Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Roma n. 96/2020 del 25 ottobre 2020
978-88-5754-753-4
1720-514X
Biannual
Cultura e Letteratura Tedesca
Peer Review
La rivista attualmente è presente nell'elenco delle riviste di classe A per l'area 10 dell'Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca (ANVUR) ai fini dell'Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale
Università di Ferrara
The paper deals with the presence of Wolfgang Hildesheimer in the German literary field. On the one hand, it focuses on the Hildesheimer’s role in literary companions from the ‘90s to the present days. On the other hand, it investigates the presence of Hildesheimer in the public sphere, in relation to the aesthetic and ethic intentions of the Group 47. In the last chapter, some hypotheses are proposed to explain the reasons why Hildesheimer occupies a non-influential position in the contemporary German literary field.
The paper investigates Hildesheimer’s relationship to Judaism through the analysis of two main elements. The first one is the correspondence between the author and his parents who lived in Palestine/Israel: it started in the second half of the 1930s and stopped in 1962. The second one is the author’s radio speech Mein Judentum (1978); here,
Hildesheimer’s attitude is complex, provocative and paradoxical. Judaism did not play a marginal role in the author’s life; he mainly felt it as Heimatlosigkeit, but also as a belonging to a community that was fated, and often imposed and determined by external pressure and antisemitism.
Between 1954 and 1963 Hildesheimer proposed four different versions of the theatrical fable Turandot, well known in Europe mainly thanks to the Carlo Gozzi’s play (1762) and the F. Schiller’s later rendition (1802). Hildesheimer distanced himself both from the Gozzi/Schiller tradition and from other nineteenth- twentieth-century versions, by focusing rather than on the main character – the Princess Turandot – on another figure, who was not present in the traditional versions: the fake Prince of Astrakhan. This new character is an adventurer/ artist, who is able to break the rules of the trial the story is centered around, unmasking the power games in the Peking Court. Throughout the following decade, Hildesheimer then turned the figure of the adventurer/artist/forger, provocatively recommitted, into an intellectual capable of social and political involvement.
This paper aims to examine the Hildesheimer’s rewriting of the Helen myth. In Das Opfer Helena, the author links the character of Helen to the theme of the scapegoat. The goal of Helen’s sacrifice is not to highlight feelings of guilt, but it involves a more crucial issue: human relationships within the nonsense of life. The analysis of Helen’s psychology becomes an interesting opportunity that Hildesheimer exploits in order to point out the imperfection of mankind.
This critical study aims to examine historical realism in Hildesheimer’s dramaturgy on the basis that his notion of Absurd does not originate from a purely existential perspective, nor from a merely aesthetic intent. In this respect, the play Nachtstück (1963) reveals significant references to the traumatic memory of Auschwitz and to the ‘question of guilt’ in West Germany, which represented a long-term unresolved issue during the post-war decades.
This paper deals with an array of diverse and yet interrelated topics, such as the Irish folklore and its musical legacy, James Joyce and his Finnegans Wake, in order to think, through its relevance to Hildesheimer’s understanding of art and literature, how and to what extent these elements affected the author’s poetics. Despite starting from Hildesheimer’s scholarly works, the essay especially focuses on his stylistic choices in translating the Anna Livia Plurabelle section into German, so as to retrospectively appreciate his compelling reasons to embark on such an ambitious venture.
According to the writer and translator Hildesheimer, writing and translating are similar and partly coincidental activities. As a translator, Hildesheimer mainly worked on translations from English to German, and his only published work from German to English was Kafka’s short story Elf Söhne. Apart from his translating practice, he produced some theoretical annotations that, despite not representing a consistent contribution to the theory and methodology of translation, can be very interesting in order to draw a picture of the author’s sober poetics. Hildesheimer’s reflections on translating, in fact, can be seen as a corollary to his conception of writing as ‘transcendence’. This concept, introduced in his essay The End of Fiction (1975), serves to illustrate the writer’s ability to penetrate and give shape to the aspects of reality perceived as authentic.
The essay tries to analyze the Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s meddling in the field of art criticism. His capability, in his literary biography Marbot (1981) and already in his novel Paradies des falschen Vögel (1953), of mixing and quoting art sources in a mystifying way has subverted every traditional stylistic and historiographical investigation. The aim of the author was to criticize the long-established system raised in the first half of the 19th century. His meeting with the surrealistic movement in Great Britain at the edge of the Second World War, however, was crucial for his literary and artistic research in the field of art criticism.
My contribution attempts to investigate the intertwining of art and life in Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot as a manifold process that touches upon the notions of authorship, authenticity, legitimation and fictionality. Hildesheimer himself stated that in Marbot he was biographer and autobiographer at the same time. When the biographical text cannot refer to an extratextual reference whose factual basis stands the test of truth beyond any reasonable doubt, the authenticity of the main character of a mock-biography lies precisely in its fictionality.
The article provides a description of the Hildesheimer’s attitude toward music across the boundary of literary works and essays. Three main issues emerge here: the representation of music as a symptom of the end and a prefiguration of death; the critical stance against the ideology of authenticity in music and the historically informed performance practice; and the reflection on musical listening as a subjective experience, which is unable to reach objective knowledge about music. Making explicit the premises of the Hildesheimer’s position, his essays prove to be both an integration and a consistent continuation of the intermedial references to music in literary works.
The ending builds up the premise of the Hildesheimer’s literary and essayistic production. As already pointed out by W. G. Sebald in reference to Tynset, Hildesheimer’s work originates from mourning and melancholy. These two aspects are nevertheless combined with peculiar literary forms of irony, directed both toward a world which is still not aware of its antiquity and emptiness, and toward the self. The study shows how this idea of ending derives from the experience of violence and murder and not from a generic sense of death. The analysis highlights the radicalness of the Hildesheimer’s position and how it undermines not only the idea of future, but also the contemporary subjectivity that succumbs under the law of reality and underlies its own transformation into a purely fictive dimension. In this way, Hildesheimer delivers to his contemporaries the important literary consciousness of the crucial passage from modernism to postmodernism. At the same time, his work and his thought show the difficulty of an alternative literary way in absence of a possible difference between the self and the world.
Since September 2015 a project in Milan has been binding the Library of the Università Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana. The aim of the project is to enhance both the person of the German writer and artist Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1916-
1991) and the 5.199 texts of his private library that the Ambrosiana has been given by his heirs. The volumes owned by the cultural institute are temporarily stored at the Università Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, at the moment, where they are available for study and research to both students and scholars.
Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa
