Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State 0472130781, 978-0472130788

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 10
1. Introduction......Page 14
2. National Origins and the Imperial Past......Page 28
3. German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance......Page 46
4. Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects......Page 68
5. Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire......Page 94
6. Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia......Page 132
7. Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany......Page 156
8. Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations......Page 190
9. Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich......Page 228
10. Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past......Page 250
11. Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature......Page 268
Notes......Page 278
Works Cited......Page 306
Index......Page 334

Citation preview

Imperial Fictions

Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Kathleen Canning, Series Editor Recent Titles Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State Todd Kontje White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture Priscilla Layne Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld Michael Thomas Taylor, Annette F. Timm, and Rainer Herrn, Editors Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany Kerry Wallach Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present David Crew The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany Jonathan Wipplinger The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany Svenja Goltermann Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918–33 Deborah Ascher Barnstone Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book Pepper Stetler The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany Greg Eghigian An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture Anna M. Parkinson Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space Kristin Kopp Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot, Editors Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany Alexander Sedlmaier Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society Sandrine Kott Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic Heather L. Gumbert The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and Dictatorship in East Germany Scott Moranda German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, Editors For a complete list of titles, please see www.press.umich.edu

Imperial Fictions German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-­State

Todd Kontje

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2018 by Todd Kontje All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-­free paper 2021 2020 2019 2018  4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. LCCN 2017054256 (print) LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054256 ISBN 978-­0-­472-­13078-­8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­472-­12373-­5 (e-­book) Cover: “The Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation) at its greatest territorial extent.” Artist: F.A. Brockhaus Geogr, in Brockhaus Kleines Konversations-Lexikon Fünfte Auflage, 1911. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We cannot criticize the German nation because it is politically splintered despite its representing a geographic unit. We do not wish for the political turmoil that would pave the way for classical works in Germany. Aber auch der deutschen Nation darf es nicht zum Vorwurfe gereichen, daβ ihre geographische Lage sie eng zusammenhält, indem ihre politische sie zerstückelt. Wir wollen die Umwälzungen nicht wünschen, die in Deutschland klassische Werke vorbereiten könnten. Goethe, “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser” “Literarischer Sansculottismus” (1795) It may be that without some foreign admixture, no higher German character is possible; that precisely the exemplary Germans were Europeans who would have regarded every limitation to the nothing-­but-­German as barbaric. Ohne einen Zusatz von Fremdem [ist] vielleicht kein höheres Deutschtum möglich; gerade die exemplarischen Deutschen [waren] Europäer und [hätten] jede Einschränkung ins nichts als Deutsche als barbarisch empfunden. Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) Since the mid-­sixties, in speeches and articles, I have spoken out against reunification and in favor of a confederation. . . . This understanding of cultural nationhood . . . implies a modern, broader concept of culture, and embraces the multiplicity of German culture without needing to assert unity in the sense of a nation-­state. In Reden und Aufsätzen habe ich mich seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre gegen die Wiedervereinigung und für eine Konföderation ausgesprochen. . . . Dieses Verständnis von Nation . . . versteht sich als erweiterter Kulturbegriff unserer Zeit und eint die Vielfalt deutscher Kultur, ohne nationalstaatliche Einheit proklamieren zu müssen. Günter Grass, “Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan” “Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen” (1990)

Acknowledgments Writing is a solitary affair, but even in the stillness of the study, one remains in constant dialogue with authors and critics. Particularly rewarding are those moments when a writer emerges from isolation to present ideas to others and to receive their oral or written feedback. Over the course of the several years in which I have been at work on this project, I have profited immensely from the kindness and critical acumen of colleagues and the generosity of the institutions that have invited me to speak about my work and participate in public discussions. I thank, in particular, Tobias Boes, Adrian Daub, Matt Erlin, Margrit Frölich, Richard T. Gray, Daniela Gretz, Randall Halle, Gail Hart, James Hodkinson, Christine Maillard, Peter C. Pfeiffer, Hamid Tafazoli, Lynne Tatlock, John Walker, Sabine Wilke, Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young, and Charlotte Woodford. I also thank my colleagues and friends at the University of California in Irvine, Stanford University, Georgetown University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Luxembourg, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of British Columbia. While it is good to go out into the world, there is still no place like home. I have benefited greatly over the years from the support of my colleagues in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. I am delighted that the University of Michigan Press decided to publish the book, and I am particularly grateful to editor LeAnn Fields for her initial interest in this project and to Christopher Dreyer for shepherding the manuscript through the evaluation and production process. There is always an element of chance when a book manuscript is sent out to anonymous readers, but I got lucky when the press picked two exceptionally astute and sympathetic critics. Their comments while I was preparing the final version of the book served me greatly, and I hope to have a future opportunity to thank them in person. My deepest gratitude, as always, is to my family, without whose support I would never have been able to complete this project. The book is dedicated to them and to the memory of my father.

Contents

1 Introduction1 Of Empires and the German Nation

2

From National to World Literature

6

Disclaimers and a Glance Ahead

11

2 National Origins and the Imperial Past15 Hermann: A German Hero?

19

The Janus-­Faced Roman Empire

22

Imperial Germany and the Legacy of Rome

24

3 German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance33 The Song of Anno

35

Walther von der Vogelweide

40

Early Modern Nuremberg

48

Conclusion54

4 Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects55 Seventeenth-­Century Silesia

59

Andreas Gryphius: Religious Faith and Imperial Politics

61

Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: The Trauerspiel as a Trojan Horse

69

Race and Resistance in Lohenstein’s Arminius

75

Conclusion78

5 Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire81 The End of an Empire

83

Goethe’s Early Experience of the Empire

85

x    Contents Young Goethe and the German Nation

89

Literary Politics in a Revolutionary Age

95

Hermann and Dorothea: Infinitely Limited

98

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: Personal Bildung and National Theater

101

Faust II: Anachronistic Empire and the New Imperialism

107

Weltliteratur in Contemporary Context

113

6 Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia119 Friedrich Schlegel’s Political Theory

123

Eichendorff: Conservative Catholic and Prussian Civil Servant

126

Presentiment and Presence: Local Patriotism and Philosophical Pessimism

128

Durande Castle: Elegiac Conservatism

135

7 Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany143 Gottfried Keller: A Swiss Liberal for the German Kulturnation

148

Between Germany and Switzerland

151

Swiss Federalism versus German Imperialism

157

Theodor Fontane: A Prussian Cosmopolitan

160

Effi Briest: Psychographic Realism

161

Conclusion174

8 Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations177 Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka: Antipodes and Affinities

178

Locating Franz Kafka

180

Minor Literatures and the Yiddish Language

185

The Chinese Wall and a Talking Ape

188

Continuity and Change in the Work of Thomas Mann

195

From the German Empire to the Weimar Republic

201

9 Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich215 Siegfried Lenz: The Joys of Duty and the Language of Silence

217

Günter Grass: A Rootless Cosmopolitan Resists Reunification

225

The Flounder: Local History in Global Context

228

Coda234

Contents    xi

10 Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past237 Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World

239

Christian Kracht, Imperium

248

11 Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature255 Notes

265

Works Cited

293

Index

321

Chapter 1

Introduction

Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-­state. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe, people have lived within empires for so long that “the nation-­state appears as a blip on the historical horizon, a state form that emerged recently from under imperial skies and whose hold on the world’s political imagination may well prove partial or transitory.” Asserting that the “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-­state is natural, necessary, and inevitable,” they suggest that we explore “the wide range of ways in which people over time, and for better or worse, have thought about politics and organized their states.”1 As their sweeping survey of the world’s empires reveals, there is no single model for a political organization that has persisted from the ancient world to the present, but empires have in common a structure of hierarchy and heterogeneity that contrasts with the egalitarian homogeneity of the nation-­state: “Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people. The nation-­state, in contrast, is based on the idea of a single people in a single territory constituting itself as a unique political community.”2 German history offers a prime example of a people that has been ruled by empires far longer than they have been governed as a nation-­state. Over the course of the past millennium, Germany has existed as a discrete, united nation only from 1871 to 1945 and from 1990 to the present. For more than a thousand years, the German-­speaking territories of Central Europe were part of the Holy Roman Empire. Even when Bismarck led a successful drive toward national unification, the resulting state was known as the Second Empire, a confederation of semiautonomous entities governed by an emperor, or kaiser, who was also the king of Prussia. Hitler and his minions latched onto this legacy when they established Germany’s third empire, the Third Reich, which led to defeat and the division of the country between the competing imperial powers

2    Imperial Fictions

of the Cold War: the Soviet Union and the United States. The current Federal Republic of Germany, conceived in opposition to the Nazi intolerance for internal diversity and hostility toward external foes, granted considerable autonomy to its individual states, even as it deepened its ties to the European Union, a decentralized confederation that has certain parallels with the old Holy Roman Empire. The recent influx of migrants into Western Europe and the threat of terrorist violence have shaken the European Union to its core. Borders lowered by the Schengen Agreement may be raised again even as “Fortress Europe” seeks to seal its external boundaries. Nationalist sentiments deemed taboo in the wake of the Second World War have been on the rise, as parties to the far right of the political spectrum gain popular support. Although falling birthrates and an aging population would seem to make the immigration of a younger labor force essential for the maintenance of social networks established in the postwar period, some Germans look back nostalgically to what they imagine to be a simpler, more homogeneous past (read: white and Christian), while even those committed to a multiethnic, pluralistic European society realize that it will not be easy to assimilate hundreds of thousands of recent refugees. Germany hardly holds a monopoly on xenophobia in today’s Europe, but its twentieth-­century history of genocide in the name of ethnic purity gives debates surrounding immigration a special urgency in Germany today. This book cannot presume to solve pressing European problems, but it does strive to place contemporary issues in historical perspective. In today’s world, as peoples move and mix in ever-­changing ways, appeals to cultural homogeneity seem quaint at best; in the light of German history, they seem dangerous. Cultural hybridity and cross-­cultural exchange were always the norm—­a fact that nationalist histories have been keen to suppress. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should instead consider the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from late antiquity to the present.

Of Empires and the German Nation The broad distinction between empires and nation-­states serves as a useful starting point for this project, but it needs further elaboration when considering the course of German history. The two concepts change over time, in relation to one another and in response to developments elsewhere in Europe. As I ar-

Introduction    3

gue in more detail in chapter 2 of this study, empires are established by conquest but maintained as confederations; that is, empires expand by asserting their dominance over other dominions, either by force or other means, but then maintain control over disparate peoples by incorporating them into larger political structures. In the case of Germany, we are most likely to think of empire or imperialism in terms of conquest, recalling, for example, the German Empire’s effort to acquire overseas colonies in the late nineteenth century; the Third Reich’s aggressive expansion into Austria, Poland, and France; or, for those with a longer historical memory, Charlemagne’s incessant efforts to subdue enemy territories. Once Charlemagne had established the Holy Roman Empire, however, it lived on for centuries with little interest in acquiring new territories, either within Europe or beyond. While few scholars today would be willing to overlook the suffering caused by German colonialism or the horrors of the Third Reich, the federative structure of the Holy Roman Empire has awakened new interest among historians who seek to understand a political organization that differs so markedly from that of the modern nation-­state and that some regard as prefiguring aspects of the European Union. The Polish-­born political theorist Jan Zielonka, for instance, argues that the enlarged European Union “increasingly resembles a neo-­medieval empire rather than a classical Westphalian type of (federal) state.” In his words, the Westphalian state “is about concentration of power, hierarchy, sovereignty, and clear-­cut identity,” whereas the neo-­medieval empire is characterized by “overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, diversified institutional arrangements, and multiple identities.” States have “fixed and relatively hard external borderlines,” as opposed to the “soft-­border zones that undergo regular adjustments” in the neo-­medieval empire of the European Union.3 One need not accept Zielonka’s argument uncritically or view his distinctions as absolute: as recent tensions surrounding immigration and the euro have revealed, nations and nationalism have hardly disappeared from the European Union, while parallels between the democratic nation-­states allied in today’s European Union and the feudal hierarchies of the Holy Roman Empire should not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, the way in which he opens the view toward continuities and contrasts across the centuries has proven productive for this present study of German literature in imperial contexts. The European Union was created to counter some of the worst excesses of twentieth-­century nationalism, pointing to a dialectical relationship between empire and the German nation that extends back to the early modern period. The rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania and tales of Arminius or Hermann leading the Germanic tribes to victory against the Roman legions, in tandem with

4    Imperial Fictions

Luther’s break with Rome and translation of the Bible into the vernacular, helped to inspire patriotic pride among Germans who were politically divided but began to feel that they shared a common language, history, and religion. Appeals to the cultural unity of the German-­speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire flared up periodically in subsequent centuries as well: baroque writers called for the purification of the German language, while Lessing, Herder, and Goethe sought to cast off French influence and establish an authentic national culture. Not until the coming of the French Revolution, however, were the Germans confronted with a movement that linked nationalist sentiments to political revolution. While German cultural nationalism developed within the structure of the Holy Roman Empire, French revolutionaries sought to annihilate the Old Regime in the name of an egalitarian democracy. Within a few years, French armies began to march across Europe and into German territory, ostensibly to spread the gospel of revolutionary reform, but they proceeded in a way that was perceived as naked aggression by those on the receiving end. The new French nation, conceived in opposition to the abuses of the aristocracy, now called itself an empire as it sought to expand its influence across the continent. In the century between Napoleon’s defeat and the beginning of the First World War, the German territories of Central Europe moved toward new forms of political organization, in dialog with their past and in opposition to France and other European powers. While some Germans embraced the ideals of the revolution, particularly in its early phases, most were appalled by the chaos and violence it soon unleashed. The architects of the Restoration in Germany did their best to put the revolutionary genie back into the bottle, reaffirming their commitment to traditional customs and local autonomy within an older form of empire. Meanwhile, a younger generation of liberal Germans sought national unification in the name of democratic reform. Their hopes were crushed by the failed Revolution of 1848, however, and national unity was forged instead by Bismarck, whose Prussian armies established an empire at home and soon extended their influence abroad. The subsequent pendulum swings of German history are well known: from the attempt to establish a global empire on par with the British, which led to the First World War, to the founding of the Weimar Republic; from dreams of a “thousand-­year Reich” to the federal republic; from national reunification to European integration. I expound these events in subsequent chapters, but the brief overview here already suggests that this book will differ in at least three significant ways from influential studies of European imperialism such as Edward Said’s Orientalism or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. First, those authors focus on

Introduction    5

empire primarily in the sense of the European conquest and colonization of non-­European territories. That history plays a role in some of the later chapters of the present study, but I am also interested in the intra-­European tensions within the Holy Roman Empire and between it and other European states, as well as the impact of that empire’s federalist legacy on subsequent German history. Second, Said, Hardt, and Negri focus on empire only as a modern phenomenon. Hardt and Negri describe a contemporary form of transnational hegemony that they dub “Empire,” which they define in contrast to the overseas conquests of individual European nations that began in the early modern period. Said focuses even more narrowly on the present, defining orientalism as a Western ideology cloaked in the guise of scientific objectivity that he dates to the last decades of the eighteenth century. Imperial Fictions, in contrast, follows the history of German empires from their origins in the period between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to the present, placing modern imperialism in the broader context of world history explored by such authors as Burbank, Cooper, and Münkler. Third, my work focuses on the German-­ language regions of Central Europe, rather than on the continent as a whole. In this regard, Imperial Fictions builds on the pioneering studies of Susanne Zantop and Russell A. Berman, both of whom raised questions about national differences within the legacy of European imperialism. As Berman points out in Enlightenment or Empire, studies of nineteenth-­ century imperialism often proceed under the tacit assumption that Britain and France are the norm and that Germany played only a minor role, as a “junior partner” that was “always lagging behind and increasingly obsessed with a need to imitate.”4 Susanne Zantop argued along these lines when she noted that while Britain and France already had colonies, Germans had only precolonial fantasies of a future in which they would not only acquire an empire but do it better—­more kindly and gently—­than their European rivals.5 Berman contends that fantasies became reality in some cases: in his view, German colonial discourse frequently displays a capacity, greater than among more dominant imperial powers, “to recognize and appreciate—­ appreciate even at the moment of colonial appropriation—­the other culture.”6 The evidence of the Herero massacre alone cautions against an overly sanguine assessment of German colonialism, but Berman’s larger purpose, which he shares with Susanne Marchand, is to contest the claim that reason is always the handmaiden of oppression and that colonial encounters preclude the possibility of cross-­cultural exchange.7 In my opinion, the incontestability of the latter point, that enlightenment does not lead only and inevitably to imperial abuse, rivals the questionability

6    Imperial Fictions

of the former, that the Germans were predisposed to be better imperialists than their European neighbors. By highlighting the specifically German history of nineteenth-­century imperialism, these scholars nevertheless break open the European monolith to expose national differences and explore international rivalries. Imperial Fictions follows along this path but pushes the history of empire in the “German lands” much further into the past and forward to the present.8 One of this book’s themes is the evolving relationship between the interrelated concepts of empire and German nationalism, but I am also interested in tensions between local territories and imperial authority, as well as the legacy of German particularism within the modern nation-­state. It is perhaps worth emphasizing at the outset that neither nations nor empires are intrinsically good or evil. Democratic nation-­states arose as progressive alternatives to imperial hierarchies, but nation-­states can produce ethnic nationalism and imperial aggression in ways that make older empires and current federations seem appealing alternatives after all.

From National to World Literature Imperial Fictions is a work of literary history. It is informed by historical fact but insists on the imaginative potential of fiction. Of course, the boundaries between those two forms of discourse are porous, and literary fictions would have no purchase on reality if they did not engage in meaningful ways with brute facts and ideological constructs. The relationship between the fields of literature and history is dynamic: literature reflects historical reality, but it can also change the way people view their world. In the course of the eighteenth century, for instance, attitudes toward marriage and the family evolved along with social and economic conditions, but the fiction of Richardson and Rousseau helped to codify those changes and disseminate new ideas. Understandings of political organizations changed as well. Benedict Anderson famously argues that the new concept of the nation that emerged around 1800 was a product as much of cultural labor as of political revolution. The resulting “imagined communities” were new, but they liked to claim that they were very old, and if there were no ancient traditions to be discovered and preserved, they could always be invented.9 One such invented tradition that gained special prominence in Germany was the history of the national literature. The German-­speaking peoples of Central Europe had a long history of political fragmentation that continued well after England and France had coalesced into modern nation-­states. When

Introduction    7

nationalist sentiments spread across eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Europe, Germans could claim that they at least had a common language and a common culture that compensated for their lack of political unity. Central to the concept of the German Kulturnation was the belief in a national literature that expressed the spirit of the German people.10 As writers from Gervinus to Dilthey labored to construct the narrative of German literary history, they inevitably had to make choices, highlighting major writers, giving honorable mention to others, and leaving the vast majority to languish in silence.11 Until the recent advent of digital data mining, such omissions were inevitable; as Franco Moretti reminds us, it is not humanly possible to read more than a fraction of the fiction that was published in the course of a few decades, let alone entire centuries.12 Nineteenth-­century literary historians insisted, however, that their selections were not random; they chose to focus on works that they deemed central to the nation’s literary history, consigning to their rightful place in oblivion those that may have been written in the German language but did not express the essence of the German spirit. The effort to trace the development of the nation through time as revealed in the successive stages of its literary history went hand in hand with the project of imagining a collective national space. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s evocation of a united Germany reaching “von der Maas bis an die Memel” (from the Meuse to the Memel)—­in the poem that eventually provided the lyrics for the German national anthem (“Das Lied der Deutschen”)—­is only one instance of a sentiment that inspired reverent works about the Rhine and other sacred spaces of the national imaginary. As the originally liberal nationalist movement took on increasingly militant and racist overtones toward the end of the nineteenth century, some spoke of the special ties of the people to their native soil and extolled the bonds of common blood that joined together the German Volk. Writers deemed artfremd, alien to the German race, had no place in the history of the national literature and no foothold on the German soil. They were rootless cosmopolitans, doomed, like Ahasuerus, to wander the earth. In response to the increased circulation of people and ideas in the world today, scholars in the humanities have shifted their focus from national subjects to nomads, from the center to the margins, from homogeneity to hybridity, from essence to performance, from stasis to mobility.13 As a result, there is new interest in the ways in which people might imagine a sense of community outside or across the borders of the nation-­state. Arjun Appadurai looks at “diasporic public spheres . . . that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-­state as the key arbiter of important social issues.”14 Homi K. Bhabha coins the term “DissemiNation” to scatter the sense of unity

8    Imperial Fictions

located in the modern nation.15 Fatima El-­Tayeb shows how the children and grandchildren of recent immigrants to Europe have forged transnational alliances that have little to do with either their parents’ country of origin or their current place within a given European nation.16 These theorists write in the context of what has been called the “spatial turn” or “topographical turn” in cultural and literary studies.17 In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between geometrical and social space: the former is a neutral category that can be described in terms of mathematics or geometry, whereas social space is produced by relations of power. In contrast to those who seek a common space for a united people, Lefebvre warns against the repressive potential of political authority. “The state is consolidating on a world scale,” he writes, noting, “It weighs down on society (on all societies) in full force.” In response, he looks for moments of resistance to the power of the homogeneous nation-­state: “The violence of power is answered by the violence of subversion.”18 He argues that the very process of constructing a common social space produces the possibility of a subversive counterspace: “I shall call that new space ‘differential space,’ because, inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.”19 In a similar spirit of defiance, Michel Foucault identifies the “heterotopia” as a space of difference set within and against social norms.20 Michel de Certeau uses jaywalking as a metaphor for resistance to the disciplined order of a city grid.21 Doreen Massey mocks the notion that nations are like billiard balls, with identities carved in solid spheres of ivory, and insists “that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity.”22 Alan Liu has traced these writers’ common aversion to uniformity back to the spirit of protest against authority that swept over Europe and North America in the late 1960s.23 Resistance to power runs as a common thread through the French poststructuralist thought of the subsequent two decades. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault challenged the notion of the author as a single authority providing stable meaning to a given text.24 Jacques Derrida focused on différance in the language of philosophy, as Jacques Lacan split the psychological subject. In the realm of politics, Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­ Luc Nancy exposed the totalitarian ideology of “the Nazi myth,” while Jean-­ François Lyotard exhorted his readers to “wage a war on totality.”25 Building connections from the recent past to the present, Liu argues that the potential for

Introduction    9

critical dialogue opened by the new social media marks a further step toward the decentralization of textual and institutional authority. These media enable the formation of a “community of dissensus” of the sort that Bill Readings envisioned in response to the “ruined university” that no longer centers the subjects of the nation-­state.26 Feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and investigations of humans in relation to other animals and the environment have all worked to dethrone the sovereign subject and to open the doors to an increasingly diverse and mobile society. As a result, scholarly attention has shifted, in recent years, from national literatures to world literature. Histories of national literatures strive to reduce multiplicity to unity, to distill drops of the national essence out of the flood of fiction written in a given language; world literature celebrates diversity. National literatures are rooted in the native soil; world literature circles the globe, blurring boundaries and producing new hybrid forms through an ongoing process of cultural cross-­fertilization. Where patriots once sought the purification of the national language, cosmopolitans explore creative transformations produced by translation between languages.27 The migrants once placed outside the pale of national borders now provide paradigms for a postnational concept of global citizenry and world culture. Like my initial distinction between nation and empire, this contrast between national and world literatures oversimplifies: nations and their literatures are still present in our globalized world; the global playing field is not even, as dominant powers exert a disproportionate influence on subaltern spaces and “minor” literatures; and new forms of global uniformity flatten the peaks and fill the valleys of national and regional terrains that were once distinct. I explore some of these ideas in more detail later in this book and introduce them here to give an indication of the impetus behind the individual chapters to come. Imperial Fictions takes changes in today’s society as its starting point but turns its gaze on the writers of previous centuries. While people and ideas may move faster now, with the aid of new technologies, than they did in the past, human mobility per se is not new, nor were ancient societies as homogeneous as modern nationalists have liked to imagine. Imperial Fictions is written against the notion of a national literature as a streamlined narrative of the collective artistic achievements of a spiritually united people. Herein, I look, instead, at how literary works reflect moments of conflict between smaller territorial units and larger imperial, national, or global contexts. Contemporary “migrant literature” plays a crucial role in helping us reconceive the study of national literatures in the age of world literature. Not only do works by such critics as Anil Bhatti, B. Venkat Mani, and Azade Sey-

10    Imperial Fictions

han help us think about today’s cosmopolitan writers with “multiple attachments” whose works “defy easy categorization into a national, an ethnic, a cultural, or even a transcultural literature,” but their criticisms also prompt reflection on the past.28 Azade Seyhan’s comments about contemporary exiles who use their literary works to formulate responses to a sense of bifurcated identity evoke memories of similarly displaced writers in earlier centuries.29 Walther von der Vogelweide was cut off from his Viennese patron near the beginning of his promising career and spent a precarious life as an itinerant poet, currying the favor of local lords and intervening on behalf of various would-­be emperors. Thomas Mann was a double exile, first leaving his native Germany to become an American citizen and then fleeing the reactionary climate of postwar America to end his life in Switzerland. Günter Grass spent his entire career writing fiction that evokes the lost world of Danzig. Many of the authors considered in this study who were not forced into some form of exile experienced the oppressive force of a dominant power close to home. The Protestant Silesians of the baroque era wrote under the shadow of the Catholic Counter-­ Reformation; Eichendorff, a Catholic Silesian of the romantic period, ended up as a civil servant in Protestant Prussia, while Kafka, who rarely left the narrow confines of his home in Prague, was pushed to the margins of every conceivable literary, linguistic, religious, national, and imperial community. The process of globalization has sparked interest in writers whose fiction takes us beyond national borders, but it also calls for renewed attention to subnational spaces. Celia Applegate and Alon Confino have written important studies about the persistence of provincialism in the newly united nation.30 Mack Walker and Lionel Gossman focus on German hometowns and intellectuals who resisted Prussian hegemony in the name of local traditions and regional diversity.31 Birgit Tautz has published a series of articles that explore the importance of eighteenth-­century Hamburg’s links to global commerce and the slave trade.32 Her work exemplifies a larger trend toward the study of “micro-­ cultures within the larger apparent political and national movements of the time” that reveal “the capacity of European culture to generate a variety of successful internal models from its own wide range of national, regional, and local models.”33 Cities will play an important role in the present study, as we move from Nuremberg, a bustling center of the early modern German Empire, to Breslau, the thriving capital of seventeenth-­century Silesia; from the imperial city of Frankfurt to the residential town of Weimar; from Keller’s Zurich to Kafka’s Prague; from Fontane’s Berlin, an imperial Weltstadt of the late nineteenth century, to Yadé Kara’s Berlin, a national center and global crossroads on the cusp of the twenty-­first century.

Introduction    11

Accepting the fact that Germany has been politically fragmented for most of its history, Imperial Fictions rejects the notion that the national literature must compensate for this fragmentation by comprising an organic whole. Just as writers today often balance local loyalties against national allegiances and transnational influences, past writers have negotiated complex identities in relation to multiple social spaces. This is not to say that writers who pledge their allegiance to imperial or federative politics are necessarily on the side of liberalism. While appeals to diversity have become synonymous with progressive politics today, they were not always so in the past. A significant portion of the present study traces a German conservative tradition—­from Goethe and the romantics to Thomas Mann—­in which appeals to the benefits of regional autonomy and cultural diversity within older imperial frameworks went together with hostility toward democracy and suspicion of the Western liberal tradition.

Disclaimers and a Glance Ahead A few disclaimers are in order. A glance at the table of contents shows that the present study is both wide-­ranging, covering authors and texts from the Middle Ages to the present, and narrow, neglecting far more well-­known writers than are discussed. This study considers Eichendorff but not Hölderlin; Keller but not Raabe; a lot of Goethe, but less Schiller; and so on and so forth. “Had we but world enough and time . . .”—­so Erich Auerbach wistfully cites Andrew Marvell at the beginning of Mimesis. But we know that all the time in the world would not suffice to discuss every author in detail, nor could any reader hope to read such a tome, assuming that he or she might want to do so. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan recently enlisted a group of distinguished scholars to write A New History of German Literature, and Wellbery points out in his introduction that even such a volume can have no pretense of “coverage” in the sense that earlier literary historians once sought.34 Instead, Wellbery and his collaborators sought and have provided individual insights, flashes of illumination into a past that must remain largely in darkness. As the work of a single author, my study must take an even more selective approach to literary history. I have chosen canonical authors, which explains the absence of women writers and minorities. Rather than seeking to shed new light on those who were left in the shadows when the canon was formed, I here seek to revisit the center from the perspective of the periphery, to show how writers deemed essential to the history of the national literature were engaged in struggles within the conflicted spaces of the empire, as well as between

12    Imperial Fictions

Central Europe and the rest of the world. Once again, however, the broad historical scope of this book makes systematic coverage of even the most canonical authors impossible. Those seeking a more conventional literary history should look elsewhere. I use the term German literature in a broad sense, meaning primarily works that were written in some form of the German language, not works necessarily written within the boundaries of the German nation-­state (which, in any case, did not exist before 1871) and certainly not works that express the mysterious essence of German national identity. My purpose is not to practice a kind of literary imperialism by grouping together all writers into a pan-­ German unity but, rather, to trouble the very category of the nation by examining how particular writers in specific times and places negotiated between regional loyalties and imperial politics. The analyses in Imperial Fictions begin, in chapter 2, with a look at the reunification of 1989–­90 from the perspective of the Turkish-­German writer Yadé Kara. Her popular novel Selam Berlin (2003) shows how the presence of minorities in modern Germany complicates the narrative of national unity. I then turn to nineteenth-­century efforts to locate heroes of the nascent German nation within late antiquity, following Heinrich Heine on his sarcastic journey through the symbols of national unity. Drawing on recent studies of late antiquity by Peter Brown, Peter Heather, and Patrick J. Geary, I argue that the Roman Empire, long conceived by nationalist historians as the enemy of such heroes as Hermann or Arminius, actually provided a model for subsequent centuries of European history under the Holy Roman Empire. Chapters 3 and 4 pursue a threefold purpose. First, stated negatively, I read against the grain of an older literary historiography that sought to assign a place in the national literature to selected authors and works of the medieval, early modern, and baroque periods (or, as has often been the case for German baroque literature, to exclude them from that tradition). Second, stated positively, I situate authors in their historical context, to show how they balanced tensions in their literary works between local concerns and larger political settings. Third and finally, I seek to bring the work of premodern writers back into our contemporary study of German literature, by suggesting that their negotiations of multiple identities and conflicted loyalties are not entirely dissimilar to those faced by more recent writers. Not pretending to be a specialist in these areas, I draw on the work of previous scholars to build bridges between the study of modern and premodern literature. The very specialization necessary for the detailed study of premodern literatures often walls scholars off in self-­contained capsules that are all too easily jettisoned entirely from

Introduction    13

academic departments seeking to pare down their offerings in perennially precarious times. Goethe plays a central role in this study, as he always has in the history of German literature. In chapter 5, I work against the nineteenth-­century literary historians who saw him, usually together with Schiller, as the epitome of the national culture and the precursor to political unity. Instead of viewing Goethe through the retrospective lens of the Prussian-­led process of national unification, I see him emerging out of a long imperial tradition that faltered and died in the course of his lifetime, even as a new concept of the modern nation-­state emerged. Goethe combines skepticism toward those who would prop up the hollow shell of a defunct Holy Roman Empire with antipathy toward two further developments: the French movement toward liberal reform and revolutionary imperialism, on the one hand, and the religiously infused nationalism of the German romantics, on the other. Goethe directed his comments about world literature against both tendencies. Critics of the postwar period were quick to embrace the cosmopolitan concept of world literature as an antidote to the nationalist poison that had led to Germany’s physical and moral destruction. Again today, commentators on global culture have looked to Goethe for inspiration. I discuss recent theories of world literature at the end of chapter 5 and return to that topic in chapter 11. Chapters 6 and 7, on nineteenth-­ century literature, explore German-­ language responses to the rise of modern nationalism, the emergence of new forms of overseas empire, and the persistence of an older imperial tradition’s respect for local difference and regional autonomy. Joseph von Eichendorff and his political mentor Friedrich Schlegel look to the past as they react against the rise of centralized governments, casting organic localism and ancient social hierarchies as salutary alternatives to the soulless uniformity of the modern state apparatus. Eichendorff’s bitter antimodernism is infused with a melancholy awareness that the times are changing in ways he cannot prevent and to which he can offer little in the way of a viable alternative. The Swiss liberal Gottfried Keller, in contrast, embraces the secular humanism of his democratic nation, while seeking to balance his loyalties to Zurich and Switzerland with a sense of belonging to a larger German-­language cultural realm. He lived outside the new German Empire, while Theodor Fontane dwelled in its center, but the Berlin-­based Fontane was more a product of Prussian regionalism than a proponent of the newly unified nation-­state. Fontane’s late novels respond to the rise of Prussia as the center of the Second Empire and reflect on the local impact of its global outreach, just as Keller’s fiction combines Swiss locales with references to the wider world. When looking for the effect of imperialism

14    Imperial Fictions

on Germany’s late nineteenth-­century authors, we should consider not only fiction set in overseas colonies but also works that combine awareness of the nascent power’s expanding empire with a focus on national rivalries within Europe and residual provincial loyalties within emerging nation-­states. Those international tensions soon led to global conflicts that changed the map of Europe and left a lasting imprint on generations of German-­language writers. Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann both came from cities on the outskirts of empires that collapsed in the wake of the First World War. In chapter 8, I explore Kafka’s conflicted identities and his oblique response to them in his literary works, before turning to a critical period in Mann’s career as he evolved from a conservative nationalist to a liberal cosmopolitan. I argue that Mann’s early experiences as a citizen of Lübeck in Germany’s Second Empire laid the foundation for his critique of the Third Reich. He watched the nightmare of Nazi Germany unfold from the distant shores of North America, but Siegfried Lenz and Günter Grass, whose works I discuss in chapter 9, grew up in its midst. They devoted their careers to the attempt (not always entirely successful) to come to terms with the Nazi past and the long shadow it cast over the postwar period. In The German Lesson, Siegfried Lenz depicts the “banality of evil” that made the Third Reich possible, while remaining disturbingly silent about the persecution of the Jews. Günter Grass notoriously obscured his membership in the Waffen-­SS until late in life, but he produced a literary oeuvre deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize. I focus on his depiction in The Flounder of the Pomorshian-­Kashubian minority in and around the city of Danzig, in the context of European and world history. My selective survey of German literary history ends, in chapter 10, with a look at two best-­selling novels of the early twenty-­first century: Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World and Christian Kracht’s Imperium. Both writers participate in a widespread reconsideration of Germany’s imperial past from the perspective of today’s global culture. In chapter 11, finally, I return to the relation between national literatures and world literature. I consider the work of three influential theorists who have proposed models for the study of world literature (David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova), before I suggest a complementary concept of national literature as aufgehoben, in the double meaning of the German term: cancelled, in the sense that it no longer serves as a repository of cultural unity amid political fragmentation, but also preserved, as an internally diverse body of writings engaged in an ongoing dialog with other national traditions and suspended in a web of transnational affiliations.

Chapter 2

National Origins and the Imperial Past

On the evening of November 9, 1989, a low-­level East German official announced that travel restrictions for citizens of the German Democratic Republic were no longer in effect. Within hours, delirious Germans from both sides of the Iron Curtain were celebrating atop the Berlin Wall. A few weeks later, chants of protest in the name of the people and against the crumbling East German government, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), yielded to expressions of pan-­German unity, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people). In less than a year, the process of reunification was concluded. For the first time since 1945, Germany existed as a single, unified nation-­state that promised to become a tolerant, peaceful democracy, in welcome contrast to the totalitarian regime that had ended in catastrophe. History with a happy ending. Or at least so it would seem. The process of German reunification looks rather different when viewed from the perspective of someone outside the mainstream of German society, as the Turkish-­German author Yadé Kara does in her best-­selling novel Selam Berlin (2003). Her first-­ person narrative recounts Hasan Kazan’s adventures in Berlin between the momentous dates of November 9, 1989, and October 3, 1990. Born to Turkish parents in 1970 in Kreuzberg, Hasan attended elementary school in Berlin and has just completed his Abitur at a German Gymnasium in Istanbul when he sees the news of the fall of the Wall on Turkish television. Hasan takes the first flight back to Berlin, where he soon undergoes a series of life-­changing experiences: he gets a small part in a film in which he plays a Turkish drug dealer, falls in and out of love with the director’s girlfriend, and discovers his father’s two-­decade affair with a woman in East Berlin, as well as a half brother, about Hasan’s age, who has been living just on the other side of the Wall all these years. Hasan Kazan is something of a latter-­day Holden Caulfield, a troubled teen whose slangy style captures the raw emotions of adolescence against the backdrop of a city lurching, with bewildering speed, from its precarious position as a hot spot in the Cold War to its future role as the capital of the Berlin Republic. 15

16    Imperial Fictions

Selam Berlin challenges the sense of national unity expressed in those chants of “Wir sind ein Volk,” by focusing on a figure who falls between established categories. As Hasan Kazan moved back and forth between Istanbul and Berlin as a child, he got used to being viewed as an outsider in both places—­as he puts it, an “Almanci” in Turkey, a “Kanacke” in Germany.1 When he returns to Berlin in November 1989, Hasan continues to be the target of both open prejudice (a woman in Spandau refuses to rent him a room as soon as she sees that he looks foreign) and clandestine curiosity (three young women from small towns in western Germany accept him into their Berlin Wohngemeinschaft, a shared apartment, as an exotic outsider. Although Hasan spends a fair amount of time projecting his own stereotypes onto other people—­ surreptitiously studying subway riders to determine whether they are from East or West Berlin and distinguishing between West German provincials and real Berliners like himself—­he actively resists being pigeonholed by others. When Hasan’s West German film director condescendingly asks him to explain what “the Turks” are like, Hasan reacts angrily: “How should I introduce Wolf to sixty million Turks? I mean, there were all kinds: from the old shepherd on Mount Ararat to the New York Yuppie with an office on the Bosporus” (244). His three West German roommates regard him as “typically Turkish,” but Hasan has his doubts: “I didn’t have a moustache and I didn’t carry a knife, but I liked to drink black tea with cloves and eat pita bread, stuffed grape leaves, and moussaka. That was all typical for me” (204). In the end, Hasan insists defiantly that he is neither exclusively German nor purely Turkish but, rather, a mixture of the two: “Actually I had everything from both sides. From East and West, from German and Turkish, from here and there” (223). Where others note a problem of being torn between two cultures, Hasan sees the unproblematic state of forging a new identity from multiple cultural traditions: “I was the way I was. The others tried to convince me that I had problems that I didn’t have” (223).2 Hasan conceives of his identity both transnationally and locally, that is, in terms of his solidarity with others who share a similar diasporic background and the city of his birth, Berlin. “Where are you from?” (Was sind Se für een Landsmann?), questions his potential landlady in her thick Berlin accent. Hasan responds in kind: “‘Berlin!’ I said proudly” (189; Berliner! sagte ick stolz). Yadé Kara expands Hasan’s defiant sense of a hybrid identity into something of a manifesto in Café Cyprus (2008), her sequel to Selam Berlin. Hasan has moved to London, where he struggles to learn English, works at a variety of odd jobs, and experiences the emotional ups and downs of another tempestuous romance. Most of his new friends have some sort of diasporic back-

National Origins and the Imperial Past    17

ground like his own, which Hasan insists is a source of pride: “We were the new Bohemians that conquered the scene step by step. We created new images, new languages, new customs, new subjects and called the old things into question.” Emphatically rejecting the notion that he and his friends should be pitied “as a generation ‘in between’” (eine Generation des “Dazwischen”), Hasan proudly declares that they are building bridges toward the future: “We didn’t fit into any patterns and were actually something completely new. A mixture like us had never existed before on European soil.” Together, Hasan and his friends stand in the vanguard of a newly mobile generation that is dragging the rest of Europe willy-­nilly in its wake: “We went our way and pulled Europe along with us. Sometimes it limped, sometimes it dragged, sometimes it screamed like a little child and threw itself down on the ground. So what!”3 The process of German reunification thus opens up two perspectives on national identity in the post–­Cold War era. On the one hand, it offers a tale of intra-­German reconciliation, in which the political boundaries of the state were redrawn in accordance with the desires of the nation. The process was unusual only in that it involved unification rather than division; more common in recent decades have been movements toward the dissolution of former nations—­ Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—­or toward partial or complete autonomy for subnational regions, ranging from Catalonia to Scotland. While such separatist movements may challenge the authority of existing nation-­states, they do not challenge the notion of the nation per se; in fact, it could be argued that they actually reinforce the idea of a nation as representing people united by a common language, religion, or ethnicity. On the other hand, the sort of transnational allegiances that Hasan Kazan describes pose a direct threat to national sovereignty. As Arjun Appadurai suggests, the combined modern phenomena of mass migration and new electronic media have created the possibility for new kinds of “imagined communities” that cannot be contained within the parameters of the nation-­state. Global movements of people and ideas render national boundaries increasingly porous while, at the same time, “producing locality in new, globalized ways.” Thus Appadurai concludes his book with “a reminder that there is nothing mere about the local.” Appadurai’s confident prediction that “the very epoch of the nation-­state is near its end” seems premature today.4 National sovereignty has certainly been challenged by migration and the communications revolution, but nation-­ states have hardly disappeared. They are not the only game in town, but they never were. It is easy to forget that the modern nation-­state is a relatively recent invention, dating back to the late eighteenth-­century, and that the sense of unity it purports to represent is a figment of the collective imagination. The acceler-

18    Imperial Fictions

ating process of globalization has highlighted tensions—­between the local, the national, and the global—­that nation-­states sought to suppress. Nation formation was always a cultural as well as a political project; while Bismarck provoked three wars to speed the process of German unification, historians looked to the past for the roots of the German language and the origins of the German people, in a process that was repeated among other emerging European nation-­ states. Yet the nineteenth-­century intellectuals who sought the tribal roots of their ethnic identity in the time of the Völkerwanderungen were laboring under an illusion, as Patrick J. Geary has argued: “Europe’s peoples have always been far more fluid, complex, and dynamic than the imaginings of modern nationalists.”5 By the same token, today’s theorists of globalization tend to exaggerate the novelty of the present. As Scott Spector points out in his study of Kafka’s Prague, Appadurai imagines “a past where populations were or seemed to be nonplural, where identities were or seemed to be stable, where centers were centers and peripheries were peripheries. But as we have already seen in our review of turn-­of-­the-­century Prague and Bohemia, such is not the case.”6 Writers such as Yadé Kara emphasize the hybrid nature of national identities today, and novels like Selam Berlin complicate traditional understandings of the national literature. As Leslie Adelson argues in an important intervention into early debates about the status of Gastarbeiterliteratur (guest-­worker literature) or Migrantenliteratur (migrant literature), we should not categorize works by minorities as a mere “addendum” to an otherwise intact national culture. Rather, we should use such works as a way to question the very notion of a national literature conceived as the cultural expression of a homogeneous people.7 More recently, Randall Halle has made a convincing case for considering today’s transnational film as the cultural imaginary of a globalized world, in the way that print culture once “facilitated the emergence of the nation-­ state.” Yet he reminds us that nostalgia for an allegedly uniform culture of the past is misguided: “There has never been a pure, isolated, culture from which a static-­authentic individual could ever have emerged.”8 In this chapter, I explore conflicted identities and geopolitical tensions in older—­often much older—­works of German literature. As David Blackbourn and James Retallack observe in their introduction to Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place, “few people consider themselves to be wholly one thing or another,” so it should not be surprising that “multiple or hybrid identities” were the norm in imperial Germany, just as they were before and have been since.9 When we stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past, we can also start thinking about

National Origins and the Imperial Past    19

different ways in which people imagine community—­not solely in terms of homogeneous nations, but also in terms of heterogeneous empires.

Hermann: A German Hero? In the fall of 1843, Heinrich Heine traveled from Paris to Hamburg. He had been living in exile since 1831, and there was some danger that the radical poet might run into trouble with the Prussian authorities, but there were compelling reasons for him to take the risk: he wanted to visit his aging mother, talk to his German publisher, and make sure that his rich Uncle Salomon would remember him in his will.10 Heine left Paris in late October and traveled a northern route, through Brussels and Bremen, to Hamburg; he returned in early December via Hanover, Cologne, and Aachen. A few months later, Heine commemorated the journey with the semiautobiographical poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter Tale, 1844). The poem retraces Heine’s actual itinerary in reverse order, beginning with the border crossing into Prussian-­ controlled western Germany and continuing, through Aachen and Cologne, to Hamburg. The reader soon realizes that the physical journey described in the jaunty rhythm of the German Volkslied is only a vehicle for Heine’s primary purpose: to engage semiseriously with the symbols of German nationalism. He pauses in Cologne to reflect on the patriotic project to complete the medieval cathedral, contemplates the sacred waters of “Father Rhine,” and eulogizes the Germanic hero Hermann, or Arminius, as he slogs his way through the muddy Teutoburg Forest. Das ist der Teutoburger Wald, Den Tacitus beschrieben, Das ist der klassische Morast, Wo Varus steckengeblieben. Hier schlug ihn der Cheruskerfürst, Der Hermann, der edle Recke; Die deutsche Nationalität, Die siegte in diesem Drecke. Wenn Hermann nicht die Schlacht gewann, Mit seinen blonden Horden,

20    Imperial Fictions

So gäb es deutsche Freiheit nicht mehr, Wir wären römisch geworden! Behold the wood of Teutoburg, Described in Tacitus’ pages; Behold the classical marsh, wherein Stuck Varus, in past ages. Here vanquish’d him the Cheruscian prince, The noble giant, named Hermann; ’T was in this mire that triumph’d first Our nationality German. Had Hermann with his light-­hair’d hordes Not triumph’d here over the foeman, Then German freedom had come to an end, We had each been turn’d to a Roman!11 Heine refers to the leader of a Germanic tribe that defeated Roman legions in a battle of 9 CE. The Roman historian Tacitus describes the aftermath of the conflict in his Annals (the Romans seek revenge for their humiliating rout), while his Germania provides an ethnographic account of the Germanic peoples. Germania was preserved in a single manuscript and forgotten for centuries, but when it was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it proved immensely influential to generations of German nationalists.12 They found there appealing images of the Germans as a handsome, bellicose people, lacking somewhat in personal hygiene perhaps and prone to drinking too much beer, but with a robust vitality that made up for minor character flaws. From Tacitus, the Germans derived three ideas of central importance to the national self-­image. First, the Germans were genetically “pure,” that is, an indigenous people uncontaminated by racial mixtures with other peoples. Second, the Germans were in conflict with a clearly defined enemy. In subsequent centuries, the ancient Romans could be replaced by Turks, Italians, French, or Jews, but the paradigm in each case remained the same: “us” versus “them.” Third, there was a direct line of descent from the ancient Germanic warriors to the modern Germans, an untrammeled legacy of the Germanic Volk leading from past to present. For a modern nation anxious to cloak itself in ancient glory, such ideas were immensely appealing. Yet none of them were true. The battle probably did not take place where the monumental statue of Hermann looms over the

National Origins and the Imperial Past    21

Teutoburg Forest today. Arminius was not the leader of a resistance movement of the united Germanic people against Roman oppression but, instead, only the chieftain of one small tribe, among many who were more likely to be fighting one another than Roman legionnaires. In fact, many of the Germanic warriors fought for the Romans rather than against them. There was not a concerted effort on the part of the Romans to conquer the sparsely populated and densely forested lands to the east of the Rhine or the north of the Danube, as they were simply not worth the effort: “It was not the military prowess of the Germani that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty.”13 Nor was there any continuity from the Germanic tribes of the first century CE to those who sacked Rome in the fifth, let alone from the ancient Goths to the modern Germans.14 Perhaps most important in light of subsequent history, there was nothing “pure” about the Germanic peoples. Group identities were flexible, multiple, and intrinsically unstable, based on the need for strategic improvisation rather than on any sort of deep-­founded and long-­lasting ethnic or racial identity.15 The modern German nationalists who looked to the Germanic past as a source of present strength were, in a sense, simply inverting Roman imperial prejudices into a positive stereotype. Only the Romans were given a sense of historical development by ancient ethnographers. Barbarian tribes were described as foreign peoples (gentes), defined negatively by the fact that they were not Roman.16 As Christopher B. Krebs puts it, “The Germanen as one people living in Germanien were invented by Caesar.”17 To the extent that Tacitus’s Germania goes into greater detail and constructs the Germans as an admirable alternative to Roman decadence rather than as the barbarian counterpart to Roman civilization, it is an exception to the rule of Roman ethnography, yet Tacitus, too, describes the Germans as if “they were homogeneous ethnic peoples.”18 The early modern Germans were more than happy to follow Tacitus’s lead, beginning a tradition—­ of flattering self-­ portraiture and self-­ righteous persecution of perceived enemies—­that would culminate in the atrocities of modern German history. Postwar scholars have made a concerted effort to cut through the haze of nationalist ideologies and expose the facts of ancient history. Armed with the tools of modern research, including archaeological and genetic evidence in addition to written records, historians have constructed a more accurate record of the Roman Empire and its barbarian others. In the process, Edward Gibbon’s narrative of “decline and fall” has been replaced by the concept of late antiquity as a period marked as much by continuities and creative transformation as catastrophic collapse.19 The “Dark Ages” once thought to mark the temporary end to Western civilization have emerged as a period of cultural ferment that gave

22    Imperial Fictions

birth to modern Europe.20 This new understanding of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages provides a key to rethinking German national identity and, with it, the history of the national literature. In the place of a single people united by an unchanging ethnic identity, we find fluid groups engaged in an ongoing process of strategic redefinition. Instead of opposition to a series of clearly defined enemies, we see porous boundaries and cross-­cultural fertilizations. Finally, the ancient Roman Empire that Tacitus and his modern admirers construed as the antithesis of the Germanic people provides, instead, a model for the empire that governed most of the Germanic peoples for the next millennium.

The Janus-­Faced Roman Empire The Roman Empire set the standard for the many European empires that followed: it was vast, powerful, long-­lasting, and exceedingly cruel.21 Nearly perpetual warfare fed the expanding empire with a steady diet of newly conquered territories; defeated peoples were exploited and enslaved. Enemies who tried to resist or slaves who dared to revolt were crushed with ruthless brutality. When they were not engaged in actual conflict, Romans staged mock gladiatorial contests between man and beast for the entertainment of the masses. Subsequent empires followed suit. Charlemagne is said to have ordered the execution of some forty-­five hundred Saxons.22 Columbus’s discovery of the New World touched off a scramble for territory that eventually brought vast areas of the world under direct or indirect European control and caused untold misery for millions of subjugated peoples. The curiosity that inspired the European Enlightenment also motivated discoveries and inventions that helped to turn slavery into big business on a global scale. Napoleon, who styled himself as the enlightened heir to the French Revolution, conscripted the men of his many captured territories and sent them marching off to conquer more. Hitler’s mania for more Lebensraum led to world war and systematic genocide. It is no wonder, then, that the words evil and empire fit together in the popular imagination, inspiring blockbuster movies from Ben Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960) to the never-­ending Star Wars franchise. As Stephen Howe puts it, the “idea that empire is a Bad Thing suffuses almost all our imaginative worlds.”23 The Roman Empire nevertheless bequeathed another, less belligerent legacy to subsequent generations. While it offered a model of imperial grandeur based on foreign conquest and centralized authority, it also provided a blueprint for political organizations that allowed for considerable local autonomy and regional diversity under the aegis of imperial authority. The Roman

National Origins and the Imperial Past    23

Empire covered a vast geographical area and included peoples with many different languages, religions, and cultural traditions, yet it “was ruled by an aristocracy of amazingly uniform culture, taste and language.”24 A Roman senator who traveled north to distant Trier was pleased to discover a city that was “Roman to the core,”25 and the same would have been true if he had visited outposts in London or Carthage. Roman law extended across the realm, as did the ultimate authority of the Roman emperor. The ruling elite shared a common literary education, based on rigorous training in grammar, rhetoric, and the style of selected classical authors. Students in the Latin-­speaking Western Roman Empire were expected to memorize long passages from Virgil, while those in the Eastern Roman Empire did the same with Homer.26 Such training served a practical purpose in a culture that placed a high value on public oratory and written eloquence, but it also provided what Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady would sneeringly refer to as “verbal class distinction,” making those who belonged to the social elite instantly recognizable. Roman literary education gave cultural capital to the ruling class; thus, from today’s perspective, we can “see Roman literary culture as an attribute of power, rather than virtue.”27 Entry into the ruling elite was not impossible. Although the Roman Empire was established by violent conquest of foreign “barbarians,” it eventually assimilated conquered peoples and allowed them to become an integral part of the Empire that they or their parents had once resisted. Even if they did not become Roman generals or senators, once-­conquered peoples could continue their lives much as before. Though governed by a uniformly educated cultural elite, the Roman Empire hardly aspired to the sort of totalitarian social control practiced by twentieth-­century dictatorships. Distances were simply too great (and transportation was too slow) to permit imperial intervention into the day-­ to-­day details of local governments. While the elegantly stylized Latin of the aristocrats seemed frozen in the time of Virgil, the common people probably spoke a form of the language that had already begun to evolve toward what would eventually become Italian, Spanish, and French.28 Elsewhere in the empire, one might encounter native speakers of anything from Celtic to Cappadocian, from Punic to Aramaic.29 Religious difference was tolerated as long as it did not get in the way of imperial authority. Each region had its local gods, each city had its own religious traditions, and this was considered good: “To be a polytheist was to glory in the fact that the gods did not want unity. Rather, they expressed themselves through the infinite diversity of human customs, inherited from the distant past.”30 Local loyalties were not incompatible with allegiance to the empire: “Whenever possible, local tradition was assimilated into or equated with that of Rome. . . . From Syria to Gaul, North Africa to the

24    Imperial Fictions

Danubian frontier, local landowners remained deeply rooted to the particularities of their region or patria.”31 Thus the “late Roman world always maintained a double face, local and imperial.”32 While the Roman Empire had always tolerated a high degree of internal diversity, its external boundaries became increasingly permeable in late antiquity. According to recent estimates, “from the time of Augustus, at least half of the total army—­all its auxiliary formations—­was always composed of non-­ Romans, a substantial number of whom were recruited from the Germanic world.”33 Germanic tribes living along the imperial borders engaged in commercial exchange and began to adopt Roman customs. “It is the closeness of Rome to central Europe that is surprising, not the notional chasm between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians,’” notes Peter Brown, who concludes that it is “profoundly misleading” to “call the entry of the Goths into the Roman empire a ‘barbarian invasion,’” since “the Middle Ages begin, not with a dramatic ‘fall of Rome,’ but with the barely perceived and irreversible absorption, by the ‘barbarians,’ of the ‘middle ground’ created in the Roman frontier zone.”34

Imperial Germany and the Legacy of Rome As the name of the Third Reich suggests, the architects of that notorious regime styled themselves as heirs to an imperial tradition that extended back, through Bismarck and Charlemagne, to ancient Rome. Ever mindful of political symbolism, Hitler chose Potsdam for the inauguration ceremonies of the “new Germany” in the wake of the March elections of 1933, partly because the Reichstag had burned down a few weeks earlier and was thus not available, but also because Potsdam offered the opportunity to display continuity between past and present. As Christopher Clark explains, “The ‘Day of Potsdam,’ as it has come to be known, was a concentrated act of political communication. It offered the image of a synthesis, even a mystical union, between the old Prussia and the new Germany.”35 The political theater of the Third Reich extended the sense of historical continuity still further into the past, summoning up national heroes out of the medieval mists and sending its soldiers to march about with banners and stiff-­armed salutes like a cohort of latter-­day Romans. The use of the word Reich, notes Richard J. Evans, “conjured up an image among educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bismarck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God’s Empire here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all

National Origins and the Imperial Past    25

German speakers in Central Europe—­‘one People, one Reich, one Leader,’ as the Nazi slogan was to put it.”36 As a result, any mention of the words Germany and empire in the same sentence seems certain to awaken bad memories, and the Federal Republic of Germany was indeed founded in deliberate opposition to the evils of Germany’s imperial past.37 At the same time, however, the constitution of the new German republic incorporated elements of federalism that also have their roots in an imperial tradition of a more benevolent sort, as we shall see when we return to the past. Whether we speak of rigid walls that suddenly collapsed or permeable border zones gradually infiltrated by half-­civilized barbarians, the fact remains that the Roman Empire came to an end, at least in the West; the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, would continue for another thousand years. As the Roman Empire imploded in the West, the uniform web of Roman elite culture that had stitched it together gradually disappeared; peoples who had been both local and imperial became nothing but local. Far-­flung trade networks collapsed in a process of “dramatic economic simplification.”38 Communications broke down: “People simply did not have regular information about what was going on outside their own local and regional circuits.”39 Politics, too, became increasingly local: “In the last two millennia the period 500–­ 800 was probably when aristocratic power in the West was least totalizing, and local autonomies were greatest.”40 Religion was also affected by the fall of Rome, as the universal Christian church devolved into multiple “micro-­ Christendoms.”41 As a result, the elite literary culture that had distinguished and united the Roman aristocrats seemed increasingly irrelevant: “To know Virgil and the other secular classics by heart, to be able to write poetry and complex prose, . . . ceased to be important; swordsmanship, or the Bible, were far more relevant sources of cultural capital.”42 In the course of the Middle Ages, there were sporadic efforts to reestablish something of the transregional sense of European unity that had once existed in the larger Roman Empire. In the eighth century, Charlemagne led a relentless series of wars against Saxons, Lombards, Avars, and others, until he controlled most of Western Europe, with the exception of the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles. He held this empire together with a combination of personal charisma, military force, and an “extensive and effective communications network.”43 As he grew older, the peripatetic monarch settled more and more near the warm waters of Aachen, giving his empire a center of the sort that had once existed in Rome. The ancient capital still retained its symbolic power, however, and Charlemagne’s imperial crowning by Pope Leo III took place in Rome, on Christmas Day 800. Leo sought to shore up the power of the

26    Imperial Fictions

Western papacy against the Byzantine Empire by crowning a new heir to Rome, but as far as the Franks were concerned, “Charlemagne was an emperor but not a specifically Roman one; he owed his title not to papal coronation but to an acknowledgement of his power by the peoples he ruled.”44 Aachen remained the center of Charlemagne’s empire, and he spearheaded the Carolingian Renaissance from there. He assembled a group of intellectuals from around Europe at his court, in the effort to standardize the practice of Christianity throughout the realm, promote correct Latin, and recover at least some of the work by authors of classical antiquity.45 The goal of these efforts was to improve present-­day morality, knit together the members of a disparate realm, and assert the continuity of a tradition that extended back into antiquity: “Latin provided the means for the Franks to associate themselves with the Roman past in the most fundamental way possible. It became their own past too.”46 One should not exaggerate the unity of Charlemagne’s realm. The distances and difficulties of travel that made day-­to-­day management of local communities impossible in the Roman Empire had only grown worse in the early Middle Ages and would not improve substantially until the end of the eighteenth century. Although Charlemagne’s empire was larger than that of any European ruler before Napoleon, it was far smaller than the Roman Empire. Ancient Roman civilization lasted the better part of a millennium; Charlemagne’s empire disintegrated within decades after his death. The Carolingian Renaissance was limited to a narrow circle of intellectuals centered at Charlemagne’s court and had little impact on the vast majority of his illiterate subjects. Even at the height of his power, Charlemagne’s supreme authority did not preclude allegiances of a more local sort,47 and when he died, regional loyalties soon stepped in to fill the void. Nevertheless, Charlemagne established an empire that would last, in one form or another, for the next thousand years. As we have become accustomed to thinking in terms of modern nation-­states, it is important to remember that the Holy Roman Empire was a political organization of an entirely different sort. As James J. Sheehan explains, “The Reich came from a historical world in which nationality had no political meaning and states did not command total sovereignty. Unlike nations and states, the Reich did not insist upon preeminent authority and unquestioning allegiance. Its goal was not to clarify and dominate but rather to order and balance fragmented institutions and multiple loyalties.”48 American and French revolutionaries pioneered the notion of an egalitarian nation-­state founded on lateral bonds between brothers, leading to the formation of the Sons of Liberty in America and to the French rallying cry “Liberté, egalité, fraternité.”49 The Holy Roman Empire, in contrast, was

National Origins and the Imperial Past    27

based on vertical hierarchies among subjects who knew that they were not created equal or endowed with certain inalienable rights. Modern nation-­ states have clearly defined borders and, thus, immediately recognizable shapes (Benedict Anderson speaks, in this context, of the “map-­as-­logo”),50 whereas the Holy Roman Empire was an amorphous conglomerate of duchies, bishoprics, kingdoms, and imperial city-­states. Nations delimit, whereas the Holy Roman Empire was conceived in universal terms. As Anderson explains, “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.”51 The Holy Roman Empire did, however, conceive of itself as at least potentially universal, the political center of global Christendom. In reality, no religion or empire has ever ruled the entire planet. As Michael Borgolte observes, Charlemagne briefly tried to establish a universal empire, but his successors quickly realized that the effort could not be sustained. While the Eastern Roman Empire clung to its universal aspirations, the Western Roman Empire acknowledged the existence of other realms: “In the place of the practically impossible universal empire there arose a multiplicity of states in Western Europe, without a plan and without a governing idea.”52 Charlemagne was neither French nor German in today’s sense, although modern nationalists in both countries have tried to claim him as one of their own.53 The Treaty of Verdun (843) that split Charlemagne’s empire into three parts did not mark the first stage in the development of discrete European nations but, rather, reflected only “dynastic conflicts within the royal house” of Charlemagne’s children and grandchildren.54 Only in the course of the later Middle Ages did powerful monarchies with centralized administrations begin to emerge in England and France—­but not in Germany. It is true that the far-­flung Roman Empire of the first centuries became increasingly identified with the German nation toward the end of the Middle Ages. As Georg Schmidt explains, “those regions of Italy or France as well as the Netherlands or Switzerland that belonged to the medieval feudal Empire had practically nothing to do with that Empire of the German Nation that operated as a political actor in internal and foreign policy.” Schmidt goes on to observe that the early modern “rump Empire” of the German nation “had become more akin to a state” and was recognized as such by its contemporaries.55 But the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation “was never ruled centrally, let alone absolutely. The emperor did not rule as a monarch, and the Empire was viable as a political actor only after first consulting with the Estates. . . . Here, unlike other countries, harmony and

28    Imperial Fictions

unity meant not exclusion, but inclusion, tolerance, and negotiated agreements instead of hegemonic dictums.”56 For some twentieth-­century historians, Germany’s deviance from the “normal” course of national development followed by England and France had fateful consequences. Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Origins of Modern Germany tells a tale of missed opportunities that marked the beginning of Germany’s “territorial disunity, of the fantastic map of German particularism and of the unlimited sovereignty of the princes, which were the curses of German history from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and which, indurated through long generations, have perhaps not been entirely obliterated even to-­ day.” By “to-­day,” Barraclough means 1944; as he notes in his preface, the “greater part” of his book was “written under conditions of active service in the Royal Air Force.” His still highly readable work tries to make sense of the present in the light of Germany’s past, and he concludes that German particularism is to blame, that German history is “a story of discontinuity, of development cut short, of incompleteness and retardation,” resulting in an unfulfilled yearning for national unity, which the Nazis skillfully exploited.57 The German Sonderweg (distinct but deviant path) that Barraclough traces found its most influential spokesman slightly earlier, in Helmuth Plessner, who seems, in turn, to have been influenced by Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1918).58 In this view, German particularism went hand in hand with an aversion to Western democracy. Germans celebrated the ethnic unity of the German Volk rather than signing on to a social contract designed to protect universal human rights in the modern nation-­state. In Mann’s view, true Germans were “nonpolitical” creatures happy to leave the business of government to others while they plunged the depths of the German soul. According to Plessner, the unfortunate result of the German tendency toward antidemocratic irrationalism was that it opened the door to an authoritarian government eager to compensate for its belated entrance onto the world stage with a recklessly aggressive militarism that was either unchecked by a nation of otherworldly poets and thinkers or actively supported by those seduced into unreason by the longing for myth made manifest in the intoxicating atmosphere of fascist politics.59 The Sonderweg thesis of German history has been challenged on multiple fronts. Richard J. Evans claims that “of all the myths of German history that have been mobilized to account for the coming of the Third Reich in 1933, none is less convincing than that of the ‘unpolitical German.’”60 David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley argue that nineteenth-­century Germany was not as deviant from the European norm as claimed and that to argue otherwise is to ideal-

National Origins and the Imperial Past    29

ize developments in Great Britain while bolstering “a morbid mystique about Germany.”61 Rüdiger Safranski claims that Thomas Mann ran the risk of precisely this danger when he cast his poetic reckoning with German National Socialism in the mold of the Faust myth, and Mann worried that he himself might have been guilty of imposing a “lofty interpretation” onto “the sordid facts of history” (höhere Interpretation des kruden Geschehens).62 Thus recent historians such as Peter H. Wilson have begun to reevaluate the legacy of the Holy Roman Empire. Instead of viewing it as an impediment to the “normal” development of the centralized nation-­state, they have seen it as a viable alternative to forms of belligerent nationalism and as the precursor to today’s European Union.63 Some historians nevertheless continue to seek the origins of modern German nationalism in the early modern period. As Caspar Hirschi points out, the Italian humanists gave a dramatic new impetus to the development of early modern German nationalism. In a certain sense, one could even argue that the Germans were “an Italian invention,” for Italians were the first “to label the visitors from the north as one single language group by calling them Teutonici.”64 The designation was neither neutral nor flattering, since the Italians viewed the Germans as crude and violent barbarians.65 An opportunity to turn this negative stereotype into a source of pride presented itself in 1425, when Poggio Bracciolini confirmed that there was a copy of Tacitus’s long-­lost Germania in a German monastery.66 The document was copied and returned to Rome in 1455, where it soon inspired Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Account of Germany, which combined a paraphrase of Tacitus with the future pope’s reflections about the German peoples he had observed in his travels to the north.67 In 1492, the German humanist Conrad Celtis held his famous inaugural address at the University of Ingolstadt, in which he claimed that modern Germans were the true heirs to ancient Rome. By the end of the decade, he had published his new edition of Tacitus, together with the beginnings of a study of modern Germany, designed to bring the ancient source material up to date. With the republication of Tacitus’s Annals, Germans learned of the exploits of Arminius, or Hermann, which inspired Ulrich von Hutten to compose his stridently patriotic and dialogic Arminius (ca. 1520), just as Luther was beginning to heap scorn on the pope and the corrupt Catholic Church in Italy. Aided by the emergence of a newly vigorous German vernacular and abetted by the invention of the printing press, a bellicose sense of national pride swept over a region that had languished in obscurity for centuries. Given the course of German history, it is not surprising that scholars such as Simon Schama and Christopher B. Krebs have constructed compelling nar-

30    Imperial Fictions

ratives that begin with Nazi storm troopers marching up to an Italian villa in search of the oldest copy of Tacitus’s Germania, “the birth certificate of the German race,”68 and that then loop back to a tale leading from Roman antiquity, through the Renaissance recovery of the Latin text, to its ideological abuse in the hands of increasingly rabid and racist nationalists. Yet, in seeking the seeds of an evil German nationalism in the early modern period, both authors create a sense of teleological progression that obscures the complexities of the past. As Thomas A. Brady Jr. points out, the sense of German national identity was still very much in flux in the early modern period: “By 1500 there were ‘the Empire,’ ‘the German Nation,’ and ‘Germany,’ no one of which was quite identical with another, nor was any uncontested.” For the humanists, “Germany” consisted of “a family of homelands whose shapes, character, and qualities remained stable no matter who might be ruling them”; a “German was one whom other Germans recognized to be German”; and “German” was thus a “flexible, ambiguous notion [that] could be applied in a very wide sense.”69 While Schama and Krebs seek the origins of an exclusionary concept of national identity that limits membership to a single racial elite, Brady describes an inclusive pattern of multiple identities in the early modern era that could combine nascent nationalism with local loyalties and a sense of belonging to a universal Christian empire. Len Scales and Caspar Hirschi have come to similar conclusions about the nature of early German nationalism, by shifting their focus from the early modern period to the late Middle Ages. For Geoffrey Barraclough, this was the period when the movement toward German unity was fatally derailed. During his long reign, the Sicilian emperor Frederick II (1215–­50) “made no attempt to oppose the existing tendencies to decentralization or to reaffirm the rights of the crown”70 (as he was preoccupied by events in Italy), and when he was gone, the die was cast: “Without the unity provided by the crown, the principalities of north and east Germany went their own way, fulfilling a destiny which was provincial rather than national.”71 The Golden Bull of 1356 established a system of seven electors who would henceforth choose the emperor, thus further shifting power to the princes: “The monarchy was henceforward a nullity and German unity a mere façade.” The Holy Roman Empire—­the most powerful empire in Europe on the eve of the Investiture Controversy and, again, under the reign of Frederick Barbarossa—­“faded into the background,” and “the German territorial states advanced to the front of the stage.”72 Without denying that power devolved in the late Middle Ages from a relatively potent emperor to multiple princes in discrete German territories, Scales and Hirschi contest the conclusion that political fragmentation was necessarily

National Origins and the Imperial Past    31

inimical to emerging nationalism. According to one point of view, there is a simple choice: either a particular group of people moves toward political unity under a strong monarch who inspires nationalist sentiments, or they do not, in which case loyalties remain merely local. Hirschi argues that the Roman Empire suggests an alternative possibility. Citing Cicero, Hirschi notes that each imperial citizen who was not born in Rome had “two different fatherlands,” the “patria naturae or patria propria, the place he came from and grew up in,” and the “patria civitatis or patria communis, the common fatherland by law, which covered the whole territory of the Roman republic.”73 Thus one could be both local and imperial, and this additive concept of multiple identities served the Roman Empire well, as it drew together diverse peoples across a vast geographical area into a single political entity. A similar sense of regional diversity within a larger imperial unity obtained in the medieval successor to the ancient imperium. Rather than viewing the decentralization of imperial power in the late Middle Ages as something new and dangerous, Scales suggests that it only highlighted a tendency that had been present from the start: “The sharing of rule between the monarch and a plethora of established regional powers was fundamental to the constitutional order of Germany from the first emergence of a separate sphere of rule there out of the ruins of Charlemagne’s empire.” Scales queries, “Might it even be that the very weakness of rulership supplied its own stimuli to popular interest and identification?” Concluding that it might, he therefore insists that the dual identities of the nation and the empire were understood as complementary rather than contradictory: “The universal found a focus in the German.”74 Thus the early modern period bequeathed a double legacy to the history of German nationalism, which can be viewed as a modulation of tendencies already present in the Janus-­faced Roman Empire of antiquity. On the one hand, Tacitus provided the script for an understanding of the nation based on ethnic purity and hostility toward external enemies, which plays into the hands of modern historians constructing teleological narratives that march toward the twentieth century like jackbooted Nazis in search of their tribal roots. On the other hand, historians such as Brady, Scales, and Hirschi suggest that local, national, and imperial identities were held in a delicate balance, in ways that recall the complexities of ancient Rome’s mixture of local diversity within imperial unity. As we shall see, this second notion, of a German nation united in its multifariousness, had the greatest impact on the thought and practices of generations of German writers, from the baroque dramatists’ effort to negotiate a balance of power between Protestant Silesia and the Catholic Counter-­ Reformation to Goethe’s belief that Germany’s political fragmentation was a

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source of cultural strength; from Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph von Eichendorff’s opposition to the homogeneous nation-­state in the name of imperial diversity to the persistence of regionalism in the literature of the Second Empire; from Thomas Mann’s accusation that Nazi Germany had betrayed its Goethean legacy of local cosmopolitanism to Kafka’s fascination with minor literatures. From this perspective, Günter Grass’s resistance to national reunification in the name of Germany’s federalist tradition seems not a stubborn attempt to swim against the stream of history but, rather, an effort to reaffirm a long-­standing tradition, while Yadé Kara’s claim that Europe has never before seen the sort of multicultural mixtures she portrays in her fiction is both right, in the sense that the particular configurations are new, and wrong, in that the tradition of identities constituted in multiplicity is very old indeed.

Chapter 3

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance

In the beginning, German studies were medieval studies. The amateur enthusiasts who had begun collecting manuscripts of medieval poets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries yielded to academics with endowed chairs who taught at leading universities. The new scholarly focus on the Middle Ages went hand in hand with popular enthusiasm for the period. While Karl Lachmann was setting a new standard for scholarly precision in his editions of medieval texts, popularizers such as San Marte (A. Schulz) and Karl Simrock translated medieval literature into modern German for the general public.1 Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen soon began to inspire the sort of medieval kitsch produced by Baron de la Motte Fouqué and his imitators, while Richard Wagner’s operas glamorized a largely imaginary past. Nationalism played a large role in what might paradoxically be termed the “medieval Renaissance.” The first academic chair in German studies went to Friedrich Hagen von der Hagen, who had prepared a popular edition of Das Nibelungenlied designed to inspire German troops in the fight against Napoleon. Nationalists looked back wistfully to the splendors of the Stauferzeit, when Germany was ruled by members of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, and forward to the day when Emperor Frederick Barbarossa would awaken from his centuries-­long slumber to lead the Germans to even greater glory. Monuments arose on the hallowed ground of the medieval past: a larger-­than-­life statue of Barbarossa was placed atop the ruins of a medieval fortress; patriotic citizens contributed to the completion of the Cologne Cathedral; and students celebrated the rebirth of the German nation at the Wartburg, the castle where Luther once translated the New Testament into German and where the Minnesänger (German lyric poets and singers) were said to have held their fabled competition.2 The nineteenth-­century fascination with medieval literature and art had deep historical roots. The early modern rediscovery of Tacitus had shown that 33

34    Imperial Fictions

a sense of national belonging could be inspired by a common past. As the scales in the eighteenth-­century “quarrel between the ancients and moderns” began to tip away from those who defended the timeless standard of classical antiquity and toward an appreciation of the relative beauty of subsequent historical periods, the Middle Ages suddenly seemed invaluable precisely because it had produced nationally specific works of art and architecture.3 A turning point came when young Goethe, studying for his law degree in Strasbourg, had a sudden flash of national pride while contemplating the city’s Gothic cathedral: “That is German architecture, our architecture, whereas the Italians cannot boast of their own architectural style, still less the French.”4 Although Goethe would return to classical antiquity for poetic inspiration in later years and scorn those younger Romantics who embraced the affected piety of a sentimentalized past, the vogue for medieval art continued unabated among artists and members of the general public. Scholars today continue to recognize the importance of the medieval art and culture that was rejected by the Renaissance, but it has become increasingly difficult and equally undesirable to force the medieval past into the procrustean bed of distinct national cultures. The great achievements of German-­ language literature around 1200 would have been inconceivable without the overwhelming influence of French courtly culture.5 Arthurian legends circulated in the literatures of Great Britain and across the continent, with little regard for linguistic or political boundaries. Frederick Barbarossa aspired to be emperor of the Western world (like Charlemagne before him), not the leader of the German nation-­state.6 While some of the authors and texts that were singled out as representative of the imagined community may use the word German or mention “Germany,” the works are less about national unity than about regional diversity and imperial politics. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, authors negotiated tenuous balances between local lords and the emperor or between rival claimants to the imperial throne within the context of an ongoing struggle for power between church and state, emperor and pope. In this chapter, I examine texts that were claimed by later generations to represent the German nation. The first is the anonymous Annolied (Song of Anno), a poem that is thought to have been written in or around the city of Cologne in the immediate wake of the Investiture Controversy. I turn next to the political poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide, written a little more than a century later, and conclude with a look at three works published around 1500 in praise of Nuremberg, the city that the German romantics, Richard Wagner, and the National Socialists proclaimed as the nation’s “imaginary capital.”7 My

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    35

goal (to reiterate a disclaimer stated in the present study’s introduction) is not to provide a comprehensive survey of older German literature but to pick a place, an author, and an anonymous text that were appropriated for nationalist purposes and to view them in their prenational, imperial contexts.

