Das Paradox des Originals: Dietrich Schwanitz und William Shakespeare auf dem Dorfe

Dietrich Schwanitz (1940–2004) held the Chair of English Literature at the University of Hamburg from 1978–1998. He became well known to a nonacademic audience with his very successful campus novel Campus. Ein Roman (Campus: A novel, 1993) and Bildung (Education, 1999). For undisclosed health reasons Schwanitz took early retirement in 1998. In 2001 he bought a dilapidated village inn near Freiburg with a theatre room and had the back wall of the stage lavishly decorated. Fashioned closely after the Supper of St. Gregory the Great by Paolo Veronese (1572), the large, colourful mural is populated with Shakespearean personnel, as a “Supper of Elizabeth I for William Shakespeare.” The essay studies the internal thematic structure of the painting with regard to the paintings and pictures used to reproduce the Shakespearean characters. Moreover, it draws connections to Schwanitz’s views on Shakespeare and, through Shakespeare, on ‘reality’: views that were strongly informed by Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory.