Shared Literary Heritages in the Non‐National Archive

Bibliographic Data

ID21322159
AuthorsSandra Richter (0000-0002-7902-5918, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach / University of Stuttgart, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume94
Issue3
Pages392-396
Publication date2021-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe German Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-8831 • E-ISSN: 1756-1183
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/gequ.12210
OpenAlexW3198011936
LanguageEN
References cited40

In 2013, I was asked by the weekly Die Zeit to record a lecture series about world literature, focusing on the works of authors who received the Nobel Prize (www.zeitakademie.de/seminare/die-schoenen-kuenste/weltliteratur/). The recording raised a number of unanswered questions, which I four years later sought to answer in my book Eine Weltgeschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur, trying to show that processes of canonization, committed translators, critics and institutions such as universities, libraries, and archives play a special role in the designation of something as world literature. And when I became director of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, I was given the chance to reflect about the role of archives in even more detail, taking as a starting point the statutes of the German Literature Archive that since its foundation in 1955/56 has been going beyond the national point of view. Along these lines, I hope to contribute to transforming the DLA into a research archive for German and global literary data. In his seminal essay “On Comparatism in the Colony,” Baidik Bhattacharya, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Emily Apter, highlights the extent to which the world literature debate suffered from Western, mainly American dominance. He adds a further topic to the debate: the politics of the archive. Bhattacharya describes archiving in British India as “lettered governance” by the colonial power and its historians (“On Comparatism” 681), a form of governance that led to a biased selection of material and ways of viewing it that still favor English and American dominance in today's world literature debate. Consequently, remarkable areas of literature that are not written in the English language are neglected in this debate. This criticism points to issues that are not only convincing as far as India is concerned but also shed light on the origin of the concept of “Weltliteratur.” Once this origin is taken into account, patterns of dominance and resistance get more complicated. Shortly after 1800, Christoph Martin Wieland and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, famous authors and advisors to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach at the same time, both mentioned the concept “Weltliteratur” but did not state clearly what they were referring to. Moreover, Goethe, who used the concept exclusively in intimate spheres, often contradicted himself, making it even more difficult to grasp its original meaning (Birus). Wieland noted “Weltlitteratur” on the margins of his edition of Horace's letters, alluding to Roman urbanity (Weitz). According to Wieland, world literature meant aesthetic communication among the most impressive authors of the time; in Antiquity, this communication happened in Rome where Virgil, Horace, and Ovid met. Around 1800, Weimar was the place to be, with Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller as world authors. Goethe seems to have thought along similar lines. He also envisaged world literature as a form of communication, yet as a distinctively modern one. World literature was possible because the post, the ships, and the up-and-coming railway enabled contemporaries to exchange faster than before, and the literary market disseminated its products almost everywhere, in part with colonial and oriental interests (Mani, Recoding World Literature 52, passim). Looking at these products, however, Goethe soon became skeptical and mocked the way in which world literature moved ahead because some of its representatives, greedy for easy money and the excitement of a large audience, had sacrificed quality (Goethe 257; Birus 13). Today, a pragmatic concept of world literature has emerged that builds on some of Goethe's quotations: a concept that focuses not on the quality of literature but on the social and cultural circumstances that help literature to be disseminated. Be it according to David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Thomas O. Beebee's “German Literature as World Literature” or the views of others, world literature is—despite the relevant restrictions to literature in English, French or German—now understood as global literature: as a phenomenon that can be deduced from the study of its production through translation, the literary market, its reception, and canonization (Richter 13–34). Furthermore, issues of representation on which Bhattacharya and others focus come into play. In the case of Wieland and Goethe, they wanted to be recognized by world authors, Lord Byron or their French counterparts, authors who wrote from capitals such as London or Paris, while they themselves were both residents of a small eastern German town that aimed at making its cultural industry famous and used the concept of world literature in order to mark this ambition. It is not by coincidence that it was Goethe who, amongst his contemporaries, may have been the first author who had a sense of his own relevance and, therefore, kept all his papers, manuscripts, as well as receipts for butter and wine, so that future generations could study his work and biography. As agents in the process of canonization, archives such as the German Literature Archive matter, as Bhattacharya states. Their decisions to collect or not to collect, to index and to study predetermine the future of literature, the future of its authors, their literary fields, and research efforts. The German Literature Archive originated from private initiative, from the interest in Friedrich Schiller and the heritage of other Swabian authors; the state was not directly involved. Since 1955/56, however, the archive has been funded under a different model, as a national and yet also non-national archive—as an archive especially for literature in exile. It has taken in literature from authors who write in the German language or international literature that has been written in Germany or has a strong link to the country's culture, which is becoming increasingly diverse. Key words such as literature in exile, cross-cultural literary heritage, and decolonialization help to name this focus—a focus on global literatures that may aspire to become or has already become world literature in a normative sense of the word. It is in the light of these debates that the German Literature Archive, together with the National Library of Israel, funded the project “Global Archives” (2017–2020). Its main idea was to collaboratively explore, index, and research the literature written by Jewish authors who emigrated to Israel during the Nazi period. A joint website on Else Lasker-Schüler's paintings and papers was one of the outcomes of this project (www.laskerschuelerarchives.org). Since 2019, activities like these have taken a further step: the German Literature Archive has co-organized the exhibition project “Narrating Africa” and a series in which Namibian literature has been broadcast to a German audience (www.literatursehen.com/projekt/narrating-africa). The initiative ran parallel with the negotiations of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany that, in 2021, resulted in the official recognition of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples. Both project partners, the Namibian and the German side, have not only studied early twentieth-century literature that documents a somewhat violent history, but also present-day Namibian literature, a literature that has seldom received attention beyond the state's borders although its main language is English. Looking back at Namibia's shattered history, authors such as Rémy Ngamije (The Eternal Audience of One, 2019) and Sylvia Schlettwein (Bullies, Beasts and Beauties, 2012) portray life in everyday Windhoek, in the desert, in the afropolitan communities that cross African borders, and constitute the present in and beyond the continent. It is a literature that is informed by its environments and global developments, a literature that acknowledges but also transcends frontiers in order to examine and reach out to human beings. Seen through the lens of the world literature debate, the project “Narrating Africa” could be regarded as an act with which the German Literature Archive not only pays tribute to the cruel German past but also moves towards future collaborative projects in which other shared literary heritages may be identified. Such shared heritages will move beyond “lettered governance” and issues of representation. To put it in a utopian perspective, the reading public addressed by such projects may also change and engage with issues that point beyond the common history of conflicts and build new shared public spheres in which global literature would truly become world literature

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