The Song of Anno In the fourth chapter of Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977), Günter Grass stages a conversation between Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius. The setting is the city of Danzig (Gdansk) on September 2, 1636, nearly two decades into a war that had devastating consequences for the German-­speaking regions of Central Europe. Although he is only in his late thirties, Opitz is already sick and tired, ground down by the war, his exile from his native Silesia, and his precarious position as a diplomat in the service of the Polish king. When the younger poet and playwright asks him about his future writing plans, Opitz responds that he no longer has the energy to complete a tragedy but that he still hopes to translate some psalms: “He further harbored the intention of bringing certain Breslau treasures to light and acquainting the world once more with the long-­ forgotten Song of Anno, in order that it might endure.”8 Opitz died of the plague only a few weeks after he published an edition of the poem in honor of Anno II (ca. 1010—­1075), archbishop of Cologne.9 Patriotism motivated Opitz to publish this hitherto obscure work of early medieval German literature. Opitz is best known today for his Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (Concerning German poetry; 1624), in which he encouraged his fellow Germans to write in their native tongue, rather than the Latin in which he had composed his own early verses. Writing at a time when virtually all European intellectuals were bilingual in Latin and their native tongue and when most could read several more languages, it never occurs to Opitz to champion monolingualism. He lards his treatise about the need for German vernacular poetry with copious examples from Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch poets, all cited in the original languages. What concerns Opitz is that German has become flooded with a surfeit of foreign loanwords. Just as today’s Académie française seeks to stem the tide of American influence into French, Opitz and his fellow members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruit-­Bearing Society) encouraged purging foreign elements from the German language.10 In editing the Song of Anno, Opitz sought to provide Germans with an early example of their language’s original purity and expressive strength. Germans could take pride in the achievements of the past, which

36    Imperial Fictions

would inspire new literature in the present.11 But what image of “Germany” does the Song of Anno convey? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at the text in its historical context. The future Bishop Anno II was born to undistinguished Swabian parents but rose to positions of highest authority in the German Reich by dint of his intelligence, diligence, and ruthlessness. He was probably educated in Bamberg and Paderborn, before serving as chaplain at the royal court.12 King Henry III invested Anno as the archbishop of Cologne in the spring of 1056, but Henry died unexpectedly later that year, plunging the empire into a period of protracted civil war. In 1062, Anno abducted the designated heir to the throne—­ the future Henry IV was only twelve at the time—­and thus established himself as the de facto ruler or coruler of the Holy Roman Empire for the next two years. Anno was a particularly effective secular and religious leader in Cologne, as he expanded the city’s territories and founded five new monasteries. Yet there was little love lost between the bishop and his flock. King Henry III had chosen the foreign Swabian as archbishop against the will of the Cologne residents, and Anno’s harsh and arbitrary rule won him few friends in subsequent years. Matters came to a head in 1074, when he enraged local merchants by confiscating one of their ships and its cargo. Anno had to flee for his life, escaping through a hole in the old Roman city wall, known still today as the Annoloch (Hole of Anno). Shortly thereafter, Anno returned to Cologne with a small army to exact a terrible revenge: he ordered the soldiers to plunder the city, fined those accused of participating in the revolt, and had the ringleaders blinded. In the following year, Anno died of a painful illness. Somewhat improbably, the pitiless Machtpolitiker was declared a saint in 1183. We do not know exactly when or by whom the Song of Anno was written, though it seems most likely that the author was a monk in Siegburg (one of the monasteries founded by Anno) who was understandably eager to defend the reputation of his former master.13 Scholars have speculated that it could have been written as early as 1077 and as late as 1126, but most opt for the last decades of the eleventh century.14 The Song of Anno is somewhat unusual as a work of hagiography, in that the ostensible hero does not appear until the last third of the poem, where we receive only a skeletal outline of Anno’s career, told from the perspective of a loyal supporter. We learn that Anno was a regent for the young King Henry (although not that he had kidnapped the adolescent), that he fought with the people of Cologne but eventually forgave them, that he miraculously restored the eyesight of a blind man, and that he suffered terribly before his death. Conceding that there was one stain on Anno’s otherwise spotless record (presumably a reference to his brutal reprisal against the civic upris-

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    37

ing in Cologne), the author notes that the archbishop atoned for his sins and was, on the whole, very good. Making the Song of Anno particularly interesting today is the author’s embedding of the life of the archbishop in the larger context of Christian salvation history and secular world history. The poem opens with a brief summary of the biblical narrative of creation, man’s fall from grace, and the promise of redemption through Jesus Christ. It is thus generally assumed that the poet was familiar with the slightly earlier Ezzolied (Song of Ezzo, ca. 1060–­64), which also presents a German-­language account of Christian salvation history.15 The Song of Anno differs significantly from the Song of Ezzo, however, in that it goes on to offer a fascinating (if fanciful) version of ancient history, beginning when the Romans sent Caesar to fight the Germans. With great difficulty, Caesar subdues the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Franks. The conquering hero is nevertheless rejected by his own people when he tries to return to Rome, so he goes back to Germany, where he is able to convince his former foes to be his allies in the struggle against the Roman Empire. Together, they win a great victory. Caesar is honored by his people, and he, in turn, honors his German allies, who are said to have been the special friends of Rome from that time on. According to the Song of Anno, the Franks and the Romans are both descended from the Trojans and, thus, are more like long-­lost cousins than mortal enemies. After Caesar’s death, Christ is born, and the Romans send missionaries to the Roman-­German cities of the north. Anno can trace his position as archbishop of Cologne back to the original Roman missionaries. This brief overview of the Song of Anno allows us to make a few preliminary observations. The Song of Anno is first and foremost a work of local history, a flattering portrait of the recently deceased archbishop. Anno’s pivotal role in imperial politics during a particularly unsettled time suggests that the work also touches on matters that extend beyond the immediate region, although the precise way it does so remains a matter of debate (discussed below). Finally, the poem places Anno’s life in the still-­larger context of world history, both secular and sacred, adding a global dimension to the career of a local saint and imperial politician. Of particular importance for the interpretation of the Song of Anno is the gap between Anno’s death in 1075 and the composition of the poem, which took place no earlier than 1077 and quite possibly much later. Anno died when the Investiture Controversy was just beginning, and the poem was written only after it was well underway. In December 1075, Pope Gregory VII (1073–­85) excommunicated Henry IV, the German king and Holy Roman Emperor whom Anno had once kidnapped. The immediate source of the conflict between the emperor and the

38    Imperial Fictions

pope turned on the question of lay investiture, that is, whether unconsecrated laymen (kings rather than popes) had the power to invest new bishops with sacred authority. The larger issue at stake was the question of who held supreme power in Western Europe, the church or the state, the pope or the emperor? As the leader of the Clunaic movement, which sought to reform the Catholic Church and reassert papal power, Gregory insisted that only he had the right to invest bishops. When Henry challenged the pope’s decision, Gregory swiftly excommunicated him. In an effort to regain his power, Henry made a treacherous journey in the dead of winter across the Alps, to seek an audience with the pope at the fortress of Canossa in northern Italy. Gregory there revoked the excommunication, but only after Henry had prostrated himself barefoot in the snow. For nineteenth-­ century German nationalists, Henry’s “Gang nach Canossa” (journey to Canossa) marked a shameful low point in their history. Bismarck famously vowed that he would never “return to Canossa,” never humiliate himself and his nation before a foreign power.16 Here again, however, we must resist the tendency to view medieval controversies through the prism of modern international conflicts. The Investiture Controversy did not pit Germany against Italy but, rather, set emperor against pope, in a battle that was as much theological as it was political and that was further complicated by local power struggles within the German territories. Henry’s public act of submission to the pope may actually have been a tactical ploy to regain power over his potentially rebellious princes.17 The question that concerns us here is where the author of the Song of Anno’s sympathies lay in regard to the controversy. Eminent medievalist Helmut de Boor assumes that the anonymous author was loyal to the pope, which seems plausible enough, given that the author was most likely a monk in the service of the Catholic Church.18 As Ernst von Reusner notes, however, the author of the Song of Anno seems curiously reluctant to mention either pope or emperor in the poem. In Reusner’s view, the author deliberately decided not to take sides on the burning political topic of the day and focused instead on the figure of Anno as a harbinger of future salvation: the Investiture Controversy is a sign of the end, when Christ will return and resolve all earthly conflict in eternal heavenly peace; Anno is not yet the savior but a sign of the savior soon to come. Reusner concludes his analysis on a critical note, contending that the anonymous author’s resignation in the face of earthly politics marks a fateful anticipation of a long and dangerous tendency of German writers and intellectuals to seek metaphysical refuge when political turmoil rages on earth.19 Eberhard Nellmann offers a third possible interpretation: in his view, the

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    39

author does take sides, but with the empire, although perhaps not with the emperor himself, against the pope. Nellmann notes that in verse 18, the poet seems particularly interested in the Roman Republic that preceded Caesar’s role as the first Roman emperor. On a tablet of gold the Romans inscribed the names of 300 senators, who maintained order and respect and who discussed day and night how they might preserve their preeminence. All the leaders followed them, since they did not want to have a king. Rômêre scrivin cisamine in einir guldîne tavelin driuhunterit altheirrin, dî dir plêgin zuht unt êrin, die dagis unti nahtis riedin, wî si ir êrin behîldin. den volgedin die herzogin al, wanti si ni woldin kuning havin.20 Nellmann takes the poet’s interest in the Roman senators’ aversion to royalty, coupled with the poet’s stress on the importance of the various Germanic tribes joining together in the struggle to conquer Rome, as indicative that the poet might have been more sympathetic with the princes allied against Henry IV than with either the king or the pope: “Politically the Anno-­poet stands on the side of the German imperial nobility.”21 All of the interpretations of the Song of Anno suggested here have to be taken with a rather large grain of salt. If the poet was really so hostile to the idea of a strong emperor, why did he stress the Germans’ pivotal role in placing Caesar on the throne?22 Maybe the poet was interested in the Roman Republic only because it was a historical curiosity that differed so markedly from the feudal structure of medieval Europe. In response to Reusner’s claim that the anonymous poet was the first in a long line of German writers who deliberately refused to engage in contemporary political debates, one might suggest that generic constraints, rather than political quiescence, could have motivated his decision; that is, the author of the Song of Anno may have considered it inap-

40    Imperial Fictions

propriate to introduce political controversies into a hagiographic poem, but he may have expressed his political opinions, whatever they may have been, in other venues. Finally, we cannot be certain that the monk who wrote the poem—­if the author was indeed a monk—­was necessarily sympathetic with the pope in the Investiture Controversy. Could he not have muttered some antipapal sentiments in his damp chambers along the banks of the Lower Rhine? We simply do not know. We can be certain, however, that the Song of Anno cannot be viewed adequately through the lens of modern nationalism, despite the linguistic patriotism that motivated Opitz to preserve the poem. We have, rather, a work about a local saint and an imperial politician caught up in a struggle between rival factions within the German territories, told from the perspective of an anonymous author writing at the time of heightened stress between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.

Walther von der Vogelweide About a century after the probable composition of the Song of Anno, German literature experienced its first great age—and also its last until young Goethe burst onto the literary scene five hundred years later. It is therefore not surprising that German scholars writing in the wake of the “Age of Goethe” looked back proudly to the achievements of the High Middle Ages when tracing the history of the national literature. Given the widespread circulation of literary forms and motifs across Europe at the time, however, it was not always easy to claim authors and works of medieval literature as representatives of Germany’s national culture. It was relatively easy to scrape off the veneer of courtly culture that had been layered over Das Nibelungenlied and find authentic heroes of the Germanic past: the charismatically handsome and perpetually cheerful Siegfried was viewed as the embodiment of Germanic valor, tragically cut down by Hagen’s treacherous stab in the back.23 Viewing the cosmopolitan Wolfram von Eschenbach and his hero’s quest for the Holy Grail as “typically German” was harder, but it could be done.24 It was nevertheless reassuring to find a figure like Walther von der Vogelweide (ca. 1170–­1230), who seemed much easier to claim as a national hero. Here was a German writer who hated the pope, loved the emperor, and even wrote a song in praise of German women. Ludwig Uhland’s 1822 biography of Walther singles out this medieval poet’s “Vaterlandsliebe” (love of the fatherland) as one of his most endearing traits: “No one recognized and empathized with the unique character of his people [die Eigenthümlichkeit seines Volkes] the way he did.”25

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    41

More recent scholars have challenged the romantic image of Walther’s German patriotism.26 As a traveling singer moving from one court to the next, Walther depended on the generosity of his patrons. Thus we often cannot be sure whether his political stance at a given point in time reflects his deep-­seated personal convictions or should be viewed as part of a strategic effort to keep a roof over his head and food on the table. In any case, the political situation during the decades in which Walther wrote was far too complicated to speak of “Germany” in any modern sense of the word. In the present discussion, I focus only on a few pivotal moments in Walther’s career, rather than trying to do justice to the entire oeuvre of this exceptionally talented and multifaceted writer. As in the case of the Song of Anno, close reading of even a few of Walther’s poems requires a certain amount of historical detail, but such particulars are necessary if we are to understand the political import of his work. Walther’s political poetry distinguishes him from other German Minnesänger of the period. Poets typically specialized either in the Minnesang, a highly stylized form of love poetry sung for a courtly audience, or the Sangspruch, didactic poems or commentaries on contemporary events sung by wandering minstrels for noble patrons. Walther was the first to excel in both genres.27 Both the Minnesang and the much longer romances or ritterliche Epen (chivalric epics) of the sort written by Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strasbourg depicted an idealized aristocratic society conceived in deliberate opposition to the actual state of affairs.28 From Erich Auerbach’s critical perspective, the refusal on the part of courtly poets to represent reality was unfortunate: “Courtly culture gives rise to the idea, which long remained a factor of considerable importance in Europe, that nobility, greatness, and intrinsic values have nothing in common with everyday reality.”29 Walther’s poetry offers an exception to this rule, as it suggests that such values do or at least should have something in common with everyday reality, even if the actuality of people and their rulers generally falls short of the ideal. The iconic portrait of Walther von der Vogelweide in the Great Heidelberg Song Manuscript (Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, or Codex Manesse) creates the impression that he was an introspective writer of the sort that was later considered typical of the German nation of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker). Walther sits in a stylized landscape with his legs crossed. His head rests on his left hand and is tilted toward the side as he gazes down at a manuscript page that he holds in his right. The image seems to have been inspired by the opening lines of one of his most famous poems.

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Ich saz ûf eime steine und dahte bein mit beine, dar ûf satzt ich den ellenbogen; ich hete in mîne hant gesmogen daz kinne und ein mîn wange. I sat on a stone and crossed my legs. I placed my elbow on my leg. I had cradled in my hand My chin and one of my cheeks.30 The poet ponders how difficult it is to attain worldly possessions and yet preserve one’s honor and find favor with God. The poem would thus seem to be religious or philosophical in nature and almost romantic in its introspective tone. Toward the end of the poem, however, Walther shifts from eternal questions about the human condition to a direct reference to his contemporary historical situation. Untriuwe ist in der sâze, gewalt vert ûf der strâze, fride unde reht sint sêre wunt. Treachery lies in ambush, violence travels on the street, peace and justice are badly damaged.31 These lines refer to the political chaos and civil war that followed the sudden death of King Henry VI in September 1197. At that time, Walther still enjoyed the support of his patron in Vienna, Duke Frederick of Austria, but Frederick died in April of the following year, and Walther then suddenly found himself cast out of the Viennese court.32 Forced to seek support elsewhere, Walther found refuge with the newly crowned King Philip, brother of Henry VI and son of Frederick Barbarossa. But Philip had a rival in Otto von Poitou, who had also been crowned king by opposing factions, thus precipitating the violence that Walther describes in his poem. Walther’s political commentary becomes more pointed in the second of three poems that have been linked on the basis of metrical analysis and historical references to the period between 1198 and 1201.33 He begins with almost

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    43

Hobbesian reflections on the state of nature as a site of perpetual conflict. He has observed everything that creeps on the earth or flies through the air and has concluded that mutual antipathy is the norm: “Keinez lebet âne haz” (Nothing lives without hatred). The animal species survive only by choosing a king and distinguishing clearly between master and servants; even insects have kings (“diu mugge [hât] ir künec”), but the Germans do not: “Sô wê dir, tiuschiu zunge, / wie stêt dîn ordenunge!” (Woe to you who speak the German language; / what is the state of your social order?) Walther concludes his poem with a command. Bekêrâ dich, bekêre, die cirkel sint zu hêre, die armen künege dringent dich. Philippe setze den weisen ûf, und heiz sie treten hinder sich! Change your ways! The diadems [literally, “circles”] are too exalted; the lesser kings are putting pressure on you. Philip, put on the orphan [a crown jewel] and order them to step back!34 In a landmark work of scholarship written more than a century ago, Konrad Burdach decoded the meaning of these obscure lines by Walther, in the spirit of dispelling romantic myths about the medieval poet. At the time when Burdach wrote, it was commonly assumed that “die armen künege” referred to the lesser German nobles who contested Philip’s authority, but Burdach argues that the word “cirkel” refers to a diadem, a circular golden headband signifying royal authority—­something that none of the petty German princes would have worn at the time. The “armen künege” must therefore refer to the foreign kings who supported Philip, he concludes, and not to the lesser German nobility. They are “poor” (arm) because they are mere kings, whereas Philip is an emperor; the crown with the special jewel signifies that he and he alone is the legitimate heir to ancient Rome. Thus Burdach concludes that the poem is not a protest against Germany’s territorial fragmentation but, rather, “the first monumental literary evidence for the idea of the German nation; the polemic is directed against foreign countries, against foreign tongues.”35 Burdach oversimplifies in ways that only become evident when we more closely consider the competing claims of the rival factions. Philip was a member of the Hohenstaufen dynasty; as the son of one emperor and the brother of another, his claim to the throne seemed strong. But Henry VI’s infant son Fred-

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erick (1194–­1250) had been elected German king in 1196; thus, by proclaiming himself king, Philip was technically usurping the legitimate line of succession.36 His rival, Otto, had the advantage of being “crowned in the right place, Aachen, and by the right man, the archbishop of Cologne.”37 Otto had not only the support of nobles along the Lower Rhine but also ties to powerful foreign allies: he had been raised at the Anglo-­Norman court in England and had the support of King Richard I (the Lionheart); he also held lands in French Poitou and Aquitaine. Philip, for his part, held lands in Italy and also had ties to France. Thus the distinction that Burdach makes between factional fighting within Germany and German conflicts with foreign powers makes little sense. In a world governed by dynastic loyalties, family relations inevitably linked the broader sphere of European politics to efforts to claim kingship over those who spoke the “tiuschiu zunge.” Two further considerations complicate Burdach’s effort to impose a national framework on medieval controversies. First, any conflict between Europe’s secular princes also became entangled with the sacred authority of the pope. Innocent III was elected in January 1198. Like Gregory VII before him, Innocent sought to assert the authority of the Catholic Church over worldly rulers. As Otto seemed more willing than Philip to make concessions to papal authority, the pope supported Otto and, in 1201, excommunicated Philip. In the third of his three poems inspired by these events, Walther complains bitterly about the pope’s decision.38 Second, Walther describes a conflict between Philip and Otto that is not just a quarrel between intra-­German factions and their foreign allies but also a struggle between rivals who claim the universal authority of the Holy Roman Empire against the limited powers of local kings, the “armen künege.” The playing field is not level: the pope and the emperor strive for supremacy within Western Christendom, which is conceived in universal, rather than national, terms; each traces a lineage of ancient authority that leads back to either Caesar or Saint Peter. By encouraging Philip to put on the imperial crown, Walther is telling him to claim his rightful role as universal ruler of Western Christendom, against his petty secular rivals and over and above the authority of the pope. In sum, the local conflict between Otto and Philip for power within German-­speaking lands has wide-­reaching repercussions for European dynastic politics within the still broader context of the struggle between emperor and pope for the leadership of the universal Christian church. As even Burdach concedes, Walther’s “appeal to the patriotic conscience is an appeal in the spirit of the Middle Ages, in the spirit of universalism, in which the state can only be conceived as a world empire and national greatness only in terms of ruling the

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    45

entire world.”39 Universalism is not nationalism, at least not in the modern, delimiting sense that pits one nation against others. Walther’s partisan support of one rival to the throne against another takes place in the context of complicated secular and religious rivalries that cannot be explained solely in terms of national loyalty or international strife. The historical situation in Germany changed considerably over the course of the next decade. After initially supporting Otto as the German emperor, Pope Innocent III changed course for political reasons and decided to back Philip instead. But just as he had won papal blessing and was about to consolidate his power in Germany, Philip was murdered in June 1208.40 The recently defeated Otto was suddenly back in the picture: he married one of Philip’s daughters and won the pope’s blessing when he signaled that he was willing to concede control of disputed lands in Italy. As soon as he was crowned by the pope in Rome in October 1209, however, Otto went back on his word and occupied the Italian territories after all. Innocent promptly excommunicated him in November 1210 and secretly encouraged the German princes to reject their new emperor. The pope now backed Henry VI’s young son Frederick, who had been duly elected emperor in 1196, when he was only two years old. Now approaching the age of majority, Frederick had become a more viable candidate for the throne. Once again, Germany had two rival emperors and faced renewed civil war.41 In 1198, Walther had enthusiastically supported Philip, but in a series of poems written in March 1212, he praises Philip’s former rival Otto, while remaining bitterly critical of the pope for intervening in imperial politics. Walther’s newfound loyalty to Otto is complicated by his relationship to other German princes. A poem written in March 1212, on the occasion of Emperor Otto’s return from Italy to Frankfurt, begins, Hêr keiser, sît ir willekomen! der küneges name ist iu benomen, des schînet iuwer krône ob allen krônen. Welcome, Lord Kaiser! The title of king has been taken from you, but your crown outshines all others.42 Pope Innocent’s excommunication has stripped Otto of his royal title, but precisely for that reason (“des” = gerade deswegen), Otto reigns supreme. The logic of this paradoxical utterance would seem to be that he who is cursed by

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an evil pope is blessed in the eyes of his subjects.43 After going on to praise Otto’s power and goodness, Walther mentions “news” (as if pulling Otto closer to get his attention) and comes to the point. Dar zuo sag ich iu maere: die fürsten sint iu undertân, si habent mit zühten iuwer kunft erbeitet. I have news for you: The princes are subordinate to you. They awaited your arrival with knightly virtue. Given that at least some of the knights were well known to have been plotting against the king, one can imagine sidelong glances and concealed smirks among those in the audience and perhaps a raised eyebrow on the part of the king. Walther is not finished: he singles out one knight for his particular loyalty. und ie der Mîssenaere: derst iemer iuwer âne wân, von gote wurde ein engel ê verleitet. And the man from Meissen: He has always been yours without fail. An angel would be more likely to be led astray from God. Despite Walther’s effusive praise, the knight mentioned, Dietrich von Meissen, was probably already among the conspirators against Otto and would certainly abandon him within a year.44 Walther’s own loyalty could shift just as quickly. In a poem probably written in late 1212, he offers a considerably cooler defense of Dietrich. Walther urges the emperor to show his now-­fallen angel mercy for his “missetât” (misdeed), on the somewhat shaky grounds that Dietrich was at least Otto’s open enemy (“sîn vîent offenbâre”), while other cowards conspired secretly (“die zagen truogen stillen rât”).45 In poems that seem aimed directly at Dietrich, Walther is harsher, complaining that his services have been hardly rewarded. “Lob ich in, sô lobe er mich” (If I am to praise him, let him praise me), complains Walther, who magnanimously claims that if properly compensated, he would be kindly disposed to overlook previous insults (“des andern alles des wil ich / in minneclîch erlâzen”).46 Walther simply brushes off complaints that

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    47

his intercessions on Dietrich’s behalf have not been as effective as they might have been: “Het er mir dô gelônet baz, / ich dient im aber eteswaz” (If he had rewarded me better, / I would have served him better).47 Even emperors were not exempt from Walther’s wrath. By 1214, Walther had shifted loyalty from Otto to Frederick II, a move that he justified by the former’s failure to reward him properly for services rendered. Ich hân hêrn Otten triuwe, er welle mich noch rîchen: wie nam abe er mîn dienest ie sô trügelîchen? I have Herr Otto’s promise that he will still grant me riches: But how did he accept my services so deceitfully? Walther goes on in this vein, begging Friedrich to give him appropriate reward and viciously comparing his former patron to a stingy dwarf (“getwerc”).48 Looking back over Walther’s career, we find that he supports three different emperors at various times: at the turn of the thirteenth century, he backs Philipp over Otto; in 1212–­13, he promotes Otto over Frederick; and in 1214, he shifts course again and abandons Otto for Frederick. Sometimes Walther champions the emperor directly, and sometimes he intervenes on behalf of one of the emperor’s lieges. Here, too, the situation is unstable: Walther first defends Dietrich of Meissen in public (possibly with the knowledge that he is not as loyal to the emperor as he seems) and then rejects him bitterly because he fails to reward his poet-­propagandist. There are some constants in Walther’s world: he consistently supports any given emperor over the pope. His piety seems genuine, as does his increasing world-­weariness toward the end of his life, when he waxes enthusiastic about the idea of a crusade (though at a time when he must have known that he was no longer capable of making the journey). The scholarly debate over Walther von der Vogelweide has long centered on the question of how we are to reconcile his consistent loyalty to the German emperor against the pope with his inconsistent shifting of support from one would-­be emperor to another. Two answers have been suggested: either Walther does not waver in his support of the office of emperor even as he is pragmatic about which particular individual is best suited to sit on the throne at any given time, or Walther is only concerned about himself and will say anything and support anyone who will pay for his supper.49 I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between the two. Although it is always dangerous to impose an anachronistic model of romantic confession onto his stylized and politically strategic poetry, Walther does seem too deeply concerned about questions of

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social order and religious salvation to be reduced to a purely cynical songster. Yet he had no social security, no health insurance, no royalties from his publications; if he was to continue to compose songs or, indeed, to survive at all, he had to take material considerations into account. His famous poem in praise of German women was probably part of an unsuccessful attempt to regain support at the Viennese court, but it may also have reflected his personal views. In any case, nationalism, in the modern sense, would have been alien to Walther, because it did not yet exist. Like the poet of the Song of Anno, Walther worked in a world of empire, balancing religious faith and imperial politics against papal decrees and the shifting loyalties of local lords.

Early Modern Nuremberg The decline of the German monarchy in the late Middle Ages coincided with the consolidation of power in the individual territories and the growing wealth of the imperial cities. The authors of the High Middle Ages tended to be either members of the aristocracy or ministerials, who were technically bound in service to a particular lord or court but were increasingly regarded as de facto members of the nobility; their literature celebrated the aristocratic ideals of court society.50 The Renaissance humanists, in contrast, were often educated members of the middle class who found work in the growing cities and centers of territorial power. They had a sense of group solidarity based on education, lifestyle, and achievement rather than birth.51 Many picked new Latin names to obscure their humble origins: the man known to posterity as Conrad Celtis was born Conrad Pickel, the son of a vine grower near Würzburg;52 his fellow humanist, Crotus Rubeanus, was the son of peasants.53 Ulrich von Hutten was unusual in that he came from a family of independent imperial knights (Reichsritter) subordinate only to the emperor; he also never changed his name.54 Yet Hutten followed a typical course of study that led him from one university to the next, including at Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, and Leipzig, just as Celtis studied or taught at Heidelberg, Krakow, Ingolstadt, and Vienna. Both Celtis and Hutten spent time in Italy, and both were part of an international community of humanists that extended from Rome to Oxford and from Paris to Prague. They resurrected the Latin of classical antiquity from its debased medieval form and distanced themselves from the uncouth masses, who were often uncomfortable reminders of their own modest beginnings.55 In the oral tradition of the High Middle Ages, it was possible to be a poet and not know how to read or write (much ink has been spilled on the

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    49

question of whether or not Wolfram von Eschenbach was illiterate, as an offhand comment in one of his works seems to imply56); it is certain that Wolfram, Walther, and their fellow poets composed works for a largely illiterate audience.57 Humanists, in contrast, were defined by, above all, their love of books and the written word.58 One of the new literary genres that emerged with the growth of Germany’s imperial cities was the Städtelob (city praise). In the course of the fourteenth century, wandering political poets (Spruchdichter) like Walther von der Vogelweide were gradually replaced by scribes who settled in one city, where they maintained archives and kept chronicles of local history.59 Among the earliest and most influential works in praise of a city was a poem written by Hans Rosenplüt in 1447. His Der Spruch von Nürnberg (In praise of Nuremberg) is a poem of 396 lines written in German Knittelvers, the doggerel that would be popularized by Hans Sachs and immortalized in the opening monolog of Goethe’s Faust.60 Rosenplüt praises the city’s pious clerics, wise rulers, and law-­abiding subjects. He takes pride in the city’s charitable institutions for the sick and poor, highlights its most significant relics, and insists that although the city loves peace, it has sturdy defensive walls in case of an attack. Rosenplüt’s Nuremberg is, above all, a city of commerce and the arts. Merchants come from near and far, trading in valuable goods and speaking exotic languages, while artisans produce works of exceptional utility and unsurpassed beauty. The last decade of the century saw the publication of a far more ambitious work in Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle of the World (Weltchronik). The massive volume was published in Nuremberg in 1493 in two editions, the first in Latin and the second in German. To speak of Hartmann Schedel (1440–­1514) as the author of the Chronicle is somewhat misleading, in that the medical doctor, humanist scholar, and book collector compiled most of the material from other, previously published sources.61 One is tempted to describe the work anachronistically as a coffee-­table book, a lavishly illustrated and expensively produced volume intended more for display and desultory browsing than sustained cover-­to-­cover reading, yet while such volumes today often combine high production values and correspondingly high prices with relatively trivial subject matter, the Chronicle covers the momentous topic of world history from the Creation to Judgment Day. Approximately twenty-­one hundred copies of the book were printed, about two-­thirds of them in Latin and the rest in German. About seven hundred of these works still exist today, which suggests that they were highly valued and carefully preserved for many generations.62 Between the alpha and omega of salvation history in the Chronicle are descriptions of events ranging from the Trojan War to the founding of Rome, lists of

50    Imperial Fictions

Greek gods and Christian saints, and miniature biographies of diverse figures from Sappho to Mohammed. The geographical scope of Schedel’s Chronicle is not quite global, as the discoveries of Columbus in America and Bartolomeus Diaz in Africa, then very recent, are not reflected in the text.63 But it does survey all of Western Christendom from the Middle East to the British Isles. Noteworthy is the new stress on the German nation within this broad historical and geographical framework. The volume ends with a large-­scale map of north-­central Europe that has been identified as “the first map of Germany ever printed in a book.”64 The page preceding the map consists of a dense paragraph that comments on the “image of Germany or the German nation” (pildnus [Bildnis] Germanie oder Teutscher nation) that follows, outlining its natural borders and physical features, praising the ruggedly handsome inhabitants in terms reminiscent of Tacitus, and concluding that there would be much more to say in praise of these good Christian people if space permitted. The map has no clear national borders of the sort that one would find today, and the political organization of the German territories is proudly imperial, not national. A large-­scale illustration elsewhere in the volume depicts the organization of the empire, with the emperor seated on a throne and surrounded by the seven electors; the Chronicle also contains passages in praise of emperors, from Charlemagne to Frederick III and Maximilian I.65 In keeping with the late medieval trend noted earlier, the center of the empire is seen as having moved from Rome to Germany, as the Chronicle explains in a section titled “On the Origin and Development of the Emperorship and How It Came to the German Nation.”66 Nevertheless, the Chronicle treats the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation as the legitimate continuation of a tradition that extends back into antiquity and not as a modern nation-­state. Schedel’s Chronicle of the World tends to focus primarily on individual cities rather than territories or nations. Scattered throughout its sweeping narrative of world history are descriptions of major capitals of the ancient world (Jerusalem, Constantinople, Carthage, Troy) and modern metropolises (Florence, Paris, Venice, and Rome), together with illustrations, some of which are based on accurate drawings of the time.67 As might be expected, German cities are particularly well represented, with Nuremberg taking pride of place. A large-­scale cityscape drawn by Michael Wohlgemut covers two full pages, followed by a narrative more than double the length afforded other German cities.68 Like Hans Rosenplüt before him, Schedel praises the city’s pious and diligent people, while tracing its origins back to Charlemagne and ancient Rome. The city is clearly identified as belonging to Germany: “Nuremberg is

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    51

a frequently visited city, well known throughout Germany [in gantzem teutschen land] and among foreign peoples.” Indeed, Nuremberg stands directly in the geographical center of Germany (“schier in dem mittel teutschslands gelegen”), just as the description of the city stands at the center of Schedel’s text.69 Yet the question of Nuremberg’s national identity is specified in subnational tribal terms and placed in a supranational imperial context. Some say that the city dwellers are Franks, and others say that they are Bavarian, but “the Nurembergers prefer to think of themselves as neither Bavarians nor Franks but, rather, as a third, distinct race.” Ever since they became part of the Roman Empire, they have remained unswerving in their loyalty to it.70 Schedel’s Nuremberg is thus not Germany’s capital in the sense that it would become in the imagination of modern German nationalists but, rather, “the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation”;71 that is, rather than being the capital of a nation-­state in a delimiting sense that clearly distinguishes it from other European nations, it serves as the national center of a universal empire. In the words of Len Scales that I cited already in chapter 2, “the universal found a focus in the German.”72 The Chronicle must have seemed in need of revision almost immediately, because even before the German edition appeared, Conrad Celtis had signed a contract in which he agreed to revise the Latin text.73 We do not know exactly what changes Celtis agreed to make, but it seems likely that the editors hoped for a more precise description of Germany than was possible in Schedel’s sprawling work.74 Celtis never fulfilled his contractual obligations, but the plan may have inspired an independent project of his own. As his inaugural lecture at the University of Ingolstadt had shown, Celtis was a fervent German patriot and the first German professor to lecture on the importance of Tacitus’s recently discovered Germania.75 Sometime between 1498 and 1500, Celtis published a new edition of Tacitus, together with a new poem of his own, 293 lines of Latin hexameters, known as the Germania generalis.76 The full title of Celtis’s poem, “De situ et moribus Germanie additiones” (Additional comments concerning German geography and customs), indicates that it was intended as a supplement to Tacitus that would continue his description of ancient Germany up to the present. Celtis soon republished the poem as a fragment of a new work in progress, to be known as Germania illustrata.77 Celtis never completed Germania illustrata, but he wrote a substantial chapter on the city of Nuremberg, which he published together with a new edition of Germania generalis and other poems in 1502; already in 1495, Celtis had submitted his description of Nuremberg to the city’s rulers.78 De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergae libellus (Little book about Nuremberg’s

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origin, site, customs, and institutions) is an unabashedly patriotic work conceived as Celtis’s gift to his beloved Germany (“mein liebes Deutschland”).79 Although he introduces the text as something of a teaser for the larger work to come, his claim that Nuremberg lies at the geographical center not only of Germany but also of Europe lends the city a representative status that renders the rest of Germania illustrata superfluous in a certain sense: to speak of Nuremberg is to speak of Germany, and to speak of Germany is to speak of the entire Holy Roman Empire. Celtis’s high praise for the city’s hardworking, pious, and charitable inhabitants is reminiscent of praise from previous authors, although his work is far more detailed than that of either Rosenplüt or Schedel. Celtis was not a permanent resident of Nuremberg, but he knew it well, and his Norimberga offers a window onto the world of an early modern city. Initially claiming that Nuremberg was settled by the “Noriker,” a Germanic tribe on the run from the Huns (24), he later asserts that it was founded by the immortal gods and has been preserved by divine mercy, “as a site in which all Germanic tribes and our neighboring peoples flow together as if in a common homeland” (75). His description of the self-­governing city bursts with a local pride that is augmented by Nuremberg’s special role as the emperor’s primary residence. Celtis’s repeated stress on Nuremberg’s cosmopolitan atmosphere adds to the sense that local patriotism not only coexists with but is even enhanced by a sense of belonging to a larger empire. Observing with astonishment how the citizens switch to completely different dialects—­Swabian, Frankish, Bavarian, and that of the Upper Palatinate—­to meet the needs of foreign visitors who come to the city from its various surrounding regions, he notes that “the willingness and ability to speak different languages is highly respected among them” (43). “Nuremberg’s location at the crossroads of twelve trade routes . . . made it a center of international commerce,” note Tracy Adams and Stephen G. Nichols,80 and the flow of goods prompted a correspondingly high interest in the latest news. Celtis reports, “Indeed, the city is informed about everything that happens in Europe, keeps quiet about nothing, is keen for information”; it is eager to know about foreign events and equally concerned for its reputation at home and abroad (46). In a sense, Celtis’s Nuremberg anticipates the modern phenomenon of the “global city,” a local crossroads of transnational exchange under the universal rule of the Holy Roman Empire.81 Making Celtis’s Norimberga both fascinating and upsetting is the grim reality that lurks behind the city’s golden facade. Celtis describes a famine in 1491 that drove starving citizens to boiling acorns and chewing bark, desperate measures that only led to broken teeth, stomach cramps, and painful death. Emaciated peasants then emerged from the forest to beg for food, “like starv-

German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance    53

ing cattle before an empty manger” (55). One man caught stealing was allegedly happy to be hanged in hope of going to heaven rather than being forced to live on in this wretched world. Celtis goes on to note that although the citizens desire peace, the city is highly fortified and always on guard against foreign attack. The authorities are equally concerned to prevent rebellions from within the city, to which end no public assemblies of the lower classes are permitted. Those who do disturb the civic order face swift and terrible punishment: for example, women caught in adultery are exposed to public shame and forced to stagger under the weight of a stone collar while surrounded by jeering crowds, a penalty that Celtis characterizes as “indeed an amusing spectacle that provokes much laughter and a very effective way to counter women’s innate tendency toward vice [die Lasterhaftigkeit der Weiber]” (66–­67). Celtis devotes an entire chapter to graphic descriptions of punishments, including torture, flogging, blinding, mutilation, and execution by drowning, burning, hanging, or being buried alive. The bodies of executed criminals are left dangling on the gallows to be eaten by birds; when a breeze blows, the corpses bump into one another like grotesque wind chimes. Most disturbing is the special hatred reserved for Nuremberg’s Jews. Antisemitism already runs like a red thread through Schedel’s Chronicle of the World, which includes the tale of a Christian boy allegedly murdered by Jews who required Christian blood for their festival of unleavened bread. Stories of Jews stealing Communion wafers are repeated several times, together with vehement denunciations of the “odious, wretched, and desolate people”; a woodcut of caricatured Jews being burned alive is reproduced no less than twelve times in the course of the work.82 Conrad Celtis, for his part, notes that the Jews had recently been expelled from Nuremberg because they poisoned all the wells in the city. “This people must indeed be exterminated or eternally banished to the Caucasus beyond the Ural Mountains,” he concludes, “because they have so often inspired the wrath of heaven and damaged and destroyed human society” (37). Celtis goes on to note that Nuremberg’s remaining Jews have been forced to live on the outskirts of the city, a fate that he claims they richly deserve: “Happy indeed,” he writes, “are the cities and countries that cleanse themselves of this human pestilence” (73). Nuremberg expelled the city’s Jews in 1499, shortly after Celtis wrote Norimberga and three years before it was published. Ironically, as Stephen Brockmann notes, “the expulsion of the Jews” may have been one contributing factor toward “Nuremberg’s ultimate economic decline.”83 When some Jews finally returned to the city in the nineteenth century, it had long since been transformed from the cosmopolitan center of the early modern empire to the imaginary capital of the German nation.

