 214-18, 223-28
         (online).
Gerhard Neumann, ‘E.T.A. Hoffmann, Der Sandmann’, in Meisterwerke der Literatur von
          Homer bis Musil, ed. by Reinhard Brandt (Leipzig: Reclam, 2001), 185-226.
Ulrich Scheck, ‘Tales of Wonder and Terror: Short Prose of the German Romantics’, in The
         Literature of German Romanticism, ed. by Dennis F. Mahoney (= The Camden House
         History of German Literature, vol. 8), 101-23.

3. Modernising the Theatre: German Social Drama

This module explores the social and cultural function of the theatre in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. In this period such German dramatists as Friedrich Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, J. M. R. Lenz and Georg Büchner pioneered new forms of social theatre by dramatizing the concerns of the middle and the lower classes for a new type of modern audience. In the age of Revolution, both the Classical conventions of the theatre and the social codes and structures of class it represented came under intense pressure. These dramatists developed new dramatic strategies and devices as they sought to explore public and private forms of tyranny and liberation and to adapt dramatic writing to new socio-cultural realities. The dramas for study here show how what might seem the most natural of human bonds, love, is distorted – if not destroyed – by social structures of power and its abuse.    

Primary material

Lessing, Emilia Galotti (1772)
Büchner, Woyzeck (1837)
Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1769), Stücke 74-83
Büchner, Briefe, 9-12.03.1834 & 28.7.1835; Lenz (1836, excerpt)

Recommended critical reading

Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2002),
          146-169 (‘The Middle Class Family’).
Maik Hamburger and Simon Williams (ed.) A History of German Theatre (Cambridge:
          Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 4 and 6.
Gertrud Maria Rösch, ‘Geschichte und Gesellschaft im Drama’ in Zwischen Restoration und
          Revolution 1815-1848, edited by Gert Sautermeister & Ulrich Schmid (Munich:
          Hanser, 1998), 378-420.

4. Transformations of the National Idea 1806-1871

This module explores the development of the German national idea from the early nineteenth century to the creation of the German empire. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire under pressure from France in 1806 raised the question of the future of Germany. Thinking about Germany was shaped by the desire first to expel the French occupiers and then to bring about political change in the German states and the German Confederation. Nationalism became an ideology of emancipation and reform, and, for some, of revolution. Political concerns interacted with cultural preoccupations, and ideas of nationalism were debated and increasingly widely disseminated in the newspapers, journals and public associations that flourished in this period. This paved the way for the dramatic modernisation of German society in the second half of the nineteenth century. The primary material reflects the political, social and cultural-historical dimensions of the topic and will enable students to explore the ramifications of the national idea in Germany in this period.

Primary materials

Selected extracts from Peter Alter (ed.), Nationalismus: Dokumente zur Geschichte und
             Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1994).
Selected extracts from Lesebuch zur deutschen Geschichte, vol. 2, ed. Bernhard Pollmann,
             (Dortmund: Chronik Verlag, 1984).
Hagen Schulze, The Course of German nationalism. From Frederick the Great to
            Bismarck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103-47.
Selected extracts from the above available on CamTools at: [link name], with the following very short texts:
Ernst Moritz Arndt, Des Deutschen Vaterland (1813)
Friedrich Wilhelm III, An mein Volk! (17 March 1813)
Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Das Deutschlandlied (1841)
Max Schneckenburger, Die Wacht am Rhein (1840) & Nikolaus Becker, Das Rheinlied
         (1840).
‘Das einzige und der Einzige worin Deutschland einig ist’ (Depiction of the Schillerfeier) in
          Die Gartenlaube, 10 November 1859.
Anton v Werner, Kaiserproklamation im Spiegelsaal von Versailles (1877).

Recommended reading
Stefan Berger, Inventing the Nation: Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), ch. 1-2
John Breuilly (ed.), The State of Germany: the National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and
            Remaking of a Modern Nation State (London: Longman, 1992), ch. 1, 3-5.
Hagen Schulze, The Course of German Nationalism. From Frederick the Great to
           Bismarck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 33-101.
Joachim Whaley, ‘Thinking about Germany, 1750-1815: The Birth of a Nation?’
             Publications of the English Goethe Society, lxvi (1997), 53-72.

5. Waterscapes: Nature as Cultural Symbol

This module explores the German fascination with nature and landscape through examples of writing about the sea and other waterscapes. Taking Heinrich Heine’s vivid cultural history of the German popular imagination, Elementargeister, as a starting point, it looks at the way in which the rich symbolic associations of water and the sea lent themselves to consideration of the relationship in human culture between: order and disorder; reason and the imagination; and man, God and nature. Waterscapes are sites of contemplation and of the (sometimes uncanny) reflection of the human figure; they are sites of recreational pleasure and of potential destruction or dissolution. Writing about the sea and about other more inland forms of waterscape thus enabled German authors to examine the nature of individual and collective identity and to reflect on the often fluid boundaries around what it means to be human and, in particular, what it meant to be German in the nineteenth century.

Primary material

Heine, Die Nordsee (1827)
Storm, Der Schimmelreiter (1888)
Heine Elementargeister (1837)
Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (painting, 1810)

Recommended critical reading

Jörg Robert, ‘Die See als Sehschule: Bilder, Medien und Mythen in Heines
        Nordseedichtung’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 245
       (2008), 1-36.
Jeffrey Sammons, Heine: a Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979)
Andrew Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford:
         Clarendon Press, 1996), 283-316.

6. Art, Desire and Death

Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) presents us with an ageing writer who seeks to restore his creativity on a trip to Venice, where he is confronted with homoerotic energies that at once revive his artistic productivity and threaten his long-established bourgeois self-composure. Hedwig Dohm’s Werde, die Du bist (1894) also addresses creativity in conjunction with illicit desire emerging late in life. Both are masterful novellas which give evidence of the rich literary imaginary that arose in response to Nietzsche’s ground-breaking reformulation of aesthetic experience in his Geburt der Tragödie,a text which is prefigured in ‘Die dionysische Weltanschauung’. Both novellas engage with the Nietzschean forces of individuation and dissolution, the Apollonian and the Dionysian; both end in death. Yet while Mann considers a successful male writer, and the price he has to pay for artistic self-realisation, Dohm shows how the discovery of such self-realisation comes too late for a woman who has lived a life of convention and social constraint. By suggesting a utopian potential behind actual limitations, each writer explores the fine balance between renunciation and emancipation that defines their protagonists.     

 Primary material

Hedwig Dohm, Werde, die Du bist (1894)
Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (1912)
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Die dionysische Weltanschauung’ (1870)

Recommended critical reading

Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (Berkeley: University of California
         Press, 1994), esp. 85-93.
Abigail Dunn, ‘‘Ob im Tode mein ich geboren wird?’ The Representation of the Widow in
          Hedwig Dohm’s ‘Werde, die du bist’’, in Women and Death: Women’s
          Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500, ed. by Clare Bielby and Anna
          Richards(Rochester NY: Camden House, 2010), 88-100.
T. J. Reed, ‘The Frustrated Poet: Homosexuality and Taboo in ‘Der Tod in Venedig’’, in
         Taboos in German Literature, ed. by David Jackson (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), 119-34.
Andrew Webber, ‘Mann’s Man’s World: Gender and Sexuality’, in The Cambridge
         Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge
         University Press, 2001), 64-83, esp. 73-78. (online)

Course adviser