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Although Germanists are indebted to the writer and dilettante historian Beda Weber for initiating research into Oswald von Wolkenstein, Weber’s biography of Oswald (1850), more a historical novel than a work of scholarship, has impeded the task of establishing a true picture of the poet’s life and personality by creating what Karl Kurt Klein has called the ‘myth of Oswald’. This thesis sets out to contribute to the reappraisal of Weber’s populary accepted image of Oswald, paying particular attention to his life and political career in Tyrol and his service of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. Chapter I, after giving a brief survey of Oswald research to date, outlines Weber’s picture of the poet as an idealist devoted to chivalry, Minne and service of the Empire. Oswald’s life and personality are considered in the next two chapters, which correspond to the two principal sources of information. Chapter II investigates the documentary evidence (including some hitherto unpublished material) of Oswald’s life at home and his political activities. Chapter III attempts a reassessment of the poems which reflect his involvement in, and attitude towards, political events. A shift of emphasis is observed from the lighthearted tone of the songs composed during his travels in Sigismund's service to the more serious mood of those inspired by experiences in his conflict with the Prince of Tyrol. These poems confirm the impression gained from historical documents that Oswald's main preoccupation was not with imperial politics, but with local affairs which affected him personally and materially. This third chapter also offers a reinterpretation of those poems in which Oswald refers to his love affair with his neighbour Sabina Jäger, who eventually became an ally of his enemies in Tyrol. All the poems dealt with in Chapter III are submitted to stylistic and linguistic analysis. The conclusion (Chapter IV) lists the amendments to Oswald's biography which the thesis has proposed, outlines his personality as it has emerged from the discussion of documents and poetry, and attempts a brief assessment of him as a man and a poet.

After a summary of German Classicism and of Grillparzer's at times confusing references to it, the main body of the thesis aims to assess Grillparzer's use of the philosophy and vocabulary of Classicism, with particular reference to his ethical, social and political ideas.Grillparzer'8 earliest work, including Blanka, leans heavily on Goethe and Schiller, but such plagiarism is avoided after 1810. Following the success of Ahnfrau, however, Grillparzer returns to a much more widespread use of Classical themes, motifs and vocabulary, especially in Sappho. Grillparzer's mood in the period 1816-21 was one of introversion and pessimism, and there is an emphasis on the vocabulary of quiet peace and withdrawal in Vließ, these ideals cannot help man out of the disaster and despair which Grillparzer repeatedly depicts in the 1810s and early 1820s, and there is a consequent tendency for the optimistic vocabulary of Classicism to appear incongruous. The more political plays of the 1820s reject the style and vocabulary of Classicism but still retain its central moral ideals. From I830 onwards, Grillparzer begins to examine more closely those ideals and concepts inherited from Goethe and Schiller, which had been doomed to failure in the pessimistic atmosphere of earlier years. The very validity of such ideals is now appraised, their relevance in political situations which Classicism had often neglected to depict. It is recognised that ideals considered as absolutes can only be achieved in isolation from chaotic human reality, and that any attempt to transfer aesthetic ideals to political and moral spheres may be detrimental to humanity rather than advantageous. There is a gradual return to Classical concepts such as moderation, limitation, right, truth, and especially "der Mensch", but these ideals must be standards for, not barriers to life and humanity.

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The thesis as presented consists of an introductory study of Sturm's life and thought, and a complete text of his collected works including early essays and poems published periodically but never reprinted, an unpublished play, and notes from a diary kept between 1934 and 1940, as well as the translations, essays, and original poems published in book form. In outlining the poet's life and the development of his thought what evidence remains of his personal relationship with W,B. Yeats and other literary figures of the time is reviewed, and some attention concentrated on possible exchanges of idea and expression.

Between 1848 and 1914 a wave of German explorers travelled to Africa, enticed by the promise of geographical, botanical and anthropological discovery. Each Afrikareisender composed a narrative account of his German-African encounters and so produced a characteristic mode of travel writing. These works reflect not only the author’s experience of their own identity, but also represent Germany’s evolving sense of national identity during a period of extensive internal political turmoil which saw the consolidation of the German nation-state in 1871, its emergence as a colonial power in Africa after 1884 and finally left colonial Germany in 1913 on the brink of the First World War. German-African encounters in nineteenth-century travel narratives are the product of a dialectical combination of influences; firstly a cognitive interest in alternative regions of human experience, a positive, heterophilic desire to appreciate cultural heterogeneity; secondly, the opposite, expansionist, hegemonic aspirations fuelled by growing German nationalism and inter-European rivalry. The chief tool in analysing these conflicting tendencies is the representation of time, for the explorers’ ingrained understanding of time, their ‘time-set’, dominates the structure of these narratives. This ‘time-set’ informed all theories of historical development, cultural advancement and racial theory with the notion of linear-historicist progress and so set the norm for encountering the other. Hence initially, Afrikareisende travel writing projected received and unreflected concepts of western and German self-understanding onto ‘Africa’. Yet the move to Africa in fact exposes the fragility of these norms, so that the whole edifice which they support begins to crumble during the explorers’ process of narration. The popularisation of evolutionary theory modified later explorers’ time-set by opening up the vista of ‘deep-time’ and an awareness of infinite time-scales that produced huge changes through infinitesimal increments. This, combined with Germany’s particular route to nation-statehood, fuelled an interest in the paths of other peoples. Afrikareisende travel writing thus ended in a wholly unexpected manner: by projecting African otherness onto German domestic reality. Oddly, this writing at the same time paradoxically incited a ‘new’ German nationalism, for evolutionary theory was also employed to propagate concepts of racial hierarchy and cultural superiority. Here, the linear-time-set modulates into the time of Darwinian struggle. A struggle which was epitomised by inter-European national rivalries on African soil. Hence German activities in the late nineteenth-century in Africa not only express internal tensions in Germany at the time, but also, in some sense, express the internal tensions of nineteenth-century Europe. These neglected yet important texts provide insight into Germany’s metamorphosis from passive observer of international political developments to self-destructive would-be world power.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is renowned as an author who posed a radical challenge to the prevailing intellectual, aesthetic and ethical orthodoxies of his age. Recently, his elusive works have frequently been seen to represent a poetics of irony that relentlessly deconstructs the philosophical paradigms of Idealism and reflects a Romantic, even postmodern, view of the fundamental ambiguities of the world. For all that this contributes to our understanding of the famed plasticity and inexhaustibility of his texts, however, a limited reading along these lines effects a decided levelling of social, political and intellectual context, and fails to do full justice to the more complex manner in which Kleist articulates the tensions between the secure modalities of Enlightenment thought and the deep anxieties of the revolutionary age. This study aims to offer a new angle on Kleist’s dialogue with the Enlightenment by reconsidering his investment in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Where previously critics have tended to conceptualise this from a biographical perspective as a temporary, personal interest borne of the strict antinomies of nature-civilisation and individual-society, an attempt will be made here to re-establish Rousseau’s specific importance as a political thinker whose theories remained a fertile source of creative inspiration and critical reflection for the violent constellations of Kleist’s fiction and drama. Focusing on a cross-section of his work, particular focus will be placed on his explorations of the links between religion and fanaticism (Das Erdbeben in Chili), the legitimacy of revolutionary violence (Die Verlobung in St. Domingo), the performance of nationhood (Die Herrmannsschlacht), and the relationship between patriotism and liberty (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg). Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, a mode of discourse will be located which sheds new, important, and at times unexpected, light on the political and ethical issues at play in Kleist’s work.

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