Fertility was a key theme of medieval rulership. To conceive and give birth to sons – and thus to ensure the succession to the throne – was one of the foremost duties of medieval kings and queens. But what happened when a male child died in infancy, no male child was born, or no pregnancy ever came about? Barrenness could have dramatic consequences in the Middle Ages, for example expulsion, divorce or conflicts over royal succession. Against this historical background, it seems logical that the fate of the childless ruler would be recounted in the form of a ‘Passion narrative’. In the German literature of the Middle Ages, however, there are also interpretative models of a contrary vein to be found. In the year 1220, for instance, Ebernand of Erfurt construed the wedded life of the imperial couple Henry and Kunigunde as a tale of resistance against the royal obligation to reproduce. In his versified legend, composed in the vernacular, the couple secretly agrees not to fulfil society’s expectations, but to lead a chaste marriage. Yet above and beyond legend, childless rulers were also subject to the impact of multifarious legal, religious, medical, narrative and discursive factors. Taking Michel Foucault as a point of departure, this contribution shows how fertility became a field of power on which hierarchies between rulers and subjects, men and women were negotiated, while also shedding light on how religious and secular ideals clashed in the assessment of infertility.

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Im Beitrag wird zunächst die Frage nach dem Laien-Wissen über Grammatik in den größeren Kontext der Laienlinguistik bzw. folk linguistics gestellt. Ein besonderes Problem stellt in diesem Zusammenhang die Unterscheidung von Experten und Laien dar. Um diese Differenz besser in den Griff zu bekommen, wird ein graduierendes, merkmalorientiertes Vorgehen vorgeschlagen. Damit lässt sich ein realistischer Zugriff auf das komplexe Spannungsfeld zwischen Experten und Laien entwickeln. Im Weiteren werden auf einem korpuslinguistischen Fundament acht Basiskonzeptualisierungen identifiziert. Sie prägen das laienhafte Bild der Grammatik. Anhand dieser Basiskonzeptualisierungen kann man auch die Spannung zwischen dem Experten- und dem laienhaften Blick auf die Grammatik näher analysieren. Darin gibt es einige Übereinstimmungen, aber auch erhebliche Unterschiede.

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In 2012 Georg Diez provoked a literary scandal with his review of Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium. Since then, almost ninety informed studies which show an ongoing academic interest in the book have been published. Many of these studies attempted to explain the apparently failing analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt that the novel claimed in an irritating manner. Nevertheless, none of them took an esoteric approach which Kracht himself suggested in an interview with Denis Scheck as a starting point for their analyses, although esoteric references seem to be an ignored constant in Kracht’s oeuvre since Tristesse Royale. Hence, by tracing this esoteric intertextuality in the whole of Kracht’s oeuvre and linking it to the references which Kracht makes to right-wing ideologies since Faserland, it will be shown that there actually does exist an analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt in Imperium which aims to deconstruct Hitler mythemes by ridiculizing Engelhardt. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the interrelations between Kracht’s texts create a rhizomatic network of intertextuality that dissolves the boarders between external references and self-references.