German Studies and Literary Studies

The crudely funny clown, the quick-witted Kasper, the violent Punch or the melancholic Pierrot - as playwrights, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer and Gerhard Rühm staged one 'funny' character after the other in their mini-plays from the 50s and 60s . What is it all about when 'hanswurst' is having sexual fun on stage, when 'kasper' causes unrest in the midst of the military or police, when 'punch' curses at the audience and throws his child out of the window,...

This anthology by students of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich offers access to the skeptical hermeneutics and the normality of the foreign by Hans Hunfeld from different individual and culture-specific perspectives. They range from hermeneutic self-assurances and cross-cultural studies to extensions to intercultural competence, philosophical basic work and a review of the method in the teaching context to a rich collection of reviews from the past decades and current references to practice, teaching and research. Other essays deal with anxiety at school,...

This work demonstrates the importance of pre-modern or irrational values ​​(curses, superstition, myths, witches and natural healers versus doctors, fetishism) in a comparative perspective in the threatening experience of the globalizing process of modernization in Theodor Fontane and black African poets of the modern age. They bring solutions where the achievements of modern civilization alone cannot work. Both literatures therefore claim the primacy of these irrational values ​​in a civilization-historical world in which metaphysical problems challenge the rational mind. In...

Courtship is a central theme of medieval poetry. However, the women are mainly negotiated as objects of exchange. The Kudrun seal occupies a special position. Even with the title "Ditz puech ist von Chaudrun" she points out the special position of women. It is structured through the courtship of four successive generations. The Kudrun poetry shows an increase from harmless to dangerous courtship. For this reason it can be assumed that in the Hilde part one can speak of an...

TheWigalois of Wirnt von Grafenberg describes the life of Gawein's son Gwigalois. The main plot is preceded by a backstory about the protagonist's parents, while the narrative ends with a wish for a sequel about the exploits of Gawein's grandson, Lifort Gawanides. The present study takes its starting point from the observation that the hero's family affiliation is a fundamental motif in Wigalois. The novel not only describes a basic form of genealogical continuity through the transition from father to son....

Since the middle of the 12th century, marriage between Christians and Gentiles was customarily forbidden in the Catholic Church due to Impedimentum disparitas cultus (the difference in religion). Nevertheless, marriage was possible if the partner had previously converted. If this requirement was not fulfilled, the marriage was declared invalid even after the marriage had already taken place. In medieval society, the issue of marriage law was a very controversial subject. The problem is illustrated using the works of Wolfram von...

Our modern world is dominated by a flood of images. It is therefore of great interest to investigate how images can also be used efficiently in language textbooks in such a way that learning success is optimized. Surprisingly, there is still little literature on the use of images in language textbooks and especially on their intercultural aspects. The sentence from Sturm (1994) still applies: intercultural understanding of images is one of the big "blank spots" in image research. This book...

The concept of postmodernism has become a central concept in the humanities discourse since the 1970s. Together with the term poststructuralism, it describes a departure from the basic intellectual assumptions of modernity. What is often overlooked, however, is that the term has a different meaning in the philosophical context than in the original literary context. While the concept of philosophical postmodernism was constituted in contrast to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the concept of postmodernism was originally used in literature...