VOLKER KOHLHEIM

Bayreuth

Scholarly research fields: Literary Onomastics, name theory, anthroponymy, hodonymy.

DOI: doi.org/10.35321/all84-10

EDUARD BEREND AND THE BEGINNINGS OF GERMAN LITERARY ONOMASTICS

Eduard Berend and the origins of German literary onomastics

ANNOTATION

In 1942, the editor of Jean Paul’s works, Eduard Berend, published from Swiss exile an essay on Jean Paul’s naming practices that may be regarded as the founding text of modern scholarly Literary Onomastics. In it, he shows not only how Jean Paul arrived at his very often eccentric names, but also characterizes the poet’s poetic naming practices in detail. In doing so, he sketches, partly explicitly and partly implicitly, the methodology of a future scholarly Literary Onomastics.

KEYWORDS: Eduard Berend, Jean Paul, Literary Onomastics, methodology, comparative Literary Onomastics, phonosemantics, number of syllables, socio-onomastics, speaking names, antithetical/broken name.

ANNOTATION

In 1942, the editor of the works of the German poet Jean Paul (Richter), Eduard Berend, published from his Swiss exile an article on Jean Paul’s poetical naming practices. This article can be considered as the founding text of scientific literary onomastics. Berend not only shows how Jean Paul found his names, but gives a detailed analysis of his naming practice. Thus, partly explicitly, partly implicitly, Berend devises a methodology of future scientific literary onomastics.

KEYWORDS: Eduard Berend, Jean Paul, literary onomastics, methodology, comparative literary onomastics, phonosemantics, number of syllables, socioonomastics, talking/cratylic names, antithetic/broken name.

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1. A PHILOLOGIST’S LIFE FOR JEAN PAUL

It is certainly not entirely wrong to date the beginning of a scholarly German Literary Onomastics to 1942. That year, the extensive essay Publications of the Modern Language Association of America entitled The Naming Practices of Jean Paul by Eduard Berend appeared in German in the American journal. It should already be said that this essay contains far more than its title promises—indeed, no less than a prescient outline of the Literary Onomastics that did not yet exist at the time, developed through an exemplary account of the naming techniques of the poet Jean Paul (Richter) (1763–1825).

But who was Eduard Berend? Born in Hanover in 1883, he came from a well-to-do bourgeois Jewish family^¹. His father, Emil Berend (1846–1920), was a lawyer and notary and rose to become a Privy Justice Councillor. The writings of Jean Paul already fascinated the young Eduard Berend during his studies, so that in 1907 he completed his studies with a doctorate in German philology, writing a dissertation on the subject Jean Paul’s Aesthetics^². Until the outbreak of the First World War, Berend was an independent scholar in Munich, but during this period he had already conceived the plan for a complete edition of Jean Paul’s works, supported by the literary scholar Julius Petersen. After the end of the war, in which Berend had participated as a volunteer, he initially prepared an edition of Jean Paul’s letters; in 1927, the Prussian Academy of Sciences commissioned him to edit Jean Paul’s works, a mammoth task to which he devoted himself until 1938, when he was informed that he had to leave Germany immediately. Although he succeeded in emigrating to Switzerland, he did not achieve the hoped-for move to the United States. After the end of the war, the German Academy of Sciences asked him to take over the editorship of the still-missing volumes of the historical-critical Jean Paul edition, but only in 1957 was he able to resume his work in Marbach am Neckar. Before his death in 1973, Eduard Berend received numerous honors; among other things, in 1957 the state of Baden-Württemberg awarded him the title “Professor,” and in 1963 he received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.

It should have become clear from this biographical sketch that Eduard Berend, when he wrote an essay on Jean Paul’s naming practices in his Swiss exile at the beginning of the 1940s,

^¹ The biographical data according to Knickmann (1994/1995).

^² Published in 1909 by Duncker, Berlin.

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was thoroughly prepared for it. Not only did he know Jean Paul’s works better than anyone else as their editor, he was also familiar with the large quantity of notes and excerpts preserved in the writer’s notebooks and exercise books (on this, Müller 1988). His decision to concern himself specifically with Jean Paul’s naming practices probably resulted, on the one hand, from the fact that, unlike the “Goethe who shied away from names” (824), Jean Paul used an enormous number of personal and place names, and, on the other hand, perhaps also from the fact that Jean Paul had, in a sense, shown him the way, for he was “one of the first to have expressed theoretical views on the question of the poet’s choice of names” (822)^³. These statements appear in §74 of the second edition of his Preschool of Aesthetics of 1804 and begin with the aphorism: “Even the small matter of giving names is scarcely a” (Jean Paul 2015: 175). But let us return to Eduard Berend’s essay and ask what it has to tell us about Literary Onomastics.

