This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ ‘Der Mensch ist nicht der Herr des Seienden.’ Existentialism and Postwar German-language Writing Marwood, Laura Ann Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 Doctoral Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at King’s College London & Universität Stuttgart ____________________________________________________________ ‘Der Mensch ist nicht der Herr des Seienden.’ Existentialism and Postwar German-language Writing Author: Laura Marwood Supervisors: Professor Robert Weninger (KCL) & Professor Sandra Richter (Stuttgart) Submitted June 2016 ABSTRACT ________________________________________________________ This doctoral thesis seeks to investigate the relationship between existentialism, a philosophy of life that is as much literary as it is philosophical in effect, and German-language literature in the aftermath of the Second World War. The focus will be on three German-language writers whose novels have given implicit formulation to a range of existential concerns. These include the notions of the self, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, angst, Grenzsituation and suffering, and constitute what I refer to as an unwritten existentialist manifesto. The writers selected for examination in this study are Max Frisch (1911-1991) with his 1954 novel Stiller, Alfred Andersch (1914-1980) with his 1952 autobiographical report Die Kirschen der Freiheit, and Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) with his posthumously published Der Engel schwieg (1949/1992). Whilst these writers do not engage in explicit philosophical or theological existentialist reflection as such, their novels can be seen to provide implicit literary formulation to the aforementioned range of existentialist themes. These three writers and their works highlight the extent to which existentialist concerns penetrated post-1945 German-language literature even where the writers themselves did not openly identify with existentialism as either a literary or philosophical phenomenon. As will be shown, their novels deal with the principal questions that stand at the core of existentialist philosophy, and indeed that stand for the human individual, at this point in Western intellectual history. These analyses will consider the idea of existentialism as literature, defining an image of existentialism as it developed in not only philosophical but also literary terms, thus establishing how existentialism can and should be approached as both a philosophical and literary phenomenon. In this regard, the works of literature by Frisch, Andersch and Böll can be seen as a crucial means of expression for and dissemination of existentialist thought. A study of these literary texts will also uncover the continuing relevance of this philosophical movement which grapples in such fundamental ways with the concrete aporias and threshold situations of human existence then as today. What renders existentialism as a method of inquiry and reflection so pertinent is less its preoccupation with existence in general than its contention that thinking existentially about human existence leads us to pose questions that extend beyond the conceptual repertoire of classical philosophy. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS _________________________________________________________ Abstract ………………………………………………………………………..…… 2 Table of Contents ...………………………………………………………..……….. 3 Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………... 4 Introduction…………………………………...……………………………………. 5 - The Topicality of Existentialism in Postwar Germany …………..…..….... 10 Chapter One: Genesis of Existentialism ………....…………………….….…….... 22 - Towards a Definition of Existentialism ………………….……..….….….. 25 – Key Themes of Existentialism ………………………….……..….…….. 46 Das Ich ………………………...………….……..…….…. 46 Freedom …………………………..……………..……….. 49 God and Nihilism ………………..……………..……... …. 60 Grenzsituation ………………..…..………….…...………. 67 Angst ……………………………..………….……...……. 70 Chapter Two: Max Frisch …………………………………….………….…….… 78 Chapter Three: Alfred Andersch …………………………….…..…….…….…... 129 Chapter Four: Heinrich Böll ………………………………………………….….. 193 Concluding Remarks ………………………………………………………….… 262 Bibliography ……………………………….……………………………………. 270 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS _________________________________________________________ Not everyone is as fortunate to have Ph.D. supervisors like Robert Weninger and Sandra Richter. My first supervisor Robert Weninger has been an exceptional supervisor in every possible way: offering invaluable guidance and feedback, supporting and believing in me, reading countless drafts, and challenging me to understand my research in new ways. I am equally indebted to my second supervisor Sandra Richter for her insight, precision, patience and support. I hope that one day I will be half the educator and mentor to someone that Robert Weninger and Sandra Richter have been to me. I would not have been able to embark on this project without the financial support of The Department of German at King’s College London and their generous doctoral scholarship which I held from 2012-2015. This award enabled me to pursue my research in London and, for the final two years of my Ph.D., in the department for Neuere Deutsche Literatur in Stuttgart. The King’s College London German Department is a constructive, critical and inspirational environment in which to study German. I would like to thank Erica Carter, Benedict Schofield, Áine McMurtry and Catherine Smale, as well as my fellow research students Richard McClelland and Alice Guilluy for creating such a productive and enjoyable work environment, and for sharing their expertise, friendship and humour. On a personal level, there are many friends and family members who have been central to my life while writing this thesis, and whom I would like to thank for their support. These include Benno Hoffmann, Sara Glojnarić, Sophie Harrold, Blinne Trainor, Helena Meskanen, Inger Torill Narvesen, Daniel Lynch and Stefanie Lurz. But I would most like to thank my close family. I have been lucky to grow up with two endlessly understanding and inspirational parents and a kind-hearted and loyal sister. Mum, Dad, Sarah, thank you for your encouragement, patience, understanding and, of course, your love. I dedicate this thesis to you. 4 INTRODUCTION _________________________________________________________ ‘The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence’ – Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between the philosophical movement of existentialism, a philosophy of life that is as much literary as it is philosophical in effect, and German-language literature in the aftermath of the Second World War. This movement, whose roots are traceable in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1990), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) and Martin Heidegger (1889- 1976), resurfaced in the mid-1940s with Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel L’Nausée, Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger and, perhaps most crucially, Sartre’s 1946 essay L’existentialisme est un humanisme as a kind of Bohemian ferment in the Parisian arrondissement of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Existentialism has since remained a subject of intense curiosity and fascination. Yet what explains this fascination? Is it attributable to a desire merely to understand the full historical ramifications of existentialism as a movement in both philosophy and literature? Does it spring from the continuing attraction of the central existential themes (some of which we will encounter later)? Or does it perhaps derive from a fundamental misunderstanding and even oversimplification of this en vogue social phenomenon that re-emerged in Europe around the end of the Second World War? The very question ‘can you give me a one-sentence definition of existentialism?’1 serves testament to the phenomenal popularisation but also misrepresentation of an otherwise vast and complex philosophical and literary tradition. The belief that existentialism can be explained in a single sentence, or that one can merely know 1 Maurice Freedman, ‘Introduction’, in The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader, ed. Maurice Freedman (New York: