Das Volk bilden: The Pursuit of Volkstümlichkeit by Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gottfried Herder examines the theorization of the concept of the Volk and Volkstümlichkeit by three authors from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gottfried Herder. The term “volkstümlich” has no exact equivalent in English, although it has been rendered as “popular” “folkish” or even the slightly pejorative “folksy.” In German, it expresses both the quality of something proper to a given people or Volk, and the notion of popularity or commonness at which the English terms gesture. I analyze how these authors aim to expand the contemporaneous reading public by shaping the reading practices of audiences otherwise ignored by traditional belletristic literature. It also interrogates how they conceive of the Volk as a co-producer of literature and culture. Each author uses the terms “Volk” and “Volkstümlichkeit” in programmatic texts to refer to shared characteristics among a given people and as a distinction between high and low culture. All three also pursue the goal of creating a widespread reading public through their own literary practices: Herder in his collections of song and poetry, Heine in his poetry, criticism and journalism, and Auerbach through a thematic focus on the village in his fiction and the serial form of the Volkskalender in his role as editor. Each of them pursues a program that is both national and cosmopolitan, writing as they did during a period when invocation of the Volk was not yet primarily the province of conservative nationalists. Chapter one shows how Berthold Auerbach used his dual role as author of the immensely popular Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten and as editor of and contributor to various Volkskalender to elevate the way of life he portrays. In doing so, he aimed at uniting the disparate audiences of the common people and the educated, as well as urban and rural populations into a single Volk. Chapter two focuses on several key texts of Heinrich Heine’s to show that he conceived of the Volk as an ideal addressee capable of resolving the contradictions that plague civilization. Contrary to much of the scholarship that sees a pessimistic turn in Heine’s later work, I use his many remarks on the common people throughout his work to draw out a utopian, trans-historical element in his thinking. Two early texts by Johann Gottfried Herder, Über die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente and the Volkslieder project, make up the focus of the third chapter. By importing genres associated with oral traditions and performance into his collections, together with texts by Shakespeare, Herder effaces existing distinctions between popular forms and high literature. The chapter shows that Herder conceives of the Volk not just as a public, but as active participants in literary world-making. My dissertation intervenes in existing scholarship on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by centering Volk as one of the defining concepts of the era and demonstrating how different literary media has been used to imagine and establish relations to it.

This thesis identifies strategies of queer/irony in the writings of Lord Byron, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Fontane, and Oscar Wilde. Key to the understanding of irony is Friedrich Schlegel's re-evaluation of the concept. The thesis establishes an approach to the multifaceted concept of irony and identify key concepts of queer theory. The focus, however, is close reading. First, Lord Byron's epic satire Don Juan is read with regards to the interplay of narrative strategies and the depiction of gender, homoeroticism and the concept of the child. Furthermore, reviews published at the time of the publication of Don Juan are examined: Why did the reviewers reject the work so violently? Second, in Heine's Buch der Lieder we find ironic strategies that Richard Rorty subsumed into the concept of 'final vocabularies.' By acknowledging the formulaic nature of language in general and Romantic tropes in particular, Heine succeeds in subverting a heteronormative discourse on love and desire. Heine's Reisebilder – 'Die Reise von München nach Genua' and 'Die Bäder von Lucca' – depict the limits of queer/irony: Where meaning is fixed, as in the case of the Platen polemic, irony loses its propensity to contain multitudes. Third, Theodor Fontane's novels of adultery are read against the background of irony as established through a Schlegelian reading of Frau Jenny Treibel and a queer reading of Ellernklipp. The novels Unwiederbringlich and Effi Briest question notions of truth and map the danger of knowledge. At the core of this chapter lies the notion of 'knowledge management,' a strategy closely related to irony. The figure of the courtier Pentz in Unwiederbringlich becomes a harbinger of dangerous, queer knowledge similar to the way Crampas' use of Heine quotations negotiates sexually suggestive knowledge in Effi Briest. In a final step, the aforementioned queer/ironic strategies are employed to read texts by Oscar Wilde. Are the strategies as inferred in the other chapters valid for Wilde's writings as well? We find that, in a time where homoerotic behaviour was heavily sanctioned, ironic writing had become a liability. Wilde's ironies are too opaque for the reader: They have become a movement where nobody is allowed to 'play along'.