Method critique of German studies

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Methodenkritik der Germanistik - Materialistic literary theory and bourgeois practice is a collection of three essays published in 1970 in the series Texte Metzler , the fourth edition (10th 13th thousand) in 1973. It contains an unpublished manuscript of the lecture by the new Germanist Marie-Luise Gansberg ( On some popular prejudices against materialistic literary studies ), an original contribution by the old Germanist Paul Gerhard Völker ( sketch of a Marxist literary study ) and a reprinted work by the latter ( The inhumane practice of a bourgeois science. On the history of methods German studies ). According to the cover text, the duo attempted “to analyze the methodological history of German studies in three essays [...] that focuses on hermeneutics and normative values. They accuse bourgeois literary studies of valuation ontology and form typology in an unhistorical space. That is why they place the subject of bourgeois literature, the individual as the 'ensemble of social conditions', at the center of literary considerations, into which history is integrated as the necessity of the abolition of reified human relationships. "

Contemporary historical context

The political and cultural optimism evoked by the 1968 movement was to have a formative influence on German literary studies in the following decades. Along with this, there was a general criticism of institutionalized science, which, due to its distance from history and society, was viewed as an instrument to secure bourgeois rule. The methodological criticism of German studies is part and expression of this time of upheaval and crisis. In the essays contained therein, the attempt to equate traditional German studies indiscriminately with bourgeois ideology becomes clear.

“Instead of continuing to hope for the emergence of a critical public in the sense of the left-liberal reformers pushing for democratic modernization, which in their opinion would never exist in a capitalist economic and social order due to the tactics of the mass media exerted by the capitalists, these groups felt it would - in alliance with the working class - as much more sensible to place oneself in the service of a counter-public which is opposed to this system and related to the broad masses of the population. Her guiding book was therefore no longer the study Structural Change of the Public (1962) by Jürgen Habermas, which was still based on left-liberal reformist concepts , but rather the study Publicity and Experience published in 1972 . On the organizational analysis of the bourgeois and proletarian public by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. [...]

With regard to German studies, there was no particularly lively practical relevance in this area, but a high level of reflection. This is supported by the theoretical discussions held in the Argument , in the Alternative , the texts Metzler , the Fischer Athenaeum paperbacks, the Scriptor volumes and elsewhere in these years , in which Walter Fähnders, Helga Gallas, Marie Luise Gansberg, Hans-Peter Herrmann, Michael Pehlke, Martin Rector, Dieter Richter, Peter Stein, Paul Gerhard Völker, Bernd Jürgen Warneken, Lienhard Wawrzyn and others subjected the previous German studies to a detailed methodological criticism and developed materialistically founded historical concepts. "

- JOST HERMAND : History of German Studies

The essays at a glance

Some popular prejudices against materialistic literary studies

The contribution is based on a lecture given in early 1969 to Munich German studies students in the seminar building on Schellingstrasse. The focus is on the concept and research task of materialistic literary studies. The author answered the question “What does materialistic literary studies mean?” As follows: “In contrast to traditional German studies, materialistic literary studies understand their subject - fiction and literary forms of purpose - as a dialectical moment in the overall social process. She recognizes every text as a product of human labor, created through and in engagement with human domination. The aesthetic structure, which interprets an overall social constellation in the characteristic selection of certain linguistic-fictional forms, in turn becomes a social force of its own. To the same extent as it succeeds in overcoming the barriers of false consciousness, it mediates in the game the imaginative knowledge of the society from which it originates. This knowledge is sensual and playful, essentially critical or utopian in nature. "

For the presentation of the materialistic method, the author found the form of prejudice criticism to be the most favorable. The four prejudices on which a detailed statement is made are:

  1. Materialistic literary studies reduce art, it takes away its aesthetic and thus actually human quality.
  2. Materialistic literary studies absolute a methodical approach that is justified, but only as one among others, as equal, not overriding.
  3. Materialistic literary studies plays itself out as the prophet of a cause that has long since established itself as a discipline in its own right: Reference is made to literary sociology.
  4. The interest in knowledge of materialistic literary studies is dubious because it is partisan.

In contrast to her academic teacher Friedrich Sengle , Gansberg called for a move away from the “knowledge of truth free of patronage”: “Only a radical critical reflection that does not exclude the dialectical intertwining of class structure and cognitive consciousness, but places it at the center of reflection, can be objective Making the causes of the partiality of the respective value judgment rationally understandable. Only it can free us from affirmative partisanship and determine the direction of emancipatory partisanship. ”According to the Freiburg Germanist Gerhard Kaiser , this epistemological postulate goes against all logic:“ Does Gansberg not see that establishing the emancipatory or affirmative character of partisanship is also a question is partisanship? "

The inhumane practice of a bourgeois science

The article, published for the first time in 1968, deals with the history of methods in German studies. Volkers attention was particularly directed to the ideological character of bourgeois methodology. He criticized both the deliberate exclusion of materialistic elements and the neglected reference to "true history". In a historical foray into various methodological approaches, he comes to the conclusion that any scientific method that isolates the literary work from its possible impact on time and society turns out to be inhumane. The thrust of Völkers criticism is illustrated most clearly by his remarks on the relationship between German studies and the fascist state 1933–1945: “The resistance of critical consciousness is eliminated by reducing the historical individual to an abstract individual who is referred to his inwardness. The subordination of the individual to the population as a whole is not enough, however, to erase the fact of class antagonisms. The national community itself is transformed into a mythical archetype in order to avoid being checked against reality. The ideal of peasantry and the class structure, which is said to have been preserved from the early Germanic period up to industrialization and massing in the 19th century, are supposed to be applied to the present to counter the proletarian danger. Behind these constructions, German studies already know that this attempt is impossible. But she even uses this knowledge to give meaning to the meaningless. The pseudo-polemic against the bourgeoisie is a recurring attempt of a rhetorical kind to break away from one's own tradition. In the rejection of bourgeois security and in the propagation of the heroic and the tragic, which no longer has any relation to guilt and purification, but should only find its fulfillment in complete senselessness, German studies has reached its extreme inhuman position and is a herald have become Nazi perseverance slogans. "

Sketch of a Marxist literary study

At the beginning of this original article, Völker placed two programmatic quotations, one of which comes from Karl Marx 's On the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right , the other from a letter from Friedrich Engels to Conrad Schmidt . The focus is on the intention to expose the idea of ​​an independent art as appearance. The objection is raised against the previous Marxist literary studies that for its representatives the conception of the work of art as an autonomous quantity was decisive. The issue of the detachment of literary interpretations from "reality", the subject of Völkers' previous essay, is taken up again. Later on, the author criticized the alleged pluralism of methods in bourgeois literary studies, although there was no fundamental dispute about the actual methodological basis.

The Germanist Karl-Heinz Götze criticized the sketch of a Marxist literary study, among other things, that its author misunderstood “both the character of bourgeois society and the character of bourgeois literature”.

Reviews

  • Colin Good: Journal of European Studies: Literature and Ideas from the Renaissance to the Present 1, 1971, pp. 179-180.
  • Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig: literary aesthetics, methodology and genre poetics, in: active word. German language in research and teaching 21, 1971, 3, pp. 187-199, here p. 190.
  • Gert Mattenklott: Communications of the German Association of Germanists 18, 1971, 1, pp. 29-30.
  • Karl-Heinz Götze: Das Argument 14, 1972, No. 72 [special issue “Problems of Aesthetics (IV). Literature and Linguistics ”], pp. 352-355.
  • Tilman Krömer: German Studies. International reference organ with bibliographical references 13, 1972, p. 272 ​​(discussion of the 3rd, unchanged edition 1971).

