Eckart Goebel

Escape to life : German intellectuals in New York : a compendium on exile after 1933

Theodor W. Adorno (Birgit Erdle, Jacques Lezra) Hannah Arendt (Sigrid Weigel, Liliane Weissberg) Erich Auerbach (Emily Apter, Karlheinz Barck) Walter Benjamin (Vivian Liska) Charlotte Berath (Kevin Vennemann) Ernst Bloch (Falko Schmieder) Bertolt Brecht (Robert Cohen) Hermann Broch (Daniel Weidner) Max Horkheimer (Eckart Goebel) Uwe Johnson (Michael Jennings) Ernst Kantorowicz (Paul Fleming) Siegfried Kracauer (Tony Kaes) Karl Lowith (Rodolphe Gasche) Erika Mann (Jonathan Kassner) Heinrich Mann (Slavoj Zizek) Klaus Mann (Nicola Behrmann) Thomas Mann (Anne-Kathrin Reulecke) Herbert Marcuse (Elke Siegel) Soma Morgenstern (Paul North) Erwin Panofsky (Andreas Beyer) Wilhelm Reich (John T. Hamilton) Fred Stein (Peter Stein) Jacob Taubes (Martin Treml) Ernst Toller (Thomas Stachel) Villem Flusser (Chadwick Smith).

Pink Ink. Zur Funktion der Farbe Rosa in Thomas Manns Roman Lotte in Weimar

Abstract This article shows in some detail that the colour pink functions as a leitmotif in Thomas Mann’s 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar. The basic link to Werther is established via the pink ribbon, which is missing on the white dress which the aging Charlotte Kestner wears during a dinner at Goethe’s house in 1816. Mann’s meticulous weaving of a red or even pink thread through the narrative, however, goes far beyond this detail. A closer investigation of the role the colour pink plays in his novel reveals a subtle network of political, erotic and literary allusions, reaching from Goethe’s Divan to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Chewing: Goethe’s Proserpina

Abstract This article argues that Goethe reduced the rich myth of Proserpina to a sequence of pure repetitions, which in their various forms then dominate the entire text of the drama. Goethe reproduces the myth as a rhetorical skeleton or, rather, as the skeleton of rhetoric. Put differently, Goethe’s Proserpina, executing a meta-theatrical experiment with the rich linguistic possibilities repetition provides, is a monodrama whose actual heroine is repetition.

Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse

Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Uberblick uber die enge Beziehung zwischen Literatur und Psychoanalyse. In den Blick kommen dabei die Literatur als Gegenstand der Psychoanalyse und das psychoanalytische Wissen der Literatur. Systematisch aufbereitet werden auch die literarischen Dimensionen der Psychoananlyse und das Verhaltnis zwischen Psychoanalye und Kultur- bzw. Literaturwissenschaft. Zwei Register und ein Glossar beschliessen den Band.

The One-Way Road of Aging: On Jean Améry's Essay Über das Altern

My article approaches Amérys complex essay via an interpretation of its five subtitles, which refer to a number of paratexts (Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, etc.) and at the same time expose the conceptual inaccessibility of aging: All five can be understood without referring to aging. Second, I try to explore how the essay on aging relates to the traumatizing events in Amérys life, and why he characterizes the inescapable process of aging as a long Todesmarsch. Third, I explain how Améry bridges the abyss between the factual experience of aging and the impossibility to conceptualize this continuous process, which begins with our birth. Aging is experienced in moments of sudden, frightening insights. The analysis of these sudden experiences leads Améry finally to a convincing rethinking of the Cartesian split between mind and body. La souffrance vécue mediates between aging as a concept and its experience. By means of fully exposing himself to aging, Améry thus rejuvenates philosophy.

Aussöhnung. Sublimierung als Paradigma in Goethes Trilogie der Leidenschaft

The essay offers close readings of three poems Goethe published in 1827 as the Trilogy of Passion. As works of art these poems are examples for what Freud later described as sublimation. Goethe’s arrangement confirms this perspective, as the trajectory leads from despair, An Werther, via grief, Elegie, to atonement, Aussöhnung. On the other hand, as the essay argues, the three poems describe Goethe’s life itself as a trilogy of passion, marked by the turning points of the novel Werther, the drama Torquato Tasso, and the Trilogy itself. In his autobiography, Goethe calls poetry the “secular gospel.” The gospel includes the passion, culminating in the resurrection, the epitome of sublimation. Goethe’s life turns out to be haunted by the taedium vitae, and secular sublimation does not refer to the suffering subject but to its beautiful products only. The sublime works of poetry therefore protest against a reality principle requiring resignation and sublimation: The gift of poetry enables the poet to say what he suffers, but does not end his suffering. (EG; in German)

Die Verwüstung der Religion durch die Anarchie des Gefühls T. S. Eliot und das Problem des Solipsismus

ZusammenfassungEinsetzend mit einer Analyse des Verhältnisses Eliots zu Pater, diskutiert der Essay Eliots Begriff der Tradition, der als Transformation von Elementen der Monadologie Leibnizens interpretiert wird. Dieser Traditionsbegriff löst das Problem des Solipsismus nicht; eine Flucht wird möglich nur durch eine Restauration der Religion. Eliots Klassizismus wird ein Abschied vom Gedicht „as in itself it really is“.AbstractBeginning with an analysis of Eliot’s relation to Pater the essay discusses Eliots concept of tradition, a concept derived from elements of Leibniz’s Monadology. This concept of tradition,however, does not provide a key to unlock the prison of solipsism. For Eliot the only possible escape is a restoration of religion. His classicism proves to be a parting from poetry „as in itself it really is“.