This paper uses a constellation of motifs and figures from the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin to unfold the legendary character of Tyll Eulenspiegel as portrayed in Daniel Kehlmann’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Tyll (2017; English translation 2020). A motley of trickster, acrobat, hoaxer and clown, Tyll is transplanted by Kehlmann from the fourteenth century into the midst of the Thirty Years War (1618-48) and plies his itinerant trade across the devastated territories of central Europe in a series of episodic and picaresque exploits and encounters. As a wandering will-’o’-the-wisp, the ‘daemonic character’ of Tyll is suggestive of a number of Simmelian social types and Benjaminian dramatis personae: the stranger, the adventurer, the ‘destructive character’ and, above all, the courtly intriguer. I suggest how Tyll intriguingly embodies various attributes and qualities of these figures and, at the same time, playfully eludes and elucidates such constructions and characterizations.
Graeme Gilloch (Wed,) studied this question.