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  • Der 'Erec' Hartmanns von Aue: Eine Einführung
  • William C. McDonald
Der 'Erec' Hartmanns von Aue: Eine Einführung. Von Joachim Bumke.De Gruyter Studienbuch. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Pp. 175. $24.

Erec (ca. 1180) by Hartmann von Aue, usually called the first German Arthurian romance, was once the stepchild of scholarship, relegated to a place far behind Wolfram's Parzival or Gottfried's Tristan. I would argue that the landscape changed in 1972 when Thomas Cramer's translation of Erec appeared as a popular Fischer Taschenbuch—with a dazzling Nachwort, as yet the best short treatment of poet and work. By 2003, no less than 25 re-printings of the Cramer volume are attested. Since 1972, Hartmann's Erec rivals all German courtly romances in scholarly attention. So much has been written, in fact, that a bibliographical volume devoted to Erec is highly desirable.

To illustrate, in a single year, 2006, I count three books: a translation volume with Nachwort by Stephan Dohle; the seventh re-working of the critical edition (Leitzmann-Wolff), this by Kurt Gärtner in the series Altdeutsche Textbibliothek; and the book under review by Joachim Bumke. Bumke finished his manuscript in 2005—thus he cannot evaluate Gärtner's immensely important volume—and to his credit he includes literature from that year in a bibliography that is, however, rather too long for a volume so short and compact. Nor surprisingly, there is considerable overlap between Gärtner and Bumke. More important, Bumke duplicates recent research that is readily available. After citing both the monograph by Christoph Cormeau and Wilhelm Störmer, Hartmann von Aue: Epoche—Werk—Wirkung (2nd edition, 1993), which devotes a full chapter to Erec, and the translation and commentary edition of Erec by Manfred Günter Scholz and Susanne Held in the series Bibliothek des Mittelalters (2004), Bumke makes the astonishing statement, when giving the rationale for his own book, "Der Plan zu diesem Büchlein entstand, als ich bei der Vorbereitung eines 'Erec'-Seminars überlegte, was ich zur Einführung empfehlen sollte. Außer dem Aufsatz von Volker Honemann [1999]… fiel mir nichts ein" (p. 171). Contrary to Bumke, Cormeau and Störmer offer an excellent introduction to Hartmann's seminal Arthurian text, and Scholz and Held provide the perfect volume for a university student: Erec with facing Middle High German and modern German translation, including over 400 pages of commentary and more than 50 pages of bibliography. Scholz and Held treat most of the same subjects as Bumke does: Autor und Werk, Handlungsüberblick, Stoff, Quellen, Bearbeitung, Wirkung, etc.

Any evaluation of Bumke's achievement must take into consideration that he sets himself a task worthy of Sisyphus, treating in 150-odd pages: Hartmann von Aue himself (and the famous problem of the chronology of his works), the manuscript transmission of Erec, a summary and interpretation of episodes in the work (including a comparison of scenes with the Erec et Enide of Chrétien de Troyes, Hartmann's chief source text), the tectonics of Hartmann's Erec, a discussion of Enite and Erec as protagonists, the role of speech and silence in the poem, the techniques of narration, the literary sources for the romance, the popularity of [End Page 384] the Arthurian romance itself, as well as the literary reception of Hartmann's Erec. I have given the chapters in the order that they appear. The student (the intended audience for this book) will be confused to find the section Stoff und Quellen (pp. 137–50) near the end, rather than the beginning, of the monograph. It seems logical to familiarize readers with Hartmann's sources and his relationship to Chrétien at the outset. (The definition of adaptation courtoise, for example, does not appear until p. 143). In the present volume one finds comparisons with Chrétien's Erec et Enide before one is familiar with the French poet himself. (Oddly, the name Chrétien de Troyes fails to appear in the Register; there is only the entry Vergleich mit Chrétiens 'Erec'). Late in the book Bumke is forthcoming that "Chrétiens 'Erec et Enide' war der erste französische Artusroman" (p...

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