Columbus A literary history of the 'other' and the 'own'

• Applicant: Dr. Hans-Christian Riechers
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442914099

The explorer and colonizer Columbus occupies a paradigmatic threshold position between cultural identity and alterity: himself a national hybrid figure, he discovers an 'other', which in turn becomes a projection screen for the European 'own'. The Columbus figure is thus a central element of post-colonial literary history. German-language literature on Columbus can be divided in three useful constellations of the history of ideas, or three modes that basically follow a chronological course: (1) the Enlightenment, which first of all appropriates the discoverer and colonizer as a hero of civilization, who lets the strangers participate in the European blessings, whereby the curses of civilization are also criticized (authors: Bodmer, Campe, Herder, Lichtenberg, Forster); (2) the idealistic-romantic, which seeks its own identity through identification with the hero, while the other hardly appears any more, Columbus is here an aesthetic cipher for the upheavals of the present (authors: Schiller, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, otherwise: Rückert, Klingemann); (3) the modern one, which only accepts the hero as an villain or comic figure, deconstructs him as a hero and tends to adopt the perspective of the 'others', who are often adapted to the own identity (authors: Wassermann, Tucholsky, Hasenclever, Zweig, Hacks, Buch).Columbus is by no means unknown in German literature, but he has not yet been adequately represented in German literary studies. I want to close this gap with my project and at the same time gain a new perspective on the history of literature.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Host: Professor Dr. Alexander Honold