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 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...

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...