Speaker
Description
The Middle High German Mären, long marginalized for their heterogeneous formats and often obscene content, were once dismissed as simplistic didactic tales. Today, their literary variety and interpretive openness are recognized as key qualities of these short narratives — and quite rightly so: for the Mären can be read as narratives of crisis and of how crises can be overcome.
These texts, I argue, stage the breaking of social norms, often through the lens of marriage, which in the Middle Ages functioned as a microcosm of social order. Adultery, frequently portrayed as a female transgression, signals not only the breakdown of marital harmony but also the destabilization of broader societal structures. While later Mären tend to revel in the abnormal and provocative, early tales such as those by Der Stricker focus on restoring order: they do not merely depict crises — they actively stage their resolution.
As an example, I will discuss Der kluge Knecht (The Clever Servant), a tale that not only narrates the disruption and restoration of social order but also demonstrates how crises can be overcome: When a servant uncovers his master's wife's infidelity, he avoids direct confrontation and instead tells a parallel story, prompting the master to recognize the betrayal himself. The wife is punished, the servant unharmed — and storytelling becomes the means of resolving the crisis.
Crucially, the tale enacts a double process of enlightenment: the master learns through the inner story, while the audience is guided by the Märe as a whole — which models how narrative itself enables insight. In times of social uncertainty and rapid information flow, the values embedded in these medieval texts — independent thinking, inference, and guided reflection — remain strikingly modern. Mären do not merely mirror crises — they teach us how to think through them.
| Keywords | Middle High German prose, stories about crises, stories about overcoming crises, overcoming crises through enlightenment, independent thinking |
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| maya.spiegel@live.de |