At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter (original) (raw)
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German culture experienced an enormous rupture after 1945. Not only was the country in ruins and an outcast of the international community because of the recent regime and its devastating effects, its entire cultural tradition was under suspicion: had German culture always been steering towards this catastrophe? Was everything within it corrupt? While the frenetic economic activity of the ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ side-stepped a mainstream confrontation with the horrors of the recent past, intellectuals and artists radically interrogated the reasons for the disaster. As always, language and the meaning-making procedures in language prepare the mind to open up and to prepare for action. Language is at the root of action and this insight fuelled reflections on language, for instance by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But it was particularly in lyric poetry that a lucid and politically aware examination of the recent past took place and an expression of such considerations c...
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It could be argued that the poetry of Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) tends towards absolute moral polarities, with Germans generally bad, and their Jewish, Polish, and other victims equally good, rather than exploring the complexities of individuals, ethnic communities, and their relations. This does not apply in the same way to the prose fiction he increasingly turned to in the 1960s. Several of his narrative texts show a German soldier with positive character traits, partly representing the author’s own experience, while pointing to the insufficiency of these traits in the historical context. This essay will explore the representation of such “good Germans” in two of Bobrowski’s short narratives, “Mäusefest” (Mouse Banquet, 1962) and “Der Tänzer Malige” (The Dancer Malige, 1965) in the context of his oeuvre, his ethics, and of East German literature and culture of the 1950s and 60s. The extent and manner in which the Germans in these texts are “good” reflects the development of Bobrowski’s aesthetics in the course of his work toward a Wirkungsästhetik (aesthetics of effect) that cannot be grasped in the framework of a simple opposition of l’art pour l’art and art engagé. At the same time, the question arises to what extent such an approach to National Socialism is exceptional in East -- and West German -- literature of the time.
'Drippy Animals: The Grotesque Body in the work of Kurt Schwitters and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven'
Germanistik in Ireland: Interrogating Normalcy, Schriftenreihe Vol. 3, ed. by Ann Murray, (Konstanz, Germany, 2013)
Reeling from the legacy of mechanised warfare and the bright but uncertain future of technological possibility, depictions of the body presented fraught territory in interwar Germany. The sheer range of avant-garde responses, from vitriolic Dada absurdities to the detached objectivity of the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Sobriety] and the reconciliatory vision of the Bauhaus, reflect the anxiety regarding the fate of the body in an industrialized post-war landscape. This essay, however, employs Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque body to propose another conception of the body: its persistence as an organic, fluid entity which transgressively overspills its boundaries and rejects industrial rationalization. This conception offers an alternative to the militarized, machinic body presented in much interwar German art, and one which poses a subversive anti-ideal of recuperation and healing. 1 To this end, parallels are drawn between the work of two artists, Kurt Schwitters (1874-1948) and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), who, although separated by geography and gender, are connected through their mobilisation of the grotesque. I Schwitters and von Freytag-Loringhoven operated in disparate social and political climates but both artists' work bear the characteristics of Dada. Founded in Zurich in 1916, in 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. by Hélene Iswolsky, (Bloomington, Indiana, 1984), p. 92. revulsion at the First World War, Dada soon became an international artistic and literary movement that flouted conventional cultural values, and strove through anarchic performances, texts and montages to shock society into self-awareness. Like their Dadaist peers, Schwitters and von Freytag-Loringhoven employed unorthodox materials and procedures to re-imagine what art and art-making could be. The majority of Schwitters's merz were created in the family home in Hannover, while von Freytag-Loringhoven, originally from Swinemünde in Prussia, moved to America in 1910 and 'lived' her Dada most fully in New York. 2 Both artists engaged in what was then considered transgressive practice: collecting and repurposing trash, stealing objects from department stores or acquaintances in order to create work that advanced more idiosyncratic models of Dada; the resulting work engaged with themes of memory, the commodity, transcience and decay. 3