Why is Germany so obsessed with Hamlet? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Germany so obsessed with Hamlet?

newstatesman.com

12 pointslermontov24 comments

Germany is obsessed with Hamlet? Don't think so. Hamlet is presumably as often played as other classics like Goethe's Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and William Tell. That are the ones that are also read and learned in school. But I had never to read Shakespeare.

This article has a very limited view and such tells a wrong story. Don't know what is the intention behind.

Personally, I still know parts out of mind from Faust and William Tell, but don't know anything from Shakespeare.

Same here. I couldn't care less about Hamlet or other works by Shakespeare. And I cannot recall any of my other friends having _any_ tendency towards Hamlet at all.

How old are you, if I may ask?

29, why?

I started to care about the stuff we read in school in my early thirties (Shakespeare would be an exception, for ... reasons).

There's a special exception for Max Frisch which I discovered mid-twenties and was very thankful I did not have to read it in school.

So, well, the "why" is: maybe later in your life.

(There's another "why" in "you an your friends aren't necessarily representative for Germany as a whole, bit that would have been a rather cheap comment)

Maybe it is because the anglophiles assume that because they feel Shakespeare is such an outstanding figure in their own culture he must have the status in every other and cannot possible fathom something else. The truth is though, here in Germany (and surely in countries like France), Shakespeare is overwhelmingly known only through English media/culture such as TV shows, movies etc. and as far as I know not on any educational plan at all. Why would it be? There is such as vast amount of German writing (in the past at least) that one can easily do without him. I guess the problem is also that there was historically little overlap between English (i.e. British) and continental poetry (although translating Shakespeare into German was done by poets such as Schiller) and coincidentally, philosophy as well, at least that would be my impression.

I am from Jena, the root of the romantic movement and the chosen hometown of Schiller and workplace of Goethe. So, I had some of that stuff (Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Schlegel, …) in school.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is not a play, it's a novel

Which doesn't mean, that there are no adaption, like this one: http://www.nationaltheater-weimar.de/de/index/spielplan/stue...

Nothing in comparison with the UK.

The UK only has a single author, poet and source of inspiration for period movies: Shakespeare. Theatres only run musicals and Shakespeare. British litterature is either Harry Potter or Shakespeare. And if a Brit must quote a classic, it must be Shakespeare.

Dickens? Austen?

Yup, I don't know what GP is talking about. English literature would still be the most amazing national literature in scope and depth and popularity even if it didn't have Shakespeare.

But it does.

You're right, and sort of wrong at the same time.

Maybe it's just my poor schooling but the only author we ever /had/ to read was Shakespeare, my mother introduced me to Orwell, my grandfather to Dickens.

The schools only ever introduced Shakespear, like he was the only notable author in the last thousand years.

When and where did you go to school? That seems like an exception rather than a rule.

perhaps, I can only speak for myself not others.

and to be fair, it was Warwickshire.

That sounds like a terrible school and such a waste. I had Shakespeare, Dickens, C. Bronte, Kipling, Graham Greene, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, all as required reading plus loads of stuff we were encouraged to read plus extra-curricular drama put on for the public such as Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, Pygmalion.

Just in case anyone is still around from those days that was Park Senior High School, Swindon, Wilts, 1970-1974. The more I hear of other people's schooling the more grateful I am for the schools I went to

I think (or hope?) they're trying to highlight how ridiculous it is to make sweeping statements about a large country is.

But the whole Tolkien thing? 19th century writers?

Some of the books which most influenced my world view are English; Dawkins (game theory, other writers criticize religion better) and Orwell ("Down and Out in Paris and London", partly also "Animal farm" etc).

You can't generalize millions of people. For a more extreme example of that:

The majority of my intellectual (for lack of a better word) "idols" are probably from USA -- but quite a few people that moved there claims the US average levels of general education is abysmal (except for the specific subject someone studied).

The funniest variant of this was when an old student friend pointed out that his many Americans friends knew more about European history than the average European. (He was active in SCA.)

I find that a stretch. Oscar Wilde is at least as quotable, though I suppose the Brits categorize him as Irish instead. How about Orwell? Lewis Carroll? Jane Austen? Emily Bronte? William Blake? There's enough Sherlock clones around that it's hard to overlook Arthur Conan Doyle? Tolkien? Douglas Adams? CS Lewis? Mary Shelley? Virginia Woolf? Heck, Francis Bacon (unless you buy the theory that he doubles as Shakespeare).

Literature is not what the English lack!

I am not saying no one wrote anything else. I am merely pointing that I only hear about Shakespeare.

Somebody in the 19th Century said that the only quotations acceptable in the US Congress were from the Bible and Shakespeare.

The average German, when asked to list works by Shakespeare, can probably name Hamlet and maybe Romeo and Juliet. That does not make it an obsession.

At first I was very confused by this alleged Hamlet obsession. For many Germans, the number one source of knowing about Shakespeare is him getting quoted a lot in Star Trek. Followed by that one Berlin wall/Romeo and Juliet crossover Asterix story.

But if someone writes about the stage art scene, then the german stage art scene becomes "Germany" and suddenly it all makes prefect sense. Classics get reinterpreted to add new twists, but that only really works if the original material is sufficiently well known to the audience. It's hardly surprising that in a country with a different language (and different literary tradition) than English, only few of the works of Shakespeare reach that threshold.

I find myself thinking of the uncle in "Withnail and I", who quit acting once he figured out that "I should never play the Dane." So the English-speaking world has its own obsession.

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