“This Is Just to Say” Introduction and Laudation for Bernd Engler

Oliver Scheiding and Jan Stievermann “This Is Just to Say” Introduction and Laudation for Bernd Engler

In 2019, the year that Bernd Engler celebrates his 65th birthday (unbelievable as that may sound!), most people will, first and foremost, think of him as the president of the University of Tübingen, an office in which he has served with great success since 2006. With this Festschrift, however, we, his former students, friends, and academic colleagues, wish to honor Bernd Engler as a dis- tinguished scholar and university professor of American literature and culture. Thinking of Bernd Engler the scholar and professor takes many of us down the somewhat dreary hallway on the fifth floor of Tübingen’s Modern Language building, the Brechtbau, which houses the American Studies department. Here, Bernd had his office for many years. Students and colleagues coming into that office (where the door was almost always open) were often struck by the reprint of Charles Demuth’s 1928 painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold that domi- nated the narrow room with its prismatic chards of space, shades of red, and the recurring number five. In retrospect, the painting in some ways appears to epitomize Bernd’s lifelong interest in and approaches to American literature and culture. The visual language it uses to represent an iconic American text and writer can be said to illustrate major topics of Bernd’s research and teach- ing, not least the themes at the center of this collection of essays: brevity, plain- ness, and their complications. Employing modernist techniques of reduction, fracture, but also a forceful interplay of surfaces and motion, Demuth’s painting engages its subject in a highly complex and self-reflexive fashion. I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold visually encodes William Carlos Williams’s famous poem “The Great Figure” (1921, 78) which recalls a night scene in New York City when Wil- liams saw a red truck speeding past with the number five painted on it in gold. Trying to recapture his experience, he avoided traditional forms, elaborated rhetoric, or symbolism in favor of a simple but dense and highly effective language. The poem’s one sentence evokes the city’s atmosphere characterized by speed, sound, and images. Demuth’s precisionist artwork was inspired by his friend’s poetic minimalism but, in addition, its plain surface contains a sub- tle portrait of Williams himself. The painting offers visual allusions and witty puns that gesture toward the friendship of kindred spirits that Demuth shared with Williams. Demuth radically simplifies the tradition of portrait-painting in American art, referring to Williams’s initials “W.C.W.” and having his nickname

“Bill” appear on top of the painting, while his middle name “Carlos” emerges on a skyscraper’s wall in the background. The ruptured arrangement of num- bers, letters, and lines is a playful comment on the cityscape as a billboard. It captures or anticipates so many of the characteristics we have come to associ- ate with the “postmodern” in the arts and literature, another abiding love of Bernd’s. But the arrangement also serves as an epigrammatic “ad” for the poet who is able to translate the urban reality into art, hinting at the concrete social contexts and lived realities of the author needing to sell his product—some- thing that Bernd’s scholarship, for all its interest in aesthetics, never failed to appreciate. Demuth’s portrait thus transformed the mundane office space of the Brechtbau into a “room with a view,” exhibiting Bernd’s outlook—at once sympathetic and critical, attentive to form and context—on American culture as a paragon of the modern with its multiple, contradictory dynamics toward reduction, fragmentation, and endless complication.

Born in 1954 in Speyer, Bernd received his academic training (Staatsexamen and Magister in English and German Literature, and Philosophy; 1980/81) at the University of Freiburg where he earned his Ph.D. (1983) and wrote his sec- ond book publication (Habilitation; 1989), supervised by his teacher and men- tor Franz Link. Link had been the first professor of American literature hired by the University of Freiburg in 1963. It was through him that Bernd developed a specific focus on American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Link also introduced him to the Görres-Gesellschaft, for which he later served as the head of the section for English and American Literature and then, since 2015, as president. Bernd’s academic training took place during a time in which literary studies was re-shaped by a paradigmatic shift through the influ- ence of the French school of radical hermeneutics (deconstruction, poststruc- turalism) and its new methods of textual analysis. In addition, the rise of New Historicism created new opportunities to reassess American literature and to study its changing cultural dynamics in specific historical, social, and political contexts. Both trends in literary criticism would come to characterize Bernd’s works that combined various theoretical approaches and philosophical per- spectives with the virtues of close reading and historical contextualization to offer fresh insights on a broad spectrum of literary texts and cultural artifacts. His dissertation and first book, Die amerikanische Ode: Gattungsgeschichtli- che Untersuchungen (1983), offers a thorough reassessment of a specific genre of American poetry that had been disqualified as either a poor imitation of Brit- ish verse, or—from the viewpoint of modernist poetics—as an insincere, flat, and ritualistic form of public art. It is the great merit of Bernd’s study to have reassessed this little-studied and underappreciated form of poetry, spelling out