Small forms of fame. Robert Walser’s portrait and obituary poems in the German-language "Prager Presse"

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Sabine Eickenrodt
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; Communication Sciences
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453178848

From 1927 to 1933 numerous portrait and obituary poems by the Swiss author Robert Walser appeared in the feuilleton section of the German-language "Prager Presse". They are witnesses of journalistic poetry on the occasions of anniversaries, birthdays and death days. They were long written off as amateurish and viewed as barely being worth the work of interpretation. The planned monograph, on the other hand, intends to research their provacative self-willedness in the context of Prague, where they appeared, and aims methodically to historically link genre and function. Walser's adaptions of hymns, elegies, dedication poems, prosopopoeia, epitaphs and obituaries are – according to my thesis – test cases of literary feuilletons. The heart of the project is the analysis of Walser's poems about famous writers, artists and aviation pioneers. These poems are not only journalistic fillers but also breaches of norms: they violate poetic conventions of memorializing recognized „respectabilities“ (Walser) like Stifter, Rilke, Hamsun, Pascin or Nungesser. On the border between mockery and praise, these feuilletonic mini-forms of literature employ linguistic ambivalences which – as opposed to satirical journalistic lyrics – avoid explicitness of representation. For the first time Walser's late portrait-poems will be examined within the context of the editorial policies of the "Prager Presse", which was considered the voice of the foreign ministry of the ČSR and had to constantly perform a balancing act between the programmatic self-perception of a leftist liberal voice in central Europe on the one hand, and on the other, consideration for the German speaking minority which drew its political and aesthetic values from the pre-war era. In the planned work, the question of the function of Walser's poems in the Prague context is guided by an interest in the aesthetic distance with which the poems deny the contempory media's jubilation, memorial and farewell journalism. The perspective on the analysis will – on different levels – have various focal points. To these belong investigations of: a) intertextual references and image tradition of the poems b) the discursive position of the portrayed persons in the cultural context of Prague c) the paratextual layout of the poems in the literature supplement „Dichtung und Welt,“ especially in the editions on anniversaries and death days d) the function of the poems for the editors of the "Prager Presse". The goal of the project is – with a view to current trends – a contribution to the research on the previously barely recognized genre of the portrait in literary feuilletons. To complement the monograph, an international workshop on „obituaries in feuilleton“ is planned, which will take place in cooperation with the DFG research unit „The Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms” at the HU Berlin.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants