Stadtgeschichten: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of Classical Weimar

Böttiger's opinion represents only one among many, but in expressing it he com- mands attention for exposing the idiosyncrasies of Weimar's most famous inhabitants. A headmaster and classicist, he quickly became a literary and theater critic and a much-maligned gossipmonger, whose papers were published as Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Literary Life and Contemporaries, 1838) and are very helpful in formulating Classical Weimar's alternate history of rumor, hyperbole, and gossip. Later significant collections include Wilhelm Bode's Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen (Goethe in Confidential Letters of his Contemporaries, 1913) and Konrad Kratzsch's Klatschnest Weimar (Gossip Pit Weimar, 2002).12 Read in the context of letters, diaries, newspapers, and journals, which for a long time remained marginal in the study of Weimar Classicism, these compilations convey a remarkably unified image: contemporaries mocked individual inhabitants' overblown self-image. They complained about high rents and prices, poorly constructed houses and streets, and the generally unremarkable small-town architecture, not to mention a local obsession with street lighting. Many accounts describe unmet expectations, emphasizing the confining nature of Weimar. In portraying the inhabitants, they document a lively literary life there and a communicative culture marked by both orality and literacy, but they also expose the ways in which an icon-be it a person or a literary period-is styled, kept alive, and marketed via gossip, often with other than the intended effects. In short, they illustrate how gossip goes viral.

Loại tài liệu:

Article - Bài báo

Tác giả:

Tautz, Birgit

Đề mục:

Literary criticism

Nhà xuất bản:

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, United states

Ngày xuất bản:

October 2013

Số trang/ tờ:

Định dạng:

pdf

Nguồn gốc:

German Studies Review, Volume 36, Issue 3, October 2013, Pages 497-514

Liên kết:

ISSN 0149-7952

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Stadtgeschichten: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of Classical Weimar

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