Talks with the dead
The conversation with the dead (also Lucian genre ) is a literary genre that consists of a special form of prose dialog in the seriously comical style of Menippe satire . The dead include discussions fictitious conversations between historical or mythological figures in the realm of the dead , which blame on the human race in general or more specific time criticism is practiced.
tradition
Antiquity and Renaissance
The first funeral conversations in European literary history are the Nekrikoi dialogoi ( Greek Νεκρικοί διάλογοι ) of Lucian of Samosata (approx. 165 AD). The Lucian Talks of the Dead, however, did not gain significant interest until humanism began with Johannes Reuchlin's translation of a conversation to the dead into German by Johannes Reuchlin in 1495. In 1512 Erasmus von Rotterdam published an interpretation of the Lucian Talks of the Dead, and they also influenced Ulrich von Hutten's dialogues.
Modern times
The development to a European literary genre took place with Nicolas Boileau's Satires (1666), Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Dialogues des morts (1683), David Faßmann's monthly magazine Talks in the realm of those dead (1718–1739) and the Lukian translations by Johann Christoph Gottsched and Christoph Martin Wieland and Wieland's own works, including The Dialogues in Elysium (1780) and New Gods Conversations (1791); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the conversations of the dead in his satirical farce Götter, Helden und Wieland (1774) directed against Wieland . In 1712, François Fénelon presented conversations with the dead, which were not satirical but didactic for the education of the French princes. The Prussian King Friedrich II used the genre in 1772 and 1773 to polemicize against his political opponents, including the Duc de Choiseul and the Marquise de Pompadour . Later representatives of the funeral talks were Franz Grillparzer (1804 and 1841) and Fritz Mauthner (1906). While irony and polemics still prevailed among them , Paul Ernst's imagined conversations tended towards philosophical didactics. See also Hans Magnus Enzensberger (2008), Hammerstein or Der Eigensinn. A German story : in it his postscript.
The satirical work Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ("Conversations in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu ") by the French Maurice Joly , which appeared anonymously in Brussels in 1864 , achieved historical significance . In it, the author lets the French enlightenment argue with the Italian Renaissance philosopher, who was put into his mouth the cynical defense of a moral-free political tyranny, as it was Joly in the reign of Napoleon III. saw. The Dialogue aux enfers… is based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , an anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlet that was written around 1900. The anonymous forgers plagiarized Joly's text and simply put the cynical plans to conquer power in the mouths of the Jews in order to make a Jewish world conspiracy credible.
Stylistic devices for the conversations with the dead can also be found in Bertolt Brecht's Das Verhör des Lukullus (1939).
More recent examples are Arno Schmidt's Poet Conversations in the Elysium (1941), Jean-Paul Sartre's Closed Society (1944), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Without Us. A conversation in the dead (1999) and Walter Jens ' The devil is no longer alive, sir! Imagined Monologues, Imaginary Conversations (2001).
Milan Kundera , in his immortality, lets Ernest Hemingway and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe walk through the afterlife while talking to each other.
literature
- Gernot Krapinger: Conversation with the dead . In: Gert Ueding (Ed.): Historical Dictionary of Rhetoric , Vol. 10. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2011 (2011), Sp. 1308-1316
- John Rutledge: "The Dialogue of the Dead in Eighteenth-Century Germany." Lang, Bern and Frankfurt, 1974.
- Helmut Weidhase: Talks with the dead . In: Günther and Irmgard Schweikle: Metzler Literature Lexicon. Terms and Definitions . 2nd, revised edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 1990, p. 468.
- Talks with the dead . In: Gero von Wilpert : Subject Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). 4th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1964, DNB 455687854 , p. 727 f.
- Riccarda Suitner, The philosophical conversations of the dead in the early enlightenment , Meiner, Hamburg 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Manuel Baumbach: “Luciano. Relatos verídicos, “in: P. Hualde Pascual / M. Sanz Morales (eds.): La literatura griega y su tradición . Ediciones Akal, Madrid 2008, p. 359.