Literary Uses of Biblical Imagery in Hartmann Von Aue's Gregorius

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository LITERARY USES OF BIBLICAL IMAGERY IN HARTMANN VON AUE’S GREGORIUS, KAFKA’S DIE VERWANDLUNG AND THOMAS MANN’S DER ERWÄHLTE by HELEN ELIZABETH HUNTER A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of German Studies College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham October 2014 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius, Kafka’s Die Verwandlung and Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte, focusing on their uses of biblical motifs. Connected by pervasive themes of guilt and atonement, each text also relies similarly in its expression of these ideas on the use of images which are familiar from the biblical context, and thus suggest archetypal instances of sin and redemption as points of comparison for the protagonist’s fate. In this way all three texts create a manifest sense of helpless affliction by guilt by implementing echoes of the fate of Adam, both in the relationships of their characters, and in structures of recurring loss, decline and expulsion. Each narrative, moreover, also suggests allusions to the opposing figure of Christ through concurrent echoes of the Passion in its imagery of degradation and exile, and, to varying degrees, through the introduction of complementary images of restoration and rehabilitation drawing on patterns of resurrection. The texts diverge, however, in the way in which they relate these fields of imagery, as the correlation of Fall and redemption which is symbolically affirmed in Hartmann’s narrative, and echoed in Mann’s, is disrupted by Kafka’s introduction of a tragic conclusion. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham for the scholarship which enabled me to undertake this research. Special thanks are also due to my doctoral supervisors, Dr Nicholas Martin and Dr Nigel Harris, for their invaluable insight and encouragement thoughout my work on this project. CONTENTS I. Introduction 1 II. The Fall and its consequences 8 1. Biblical agents of Fall and expulsion: Selective use of a familiar model 10 a) Diabolic suggestion 11 b) Adam and Eve and the archetype of the temptress 30 c) Paternal authority, divine and worldly 51 2. The recurring Fall: The loss of Eden as a temporal motif 77 a) The Fall as a structural device 78 b) ‘In Sünden gezeugt und zum Sünder’: The effects of the Fall and 100 their role in its recurrence 3. Cast down and cast out: Spatial shifts and the concrete representation 122 of spiritual states a) ‘Herabgesetzt’ and ‘nider geslagen’: Images of descent and decline 123 b) Motifs of expulsion and exile 144 III. Christ and the redemption of man 179 1. A second Adam?: Imagery of the Passion as a counterpoint to imagery 180 of the Fall a) Degradation and exile in the context of the Passion 180 b) Sacrifice and liberation: Messianic tendencies 209 2. Imagery of the Resurrection 226 a) Personal restoration and the model of the risen Christ 227 b) The concept of new life: Patterns of personal and collective rebirth 241 IV. Conclusion: Literary uses of biblical imagery 258 1. Networks of imagery 259 2. Concretised images 269 3. Dual meanings and changing roles 275 Bibliography 283 1 I INTRODUCTION Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius (c. 1190), Thomas Mann’s Der Erwählte (1951) and Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915) are three texts which display a significant affinity in their focus on ideas of guilt and redemption. Both Hartmann’s medieval narrative and its modern reworking by Mann describe the fate of a figure who is an exemplary sinner, initially deeply embroiled in guilt through his implication in a series of familial transgressions, but ultimately restored and elevated to greatness through a dramatic ordeal. Kafka’s account of the fate of his own Gregor, on the other hand, may differ in the sense that the protagonist’s ordeal proves fatal, but is strikingly compatible with the themes of the Gregorius legend in its relation of guilt to familial structures, and to a manifest experience of exile and degradation. In correspondence with this common focus on the idea of a fallen condition, and – to an extent – on the possibility of redemption, all three texts also make use of biblical imagery which relates their protagonists’ fates to archetypal models of sin and salvation. On the one hand we may identify images associated with the causes and consequences of guilt as represented in the Old Testament narrative of the Fall of man; on the other, motifs recalling the New Testament account of redemption through the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. In this way, each of the three protagonists takes on dual associations which play a significant role in shaping