Research on Trojan myths

ISBN-13: 9786203852264 / Angielski / Miękka / 2025 / 152 str.

Elisabeth Scheele

Opis

In the first part, the drama Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist is seen as a tragedy of the destruction of interpersonal relationships through war. It uses the tragedy of the Amazon myth, which only allows the Amazons to find a lover after they have defeated him in battle, in order to counter the tragedy of the failure of love between Achilles and Penthesilea, heroic archetypes of the Trojan War, who face each other in battle, as here the Amazons face the Greeks and Trojans in battle, in accordance with Kleist's poem "The Higher Peace", in which "on war's thundering chariots men arm themselves", whose hearts "the God of love created". The second part examines the myth of Philoctetus from Homer to Heiner Müller, relates its concept of heroic death in war to Erich Maria Remarque's "Im Westen nichts Neues", opera librettos such as Berlioz's Trojans, Bertolt Brecht and Karl Kraus, and compares them with the ideology of the tragedy of the use of force in police trials.