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Aesthetics of Violence in Uwe Timm's Rot and Friedrich Christian Delius's Mein Jahr als Mörder 1
Author(s) -
Baker Gary L.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.10167
Subject(s) - realm , narrative , politics , public sphere , legitimacy , relation (database) , action (physics) , sociology , aesthetics , literature , philosophy , law , art , political science , physics , quantum mechanics , database , computer science
This essay examines how two novels written in the spirit of 1968 incorporate potential violent acts into narrative in ways that reflect the nonviolent principles of Autoren Edition and Hannah Arendt's ideas on the relation between violence and political action. The authors of these novels join art and terror by recounting purely fantasized acts of violence that become aesthetically reified in narrative form. This essay asserts that Timm's Rot and Delius's Mein Jahr als Mörder acknowledge the place of violence in the public realm of politics but displace it to the sphere of aesthetics and narrative in order to grant it a political legitimacy that it otherwise does not possess for peaceful social change.