German literature
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The 20th century
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Georg
Trakl
Georg Heym
Gottfried
Benn
Ernst Toller
Georg Kaiser
Franz Kafka
"The
Trial"
Alfred Doblin
Hermann Broch
Robert Musil
Anna Seghers
Joseph Roth
Franz Werfel
Arnold Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Wolfgang Borchert
Max Frisch
Friedrich Durrenmatt
Bertolt Brecht
Theodor Adorno
Nelly Sachs
Paul
Celan
Heinrich Boll
Gunter Grass
Peter
Weiss
Peter Handke
Ingeborg Bachmann
Uwe Johnson
Thomas Bernhard
Christa
Wolf
Lion Feuchtwanger
Erich Maria Remarque
Carl Jung
Rudolf Carnap
Martin Heidegger
Karl Jaspers
Moritz Schlick
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Jurgen Habermas
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The 20th
century
German
Modernism Expressionism
German Modernism emerged from turn-of-the-century
Aestheticism. Like European Modernism as a whole,
German Modernism was in fact a cluster of different
literary movements, including Expressionism, Neue
Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), and Dada. Of
these, Expressionism is the best known and most
important. Beginning about 1910 and reaching its
culmination during World War I, Expressionism was a
powerful response to the chaos and suffering of
modern life. Georg Trakl, Georg
Heym, and
Gottfried Benn created terrifying images of
war, urban life, oppression, and illness in their
lyric poetry, and, although Trakl expressed a
visionary mysticism in his battlefield scenes,
Heym and Benn presented reality as
grotesque, distorted, and starkly unrelieved. At the
same time, their poetry, like Expressionist art of
the period, is full of such colours as red, gold,
purple, and blue, which bear an often hermetic or
deeply personal significance for these writers. The
anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (1919; The Dawn of
Humanity), edited by Kurt Pinthus, was a rich and
influential collection of Expressionist poetry.
Expressionist drama used the same methods of
grotesque distortion to attack what it saw as the
soullessness of modern technology and the subjection
of workers to machines. Yet Expressionist drama
often took a more optimistic approach to the machine
age, in part because of impulses derived from
Italian Futurism. Whereas the Futurists glorified
the machine, however, the Expressionists saw it more
as an instrument that might help bring about a
socialist utopia. The Expressionist stage became a
vehicle to effect a transformation of consciousness
in the audience. Die Wandlung (1919;
Transfiguration), a play by Ernst Toller,
depicts this kind of transformation in a young man
who turns his horrific war experience into a new
awareness of the brotherhood of man; his play
Masse-Mensch (1920; Man and the Masses) presents the
tragic attempt of a woman worker to effect a mass
revolution among her fellow workers and lead them
beyond violence toward peaceful coexistence. The
dramas Gas I (1918) and Gas II (1920), by Georg
Kaiser, show how a group of gas production
workers are thwarted in their attempt to gain
control of technology and establish a workers’
utopia in brotherhood and peace.
Georg Trakl

born Feb. 3, 1887, Salzburg, Austria
died Nov. 3, 1914, Cracow, Galicia,
Austria-Hungary [now Kraków, Pol.]
Expressionist poet whose personal and
wartime torments made him Austria’s
foremost elegist of decay and death. He
influenced Germanic poets after both
world wars.
Trakl trained as a pharmacist at the
University of Vienna (1908–10). He led
an unhappy existence; he was moody and
withdrawn and had become addicted to
drugs as early as 1904. Moreover, he
felt an incestuous attraction to his
younger sister Margarete and was plagued
by restless wanderlust.
The patronage of a periodical
publisher and of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who secretly gave him part
of a patrimony, enabled Trakl to devote
himself to poetry; he brought out his
first volume, Gedichte (“Poems”), in
1913. The following year he became a
lieutenant in the army medical corps
and, in Galicia, was placed in charge of
90 serious casualties whose agonies he,
as a mere dispensing chemist, could
hardly relieve. One patient killed
himself while Trakl watched helplessly;
he also saw deserters being hanged. He
either attempted or threatened to shoot
himself in the aftermath of these
horrors and was sent to a military
hospital at Cracow for observation.
There he died of an overdose of cocaine,
perhaps taken inadvertently.
Trakl’s intense lyrics infuse
lamentation for the present with longing
for a pastoral past. Much of his work is
rife with negative, often disturbing
imagery. A volume of selected poems,
translated into English by Lucia Getsi
as Poems, was published in 1973.
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Georg Heym

Georg Heym (30 October 1887– 16
January 1912) was a German writer. He is
particularly known for his poetry,
representative of early Expressionism
Heym was born in Hirschberg, Lower
Silesia in 1887 to Hermann and Jenny
Heym. Throughout his short life, he was
constantly in conflict with social
conventions. His parents, members of the
Wilhemine middle class, had trouble
comprehending their son's rebellious
behavior. Heym's own attitude towards
his parents was paradoxical; on the one
hand he held a deep affection for them,
but on the other he strongly resisted
any attempts to suppress his
individuality and autonomy.
In 1900 the Heyms moved to Berlin,
and there Georg began unsuccessfully
attending a series of different schools.
Eventually, he arrived at the
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium at
Neuruppin in Brandenburg. He was very
unsatisfied, and as a way to achieve
some release he began writing poetry.
After he graduated and went to study law
at Würzburg, he started writing plays as
well. However, publishers largely
ignored his work.
In 1910 Heym met the poet and writer
Simon Guttmann, who invited Heym to join
the recently founded Neue Club, a
descendant of a student society at the
University of Berlin. Other members of
the Club included Kurt Hiller, Jakob van
Hoddis, and Erwin Loewenson (also known
as Golo Gangi). Often visiting were Else
Lasker-Schüler, Gottfried Benn, and Karl
Kraus. Although the Club had no actual
stated objective, its members all shared
a sense of rebellion against
contemporary culture and possessed a
desire for political and aesthetic
upheaval. The Club held "Neopathetisches
Cabaret" meetings in which members
presented work, and it was here that
Heym first gained notice. His poetry
immediately attracted praise. In January
1911, Ernst Rowohlt published Heym's
first book and the only one to appear in
his lifetime: Der ewige Tag.
Heym later went through several
judicial jobs, none of which he held for
long due to his lack of respect for
authority. On 16 January 1912, Heym and
his friend Ernst Balcke went on a
skating trip to the frozen Havel. They
never returned. A few days later their
bodies were found. Appearances indicated
that Balcke had fallen through the ice
and Heym had attempted to save him but
fell in as well. Heym remained alive for
half an hour, calling out for help. His
cries were heard by some nearby forestry
workers, but they were unable to reach
him.
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Gottfried Benn

born May 2, 1886, Mansfeld, Ger.
died July 7, 1956, Berlin
German poet and essayist whose
expressionistic pessimism and
conjurations of decay in the period
immediately after World War I gradually
mellowed into a philosophy of
pragmatism. He was perhaps the most
significant poet in post-World War II
Germany.
The son of a Lutheran clergyman, Benn
studied theology at the University of
Marburg, then transferred to the academy
there for military-medical instruction
and became a specialist in venereal and
skin diseases. He took medical jobs on
cruise ships, got to know the
Mediterranean (a frequent setting in his
poems), and as a German officer in World
War I was made medical supervisor of
jail inmates and prostitutes in occupied
Brussels.
Degeneracy and medical aspects of
decay are important allusions in his
early poems, which also were shadowed by
the death of his first wife (1914) and
the suicide of an actress friend. His
first and third collections of verse
were fittingly titled Morgue (1912) and
Fleisch (1917; “Flesh”).
Because of his expressionism and
despite his right-wing political views,
the Nazi regime penalized him both as a
writer and as a physician; in 1937,
publication was forbidden to him. To
escape harassment, he rejoined the army.
Benn regained literary attention with
Statische Gedichte (1948; “Static
Poems”) and the simultaneous
reappearance of his old poems. While
busily writing, he remained a practicing
physician until he was 68. His gradual
loss of cynicism is richly reflected in
the autobiography Doppelleben (1950;
“Double Life”). A broad selection of his
poetry and prose in English translation
was published under the title Primal
Vision (1961).
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Ernst Toller

born Dec. 1, 1893, Samotschin, Ger.
died May 22, 1939, New York, N.Y., U.S.
dramatist, poet, and political activist,
who was a prominent exponent of Marxism
and pacifism in Germany in the 1920s.
His Expressionist plays embodied his
spirit of social protest.
Toller studied at Grenoble University
in France but went back to Germany in
1914 to join the army. Invalided after
13 months at the front during World War
I, Toller launched a peace movement in
Heidelberg. To avoid arrest he fled to
Munich, where he helped lead a strike of
munition workers and was finally
arrested. In 1919 Toller, an Independent
Socialist, was elected president of the
Central Committee of the revolutionary
Bavarian Soviet Republic. After its
suppression he was sentenced to
imprisonment for five years. A scheme to
get him shot in the prison yard was
frustrated by a kindly old guard, who
routed him away from the gunmen.
In confinement Toller wrote
Masse-Mensch (1920; Man and the Masses,
1923), a play that brought him
widespread fame. Books of lyrics added
to his reputation. In 1933, immediately
before the accession of Hitler, he
emigrated to the United States. Also in
that year he brought out his vivid
autobiography, Eine Jugend in
Deutschland (I Was a German, 1934).
In Hollywood Toller had a brief,
unhappy stint as a scriptwriter.
Impoverished, convinced that his plays
were passé, and separated from his young
wife, he committed suicide in his
Manhattan hotel.
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Georg Kaiser

born Nov. 25, 1878, Magdeburg, Ger.
died June 4, 1945, Ascona, Switz.
leading German Expressionist dramatist.
Kaiser’s father was a merchant, and
he apprenticed in the same trade. He
went to Argentina as a clerk but
contracted malaria and was forced to
return to Germany. During a long
convalescence he wrote his first plays,
mainly satirical comedies that attracted
little attention. His first success was
Die Bürger von Calais (1914; The
Burghers of Calais). Produced in 1917 at
the height of World War I, the play was
an appeal for peace in which Kaiser
revealed his outstanding gift for
constructing close-knit drama expressed
in trenchant and impassioned language.
He followed this with a series of plays
in which he showed man in deadly
conflict with the modern world of money
and machines: Von Morgens bis
Mitternachts (1916; From Morn to
Midnight), and the Gas trilogy,
consisting of Die Koralle (1917; The
Coral), Gas I (1918), and Gas II (1920).
Written in terse and fragmented prose,
these plays established him as a leader
of the Expressionist movement.
In 1920 Kaiser was arrested for
selling the furniture of a house he was
renting. Arguing that artists deserve
special treatment before the law, he
defended his actions as necessary for
his work, but he was convicted of
embezzlement and jailed for six months.
In his subsequent plays he showed that
Expressionism was only a phase in his
career. These plays, considered the
products of his artistic maturity, are
more intimate and embody a deep
experience of love: Oktobertag (1928;
The Phantom Lover), Der Gärtner von
Toulouse (1938; The Gardener of
Toulouse), Alain und Elise (1940), and
others.
In 1938, after the Nazis had banned
his plays for their antiwar stance,
Kaiser went into exile in Switzerland,
where he continued his prolific output
of over 60 plays until his death. His
last work, published posthumously in
1948, was a mythological trilogy of
verse dramas: Zweimal Amphitryon (Twice
Amphityron), Pygmalion, and Bellerophon.
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Franz Kafka
The works of
Franz
Kafka, especially his two stories Das Urteil
(1913; The Judgment) and Die Verwandlung (1915; The
Metamorphosis), owe much to Expressionism and are
often considered in the context of that movement.
But his writing is better understood as an early
phase of experimental Modernism.
Kafka’s
central concern, like that of other 20th-century
Modernists, is the problematic nature of human
subjectivity and the limitations of individual
perception and knowledge. His striking narrative
technique, first developed in The Judgment, of
presenting reality from a limited third-person point
of view enables readers to identify with his
oppressed and passive protagonists while also
recognizing that their view is deeply flawed.
Kafka’s
unfinished novels, especially Der Prozess (1925; The
Trial) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle), explore
further aspects of the individual’s inescapable
entrapment in subjectivity. Like many other
Modernists,
Kafka
also treated problems of authority and power. His
characters feel hopelessly subjugated to
inexplicable forces associated with patriarchal
social structures and an overly mechanized and
bureaucratic modern world. The Brief an den Vater
(posthumously published, 1960; “Letter to His
Father,” bilingual edition, 1966), written in 1919
but never actually delivered to his father, reveals
the autobiographical background to the father-son
conflict
Kafka depicted
in many of his stories, a thematic concern he shared
with the Expressionists. The grotesque element in
Kafka’s
writing stems from his tendency to take metaphors
literally, as when the “spineless” Gregor Samsa,
protagonist of The Metamorphosis, wakes up one
morning to find he has become an insect, a creature
without a spine. Kafka’s love of paradoxes and
logical puzzles gave rise to a highly symbolic style
of writing that makes his works resistant to any
single interpretive key.
Franz
Kafka
"The
Trial"

