Blog Post January 2025

Dear readers of my blog,

Writing this post with typing first the English, then the German text means to slow down production. At the same time, it means that I am keenly conscious of living between two languages plus the cultures they express.

All the best to all of you for the New Year despite the dire prospects for most politically-minded people who already face autocrat rulers in Turkey, Hungary, Russia, and in Israel who albeit democratically elected have done everything to discredit democracy in past years with the lodger no. 47 of the White House in Washington DC to rejoin them in just under three weeks’ time.

While Wilde remains the focus of this website, I hereby pledge never to name said 47th lodger in the months and years to come. In fact, it is quite easy to describe what he says and does without ever mentioning him by name. Indeed, it is fun to do so!

There is a change about this year’s calendar which is not going to be presented online in full. You are going to see all the collage work but not all of its texts in full. So whoever likes and wants to have a printed calendar should not hesitate and contact me.

Before announcing such plans that might still fall flat, I would like to tell about things that have already happened first. On 27 December 2024, I was browsing in the bookstore at Münster Westphalia Main Station to find a single volume by Susan Sontag, On Women. [Figure 1] I knew why it struck my eye, for I had just a few days ago advised a student of mine who plans to write a paper on Marilyn Monroe and her feminist stance to either study texts by Simone de Beauvoir or by Susan Sontag.

Figure 1

 

It was a day later on return to Leer that I realized that it was around and on the 20th anniversary of Sontag’s death that I had bought and started to read On Women. I watched a commented slide show with translated sub-titled full of ridiculous mistakes and listened to a German radio podcast reviewing her career in just under five minutes. From what I learned there it became clear to me that Sontag could not but refer to Oscar Wilde in some of her most seminal texts. Indeed, the only other book by her on my shelves, entitled Against Interpretation and Other Essays [Figure 2], includes her “Notes on ‘Camp’”, which she not only dedicates to Wilde, but she also peppers it with quotes and aphorisms form the Irishman’s works.

People write rather than draw, who use words to describe what they see rather than the camera, are often quite slow to realize what they may have seen and kept in mind a long time ago. I am such a slow person.

In a recent post, which is online in German only, I wrote about a lecture contest at Münster University in the spring of 1989. There, two professors of literature, known for their mutual enmity, met in the lecture theatre to fight about words. One of them kept talking about Oscar Wilde and “The Critic as Artist”. It was him who came under attack by the other, an expert on Shakespeare as well as on Victorian Literature, excluding Oscar Wilde.

 

Figure 2

 

It was a period when the utmost of modern technology visible in the lecture theatre was the use of slides or the overhead projector. Our Shakespearean, however, used his rounded childlike handwriting to fill the green board with names of authors and some quotes. Normally, it was his students assistants who had to do this for him prior to the lecture. Obviously, this time he was afraid anyone might leak his intent, so he had done the work himself. I knew his handwriting well, for some years before I had acted as his secretary in all but name while his usual secretary was on maternity leave. Until recently I wondered why he had coupled the names of Paul Feyerabend and Susan Sontag in his lecture. Of course, I did understand why he referred to them in his lecture, poking fun at his adversary who he said seemed to work only after having called it a day – am Feierabend – or on Sundays. What I did not understand until very recently was the antisemitic subtext of this sideswipe. It remained hidden perhaps even to the aggressor himself.

For what did Feyerabend and Sontag share with Oscar Wilde other than their sense of humour? Certainly, Sontag shared a diverse sexual orientation with Wilde and the fact of being Jewish with Paul Feyerabend. All of them shared being ostracized by those who as part of the majority felt to be under attack.

And it is here exactly that the pasts of the two professors must have come in to make them enemies for life once they had met for the first time in the mid-seventies. Both had made a life and career in Germany being outsiders for the mainstream society they sought to enter after World War Two. Positivism in Shakespeare and Victorian Studies challenged Art for Art’s Sake and Wilde’s ideas of life as an art in itself. Busy like a bee, the Positivist was perhaps envious of what looked like leisure to him – unaware perhaps until very late in his life of how carefully Oscar Wilde had hidden his actual industriousness both when a student at Dublin and Oxford and when at work in London. Wilde had had to hide his love for men as well – something that people like Sontag and also our Shakespearean were able to profess by means of their various coming outs in the mid- to later twentieth-century.

