Königsberger Zuversicht: Über die jüdische Lyrikerin Gertrud Marx (1851–1916)

Abstract

The essay acquaints us with the long-forgotten German poetess Gertrud Marx (1851–1916) from Königsberg (East Prussia), today: Kaliningrad (Russia). The author highlights her optimistic aesthetics, and he contrasts it with the quintessential tendency of German philosophy and literature around 1900. The optimism and the confidence in her poems arise from religion, from her steadfastly Jewish way of living, while modernity and the modern spirit are affected by secularization, by the dominance and hazardous superiority of rationalistic disbelief, as a result of the Enlightenment. The thesis and punch line of the essay is, that disbelief and confidence form or rather represent conjointly one figure of thought, which is the interaction and interlock of realism and idealism, actuality and possibility, diagnosis and therapy.

Keywords

• Edification
• Confidence
• Disbelief
• Modernity