Der Schirm

Loneliness is not a matter of the isolated one. Loneliness occurs as soon as the others return, whether as the remembered, the missing or the threatening, whether as the enticing, the fighting or the chattering. Loneliness is a relationship. Ripplinger's essay looks at this relationship through the echo literature of Gustave Flaubert and Uwe Nettelbeck, the exile writings of Victor Hugo, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson, the anti-politics of Maurice Blanchot, the fables of Günther Anders and Ernst Bloch, but also the melodrama Portrait of Jennie by William Dieterle.