German-language writer
born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech
Republic]
died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria
Main
German-language writer of visionary fiction, whose posthumously
published novels—especially Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and Das
Schloss (1926; The Castle)—express the anxieties and alienation of
20th-century man.
Life
Franz Kafka, the son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, a merchant, was
born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers
died in infancy, he became the oldest child, remaining forever conscious
of his role as older brother; Ottla, the youngest of his three sisters,
became the family member closest to him. Kafka strongly identified with
his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual
distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, eccentricity, melancholy
disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not,
however, particularly close to his mother, a simple woman devoted to her
children. Subservient to her overwhelming, ill-tempered husband and his
exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of
their son’s unprofitable and possibly unhealthy dedication to the
literary “recording of [his]…dreamlike inner life.”
The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed his work as well as his
existence; the figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations.
For, in his imagination, this coarse, practical, and domineering
shopkeeper and patriarch, who worshiped nothing but material success and
social advancement, belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome,
admirable, but repulsive tyrant. In Kafka’s most important attempt at
autobiography, Brief an den Vater (written 1919; Letter to Father), a
letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to
live—to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage
and fatherhood—as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive
father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. He
felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the
father is reflected directly in Kafka’s story Das Urteil (1913; The
Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which
portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle
with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The
Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval
(as in The Castle). Yet the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go
deeper than his relationship to his father and family, with whom he
chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his
adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate
isolation from true communion with all human beings—the friends he
cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived
in—and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.
The son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the
religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community,
Kafka was German both in language and culture. He was a timid,
guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and
in the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the
academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers. Inwardly,
however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the
dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning
and classical languages. Kafka’s opposition to established society
became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist
as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified
sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of the Czech
Anarchists (before World War I), and in his later years he showed marked
interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. Even then he was
essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was
isolated from the German community in Prague, but, as a modern
intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was
sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his
identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued.
Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong
personal unhappiness. Kafka did, however, become friendly with some
German-Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met
Max Brod; this minor literary artist became the most intimate and
solicitous of Kafka’s friends, and eventually he emerged as the
promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most
influential biographer.
The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the
University of Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he
took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and
exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not
permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a
job in the seminationalized Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for
the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis
forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire
(with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. In his job he
was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of
his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.
In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and
humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the
exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were
frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture, and his
deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed. The
conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found
expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully disturbed
his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before
their final rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesenská Pollak
was also thwarted. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In
1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he
spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.
In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. During a
vacation on the Baltic coast later that year, he met Dora Dymant
(Diamant), a young Jewish socialist. The couple lived in Berlin until
Kafka’s health significantly worsened during the spring of 1924. After a
brief final stay in Prague, where Dymant joined him, he died of
tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna.
Works
Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers, Kafka reluctantly
published a few of his writings during his lifetime. These publications
include two sections (1909) from Beschreibung eines Kampfes (1936;
Description of a Struggle); Betrachtung (1913; Meditation), a collection
of short prose pieces; and other works representative of Kafka’s
maturity as an artist—The Judgment, a long story written in 1912; two
further long stories, Die Verwandlung (1915; Metamorphosis) and In der
Strafkolonie (1919; In the Penal Colony); and a collection of short
prose, Ein Landarzt (1919; A Country Doctor). Ein Hungerkünstler (1924;
A Hunger Artist), four stories exhibiting the concision and lucidity
characteristic of Kafka’s late style, had been prepared by the author
but did not appear until after his death.
In fact, misgivings about his work caused Kafka before his death to
request that all of his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed; his
literary executor, Max Brod, disregarded his instructions. Brod
published the novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika in 1925, 1926,
and 1927, respectively, and a collection of shorter pieces, Beim Bau der
chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), in 1931. Such early works
by Kafka as Description of a Struggle (begun about 1904) and Meditation,
though their style is more concretely imaged and their structure more
incoherent than that of the later works, are already original in a
characteristic way. The characters in these works fail to establish
communication with others; they follow a hidden logic that flouts
normal, everyday logic; their world erupts in grotesque incidents and
violence. Each character is only an anguished voice, vainly questing for
information and understanding of the world and for a way to believe in
his own identity and purpose.
Many of Kafka’s fables contain an inscrutable, baffling mixture of
the normal and the fantastic, though occasionally the strangeness may be
understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device, as when the
delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality or
when the metaphor of a common figure of speech is taken literally. Thus
in The Judgment a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of
his aged father. In The Metamorphosis the son wakes up to find himself
transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect; he slowly dies, not
only because of his family’s shame and its neglect of him but because of
his own guilty despair.
Many of the tales are even more unfathomable. In the Penal Colony
presents an officer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting
himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his
own instrument of torture. This theme, the ambiguity of a task’s value
and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka’s constant
preoccupations—appears again in A Hunger Artist. The fable Vor dem
Gesetz (1914; Before the Law, later incorporated into The Trial)
presents both the inaccessibility of meaning (the “law”) and man’s
tenacious longing for it. A group of fables written in 1923–24, the last
year of Kafka’s life, all centre on the individual’s vain but undaunted
struggle for understanding and security.
Many of the motifs in the short fables recur in the novels. In
Amerika, for example, the boy Karl Rossmann has been sent by his family
to America. There he seeks shelter with a number of father figures. His
innocence and simplicity are everywhere exploited, and a last chapter
describes his admission to a dreamworld, the “nature-theatre of
Oklahoma”; Kafka made a note that Rossmann was ultimately to perish. In
The Trial, Joseph K., an able and conscientious bank official and a
bachelor, is awakened by bailiffs, who arrest him. The investigation in
the magistrate’s court turns into a squalid farce, the charge against
him is never defined, and from this point the courts take no further
initiative. But Joseph K. consumes himself in a search for inaccessible
courts and for an acquittal from his unknown offense. He appeals to
intermediaries whose advice and explanations produce new bewilderment;
he adopts absurd stratagems; squalor, darkness, and lewdness attend his
search. Resting in a cathedral, he is told by a priest that his
protestations of innocence are themselves a sign of guilt and that the
justice he is forced to seek must forever be barred to him. A last
chapter describes his execution as, still looking around desperately for
help, he protests to the last. This is Kafka’s blackest work: evil is
everywhere, acquittal or redemption is inaccessible, frenzied effort
only indicates man’s real impotence.
In The Castle, one of Kafka’s last works, the setting is a village
dominated by a castle. Time seems to have stopped in this wintry
landscape, and nearly all the scenes occur in the dark. K. arrives at
the village claiming to be a land surveyor appointed by the castle
authorities. His claim is rejected by the village officials, and the
novel recounts K.’s efforts to gain recognition from an authority that
is as elusive as Joseph K.’s courts. But K. is not a victim; he is an
aggressor, challenging both the petty, arrogant officials and the
villagers who accept their authority. All of his stratagems fail. Like
Joseph K., he makes love to a servant, the barmaid Frieda, but she
leaves him when she discovers that he is simply using her. Brod observes
that Kafka intended that K. should die exhausted by his efforts but that
on his deathbed he was to receive a permit to stay. There are new
elements in this novel; it is tragic, not desolate. While the majority
of Kafka’s characters are mere functions, Frieda is a resolute person,
calm and matter-of-fact. K. gains through her personality some insight
into a possible solution of his quest, and, when he speaks of her with
affection, he seems himself to be breaking through his sense of
isolation.
Kafka’s stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations.
Brod and Kafka’s foremost English translators, Willa and Edwin Muir,
viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Existentialists have
seen Kafka’s environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which
to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic
involvement with his father as the heart of his work; others have
emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and
their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal
routine. Some have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism
in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of The Trial. The
Surrealists delighted in the persistent intrusions of the absurd. There
is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these
interpretations, but Kafka’s work as a whole transcends them all. One
critic may have put it most accurately when he wrote of the works as
“open parables” whose final meanings can never be rounded off.
But Kafka’s oeuvre is also limited. Each of his works bears the marks
of a man suffering in spirit and body, searching desperately, but always
inwardly, for meaning, security, self-worth, and a sense of purpose.
Kafka himself looked upon his writing and the creative act it signified
as a means of “redemption,” as a “form of prayer” through which he might
be reconciled to the world or might transcend his negative experience of
it. The lucidly described but inexplicable darkness of his works reveal
Kafka’s own frustrated personal struggles, but through his powerless
characters and the strange incidents that befall them the author
achieved a compelling symbolism that more broadly signifies the anxiety
and alienation of the 20th-century world itself.
At the time of his death, Kafka was appreciated only by a small
literary coterie. His name and work would not have survived if Max Brod
had honoured Kafka’s testament—two notes requiring his friend to destroy
all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing the works
that had already appeared in print. Brod took the opposite course, and
thus the name and work of Kafka gained worldwide posthumous fame. This
development took place first during the regime of Adolf Hitler, in
France and the English-speaking countries—at the very time when Kafka’s
three sisters were deported and killed in concentration camps. After
1945 Kafka was rediscovered in Germany and Austria and began to greatly
influence German literature. By the 1960s this influence extended even
to the intellectual, literary, and political life of communist
Czechoslovakia.
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Other works of
German Modernism
A foundational novel for German Modernism is
Rilke’s Die
Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Set in Paris and
presented in the form of fragmentary jottings, the
novel depicts modern city life as the multiple
reflexes of a disoriented narrator who tries in vain
to recapture the straightforward narrative logic he
recalls from stories heard and read in his youth.
Thomas Mann’s
Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain), a
bildungsroman set in the self-contained and
seemingly timeless world of a tuberculosis
sanatorium, interweaves an exploration of human
psychology with philosophical reflection in an
attempt to reveal the subtle interplay of
rationalism and the irrational in modern culture. In
Der Steppenwolf (1927; Eng. trans. Steppenwolf),
Hermann Hesse
also developed many concerns of Modernism, depicting
the ordeals of a divided psyche torn between the
conventional and the artistic worlds, the feminine
and the masculine, reason and hallucination. The
novel ends with a grotesque surrealistic episode set
in a “Magic Theatre.” Other novelists of this period
continued to experiment with the presentation of
consciousness in a fractured world. Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz, Berlin) by
Alfred Döblin, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler
(1930–32; The Sleepwalkers) by Hermann Broch,
and the unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(1930–43; The Man Without Qualities) by Robert
Musil use multiple techniques such as
stream-of-consciousness narration, montage,
essayistic reflection embedded in the narrative, and
experimental visionary passages to explore the
problematic relation between individual
consciousness and a modern world that is experienced
as a threat to individual identity. All three
writers took a deep interest in the psychological
and social determinants of criminality: the
protagonist of Döblin’s novel is a released
prisoner; the main character in the third volume of
Broch’s trilogy becomes involved in a life of
crime; and several characters in Musil’s
novel are obsessed with the fate of a condemned
sex-murderer.
A substantial part
of
Musil’s experimental novel was written during
his Swiss exile from Adolf Hitler’s Reich.
Similarly, Broch’s stream-of-consciousness
novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil)
was written during his exile in America, as was
Thomas Mann’s
pathbreaking novel on the genesis of Nazism and its
relation to the aesthetic, Doktor Faustus (1947;
Doctor Faustus). Anna Seghers’s novel Das
siebte Kreuz (1942; The Seventh Cross) depicts the
escape of seven prisoners, only one of whom
survives, from a concentration camp. Other important
exile writers were
Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Franz
Werfel,
Arnold Zweig, and
Stefan Zweig.
Among the communist writers who had fled from Nazi
Germany a major debate took place about the merits
of realist as opposed to Modernist techniques. The
issue was whether straightforward presentation of
reality or formal experimentation was a more
effective way of raising social consciousness in
readers of literature. The main proponent of the
realist cause was the theorist and literary
historian Georg Lukacs (György Lukács); on the
Modernist side were
Brecht
and Seghers. This debate was later to have
significant repercussions in East Germany.
Alfred Döblin

born Aug. 10, 1878, Stettin, Ger.
died June 26, 1957, Emmendingen, near
Freiburg im Breisgau, W.Ger.
German novelist and essayist, the
most talented narrative writer of the
German Expressionist movement.
Döblin studied medicine and became a
doctor, practicing psychiatry in the
workers’ district of the Alexanderplatz
in Berlin. His Jewish ancestry and
socialist views obliged him to leave
Germany for France in 1933 after the
Nazi takeover, and in 1940 he escaped to
the United States, where he converted to
Roman Catholicism in 1941. He returned
to Germany in 1945 at the war’s end to
work for the Allied occupying powers,
but he resettled in Paris in the early
1950s. He was seeking treatment in
Germany for ill health when he died.
Although Döblin’s technique and style
vary, the urge to expose the hollowness
of a civilization heading toward its own
destruction and a quasi-religious urge
to provide a means of salvation for
suffering humanity were two of his
constant preoccupations. His first
successful novel, Die drei Sprünge des
Wang-lun (1915; The Three Leaps of
Wang-lun), is set in China and describes
a rebellion that is crushed by the
tyrannical power of the state.
Wallenstein (1920) is a historical
novel, and Berge, Meere und Giganten
(1924; “Mountains, Seas, and Giants”;
republished as Giganten in 1932) is a
merciless anti-utopian satire.
Döblin’s best-known and most
Expressionistic novel, Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz,
Berlin), tells the story of Franz
Biberkopf, a Berlin proletarian who
tries to rehabilitate himself after his
release from jail but undergoes a series
of vicissitudes, many of them violent
and squalid, before he can finally
attain a normal life. The book combines
interior monologue (in colloquial
language and Berlin slang) with a
somewhat cinematic technique to create a
compelling rhythm that dramatizes the
human condition in a disintegrating
social order.
Döblin’s subsequent books, which
continue to focus on individuals
destroyed by opposing social forces,
include Babylonische Wandrung (1934;
“Babylonian Wandering”), sometimes
described as a late masterwork of German
Surrealism; Pardon wird nicht gegeben
(1935; Men Without Mercy); and two
unsuccessful trilogies of historical
novels. He also wrote essays on
political and literary topics, and his
Reise in Polen (1926; Journey to Poland)
is a stimulating travel account. Döblin
recounted his flight from France in 1940
and his observations of postwar Germany
in the book Schicksalsreise (1949;
Destiny’s Journey).
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Hermann Broch

born Nov. 1, 1886, Vienna, Austria
died May 30, 1951, New Haven, Conn.,
U.S.
Austrian writer who achieved
international recognition for his
multidimensional novels, in which he
used innovative literary techniques to
present a wide range of human
experience.
In 1927 Broch renounced his
inheritance by selling his family’s
textile mill and enrolling in the
University of Vienna in order to pursue
studies in physics, mathematics, and
philosophy. His first major work was the
trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931–32; The
Sleepwalkers), which traces the
disintegration of European society
between 1888 and 1918, depicting the
triumph of the realist over the
romanticist and the anarchist.
Paralleling the historical process, the
novel moves from a subtle parody of
19th-century realism through
expressionism to a juxtaposition of many
different forms, including poetry,
drama, narrative, and essay.
Between 1934 and 1936 Broch worked on
a novel that was published posthumously
in 1953 as Der Versucher; three versions
of it were later published together as
Bergroman, 4 vol. (1969), and it has
also appeared as Die Verzauberung (1976;
Eng. trans. The Spell). This complex
novel exemplifies his theory of mass
hysteria in its portrayal of a Hitlerian
stranger’s domination of a mountain
village.
In 1938 Broch spent several weeks in
a Nazi prison. His release was obtained
through the international efforts of
friends and fellow artists, including
James Joyce. Later that year he
emigrated to the United States.
One of Broch’s later works, Der Tod
des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil),
presents the last 18 hours of Virgil’s
life, in which he reflects on his times,
an age of transition that Broch
considered similar to his own. Broch
later turned from literature to devote
himself to political theory and attempts
to aid European refugees.
His other works include Die
unbekannte Grösse (1933; The Unknown
Quantity), Die Schuldlosen (1950; “The
Innocents”), and numerous essays,
letters, and reviews.
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Robert Musil

also called Robert, Edler (Nobleman)
Von Musil
born Nov. 6, 1880, Klagenfurt,
Austria
died April 15, 1942, Geneva, Switz.
Austrian-German novelist, best known
for his monumental unfinished novel Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–43; The
Man Without Qualities).
Musil received a doctorate from the
University of Berlin in 1908 and then
held jobs as a librarian and an editor
before serving in the Austrian army in
World War I (1914–18). (He inherited the
Edler title, awarded his father in 1917,
but did not use it as an author.) From
1918 to 1922 Musil was a civil servant
in Vienna and thereafter worked randomly
as a writer and journalist. He lived in
Berlin (1932–33) but returned to Vienna
until the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, when
he fled to Switzerland, where he lived
first in Zurich and then in Geneva.
Musil began writing as a student and
attracted some notice in the 1920s
writing various fiction and two plays,
Die Schwärmer (1920; The Enthusiasts)
and Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender
Männer (1924; “Vincent and the Lady
Friend of Important Men”), both of which
were performed in Berlin and Vienna. In
1924 he began his main work, Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften, a witty and urbane
view of life in the glittering world of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, told from
the viewpoint of Ulrich, a fictionalized
Musil. The First Book was published in
1930, and part of the Second Book in
1933; a remaining portion was published
posthumously in 1943.
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Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900–June
1, 1983) was a German writer famous for
depicting the moral experience of the
Second World War.
Born Netty Reiling in Mainz in 1900
of Jewish descent, she married Laszlo
Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.
In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied
history, the history of art and Chinese.
She joined the Communist Party of
Germany in 1928, at the height of its
struggle against the burgeoning National
Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932
novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic
warning of the dangers of Fascism, which
led to her being arrested by the
Gestapo.
Tombstone of Anna Seghers in BerlinAfter
German troops invaded the French Third
Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles
and one year later to Mexico, where she
founded the anti-fascist
'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the
German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and
founded Freies Deutschland (Free
Germany), an academic journal. During
this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross,
for which she received the Büchner-Prize
in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and
describes the escape of seven prisoners
from a concentration camp. It was
published in the United States in 1942
and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM
starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh
Cross was one of the very few depictions
of Nazi concentration camps, in either
literature or the cinema, during World
War II.
Seghers best-known story The Outing
of the Dead Girls (1946), written in
Mexico, was an autobiographical
reminiscence of a pre-World War I class
excursion on the Rhine river in which
the actions of the protagonist's
classmates are seen in light of their
decisions and ultimate fates during both
world wars. In describing them, the
German countryside, and her soon-to-be
destroyed hometown Mainz, Seghers gives
the reader a strong sense of lost
innocence and the senseless injustices
of war, from which there proves to be no
escape, whether or not you sympathized
with the Nazi party. Other notable
Seghers stories include Sagen von
Artemis (1938) and The Ship of the
Argonauts (1953), both based on myths.
In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to
Germany, moved to West Berlin, and
became a member of the SED in the zone
occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she
moved to East Berlin and became a
co-founder of the freedom movement of
the GDR. In 1951, she received the first
Nationalpreis der DDR, the Stalin Peace
Prize also in 1951, and the
"Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena"
in 1959. In 1981, she became
"Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town
Mainz. She died in Berlin on June 1,
1983.
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Joseph Roth

born Sept. 2, 1894, Brody, Galicia,
Austria-Hungary [now in Ukraine]
died May 27, 1939, Paris, France
journalist and regional novelist who,
particularly in his later novels,
mourned the passing of an age of
stability he saw represented by the last
pre-World War I years of the Habsburg
empire of Austria-Hungary.
Details about Roth’s early years,
religious beliefs, and personal life are
little known; Roth himself made a
practice of concealing or transforming
such biographical information. It is
known that he studied at Lemberg (now
Lviv, Ukraine) and Vienna and then
served in the Austrian army from 1916 to
1918. After the war he worked as a
journalist in Vienna and Berlin and was
a regular contributor to the Frankfurter
Zeitung (1923–32). During this period he
wrote several novels, including
Radetzkymarsch (1932; Radetzky March),
considered his best novel, an excellent
portrait of the latter days of the
monarchy. Roth was concerned with the
dilemma of individual moral heroes in a
time of decadence and moribund
traditions. A number of his plots treat
the difficulties of the father-son
relationship; the aged emperor Francis
Joseph appears repeatedly as a paternal
figure. In 1933 Roth immigrated to
Paris, where he spent the remainder of
his life. In his final years he viewed
the past with increasing nostalgia, a
sentiment evident in the six novels that
were written during this exile period.
Die Kapuzinergruft (1938; “The Capuchin
Tomb”) is an example. Der stumme Prophet
(1966; The Silent Prophet), the story of
a failed revolutionary, was written in
1929.
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Franz Werfel

born Sept. 10, 1890, Prague [now in
Czech Republic]
died Aug. 26, 1945, Hollywood, Calif.,
U.S.
German-language writer who attained
prominence as an Expressionist poet,
playwright, and novelist and whose works
espoused human brotherhood, heroism, and
religious faith.
The son of a glove manufacturer,
Werfel left home to work in a Hamburg
shipping house. Shortly afterward he
published two books of lyric poems, Der
Weltfreund (1911; “The World’s Friend”)
and Wir sind (1913; “We Are”). After
fighting on the Italian and Galician
fronts in World War I, he became
antimilitary, recited pacifistic poems
in cafés, and was arrested. His
playwriting career began in 1916 with an
adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women,
which had a successful run in Berlin. He
turned to fiction in 1924 with Verdi,
Roman der Oper (Verdi, A Novel of the
Opera). In 1929 he married Alma Mahler.
International fame came with Die vierzig
Tage des Musa Dagh (1933; The Forty Days
of Musa Dagh), an epic novel in which
Armenian villagers resist Turkish forces
until rescued by the French.
When the Nazis incorporated Austria
in 1938, Werfel, a Jew, settled in an
old mill in southern France. With the
fall of France in 1940 (reflected in his
play Jakobowsky und der Oberst, written
in 1944 and successfully produced in New
York City that year as Jakobowsky and
the Colonel), he fled to the United
States. In the course of his journey, he
found solace in the pilgrimage town of
Lourdes, France, where St. Bernadette
had had visions of the Virgin. He vowed
to write about the saint if he ever
reached America and kept the vow with
Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The Song
of Bernadette). His novel was the basis
for a popular film (1943) that won four
Academy Awards.
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Arnold Zweig

born Nov. 10, 1887, Glogau, Silesia,
Ger. [now Głogów, Poland]
died Nov. 26, 1968, East Berlin, E.Ger.
German writer best known for his
novel Der Streit um den Sergeanten
Grischa (1927; The Case of Sergeant
Grischa).
In 1933 Zweig left Germany for
Czechoslovakia. He later lived as an
émigré in Palestine until 1948, when he
moved to East Germany. He served as
president of the East German Academy of
Arts from 1950 to 1953.
The Case of Sergeant Grischa depicts
the social workings of the German army
during World War I through the story of
the Russian prisoner Grischa’s tragic
encounter with the vast machine of
Prussian military bureaucracy. Zweig’s
other works include Junge Frau von 1914
(1931; Young Woman of 1914), De Vriendt
kehrt Heim (1932; De Vriendt Goes Home),
Erziehung vor Verdun (1935; Education
Before Verdun), and Einsetzung eines
Königs (1937; The Crowning of a King),
each of which pursues the fortunes of
characters introduced in The Case of
Sergeant Grischa.
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Stefan
Zweig

