Song of childhood

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The song about being a child is a poem by Peter Handke .

It was written in 1986 for the film Der Himmel über Berlin by Wim Wenders , which suggests being a child as a utopian ideal state of people.

Structure and creation

The song about being a child has four stanzas, each beginning with the verse "When the child was a child". An important construction principle of the poem is the paradigmatic sequence, which also determines the Duineser Elegien (1923) by Rainer Maria Rilke . The reader has to put the individual aspects together in them.

Peter Handke wrote the poem as well as the prologue for a love and invocation of the world primarily for the film after a conversation with Wenders. Handke felt that it was advertised in 1986 and could therefore only deliver parts for the film and no narrative framework or script in the traditional sense. The poems were created in a process by which the work of an author enters literature without going through the traditional stages of the literary career in book form. They were never published in a book or as a stand-alone work. But the film book does not contain all of the poems either. So it is literature that neither corresponds to the conception of the paper form of poems and fulfills the traditional concept of literature, nor was it written in film.

The step of a transformation from poem to film cannot be understood solely with a literary understanding of poetry and must be distinguished from it.

Handke's texts are often related to the basic idea of ​​a fusion of life and art, as the Vienna group and the Graz group have striven for. These include language happenings , collages, poetic demonstrations and visual texts . The song about being a child and the lyrics for Himmel über Berlin are an indication of his attempt to overcome existing literary and cinematic patterns. At the same time, the film brings out the literary demands of a new generation of writers who no longer want to cling to traditional means.

It is possible that a passage in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians Handke inspired the poem: “Since I was a child, I talked like a child and was as clever as a child and had childish acts; but since I became a man, I dismissed what was childish. ”The basic theme of the change from child to adult is taken up, but changed. In Handke's notebook, the beginning of the poem is initially in the first person (“When I was a child”) and was later changed to the general form “When the child was a child”.

General aspects

On the one hand, the poem asks about the conditions of human existence and its categories. On the other hand, it does not directly describe and represent the experience of remembering childhood, but rather it provides a poetic expression of the feeling that accompanies memories of childhood. It shows the living power that these memories possess.

It stands as a riddle in a symbolic, baroque tradition and raises questions that are existential-philosophical topics from metaphysics and moral philosophy . The beginning of the film, in which the poem appears, is committed to the ideal of childhood but also to romanticism in the tradition of ETA Hoffmann and Wilhelm Hauff .

In the song about being a child, amazement has the high priority that it has held from Plato and Aristotle to modern philosophy. The topics are basic questions of existence and the "children's questions", as the philosopher Ernst Bloch calls them. These children's questions are basic questions of metaphysics such as "Why is something and not nothing?", Which also preoccupied the philosopher Martin Heidegger , to whose philosophy Handke often referred, and are a subject of the poem. The philosopher Jacques Derrida also attached great importance to a way of life that is characterized more by amazement than by knowledge , according to whose opinion it disempowers the view of certain knowledge. According to Derrida, amazement opens up possibilities for the view that the difference , although it is not at all, affects language and thought. In Derrida's thinking, amazement also has an ethical dimension; he pleads for an unbiased approach to every single person and every single phenomenon, even if it is clear that completely unbiased perception is impossible. The childhood ideal can therefore also be understood as a deconstruction of the myth of the metaphysical competence of people in general. The song about being a child tries to understand the present as the result of an individual past and future. Already in the first verse there is temporal contradiction in the fact that a child was a child and is no longer a child. This creates a paradox .

Childhood with Peter Handke

Childhood as a theme plays a role in Handke's work as a whole. Intertextual references to Handke's work can also be found in the Song of Childhood , such as Children's History (1981). In his work, Handke also referred to Rainer Maria Rilke's preoccupation with being a child, for example in Handke's The Hour of True Sensation (1975), which relates to Rilke's novel The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), which also deals with the fear of existence goes, which shows itself for the first time and long before its existential philosophical exploration as a basic mood of the century. The protagonist in The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge “learns to see” by going back to his childhood, penetrates beneath the surface of the phenomena and reveals the inside of things (for example on a standing wall of a ruin) because he “feels” the The observed identified internally with the observed. At the same time, his own inner being opens up to him, from which “things lost from childhood” emerge. These experiences show a usual time-sequence negating time relationship, a simultaneous presence of past, present and future. For Rilke, remembered childhood remains “an infinite reality” and should be achieved in the present through narrative and reflective visualization.