2. OUTLINE OF A FUTURE LITERARY ONOMASTICS

At the beginning of his essay, Berend visionaryly sketches the future of Literary Onomastics: Although desirable, it would be exceedingly difficult to realize “to answer, within the broadest possible temporal and spatial scope, the question of according to what considerations and principles poets have baptized their invented characters; the differences between periods, peoples, and languages would be clearly captured in this mirror” (820). For Berend himself, this was a utopian project, particularly since he still assumed that a single researcher would undertake the task. Yet, without using the term, Berend had already outlined here a global comparative Literary Onomastics, a concept that current computer technologies appear to have brought within reach. In this connection, the work of the Dutch linguist Karina van Dalen-Oskam should be mentioned; she has had computer programs developed that are largely capable of correctly recognizing names in digitized texts and classifying them according to specific criteria. By means of these so-called named entity recognition and classification tools, large quantities of digitized texts can be examined with regard to

^³ Residing in Geneva, E. Berend uses Swiss orthography, which even at that time did not know the letter “ß”.

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analyze and compare name usage and name function (van Dalen-Oskam 2016).

In what follows, Berend sets out demands for the interpreter of literary names. In poetonomastic investigation, “what matters is not so much the direct meaning and sound of the name as the manifold overtones that resonate with it, the nearer or more distant associations connected with it” (820). If Berend speaks here, on the one hand, of the “manifold overtones” and, on the other, of the “nearer or more distant associations,” one may perhaps already recognize in this the same differentiation that later, from a systems-theoretical perspective, led to the distinction between the “intrasystemic” and “extrasystemic values” of the poetic name: the “intrasystemic values” include the phonological level, the sound symbolism of names, everything that can be called phonosemantics; stylistic devices such as name repetition and parallelism, opposition and alliteration; and finally the semantics of “speaking names” (Kohlheim V. 2019: 32–36). By contrast, the “extrasystemic values” include intertextual and intercontextual relations to fictional or real persons or places (Kohlheim V. 2019: 36–40). In this context, Berend also touches on translational questions by pointing to the difficulties confronting the translator of speaking, that is, semantically transparent names (821; cf. Kohlheim V. 2019: 291–309).

It is also interesting that Berend’s poetonomastic treatise already touches on genre-theoretical aspects: He observes that, on the one hand, “a distinction must be made between serious and comic, between idealistic and realistic works of poetry,” “and probably also between epic and dramatic works; for in the two, names are subject to very different conditions” (821). While on stage the person’s outward appearance and behavior are decisive and the name plays only a subordinate role, “in narrative, by contrast, [...] the name contributes very substantially to evoking a particular conception of its bearer” (321). It is striking that although Berend mentions epic and drama here, he does not mention lyric poetry. Certainly, there are poems that contain no proper names (Mörike: In the mist the world still rests, / Still the woods and meadows dream...), yet names can, on the other hand, shape the entire atmosphere of a poem (Mörike: What is King Ringang’s little daughter called? / Rohtraut, Fair-Rohtraut...^⁴

^⁴ On Mörike’s Fair-Rohtraut, see Schildberg-Schroth 1995: 183-142. On proper names in lyric poetry, see Gottschalk 2009.

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Berend even raises production-aesthetic aspects, though naturally without yet using this term. Thus, he criticizes blunders “that have befallen some writers in choosing foreign names,” for example Carlyle, who gave the hero of his novel Sartor Resartus (1834) “the impossible name Teufelsdröck” (820). More important is the following: When he observes that Jean Paul once said “not entirely without reason that the heroines and heroes of his novels could not exist at all without their delightful names” (821), he comes very close to the view that it is actually the name that constitutes the character (Kohlheim V. 2019: 25–28).

3.

