Wilhelm Schaefer (writer)

The title of this article is ambiguous. For a German writer with a similar name, see Wilhelm Schäfer (writer) (1868–1952).

Johann Nikolaus Wilhelm Schaefer (born March 4, 1835 in Frankfurt am Main , † May 13, 1908 in Zurich ) was a German-Swiss writer.

Life

Wilhelm Schaefer "worked as a merchant for a long time, wrote a series of dramas, some of which were performed in his hometown, had to give up his position due to illness, moved to Zurich and died in a sanatorium". He should not be confused with the better-known, folk- national writer Wilhelm Schäfer (1868–1952).

(Automatically generated) figure network for Faustine

One of Schaefer's works is Faustine, the female Faust , a “tragedy in six acts plus a prelude and prologue”, which appeared in Zurich in 1898. It is a parody of Goethe's Faust . For example, there is a “prelude in the theater director's room” and a “prologue in hell”. In the list of people the protagonist is referred to as "Faustine Hermaphroditos ". The first act begins with a parody of the Faust monologue "I have now, ah!":

I tried science,
the skull filling "comme il faut".
I had got myself up for a strict study;
The spiritual hearth burned brightly.
For free! I did not feel satisfaction in my bosom:
my head was full; but my heart remained empty.
Now I still count to the abstruse
And can no longer find the way in myself .

Sabine Doering dedicates herself to Schaefer's Faustine in her Regensburg habilitation, The Sisters of Doctor Faust. A history of female fist shapes (2001). Renate von Heydebrand summarized this section in a review for the yearbook of the Raabe Society ; Accordingly, Schaefer's parody is one of the works "which are not first-rate literary-aesthetic, but are quite innovative and imaginative in other respects, for example through parodistic strategies and bold updates of the ambience":

“Schäfer, closely parodying some scenes from Goethe's Faust , places the learned Faustine, charged with superhuman energies, as Mephisto with an electrical engineer Praktinski in order to address both the women's emancipation movement with this threatening couple who ultimately perish in their own arts how to criticize modern science and technology: electricity is seen as feminine and is associated with the dangerous 'new woman'. "

Web links

• Wilhelm Schaefer at the Kalliope network
• Faustine, the female Faust (first print: Zurich 1898) at Zeno.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See https://books.google.de/books?id=ooRIAQAAMAAJ&q=Wilhelm+Schaefer+1835
2. ↑ http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jdrg.2003.44.issue-1/9783484339033.176/9783484339033.176.xml