Reminder at Handke

In connection with the theme of childhood in Handke's work, memory is important.

Memory as a sudden, unexpected glimpse of something completely different from the familiar, Handke, like Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time, and James Joyce as a path to an epiphany that, in connection with modern literature, has to be understood as suddenly occurring spiritual experience that enables an insight into an unknown world. There is an existential but also an aesthetic promise in remembering. Proust's involuntary memory as a criterion of truth and inner reality also has an aspect of transcendence that also applies to Handke's work. For Handke, however, the inner world and memory are only a gateway to an epiphany. In the 1970s, Handke wrote in his notebook directly after taking notes on Heidegger, how a taste experience similar to In Search of Lost Time triggered memories. But the memories and the details of the surroundings cannot explain the sudden experience of cosmopolitanism either. For Handke, the descriptions of things themselves are already an expression of openness to the world. This free-floating attention perceives past and present things at the same time and reflects the astonishing of their existence. For Handke as for Heidegger, intuition and memory lead, in contrast to the views of Proust and Joyce, into being and not into private memory spaces of one's own self. With Handke, the focus is on the object of experience itself and not the inwardness as with Proust. Memories are ontological visions and not biographical reconstructions. For Handke, space and time are then ineffective in remembering.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Ein Brief is also of importance to Handke's understanding of epiphany and memory . For Handke, as for Hofmannsthal, the aura of hope replaces a meaningless nothing. For example, Handke, like Hofmannsthal, describes an experience as if the body consisted of nothing but ciphers.

Parallels to Handke's view can be found in Robert Musil . Like Musil, Handke protects himself against a helpless contemporaneity, against giving in to participating in the centuries. The epiphany opens up the real and reveals openness and possibility.

Childhood and the motive of the narrative

The motif of being a child is also associated with the motif of the narrative in the film. The character of Homer is a narrator, cantor and memory researcher in search of lost time, who in the film modifies the beginning of Homer's Iliad . It stands for the narrator's loss of meaning and authority in modern times . There are similarities between the song of childhood and Homer's thoughts. Homer's thoughts suggest both a metaphysical and a deconstructive understanding of childhood. In one scene of the film, Homer says: "And once humanity has lost its narrator, it has also lost its childhood." Homer, however, cannot fully live up to the childhood ideal of openness and impartiality. The aporia that shows itself in the ideal of childhood thus also characterizes Homer's relationship to childhood. Homer tries to achieve the ideal of childhood and the indeterminable state at the same time. But in believing that he can reach this state in the categories of his thinking, he misses it.

Childhood and writing

Handke's work is often interpreted as a poetic implementation of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. According to the Germanist Ulrich von Bülow, Handke did not deal intensively with Heidegger's being and time , but with the concept of living in poetry, people live and align themselves with Friedrich Hölderlin , to whom Heidegger also referred. Heidegger distinguished between two types of thinking: arithmetic thinking, which plans and researches on the one hand, and reflective thinking, on the other hand, which thinks about the meaning that lies in things and looks at them beyond their practical value or scientific questions. In Heidegger's view, science sets its objects to neutral and uniform positions in space and time, but things shape the space surrounding them. Heidegger describes the relationship between people and things with the term “living”. According to Heidegger, these things include heaven and earth. In dealing with Heidegger, Handke also declared the analytical form of the thinking appropriation of the world to be inadequate and pleaded for a view that begins with things. This tradition of connectedness to things extends in literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Rilke, but Handke updates it in his work. In addition to references to Rilke, the song about childhood also reminds of Hölderlin and his conception of childhood.

Handke himself explicitly draws a line from the theme of writing to that of childhood. In reception, his mysticism of writing is often related to Heidegger's analysis of existence . The union of the writer with the world promises a healing of the “ontological crack” diagnosed by Heidegger . In the 1980s, Handke repeatedly took up a sentence by Heidegger: "People speak insofar as they correspond to the language." When the writer finds the right words for things, according to Handke, structuralism with its arbitrariness of symbols disappears Handke feared. According to the Germanist Susanne Niemuth-Engelmann, this mystical concept of language by Handke reverses the view of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein . In contrast to Wittgenstein's opinion, in Handke's view there are fixed words that are intended for a specific cause. The poet must find these words. Handke's determination of “writing” and “narration” creates their reference to the world in this context. In relation to the world, childhood grows its special quality only from the “narrative” contemplation of the adult; on the other hand, the narrative pretends to only “hide” childhood. For him, the child has possibilities of experience that have not yet been conceptually preformed. They lie particularly in conceptless, non-analytical seeing. If the adult succeeds in participating in the child's view, then, according to Handke, “life into the epic ” expands .

For Handke, writing is associated with narration and the theme of memory as repetition, referring to Søren Kierkegaard's concept of repetition. Handke sees writing as a transcendent act of meaningful visualization. For him, writing is transcendent because Scripture has an ultimately unfounded and unfounded authority. Modernity, which no longer characterizes a binding system of values, is dependent on the production of meaning through signs in the respective context. The visually visionary communicating typeface is already important for Handke's novel The Repetition (1986).

Childhood and history

For Handke, childhood as an archaic counter-happiness also functions as a mythical counter-concept to history as a linear course of time. He would like to renounce history: In children's stories , “those non-being who need history for their lives” are cursed. References to the concept of the man in Heidegger are clearly recognizable here. For Handke, the theme of childhood and history becomes an idea of ​​a mythical and cyclical historicity, the reality of a "different story" also appears in the child, the same story of simple but almost sacred things. The time of the child, according to Handke, is the "real time".

Handke would also like to combine poetic fantasy with a philosophy of morality, with which he consciously opposes the mainstream of contemporary literature. As the Germanist Anna Kinder notes, he has been relying on the power of language to change and the ability to transform life and reality with and through language since the mid-1960s.

From the theological point of view, the poem shows the immanence of transcendence and the everyday presence of the sacred. Understood in this way, the stanzas of the poem also mark the stages of the transformations of the angel Damiel. In the beginning the child was just there. The second stanza is already the original question about the origin.

The first two stanzas in particular are often mentioned and interpreted.

First verse

The first stanza shows the early stage of childhood.

When the child was a child, it
walked with hanging arms,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a stream,
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child,
it did not know that it was a child,
everything was animated to it
and all souls were one.

[...]

and made no face while taking photos.

(Excerpt from: Song of Childhood )

Here thoughts of an original and metaphysically founded unity of the past are evoked. But there are also contradictions to the metaphysical understanding: The unity and immediate self-presence of the subject turns out to be unconscious and indefinite confusion in which there is no difference between two different subjects. All souls were one for the child. The state of being a child is described as indeterminate and almost attributeless. The first stanza is also described as a pre- fall condition .

From Handke's myth of childhood, many components of the poem become clear in the first stanza:

In line 1 (“When the child was a child”), the word “child” is initially semantically charged by duplicating it, i.e. emphasizing it with the stylistic device totum pro parte .

The second line, "It went with hanging arms", (but also through lines 13–15, "often sat cross-legged, ran from a standing position, had a whirl in his hair"), the perception of the banal and the mundane is included and with it the child's perspective from the point of view of the poem, in a sense, itself. A paradigm of Handke's poetological concept is a concept of everyday life with which he relates directly to Goethe, whom he admired and his work.

Lines 3–5, "wanted the brook to be a river, the river to be a stream, and this puddle to be the sea," describe the resistance to a conception of reality that claims to be the only valid one. They address trust in the power of imagination and the sphere of appearance.

Lines 6-7, “When the child was a child, did not know he was a child,” describe how childhood is viewed as a pre-reflective state.

In lines 8–9, “everything was animated to him and all souls were one”, the absence of the “ontological rift” diagnosed by Heidegger between the self and the world is discussed.

The eleventh line, "When the child was a child, it had no opinion of anything", addresses the unaffectedness of the attitude towards the world and refers to Heidegger's philosophy, which with the term man describes the attitude of the ego to the other, ie also describes “public opinion”.

Spontaneity, as it is addressed in line 14, “ran out of control”, is often a carrier of aesthetics and truth in Handke's texts.

In the 16th line (“and didn’t make a face while taking pictures”), impartiality and freedom from reflexive self-control, which play a role in Handke's view, are addressed. He already commented on these topics in an earlier essay on Heinrich von Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater . Almost all of Handke's texts show such a critique of rationality in the sense of Kleist against the background of a confrontation with the antinomies of innocence and experience, the unconscious and intention, originality and imitation.

Second stanza

The second stanza deals with the changes in the child through the first big questions. The psychological development of the child's identity and the formation of the ego are described here.

When the child was a child,
it was a time to ask the following questions:
Why am I me and why not you?
Why am I here and why not there?
When did time begin and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun just a dream?
Isn't what I see, hear and smell
just the appearance of a world before the world?
Is there really evil and people who
are really the bad guys?
How can it be that I wasn't who I am
before I became

(Excerpt from: Song of Childhood )

As an example, the second stanza also proves that Handke's gaze also remains the perspective of an adult. The child's questions are also philosophical questions. It is therefore also reminiscent of Only Two Things by Gottfried Benn , in which the "eternal question: why?" Is asked and referred to as a "child's question". In the second stanza, personal identity is linked directly to location and geography, suggesting the possibility of shifting location and identity. The unnecessary nature of such distinctions, at least from a child's perspective, is addressed. These verses are also interpreted in the reception in connection with questions about nation states and the Berlin Wall .

In connection with the second stanza, the words "When the child was a child ...", which is often repeated in the film, also suggest the conviction that by nature adults too are still children who only move away from their original state to have. With this determination as children, however, people are not assigned a fixed essence. Rather, the concept of essence is shaken by the connection with indefinite childhood. This uncertainty is supported by the child's way of thinking, which calls into question all security and all categorization of adult thinking.

Third and fourth stanzas

The third stanza shows further development of the child towards the adult, and the fourth stanza gives examples of what is left of the child in the adult. The power of memory is indicated in the last verses of the poem in the fourth stanza: "When the child was a child, it threw a stick as a lance against the tree, and she still trembles there today." A feeling of narration is expressed here that can preserve memories and create man's present identity from the past.

Implementation of the poem in the film

The song about being a child runs as a leitmotif through the entire film, the individual stanzas were recorded separately. In the film, the high proportion of internal figure speech evokes the effect of polyphony, which is also reminiscent of the Duinese elegies . The appeal structure established by the Germanist Manfred Engel for the Duineser Elegies , which is expressed in a frequent address of a "you" and a change from "I" to "we", is found as a gesture of the collective in the language of the angels who write the poem recite, also in the film. Other texts to which the film refers are Prolog für eine Liebe , Invocation of the World (both 1987) and The Weight of the World (1977) by Peter Handke, About the Concept of History (1940) by Walter Benjamin and the Odyssey (circa 8th century BC) by Homer .

Handke's texts provided literary orientations for the film, which were incorporated almost as part of an improvisation with simple means and in the course of the production. The way in which Handke's poems are recorded in the film is called “ intermedial ”: the film in a certain way reflects the structure of the verse form and the lyrical form. The director is inspired by the poetry . The picture of a poem and its musical performance determine the opening scene of the film. In this way, many sequences and scenes in the film show a poetic view of the world. The focus is not on imitating the material and formal basis of the poems, but on their linguistic and structural function. The film is like a pictorial poem.

The first take of the film shows the poem being recited by the angel Damiel ( Bruno Ganz ) while a hand is writing the poem. The fact that the poem can be partly read and partly heard is considered atypically philosophical for the medium of film. In this scene there are many possible interpretations of Handke's mystical concept of language. In the first scene the viewer does not yet know whose hand he is seeing and whose voice he is hearing. The speaker with his philosophical reflections seems to enter a childlike state himself and to leave the adult way of communication. The close-up of the hand moving the fountain pen over a piece of paper is a perspective that the viewer shares immediately, as if writing and saying the words himself.

The writing of the poem at the beginning of the film can also be understood as a representation of the transition from the written (Handke) to the filmed (Wenders). The writing is transformed into the moving image of the film. The connection between language and image, writer and filmmaker is created through the theme of childhood, which is equally important for Wenders and Handke.

Joyful childhood and a soulful world in which all souls are one is understood not only as an individual life experience, but as a state without judgment, an attentive way of experiencing the world, which is open to the world, does not judge and interpret. Writing itself is the means to preserve the observations and memories and with it this state of being a child.

The different perspectives of the film between child and audience create the perception of a child and innocence for the viewer. Wim Wenders also shows the potential of cinema to mediate between word and image and the earthly and transcendent. The figure of children (who can also be adults who remember their childhood) is closer to myth than to reality and appears more as an archetype of memory. This becomes clear in the treatment of angels as a metaphor in the film. In the film, the world of angels floating outside the world corresponds to a child's perception of the world, which is under the sign of timelessness and utopia. The close relationship between children and angels also arises from the fact that they have a common perception of themselves and thus of the world that is evoked throughout the film. The lack of a child's identity before the formation of the ego and the psychological development, as the second stanza describes it, also finds a correspondence in the state of non-differentiation that characterizes the angels. They cannot be reduced to a spiritual metaphor. The visible staging of the angels and their stories have a symbolic dimension.

The contrast between the angels reciting the song of being a child in the sky over Berlin and the realism of Peter Falk with simple things like cigarettes, coffee mugs and snack bars, unites the differences between high and low tone, between pathos and comedy , transcendence and immanence As described by Niklas Luhmann : Communication is always religious when it regards the immanent from the point of view of transcendence.

Others

The questions of the past childhood, which are unanswered in a fading past, are also mentioned in connection with psychoanalysis and Carl Gustav Jung .

The poem is also used to illustrate questions about time, space, subject and object in metaphysics .

The philosopher Babette Babich, a student of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer , names the poem to discuss the question of the relationship between ethics , hermeneutics and existential philosophy .

In connection with questions about personal identity and the relationship to the other, the poem is examined with reference to Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze .

The poem is also used to illustrate philosophical questions of virtue ethics, for example in connection with Alasdair MacIntyre , who examined the essence of human activity and human identity, and when asked what constitutes the unity of an individual life, one possible answer was the Unity of a narrative search.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han quoted it as a big fan of Handke in an interview.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f Song of being a child. In: Handkeonline - Austrian National Library . Retrieved August 15, 2019 .
  2. a b Stefanie Orphal: Poetry film. Poetry in the audiovisual medium . Ed .: Jutta Müller-Tamm , Andrew James Johnston, Anne Eusterschulte, Susanne Frank, Michael Gamper (=  WeltLiteraturen / World Literatures . Volume 5 ). De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-035168-2 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  3. Manfred Engel : Rainer Maria Rilke's “Duineser Elegien” and modern German poetry between the turn of the century and the avant-garde (=  Germanistic treatises . Volume 58 ). JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-476-00589-5 , p. 133 .
  4. a b Simone Malaguti: Intermedial relationships in the film Der Himmel über Berlin . In: Revista Contingentia . tape 5 , no. 1 , 2010, ISSN  1980-7589 , p. 20–40 , urn : nbn: de: hebis: 30: 3-257943 .
  5. Simin Nina Littschwager: Film adaptation of poetry . with sample analyzes from the film "Poem". Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2296-2 , p. 93 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. a b Simone Malaguti: On the transformation of Peter Handke's texts in Wim Wenders' films . In: Achim Barsch, Helmut Scheuer, Georg-Michael Schulz (eds.): Festschrift for Peter Seibert on his 60th birthday (=  context. Contributions to the history of German-language literature . Volume 8 ). Martin Meidenbauer, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-89975-130-7 , p. 389-403 , doi : 10.5282 / ubm / epub.19140 .
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  8. a b c d Jörn Glasenapp : From story refuser, who sometimes tells stories, to storyteller, who sometimes refuses stories . Wim Wenders and his feature films. In: Jörn Glasenapp (Ed.): Film Concepts 50 . Wim Wenders (=  Michaela Krützen , Fabienne Liptay , Johannes Wende [Ed.]: Film Concepts . No. 4 ). edition text + kritik, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-86916-655-1 , p. 116 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ^ A b Roger F. Cook: Postmodern Culture and Film Narrative: Paris, Texas and Beyond . In: Roger F. Cook, Gerd Gemunden (Ed.): The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1997, ISBN 0-8143-2578-5 , pp. 131 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  10. a b Ministry for Science, Further Education and Culture Rhineland-Palatinate (ed.): Handout for the advanced course philosophy curriculum . Druckerei-Wolf, Mainz 2013, p. 10 ( bildung-rp.de [PDF; 3.4 MB ]).
  11. ^ A b Christopher Falzon: Philosophy Goes to the Movies. An Introduction to Philosophy . 3. Edition. Taylor & Francis, New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-315-81718-7 , pp. 17 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  12. a b c d Matthias Ganter: Wim Wenders and Jacques Derrida . On the compatibility of Wim Wenders' filmmaking with Jacques Derrida's deconstructive literary theory . Tectum, Marburg 2003, ISBN 3-8288-8486-5 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  13. a b c d e f Werner Köster: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke . “Congeniality” - intermedia aesthetics - need for comment. Ed .: Volker Wehdeking, Gunter E. Grimm , Rolf Parr (=  literature and media . Volume 7 ). Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8288-6307-1 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  14. a b c d e Ulrich von Bülow: space time language . Peter Handke reads Martin Heidegger. In: Anna Kinder (Ed.): Peter Handke. Stations, places, positions . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-029498-9 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  15. ^ Joachim W. Storck: Rilke, Rainer Maria. The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge . In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . tape 14 . Komet, Frechen 1991, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 .
  16. a b Alexander Huber: Attempt to arrive. Peter Handke's Aesthetics of Difference (=  Epistemata / Series Literary Studies . Volume 531 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2985-2 , The Epiphany. The ontological state of emergency: historical aspects. Joyce, Proust, Hofmannsthal, Musil ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  17. a b Michael Braun : The angel of the story. Wim Wenders “The Sky Over Berlin” . In: media observations . February 4, 2019. ISSN  1612-7315 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2019020412395951594784 .
  18. Volker Schmidt: The development of language criticism in the work of Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek . An investigation based on selected prose texts and plays. Heidelberg 2008, doi : 10.11588 / heidok.00008511 (diss.).
  19. a b Thorsten Carstensen: Romance storytelling. Peter Handke and the epic tradition (=  Manhattan Manuscripts . Volume 8 ). Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1108-4 , p. 82–83 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  20. ^ Robert Phillip Kolker, Peter Beicken : The Films of Wim Wenders. Cinema as Vision and Desire (=  Cambridge Film Classics ). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York 1993, ISBN 0-521-38064-2 , pp. 147 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  21. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf: Mystik der Moderne. The visionary aesthetics of German literature in the 20th century. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-476-00665-4 , p. 202–203 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  22. Anna Kinder: Peter Handke as a research phenomenon . In: Anna Kinder (Ed.): Peter Handke. Stations, places, positions . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-029498-9 , pp. 10 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  23. Wilfried Härle , Reiner Preul (Ed.): Theologische Gegenwartsdeutung (=  Marburg theological studies . Volume .) 24 ). Elwert, Marburg 1988, ISBN 3-7708-0903-3 .
  24. Quoted from: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke: Der Himmel über Berlin . A film book. 9th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-02406-X , p. 4 (1st edition 1987).
  25. ^ Susanne Niemuth-Engelmann: Everyday life and recording. Studies on Canetti , Bender , Handke and Schnurre (=  Epistemata / Series Literary Studies . Volume 253 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1530-4 , p. 103 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  26. a b Claude Winkler-Bessone: Wim Wenders (* 1945) . In: Fernand Hörner, Harald Neumeyer, Bernd Stiegler (eds.): Practiced intermediality. Franco-German portraits from Schiller to Goscinny / Uderzo . transcript, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-8376-1338-4 , p. 291–303 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  27. Quoted from: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke: Der Himmel über Berlin . A film book. 9th edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-02406-X , p. 14-15 (1st edition 1987).
  28. ^ Anne Kramer: The cinema: place of angels . The function of angelic figures in film (=  symbol - myth - media . Volume 13 ). Lit Verlag, Berlin / Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9424-X , p. 189 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  29. Patrick Colm Hogan: Metaphor in Cinematic Simulation, or Why Wim Wender's Angels Live in a Colorless World . In: Kathrin Fahlenbrach (Ed.): Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games . Cognitive Approaches (=  Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies . Volume 76 ). Taylor & Francis, New York / London 2016, ISBN 978-1-315-72452-2 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  30. Laura Mock: This Side / Beyond in Sartre's “The Game is Over” and current films - a variable motif . In: Michael Lommel, Volker Roloff (eds.): Sartre and the media (=  media upheavals . Volume 24 ). Transcript, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89942-816-2 , p. 136 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  31. Richard Raskin (ed.): Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (= Richard Raskin [ed.]: POV - A Danish Journal of Film Studies . No. 8 ). Aarhus 1999, OCLC 643973524 , p. 101–115 (English, au.dk [PDF; 5.0 MB ]).
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