the reader’s interpretation of their respective ordeals. Since both Adam and Christ are highly recognisable biblical figures, allusions to either one have potential to evoke clear associations in the mind of the reader – and indeed to provoke specific expectations regarding narrative developments. The Christian association of these figures with complementary parts of a grand narrative of human decline and recovery, moreover, tends also to inspire a search for a correlation between the two within the narrative 2 context in terms of a progression from Fall to salvation, or a counterbalancing of the imagery of guilt by that of redemption, in the course of the protagonist’s career. If the use of biblical motifs in each text thus operates in relation to a relatively fixed range of reader associations, however, the differing styles of the narrratives, and the widely varying temporal contexts in which they were composed, naturally lead to rather different approaches in terms of the extent to which the expectations associated with these familiar images are satisfied or frustrated. Though Hartmann’s Gregorius, as a narrative with strong courtly elements, is not conventionally hagiographic in style, its account of the exemplary life of Gregorius has a strong theological focus. Indeed, while all of Hartmann’s narrative works, to an extent, are concerned with falls from grace and corresponding re-ascents, only Der arme Heinrich matches Gregorius in its explicit interest in themes of guilt and redemption. The primary aim of the text, as stated in its prologue, is a demonstration of the capacity of grace to redeem even those burdened with extraordinarily great sin; and, as an example of this phenomenon, the protagonist takes on a representative function. In this sense, biblical imagery is of significant use to Hartmann’s narrator.1 In presenting a case of grave sin, the figure of Adam as the original archetype of the sinner, and the root of human guilt, is a natural point of reference, easily identifiable to a medieval audience. Similarly, allusions to the Passion or Resurrection of Christ in the account of the hero’s restoration and renewal are immediately transparent as reflecting the means of human redemption on a wider scale. It is striking, moreover, that the nature of the story Hartmann 1 While Hartmann’s narrative follows a French source, the Vie du pape Saint Grégoire, the extensive use of biblical imagery in Gregorius appears to be an innovation on Hartmann’s part. See Corinna Dahlgrün Hoc fac, et vives (Lk 10,28) - ‘vor allen dingen minne got’: Theologische Reflexionen eines Laien im ‘Gregorius’ und in ‘Der arme Heinrich’ Hartmanns von Aue (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1991), p. 200 (‘die [...] biblischen Zitate und Motive [...] sind Zufügungen Hartmanns, so daß [...] wohl sogar von einer Herstellung des heilsgeschichtlichen Bezuges gesprochen werden kann’). 3 sets out to tell requires at once the suggestion of opposing extremes of sin and redemption, and the assertion of a definite correspondence between the two. In this sense, the use of imagery in the narrative has a vested interest both in presenting a particularly hopeless and manifest sense of guilt, and, on the other hand, inspiring expectations of recovery in relation to a logical biblical scheme. As we shall see, Hartmann’s use of imagery thus seems particularly aimed at creating a sense of balance and encouraging the reader’s recognition of correspondences between related but opposing motifs. The symbolic framework developed by Hartmann is inherited and modified by Mann, as he reinterprets his source in a modern, and more secular context, in which ideas of sin and redemption and corresponding biblical images may still be readily recognisable, but where this recognition no longer necessarily relates to an absolute conviction in the divine logic of their associations or correspondences. Indeed, Mann’s interest in reworking Gregorius, which he had earlier encountered during his brief study of literary history,2 is associated in his own comments with a desire for comic relief after writing Doktor Faustus,3 in which he had, moreover, made use of another version of the legend.4 An addition of ironic inflections not present in Gregorius is also associated with the process of modification adopted by Mann, described as an ‘Amplifizieren, Realisieren und Genaumachen des mythisch Entfernten, bei dem ich mir alle Mittel zunutze machte, die der Psychologie und Erzählkunst in sieben 2 Mann attended lectures on ‘Deutsche Literaturgeschichte’ by Wilhelm Hertz at the Technische Hochschule in Munich in the summer semester of 1895 and took notes on the works of Hartmann von Aue, which display a particular interest in Gregorius.

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