AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Hartmann von Aue’s \(Gregorius\), Kafka’s \( Die\) \(Verwandlung\) and Thomas Mann’s \(Der\) \(Erwählte\), focusing on their uses of biblical motifs. Connected by pervasive themes of guilt and atonement, each text also relies similarly in its expression of these ideas on the use of images which are familiar from the biblical context, and thus suggest archetypal instances of sin and redemption as points of comparison for the protagonist’s fate. In this way all three texts create a manifest sense of helpless affliction by guilt by implementing echoes of the fate of Adam, both in the relationships of their characters, and in structures of recurring loss, decline and expulsion. Each narrative, moreover, also suggests allusions to the opposing figure of Christ through concurrent echoes of the Passion in its imagery of degradation and exile, and, to varying degrees, through the introduction of complementary images of restoration and rehabilitation drawing on patterns of resurrection. The texts diverge, however, in the way in which they relate these fields of imagery, as the correlation of Fall and redemption which is symbolically affirmed in Hartmann’s narrative, and echoed in Mann’s, is disrupted by Kafka’s introduction of a tragic conclusion.