Small forms of fame. Robert Walser’s portrait and obituary poems in the German-language "Prager Presse"
Communication Sciences
Final Report Abstract
From 1927, numerous portrait and obituary poems by the Swiss author Robert Walser appeared in the feuilleton of the German-language Prager Presse. They are testimonies to journalistic casual poetry on anniversaries and death memorial days. For a long time they were relegated to the model catalogue of dilettantism. In contrast, this work reads Walser's adaptations of hymns, dedication poems and obituaries as genre-specific test cases of the interwar feuilleton. The focus is on exemplary analyses of poems about authors such as Rilke, Stifter, Trakl, Brandes, Harden and Hamsun. These poems are not only gap-fillers, but also strategically violate conventions of contemporary fame and memorialisation in the ambivalent borderline between mocking verse and praise. For the first time, Walser's late portrait and necrology poems are related to the editorial framework of the Prager Presse. This was regarded as the international mouthpiece of the ČSR's Foreign Ministry and had to perform a balancing act: between the self-image of a left-liberal voice of peace in Masaryk's "New Europe" and the cultural containment of German-speaking minorities. The research interest formulated with the title ("Small forms of fame") applies on the one hand to the editorial function of newspaper poems, the smallest forms of daily news; on the other hand to the aesthetic distance, the ambivalent self-stylisation of a reading 'I' as a constantly praising verse-smith, who takes up the rules of contemporary jubilant and farewell journalism and at the same time ironically breaks through them. The perspective of the analyses – supported by archive work in Bern, Berlin and Prague – is therefore reoriented in each case. They focus on a) intertextual references and pictorial traditions of the poems; b) the discursive significance of those portrayed in the cultural context of Prague and Switzerland; c) the paratextual arrangement of the poems in the literary supplement "Dichtung und Welt", in the special editions on anniversaries and death anniversaries. In addition to detailed studies and an excursus on Franz Blei's portrait essays in the Prager Presse in 1934/35, the work offers new insights into the largely unexplored corpus of texts, especially from 1927 to 1929; into the journalistic debates on "fame and criticism of fame" since the beginning of the century (e.g. in Franz Blei, Herman Bang, Julian Hirsch, Emil Ludwig, Eduard Korrodi, Alfred Polgar, Paul Eisner, Karl Kraus); into Walser's poetic process, the connection between "rhyming and boasting", as well as into his (self-)localisation in lyrical journalism (with reference to Rychner, Werfel, Kerr, Kraus, among others). Two digressions on the "Nekrolog" of 1924 (on Anatole France) and the "Grabrede" of 1926 mark the transition between Walser's micrographic beginnings and his mission as a "Czechoslovakian Attasché".
Publications
-
Der Tod und seine Presse. De Gruyter.
Eickenrodt, Sabine & Matala de Mazza, Ethel (Eds.)
-
Zur Konjunktur von Todestagen im Feuilleton der Zwischenkriegszeit. Der Tod und seine Presse, 1-24. De Gruyter.
Eickenrodt, Sabine & Mazza, Ethel Matala de
-
„Kein Anatole France läuft mehr herum …“. Robert Walsers Nekrolog auf einen Nobelpreisträger. Der Tod und seine Presse, 83-104. De Gruyter.
Eickenrodt, Sabine
-
Robert Walser im Porträt. : Eine Arbeit des Londoner Malers Dexter Dalwood (2012)1. Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 34(2), 432-446.
Eickenrodt, Sabine