born November 28, 1881, Vienna,
Austro-Hungarian Empire [now in Austria]
died February 22, 1942, Petrópolis, near
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Austrian writer who achieved
distinction in several genres—poetry,
essays, short stories, and dramas—most
notably in his interpretations of
imaginary and historical characters.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and
Germany before settling in Salzburg in
1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the
Nazis, he emigrated to England and then,
in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York.
Finding only growing loneliness and
disillusionment in their new
surroundings, he and his second wife
committed suicide.
Zweig’s interest in psychology and
the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to
his most characteristic work, the subtle
portrayal of character. Zweig’s essays
include studies of Honoré de Balzac,
Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and
of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von
Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der
Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master
Builders). He achieved popularity with
Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The
Tide of Fortune), five historical
portraits in miniature. He wrote
full-scale, intuitive rather than
objective, biographies of the French
statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary
Stuart (1935), and others. His stories
include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle
(1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a
psychological novel, Ungeduld des
Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and
translated works of Charles Baudelaire,
Paul Verlaine, and Émile Verhaeren.
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The post-1945
period: “Stunde Null”
In the part of Germany that became West Germany in
1949, the immediate aftermath of World War II was
known as the “Stunde Null,” or “zero hour.” Writers
felt that the need to make a clean sweep after the
defeat of Nazism had left them in a cultural vacuum,
but in fact the postwar situation made it possible
to establish new connections with European and
American literature.
Ernest Hemingway
and
Jean-Paul Sartre
were among the most important literary influences of
this period.
Radio plays—for
example,
Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür
(1947; “Outside the Door,” Eng.
trans. The Man Outside)—were a
highly popular form. Stage drama also exercised
considerable influence throughout the early postwar
years. The Swiss playwrights
Max Frisch
and
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
used drama to reflect on Nazism and the
postwar period.
Bertolt Brecht,
who had returned to East Berlin in 1949, exerted
considerable influence, even though many of his
major plays—including Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
(1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), Der gute
Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan),
and Leben des Galilei (1943; Life of Galileo, also
translated into English as Galileo)—had been written
during his exile years. His theoretical writings
developed a new theatrical model designed to
overcome the Aristotelian principles that had
dominated German theatre since Lessing. Instead of
the three unities of time, place, and action,
Brecht argued
for what he termed “epic theatre,” in which plot is
developed in the manner of a chronicle by means of a
loosely linked series of episodes. The audience was
to focus less on the outcome of the dramatic plot
than on the characters’ motivations and on
alternative actions they might have chosen.
Brecht’s
principle of the Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation
effect”) called for a deliberately artificial style
of acting that drew attention to the fact that what
was taking place on stage was a play, not the “real
life” suggested by naturalist drama. The alienation
effect, designed to discourage empathy with the
protagonist and to stimulate critical responses in
the audience, became a touchstone for postwar
dramatists.
Wolfgang Borchert

born May 20, 1921, Hamburg, Ger.
died Nov. 20, 1947, Basel, Switz.
playwright and short-story writer who
gave voice to the anguish of the German
soldier after World War II.
As a young man Borchert wrote several
plays and a large number of poems, but
he was determined to be an actor. In
1941 he was drafted into the army. The
rigours of his army service resulted in
jaundice, frostbite, malnutrition, and
progressive liver degeneration. He spent
much of his military career in jail,
accused of self-mutilation (he lost a
finger). From his cell he wrote
anti-Nazi letters and mocked propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels. Borchert
returned to Hamburg after the war, but
ill health forced him to leave an acting
troupe he had cofounded. He began
writing short stories in January 1946
and, though bedridden, produced most of
the body of his work in the remaining
two years of his life. He died the day
before his most famous work, the play
Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the
Door”; Eng. trans. The Man Outside), was
first staged. It presents a wounded
former prisoner’s attempt to discover a
reason to keep on living.
Many of Borchert’s stories, first
collected in Die Hundeblume: Erzählungen
aus unseren Tagen (1947; “The
Dandelions: Tales of Our Days”), are
based on personal experience. They
include boyhood memories as well as the
war and prison stories for which he is
best known. The heroes of his stories,
who are victims and are often in
physical pain, seek meaning but find
death and ruin.
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Max Frisch

born May 15, 1911, Zürich, Switz.
died April 4, 1991, Zürich
Swiss dramatist and novelist, noted
for his depictions of the moral dilemmas
of 20th-century life.
In 1933 Frisch withdrew from the
University of Zürich, where he had
studied German literature, and became a
newspaper correspondent. After touring
southern and eastern Europe from 1934 to
1936, he returned to Zürich, where he
studied architecture. Frisch worked as
an architect after service in the Swiss
army during World War II. He abandoned
architecture in 1955 to devote himself
full-time to writing.
Frisch’s play Santa Cruz (1947)
established the central theme found
throughout his subsequent works: the
predicament of the complicated,
skeptical individual in modern society.
One of Frisch’s earliest dramas is the
morality play Nun singen sie wieder
(1946; Now They Sing Again), in which
Surrealistic tableaux reveal the effects
caused by hostages being assassinated by
German Nazis. His other historical
melodramas include Die chinesische Mauer
(1947; The Chinese Wall) and the bleak
Als der Krieg zu Ende war (1949; When
the War Was Over). Reality and dream are
used to depict the terrorist fantasies
of a responsible government prosecutor
in Graf Öderland (1951; Count
Oederland), while Don Juan oder die
Liebe zur Geometrie (1953; Don Juan, or
The Love of Geometry) is a
reinterpretation of the legend of the
famous lover of that name. In his
powerful parable play Biedermann und die
Brandstifter (1958; The Firebugs, also
published as The Fire Raisers),
arsonists insinuate themselves into the
house of the weak-willed, complacent
Biedermann, who allows them to destroy
his home and his world rather than
confront them. Frisch’s later plays
include Andorra (1961), with its theme
of collective guilt, and Biografie
(published 1967; Biography), which deals
with social relationships and their
limitations.
Frisch’s early novels Stiller (1954;
I’m Not Stiller), Homo Faber (1957), and
Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964; A
Wilderness of Mirrors) portray aspects
of modern intellectual life and examine
the theme of identity. His
autobiographical works include two
noteworthy diaries, Tagebuch 1946–1949
(1950; Sketchbook 1946–1949) and
Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972; Sketchbook
1966–1971). His later novels include
Montauk: Eine Erzählung (1975), Der
Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979; Man
in the Holocene), and Blaubart (1982;
Bluebeard).
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Friedrich
Dürrenmatt

born Jan. 5, 1921, Konolfingen, near
Bern, Switz.
died Dec. 14, 1990, Neuchâtel
Swiss playwright, novelist, and essayist
whose satiric, almost farcical
tragicomic plays were central to the
post-World War II revival of German
theatre.
Dürrenmatt, who was educated in
Zürich and Bern, became a full-time
writer in 1947. His technique was
clearly influenced by the German
expatriate writer Bertolt Brecht, as in
the use of parables and of actors who
step out of their roles to act as
narrators. Dürrenmatt’s vision of the
world as essentially absurd gave a comic
flavour to his plays. Writing on the
theatre in Theaterprobleme (1955;
Problems of the Theatre), he described
the primary conflict in his
tragicomedies as humanity’s comic
attempts to escape from the tragic fate
inherent in the human condition.
His plays often have bizarre
settings. His first play, Es steht
geschrieben (1947; “It Is Written”), is
about the Anabaptist suppression in
Münster in 1534–36. In it, as in Der
Blinde (1948; “The Blind Man”) and
Romulus der Grosse (1949; Romulus the
Great), Dürrenmatt takes comic liberties
with the historical facts. Die Ehe des
Herrn Mississippi (1952; The Marriage of
Mr. Mississippi), a serious play in the
guise of an old-fashioned melodrama,
established his international
reputation, being produced in the United
States as Fools Are Passing Through in
1958. Among the plays that followed were
Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956; The
Visit); Die Physiker (1962; The
Physicists), a modern morality play
about science, generally considered his
best play; Der Meteor (1966; The
Meteor); and Porträt eines Planeten
(1970; Portrait of a Planet).
In 1970 Dürrenmatt wrote that he was
“abandoning literature in favour of
theatre,” no longer writing plays but
working to produce adaptations of
well-known works. In addition to plays,
Dürrenmatt wrote detective novels, radio
plays, and critical essays.
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Bertolt
Brecht

original name Eugen Berthold
Friedrich Brecht
born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.
died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin
German poet, playwright, and theatrical
reformer whose epic theatre departed
from the conventions of theatrical
illusion and developed the drama as a
social and ideological forum for leftist
causes.
Until 1924 Brecht lived in Bavaria,
where he was born, studied medicine
(Munich, 1917–21), and served in an army
hospital (1918). From this period date
his first play, Baal (produced 1923);
his first success, Trommeln in der Nacht
(Kleist Preis, 1922; Drums in the
Night); the poems and songs collected as
Die Hauspostille (1927; A Manual of
Piety, 1966), his first professional
production (Edward II, 1924); and his
admiration for Wedekind, Rimbaud,
Villon, and Kipling.
During this period he also developed
a violently antibourgeois attitude that
reflected his generation’s deep
disappointment in the civilization that
had come crashing down at the end of
World War I. Among Brecht’s friends were
members of the Dadaist group, who aimed
at destroying what they condemned as the
false standards of bourgeois art through
derision and iconoclastic satire. The
man who taught him the elements of
Marxism in the late 1920s was Karl
Korsch, an eminent Marxist theoretician
who had been a Communist member of the
Reichstag but had been expelled from the
German Communist Party in 1926.
In Berlin (1924–33) he worked briefly
for the directors Max Reinhardt and
Erwin Piscator, but mainly with his own
group of associates. With the composer
Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical,
successful ballad opera Die
Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny
Opera) and the opera Aufstieg und Fall
der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny). He also wrote
what he called “Lehr-stücke” (“exemplary
plays”)—badly didactic works for
performance outside the orthodox
theatre—to music by Weill, Hindemith,
and Hanns Eisler. In these years he
developed his theory of “epic theatre”
and an austere form of irregular verse.
He also became a Marxist.
In 1933 he went into exile—in
Scandinavia (1933–41), mainly in
Denmark, and then in the United States
(1941–47), where he did some film work
in Hollywood. In Germany his books were
burned and his citizenship was
withdrawn. He was cut off from the
German theatre; but between 1937 and
1941 he wrote most of his great plays,
his major theoretical essays and
dialogues, and many of the poems
collected as Svendborger Gedichte
(1939). The plays of these years became
famous in the author’s own and other
productions: notable among them are
Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941;
Mother Courage and Her Children), a
chronicle play of the Thirty Years’ War;
Leben des Galilei (1943; The Life of
Galileo); Der gute Mensch von Sezuan
(1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), a
parable play set in prewar China; Der
Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui
(1957; The Resistible Rise of Arturo
Ui), a parable play of Hitler’s rise to
power set in prewar Chicago; Herr
Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (1948;
Herr Puntila and His Man Matti), a
Volksstück (popular play) about a
Finnish farmer who oscillates between
churlish sobriety and drunken good
humour; and The Caucasian Chalk Circle
(first produced in English, 1948; Der
kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1949), the
story of a struggle for possession of a
child between its highborn mother, who
deserts it, and the servant girl who
looks after it.
Brecht left the United States in 1947
after having had to give evidence before
the House Un-American Activities
Committee. He spent a year in Zürich,
working mainly on Antigone-Modell 1948
(adapted from Hölderlin’s translation of
Sophocles; produced 1948) and on his
most important theoretical work, the
Kleines Organon für das Theater (1949;
“A Little Organum for the Theatre”). The
essence of his theory of drama, as
revealed in this work, is the idea that
a truly Marxist drama must avoid the
Aristotelian premise that the audience
should be made to believe that what they
are witnessing is happening here and
now. For he saw that if the audience
really felt that the emotions of heroes
of the past—Oedipus, or Lear, or
Hamlet—could equally have been their own
reactions, then the Marxist idea that
human nature is not constant but a
result of changing historical conditions
would automatically be invalidated.
Brecht therefore argued that the theatre
should not seek to make its audience
believe in the presence of the
characters on the stage—should not make
it identify with them, but should rather
follow the method of the epic poet’s
art, which is to make the audience
realize that what it sees on the stage
is merely an account of past events that
it should watch with critical
detachment. Hence, the “epic”
(narrative, nondramatic) theatre is
based on detachment, on the
Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect),
achieved through a number of devices
that remind the spectator that he is
being presented with a demonstration of
human behaviour in scientific spirit
rather than with an illusion of reality,
in short, that the theatre is only a
theatre and not the world itself.
In 1949 Brecht went to Berlin to help
stage Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder
(with his wife, Helene Weigel, in the
title part) at Reinhardt’s old Deutsches
Theater in the Soviet sector. This led
to formation of the Brechts’ own
company, the Berliner Ensemble, and to
permanent return to Berlin. Henceforward
the Ensemble and the staging of his own
plays had first claim on Brecht’s time.
Often suspect in eastern Europe because
of his unorthodox aesthetic theories and
denigrated or boycotted in the West for
his Communist opinions, he yet had a
great triumph at the Paris Théâtre des
Nations in 1955, and in the same year in
Moscow he received a Stalin Peace Prize.
He died of a heart attack in East Berlin
the following year.
Brecht was, first, a superior poet,
with a command of many styles and moods.
As a playwright he was an intensive
worker, a restless piecer-together of
ideas not always his own (The Threepenny
Opera is based on John Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera, and Edward II on Marlowe), a
sardonic humorist, and a man of rare
musical and visual awareness; but he was
often bad at creating living characters
or at giving his plays tension and
shape. As a producer he liked lightness,
clarity, and firmly knotted narrative
sequence; a perfectionist, he forced the
German theatre, against its nature, to
underplay. As a theoretician he made
principles out of his preferences—and
even out of his faults.
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Despite concerns,
codified by German philosopher
Theodor Adorno in 1949, about the possibility
of “lyric poetry after Auschwitz,” poetry was in
fact produced quite prolifically during the
immediate postwar years. The exile poets Nelly
Sachs and
Paul Celan emerged as two of the most
prominent poetic voices to reflect on the
concentration camp experience. Celan’s poem
Todesfuge (“Death Fugue,” from his collection Mohn
und Gedächtnis [1952; “Poppy and Memory”]) is
perhaps the best-known poem of the entire postwar
period. Gottfried Benn’s lecture Probleme der
Lyrik (1951; “Problems of the Lyric”), essentially a
restatement of the formalist precepts of early
20th-century Modernism, enabled postwar German
poetry to reconnect with the European tradition.
Under Benn’s influence, much postwar poetry
tended to be abstract and hermetic; but there was
also a more socially critical tradition, initiated
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his volume
Verteidigung der Wölfe (1957; “In Defense of
Wolves”).
Short stories by
Borchert,
Heinrich Böll,
and others took stock of the postwar situation in a
straightforward, realistic style, and early novels,
such as
Böll’s
Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953; And Never Said a
Word, also translated in English as Acquainted with
the Night), depicted the misery of family life among
the ruins. Though maligned as “Trümmerliteratur”
(“rubble literature”), these works played a
significant role in documenting and reinforcing the
change of values that had taken place in Germany
since the end of the war.
In East Germany the
literary situation was very different from that of
West Germany. Established in 1949, East Germany
declared itself the cultural “heir” of the communist
resistance to Nazism. Adapting the doctrine espoused
by Georg Lukacs during the Modernism debate of the
1930s, the official literary mode was Socialist
Realism. By this was meant a type of literature that
avoided formal experimentation, was concerned with
social reality, and turned upon a “positive hero”
(or heroine) whose ultimate affirmation of community
ideals is intended to serve as a model for the
reader’s own approach to the vicissitudes of life.
In response to various attempts to break the
rigidity of this prescribed form, a writers’
conference at Bitterfeld in 1959 called for closer
cooperation between writers and workers. Erwin
Strittmatter’s Ole Bienkopp (1963; “Old Beehead,”
Eng. trans. Ole Bienkopp), a novel about an old man
who establishes a peasant commune, and Christa
Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963; Divided
Heaven), in which a young woman decides to return to
East Germany after having experienced the lures of
the West, are good examples of Socialist Realism.
Theodor Adorno

born Sept. 11, 1903, Frankfurt am
Main, Ger.
died Aug. 6, 1969, Visp, Switz.
German philosopher who also wrote on
sociology, psychology, and musicology.
Adorno obtained a degree in philosophy
from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University
in Frankfurt in 1924. His early
writings, which emphasize aesthetic
development as important to historical
evolution, reflect the influence of
Walter Benjamin’s application of Marxism
to cultural criticism. After teaching
two years at the University of
Frankfurt, Adorno immigrated to England
in 1934 to escape the Nazi persecution
of the Jews. He taught at the University
of Oxford for three years and then went
to the United States (1938), where he
worked at Princeton (1938–41) and then
was codirector of the Research Project
on Social Discrimination at the
University of California, Berkeley
(1941–48). Adorno and his colleague Max
Horkheimer returned to the University of
Frankfurt in 1949. There they rebuilt
the Institute for Social Research and
revived the Frankfurt school of critical
theory, which contributed to the German
intellectual revival after World War II.
One of Adorno’s themes was
civilization’s tendency to
self-destruction, as evinced by Fascism.
In their widely influential book
Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947;
Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno and
Horkheimer located this impulse in the
concept of reason itself, which the
Enlightenment and modern scientific
thought had transformed into an
irrational force that had come to
dominate not only nature but humanity
itself. The rationalization of human
society had ultimately led to Fascism
and other totalitarian regimes that
represented a complete negation of human
freedom. Adorno concluded that
rationalism offers little hope for human
emancipation, which might come instead
from art and the prospects it offers for
preserving individual autonomy and
happiness. Adorno’s other major
publications are Philosophie der neuen
Musik (1949; Philosophy of Modern
Music), The Authoritarian Personality
(1950, with others), Negative Dialektik
(1966; Negative Dialectics), and
Ästhetische Theorie (1970; “Aesthetic
Theory”).
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Nelly Sachs

