Martha Helfer, Professor of German at Rutgers University, will uncover the mystery behind the forgotten name of the dog, “Strohmain”, from Blond Eckbert, one of the most popular tales of the German Romantic tradition. Hidden in this single forgotten word is a repressed family secret that has gone undetected in the scholarship to date. Her talk aims to uncover what has been hidden and asks how and why Ludwig Tieck’s prose masterpiece generates its own camouflage as it articulates a bold and radical Romantic aesthetic.
If you want to get in on Eckbert’s Secret, read the English translation of “Der Blonde Eckbert” by clicking here.
Martha Helfer is author of The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture and numerous articles on Romantic aesthetic and philosophical theories, German intellectual history (18th-20th-century), and questions of gender and the construction of subjectivity in German critical discourse.
April 20 | 4PM in Hollander 241
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