Open letter
An open letter (formerly also mission letter or letter , Latin missum ) is a letter that is published as a pamphlet, in the press or in other media. It should be noted that since the Middle Ages and up into the 19th century, the term usually has a different meaning in Germany and Europe. It designates a “document that everyone could and should read. Accordingly, since the late Middle Ages, public attacks have also been called this ”. Due to the form of the open letter, the recipient is often asked to comment publicly on the subject of the letter. An open letter is sometimes linked to a petition or press release and can be used as a public relations tool. An open letter can also be sent directly to the recipient (s).
The open letter in its best-known form is often used to confront people of the public interest, associations or companies with controversial statements, broken promises or falsehoods or to provoke the addressee to act that is necessary from the perspective of the author of the letter .
In fact, his game forms are much more numerous, such as open letters for her birthday ( Anna Seghers to Christa Wolf on her 50th birthday), as literary criticism ( Marcel Reich-Ranicki to Günter Grass in the mirror ), as satire and above all as “entry into Book of Complaints in History ”(B. Dücker).
In his dissertation, Rolf-Bernhard Essig analyzes examples of open letters since antiquity, starting with Isocrates , which show how the open letter changes in the interplay with the development of the public. So they are first distributed in transcripts and orally and are in rhetorical tradition.
One of the most famous open letters ( J'accuse ) comes from Émile Zola and dealt with the Dreyfus affair in 1898 . It triggers a heated debate, in the course of which the ideal and the caricature of intellectuals develop.
See also
literature
- Burckhard Dücker: The open letter as a medium for social self-understanding. In: Language and Literature in Science and Education , Issue 69, No. 1/1992, ISSN 0724-9713 , pp. 32–42.
- Rolf-Bernhard Essig: The Open Letter. History and function of a journalistic form from Isokrates to Günter Grass (= Epistemata: Series Literary Studies . Vol. 267). Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1647-5 (also: Dissertation, University of Bamberg, 1999).
- Reinhard MG Nickisch : Writer on the wrong track? About political 'open letters' by German authors in the past and present. In: Journal of English and Germanic Philology , No. 93, 1994, pp. 469-484.
- Hans Wellmann: The open letter and its beginnings. About text type and media history. In: Maria Pümpel-Mader, Beatrix Schönherr (Hrsg.): Language - Culture - History. Linguistic history studies on German. Hans Moser on his 60th birthday. University of Innsbruck, Institute for German Studies, Innsbruck 1999, ISBN 3-901064-22-2 , pp. 361–384.
