Aleph (Jan 2024)
Geschichtsschreibung als kulturpoetische Grenzziehung in Daniel Kehlmanns Roman Tyll
Abstract
Tyll is a novel of the German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann that was published in 2017. The author deals through anachronistic as well as heterochronic moments with the medieval figure Tyll and their encounters with other historical and fictional figures in the context of the Thirty Years’ War. With an exciting story as an interplay between the tragedy of historical events and the humor of the mythical figure, Kehlmann succeeds in reconstructing the humorous characteristics of the fictional character Tyll and inscribing the facts of constructed history into his fictional text. In doing so, the character Tyll is ascribed a comic-carnivalesque status. In this way, Kehlmann reconstructs the historical events and thus transcends the boundaries between history and literature or fiction as a cultural-poetic demarcation. Here, the understanding of the reader’s present horizon overlaps with the historical horizon of the text. The present article aims to analyze Kehlmann’s historiographical writing as a textual demarcation and asks to what extent the contextualization of historical facts in Tyll can contribute to drawing cultural-poetic boundaries.
