Lecture: The Death (NDL)

This course is the lecture "Death" in Modern German Literary Studies, which was held in the winter semester 2022/23. From the point of view of literary studies, death is, of course, a motif: characters die or are brought to death in novels, tragedies, and tragedy plays, characters take their own lives, death is feared or longed for, sung about and lamented. But death is also, as it were, the poetological context of the genre: without tragic death there can be no tragedy.

The lecture examines the various implications of its subject matter essayistically, as it were: starting from Lessing's art-historical writing "Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet" ("How the ancients formed death"), medieval death dances, baroque sonnets and Leichabdankungen, famous literary deaths (Carl Stuart, Emilia Galotti, Werther, Mignon, etc.), but also genre-poetological and anthropological issues are discussed.