Self-Made Royalty: Celebrity in German Literature

This dissertation explores the development of German literary celebrity and its influence on the German literary canon beginning in the 18th century. I explore in particular the influence of gender on achieving and maintaining one’s celebrity status, both within representative literary works and for the authors themselves. I focus on the development of modern celebrity in the context of male-female author pairings during three significant time periods: the Enlightenment, the early 20th century, and the contemporary period. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Sophie von La Roche serve as representatives of the gender dynamics of authorship and literary celebrity at play during and immediately following the Enlightenment. The simultaneous elevation of the “genius” male author and denigration of female artistic production has resulted in a lack of recognition for the influence of La Roche's novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) on the development of the German epistolary novel in general and on Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) in particular. The early 20th century likewise is a period of radical changes, both modernizing and regressive in light of the rise of Nazism in Germany. Here I focus on Thomas Mann and Irmgard Keun, as both authors offer crucial insight into the influence of gender on the authors’ ability not only to access literary success but to achieve lasting renown. Mann’s and Keun’s exile novels, Lotte in Weimar (1939) and Kind aller Länder (1938) respectively, offer divergent yet critical depictions of the male celebrity author. In our contemporary period I engage with the biographies and literary works of Elfriede Jelinek and Martin Walser. Both authors’ long and successful literary careers offer compelling cases for comparison: Jelinek has withdrawn almost completely from the public sphere in recent years, whereas Walser has remained in the spotlight despite several controversies. I read Walser’s Ein liebender Mann (2008) alongside Jelinek’s play Der Tod und das Mädchen IV: Jackie (2004), revealing a highly gendered relationship between (literary) celebrity and the public. The connecting thread among the male authors in this study is a mode of self-fashioning vis-à-vis Goethe; indeed, both Mann and Walser, whose novels fictionalize the historical Goethe, figuratively write themselves into the revered lineage of German authorship. What becomes apparent through the gendered pairings is an easily traceable male genealogy of authorship contrasted with a disjointed history of female authorship. My dissertation offers a pathway to writing a more diverse literary genealogy by highlighting the incomplete democratization of celebrity in the Literaturbetrieb and in the broader literary field.