JEAN PAUL’S FORESIGHTFUL CHOICE OF NAMES

To appreciate the originality of Jean Paul’s choice of names, he first distinguishes it from the literary naming practices of his contemporaries and thereby himself provides initial indications for a history of literature “from the perspective of the name.” In Jean Paul’s time, Berend writes, “the old custom—or bad habit—still prevailed in many quarters of designating personal or place names only with individual letters, usually the initial letter, or with asterisks, e.g. in Gellert’s The History of the Swedish Countess of G.” (823). Others, Goethe for example, often gave not the name but merely a profession or family status: “the architect, the captain; the mother, the uncle” (823). Jean Paul, by contrast, disliked anonymity, even in real life: “If, of an unknown being,” Berend quotes the poet, “I know only the name, then he is more individual and closer to my heart than without it” (824). Here Berend credits the poet with an insight into name theory that seems to have gained acceptance only gradually, namely that the primary function of the proper name is not the identification function but the individualization function (cf. Windberger-Heidenkummer 2011: 20, footn. 1).

Jean Paul also avoided the customary practice of assigning names that were as inconspicuous as possible yet poetically resonant, such as “Waldheim, Sternheim, Hohenthal” (825). Nor did he participate much in the contemporary fashion of naming novel characters with occupational surnames suited to their activities—that is, calling a shoemaker Pech or Pfriem, or a merchant Pfeffer (826)—which was actually just another kind of anonymity. In general, Jean Paul felt an aversion to names that “speak” directly: “If I were called Father or Child or Gutsmuths, I would have long since discarded these names,” Berend quotes from Jean Paul’s autobiographical notes, the so-called Vitabuch (826). Berend sees Jean Paul here as an innovator in literary naming, but the

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nineteenth century did not follow him in rejecting speaking names: the literature of Realism—not only German—is full of them. In this respect, Jean Paul was far ahead of his century; only the twentieth century began to reject conspicuously speaking names. As an example, let us quote the writer Hans Bender, who responded in a letter to an inquiry in 1991: “I do not like picturesque, ironic, comic names. [...] They tell the reader how to imagine the figures: talkative, potbellied, vain, shabby, etc.” (Debus 2002: 130). Thus the prophetic words Ludwig Börne spoke in his commemorative address on Jean Paul on 2 December 1825 in Frankfurt am Main also apply to Jean Paul’s naming practices: “But he stands patiently at the gate of the twentieth century and waits smilingly until his lagging people follow him” (Börne 1993: 184).

4. JEAN PAUL’S SOURCES OF NAMES

But how did Jean Paul find his numerous names? Berend, being familiar with the poet’s surviving working materials, is ideally placed to provide information on this. He reports, for example, on a “notebook” of Jean Paul’s probably begun as early as 1789, containing a “very extensive list of place and personal names” (828). This collection, containing “an estimated 2,000 place and personal names” (832), shows that Jean Paul “made use of every opportunity that presented itself to expand his collection of names” (833). Initially, he must have written down numerous names from his Upper Franconian homeland: “One need only take a walk through the streets of Hof or Bayreuth for a familiar name from Jean Paul’s works to catch one’s eye every moment on a door or shop sign” (833). And his “travel narratives” can be precisely retraced on the map (Kohlheim V. 2015). Then, Berend says, he excerpted calendars, French and English dictionaries, and grammars. He took Old German names such as Theoda from the book On German First Names and Family Names by Tilemann Dothias Wiarda, published in 1800; he excerpted place names from the standard geographical handbooks of his time (833f.). Jean Paul very rarely invented his sometimes rather striking names outright (834), but he did slightly modify previously existing toponyms. For this purpose, he had compiled collections of toponymic morphemes, such as “Ober-, Unter-, Mittel-, Alt-, Frei-, Kirch-, -berg, -thal, -rode, -hofen, -fingen, -weiler, -hagen, -stetten” (835). He also occasionally moved places bearing real place names to other regions,

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as in the novel Siebenkäs (1796), where the Saxon Kuhschnappel is relocated to Swabia (cf. Kohlheim V. 2019: 179–181).

Berend points to another, probably unique peculiarity in Jean Paul’s collections of names, namely their division into “good” and “bad” or “evil” names, both among place names and among personal names. As Berend recognized, this involves not only a separation of morally good and bad characters, but also a social division between high and low, with seriousness and comedy corresponding to this in the traditional sense (830). “It is significant in this regard,” Berend writes, “that foreign names strongly predominate among the ‘good’ names,” for example “Machy, Selis, Lorgna, Düchauffour, Ancillon, Almeria, le Baut, Davila [...]” (830). “Evil” names, by contrast, are: “Streichert, Meuseler, Astmann, Stechmann, Banspach, Beez, Franzen, Fokeln [...]” (831).

