This thesis seeks to examine Novalis's philosophy of practical knowledge and to position it within the context of the work of other Romantic natural philosophers and some aspects of contemporary science. His views on Ritter's galvanism and the latter's significance for his thought in general are treated here for the first time in full. Contrary to most previous views, it is argued that a major part of Novalis's outlook stems from his concept of practical knowledge and his reflection over the term "experiment", which proves to be an extremely complex and central idea in his thought. It is shown how this philosophy of his finds most explicit expression in the idea of a symbolic notation or a "phenomenal" calculus. These notions merge in Novalis's idea of productive "Plastisirung". Particular attention is paid to the symbolic use of phosphorus in the pneumatic debate and Ritter's galvanic interpretation of the nerve. Beyond contemporary science, it is further shown how broad an historical base Novalis channels into his notion of practical knowledge. This should lead to a clearer understanding of Novalis's position within Romantic natural philosophy, his debt to tradition, and his originality. In the light of these findings, it is argued that Novalis's concern for practical knowledge provides the basis for a possible form of consensus in his thought. It is shown that there is an increasing tendency in his writings away from a programme for classifying knowledge in general towards the idea of individual knowledge and the case study, as is exemplified in his reception of Ritter's work. It is also advanced that Novalis's notion of practical knowledge is a significant methodological statement of early Romantic science, which also puts a new perspective on thinkers such as Goethe, Humboldt, Schelling and Ritter

The method of analysis employed in this thesis includes the comparative study of Hermann's novels with contemporary aesthetic and sociological writings as well as with works by other contemporary writers and visual artists. This approach places Hermann's pre-First World War novels in a cultural historical context and helps to re-establish Hermann as a writer whose works mirror in a representative way the developments of turn-of-the-century aesthetics and of the contemporary depiction of Berlin. For each novel in turn, I first show how Hermann adapts the formal aspects of his writing to the thematic concern at hand: experimenting with the aesthetic principles of Naturalism in the autobiographical Spielkinder (1897); with Realism in the tradition of Fontane in the Biedermeier `Doppelroman' Jettchen Geberts Geschichte (Jettchen Gebert (1906) and Henriette Jacoby (1908)); and with Impressionism in Kubinke (1910); until, in Die Nacht des Doktor Herzfeld (1912), he largely abandons the presentation of a plot-based narrative in favour of the Modernist concept of the novel as reflecting the hero's consciousness. The second strand of analysis for each novel follows the development of Hermann's representations of the emerging metropolis of Berlin from 1897 to 1912. The detailed description of physical and social reality is, over the years, increasingly complemented by the depiction of atmosphere and by analysis of the new metropolitan society. A critical attitude to the modem aspects of the city is expressed through direct social criticism in Spielkinder and, in a less pronounced form, by the nostalgic mood of the Jettchen novels. However, in the two following novels this makes way for a nonjudgemental depiction of city society, expressed in a detached, aestheticising panorama of the city (Kubinke) and in a psychological analysis of the metropolitan person's mental make-up (Die Nacht des Doktor Herzfeld).

