German Hearts of Darkness

Joseph Conrad as an Interlocutor in Times of Crisis

verfasst von

Matthias N. Lorenz

Abstract

This essay traces the rich literary reception of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness in German-speaking countries over the last four decades. It is shown that West and East German, Swiss and Austrian authors have produced a broad corpus of literary works, ranging from poems and poetry lectures to various novels, which have so far received little attention in Conrad philology. Yet the reference to Conrad’s Congo novel has become a commonplace in German-speaking countries especially when it comes to dealing with personal and collective traumas, at the latest since Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, probably the most popular intertextual reference to Conrad’s text. The text corpus, which comes from the best-known authors of their respective generations, such as Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Urs Widmer, Christian Kracht and Lukas Bärfuss, is grouped around the four concepts of race, class, gender and trauma. The article also attempts to determine the intertextual relationships with a model of four different forms of power relations between Heart of Darkness and its German-language adaptations, which provide information about the trouble texts can get into when they refer to other texts.

Organisationseinheit(en)

Deutsches Seminar

Typ

Artikel

Journal

Fictions

Band

23

Seiten

109-125

Anzahl der Seiten

17

ISSN

1721-3673

Publikationsdatum

2024

Publikationsstatus

Veröffentlicht

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Geisteswissenschaftliche Fächer (sonstige), Literatur und Literaturtheorie

Elektronische Version(en)

https://doi.org/10.19272/202406901007 (Zugang: Geschlossen)