literature

  • Albert Klein, Jochen Vogt: Methods of Literary Studies I: History of Literature and Interpretation (Basic Studies in Literary Studies; 3), Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag 1971 (4th edition Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1977).
  • Florian Vaßen: Methods of literary studies II: Marxist literary theory and literary sociology. With a bibliography (basic study of literature; 4), Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag 1972 (3rd edition Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1978).
  • Werner Weiland: Literaturwissenschaft, materialistische, in: Diether Krywalski (Hrsg.), Handlexikon zur Literaturwissenschaft, Munich: Ehrenwirth 1974, pp. 281-286, here pp. 281f., 286.
  • Friedrich Sengle: To overcome the anachronistic method controversy in today's literary studies [1972], in: ders., Literary historiography without training mandate. Workshop reports, methodology, criticism, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1980, pp. 89-102, here pp. 93-94, 100.
  • Fotis Jannidis: Marxist literature, in: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Revised version of the Real Lexicon of German Literary History, Vol. 2: H ‒ O, Berlin, New York / NY: De Gruyter 2000, pp. 541-546, here pp. 542, 545.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Critique of methods in German studies. Materialistic literary theory and bourgeois practice, 4th, partly revised. Stuttgart: Metzler 1973, brief description on the back of the cover.
  2. ^ Rainer Rosenberg: The sixties as a turning point in German literary studies. Theoretical history, in: Rainer Rosenberg, Inge Münz-Koenen, Petra Boden (eds.), The Spirit of Unrest. 1968 in comparison. Science - Literature - Media, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2000, pp. 125-152, here pp. 162f.
  3. ↑ Jost Hermand: From Critical Liberalism to the Sixty-Eight Revolte, in: ders., Geschichte der Germanistik, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1994 (unchanged new edition 2017), pp. 141-164, here pp. 160f.
  4. ↑ The phrase “popular prejudices” is a quote from Marx's German Ideology . See Sabine Koloch: Marie Luise Gansberg: the successful, the taboo breaker, the traumatized - biographical approaches to a sixty-eight woman and a pioneer of "feminist literary studies" (June 20, 2018) [1]
  5. ↑ "300 people sat, stood and smoked in the small lecture hall and followed the presentation by Ms. Marie-Luise Gansberg, who tried to present in a larger theoretical context what she and two other assistants Professor Sengles [Hans-Wolf Jäger, Werner Weiland] in Tried to practice approaches and what - like others already - brought her inconvenience: materialistic literary studies. ”Jörg Drews: For a new German studies. Discussion in the Munich University, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 21, January 24, 1969, p. 11.
  6. ↑ In the footnotes, the background to the origin of the print version is highlighted: "The criticism of Gerhard Bauer (Berlin) and Alfons Glück (Marburg) has been incorporated into the partially revised text." Ibid., P. 135, note 1.
  7. ^ Methodenkritik der Germanistik, 1973, p. 7f.
  8. ↑ Ibid., P. 10.
  9. ↑ Ibid., P. 32f.
  10. ^ Gerhard Kaiser: German Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany. Your tendencies as a science of modern German literature, in: Seminar. Journal of Germanic Studies 11, 1975, pp. 93-111, here pp. 108f., Note 26. See previously Jens Stüben: Parteilichkeit. On the criticism of Marxist literary theory (Treatises on art, music and literary studies; 171), Bonn: Bouvier 1974. The Düsseldorf Germanist Manfred Windfuhr recorded six points of criticism in a letter to Gansberg on December 5, 1970 [2] .
  11. ^ Paul-Gerhard Völker: The inhumane practice of a bourgeois science. On the history of methods in German studies, in: The argument. Berliner Hefte für Problem der Gesellschaft 10, 1968, No. 49 [Special issue "Critique of bourgeois German studies (Science as Politics II) (3rd edition 1970)"], pp. 431‒454.
  12. ↑ Preliminary remarks have been added to the original version for reprinting.
  13. ↑ Methodenkritik der Germanistik, 1973, p. 66f.
  14. ↑ Karl-Heinz Götze: Das Argument 14, 1972, No. 72 [special issue “Problems of Aesthetics (IV). Literature and Linguistics ”], pp. 352‒355, here p. 354.