Die „große Konfusion“

In the decades around 1900, “Weltanschauungsliteratur” (ideological literature) boomed. These texts, which oscillate between science and literature, promise a meaningful explanation of the world in times of crisis. Three great novels of German modernist literature – Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, Robert Musil's Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Hermann Broch's Schlafwandler – also focus on the whole. The study shows how they enter into a critical dialogue with the textual genre of “Weltanschauungsliteratur”. In order to understand this intertextual relationship, the study combines source criticism and textual analysis, it reconstructs the authors' “Weltanschauungsliteratur” readings and analyzes how the novels each narratively process the text type pattern.