This study of 1930s German fiction adds a new dimension to existing scholarship on the depiction of crowds in literature. Whereas previous surveys on the topic have predominantly focused on the crowd as a revolutionary phenomenon judged on the basis of class perspectives, or as a feature of mass society, this investigation deals specifically with reactions to the crowd in its incarnation as a manifestation of and symbol for political fascism. Drawing on a number of contemporaneous theoretical treatises on crowds and mass psychology, it seeks to demonstrate that war, extreme socio-political upheaval and the rise of Nazism produced intense multidisciplinary engagement with the subject among German-speaking intellectuals of the period, and examines the portrayal of crowds in works by selected literary authors in this context. Exploring the interplay between literature and concurrent theoretical works, the thesis asks how writers used specific possibilities of fiction to engage with the theme of the crowd at a time when the worth of art was often questioned by literary authors themselves. In doing so, it challenges the implication of earlier criticism that authors uncritically appropriated the findings of theoretical texts for fictional purposes. At the same time, it becomes clear that although some literary crowd portrayals support a distinction between the nature of theoretical and literary writing, certain crowd theories are as imaginative as they are positivistic. Extrapolating from textual comparisons, the thesis thus challenges the view held by some authors that knowledge produced by theoretical enquiry was somehow truer and more valuable than artistic responses to the politics of the age.

The nature of life after death is only tentatively sketched out in the canonical writings of the Christian Church, yet it represents one of the most prominent literary subjects in medieval Europe. The so-called Visiones represent a genre that enjoyed a particularly broad dissemination between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. This study aims to assess the impact of this Latin tradition on Norse-Icelandic authors and processes of cultural appropriation evident in medieval vernacular adaptations of the genre. The first chapter outlines the historical and theological conditions surrounding the genre’s dissemination in Western Scandinavia and identifies the primary corpus of vernacular adaptations of the genre to be analysed in this study. Chapter II considers the literary contexts in which Visio-conventions have been integrated, highlighting the distinctive generic and creative diversity exhibited in the primary corpus. Chapters III and IV are concerned with the literary motif of the journey to the otherworld and its importance in Old Norse literary traditions across the period of Christianisation. The former examines signs of continuity on a conceptual level between traditional native and Christian narratives about the otherworld, suggesting that the journey motif represented a sustained source of literary creativity in pre- and post-conversion societies. The latter examines this notion of continuity with reference to two significant literary symbols, the otherworld shoe and the otherworld bridge, and their pregnant resonances in Norse Icelandic records of myth, law, and religious ritual; it will here be shown how certain symbols found in vernacular accounts of the afterlife produce a rich set of connotations meaningful within their particular cultural setting. The final Chapter analyses the social mentality encoded in portrayals of the idealised hereafter, and it will be argued that portrayals of eschatological justice and the topography of heaven reflect attitudes characteristic of the societies from which these visions emerge. The thesis as a whole thereby calls attention to the broad and deep nature of the Visio genre’s impact on Western Scandinavian literary culture, suggesting that this particular genre-oriented study may serve as a case study of the reception of Christian literary traditions in medieval Iceland and Norway more generally.

This thesis examines the function of commemorative skaldic verse at the Viking-age court. The first chapter demonstrates that the commemoration of past kings could provide a prestigious genealogical record that was used to legitimize both pagan and early Christian rulers. In the ninth and early tenth centuries, poets crafted competing genealogies to assert the primacy of their patrons and of their patrons’ religions. The second chapter looks at the work of tenth-century poets who depict their rulers’ entrances into the afterlife. Such poets interrogate the role public speech and poetic discourse play in the commemoration of the king, especially during the political turmoil that follows his death. A discussion follows of the relationship between poets and their patrons in the tenth and eleventh centuries: although this relationship is often praised as one of mutual trust and reliance, the financial aspects of the relationship were often juxtaposed uneasily with expressions of emotional attachment. The death of the patron caused a crisis in these seemingly contradictory bonds between poet and patron. The final chapter demonstrates the dramatic development in the eleventh century of deeply emotional commemorative verse as poets become adopted into their patrons’ families through such Christian ceremonies as baptism and marriage. In these verses poets express their grief after the death of the king and record the performances of public mourning on the part of the kings’ followers. As the petty warlords of the Viking age adapted to medieval models of Christian kingship, the role of the skald changed too. Formerly serving as a propagandist and retainer in the king’s service, a skald documenting the lives of kings at the end of the Viking age could occupy an almost infinite number of roles, from kinsman and friend to advisor and hagiographer.

Responding to the common plea in medieval inscriptions to ráð rétt rúnar, to ‘interpret the runes correctly’, this thesis provides a series of contextual readings of the runic topos in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry. The first chapter looks at the use of runes in the Old English riddles, examining the connections between material riddles and certain strategies used in the Exeter Book, and suggesting that runes were associated with a self-referential and engaged form of reading. Chapter 2 seeks a rationale for the use of runic abbreviations in Old English manuscripts, and proposes a poetic association with unlocking and revealing, as represented in Bede’s story of Imma. Chapter 3 considers the use of runes for their ornamental value, using 'Solomon and Saturn I' and the rune poems as examples of texts which foreground the visual and material dimension of writing, whilst Chapter 4 compares the depiction of runes in the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda with epigraphical evidence from the Migration Age, seeking to dispel the idea that they reflect historical practice. The final chapter looks at the construction of a mythology of writing in the Edda, exploring the ways in which myth reflects the social impacts of literacy. Taken together these approaches highlight the importance of reading the runes in poetry as literary constructs, the script often functioning as a form of metawriting, used to explore the parameters of literacy, and to draw attention to the process of writing itself.

