German I: Pop Goes the Canon!

Session Coordinator: Jenifer Cushman

The College of Wooster

JCushman@wooster.edu

PANEL A: WRITTEN TEXTS AND FILM TEXTS
(moderator Mueller)

Sorcerer’s Apprentice: From Lucian through Goethe to Walt Disney

Min Zhou

The title of Sorcerer’s Apprentice is often associated with Walt Disney’s production of “Fantasia”. It is little known, however, that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the English name of a 1797 ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Der Zauberlehrling in German). Goethe, in turn, based his poem on a story in Philoseudes by Lucian of Samosata, written in AD 150.

How do the various versions of Sorcerer’s Apprentice differ from one another? In this paper, I will use the approach of “sociology of knowledge” to examine the social, historical and cultural background and the literary context of these three “texts” and to trace a transformation that Sorcerer’s Apprentice has undergone in the last two thousand years.

Lucian, a poet of the Roman Empire, first composed a prose about a sorcerer’s apprentice in Greek. Goethe developed the story into a ballad with a different moral. Because of his use of German, a national language, and his subtle and humorous narration, Sorcerer’s Apprentice becomes a popular piece in German literature, cited and referred to even in contemporary German-speaking countries. Walt Disney’s film production, on the other hand, made the story known worldwide. Although Goethe’s name does not come up in the film, and the moral of the film differs from that of Goethe’s poem, a much broader audience increasingly turns to Goethe’s poem after watching the film.

As shown during this process, canons do not necessarily exclude popular culture; on the contrary, pop could help canons become more easily accessible and get more people interested in canons. However, pop does not seem to all canons. According to Aristotle, poetics could be divided into two categories: the comedy and the tragedy. While the former is to entertain, the latter is to instruct. The success of the popularization of Sorcerer’s Apprentice lies, to a great degree, in its comic character. As for the question how to make tragedy popular, it still needs to be explored.

The Golem in Meyrink and Wegener

Jenifer Cushman

As an embodiment of the aberrant Other, the monster in literature and film can represent an anomalous social order, or an undesirable ethnic group. In his book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen refers to monsters as “uncertain cultural bodies […] [that] ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them” (20). Monstrous representations of social orders or ethnic group are most often hunted and destroyed as dangerous threats to the norm, but they can also cause us to look more closely at what we consider to be normal. This presentation will explore how the Golem functions as social commentary in literature and film set in Habsburg-controlled Mitteleuropa.

"Der Himmel über Berlin: A visual poem. Peter Handke, Wim Wenders: the word and the gaze; poetics and politics of the angels."

Philippe Costaglioli

Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon and its Adaptation of Georg Buechner’s Woyzeck

Inga Meier

Georg Buechner died on February 19, 1837 at the age of 23. Because his early death left subsequent chapters of his life unwritten, it is impossible to place Buechner’s works into a rigid ideological context, thus allowing for multiple (sometimes contradicting) interpretations.

Of all of Buechner’s works, his unfinished play fragment Woyzeck is the most vulnerable to this sort of analysis. Woyzeck is a unique canonical text in the sense that it simulataneosly does and does not exist. The remaining manuscripts consist of two complete earlier drafts, one unfinished “final” draft and two individual scene fragments.

Given the state of the manuscripts, scholars have, over the years, taken a variety of approaches to piece together a viable performance text from the remaining fragments. The play has been produced countless times, turned into an opera and been the subject of numerous film adaptations. Though all of these productions have certain commonalities, they also represent a wide variety of textual and interpretive choices.

The most recent film adaptation of Woyzeck is Niels Mueller’s 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Though the film is loosely based on Samuel Byck’s failed 1974 attempt to assassinate Richard Nixon, the story is ultimately a retelling of Buechner’s Woyzeck. As Mueller stated in an interview with “Vue Weekly” shortly after the film was released:

I think Sam Byck […] spring[s] from, or owe[s] a […] debt to, Georg Buechner’s early 19th-century play Woyzeck. […] I certainly stole from the film of Woyzeck by Werner Herzog.

