Reading and discussion: Wut und Wertung

“Yawn-induc­ing,” “dead bor­ing,” “bor­ing to death,” “very tough go­ing,” and “ter­ribly bor­ing”— these are the judg­ments Jo­han­nes Fran­zen quot­ed from re­views on digital plat­forms like Good­reads. But the text that is so re­viled here is an un­dis­puted clas­sic of Ger­man liter­ary histo­ry: The­odor Fon­tane's Effi Briest. Even as Fran­zen un­rav­eled this in a first read­ing from Wut und Wer­tung (pub­lished by S. Fischer in 2024), one could sense con­trasting re­ac­tions in the audi­ence: re­lieved agreement on the one hand, a cer­tain indig­nation on the other. 

This made the dis­cussion that en­sued about such criti­cism of clas­sics all the more inter­esting and en­light­ening. Jo­han­nes Fran­zen dis­cuss­ed with Stephanie Waldow, spokes­per­son for the Elite Graduate Program “Ethics of Tex­tual Cul­tures”, and Mat­thias Löwe, holder of the Chair of Mod­ern Ger­man Liter­ature in Augsburg, about possi­ble rea­sons for this: Could it be that the fact that the recep­tion of fa­mous works is often not en­tirely vol­untary — think of school or uni­versi­ty read­ing lists — plays a role in how they are eval­uat­ed? Does the label “clas­sic” some­times pre­vent us from ap­proaching a text with­out preju­dice? How do the value at­tribu­tions that form a canon come about in the first place? Who actu­ally de­cides, and with what au­thori­ty, which art re­mains visi­ble over centu­ries and which does not?

In a sec­ond read­ing, Jo­han­nes Fran­zen re­called the de­bate sur­rounding Eugen Gom­ringer's cuidad (aven­idas). The poem adorned the fa­cade of the Alice Salo­mon Uni­versi­ty in Ber­lin. Argu­ing that the text pre­sented a male gaze to­wards wom­en, a stu­dent peti­tion de­manded that it be re­moved from public space. In the ensu­ing heat­ed con­tro­versy, the stu­dents were ac­cused of cen­sor­ship and “bar­baric non­sense.” In re­sponse, a pow­erful alli­ance of cul­tural jour­nalists and au­thors formed, claim­ing to de­fend artis­tic free­dom from the stu­dents. On stage, there was agreement that such dis­putes need­ed to be viewed in a more nu­anced way. After all, this was also a case of what could be called “phantom cen­sor­ship.” 

In the end, it be­came clear that con­sider­ations about anger and judg­ment also raise many ques­tions of ethics and aes­thet­ics that have long pre­occu­pied the pro­gram: those who argue about taste are im­plicit­ly also argu­ing about ques­tions of mo­rality. 

Text: Elite Graduate Program “Ethics of Textual Cultures”