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Conclusion Popular enthusiasm for the Middle Ages continues today, although, as Heinz Schlaffer observes, most people are more interested in reading about the medieval past than in delving into the original literature.84 Of course, scholars continue to study medieval and early modern texts, but the field tends toward specialization and is among the most vulnerable in times of budget cuts and curricular streamlining. The exotic appeal of an era that poets evoke with images of “charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / of perilous seas”85 can also fuel the impression that it is alien, obscure, and ultimately irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Recent work in colonial and global studies has sought to correct this misperception by challenging “the fantasy that an earlier Europe was the opposite of Europe today.”86 In the effort to “dislodge the lingering Eurocentrism in our literary histories,” critics have begun to explore interactions between empires around the globe, a geographical displacement that simultaneously dismantles temporal “binaries of premodern and modern.”87 Complementary to these efforts to “provincialize Europe”88 by placing its empires in global perspective are others that focus on the history of intra-­ European colonial conquests. “Europe,” concludes Robert Bartlett, “the initiator of one of the world’s major processes of conquest, colonization and cultural transformation, was also the product of one.”89 He writes about the making of a European identity between the years 950 and 1350, but the process of internal colonization he describes anticipates the intra-­European political dynamics of much later periods as well. Recent suggestions that we might view today’s European Union as a distant mirror of the prenational Middle Ages have further sought to bridge the gap that has long divided modern from medieval studies. This chapter’s brief examinations of the Song of Anno, Walther’s political poetry, and early modern depictions of Nuremberg were undertaken in the spirit of those who seek to reframe literary studies in the longue durée, without, however, making any pretense toward systematic coverage of the major works of German medieval literature. I have here sought only to explore “the singularity of the literary event”90 in ways that suggest how it might be possible to open not-­so-­magic casements to a past that is perhaps not so distant after all.

Chapter 4

Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects

German baroque drama has always been difficult to incorporate into the narrative of the national literature. As Walter Benjamin noted in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama), Goethe, Schiller, and the other dramatists of the Sturm und Drang looked for inspiration to Shakespeare and not the German-­language writers of the seventeenth century. With their paucity of action and long speeches in a German language that seemed old-­fashioned and stilted, the dramas were deemed bühnenfremd, unsuitable for the stage.1 The prejudice against the baroque began with a revolution in eighteenth-­century taste, when good art was equated with the authentic expression of the rule-­breaking genius. The rhetorically based literature of the baroque seemed coldly calculated to achieve a particular effect, in contrast to the purposeless pleasure afforded by autonomous works of art.2 For those intent on rediscovering repositories of the national culture in Germanic sagas, fairy tales, and folk songs, the works of highly educated civil servants such as Andreas Gryphius (1616–­64) and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–­83) seemed little more than arcane rhetorical exercises. To be sure, the seventeenth-­ century authors were not immune to patriotic sentiments. Martin Opitz encouraged German vernacular poetry and inspired Gryphius to write sonnets about the physical and spiritual devastation of Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. Learned societies campaigned for the purity of the German language and speculated about its Adamic origins.3 Grimmelshausen wrote his programmatically titled picaresque novel Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669) about life in war-­torn Germany, and Lohenstein wrote a massive courtly novel about the ur-­Germanic hero Hermann. Yet, for all their concern about the fate of the fatherland and its language, the writers remained “totally non-­popular” (durchaus unvolkstümlich), thoroughly divorced from the language and interests of the common people.4 Old prejudices die hard. Heinz Schlaffer’s Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Short history of German literature, 2002) is particularly 55

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noteworthy in this regard because it reached a wide audience of educated readers both within and beyond the academy. Schlaffer begins his brief comments on German literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by urging his readers to acknowledge the unpleasant fact that it is not very good, particularly when set against the works of writers like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tasso, and Milton. To back up his argument, Schlaffer offers a series of reasons that would be familiar to earlier generations of literary critics: German literature of the period is belated, lagging behind the vanguard of other national literatures; baroque literature fails to explore new imaginative worlds or express deep feelings; the German language of the period is awkward and artificial; poets embellish conventional truths with flowery language that becomes a mere “ornament of an ornament” (Ornament eines Ornaments). As a result, the literature remains “divorced from the everyday experience and speech of the common people,” oversaturated with foreign influences, and thus not really German at all—­“not the result of an independent German development, but rather the imitation of other national literatures.”5 Schlaffer does not cite Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel in his brief exposé of German literary history, but if he had, he would have had to come to terms with a very different understanding of the German baroque, as a period that did express the national character. As Jane O. Newman has shown in her study of the intellectual-­historical context in which he wrote, Benjamin was deeply influenced by the anticlassical aesthetics of Wilhelm Worringer and Alois Riegl.6 In Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908), Worringer pleads for a new appreciation of non-­European art.7 If we measure all art against the standard of Greek antiquity and the European Renaissance, he argues, we will fail to understand many of the world’s cultures, both past and present. Europeans are used to a naturalistic aesthetic that elicits empathetic identification on the part of the viewer, but “primitives” and “Orientals” are driven toward abstract art. While the Greek and Renaissance artists reproduce reality in a way that reflects their sense of being at home in the world, primitives seek refuge in abstract forms from a hostile and incomprehensible world of appearances. Worringer’s own taste in art was relatively conservative, and his essay was written before the expressionists created their most famous works, yet many of those who read Abstraction and Empathy understood it as a manifesto of the new art movement.8 Impatient with the tired historicism of conventional culture and anxious in their age of “transcendental homelessness,” the expressionists were drawn to an art of abstraction and felt an affinity toward the primitive art of ancient and distant cultures. Worringer extended his discussion of anticlassical aesthetics into the

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Middle Ages in his next influential book, Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic, 1911), which he viewed as a “direct sequel” to his earlier work. In the later work, he raises questions about “that complex of abstract art which is closest to us, namely to the stylistic phenomenon of Gothic.”9 Worringer begins by restating his fundamental belief that the artistic style of a particular people expresses their mentality and has little or nothing to do with their technical ability. Societies create the art they want to produce, not the art they can produce; “a history of ability” yields to “the history of the evolution of art as a history of volition.”10 Worringer goes on to restate the basic difference between primitive and classical art that he had developed in Abstraction and Empathy: primitives employ abstract forms to seek shelter from a hostile world, whereas the stylistic naturalism of classical art emanates from societies that are in peace with their surroundings. Worringer adds a brief discussion of “Oriental man” as a kindred spirit to the primitive and of Oriental art as reflecting a similar antipathy toward the natural world of illusion or Maya, although on an infinitely more sophisticated level. All three art forms—­the primitive, classical, and Oriental—­reflect a worldview that is essentially static: the primitive and the Oriental are unchanging in their antipathy toward the world, whereas the classical is steady in its appreciation of the same. Gothic man is different: he does not understand the world yet, but there is the sense that one day he will. Gothic art is the product of this transitional period: it is provisional and, thus, vital, expressive, youthful, and dynamic. Even more, it is almost crazed in its wild energy. It radiates “a confused mania of ecstasy, a convulsive yearning to be merged into a super-­sensuous rapture”; it produces an “exalted hysteria which is above all else the distinguishing mark of the Gothic phenomenon.”11 Walter Benjamin adds the German baroque to the catalog of anticlassical, proto-­expressionist literature and argues that the current intellectual climate may have affinities with the seemingly alien seventeenth-­century texts: “For like expressionism, the baroque is not so much an age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will [eines una­b­ lenk­baren Kunstwollens].”12 Benjamin goes on to describe the spirit of the German baroque in terms that evoke the belief in a quintessentially German sense of tragic-­heroic pessimism, a belief that we also find in such contemporary works as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). According to Benjamin, German baroque drama has its historical roots in medieval mystery plays but shifts the focus from heaven to earth: “the German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition.” Benjamin concedes that the “rejection of the eschatology” is typical of other European dramas at the

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time, and yet he insists that “the rash flight into a nature deprived of grace” is “specifically German.”13 Benjamin traces the affinities of the German baroque to Albrecht Dürer’s brooding image of Melancholy and to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He points out that its major authors were all Lutherans who rejected the notion of salvation through good works in the spirit of “German paganism and the grim belief in the subjection of man to fate” (germanischen Heidentums und finsteren Glaubens an die Schicksalsverfallenheit).14 The romantics championed a notion of the symbol as a vehicle that carries us directly from the beautiful to the divine, Benjamin contends,15 whereas baroque allegory expresses the anguish of a world in which the path to heaven has been blocked and the earth lies in ruins, where history has become only a process of degeneration, classical harmonies have been replaced by dissonance, and mutilated corpses litter a devastated landscape. Benjamin wrote The Origins of German Tragedy when the memory of the First World War was still fresh and when traumatized veterans were everywhere to be seen in German cities. Otto Dix and George Grosz were painting horrific images of the war and its aftermath, Erich Maria Remarque was soon to write his antiwar novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), and the pioneers of German film were producing their “shell shock cinema.”16 It is easy to see how the graphic violence and dark pessimism of German baroque drama could serve Benjamin as a distant mirror of his own times.17 Given the widespread revulsion against the war and the fact that Benjamin would take his own life in the course of a desperate attempt, just fifteen years later, to escape a new and even more deadly outbreak of violence, it seems difficult to believe that some of the ideas developed in his book on German tragedy should have found their way into the work of scholars sympathetic with the Nazi regime. Yet, as Newman has shown, such was the case.18 When Benjamin writes of the German baroque as the expression of an “unremitting artistic will [Kunstwollen],” he plays into essentialist notions of national cultures in which the individual becomes subsumed within the collective. The writer becomes a medium through which is channeled the spirit of the people. Ironically, precisely the same writers’ alleged failure to achieve this collective mind meld serves as the basis for Heinz Schlaffer’s rejection of the German baroque. When he argues that German baroque literature is “not the result of an independent German development, but rather the imitation of other national literatures,” he essentially claims that it is not authentically German, because it is überfremdet and, thus, volksfremd—­saturated with foreign influences and, thus, alien to the spirit of the German people. Such claims reflect a residual romanticism that is, at best, surprising in the work of a self-­professed

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Marxist, as he draws on notions of the national essence and cultural purity that have been thoroughly discredited by the events of modern German history. To put it in another, less ideologically charged way, both Benjamin and Schlaffer find ways not to talk about German baroque literature. That conclusion is obvious in the case of Schlaffer, who broaches the subject only for dismissal according to the reasons cited above, but it is less obvious for Benjamin, who, after all, devoted a book of about two hundred pages to the topic. Yet, despite all his enthusiasm about the seventeenth-­century Trauerspiel, Benjamin never discusses any particular work in detail or delves deeply into the political situation confronting the writers at the time. His work remains a pastiche of excerpted quotations and broad generalizations rather than close analysis of specific authors or texts. If we look more closely at the works of the most prominent dramatists of the period, Gryphius and Lohenstein, we discover that they are “typically German” in a very different sense than those who would measure their Germanness in terms of their alleged proximity to or distance from the “spirit of the people.” Like German-­language writings of earlier and later periods, their work struck a balance between local loyalties and imperial politics. Both men were Silesian Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire of the Catholic Counter-­Reformation.

Seventeenth-­Century Silesia Seventeenth-­century Silesia was a roughly rectangular strip of land running along the border of today’s western Poland. Like sixteenth-­century Nuremberg, the capital city of Breslau (today’s Wrocław) was a commercial center located on trade routes that extended across Europe and into the Middle East.19 The booming economy fueled a cultural blossoming that produced such baroque authors as Martin Opitz, Friedrich von Logau, Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau, and Johann Scheffler, in addition to Gryphius and Lohenstein.20 The region was predominantly Protestant, but it was subordinate to the political authority of the Hapsburg emperors in Vienna and targeted by the increasingly militant Counter-­Reformation. The Silesian writers thus faced challenging circumstances that they met in various ways. Gryphius, Hofmannswaldau, and Lohenstein became Lutheran lawyers who represented the interests of their Silesian constituents at the imperial court. Johann Scheffler was born and raised Lutheran but converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and changed his name to Angelus Silesius (the Silesian Messenger). The Lutheran Martin Opitz worked as a private secretary to one of the leaders of the

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Counter-­Reformation and even translated “one of the most militant of the anti-­ Protestant tracts that were used for forced conversions,” but he later undertook diplomatic missions on behalf of the Protestant aristocrats and served as a Swedish spy.21 The strategies adopted by these Silesian writers when confronting imperial authority point toward larger trends in post-­Reformation Germany. The wave of nationalist enthusiasm that swept over German humanists and religious reformers in the early sixteenth century did not bring about political unity. Luther’s appeal to the Christian nobility of the German nation had the unintended consequence of splitting the Christian church into Catholics and Protestants, a fissure that soon splintered further into Protestant subdivisions between Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and others.22 In the first decades after Luther’s break with Rome, the Protestant movement spread rapidly throughout the German-­speaking lands. The Confession of Augsburg (1530) imposed ideological unity on the nascent Protestant movement, while the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) guaranteed tolerance for regions loyal to the new faith. Each ruler could now determine the religious denomination of his domain according to the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio (whose the rule, his the religion), a policy that further cemented territorial divisions within the Holy Roman Empire.23 Peace lasted until the end of the century, but already in the 1570s and 1580s, the Catholic Church had begun to fight back against the growing Protestant hegemony in Europe. In 1618, a local dispute between Vienna and Bohemia triggered a series of events that soon engulfed much of Central Europe in a religious war that would last thirty years.24 To be sure, religious faith and dynastic politics were combined in often confusing and contradictory ways in this conflict—­ the Protestant Swedes were secretly allied with Catholic France against Catholic Austria—­but it had the clear effect of devastating the German countryside and decimating the population.25 Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire posed an imminent danger to the east. Turkish armies had besieged Vienna in 1526 and would do so again in 1683, the year of Lohenstein’s death. Silesia was in a particularly precarious position because of its location on the eastern front of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1663, Tatar allies of the Turks rampaged through portions of Silesia. More than fifty villages were destroyed, and about eighty thousand Silesians were sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Refugees from all parts of Silesia sought shelter behind the fortified walls of Breslau.26 Unlike France, where political authority was concentrated in the person of the king and centered in Paris, the German-­speaking lands had multiple sites of local power. In theory, the German princes were subject to the authority of the

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Holy Roman Emperor; in reality, they enjoyed considerably more autonomy than their French counterparts.27 As noted earlier, there is a long historiographical tradition that laments the German Sonderweg, pitting “(good) centralizing” against “(bad) particularist forces represented respectively by the monarchy and the princely territories.” Yet Thomas A. Brady Jr. contends that “this dichotomy neither fits the actual story of how new governmental forms evolved in the German lands nor helps to explain the new polity’s remarkable longevity and stability” and that we should, rather, conceive “territorial dynasticism and imperial universalism” as being “not opposed but complementary tendencies and motives.” Brady explains, “The emperor’s rule had to be symbolic because he had little power to coerce; the local and territorial rulers had to acknowledge the emperor because, however powerful, their authority was partial and uneven.” In France, King Louis XIV exerted absolute authority over his fellow aristocrats and potential rivals. In Germany, things were different, as Brady notes: “The ancient monarchy may have been sacral, but the new, corporate German Nation certainly was not. It negotiated with its emperor; it did not simply obey him.”28

Andreas Gryphius: Religious Faith and Imperial Politics Andreas Gryphius was born in 1616 in the Silesian city of Glogau.29 His father, a Lutheran minister, died when Andreas was only four, his mother when he was eleven. The Thirty Years’ War began just two years after Gryphius was born, and Glogau was often occupied and sometimes plundered by marauding soldiers.30 In 1628, Catholic troops broke into the city and forced many of the local Lutherans to convert; those who refused, including Gryphius’s stepfather, were forced to pay harsh fines and driven out of town. A few years later, Gryphius found a patron in Georg Schönborner, a Silesian aristocrat who suffered physically from a bad heart and psychologically from the aftereffects of his forced conversion to Catholicism. In addition to the depredations of war and religious persecution, young Gryphius experienced personal illness, outbreaks of the plague that killed thousands, and fires that destroyed entire cities. It is not surprising, then, that his early poetry expresses an uncompromising insistence on the vanity of earthly delights: “You see, wherever you look, only vanity on earth” (DV sihst / wohin du sihst nur Eitelkeit auff Erden).31 Gryphius’s tragedies reinforce the message that the things of this world are never a source of lasting pleasure: those in the highest places today are likely to fall to the lowest depths tomorrow, and in a world characterized by Vergänglichkeit (tran-

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sitoriness) and Unbeständigkeit (inconstancy), one should fix one’s gaze firmly on the prize of eternal salvation and stoically endure even the worst torture as a temporary test of religious faith. Thus Leo Armenius, the eponymous hero of Gryphius’s first tragedy (1650), kisses the cross as he succumbs to his assassin’s wounds; King Charles I of England prepares for his execution as a Christ-­ like martyr in Gryphius’s Carolus Stuardus (1657); and the eponymous heroine from Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien (Catharina of Georgia, 1655) has the flesh ripped from her bones because she refuses to marry a Muslim and abandon her Christian faith. Without minimizing the hardships that Gryphius experienced in his life or downplaying the significance of religious faith in his dramas, we should also note that he was a highly educated intellectual and well-­traveled cosmopolitan. Gryphius enjoyed privileges granted to only a very few of his contemporaries. Both his father and stepfather attended university, and Gryphius impressed his teachers at an early age with his brilliance and diligence; his biographer estimates that he may have spoken or read as many as eleven languages.32 While much of Germany was convulsed in war, Gryphius was able to further his education in the cosmopolitan city of Danzig. He then spent almost six years at the Dutch University of Leiden, the “Harvard” of his time, before going on a grand tour of Europe, “the elite track par excellence” (der Eliteweg schlechthin), which took him to Paris, Florence, and Rome.33 When he finally returned to his native Silesia after an absence of nearly a decade, he worked in Glogau as a syndic (Syndikus), an eminently political position that required him to represent the rights and interests of Silesia’s Protestant nobility against the imperial authority of Catholic Vienna.34 It should come as no surprise that Gryphius’s religious dramas are also deeply concerned with questions of imperial politics.35 As a devout Lutheran, Gryphius strongly supported royal authority. Just as Luther had condemned peasants who mistook his willingness to challenge papal authority on certain theological questions as a sign of sympathy for political rebellion, Gryphius reacted violently against the Puritans’ decision to execute King Charles I of England. He was in Strasbourg when he heard the electrifying news and immediately began work on Carolus Stuardus, a tragedy that portrays the king as the victim of injustice.36 In his final drama, Großmütiger Rechtsgelehrter oder Sterbender Aemilius Paulus Papinianus (Magnanimous legal scholar; or, Dying Aemilius Paulus Papinianus, 1659), Gryphius shifts the focus from martyred royalty to the question of whether a loyal subject should obey a criminal king. The play is set in the Roman Empire of the early third century CE and centers on the figure of Papinianus, one of the most celebrated lawyers of clas-

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sical antiquity.37 Emperor Severus has recently died, bequeathing his realm to his two sons, Antoninus Bassianus Caracalla and Antoninus Geta. Anxious to secure sole rule for himself, Bassianus has his brother murdered and then demands that Papinianus provide legal justification for politically motivated fratricide. The stage is thus set for the real drama in Papinianus, which turns not on the naked struggle for power but on questions of legality and legitimacy. Given that the deed has already been done, Papinianus could easily have claimed that ordering Geta’s execution was an appropriate response to a challenge to Bassianus’s imperial authority.38 Or Papinianus could condemn the emperor’s actions and accept the offer of a rebel faction that is eager to depose the tyrant and put Papinianus on the throne. Papinianus rejects both possibilities, refusing either to legitimate the emperor’s evil deed or to rebel against the emperor’s authority. He chooses a third, far more difficult but highly principled path: he allows himself to be executed. The emperor is wrong for what he has done, but he is still the emperor and must be obeyed. In refusing to rebel even against a clearly compromised authority, Papinianus thus follows a path that Luther would have approved. Unlike Luther, however, who directed some of his most vitriolic tirades against the revolting peasants, Gryphius was a dramatist, whose medium required him to give voice to dissenting opinions. As in the case of Milton’s Satan, some of the best lines go to the devil’s advocate in Gryphius’s dramas. The rebel Hugo Peter in Carolus Stuardus challenges the very basis of aristocratic rule when he rejects the idea that he should obey someone simply because of the accident of birth. In Leo Arminius, Gryphius allows the rival to the royal throne, Michael Balbus, to express ideas that are even more radically egalitarian: “What is a prince? A man! And I am as good as he!”39 Balbus led the armies that overthrew the previous emperor and agreed to place Leo Armenius on the throne only because his coconspirator was of higher birth, but now he questions the logic behind his decision and, thus, the entire feudal order: “What is a prince? Nothing more than a crowned servant.”40 In the end, Michael Balbus is exposed as a man of ruthless ambition who will stop at nothing in his quest for power. It seems highly unlikely and thoroughly anachronistic to view him as the spokesman for Gryphius’s clandestine republican sentiments. This and other dramas by Gryphius do reveal, however, an abiding fascination with the politics of empire. Leo Armenius, Catharina of Georgia, and Papinian all take place in multinational empires of the sort that would have been familiar to Gryphius through his role as a Silesian syndic mediating between the demands of his local clients and the authority of the Hapsburg Empire. Gryphius tends to set his dramas either in the distant past

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(Leo Armenius takes place in the early ninth century, Papinian in the third) or in distant locales (Carolus Stuardus is set in London, Catharina of Georgia in Persia), but given the baroque sense of history as a reservoir of timeless exempla rather than unique events,41 it seems reasonable to suggest that Gryphius reflected on political issues close to home even when he was staging stories that took place long ago or far away. Leo Armenius is a drama about the difference between winning power over a far-­flung empire and maintaining that power, about the interrelation between foreign conquest and domestic authority. Gryphius’s source makes clear that Leo has ascended the throne because the previous emperor failed in battle against the Bulgarians. As a result, his army became disloyal and gave its support to General Michael Balbus, who defeated the Bulgarians and placed fellow rebel Leo Armenius on the imperial throne. Balbus is a man of action who has built a reputation by crushing foreign foes. As the drama begins, he is bitter because he feels that sycophantic courtiers have reaped the benefits of his hard labor on the battlefield. Exabolius, the emperor’s privy counselor, explains to Balbus that it is one thing to win an empire and quite another to keep it. Every day, the emperor hears news about foreign threats from Persians, Scythians, Goths, and Huns, while new heresies threaten to destabilize the realm from within. Individual acts lead to collective suffering, and the emperor must bear the burden for the entire Reich: “The prince can avoid nothing; he feels the entire burden.”42 By beginning his drama after the military coup that put Leo Armenius on the throne, Gryphius shifts the focus from the battlefield to the intricacies of court society. Power is gained by brute force, but it is maintained by the clever manipulation of appearances. Unleashed rage may win battles, but the courtier must hold his tongue: “You have to be polite, no matter how much your heart burns with rage and zeal.”43 Balbus prides himself on the fact that he refuses to play that game. While courtiers flatter, he acts: “Do not think of my words. Look at the deeds of my arms.”44 Balbus defends himself against accusations of treason by claiming that while he may have said seditious things in anger, he did not really mean them: “I never really wanted your throne, your death.”45 His defense is, at best, disingenuous (the play begins with Michael Balbus urging his co-­conspirators to revolt, in no uncertain terms), yet the emperor is willing to consider his argument, because Balbus “only sinned in words, not with weapons.”46 As Leo’s judges point out, mere words cannot be trusted; even torture may elicit only a false confession. At base, the conflict in Leo Armenius is clear: Balbus wants to gain power, and Leo wants to keep it. Making the work interesting is its portrayal of a brute

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power struggle that unfolds as an exercise in interpreting ambiguity and manipulating public opinion. Once he is imprisoned on suspicion of treason, Balbus shifts tactics away from pretending that he is the only man at court who is not dissembling, to adopting subversive survival strategies. When Leo tiptoes into prison to check on the accused traitor, he is astonished to find Balbus sleeping peacefully, which is either a sign of a clear conscience or a clever ruse designed to render the vacillating emperor even more uncertain about his decision to execute his rival. Balbus then rallies his co-­conspirators with a message encased in wax and smuggled out of prison by a priest who hides the capsule in his mouth, in a scene that underscores the inherent duplicity of the written as well as the spoken word. The plot succeeds: disguised as monks with swords hidden in hollowed-­out candles, the rebels assassinate the emperor in church on Christmas Eve. As his enemies surround him by the altar, Leo grabs the cross and pleas for mercy in the name of Jesus, but the mob cannot be stopped, and he dies kissing the cross. Ambiguities remain: if Gryphius intended Leo Armenius to represent King Charles I, one could argue that Leo dies as a Christ-­like martyr, embracing the cross. Yet we know that Leo grasped power through a military coup and ruled as a vacillating tyrant. From the perspective of Michael Balbus and his supporters, Leo simply got what he deserved. Does his embrace of the cross signal a moment of divine grace that suddenly transforms the sinner into a saint? Or could it be, like Balbus’s seemingly tranquil sleep in prison, merely an act, a deliberate strategy, a final effort to manipulate public opinion by dying like, rather than actually as, a martyr? Likewise, when Michael Balbus is proclaimed emperor in the final line of the play, are we to assume that justice has finally prevailed and that the legitimate ruler now sits on the throne? Or is he merely the next in a long series of pretenders who rise to power only to fall prey to the next ambitious general? As many have argued, Leo Arminius reveals the ultimate folly of human ambition and implicitly encourages its audience to focus on the Christian faith and the eternal salvation to which it leads. Yet the play itself reveals a fascination with a political world in which appearances are deceptive and in which even sainthood can be staged. Catharina of Georgia offers the purest example of a martyr drama, in which the heroine steadfastly resists the advances of the Persian shah Abas and suffers gruesome tortures as she awaits her heavenly reward.47 Lest we miss the overt moral of this religious drama, Gryphius prefaces the play with an allegorical prologue in which Eternity insists on the vanity of earthly delights, in language borrowed directly from one of Gryphius’s most famous sonnets: “What the one builds, the other will tear down tomorrow. Where palaces stand

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now, there will be nothing but grass and meadow.” (Was diser baut: bricht jener Morgen ein! / Wo itzt Paläste stehn / Wird künfftig nichts als Graß und Wiese seyn.)48 The stage is strewn with corpses and decorated with images of heaven above (“here above you is that which eternally laughs”) and hell below (“here below you what eternally crackles and burns”).49 Gryphius further underscores the religious message of his drama by giving Catherina an allegorical dream that anticipates her future. In her dream, the queen, who is imprisoned in Persia, finds herself back in her palace in Georgia, sitting on a throne in a room splendidly decorated in gold. Suddenly, her crown turns into a crown of thorns; as blood run down her cheeks, a strange man enters the room and tears at her breasts. She swoons, awakens within the dream to find herself in a white dress covered with diamonds and with Shah Abas trembling at her feet, and then awakens in reality. The dream thus anticipates her martyrdom on earth and ultimate triumph, in heaven, over the shah and his evil henchmen. Given the unmistakable religious thrust of Catharina of Georgia, critics have been understandably bewildered by the political content of the play. In acts 1 and 3, we are treated to very long and partially repetitive disquisitions on the details of Georgian history. For a modern audience that expects dramas to be full of action, such passages are tedious and confusing, which is one of the reasons why Gryphius’s tragedies are rarely staged today. One influential but clearly puzzled scholar concludes that the play’s extensive details about political turmoil in Georgia only serve to reinforce its religious theme of vanitas, a theme already stressed more than sufficiently by the allegorical prologue to the play.50 Clearly, Gryphius found the political events important enough to recount at length, even at the risk of repeating certain details. As in the case of Leo Armenius, Gryphius presents us with a drama that functions simultaneously on two different levels, the religious and the political.51 Precisely the tension between the overt religious message of the Christian martyr drama and the more ambiguous political tragedy constitutes the most compelling aspect of Catharina of Georgia. The political situation depicted in the drama is both local and imperial. In the early seventeenth century, Georgia was a small, primarily Christian country that lay on the crossroads of Europe and Asia. In our post-­Soviet era, it stands between the global superpowers of Russia and the United States; at the time of the play, which is set in the 1620s, it was pulled between the imperial powers of Turkey, Russia, and Persia.52 Georgia could only survive by establishing strategic alliances with its dominant neighbors. Relations between Georgia and Persia are described in the drama as tumultuous, marked by open conflict and treachery that has led to Catharina’s imprisonment in the

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Persian capital. There is nevertheless reason to hope for her release, as two messengers from Georgia report in act 1: Georgia has forged an alliance with Russia, just as Russia has established a bond with Persia. Thus the Russian ambassador is willing to intervene on Catharina’s behalf with the shah. He agrees to the Russians’ request to set her free, but then—­overcome by lust for the beautiful queen—­retracts his offer and presents her with an ultimatum: she can either convert and marry him or die. Catharina chooses death. At a time when Central Europe was beset by the near and present danger of the Ottoman Empire, it is easy enough to see her heroic resistance to the Muslim shah as a rallying cry to Gryphius’s contemporary audience: just as a Christian queen had resisted the advances of a lustful Oriental despot some thirty years before, the Holy Roman Empire should hold fast against the threat of the Ottoman Turks. The neat parallel between past and present is nevertheless complicated by the fact that the Georgians in Gryphius’s drama are willing to ally themselves with the Ottoman Turks if their relations with Persia become too dangerous: “If Isfahan won’t help us, then Istanbul can protect us, despite treachery and power and weapons.”53 The Turks are no less Muslim than the Persians, so the potential alliance with Istanbul clearly places political expediency above religious conviction. A second parallel to Gryphius’s contemporary situation suggests itself here: not the situation between a monolithically Christian West and an equally unified Islamic East, as Bethany Wiggin suggests,54 but that between the predominantly Lutheran principality of Silesia and the Catholic Austrian Empire. Heroic resistance against a clearly defined enemy yields to delicate negotiations between uncomfortable allies, just as Gryphius had to balance loyalty to his local constituents against subordination to Hapsburg authority.55 From this perspective, the details of Georgian history in Catharina of Georgia suddenly seem not a tedious distraction from the Christian martyr drama but, rather, central to its examination of local and imperial politics. Georgia, like Silesia, finds itself squeezed between imperial superpowers: “The proximity of the Turks was certainly too threatening for us,” summarizes Catharina, “but we were much more frightened by the Persian army.” The Russian ambassador sympathizes: “Georgia was indeed between a rock and a hard place [zwischen Thür und Angel].”56 While the central focus in Catharina of Georgia is on the unqualified heroism of the Georgian queen, its political subplots feature far less admirable characters. Catharina’s brother-­in-­law, Prince Constantine, is a traitor pure and simple, who converts to Islam and goes over to the side of Persia. He then murders his own father and brother (Catharina’s husband, David). He even has the audacity to enter Georgia at the head of a

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Persian army and propose marriage to the recently widowed queen, but she lulls him into a sense of false security that leads to an ambush, in which Constantine and his armies are slaughtered. The Georgian prince Meurab plays a more ambiguous role in Catharina of Georgia. He also seems to convert to Islam and betray his people, but only after being forced to watch the shah rape his wife. Meurab serves as Abas’s general and leads a Persian army that enters Georgia and causes widespread death and destruction, yet he insists that, deep down, he has remained loyal to his own people: “My clothing looks Persian, but in my heart I am Christian.”57 Shah Abas must have had suspicions about Meurab, for although he appointed him commander in chief of the Persian army ordered to invade Georgia, he also sent along two assassins with orders to kill Meurab as soon as the latter completed his mission. Meurab outsmarts them and has them executed. He then decorates his dinner table with their severed heads and screams that he has avenged his wife and is no longer the slave of Persia, before offering a toast to his native Georgia. Thus, in the end, Meurab does prove loyal to his people, but only after he commands armies that wreak havoc on his native land. Catharina dies as a Christian martyr but, in different circumstances, was also willing to forge an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Even her martyrdom contains an element of political calculation: she knows that Russia will be upset if its new ally (Persia) refuses to grant its first official request (to set Catharina free). The play ends not with Catharina’s execution but, rather, with the appearance of the Russian ambassador, who is furious that the shah has broken his promise. The ghost of Catharina predicts that Shah Abas will live long enough to see his empire collapse into flaming chaos, proving that her martyrdom grants her both peace in heaven and revenge on earth. Looking back to Papinianus from the perspective of Catharina of Georgia, we find that both works explore imperial politics from the perspective of those peripheral to imperial power.58 To be sure, Papinianus takes place at the center of the empire in Rome; its eponymous hero is a confidant of Emperor Severus and the most respected legal authority in the realm. Yet when Papinianus dares to challenge the authority of the new emperor, Bassianus is quick to accuse him of disloyalty and remind him that he is by birth not Roman but Syrian: “Papinian is more loyal to his Syrian origins than to our supreme command” (emphasis in the original).59 Papinianus dismisses the accusation as irrelevant, which, in a sense, it is: he defends a legal principle, not a colonized principality; he speaks as a Roman citizen, not as a Syrian freedom fighter. If Bassianus is grasping at straws in this particular case (falsely accusing Papini-

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anus of disloyalty because of the lawyer’s foreign birth), he is nevertheless correct to assume that peoples under the control of the huge and diverse Roman Empire always pose a potential threat to Rome’s central authority. Rulers have to be appointed in Egypt; if the emperor commits a questionable action by executing his own brother, he must immediately consider how this deed will be perceived in the provinces. Gryphius makes clear in his first drama that Leo Armenius sits on the imperial throne only because Michael Balbus has led his armies to victory, and the actions of the Georgians in Catharina of Georgia show that a seemingly docile colony can strike, without warning, at the heart of the occupying forces.

Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: The Trauerspiel as a Trojan Horse When we move from Gryphius to Lohenstein, we find an author who was interested more in the psychology of Machiavellian politics than in religion and whose work was later condemned for its combination of shocking violence, lurid sex, and rhetorical bombast. Both writers faced similar challenges in the realm of politics, however. Like Gryphius before him, Lohenstein was a Silesian Lutheran living during an increasingly militant phase of the Catholic Counter-­Reformation. Daniel Casper was born in the Silesian town of Nimptsch in 1635 but attended school and spent his adult life in the capital city of Breslau.60 His father was granted a hereditary title of nobility in 1670, and the writer thus became known to his contemporaries and posterity as Daniel Casper (or Caspar) von Lohenstein.61 After studying law at the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen, he went on an extended European tour that included travel to the Netherlands, France, and northern Germany and up to the Turkish border in Hungary. He then settled down as a lawyer and leading city administrator in Breslau. There, he completed five tragedies, which, together with his first play (written when he was a precocious fifteen-­year-­old student), established his reputation as the second great German-­language baroque dramatist, after Gryphius. He, too, mastered the art of the Trauerspiel as a Trojan horse, bursting with praise for the Holy Roman Empire on the outside but packed with subversive Silesians within. The political situation of Breslau during Lohenstein’s lifetime was complex. Silesia was ruled by multiple sovereign princes of the Piast dynasty who were subordinate to the Kingdom of Bohemia, which, in turn, was under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire under the Hapsburg dynasty in Vienna.

