Literature and Politics

In this paper A. Kiarina Kordela turns to one seventeenth-century German Baroque drama (Trauerspiel) to examine the literary construction of, and juxtaposition between, rejected and sanctioned forms of love, as distinct logical and grammatical models for grounding secular (i.e., no longer divinely grounded) truths and laws. The play in question is Gryphius’ Cardenio und Celinde, or, Unfortunate Lovers (1657), a path-breaking Protestant Trauerspiel, which in the nineteenth century was retroactively recognized by the canon of German letters as the first intimation of the properly “bourgeois drama,” developed in the eighteenth century. Kordela’s analysis focuses on these central epistemological reconfigurations in the process of secularising the grounding of truth, as they are manifest in Gryphius’ play, in order to foreground their sustained relevance to contemporary politics and its claims to truth.