As a student in Göttingen, Karl Heinz Bohrer spent ten days in prison after he had hit and run on his bike and insulted the police. While in custody, on an uncomfortable, hard chair, he read Gottfried von Strasbourg's courtly novel “Tristan und Isolde” - in Middle High German. An “exhausting distraction”, as one learns in his autobiography “Now”. The reception scene, which served to prepare for the exam, can be interpreted symbolically in the sense of Bohrer's relationship to medieval literature, which is programmatically understood as "heteronomous" and to Bohrer, for whom the autonomy of art was of the greatest importance, hardly any Could find access. However, it is not that simple, as a synopsis of the medieval references in "Jetzt" shows.
Against the background of the enthusiasm for Musil's “man without qualities”, the absence of medieval mysticism in Bohrer's cosmos is astonishing.
In the mystical thought of delimitation, which is effectively expressed with linguistic means, in the abundance in the moment, in the tendency to paradox, there are connecting points for Bohrer's aesthetic thinking, which, however, was burdened with a heavy mortgage.
Bohrer absolutely wanted to rule out "seeing the word 'suddenly' as the designation of some kind of metaphysical event".
Franconian and free
In doing so, he does not flatly reject metaphysics. It is one thing that he traces the “spiritual pathos” of the religious right and the atheist left in France back to a line that extends from high medieval scholasticism via Port-Royal and Jansenism to almost the present day. The other is that his praise must capitulate to the guillotine before Christ is crucified. The cross has become “the greatest symbol of the eternal”, while the edge of the guillotine is “only of worldly symbolism”. That sociology has no concept for this excess, as Bohrer scornfully notes, may not even be true; but that what Bohrer encircles here cannot be grasped in purely aesthetic categories, is actually obvious.
Bohrer, who despised literary historians and Marxists alike, which incidentally - keyword: Greenblatt's “New Historicism” - also included the younger cultural studies, was particularly interested in the visual arts of the Middle Ages (such as the cruelty of the crucifixion and martyrdom) but for the story. Enthusiasm arises in view of the “Franconian”, which in Bohrer's ears sounds “like something bold, aggressive and free” and also creates a connection between Cologne and Paris. From London, he places Emperor Heinrich IV and Henry the Lion in a row with the Plantagenets in terms of what is “politically, militarily, psychologically and culturally” alarming.In the case of Karl Martell and Charlemagne, with a view to the repression of the Arabs, questionable evaluations permeate the historical judgment, which turns into the present conversation after September 11, 2001.
It is the heroic that not only attracts Bohrer to the “fabulous” Franks with their “hideous series of murders”, but also leads him to associate statements about his Bielefeld assistants with the epic narration of the Middle Ages: About the assistants “to speaking is a bit like how the various heroes are magnificently portrayed in the Roland song before they fall victim to the Saracen-pagan ambush ”. The Middle Ages appear as an epoch of existential emphasis on struggle and death, an unconditionality of deed that has at best been preserved in words. The impression may be deceptive, but Bohrer's romantic character may also have an impact here: A time in which the unity of art and life still existed is best captured in a long shot.