Der mittelalterliche und der neuzeitliche Walther. Beiträge zu Motivik, Poetik, Überlieferungsgeschichte und Rezeption

The selection of Walther von der Vogelweide as the subject of an entire series (Walther-Studien) as inaugurated five years ago, has proven to be enormously fruitful. This fifth volume complements the previous ones in its offering of several careful studies, although here the parameters are broader, raising the question of the contemporary image of Walther. The diverse contributions address the past, present, and future of Walther studies to show that the history of Walther reception is important for understanding the formation of German cultural identity right into the twentieth century and that his poetry has only recently lost its appeal with the educated public. The second half of the volume re-examines issues concerning textual variants and theoretical approaches to narrative by applying them to Walther's songs.

Part 1 features Walther in public schools. Jelko Peters's "'Es ist überflüssig diesen Dichter für die Jugend zu empfehlen.' Zum Stellenwert der Lyrik Walthers von der Vogelweide im altdeutschen Unterricht des 19. Jahrhunderts" argues that the curriculum of the nineteenth century was influenced by Ludwig Uhland, who made Walther into a national poet and religious predecessor of Luther. For German youth Walther's poetry was supposed to offer linguistic and intellectual training equal to Homer and Horace. As for teaching Walther today, Elmar Willemsen's contribution, "Hat Walther in der Schule noch eine Zukunft? Anmerkungen aus der Praxis," points out the fragmentary nature of instruction of medieval German literature in schools where the historical context is lacking and urges a systematic contextualization of medieval topics so that students learn the difference between the cultural values produced in the past and their own contemporary context. In "Von der Vogelweide in deutsche Klassenzimmer. Der Versuch einer Verortung," Boris Thelen evaluates school texts and their application and he too concludes that students do not learn that the past cannot be approached the way we approach the present.

Part 2, "Modern Reception," surveys the nineteenth century to the present. Christian Krepold, "Das Walther-bild der Romantiker zwischen 'Universalpoesie' und Konfessionalismus—Zu Tieck, Uhland und Eichendorffs Geschichte der poetischen Literatur Deutschlands," demonstrates that the personal reactions of romantics to Walther's poetry set the direction for subsequent scholarship. Uhland used the biographical approach to make Walther a model for the middle class. Tieck promoted Minnesang as an example of the aesthetics of universal poetry, while Eichendorff attempted to use Walther to counter Protestant literary history writing. Jelko Peters's "Walther von der Vogelweide als Figur des patriotischen Schulfestspiels in der Wilhelminischen Kaiserzeit. Mit einer Edition des Festspiels Walther von der Vogelweide, König Philipps Herold' Heinrich Drees (1895)" reads like an extension of his contribution in part 1, illustrating the creation and dissemination of Walther as national hero in patriotic school plays. Helmut Klug reviews a novel by Viola Alvarez, Wer gab dir, Liebe, die Gewalt, telling of Walther's life from early childhood to death and criticizes the novel for its superficial stereotyping and ahistorical presentation of the Middle Ages. Walther reception on websites is sad according to Jan Hildebrandt's "World Wide Walther. Walther von der Vogelweide auf privaten und kommerziellen Internetseiten." With the exception of de.wikipedia.org, the sites reflect curiosity about Walther but offer almost no information indicating that what survives in cultural consciousness has little meaningful resonance.

The heading for Part 3 contains four descriptors for the six articles: poetics, motifs, music, and transmission. All six contributors demonstrate by their several approaches to various topics that Walther is repeatedly innovative in his use of familiar and also new motifs, phrases, images, musical composition, and rhetorical strategies. In "Zwischen Wachsamkeit, Weltflucht und Wehmut: Sichtweisen und Funktionen des Schlafs bei Walther von der Vogelweide," Gabriele Klug surveys Walther's multivalent adaptations of the sleep motif reformulating them into new metaphors for striving instead of the topical meaning of failure to strive. Stefan Erlei in "Walther von der Vogelweide als sprachlicher Innovator. Der Ausdruck 'höfisch' in Walthers Dichtung," finds that "höfisch" gains new meaning when Walther introduces the word from narrative into lyric and moves the concept of courtliness into the sphere of song. Walther coins new combinations with it in both his love lyric and gnomic poetry that are then adopted by subsequent poets. Since musicologists have reached an impasse in interpreting rhythm based on medieval musical notation, Florian Kragl turns in this statistical analysis, "Walther, Neidhart und die Musik. Möglichkeiten der musikalischen Analyse," to the transmission of melody coupled with strophic form. He compares all of Walther's melodies and discovers melodic characteristics that differentiate between Walther and Neidhart von Reuenthal but correlate with folk melody.

The next three contributions address the textual variants in Walther's corpus. They consider the question of manuscript transmission and mouvance, i.e., whether variation was built in from the conception of the song as the poet's aesthetic or whether it is an aesthetic created by the performative context of its reception. Corinna Laude, "Walthers Enzwischen und Neidharts Spiegelraub. Beobachtungen zur poetologischen Funktion von Leerstellen im Minnesang," examines the poetological function of "empty" descriptions which avoid iterating certain focal points in a description as used by Neidhart and Walther to show that these null spaces allow logical segments and sequences of text to collide and thus create in Walther's song 30 (L 53, 25) a poetological conflict between the theological concept of creator and the activity of the singer-creator. By staging this conflict the singers both of the song and in the song assert their control over their creation and its reception. Tobias Lüpges presents in "'Zurück zu den Handschriften!' Untersuchungen zum Varianzphänomen mittelalterlicher Literatur am Beispiel Walthers von der Vogelweide" a concise survey of the current debate on textual variants and editorial principles. While he enumerates all the issues in dealing with textual multiplicity or multi-texts, he weighs all possibilities equally so that he is not able to make judgments. Thus when he lists the many possible strophic sequences in manuscript variants for Walther's Ton 30 (L 53, 25), he does this without benefit of performance theory and consequently finds nothing conclusive and can offer no solutions. Welcome and realistic solutions to the editing of multi-texts are, however, offered by Thomas Bein, "Varianten in der Walther-Überlieferung: Deutung und Dokumentation. Überlegungen am Beispiel von Ton 20." Using the example of L 43, 9, he argues that a single text edition based on a lead manuscript, as is now the practice, is necessary for general and educational use. But more importantly, he outlines and illustrates an extremely useful type of electronically based hybrid historical edition. It would include a facsimile of manuscripts; a commentary discussing the peculiarities of the individual texts including dialect, metrics, glossary, significant semantic variants; chronology and geography of transmission and possibly a stemma; and finally a diplomatic transcription. Some of these principles are already being applied to editions of vernacular chronicles such as the Heinrich von München or Christherre group of manuscripts, as more scholars come to recognize we are not dealing with mere variants of "the" text, but rather with texts in process.

Part 4 offers a report by Sabine Ley on her dissertation project, a study of König Friedrichston in all its variants. In Part 5 Thomas Bein presents a review of Andrea Grafetstätter's important book, Der Leich Walthers von der Vogelweide. Transkriptionen, Kommentare, Analysen. Münster, 2004.

The complete titles of contributions are listed here because the volume's highly disparate collection of topics makes the book appear rather disjointed and no simple heading captures the contents. To be sure, articles cluster around the single author but individual contributions will appeal to different readers. With the addition of a current dissertation description and a book review, the book becomes quite like an annual journal, especially since the editor has been producing one volume a year. This is not a bad thing. The variety of articles is informative and thought-provoking because they present issues concerning the broader relevance of Walther in contemporary German society that need nevertheless to be addressed even though they may lie somewhat outside the interests of American medievalists.