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The city-­state of Breslau enjoyed a certain autonomy due to its economic prosperity.62 It was ruled by elected officials drawn from the aristocracy and members of the educated middle class. As one of Breslau’s leading political figures, Lohenstein represented the city in negotiations with imperial Vienna. In the crowning achievement of his diplomatic career, Lohenstein successfully preserved Breslau’s independence against plans to turn it into a garrison town where soldiers would have been stationed to guard against the threat of encroaching Swedish troops. Exactly how loyal Lohenstein was to the emperor and his policies has been a matter of much debate. Gerhard Spellerberg speculates that he may have enjoyed the modicum of independence granted by his position in Breslau, which insulated him from the direct authority of the local Silesian princes and the central power of Vienna.63 Others have located him at the opposite ends of a political spectrum that ranges from sycophantic subservience, to Hapsburg rule, to clandestine resistance to imperial power. The difficulty of determining where Lohenstein’s personal allegiances lay may well be the result of a deliberate strategy on his part. A lawyer and a diplomat living at a time when writers did not tend to bare their souls in confessional autobiographies,64 he crafted literary works that strike a subtle balance between overt glorification of the Hapsburg Empire and covert fascination with those on the margins of imperial authority. Whether heartfelt or not, Lohenstein’s work does contain unambiguous celebrations of the Holy Roman Empire. Extending a tradition as old as the Song of Anno, Lohenstein places world history in the eschatological framework of the prophet Daniel. Both of his dramas set in Africa, Cleopatra (1661) and Sophonisbe (1666), conclude with choruses that identify the Roman Empire as the fourth and final stage of a sequence that had moved from Assyria to Persia to Greece. Lohenstein also follows the traditional concept of the translatio imperii that views the modern Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate continuation of its ancient predecessor.65 For the first time, however, the dream of establishing universal Christendom seemed capable of being realized on a global scale. In December 1666, the Austrian emperor Leopold I married Margareta Theresia of Spain, uniting the two branches of the Hapsburg dynasty. Overnight, the formerly landlocked empire extended not only across Europe to the shores of the Atlantic but also to Spain’s vast holdings in the Americas. The allegorical representations of the Danube and Rhine in Cleopatra boast that Leopold’s realm will soon outstrip the accomplishments of ancient Rome: “The current world is too small for him. Another world will arise for him, in which the sun will not set. Ultima Thule will no longer mark the limits of the earth.”66 Visions of Hapsburg glory only grow stronger in Sophonisbe, where

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Dido’s ghost predicts that although Rome will triumph in its battle against Carthage, it will succumb, in the long run, to “the Gothic flood and the swarm of Wends.”67 Looking to the future, the prophet foresees a time when “Germany will be the seat of imperial power” and when “the modern Austrian dynasty will occupy the Roman throne with even greater glory [than its ancient predecessors].”68 The drumbeat of praise for the Austrian Empire reaches a crescendo in Lohenstein’s final work, the courtly novel Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius oder Herrmann (Magnanimous General Arminius, or Hermann, 1689/90), a detailed portrait of Arminius, or Hermann, that Elida Maria Szarota reads as a tribute to the Austrian emperor Leopold as the modern incarnation of the ancient hero.69 Left at this level, Lohenstein’s work would seem to be little more than political propaganda in service of the Hapsburg emperors. It clearly is political propaganda; at the same time, however, the works contain subtexts that complicate and even contradict their overt messages. One of the central premises of court society is that things are not always what they seem, that people may say one thing or act one way and mean something quite different. As Norbert Elias points out, in a world in which people are always on stage, performing their public identities, it is rarely in one’s best interest to bare one’s soul.70 When, a century later, Goethe’s Mephistopheles chides the Baccalaureus for his impertinence, the student snaps back in defense of honesty, even to the point of rudeness: “People lie in German when they are being polite” (Im Deutschen lügt man, wenn man höflich ist [literally, “when they speak like they do at court”]).71 Goethe wrote at a time when forthrightness had become a virtue; Lohenstein lived in a society of semblance and dissemblance. Trying to convince her son Caesarion to disguise himself as a Moor, Lohenstein’s Cleopatra observes, “All the world wears a mask these days, and virtue cannot go without a costume if it is not to suffer shipwreck.”72 Lohenstein’s two plays about the Roman emperor Nero, Agrippina (1665) and Epicharis (1665), present negative examples of how not to rule. The dramas reveal Lohenstein at his most shocking: in Agrippina, Nero oscillates between incest and matricide as possible responses to his mother’s challenge to his authority; Epicharis features protracted scenes of onstage torture so ghastly that one of the characters exclaims that it is too horrible to watch. One could easily argue that these dramas offer an implicit contrast between ancient tyranny and modern justice: today’s Hapsburgs are not Nero. Pierre Béhar suggests an alternate possibility, however. He contends that Epicharis was probably written after the death of Emperor Ferdinand III in April 1657 but before his successor, Leopold, was elected in July 1658—­at a time, in other words,

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when the Silesians were hoping that the new emperor would be more lenient in his treatment of his Protestant subjects.73 The two dramas thus function both as a warning to Vienna not to choose another despot like Nero and as an expression of republican loyalties on the part of the Breslau dramatist and diplomat. Agrippina casts the potential assassination of a tyrannical ruler in a sympathetic light; Epicharis does the same for a republican revolt against despotic rule. The very choice to portray Nero in both tragedies is potentially damning, because according to the logic of the translatio imperii, the Roman Emperor, however decadent, prefigures the modern rulers of the Hapsburg dynasty.74 Lohenstein’s two dramas set in the Ottoman Empire follow a similar strategy. At face value, the early Ibrahim or Ibrahim Bassa (1653) features an Oriental despot who serves as a negative contrast to the Austrian emperor. Emperor Soliman lusts after the wife of his ambassador Ibrahim and has his rival executed on the basis of a transparently specious argument. In the much later Ibrahim Sultan (1673), Lohenstein depicts an Ottoman emperor who rapes a fifteen-­year-­old girl and drives her to suicide. Both works contain dedicatory prologues that explicitly condemn Asiatic corruption and praise Austrian rule, which is hardly surprising in the case of Ibrahim Sultan, given that it was written to celebrate the marriage of Emperor Leopold and Claudia Felicitas.75 There again, however, it is possible to read between the lines to discover a more critical subtext. Not all Turks are evil in Ibrahim Bassa, and not all of the sultan’s servants are Muslim: the eponymous hero is an Italian Christian who has risen to prominence in Soliman’s court and was on friendly terms with the sovereign in the past. Even after his arrest on trumped-­up charges, Ibrahim is temporarily reconciled with Soliman and would have escaped execution if not for the influence of an evil advisor. Ibrahim Sultan also presents the inner workings of an Ottoman court in which the sultan is utterly evil while his subjects are not. As a result, both dramas are also about the kind of intrigue that is common to all courts, both Ottoman and Austrian; the portrait of the depraved sultan as the negative counterpart to the glorified emperor also brings the Turkish court into uneasy proximity to the Holy Roman Empire.76 Lohenstein, in his role as the loyal subject of the Hapsburg emperor, extols the virtues of his Catholic superior; in his role as Silesian Protestant, however, he may sympathize with those members of the Ottoman court who seek to curb royal authority. Even Lohenstein’s decision to write his first play in German can be viewed as a Protestant protest against the officially sanctioned Latin dramas of the Jesuits.77 Lohenstein’s African tragedies present the best case for the presence of an anti-­imperial countercurrent in the river of Roman-­Hapsburg triumphalism.

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Both works are framed by celebrations in praise of the new global scope of the Hapsburg Empire (as noted earlier), and both depict victories of that empire’s historical precursor over its foes. Destiny seems clear: Cleopatra’s Egypt must succumb to the Roman juggernaut, just as Sophonisbe’s Carthage is also fated to be defeated by the forces of Rome. In both cases, however, Lohenstein chooses to focus primarily on female rulers who resist Roman authority, rather than on leaders of the Roman legions. Cleopatra is already married to Mark Anthony when Octavius Augustus invades her country. Augustus attempts to play the lovers against one another, promising spoils of war to either Cleopatra or Anthony if the one betrays the other, but Cleopatra outsmarts him: to prevent Anthony from succumbing to temptation, she drives him to commit suicide by pretending to commit suicide herself. Augustus plays the role of the magnanimous conqueror, assuring Cleopatra that the people of Egypt can keep their religion and that their places of worship will be respected. In the next scene, however, we learn that Egypt’s temples are being desecrated by Roman soldiers, and Cleopatra realizes that Augustus plans to stage her public humiliation in Rome. Again Cleopatra thwarts his plans by committing suicide, this time in earnest. Like Cleopatra, Sophonisbe must choose between personal inclination and patriotic duty. She is a Carthaginian princess who was once engaged to Masinissa, a leader in the struggle against Rome. When Masinissa betrays his people and begins to fight for the enemy, however, Sophonisbe marries Syphax, another African partisan who has remained true to the cause. As the play begins, Syphax has already been defeated and is threatened with execution. Sophonisbe takes his place in prison, disguising herself as a man. She confronts her former fiancé there and—­in an unexpected twist—­marries him. In the end, Masinissa’s commanding general, Scipio, tells Masinissa that he cannot serve Rome on the battlefield and share a marriage bed with Rome’s enemy. Masinissa reluctantly obeys his commander, and Sophonisbe, like Cleopatra, commits suicide rather than being paraded in Rome as a defeated enemy. In both cases, Lohenstein explores the moral ambiguities of political exigency rather than reveling in the steadfast faith of the religious martyr or celebrating the success of imperial Rome. Is Cleopatra a fickle woman who betrays her lover by tricking him to commit suicide, or is she a desperate patriot willing to do whatever is necessary to save her country? Is Sophonisbe driven by lust into a bigamous marriage with her enemy’s ally, or does she pursue a calculated strategy in which she employs her sexual charms to the political end of winning a Roman collaborator back to the Carthaginian side? The eventual triumph of the Roman Empire is a foregone conclusion; what interests Lohenstein more are

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the strategies adopted by the leaders of the colonized territories in their ultimately futile attempts to avoid their fate.78 In keeping with his dual role as a celebrant of Hapsburg hegemony and a defender of Silesian autonomy, Lohenstein both supports and subverts racial categories in his work. As Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton note, references to race pervade early modern literature, even though the concept of race had not yet acquired the pseudoscientific specificity of the later nineteenth century. The concept was fluid and often extended beyond physical appearance to include religious difference, social class distinctions, and “‘abnormal’ sexualities—­ intemperance, hermaphroditism, lesbianism, and ‘sodomy’ in its various forms.”79 Thus Lohenstein’s Turkish despots display the sexual depravity to be expected of Oriental tyrants. Ibrahim Sultan is said to have ascended the throne “with his neck adorned with pearls, his body with diamonds, and his fingers with golden nail polish; he tried eagerly in many ways to be a woman.”80 Skin color plays a similarly distinguishing role in Cleopatra.81 An emissary of the Roman forces chides Antonius for having married a Moor. Conceding that Julius Caesar also had a dalliance with the African queen, the emissary contends that at least Caesar had the good sense to stop short of marriage.82 Another Roman marvels at the idea that Antonius would refuse to surrender Cleopatra to Emperor Augustus, noting that Antonius could have his pick of hundreds of white women to replace his “brown wife” (sein braunes Eheweib).83 Cleopatra seems to have internalized the same prejudices, for when she learns that Augustus wants to marry her, she is flattered but also concerned, protesting, “But no! Moors are beneath Caesar.”84 Sophonisbe and Syphax also refer to themselves as Moors or Africans, and Syphax defends his impromptu marriage to Rome’s enemy on the grounds that he cannot control his hot African blood.85 On closer inspection, however, racial distinctions prove less rigid than might be expected in Lohenstein’s two African dramas. When Augustus finally meets Cleopatra face to face, he praises her beauty in curiously ambivalent terms: “Proud Rome does not believe that this brown land nurtures such white Moors” (Daß dieses braune Land so weisse Mohren hege). Is he astonished because her complexion is lighter than expected? Or is he surprised to find such a “white” character in a person with dark skin, as suggested by the next line, “Nor that here a noble spirit stirs a soul.”86 Sophonisbe insists that her brown breast conceals a snow-­white heart, when attempting to prove her newfound loyalty to Rome.87 Sophonisbe is dissembling here, for whatever color her heart may be, her loyalties to Carthage remain constant. The passage points toward a larger tendency for characters in Lohenstein’s work to use racial and sexual distinctions strategically. Disguised as a man, Sophonisbe takes Syph-

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ax’s place in prison; she assures her African husband that he will be able to escape undetected, despite his presumably dark skin, because he speaks good Latin.88 Cleopatra encourages her son Caesarion (whose father was Caesar and who is thus apparently of lighter complexion than other Egyptians) to disguise himself as a Moor by blackening his face. Caesarion at first refuses to pose as a member of an inferior race, arguing, “I want to die as a noble and not a servile Moor.”89 His mother insists, however, that now is not the time for scruples; his survival and the survival of the Egyptian cause depend on the use of strategic subterfuge. This passage simultaneously supports and subverts racial distinctions: while suggesting that Moors are, in fact, inferior to Romans, it uses the performance of blackface as a clever ruse to undermine Roman authority.

Race and Resistance in Lohenstein’s Arminius In the final decade of his life, Lohenstein poured his creative energies into his courtly novel Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius oder Herrmann (Magnanimous General Arminius, or Hermann). He had completed all but the final chapter when he died in 1683; his brother and a pastor from Leipzig finished the work and published it a few years later.90 The novel is huge, stretching to over three thousand double-­columned pages. In a nutshell, it tells the story of the Germanic struggle against the ancient Romans, beginning with the victory of Hermann, or Arminius, over the Roman general Varus in 9 CE. As is typical for the baroque genre of the heroic or courtly novel, the convoluted plot features romance as well as war among the ruling elite, with episodes sprawling across the ancient world, from Europe to the Middle East and on to northern Africa, India, and China.91 Action scenes alternate with discussions in which characters digress, with encyclopedic thoroughness, on any topic that comes to mind. At a time when the majority of the population was illiterate and living in abject poverty, the potential readership for Lohenstein’s novel must have been very limited indeed, yet the novel made a powerful impression on the first generation of those who did read the work.92 Only in the course of the eighteenth century, as the aesthetics of genius began to replace the rhetorical flourishes and ostentatious erudition of the baroque novel, did Lohenstein’s Arminius fall into disfavor. Ironically, the author who had devoted himself to the most “German” of themes—­Hermann’s victory over the Romans—­was denounced as the practitioner of a style at odds with the German national character. Ulrich von Hutten was the first to base a literary work on the Germanic leader’s battles with Rome. Published posthumously in 1529, Hutten’s Her-

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mann oder Arminius (Hermann, or Arminius) was probably written between 1517 and 1520.93 Hutten adapts Lucian’s literary model of the Mortuorum Dialogi (Dialogues of the dead), bringing famous generals of antiquity together in the underworld to draw up a list of the best military leaders of all time.94 Insulted that he has been forgotten, Hermann calls in Tacitus to testify about the general’s accomplishments. Together, they make the case that Hermann should be included because he defeated the world’s mightiest empire at the height of its power. Hutten’s work is short and unambiguous in its patriotic fervor; not only is Lohenstein’s Arminius infinitely longer than Hutten’s “dialogue in booklet form” (Gesprächsbüchlein), but Lohenstein’s novel is more complex in relation to his contemporary society. Within the fictional world of his novel, there is no question of Hermann’s heroism or of his people’s virtue; in fact, Lohenstein stretches the limits of plausibility and historical accuracy by having Germans participate in most of the major conflicts in world history. The negative counterpart to the virtuous Germans in Arminius are the decadent Romans, but in keeping with the multivalence of the novel, the ancient Romans can also be understood as unflattering portraits of Lohenstein’s contemporary French and the Ottoman Turks.95 Critical debate has centered on the question of how the idealized Germans of antiquity should be understood in relation to Lohenstein’s world. As noted earlier, Elida Maria Szarota reads the novel as an elaborate tribute to the Austrian emperor Leopold as the modern incarnation of the ancient hero. Thomas Borgstedt cautions against a one-­to-­one identification of Leopold with Hermann, however, suggesting that the novel might be understood better as the representation of an idealized Germanic type than as the encoded glorification of a particular regime.96 The novel is actually dedicated to the Prussian Kurfürst Frederick III rather than the Austrian emperor Leopold I, but it is likely that Lohenstein’s son added the dedication when he completed the fragmentary novel.97 More ambivalent is the very choice of Hermann as the protagonist of the novel: on the one hand, his heroism prefigures that of the modern Hapsburg ruler; on the other, his resistance to Rome anticipates Luther and signals opposition to the leaders of the Counter-­Reformation.98 Although Lohenstein has switched genres from Trauerspiel to courtly novel, he continues to combine unambiguous enthusiasm for the accomplishments of Hermann and the Germanic people with an interest in the political complexities of imperial border zones. Long episodes included in the first half of the novel detail the adventures of Armenian aristocrats. As a nation threatened by Roman power, Armenia serves as a parallel to ancient Germany as a site of resistance to imperial authority, and both sites can be substituted for the

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Holy Roman Empire’s struggles against its French or Ottoman enemies. Armenia’s internal politics involve tensions between imperial collaborators and local patriots, however, in ways that recall Cleopatra’s Egypt, Sophonisbe’s Carthage, and Lohenstein’s Silesia. Like his dramas, Lohenstein’s novel depicts characters who work as spies or undercover agents, a motif that is again often linked to gender or racial ambiguity. The Armenian subplots in Arminius involve gender reversals of dizzying complexity, usually featuring virtuous women who fight as men and decadent men who might as well be women.99 While Hermann leads a life of Germanic heroism, his brother Flavius—­ whose real name is Ernst—­spends most of his time passing for Roman. One particularly gripping episode shows him tempted by but ultimately resisting the sexual debauchery to which his companions succumb.100 In the process, he falls in love with an African princess named Dido, even though he insisted earlier that he could never be attracted to a black woman. The corrupt keeper of a Roman seraglio provides African boys and girls for the sexual pleasure of Rome’s future leaders, but Dido is not just another colonized subject trafficked as a sex slave. She comes to Rome as an African princess whose inner nobility outshines even that of Flavius, not to mention his debauched Roman friends. Dido flees Rome to escape a particularly lascivious Roman, only to fall into the hands of a pernicious sect where she is imprisoned and raped by its head priest. Flavius forces the offending cult leader to castrate himself, but Flavius also refuses to marry the deflowered woman. Even though she is an innocent victim, Dido remains loyal to the man who rejects her. She helps Flavius escape Roman persecution in the wake of the Germanic victory over Varus and makes him ashamed of what he has done: “I blushed at the kindness of the woman whom I felt that I had insulted with my disdain.”101 Just as the character known as both Flavius and Ernst slides between his Roman and German identities, Dido shifts from black to white: “She was, to be sure, black, as people from Numidia are, but her eyes sparkled with grace, and her mouth laughed with friendliness. Her lips did not protrude in a Moorish way but were in perfect proportion, just like the rest of her body.”102 Dido’s skin may be black, but her features are white in a way that recalls the eponymous hero of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), published just one year before the first volume of Lohenstein’s novel. Oroonoko is an African prince with very dark skin, but his nose is “Roman, instead of African,” and his mouth is “far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes.”103 Dido’s father has sent her from the colonial periphery to the imperial capital “to learn Roman customs and to win favor with the ruling family.”104 Oroonoko has been schooled by European slave traders in Africa, speaks mul-

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tiple European languages, is well versed in ancient and modern European history, and bears himself with the civility of a gentleman. In the end, however, both Dido and Oroonoko fall victim to the imperial power whose language and culture they seek to acquire: Oroonoko is sold into slavery and tortured to death for his role in a slave revolt, while Dido is violated by a corrupt priest and cast aside by her former lover. Lohenstein’s choice of the name Dido for his protagonist adds another layer of significance to his novel. Already in Sophonisbe, Lohenstein places the prediction of the Roman Empire’s collapse and Austria’s future grandeur in the mouth of a character with the name Dido, which, as Jane O. Newman notes, has an element of irony.105 Virgil’s Aeneas must tear himself away from the African queen Dido, lest he fail to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. In Lohenstein’s drama, the character whom Virgil’s epic sweeps aside so that the Roman Empire may arise predicts the empire’s eventual collapse. Rome’s demise paves the way for Vienna’s rise to power, but if the parallel between the ancient and modern empires holds fast, Vienna, too, is fated to fall. In Lohenstein’s Arminius, a different character with the name Dido comes from the colonies to the imperial capital in search of civilization but discovers only decadence. Only her fellow outsider from the empire’s northern border seems worthy of her love, and even if Flavius, or Ernst, betrays her trust, his remorse distinguishes him favorably from his incorrigible Roman companions.

Conclusion In his study of the Thirty Years’ War, Peter H. Wilson challenges the common assumption that the Peace of Westphalia that brought an end to the war marked the beginning of “the modern international order based on sovereign states.”106 As he explains, “the classic ‘Westphalian state’ rests on indivisible sovereignty . . . it possesses well-­demarcated, non-­porous borders, and a common identity and culture among its inhabitants.” From today’s perspective, Wilson contends, the year 1648 no longer seems a sharp turning point in European history, for two reasons. First, the movement toward the modern nation-­state was a slow process that began before and continued long after the Peace of Westphalia was signed. It would be more than two centuries before Germany appeared on the map of Europe. Second, “the nation state no longer appears the final destination of political development.” Citing Jan Zielonka’s study Europe as Empire, Wilson agrees that today’s European Union can be viewed more as a “neo-­ medieval empire” than as “a single, centralized Westphalian super-­state.”107

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With the exception of some early poetry, Andreas Gryphius’s career took place in the years immediately after the Thirty Years’ War, as did that of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Against both Walter Benjamin’s effort to identify an essential German character in the baroque Trauerspiel and Heinz Schlaffer’s dismissal of the same because of its allegedly derivative and, thus, non-­ Germanic nature, more recent critics have rejected the nationalist paradigm as inadequate for the understanding of Central Europe in the seventeenth-­century. Challenging notions of “a trajectory that posits a homogeneous culture as the necessary expression of a unified national identity,” Newman finds in Lohenstein’s drama “heterogeneous relations of culture, loyalties, and power” of the sort that have become familiar today.108 Thomas Borgstedt identifies in Lohenstein’s Arminius “a shift in focus from the center to the periphery,” as the work once read as the unequivocal celebration of Hapsburg power now seems more about the complexities of imperial politics viewed from the perspective of the Silesian border zone: “Politically the novel does not point toward a centralized nation-­state. . . . It would be more accurate to think in terms of the modern problems of German federalism.”109 One intriguing question remains: if it is true, as I have argued here, that both Gryphius and Lohenstein write works that question Hapsburg hegemony as much as they support it, how did the emperors and their Catholic courtiers regard the work of these Silesian Protestants? Two possibilities come to mind: either the rulers were so pleased with the main melody of praise that they turned a deaf ear to the discordant notes, or they were aware of—­and perhaps even enjoyed—­the hints of subversiveness beneath the works’ sycophantic surfaces. Given that both writers and royalty inhabited the same court society, in which duplicity and disingenuousness were the norm, it seems more likely that the latter possibility was the case. There were certainly limits to what could be said, but neither Gryphius nor Lohenstein was a bloodthirsty rebel or political radical of the sort that emerged in late eighteenth-­century France, out to dethrone the king and abolish the aristocracy. Lawyers and diplomats as well as dramatists, Gryphius and Lohenstein were shrewd players in a system whose complexities they explored and, when possible, sought to exploit, without challenging the existence of the Holy Roman Empire. The present study now turns to the end of that thousand-­year Reich and to Goethe’s reaction to its demise.

Chapter 5

Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire

With Goethe, we reach a pivotal figure in German literary historiography. Authors and works of earlier periods were selected retrospectively as representatives of the national literature—­or not; baroque drama suffered both fates. Goethe, in contrast, was widely acknowledged as the leading figure in German letters already during his lifetime. As a young man, Goethe experienced a meteoric rise to fame, first within Germany, with his sensational play Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Faust (Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 1771), and then across Europe, with Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774). He retreated from public view for the better part of two decades, only to emerge, together with Schiller, as a prolific author and dominant cultural force. In the last decades of his long life, Goethe became something of a living monument, inspiring writers like the young Heinrich Heine to make their pilgrimage to Weimar to pay homage to the great man. Heine recounts his audience with Goethe with a mixture of self-­ deprecation and sarcasm, but he respected Goethe’s genius too much to reject him entirely as a political reactionary, as did Ludwig Börne and other radicals of the German Vormärz.1 Goethe hagiography reached new heights soon after his death. The almost simultaneous publication of Bettine von Arnim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 1835) and Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe, 1836) popularized the image of the Weimar Olympian, while Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s pioneering Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (History of the poetic national literature of the Germans, 1835–­42) was the first in a series of monumental works that traced the emergence of the national literature from its origins to the recent past. Gervinus was a liberal, like many German nationalists prior to 1848; he hoped to replace the aristocratic rulers of 81

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Germany’s many principalities with a constitutional government in a unified state. Thus he argued that the Germans, having reached the zenith of their literary development in the works of Goethe and Schiller, would have to leave literature behind if they were to fulfill their political destiny.2 The supreme achievement of Weimar classicism marked only a provisional step on the path toward greater democracy. In the later nineteenth century, in contrast, Goethe was increasingly appropriated for a conservative political agenda within the Prussian-­dominated Second Empire. In a two-­step process, Goethe was first depoliticized into an ahistorical Olympian expressing the spirit of the German people and then transformed into a Faustian figure inspiring Germany in its drive toward its national unity and imperial power.3 Almost immediately after Germany suffered a catastrophic defeat in the Second World War, a new Goethe arose, the antinationalist prophet of world literature. Fritz Strich’s study Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared already in the fall of 1945, followed, in 1952, by a Festschrift honoring Strich, with articles on the concept of world literature by such luminaries as Erich Auerbach and Emil Staiger.4 The new stress on Goethe’s cosmopolitanism was part of a larger effort to salvage a positive cultural legacy from the ruins of the Third Reich.5 More recently, Goethe’s comments on world literature have crossed the Atlantic to inspire critical discourse and curricular reform in North America, as scholars seek to expand their horizons to encompass global literary production and as administrators replace Eurocentric surveys of “great books” with introductions to world literature.6 The author once appropriated by nineteenth-­ century nationalists has become the patron saint of twenty-­first-­century cosmopolitanism. The reception of an iconic writer by subsequent generations always runs the risk of falsification or, at least, simplification. Nationalists had to overlook Goethe’s aversion to the patriotic enthusiasm of those who joined the struggle against the French invaders, as well as his provocative habit of referring to Napoleon as “my emperor.”7 Looking back on this period years later, Goethe confessed to Eckermann that he had then found it impossible to write angry poems against the French: “Just between us, I did not hate the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I have hated a nation that belongs to the most cultivated on earth and to which I owe such a large part of my own education!”8 Today’s cosmopolitans, for their part, threaten to transform the archconservative opponent of democracy and liberal reform into a fellow progressive who shares their commitment to human rights and world peace.9 The last section of this chapter returns to the recent reception of Goethe’s

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comments on world literature. I here take up the reaction among more recent critics against those who were eager to enlist Goethe in the nationalist cause. Georg Schmidt, for example, challenges the view, promulgated by Friedrich Meinecke and others, that the artists and intellectuals in Weimar and Jena founded a cultural nation (Kulturnation) that paved the way for political unification under Prussian leadership many decades later. As Schmidt observes, Meinecke imposes a Prusso-­centric notion of national unity onto the past, in a way that obscures the federative tradition of the Holy Roman Empire. He reminds us that a sense of German national identity arose already in the early modern period, long before Goethe and Schiller. From Meinecke’s perspective, the old Reich could only be viewed negatively, as the site of political particularism that had to be overcome, but if we approach these writers from the opposite direction, as emerging out of the early modern period rather than as anticipating subsequent eras, we find that notions of a common German national identity were formed not in opposition to but, rather, in the context of the Holy Roman Empire: “The German national consciousness was federative, demanding exclusive identity only in situations of extreme danger, but which otherwise did not exclude provincial or civic loyalties.” Thus Schmidt concludes that “federalism is not a German invention, not a German Sonderweg, and certainly not the German fate, but, rather, one of several paths toward modern states and nations in Europe.”10 This chapter focuses on several pivotal moments in Goethe’s life and works in which he engages with the idea of empire, ranging from his account of the imperial coronation ceremony he witnessed as an adolescent in Frankfurt to the some of the last lines he added to Faust II. My primary effort here is to view Goethe and his works in the historical contexts in which they arose, although the chapter concludes with more recent concerns. As we shall see, Goethe’s early experience as a subject of the Holy Roman Empire had a lasting effect on his worldview, simultaneously informing a conservatism that made him equally hostile to the French Revolution and modern German nationalism while laying the foundation for his cosmopolitan concept of world literature and his critique of nineteenth-­century imperialism.

The End of an Empire On August 6, 1806, Emperor Francis II declared the end of the Holy Roman Empire. His action was technically illegal: he had the personal right to abdicate his throne, but he did not have the authority to dissolve the entire empire.11 No

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one objected, however, for the emperor’s declaration marked the end of a chain of events that stretched back to the early years of the French Revolution and that made his decision seem inevitable and irrevocable. In 1792, French revolutionary armies defeated the combined forces of Austria, Prussia, and their imperial allies in the battle that Goethe subsequently declared a turning point in world history. Three years later, Prussia showed that it was willing to place its own interest above that of the empire, by signing the Treaty of Basel, acknowledging the revolutionary government’s legitimacy, and withdrawing from the conflict for the next decade; Austria followed suit in 1797, with the Peace of Campoformio. In early 1803, a special committee known as the Reichsdeputation submitted a proposal that led to the secularization of the empire’s ecclesiastical territories, the incorporation of city-­states into territorial states, and the eventual end of the free imperial knights. Thus the patchwork quilt of local sovereignties within the old empire yielded to division between Austria, Prussia, and the Confederation of the Rhine, satellite states of the expanding French Empire. By the summer of 1806, it had become clear that the balance of power had shifted to France; when confronted by a French ultimatum, Francis had no choice but to proclaim the end of an empire that had lasted more than a millennium. At first, Goethe seemed sublimely indifferent to the empire’s collapse. He was on his way from Karlsbad to Weimar when he got the news that the Confederation of the Rhine had declared its loyalty to France: “Quarrel between coachman and a servant on the coach-­box, which agitated us more than the split of the Roman Empire.”12 Two months later, however, the situation changed dramatically. After Napoleon’s forces had dealt a shattering defeat to the Prussian army at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, fleeing Prussian troops plundered the nearby city of Weimar. Goethe was awakened in the middle of the night by soldiers pounding on the door and came downstairs in his nightgown to confront men who threatened to assault him and loot his house.13 The worst was averted, but the events left Goethe deeply shaken. His immediate reaction was to marry his long-­term mistress, Christiane Vulpius, on October 19, backdating the wedding rings to October 14, the day of the traumatic events that he felt marked the end of an era. Goethe’s decision to marry marked an effort to set his personal affairs in order and solidify his legal claim to his house in Weimar at a time when radical changes in the city’s political structure seemed inevitable. Questions of marriage and property rights loom large in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), a novel that Peter Schwarz has convincingly argued represents Goethe’s initial artistic response to the end of the Old Regime.14 From a broader perspective, Goethe

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spent his entire career responding to the slow demise of the Holy Roman Empire and the political, cultural, and economic upheavals of the modern age.

Goethe’s Early Experience of the Empire The events that prompted Goethe to marry Christiane Vulpius and helped to inspire Elective Affinities also sparked a sustained period of autobiographical reflection. Between 1806 and 1808, Goethe oversaw the publication of his collected works, a project that required him to look back over his career of nearly four decades. In October 1809, less than two months after his sixtieth birthday, Goethe began to gather material for his autobiography. The autobiographical project would occupy Goethe, in one way or another, for the rest of his life. He did not complete book 4 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) until 1831, adding it to a series of autobiographical works that included Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1816–­17), Campagne in Frankreich (Campaign in France, 1822), and Die Belagerung von Mainz (The Siege of Mainz, 1822). His initial burst of autobiographical writing took place over a much shorter period, however. Goethe completed part 1 of Poetry and Truth in September 1811, concluded part 2 in October of the following year, and finished work on part 3 in August 1813 (although part 3 was not published until the following May).15 Thus Goethe’s work on the first three volumes of Poetry and Truth coincided with the period in which Germany recovered from its hour of “deep humiliation” at the hands of France and waged the triumphant Wars of Liberation that drove Napoleon into exile.16 Yet Goethe, one of the few German artists and intellectuals who had not responded enthusiastically to the early stages of the French Revolution, proved equally immune to the growing nationalist sentiment of the Napoleonic era. Poetry and Truth is a work of personal introspection that turns away from contemporary politics but, at the same time, evokes the atmosphere of local cosmopolitanism in the Holy Roman Empire of Goethe’s youth, a climate that stands in implicit contrast to the increasingly militant nationalism of Goethe’s younger contemporaries. In many ways, young Goethe was a provincial, a product of his local environment. He was born and raised in Frankfurt, a self-­governing imperial city, or Reichsstadt, within the Holy Roman Empire. Goethe spent his first sixteen years in narrow Gothic streets that had changed little since early modern times. The nostalgic fantasy of late medieval Nuremberg evoked forty years later by Wackenroder and Tieck in their Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterburders (Effusions of an Art-­Loving Monk, 1797) was still a harsh real-

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ity in the Frankfurt of Goethe’s youth.17 The weathered skulls of criminals beheaded in 1616 still hung in public view, and Goethe witnessed new executions and a book burning. The gates of the Jewish ghetto would remain in place until 1811.18 The fairy tales and Volksbücher that the romantics preserved from extinction were still part of a living tradition in Goethe’s youth, as they were printed and sold by peddlers in the city streets. Goethe’s provincial origins were underscored when he went off to college in Leipzig (known as “Little Paris”), a city of broad promenades and fine fashion, where Goethe was initially ridiculed for his unstylish wardrobe and uncouth dialect.19 Despite its city gates and crooked streets, Frankfurt was no isolated village. Like sixteenth-­ century Nuremberg or seventeenth-­ century Breslau, Frankfurt stood at the crossroads of multiple commercial networks: it “was at once provincial and metropolitan, its character both radically German and unselfconsciously international.”20 Goethe’s father was something of an outsider among the city’s ruling elite, but he was well educated, well traveled, and rich. His grandfather, Johann Wolfgang Textor, was Frankfurt’s Schultheiß, the city’s highest-­ranking lawyer, chief administrator, and best-­paid civil servant. As a privileged member of this metropolitan milieu, Goethe enjoyed an education that was as cosmopolitan as his experiences were local. As a boy, Goethe absorbed languages with remarkable facility, including Latin, some Greek, a little Hebrew, modern Italian, English, and even a little Yiddish, which he used for comic effect in a multilingual novel, now lost. During the Seven Years’ War, a French officer quartered in Goethe’s house gave him daily opportunities to speak the language that he had already acquired by reading French neoclassical dramas. His reading was eclectic but extensive, ranging from baroque compendia of world history to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, from Luther’s Bible to The Vicar of Wakefield, from Moliere to Tasso.21 Goethe was thus both a member of Frankfurt’s local elite and a polyglot student of Western European culture. He was also a subject of the Holy Roman Empire. In the first book of Poetry and Truth, Goethe recalls how he gradually became aware of the political institutions of his native city and its place within the larger empire. As a boy, he and his friends explored the “Römer,” Frankfurt’s city hall, from its lower arched chambers to the room in which the local government convened. The seating order there provided a visual overview of the city’s social hierarchy. Frankfurt was also home to one of the seven electors prescribed by the Golden Bull of 1356 and was the site of the election and crowning ceremonies for future emperors. Goethe describes how he and his friends persuaded a guard to unlock the door to the special stairway in the city hall that led to the chamber reserved for the imperial elections. Amid its walls

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decorated with portraits of the emperors going all the way back to Charlemagne, Goethe received history lessons in the form of anecdotes about the various monarchs who had ruled in an unbroken tradition from the distant past to the present day. In the spring of 1764, fourteen-­year-­old Goethe was informed by his father that Archbishop Joseph of Austria was to be elected and crowned as the Roman-­German king and future Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt. The election was set for March 27, and the crowning took place on April 3. Emissaries of the empire were quartered in Goethe’s house, taking the place of the French officer who had departed after the recently concluded Seven Years’ War. Goethe based his account of the event on historical sources that he studied in the spring of 1811 and on his own vivid memories; the result is one of the narrative highlights of his biography. Goethe evokes the tightly choreographed pageantry surrounding the coronation: beginning when four trumpeters on horseback proclaimed the impending event, it reached a first climax when the king and his father, the reigning Holy Roman Emperor, arrived in their ceremonial robes, cheered on by excited throngs. In the days before the modern media that broadcast such spectacles to a global audience, one had to be there in person to witness the events, and Goethe happened to live literally around the corner. He was filled with civic pride that extended to a sense of belonging to a greater whole: “As both Germans and Frankfurters, we felt not only highly but doubly edified by this worthy day.”22 Goethe’s loyalties were at once local and imperial: “A Frankfurt citizen could not fail to be especially gratified on this occasion . . . that the imperial city of Frankfurt also appeared as a little sovereign,” he wrote, elevating Frankfurt above the many other imperial cities and territories that comprised the Holy Roman Empire.23 Goethe and his fellow citizens provide a good example of James J. Sheehan’s comment (already cited in chapter 2 of the present study) that the empire differed from the modern nation-­state in that it “did not insist upon preeminent authority and unquestioning allegiance. Its goal was not to clarify and dominate but rather to order and balance fragmented institutions and multiple loyalties.”24 As Goethe recalls, “We were delighted to share with them in feeling this honor and to own a one hundred-­thousandth part of the sovereignty which was manifesting itself here in its full splendor.”25 The coronation ceremonies infused the crowd, “which now included not only Frankfurters but Germans from all regions,”26 with a sense of collective harmony (“all seemed to be a single mass moved by a single will and grandly harmonious”) and a hope for a lasting peace after seven years of war (“and actually Germany was blessed with peace for many years”).27

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A critical subtext nevertheless runs through Goethe’s depiction of the election and coronation ceremonies. From start to finish, Goethe signals that the magnificent performance of pomp and circumstance was just that, a performance that masked the grittier political reality of the Reich.28 The Frankfurt authorities prepared for the event by expelling all foreigners from the city and locking the gates of the Jewish ghetto, an artificial “sanitizing” of the city streets that has been repeated on the eve of modern Olympic Games and other events for a global audience. The exotic costumes of those in the emperor’s entourage fired the imagination of Goethe and his companions but left them with a lingering sense of incongruity as well. Many details “did give . . . a genuinely antique look” to the costumes, yet “so much was semi-­new or completely modern that the character which generally emerged was merely motley and unsatisfactory, and often even tasteless.”29 Goethe was particularly annoyed by the modern trousers and fashionable shoes that protruded beneath the ceremonial Spanish robes of some participants. Even the star of the show looked ill-­cast: the future king’s father was adorned in purple robes and with crown, scepter, and orb, in a tasteful imitation of antiquity, while the young king “dragged himself along in these vast garments and Charlemagne’s jewels as though in a masquerade costume, and he himself could not repress a smile when he occasionally glanced at his father.”30 The flawed performance both masked and revealed deeper fissures in the Reich. The goal of the symbolic ceremony was to make “the German empire, which was almost buried under a heap of parchment, papers, and books, seem alive again for a moment.”31 As Goethe began to read about the actual state of affairs in the empire, however, he realized that the only unity lay in the concerted effort on the part of the princes to limit imperial authority and to arrogate as much independence and as many privileges for themselves as possible. A territorial dispute between Mainz and Frankfurt delayed the delivery of the royal insignia, and all of the secular electors boycotted the ceremonies as a result of the “unfriendly relations that had gradually developed through the centuries between these lords and the supreme head of empire.”32 In one of the eyewitness moments that make this episode of Poetry and Truth compelling reading, Goethe recalls how he convinced one of the guards to let him into the festival hall, where he saw the emperor and the king sitting in state and with all the accoutrements of symbolic power, surrounded by the three electors of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. The tables were also set for their secular counterparts, but it was an empty display of imperial unity, for the other electors had refused to attend.33

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Young Goethe and the German Nation Goethe’s emergence onto the literary scene in the following decade coincided with his discovery of his German national identity. While the future emperor was being crowned in Frankfurt, German writers sought to emancipate themselves from foreign tutelage. As Goethe recalled in his autobiography, “Germany had for so long been inundated with foreigners, infiltrated by other nations, and dependent on foreign languages in scholarly and governmental proceedings that it could not possibly cultivate its own tongue.”34 Lessing called for an authentically German drama in the style of Shakespeare rather than the French neoclassicists, Klopstock began writing patriotic poetry, and Herder urged the Germans and all nations to remain true to the spirit of their indigenous cultures. Goethe and his fellow authors of the Sturm und Drang movement heeded the call: “So it was that from many sides a literary revolution was also being prepared for Germany. We witnessed it and helped work toward it, consciously and unconsciously, willingly and unwillingly.”35 Goethe’s year in Strasbourg proved decisive in his turn toward the national culture. His father sent him to complete his law degree there partly because it would give him the opportunity to improve his French.36 After his studies, Goethe was supposed to embark on a grand tour of Europe that would have led him to Paris, Vienna, and Rome, before returning to assume his rightful place among the upper crust of Frankfurt society. Instead, Goethe remained in Strasbourg and met Herder, who preached the new gospel of national authenticity. Goethe soon learned to appreciate the Gothic cathedral, whose architecture suddenly seemed to him to express German genius and not the spirit of the barbarous Middle Ages. In Strasbourg, too, Goethe discovered German folk art in poetry and fairy tales, danced the German waltz instead of the French minuet, and fell in love with a young woman from the surrounding countryside who still dressed in the traditional German style, unlike the city girls who had adopted French fashions. He also began to look to the German past for an appropriately national subject matter for his poetry. Unlike the next generation of German romantics, Goethe was not particularly interested in the literature of the high Middle Ages: “The minnesingers were too remote from us. We would have had to study their language first, and this did not appeal to us. We wanted to live, not to learn.”37 In the early modern period, however, Goethe found what he was looking for, inspiring figures from the not-­too-­distant German past that could be mined for their contribution to German national identity, including Martin Luther, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Sachs, Ulrich von Hutten, Goetz von Berlichingen, and Faust.