Erstmals hat Günter Grass, dessen bisheriges Werk eine Beschäftigung mit den Fragen um Schuld und Scham verfolgte, in seiner Novelle Im Krebsgang die Ambivalenz der "Opfertäter" aus Mitwissern, Mitläufern und Mittätern von NS-Regime und Holocaust einerseits und als traumatisierte Opfer von Krieg, Flucht und Vertreibung andererseits behandelt. Indem der Untergang des "Kraft durch Freude" - Schiffes Wilhelm Gustloff in den Kontext der Geschichte, dem Vorher und dem Nachher der Katastrophe gesetzt wird, rücken die historischen Prozesse in den Blickpunkt, die zu diesem Ereignis geführt haben und die Folgen, die daraus entstanden sind. Dieser "kontextualisierte Ansatz" erfährt insofern eine Beschränkung, als er durch die Perspektive der traumatisierten Opfertäter erfolgt. Durch die Erweiterung des Figurenensembles um eine neue Generation - Konny Pokriefke und Wolfgang Stremplin als Repräsentanten der dritten Nachkriegsgeneration - richtet die Novelle den Blick auf die Gegenwart und Zukunft aus der Vergangenheit und somit implizit auf die historische Verantwortung als Aufgabe für die nachfolgenden Generationen. Seit 1980 hat Grass mit dem Begriff der "Vergegenkunft" gearbeitet, einer Vergangenheit, die ihre Schatten auf die Gegenwart und die Zukunft werfe. Die zunächst durch Schuld und Scham besetzte Vergangenheit wird im Krebsgang erweitert um die Wahrnehmung des Traumas und seiner pathologischen Wirkung. Durch die Einführung der zweiten und dritten Nachkriegsgeneration in der Narration gewinnt die aus der Vergangenheit überschattete Gegenwart und Zukunft eine Form, die die traumabedingten Brüche der Identität als Grund für die Unmöglichkeit der Trauer offenbart. Der Stillstand der Protagonisten, der sich als Wiederholung im finalen Moment des Mordes an Wolfgang Stremplin alias David Frankfurter offenbart, entspringt im Krebsgang nicht einer melancholischen Unfähigkeit zu trauern, weil die Schuld- und Schamgefühle übermächtig sind. Vielmehr scheint das Erstarren der Protagonisten in ihren unmittelbaren und mittelbaren traumatischen Erfahrungen begründet zu sein, die sie in ihrem Bann gefangen halten. Es sind die vermeintlichen Schuld- und Schamgefühle der Nebenprotagonisten, die eine Bearbeitung des Traumas als Vorbedingung der Trauer unmöglich machen.

This study examines German literary images of musical life as part of the wider sound identity of the modern German city at the turn of the twentieth century. Focussing on a forty-year period from 1890 to 1930, synonymous with the emergence of the modern German metropolis as an aesthetic object, the project assesses, compares and contrasts how musical life in the Musikstädte was perceived and portrayed by writers in an increasingly noisy urban environment. How does urban musical life influence and condition city writings? What are the differences and similarities between the writings on various musical cities? Can an urban textual sound identity be derived from these differences and similarities? The approach employed to answer these questions is a new, cross-disciplinary one to urban sound in literature, moving beyond reading the key sounds of the urban soundscape using urban musicology, sensorial anthropology and cultural poetics towards a literary contextualisation of the urban aural experience. The literary motifs of the symphony, the gramophone and urban noise are put under the spotlight through the analysis of a wide range of modernist works by authors who have a special relationship with music. At the centre of this analysis are the Kaffeehausliteratur authors Hermann Bahr, Alfred Polgar and Peter Altenberg, the then Munich-based author Thomas Mann and the lesser known René Schickele. The analysis of these particular works is framed in the music-geographical context of the Musikstadt and literary underpinnings of this topos, ranging from Ingeborg Bachmann to Hans Mayer and, once again, Thomas Mann. In analysing these texts, the methodological approach devised by Strohm, who identifies the blending of a range of urban sounds as a definition of urban space and identity, is applied. His ideas combine historical literary analysis, musical history and urban sociology. They are rarely used in the analysis of the auditory environment.

This dissertation demonstrates that German and Yiddish literature about Jews from the turn of the twentieth century until after the Holocaust is characterized by several discourses and tropes borrowed from contemporary ethnography, anthropology, and folklore studies. The influence of these disciplines is manifest in the representation of Eastern European Jews as primitive savages, the depiction of the Jewish people as being at risk of extinction, the articulation of the need to salvage European Jewish culture, and the literary conjunction of folklore with contemporary instances of violence against Jews. These motifs are especially prominent in the works of Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and Arnold Zweig in German and S. An-sky in Yiddish. This dissertation identifies the permutations of these ethnographic discourses in German-Jewish and Yiddish literature, opening new avenues of exploration in the study of the literary and cultural construction of Jewish identity in European modernity.

