Avantgarde avant la lettre: Strategien literarischer Popularisierung im Werk von Otto Julius Bierbaum

The author and publisher Otto Julius Bierbaum is largely unknown today. As a pioneer of modern aesthetics and as a representative of popular forms of literature, theater and cabaret, this study once again places him at the center of attention. The literary work of Otto Julius Bierbaum gives new insights into the era around 1900 and into the prevailing fascination with world exhibitions, sporting events, tabloid journalism and the world of entertainment and cabarets. The present work discovers the author, publisher, publicist and theater maker as a pioneer of an artistic avant-garde avant la lettre and exposes those popular narrative strategies in the novels Pankrazius Grauzer, Stilpe and Prinz Kuckuck, which made these works media events at the time. Even if Bierbaum is today regarded as a whirlwind author and, due to his picturesque and comical style of writing, is one of the representatives of the "lower" literature of the turn of the century, the themes of many novels and short stories are serious and political. Today, Bierbaum can be read by literary or cultural studies as a contemporary critic, documentarist or literary seismograph of an epoch of upheaval. In doing so, Bierbaum unites a literature that sees itself as realistic in the best sense of the word in its choice of subject matter, i.e. that attempts to depict social realities in their social and cultural mechanisms of action, and an aesthetic that, despite its proximity to trivial narrative forms, grants the literary structure an aesthetic independence.