Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
12 - On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Haunting (Literary) History: An Introduction to German Gothic
- 2 “The echo of the question, as if it had merely resounded in a tomb”: The Dark Anthropology of the Schauerroman in Schiller's Der Geisterseher
- 3 Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert's Hermann von Unna (1788/1794)
- 4 Scott, Hoffmann, and the Persistence of the Gothic
- 5 Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic
- 6 In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 — Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe
- 7 Popular Ghosts: Heinrich Heine on German Geistesgeschichte as Gothic Novel
- 8 The Spirit World of Art and Robert Schumann's Gothic Novel Project: The Impact of Gothic Literature on Schumann's Writings
- 9 About Face: E. T. A. Hoffmann, Weimar Film, and the Technological Afterlife of Gothic Physiognomy
- 10 Of Rats, Wolves, and Men: The Pied Piper as Gothic Revenant and Provenant in Wilhelm Raabe's Die Hämelschen Kinder
- 11 The Lady in White or the Laws of the Ghost in Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm
- 12 On Golems and Ghosts: Prague as a Site of Gothic Modernism
- 13 “Ein Gespenst geht um”: Christa Wolf, Irina Liebmann, and the Post-Wall Gothic
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Prague occupies an unusual position on the map of literary modernism insofar as it came to be considered more than most other locations as an uncanny site of ghosts, golems, and mysticism in spite of comprehensive programs of urban modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whether through novels dealing thematically with Prague as an uncanny site (such as Francis Crawford's The Witch of Prague and Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem) or in literary and theosophical works by writers connected with Prague (such as Franz Kafka or Rudolf Steiner), the city's standing as a ghostly space was well-established. This reputation was further underlined by some of the most successful films in the period around the First World War, including Hanns Heinz Ewers and Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) and Paul Wegener's Der Golem (The Golem, 1914/1920). This essay will argue that Prague can thus be seen as a prime location for formulating and answering David Punter's question as to where we might locate the “Gothic moment” in modernism itself.
Punter's question is provocative as it implies a surprising convergence of what we today consider popular mass culture and “high” modernist aesthetics. The case of Prague modernism is of particular interest precisely because such a convergence is one of the defining moments of cultural production in the city, where different forms of modernism have engaged with gothic tropes and intertexts to give Prague a literary identity inseparable from German and wider European traditions of the gothic, or Schauerphantastik.
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- Information
- Popular RevenantsThe German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000, pp. 222 - 241Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012