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 2011-12, modules 1 and 2 in the list below will be covered in lectures in the first term. In the second term there will be lectures on modules 3 and 4. In the final term there will be two revision seminars on topics in current research. Lectures are supplemented by fortnightly College supervisions throughout the three terms of the teaching year. You can expect to cover between 4-6 texts, spending one or two supervisions on each one, depending on whether you opt for depth or breadth of coverage.

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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 as possible before the course:

  • Hartnann von Aue: Iwein
  • Martin Luther: Von weltlicher Obrigkeit
  • Sebastian Brant: Das Narrenschiff
  • G. Brinker-Gabler: Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart
  • Nibelungenlied
  • Thüring von Ringoltingen: Melusine

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Editions and Further Reading

1. Hartmann von Aue, Iwein

A story of love and chivalrous adventure, the romance of Iwein (c.1200) invites us not only to enjoy the twists and turns of its suspense-laden plot, but also to explore the role and nature of literature in the context of contemporary court society. Like many other texts from the same period, Iwein was written for the entertainment of the newly emergent aristocratic leisure class; yet the author is often ironic about the court and its representatives, suggesting that there may have been competing definitions of courtliness. Hartmann's message is further complicated by the fact that the early manuscripts contain significantly different endings to the work; by looking at these variants, and also at the paintings and other visual representations which Iwein inspired, we can see how literature in this pre-print era was a fluid concept, bound up with aural and visual media in ways that bear comparison with multimedia culture in our own age.

Text

  • Recommended edition: Iwein, ed. Benecke/Lachmann/Wolf, trans. T. Cramer, 1981
  • Introductory reading: W.H. Jackson, Chivalry in twelfth-century Germany: the works of Hartmann von Aue, 1994, chs 7, 8.

Contexts

  • Courtliness:
    • Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 1986, ch. 5 (transl. Courtly culture , 1991)
    • C.S. Jaeger, The origins of courtliness, 1985, ch. 12
  • Manuscript culture:
    • Joachim Bumke, 'Der unfeste Text', in: Aufführung und Schrift, ed. J.-D. Müller, 1986, pp. 118-29.
  • Iwein in the visual arts:
    • James A. Rushing Jr, Images of adventure. Ywain in the visual arts 1995.

2. 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

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

3. Seventeenth-century tragedy

The seventeenth century saw an upsurge of writing in the tragic mode, much of it a reaction to the political uncertainties produced by the Thirty Years' War. Accompanying this, there is also an important corpus of dramatic theory that concentrates on definitions of tragedy. This course will provide an introduction to seventeenth-century ways of seeing the interplay of human strivings and passions. There will be two set texts, one (Gryphius) will exemplify a martyr tragedy (Christian versus Muslim) and the problems of human suffering, the other (Lohenstein) a famous tragic heroine of the ancient world caught in her own political machinations.

Text

  • Andreas Gryphius: Catharina von Georgien. Ed. Alois Haas. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 9751 (available). Another edition, by Willi Flemming (Tübingen: Niemeyer) is in the UL and Beit.
  • Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: Cleopatra. Ed. Volker Meid. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 18548 (available)

Selected statements of dramatic theory will be provided in photocopy.

Introductory reading

Both dramas are discussed in Interpretationen. Dramen vom Barock bis zur Aufklärung. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 17512 (in print).

4. Poetry of the Baroque

Baroque dominated much of Western Europe in the seventeenth century, and in Germany its evidence was clear until the 1720s and the breakthrough into an early form of Erlebnislyrik as well as the didacticism of the Enlightenment. Baroque left a firm mark on music and painting as well as on literature, but German poetry of this period brilliantly captures virtually all the threads of the movement - within a brief compass of poems (notably by Opitz, Fleming, Gryphius, Hofmannswaldau) the entire range Baroque can be identified. It is poetry in particular that reveals the tensions and stresses of one of the most unsettling periods of German history, with war, pestilence, religious zeal and the fear of transience alongside a lust for life and a delight in nature, and there is much love poetry, which betrays Italian and Spanish influence. It is also that stage in German literature in which women poets emerge, showing the possibilities of a strong female voice.
In a combination of lectures and classes, this option will explore a relatively small corpus of poetry in order to illustrate the way in which this rich, complex, sometimes derivative, sometimes innovatory, writing reflects the mood of its age.

Text

  • Arbeitstexte für den Unterricht: Gedichte des Barock, edited by Peter Jentzsch (Reclam)

Secondary literature

  • Robert A. Browning, German Baroque Poetry, 1618-1723
  • Gedichte und Interpretationen: Renaissance und Barock, edited by Volker Meid (Reclam)

5. Brant, Das Narrenschiff

In the late fifteenth-century, printing with moveable type and cheaper sources of paper facilitated the rise of literature for a lay audience, who could read in the vernacular. In fact, only between 5-10% of the German population was literate when Das Narrenschiff was written in 1494. To have as broad an appeal as possible, the text combines vivid woodcuts with short texts in verse, mostly only around 30 lines long. Such an accessible form pleased a popular readership, which could read the iconography of the woodcuts even without the text. Almost two thirds of the pictures were produced by the young Albrecht Dürer, one of Germany's best-known artists. For the work's conceit, Brant draws on the recent discovery of America in 1492: he imagines a ship travelling the ocean bearing embodiments of human vice and foolishness away to the fictional Narragonia. His witty satire on the foibles of human nature provides social-historical insights into life on the threshold of modernity. The text is underpinned by a Humanist and nationalist ambition to reform the morals of the Holy Roman Empire. It quickly appeared throughout Europe in translation.

Text

Contexts

  • Folly Literature: Erasmus, The Praise of Folly [Greek: Morias Enkomion, printed 1511] (Penguin, 1994) Thomas Murner, Von dem großen lutherischen Narren (1522) [at www.zeno.org]
  • Print Culture: Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993)
  • Humanism: J. Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge 1996)

6. 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

7. 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

  • Nineteenth-century reception:
    • R. Borchmeyer (ed.), Wege des Mythos in der Moderne. Richard Wagner, 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', 1987 (dtv 4468)
    • J. Heinzle & A. Waldschmidt (eds), Die Nibelungen. Ein deutscher Wahn, ein deutscher Alptraum. Studien und Dokumente zur Rezeption des Nibelungenstoffs im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 1991(Suhrkamp)
  • Weimar and National Socialism:
    • Fritz Lang, Die Nibelungen. Part 1: Siegfrieds Tod, 1923; Part 2: Kriemhilds Rache 1924 (film; available as Transitfilm videocassettes)
    • Borchmeyer, pp. 202-23; Heinzle/Waldschmidt, pp. 151-90.
  • Post-1945:

8. 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
    • 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

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Course adviser

The Department's undergraduate course adviser for this paper is Dr Mark Chinca (Trinity College, network tel 38542, e-mail mgc1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk).

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

 

 

 

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