Zugl.: Karlsruhe, Univ., Diss.

In the present study, the sonnets Margarete Steffin and Bertolt Brecht wrote each other will be examined both in regard to the form of the sonnet as well as the tradition with which this form is associated. A second point of consideration, which stands to a certain extent in conflict with the first, is the dialogue which these sonnets constitute. This dialogue provided Steffin and Brecht the forum and opportunity to be equal partners, contrary to their real-life situations, where equality between the two did not exist. This forum allowed them to witness and experience each other simultaneously both as subjects and objects both in terms of longing and desire, as in poetic discourse, enabling them to mutually influence each other. And as the sonnets show, this influence did in fact occur regarding their different ideas, attitudes and needs in their relationship to each other.

This dissertation interprets Brecht's Mutter Courage through its protagonist. Most interpreters have derived Courage's meaning from only one term of the contradiction of merchant and mother that constitutes her, either blaming the inhuman, war-mongering merchant for her participation in war, or defending the vital, productive, and nurturing mother for that same (unavoidable) participation. Some have stressed instead the unity formed by Courage's contradiction, without being able to elucidate its meaning. The present interpretation, proceeding from a clue given in scene 7 to the meaning of the text, draws parallels between the drama and Brecht's view of the world, and shows that the world of Mutter Courage is the symbolic representation of capitalism as Brecht knew it during the rise of fascism and the approach of the Second World War. Courage is then shown to be a concentrated form of this symbolic representation; indeed, she turns out to be a representation of capitalism in its "totality". This representation is inseparable from the invocation, through Courage, of the Great Mother archetype. The Great Mother describes a contradictory capitalism that is both a Good Mother in its promising productivity, and a Terrible Mother in its destructive warring and oppression; but she, as the symbol of Nature, also describes a capitalism that had begun to seem even to Brecht like a second Nature. Courage also represents the totality of capitalism (as the Marxist Brecht saw it) by embodying both its "affirmative" aspect (as a merchant who engenders soldiering sons), and (undermining the archetype of the Great Mother) its "critical" aspect as the representation of the resistance of the oppressed to their warring world (as the outlaw who engenders a daughter who rebels against war). The meaning of the drama, then, is the story of Courage as the incarnation of the dialectic of capitalism, a dark tale whose conditions seem eternal, but which contains the promise of something bet

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Freie Universiẗat, Diss., 2006--Berlin. / Dateiformat: zip, Dateien im PDF-Format.

Thesis (M.A. 1972) from the Department of German Language and Literature, University of Adelaide.

Zugl.: Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 2007

Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Köln--Universität Köln, 1990-1991.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-194).