Die Stadt Posen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (1772-1918)
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Date
2016
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Wydział Neofilologii UAM w Poznaniu
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Abstract
The paper titled “The city of Poznań in German-language literature” attempts to present and examine literary depictions of the city of Poznań in German-language literary texts written between 1772 and 1918. In connection with the analysis of the literary image of the city, it also seeks to answer the questions as to the motives of authors who decided to make Poznań the subject of their texts as well as to the particular merits of the city which indirectly contributed to the literary transformation of Poznań’s realities.
The subject of study is the literary creation of the city space, historically and geographically defined as the city of Poznań, referred to in the source material as Posen, the German name of Poznań. The time span of this paper is marked by two characteristic dates in the history of Poland. The year 1772 witnessed the beginning of a new political and social reality of the Polish state, i.e. the loss of its sovereignty and independence, as a result of which the city of Poznań was placed under Prussia’s jurisdiction, with a new chapter opening in its history. The last year under analysis is 1918, the year when World War I ended and the city of Poznań was liberated from Prussian domination.
The subject of examination is an ‘outside look’ at the city, i.e. its depictions in the German-language literature of that period. The combination and choice of specific texts are not fortuitous. The works were selected not only to reflect the diversity in the literary imaging of the city, but also to take account of the characteristic Polish-German ethnic composition of Poznań as in the period in question it was inhabited by two dominating populations, significantly different in terms of language and culture, and both of them left their stamps on the city.
The starting point for the examination is the literary space, as opposed to the real space of the city, created by fictional and non-fictional literary texts, divided into three segments corresponding to different genres and additionally to three diverse perspectives on the literary creation of the city as the experienced, recollected and narrative space. The first group comprises travel accounts, memoirs, autobiographic notes and letters which make Poznań their subject and which, as specific historical documents, create the experienced literary space, the most faithful to the actual image of the city. The second group includes memories of the childhood in Poznań, autobiographic texts which outline the recollected space of the city. Finally, the analysis covered prose texts, novels, novellas and short stories where the literary space of the city is simultaneously the narrative space, a result of the epic processing of real urban elements.
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Keywords
city of Poznań, literary image of Poznań, Polish-German co-existence, miasto Poznań, literacki obraz Poznania, polsko-niemiecka koegzystencja
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978-83-947198-0-7