Dirk von Petersdorff

Dirk von Petersdorff (Photo: Anne Günther / FSU)

Dirk von Petersdorff (born March 16, 1966 in Kiel ) is a German literary scholar and writer .

Life

Dirk von Petersdorff studied German and history at the University of Kiel . There he passed the first state examination in 1991 . In 1995 he received his doctorate in literary studies and completed his habilitation in 2003 at the Saarland University . Today he lives in Jena , where he is professor of modern German literature at the Friedrich Schiller University . Dirk von Petersdorff has been a member of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature since 2004 . In addition, he is a member of the graduate school "Model 'Romanticism". Variation - reach - topicality ”.

As a literary author, Dirk von Petersdorff works primarily as a poet and essayist .

Awards and honors

• 1991 Leonce and Lena Prize
• 1993 Friedrich Hebbel Prize
• 1998 Kleist Prize
• 1999 Liliencron lecturer in poetry in Kiel
• 2000 Prize of the LiteraTour North
• 2009 Mainz poetry lecturer
• 2011/12 Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin
• 2013 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington St. Louis
• 2013 Tuebingen Poetics Lecturer , together with Hans Magnus Enzensberger
• 2016/17 Fellow at the “ International Morphomata College ” at the University of Cologne

poetics

Dirk von Petersdorff is looking for new approaches in the face of a modern aesthetic that approves or rejects certain modes of expression with commands and prohibitions. Such an “aesthetic of negation” thus contradicts the conditions of modernity itself, the simultaneous juxtaposition of different interpretations of the world, styles and norms and the acceptance of this juxtaposition.

In order to free art from this situation and to open up new and old forms for lyric poetry, von Petersdorff developed a contemporary aesthetic that accepts the requirements of modernity and transfers it to literature.

Instead of complaining about uprooting, loss of home and alienation, art, according to von Petersdorff, can understand the loss of a binding truth and an aesthetic mythology as a gain in freedom. The acceptance of contingent modern forms of society, an ironic attitude towards life and art, but above all towards scientific or political theories, are suitable means for von Petersdorff for a new understanding of art.

He bases his aesthetics while on Niklas Luhmann's concept of contingency and Richard Rorty's draft ironist , or the ironist. The function of irony is to depict the contingency of the world in literature. It prevents the establishment of an ultimate truth and loosens fixed world views. As a means of mapping the plurality of competing interpretive claims, it is suitable for addressing contradictions within a society, but also within the mental states or world views of an individual. Irony thus becomes, on the one hand, the formal principle of Petersdorff's poetry and, on the other hand, a worldview that translates the contingency of the world into a concept of life.

In his Tübingen Poetics Lectures (2013) he developed this program further: he opposed a way of thinking that formulated laws from Schiller to Adorno , selected some of the possibilities of art “and explains solely legitimate answers to the state of the present” with an alternative . He derives it from Hegel's "Lectures on Aesthetics": It is accepted that there is no longer a definiteness of the description of the world that is binding for all members of a society, that art no longer has any objective content, therefore it is based on all spheres of life and Can show appearances. The greatest and the smallest, the highest and the smallest, that which is insignificant for itself is made important. Such an art, which does not exclude any interest, can represent everything "in which the human being has the ability to be at home at all" ( Hegel ). This is how von Petersdorff also defines the term postmodernism: It describes the pluralization of programs in the art system that are no longer provided with the categories of historical legitimacy and illegitimacy. In the final part of the lectures, he uses the example of artists such as Shakespeare , Neo Rauch , Peter Doig or Lana del Rey to describe a feeling of uncertainty during the disintegration of old systems of order. The processes in the environment cannot be fully captured, which leads to a loss of self-confidence. One faces them in astonishment, but without fundamental rejection, because one recognizes the beautiful and the repulsive at the same time.

Poetry

Von Petersdorff moves as an ironic through the world and becomes an imitator, re-sorter and reshaper of what he finds in the present world as well as in past times as material for processing. Everyday and trivial things, such as B. advertising slogans, stands in von Petersdorff's poetry next to old literary forms, such as the emblem or other rhyming stanzas . As a “lyrical wanderer” who understands lyrical forms as a timeless principle, his poetry moves between originality and mimesis .

