Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry from 1898 is not held in high esteem by connoisseurs. Scholars focus rather on the ‘Florence Diary’, published posthumously in 1942. As a journal from an educational trip to Florence and Viareggio in the spring of 1898, it records visits to Renaissance artworks, great collections and famous churches, but it does not contain any poetical and lyrical traces. Nevertheless, poems do emerge but their motifs deviate from picturesque vedutas and classical forms; their objects are neither the great examples of art nor the everyday world of tourists but they rather moves to so-called ‘third places’, topographically recognizable in the city periphery and surrounding landscapes as well as the choice of ordinary people as poetic characters, insignificant young girls on their pilgrimage to sacred sites of the Madonna, and remote rituals of popular religion. From these ‘new’ contexts Rilke tries to create a poetry and poetics of his own, which contrasts with the epigonal style of poetry on Italy from central and northern Europe.
The paper examines the twofold relation of the cultural philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz to the Mediterranean culture. Firstly, the biographical aspect (he lived on the Dalmatian island if Koločep between 1921-1947) and its reflections in some of his texts, mainly in his (only) novel The New Life will be discussed. Secondly, his mythopoetic works, such as his five “Dionysian Tragedies” will be interpreted partly as reactions to Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy, partly as poetic manifestations of Pannwitz’s own cultural philosophy and cosmology. In order to explain the latter ones, some of his essays and articles will also be taken into consideration.
The article focuses on the subject- and identity constitutions in the novel Als ob sie träumend gingen by Anna Baar within a discourse of literary and cultural studies and tries to point out the alienation phenomena in the text. The novel is a narrative text that alienates historicity, especially the war scenarios in Mediterranean region, and represents them as an expression of memories. The self-knowledge of the protagonist is based on an identity-alterity dynamic that leads to a questioning of the interplay of self and other. Foreignness is charac terized by an increasing loss of love, trust, and humaneness. Dalmatia as experiential space correlates with existential necessity of literary figures and their dissociation from the cultural other. The distanced narrative instance refers to social exclusion of the protagonist and his search for orientation in foreign everyday life.
This article first discusses the theoretical approaches to both didactics of translation from an intercultural perspective and translation as a cultural process. Accordingly, these approaches are discussed with reStichwörter gard to the Italian-German author Gino Chiellino’s poems from Die Sehnsucht der Seerose nach der Libelle (2017), which were translated into Italian in a university translation workshop. It will be shown which didactic-methodic measures chosen by Italian students of German as a foreign language prove to be worth in translating Chiellino’s poems. Special emphasis is placed on the translation into Italian of polysemic words, ad hoc formations, and compounds in Chiellino’s poems. Furthermore, it will be shown how the Mediterranean landscape of Calabria presents itself on a semantic level in the author’s writing style.
Bericht zum 1. Forum junger WissenschaftlerInnen der Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik (GiG) vom 10. bis 11. April 2019 an der Universität Zadar (Kroatien)
History of Southern European German Studies (SEG)/Mediterranean Southern European German Studies (MSEG) and Report from the Annual Meeting on Malta in May/June 2019