Prof. Dr. Manfred Engel
Modern German literature, Saarbrücken

Contact Details

Prof. Dr. Manfred Engel
Institute of German Studies
University of the Saarland

Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Homepage: www.uni-saarland.de/fak4/fr41/Engel/
Profile cultural dream studies: www.culturaldreamstudies.eu/manfred-engel

Biographical Note

Manfred Engel is Professor of Modern German literature at the Saar-University and an expert in the cultural history of the dream. Together with Bernard Dieterle he chairs the ICLA Research-Committee on dreams: www.dreamcultures.org. Important publications: Bernard Dieterle/M. Engel (Hg.): The Dream and the Enlightenment/Le Rêve et les Lumières. Paris 2003; Traumtheorie und literarische Träume im 18. Jahrhundert. Eine Fallstudie zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Literatur, in: Scientia Poetica 2 (1998), 97-128; Traumnotat, literarischer Traum und traumhaftes Schreiben bei Franz Kafka. Ein Beitrag zur Oneiropoetik der Moderne, in: Bernard Dieterle (Hg.): Träumungen. Traumerzählungen in Literatur und Film. St. Augustin 1998, 233-262; Kulturgeschichte/n? Ein Modellentwurf am Beispiel der Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte des Traumes, in: KulturPoetik 10 (2010), 153-177.

Researchproject within the DFG-network

Philosophy of nature in German Romanticism and its afterlife

German Dream Theory in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Other than in France and Great Britain, the tradition natural philosophy, (re-)established by  Idealism and Romanticism, continues to exert a formative influence in Germany throughout the nineteenth century – even in the works of authors who already seem to have subscribed to the new scientific turn. This is especially true for German theories of the dream in the second half of the century. My essay will shortly sketch the dream theory of Romantic anthropology and show the continuing effect which it exerted on studies like: Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewußten (1869), Carl Freiherr Du Prel’s Oneirokritikon: Der Traum vom Standpunkt des transcendentalen Idealismus (1869), Ludwig Strümpell’s Die Natur und Entstehung der Träume (1874), Johannes Volkelt’s Die Traumphantasie (1875), Carl Binz’s Über den Traum (1878), and Paul Wilhelm Radestock’s Schlaf und Traum: Eine physiologisch-psychologische Untersuchung (1879).