Barbara Burns

Introduction: European dialogues

Europe is a diverse continent, and the aim of this special issue of Oxford German Studies is to offer a small taste of that diversity. This issue focuses on cultural exchanges between German and European authors/auteurs. It examines a few episodes in literary and cultural history in order to shed light on Germany’s changing relationships with some of its European neighbours including Britain, France, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. A number of these articles originated as research presentations at the School of Modern Language and Cultures at the University of Glasgow over the course of 2014–15. The articles bear witness to just a few of the many dialogues which have shaped European culture. Such dialogues are not only intercultural but also transcultural; indeed, Wolfgang Welsch argues that we should prefer the latter term because it suggests that different cultures can coexist and overlap within the same community. Starting chronologically in the middle ages, James Simpson’s article on Reinhart the fox (otherwise known as Renart, Reynard and Reineke Fuchs) reflects on an exemplary European dialogue, for the beast epic is a tradition shared between Germany and France. It is significant that Heinrich (sometimes known as ‘der Glichezare’), the author of the oldest extant version, was a native of Alsace, a region which symbolizes the history shared between France andGermany.MichaelWood considersWalter Scott’s reception ofGoethe in the 1790s, a key exchange between two national poets at a time when modern European nation states were still in the process of being formed. Given the theme of European dialogues, Heine seems an obvious candidate for inclusion. In a letter to an unnamed friend in Hamburg, published in Unser Planet on 11 April 1833, Heine described himself as ‘der inkarnirte Kosmopolitismus’. Heine’s internationalism even led the British poet Tony Harrison (born

Heyse and Storm on the Slippery Slope: Two Differing Approaches to Euthanasia

The article considers two different nineteenth-century literary approaches to the subject of mercy killing. Paul Heyse and Theodor Storm were friends whose concurrent treatments of the theme of euthanasia in the late 1880s brought them temporarily into conflict with one another. Heyse’s Auf Tod und Leben and Die schwerste Pflicht and Storm’s Ein Bekenntnis represent interesting early attempts to address in literary form a difficult moral issue before many of the arguments in the modern debate over voluntary euthanasia had been fully articulated. The three works are examined in order to ascertain what they reveal about the contrasting world views of the two writers, and to focus attention on the questions they raise relating to the hardening of the moral climate in Germany and the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme which was to come.