University of Wisconsin Madison crest that links to main university site

Association of University Presses member logo that links to main AUPresses site

   

Monatshefte

Subscribe

Read the Journal Online

Submission Guidelines

Editorial Board

Receive Email Updates

Advertise in Monatshefte

Indexes/Abstracts

 

Current Issue TOC

Back Issues TOC



Monatshefte 2022 Subscription Rates
Institutions:
      print & online $271
      online only $233
Individuals:
      print & online $103
      online only $86

Non U.S. Postage (no postage charges for online-only subscriptions)

Airmail: add $40/yr.

Canadian Subscribers: add 5% GST.

Monatshefte

Volume 109, Number 3, Fall 2017
Table of Contents

 

ARTICLES

Theodore Ziolkowski

Literarisierte Sonnenaufgänge

An analysis of Also sprach Zarathustra reveals that Nietzsche used the sunrise at the beginning—an element that he did not find in his source for the scene— as a metaphor for the awakening of consciousness. By analogy, the sunrise at the end suggests the now awakened consciousness. Further analysis shows that the motif had already been used for similar purposes by Goethe at the beginning and end of Faust II as well as in the “Zueignung” to his collected poems; by Schiller in “Der Spaziergang”; and by Hölderlin in Hyperion. Analogous uses of the motif of sunrise by such poets as Mörike (in his introductory “An einem Wintermorgen, vor Sonnenaufgang”) and Rilke (in the opening poems of both parts of his Neue Gedichte) suggests that literary sunrises should alert the reader to substantive implications that go well beyond the portrayal of nature. (TZ)

 

Markus Wilczek

Jenseits der Reife. Zu Bildung und Nachhaltigkeit bei Stifter

This essay poses the question of how ‘Bildung’ can be narrated without following the script of maturation. In close readings of Stifter’s Brigitta and Nachsommer, the essay argues that these texts, by employing the notion of ‘sustainability’, develop moments of dynamics in stasis that open up the Bildungserzählung. (MW; in German)

 

Andrew B.B. Hamilton

Stifter’s Granit and the Art of Seeing

Adalbert Stifter has long been read, especially in his later works, as a pedagogical writer. But critics have disagreed as to the precise content of the lessons he tries to convey in his fiction. This article argues that the basis of Stifter’s morality and aesthetics—the lesson his fiction is meant to convey—lies in the need to articulate meanings onto the landscape by dividing it into nameable units. In the novella “Granit,” the narrator is taught by his grandfather how to do just that: to construct a semiotic order and impose it upon the natural world, in order to be able to successfully coexist with it. The appearance of serene harmony with nature, in this text and others, is only possible after a thorough assertion of intellectual control, the techniques for which the grandfather and the text impart to the narrator and the reader. (ABBH)

 

William Kinderman

Exploring the “Temple of Initiation” on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain: Wagnerian Affinities and “Politically Suspect” Music

While the general importance of music for Thomas Mann is well recognized, the specific relationship of The Magic Mountain to Wagner’s Parsifal has received scant attention. Mann himself made reference to Wagner’s last drama, and he knew it intimately. Close comparison of these works reveals an extensive network of relationships, whereby Clavdia Chauchat corresponds to Kundry in Parsifal. Mann’s propensity toward irony is abundantly evident, and the import of Wagner’s symbolism is often inverted, as is the narrative structure as a whole. The Magic Mountain is shown to be a humorous counterpart not only to Mann’s novella Death in Venice, but to Parsifal, involving a parodistic deflation of Wagnerian sublimity. In this context, we can best understand the pivotal position of The Magic Mountain in Mann’s life-story, and its importance as a cultural document offering insight into why Mann changed his political stance, shifting away from a German nationalist position. The analysis thereby sheds fresh light on the political implications of Mann’s novel during the Weimar Republic. (WK)

 

Spencer Hawkins

Anecdote as Philosophical Intervention: Hans Blumenberg’s Figure of the Absent-minded Phenomenologist

This article discusses anecdotes functions’ to express philosophical anxieties and skepticism towards philosophical generalizations. By taking up Hans Blumenberg’s work on the rhetoric of philosophical discourse, this article examines an unpublished one-page story written by Blumenberg about his advisor, phenomenologist Ludwig Landgrebe. The story becomes absurd when Landgrebe (identified as “L.”) uses his pocket-watch to time a ferry trip, which he is only taking in order to go home and search his house for the selfsame pocket-watch. The article interprets the story as an illustration both of Heideggerian Being-in-the- World and of Landgrebe’s little-known variation on Heidegger’s model. Blumenberg’s anecdote conveys a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that we only notice objects when they are not handy (zuhanden). Besides critiquing Heidegger and Landgrebe, the anecdote exposes problems of phenomenology that an argument would express less satisfactorily. (SH)

 

BOOK REVIEWS

Ahrens, Jörn, Paul Fleming, Susanne Martin und Ulrike Vedder, Hrsg., „Doch ist das Wirkliche auch vergessen, so ist es darum nicht getilgt“. Beiträge zum Werk Siegfried Kracauers (Marcus Bullock)

Ben-Horin, Michal, Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature (Rolf J. Goebel)

Block, Friedrich W., Hrsg., Kunst & Komik (Jill E. Twark)

Carstensen, Thorsten und Marcel Schmid, Hrsg., Die Literatur der Lebensreform. Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900 (Peter Keitel)

Cho, Joanne Miyang, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang, eds., Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chunjie Zhang)

Druxes, Helga, Karolin Machtans, and Alexandar Mihailovic, eds., Navid Kermani (Monika Shafi)

Gamper, Michael und Helmut Hühn, Hrsg., Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft (Catriona MacLeod)

Gerstenberger, Katharina and Tanja Nusser, eds., Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond (Gundolf Graml)

Goßens, Peter und Monika Schmitz-Emans, Hrsg., Weltliteratur aus der DDR. Relektüren (Stephen Brockmann)

Goßens, Peter und Monika Schmitz-Emans, Hrsg., Weltliteratur in der DDR. Debatten—Rezeption—Kulturpolitik (Stephen Brockmann)

Grosch, Nils und Carolin Stahrenberg, Hrsg., „Im weißen Rößl“. Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven (Alan Lareau)

Guthke, Karl S., Geistiger Handelsverkehr. Streifzüge im Zeitalter der Weltliteratur. Mit Erinnerungen von Karl S. Guthke an die „Goldenen Jahre“ der akademischen Migration (Peter Goßens)

Johnson, Laurie Ruth, Forgotten Dreams: Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog (Margit Grieb)

Kessler, Michael und Paul Michael Lützeler, Hrsg., Hermann-Broch-Handbuch (Jennifer Jenkins)

McBride, Patrizia C., The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (Justin Court)

Mehring, Reinhard, Heideggers „große Politik“. Die semantische Revolution der Gesamtausgabe (Brad Prager)

Mossop, Frances, Mapping Berlin: Representations of Space in the Weimar Feuilleton (Erhard Schütz)

Mufti, Aamir R., Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (B. Venkat Mani)

Paulin, Roger, The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry (Johannes Schmidt)

Richter, Daniela, ed., The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century: More than a Bestseller (Jeffrey L. Sammons)

Schmidt, Sarah, Hrsg., Sprachen des Sammelns. Literatur als Medium und Reflexionsform des Sammelns (Monika Schmitz-Emans)

Stetler, Pepper, Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book (Justin Court)

Urmann, Martin, Dekadenz. Oberfläche und Tiefe in der Kunst um 1900 (Rolf J. Goebel)

Weber, Christoph, Vom Gottesgericht zur verhängnisvollen Natur. Darstellung und Bewältigung von Naturkatastrophen im 18. Jahrhundert (Thorsten Unger)

Wienand, Christiane, Returning Memories: Former Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany (Mélanie Yœurp)

Zeller, Joachim, Wilde Moderne. Der Bildhauer Fritz Behn (1878–1970) (Sabine Wilke)