“SŰDSEETRAUM” UND KUNSTTHEORIE – EIN STREITFALL? DIE SŰDSEE-THEMATIK BEI C. EINSTEIN UND G. BENN IM SPIEGEL INRER AVANTGARDISTISCHEN POETIK UND IHRE DESILLUSIONIERUNG BEI B. BRECHT UND R. MŰLLER

• Authors: Matthias Berning

Title variants

EN

The dream of the South Seas and art theory – a clash? The theme of the South Seas in C. Einstein and G. Benn as reflected in their avant-garde poetics and the disillusionment in B. Brecht and R. Műller

• Languages of publication: DE

Abstracts

EN

The paper intends to show the disillusion of exotic projections onto the South Seas by Bertold Brecht and Robert Műller, as well as similarities and differences in how Carl Einstein and Gottfried Benn deal with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl ś idea of mystical participation in their writings. Brecht ś early piece of work Tahiti is a metaphor of escapism. Later on in the 1920s the trend towards this motif of the South Seas became a target of satire. Robert Műller ś novella Das Inselmädchen tells us about the failure of trying to understand genuinely the archaic world of the South Seas. Einstein emphasizes the autonomy of primitive art and tries to interpret ethnographically its sculptures. Benn uses linguistics material of scientific books about the South Seas to evoke the transcendent “you” that has been lost in modernism.

Keywords

EN

SOUTH SEAS; PRIMITIVE ART; EXOTICISM; GERMAN LITERATURE; AVANT-GARDE

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 7 (24)
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 47 – 57

Contributors

author

Matthias Berning

• Institut fűr Germanistische und Allgemeinene Literaturwissenschaftten mit dem Schwerpunkt Wissensformen der RWTH, Aachen University, Templergraben 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany