Oxford through German eyes…

Christiane Rehagen, a Masters student from Tübingen, recently spent five months in Oxford for an internship with the university’s libraries and we asked her to give us her impressions of her experience – what did she do with her time here? What differences did she notice between Oxford life and her life at home?

Berufliche Erfahrungen zu sammeln, dabei insbesondere Auslandspraktika, sind heutzutage sehr gefragt. Im Rahmen meines Masterstudiengangs Deutsche Literatur in Tübingen, habe ich die Option, Erweiterungsmodule mit Berufspraktika zu ersetzen, die auch im Ausland stattfinden können. Da ich schon länger gerne nach England wollte, kam die Idee auf, meine Praxiserfahrungen in Oxford bei der Ex-Tübingerin und jetzigen Mediävistikprofessorin Henrike Lähnemann zu sammeln.

Tatsächlich bin ich erst einmal kurz in England gewesen und war deshalb sehr neugierig, wie sich meine Zeit in Oxford wohl gestalten würde. Ursprünglich waren drei Monate angesetzt, aber schon nach zwei Monaten war mir klar: „Das reicht nicht, ich muss unbedingt länger bleiben!“, und habe auf fünf verlängert. Die Arbeit in Oxford hat mir Spaß gemacht; im Gegensatz zu manchen deutschen Praktikastellen wird man hier wenig angemuffelt und erhält stattdessen ein überschwängliches Dankeschön für die geleistete Mithilfe, was mir persönlich sehr viel lieber ist. Auch wenn die einzelnen Aufgaben in der Taylor Institution Library, am Exeter College und an der Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages für mich spannend und abwechslungsreich waren, möchte ich stattdessen ein paar Eindrücke abseits der Arbeit zusammenfassen, die mir den Aufenthalt so wertvoll gemacht haben.

Squirrel in Christ Church Meadow (Photo: C. Rehagen)

Eines der ersten Dinge, die mir aufgefallen sind und die ich aus Deutschland so nicht kenne, klingt erstmal etwas seltsam: Die Tiere sind unglaublich zutraulich. Selbst aus Großstädten wie Hamburg ist es mir nicht bekannt, dass Eichhörnchen auf einen zukommen und um Futter betteln – und während ich mich nur ein einziges Mal daran erinnern kann, dass ich in Deutschland einen Fuchs gesehen habe, begegneten mir in Oxford innerhalb kürzester Zeit gleich zwei, wobei keiner von den beiden besonders davon beeindruckt war, dass ich plötzlich vor ihm stand. Ähnliches gilt für die Enten, die man fast schon als latent aggressiv beschreiben könnte. Eigentlich ist das ‚Punten’ bzw. Stocherkahnfahren eine wirklich schöne Freizeitaktivität, die besonders bei schönem Wetter nur jedem empfohlen werden kann, aber vor diesen mit Federn getarnten Haifischen sollte man sich wirklich hüten! Ein besonders freches Exemplar dieser Art hat sich bei unserem Picknick nicht auf die Generosität der Menschen verlassen wollen, sondern sprang tatsächlich vom Wasser aus ins Boot auf meinen Schoß, um mir mein Essen aus der Hand zu klauen. Und das, obwohl sie vorher schon eine Brothälfte aus der Hand einer weiteren Bootinsassin geklaut und davor den halben Finger einer anderen ‚Punterin’ abgebissen hat. So viel zu den Raubtieren in England!

Mit Federn getarnten Haifische (Photo: C. Rehagen)

Was sich als nächstes sehr schnell feststellen ließ, ist die Unmöglichkeit, alle Sehenswürdigkeiten selbst in der engsten Umgebung anzusehen. Kaum dass man denkt, man hätte schon ein ordentliches Programm geschafft und seinen Horizont bereits gut erweitert, entdeckt man noch ein College, noch einen Park, noch ein Museum und noch eine Stadt, die man unbedingt angucken muss. Nach vergleichsweise kurzer Zeit konnten schon Iffley, Binsey, Port Meadow, Christ Church Meadow, University Park, South Park (überhaupt alles mit einem Park am Ende und ohne Mauer drumherum), das Ashmolean Museum, Pitt Rivers und University Museum und verschiedene Colleges abgehakt werden. Erst danach hat der Geist die Ruhe, in die weitere Entfernung zu schauen und zum Beispiel nach London zu fahren. Das ist letztlich auch sehr zu empfehlen, da mit dem Bus die Distanz ziemlich einfach zu schaffen ist und die Tickets recht günstig zu erwerben sind.

Gleichzeitig hatte ich sehr viel Glück, was die einmaligen Veranstaltungen angeht, die während meines Aufenthaltes stattgefunden haben. Auf diese Weise konnte ich solche besonderen Ereignisse mitnehmen wie den May Day und Beating the Bounds, bei der die ursprüngliche Grenze des Pfarrgebiets einer (College-)Kirche abgeschritten wird, die Markierungen auf den Grenzsteinen erneuert werden, man dann mit einem Bambusstab daraufschlägt und mehrmals „Mark!“ schreit (einem Kind war die historische Dimension des Ganzen dabei nicht völlig bewusst: „Who’s Mark?“). Das gehört definitiv zu den ungewöhnlichsten Traditionen, die ich je gesehen habe. Ähnlich ging es mir bei solchen Events wie dem Carneval in der Cowley Road, das Farmer’s Festival bei Blenheim Palace, ein Mini-Streetfestival der Nachbarschaft aus der Chester Street etc. Es war ständig was los!

May Morning (Photo: C. Rehagen)

Ebenfalls zu empfehlen sind Wanderungen an den Wegen der Themse entlang, die mit ihren Hausbooten wirklich traumhaft schön sein können. Allerdings sollte man sich darauf einstellen, dass man dort selten allein unterwegs ist, denn Oxford – allen voran die Innenstadt – kann unglaublich überlaufen sein. Unzählige Touristentrupps, die mit ihren Selfiesticks mitten auf der Straße stehen bleiben, sind besonders in den Sommermonaten keine Seltenheit. Auch der Verkehr ist für die kleine Stadt mit ihren teilweise recht engen (oder ‚eng geparkten’) Straßen sehr stark und vor allen Dingen vergleichsweise schnell. Wenn man die Straße überqueren will, sollte man wirklich aufpassen, denn auch wenn Autos an Zebrastreifen eher halten als in Deutschland, wird man dafür beim Abbiegen über den Haufen gefahren.

Christiane Rehagen, Tübingen

Gleiche Rechte, Gleiche Pflichten – Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland — Deutsches Historisches Museum: Blog

Germany just went to the polls – so we thought we’d share this great post from the Deutsches Historisches Museum blog about the history of women’s right to vote in Germany!

Gleiche Rechte, Gleiche Pflichten – Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland Am 24. September 2017 findet die 19. Bundestagswahl statt. Unter den zur Wahl stehenden Kandidaten sind in diesem Jahr 1.400 Frauen, 29 % aller Bewerber. Parteien wie Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, Die Linke und die SPD haben sogar überwiegend weibliche Listenführer. Und seit 2005 gibt es in Deutschland…

via Gleiche Rechte, Gleiche Pflichten – Frauenwahlrecht in Deutschland — Deutsches Historisches Museum: Blog

150 years of ‘Das Kapital’ – 200 years of Karl Marx

Karl Marx ca.1875

Did you know that Karl Marx spent time in London – and a lot of time in the British Library? With the bicentenary of Marx’s birth approaching next year, the British Library has been digging into its archives – and came up with this fascinating insight into the multilingualistic aspects of working with Marx and his famous texts…

The British Library claims an important relationship with Karl Marx and his associates. Arriving to London as an exile in 1849, Marx became a familiar face in the reading rooms of the British Library (then part of the British Museum), making use of their extensive collections to pursue information that…

via 150 Years of Capital — European studies blog

1867 edition of ‘Das Kapital’ by Karl Marx, held in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Kriemhild in Text-Image Constructions of the 1560 Heldenbuch

Helena continues her analysis of the puzzling presentation of Kriemhild in the early modern print reception of stories based on the Nibelungenlied. Here she explains some of the economical uses of woodcut images in early modern printing and what this meant for the relationship between text and image in printed books.

Introducing the 1560 Heldenbuch

Weigand Han (1526/29-1562) and Sigmund Feyerabend (1528-1590) were among the most eminent publishers in Frankfurt during the sixteenth century and collaborated in overseeing the fifth print of the Heldenbuch in Frankfurt am Main in 1560. The title page proclaims that the print is “auffs new corrigiert und gebessert” [newly edited and improved] and is “mit schönen Figuren geziert,” [decorated with beautiful figures].

So the 1560 Heldenbuch really highlights its textual and iconographic features as a selling point and it is these features which distinguish it from the Heldenbuch’s prior versions. In comparison to the 1545 version’s 42 woodcuts for the Rosengarten, Han and Feyerabend reduce their print by over twenty folios by including 28 woodcuts in the Rosengarten. Furthermore, they don’t follow the image progression of previous Heldenbücher.

The majority of the 1560 version’s woodcuts are attributed to the artist Hans Brosamer (1495-1554), who was employed by both Weigand Han and his father-in-law and predecessor, Hans Gülfferich. However, although Brosamer’s woodcuts did not illustrate earlier Heldenbücher, they were not new to Frankfurt’s sixteenth-century printing scene: to minimise production costs, the fifth print of the 1560 Heldenbuch reuses 157 woodcuts from six Volksbücher (in English these are sometimes called chapbooks or incunables, although there is no really adequate direct translation of the term), which were previously illustrated by Brosamer and were manufactured in Gülfferich’s and Han’s printing press. The reduced number of illustrations and their reuse from other prints was a commonplace printing tactic in the early modern period, which favoured mass production and enabled printing presses to adapt illustrations to a variety of prints and maximise their production output with minimal effort and complexity.

The (Re)Use of Illustrations in Early Modern Printing

When I was looking at these texts in Oxford’s libraries, I was interested in how the economical printing approach to the Heldenbuch’s woodcuts affects its text-image conceptions – I particularly wanted to find out how this practice of reuse affected the relationship between Kriemhild’s portrayal in the text of the Rosengarten on the one hand and her pictorial portrayal on the other.

On the title page of the 1560 version of the Rosengarten, Kriemhild’s substantial impact on the demise of her male relatives is blamed on her authoritative position as the keeper of Worms’ rose garden. The direct connection between Kriemhild’s influential role and the plot’s trajectory, stressed from the onset of the story, is additionally enforced by the following text and its accompanying woodcuts, which spotlight the extent of Kriemhild’s power over her male counterparts. For example, after welcoming Dietrich von Bern and his men to Worms, Kriemhild declares that the winner of each chivalric contest will be rewarded with a kiss and a wreath of roses from her garden. Her absolute control over the contest and its prizes is reinforced by the following woodcut:

Woodcut from the 1560 print of Rosengarten zu Worms in the Heldenbuch. Qq, fol. 1v.

Taken from a print of an early proto-novel and Volksbuch called Fortunatus (1549), this woodcut by Brosamer depicts a queen (whom we are meant to interpret as Kriemhild) reaching out and touching a nobleman’s arm, who, in this case, may be interpreted as Dietrich. In this illustration, Kriemhild sports a crown on her head to symbolise her hierarchical superiority, which sets her apart from her plainly robed maid on the left of the woodcut. Kriemhild is also represented as powerful in her exchanges with her male counterparts, since she establishes direct contact with Dietrich by touching his arm and is unescorted. Therefore, although this woodcut fails to expose Kriemhild’s domineering nature as a dishonourable attribute, as previously suggested by the phrase “ungetriuwe meit” [devious maiden], its portrayal of Kriemhild nevertheless draws attention to her initiating role in the chivalric battle of the Rosengarten.

So Kriemhild’s instigating function in the Rosengarten is apparent in text and image, but her portrayal in the text as a thoroughly negative character does not translate to the pictorial dimension of the print. This is most evident in one of the Rosengarten’s final scenes, in which Kriemhild is punished for her arrogance when one of Dietrich’s knights, who overpowered 52 Burgundians, disfigures Kriemhild’s face with his bristly beard. While the text clearly states that Kriemhild’s “ubermut” [haughtiness] should be blamed for inflicting unnecessary pain on so many men and for causing her relatives’ demise, to which the title page already alludes, there is no woodcut to confirm and/or reinforce this final and decidedly unforgiving interpretation of her character. Instead, Kriemhild’s punishment is solely conveyed through the text; this stands in stark contrast to the previous prints of the Heldenbücher, as they provide illustrations to underscore Kriemhild’s chastisement (such as the one below):

Woodcut of Kriemhild’s punishment in the 1509 print of Rosengarten zu Worms in the Heldenbuch. H, fol. 2r.

 

The Perception of Medieval Literature in the Early Modern Period

Han and Feyerabend’s deviation from earlier representations of Kriemhild’s fate may be attributed to their reuse of woodcuts from other, unrelated projects, which presumably did not contain illustrations that related to the Rosengarten’s concluding subject matter. Nevertheless, considering that Kriemhild’s punishment is the most significant scene of the Rosengarten, as it explicitly summarises the moral of the story, it is striking that Han and Feyerabend did not follow in their predecessor’s footsteps by providing an illustration to accompany the text. Choosing to omit a visual supplement for Kriemhild’s humiliation, which would have foregrounded her uncomplimentary character portrayal, may not only result from Han and Feyerabend’s economical approach to their print of the Heldenbuch, but could also shed light on their lack of awareness of the Rosengarten’s original purpose, namely to serve as a response to the Nibelungenlied’s conception of Kriemhild. This notion is supported by the fact that the Nibelungenlied was no longer a known epic in the sixteenth century, which suggests that Han and Feyerabend may not have understood the Rosengarten’s fundamental implications and, thus, were not concerned with underpinning Kriemhild’s loss of reputation in both text and image.

Conclusion

The Rosengarten’s disconnect between text and illustrations is most likely a binary consequence of certain transformations in early modern printing and literary awareness: firstly, the lower number of woodcuts and their loose relation to the text exposes the declining interpretative and increasing commercial significance of illustrations in sixteenth-century prints, which is indicated by the title’s emphasis on the work’s ‘new’ and ‘beautiful’ artwork; secondly, while the illustrations point towards Kriemhild’s authority, their failure to convey her unfavourable textual portrayal accentuates the lack of awareness in the text’s sixteenth-century audience of the Rosengarten’s original purpose, namely to clarify and enforce her negative rendering in the Nibelungenlied. As a result, the text-image conceptions of Frankfurt’s Heldenbuch from 1560 not only elucidate the developing characteristics of early modern printing, but also shed light on the transformed function and understanding of the Rosengarten in the latter half of the sixteenth century, which continued to exist without its literary source material.

Another possible interpretation of this development in the presentation of the Rosengarten in the 1560 Heldenbuch concerns changes in the contemporary interpretation of the work: the diminished visual attention that is devoted to Kriemhild and her punishment may be understood as an intentional shift in focus from her character to the masculine valour demonstrated by Dietrich, a well-known Germanic hero, and his men – much like the nationalistic interpretations of the Nibelungenlied in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which chose to place an absolute emphasis on German heroism. This reading of the Rosengarten, which would also explain Kriemhild’s decreased visual prominence, is connoted by the prints’ collective title: Heldenbuch, or Book of Heroes.

Helena Ord, University of Oxford

A woman in a book of heroes: Kriemhild in text and image in the sixteenth century

Helena Ord is a Master’s student in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University. This week, she offers us a glimpse into the relationship between text and image in early modern German printing, focusing on the Frankfurt Heldenbuch from 1560. In this first instalment, Helena introduces us to the puzzling figure of Kriemhild…

The Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic from the early thirteenth century, is arguably the most disputed text in medieval German literature. This statement is rooted in the fact that the epic culminates in an appalling bloodbath, but offers no definitive moral to justify its tragic ending. The significance of Kriemhild, an ambiguous female protagonist that transitions from a compliant wife to a dominant, murderous character, remains one of the biggest points of dispute, due to her exceptionally ruthless portrayal for a courtly woman.

An illustrated page from the Rosengarten zu Worms (1418) held in Heidelberg. Kriemhild and her lady-in-waiting reward the victors with a kiss and a wreath.

In fact, her prominent involvement in the text’s catastrophic occurrences already appears to have shocked and perplexed medieval audiences: other texts that took up the story of the Nibelungenlied, such as the thirteenth-century texts Nibelungenklage and Rosengarten zu Worms, attempt to offer more conclusive explanations of Kriemhild’s intended role and demeanour. However, whereas the Nibelungenklage depicts her in a positive light, absolving her of blame, the Rosengarten perpetuates and reinforces the Nibelungenlied’s unflattering depiction of Kriemhild as a “vâlendinne” [she-devil]. In this story, Kriemhild challenges the renowned hero Dietrich von Bern and his men to engage in swordfights against her fiancé Siegfried and her relatives in Worms, which results in the bloody defeat of the latter group. Their demise is explicitly blamed on Kriemhild’s haughtiness.

This negative portrayal reassesses the cause of Siegfried’s death and the downfall of the Burgundians in the Nibelungenlied, and ascribes the blame to Kriemhild, foregrounding a consistent and overtly moralistic reading of her character that the source material lacks. Therefore, the Rosengarten offers a direct and clarifying response to the Nibelungenlied’s ambiguous portrayal of Kriemhild, and it is recognised as a part of the text’s reception history in modern scholarship.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Rosengarten was documented in twenty-one manuscripts – so not only was it a popular story, it clearly also had a prominent function as a reception story. There are four recognised renditions of the Rosengarten – manuscripts that are rather drily referred to as A, DP, F, and C. Version A, which is written in vulgate and appears in six manuscripts, is particularly concerned with presenting Kriemhild in a negative light. Her centrality to the Burgundians’ downfall is not only enforced by her textual rendering as an “ungetriuwe meit,” [devious maiden] who is punished for her “übermuot,” [haughtiness], but is also highlighted by the Rosengarten’s accompanying illustrations, which depict her direct interactions with the competing knights. Follow the link to look at a digitisation of a manuscript of the Rosengarten that is held at the University of Heidelberg.

However, while the Nibelungenlied’s literary significance progressively dwindled, Version A of the Rosengarten continued to attract the attention of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers, as indicated by its enduring presence in early modern prints. These illustrated works, published together and entitled Heldenbücher, contained the medieval German narratives of Ortnit, Wolfdietrich, Laurin, and the Rosengarten, whose widespread and prolonged popularity is underscored by the fact that the collection was printed six times by presses in Straßburg, Augsburg, Hagenau, and Frankfurt am Main between 1479 and 1590. Oxford’s collections include four prints from 1491, 1509 (also held in the Austrian National Library), and 1560, as well as the work’s final print from 1590, which is available online.

The Rosengarten offers a direct response to the Nibelungenlied, but the latter faded into literary history in the second half of the fifteenth century. So how was this reinterpretation understood in early modern prints? The answer to this question is not elucidated by the text and woodcut illustrations of the Rosengarten in the Heldenbuch’s first four prints. These were produced in different locations between 1479 and 1545, but primarily fall back on the format used in earlier manuscripts and, consequently, do not undergo notable semantic developments. However, the fifth print, which was manufactured in Frankfurt am Main in 1560, denotes a clear ‘break with tradition’, because it contains a new introduction and – most notably – departs from the conventional image sequence of its precursors. I took a closer look at this print, two copies of which are in Oxford’s Bodleian and Taylorian libraries, and its portrayal of Kriemhild in the text-image relationships of the Rosengarten – and that is what I’ll be writing about in the next instalment of this blog…!

Helena Ord, University of Oxford

Psst!…Check out our previous post, by Dr Mary Boyle, which introduced the Nibelungenlied a year ago!

Further reading:

Karl Bartsch and Helmut de Boor (eds.), Siegfried Grosse (trans.), Das Nibelungenlied (Stuttgart: Reclaim, 2002, repr. 2006).

Cyril Edwards (trans.), The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)