Interdisziplinäre Grenzgänge bei Käte Hamburger: Zum Briefnachlass der Literaturwissenschaftlerin

Summary

This article deals with the unpublished correspondence of the literary specialist Käte Hamburger (1896–1992), which is housed in the literary archive in Marbach, Germany. The correspondence of Hamburger, who is best known for her theoretical work The Logic of Literature, depicts the scholarly context as well as the personalities and public figures with whom she interchanged. The letters demonstrate that Käte Hamburger was widely admitted and acknowledged internationally, but at the same time reveal the problems she had to face as a scholar, female and Jewish, in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not until the end of the 1950s that her work, The Logic of Literature, was belatedly accepted as her postdoctoral thesis required for qualification as a university lecturer, after which she received a professorship at the University of Stuttgart. One example of the wide reception of her work is a previously unpublished letter by the well-known Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, in which he discusses Hamburger’s criteria to distinguish between the fictional and the factual found in the The logic of literature.

Looking at the topics that Hamburger discusses in her letters, one observation is striking: her approach to literature is almost always interdisciplinary. In her readings she strives to expose the ethical and humanistic potential of literature, seen mainly in her correspondence regarding the question of faith with the theologian Martin Doerne (1900–1970). With him she discusses theological questions in the works of Dostojewski and Tolstoi as well as in the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. Religious topics are of importance also for her scientific work. The correspondence thus not only documents the wide, international reception of the work of Käte Hamburger but sheds new light on it.