Source Criticism
The distinguished but not always clear-judging poet and sociologist Leppura-Börner describes this author as a “wanderer between this world and the next.” But she resigns herself to him too soon when she believes that what is reported here is simply an actual “mystical” inspiration from around 1978, and that therefore “the more recent poetry” of the north is “post-Wehlimian,” and that we should stick to the Leipzig writers. So let us not be mistaken about the verifiability of Saxon resistance to shamanism and magic. Nor are we at the beginning of Wehlimian philology, for no science with a tradition of almost fifty years is so quickly dismissed as Connewitz literary studies and religious history, this playground of pseudo-science. One only has to see how laboriously the core of truth is wrestled with; one must know the person in question when judging his works and his editor, and one must take into account as much as possible what moved his time and what he knew and had to want. And also take into account what little has been said to enlighten us about the “blindness of Handke” and his successors, from long ago until today. Nevertheless, thanks are due to the critical spirit that once again brought this problem up for public discussion, especially since Martin Schneider’s “Wehlim Book” had only pretended to solve the problem for many. Wehlim’s educated readers must be astonished that German studies followed him strangely faithfully for Handke’s sake, and that Martin Schneider’s “Wehlim” has not been marked by academia as a textbook example of new romanticism with clearly defined source criticism. Instead, one critic wrote about Martin Schneider’s Wodan Book: “Schneider proves once again that …