This paper will explore the particular ways in which The Assassination of Richard Nixon serves as an adaptation of Buechner’s Woyzeck.

PANEL B: OTHER TEXTS
(moderator Cushman)

Nach dem Film ist vor dem Film. National Identity and Soccer in German Film and Music
Rebecca Raham

Sadomasochistic Eroticism as Narrative Fetish in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader

Andrea Powell Jenkins

Bernhard Schlink’s complex characterization and multifaceted plotline in The Reader certainly play at profundity, but, in the end, the novel seems to stop short of realizing any coherent commentary on any of the diverse topics that it undertakes to examine. Michael Berg, who narrates the novel, collapses two very different narrative strands, one that depicts the unusual romantic relationship that developed during his teenage years between himself and a much older Hanna Schmitz and one that attempts to understand Hanna as a former Nazi criminal, in a “second-generation” attempt to make sense of Germany’s unsavory past. By exploring the sadomasochistic dynamics of his relationship with Hanna, Michael feels as if he is working through his nation’s terrifying guilt and his “second generation” shame. His story, then, functions as a narrative fetish—it covers for the real trauma in his (and/or Schlink’s) life. I argue that we can read the conflation of Michael’s two narrative strands, and Schlink’s deployment of narrative fetish, as telling of the cultural climate in Germany during the postwar years up until the present day.

Examining The Reader in this light is especially pertinent considering its phenomenal popular success. It has been received by critics, both German and English-speaking, favorably. The novel has earned a place on Oprah's own bookshelf as a selection for her infamous Book Club and is slated to be released as a Miramax film within the next couple of years. As narrative fetish, The Reader assumes the importance of working through Holocaust guilt and, all the while, covertly reassures us that the trauma of the Holocaust has been sufficiently felt and “dealt with” by Germans and non-Germans alike.

Modern Classics – Rammstein’s music and German canonical texts and classical music
Martina Lüke

Due to actual billboard charts Rammstein is the most successful German band internationally. With provocative and impressive lyrics, soft to hard rock music, controversial texts and video clips, the Berlin group has become a world wide known phenomenon, especially in the United States, within a couple of years. I claim that many of the lyrics deal with classical German literature and music and therefore should be added to the curriculum.

For example, Dalai Lama from the album Reise, Reise is a modern version of one of Germany’s most famous ballads: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Erlkönig. The lyrics and the structure are almost identical: While father and son travel in the Erlkönig horseback, Reise Reise describes the deadly trip in an airplane. Another song, Hilf mir from the Album Rosenrot can be seen as a new interpretation of the German childbook classic Struwelpeter while the video of Sonne from the album Mutter plays with the fairy tale Snowhite of the Gebrüder Grimm.

Lyrics can easily be compared with German baroque love ballads from Martin Opitz or Andreas Gryphius, e.g. Morgenstern or Ohne Dich from Rammstein’s Reise Reise. Others, such as Heirate mich from the album Herzeleid, dealing with necrophilia, and Stein um Stein from the album Reise, Reise, describing the immurement of a beloved, show similarities to the pathological and morbid lyric of the expressionists Gottfried Benn or Georg Heym.

There are many approaches thinkable. Including Dalai Lama in the syllabus could lead to a close text analysis and a comparison of the classical and the modern texts. The music of Rammstein includes choir, for example the Dresdner Kammerchor in Morgenstern, or the string arrangements in Ohne Dich und Stein um Stein. In addition to a textual analysis the Rammstein’s musical versions can be compared to classical music versions, for example Franz Schuberts variation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Erlkönig or Joseph von Haydns string quartets. For both text and music, classroom questions could be: Where are similarities? What are classical and modern aspects? What is the cultural background? The answers could be given in written, oral or artistic single or group presentations.

In my experience, a majority of students knows the group Rammstein as well as its lyrics and are fascinated with the play of words in German, the easily to recognizable texts and the impressive music. Why not use this already existing enthusiasm and motivation and combine it with the treatment of classical German canonical texts and music? Why not include students’ personal interest and modern versions in the lesson plan? Language and culture are ongoing processes and we should not forget the present when we look at the past.