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As suggested earlier, Goethe’s cultural nationalism arose within the context of the Holy Roman Empire and not as an anticipation of the centralized nation-­state. Just as the humanists and Protestants began to develop a sense of loyalty to the German nation as only one of several allegiances that bound them to feudal lords and the larger empire, Goethe combined his enthusiasm for the German past with local patriotism and a continuing cosmopolitan taste in literature. Typical in this regard is an incident that occurred on his journey to Italy, when Goethe, pausing to make a sketch of a ruined fortress near Venice, was accosted by authorities who accused him of being an Austrian spy. “Far from being a subject of the Emperor,” Goethe exclaimed, “I can boast of being, like yourselves, the citizen of a republic. . . . I am, that is to say, a native of Frankfurt-­am-­Main.”38 Even during his Sturm und Drang period, Goethe never rejected all foreign influences, only those that seemed artificial copies of alien cultures. While he distanced himself from the slavish German admiration of French neoclassicism, he continued to admire what he believed was Homer’s artless grandeur, Pindar’s wild genius, and the noble simplicity of the Old Testament patriarchs. His study of sixteenth-­century German authors did not preclude his appreciation of their French contemporaries: “Just as in my adolescent years I had been attracted to sixteenth-­century German culture, so now my affection spread to the Frenchmen of that splendid epoch.”39 His love for Shakespeare remained unchanged. By turning his attention to the early modern period, Goethe signaled not only a sense of continuity between his own era and the imperial past but also the change that had occurred as the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had degenerated into the half-­farcical crowning ceremony he had witnessed in Frankfurt. Goethe’s choice of Gottfried “Goetz” von Berlichingen (1480–­1562) as the subject of his early drama reflects the dramatist’s elegiac attitude toward the empire and his critical stance toward his contemporary Germany. In Goethe’s play, Goetz is an imperial knight subordinate only to the authority of the emperor, while his boyhood friend, Weislingen, has gone into the service of a bishop in a local province. Thus the drama’s conflict pits an independent knight against a territorial state, traditional Germanic feudal law (Faustrecht) against the abstract principles of Roman law.40 Goetz is a charismatic leader and upright character who inspires the loyalty of his men and the love of his family, but he is also one of the last of his kind, a dying breed of action heroes in a world of effete courtiers and petty bureaucrats. The future lies with the cowardly Weislingen, who surrenders his knightly freedom so that he can work for one of the growing state administrations. Goetz’s iron fist is a symbol of both his heroic resolve and his crippling wound; the play

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inspires both rebellious identification with the hero of earlier times and melancholy awareness that those times have passed.41 Goetz dies with a bleak prophecy: “The time of betrayal is coming, it will have a free rein. The worthless ones will rule with deceit, and the noble man will fall into their nets.” His last words are “Freedom! Freedom!”42 But he knows that the freedom he seeks lies only in the grave. The play is set at the time of the Peasants’ War in the 1520s. Goetz’s tragic downfall stems from his decision to join the rebels in their revolt against the established order. He reluctantly agrees to lead the peasants for a limited time in the hope that he can prevent further violence, but Goetz is no revolutionary. As Karl Marx argued against the German Socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, there was a clear difference between the revolutionary aspirations of the peasants and the reactionary cause of the imperial knights.43 Goetz is fiercely loyal to the German emperor and wants only to retain his ancestral rights as a feudal lord. Despite its unbridled form and notoriously vulgar language, this signature work of the German literary revolution is deeply conservative in its worldview. Thus Goethe recalls that his early work actually put him in good standing with the upper classes, and even Werther’s fulminations against arrogant aristocrats could be dismissed as the passionate outbursts of a suicidal young man who was hardly capable of fomenting political revolution (“since everyone sensed that no direct attack was intended here”). Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen could also be accepted as formally innovative but traditional in its vision of a social order based on “old German conditions with the inviolable emperor on top.”44 Shortly before moving to Weimar, Goethe began Egmont (1787), another historical drama that opposed local rule to imperial authority. His interest in the figure of Lamoral Graf von Egmond (1522–­68) and the Netherlands’ revolt against Spain arose from his early studies of the sixteenth century, but the final version of Egmont was not completed until September 1787, in Rome. The work thus brackets two major phases of Goethe’s career. His evolution from the youthful writer of the Sturm und Drang to the mature poet of Weimar classicism is generally viewed in terms of contrast—­from the rough and ready style of Goetz to the chiseled iambic pentameters of Iphigenie, from the iconoclastic wanderer to the overburdened administrator, from the burgher of an imperial city-­state to the ennobled subject of a petty principality. A glance at Egmont nevertheless reveals continuity behind the change—­a consistent loyalty to the local, a preference for regional diversity against centralized government, and a conservative rejection of revolution. Egmont is set in Brussels in 1568, at a time of increasingly harsh Spanish

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rule of the Netherlands. Duke Egmont has been distinguished as a Knight of the Golden Fleece for his service to Spain, but when he resists the tyrannical rule of the Spanish Duke of Alba, he is tricked, trapped, and publicly beheaded. Egmont thus dramatizes an episode in the history of intra-­European imperialism that marks the beginning of the Eighty Years’ (or Spanish-­Dutch) War, which eventually led to the independence of the Netherlands in 1648. Goethe uses that specific historical setting to stage a conflict between two philosophies of government. As the Dutch secretary Vansen explains in act 2, the Netherlands were originally governed by individual princes, “all according to traditional rights, privileges, and customs,” and “every Province, however small, had its parliament and deputies.”45 Vansen’s sketch of Dutch history sets up the central debate between Egmont and Alba in act 4. Alba seeks to impose Spanish rule on the Netherlands; Egmont does not challenge his authority directly but demands that the Spanish allow more regional autonomy than Alba is willing to grant. As Egmont explains, the Dutch are independent by nature, “each one a world to himself, a little king, steadfast, active, capable, loyal, attached to old customs.”46 Egmont argues that all they want is to retain their traditional constitution and to be governed by their own people and that anything less, such as what Alba seeks, would be tantamount to genocide: “His will is to weaken, oppress, destroy the strength of his people—­their self-­confidence, their own conception of themselves—­so as to be able to rule them without effort. His will is to corrupt the very core of their individuality. . . . His will is to annihilate them.”47 Goethe’s reference to the innate qualities of specific peoples reflects the influence of Herder, but his defense of local rule against centralizing authority is indebted to Justus Möser (1720–­94). It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Möser’s work on Goethe’s political thought.48 Herder introduced Goethe to the local historian from Osnabrück when they were in Strasbourg. Möser’s piece on feudal law informed Goethe’s Goetz, and Herder included Möser’s essay on German history in the landmark anthology Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Concerning German character and art, 1774). In the summer of 1774, Goethe encouraged Möser’s daughter to publish his collected works as Patriotische Phantasien (Patriotic fantasies, 1775), and Goethe continued to speak warmly of Möser in later life. Of particular importance for Egmont is Möser’s essay “Der jetzige Hang zu allgemeinen Gesetzen und Verordnungen, ist der gemeinen Freyheit gefährlich” (The current tendency toward general laws and orders is dangerous to communal freedom). Möser argues against the Enlightenment tendency to govern in the name of universal principles rather than local traditions: “But in fact we distance ourselves thereby from the true

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plan of nature, which reveals its wealth in diversity [Mannigfaltigkeit], and pave the way toward despotism that would coerce everything in accordance with a few rules and thus lose the wealth of diversity.”49 Möser bases his political theory on aesthetic principles. Noting that the ancient Greeks created their art by observing specific objects in nature, not by obeying general rules, he argues that the same should be true of government: “People speak every day about how dangerous general rules and laws are to genius and how much the modern [geniuses] are prevented from rising above mediocrity by a few limited ideals; and yet the noblest artwork of all, the constitution [Staatsverfassung], is supposed to be reduced to a few universal laws.”50 Möser was an admirer of the Sturm und Drang movement, and his stress on individual genius and the innate qualities of a particular people is in keeping with the ideas that inspired Herder, Goethe, and his fellow artists to rebel against the tyranny of French neoclassicism. More surprising at first glance is Goethe’s reference to Möser during his initial meeting with Carl August, the Duke of Saxon-­Weimar. In book 15 of Poetry and Truth, Goethe recalls how Carl August and his brother, Prince Constantin, requested a meeting with the famous author of Young Werther when they were passing through Frankfurt in December 1774.51 Goethe was happy to oblige and soon found himself chatting with the two young princes and their chaperones. A new copy of Möser’s Patriotic Fantasies lay on the table, either by chance or, more likely, because Goethe wanted to impress the visiting dignitaries with his knowledge of political affairs. He took the opportunity to summarize ideas that he was certain would “be highly interesting to every German,” noting that “whereas the German Empire was usually reproached for lack of unity, anarchy, and impotence, to Möser’s way of thinking this multitude of little states was a most desirable means of disseminating culture according to the individual requirements of a great variety of provinces, each with a different situation and constitution of parts.”52 The princes were impressed by the young author and invited him to travel with them to Mainz; within less than a year, Goethe would accept Carl August’s offer to spend what turned out to be the rest of his life in Weimar. Goethe had as many good reasons to leave Frankfurt as he did to go to Weimar.53 He had been anxious to get out of town after an unpleasant brush with authorities at the time of the imperial coronation: “I felt an increasingly distinct aversion to my native town.”54 Having completed his studies in Leipzig and Strasbourg and spent time in Wetzlar, Goethe found himself once again living at home with an overbearing father. He was engaged to a respectable young woman and had before him a secure but all-­too-­predictable future as a lawyer and civic leader. Weimar offered the lure of the unknown, the promise

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of a budding friendship with Duke Carl August, patronage (of the sort that had already brought Christoph Martin Wieland to Weimar) for his career as a writer, and the prospect of rising rapidly to a position of authority in the local government. In Weimar, Goethe could and would become a big fish in a small pond; in Frankfurt, he might have been just another lawyer in a large city. From his father’s perspective, however, Goethe’s move to Weimar was a betrayal of principle and a challenge to paternal authority. As a citizen of Frankfurt and subject of the empire, Goethe’s father avoided and mistrusted the nobility. Reminding his son that Voltaire’s visit to Potsdam at the behest of Frederick the Great had ended badly, Goethe’s father predicted the same was to be feared if Goethe went to Weimar. Möser’s defense of German particularism provides a clue to Goethe’s decision to move and suggests, again, that there was more continuity than change in Goethe’s political views. Goethe had paid a nostalgic tribute to the independent imperial knights in Goetz von Berlichingen, but the Reichsritter were on their way out already in the sixteenth century. At that time, imperial cities like Nuremberg were in their prime, but in the late eighteenth century, their power had begun to fade as well. In 1775, as Nicholas Boyle insists, “political power . . . lay, not with the Empire and not with the burghers of Germany’s city republics, but with the Enlightened autocracies ruled by Germany’s princes. In the nineteenth century Germany was to be united, and to be given a national culture, by Prussian absolutism, not by Imperial federalism.”55 True enough; in the course of the eighteenth century, it was already becoming clear that in the land of petty provinces, two territorial states, Prussia and Austria, were emerging as more powerful than others. But Goethe did not go to Berlin or Vienna; he went to Weimar, signaling his allegiance to German particularism, to the cultural potential of the province against the territorial state. Thus the most significant opposition for Goethe’s subsequent career is not between Frankfurt and Weimar, both semiautonomous entities under the aegis of the Holy Roman Empire, but between the German federalism of the old feudal tradition and the centralizing and expansionist tendencies of Prussia and Austria. To make this argument is not to fall back into the deluded belief that Weimar was an island of peace and justice in a land of German despotism or that Goethe was a champion of human rights. As W. Daniel Wilson has shown through careful archival research, “Saxon-­Weimar was in many ways a quite normal small German principality of the eighteenth century,”56 full of conflict between feudal subjects and the ruling class, and Goethe was, if anything, more conservative than many of his contemporary intellectuals in his role as a government official.57 Underscoring the similarities between Frankfurt and

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Weimar does highlight the consistency of Goethe’s political thought, however. When revising Egmont in Rome, Goethe drew direct parallels between the Spanish oppression of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and the Austrian conflict with the Netherlands in the 1780s. Under Joseph and Frederick II, Austria and Prussia were moving toward government based on abstract principles rather than traditional customs; they were moving, in other words, toward France.58 Goethe moved to Weimar in the name of the old imperial tradition of localism and against the sort of centralization and rationalization of government that was taking place in Prussia and Austria. When Egmont proclaims that he is dying for the cause of freedom as he is led off to his execution, he means the freedom of the Holy Roman Empire, not that of modern political revolution.59 Like Goetz, his vision is directed backward, not forward; he is a conservative in the name of local tradition, not a revolutionary prophet of the nation-­state.

Literary Politics in a Revolutionary Age At three o’clock in the morning of September 3, 1786, Goethe slipped out of Carlsbad to begin the journey to Italy that he was supposed to have undertaken some fifteen years earlier. He traveled alone and incognito, pressing forward impatiently until, at the end of October, he finally reached Rome. Goethe would remain in Italy for the next year and a half, until he finally, reluctantly, obeyed the request of his patron, Duke Carl August, to return to Weimar. There, within a few years, he would form an alliance with Friedrich Schiller, and together they would embark on what is arguably the most famous decade in German literary history. If Goethe and his contemporaries had devoted themselves in the 1770s to the “relative” beauty of nationally specific art, his Italian journey marked the beginning of a return to the “absolute” standard of classical antiquity. As he visited the sites of ancient Rome and admired Palladio’s neoclassical architecture, Goethe also reworked themes and adopted forms in the classical style: he completed Iphigenia in Italy, published the Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies, 1795) upon his return to Germany, and went on to write neoclassical poems like “Alexis und Dora” (1797), while introducing Helen of Troy into the continuation of Faust. Schiller also moved toward classical themes and a more elevated style. The turn toward the timeless beauty of the past involved a turning away from timely events in a revolutionary era. In his mission statement for Die Horen (The Graces, 1794), an ambitious journal that sought to unite the

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leading German artists and intellectuals, Schiller welcomed all worthy contributions but expressly forbade writers to engage in political debates. In his epistolary Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), Schiller developed, at length, the argument that art unites and uplifts whereas politics divides and drags down. Schiller’s programmatic prohibition of politics at a time when the French were undertaking a radical experiment in democracy has always been the most controversial feature of Weimar classicism. Liberals lament Goethe and Schiller’s irresponsible flight from reality at a time when Germany was in dire need of political reform, but Prussian literary historiographers of the late nineteenth century saw things differently. In their view, Schiller’s plan “to reunite the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty”60 marked a necessary step away from partisan strife in the politically fragmented German territories, so that the united Kulturnation could eventually stride toward political union under Prussian leadership.61 Both positions oversimplify the relationship between politics and art in classical Weimar. Goethe’s fascination with neoclassical themes and forms was never complete; in the two decades that began with his Italian journey, he devoted much of his time to the completion or continuation of projects begun during the “national” phase of the 1770s, including Egmont, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795–­96), and Faust. Despite his antipathy toward the French Revolution, Goethe realized that it was a political event of the first magnitude, a historical turning point that could not be ignored. He witnessed firsthand some of the major conflicts of the revolutionary era and engaged with the causes and consequences of the events in his literary works to a greater degree than most of his contemporaries.62 His first contribution to Schiller’s supposedly apolitical Die Horen was Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German emigrés, 1795), which begins with an explicit discussion of the plight of refugees from revolutionary France, a theme that he reprises in the popular verse epic Hermann und Dorothea (Hermann and Dorothea, 1797). From the beginning to the end of the revolutionary period, Goethe dealt directly or obliquely with the cataclysmic changes that shook the political world. He did so, however, from the perspective of a man raised in the final decades of the Holy Roman Empire, not as a prophet of Prussian hegemony. Goethe’s most explicit discussion of German literary aspirations in the era of the French Revolution came in the form of a short essay, “Literarischer Sansculottismus” (“Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser”), published in the May 1797 edition of Die Horen. The work reveals that Goethe’s belief in the

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cultural benefits of German particularism had not changed. It offers a qualified defense of German literature, against the impudent accusations of an upstart critic, a certain Daniel Jenisch, who had dared to criticize Schiller’s journal and German writers in general for their failure to produce “classical” works of art.63 Adapting a term coined to characterize lower-­class political revolutionaries in France, Goethe refers to Jenisch and his ilk as literary sansculottes who dared to raise their voices against Germany’s intellectual aristocracy. “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser” would thus seem to be an antirevolutionary credo issued by the monarch of Germany’s national literature. However, Goethe spends a considerable portion of the essay explaining why Germany does not have a “classical national author” (ein klassicher Nationalautor).64 A classical literature could only arise, Goethe contends, in a nation with a grand and continuous history, noble national character, and high national culture, allowing a gifted author to write a major work at the height of his powers. He argues that none of these conditions obtain in his contemporary Germany: the nation is geographically and politically fragmented, the upper classes have been too focused on foreign influences to permit the development of an indigenous tradition, and the lower classes have no taste. Thus, writers are forced to eke out a living through hackwork rather than able to develop their talents to the full. Despite these obstacles, Goethe insists that a new dawn has broken for German literature: almost everyone writes well, good novels and novellas are easy to find, essays are written with style, and philosophers have enlightened the public. A petty critic who dares to shine his pitiful lamp against this dazzling new dawn “should be excluded from literary society,” thunders Goethe,65 maintaining that such critical rabble-­rousers can only sow the seeds of doubt and mistrust at a time when German literature needs to reflect with pride on its accomplishments and be encouraged to make further progress. In a central passage in “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser,” Goethe addresses the charge that German particularism is to blame for the shortcomings of Germany’s national literature: “We cannot criticize the German nation because it is politically splintered despite its representing a geographic unit. We do not wish for the political turmoil [Umwälzungen] that would pave the way for classical works in Germany.”66 Given the date and title of the essay, it seems probable that Goethe is referring to the revolutionary “turmoil” in neighboring France, but Dieter Borchmeyer has suggested that he may have been thinking of Joseph II’s attempts to expand Austrian power in accordance with the absolutist reforms of a strictly centralized government.67 Although the goals of the two political movements were diametrically opposed—­in Austria,

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an effort to strengthen the monarchy; in France, the temporarily successful decision to do away with the monarchy entirely—­the process of centralization was the same, and Goethe was its consistent enemy.68

Hermann and Dorothea: Infinitely Limited How, then, did Goethe think that Germany should proceed? Going back to the early modern model of the Holy Roman Empire was not possible. The anachronistic crowning ceremony that Goethe had witnessed in his youth demonstrated that the empire had already devolved into an empty show, and French advances across the Rhine and over the Alps now made it clear that its days were numbered. Goethe’s most direct literary response to the rapidly shifting political terrain came in the form of a verse epic, Hermann and Dorothea. In this work, Goethe embraced, as never before, his role as a poet of the German people, and the people returned his embrace.69 Hermann and Dorothea was an immediate popular and critical success and would remain one of Goethe’s most beloved works throughout the nineteenth century. With the possible exception of Faust, it did more than any single work to enshrine him as an icon of the national culture. Both the work’s content and its form contributed to its lasting popularity. Set in the immediate historical present, Hermann and Dorothea tells the tale of ethnic Germans driven, by French revolutionary armies, from their homes on the left bank of the Rhine.70 Fellow Germans in an unnamed Rhineland town to the east of the Rhine, who watch the pitiful train of refugees pass by, offer them food and provisions. While delivering supplies, one of these good Samaritans, Hermann, falls in love at first sight with Dorothea, a particularly attractive and capable young woman. By the end of the day, the couple is engaged: the displaced woman has found a husband and a new home, and Hermann has matured from a shy boy to a man of heroic stature who vows to defend the German homeland against foreign invaders. Hermann’s name identifies him as a modern incarnation of the ancient hero who once defeated the Romans, now prepared to stand firm against the French. The poem is written in hexameters in a deliberate imitation of Homer, lending an aura of epic grandeur to the otherwise average middle-­class citizens of a small German town. It is no wonder, then, that generations of German readers hailed Goethe’s modern epic as an unambiguous celebration of middle-­class morality and German patriotism. At the thematic center of the poem lies a sharp contrast between French revolutionary chaos and German stability and tradition. As a patriarchal figure

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among the refugees explains, the French Revolution seemed benevolent at first, promising freedom and equality to all in ways that inspired enthusiasm even among some idealistic Germans. When war came, the occupying French troops were friendly and promised self-­rule to their new satellite states. But the tide turned abruptly after the army suffered defeat. Liberators became oppressors, plundering the locals’ possessions and threatening to violate their women. What began as a good idea turned into a terrible reality. Goethe here touches on a theme that would have a long afterlife: the distinction between French civilization and German culture. As Norbert Elias describes in the opening chapter of The Civilizing Process, cultures are specific to particular peoples, whereas civilization is conceived as universal.71 It would be futile to try to turn the French into Germans, but it would make sense to export ideals conceived in the name of all humanity across the Rhine and around the world. What looks like a civilizing mission according to one perspective, however, appears to be imperial aggression according to another. Thus, more than a century later, Thomas Mann would couch his bitter diatribe against the French in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man as a defense of indigenous German Kultur against the encroachment of French Zivilisation. Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea offers an earlier formulation of the same logic, and it was celebrated as such by generations of German patriots and drummed into the heads of German schoolboys. Hermann, like his classical counterpart, is ready to resist the enemy. He will not provoke war but will defend hearth and home against any and all invaders. With this happy ending, the work’s popularity among patriotic readers was assured. But for reasons that I explore more closely in the following discussion, perhaps Hermann does not speak for Goethe as directly as many assumed. Hermann’s small unnamed city on the right bank of the Rhine resembles a miniature version of Frankfurt (the imperial city-­state where Goethe was born and raised) or one of the many German self-­governing hometowns that Mack Walker describes in his landmark study.72 Hermann’s father boasts that he has served on the city council six times and that he is largely responsible for many of the improvements to the city since the devastating fire twenty years ago: the buildings are in good repair, a new canal system will prevent future fires, and a highway that will link the town to the wider world is being built. The father is a local but not a yokel: as an innkeeper, he is presumably in regular contact with travelers; he urges his son to visit the nearby cities of Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and Mannheim to expand his horizons, and his favorite article of clothing is a cotton robe that has made its way from East India into the little German city. Literary convention suggests that we should identify with

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youth against age, empathizing with the young couple against the tyrannical father. Goethe sets us up to take the mother’s side with the son, who eventually vindicates her faith in him by winning his bride and finding the courage to defend the homeland. But caution is advised. The father may not be the most diplomatic critic of his son, but he has a point: Hermann has never been good at school and may not be too bright. He is happy at home with the horses, showing no interest in the travel that his father urges. He rejects modern fashion and remains ignorant of contemporary culture, missing the simplest allusion to The Magic Flute. He is a milquetoast and a mama’s boy, too cowardly to propose until circumstances force him to confess that he wanted to bring home a wife rather than hire a maid—­or perhaps, in the end, there is not much difference. Dorothea, in any case, seems far beyond Hermann in terms of her maturity and experience in the world.73 She has already been engaged once, to a revolutionary (frequently said to be modeled on Georg Forster)74 whose political horizons extended far beyond the local Heimat (homeland). When first seen, Dorothea is driving the oxen and interceding on behalf of a woman whom she has just helped to give birth, and we soon learn that she has heroically cut down several would-­be rapists with a sword. The plot of Hermann and Dorothea is not so much like a Shakespearean romance that rejuvenates a moribund society as it is an exercise in constriction, regression, devolution, and reaction. Dorothea’s worldly experiences end, and the horizons that Hermann’s father seeks to expand close down. Walls spring up everywhere—­around the garden, around the city; even the Rhine has become a protective barrier against the French.75 Dorothea is tamed, domesticated, even symbolically castrated: the woman who once wielded the sword will now be wielding a mop and using her French-­style charm to mollify the moods of her grouchy father-­in-­law.76 The expansiveness symbolized by the Indian cotton has constricted to Hermann’s tight grasp on his newest possession: “Now you are mine: and that makes what I have more mine now than ever” (Du bist mein; und nun ist das Meine meiner als jemals).77 Hermann’s truculent insistence on making what he has more his than it was before corresponds to a new belligerence on the part of the Germans hunkered down in the homeland. This reading of Hermann and Dorothea challenges the argument that Goethe transforms the historically specific into the universally human, in a way that was praised by Emil Staiger and lamented by subsequent scholars.78 Goethe does not depict the political events or the economic causes of the French Revolution, but he does stage a conflict between two systems of government, a new imperialist nationalism versus an older form of empire. He

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does not, however, take sides as clearly with the Germans as one might expect. While he allows the old judge and the young fiancé to voice an enthusiasm, shared by many, for the revolutionary ideals, he criticizes the imposition of these ideals on others. If he presents a lovingly detailed image of small-­town German life, he also offers an implicit critique of an increasingly narrow-­ minded German nationalism. What we see in Hermann and Dorothea is less the emergence of a heroic willingness to defend the fatherland and more the constriction of a vision that was once cosmopolitan to one that seems—­to borrow an oxymoron from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks79—­“infinitely limited” (grenzenlos borniert), so limited that its inhabitants do not realize how limited they are. In contrast to Schiller’s attempt to forge a national venue for German intellectuals in Die Horen and to Goethe’s praise elsewhere, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser,” of the collective accomplishments of German writers scattered throughout the politically fragmented landscape, the figures in Hermann und Dorothea seem merely local, a salutary alternative to French revolutionary imperialism perhaps, but lacking the cosmopolitan perspective of Goethe and Schiller.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: Personal Bildung and National Theater Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship offers a more comprehensive picture of Goethe’s cultural politics in the 1790s. While Hermann and Dorothea focuses exclusively on members of the middle class in a small city, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship offers an expansive panorama of all social classes in Germany, ranging from itinerant jugglers and acrobats to the landed aristocracy. The novel’s portrayal of sexuality is correspondingly frank. In place of an innocent young man beginning a monogamous marriage, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship begins with its protagonist already in the midst of a torrid affair with a young actress; he goes on to become romantically involved with several other women before being engaged to marry at the end of the novel. Goethe wrote Hermann and Dorothea in a matter of months, whereas Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, like Faust, was the project of a lifetime. He began the first draft of the novel in the 1770s and concluded its continuation in the late 1820s. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship also responds to the French Revolution, although in a more oblique way than Hermann and Dorothea. In the novel, Goethe revisits the idea of a German theater as a venue for the cultural unity of the politically fragmented nation. He also posits personal Bildung (growth,

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maturation, education) as an alternative to political revolution, while introducing ideas about land reform that would transform feudal properties into commodities that circulate in the public sphere. In each case, however, Goethe qualifies his ideas in a way that exasperated Schiller, with whom he shared large segments of the novel in manuscript form. Again and again in his correspondence with Goethe, Schiller worries that the “main idea” (Idee des Ganzen) is not as clearly articulated as it might be.80 Goethe excuses his reticence with a self-­deprecating reference to the “realistic tic”81 that makes him reluctant to proclaim openly the meaning of his work, yet the ambivalence is central to his artistic strategy. Rather than providing unequivocal answers, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship raises open-­ended questions about the role of art in a German society facing the challenges of economic change, political revolution, and the imminent end of the Holy Roman Empire. The irony surrounding Wilhelm Meister’s mission to establish a national theater is symptomatic of Goethe’s refusal to write an openly didactic novel. When his initial affair with an actress ends in disappointment, Wilhelm sets off on a business trip, during which he encounters various forms of public performance and soon decides to devote himself to his art. Wilhelm’s hopes for the theater are soon dashed, however, as he and his companions experience the difficulties confronting actors and the theater in eighteenth-­century Germany. Perennially short of money, subject to the whims of local aristocrats and the questionable taste of uncouth audiences, riven by personal rivalries, and exposed to marauding soldiers in Germany’s war-­torn countryside, the acting troupe has little hope of fulfilling Wilhelm’s lofty goals for national rejuvenation. The very particularism that Goethe’s “Response to a Literary Rabble-­ Rouser” admits is a potential impediment to the development of the national literature and then dismisses as the lesser of two evils when compared with revolutionary turmoil returns with a vengeance in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Early in the novel, Meister hears of a young man who goes by the name Melina (his real name is Pfefferkuchen) and has run away to join the theater because he has fallen in love with an actress. Meister sympathizes with the young couple, but Melina, having experienced the vicissitudes of life on the road, wants nothing more than to return to his middle-­class life. In the first draft of the novel, Wilhelm first encounters the couple after they have been arrested by the local militia. They are being detained under a large oak tree, which arouses patriotic sentiments in Wilhelm Meister, but the tree turns out to be a border marker between two German provinces. The symbol of national unity ironically underscores political divisions that enable the arrest of the eloped couple. By the time that Wilhelm has thrown in his lot

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with the actors, open warfare has broken out in the German provinces. Exactly who is fighting whom and for what reason is left unclear, and we have no sense of Wilhelm’s stance regarding the particulars of the conflict. Instead, he views the war as an opportunity for a costume party. Jarno has just introduced him to Shakespeare, so Wilhelm decides to dress up as Prince Hal as he and his companions set off on a journey through a dangerous war zone. Wilhelm imagines that he is the leader of a wandering community of actors who have opened “new vistas for the national stage,”82 but the troupe soon stumbles into an ambush that leaves Wilhelm badly wounded. Once again, Goethe underscores the gap between patriotic fantasies and real factional strife within provincial Germany. Thus, if Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship expresses the hope that Germany’s national theater will be the source of a cultural renaissance of the sort that he describes in Poetry and Truth, it does so in a way that is ironically qualified throughout. The same ambiguity haunts Wilhelm Meister’s personal engagement with the theater. As he explains in his frequently cited letter to his friend Werner, the theater offers him the opportunity to act with the grace of a courtier on stage, even if he remains a mere burgher in real life.83 Yet Wilhelm seeks more than ersatz nobility, for his performance of aristocratic comportment will express his genuine personal development. Wilhelm’s journey out into the world is also a journey within, a means to the end of self-­discovery: “Even as a youth I had the vague desire and intention to develop myself fully, myself as I am.”84 Wilhelm appropriates the ideal of noble comportment to express a new form of bourgeois subjectivity; acting is a means to the end of performing himself, the outward expression of an inner harmony attained through a process of self-­cultivation and organic growth. In this regard, Wilhelm Meister’s engagement with the theater parallels the process of aesthetic education that Schiller proposed as the antidote to modern alienation and the alternative to the French Revolution. Here again, however, Goethe seems determined to question the extent to which Wilhelm Meister’s Bildung succeeds. To be sure, Meister has some success in his brief acting career and compares favorably to his friend Werner when they are reunited. Werner’s poor posture, shrill voice, emaciated body, and prematurely balding scalp provide a striking contrast to Wilhelm, who has become “taller, stronger, more upright, more cultivated in manner and more pleasant in behavior.”85 By the end of the novel, Wilhelm’s paternity of Felix has been confirmed, and his engagement has been concluded in a way that leaves him astonished. The very force with which he is thrust into marriage nourishes the nagging suspicion that he is still a pawn in the hands of the secret society that

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has intervened repeatedly in his life. They have used him to distract Lydia, prevented his marriage to Therese, and commanded him to travel around Germany with an Italian marquis. This time, their decision coincides with his desires, but we leave him more stunned than satisfied, the passive recipient of good fortune rather than the self-­determining shaper of his own destiny. While Wilhelm seeks to pull himself up to a level of noble comportment through his engagement with the theater, the real aristocrat, Lothario, condescends to form an economic alliance with the middle class, in the person of Wilhelm’s friend Werner. At the beginning of book 5, Werner sends Wilhelm the sad news that Wilhelm’s father is dead. He goes on to explain that he plans to marry Wilhelm’s sister. They will sell the father’s ostentatious house and invest the money in business, just as Wilhelm’s father had once sold his father’s art collection to purchase the home and expand the business. Both decisions reflect the gradual move away from the patrician’s quasi-­aristocratic display of wealth and social status and toward the stripped-­down functionalism of the bourgeois capitalist.86 In the context of this financial restructuring, Werner suggests that Wilhelm should invest his inheritance in land speculation. He could purchase rural estates, improve the properties, and then resell them for a profit, thus adding to the family fortune. Wilhelm does not take his brother-­in-­law’s advice, but Lothario does. When his uncle dies, Lothario inherits enough money to complete long-­ standing plans to purchase nearby estates, with the “only matter of concern” being “that another business house, not in this area, has designs on these estates also.”87 That outside company is none other than Werner and Wilhelm’s family business. Thus the reason that Werner suddenly appears among Wilhelm’s noble companions is that he and Lothario have agreed to a joint purchase of the lands in question. The business is soon complete, whereupon Lothario astonishes Werner by declaring that he is willing to forgo his aristocratic privilege and pay taxes on the land; he also plans to do away with “feudal hocus-­pocus” (Lehns-­Hokus-­Pokus)88 and liberate the serfs from their feudal obligations. Lothario explains that the state will benefit from such reforms, which are particularly necessary “in modern times, when so many concepts are changing”89—­a veiled reference to the intellectual ferment that led to political revolution. Lothario has just returned from America, where he fought with the French armies against the British for American independence. Presumably, he there picked up his progressive economic views that will put the aristocracy on an equal footing with the bourgeoisie. Lothario claims that he had found purposeful activity in America that was denied him at home, but he has since decided that he should return to his own lands, where he hopes to implement

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the economic ideals that he learned abroad. The reference to the recently concluded American Revolution dates this section of the novel to the 1780s, but Lothario’s ideas had taken on new urgency when the novel was published a decade later. Revolution had broken out much closer to home, and one of the main reasons that the French rebelled was to challenge the sort of aristocratic privilege that Lothario voluntarily relinquishes. He does not intend to spark in Germany a political revolution of the sort that he has just witnessed in America. To the contrary, his proposed land reforms are conceived to strengthen the state in a way that will make such revolution unnecessary. Economic liberalization will revitalize the existing social order in a program of conservative reform in keeping with Goethe’s general belief that social evolution is preferable to political revolution. Lothario is ahead of his times in his economic views, anticipating the Stein-­Hardenberg land reforms of Prussia by more than a decade. But he is also an old-­fashioned “Lothario,” a philandering aristocrat (in the mold of Don Giovanni) who has left a trail of broken hearts and is indirectly responsible for the death of Aurelie, an actress who once shared Meister’s hope for the German national theater.90 Lothario’s proposed economic reforms are nevertheless important in that they promise to set property ownership in motion in ways that complement Werner’s praise of global trade in the opening book of the novel and contrast with the static world of Hermann and Dorothea. Romantic convention suggests that art and money have little in common, and Wilhelm initially chooses life in the theater as a poetic alternative to the dreary business world. As Werner argues in an uncharacteristically passionate exchange with his friend, however, commerce has a poetry of its own. He urges that one who visits the cities and goes down to the harbors will see that even the most trivial commodity circulates within a global trade network: “The mighty of this world have seized the earth and live in luxury and splendor. Every small corner of this earth is already taken possession of, every property firmly established.” Werner questions why he and Wilhelm should not profit from this global commerce as well, arguing, “And I can assure you that if you would but engage your poetic imagination, you could establish my Goddess as the undoubted victor over yours.”91 Hermann stands firm on the solid ground of the homeland; Lothario’s proposed reforms, in contrast, will set land into motion. He opposes serfdom that binds people to the land, and he rejects the Fideikommiss (fee tail or entail), the idea that property must, by law, be kept in the family, passed on from one generation of aristocrats to the next, rather than put up for sale to the general public. Land becomes a commodity that circulates in the free market, rather than the foundation of an ancestral estate.

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The movement in goods finds a corresponding movement in people. The Tower Society brings together German aristocrats tutored by a French abbé with connections to a troubled Italian family. The assembly does not last long, for the society’s members are soon to be scattered abroad: “From our ancient Tower a Society shall emerge, which will extend into every corner of the globe, and people from all over the world will be allowed to join it.”92 Jarno and his bride, Lydia, are leaving for America and may be joined on their journey by Friedrich and Philine. Wilhelm heads off to Italy, where we find him at the beginning of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 1829). While the old duke also toys with the prospect of a trip to America for religious reasons, Jarno explains the economic logic behind the Tower Society’s plans to leave home: “One does not have to know much about the present state of the world to realize that great changes are impending and property is no longer safe anywhere.“93 A diversified portfolio is the prudent way to prevent economic disaster: “At the present moment it is highly inadvisable to have all one’s property and all one’s money in one place.”94 Jarno does not specify what looming changes will endanger the Tower Society’s possessions, but it is easy enough to assume that he anticipates the French Revolution and its attendant European conflicts.95 From a broader historical perspective, however, Jarno articulates a fundamental shift from a stable land-­based economy centered on European estates to a newly mobile global economy in the age of imperialism and colonialism.96 “Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way,” proclaim Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products,” they continue, “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe.”97 The original organization of the Tower Society resembles the dynastic politics of prerevolutionary Europe, in which ruling families made alliances without regard for national boundaries or native languages. The aristocrats’ plans to travel abroad and shield their investments in anticipation of impending changes in the global economy represent, in contrast, a creative response to a new world order in which people and products move like capital in a free market. In such a world, stable hierarchies of feudal rank become meaningless, as do estates passed on by entail to future generations. Thus Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship ends with a series of marriages across class lines and an argument for the liberation of land and its servants from feudal restraints. Taken together, the different thematic threads of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship suggest ways in which the politically fragmented and socially stratified Germans can adapt to revolutionary change by modifying the existing

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system rather than replacing it with something entirely new. The burgher seeks to ennoble himself on stage, the aristocrats adopt bourgeois business practices, and a new social and physical mobility permits marriages across class lines and uproots burghers and nobles alike from their ancestral homes, to wander across Europe and even overseas. Goethe does not write a utopian novel: even the most progressive noble indulges in sexual adventures with a reckless disregard for the emotional consequences on his conquests, while the Tower Society exhibits authoritarian tendencies that only grow more pronounced in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. In its own qualified way, however, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship formulates Goethe’s ambiguous alternative to revolutionary change in the waning days of the Holy Roman Empire and anticipates ideas he pursued in its wake.

Faust II: Anachronistic Empire and the New Imperialism Germany remained politically fragmented until the end of Goethe’s life, as he was well aware: “We have no city: indeed, we do not even have a country about which we could decisively say: Here is Germany!”98 “We are nothing but Particuliers,” explained Goethe to Eckermann, employing a term used in his native Frankfurt for an independent gentleman who had purchased a title from the emperor.99 “Agreement is inconceivable,” Goethe continued, explaining, “Everyone has the opinions of his province, his city, even just himself, and we can still wait a long time until we reach a level of common development.”100 More than three decades after declaring, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser,” that Germany did not desire the sort of upheavals that would be necessary for political unification, Goethe again asserted that it would be wrong to think that the German people and German culture would have fared better in a centralized state: “If you think that the unity of Germany lies in the idea that the very large Empire should have a single large royal residence, . . . then you are wrong. . . . Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck are large and splendid, their contribution to the prosperity of Germany incalculable. But would they remain what they are if they lost their sovereignty and were incorporated into some sort of large German Reich as provincial cities? I have reason to doubt it.”101 Many younger liberals, some of whom had fought in the Wars of Liberation, were already beginning to envision a nation-­state with a constitutional government that would remove or at least check the authority of provincial aristocrats and that would guarantee civil liberties by ending censorship and

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emancipating women and Jews. The Holy Roman Empire was gone, but vestiges of feudalism remained; indeed, the reactionary governments of the Restoration era did their best to pretend that the French Revolution had never happened or, at least, to set back the clock to an earlier era of aristocratic rule. Changes that would prove impossible to stop were nevertheless underway: the nationalist movement inspired by the French Revolution would become the dominant political force in Europe in the course of the nineteenth century. Although the Industrial Revolution, which had begun in England already in the last decades of the eighteenth century, would not begin to have a substantial effect on Germany until the 1850s, Goethe already saw it coming, with a mixture of fascination and fear. “The increasing dominance of machine production torments and frightens me,” writes Lenardo in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. “It is rolling on like a storm, slowly, slowly,” he observes, “but it is headed this way, and it will arrive and strike.”102 The movement of ideas, goods, and people across national borders and around the world accelerated in the last years of Goethe’s life; the members of the association in the Journeyman Years who plan to emigrate to America anticipate the millions that would leave Germany for the New World in coming decades. The Europeans who had explored the world in previous centuries now began to exploit its resources, ushering in a new kind of global imperialism and colonialism that would bring most of the world under European control by the end of the nineteenth century. Despite his isolation in a small city in provincial Germany, Goethe kept abreast of these changes through a combination of avid reading and conversations with the many travelers who came to visit him in Weimar or who sent him their books. “Choose Weimar for your home,” Goethe advised Eckermann when they first met, claiming, “Its gates and streets open to the ends of the earth.”103 Goethe was an avid reader of Le Globe, a French newspaper that informed him about publications and events in Europe, while he also kept up on the increasingly global reach of European exploration and commerce.104 As Karl S. Guthke has shown, Goethe was actively involved in acquiring books from London about overseas travel during the final decade and a half of his life; he also gained firsthand information from German explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Forster, as well as from the many English tourists who made their way to Weimar.105 Goethe remained conservative in his political views, scoffing at the notion that the masses could rule themselves and rejecting calls for the freedom of the press. Yet Goethe was never a reactionary who wanted to go back to earlier times. He rejected revolution but not historical change, and if revolutions did occur, he blamed those in charge who failed to adapt to new circumstances, rather than those at the bottom of the social

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ladder who felt compelled to take matters into their own hands.106 If he chose not to champion the liberal causes that inspired some German patriots, he also refused to share their militant national chauvinism. Goethe’s continuation of Faust offers his most profound reflections on modern times, from the final decades of his life. Faust I was, in a certain sense, a historical drama, arising out of Goethe’s fascination with the early modern period, although he used the sixteenth-­century character of Faust to address eighteenth-­century themes, such as the poetics of genius and romantic love in social context. Faust II is also a historical drama, but of a very different sort. The scope of the historical references is vastly expanded, from the Homeric world of ancient Greece to the final years of Goethe’s life. More radically, Goethe sublates historical succession into a simultaneous present. “I live in millennia,” Goethe once proclaimed to Eckermann.107 In his West-­Eastern Divan, Goethe suggests that those who fail to share his sweeping vision are condemned to plod blinkered through life: “He who does not know how to account for three thousand years remains in darkness, inexperienced, and lives merely day to day.”108 Characters in Faust II exist both as realistic figures rooted in specific historical periods and as self-­conscious allegories that can be transported across time.109 For example, when Helen returns to Greece after the Trojan War, she worries about how she will be received back into the home of the husband she abandoned, even as she is aware of her legendary status and uncertain if she is real or just a myth. In the course of a few hundred lines, she is magically transformed from an ancient Greek character, to the lover of a medieval lord, to the mother of boy modeled on Lord Byron. The fluid nature of time in Faust II allows Goethe to address questions of historical development that had long been central to the self-­understanding of the Holy Roman Empire and that assumed a new importance in the era of modern nationalism. Generations of writers, from the time of the Song of Anno to Lohenstein’s Sophonisbe, positioned the Holy Roman Empire as heir to the Roman past. As that empire crumbled during the Napoleonic era and as modern nationalism emerged out of the ruins, a new sense of history emerged, as an open-­ended process outside the biblical paradigm of salvation history.110 This “mutation of Order into History” (as Michel Foucault describes the epistemic shift from the Enlightenment to romanticism)111 inspired nationalists to search the past for evidence of former glory that could inspire modern grandeur. On the part of the German romantics, we thus find a new fascination for medieval poetry and an effort to draw lines of continuity from past to present. “But what was the romantic school in Germany?” asked Heinrich Heine, writing just one year after Goethe’s death. For Heine,

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the answer was simple: “It was nothing but the reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages.”112 Goethe had no patience for the affectations of Catholic piety and the pseudomedieval style adopted by the German romantic artists known as the Nazarenes.113 When, in act 4, Faust summons the supernatural aid of powerful figures dressed in medieval costume, Mephistopheles turns to the audience and utters a sly dig at the current popularity of knights in shining armor in novels: “Today you cannot find a child who doesn’t dote / on suits of armor or a uniform.”114 In this context, Mephistopheles restricts himself to a typically snide aside, but Goethe stages a more sustained engagement with questions of historical development in act 3, where Helen has returned from Troy to the palace of Menelaus, who is not home. Mephistopheles, disguised as Phorkyas (a hideous, hermaphroditic, witchlike creature), there informs Helen that while Menelaus was away at the Trojan War, a bold race from the Cimmerian night has built a mighty fortress in a nearby mountain valley. With some trepidation, Helen agrees to Phorkyas’ suggestion that she should escape the threat of human sacrifice in Menelaus’ palace by fleeing to the impregnable castle. She is magically transported, through darkness and fog, to a fortress where she is greeted by Faust, magnificently clad as a medieval knight. North meets south, the medieval lord marries the ancient heroine, and modern poetry is born in the allegorical figure of Euphorion before the whole phantasmagoric scene dissolves back into primal chaos. The meeting between Faust and Helen thus tells the story of European origins in its most triumphant form. The decline and fall of the ancient world is recast as modern Europe’s ascent to power, much as Lohenstein does in his African dramas. Goethe’s Faust is no barbarian: “He’s lively, forthright, handsome, and, to a degree / even in Greece exceptional, intelligent.”115 The Gothic architecture of his fortress far surpasses the “crude masonry” of the ancient Greek edifices.116 According to Goethe’s outline that he sketched for the drama in 1816, the owner of the fortress was supposed to have been waging war in Palestine,117 which would date this scene to the time of the Crusades, although specific references are absent in the completed drama, in keeping with its sovereign indifference to normal time sequences. Thus Faust’s initial meeting with Helen is interrupted by news that Menelaus is coming with his armies to assault the medieval fortress. Faust confidently predicts that his armies will crush the foe, which they do, and he goes on to conquer the entire Peloponnese peninsula. Faust then divides the spoils among his followers—­Germans, Goths, Normans, Franks, and Saxons. Goethe here taps into two of the most powerful narratives that informed

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European history from a German perspective. On the one hand, Faust appears as an Arminius-­like conqueror who smites an ancient foe, although the enemy in this case is Greece rather than Rome. The rhetoric of “steel” and “storm” used to describe Faust’s armies (“encased in steel, its armor flashing” [in Stahl gehüllt, vom Strahl umwittert])118 might well remind today’s reader of Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel, 1920), a notorious glorification of the battlefield experience of the First World War. Shortly after the Second World War ended, Gottfried Benn referred to the same lines as “S.S. lyrics.”119 On the other hand, Faust’s union with Helen suggests that the relationship between modern Europe and classical antiquity is based on continuity and creative appropriation rather than violent conquest, as their love affair gives birth to modern poetry. Their peaceful union recalls earlier understandings of the Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate heir to ancient Rome and thus defuses the aggressive appropriation of the past for modern nationalist or imperialist purposes. Faust’s invention of paper money in act 1 revisits questions of modern economic development broached by Lothario’s land reforms in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. By voluntarily doing away with the “hocus-­pocus” of the fee entail, Lothario transforms property from a symbol of a static feudal hierarchy into a dynamic commodity in a capitalist economy. Faust encounters another economic crisis at court: the emperor needs cash, and the new paper money provides a temporary solution. Several recent critics have written innovative analyses of this episode, which each views as central to Goethe’s depiction of a feudal social structure undermined by the forces of modern capitalism.120 Money becomes dematerialized, an empty sign that moves with dizzying, accelerating velocity in the world of global commerce, thus undermining the solidity and stability of the former social hierarchy: “All that is solid melts into air.”121 At the time when Goethe was writing, however, in the post-­Napoleonic Restoration of the 1820s, those hierarchies were back in place. The invention of paper money in act 1 of Faust II is thus not so much about the coming of a capitalist economy that levels social hierarchies as about the use of innovative economic means to prop up an anachronistic, pseudo-­feudal government. Most of act 1 consists of an elaborate masque, a debauched and ruinously expensive costume party designed to demonstrate imperial power and aristocratic legitimacy even as it bankrupts the social order that it would uphold. As an adolescent, Goethe had witnessed a crowning ceremony of the Holy Roman Emperor that already seemed awkwardly anachronistic; now, two decades after the empire’s demise, restored monarchies in France, Austria, and Germany were once again performing a charade of imperial grandeur.

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Goethe’s implicit critique of the Restoration continues in act 4. The emperor is in financial trouble again: he has squandered his paper money and neglected his kingdom, under the mistaken assumption that he could combine personal pleasure with political power. The emperor’s realm has fallen into anarchy, and the people have decided to elect a new leader. Motivated by the desire to obtain land for himself, Faust agrees to serve as the old emperor’s general and, with the help of Mephistopheles’s black magic, defeats the rival kaiser and receives his reward. These are the last lines that Goethe added to his lifelong project. He completed Faust II in the summer of 1831, one year after the July Revolution in Paris. Goethe was well aware of these political developments and roundly criticized “the delusions of young people who want to take part in the loftiest affairs of state.”122 Thus one might expect that Goethe would use the political events depicted in act 4 to celebrate the triumph of legitimate imperial rule over a new generation of rabble-­rousers. However, the old emperor appears inept and corrupt. His plan to have his men engage in hand-­to-­ hand combat with the rival emperor’s men is rejected “as ridiculously old-­ fashioned nonsense,” typical of his efforts to prop up “a rotten and deeply questionable—­indeed, anachronistic—­form of government.”123 As was the case with the French Revolution decades earlier, Goethe has no sympathy with political rebels and even less with rulers who mismanaged their realm and, thus, provoked violent protest. The act ends with the bishop scolding the emperor for having retained his throne with Satan’s help. The bishop suggests that the emperor can atone for his guilt by funding a lavish new cathedral, a possible reference to the corrupt collusion between church and state under the Bourbon monarchy in Restoration France.124 Finally, in act 5 of Faust II, we witness a new sort of imperial power—­not the crumbling federal structure of the late Holy Roman Empire, but the rapacious greed of nineteenth-­century European imperialism.125 Faust has established a global empire based on world trade of the sort that Werner glorifies in his enthusiastic outburst to Wilhelm Meister. In this case, however, there is nothing poetic about Faust’s economic conquests. His ships return to port laden with ill-­gotten gain, and Mephistopheles provides the usual cynical commentary: “Since it’s a fact that might is right—­not how but what will be the only question asked. / Unless I’m all at sea about maritime matters, / war, trade, and piracy together are / a trinity not to be severed.”126 Faust’s merchants have been so successful that there is no room in the harbor for his ships: “We started out with two ships only, / but now we’re back in port with twenty.”127 Faust has received his reward of beachfront property for aiding the old emperor in his struggle against his rival, but most of the land still lies under water. Thus Faust

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sets about reclaiming land to build a palace and a harbor for the ships that bring home booty from all over the world. In the process, however, his men burn down a house and kill an innocent old couple and their guest. Faust’s delusions of grandeur continue up to the moment when he collapses into his grave. If Goethe casts a critical eye on attempts to restore outmoded forms of imperial government in acts 1 and 4 of Faust II, act 5 looks forward even more critically, to new kinds of European imperialism that will colonize and exploit the goods and people of the non-­European world, while crushing domestic dissent with totalitarian force. Faust even strives to subject the sea itself, with the aid of infernal machines that belch fire and smoke into the atmosphere. One need not ascribe to Goethe clairvoyant powers that gave him the ability to foresee the evils of nineteenth-­century European imperialism, twentieth-­century totalitarianism, and twenty-­first-­century climate change, although one senses that he may not have been entirely astonished by these developments. By the time he died in 1832, the writing was already on the wall: England, France, and Spain were busy establishing the sort of global empires that Germany would seek within a few decades; authoritarian governments were already in place; and if the Industrial Revolution had not yet reached Germany, it was certainly on its way, as Lenardo had predicted. Goethe leaves us with a double legacy: his unflinching gaze exposes the anachronism of an old world order and anticipates that there will be much worse to come in the new one, but he also envisions a cosmopolitan world literature that expresses, in its diversity, our common humanity.

Weltliteratur in Contemporary Context In conclusion, I return to the topic of Goethe and world literature. As we have seen, Goethe was always open to foreign literary influences, even during the early years of his writing career, when he focused most closely on figures situated in the German present (Wilhelm Meister, Werther) or drawn from the early modern past (Goetz, Faust). Specific to the concept of world literature that Goethe embraced in the final years of his life, however, was the idea of a living international community of writers who could read and learn from each other’s works.128 In a world in which improved communication and global commerce were accelerating the exchange of goods and ideas, it seemed obvious to Goethe that literature could not be contained within national borders. Fritz Strich describes Goethe’s concept of world literature as “an intellectual barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market,” while David Dam-

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rosch goes on to observe that Marx and Engels, when writing the Communist Manifesto, “adopted Goethe’s term precisely in the context of newly global trade relations.”129 As Goethe became increasingly convinced “that poetry is the common property of humanity,” he became impatient with what he felt was the German tendency to wall itself off from the world.130 Indeed, Goethe suggests that national literatures will wither and die if they are not periodically stimulated with foreign fertilizer.131 For this reason, he stresses the importance of translation, not just because it makes works available to those outside the country who cannot read the original language, but also because it refreshes a language grown stale in its original context. Thus Goethe concludes “that the translator is working not for his own nation alone but also for the nation from whose language he takes the work.”132 While Goethe insists on the importance of international literary exchange, he never abandons the belief that nations are fundamentally different from one another: “We repeat however that there can be no question of the nations thinking alike, the aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, understand each other, and, even where they may not be able to love, may at least tolerate one another.”133 What is true in the present was true in the past. The Persians, for instance, demonstrate that a nation possesses an ineradicable core of a stable identity that will withstand even the worst vicissitudes: “No matter how many times a country is conquered, subjugated, even annihilated by enemies, it still preserves a certain kernel of the nation in its character, and before you know it, an old familiar appearance of the people manifests itself again.”134 Thus assimilation of foreign influences can only go so far; when they violate the national integrity, it is time to stop: “And once again, what is good for a nation is only what comes out of its inner core and its own general needs, without the imitation of another.”135 Goethe’s references to the inner integrity of national cultures reflects the long-­standing influence of Herder, which goes back to Goethe’s days in Strasbourg. At that time, Herder inspired Goethe to resist French cultural hegemony and to cultivate authentically German literature. As John K. Noyes has shown, Herder’s early advocacy of German national traditions was part of a lifelong effort to respect and preserve the diversity of human cultures as they develop in specific historical and geographical contexts. The concept of development, or Bildung, is critical in this regard: while nations (conceived as linguistic and cultural communities, not political nation-­states) are distinct, they are not what Leibniz would term “windowless monads.”136 They change over time, in part by absorbing and adapting foreign influences. Goethe’s concept of world literature reflects this combination of respect for national difference with open-

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ness to international exchange. The question that inevitably arises is, when does cosmopolitan enrichment shade into cultural imperialism? The answer is simple, at least in theory: it depends on historical context. In the 1770s, for instance, Goethe, Herder, Lessing, and others resisted French influence as invasively foreign, because they were trying to assert their national independence. What was formulated in terms of an international struggle was equally rooted in class conflict: as Reinhart Koselleck observes, the middle class, excluded from political power, sought to establish itself as the voice of common humanity against the Old Regime.137 French culture in Germany was the mantle of aristocratic rule provoked into crisis by bourgeois critique. In the 1790s, in contrast, Goethe reacts against what Gonthier-­Louis Fink describes as the “revolutionary Messianism” of the French,138 that is, their attempt to impose universal values, by force if necessary, on other European nations. Here Goethe breaks with some of his contemporaries who were more sympathetic to the Revolution (including Herder, Wieland, and Georg Forster), to insist, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser,” that the German writers are doing quite well under difficult circumstances and do not want the sort of political upheavals necessary to bring about radical change. Resistance to revolution is not the same as reaction; hence Goethe implicitly criticizes Hermann’s insularity and supports Lothario’s reforms. In the 1810s and 1820s, Goethe’s enemy shifts again, away from French revolutionary imperialism and toward German nationalism, particularly when it reeked of sentimentalized religion. It is important to remember, however, that Goethe’s literary cosmopolitanism was not an expression of political liberalism. Goethe resisted German national chauvinism not in the name of greater democracy and human equality but in the spirit of an empire that allowed for local autonomy and traditional rights within a larger feudal hierarchy. At the same time, his conservatism was not reactionary. In his adolescence, he suspected that the empire was becoming an empty display, and he used his final drama to expose the absurdity of a postrevolutionary imperial anachronism. If historical context determined the meaning of Goethe’s fluctuation between national and world literature during his lifetime, the same is true of subsequent efforts to appropriate his work for contemporary contexts. I began this chapter with a brief description of how Goethe was first hailed as the hero of Germany’s national literature and then embraced as the antinational prophet of world literature. In the wake of the Second World War, Goethe’s cosmopolitanism had an obvious appeal for those seeking an alternative to the discredited cultural nationalism of the recent past. Less obvious was the use of Goethe as an ally against a new form of internationalism. In 1952, Erich Auer-

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bach embraced Goethe’s insistence on national diversity within the larger order of world literature, as an antidote to “the process of levelling” and “standardization” in an increasingly interconnected world.139 National difference matters after all, if conceived in the Herderian sense of respect for cultural diversity against the homogenizing tendencies of global culture. We can push this tension between national specificity and cosmopolitan exchange inherent in Goethe’s concept of world literature closer to present debates with a look at the work of Emily Apter and Rebecca Walkowitz. In Against World Literature, Apter voices her reservations about a newly emerging canon of world literature that moves all too easily across national and linguistic borders. She endorses “World Literature’s deprovincialization of the canon,” but she harbors “serious reservations about tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-­marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”140 If cultural critics of the 1990s identified the emergence of a new, globalized “McWorld,”141 Apter might be said to be protesting against “McWorld Literature.” She therefore stresses the ineradicable uniqueness of individual literary works and traditions by highlighting the “Untranslatable” residue that resists cultural transfer. In response, Rebecca Walkowitz focuses on contemporary literature that presents itself as “born translated,” by which she means works that are written for a global audience and that appear nearly simultaneously in multiple languages. While Apter highlights what she feels are untranslatable impediments to global literary circulation, Walkowitz insists that precisely such terms and texts that seem most resistant to translation provoke more efforts to send them out into a multilingual world: “Untranslatable words . . . are those for which translation is interminable. They express not the refusal of translation but the persistence of it.”142 Walkowitz’s larger aim in discussing fiction that is “born translated” is to identify contemporary literature that challenges “the national singularity of the work” and moves away from the “possessive collectivism” of the nation.143 The novels of J. M. Coetzee, for instance, are not “part of a distinct national-­language tradition that emerges from a coherent national community” and are thus ill-­suited to “a nation-­based model of literary history.”144 In the last chapter of this book, I return to the role of national traditions in an age of world literature. In the present context, I seek to underscore the extent to which Goethe anticipates some of our contemporary debates about the meaning of world literature, as they oscillate between an embrace of the accelerated circulation of transnational texts and an appeal to the integrity of indigenous traditions. As we have seen, Goethe already alternates between proc-

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lamations that national literature is an outmoded provincialism and an insistence on the essential, ineradicable differences between national cultures. This balancing act will be familiar to readers of Herder, Goethe’s early mentor, who also asserts our common Humanität even as he defends cultural diversity. As Noyes argues in convincing detail, Herder thereby articulates a tension, between the universal and culturally specific, that continues to trouble postcolonial theorists today.145 In the case of Goethe, I argue that the apparent contradiction between national essentialism and universal humanism might be better understood as a strategy that positions him between two different opponents. On the one hand, Goethe directs his advocacy of world literature against those who insist too vehemently on the purity of the national culture, in keeping with his general refusal to participate in the patriotic enthusiasm of his fellow Germans. On the other hand, Goethe emphasizes his belief in national difference, in keeping with his consistent aversion toward all forms of imperialist universalism, from the territorial state that crushes the independent imperial knight Goetz, through the French revolutionary armies that drive refugees across the Rhine, to the colonial violence that kills Baucis and Philemon in the final act of Faust II. A world literature that effaced all forms of cultural diversity would be no more acceptable than a national literature that resisted all incursions of foreign influence. The world literature that Goethe describes has room for national differences, even as the national literature he defends opens its doors to alien imports.

Chapter 6

Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia

The defeat of the Prussian army near Weimar that precipitated Goethe’s decision to marry his long-­term mistress also marked a new phase in the history of German nationalism. Foreign troops were on German soil; a French emperor dictated the terms of surrender. Now it was time to fight back. In the ideological haze of nationalist retrospection, the Wars of Liberation became a tale of national triumph: the Germans arose as one to cast off the Corsican tyrant. In fact, however, patriotic sentiment was limited to a relatively small segment of the general population,1 and life under French rule was not necessarily worse than it had been in the old German provinces. Jews particularly benefited, by being granted full political rights in the French satellite states along the Rhine, which in turn inspired the emancipation of Jews in Prussia (sadly, the edict was suspended only three years after Napoleon’s defeat).2 Nevertheless, precisely because it loomed so large in the collective memory of the German people, the nationalism of the romantic era deserves a closer look. The new nationalism developed in two interrelated directions: one looked outward at an external foe, while the other looked within, searching the depths of the German soul. In both cases, members of the recently defunct Holy Roman Empire sought to identify a common sense of national identity that transcended local loyalties. Christoph Martin Wieland recalled, in 1793, that no one spoke about German patriotism when he was a boy. Children were taught to obey the local magistrates and acknowledge the emperor’s supreme authority, but the concept of a collective German identity (Teutschheit) did not yet exist.3 Even Jacob Grimm, born two generations after Wieland, remembered his childhood “love of the fatherland” in terms of local pride rather than national enthusiasm.4 That changed in the work of Heinrich von Kleist, the most militant of the new nationalists, who sought to expand the horizons of German self-­ understanding from the province to the nation. His Katechismus der Deutschen 119

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(German catechism, 1809), which appropriates the dialogic structure of Luther’s Catechism for patriotic purposes, begins with a programmatic distinction between Germany’s political divisions and its sense of collective unity. Question: Tell me, child, who are you? Answer: I am a German. Question: A German? You are joking. You were born in Meissen, and the land that Meissen belongs to is called Saxony! Answer: I was born in Meissen, and the land that Meissen belongs to is called Saxony; but my fatherland, the land that Saxony belongs to, is Germany, and your son, my father, is a German!5 The dialog goes on to explain, in the simplest terms, that the Germans have been victims of French aggression; Napoleon is a dog who deserves to die, and it is the duty of all Germans to join in the struggle to liberate the fatherland. Kleist’s poetry of the period adopts a savage tone, exhorting the Germans to cover the fields with French bones and to fill the Rhine with French corpses, while his drama Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, 1808), reworks the familiar tale of Germanic resistance to the Romans into a thinly disguised work of political propaganda against the French.6 Other writers suggested that the German defeats were only a symptom of their self-­estrangement. Already in the eighteenth century, Lessing, Klopstock, Herder, and Goethe had lamented the German tendency to be seduced by French fashion; now more than ever, it seemed imperative to lift the fog of foreign influence. Thus, in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation, 1807–­8), Johann Gottlieb Fichte invokes the old Tacitean story about the Germans being an indigenous people rooted, since time immemorial, in the German countryside, but he also places a new stress on language as the expression of the collective soul of the German people, or Volk. Conceding that the language has changed over time, he insists that the changes have sprung from the living stock of the national tree. Foreign words and concepts grafted onto the national culture, such as “humanity,” “popularity,” and “liberty,” cannot thrive. National renewal can only come if the Germans cut off the alien implants and reconnect to the vital roots of their own traditions. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many German artists and intellectuals heeded the call to preserve what remained of the national culture. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected fairy tales and sagas, Joseph Görres resurrected chapbooks in Die Teutschen Volksbücher (The German chapbooks, 1807), and Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim assembled an influential

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anthology of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (The boy’s magic horn: Old German songs, 1806–­8). Enthusiasts began to collect and edit German literature of the High Middle Ages. What began in the spirit of romantic amateurism soon developed into serious scholarship, which led, in turn, to the establishment of university chairs for the study of German medieval literature and the beginnings of the academic discipline of Germanistik (German studies). Still others expanded Fichte’s interest in the history of the German language into a search for its Indo-­Germanic source. Given Fichte’s appeals to the organically united German Volk and the violence of Kleist’s warmongering rhetoric, it is not surprising that modern historians in search of the ideological sources of National Socialism have looked to the work of the German romantics,7 where scholars have found a fateful willingness to cast off the shackles of mere reason and to plunge into the darkness of chthonic desires, a search for the mythic foundations of the national culture, and the beginnings of a newly virulent strain of antisemitism.8 In German romanticism, Thomas Mann located the prototype of the otherworldly dreamer who was all too willing to leave politics to others—­others who sought to compensate for German “belatedness” with a Faustian recklessness that provoked two world wars and encouraged the masses to fight to the last man for a lost and utterly corrupt cause.9 As tempting as it may be to trace the origins of National Socialism back to the romantic era, one should be cautious not to overlook significant differences between the two movements. As Rüdiger Safranski observes, there were certainly elements of antisemitism among some romantics, but their völkisch beliefs had not yet been buttressed by the pseudoscientific race theories of the later nineteenth century, nor were they guilty of systematic genocide.10 The romantics may have glorified artistic genius, but they did not subscribe to a political führer cult. Many of the Germans who volunteered to fight against Napoleon were liberals who hoped for a more democratic form of government in Germany, although those hopes were repeatedly dashed over the coming decades. Only after the failed Revolution of 1848 did German nationalism swerve from its initial liberal impulses.11 Despite their rhetoric of a return to wholesome traditions and their rejection of modernist art, the Nazis, in their quest for political power, embraced modern technology in a way that the romantics did not.12 Finally, National Socialism was a totalitarian movement that sought to stamp out regional diversity and intellectual dissent. As Celia Applegate observes, the Heimat (homeland) movement that once thrived in the early years of national unification withered under the Nazi penchant “for the gigantic and national in place of the small and local.” Kleinstaaterei (particularism) became the negative counterpart to the new Reichsidee

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(concept of empire) as “the Nazi historians condemned the last centuries of localized rule and with it the whole idea of federalism.”13 Just such a stress on the benefits of regional diversity played a central role in the political thought of conservative romantics in the early nineteenth century. In this chapter, I focus primarily on the work of Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–­1857), with an excursus on Friedrich Schlegel’s political theory. Eichendorff has often been viewed as the quintessential German romantic, the poet of spiritual wanderlust, and the patriot who volunteered for the legendary Lützow Freikorps in the battle against Napoleon. Often forgotten is the fact that this seemingly “nonpolitical” poet spent his career as a Prussian civil servant and wrote bitterly sarcastic send-­ups of the liberal movement. Auch ich in Arkadien (I too was in Arcadia, probably 1832) takes aim at the Hambach Festival, a gathering in late May 1832 of some twenty or thirty thousand liberals who sought freedom of the press, free trade, and popular sovereignty in a unified Germany.14 Libertas und ihre Freier (Liberty and her lovers, 1849) mocks the revolutionaries of 1848. Eichendorff’s son published these satirical works long after his father’s death and excised some of the more direct references to contemporary events, so their impact on Eichendorff’s image was delayed by many years. From the beginning of his career, however, Eichendorff’s works reflect on the difficult choices confronting a Catholic conservative in an era of revolutionary change. Like so many of the major baroque writers of the seventeenth century, Eichendorff was from Silesia, a province in today’s southeast Poland. In Gryphius and Lohenstein’s day, Silesia was subordinate to the authority of the Austrian-­based Hapsburg monarchy, but in 1740, the Prussian king Frederick II (“the Great”) launched a surprise attack on the neighboring province and brought it under Prussian control. Eichendorff’s family was of ancient German aristocracy whose origins can be traced back to tenth-­century Bavaria.15 Over the centuries, the family wandered north to Brandenburg and then southeast to Silesia, where Eichendorff was born on a family estate outside the town of Ratibor, today’s Racibórz, just north of the Czech border. At the time, Ratibor was near the southern tip of Prussian Silesia, immediately above the Austrian border. Joseph and his older brother Wilhelm “did not consider themselves to be Prussian, but rather Silesians with loyalties to Austria.”16 Technically, however, they were Prussian, which posed a problem in that the Eichendorffs were devout Catholics in a predominantly Protestant land. Although members of the highest social status by birth, the Eichendorffs faced increasingly dire financial circumstances, as their father speculated unsuccessfully in land and managed to squander the family fortune. The Eichendorffs were forced to sell their es-

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tates, one by one, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, presenting the young brothers with difficult career choices. Wilhelm was able to find work in the Austrian government, but after Joseph rejected an arranged marriage that would have stabilized his disastrous family finances, he had no choice but to pursue a career in Prussia.