Berend sees the deeper reason for Jean Paul’s diversity of names in the poet’s conception of humor: Jean Paul, Berend says, “had [...] recognized [...] that humor, because it rests on the contrast between the sensory world and the idea, must individualize everything down to the smallest detail as much as possible” (828). Through this art of the “humorous individualization of all persons and situations,” Jean Paul, Berend argues, prepared the later Realism of the nineteenth century and partly anticipated it (828).

5. CLOSE ANALYSIS OF JEAN PAUL’S NAMING PRACTICES

Berend’s treatise proceeds with an exemplary close analysis of Jean Paul’s literary naming practices. He examines, for example, the number of syllables in proper names and observes that, in Jean Paul, insignificant persons or places are given monosyllabic names (“Kob, Kolb, Lind, Knef, Lerch, Stark, Fisch [...]”), while the names of significant objects are polysyllabic (837). He had thus probably recognized a generally valid fact. Berend himself also mentions Fontane, who proceeded in a similar way (836f.); the fact that in the English-speaking world too a greater number of syllables correlates with higher social status is suggested, for example, by Mr Chucks’s statement in Frederick Marryat’s novel Peter Simple (1834): “When I was in good society, I [...] seldom bowed, Sir, to anything under three syllables” (quoted after Hengst, Sobanski 2000: 81). Berend also addresses the consonantism of Jean Paul’s proper names and observes that numerous names end in [s], which in combination with a preceding consonant has “a strongly onomatopoeic force and usually a more or less comic effect” (838). As examples, Berend cites “Kuhpanz,

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Renovanz, Veldenz […]” (839). Jean Paul readily attaches the diminutive endings -lein or the southern German shortenings -le and -el to his names, giving his characters “a cozy, harmless, unheroic air. Accordingly, almost all the ‘heroes’ of Jean Paul’s idylls and humoresques belong to this group: Fixlein, Krönlein, Schmelzle, Fälbel, Freude[l], Fibel, Vierneissel” (839). Above all, the phonosemantics of the vowels is significant: “Unpleasant persons frequently have a long Ö in the stressed syllable, e.g. Oefel, Oehrmann […]” (842). Long Ä and E are also negatively marked: “Blaise, Flätz, […] Egelkraut” (842). When Berend further observes that “long I has a decidedly friendly character,” while long A and O characterize “noble, exalted figures, e.g. Albano, Cesara, Liane, Beata […]” (842), he is in complete accord with the latest research findings on phonosemantics, which state that the vowel [i] is associated almost universally with the notion of smallness, while the vowels [o] and [u] are associated with that of largeness (Elsen 2015: 29). Berend also diagnoses socio-onomastic features in Jean Paul’s naming practices when he observes: “Persons of the upper classes [...] frequently have foreign names, even when they are not otherwise characterized as foreigners.” French names, however, “consistently bear characters who are evil or at least frivolous” (842).

It has already been noted that Jean Paul rejected speaking, that is, semantically transparent names. However, Berend observes, given their widespread use he could not exclude them entirely, “but he rarely uses them in such a way that they clearly indicate the character or status of their bearer.” Thus, such a connection can be shown “not at all or only with great artificiality” in “the school councillor Stiefel, [...] the mayor Harnisch, the early preacher Flachs” and others (846).

Finally, Berend draws attention to an onomastic peculiarity of Jean Paul’s that was readily taken up again by the writers of Realism: the internally contradictory name. Berend mentions Attila Schmelzle and Amandus Katzenberger (848). The contrast lies here in the differently connoted parts of the full name, the given name and the surname. Attila Schmelzle from the story The Journey of Field Preacher Schmelzle to Flätz (1809) is portrayed as an almost pathological case of anxiety; this is indicated by his surname, which evokes the notion of melting, softness. Yet he himself considers himself extremely brave and sees himself correctly represented by his given name Attila, which, as an embodying name, refers to the Hunnic military leader, the “Scourge of God” (cf. Kohlheim V. 2019: 67–71). In the case of the eccentric physician Amandus Katzenberger from the story Dr. Katzenberger’s Bathing Trip (1809), too, the surname stands for his nature, which strikes his fellow citizens as extremely abrasive and cantankerous.

