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Colleagues may be interested in seeing this petition. All the best, Jeremy Adler http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-tuerkei-abkommen-dieses-tauschverfahren-ist-nichts-anderes-als-menschenhandel-1.2980260 [http://polpix.sueddeutsche.com/polopoly_fs/1.2980288.1462372022!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/940x528/image.jpg]<http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-tuerkei-abkommen-dieses-tauschverfahren-ist-nichts-anderes-als-menschenhandel-1.2980260> Interview mit Jeremy Adler – EU-Türkei-Deal : "Dieses Tauschverfahren ist nichts anderes als Menschenhandel"<http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/eu-tuerkei-abkommen-dieses-tauschverfahren-ist-nichts-anderes-als-menschenhandel-1.2980260> www.sueddeutsche.de In einem offenen Brief üben knapp 60 prominente Intellektuelle schwere Kritik am EU-Türkei-Flüchtlingsabkommen, unter ihnen der britische Germanist Jeremy Adler. Ein Gespräch über die Frage, ob die EU gescheitert ist. ________________________________ From: JISCmail German Studies List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Henrike Laehnemann <[log in to unmask]> Sent: 05 May 2016 09:37 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: German Shakespearomania An original contribution from the British Library European blog along the Shakespeare is German lines. Also out now: the full catalogue of the Taylorian Shakespeare exhibition<https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/taylorian/tag/sonnets/> with the edition of ‘Twin Spin’; it can be bought in the Taylorian at the Issue Desk for GBP3 or ordered from online retailers (ISBN 978-0-9954564-0-2). The exhibition itself had to make way for a couple of weeks for Dante (very worthwhile seeing: among the exhibits are the huge Berlin facsimile prints of Botticelli’s Dante drawings) but will be back end of May. 04 May 2016 (read the post online to view the images<http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/european/2016/05/the-shakespearomania-of-karl-marx.html>) The 'Shakespearomania' of Karl Marx Karl Marx's magnum opus Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1872; British Library C.120.b.1.) may have a reputation as an exceedingly dry and difficult book (causing William Morris to suffer acute ‘agonies of confusion of the brain’ in his reading of the great critique of political economy), but the toil is lightened by his frequent and often comic allusions to classical and European literature, from Aeschylus to Cervantes and Goethe. His favourite though was always Shakespeare<http://www.bl.uk/shakespeare>. Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, described Shakespeare’s works as the Bible of the household, ‘seldom out of our hands and mouths’, and the German socialist biographer of Marx Franz Mehring pictured the whole family as practising ‘what amounted practically to a Shakespearian cult’. Marx reportedly read Shakespeare every day, and the family would entertain themselves on the walk back from their regular Sunday picnics on Hampstead Heath by dramatically reciting extracts from Shakespeare’s plays. Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, co-author of the famous Communist Manifesto (London, 1848; C.194.b.289), displayed a similarly fierce passion for the bard in a letter to Marx, with characteristic invective, after the German dramatist Roderich Benedix<http://www.theatrehistory.com/german/benedix001.html> criticized Shakespeare’s overwhelming popularity: That scamp Roderich Benedix has left a bad odour behind in the shape of a thick tome against ‘Shakespearomania.’ He proved in it to a nicety that Shakespeare can't hold a candle to our great poets, not even to those of modern times. Shakespeare is presumably to be hurled down from his pedestal only in order that fatty Benedix is hoisted on to it… Marx and Benedix: United by the beard, divided by the bard. (Images from Wikimedia Commons) Much has been written of Marx's use of the ‘old mole’ from Hamlet as a metaphor for revolution in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (for an interesting discussion of this theme see the article by Peter Stallybrass cited below), but also noteworthy is Marx’s repeated use of a passage from Timon of Athens which, he says, shows how ‘Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money’: Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. ... Why, this Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench: This is it That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices To the April day again. Come, damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds Among the rout of nations. 1829 watercolour by Johann Heinrich Ramberg depicting Timon 'laying aside the gold'. (Image from Wikimedia Commons<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timon_Laying_Aside_the_Gold.jpg>, original at the Folger Shakespeare Library). Many literary critics have written interpretations of Shakespeare from a Marxist perspective, and several prominent commentators on Shakespeare (like George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht) drew on Marxian ideas in their understanding of his body of work. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, unusually steeped in European literary culture for a Bolshevik, sought to explain what was so interesting about Shakespeare to Marxists: In the tragedies of Shakespeare, which would be entirely unthinkable without the Reformation, the fate of the ancients and the passions of the mediaeval Christians are crowded out by individual human passions, such as love, jealousy, revengeful greediness, and spiritual dissension. But in every one of Shakespeare’s dramas, the individual passion is carried to such a high degree of tension that it outgrows the individual, becomes super-personal, and is transformed into a fate of a certain kind. The jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth, the greed of Shylock, the love of Romeo and Juliet, the arrogance of Coriolanus, the spiritual wavering of Hamlet, are all of this kind… For Trotsky, Shakespeare represents the birth of modern literature by placing the individual man, his own personal desires and emotions, in the centre of the narrative, symbolizing the equally progressive and destructive aspirations for personal emancipation characterizing the bourgeois revolt against feudalism. After Shakespeare, he writes, ‘we shall no longer accept a tragedy in which God gives orders and man submits. Moreover, there will be no one to write such a tragedy.’ Mike Carey, CDA Student References Julius Roderich Benedix, Die Shakespearomanie (Stuttgart, 1873) 11766.g.14. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (London, 1970). X.519/4753. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow, 1976). X.809/42007. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (London, 1936). 010709.e.52. Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Well Grubbed, Old Mole”: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)Fixing of Representation’, Cultural Studies 12, 1 (1998), 3-14. ZC.9.a.1419 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York, 1925). 011840.aa.17. The British Library’s current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts<http://www.bl.uk/events/shakespeare-in-ten-acts> is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare’s constant reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/european/2016/05/the-shakespearomania-of-karl-marx.html#sthash.PBZQRqfr.dpuf