Fictions of friendship in twentieth-century German literature: Mann's 'Doktor Faustus', Grass's 'Katz und Maus', Bernhard's 'Der Untergeher' and 'Wittgensteins Neffe', and Wolf's 'Nachdenken ueber Christa T.'

Can the friendships examined here really be called friendships, since in each instance, one of the friends is dead? This dissertation concludes that the death of the single friend corresponds to a need to mourn the loss of the unified self. As modern philosophical writing on friendship indicates, the ideal of one friend is no longer viable because the modern self is divided into so many different segments. While the fictional friendships analyzed here do attempt to accomodate both the difference of the Other and the incongruity of the self, they nevertheless nostalgically long for the dream of self-unity which represents some relief from the stress of modernity's fragmentation. The groundwork for this analysis, including a survey of narrative and psychoanalytic theory, is laid in the introduction.; The dissertation examines friendship as a relationship which constructs a gendered identity. The second, long section outlines the development of male gender ideals from the beginning of the century to the early eighties. In the teens and twenties, male friendship is depicted as a narcissistic relationship bent on the production of a heroic male ego. The myth of the heroic friend, however, was coopted by the Nazis during Gemany's fascist period, and after the war it became nearly impossible to write a tale of male friendship. Instead, writers like Grass and Mann unearth the sadistic component of relationships which constitute the hero. Following in Mann's footsteps, Bernhard uses friendship to dismantle yet another masculine national icon--the artistic genius. His texts deconstruct relationships which merely elevate the male ego to pantheonic heights. Simultaneously, by stressing the social and ethical component of friendships between men, he echoes the search carried out by the Men's Movement for communicative models of masculinity.; The final section traces the tradition of female friendship, which began in Germany with the women romantics, and which posited friendship between women as a place for the development of alternative female identities. Within the context of the GDR, Wolf uses a friendship with a woman to serve as a didactic relationship that introduces concerns of feminity and subjectivity into the Socialist agenda.