Zwischen Identität und Alterität: Die Wahrnehmung des Fremden bei Oswald von Wolkenstein

Abstract

In Oswald von Wolkenstein's poems, especially his travel songs, the intercultural experience of foreignness is brought to the fore in many ways. The encounter with the courtly world of Spain and the Muslim world, upon which the narrative self reflects in his autobiographical memories, presents what is foreign as a normality on equal footing with what is one's own, a normality indeed that works to enrich the self. The recollection in memory of the foreign world is contrasted with the unsatisfactory reality of present life. In poem KL 44, what is one's own is perceived as oppressive whereas what is foreign is remembered with longing. The longing for the wider world in all its manifestations is juxtaposed with the feeling of constriction that the self is now experiencing at home. Faraway Spain appears almost like a lost homeland. The words Wolkenstein deploys unmistakably raise the question of the subject's identity; in view of the complete loss of the familiar - which ironically is precisely the foreign that it has been summoning up - it feels as if it has been thrust into a state of fundamental insecurity.