2024-11-07 14:15:00
His reading began with “Struwwelpeter” and led, through Karl May, to Sartre and Adorno, Stifter and Klemperer. Here the Germanist and essayist Hannelore Schlaffer tells us which books have accompanied her in life.
Editor’s Preliminary Observation: Hannelore Schlaffer is one of the most interesting literary scholars of her generation and represents the intellectual glamor most familiar in this country from France. Born in Würzburg in 1939, Schlaffer studied German in Erlangen, later taught at the Sorbonne in Paris and became a professor of modern German literature in Freiburg. She made a name for herself beyond specialist books with essays on beauty, fashion and intellectuals (“Rüpel und Rebel”).
His most famous publication is “Intellectual marriage. The couple’s life project”. Perhaps the book was so well received because Hannelore Schlaffer herself had an intellectual marriage: she was with the Stuttgart literary scholar Heinz Schlaffer for almost 60 years marriedthan last year died. Hannelore Schlaffer’s latest book is titled “The Time of My Life. What was and still is. Below, explain with her Biography in books also what one could imagine under a “Family reading“ and below “Reserve the grappa“ must imagine.
Heinrich Hoffmann: The Struwwelpeter
When a few years ago I came across this children’s book, which was my first and favorite since time immemorial, I was shocked by the wickedness of the stories, the gloom of the images, the grotesqueness of the gestures: it was intended to educate, entertain and educate a child become? Yet, I came to myself and realized what a formative effect these scenes had had on my childhood mind. They gained the experience of what poetry is in the heart that only a small world knew. As soon as his father picked up the book and read it, he was a different person: he spoke more slowly, with a deeper voice, even in verse, and that is: he really sang. What he was talking about wasn’t even what happened in our house: there were no cats, no rabbits, no Moors, no stubborn children.
However! There was one! Being the thumb sucker that I was, is it possible that my finger was cut off? E: I sat at the table too! However, I have never behaved like this restless Philip. The grotesque characters and absurd events made me aware of the difference between my reality with my father and mother and a fantasy world that I could participate in but which did nothing to me. And the best part: you could joke about it with everyone. Thus I discovered the poetic subjunctive, I learned to affirm a reality and, for the first time, I savored the pleasure of playing with what is not but what could be. In short, I got an idea of the difference between fantasy and reality.
Karl May: Winnetou
The adult helps the child to have fun through books. A reader is someone who reads alone. I soon began to read independently, although my family also took part and confirmed the importance of what I was doing. I learned the pleasure of retreating into the book and into another world, but at the same time I enjoyed communicating what I had read and experienced. I read Karl May
When I returned to the living room after this spy exploit, my brother and father had also read the book and were playing: the brother was Winnetou, the father was Old Shatterhand, I, the “little sister”, Nscho-tschi. And now, with every soup and every game of cards, we reminded ourselves not to forget to watch out for the Sioux, our enemies. So I experienced that reading not only leads to a pleasant silence with a book, but reading also opens up a happy sociality.
Friedrich Schiller: Kabbalah and love
Soon I found myself alone at home with my reading. I enjoyed reading too much and chose books that were too select for the hardworking family to want to read. Now people would pass me by and simply say, “The eldest daughter is reading.” Schiller was my favorite author; through him I found a new social context for my reading, the theatre: I transformed from a reader into an audience. However, I remained a loner. I learned the roles of the plays by heart and recited them alone by locking myself in my room. “Kabale and Love” was performed particularly often in my home theater.
Ferdinand von Walter’s lively words of love impressed the teenage girl, but the shy Louise completely ignored them. When I acted in the theater in my room, I liked to play Lady Milford, for example the scene where she receives Luise and invites the shy woman to come to her. This aristocratic arrogance impressed my bourgeois modesty; I repeated the imperious phrases to myself over and over again while I washed, dusted and embroidered. With Schiller I not only learned big words, but also big gestures. This was necessary to bring what you read beyond mere quotation into life, into everyday life, if reading was to become a lifestyle.
Jean-Paul Sartre: The words
No one has described in such detail the psychological and intellectual process of introducing bookish knowledge into the mind of a child as Sartre in his book “Les mots”, available in the commendable translation by Hans Mayer. Sartre describes the environment necessary for books to become apparent to an awakening mind. Anyone today who strongly recommends reading to children must be surprised that Sartre makes it convincingly clear that every pleasure in reading begins with a prohibition.
No one other than his grandfather was allowed to touch the books in the library, which he initially thought were children’s boxes. Only through this authority has reading acquired a lifelong sacredness. I celebrated it too. When I was still in school, in the afternoon I walked from the mountain where I lived to the one opposite, where there was a mighty Art Deco style church, and I read Sartre, the author that the church didn’t appreciate very much. This almost sinful reading in the stately hall with its mysterious rustling was the beginning of my inclination to read in libraries, and this was beautiful in the Biblioteque Nationale.
Richard Hamann: History of Art (volume 1)
It’s no joke when I call this classic art-historical work from the 1950s, which I bought with the first BAföG grant money, the equivalent of “Struwwelpeter”. Every reader is also a reader of images from childhood; The scary gestures in the children’s book were my first art-historical experience. Where, as usually happens, images are missing in the book, the reader creates them in his head, everyone paints “his” Effi Briest, “his” Madame Chauchat. The reader is an employee of the author. Reading Hamann’s art history helps to understand this.
The art historian describes, in the finest German, all the bronze and marble figures with meticulous precision, so that what they understand as mythology can be easily understood and imagined as an almost literary plot. Hamann reads a mythical meaning from every gesture, every look, every turn of hands and feet. Reading the pictures was what I now learned through this book, as I once did with “Struwwelpeter”.
However, I was desperate because, after studying the sculptures depicted in the book so intensively, I could not distinguish a relief on the wall of the Würzburg middle school, which I knew to be from the 19th century, from the Greek original. Every day I made pilgrimages to
Adalbert Stifter: Colored stones
The greater the enjoyment of reading, the easier it is to approach reading as a matter of duty: one chooses to undertake literary studies. In the 1950s, students of the subject had to know the entire canon of what was called classical literature to pass the exam. Studying was like entering a library and, just like there on the shelves, one book after another soon lined up in my head. Naturally everyone chose some pearls and Stifter’s stories particularly struck me.
His much-praised landscape descriptions frame idylls, yet also have a secret demonic and dramatic quality. The stories “Granite”, “Rock Crystal”, “Limestone” describe the battle of color against fading. Everything that is colored is afraid of grey, dust, death. Not only the sky, every tree, every branch, every stone, even a person’s jacket arouses this guilty fear, which is never expressed and is therefore all the more fascinating.
Theodor W. Adorno: Minima Moralia
In the 1960s, the student movement offered the possibility of entering a new family of readers. The so-called leftist students were readers and shared many Bibles. Apparently their reading material was Marx, but they became acquainted with him through the Frankfurt School. It later becomes clear that these intellectuals did not so much want to liberate the proletariat but rather seek contact with early modernity, with the revolutionary poetry and thought that National Socialism had banned.
Students celebrated the rebirth of this intellectual revolution by beginning to write like the authors of the time. The new Benjamins and Adornos are on the rise. Adorno’s “Minima Moralia”, a book that breaks down the social situation of the late bourgeoisie into scenes and criticizes it with arrogant indignation, fuels the resentment of rebellious youth. Adorno outlined the society from which one came, which one wanted to oppose and for which one had become part of the new family of readers.
Victor Klemperer: LTI – Notebook of a philologist
Klemperer’s autobiographical notes on National Socialism and its language, the “Lingua Tertii Imperii”, were written in the midst of the catastrophe. The calm and reason with which we speak of a world in which unreasonableness reigns is admirable! For Klemperer, writing is a chance for survival. This educational book for posterity gives you the strength to survive. The philologist analyzes the language of political struggle; he sees his work as a means of “linguistic detox” because “words can be like small doses of arsenic”. Everything in this society becomes “greeting, calling, whipping”.
Ever since Klemperer had to walk the streets with the Jewish star on September 19, 1941, he has worked on this “philology of misery”, but for today’s reader the charm of historical teaching lies in the fact that every analysis and knowledge are at the same time linked to what has been experienced, to what is connected to the moment, that living, speaking and writing are the same thing. Historical enlightenment has never been presented so calmly and with such touching success, and the analysis of history has never been provided in such detail as the history of everyday speech.
Christian Morgenstern: Songs of the Gallows
The trained reader moves effortlessly through a thicket of words, images, nonsense and thoughts. However: reading sports is an achievement without an achievement; No public official will be as happy sitting behind a file as a reader will be sitting behind the next book. If he also takes Morgenstern’s “Gallows Songs” out of his bookcase, Korf, the poet of poetry, comes to him and helps him absorb and reject even more quickly the “tapeworm wisdom” of thick books:
“His mind now invents/ something that comes off:/ glasses whose energies/ put the text together for him.” The reader also no longer needs to study Kant, because Korf invented a “day-night lamp” that marks the day Enlightenment turned into night. Morgenstern’s poems are grappa; The reader must sleep a little drunk if he wants to return to his bookstore the next morning thirsty for knowledge.
Farewell, and lullaby,” meaning that language itself can become a tool of deception or manipulation. Klemperer’s observations extend beyond mere documentation; they provide insight into how language shapes our understanding of reality and the importance of critical thinking, especially in perilous times.
Klemperer’s work resonates today, as it highlights the profound effects of language on thought and identity. He demonstrates how language can perpetuate ideologies and create divisions within society. The urgency of Klemperer’s reflections reminds readers to remain vigilant against the subtleties of language that can lead to misunderstanding or acceptance of oppressive regimes.
these authors each illuminate different dimensions of the reading experience. From the escapades in Karl May’s tales of the Wild West to the existential musings of Sartre, to the socio-political critiques of Adorno and Klemperer, each contribution enriches a reader’s understanding of the world, encompassing both personal enjoyment and the weighty responsibility of engaging with the texts that shape our collective consciousness. The journey from solitary reading to becoming part of a vibrant community of thinkers and readers illustrates the transformative power of literature, urging us to explore, question, and connect through the written word.
