No Hamlets

German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-285743-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 346 Seiten, Format (B × H): 147 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

No Hamlets is the first critical account of the role of Shakespeare in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the Empire in 1871 to the 'Bonn Republic' of the Cold War era. In this sustained study, Andreas Höfele begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and follows the rightist engagement with Shakespeare to the poet Stefan George and his circle, including Ernst Kantorowicz, and the literary efforts of
the young Joseph Goebbels during the Weimar Republic, continuing with the Shakespeare debate in the Third Reich and its aftermath in the controversy over 'inner emigration' and concluding with Carl Schmitt's Shakespeare writings of the 1950s. Central to this enquiry is the identification of Germany and, more specifically, German
intellectuals with Hamlet. The special relationship of Germany with Shakespeare found highly personal and at the same time highIy political expression in this recurring identification, and in its denial. But Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character with strong appeal: Carl Schmitt's largely still unpublished diaries of the 1920s reveal an obsessive engagement with Othello which has never before been examined. Interest in German philosophy and political thought has increased in recent
Shakespeare studies. No Hamlets brings historical depth to this international discussion. Illuminating the constellations that shaped and were shaped by specific appropriations of Shakespeare, Höfele shows how individual engagements with Shakespeare and a whole strand of Shakespeare reception were
embedded in German history from the 1870s to the 1950s and eventually 1989, the year of German reunification.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Höfele, Andreas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Dramen und Dramatiker
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Über Autor(innen)

Andreas Höfele is Professor of English at Munich University. He is the author of Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare's Theatre (OUP, 2011) which won the 2012 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature. His publications in German include books on Shakespeare's stagecraft, late nineteenth-century parody, and Malcolm Lowry, as well as six novels. He served as President of the German Shakespeare Society from 2002 to 2011.