Spaces of the Ear examines the concomitant emergence of new forms of acoustical embodiment across the diverse fields of literature and science in the historical period beginning with the Franco-Prussian War and ending with the introduction of early information theory in the late 1920s. In opposition to popular accounts of changes in listening practices around 1900, which typically take the disembodied voices of new media such as the phonograph and radio as true markers of acoustical modernity, the dissertation emphasizes the proliferation of new modes of embodied listening made possible by the explosion of urban and industrial noise, contemporary media technologies, the threat of auditory surveillance, and the imposition of self-observational and self-disciplinary practices as constitutive of artistic, scientific, and everyday life. In doing so, I show how distinct elements of modern soundscapes and corresponding techniques of listening informed both the key thematic and formal elements of literary modernism. In particular, I argue that modernism's often-cited narrative self-reflexivity drew on conceptions of a uniquely embodied listener and the newfound audibility of the body, and overlapped with contemporaneous scientific knowledge surrounding the physiology of the ear and the role of the body in the perception of sound. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of non-literary discourse on urban noise and the cacophony of the modern battlefield in formal developments central to late nineteenth-century literary aesthetics, taking the largely forgotten Austrian impressionist Peter Altenberg as my primary case study. In Chapter 2 I analyze the ways in which Franz Kafka appropriated elements of the modern soundscape and, in particular, ontological disorders common to the factory worker, in conceptualizing the mechanisms of the modern legal system and its epistemological and perceptual effects on its subjects. Chapter 3 again focuses on works by Kafka, this time juxtaposing scientific practices of self-observation within acoustical research with Kafka's literal and metaphorical figurations of self-auscultation and its function as a narrative strategy in "The Burrow" (1923/24). Chapters 4 and 5 sketch out a competing conception of hearing within Gestalt psychology, early stereophonic sound experiments, and literary texts by Robert Musil, which portray the modern listener as surprisingly active and confident in deciphering and navigating an increasingly complex auditory environment. In the process, the site of acoustical embodiment is displaced from the side of the subject to that of the object, engendering notions of "auditory things (Hördinge)" with physical, corporeal properties, which can be traced through space as three-dimensional entities. In the final chapter, I situate the effacement of the listener's body and simultaneous foregrounding of `auditory things' in Musil's novella, "The Blackbird (1928), against the backdrop of early information theory and non-corporeal notions of Rauschen (noise, rustling, static).

Toward a Poetics of Animality is a study of the place and function of animals in the works of four major modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. Through a series of close readings of canonical as well as lesser-known texts, I show how the so-called "Sprachkrise"- the crisis of language and representation that dominated European literature around 1900 - was inextricably bound up with an attendant crisis of anthropocentrism and of man's relationship to the animal. Since antiquity, man has been defined as the animal that has language; hence a crisis of language necessarily called into question the assumption of human superiority and the strict division between humans and animals on the basis of language. Furthermore, in response to author and critic John Berger's provocative suggestion that "the first metaphor was animal" I explore the essential and constantly reaffirmed link between animals and metaphorical language. The implication is that the poetic imagination and the problem of representation have always on some level been bound up with the figure of the animal. Thus, the "poetics of animality" I identify in the authors under examination gestures toward the origin of poetry and figurative language as such.

This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and appropriation of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, against the background of the contemporary international readings of Kafka, especially in West Germany. The first chapter examines Paul Eisner's translation of the Trial in the context of his influential triple "ghetto theory" and from the perspective of his contemporary translation discourse as well as recent translation theories. The second chapter focuses on the reception of Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka, and the reasons why this controversial text was welcomed in the West and dismissed in the East as a forgery. The chapter uses new archival discoveries about Janouch and discusses questions of witness and testimony. The role of "witness" took an ominous turn in the case of Eduard Goldstücker, who is the focus of the third chapter. Goldstücker was tried in the Slánský show trials in the early 1950s and forced to testify against Slánský. The chapter explores how Goldstücker attempted to come to terms with his past through reading of Kafka. The secret police files that were kept on him provide new insights on Goldstücker's published texts, public persona, and the Liblice Conference that succeeded in rehabilitating Kafka in 1963. The last chapter examines the samizdat publications of Kafka's works. This chapter spans the 1960s to the 1980s Underground culture and examines the appropriation by Ivan Jirous of the "ghetto" topos and Kafka for the Czech Underground. I address the following topics: the status of witness as a legitimization of an "authentic" reading, censorship, the interplay between politics and literature, and the construction of authorship.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-339). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Inaug.-diss.--Universität Basel. / "Die vorliegende Dissertation erscheint gleichzeitig als Buchausgabe im Philographischen Verlag/Basel." Curriculum vitae. "Benützte Literatur": p. 79-80.