Populäre Moderne. Science-Fiction zwischen Groschenheft und Avantgarde (1863–1947)
At the beginning of the 20th century, German literature experiences a peak in the Fantastic. Especially in the media of popular culture, but also in the texts of the highly literary avant-gardes, motifs circulate that are familiar today from science fiction: Contact with extraterrestrials, planetary travel and technical utopian fantasies. This finding alone shows that the separation of 'high' and 'low', of art and entertainment, which is repeatedly invoked among others by literary studies is untenable. It is true that authors like Hans Dominik, Kurd Laßwitz and Friedrich Wilhelm Mader publish in other media (e.g. in Das neue Universum or the Schlesische Zeitung) than authors like Georg Heym and Albert Ehrenstein (e.g. Die Aktion). But when Heym and Ehrenstein write about Martians, Alfred Döblin presents Giganten (1932), an "adventure book" that is supposed to be an easily digestible version of his epic Berge Meere und Giganten (1924), and Paul Scheerbart writes about large-scale technical projects, as they are also the title of Bernhard Kellermann's Der Tunnel (1913), it quickly becomes evident that popular culture and the avant-garde don’t inhabit separate spheres.
The dissertation examines which energies circulate between the texts in Greenblatt's sense and takes a look at differences and similarities between the texts. Publication contexts play just as much a role as practices of canonisation. In this way, the field of the Fantastic around 1900 is explored in a theoretically well-founded and analytically validated manner and new descriptive categories are developed that no longer work through the antagonism of 'high' and 'low'.
Subject: German Studies
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Moritz Baßler