It goes without saying that when he died twenty years on, our Shakespearean had not only had his coming out, he had also swapped the robe and three-piece suit of an academic critic for the rough T-shirt of a director’s assistant while living off a professor’s pension. Ironically, even this major change of life style may not have made him regret his earlier demolition of the colleague in the lecture theatre – for when he died in 1999, at the age of seventy, his loss was also dearly regretted by those who had witnessed him work as the President of the Friends of a Münster off theatre company. A bystander to those events, I did not forget, however, the battle of the books at Münster University, so that it was out of the question even to mention the former Positivist by name, while the lover of Oscar Wilde and of the theatre at large had deserved an entry in a book including 88 thinkers, writers, and theologians who had lived and worked as well as stayed, however, briefly in the city of Münster Westhalia.

Herbert Mainusch (1929-1999), like his academic mentor Edgar Mertner (1907-1999) and the Swift scholar Irwin Ehrenpreis (1920-1985), who died in Münster and who is the namesake also of the local Institute for Swift Studies, are all part of Gelehrtes Münster und rundum [figure 3], published in 2005, prefaced by the local musician Götz Alsmann, who, however, is much more widely known in Germany than any of the academics ever were in their lifetime. It was in the Ehrenpreis Institute for Swift Studies, too, that a short interview was done on the occasion of the centenary of Wilde’s death in October 2000, showing also the study written by Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, on the final illness of Dean Swift, proudly owned in its first edition by the institution. Having published an illustrated biography of Wilde that year, I had been approached by ARTE to do this interview, and I had asked a local antiquarian bookstore whether they would like to be hosts. When they declined, my last hope was the Ehrenpreis Institute the director of which, Hermann-Josef Real, kindlly agreed to have us.

 

Figure 3

 

Since the centenary of Wilde’s death was on a Thursday and ARTE feared nobody would watch the broadcast on Saturday, the 2 December 2000, they changed the programme at short notice, so I never watched it. And it was well before the time that such pieces were put up on YouTube. I was busy with Wilde all day and that night and only heard about the programme having been screened earlier than scheduled when it was too late.

It was the first time in almost twenty years spent in Münster that I had ever properly spoken with Real, and I was surprised how much he seemed to know about Irish literature in general apart from his favourite writer Jonathan Swift. So with hindsight it is no surprise that again after many years I followed his proposal to write a letter to the Irish Embassy in Berlin in order to suggest showing an exhibition on Oscar Wilde in their premises. Things took a long while to materialize, though, and the exhibition now to be seen in the library of Castle Ansbach only arrived at Berlin in September 2014 via Vienna where it had first opened at the University on 13 June, on W. Y. Yeats’s 149th birthday, to be precise.

 

Ausstellung zu Oscar Wilde

 

Ab Freitag, 13. Juni 2014, 0:00 Uhr,

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): A Writer Trapped by His Own Words: A Portrait of the Artist as a Man in Court

The exhibition recounts the story of how Oscar Wilde wrote his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in the context both of its first publication in 1890 and his trials in the spring of 1895.

Referring to the typescript for the novel and the first serial publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine as well as to the writer’s literary letter and the transcript of the trial for criminal libel in April 1895, the curator of this exhibition, Dr. Jörg W. Rademacher, shows Wilde primarily as a victim of his gift of the gab.

Opening of the exhibition:

WHEN:
Friday, 13 June 2014, 16:15-18:00

WHERE:
Seminarraum SE 1 of the English Department, Hof 8.2, Campus AAKH, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien

Programme:

H.E. James Brennan, The Irish Ambassador to Austria:
"Welcome and Opening of Exhibition"

Dr. Jörg W. Rademacher (Leer, Germany):
Oscar Wilde: A Portrait of the Artist as a Fallen Man

(followed by book launch)

In the chair:
Univ. Prof. Dr. Werner Huber
(Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna

Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7

All the same, it is only the Berlin exhibition from which photos survive [figure 4].

In December the same year, the window of a bakery at Norden, East Friesia, was decorated with a copy each of the English edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Uncensored Wording of the “Lippincott’s Text” and the first bilingual Oscar Wilde Calendar [figure 5]. From the other places where the exhibition was shown: Passau in 2015 as well as Dortmund and Vechta in 2016 all that survives are a brief notice in the press [figure 6; Passau] in German or the poster [figure 7; Vechta]. So it is due only to the commitment of Wolfgang Streit, now based at Ansbach, that the exhibition could be unearthed once again, and, having talked to him recently, I can already promise you pictures and a report of the opening to be ready to be posted online in the near future.

If there is anything I have learned from the battle of the books at Münster University, it is that while enmity only leaves you full of bad feelings it is mutual respect and friendship rather than competitiveness that help you to go on working in the long run. Sometimes things come true that you have never hoped for while stubbornly working towards them, something you realize only when looking back without anger.

With this I leave you till next time,

all best wishes,

Jörg W. Rademacher

December 2024/Early January 2025

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