Einflussverweigerung! Intellektuelle zwischen Macht und Lethargie in Wolfgang Hildesheimers Lieblosen Legenden oder „Warum ich mich in eine Nachtigall verwandelt habe“.

The essay primarily provides a close reading of the legend mentioned in the title, which can be understood as the epitome of Hildesheimer's volume of stories "Loveless legends", and traces the narrator's rabulistic processing of Kantian moral philosophy. "Why I changed into a nightingale" is, according to the thesis of this essay, a parody of philosophy , in the same sense that the other legends are parodies of biographies, parodies of fairy tale, parodies of scientific essays, etc. The philosopher is on his search for truth and security, as the art experts and historians in the further legends, succumb to forgeries or, like the narrator of the "nightingale", himself a resourceful counterfeiter: ethics and epistemological framework are invented for self-exculpation and sold to the reader. The legend mentioned can thus also be read as paradigma of the suppression of "the great guilt" after the war. From the introduction by G. Häntzschel, S. Hanuschek, U. Leuschner: “Due to his later strict abstinence from writing, Hildesheimer is often considered as an exponent of cultural pessimism, in which political engagement appears to be doomed to fail in the context of the restoration period. Yvonne Hütter signs of a different reading. The indolence of the protagonists of the "Loveless Legends", published for the first time in 1952 and increased in the following editions, has not yet been established. If the refusal to act could be understood as an appealing accusation from which a different attitude than that of impotence and withdrawal would be conceivable, art and social responsibility should not have been mutually exclusive. ”(13- 14).