Souveränität-Feindschaft-Masse. Theatralik Und Rhetorik Des Politischen in Den Dramen Christian Dietrich Grabbes
2015; Wiley; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic research and analysis
ResumoMaes, Sientje. Souveranitat-Feindschaft-Masse. Theatralik und Rhetorik des Politischen in Dramen Christian Dietrich Grabbes. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2014.240 pp. euro34.00 (paperback).Nearly two hundred years after the death of Christian Dietrich Grabbe in 1836 at the age of 35-a death precipitated by excessive drinking, a disastrous marriage, and financial troubles-the most memorable comments on his life and work are still those of his contemporary, Heinrich Heine. It was Heine who suggested that one could call Grabbe, with his great gift and his destructive addiction, leider mit doppeltem Rechte einen betrunkenen Shakespeare (Heinrich Heine, Werke und Briefe, vol. 7 [Weimar and Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1972], 194). Heine would not be Heine if he did not enjoy a bit ofpoetic licence, but his exaggerations tell us more about his topic than the earnest reflections of many lesser authors. By pointing to the mixture, in Grabbe's plays, of an enchantingly natural discourse recalling dieselben Naturlaute, womit uns Shakespeare... entzuckt, on the one hand, with rather less admirable qualities-eine Geschmacklosigkeit, einen Zynismus und eine Ausgelassenheit, die das Tollste und Abscheulichste uberbieten (ibid.)-on the other, Heine established the parameters for Grabbe's reception in his lifetime and sometimes up to our own day.While Grabbe's talent was recognised by many of his contemporaries, in the first few decades after his death he was more often dismissed as a bull in the china shop of Biedermeier culture, based not least on his much-publicised image of himself as a literary maverick, a social misfit, and a wild genius bom into a paralyzing petty-bourgeois environment. These were not the only distortions suffered by Grabbe as man and artist in the course of one and a half centuries, in which each new movement has claimed him as its ancestor. In the Wilhelmine era he was seen as a conservative patriot, at the time of the First World War as a proto-expressionist, in the mid-twentieth century as an exponent of Marxist epic theatre and N azi propaganda, and subsequently as an absurdist, surrealist, and post-modernist ofvarious hues. However, the dissonant voices have generally agreed in identifying him as a major innovator of historical drama.Grabbe's short fife covered part of the transitional years between the French Revolution, the Restoration, and the revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century-a period in which the manifestations of idealism were giving way to philosophical, political, and aesthetic positivism. Accordingly, Grabbe's plays are deeply marked by the contradictions between the closed form of classical drama and the open form of the new drama of realism. It is these contradictions that Sientje Maes examines in her new monograph. In contrast to those critics whose interpretations seek to impose harmony and reconciliation on Grabbe's works, she focuses on the disparities that make them such intriguing representations of their epoch. It is her intention, den irritierenden, ambivalenten und heterogenen Charakter der Dramentexte darzustellen und zu analysieren, ohne ihn harmonisieren oder ausgleichen zu wollen (35).Maes concentrates on four of Grabbe's plays: Herzog Theodor von Gothland and Napoleon oder die Hundert Tage from his earlier years, followed by Hannibal and Die Hermannsschlacht from the later ones. …
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