born Dec. 10, 1891, Berlin, Ger.
died May 12, 1970, Stockholm, Swed.
German poet and dramatist who became a
poignant spokesperson for the grief and
yearnings of her fellow Jews. When, with
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the
1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she
observed that Agnon represented Israel
whereas “I represent the tragedy of the
Jewish people.”
The daughter of a prosperous
manufacturer, Sachs grew up in the
fashionable Tiergarten section of Berlin
and began writing verse at age 17.
Romantic and conventional, her poems of
the 1920s appeared in newspapers but
were mainly for her own enjoyment.
As the advent of Nazism in Germany
darkened her life, she sought comfort in
ancient Jewish writings. In 1940, after
learning that she was destined for a
forced-labour camp, she escaped to
Sweden with the help of the Swedish
novelist Selma Lagerlöf, with whom she
had corresponded and who interceded with
the Swedish royal family on her behalf.
Sachs lived with her mother in a
one-room apartment, learned Swedish, and
translated German poetry into Swedish
and Swedish poetry into German.
Sachs’s lyrics from those years
combine lean simplicity with imagery
variously tender, searing, or mystical.
Her famous “O die Schornsteine” (“O the
Chimneys”), in which Israel’s body
drifts upward as smoke from the Nazi
death camps, was selected as the title
poem for a 1967 collection of her work
in English translation. Another
collection in English translation, The
Seeker, and Other Poems, was published
in 1970.
Her best-known play is Eli: Ein
Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1951;
Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of
Israel, included in the O the Chimneys
collection). Before she won the Nobel
Prize on her 75th birthday, she received
the 1965 Peace Prize of German
Publishers. In accepting the award from
the land she had fled, she said (in the
spirit of concord and forgiveness that
are among the themes in her poems), “In
spite of all the horrors of the past, I
believe in you.”
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Paul
Celan

pseudonym of Paul Antschel
born Nov. 23, 1920, Cernăuți, Rom.
[now Chernovtsy, Ukraine]
died May 1, 1970, Paris, Fr.
poet who, though he never lived in
Germany, gave its post-World War II
literature one of its most powerful and
regenerative voices. His poetry was
influenced stylistically by French
Surrealism, and its subject matter by
his grief as a Jew.
When Romania came under virtual Nazi
control in World War II, Celan was sent
to a forced-labour camp, and his parents
were murdered. After working from 1945
to 1947 as a translator and publisher’s
reader in Bucharest, Celan moved to
Vienna, where he published his first
collection of poems, Der Sand aus den
Urnen (1948; “The Sand from the Urns”).
From the outset his poetry was marked by
a phantasmagoric perception of the
terrors and injuries of reality and by a
sureness of imagery and prosody.
Settling in Paris in 1948, where he
had studied medicine briefly before the
war, he lectured on language at the
École Normale and translated French,
Italian, and Russian poetry, as well as
Shakespeare, into German. His second
volume of poems, Mohn und Gedächtnis
(1952; “Poppy and Memory”), established
his reputation in West Germany. Seven
volumes of poetry followed, including
Lichtzwang (1970; “Lightforce”). The
fullest English translation of his work
is Speech-Grille and Selected Poems
(1971). He died by his own hand.
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The late 1950s and
the ’60s
In the other German-speaking countries, the late
1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of a number
of novelists whose works have since become
contemporary classics. In Switzerland,
Max Frisch explored
the problem of guilt in his novels Homo Faber
(1957; Eng. trans. Homo Faber), the story of an
engineer who becomes a modern Oedipus, and Stiller
(1954; I’m Not Stiller), about a man who refuses to
take responsibility for his past. In West Germany,
Heinrich Böll
produced his Billard um halb zehn (1959; Billiards
at Half-Past Nine), a brilliant novel in several
voices that plays two generations of Germans off
against each other as they look back at Nazism. At
the same time, Günter Grass, perhaps the most
important writer of the period and later, in 1999,
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, began to
publish what eventually became known as his Danzig
trilogy, consisting of Die Blechtrommel (1959; The
Tin Drum), Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse), and
Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years). The trilogy presents a
grotesquely imaginative retrospective on the Nazi
period. The narrator of Die Blechtrommel is the
dwarf Oskar Matzerath, who claims that he
deliberately stopped growing on his third birthday
out of protest against the corruptions of adult
society under Nazism. He expresses his opposition by
means of his toy drum as well as by his almost
supernatural ability to shatter glass with his
voice. Despite his initial protest, however, Oskar
allows himself to be co-opted by the Nazis, joining
a performing group that entertains soldiers on the
Atlantic front. After the end of World War II, Oskar
chooses to become involved in the slick deception of
the government-sponsored West Concert Bureau, which
promotes collective repression of the Nazi period.
The novel’s ultimate irony lies in the fact that
Oskar is telling his story from a mental hospital.
With its virtuosic command of language, its
innovative reworking of the picaresque tradition,
and its sophisticated approach to German social
history, Die Blechtrommel was a landmark in postwar
German literature.
Dramatists of this
period were increasingly concerned with the relation
between the Nazi past and the political realities of
the present. Documentary drama, using material from
the war-crimes trials of 1961–65, proliferated: Der
Stellvertreter (1963; The Deputy), by Rolf Hochhuth;
Die Ermittlung (1965; The Investigation), by
Peter Weiss; and Prozess in Nürnberg (1968;
“Trial in Nürnberg”), by Rolf Schneider, are famous
examples. Tankred Dorst, Peter Weiss, Dieter
Forte, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger also explored
the theme of the “lesson of history” in a number of
plays written circa 1970. The play Kaspar (1968;
Eng. trans. Kaspar), by Peter Handke, takes
its starting point in the story of the foundling
Kaspar Hauser and his gradual acquisition of
language and culture, showing him being browbeaten
into learning German and becoming increasingly
dehumanized in the process. Although this play did
not explicitly address the question of the Nazi
past, it explored the degree to which an individual
can preserve the spirit of resistance in the face of
overwhelming pressures.
Heinrich
Böll

German author
in full Heinrich Theodor Böll
born Dec. 21, 1917, Cologne, Ger.
died July 16, 1985, Bornheim-Merten,
near Cologne, W.Ger.
Main
German writer, winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1972. Böll’s ironic
novels on the travails of German life
during and after World War II capture
the changing psychology of the German
nation.
The son of a cabinetmaker, Böll
graduated from high school in 1937. He
was called into compulsory labour
service in 1938 and then served six
years as a private and corporal in the
German army, fighting on the Russian and
other fronts. Böll’s wartime
experiences—being wounded, deserting,
becoming a prisoner of war—were central
to the art of a writer who remembered
the “frightful fate of being a soldier
and having to wish that the war might be
lost.” After the war he settled in his
native Cologne.
Böll’s earliest success came with short
stories, the first of which were
published in 1947; these were later
collected in Wanderer, kommst du nach
Spa (1950; Traveller, If You Come to
Spa). In his early novels Der Zug war
pünktlich (1949; The Train Was on Time)
and Wo warst du Adam? (1951; Adam, Where
Art Thou?), he describes the grimness
and despair of soldiers’ lives. The
uneasiness of reality is explored in the
life of a mechanic in Das Brot der
frühen Jahre (1955; The Bread of Our
Early Years) and in a family of
architects in Billard um halb zehn
(1959; Billiards at Half-Past Nine),
which, with its interior monologues and
flashbacks, is his most complex novel.
In the popular Ansichten eines Clowns
(1963; The Clown), the protagonist
deteriorates through drinking from being
a well-paid entertainer to a begging
street musician.
Böll’s other writings include Und sagte
kein einziges Wort (1953; Acquainted
with the Night) and Ende einer
Dienstfahrt (1966; End of a Mission), in
which the trial of a father and son lays
bare the character of the townspeople.
In his longest novel, Gruppenbild mit
Dame (1971; Group Portrait with Lady),
Böll presented a panorama of German life
from the world wars to the 1970s through
the accounts of the many people who have
figured in the life of his middle-aged
“lady,” Leni Pfeiffer. Die verlorene
Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974; The Lost
Honour of Katharina Blum) attacked
modern journalistic ethics as well as
the values of contemporary Germany. Was
soll aus dem Jungen bloss werden?; oder,
Irgendwas mit Büchern (1981; What’s to
Become of the Boy?; or, Something to Do
with Books) is a memoir of the period
1933–37. The novel Der Engel schwieg
(The Silent Angel) was written in 1950
but first published posthumously in
1992; in it a German soldier struggles
to survive in war-ravaged Cologne after
World War II. Der blasse Hund (1995; The
Mad Dog) collected previously
unpublished short stories, while another
early novel, Kreuz ohne Liebe (“Cross
Without Love”), was first published in
2003.
A Roman Catholic and a pacifist, Böll
developed a highly moral but individual
vision of the society around him. A
frequent theme of his was the
individual’s acceptance or refusal of
personal responsibility. Böll used
austere prose and frequently sharp
satire to present his antiwar,
nonconformist point of view. He was
widely regarded as the outstanding
humanist interpreter of his nation’s
experiences in World War II.
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Günter Grass

born Oct. 16, 1927, Danzig [now
Gdańsk, Pol.]
German poet, novelist, playwright,
sculptor, and printmaker who, with his
extraordinary first novel Die
Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum),
became the literary spokesman for the
German generation that grew up in the
Nazi era and survived the war. In 1999
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature for his accomplishments.
In his native Danzig, Grass passed
through the Hitler Youth movement and
was drafted during World War II. As he
revealed in 2006, he was called up to
the Waffen-SS (the elite military wing
of the Nazi Party) at age 17, two years
after he had been refused as a volunteer
for submarine duty. He was wounded in
battle and became a prisoner of war in
1945. Later, while an art student in
Düsseldorf, he supported himself as a
dealer in the black market, a tombstone
cutter, and a drummer in a jazz band.
Encouraged by the writers’ association
Gruppe 47, he produced poems and plays,
at first with little success. In 1956 he
went to Paris and wrote Die Blechtrommel
(filmed 1979). This exuberant picaresque
novel, written in a variety of styles,
imaginatively distorts and exaggerates
his personal experiences—the
Polish-German dualism of Danzig, the
creeping Nazification of average
families, the attrition of the war
years, the coming of the Russians, and
the complacent atmosphere of West
Germany’s postwar “economic miracle.”
Underlying the anarchic fantasy is the
moral earnestness that earned Grass the
role of “conscience of his generation.”
It was followed by Katz und Maus (1961;
Cat and Mouse) and an epic novel,
Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years); the three
together form a trilogy set in Danzig.
His other novels—always politically
topical—include Örtlich Betäubt (1969;
Local Anaesthetic), a protest against
the Vietnam War; Der Butt (1977; The
Flounder), a ribald fable of the war
between the sexes from the Stone Age to
the present; Das Treffen in Telgte
(1979; The Meeting at Telgte), a
hypothetical “Gruppe 1647” meeting of
authors at the close of the Thirty
Years’ War; Kopfgeburten; oder, die
Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths;
or, The Germans Are Dying Out), which
describes a young couple’s agonizing
over whether to have a child in the face
of a population explosion and the threat
of nuclear war; Die Rättin (1986; The
Rat), a vision of the end of the human
race that expressed Grass’s fear of
nuclear holocaust and environmental
disaster; and Unkenrufe (1992; The Call
of the Toad), which concerned the uneasy
relationship between Poland and Germany.
In 1995 Grass published Ein weites Feld
(“A Broad Field”), an ambitious novel
treating Germany’s reunification in
1990. The work was vehemently attacked
by German critics, who denounced Grass’s
portrayal of reunification as
“misconstrued” and “unreadable.” Grass,
whose leftist political views were often
not well received, was outspoken in his
belief that Germany lacked “the
politically organized power to renew
itself.” Mein Jahrhundert (1999; My
Century), a collection of 100 related
stories, was less overtly political than
many of his earlier works. In it Grass
relates the events of the 20th century
using a story for each year, each with a
different narrator.
Grass was a long-time participant in
Social Democratic Party politics in West
Berlin, fighting for social and literary
causes. When he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1999, there were
many who believed that his strong, and
sometimes unpopular, political beliefs
had prevented him from receiving the
prize far earlier. Grass’s disclosure of
his membership in the Waffen-SS, which
came just before publication of his
memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006;
Peeling the Onion), caused widespread
controversy, with some arguing that it
undercut his moral authority. He had
previously claimed he had been drafted
into an air defense unit in 1944.
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Peter Weiss

born Nov. 8, 1916, Nowawes, near
Potsdam, Ger.
died May 10, 1982, Stockholm, Swed.
German dramatist and novelist whose
plays achieved widespread success in
both Europe and the United States in the
1960s.
The son of a textile manufacturer who
was Jewish by origin but Christian by
conversion, Weiss was brought up a
Lutheran. In 1934 he and his family were
forced into exile by Nazi persecution.
He lived in England, Switzerland, and
Czechoslovakia before settling, in 1939,
in Sweden. He painted and made films
(which showed the influence of the
Surrealists) and also illustrated a
Swedish edition of the Thousand and One
Nights. Later he turned to fiction and
drama. His early works were in Swedish,
but by 1950 he had decided to publish in
German. His initial literary influence
was the novelist Franz Kafka, whose
dreamlike world of subtle menace and
frustration impressed Weiss. An
important later influence was the
American writer Henry Miller.
Weiss’s Die Verfolgung und Ermordung
Jean Paul Marats, dargestellt durch die
Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu
Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de
Sade (The Persecution and Assassination
of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the
Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under
the Direction of the Marquis de Sade,
usually referred to as Marat/Sade) pits
the ideals of individualism and of
revolution against each other in a
setting in which madness and reason seem
inseparable. The play was first
performed in West Berlin in 1964 and
received a celebrated staging in New
York City in 1965 by Peter Brook, who
filmed it in 1967. Die Ermittlung (1965;
The Investigation) is a documentary
drama re-creating the Frankfurt trials
of the men who carried out mass murders
at Auschwitz; at the same time, it
attacks later German hypocrisy over the
existence of concentration camps and
investigates the root causes of
aggression. Weiss’s other plays include
documentary dramas attacking Portuguese
imperialism in Angola, Gesang vom
lusitanischen Popanz (1967; The Song of
the Lusitanian Bogey); and American
policy in the Vietnam War, Viet Nam
Diskurs (1968; Discourse on Viet Nam).
Weiss wrote three autobiographical
novels: Der Schatten des Körpers des
Kutschers (1960; “The Shadow of the Body
of the Coachman”), Abschied von den
Eltern (1961; The Leavetaking), and
Fluchtpunkt (1962; Exile). He won a
number of literary awards, including the
Charles Veillon Prize for Fluchtpunkt in
1963 and the Georg Büchner Prize in
1982. He was also a member of Gruppe 47,
an association of German-speaking
writers formed after World War II.
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Peter Handke

born December 6, 1942, Griffen,
Austria
avant-garde Austrian playwright,
novelist, poet, and essayist, one of the
most original German-language writers in
the second half of the 20th century.
Handke, the son of a bank clerk,
studied law at Graz University from 1961
to 1965 and contributed pieces to the
avant-garde literary magazine
manuskripte. He came to public notice as
an anticonventional playwright with his
first important drama,
Publikumsbeschimpfung (1966; Offending
the Audience), in which four actors
analyze the nature of theatre for an
hour and then alternately insult the
audience and praise its “performance,” a
strategy that arouses varied reactions
from the crowd. Several more plays
lacking conventional plot, dialogue, and
characters followed, but Handke’s other
most significant dramatic piece is his
first full-length play, Kaspar (1968),
which depicts the foundling Kaspar
Hauser as a near-speechless innocent
destroyed by society’s attempts to
impose on him its language and its own
rational values. Handke’s other plays
include Das Mündel will Vormund sein
(1969; “The Ward Wants to Be Guardian”;
Eng. trans. My Foot My Tutor) and Der
Ritt über den Bodensee (1971; The Ride
Across Lake Constance).
Handke’s novels are for the most part
ultraobjective, deadpan accounts of
characters who are in extreme states of
mind. His best-known novel, Die Angst
des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970; The
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick),
is an imaginative thriller about a
former football (soccer) player who
commits a pointless murder and then
waits for the police to take him into
custody. Die linkshändige Frau (1976;
The Left-Handed Woman) is a
dispassionate description of a young
mother coping with the disorientation
she feels after she has separated from
her husband. Handke’s memoir about his
deceased mother, Wunschloses Unglück
(1972; “Wishless Un-luck”; Eng. trans. A
Sorrow Beyond Dreams), is also an
effective work.
Handke also wrote short stories,
essays, radio dramas, and
autobiographical works. The dominant
theme of his writings is that ordinary
language, everyday reality, and their
accompanying rational order have a
constraining and deadening effect on
human beings and are underlain by
irrationality, confusion, and even
madness.
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The 1970s and
’80s
The 1970s were marked by an inward turning that
became known as Neue Subjektivität (“New
Subjectivity”). The dominant genre was lyric poetry.
Its authors had formerly been involved in the
“student revolution” of 1967–68, which had called
for a new politicization of literature in the face
of the Vietnam War and the problems of the Third
World. After the student movement died down, the
young writers returned somewhat reluctantly to
everyday domesticity, which they described in their
poetry in affectionate detail, though also with a
distinct touch of irony. The New Subjectivity is
documented in Jürgen Theobaldy’s anthology Und ich
bewege mich doch: Gedichte vor u. nach 1968 (1977;
“And Yet I Move: Poems Before and After 1968”). In
the novel, the turn inward was powerfully
represented by Peter Handke in autobiographical
works such as Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied
(1972; Short Letter, Long Farewell), an account of
an American tour that is also about the collapse of
his marriage, and Wünschloses Unglück (1972;
“Wishless Unluck,” Eng. trans. A Sorrow Beyond
Dreams), a sensitive portrait of his mother and her
suicide. His novel Die linkshändige Frau (1976; The
Left-Handed Woman) delicately explores the inner
feelings of a young married woman who tries to live
on her own with her child in the Frankfurt suburbs.
Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) splits
its autobiographical persona into a sensitive,
feminine self and a masculine double who is a
writer; the novel contains visionary and lyrical
passages. Walter Kempowski’s series of novels
beginning with Tadellöser & Wolff (1971) reached a
wider audience by depicting the everyday life of a
middle-class family during the Third Reich.
Sentimental, nostalgic, and gently ironic, these
quasi-autobiographical novels explore the
problematic nature of the positive family memories
still somewhat guiltily cherished by many of those
who were not persecuted by the Nazis.
In East Germany,
where the official socialist line still eschewed
subjectivity and inwardness, Christa Wolf
brilliantly explored the problems of interiority in
her novel Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The
Quest for Christa T.), a meditation about a dead
friend who is, in essence, an alter ego of the
narrator. In Flugasche (Flight of Ashes), written in
East Germany during the 1970s but not published
until 1981 and then in West Germany, Monika Maron
depicted the tension between inner and outer reality
in the attempt of a young woman journalist to
present unpleasant truths about the lives of workers
in the industrial town of Bitterfeld. While she does
succeed in writing an article that causes the power
plant to be shut down, she herself is under threat
of expulsion from the Communist Party at the
conclusion of the novel.
Subjectivity was
not the only theme of the 1970s, however. In West
Germany, writers such as Enzensberger, Grass,
and
Böll continued
to follow political developments in their writing.
Two vast novel projects originating in this period
combine techniques of perspectivized narration with
the problem of fact versus fiction that was
increasingly dominating the retrospective on Nazism:
Jahrestage: aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl
(1970–83; Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine
Cresspahl), by Uwe Johnson, and Die Ästhetik
des Widerstands (1975–81; “The Aesthetics of
Resistance”), by Peter Weiss. Weiss’s
novel, an ambitious attempt to depict the
intellectual and political development of a young
communist Resistance fighter, is a remarkable
mixture of history, myth, and fantasy embedded in a
running discussion of political and aesthetic
theory.
The feminist
movement in Germany led to the emergence of a
prolific and innovative group of women writers.
Women were encouraged to feel and write through
their bodies rather than through conventional
rationality, and the distinctiveness of feminine
sensibility became a hotly debated issue. Karin
Struck’s novel Klassenliebe (1973; “Class Love”), an
exploration of female sexuality, and Verena Stefan’s
Häutungen (1975; Shedding), a collection of notes
and jottings that trace a young woman’s search for
identity, became classic works of German feminism.
This period was
also marked by a preoccupation with generational
differences, brilliantly developed by Peter
Schneider in Vati (1987; “Daddy”), in which a young
German lawyer travels to South America to meet his
father, who has fled there to escape trial for Nazi
crimes (the figure of the father is modeled on the
Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). Auslöschung: ein Zerfall
(1986; Extinction), by Thomas Bernhard, takes
the form of a violently insistent and seemingly
interminable diatribe by a first-person narrator who
returns from Rome to Austria for a family funeral.
Bernhard’s novel expresses intense feelings of
disgust and anger about Austria’s collaboration in
Nazism. Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die
Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher), the
story of a musician dominated by her possessive
mother, is a terrifying story of family violence
told from a feminist perspective.
Ingeborg Bachmann

born June 25, 1926, Klagenfurt,
Austria
died Oct. 17, 1973, Rome, Italy
Austrian author whose sombre, surreal
writings often deal with women in failed
love relationships, the nature of art
and humanity, and the inadequacy of
language.
Bachmann grew up in Kärnten during
World War II and was educated at the
Universities of Graz, Innsbruck, and
Vienna. She received a doctoral degree
in philosophy from Vienna in 1950.
Bachmann’s literary career began in
earnest in 1952, when she read her
poetry to members of the avant-garde
Gruppe 47. She produced two volumes of
verse, Die gestundete Zeit (1953;
“Borrowed Time”), about the sense of
urgency produced by the passage of time,
and Anrufung des grossen Bären (1956;
“Invocation of the Great Bear”),
featuring poems of fantasy and
mythology. Of her several radio plays,
the best known is Der gute Gott von
Manhattan (1958; “The Good God of
Manhattan” in Three Radio Plays). First
broadcast on May 29, 1958, it is about a
couple attacked by a covert group that
seeks to destroy all traces of love.
Following Bachmann’s five landmark
lectures on literature at the University
of Frankfurt in 1959–60, she shifted her
focus from poetry to fiction. During
this period she also wrote the libretti
for Hans Werner Henze’s operas Der Prinz
von Homberg (1960; from a play by
Heinrich von Kleist) and Der junge Lord
(1965; from a fable by Wilhelm Hauff).
Among her prose writings are Das
dreissigtse Jahr (1961; The Thirtieth
Year) and the lyrical novel Malina
(1971; Eng. trans. Malina). She also
published essays, stories, and more
radio plays. Her death by fire may have
been a suicide.
Much attention was given to
Bachmann’s work both in her lifetime and
after her death, and several of her
writings were translated into English. A
volume of selected poems, In the Storm
of Roses, was published in 1986; it was
the inspiration for Elizabeth Vercoe’s
composition In the Storm: Four Songs on
Texts by Ingeborg Bachmann for medium
voice, clarinet, and piano. Some of
Bachmann’s stories were translated in
Three Paths to the Lake (1989), and a
bilingual edition of her collected
poems, translated and introduced by
Peter Filkins, was published as Songs in
Flight (1995). Fragments of two novels
intended to complete the trilogy begun
with Malina were translated and
published together in a single volume
entitled The Book of Franza & Requiem
for Fanny Goldmann (1999).
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Uwe
Johnson

born July 20, 1934, Cammin, Germany
found dead March 12, 1984, Sheerness,
Kent, England
German author noted for his
experimental style. Many of his novels
explore the contradictions of life in a
Germany divided after World War II.
Johnson grew up during the difficult
war years. In East Germany he studied
German at the Universities of Rostock
and Leipzig, graduating from the latter
in 1956. That same year he attempted to
publish his first novel, Ingrid
Babendererde: Reifeprüfung 1953
(published posthumously in 1985; “Ingrid
Babendererde: School-Leaving Exam
1953”), but it was refused by several
East German publishers when he declined
to alter it to suit their ideology. He
eventually found a West German publisher
for his second novel, Mutmassungen über
Jakob (1959; Speculations About Jakob).
Its modernist narrative and its frank
engagement with the problems faced daily
by German citizens brought Johnson
critical acclaim. Aware that his work
would not be published in East Germany
as long as he wrote what he wished to
write and unable—because of his
political record—to find a job there, he
moved to West Berlin shortly after
publishing the novel. This move was an
event he distinctly did not consider
“escape.”
Once in the West, Johnson became a
member of Gruppe 47, a writers’
association. He continued to experiment
with narrative and examine the meaning
of a divided land with the publication
of Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961; The
Third Book About Achim); Karsch, und
andere Prosa (1964; "Karsch and Other
Prose"), a collection of shorter fiction
that included the novella Eine Reise
wegwohin (An Absence); and Zwei
Ansichten (1965; Two Views). In each of
these works, Johnson’s narrative
abruptly shifts from one consciousness
or setting to another; words assume
different meanings when used by
different characters; and objects and
events are described with intricate
exactness, as if to emphasize their
constancy against the mutability of
emotions, memory, and human expression.
From 1966 to 1968, Johnson lived in
New York. There he began his masterwork,
the tetralogy Jahrestage: aus dem Leben
von Gesine Cresspahl (1970–73, 1983;
Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine
Cresspahl). In it he used a montage
technique, combining newspaper
clippings, notes, and diary entries—as
well as the presence of a writer named
Uwe Johnson—to examine the issues that
continued to engage him. He published
the first three volumes upon his return
to West Berlin. In 1974 Johnson moved to
England, ostensibly to complete his
tetralogy. There he underwent a personal
crisis, and, though he continued to
publish other work, he suffered from
writer’s block; the last volume of
Jahrestage was not finished until the
year before his death.
Johnson’s later works included a
reflection on the poet Ingeborg
Bachmann, Eine Reise nach Klagenfurt
(1974; A Trip to Klagenfurt: In the
Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann),
published after her death; Berliner
Sachen (1975; “Berlin Matters”), a
volume of previously published essays,
including two in English; and
Begleitumstände: Frankfurter Vorlesungen
(1980; “Circumstances: Frankfurt
Lectures”), a collection of
autobiographical lectures he gave to
reestablish the poetics chair at the
University of Frankfurt. Living an
isolated life in England and, by many
accounts, drinking heavily, Johnson died
at home on or about February 23, 1984,
but his body was not discovered until
some three weeks later.
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Thomas Bernhard

born Feb. 9/10, 1931, Cloister
Heerland, Neth.
died Feb. 12, 1989, Gmunden, Austria
Austrian writer who explored death,
social injustice, and human misery in
controversial literature that was deeply
pessimistic about modern civilization in
general and Austrian culture in
particular.
Bernhard was born in a Holland
convent; his mother, unwed at the time,
had fled there from Austria to give
birth. After a year, she returned to her
parents in Vienna, where her father,
writer Johannes Freumbichler
(1881–1949), became the major influence
on Bernhard. After surviving a
life-threatening coma and repeated
hospitalizations (1948–51) in
tuberculosis sanatoriums, he studied
music and drama in Salzburg and Vienna.
Bernhard achieved little success with
several collections of poetry in the
late 1950s, but in 1963 he gained
notoriety with his first novel, Frost
(Eng. trans. Frost). In such novels as
Verstörung (1967; “Derangement,” Eng.
trans. Gargoyles), Das Kalkwerk (1970;
The Lime Works), and Korrektur (1975;
Corrections), he combined complex
narrative structure with an increasingly
misanthropic philosophy. In 1973
Bernhard withdrew his drama Die
Berühmten (“The Famous”) from the
prestigious Salzburg Festival because of
a controversy over staging. After its
publication in 1984 his novel Holzfällen
(Woodcutters, or Cutting Timber: An
Irritation) was seized by police for
allegedly criticizing a public figure.
Even before its premiere in November
1988, Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz
(“Heroes’ Square”), a bleak indictment
of anti-Semitism in contemporary
Austria, provoked violent protests. His
other plays include Ein Fest für Boris
(1968; A Party for Boris), Die
Jagdgesellschaft (1974; The Hunting
Party), Die Macht der Gewohnheit (1974;
The Force of Habit), and Der Schein
trügt (1983; Appearances Are Deceiving).
Bernhard’s memoirs were translated in
Gathering Evidence (1985), a compilation
of five German works published between
1975 and 1982.
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Postmodernism
In the last decades of the 20th century, German
literature was influenced by international
postmodernism, a movement that combined
heterogeneous elements in order to appeal
simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated
readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions
to other types of cultural production are
characteristic of postmodernist literature.
Günter Grass’s Der Butt (1977; The Flounder) and
Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), with their convoluted
inset narratives, lyric interludes, recipes for
favourite German dishes, revisions of fairy tales,
and ironic representations of contemporary feminism,
were at first misunderstood because they were judged
by the standards of the canonical modern novel. Once
viewed in the light of postmodernism, however, these
novels underwent a critical reevaluation. Patrick
Süskind’s Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders
(1985; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), with its
brilliant imitations of literary styles from various
periods, was another work of German postmodernism
that became an international best-seller.
After reunification
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,
writers began to explore the tensions between the
economic, social, and cultural values of West and
East Germany. There was intense debate about the
East German experience under communism, in
particular about whether the psychological need to
come to terms with this experience was comparable to
the soul-searching that had been undertaken after
the end of World War II.
Monika Maron addressed this issue in her novel
Stille Zeile Sechs (1991; Silent Close No. Six), set
in the 1980s and ostensibly a story about the
discovery of guilt incurred by an important East
German party functionary during the Third Reich. By
exploring the rift between actions and desires, the
novel becomes an inquiry into the responsibility of
historians and writers in general. The link between
the communist and the Nazi eras is established in a
key scene that metaphorically brings together
violence past and present.
One year earlier, Christa Wolf’s narrative
Was bleibt (1990; What Remains) had unleashed a
violent controversy about the form and function of
reflections on the East German past. The subject of
the story was Wolf’s reactions to
surveillance by the East German state security
police. Some readers saw the tale as a self-serving
portrayal of the author as a victim of communism;
these readers failed to notice, however, the thread
of self-critique woven into the narrative. In 1993
it was revealed, in a further twist of irony, that
Wolf herself had given information to the
security police for a brief period. The Christa
Wolf case became paradigmatic for the
difficulties of coming to terms with East Germany’s
communist past. It was succeeded by another debate
that broke out after the secret police files of
several other well-known writers became available.
One outraged victim of surveillance, Reiner Kunze,
published a selection from his own files under the
title Deckname “Lyrik” (1990; “Code Name ‘Lyric’”).
At the same time, some members of an apparently
oppositional group of East German writers, known as
the Prenzlauer Berg poets after the district in
Berlin where they lived, were shown to have acted as
informants for the secret police. The resulting
discussions stimulated a probing reexamination of
the problem of autonomous art and the relation of
aesthetics to ideology.
Christa Wolf

born March 18, 1929, Landsberg an der
Warthe, Germany [now Gorzów
Wielkopolski, Poland]
German novelist, essayist, and
screenwriter most often associated with
East Germany.
Wolf was reared in a middle-class,
pro-Nazi family. With the defeat of
Germany in 1945, she moved with her
family to East Germany. She studied at
the Universities of Jena and Leipzig
(1949–53), thereafter working as editor
of the East German Writers’ Union
magazine and as a reader for book
publishers. After 1962 she was a
full-time writer.
Wolf’s first novel was Moskauer
Novelle (1961; “Moscow Novella”). Her
second novel, Der geteilte Himmel (1963;
Divided Heaven; filmed 1964),
established her reputation. This work
explores the political and romantic
conflicts of Rita and Manfred. He
defects to West Berlin for greater
personal and professional freedom; she,
after a brief stay with him, rejects the
West and returns to East Berlin. The
novel brought Wolf political favour.
Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The
Quest for Christa T.) concerns an
ordinary woman who questions her
socialist beliefs and life in a
socialist state and then dies
prematurely of leukemia. Though well
received by Western critics, the novel
was severely attacked by the East German
Writers’ Congress, and its sale was
forbidden in East Germany.
Wolf’s other works include
Kindheitsmuster (1976; A Model
Childhood), a semiautobiographical
account of growing up in the Third
Reich; Till Eulenspiegel (1972; filmed
1974), which interprets the folk legend
from a Marxist point of view; Kassandra
(1983; Cassandra), an inner monologue
that associates nuclear power with
patriarchal power; Was bleibt (1990;
What Remains), an account of the
surveillance practices of the East
German government, in which Wolf
implicates herself; Störfall (1987;
Accident: A Day’s News), which
juxtaposes the Chernobyl disaster with
the narrator’s brother’s brain tumour
operation; Auf dem Weg nach Tabou (1997;
Parting from Phantoms: Selected
Writings, 1990–1994); Medea: A Novel
(1998); and Leibhaftig (2002; In the
Flesh), in which the narrator
experiences a health crisis that
parallels the disintegration of the East
German state. The memoir Ein Tag im
Jahr: 1960–2000 (2003; One Day a Year)
was a project 40 years in the making.
Once each year, on September 27, Wolf
recorded her thoughts on her life and
surroundings, and the book provides a
unique look at East Germany from the
rise of the Berlin Wall to the
post-unification period.
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The turn of
the 21st century
In the mid-1990s a new generation of writers emerged
who finally provided the “reunification” novels that
critics had expected immediately after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Thomas Brussig’s grotesquely comic
novel Helden wie wir (1995; Heroes Like Us) was a
satiric reworking of the debate about the East
German secret police. Thomas Hettche’s Nox (1995;
“Night”) has a strangely omniscient narrator in the
form of a young man whose throat has been slit in a
sadomasochistic sexual act during the night the Wall
came down. Nox draws a rather too obvious
equivalence between its narrator’s wound, from which
he is dying, and the “wound” of the divided Germany,
which, on the face of things, is about to be healed.
Nonetheless, Hettche succeeds in transforming this
central metaphor into a multilayered analysis of
postunification psychology. The cityscape of Berlin
comes to stand for national and individual memory,
conserved, as it were, beneath the surface of
streets and canals and the no-man’s-land of the
former border.
In these and other
novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
the Nazi past continues to haunt German writing.
Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (1995; “Flying
Foxes,” Eng. trans. Flughunde) recounts the deaths
of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s
children through the eyes of two narrators: the
eldest daughter, Helga, and a sound technician who
had worked for Goebbels. Long after the children’s
deaths, the technician begins to recognize his own
role in their murders at the hands of their mother.
Thomas Lehr’s experimental novella Frühling (2001;
“Spring”) employs drastically ruptured syntax to
reproduce, in the form of a hesitating interior
monologue, the final 39 seconds of its protagonist’s
life. Only toward the end of the story does the
narrator, who has just completed a suicide pact with
his female lover, come to understand his father’s
guilt as a former concentration-camp doctor. This
guilt, which has already caused the narrator’s young
brother to commit suicide, is revealed as the
solution to a childhood scene that the narrator has
never fully understood. In contrast to German novels
of the 1960s, which attempted to “master” the Nazi
past through narration, these more recent novels
belong to what has come to be called “memory
culture.”
Linked with debates
about the problem of memorializing the victims of
Nazism in the form of public monuments,
German-language novels of the 1990s explicitly probe
questions about how memories of the Nazi period can
best be represented. The Austrian writer Christoph
Ransmayr’s powerful Morbus Kitahara (1995; The Dog
King) is set in a dystopian landscape that resembles
Mauthausen concentration camp and in an imagined
alternative history in which Germany has not been
permitted to redevelop its industrial capabilities
following World War II. W.G. Sebald’s haunting novel
Austerlitz (2001; Eng. trans. Austerlitz)—the story
of a man who had been saved from Nazi Germany and
adopted by an English couple but who has been
traveling in search of the places he believes to
have been way stations in his early life—has had
international success as a moving, though puzzling,
exploration of memory, real and imagined.
Judith Ryan
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APPENIX
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Lion Feuchtwanger

born July 7, 1884, Munich, Ger.
died Dec. 21, 1958, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.
German novelist and playwright known for his
historical romances.
Born of a Jewish family, Feuchtwanger studied
philology and literature at Berlin and Munich
(1903–07) and took his doctorate in 1918 with a
dissertation on poet Heinrich Heine. Also in
1918 he founded a literary journal, Der Spiegel.
His first historical novel was Die hässliche
Herzogin (1923; The Ugly Duchess), about
Margaret Maultasch, duchess of Tirol. His finest
novel, Jud Süss (1925; also published as Jew
Süss and Power), set in 18th-century Germany,
revealed a depth of psychological analysis that
remained characteristic of his subsequent
work—the Josephus-Trilogie (Der jüdische Krieg,
1932; Die Söhne, 1935; Der Tag wird kommen,
1945); Die Geschwister Oppenheim (1933; The
Oppermanns), a novel of modern life; and Der
falsche Nero (1936; The Pretender). Jud Süss
tells the story of a brilliant and charismatic
Jewish financier who adroitly manages the
revenues of the Duke of Württemberg. After the
tragic death of his daughter, Süss voluntarily
renounces the pursuit of power and is tried and
executed by his political enemies.
Exiled in 1933, Feuchtwanger moved to France;
from there he escaped to the United States in
1940 after some months in an internment camp,
described in The Devil in France (1941; later
published in its original German as Unholdes
Frankreich and Der Teufel in Frankreich). Of his
later works the best known are Waffen für
Amerika (1947; also published as Die Füchse im
Weinberg; Eng. trans. Proud Destiny), Goya oder
der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1951; This Is the
Hour), and Jefta und seine Tochter (1957;
Jephthah and His Daughter). He translated
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (in
collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht)
and plays by Aeschylus and Aristophanes.
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Erich Maria Remarque

born June 22, 1898, Osnabrück, Ger.
died Sept. 25, 1970, Locarno, Switz.
novelist who is chiefly remembered as the author
of Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on
the Western Front), which became perhaps the
best-known and most representative novel dealing
with World War I.
Remarque was drafted into the German army at
the age of 18 and was wounded several times.
After the war he worked as a racing-car driver
and as a sportswriter while working on All Quiet
on the Western Front. The novel’s events are
those in the daily routine of soldiers who seem
to have no past or future apart from their life
in the trenches. Its title, the language of
routine communiqués, is typical of its cool,
terse style, which records the daily horrors of
war in laconic understatement. Its casual
amorality was in shocking contrast to patriotic
rhetoric. The book was an immediate
international success, as was the American film
made from it in 1930. It was followed by a
sequel, Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back),
dealing with the collapse of Germany in 1918.
Remarque wrote several other novels, most of
them dealing with victims of the political
upheavals of Europe during World Wars I and II.
Some had popular success and were filmed (e.g.,
Arc de Triomphe, 1946), but none achieved the
critical prestige of his first book.
Remarque left Germany for Switzerland in
1932. His books were banned by the Nazis in
1933. In 1939 he went to the United States,
where he was naturalized in 1947. After World
War II he settled in Porto Ronco, Switz., on
Lake Maggiore, where he lived with his second
wife, the American actress Paulette Goddard,
until his death.

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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
1898-1970
The epigraph of Ail Quiet on the Western Front states that
the intention of the book is to be neither an accusation nor a
confession, but an account of a generation, Including the
survivors, "destroyed by the war." But rather than a warning, or
even a statement of self-defense, this epigraph, marked by its
simplicity and clarity, is a one-sentence declaration, however
quiet, that what follows is a story of destruction.
In the polarized political debates of the Weimar Republic, the
Great War was not a topic but a touchstone for all else. How you
understood the war, its origins, its conduct, surrender, and
defeat, was the index to your understanding of the past and to
your understanding of how liveable or damaged the future could
be. Given this interpretive context, the pacifism of the novel
could satisfy neither left nor right ends of the critical
spectrum in inter-war Germany. But Remarque's text does not
assume or argue for pacifism; it simply enacts it as an appalled
response to the daily efficiencies of organized slaughter. It is
this quiet, certain, yet exploratory demonstration of the utter
inhumanity of war that constitutes the magnificence of All Quiet
on the Western Front as an anti-war novel.
Central to Remarque's achievement is the voice of Paul Baumer,
the novel's nineteen-year-old narrator. He is one of a band of
front-line soldiers whose experience of war strips the mythology
of heroism bare, leaving the tedium, the earth-shaking fear, the
loneliness, and the anger of men whose bodies are neither
protected nor honored by military uniforms. The novel ends with
the disappearance of Baumer's voice; it is replaced by the
polite brevity of the report of his death on a day in which all
was quiet on the western front.
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Carl Jung

born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switz.
died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht
Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic
psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the
extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the
collective unconscious. His work has been influential in
psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related
fields.
Learn more about "Carl Jung" Early life and career
Jung was the son of a philologist and pastor. His childhood was
lonely, although enriched by a vivid imagination, and from an
early age he observed the behaviour of his parents and teachers,
which he tried to resolve. Especially concerned with his
father’s failing belief in religion, he tried to communicate to
him his own experience of God. In many ways, the elder Jung was
a kind and tolerant man, but neither he nor his son succeeded in
understanding each other. Jung seemed destined to become a
minister, for there were a number of clergymen on both sides of
his family. In his teens he discovered philosophy and read
widely, and this, together with the disappointments of his
boyhood, led him to forsake the strong family tradition and to
study medicine and become a psychiatrist. He was a student at
the universities of Basel (1895–1900) and Zürich (M.D., 1902).
He was fortunate in joining the staff of the Burghölzli
Asylum of the University of Zürich at a time (1900) when it was
under the direction of Eugen Bleuler, whose psychological
interests had initiated what are now considered classical
studies of mental illness. At Burghölzli, Jung began, with
outstanding success, to apply association tests initiated by
earlier researchers. He studied, especially, patients’ peculiar
and illogical responses to stimulus words and found that they
were caused by emotionally charged clusters of associations
withheld from consciousness because of their disagreeable,
immoral (to them), and frequently sexual content. He used the
now famous term complex to describe such conditions.
Learn more about "Carl Jung"
Association with Freud
These researches, which established him as a psychiatrist of
international repute, led him to understand Freud’s
investigations; his findings confirmed many of Freud’s ideas,
and, for a period of five years (between 1907 and 1912), he was
Freud’s close collaborator. He held important positions in the
psychoanalytic movement and was widely thought of as the most
likely successor to the founder of psychoanalysis. But this was
not to be the outcome of their relationship. Partly for
temperamental reasons and partly because of differences of
viewpoint, the collaboration ended. At this stage Jung differed
with Freud largely over the latter’s insistence on the sexual
bases of neurosis. A serious disagreement came in 1912, with the
publication of Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), which ran counter to many
of Freud’s ideas. Although Jung had been elected president of
the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he resigned
from the society in 1914.
His first achievement was to differentiate two classes of
people according to attitude types: extraverted
(outward-looking) and introverted (inward-looking). Later he
differentiated four functions of the mind—thinking, feeling,
sensation, and intuition—one or more of which predominate in any
given person. Results of this study were embodied in
Psychologische Typen (1921; Psychological Types, 1923). Jung’s
wide scholarship was well manifested here, as it also had been
in The Psychology of the Unconscious.
As a boy Jung had remarkably striking dreams and powerful
fantasies that had developed with unusual intensity. After his
break with Freud, he deliberately allowed this aspect of himself
to function again and gave the irrational side of his nature
free expression. At the same time, he studied it scientifically
by keeping detailed notes of his strange experiences. He later
developed the theory that these experiences came from an area of
the mind that he called the collective unconscious, which he
held was shared by everyone. This much-contested conception was
combined with a theory of archetypes that Jung held as
fundamental to the study of the psychology of religion. In
Jung’s terms, archetypes are instinctive patterns, have a
universal character, and are expressed in behaviour and images.
Learn more about "Carl Jung"
Character of his psychotherapy
Jung devoted the rest of his life to developing his ideas,
especially those on the relation between psychology and
religion. In his view, obscure and often neglected texts of
writers in the past shed unexpected light not only on Jung’s own
dreams and fantasies but also on those of his patients; he
thought it necessary for the successful practice of their art
that psychotherapists become familiar with writings of the old
masters.
Besides the development of new psychotherapeutic methods that
derived from his own experience and the theories developed from
them, Jung gave fresh importance to the so-called Hermetic
tradition. He conceived that the Christian religion was part of
a historic process necessary for the development of
consciousness, and he also thought that the heretical movements,
starting with Gnosticism and ending in alchemy, were
manifestations of unconscious archetypal elements not adequately
expressed in the mainstream forms of Christianity. He was
particularly impressed with his finding that alchemical-like
symbols could be found frequently in modern dreams and
fantasies, and he thought that alchemists had constructed a kind
of textbook of the collective unconscious. He expounded on this
in 4 out of the 18 volumes that make up his Collected Works.
His historical studies aided him in pioneering the
psychotherapy of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those
who felt their lives had lost meaning. He helped them to
appreciate the place of their lives in the sequence of history.
Most of these patients had lost their religious belief; Jung
found that if they could discover their own myth as expressed in
dream and imagination they would become more complete
personalities. He called this process individuation.
In later years he became professor of psychology at the
Federal Polytechnical University in Zürich (1933–41) and
professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel
(1943). His personal experience, his continued psychotherapeutic
practice, and his wide knowledge of history placed him in a
unique position to comment on current events. As early as 1918
he had begun to think that Germany held a special position in
Europe; the Nazi revolution was, therefore, highly significant
for him, and he delivered a number of hotly contested views that
led to his being wrongly branded as a Nazi sympathizer. Jung
lived to the age of 85.
The authoritative English collection of all Jung’s published
writings is Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler
(eds.), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. by R.F.C. Hull,
20 vol., 2nd ed. (1966–79). Jung’s The Psychology of the
Unconscious appears in revised form as Symbols of Transformation
in the Collected Works. His other major individual publications
include Über die Psychologie der Dementia Praecox (1907; The
Psychology of Dementia Praecox); Versuch einer Darstellung der
psychoanalytischen Theorie (1913; The Theory of Psychoanalysis);
Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916); Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology (1928); Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte
(1929; The Secret of the Golden Flower); Modern Man in Search of
a Soul (1933), a collection of essays covering topics from dream
analysis and literature to the psychology of religion;
Psychology and Religion (1938); Psychologie und Alchemie (1944;
Psychology and Alchemy); and Aion: Untersuchungen zur
Symbolgeschichte (1951; Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology
of the Self). Jung’s Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (1962;
Memories, Dreams, Reflections) is fascinating
semiautobiographical reading, partly written by Jung himself and
partly recorded by his secretary.
Michael S.M. Fordham
Frieda Fordham
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Rudolf Carnap

German-American philosopher
born May 18, 1891, Ronsdorf, Ger.
died Sept. 14, 1970, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.
Main
German-born U.S. philosopher of Logical Positivism. He made
important contributions to logic, the analysis of language,
the theory of probability, and the philosophy of science.
Education.
From 1910 to 1914 Carnap studied mathematics, physics, and
philosophy at the universities of Jena and Freiburg im
Breisgau. At Jena he attended the lectures of Gottlob Frege,
now widely acknowledged as the greatest logician of the 19th
century, whose ideas exerted a deep influence on Carnap.
After serving in World War I, Carnap earned his doctorate
in 1921 at Jena with a dissertation on the concept of space.
He argued that the conflicts among the various theories of
space then held by scholars resulted from the fact that
those theories actually dealt with quite different subjects;
he called them, respectively, formal space, physical space,
and intuitive space and exhibited their principal
characteristics and fundamental differences.
For several years afterward Carnap was engaged in private
research in logic and the foundations of physics and wrote a
number of essays on problems of space, time, and causality,
as well as a textbook in symbolic, or mathematical, logic
(Abriss der Logistik, 1929; a considerably different later
German version appeared in English translation: Introduction
to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications, 1958).
Career in Vienna and Prague.
In 1926 Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle—a
small group of philosophers, mathematicians, and other
scholars who met regularly to discuss philosophical
issues—invited Carnap to join the faculty of the University
of Vienna, where he soon became an influential member of the
Circle. Out of their discussions developed the initial ideas
of Logical Positivism, or Logical Empiricism. This school of
thought shared its basic Empiricist orientation with David
Hume, a Scottish Empiricist, and Ernst Mach, an Austrian
physicist and philosopher. Its leading members, informed and
inspired by the methods and theories of contemporary
mathematics and science, sought to develop a “scientific
world view” by bringing to philosophical inquiry the
precision and rigour of the exact sciences. As one means to
this end, Carnap made extensive use of the concepts and
techniques of symbolic logic in preference to the often
inadequate analytic devices of traditional logic.
Carnap and his associates established close connections
with like-minded scholars in other countries, among them a
group of Empiricists that had formed in Berlin under the
leadership of Hans Reichenbach, an eminent philosopher of
science. With Reichenbach, Carnap founded a periodical,
Erkenntnis (1930–40), as a forum for the new “scientific
philosophy.”
The basic thesis of Empiricism, in a familiar but quite
vague formulation, is that all of man’s concepts and beliefs
concerning the world ultimately derive from his immediate
experience. In some of his most important writings, Carnap
sought, in effect, to give this idea a clear and precise
interpretation. Setting aside, as a psychological rather
than a philosophical problem, the question of how human
beings arrive at their ideas about the world, he proceeded
to construe Empiricism as a systematic-logical thesis about
the evidential grounding of empirical knowledge. To this
end, he gave the issue a characteristically linguistic turn
by asking how the terms and sentences that, in scientific or
in everyday language, serve to express assertions about the
world are related to those terms and sentences by which the
data of immediate experience can be described. The
Empiricist thesis, as construed and defended by Carnap, then
asserts that the terms and sentences of the first kind are
“reducible” to those of the second kind in a clearly
specifiable sense. Carnap’s conception of the relevant sense
of reducibility, which he always stated in precise logical
terms, was initially rather narrow but gradually became more
liberal.
In his first great work, Der logische Aufbau der Welt
(1928; Eng. trans.—with a smaller work—The Logical Structure
of the World: Pseudoproblems in Philosophy), Carnap
developed, with unprecedented rigour, a version of the
Empiricist reducibility thesis according to which all terms
suited to describe actual or possible empirical facts are
fully definable by terms referring exclusively to aspects of
immediate experience, so that all empirical statements are
fully translatable into statements about immediate
experiences.
Prompted by discussions with his associates in Vienna,
Carnap soon began to develop a more liberal version of
Empiricism, which he elaborated while he was professor of
natural philosophy at the German University in Prague
(1931–35); he eventually presented it in full detail in his
essay “Testability and Meaning” (Philosophy of Science, vol.
3 [1936] and 4 [1937]). Carnap argued that the terms of
empirical science are not fully definable in purely
experiential terms but can at least be partly defined by
means of “reduction sentences,” which are logically
much-refined versions of operational definitions, and
“observation sentences,” whose truth can be checked by
direct observation. Carnap stressed that usually such tests
cannot provide strict proof or disproof but only more or
less strong “confirmation” for an empirical statement.
Sentences that do not thus yield observational
implications and therefore cannot possibly be tested and
confirmed by observational findings were said to be
empirically meaningless. By reference to this testability
criterion of empirical significance, Carnap and other
Logical Empiricists rejected various doctrines of
speculative metaphysics and of theology, not as being false
but as making no significant assertions at all.
Carnap argued that the observational statements by
reference to which empirical statements can be tested may be
construed as sentences describing directly and publicly
observable aspects of physical objects, such as the needle
of a measuring instrument turning to a particular point on
the scale or a subject in a psychological test showing a
change in pulse rate. All such sentences, he noted, can be
formulated in terms that are part of the vocabulary of
physics. This was the basic idea of his “physicalism,”
according to which all terms and statements of empirical
science—from the physical to the social and historical
disciplines—can be reduced to terms and statements in the
language of physics.
In later writings, Carnap liberalized his conception of
reducibility and of empirical significance even further so
as to give a more adequate account of the relation between
scientific theories and scientific evidence.
Career in the United States.
By the time “Testability and Meaning” appeared in print,
Carnap had moved to the United States, mainly because of the
growing threat of German National Socialism. From 1936 to
1952 he served on the faculty of the University of Chicago.
During the 1940–41 school year, Carnap was a visiting
professor at Harvard University and was an active
participant in a discussion group that included Bertrand
Russell, Alfred Tarski, and W.V.O. Quine.
Soon after going to Chicago, Carnap joined with the
sociologist Otto Neurath, a former fellow member of the
Vienna Circle, and with an academic colleague, the
Pragmatist philosopher Charles W. Morris, in founding the
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which was
published, beginning in 1938, as a series of monographs on
general problems in the philosophy of science and on
philosophical issues concerning mathematics or particular
branches of empirical science.
Since his Vienna years, Carnap had been much concerned
also with problems in logic and in the philosophy of
language. He held that philosophical perplexities often
arise from a misunderstanding or misuse of language and that
the way to resolve them is by “logical analysis of
language.” On this point, he agreed with the “ordinary
language” school of Analytic Philosophy, which had its
origins in England. He differed from it, however, in
insisting that more technical issues—e.g., those in the
philosophy of science or of mathematics—cannot be adequately
dealt with by considerations of ordinary linguistic usage
but require clarification by reference to artificially
constructed languages that are formulated in logical
symbolism and that have their structure and interpretation
precisely specified by so-called syntactic and semantic
rules. Carnap developed these ideas and the theoretical
apparatus for their implementation in a series of works,
including Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934; The Logical
Syntax of Language) and Meaning and Necessity (1947; 2nd
enlarged ed., 1956).
Carnap’s interest in artificial languages included
advocacy of international auxiliary languages such as
Esperanto and Interlingua to facilitate scholarly
communication and to further international understanding.
One idea in logic and the theory of knowledge that
occupied much of Carnap’s attention was that of analyticity.
In contrast to the 19th-century radical Empiricism of John
Stuart Mill, Carnap and other Logical Empiricists held that
the statements of logic and mathematics, unlike those of
empirical science, are analytic—i.e., true solely by virtue
of the meanings of their constituent terms—and that they can
therefore be established a priori (without any empirical
test). Carnap repeatedly returned to the task of formulating
a precise characterization and theory of analyticity. His
ideas were met with skepticism by some, however—among them
Quine, who argued that the notion of analytic truth is
inherently obscure and the attempt to delimit a class of
statements that are true a priori should be abandoned as
misguided.
From about 1945 onward, Carnap turned his efforts
increasingly to problems of inductive reasoning and of
rational belief and decision. His principal aim was to
construct a formal system of inductive logic; its central
concept, corresponding to that of deductive implication,
would be that of probabilistic implication—or, more
precisely, a concept representing the degree of rational
credibility or of probability that a given body of evidence
may be said to confer upon a proposed hypothesis. Carnap
presented a rigorous theory of this kind in his Logical
Foundations of Probability (1950).
Carnap spent the years from 1952 to 1954 at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he continued his work
in probability theory. Subsequently, he accepted a
professorship at the University of California at Los
Angeles. During those years and indeed until his death,
Carnap was occupied principally with modifications and
considerable extensions of his inductive logic.
Carl G. Hempel
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Martin Heidegger

