Richard Wagner's Parsifal remains an inexhaustible yet highly controversial work. This -stage consecration festival play, - as the composer described it, represents the culmination of his efforts to bring medieval myth and modern music together in a dynamic relationship. Wagner's engagement with religion--Buddhist as well as Christian--reaches a climax here, as he seeks through artistic means -to rescue the essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols . . . according to their figurative value, enabling us to see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation.- The...

Stefan George (1868-1933) is along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke one of the pre-eminent German poets of the twentieth century. He also had an important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural history. It is generally agreed that he played a significant part in the transition of German literature to Modernism, particularly in poetry. At the same time he was an outspoken critic of modernity. He believed that only an all-encompassing cultural renewal could save modern man. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although...

More than any other avant-garde movement, German Expressionism captures the aesthetic revolution of 20th-century modernity in all its contrasts and conflicts. In continuous eruptions from 1905 to 1925, Expressionism upset reigning practices in the arts, most vividly in painting and the visual arts. In the literature, a heady intellectualism combined with dramatic gesture, graphic visions, exuberant emotions and urgent proclamations to forge forceful styles of verbal expression. Expressionism introduced into art both visual and verbal a shockingly new intensity with many facets and many faces....

Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love...

A panel of authors, critics, and academics convened by the Literaturhaus in Munich in 1999 voted Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities the most important German novel of the 20th century. Their collective judgment rests on strong foundations: on the work's encyclopedic compass, embracing intellectual, social, political, and cultural concerns embodied in themes of striking originality; on its probing of key issues of Austrian and German life from the first four decades of the twentieth century; on the brilliance of its language, unsurpassed by any other 20th-century author writing in...

One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. Lessing invented the burgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy) and wrote one of the first successful German tragedies as well as one of the finest German comedies. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise, he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing's dramas are...

For over 150 years, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) has been one of the most widely read and performed German authors. His status in the literary canon is firmly established, but he has always been one of Germany's most contentiously discussed authors. Today's critical debate on his unique prose narratives and dramas is as heated as ever. Many critics regard Kleist as a lone presager of the aesthetics and philosophies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Yet there can be no question that he responds in his works and letters to the philosophical, aesthetic, and political...

The Viennese poet, dramatist, and prose writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was among the most celebrated men of letters in the German language at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. His early poems established his reputation as the child prodigy' of German letters, and a few remain among the most anthologized in the German language. His early lyric dramas prompted no less a judge than T. S. Eliot to pronounce him, along with Yeats and Claudel, one of the three European writers who had done the most to revive verse drama in modern times. His critical essays attest to the subtle...

As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the...

Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimus remains the one German novel of its time that has attained the stature of -world literature-: its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayal of a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those...