Realism/Naturalism

1810 - 1893

Kleist

and

Ebner-Eschenbach (1830 - 1916) - Austro-Hungarian Empire

• Germany shift from rural to industrial society
• industrialisation
• urbanisation
• prolatarianisation

• Post-Napoleonic period 1815 onwards
• 1830 - revolutions - conservative reinforce position
• 1860s and 70s - Prussian influence

Nationalist tendancies

March 1848 revolution - watershed for how we talk about period. 

• 1815 - 1848  --- Vormärz   ---- Biedermeir - bourgeois middle-class German values, heavy furniture, family centred, idealistic, sentimental
• Nachmärz --- realism

Paradoxes of realism:

• relationship between art and reality
• artistic movement in Europe in second half of Century

Realism is art:

• liberal, middle-class
• aware of social under-class and socio-economic misery
• Social Darwinism
• period of empire
• classification, intellectual hierarchy
• physical laws of cause and effect
• imperical science 

Use literary texts like an experiment

Germans - poetic realism 

• normally 3 people involved
• never simple
• wrong person first, then right person

Absolutely classic love story which bears title 'Ohne Liebe' because not married for love but rather for sympathy and friendship 

Too much love / indulgence - negative influence on behaviour of people especially children

Central female character in charge

Importance of set:

• each character = important social types
• Rüdiger - unsuitable suitor - bourgeois, not self-aware, loses countenance
• Marko - down to earth, worked on estate, authority from living in real world

• restricted
• turning point
• central symbol
• conflict
• drama
• realistic
• imaginable
• concentrated special
• language 

Love 

Positives and negatives of love

What love can do 

• one place
• one day
• not many people
• classical unities
• one plot 

• Gräfin and the child
• The childs arrival

• Rüdiger wants to marry Emma but she does not want to marry him
• Emma and Gräfin - who she wants to marry
• Gräfin and Rüdiger - over the child
• Rüdiger and Marko - over Emma 

In each scene there is a particular battle 

• understand the whole play for staging and gestures without needing discourse
• play 

Unerhört

• behaviour of woman (Emma)
• independant (majorly revolutionary)
• choosing husband
• no parents especially father 

Realism

• spoilt child of grandmother
• social family environment

Carefully constructed

• symbolic meaning in speech and expression 

Does all the things a Novelle should do but in a dramatic way

Ohne Liebe forces you to understand what is behind each gesture and what is happening on stage