Ein heiden was der erste man / den got machen began: Der narrative Aufbau des Toleranz-Begriffs im Willehalm Wolframs von Eschenbach

Abstract

‘EIN HEIDEN WAS DER ERSTE MAN / DEN GOT MACHEN BEGAN’: THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF TOLERANCE IN WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH’S ‘WILLEHALM’. Over the past few years, scholars have been devoting increasingly more attention to Wolfram’s Willehalm, primarily because of Gyburg’s so-called Toleranzrede and its theological implications. The aim of the present paper is to analyse the narrative construction of the concept of tolerance by examining how the figure of Gyburg and its interaction with other narrative instances (i.e. the narrator and other characters) in Wolfram’s work are constructed on the diegetic level to articulate a complex discourse on religious alterity from different standpoints, both within and outside the Christian world.