Contraries: Studies in German Literature - Softcover

Hamburger, Michael

9780525472674: Contraries: Studies in German Literature

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525472673 ISBN 13: 9780525472674

Publisher: Penguin Putnam~childrens Hc, 1970

"From Holderlin who went mad to Trakl who died from an overdose of narcotics taken on the Galician front during the First World War, most of the great German literary figures after Goethe seem to have been enacting a unique personal drama of historical catastrophe and tragic romanticism. As Michael Hamburger demonstrates in his brilliant study, Holderlin, Novalis, Kleist, Buchner, Nietzsche, and Trakl were caught on the contrary poles of Reason and Energy. All the ""universals"" exploded about them: the claims of human consciousness and those of ""nature""; Schiller's ideals of liberty, friendship, classical beauty, the ethical sublime; Hegelian dialectics and Schopenhaurean pessimism. Gone forever were Goethean harmony and Apollonian heroism. What we see here, rather, and what Hamburger makes so acutely, even movingly manifest, is the beginning of the existential temperament, the preoccupation with the fragmentary and the subjective, the fallen mind and the ""mystical,"" perceptions based not, as Hamburger says of Buchner, ""on metaphysical premises, but on the bare condition of men, on the reality of suffering, our participation in suffering not our own and our desire to relieve it."" Blake's dictum that ""no bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings,"" could be the motto of all these figures, for however darkly they lived in a world of continual crises, they were truly individual beings, producing works of a testamentary intensity quite unknown to the culture that preceded them. This is scholarship of striking interest. It falters somewhat when considering the ironic modes of Heine, Mann, and (especially) Benn, but the overall performance, the psychological and philosophical insights, are admirably sustained."--Kirkus Review

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