Özet:

‚Dichter-und-Denker-Mantel-und-Degen’ novels. The Poetics of the miraculous and the game in the parahistorical Gebrüder Grimm and Goethe novels of Kai Meyer and Robert LöhrAt the turn of the 21st century, a new genre in German popular literature is in the process of developing into increasing complexity. It is the so-called ‚Dichter-undDenker-Mantel-und-Degen’ novel (something like a ‘swashbuckler’ novel about ‘poets and thinkers’), a hybrid of historical novel, adventure novel and fictional biography of poets. The heroes of this new hybrid genre are famous German poets of the past. The plots are freely invented, obviously fictive, but nonetheless interwoven with well-known or at least verifiable historical and biographical facts.My first two examples of this new hybrid genre are two novels about the brothers Grimm, Die Geisterseher (1995) and Die Winterprinzessin (1997) by Kai Meyer. These texts combine the uncanny tone of the classic ‘Geheimbundroman’, a typical German subgenre of gothic fiction about secret confederacies and conspiracies from the end of the 18th century, with the poetic of the marvelous, where wonder and enchantment are part of the fictive universe as in the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. Next, I investigate Das Erlkönig-Manöver (2007) and Das HamletKomplott (2009) by Robert Löhr. Although these novels about Goethe’s adventures also belong to the parahistorical ‚Dichter-und-Denker-Mantel-und-Degen’ novels and are set at about the same time perios as Meyer’s stories, the tone of these novels is completely different. Instead of the uncanny atmosphere evoked by pathetic language in Meyer’s novels, Löhr’s textworlds are constructed in an ironic tone, as they explore the metafictional potential of intertextual play, allusions and bricolage.

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