This thesis examines post-1990 representations of growing up in the Third Reich within German culture. It has two primary aims: to demonstrate how childhood is recalled, represented, and imagined by those with, and without first-hand experience of Nazism; and to situate these narratives as a central part of the post-Unification discourse about identity in the Berlin Republic. The material is organised into five chapters: it begins with an analysis of recent museum displays and exhibitions, followed by German cinema (Hitlerjunge Salomon, NaPolA: Elite für den Führer); autobiographical works, by former members of the Hitler Youth (Günter de Bruyn, Martin Walser, Günter Grass) and by Jewish children (Ruth Klüger, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Günter Kunert); and finally, imagined accounts of growing up in the Third Reich (W.G. Sebald, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Gudrun Pausewang). Through close readings of primary sources, and analysis of their reception, including the public debates which they sparked, this study shows how these narratives interact with historical and contemporary notions of childhood. They are informed by the concern, embedded within post-Unification discourse, that the wealth of documentary and technical accounts of Nazism obscures the individual’s understanding of those events and what it was like to experience them. I argue that because of the close conceptual association between childhood and origins, these narratives contribute to a discourse about how the Third Reich is to be remembered, performing a 'search for a usable childhood'. This is situated within the context of Harald Welzer's notion of 'gefühlte Geschichte'; that is a mode of historical discourse focused on experience, rather than 'factual knowledge', and which appeals to emotions. In assessing narratives of growing up – which take a developmental view of childhood – this study seeks to open up previously rigid categorisations of childhood as found in literary studies which focus on the function of the child’s perspective as a literary device. Thus within a crowded research area the present study offers a differentiated treatment of these works.

The thesis focuses on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800, and has two primary aims: to demonstrate the importance of idealist thought for contemporary approaches to tragedy and the tragic; and to revise the intellectual historiography of the classic phase in German letters. It traces reflection on Greek tragedy from the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in France around 1700 through the aesthetic systems formulated in Germany around 1800. Two intellectual developments are emphasized: the historicist consciousness that develops throughout the eighteenth century and places Greek tragedy more radically in its cultural context than ever before; and the idealist philosophy of art, which seeks to restore a measure of universality to the ancient genre, seeing it as the manifestation of a timeless quality of ‘the tragic.’ These two impulses, historicizing and universalizing, it is argued, are fundamental to modern understanding of Greek tragedy. The genealogical method seeks to establish a greater continuity with earlier eighteenth-century thought than is generally recognized, and to refute the teleologies that dominate accounts of idealist thought. A reconstruction of the central texts of Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin reveals that the theory of tragedy around 1800 is in large part a reflection on history, an effort to understand how ancient literature can be meaningful in modernity. Greek tragedy becomes the ground for an engagement with the pastness of antiquity and its possible presence. Idealist theories, far from dissolving particularity in abstraction, seek a mediation between philological historicism and philosophical universalism in considering Greek tragedy. A genealogy of the tragic suggests that such mediation remains a vital task for scholars of the Classics.

„Protokolle oder Porträts?“ ist eine Genre-Frage, die sich bei Maxie Wanders „Guten Morgen, du Schöne“ angesichts des Untertitels der DDR-Ausgaben, „Protokolle nach Tonband“, nicht auf Anhieb stellt. Dass es sich trotz des anders lautenden Paratextes bei den 19 Frauengeschichten um Porträts handelt, belegt diese Magisterarbeit insbesondere durch die Rekonstruktion der Arbeitsweise der Autorin (II.2.2) und die Analyse der Übergänge zwischen Fiktionalem und Dokumentarischem in den Porträts „Petra“, „Lena“ und „Ruth“ (III.). Neben diesem textzentrierten Zugang wird auch der historische Kontext, in dem das Buch 1977 in der DDR, 1978 in der BRD erschien, beleuchtet. Wie wichtig ein kritischer Umgang mit der Lizenzausgabe „Guten Morgen, du Schöne. Frauen in der DDR. Protokolle. Mit einem Vorwort von Christa Wolf“ ist, zeigt die Analyse der ersten und zweiten DDR-Ausgabe im Vergleich mit der ersten, von Maxie Wander nicht-autorisierten, BRD-Lizenzausgabe, die zudem neue Hintergründe zur Entstehung und Publikation von „Guten Morgen, du Schöne“ offenlegt (II.3). Die – durch die Genre-Bezeichnung im Untertitel beeinflusste – Abwertung des Werkes in der BRD als „Dokumentarliteratur“ wird durch einen Forschungsüberblick zum Thema Dokumentarliteratur innerhalb der Bundesrepublik und – erstmals ausführlich – innerhalb der DDR verdeutlicht. Es treten gravierende Unterschiede in der Beurteilung von Dokumentarliteratur zutage. Indem „Guten Morgen, du Schöne“ in der Bundesrepublik in den Diskurs der „Frauenliteratur“ eingeordnet wird, wird es nochmals stigmatisiert (IV.). Ziel der Arbeit ist eine Aufwertung des Werkes „Guten Morgen, du Schöne“ und deren Autorin – nicht Herausgeberin – Maxie Wander. Die zentrale These, dass das Buch stark bearbeitet und fiktionalisiert worden ist, konnte durch Archivarbeit, Korrespondenzen mit der Nachlassverwalterin Maxie Wanders, Susanne Wander, und mit dem damaligen stellvertretenden Verlagsdirektor und Cheflektor des Buchverlags Der Morgen, Heinfried Henniger, sowie Arbeit mit Dokumenten aus Maxie Wanders Nachlass belegt werden.

