Liberating Laughter: Dramatic satire and the German public sphere, 1790-1848
Date
2020-05
Author
Advisors
Norberg, Jakob
Downing, Eric
Engelstein, Stefani
Langston, Richard
Trop, Gabriel
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Abstract
One of the most far-reaching consequences of the French Revolution was the spread
of
political debate. Across Europe, people of all sorts — not just princes, but peasants
and peddlers as
well— started talking politics. When, in the face of this, the princes of the German
states censored
traditional modes of public discourse including newspapers other print media, the
burden of sociocritical
discourse fell to an unlikely place: ridiculing entertainment in the form of satire
and, more
specifically, satiric theater. Not a place of reasoned discourse seeking the expression
of consensus,
satire attacks and ridicules its object, making it a fitting forum for the dawn of
partisan politics.
This dissertation traces the historical and cultural conditions peculiar to German
dramatic
satire between 1790 and 1848 as it compensated for a lack of political debate elsewhere.
Looking at
how satire in the public space of the theater became one of the premier channels of
political debate
in an age of revolutionary change and heavy-handed censorship, the work chronologically
surveys
the most important satiric dramas of the era, including works by August von Kotzebue,
Ludwig
Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer,
Johann
Nestroy, Georg Büchner, and Karl Gutzkow. Through careful explication of the sociopolitical
crises
in which dramatic satirists intervened, we see how they tried to help the German people
laugh their
way to liberation.
Type
DissertationPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20631Citation
Hertel, Jeffrey (2020). Liberating Laughter: Dramatic satire and the German public sphere, 1790-1848. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20631.Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Jeffrey Hertel
Graduate Assistant
Jeff got his BA in German, History, and Psychology from Indiana University Bloomington,
where he went on to complete an MA in European Studies with a focus on Germany, writing
a thesis about how the concept of “movement” or Bewegung changed over
the course of the “long nineteenth century.” During his MA studies, he
spent six months at the Freie Universität Berlin, taking courses in history and
doing research for his thesis at the Staatsbibliothek. His current researc

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