Waltzel, Oscar

Born in Vienna on October 28, 1864 . He was the son of the famous German feuilletonist and librettist Camillo Valzell . In 1883-1888 studied at the universities of Vienna and Berlin ^[1] . In 1894 he received a habilitation in his native Vienna. In 1897, he was invited to teach at the University of Bern , and in 1907 he became the successor to Adolf Stern at the University of Dresden . Since 1921 he taught at the University of Bonn . In 1933, he became a professor emeritus, but continued to lecture.

In 1936, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, he was dismissed from the university due to his close relationship with the Jews. He died on December 29, 1944 during the bombing under completely unclear circumstances. He was buried in Bonn, at the Southern Cemetery ( Bonner Südfriedhof ). His wife, a Jewish Jew, was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp the same year, where she later died.

Under the influence of V. Dilthey , Waltzel in his works connects the phenomena of fiction with the direction of philosophical thought in a given period of time. This can be seen in his writings on German romanticism , F. Schiller , I.V. Goethe , G. E. Lessing , F. Schlegel , Ricarda Guh , etc., in which the author studies the emergence of individual literary genres, poses questions of the theory of short stories , drama lyrics . One of the main books devoted to these problems is On Creative Life in the 18th and 19th Centuries ( Vom Geistesleben des XVIII and XIX Jahrhunderts ). In 1916-1917, Waltzel turned mainly to the methodological problems of literary criticism ; here it is based on two principles: firstly, it is the classification of works of art according to their style , for example, to the Renaissance or Baroque , and secondly, this is the principle of interaction of arts. He first set out his views on methodology in a report published in 1917, entitled “Interaction of Arts” ( Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste ), then detailed in his published history of world literature “Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft” - “Content and form in the writer's work "( Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk des Dichters , 1923).

Waltzel considers literary phenomena mainly from the formal side and classifies literary works according to formal characteristics. His “will to form” ( Formwille ) is the main factor in the evolution of literature. In his opinion, the form of a work of art expresses metaphysical absoluteness, determines the unity of the work, and therefore the study of the latter should take place primarily from the formal side.

Following the principle of the unity of the laws of the art form for all arts, Walzel suggests using musicological and art criticism techniques in the analysis of texts. This is described in the books “Content and Form in the Writer's Works” and “The Work of Verbal Art: Methods of Researching It” ( Das Wortkunstwerk: Mittel seiner Erforschung , 1926).

According to Walzel, art, like philosophy, is an independent expression of the essence of life and forms a direction of human cognition parallel to philosophy. When examining a literary work, it is necessary to consider its artistic image, consisting of form and content, and in the analysis of artistic creation only the immanent essence of the work is determining, while neither the artist nor those around him matter.

Despite some validity of his philosophical views, Walzel is not able to solve a number of problems. For example, he does not answer the question about the principles of the relationship of form and content. Defining form as the fundamental property of a work, he at the same time proclaims the unity of form and content. He is also powerless to give an acceptable justification for the types of artistic and literary work that he himself established. Nevertheless, his research in the field of narrative organization of a literary text is not without relevance. Valzel was also one of the first to raise the question of the meaning of improperly direct speech in the structure of a European novel.

• Deutsche Romantik , 1908.
• Leitmotive in Dichtungen , 1917
• Die deutsche Dichtung seit Goethe Tod , 1920.
• Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk des Dichters , 1923.
• Das Wortkunstwerk , 1926
• Florenz in deutscher Dichtung , Cologne, 1937
• Wachstum und Wandel. Lebenserinnerungen ; Erich Schmidt Verlag. Berlin, 1956.

Editions

• Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft ; under the editorship of Oscar Waltzel, 1938.

• Waltzel Oscar . Electronic Encyclopedia "Scientific Heritage of Russia".
• Oscar Walzel . BDT.

• Zaprovskaya A. Waltzel // Literary Encyclopedia: 11 vol. - M.: Kom. Acad., 1929-1939. - T. 2, p. 93-95.
• Festgabe für Oskar Walzel, überreicht von seinen Schülern zur Feier des 65. Geburtstages. Bonn, 1929. Nachlass Walzel II. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn.
• Naderer KO Oskar Walzels Ansatz einer neuen Literaturwissenschaft. Bonn, 1993. ISBN 3-928799-12-6 .