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His given name Amandus, however, a gerundive, designates someone who, as E. T. A. Hoffmann (1995: 952) aptly puts it, “is supposed and must,” namely love. Whether he can do so remains uncertain, but his given name evokes a subtext that may also have helped “to seduce interpreters into the most contradictory interpretations” (Ueding 1993: 174). Peter Demetz (1964: 197–201) introduced the term “antithetical name” for such names and cited as examples Theodor Fontane’s Alonzo Gieshübler (Effi Briest, 1895) and Dr. Niels Wrschowitz (Der Stechlin, 1898) (cf. Kohlheim R. 2019: 176). Gunter Presch, in turn, called such names, into which “contradictions can migrate” (Presch 2002: 100), so that they “mean this and the opposite,” “broken names” (ibid., 5), and devoted an entire monograph to them. His literary example was Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger—also an antithetical name entirely in the tradition of Jean Paul.

Berend concludes his article with an overall assessment of Jean Paul’s naming practices. He reports that the poet’s unusual names had already attracted the attention of his contemporaries. They did not always receive their approval. Charlotte von Kalb admired Jean Paul, yet judged: “Much as I am devoted to the demigod Jean Paul [...], I am nevertheless very dissatisfied with his choice of names” (849). Berend grants the critics that Jean Paul’s choice of names is at times very “contrived” (850), but he points out that Jean Paul did not intend to write realistic novels; rather, “despite all realism in detail, he wanted only to construct a romantic world of fantasy” (850). In fact, Berend rightly says, “pronounced realists [...] sometimes allowed themselves far more, e.g. [...] Fontane with Sahnepott, Thomas Mann with Klöterjahn, Lobgott Piepsam; Sesemi Weichbrodt, especially Raabe with names such as Schlotterbeck, Ulebeule [...], Knackstert, etc.” (850). And when Berend concludes his pioneering essay with the words: “The great masters of narrative art in the nineteenth century [...] were all his direct or indirect pupils” (850), the same statement can be made about the relationship between Berend and the literary name researchers from the middle of the twentieth century onward.

6. SUMMARY: BEREND’S ESSAY AS THE FOUNDING TEXT OF LITERARY ONOMASTICS

The foregoing was intended to show that the essay published in 1942 by Eduard Berend, the editor of Jean Paul’s works, with the

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Title The Naming of Jean Paul may be regarded as a foundational text of modern scholarly Literary Onomastics in the German-speaking world. Following a brief outline of the life of the German-Jewish scholar, the emphasis was placed above all on those aspects of his work that were to prove pioneering for the future of poetonomastics. Thus, right at the beginning of his essay, E. Berend outlines the project of a worldwide comparative Literary Onomastics, a concept that only now appears to have been brought within reach by current computer-technological possibilities. Questions of genre theory concerning literary naming are also touched upon—questions that are still far from having been definitively resolved. Berend furthermore addresses production-aesthetic problems of literary naming and places Jean Paul’s naming within its historical context. In doing so, he shows that Jean Paul held poetonomastic ideas that come close to those of the twentieth century. As editor of Jean Paul’s works, Berend was also familiar with his working materials, enabling him to show where the poet took his names from. Although these often sound striking, they were almost without exception taken from reality. In his pioneering close analysis of Jean Paul’s naming, Berend examines the number of syllables in the names, their phonosemantics, their socio-onomastic characteristics, and Jean Paul’s antithetical/broken names. Finally, Berend acknowledges Jean Paul’s naming for its stylistic appropriateness. With his numerous statements pointing toward the future, the essay concludes, Berend may be regarded as a teacher of contemporary Literary Onomastics.

LITERATURE

Berend Eduard 1942: Die Namengebung bei Jean Paul. – Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 57, 820–850.

Börne Ludwig 1993: Mirror Image of Life. Essays on Literature. Expanded new edition, selected and introduced by M. Reich-Ranicki (= Insel Taschenbuch 1578), Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig: Insel.

Debus Friedhelm 2002: Names in Literary Works. (In–)vention – Form – Function (= Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, Treatises of the Humanities and Social Sciences Class, vol. 2002, no. 2), Stuttgart: Steiner.

Demetz Peter 1964: Forms of Realism: Theodor Fontane. Critical Investigations, Munich: Hanser.

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Elsen Hilke 2015: The Factor of Sound Symbolism. – JournalLIPP 4, 27–42. Access: https://lipp.ub.lmu.de [accessed 02.03.2021].

Gottschalk Jürn 2009: Proper Names and Poetry. Studies on the Use of Proper Names in Poems: Phil. dissertation, Göttingen 2009. Access: https://ediss.uni-goettingen.de/bitstream/handle/11858/00-1735-0000-0006-AED5-6/gottschalk.pdf?sequence=1 [accessed 02.03.2021].

