Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Classen, Albrecht

Titel

The Transnational and the Transcultural in Medieval German Literature Spatial Identity and Pre-Modern Concepts of Nationhood in the Works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Straßburg, Rudolf von Ems, and Konrad von Würzburg

Ist Teil von

• Mediaevistik, 2016-01, Vol.29 (1), p.175-194

Ort / Verlag

Peter Lang GmbH

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper will examine the notion of the transnational and transcultural in a selection of premodern German texts, raising the fundamental question what the concept of 'nation' might have been in the past and probing how cultural identity was determined in contrast with other people or social groups. Such an investigation might come just at the right time today when traditional categories of the nation and cultural identity are becoming fluid once again and lose much of their usual conceptual rigidity, although there are many forces across Europe today that fight energetically against the loss of national identities. Hence, we are required to raise the ancient-old question once again what constitutes our identity within what cultural context (religion, language, political community, history, ethics, morality, aesthetics, etc.). We will not need to discuss the political concept of 'nation' ('national') much in the context of the pre-modern world because true politically determined nations in the modern sense emerged only by the sixteenth and seventeenth century, especially in the age of Absolutism. But this does not release us from the need to investigate carefully what 'transcultural' would mean within the larger context of political and linguistic entities clearly separating various countries from each other, and this already in the Middle Ages. After all, this takes us directly to the critical issue of identity that needs to be situated within a specific historical and cultural framework that is constantly subject to changes, and yet survives because of deep roots in the regional or local setting.