Peter Erspamer explores the 'Jewish question' in German literature from Lessing's Nathan der Weise in 1779 to Sessa's Unser Verkehr in 1815. He analyzes the transition from an enlightened emancipatory literature advocating tolerance in the late eighteenth century to an anti-Semitic literature with nationalistic overtones in the early nineteenth century. Erspamer examines Nathan in light of Lessing's attempts to distance himself from the excesses of his own Christian in-group through pariah identification, using an idealized member of an out-group religion as a vehicle to...

Current interest in the intersections of various kinds of discourse provides the basis for a fresh look at diverse textual strategies of cultural legitimation. This collection presents an introductory essay and eleven studies (written in English and German) that address claims to authority associated with differing kinds of texts from such varied perspectives as political performance, popular culture, history of science, interrelations between verbal texts and other arts, and artistic professionalism. Read together, these studies illuminate historical contingencies and reveal important...

Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film.

Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things...