Hengst Karlheinz, Sobanski Ines 2000: Proper Names as Structural Elements in the Literary Text. – English in the Modern World. Festschrift for Hartmut Breitkreuz on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (= Foreign Language Studies 5), edited by M. Dakowska, Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 79–101.

Hoffmann E. T. A. 1995: The King’s Bride. A Fairy Tale Designed from Nature – Hoffmann E. T. A. – The Serapion Brothers. Collected Stories and Fairy Tales. Based on the text of the first edition of 1819–21, with reference to the editions of C. G. v. Maassen and G. Ellinger, with W. Segebrecht’s notes, revised and supplemented by E. Matala de Mazza, 5th ed., Munich: Winkler, 945–995.

Jean Paul 2015: Pre-School of Aesthetics, Together with Some Lectures on the Parties of the Age, edited by F. Bambeck (= Works. Historical-Critical Edition, edited by H. Pfotenhauer, B. Hunfeld, vol. 5, i), Berlin, Munich, Boston: de Gruyter.

Knickmann Hanne 1994/1995: The Jean Paul scholar Eduard Berend (1883–1973). A Contribution to the History of German Studies in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Part 1. – Yearbook of the Jean Paul Society 29, 7–91; Part 2. – Yearbook of the Jean Paul Society 30, 7–104.

Kohlheim Rosa 2019: Considerations on nominatio in Theodor Fontane’s Novels Set in the Society of His Time. – The Name in the Text. International Journal of Literary Onomastics 21, 169–176.

Kohlheim Volker 2015: Jean Paul and the World of Names of the Bavarian Vogtland. – Journal for Upper German Name Research 52, 176–191.

Kohlheim Volker 2019: The Name in Literature. With the collaboration of Rosa Kohlheim (= Contributions to Modern Literary History 393), Heidelberg: Winter.

Müller Götz 1988: Jean Paul’s Excerpts, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

Presch Gunter 2002: Names in Conflictual Fields. How Contradictions Find Their Way into Proper Names (= Tübingen Contributions to Linguistics 460), Tübingen: Narr.

Schildberg-Schroth Gerhard 1995: Proper Name and Literariness (= Kiel Contributions to German Language History 16), Neumünster: Wachholtz.

Ueding Gert 1993: Jean Paul (= Beck’sche Reihe Autoren 629), Munich: Beck.

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van Dalen-Oskam Karina 2016: Corpus-based Approaches to Names in Literature. – The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming, hrsg. von C. Hough, D. Izdebska, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 344–354.

Windberger-Heidenkummer Erika 2011: Onymic Monovalence and Class Formation. An Onomastic Problem and Its Methodological Consequences. – Methods of Name Research. Methodology, Methods, and Practice, edited by A. Ziegler, E. Windberger-Heidenkummer, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 29–46.

Eduard Berend and the Origins of German Literary Onomastics

ABSTRACT

The article “The Naming of Jean Paul” (“Die Namengebung bei Jean Paul”), published in 1942 by Eduard Berend, editor of the works of Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), should be regarded as a foundational work of modern scholarly Literary Onomastics in the German-speaking area. After a brief biographical overview of the scholar, a German Jew who probably wrote his work on the peculiarities of the poet Jean Paul’s naming in exile in Switzerland, the article presents E. Berend’s prophetic vision of Literary Onomastics at the beginning of his work. It is based on global thinking and a worldwide comparative project, while the possibilities of modern computing make this vision tangible. This concept encompasses both theoretical aspects of classification and aesthetic aspects of realization. E. Berend situates the phenomenon of Jean Paul’s naming within its historical context and shows that Jean Paul was guided by a poetonomastic conception characteristic of the twentieth century. As editor of Jean Paul’s works, E. Berend was also well acquainted with the materials of his work and could therefore indicate where the names used by the poet had been taken from. In his detailed analysis of Jean Paul’s naming, E. Berend even undertakes an evaluation of the number of syllables and phonosemantics of the names, as well as their socio-onomastic characteristics and Jean Paul’s antithetical/broken names; he praises the aptness of Jean Paul’s naming. On the basis of the numerous statements pointing toward the future of research made in the conclusions of the article, he should be regarded as a master of contemporary Literary Onomastics.

Received 6 April 2021

VOLKER KOHLHEIM

Schlosshof Birken 11, D-95447 Bayreuth, Germany [email protected]

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