In the first four volumes of poetry published so far, Petersdorff's poetry evolves into subjective and autobiographical writing. The poetry of the first two volumes is formally unbound and deals with the situation of art production in the 1980s and 1990s. In the last two volumes, poetological writing takes a back seat in favor of an ironic change from fixed literary forms and traditions, which von Petersdorff fills with subjective content and feelings. In his lyric poetry there is a tension between irony, which demands a quick change, and a longing for standstill, which is supposed to protect against negative or personally painful changes.

The 2010 volume of poetry “Take the long way home” brings together the best poems from the four volumes of poetry at hand, as well as new poems, including numerous love poems and the cycle “The Forty Years”, in which the attitude towards life of a generation can be read sees more firmly anchored in mid-life than expected and who still lacks one final certainty as to whether the path taken was the right one.

The title of the “Sirenenpop” collection (2014) indicates the importance of songs, songs and the effects of sound. In the Tübingen poetics lectures, von Petersdorff named the influences of pop music, in which, in contrast to e-poetry, he recognized "the free jokes, the lavish and lurching in everyday life, the patching together of meaning". As in the volume “Take the long way home”, which contained numerous songs in addition to sonnets, there are also numerous song-like poems here (in addition to long poems and free love poems) that experiment with rhyme and rhythm. Everyday phenomena (the "Rubik's Cube" or a landscape above Jena) make the beauty and transience visible:

Rubik's Cube

A high-pitched buzz comes through the decades,
these are the washing machines of the shared apartments,
and there: Susanne, who was
leaning against the minibus, with this follow-me appeal, I see -
smell the Suhrkamp books on the shelf,
where the truth is somewhere Dozed,
turn the Rubik's Cube, a hundred times,
don't you feel how it was always solved
in fast, fantastically secure processes,
I feel, I just forgot how it went.

Like Harald Hartung in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, the critics saw this volume as a synthesis of romanticism and pop culture, praised the formal art like Rüdiger Görner in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” or criticized the triviality of the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” like Burkhard Müller Objects and questioned the appropriateness of rhyme and rhythm. The "German Academy for Language and Poetry" included the volume in its 2015 poetry recommendations.

novel

In 2018 von Petersdorff published his novel "How did I get here". The question formulated in the title concerns the characters Tim, Anna, Johannes and Doris, four people in their mid-thirties, from whose perspective the plot is told alternately. On the basis of the protagonists, "who are connected and attracted to one another, but did not find their way into life in the same rhythm", von Petersdorff depicts various relationships and life plans on which he allows his characters to reflect. A central question here is “whether it is not precisely the bond that sets us free”.

Tim and Anna are married, while Tim's friend Johannes is a bachelor who longs for a solid bond. There is a certain attraction between him and Anna. The action is preceded by a night of love between the two of them. Movement in the triangular constellation brings Doris, Anna's childhood friend, who - as it turns out at the end of the plot - has already made the acquaintance of Johannes.

Despite their different lifestyles, the protagonists share a certain feeling of insecurity that distinguishes them from previous generations: “We don't have the security, we don't know anything about this holy big 'development' everywhere, how it had to come, we just walk around and lose us in things. ”If the figures do not have a fixed knowledge of the“ holy great 'development' ”, then they experience an attitude to life, as von Petersdorff describes in his Tübingen poetics lectures (2013) as constitutive for that of the present Then the individual is “directly facing the unknown, the big whole, on which understanding is directed and which always eludes understanding”. What the figures need "is ground under their feet, but in the end they just feel it with their toes". The potential for conflict that is built up in the course of the action is “deliberately kept in suspension in the end”.

