| Popis: |
This chapter traces the relationship of the German ballad to the sea. In the early nineteenth century, Germany’s coast was understood as ultimately exotic and regionally specific. By the late nineteenth century, through an upsurge in tourism, through cultural reinterpretation, but also due to the excitement the Kaiserreich managed to generate for the German fleet, the seashore had become nationalized. During the same period, the ballad was increasingly positioned (among its popularizers as much as among the poets themselves) as a national form, and poets from Detlev Liliencrohn to Arno Holz used the form to reconcile what was regional and what was national in life on the shore, and by extension in the ballad. This chapter focuses on how issues of language, dialect, memory, and politics became entangled as writers, both in “high” German and in regional dialects, were forced to grapple with the reality that the nation to which the ballad was thought to belong suddenly was an actual country. |
