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German painting of Herucles

Resistance at the Crossroads: Heracles in German Postwar Literature

André Fischer, WashU

Abstract

In the long reception history of Greek mythology in the German literary and philosophical tradition, several canonical figures stand out for their political resistance, prominently among them Antigone, Prometheus, or Medea. Typically, Heracles has not served that function in the political aesthetics of German language authors. It is all the more surprising, then, how he emerges as an ambiguous figure of resistance in postwar German literature, when the persuasive power of mythology was met with skepticism on both sides of the iron curtain. In the works of Peter Weiss and Heiner Müller, Heracles is rather critically examined than posited as a model of heroic resistance. Against the historical backdrop of anti-fascist resistance against Nazism as well as in the political context of the Cold War and a divided Germany, both authors reflect their respective philosophies of history in an unlikely figure of resistance. The crossroads at which Heracles finds himself in their works is not that of vice and virtue, but that of oppression and liberation. 
 

André Fischer

Fischer headshot

André Fischer’s research focuses on 20th-century German literature, film, theater, and intellectual history.

Fischer’s scholarship is located at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, where he investigates practices of modern mythmaking, its aesthetics and political theologies, as well as associated concepts and strategies of resistance. In his monograph The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German PostwarCulture (Northwestern University Press, 2024), he explores significant turns towards myth in German postwar literature, film, and conceptual art. He is currently working on a project on forms of aesthetic and political resistance in European modernism, as well as on Black Atlantic religious aesthetics. In 2022/23, Fischer was a BECHS-Africa fellow at the Institute of African Studies in Accra, Ghana. He has edited a special issue of Colloquia Germanica (55.3-4, 2023) on “Hubert Fichte and the Poetics of Syncretism” and published articles on Bertolt Brecht, Werner Herzog, Hans Henny Jahnn, Alexander Kluge, and Peter Weiss.

Besides teaching all levels of German language, Fischer offers courses on German and comparative literature, film, and theater, for example “Myth and Modernism” or “Queer German Cinema.” He received his PhD in German Studies from Stanford University and has taught at Auburn University, before joining the faculty at WashU. 

Co-sponsored by the John and Penelope Biggs Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought, and the Program in Germanic Languages and Literature.