Since the characters in the novel cannot fully grasp what is going on in their environment, they let themselves be carried away. This mood is also taken up in one of the pop songs quoted in the novel, "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. In addition to pop (e.g. Talking Heads , Fehlfarben , "Tintin" comics ), von Petersdorff also lectures on high culture (e.g. Hermann Hesse , Milan Kundera , Shakespeare ). Due to the open end of the novel and the various references to pop and high-cultural phenomena, the novel represents a simultaneity of the different in terms of both practical and artistic styles. In this sense, the program developed by the author in his Tübingen Poetics Lectures (2013) finds its place here Realization. There von Petersdorff perceives the present as an "image of a juxtaposition of very different styles of lifestyle and art" and pleads for an art that - following Hegel's aesthetics - is neither fixed to certain contents, worldviews or forms, but freely between the various options to choose from.

Works

• How it goes on. Poems , Frankfurt am Main 1992, second edition 1998, ISBN 978-3596223718 .
• Time solution. Poems , Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 978-3596223848 .
• Mystery speech. On the self-image of romantic intellectuals , Tübingen 1996 [dissertation], reprint 2012, ISBN 978-3-484-18139-7 .
• Confessions and Postcards. Poems , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 978-3-10-061003-4 .
• Lost battles. Essays , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 978-3-10-061004-1 .
• The devils in Arezzo. Poems , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-10-560130-3 .
• Centrifugal forces of modernity. On the ego-constitution in the poetry of the early 20th century , Tübingen 2005 [habilitation thesis], reprint 2011, ISBN 978-3-484-15107-9 .
• Beginning of life. A true story , CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56376-8 .
• History of German poetry , CH Beck, Munich 2008 (= Beck'sche Reihe. 2434.), ISBN 978-3-406-53634-2 .
• Take the long way home. Poems , CH Beck, Munich 2010, second edition 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-72025-3 .
• Literary history of the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1945 to the present , CH Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62231-1 .
• A poem from me. Contemporary poets introduce themselves , Reclam, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-010885-7 .
• How do I write a poem? Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-020294-4 .
• How should one write history (s)? Tübingen Poetics Lecturer 2013. Edited by Dorothee Kimmich and Philipp Alexander Ostrowicz with the collaboration of Caroline Merkel, Swiridoff, Künzelsau 2014. (other author: Hans Magnus Enzensberger ), ISBN 978-3-89929-296-1 .
• Sirenenpop , CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-66691-9 .
• How did I get here . Roman, CH Beck, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-406-72629-3 .
• Since 2019: Publication of the CH Beck poetry calendar, ISBN 978-3-406-72219-6 .
• "And love, gods, what luck": Faith and love in Goethe's poems , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3542-4 .

swell

1. ↑ member entry of Dirk Peter Dorff in the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz , accessed on 11.06.17
2. ↑ Luhmann, Niklas: Social Systems. Outline of a general theory. Scientific Book Society, Frankfurt am Main 2002.
3. ^ Rorty, Richard: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Dirk von Petersdorff, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: How should one write history (s)? on the occasion of the Tübingen Poetics Lecturer 2013. Ed .: by Dorothee Kimmich and Philipp Alexander Ostrowicz with the assistance of Caroline Merkel. Swiridoff, Künzelsau 2014, ISBN 978-3-89929-296-1 .
5. ↑ See von Petersdorff: How should one write history (s)?
6. ↑ Dirk von Petersdorff: How did I get here . Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-406-72629-3 , pp. Blurb .
7. ^ Marie Schmidt : summer house, twenty years later. Retrieved September 5, 2019 . 
8. ↑ Dirk von Petersdorff: How did I get here . Munich 2018, p. 14th f .
9. ↑ Dirk von Petersdorff, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: How should one write history (s)? Künzelsau 2014, p. 49 .
10. ^ Andreas Platthaus: Mishmash à trois with a view of Sanssouci. Retrieved September 5, 2019 . 
11. ↑ Dirk von Petersdorff, Hans Magnus Enzensberger: How should one write history (s)? Künzelsau 2014, p. 35 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Dirk von Petersdorff in the catalog of the German National Library
• University website Dirk von Petersdorff at the University of Jena
• Dirk von Petersdorff: "Smoking area" . Frankfurter Anthologie, January 2, 2015. Retrieved January 4, 2015