Professor Joyce Hallamore has headed the Department of German at the University of British Columbia for almost twenty years. Those who have worked with her during this time and earlier have learned to appreciate her keen intellect and stimulating vitality, her profound sense of fairness, her responsiveness to any problem, be it academic or personal. ThisFestschriftis an expression of her students’ and colleagues’ high esteem and affection for her as a scholar and a person.

The essays in this present volume reflect a response to Miss Hallamore’s twofold interest. The first five essays have been contributed by past...

There are a number of clear references in Middle High German literature to the votive mass of the Holy Spirit, most of them in legends of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in the Arthurian romances. In almost all cases the mass is celebrated for the specific benefit of a character portrayed in the work, thus indicating the rather common belief in its supernatural efficacy. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the use of this special votive mass in German literature from 1150 to 1250 and thereby to illuminate its cultural and religious significance for the poets...

In the concluding remarks to his article “Brauchen wir ein neues Hartmannbild”¹ H. Sparnaay wrote:

Auf eins möchte ich noch hinweisen, weil es gerade für Hartmann von so großer Bedeutung ist, auf die so oft bei ihm hervortretende Macht des Symbols. Beispiele gibt es bei ihm zu Dutzenden. 1st denn der Arme Heinrich wirklich krank oder ist der geistige Aussatz, diesuperbiagemeint? Wo Heinrich in sich geht und diesuperbiaüberwindet, heilt Gott ihn auf der Stelle, so wie er einst den Papst Sylvester ermächtigte, den Kaiser mit der Taufe von dem geistigen Aussatz, dem Unglauben, zu heilen. Man...

Previous studies of theSchäfferey von der Nimfen Herciniesuggest that the most important scholarly question connected with Opitz’ once famous work is that of its literary sources and that, in turn, the principal verdict to emerge from such consideration is an indictment of the poet’s lack of originality.² Under these circumstances it is not surprising that critics generally ignored the fact that Opitz’ borrowings from Sannazaro’sArcadia, from Cicero, and many others, were, by the standards of seventeenth-century poetics, fully justified. Furthermore, no serious attempts have been made to evaluate Opitz’Herciniein its significance for the seventeenth-century reader....

A reader who expects to find in Schlegel’s essay, “Allgemeine Übersicht des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der deutschen Literatur,”¹ a discussion of the literature of the age will be sorely disappointed. Nevertheless, the essay is a rich source for the historian of ideas who wants to study the ideological reorientation that transpired between Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment, Schlegel charges, has made all ideas ever expressed by man in philosophy, poetry, religion, and ethics serve a rational and utilitarian purpose. For theAufklärer, neither life nor the universe hold any “mysteries”; rational explanations are at hand for everything: “Ein beschränkter endlicher Zweck...

The term “grotesque” appears but rarely in the writings of the sculptor-playwright Ernst Barlach. It must also be noted at the outset that very little investigation has been made of grotesquery in Barlach’s works or of its origin and place within his Weltanschauung, despite the great bulk of Barlach criticism in recent years. To be sure, some of his works have been loosely described as “grotesque,” but in fact, no major critic dealing specifically with the phenomenon of the grotesque has cited examples from Barlach’s works either in the formation of, or as support for his thesis. However, despite all...

“Eduard—so nennen wir einen reichen Baron im besten Mannesalter …”—with this famous beginning to Goethe’s novelDie Wahlverwandtschaften, the narrator makes it clear from the outset, and with only few words, how the novel is to be understood by the reader. He introduces himself in the interpolated clause; he takes the lead and clearly intends to keep it. He claims that this story is true and wishes to convince the reader of its authenticity. As the omniscient narrator, he knows all the events from the beginning to the end, but the actual name of the nobleman in this...

Many critics have shown how the essential optimism of Ferdinand Raimund’s dramas is weakened by tragic undertones.¹ Politzer suggests that the Baroque theatre, from which Raimund’s plays derive their metaphysical framework, may be seen as the expression not only of belief in a cosmic order, but more disquietingly, of man’s insignificance in the larger scheme of things.² Thus, the course of human existence in Raimund’s dramas seems largely determined by hosts of spirits and allegorical personifications in constant conflict with one another. In constructing such mythology, Rommel writes, Raimund not only upholds Viennese theatrical tradition, but also gives expression to...

There is a certain quality about Raabe’s writings which has consistently puzzled and fascinated critics. They all refer to it in different ways but are obviously trying to say the same thing. Wilhelm Fehse, the author of the first substantial work on Raabe—a somewhat emotional but sensitive book—puts it as follows : “Ein Schleier tagheller Mystik umwebt das Werk, unter dem die Umrisse der Wirklichkeit klar und kantig genug erscheinen, der aber unmittelbar auch den Glauben zerstört, daß diese Wirklichkeit Entscheidendes vom Wesen der Dinge auszusagen vermag.”¹ The statement makes good sense; however, Fehse is obviously aided by...

The only essay dealing specifically with Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin was published some thirty-eight years ago.² At that time, both writers enjoyed considerable fame both in Germany and abroad. Mann had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; and in the same year, 1929, Döblin’sBerlin Alexanderplatzhad been published, a great novel for which he is justly famous, but which has been praised by critics to the detriment of his other works and—in Döblin’s own opinion—praised for the wrong reason.³ Today, when eleven volumes of Döblin’sAusgewählte Werke⁴ provide us for the first time with...

The curious blending of fact with fiction in Thomas Mann’sDoktor Faustus, his extensive use of a montage technique in the biography of Adrian Leverkühn, has claimed the attention of many of the novel’s commentators in the twenty years since its appearance in 1947. InDie Entstehung des Doktor Faustus(1949), where Mann gave his own account of the novel’s composition, he revealed some of the sources used in this modern re-creation of the Faust myth.²Die Entstehungconfirmed what many had already discovered for themselves: Leverkühn wasmorethan merely Faust. A number of biographies, including that of the...

Brecht was very much a didactic, public poet, and he made no bones about it. In the poem “Ich benötige keinen Grabstein”² (quoted below) he says of himself that he “machte Vorschläge,” and Mayer quotes him as saying in an interview: “Schildern Sie mich einfach als das, was ich bin, als Lehrer.”² Brecht was driven by a strong desire to arouse, instruct, and change his readers. Poetry is perhaps not as well suited as drama to the “verbindliche, belehrende, gesellschaftlich verändernde Aufgabe” of which Mayer speaks (p. 116), but with Brecht it most certainly takes on that function. Klotz speaks...

The death of Otto Flake in 1963, at the age of 83, has led a few German critics to do a measure of soul-searching in their obituaries. Some of them without minimizing their own lack of concern while Flake was still alive, have pointed accusingly at the Germanists whose task it would have been to assign Flake his due place, and to publishers who failed to re-edit, after the Second World War, some of his lighter and more saleable novels. Flake was at that time in dire financial circumstances and had made an attempt at suicide.

It should not prove...