German philosopher
born September 26, 1889, Messkirch, Schwarzwald, Germany
died May 26, 1976, Messkirch, West Germany
Main
German philosopher, counted among the main exponents of
existentialism. His groundbreaking work in ontology and
metaphysics determined the course of 20th-century philosophy
on the European continent and exerted an enormous influence
in virtually every other humanistic discipline, including
literary criticism, hermeneutics, psychology, and theology.
Background and youth
The son of a Roman Catholic sexton, Heidegger showed an
early interest in religion. Intending to become a priest, he
began theological studies at the University of Freiburg in
1909 but switched to philosophy and mathematics in 1911. His
interest in philosophy dated from at least 1907, however,
when he undertook an intensive study of Von der mannigfachen
Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862; “On the
Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle”) by the
19th-century German philosopher Franz Brentano.
Brentano’s work in ontology helped to inspire Heidegger’s
lifelong conviction that there is a single, basic sense of
the verb “to be” that lies behind all its varied usages.
From Brentano Heidegger also developed his enthusiasm for
the ancient Greeks—especially the pre-Socratics. In addition
to these philosophers, Heidegger’s work is obviously
influenced by Plato, Aristotle, the Gnostic philosophers of
the 2nd century ad, and several 19th- and early 20th-century
thinkers, including the early figures of existentialism,
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche; Wilhelm Dilthey,
who was noted for directing the attention of philosophers to
the human and historical sciences; and Edmund Husserl, the
founder of the phenomenological movement in philosophy.
While still in his 20s, Heidegger studied at Freiburg
with Heinrich Rickert, the leading figure of the axiological
school of neo-Kantianism, and with Husserl, who was then
already famous. Husserl’s phenomenology, and especially his
struggle against the intrusion of psychologism into
traditionally philosophical studies of man, determined the
background of the young Heidegger’s doctoral dissertation,
Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: Ein
kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik (“The Doctrine of
Judgment in Psychologism: A Critical-Positive Contribution
to Logic”; 1914). Consequently, what Heidegger later said
and wrote about anxiety, thinking, forgetfulness, curiosity,
distress, care, and awe was not meant as psychology; and
what he said about man, publicness, and other-directedness
was not intended to be sociology, anthropology, or political
science. His utterances were meant to disclose ways of
Being.
Philosophy
Heidegger began teaching at the University of Freiburg
during the winter semester of 1915 and wrote his
habilitation thesis on the 13th-century English Franciscan
philosopher Duns Scotus. As a colleague of Husserl,
Heidegger was expected to carry the phenomenological
movement forward in the spirit of his former master. As a
religiously inclined young man, however, he went his own way
instead. While serving as a professor ordinarius at Marburg
University (1923–28), he astonished the German philosophical
world with Being and Time (1927). Although almost
unreadable, it was immediately felt to be of prime
importance, whatever its relation to Husserl might be. In
spite of—and perhaps partly because of—its intriguingly
difficult style, Being and Time was acclaimed as a
masterpiece not only in German-speaking countries but also
in Latin ones, where phenomenology was well established. It
strongly influenced Jean-Paul Sartre and other
existentialists in France, and on the basis of this work
Heidegger came to be regarded as the leading atheistic
existentialist, though he always rejected that label. The
reception of Being and Time in the English-speaking world
was chilly, however, and its influence there was negligible
for several decades.
Heidegger’s declared purpose in Being and Time is to show
what it means for a person to be—or, more accurately, how it
is for a person to be. This task leads to a more fundamental
question: what does it mean to ask, “What is the meaning of
Being?” These questions lie behind the obviousness of
everyday life and, therefore, also behind the empirical
questions of natural science. They are usually overlooked,
because they are too near to everyday life to be grasped.
One might say that Heidegger’s entire prophetic mission
amounts to making each person ask this question with maximum
involvement. Whether one arrives at a definite answer is, in
the present crisis of mankind, of secondary importance.
This crisis, according to Heidegger, stems from the deep
“fall” (Verfall) of Western thought since the time of Plato,
a condition brought about by the one-sided development of
technological thinking and the neglect of other kinds,
resulting in alienation (Entfremdung)—or, as expressed in
terms more central to Heidegger’s thought, in a “highly
inauthentic way of being.” Although fallenness, or
inauthenticity, is an inescapable feature of human
existence—i.e., it is an existential, and an essential,
potentiality (Möglichkeit)—epochs and individuals may be
coloured by it in different degrees. This somewhat stern
outlook was mitigated in Heidegger’s later writings, in
which he suggested that it is possible to find a kind of
“redemption” through “thinking of Being”—a process that
would be led, he believed, by the continental European
countries rather than the eastern or other western ones.
As an aid in the effort to get back to “thinking of
Being” and its redemptive effects, Heidegger employs
linguistic, or hermeneutical, techniques. He develops his
own German, his own Greek, and his own etymologies—for
example, he coins about 100 new complex words ending with
“-being.” In reading his works one must, therefore,
translate many key terms back into Greek and then consider
his free, often special (but never uninteresting)
interpretations and etymologies.
The wealth of ideas in Being and Time is best discussed
in conjunction with those developed in another, shorter
work, What Is Metaphysics? (1929), which was originally
delivered as an inaugural lecture when Heidegger succeeded
Husserl at Freiburg in 1928. As Heidegger learned from
Husserl, it is the phenomenological and not the scientific
method that unveils man’s ways of Being. Thus, in pursuing
this method, Heidegger comes into conflict with the
dichotomy of the subject-object relation, which has
traditionally implied that man, as knower, is something
(some-thing) within an environment that is against him. This
relation, however, must be transcended. The deepest knowing,
on the contrary, is a matter of phainesthai (Greek: “to show
itself” or “to be in the light”), the word from which
phenomenology, as a method, is derived. Something is just
“there” in the light. Thus, the distinction between subject
and object is not immediate but comes only later through
conceptualization, as in the sciences.
Man stands out from things (ex-sists, not merely
ex-ists), says Heidegger in Being and Time, never being
completely absorbed by them but nevertheless being nothing
(no-thing) apart from them. Man dwells in a world that he
has been, and continues to be, “thrown into” until death.
Being thrown into things, being-there (Da-sein), he falls
away (Verfall) and is on the point of being submerged into
things. He is continually a pro-ject (Ent-wurf); but
periodically, or even normally, he may be submerged in
things to such a degree that he is temporarily absorbed
(Aufgehen in). He is then nobody in particular; and a
structure that Heidegger calls das Man (“the they”) is
revealed, recalling certain Anglo-American sociological
criticisms of modern industrial society that stress man’s
“other-directedness”—i.e., his tendency to measure himself
in terms of his peers. But Heidegger’s phenomenological
metaphors avoid the concepts of social science as much as
possible in favour of the concepts of ontology.
Characteristic of das Man are idle talk (Gerede) and
curiosity (Neugier). In Gerede, talker and listener do not
stand in any genuine personal relation or in any intimate
relation to what is talked about; hence, it leads to
shallowness. Curiosity is a form of distraction, a need for
the “new,” a need for something “different,” without real
interest or capability of wonder.
But there is a mood, anxiety or dread (Angst), that
functions to disclose (dis-close) authentic being, freedom
(Frei-sein), as a potentiality. It manifests the freedom of
man to choose himself and take hold of himself. The
relevance of time, of the finiteness of human existence, is
then experienced as a freedom to meet one’s own death (das
Freisein für den Tod), as a preparedness for and a
continuous relatedness to death (Sein zum Tode). In anxiety,
all entities (Seiendes) sink away into a “nothing and
nowhere,” and man hovers in himself as ex-sisting, being
nowhere at home (Un-heimlichkeit, Un-zu-hause). He faces
no-thing-ness (das Nichts); and all average, obvious
everydayness disappears—and this is good, since he now faces
the potentiality of authentic being.
Thus, for Heidegger the “sober” (nüchtern) anxiety and
the implied confrontation with death are primarily of
methodological importance, because through them fundamental
structures are revealed. Among them are potentialities for
being joyfully active (“. . . knowing joy [die wissende
Heiterkeit] is a door to the eternal”). Anxiety opens man up
to Being. This does not imply that Being partakes in the
dark aspect of dread, however; Being is associated with
“light” and with “the joyful” (das Heitere). Being “calls
the tune”; “to think Being” is to arrive at one’s (true)
home. Although Heideggerian students are often baffled by
just what Being and Thinking stand for, it is clear that
Heidegger opposes a cult of mankind and wishes to call
attention to something greater.
In the early 1930s Heidegger’s thought underwent a change
that scholars call his Kehre (“turning around”). Although
some specialists regard the Kehre as a turning away from the
central problem of Being and Time, Heidegger himself denied
this, insisting that he had been asking the same basic
question since his youth. Nevertheless, in his later years
he clearly became more reluctant to offer an answer, or even
to indicate a way in which an answer might be found.
Heidegger and Nazism
In the months after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as
chancellor of Germany in January 1933, German universities
came under increasing pressure to support the “national
revolution” and to eliminate Jewish scholars and the
teaching of “Jewish” doctrines, such as the theory of
relativity. After the rector of Freiburg resigned to protest
these policies, the university’s teaching staff elected
Heidegger as his successor in April 1933. One month later,
Heidegger became a member of the Nazi Party, and until he
resigned as rector in April 1934 he helped to institute Nazi
educational and cultural programs at Freiburg and vigorously
promoted the domestic and foreign policies of the Nazi
regime. Already during the late 1920s he had criticized the
dissolute nature of the German university system, where
“specialization” and the ideology of “academic freedom”
precluded the attainment of a higher unity. In a letter of
1929, he bemoaned the progressive “Jewification” (Verjudung)
of the German spirit. In his inaugural address, Die
Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (“The
Self-Assertion of the German University”), he called for
reorganizing the university along the lines of the Nazi
Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, and celebrated the
fact that university life would henceforward be merged with
the state and the needs of the German Volk. During the first
month of his rectorship, he sent a telegram to Hitler urging
him to postpone an upcoming meeting of university rectors
until Gleichschaltung—the Nazi euphemism for the elimination
of political opponents—had been completed. In the fall of
1933, Heidegger began a speaking tour on behalf of Hitler’s
national referendum to withdraw Germany from the League of
Nations. As he proclaimed in one speech: “Let not doctrines
and ideas be your guide. The Führer is Germany’s only
reality and law.” Heidegger continued to support Hitler in
the years after his rectorship, though with somewhat less
enthusiasm than he had shown in 1933–34.
At the end of the war in 1945, a favourably disposed
university de-Nazification commission found Heidegger guilty
of having “consciously placed the great prestige of his
scholarly reputation … in the service of the National
Socialist Revolution,” and he was banned from further
teaching. (The ban was lifted in 1950.) In later years,
despite pleas from friends and associates to disavow
publicly his Nazi past, Heidegger declined to do so.
Instead, in his own defense, he preferred to cite a maxim
from the French poet Paul Valéry: “He who thinks greatly
must err greatly.” In his book Introduction to Metaphysics,
published in 1953, Heidegger retrospectively praised “the
inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”
Beginning in the 1980s, there was considerable
controversy among Heidegger scholars regarding the alleged
connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political
views in the 1930s and ’40s. Were there affinities between
Heidegger’s philosophical thought, or his style of
philosophizing, and the totalitarian ideals of the Nazis?
Supporters of Heidegger, repeating a view prominent in the
first decades after the war, argued that there was nothing
inherently fascistic in his philosophy and that claims to
the contrary grossly distorted his work. Opponents, on the
other hand, cited parallels between the critical treatment
in Being and Time of notions such as “publicness,”
“everydayness,” “idle talk,” and “curiosity” and
fascist-oriented critiques of the vapidity and dissoluteness
of bourgeois liberalism. They also pointed to more specific
similarities evident in Division II of Being and Time, in
which Heidegger emphasizes the centrality of the Volk as a
historical actor and the importance of “choosing a hero,” an
idea widely promoted among the German right as the
Führerprinzip. For these scholars, Heidegger’s philosophical
critique of the condition of man in modern technological
society allowed him to regard the Nazi revolution as a
deliverance that would make the world “safe for Being.”
Among those who shared this view were the German
existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, who wrote in a
letter to the head of the de-Nazification commission that
“Heidegger’s manner of thinking, which to me seems in its
essence unfree, dictatorial, and incapable of communication,
would today be disastrous in its pedagogical effects.”
Assessment
Heidegger’s thought has been faulted on other grounds as
well. Some have suggested that his phenomenological method
rests on a grandiose illusion, and that the search for
“thinking Being” is merely a disguised quest for a kind of
belief in God. In the same vein, others have charged that
Heidegger’s abstruse terminology is only a mask disguising
and mystifying a more traditional approach to philosophy.
Such negative evaluations, if joined with a sincere attempt
to follow Heidegger’s own path through his writings, would
not be incompatible with his thought. After all, he asks—or
rather, provokes—his readers to question, not to listen to
answers. It is, therefore, misleading to present Heidegger’s
philosophy as a set of clearly understandable results. His
metaphors must remain, rather than be translated into the
usual philosophical terminology that he rejected.
Arne D. Naess
Richard Wolin
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Karl Jaspers

