Peter Szondi

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Peter Szondi [ ˈpeːtɛr ˈsondi ] (born May 27, 1929 in Budapest ; † October 18, 1971 in Berlin ) was a literary scholar , critic , translator and essayist who institutionally established general and comparative literature in the Federal Republic of Germany and connected it internationally . He was a professor at the Free University of Berlin .

Life

Peter Szondi was born in 1929 to the Hungarian psychiatrist Leopold Szondi in an assimilated Jewish family. He came from an educated middle class family in Budapest. His uncle László Radványi belonged to the Budapest Sunday circle around Georg Lukács , Karl Mannheim and Béla Balázs , his aunt was Anna Seghers . Even in his youth, Szondi was friends with Ivan Nagel , with whom he later studied together.

The Szondi family were interned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from July to December 1944 and were ransomed to Switzerland under the so-called Kasztner Agreement. From 1945 to 1948 he attended the Trogen Cantonal School . Szondi then studied German, Romance languages ​​and philosophy in Zurich and Paris. Around 1950 he read together with Ivan Nagel in Zurich the fixed stars of his later intellectual orientation, the early work of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin . In 1954 he completed his soon-to-be-famous dissertation, Theory of Modern Drama, with Emil Staiger . Following Adorno's philosophy of new music , Walter Benjamin's origin of the German tragedy and Georg Lukács' theory of the novel , he tried out a historical semantic of drama on the basis of his European-American rescue attempts. 1960/61 followed his habilitation at the Free University of Berlin with an attempt on the tragic .

In 1960 Szondi met Paul Celan in Paris, later Gershom Scholem . From then on he was committed to Celan, defended him against allegations of plagiarism and fought publicly against conservative intellectuals with a Nazi past such as Hans Egon Holthusen . In the late 1960s, Scholem tried to call up his friend Szondi for a professorship in Israel, but received a rejection.

From 1965 Szondi was full professor and director of the newly founded seminar for general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin , the first comparative institute in the Federal Republic. He was also visiting professor at Princeton and Jerusalem . Szondi made a major contribution to the internationalization of literary studies in a way that had not happened in Germany since 1933. He said goodbye to national philology and opened the humanities to European literature. Among the guests of his institute were scholars and poets friends such as Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, René Wellek , Bernhard Böschenstein , Jean Starobinski , Jean Bollack and Jacques Derrida . Szondi's works have been translated into several languages.

Szondi was no longer able to take over the professorship for comparative literature at the University of Zurich , which Paul de Man had previously held. The death of Adorno in August 1969 was a deep turning point for him - as was the suicide of Celan in April 1970, which he had visited in Paris a month earlier. On October 18, 1971, Szondi drowned himself in Halensee in Berlin. He is buried in the Fluntern cemetery in Zurich. The former seminar for general and comparative literary studies is now called the Peter Szondi Institute in his memory . Jean Bollack gave a speech at the funeral service, the speech was published in 2013.

In his speech on the 30th birthday of the institute (1996), Szondi's student Gert Mattenklott emphasized :

“This institute would not exist without the shame of the history of German philology during fascism. (...) In other words, this institute - whatever else it may be - is first and foremost the result of a secession in the history of science. Following this logic, his comparative studies are not based on the national comparison of the old 'Littérature Comparée', they did not take the Bonn comparative studies, but rather the transnational aesthetics and poetology of general literary studies, as exemplified by the exile René Wellek at Yale University . "

Quotes

“Everything that is formal, in contrast to thematic, contains its future tradition as a possibility. But the historical change in the relationship between subject and object has called the tradition itself into question with its dramatic form. (...) So that a new style would be possible to solve the crisis not only of the dramatic form, but of the tradition as such. "

“To this day, the concept of tragic and tragic has basically remained German - nothing more characteristic than the parenthesis of the sentence with which a letter from Marcel Proust begins: 'Vous allez voir tout le tragique, comme dirait le critique allemand Curtius , de ma situation . '"

“It is not uncommon for evidence to play the same role in philological disputes as the evidence in the delusion tragedies of Shakespeare or Kleist: the evidence silences doubts because it is not doubted. If this happened more often, the footnotes would hardly have the aura of the well-founded. "

“Traditional poetry has only realized the past to the extent that it was regained by the subject from the objectivity of alienation. In [ Guillaume Apollinaire's poem cycle] Zone the attempt is made to express what is alienated as such. The most important consequence of this renunciation of subjectification is the loss of working time. The term denotes the participation of the poetic (or musical) work of art in the time in which it occurs as a temporal one. It consists in the fulfillment of meaning in empty successions. Meaning fulfillment, however, presupposes a subject who relates one to the other and thus creates meaning. The unrelated 'scraps of memory' can not attain an organic sequence in Zone , but (...) only a mounted juxtaposition. "

“ Celan often falls back on the ability of German to put together unlimited new words; this is one of the characteristic features of his language. Of course, it is not a stylistic device (if there should be anything like that). With the help of compound words, Celan succeeds in expressing himself in condensed syntagms, in capturing the discursive element in isolated words, but at the same time including it in such a way that the predication achieves a freedom that it, in view of the limits of syntactic ambiguity (on which as we know, Mallarmé's language is the foundation of the language) is not inherently. "

Publications

Monographs

  • Modern Drama Theory . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1956. From the 7th edition (1970) under the title: Theory of modern drama. 1880-1950.
  • Attempt on the tragic . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1961.
  • The other arrow. On the genesis of Hölderlin's hymn-like late style . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1963.
  • Sentence and contrast . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1964.

Translations

Posthumously

  • Celan studies . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • Readings and lessons. Experiments on literature, literary theory and literary sociology . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973.
  • About a "free (ie free) university". Opinions of a philologist. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973.
  • Fonts . 2 vols. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1978.
  • Study edition of the lectures . From the estate, ed. by Jean Bollack with Henriette Beese.
    • Volume 1: The theory of bourgeois tragedy in the 18th century. The merchant, the householder and the court master , ed. by Gert Mattenklott. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973. ISBN 3-518-07615-9
    • Volume 2: Ancient and Modern in the Aesthetics of Goethe's Era. Hegel's Doctrine of Poetry , (Poetics and Philosophy of History 1), ed. by Senta Metz and Hans-Hagen Hildebrandt. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974. ISBN 3-518-07640-X
    • Volume 3: From normative to speculative genre poetics. Schillings Genre Poetics, (Poetics and Philosophy of History 2), ed. by Wolfgang Fietkau. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973. ISBN 3-518-07672-8
    • Volume 4: The lyrical drama of the fin de siècle , ed. by Henriette Beese. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975. ISBN 3-518-07690-6
    • Volume 5: Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics , ed. by Jean Bollack. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1975. ISBN 3-518-07724-4
  • Letters , ed. by Christoph König and Thomas Sparr. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1993. ISBN 3-518-40524-1
  • Paul Celan / Peter Szondi: Correspondence , ed. by Christoph König. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2005.

estate

Szondi's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Parts of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition of the Modern Literature Museum in Marbach.

literature

Monographs and edited volumes

  • Michael Hays (Ed.): The Criticism of Peter Szondi (= Boundary 2. An International Journal of Literature and Culture. Vol. 11, Issue 3, 1983). Binghamton, NY (State Univ. New York) 1984, pp. 53-68.
  • Mayotte Bollack (Ed.): L Acte Critique. Un Colloque sur l'oeuvre de Peter Szondi Paris 21-23 June 1979 . Lille (Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme) 1985.
  • Christoph König, among colleagues. by Andreas Isenschmid : Narrows. Peter Szondi and the literature (= Marbacher Magazin. Vol. 108). 2nd Edition. German Schiller Society, Marbach 2004, ISBN 3-937384-04-9 .
  • Joshua Robert Gold and Russell A. Berman (Eds.): Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics. (= Telos Series 140). New York (Telos Press) 2007, ISBN 0-914386-37-9 .
  • New Rundschau : Peter Szondi. Frankfurt am Main (S. Fischer), issue 3/2008.
  • Irene Albers (Ed.): After Szondi: General and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin 1965–2015 . Berlin (Kadmos Verlag) 2015, ISBN 978-3-86599-322-9 .
  • Hans-Christian Riechers: Peter Szondi. An intellectual biography . Frankfurt am Main / New York (Campus) 2020, ISBN 978-3-593-51222-8 .

Individual studies

  • Cesare Cases: Introduzione. In: Peter Szondi: Teoria del dramma moderno (= Saggi. Vol. 311). Torino 1962.
  • Thomas Diecks:  Szondi, Peter (actually Péter). In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 25, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-428-11206-7 , p. 748 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Steve Giles: Szondi's Theory of Modern Drama. In: British Journal of Aesthetics. ISSN  0007-0904 , Vol. 27, 1987, Issue 3, pp. 268-277.
  • Gert Mattenklott : Peter Szondi as a comparator. In: Mediator. Franco-German yearbook. Vol. 1. Athenaeum, Bodenheim 1989, ISBN 3-8108-0182-8 , pp. 127-142.
  • Eberhard Lämmert : Peter Szondi. A look back at his 65th birthday In: Poetica. 26, 1994, pp. 1-30.
  • Stefan Scherer: Philological modernization in the restoration. Literary Studies in the 1950s: Peter Szondi. In: literary studies and science studies. DFG Symposium 1998 (Heidelberg), ed. v. Jörg Schönert, Stuttgart / Weimar 2000, pp. 292-316.
  • Martin A. Hainz : masks of ambiguity. Celan readings with Adorno, Szondi and Derrida (= studies on Austrian literature of the 20th century. Vol. 15). 2nd, modified edition. Braumüller, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-7003-1454-X .
  • Eberhard Lämmert: Theory and Practice of Criticism. Peter Szondis Hermeneutik In: Michael Klein, Sieglinde Klettenhammer (Ed.): Literary studies as critical science. Vienna 2005, pp. 77–99.
  • Stefan Scherer: Conciseness and Evidence. Philological knowledge and scientification of German literary studies in the upheaval of disciplines and social history in the 1950s. In: Between resonance and obstinacy. Studies on the History of Linguistics and Literature Studies in the 20th Century , ed. v. Gerhard Kaiser, Matthias Krell, Heidelberg 2005, pp. 33–52.
  • Peter Szondi on his 90th birthday (Peter Szondi Institute)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Szondiweg , alt-zueri.ch, accessed on 15 June 2012 found.
  2. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung: The society in the ivory tower. Retrieved June 9, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Immersion in the works , Wiener Zeitung , May 22, 2009, accessed on June 15, 2012.
  4. ↑ see Jean Bollack: Speech at the funeral service for Peter Szondi on November 16, 1971 in the crematorium Berlin-Wilmersdorf , communicated by Christoph König, in: Geschichte der Germanistik: historical journal for the philologies , ISSN 1613-0758, vol. 47/48, 2015, pp. 106-109
  5. ^ Peter Szondi: Theory of modern drama (1880-1950). In: Writings I. Ed. Jean Bollack et al. Frankfurt am Main 1978, pp. 11–147, here p. 147.
  6. ↑ Peter Szondi: Attempt on the tragic. In: Schriften I. S. 151–260, here S. 152.
  7. ↑ Peter Szondi: About philological knowledge. Pp. 263–286, here p. 274.
  8. ↑ Peter Szondi: "Zone". Marginalia to a poem by Apolinaire. In: Schriften II. Pp. 414–422, here p. 417.
  9. ↑ Peter Szondi: Led through the narrowness. Attempt on the intelligibility of the modern poem. In: Schriften II. Pp. 345–389, here p. 376 f.
  10. ↑ Information about the holdings of the DLA about Peter Szondi.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.dla-marbach.de  
personal data
SURNAME Szondi, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Szondi, Péter (Hungarian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German literary scholar, critic, translator and essayist of Hungarian origin
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH 18th October 1971
Place of death Berlin