February
2008
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The Politics of Cultural Transfer: George Bernard Shaw in the German-speaking context
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Hannes Schweiger (University of Vienna)
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Research on George Bernard Shaw in the German-speaking context has until recently focussed on the reception of his drama and on Siegfried Trebitsch as the key figure whose work as a translator and literary agent shaped the German and Austrian perception of Shaw to a large extent. However, there were other cultural intermediaries who influenced the reception of Shaw and his position in the literary field of Germany and Austria, among them socialists such as Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein and Friedrich Adler, the cosmopolitan writer and intellectual Count Harry Kessler, writers and critics such as Hermann Bahr, Siegfried Jacobsohn and Alfred Kerr as well as Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus – to name but a few. Shaw became first known in the German-speaking countries not as a dramatist, but as a socialist and as one of the protagonists of the Fabian Society. In my PhD thesis, I concentrate on hitherto neglected aspects of the “German Shaw” by focussing on writers, intellectuals, critics, journalists, editors and politicians who influenced the transfer of Shaw’s works and ideas to Germany and Austria and by taking into account Shaw’s non-dramatic writings, i.e. essays, newspaper articles and letters as well as his political and economic treatises. Therefore, Shaw is not only considered as an internationally acclaimed dramatist, whose plays frequently became box office hits in German-speaking theatres, but also as a political commentator and as an intellectual who contributed to the literary, cultural, economic and political discourses and debates of his time. I also pursue the question of how the media phenomenon Shaw became one of the key figures in Germany and Austria in the first three decades of the 20th century through clever strategies of self-fashioning and self-promotion. |
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Taking Shaw as a prime example, I explore the diverse interactions between British and German as well as Austrian culture at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. I analyse the key components in processes of cultural transfer, in particular the role of cultural intermediaries, and I discuss the changes in an author’s position in the literary field that depend on specific social, historical, political and literary conditions. The theoretical basis is provided by concepts taken from cultural transfer studies and from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose cultural theory is based on the assumption of power struggles in the cultural field. The actors take and change their positions in the field according to their habitus and their social, artistic, economic and symbolic capital. I am concerned with the relationship and the interaction between the political and the cultural field and I discuss the repercussions of Shaw’s non-dramatic writings for the reception of his drama and on his reputation in general in Germany and Austria. Based on these theoretical concepts the thesis provides a reconstruction of Shaw’s changing position in the German-speaking context and explores the processual nature of cultural transfers in general, illustrating their dynamics with particular reference to the relationship between the British and the German-speaking cultures. |
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Hannes Schweiger (MA) is a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography and is working on Ernst Jandl and the theory of biography. He also organizes international seminars for teachers, writes course material for German as a Foreign Language and holds workshops and lectures at teachers’ seminars in Austria and abroad. Before joining the Institute he taught German language pedagogy and German as a foreign language in adult education. During his studies in German, English and German as a foreign language at the University of Vienna, he spent a year abroad both at University College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. He was a student representative for German Studies and for the PhD programme at the University of Vienna. As part of his studies in German as a Foreign Language, he worked as a teacher in Bamako (Mali) for five months. Hannes Schweiger graduated from the University of Vienna in 2002 with a thesis on Samuel Beckett’s reception in Austria. He is currently writing a PhD thesis on the reception of George Bernard Shaw in a German-speaking context. His further research interests include cultural transfer, literature and migration and Austrian Literature since 1945. |
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Publications: |
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Identitäten mit Bindestrich. Biographien von Migrant Innen. In: Spiegel und Maske. Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit. Ed. by Bernhard Fetz und Hannes Schweiger in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute the History and Theory of Biography. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006 (= Profile 13), pp. 175-188. |
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Failing better. Samuel Beckett in Österreich. Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2005 (Wechselwirkungen vol. 8). |
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Articles on Friederike Mayröcker, Samuel Beckett, Bernard Shaw and Dimitré Dinev, among others. Editorial work on Ernst Jandl. Musik Rhythmus Radikale Dichtung, edited by Bernhard Fetz. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2005. |
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