These collective narrations are often framed as a response to a crisis, ranging from a deadly disease (the plague), to political and social upheavals such as the French Revolution and domestic terrorism in Germany. Drawing on the Presidential Theme of “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow,” the panel will examine how the narrations allow for a range of collective responses to such crises, including evasion, the use of humor, the acknowledgment of sorrow and loss, and political and social criticism.
Albrecht Classen’s presentation, “Story Collections, Frame Narratives, and the Genre of Schwänke: From the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age,” focuses on Schwänke or jest narratives, collections of humorous tales. He studies how major sixteenth-century German writers operated as narrators and responded to, or deviated from, the models of Boccaccio and Chaucer. What was the central narrative impetus for those highly popular storytellers to use the frame story only very liminally? For them, the prolog and epilog mattered significantly, but they seemed to have shied away from the complex structure developed by Boccaccio and Chaucer. Professor Classen examines how the social and literary environments in sixteenth-century Germany may have influenced the narrative structure of these collections.
Donald Wehrs’s presentation, “Aesthetic Healing of Divisiveness or Aesthetic Evasion of Politics: Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” explores Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1795 cycle of generically and culturally heterogeneous stories embedded within a frame narrative, modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron. Goethe’s frame narrative replaces Boccaccio’s plague with the political upheaval of the French Revolution as the impetus for communal storytelling. Goethe suggests that the causes of this human-made “plague” are uncritical embrace of political extremism, totalizing forms of thought inimical to pluralism, and indifference to humane moderations of thought by feeling. The assumption is that the best therapy against the debilitating conceptual, moral, and practical effects of political extremism is not an alternative political discourse, but rather the indirection of literary art. Goethe’s proposed healing therapy, literary art, raises the question of what hopes we can reasonably and responsibly invest in literature and the humanities as both disciplines and cultivated habits of mind. The presentation looks at how Goethe works out his project as a guide, a warning, or a combination of both.
“Collective Kritik: Deutschland im Herbst and the Trauma of 1977,” a presentation by Harry Roddy, examines the 1978 film, Deutschland im Herbst, as a collective attempt by eleven prominent West German filmmakers of the German New Wave to critically engage with the German government’s and the German public’s response to the actions of the domestic terrorist organization, Red Army Faction. Professor Roddy argues that one of the filmmakers, Alexander Kluge, establishes the framing of the narrative and, playing the role of Boccaccio’s Dioneo, attempts to consolidate the competing critiques with narrative interjections and commentary. The presentation interrogates the uneven narrative produced by these filmmakers within the frame of two funerals and argues that, although this collective intervention fails to spur a hoped-for critical self-examination on the part of the West German public, its legacy endures in later collective cinematic interventions such as the film Deutschland 09.
The panel as a whole examines the potential of collective narrations modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron to challenge generic boundaries and enable reflection about how we respond individually and collectively to cataclysmic events.