"Die schmale Brücke" ist eine Dreiecksgeschichte, die das Ringen zweier ungleicher Männer um eine junge Frau schildert. Der fleißige und solide Mittelschulrektor Peter Hansen, der unter der Kinderlosigkeit und Kälte seiner Frau leidet, trifft nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg seinen "Jugendfeind", den redegewandten, bei den Damen hoch beliebten Werner Hagemann wieder, welcher im Zug die Lehrerin Ursula Wüstenhagen kennengelernt hat, eine Kollegin Peter Hansens, in die dieser sich verliebt hat. In schwüler Gesprächsatmosphäre entwickelt sich eine Rivalität, die zunehmend bedrohliche Züge annimmt. Mordgedanken keimen auf. Schließlich fordert Peter Hansen, auf ein Gottesurteil hoffend, Werner Hagemann zu einem lebensgefährlichen Kräftemessen auf einer Brücke auf. Die Erzählung ist das einzige Werk von F. E. Peters, das im Lehrermilieu spielt. Verwoben mit der spannungsreichen Dreiecksbeziehung sind Themen der Frauenemanzipation und modernen Pädagogik sowie zahlreiche literarische Reminiszenzen an den "Zauberberg" oder auch an Goethe und Hölderlin, insbesondere in der zentralen Frage der "Schicksalswürdigkeit". Der ursprünglich von Peters gewählte Titel ("Der Schicksalswürdige") wurde auf Wunsch des Verlages in "Die schmale Brücke" geändert.

Eine aus der 1975 posthum veröffentlichten "Baasdörper Krönk" entwickelte Geschichte, die F.E. Peters in hochdeutscher Sprache veröffentlicht hat. Es geht um die Liebesgeschichte, aber auch den kleinen Machtkampf zwischen einem verwitweten Bauern mit vier Kindern und seiner Haushälterin, die für den Geschmack des angehenden Ehemannes zu viel Wert auf Äußerlichkeiten legt. „Staken und Bretter dienen dazu, das Fassungsvermögen eines Leiterwagens zu steigern.“ Der Ausdruck wird in Baasdorf im übertragenen Sinn für Anzeichen eines übertriebenen Geltungsbedürfnisses gebraucht. Berühmt ist die zu der Erzählung gehörende Episode aus der "Baasdörper Krönk" wegen des Ausspruchs von Johann-Detlef: „Dar fohrt Puls [hier: Thun] mit Tante längs.“ (Krönk, S. 67, Staken und Bretter, S. 8). In der "Krönk" folgen sprachsoziologisch interessante Ausführungen des Erzählers zu den vier Gründen, warum der Ausspruch von Johann-Detlef, der die Geziertheit der Haushälterin parodiert, im Dorf zu einem Lacherfolg wird. Nach Baasdorfer Meinung heißt es „föhrt“ und nicht „fahrt“, außerdem „lang“ und nicht „längs“. Zu allem Überfluss lässt sich die Haushälterin von den Kindern „Tante“ nennen, „wat ok dumm Tüüch weer“ und schließlich nennt sie Hansjörn Puls (hier: Ehler Thun) beim Nachnamen. Johann-Detlef macht also mit seinem Spott mobil gegen die Haushälterin, denn der Gebrauch des Hochdeutschen wird in Baasdorf als ein Zeichen von Hochnäsigkeit gewertet: „So’n Lö, de – mit een Woort geseggt – ümmer höger schieten wüllt, as se den Mors hebbt, de nehmt wi erst mal en betjen in’e Maak; de mööt erstmal wat ümlehren.“ (Krönk, S. 67). In der "Krönk" geht der sich später fortsetzende eheliche Kampf um „Staken und Bretter“ anders und weniger harmonisch aus als in der Erzählung.

Anekdoten und Beobachtungen zu Denk- und Verhaltensweisen in der norddeutschen Provinz mit sensibler Charakterisierung des ländlichen Lebensrhythmus. Die vierte und die fünfte Geschichte findet man auch in der "Baasdörper Krönk". „Unterschiedliche Moden“ ist eine Hommage an Timm Kröger.