Studies in German literature, linguistics and culture

xv, 456 p. ; 23 cm

At the beginning of this century, a young German poet returned from a journey to Russia, where he had immersed himself in the spirituality he discovered there. He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever had done and ever would do again. This poet saw the coming darkness of the century, and saw the struggle we would have in our relationship to the divine. The poet was Rainer Maria Rilke, and these love poems to God make up his Book of Hours.

Beers' German Winter Nights (1681) is one of the watermarks of German Baroque literature. Although it clearly owes much in motif and style to Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel, Simplicius Simplicissimus, its blend of outrageous student humor and unprecedented realism mark it as a uniquely readable work that has appeal even today. Beer's novel reveals the influence of Spanish and French models in this genre, but it also shows the influence of his native Austrian landscape, the German chapbook, and his wide reading both in adventure literature and books of contemporary literary theory (poetics). The book is perhaps most important as a cultural mirror of the late 17th century, rich in folklore, humor, and details of everyday life.

"The early death in 1908 of her husband, Count Christoph Martin Degenfeld, combined with the birth of her child, left Ottonie Degenfeld confined to a wheelchair and in a state of severe depression. But two years earlier, in December 1906, she had met the famous young Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Learning of her situation, he now started writing to the twenty-seven-year-old countess, and her road to a new life enriched by literature and the arts began. Presented here for the first time in the English language, their correspondence provides insights into the creative processes of Hofmannsthal, whose works were strongly influenced by this unusual relationship.". "The lively correspondence is a window into a vanished world of European high society. It is a period piece reflecting the life of the affluent German aristocracy and its interaction with the arts in the first quarter of the century. Against this background, the lives and works of a number of prominent cultural figures, such as Richard Strauss and Max Reinhardt, are brought into a new light. Hofmannsthal's reports on the trials and triumphs of his libretti for Strauss's revolutionary operas are fascinating, as are his poignant comments on the First World War, and its catastrophic consequences.". "The correspondence reveals an intense friendship and shows how a sensitive and compassionate man, considered one of the foremost writers in the German language, helped a young woman to recover from the depths of despair and to find new meaning in her shattered life. At the same time, the correspondence reveals that, as Ottonie matured, it was she who helped lift the poet from his own gloom and personal problems."--BOOK JACKET.

"Upon publication in 1895, Gabriele Reuter's From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie) became something of a cultural event, making its author one of Germany's most talked-about women of letters and providing the publisher Samuel Fischer with his first popular success. Set in the first two decades of the Second German Reich, this story of a Prussian bureaucrat's daughter caught between conformity and rebellion struck at the core of the class that upheld this empire, revealing the hypocrisy and misery at the very heart of the bourgeois family. It recorded the conflicted and ultimately interminable adolescence of a middle-class girl who failed to fulfill the destiny prescribed for her by her gender and class, a young woman who, despite an incipient high-spiritedness and independence of mind, internalized the attitudes of her culture to the point of lethal self-censorship. The feminist Helene Stocker remembered Reuter's novel as a wake-up call that gave such voiceless women the voice they desperately needed."--BOOK JACKET.