| Triggered by E. Auerbach's judgment that German realism does not react adequately to the shock of the late 19th century, the literature of the epoch has been widely devalued as one of minor reflectiveness. My dissertation aims to show that the literary texts of the time, on the contrary, react in a sophisticated and elaborate way to the dramatic changes that emerged throughout the period. The era exhibits several features which can be read as remarkable attempts to secure the representation of reality, such as the regard for evidence in criminal investigations, photography as a means and starting point of record taking, the museum as a display of nature, and the editing and ultimately publishing of the literary remains. It could be reasonably expected, that at least at the time, the strife of the newly established features to preserve a representation of reality was supported in literature. A close look at the contemporaneous literary texts reveals that they, conversely, undermine the status of these introduced notions and procedures, already in the moment of their emergence. Regarding canonical literary texts by Theodor Fontane, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, and Gottfried Keller, I show how the epoch's approach the newly established cultural phenomena reveals the concerns realism raises in any unproblematized representation of reality.; A common feature of the texts I analyze is that poetological self-reference prevails and marks literature as a still functioning aesthetical notion in realism, despite the breakdown of the texts' formal settings. The breakdown is, however, necessary to display the problems of reference and ultimately the texts of literary realism reveal that beneath the attempts to record and secure reality, the farewell to reality and with it the beginning of modernism is already at stake. |
