Lynne Tatlock

Communion at the Sign of the Wild Man

In this rereading of Wilhelm Raabe’s Zum wilden Mann (1874) I argue that the author invented in the guise of a universal fable an alternative story to the selfcongratulatory visions of Germany current after unification in 1871. Furthermore, by choosing to re-publish the tale in 1885 in Reclam’s Universalbibliothek, he afforded this alternative story wide circulation and canonical status. The juxtaposition in this text of the choleric executioner-mercenary, who in the role of the wild man tends to communal well-being in the name of the state, with the melancholy apothecary, who blindly and ineffectually tends to communal health, reveals that the social and economic order preserved in the new Reich is constituted and maintained by violence. With this harrowing insight the story thus launches its own violent address to its reading public by leaving readers in an unclosed narrative frame in the apothecary shop, vainly awaiting solace and healing.

Narrative strategies in the novels of Jeremias Gotthelf

Contents: Gotthelfs Readers - Social Reform Through Autobiography - The Reader as Mentor - The Reader as Gardener of Happiness - Enlightening Natural Man - Politics and Perdition - Gods Hand - Battling the Zeitgeist - The Reader in Gotthelf.

Introducing Students to a New Way of Viewing: Teaching Three Feminist Films from the New German Cinema

This is a description, summation and evaluation of my recent experience introducing students to three German feminist films as part of a fourth-year university course in German on the New German Cinema. When originally choosing the fourteen films for this course I had attempted to offer some breadth by including works by several different directors as well as various film genres. At the same time the selection was united to some extent by two principal themes, namely the treatment of history, both past and contemporary, and the act of seeing, recognition and cognition. A central goal was to make essentially naive viewers aware of how film manipulates vision. Within this framework, I had chosen to include three films by women, principally for the purpose of underscoring the major concerns of the course, namely treatment of history, perception, film technique. However, I ultimately decided, as an experiment, not to submerge these three films into the general themes, but instead to treat them as central works which offer a new way of viewing, i.e., to treat them specifically as feminist films. This turned out to be particularly useful as it not only offered contrast to and questioning of the views offered by some of the other films, but also helped the students come to grips with the often unsettling treatment of women by male directors. The liveliest discussions in the course followed the showing of the three feminist films, due at least in part, I think, to the political dimension I introduced.