Original scientific paper
„Mammon's Sack“ and „Tabernacle“: On Money and God in Hofmannsthal's Jedermann
Hans Richard Brittnacher
; Free University of Berlin
Abstract
The article presents a reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's play Jedermann (Everyman) as an attempt to seek a literary exit from a sense of fundamental crisis on the eve of the First World War. Unlike the experience of an enfeebled and enervated language; the sick and „unsalvageable“ self; and against the menacing erosion of the male hegemony in the relations between the sexes at the turn of the century, one should offer a new, different drama. Both Hofmannsthal's Electra and his Everyman endeavor to satisfy the demand for theatrical revival – Electra by returning to the orientalizing, barbaric Greece; Everyman, on the other hand, by referring to the Christian Middle Ages. While Electra shocked the audience with its extreme cruelty, Everyman proved to be a constant success with its conciliatory turn to Christianity in Austrian theater. Its success is due not only to its simple aesthetic means but also to its sociological intelligence, which by reliance on Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class reveals a value orientation aimed exclusively at money, contrary to which stands the Christian thought of the old European worldview.
Keywords
turn of the century Austrian literature; a sense of crisis; Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Elektra; Jedermann
Hrčak ID:
210830
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2018.
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