German philosopher
in full Karl Theodor Jaspers
born Feb. 23, 1883, Oldenburg, Ger.
died Feb. 26, 1969, Basel, Switz.
Main
German philosopher, one of the most important
Existentialists in Germany, who approached the subject from
man’s direct concern with his own existence. In his later
work, as a reaction to the disruptions of Nazi rule in
Germany and World War II, he searched for a new unity of
thinking that he called world philosophy.
Early life and education
Jaspers was the oldest of the three children of Karl Wilhelm
Jaspers and Henriette Tantzen. His ancestors on both sides
were peasants, merchants, and pastors who had lived in
northern Germany for generations. His father, a lawyer, was
a high constable of the district and eventually a director
of a bank.
Jaspers was delicate and sickly in his childhood. As a
consequence of his numerous childhood diseases, he developed
bronchiectasis (a chronic dilation of the bronchial tubes)
during his adolescent years, and this condition led to
cardiac decompensation (the inability of the heart to
maintain adequate circulation). These ailments were a severe
handicap throughout his adult life.
Jaspers entered the University of Heidelberg in 1901,
enrolling in the faculty of law; in the following year he
moved to Munich, where he continued his studies of law, but
without much enthusiasm. He spent the next six years
studying medicine at the Universities of Berlin, Göttingen,
and Heidelberg. After he completed his state examination to
practice medicine in 1908, he wrote his dissertation Heimweh
und Verbrechen (“Nostalgia and Crime”). In February 1909 he
was registered as a doctor. He had already become acquainted
with his future wife, Gertrud Mayer, during his student
years, and he married her in 1910.
Research in clinical psychiatry
In 1909 Jaspers became a volunteer research assistant at the
University of Heidelberg psychiatric clinic, a position he
held until 1915. The clinic was headed by the renowned
neuropathologist Franz Nissl, who had assembled under him an
excellent team of assistants. Because of his desire to learn
psychiatry in his own way without being regimented into any
particular pattern of thought by his teachers, Jaspers
elected to work in his own time, at his own pace, and with
patients in whom he was particularly interested. This was
granted to him only because he agreed to work without a
salary.
When Jaspers started his research work, clinical
psychiatry was considered to be empirically based but
lacking any underlying systematic framework of knowledge. It
dealt with different aspects of the human organism as they
might affect the behaviour of human beings suffering from
mental illness. These aspects ranged from anatomical,
physiological, and genetic to neurological, psychological,
and sociological influences. A study of these aspects opened
the way to an understanding and explanation of human
behaviour. Diagnosis was of paramount importance; therapy
was largely neglected. Aware of this situation, Jaspers
realized the conditions that were required in order to
establish psychopathology as a science: a language had to be
found that, on the basis of previously conducted research,
was capable of describing the symptoms of disease well
enough to facilitate positive recognition in other cases;
and various methods appropriate to the different spheres of
psychiatry had to be worked out.
Jaspers tried to bring the methods of Phenomenology—the
direct investigation and description of phenomena as
consciously experienced, without theories about their causal
explanation—into the field of clinical psychiatry. These
efforts soon bore fruit, and his reputation as a researcher
in the forefront of new developments in psychiatry was
established. In 1911, when he was only 28 years old, he was
requested by Ferdinand Springer, a well-known publisher, to
write a textbook on psychopathology; he completed the
Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology, 1965)
two years later. The work was distinguished by its critical
approach to the various methods available for the study of
psychiatry and by its attempt to synthesize these methods
into a cohesive whole.
Transition to philosophy
In 1913 Jaspers, by virtue of his status in the field of
psychology, entered the philosophical faculty—which included
a department of psychology—of the University of Heidelberg.
His academic advance in the university was rapid. In 1916 he
was appointed assistant professor in psychology; in 1920
assistant professor in philosophy; in 1921 professor in
philosophy; and in 1922 he took over the second chair in
that field. The transition from medicine to philosophy was
due in part to the fact that, while the medical faculty was
fully staffed, the philosophical faculty needed an empirical
psychologist. But the transition also corresponded to
Jaspers’ intellectual development.
In 1919 Jaspers published some of his lectures, entitled
Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (“Psychology of World
Views”). He did not intend to present a philosophical work
but rather one aimed at demarcating the limits of a
psychological understanding of man. Nevertheless, this work
touched on the border of philosophy. In it were foreshadowed
all of the basic themes that were fully developed later in
Jaspers’ major philosophical works. By investigating the
legitimate boundaries of philosophical knowledge, Jaspers
tried to clarify the relationship of philosophy to science.
Science appeared to him as knowledge of facts that are
obtained by means of scholarly methodological principles and
that are apodictically certain and universally valid.
Following Max Weber, a sociologist and historian, he
asserted that scientific principles also applied to both the
social and humanistic sciences. In contrast to science,
Jaspers considered philosophy to be a subjective
interpretation of Being, which—although prophetically
inspired—attempted to postulate norms of value and
principles of life as universally valid. As Jaspers’
understanding of philosophy deepened, he gradually discarded
his belief in the role of a prophetic vision in philosophy.
He bent all his energies toward the development of a
philosophy that would be independent of science but that
would not become a substitute for religious beliefs. Though
the resulting system presupposed science, it passed beyond
the boundaries of science in an effort to illuminate the
totality of man’s existence. For Jaspers man’s existence
meant not mere being-in-the-world but rather man’s freedom
of being. The idea of being oneself signified for Jaspers
the potentiality to realize one’s freedom of being in the
world. Thus, the task of philosophy was to appeal to the
freedom of the individual as the subject who thinks and
exists and to focus on man’s existence as the centre of all
reality.
The elaboration of these germinal ideas occupied Jasper’s
thought from 1920 to 1930. During this decade his
brother-in-law, Ernst Mayer, himself a philosopher of
repute, worked with him. During these years he also enjoyed
the friendship of Martin Heidegger. Somewhat later, this
friendship broke up because of Heidegger’s entry into the
National Socialist Party.
In the early years of the 1930s the fruits of his
intellectual labour became evident: in 1931 Die geistige
Situation der Zeit (Man in the Modern Age, 1933) was
published; in 1932 the three volumes of Philosophie
(Philosophy, 1969) appeared—perhaps the most systematic
presentation of Existential philosophy in the German
language. A book on Max Weber also appeared in 1932.
Conflict with the Nazi authorities
When Hitler came into power in 1933, Jaspers was taken by
surprise, as he had not taken National Socialism seriously.
He thought that this movement would destroy itself from
within, thus leading to a reorganization and liberation by
the other political forces active at the time. These
expectations, however, did not materialize. Because his wife
was Jewish, Jaspers qualified as an enemy of the state. From
1933 he was excluded from the higher councils of the
university but was allowed to teach and publish. In 1935 the
first part of his future work on logic, entitled Vernunft
und Existenz (Reason and Existenz, 1955), appeared; in 1936
a book on Nietzsche; in 1937 an essay on Descartes; in 1938
a further work preliminary to his logic, entitled
Existenzphilosophie (Philosophy of Existence, 1971). Unlike
many other famous intellectuals of that time, he was not
prepared to make any concessions to the doctrines of
National Socialism. Consequently, a series of decrees were
promulgated against him, including removal from his
professorship and a total ban on any further publication.
These measures effectively barred him from carrying on his
work in Germany.
Friends tried to assist him to emigrate to another
country. Permission was finally granted to him in 1942 to go
to Switzerland, but a condition was imposed by the Nazis
that required his wife to remain behind in Germany. He
refused to accept this condition and decided to stay with
his wife, notwithstanding the dangers. It became necessary
for his friends to hide his wife. Both of them had decided,
in case of an arrest, to commit suicide. In 1945 he was told
by a reliable source that his deportation was scheduled to
take place on April 14. On March 30, however, Heidelberg was
occupied by the Americans.
Disillusioned by the events of these years, Jaspers
withdrew more and more into himself. He revised the General
Psychopathology in an effort to make it represent the high
point of a free but responsible search for knowledge of man,
as distinct from science, which had betrayed man. He also
completed his work on logic, Von der Wahrheit (“Of Truth”),
the first part of which was intended to throw the light of
reason on the irrational teachings of the times. These works
appeared in print in 1946 and 1947.
Postwar development of thought
After the capitulation of Germany, Jaspers saw himself
confronted with the tasks of rebuilding the university and
helping to bring about a moral and political rebirth of the
people. He dedicated all of his energies in the postwar
years toward the accomplishment of these two tasks. He also
represented the interests of the university to the military
powers. He gathered his thoughts on how the universities
could best be rebuilt in his work Die Idee der Universität
(1946; The Idea of the University, 1959). He called for a
complete de-Nazification of the teaching staff, but this
proved to be impossible because the number of professors who
had never compromised with the Nazis was too small. It was
only gradually that the autonomous university of the
pre-Nazi years could once again assert itself in Germany.
Jaspers felt that an acknowledgment of national guilt was a
necessary condition for the moral and political rebirth of
Germany. In one of his best political works, Die Schuldfrage
(1946; The Question of German Guilt, 1947), he stated that
whoever had participated actively in the preparation or
execution of war crimes and crimes against humanity was
morally guilty. Those, however, who passively tolerated
these happenings because they did not want to become victims
of Nazism were only politically responsible. In this
respect, all survivors of this era bore the same
responsibility and shared a collective guilt. He felt that
the fact that no one could escape this collective guilt and
responsibility might enable the German people to transform
their society from its state of collapse into a more highly
developed and morally responsible democracy. The fact that
these ideas attracted hardly any attention was a further
disappointment to Jaspers. In the spring of 1948 he accepted
a professorship in philosophy in Basel, Switz. In spite of
the apparent neglect of Jaspers’ ideas of a moral
regeneration of the German people, his departure for Basel
was regarded as a betrayal by many of the German people.
Jaspers himself hoped to find there a peace of mind that
might enable him to work through and revise once again his
whole approach to the entire field of philosophy.
This revision was guided mainly by the conviction that
modern technology in the sphere of communication and warfare
had made it imperative for mankind to strive for world
unity. This new development in his thinking was defined by
him as world philosophy, and its primary task was the
creation of a mode of thinking that could contribute to the
possibility of a free world order. The transition from
existence philosophy to world philosophy was based on his
belief that a different kind of logic would make it possible
for free communication to exist among all mankind. His
thought was expressed in Der philosophische Glaube (1948;
The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, 1949) and Der
philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (1962;
Philosophical Faith and Revelation, 1967). Since all thought
in its essence rests on beliefs, he reasoned, the task
confronting man is to free philosophical thinking from all
attachments to the transient objects of this world. To
replace previous objectifications of all metaphysical and
religious systems, Jaspers introduced the concept of the
cipher. This was a philosophical abstraction that could
represent all systems, provided that they entered into
communication with one another by means of the cipher. In
other words, the concept of the cipher enabled a common
ground to be shared by all of the various systems of
thought, thus leading to a far greater tolerance than had
ever before been possible. A world history of philosophy,
entitled Die grossen Philosophen (1957; The Great
Philosophers, 2 vol., 1962, 1966), had as its aim to
investigate to what extent all past thought could become
communicable.
Jaspers also undertook to write a universal history of
the world, called Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte
(1949; The Origin and Goal of History, 1953). At the centre
of history is the axial period (from 800 to 200 bc), during
which time all the fundamental creations that underlie man’s
current civilization came into being. Following from the
insights that came to him in preparing this work, he was led
to realize the possibility of a political unity of the world
in a 1958 work called Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des
Menschen (The Future of Mankind, 1961). The aim of this
political world union would not be absolute sovereignty but
rather world confederation, in which the various entities
could live and communicate in freedom and peace.
Under the influence of these ideas, Jaspers closely
observed, during the latter years of his life, both world
politics and the politics of Germany. When the efforts
toward democracy in Germany appeared to him to turn more and
more into a national oligarchy of parties, he wrote a bitter
attack on these tendencies in Wohin treibt die
Bundesrepublik? (1966; The Future of Germany, 1967). This
book caused much annoyance among West German politicians of
all shades. Jaspers, in turn, reacted to their unfair
reception by returning his German passport in 1967 and
taking out Swiss citizenship.
At the time of his death in 1969, Jaspers had published
30 books. In addition, he had left 30,000 handwritten pages,
as well as a large and important correspondence.
Hans Saner
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Moritz Schlick

born April 14, 1882, Berlin
died June 22, 1936, Vienna
German logical empiricist philosopher and a leader of the
European school of positivist philosophers known as the
Vienna Circle.
After studies in physics at Heidelberg, Lausanne, Switz.,
and Berlin, where he studied with the German physicist Max
Planck, Schlick earned his Ph.D. with a thesis on physics.
His treatise, “Das Wesen der Wahrheit nach der modernen
Logik” (1910; “The Nature of Truth According to Modern
Logic”), reflected his scientific training and helped him
obtain a teaching post at the University of Rostock in 1911.
In 1922, after a year of teaching at Kiel, he became
professor of the philosophy of inductive sciences at Vienna.
There his disenchantment with earlier philosophies of
knowledge crystallized, and he sought to establish new ways
of ascertaining the nature of “how men know what they know,”
by referring to the methods of the sciences.
The group of philosophers that gathered around Schlick at
Vienna included Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath and the
mathematicians and scientists Kurt Gödel, Philipp Frank, and
Hans Hahn. Influenced by Schlick’s predecessors in the chair
of philosophy in Vienna, Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann,
the Circle also drew on the work of philosophers Bertrand
Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The members of the Circle
were united by their hostility to the abstractions of
metaphysics, by the grounding of philosophical statements on
empirical evidence, by faith in the techniques of modern
symbolic logic, and by belief that the future of philosophy
lay in its becoming the handmaiden of science.
As the reputation of the Circle grew through its books,
journals, and manifestos, philosophers in other countries
who were similarly inclined became familiar with one
another’s work. In 1929, as the movement for Logical
Positivism began to expand, Schlick went to California
briefly as a visiting professor at Stanford University. He
continued to direct the Circle’s activities and to write for
its new review, Erkenntnis (Knowledge), from the time of his
return to Europe until his death, which resulted from
gunshot wounds inflicted by a deranged student.
Schlick was a prolific essayist and was the author of
such books as Raum und Zeit in der gegenwärtigen Physik (2nd
ed. 1919; Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, 1920);
Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918; “General Theory of
Knowledge”); Fragen der Ethik (1930; Problems of Ethics,
1939); and the posthumous Grundzüge der Naturphilosophie
(1948; Philosophy of Nature, 1949) and Natur und Kultur
(1952).
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Hans-Georg Gadamer

born , February 11, 1900, Marburg, Germany
died March 13, 2002, Heidelberg
German philosopher whose system of philosophical
hermeneutics, derived in part from concepts of Wilhelm
Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, was
influential in 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics,
theology, and criticism.
The son of a chemistry professor, Gadamer studied the
humanities at the universities of Breslau, Marburg,
Freiburg, and Munich, earning his doctorate in philosophy
under Heidegger at Freiburg in 1922. He lectured in
aesthetics and ethics at Marburg in 1933, at Kiel in
1934–35, and again at Marburg, where he was named
extraordinary professor in 1937. In 1939 he was made full
professor at the University of Leipzig. He later taught at
the universities of Frankfurt am Main (1947–49) and
Heidelberg (from 1949). He became professor emeritus in
1968.
Gadamer’s most important work, Wahrheit und Methode
(1960; Truth and Method), is considered by some to be the
major 20th-century philosophical statement on hermeneutical
theory. His other works include Kleine Schriften, 4 vol.
(1967–77; Philosophical Hermeneutics, selected essays from
vol. 1–3); Dialogue and Dialectic (1980), comprising eight
essays on Plato; and Reason in the Age of Science (1982), a
translation of essays drawn from several German editions.
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Jurgen Habermas

(born June 18, 1929) is a German
philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical
theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for
his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic (and
title) of his first book. His work focused on the
foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis
of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule
of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and
contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the
possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical
communication latent in modern institutions and in the human
capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Until his graduation from gymnasium, Habermas lived in
Gummersbach, near Cologne. His father, Ernst Habermas, was
executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and
Commerce, and was described by Habermas as a Nazi
sympathizer. He was brought up in a staunchly Protestant
milieu, his grandfather being the director of the seminary
in Gummersbach. He studied at the universities of Göttingen
(1949/50), Zürich (1950/51), and Bonn (1951–54) and earned a
doctorate in philosophy[1] from Bonn in 1954 with a
dissertation entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von
der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken ("The absolute and
history: on the contradiction in Schelling's thought"). His
dissertation committee included Erich Rothacker and Oskar
Becker.
From 1956 on, he studied philosophy and sociology under
the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at
the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Institute for Social Research, but because of a rift between
the two over his dissertation—Horkheimer had made
unacceptable demands for revision—as well as his own belief
that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with
political skepticism and disdain for modern culture—he
finished his habilitation in political science at the
University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth.
His habilitation work was entitled, Strukturwandel der
Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der
Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (published in English translation
in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). In
1961, he became a privatdozent in Marburg, and—in a move
that was highly unusual for the German academic scene of
that time—he was offered the position of "extraordinary
professor" (professor without chair) of philosophy at the
University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962, which he accepted. In
1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to
Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and
sociology.
He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck
Institute in Starnberg (near Munich) in 1971, and worked
there until 1983, two years after the publication of his
magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas
then returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship
of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from
Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish
extensively. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which
is the highest honour awarded in German research. He also
holds the uncharacteristically postmodern position of
"Permanent Visiting" Professor at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois, and "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New
School, New York.
Habermas was awarded The Prince of Asturias Award in
Social Sciences of 2003. Habermas was also the 2004 Kyoto
Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section. He traveled to
San Diego and on March 5, 2005, as part of the University of
San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled The
Public Role of Religion in Secular Context, regarding the
evolution of separation of Church and State from neutrality
to intense secularism. He received the 2005 Holberg
International Memorial Prize (about € 520,000).
Habermas was famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most
prominent students were the pragmatic philosopher Herbert
Schnädelbach (theorist of discourse distinction and
rationality), the political sociologist Claus Offe
(professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin) ,
the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at La Trobe
University and chief editor of the journal Thesis Eleven),
the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the
University of Erfurt and at the University of Chicago), the
theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social
philosopher Axel Honneth (the current director of the
Institute for Social Research), the American philosopher
Thomas McCarthy, the co-creator of mindful inquiry in social
research Jeremy J. Shapiro, and the assassinated Serbian
prime minister Zoran Đinđić.
Habermas constructed a comprehensive framework of social
theory and philosophy drawing on a number of intellectual
traditions:
the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant,
Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund
Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer
the Marxian tradition — both the theory of Karl Marx himself
as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt
School, i.e. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse
the sociological theories of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and
George Herbert Mead
the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Ludwig
Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Stephen Toulmin
and John Searle
the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence
Kohlberg
the American pragmatist tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce
and John Dewey
the sociological social systems theory of Talcott Parsons
and Niklas Luhmann
Neo-Kantian thought
Jürgen Habermas considered his major achievement to be the
development of the concept and theory of communicative
reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes
itself from the rationalist tradition by locating
rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic
communication rather than in the structure of either the
cosmos or the knowing subject. This social theory advances
the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an
inclusive universalist moral framework. This framework rests
on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all
speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for
"end") — the goal of mutual understanding, and that human
beings possess the communicative competence to bring about
such understanding. Habermas built the framework out of the
speech-act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin,
and John Searle, the sociological theory of the
interactional constitution of mind and self of George
Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean
Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of
his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.
He carried forward the traditions of Kant and the
Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his
emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and
arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society
through the realization of the human potential for reason,
in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas conceded
that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argued
it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In
this he distanced himself from the Frankfurt School,
criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought,
for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and
exaggerations.
Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution was the
development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution
and modernization focusing on the difference between
communicative rationality and rationalization on the one
hand and strategic/instrumental rationality and
rationalization on the other. This included a critique from
a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based
theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a
student of Talcott Parsons.
His defence of modernity and civil society has been a
source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major
philosophical alternative to the varieties of
poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential
analysis of late capitalism.
Habermas saw the rationalization, humanization, and
democratization of society in terms of the
institutionalization of the potential for rationality that
is inherent in the communicative competence that is unique
to the human species. Habermas believed communicative
competence has developed through the course of evolution,
but in contemporary society it is often suppressed or
weakened by the way in which major domains of social life,
such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been
given over to or taken over by strategic/instrumental
rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that
of the lifeworld.
Habermas introduces the concept of “reconstructive
science” with a double purpose: to place the “general theory
of society” between philosophy and social science and
re-establish the rift between the “great theorization” and
the “empirical research”. The model of “rational
reconstructions” represents the main thread of the surveys
about the “structures” of the world of life (“culture”,
“society” and “personality”) and their respective
“functions” (cultural reproductions, social integrations and
socialization). For this purpose, the dialectics between
“symbolic representation” of “the structures subordinated to
all worlds of life” (“internal relationships”) and the
“material reproduction” of the social systems in their
complex (“external relationships” between social systems and
environment) has to be considered. This model finds an
application, above all, in the “theory of the social
evolution”, starting from the reconstruction of the
necessary conditions for a phylogeny of the socio-cultural
life forms (the “hominization”) until an analysis of the
development of “social formations”, which Habermas
subdivides into primitive, traditional, modern and
contemporary formations. This paper is an attempt,
primarily, to formalize the model of “reconstruction of the
logic of development” of “social formations” summed up by
Habermas through the differentiation between vital world and
social systems (and, within them, through the
“rationalization of the world of life” and the “growth in
complexity of the social systems”). Secondly, it tries to
offer some methodological clarifications about the
“explanation of the dynamics” of “historical processes” and,
in particular, about the “theoretical meaning” of the
evolutional theory’s propositions. Even if the German
sociologist considers that the “ex-post rational
reconstructions” and “the models system/environment” cannot
have a complete “historiographical application”, these
certainly act as a general premise in the argumentative
structure of the “historical explanation”.
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