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* Christian Gellinek. 2012. Adam Oehlenschläger: In Dänemark berühmt, in Deutschland vergessen. Frankfurt a.M. et al: Peter Lang. Pp. 116.
* Christian Gellinek. 2012. Dänemarks und Deutschlands Kultursolidarität über Grenzen. Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang. Pp. 66.
As a graduate student of Germanistics, the reviewer had four Danish moments. First, Rilke enticed him into reading J.P. Jacobsen. Second, he got into hot water during a dismal course on the German Novelle by wondering if Theodor Storm, from Husum, could not have chosen to write in Danish-the teacher was a Teutophone from Schleswig-Holstein. Third, he upset his venerated Doktorvater, the conductor of an excellent Klopstock seminar, by asking if the bard of Der Messias (and the infinitely more palatable Oden) had bothered to master the tongue of Holberg and Johannes Ewald during his "eleven to fifteen years" (Professor Gellinek's estimate), out-and-about in Copenhagen, cosseted by Fredrik V. Fourth, the ignorant youth was further inspired to sample the riches of Danish letters by Rilke's enthusiasm for Leonora Christina Ulfeldt's Jammersminde.
In his one volume, Gellinek doughtily reminds his (German) audience of a giant once looming very large south of the border. Until his twenty-first year, Adam Oehlenschläger (hereafter AOe) wrote not a syllable of German, but then became, for a time, a star in the larger tongue-his collected Werke came out twice (1829, 1839). Gellinek compares-no easy task-the text of his posthumous Erindringer, 1-4 (1850-1851) with Meine Lebenserinnerungen (1850) in chapter 1. Chapter 2 tells about AOe's frequent German travels...