Friedrich Schlegel’s Political Theory In November 1810, the inseparable Eichendorff brothers moved to Vienna to study law. One of the main attractions there was Friedrich Schlegel, who was to have a decisive impact on Joseph von Eichendorff’s political views.17 Schlegel’s career confirms the common stereotype that German romanticism began radical and became reactionary. The young Schlegel was a central figure in the group of romantics in Jena that included his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, as well as Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Carolina Schlegel-­Schelling, and Sophie Mereau. Young Schlegel is best known for his programmatic Athenäum fragments, in which he defined romantic poetry as a “progressive universal poetry,” and for his scandalously salacious novel Lucinde (1799). The turning point for Schlegel came in 1802, when he moved from Jena to Paris. His account of the journey reveals a new reverence for symbols of German nationalism such as the Wartburg castle and the river Rhine, together with a growing critical distance from the French national character. In Paris, Schlegel studied Persian and Sanskrit before returning to Cologne to write his seminal Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808). The once impertinent Protestant, who had sympathized with the French Revolution in his youth, converted to Catholicism and moved to Vienna, where he worked for Metternich’s conservative government. As his critics maliciously observed, the older Schlegel was a gourmand and became morbidly obese before dying at the age of fifty-­six. In addition to his interest in literature, aesthetics, Eastern languages, and politics, Friedrich Schlegel was increasingly fascinated by history. In 1809, he requested and received permission to hold a series of lectures on history at the University of Vienna, which he delivered between February and May 1810, just months before the arrival of the Eichendorff brothers. The lightly revised essays were published in 1811.18 Schlegel makes no pretense of neutrality in his lectures, which are narrated from the perspective of a German patriot loyal to the social structure of medieval Europe and the recently defunct Holy Roman Empire. He welcomes the end of antiquity, because it gave birth to mod-

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ern Europe, and he celebrates Hermann as a great Germanic hero who liberated his people from the tyranny of Rome. Charlemagne gets high marks as the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, while Luther is scolded for his arrogance and inflexibility. One of Schlegel’s particular favorites is Luther’s archenemy, the Catholic emperor Charles V, and Schlegel laments the division of the Christian church by the Reformation and expresses reservations about the Enlightenment. In its broad outlines, Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte (Lectures concerning modern history) follows the course charted in Friedrich von Hardenberg’s famous and notorious essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (Christianity or Europe, 1799).19 The essay by Hardenberg, or Novalis, is famous to some because it offers an early and particularly poignant example of the romantic veneration of the Middle Ages, and it is notorious to others for precisely the same reason, because it seems to turn its back on the present revolutionary age and seek refuge in idyllic days of yore.20 For generations of left-­leaning critics, Novalis’s essay marks the fateful moment when early German romanticism swerves from its progressive beginnings toward a reactionary Christian nationalism. More recent readers have exposed a radical agenda beneath the cloak of medieval nostalgia, as Novalis advocates, toward the end of his essay, for a new European future in the language of Fichtean philosophy. His vision of a postrevolutionary European unity cannot obscure the rhetorically powerful evocation of the High Middle Ages that begins the essay, however, and this veneration of the past was to have an immediate impact on the first generation of German romantics. Friedrich Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte continue the fascination with Germany’s medieval past that Novalis began, but with significant differences in personal politics and historical context. Hardenberg wrote as a Protestant Pietist steeped in the language of philosophical idealism. In 1799, he and Schlegel formed part of a radical group of young intellectuals at the University of Jena, but by 1810, Schlegel had made his right-­hand turn toward conservative Catholicism at the court of Vienna. The Jena romantics flourished in a period of peace granted by the Treaty of Basel; Friedrich Schlegel delivered his essays in the wake of Austrian and Prussian defeats at the hands of Napoleon’s armies. Although Schlegel’s earliest plans for the lectures date back to his days in Cologne, they became, in the context of their delivery, a contribution to the literature of the German resistance against Napoleonic rule. When published, early in 1811, they were hailed as the “voice of the uprising, as a nationalist manifesto.”21 Rather than writing a political treatise about the specific ills of the Napoleonic occupation, however, Schle-

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gel delivers a sweeping account that offers a partisan view of nearly two millennia of European history and a political alternative to revolutionary democracy for the present. Like Hardenberg’s “Europa,” Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte looks back fondly to the Middle Ages as a time when church and state were one, in implicit opposition to the principles of modern secular democracies. Rejecting the revolutionary notion that “all men are created equal,” Schlegel advocates a society based on the social hierarchy of a “corporative constitution” (der ständischen Verfassung).22 He prefers religious faith to enlightened reason, the living body of an organic community to the sterile machinery of the modern state. Perhaps most important for the development of Eichendorff’s views, Schlegel envisions a modern Europe that would allow for local diversity within a universal framework, rather than one torn by sharp divisions between modern nation-­states. If Rome had been able to conquer northern Europe, Schlegel contends, it would have imposed a bland homogeneity on the region’s rich cultural diversity: “The freedom and peculiar characteristics of the nations [would be] eradicated, and everything [would be] transformed into the same provincial uniformity.  .  .  . And yet it is precisely this richness, this variety [Mannigfaltigkeit], that makes Europe what it is” (131). One of Charlemagne’s major achievements was to create “the ideal of a legal bond, a free association that would embrace all nations and states of the educated and cultivated world, without sacrificing the free and characteristic national development [eigentümliche Nationalentwicklung] of each individual nation” (208). By “nation,” Schlegel means an organic community of like-­minded individuals, not the political machinery of the modern nation-­state. In fact, he explicitly rejects the development of modern nationalism as an unfortunate consequence that resulted from the Reformation and destroyed European unity: “After the Reformation, the countries and nations become very isolated; the general coherence of Europe almost completely ceased” (337). Schlegel’s ideal is not nationalism but federalism, “a federative, corporatively free state” (ein föderativer, ständisch freier Staat) of the sort that once existed under Emperor Charles V, “a state that is itself a system of allied nations and states” (301). In a major political essay written a decade later, “Signatur des Zeitalters” (Characteristics of the age, 1820–­23), Schlegel again took stock of the state of Europe. The historical situation had changed, as the conservative forces of the Restoration had triumphed, but Schlegel’s principles remained the same. At the outset of the essay, he notes that there is a new unity in Europe, not a good sort of unity, but one based on the “tendency toward centralization and the systematic amalgamation and eradication of everything local and independently cor-

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porative [Verschmelzung und Vertilgung alles Lokalen und selbständig Korporativen].”23 He looks back disapprovingly at the revolutionary period, as a time of political chaos caused by modern nationalists whose desire for “a mathematical equivalency in the treatment of the entire state” resulted in “the annihilation of the personal, local, and all independent corporations” (513). Schlegel bases his social ideal on what he terms “the living positive” (522; das lebendig Positive), by which he means an organic community based on the family and the church, as opposed to “that purely mathematical and mechanical view of the state” typical of revolutionary governments and modern state administrations (524). Schlegel vigorously rejects the notion of a centralized state with a single national capital, in favor of “a federative alliance [föderative Verbindung] of medium-­sized, larger, and smaller states,” in which “the new . . . affiliates itself everywhere with the historically grounded and specifically local [eigentümlich Lokale], with the still-­remaining stronghold” of past tradition (535; emphasis in original). In sum, Schlegel seeks to preserve the virtues of the old system of rule by Herrschaft, based on loyalty to individual rulers in a hierarchical society, against what he feels are the pernicious effects of Verwaltung, the soulless bureaucracy of the modern nation-­state.24

Eichendorff: Conservative Catholic and Prussian Civil Servant The home of Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel soon became the Eichendorff brothers’ intellectual and social focal point in Vienna.25 Joseph passed his first set of examinations between September 1811 and September 1812, with high marks, but then interrupted his career to fight against Napoleon. After the war, the family’s worsening financial situation and the fact that his fiancée was pregnant forced Eichendorff to abandon his hope for a career in Austria.26 He accepted an unpaid internship for the Prussian government in Breslau and swore an oath of loyalty to King Frederick William III.27 After various failed attempts to secure positions as a professor of history or Silesian administrator, Eichendorff applied for permission to take the examination that would qualify him for a career as a Prussian civil servant. For this “second state examination” (zweites Staatsexamen), Eichendorff was required to write an essay in response to a question posed by the Prussian authorities. Competition for the limited number of positions in the Prussian civil service was fierce, and Catholics like Eichendorff stood at a disadvantage in predominantly Protestant Prussia.28 To make matters worse, Eichendorff was assigned a question that required him to address

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directly the politics of religion in Restoration Germany: “What disadvantages and advantages should the Catholic regions of Germany in all probability expect from the dissolution of the sovereignty of the bishoprics and abbeys as well as the confiscation of property from the monasteries and cloisters?” On the eve of the French Revolution, many of the small ecclesiastical territories within the Holy Roman Empire were in direct control of the Catholic Church. As the Revolution proceeded and the empire collapsed, the number of German territories was dramatically reduced. Already in 1792, German aristocrats were stripped of their seigneurial rights in Alsace, as the French government took over lands that had previously belonged to the empire. In compensation for lost territory in the west, the German territories near the Rhine were allowed to annex smaller, formerly independent regions: “Once it had begun, this interlocking process of annexation and compensation became a standing invitation to aggression by encouraging states to expand, sweep aside established boundaries, and absorb smaller polities.”29 By 1803, almost all of the ecclesiastical territories “were gone forever. On the right bank of the Rhine, three electorates, nineteen bishoprics, and forty-­four abbeys, totaling some ten thousand square kilometers with about three million subjects disappeared.”30 Among the results of this dramatic simplification of the German territorial boundaries were an increase in the size and power of Prussia, an end to the policy (existing since the Reformation) by which confessional and political boundaries coincided, and a corresponding erosion of Catholic authority. Thus it is not surprising that Eichendorff felt he had been handed a trick question when he was asked to assess the repercussions of the annexation of ecclesiastical territories. The easiest path for the aspiring civil servant would have been to praise the process that had strengthened Prussia. To his credit, however, Eichendorff stuck to his convictions and insisted that the secularization and consolidation of those territories into larger states was detrimental to Germany. Fortunately, the examining official who evaluated Eichendorff’s essay was also Catholic and was open-­minded enough to appreciate the intellectual quality of an essay that refused to toe the party line.31 The Prussian government also deserves credit, for Eichendorff was allowed to pass the examination and become a Prussian civil servant. He was never completely comfortable in the role and was probably underpaid and underpromoted because of his dissenting views,32 but the possibility of his career testifies to a degree of tolerance within the Prussian government that would have been inconceivable during the Third Reich. Eichendorff’s examination essay formulates the political beliefs that remained consistent throughout his career. Strongly influenced by Friedrich

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Schlegel’s lectures on German history, Eichendorff defends the benefits of German particularism against the centralizing tendencies of the modern bureaucratic state. He begins by claiming that, at a time when Christians were still a persecuted minority in Europe, the Germans were the first to integrate the new church into the state: “The Church became the soul of the state.”33 At that time, distance made it impossible for kings to maintain direct control over their scattered territories, so individual lords were granted local autonomy under the authority of the emperor alone (Reichsunmittelbarkeit) (458). Thus the empire flourished until religious faith began to fade and the healthy body of the Christian state sickened under the corrupting influence of statistics, commerce, and the military. The beautiful German forest was sacrificed to finance new standing armies, and the living diversity of the organic state was covered up by “the shroud of uniformity” (474; die Leichendecke der Einerleiheit). At this point, Eichendorff lays his cards on the table and declares that he considers “the secularization of the ecclesiastical states and properties . . . a misfortune for Germany” (477). Two forms of government have developed in Europe, he argues, the French and the German. The former functions “like a conqueror in its own land” and seeks to maximize wealth through mechanized uniformity; the latter respects tradition and evolves in a “quietly powerful process of development” (477–­78; stillkräftiges Werden). By dramatically reducing the number of its traditional territories and severing the bond between church and state, the Prussians have adopted a French form of government that is alien to its nature. Like a healthy ecosystem, the German state needs its diversity; harmony and equilibrium only develop in small states through the “intertwining of multifarious peculiarities” (486; Ineinanderverschlingen der mannigfaltigen Eigentümlichkeit). Eichendorff implores God to forbid that the Germans should be subject to the tyranny of a single capital like Paris. True unity lies in heterogeneity, not enforced homogeneity: “Monotony is not only not unity [Einerleiheit ist nicht nur keine Einheit] but an active obstacle to the same” (488). Thus Eichendorff can only conclude that the incorporation of formerly independent ecclesiastical territories into larger German provinces was a mistake that impoverishes the nation and destroys its organic unity.

Presentiment and Presence: Local Patriotism and Philosophical Pessimism Eichendorff was understandably proud of his principled stand in his examination essay, but he won something of a Pyrrhic victory with it, for the changes it

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denounces had already taken place. A sense of contemporary crisis as a symptom of irrevocable decline already pervades Eichendorff’s first novel, Presentiment and Presence (Ahnung und Gegenwart, 1815). He wrote the novel while studying in Vienna and during vacations in Silesia. It was finished already in the fall of 1812 but did not appear until the spring of 1815, partly because of the turmoil of the war years, but also because the unknown writer had some difficulty finding a publisher. Unlike Friedrich von Hardenberg’s prototypically romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), Presentiment and Presence is set not in the distant past of an idealized Middle Ages but in the immediate historical present of the Napoleonic Wars. In part 1 of Presentiment and Presence, we meet the protagonist, Graf Friedrich, just after he has completed his university studies. We follow him as he makes friends and meets potential lovers in a landscape reminiscent of rural Silesia. Part 2 takes Friedrich to an unnamed city, where he observes the social life of decadent aristocrats and would-­be poets. In the third and final section of the novel, Friedrich joins the partisan resistance against Napoleonic forces, before deciding to renounce the world and become a monk. Eichendorff borrowed liberally from the work of other romantic writers when composing his first novel, but the primary model for his and every other romantic bildungsroman was Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.34 Eichendorff modified Goethe’s model in several significant ways. Wilhelm Meister, a member of the urban middle class, is guided by and eventually granted access to a circle of landed aristocrats; Graf Friedrich, a member of an old noble family, undergoes no change in social rank. Goethe depicts Meister, a character he once described as a “poor dog,” with a certain ironic detachment. Meister is often bewildered about his role in life and becomes increasingly angry as he discovers the extent to which he has been manipulated by the members of the Tower Society. Graf Friedrich, in contrast, is the unquestioned hero of Eichendorff’s novel; he is always in control of himself and generally superior to those he encounters. Like Goethe’s other works, from the Roman Elegies to Elective Affinities, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship deals frankly with matters of sexuality. Presentiment and Presence appears prurient and prudish in contrast: attractive women always seem to be on the verge of exposing their ample charms, while Friedrich sternly chastises them for their unseemly behavior. Even young Erwin, an androgynous character directly modeled on Goethe’s Mignon, turns out to have been concealing a voluptuous female body beneath men’s clothing. Friedrich discovers her secret when he rips open her shirt in an effort to revive her after she collapses: “How shocked and astonished he was when the most beautiful bosom swelled up toward him, still warm, but no lon-

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ger beating.”35 Erwin—­or, rather, Erwine—­is dead, but still-­living temptresses continue to provoke Friedrich into outbursts of self-­righteous indignation. From the opening page of the novel, Friedrich is characterized not just as another particularly noble—­if somewhat humorless—­nobleman but also as a paragon of German virtue. Surrounded by fellow students engaged in sophomoric high jinks, Friedrich stands aloof and alone: “He was taller than the others and distinguished by a simple, unfettered appearance, almost like a medieval knight” (2:57). His friend Leontin appears at one point with companions in fantastic, foreign-­looking outfits, but “Friedrich looked completely German” (2:91). Graf Friedrich is patriotic, pious, and poetic. He moves with his aristocratic companions through a patriarchal landscape where peasants know their place and are happy with their lot: “As they passed through the village, they were greeted from all sides, not only with tipped hats, but also with friendly words and looks, which always indicates a benevolent and natural relationship between the lords and their peasants” (2:125). Not the least of Friedrich’s virtues is his manliness. “But you must be harder,” says Friedrich to his fellow students, “for the world is hard and will crush you otherwise” (2:214). Thus he scornfully rejects a man who has “no manly muscles” (2:217), just as he disapproves of a woman’s “mad genius that has blundered its way into masculinity” (2:115; tollgewordene Genialität, die in die Männlichkeit hinein­ pfuscht). In Graf Friedrich’s world, men are men, women are women, and woe betides anyone who forgets the difference. Toward the end of the novel, Graf Friedrich’s timeless German virtues are enlisted in the timely cause of national defense against a foreign aggressor. In a scene redolent with national symbolism, Friedrich and Leontin consecrate themselves for the struggle ahead by making a pilgrimage to the “river of past times and immortal enthusiasm, the royal Rhine” (2:245). As the sun rises, the two young men plunge into the river. They then climb to a castle overlooking the landscape of oaken forests and ruined fortresses. A comely maiden serves them goblets of Rhine wine and gives them each a kiss, after which they stroll through the ancient site rejuvenated by new growth: “Young green twigs and colorful wildflowers inclined everywhere over the dark castle ruins; the cool forest rustled; . . . countless birds sang” (2:246–­47). Eichendorff deploys stock images of his own romantic poetry for a political agenda cloaked in quasi-­ religious symbolism. The two German heroes baptize themselves in the sacred river before setting off to battle. The green twigs and wildflowers peeking through the castle ruins suggest that a national renaissance has begun, linking ancient tradition to a modern sense of purpose in a process of organic growth, not violent revolution. Nature and Germanic civilization, past and present, are

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joined in mutual harmony: “It was as if memory made nature stronger and more vital in the presence of the Rhine and bygone times” (2:247). Thus fortified with their “consecration of strength” (Weihe der Kraft) along the Rhine (2:246), Leontin and Friedrich return to Austria. At the beginning of book 3, we find Friedrich approaching “the last curtain wall of Germany, .  .  .  where one looks down into Italy,” that is, in the Tyrolean Alps (2:278). As contemporary readers would have known, Austria was defeated by the French at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in the fall of 1805. According to the provisions of the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on December 26, 1805, Austria lost substantial territory, including Bavaria, to France and its allies. The Alpine province of Tirol became part of the newly minted Kingdom of Bavaria. The Tyrolese resented their subordination to French-­Bavarian rule and began a rebellion in April 1809. The fortunes of the rebels fluctuated over the course of the summer and into the fall, as Innsbruck was taken and lost more than once. In the end, the rebellion was crushed, and its leader, Andreas Hofer, was captured and executed in February 1810. Thus the events depicted in part 3 of Presentiment and Presence take place in 1809 in Tirol. Graf Friedrich is not Tyrolese; toward the end of the novel, we learn that he and his long-­lost brother, Rudolf, were born along the Rhine. He does own estates in the area, at least until they are confiscated after the uprising, and he fights honorably for the lost cause. We last see him about to retreat from the world into a monastery, as his friends depart for Egypt and America. In the broadest terms, the war depicted in Presentiment and Presence is between France and “Germany,” represented politically by the Austrian government, as a remnant of Holy Roman Empire, and symbolically by the Rhine, its surrounding castles and forest, and the knightly virtues of Graf Friedrich. The specific conflict, however, is more of an intra-­German affair, between those who ally themselves with France and those who resist. Among the former are the French-­dominated Bavarians and the Tyrolese collaborators. The most notorious of the latter is Gräfin Romane, who entertains the enemy with wild parties while the partisan village is razed and burned. As Hans Kohn notes, the Tyrolese fought “in the defense of their ancient traditions and their inherited religion.” They were “motivated neither by German nationalism nor by revolutionary ideas.” They rejected the administrative reforms of the secular regime in Bavaria and fought for local autonomy, not national liberation: “Their loyalty was not to a German nation which did not exist for them, . . . nor to an Austrian monarchy with the peoples of which they had hardly any contact, but to God, Emperor, and their land Tyrol.”36 Although the specific historical details differ, the basic structure of the

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conflict in Presentiment and Presence recalls that of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, Goethe’s Goetz and Egmont, Lohenstein’s Cleopatra and Sophonisbe, and Gryphius’s Catharina of Georgia. In each case, communities seek to preserve local autonomy and a traditional way of life against the encroaching power of an enemy empire.37 That empire is often a foreign power: the Dutch defy the Spanish, the Egyptians and Carthaginians resist Rome, and the Georgians negotiate with the Russians, Turks, and Persians. Elsewhere, however, the enemy lies closer to home, between the submissive courtier Weislingen and the stubbornly independent Goetz, the authoritarian Austrian Empire and the Swiss cantons seeking independence in Wilhelm Tell, or collaborators and partisans in Eichendorff’s novel. At stake is a conflict less between two nations than between two principles of government that can be described in terms of the Janus-­faced nature of empire discussed in chapter 1 of the present study. On the one hand, empires are aggressive powers that seek to draw ever more satellites into their orbit; on the other, empires function as loose governing structures that can assimilate a diverse range of once-­alien peoples and allow for a considerable degree of local independence. Eichendorff celebrates the benevolent federalism of the old Holy Roman Empire and decries the aggressive imperialism of the new French nationalists. As he views it, modern nationalism has inherited the rapacious tendencies of ancient empires toward foreign enemies, while forgetting the tradition of tolerance toward its own people. He fights with the Tyrolese for God, emperor, and the local traditions of a people united in its diversity against the homogenizing tendencies of the modern nation-­state. That Eichendorff finished Presentiment and Presence at all is itself unusual: many of the most famous German romantic novels remained fragments. The more important question is why Eichendorff chose to conclude the novel as he did. To this end, it is useful to consider the chronology of events surrounding the composition and publication of Presentiment and Presence. As noted, the Tyrolean uprising was put down in the fall of 1809, and Andreas Hofer was executed in early 1810, so the conclusion of Presentiment and Presence must be set at about this time. Eichendorff probably completed the novel while on vacation in Lubowitz between July and September 1812, as Napoleon’s armies were advancing on Russia. Napoleon successfully occupied Moscow, but his ill-­equipped troops suffered horrendous losses as they retreated across the frozen plains of Eastern Europe. By the summer of 1813, Austria had joined an alliance with Russia, Prussia, and England against Napoleon; by April of the following year, the allies occupied Paris, and Napoleon was in exile. During this two-­year period, Eichendorff served in the army, and

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his novel remained unpublished. Finally, in October 1814, his friend and former mentor Graf Loeben sent the manuscript of Presentiment and Presence to Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. The popular Prussian novelist liked Eichendorff’s work and recommended it to his publisher. It appeared in late March 1815, just as Napoleon escaped from exile and rallied his troops for what would be his final one hundred days in power. Eichendorff reenlisted on April 22, 1815, in what he sardonically described as “a paroxysm of patriotism” (einen Paroxismus von Patriotismus), just two weeks after he had married his pregnant bride;38 he spent months garrisoned outside Paris and did not return to Silesia until the following winter. As the chronology suggests, Eichendorff had ample time to craft a more upbeat ending to Presentiment and Presence. When he finally sent off the manuscript, Napoleon had been defeated for several months, and there was no reason to suspect that the French emperor would ever leave the island of Elba. In fact, both Loeben and Fouqué suggested that Eichendorff should find a way to bridge the gap between the uncertain times in which the novel is set and the happier present. “If I were you, I would add an indication of when you composed and completed it,” wrote Loeben.39 Fouqué suggested that a preface to the novel might do the job, and Eichendorff obliged him with a letter that Fouqué copied verbatim into his own introduction to Presentiment and Presence.40 “I had completed the novel before the French entered Russia in the last war,” begins Eichendorff, incidentally creating a minor problem regarding the history of the novel’s composition: the French began their advance in late June 1812, but in a letter to Fouqué, Eichendorff claims that he did not finish writing Presentiment and Presence until September or October of that year.41 Either way, the novel was completed more than two years before it went to press. “Of course, I could have artificially spun the threads of this story into the present,” continues Eichendorff, but he notes that the present times were too unsettled and that, in any case, a forced connection between past and present would violate the spirit of the work, which was intended as “an accurate representation of that ominous time of expectation, longing, and confusion.”42 Eichendorff argues that we should read Presentiment and Presence as a historical novel, of the recent past, that captures the unsettled mood of a very specific period in European history, after Napoleon’s major victories and before his ultimate defeat. Evidence in the novel and elsewhere suggests, however, that Eichendorff chose this moment to express a deeper sense of malaise that went far beyond the events of that moment in time. When Leontin announces his plan to emigrate to America, Graf Friedrich approves, “for he knew well that only a fresh new life abroad could save his friend; the wide-

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spread misery here would have destroyed him with pointless restlessness and busywork” (2:367). Friedrich defends his decision to enter a monastery as a justified flight from the times that mix “poetry, reverence, Germanness, virtue, and patriotism” into a Babylonian confusion: “It seems to me that in these miserable times, as always, the only help is in religion.” The time may come for future action, but Friedrich “chooses the cross as his sword” for now (2:375). The image of the cross harkens back to the opening scene in the novel. As Friedrich sails down the Danube with his friends, they come to dangerous rapids known as “the maelstrom”: “Not one person is here; no bird sings; only the forest from the mountains and the terrible vortex that pulls all life down into its unfathomable abyss have been roaring here ceaselessly for centuries” (2:58). A cross stands on a mighty boulder high above the turbulent stream. As Egon Schwarz observes in his insightful reading of this passage, Eichendorff conceals an allegory behind the realistic description of the river: Friedrich sails on the ship of life, with heaven above and death below. Only the cross promises eternal salvation from the roiling waters. Just then, as Friedrich contemplates the churning rapids, beautiful Rosa floats by on another boat. Friedrich forgets all about the river’s dangers, as he is entranced by something far more perilous, a woman and the sexual desire she awakens. “One is tempted to apply Goethe’s famous saying to Eichendorff, but in reverse,” writes Schwarz: “The Eternal Feminine draws us downward” (Das Ewig-­Weibliche zieht uns hinab).43 Eichendorff’s allegory anticipates Schopenhauer’s image of the will as an erotic force that underlies and undermines human consciousness; it also looks back to the baroque view of the world as a place of Unbeständigkeit (impermanence) and Vergänglichkeit (transience). Although Schopenhauer lacks the religious faith of baroque Christianity, he shares with the earlier era a fundamental hostility to notions of historical progress.44 The baroque wheel of fortune spins around and around but goes nowhere: a momentary rise in one’s earthly fortunes should not be confused with lasting progress. What matters in the end is one’s place in the eternity of heaven or hell, not the temporary upswings or downswings of life on earth. In Schopenhauer’s bleaker view, only art can provide temporary distraction from life’s vicissitudes as the all-­consuming will mocks the pretensions of human rationality and delusional faith in progress.45 Such faith gave rise to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as idealistic citizens sought to advance society to a new and better form. Although the Revolution proved a mixed blessing, inspiring needed reforms but also sparking years of violent conflict, it certainly created the sense that the world was involved in a process of irrevocable historical change. Eichendorff sets his novel in the midst of this tumultuous age and against it. He chooses a histori-

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cally specific moment to drive home a timeless truth: religious faith is the only certainty in an uncertain world. This is why he refused to add an upbeat ending to Presentiment and Presence. What Loeben and Fouqué hail as an unmitigated success appears only as further confusion to Eichendorff; to write a triumphant novel about Germany’s victory over Napoleon would be to confuse a “paroxysm of patriotism” for lasting progress.

Durande Castle: Elegiac Conservatism As Eichendorff sensed already in 1815, the Revolution was more of an ongoing process than a limited event with a clearly defined beginning and end. Napoleon was defeated in 1814 but came back in 1815; the Congress of Vienna did its best to repress revolutionary aspirations, but they burst out again in 1830 and again in 1848. As might be expected, Eichendorff viewed the events critically, which prompted his antiliberal satires noted earlier. The events of the Revolution also inspired a more substantial work, Das Schloß Dürande (Durande Castle, 1837).46 Eichendorff sets his novella in France on the eve of the Revolution, but given the ongoing outbreaks of revolutionary violence in subsequent decades, the novella also engages issues of more immediate concern. It begins with a description of the hunter Renald’s idyllic cottage on the grounds of the ancestral estates of the Durande family outside Marseilles. The cottage is so covered in flowers and vines that it is almost impossible to distinguish from the surrounding forests, and when the moon shines full, wild animals graze peacefully just outside the door. The image introduces the Durande estate as an example of Schlegel’s “living positive” (cited earlier in the present chapter), an organic community based on local tradition and accepted social hierarchies. But the cottage is now gone, the castle lies in ruins, and the hunter and the duke he served are dead. With their passing, the community has been destroyed as well. Durande Castle is about the end of the idyll, or at least it might seem so at the outset—­about the incursion of revolutionary ideas hatched in Paris into the sleepy province of southern France. As we shall see, however, the novella is considerably more complex than its antirevolutionary “message” suggests.47 The events that led to the castle’s destruction are told in a long flashback. Renald lives with his younger sister, Gabriele, in the little cottage on the Durande estate. Their parents are dead, and Renald is determined to guard his sister’s virtue. To his dismay, he hears rumors that she has been meeting with a man, which turns out to be true. Although Gabriele insists that her evening

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rendezvous with the mysterious stranger have been completely innocent, Renald immediately sends her off to a monastery. She learns there that the charming gentleman was none other than Graf Hippolyt, who is the son of the old Graf Durande and is thus the future lord of the manor. Hippolyt heads off to Paris for the winter, and Gabriele disappears from the cloister at about the same time, so Renald can only assume that the young duke has abducted his beloved sister. Renald pursues Hippolyt to Paris and confronts him, but the duke denies any knowledge of Gabriele’s whereabouts. When Renald tries to bring his case to the king, Hippolyt has him arrested and cast into prison. Renald escapes and returns home just as the Revolution begins. The old duke dies, and Hippolyt also returns to the estate, as a revolutionary mob is about to storm the castle. Events quickly get out of hand, and identities are confused. In the end, all of the principal actors are dead, and the castle is a smoking ruin. The narrator of this tragic tale has little sympathy for the revolutionary rabble, who are motivated solely by greed in their desire to plunder the castle, and the representatives of the Old Regime are also portrayed in a thoroughly critical light. In a late essay titled “Der Adel und die Revolution” (The aristocracy and the revolution, 1857), Eichendorff begins by mocking those very old people who still claim to remember the so-­called good old days: “They were actually neither good nor old but, rather, only a caricature of the good old days.”48 In a sketch intended as part of an uncompleted autobiography, Eichendorff develops a typology of the prerevolutionary aristocracy. Some of the landed aristocrats were little more than farmers, living on isolated rural estates together with their subjects and livestock. A second group of pretentious nobles tried to keep abreast of the latest fashion, living in their Rococo palaces surrounded by formal French gardens, while a young generation of cavaliers bankrupted themselves pursing decadent pleasures in Paris. None of these groups had anything to do with bygone days of knights in shining armor: “The sword had become merely ceremonial, the helmet a powdered wig. In a word, it was the powdered age of chivalry grown frail and tired.”49 True to form, the old Graf Durande sits in his castle surrounded by servants, who powder his hair while he yawns with boredom. His servants are forbidden to tell him about the Revolution. The sick old man sits in his marble palace, surrounded by candelabras and portraits of his ancestors, “in ceremonial dress, with his hair styled, like a corpse in its Sunday best.” The mechanism of the old castle clock still functions, but the rusted hands no longer move, “as if time had fallen asleep at the old palace.”50 Neither the old aristocracy nor the revolutionary mob offers a viable alternative for the future in Durande Castle. The latter brings only greed and de-

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struction, while members of the former are like zombies, still walking but already dead. Perhaps the younger generation can show the path toward a better way? Such would seem to be the case when Graf Hippolyt is reunited with Gabriele in the besieged castle. He swears that he loves her and will remain faithful to her forever. Eternity does not last long, for both die within hours, but the nobleman’s willingness to marry one of his subjects transcends class boundaries in a way that would have been unthinkable to his father’s generation. Hippolyt’s slightly earlier announcement that he is willing to challenge Renald to a duel also breaks the rules of court society: “He, the duke, was willing to give him satisfaction like a cavalier and fight a duel with him, man against man—­the proud man could ask no more” (3:455–­56). In both cases, Graf Hippolyt suggests a third path—­between revolutionary violence and reactionary recalcitrance—­that might be termed “progressive conservatism.”51 He makes his proclamations under extreme duress, however, and has no time to make good on his promises, so his newfound commitment to egalitarian love and his readiness to engage in mortal combat with his social inferior come too late to effect any lasting change. Graf Hippolyt’s prior actions have been marked only by duplicity and maliciousness. Gabriele has no idea who her mysterious visitor is or what he might want, but her older brother is not wrong to suspect that the young duke might be interested in more than a pleasant chat with the pretty young woman. Seducing their subjects is something of a Durande family tradition, as readers discover when Renald confronts Hippolyt’s father with the (mistaken) accusation that his son has run off with Gabriele. The old man simply chuckles, commends his son’s good taste in women, and assures his outraged subject that he will provide appropriate compensation for the girl and her family: “The Durandes always behave splendidly in such affairs” (3:438). If Hippolyt’s intentions were indeed honorable, he could have revealed his identity and proposed marriage when first confronted by Renald, or he could have at least returned under calmer circumstances and assured Renald of his genuine affection for Gabriele. But Hippolyt apparently makes no effort to talk to Renald or to find out where Renald has hidden Gabriele; instead, Hippolyt heads off “to spend the winter at parties” in Paris (3:437). Renald finds him there, looking rather worse for wear: “Wasted and exhausted, he [Graf Hippolyt] threw himself down on the couch. ‘I am so tired,’ he said, ‘so tired of pleasure, always pleasure, boring pleasure! I wish there were a war!’” (3:441). A revolutionary gang leader in Paris hints that venereal disease may be the source of Hippolyt’s malaise and the corruption of his entire lineage: “It is an old dynasty, but the worm of death is already gnawing at it, completely corroded by

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love affairs” (3:439). Hippolyt not only refuses to provide honest answers to Renald’s questions about his sister’s whereabouts—­he really does not know but defiantly tells Renald that he would not tell him even if he did know—­and has Renald arrested on false charges of insanity. Later, when both have returned to the estate in Provence, Renald again beseeches Hippolyt to marry his sister, and again the duke refuses. Thus, while Hippolyt’s eleventh-­hour profession of love for Gabriele seems sincere, it marks, at the very least, an abrupt change in the pattern of avoidance and denial that has characterized his behavior up to this point. If Graf Hippolyt exhibits less-­than-­admirable character traits that are typical of the decadent aristocracy, Renald takes bourgeois virtue to a destructive extreme. In the opening scene, Renald fires his rifle at his own sister and her unknown companion before taking the time to ask questions, initiating a pattern of violent behavior that continues until he burns down the castle and blows himself up. He sends his sister off to a nunnery immediately after he learns of her potential love affair, and soon after she is safely tucked away, he stops going to visit her. Renald’s obsessive pursuit of Hippolyt from Provence to Paris only provokes the duke’s defiance and does nothing to further Renald’s cause. Most curiously, Renald refuses to see a connection between the duke’s personal behavior and the systemic corruption of power in the Old Regime. As both the old duke and the revolutionary leader in Paris remind him, aristocrats have been preying on the wild game on their property, both animal and human, for a long time: “Are they not the lords in the forest, and does the game not belong to them, both high and low? Are we not damned dogs who lick their boots when they kick us?” (3:439). Renald, who is convinced, at this point, that Graf Hippolyt has seduced his sister and abducted her to Paris, has every reason to join the revolutionary battle against aristocratic tyranny. Instead, he defiantly defends the duke: “The young Duke Durande is a generous lord, I only want justice from him, and nothing more” (3:439). Although divided by their social class, Renald and Hippolyt are united in their stubborn insistence on their rights. Renald is as tyrannical in his defense of his sister’s virtue as is Hippolyt in his pursuit of aristocratic power. Against these egotistical men, Gabriele stands out for her selfless and steadfast virtue. She obeys her brother and yet remains loyal to her lover to the point of sacrificing her life for his: she is shot when she dons Hippolyt’s cloak to distract the mob and allow him to escape, even though she is sure that Hippolyt left her for another woman in Paris. In her willingness to stand by her man, no matter what he has done or how she will suffer, Gabriele is, in her own way, as extreme as her brother. Like him, Gabriele is unwilling or unable to see

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the connection between the personal and the political, which lends a certain irony to the novella’s conclusion. Renald explicitly and repeatedly distances himself from the revolutionaries, insisting that he wants only private revenge for personal injustice. He burns down the palace not because he wants to do away with the French aristocracy but because he has been unable to protect his sister from a man who turns out not to have abducted her after all. His final desperate actions are motivated by grief and the realization that his quest for justice has been inspired by a mistake. Ironically, however, he achieves what the revolutionaries desired, by killing the duke and razing his palace. Moments earlier, the mob had shot a person who they thought was the evil aristocrat but who turns out to have been his potential victim, Gabriele. In seeking political justice, the mob kills one of its own; in seeking personal vengeance, Renald kills the aristocrat. Far from writing a story with a clear-­cut message that simply condemns the revolutionaries and exonerates the aristocrats, Eichendorff creates an ambiguous tale in which both aristocrats and their subjects are caught up in personal conflicts with political implications that they refuse to acknowledge or cannot understand. Hence it is fitting that Eichendorff should use the metaphor of a coming storm to characterize both the Revolution and Renald’s rage. The recurring image of lightning on the horizon creates an aura of impending disaster that eventually erupts into revolutionary violence. At first, the storms seem distant and unthreatening: Gabriele sits looking out the window of the cloister with a young nun in the evening as the crickets chirp in the meadows and lightning flashes far away. The image becomes more ominous when thunderstorms hang over the forest as Renald returns home after his imprisonment in Paris, and it is more threatening still when lightning bolts strike outside the room where the old duke sits dreaming of the past and oblivious to the present. Here already, the light from the sky is mixed with the glow of burning houses set afire by the revolutionary mobs, and soon the natural lightning (“Wetterleuchten”) above the Durande palace becomes one with the flashing light of the torches (“Wetterleuchten der Fackeln”) swung by the marauding crowd as they loot the castle cellar (3:455–­56). Renald enters the story in a rage that makes his body tremble and his brow twitch “as if there were lightning in the distance” (3:425), and he leaves it like a lightning bolt that explodes the palace with blinding force. Such moments make for good storytelling but poor political analysis. Revolutions are the product of human society; violent storms occur in nature. One can argue about whether a revolution is warranted at a given time but not about a natural calamity. By equating the Revolution with a violent storm, Durande Castle obscures the material causes that motivated the

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mob to grab their torches and burn down the palaces, however rightly or wrongly. The Revolution “just happened,” like an act of God or, more precisely, like an intervention of the devil, who employed his blood-­drinking henchmen to wreak havoc on earth. “But you should be careful not to awaken the wild animal in your breast, so that it does not break out suddenly and destroy you” (3:465), concludes Durande Castle, with a clear warning: control your temper, or else you will become a self-­destructive wild beast like Renald. By extension, the narrator rejects the revolutionary violence of 1789 in France and urges the German readers of 1837 to keep cool and stay at home. At the same time, the depiction of the older generation of ossified aristocrats suggests that some sort of change was inevitable. The old order had to go. Graf Hippolyt offers a glimmer of hope for peaceful reform, when he decides to return to the ancestral estate and marry for love beneath his social standing, but that promise is cut short by the revolting masses and Renald’s blind rage. The unmitigated disaster nevertheless comes with a silver lining: the magazine explodes, and the palace collapses, but the chaos ends: “Then all became quiet! Like a sacrificial flame, slender, mild, and splendid, the fire rose to the starry sky, illuminating the fields and forests all around—­and Renald was never seen again” (3:465). Almost miraculously, Renald’s self-­destructive despair and the mob’s unchecked madness have been transformed into a sacrificial flame that atones the heavens and brings peace and the promise of rebirth on earth. The rubble of the old palace is covered with new growth, just as Renald’s cottage was once hidden by vines and flowers: “Those are the ruins of the old Durande Castle, covered in grapevines, which look out into beautiful spring days from the forested mountains” (3:465). The image of new growth reflects boundless faith in the rejuvenative powers of nature but little or none in the human ability to effect meaningful social reform. In “Der Adel und die Revolution,” Eichendorff insists that if positive change is to come in the postrevolutionary era, it must arise out of local traditions and be guided from above: “But only complete barbarism can survive without the nobility.” The social elite of the future may differ from the nobility of the past, but “the aristocracy (to call it by the name that has become traditional) is, in accordance with its immutable nature, the ideal element of society.” Its task is to mediate between past traditions and present needs, “to mediate between the eternally changing new with the eternally existing and thus make it truly capable of life for the first time.”52 New life cannot be exported from elsewhere and grafted onto ancient roots, a method Eichendorff condemns as the “barbaric practice of making everything equal [barbarische

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Gleich­macherei], this trimming of the fresh tree of life according to a single presumptuous measurement.”53 To the end, Eichendorff staunchly opposes a government based on universal principles and led by rootless cosmopolitans (“that strange ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ who is at home in all the world and thus not really anywhere”), while strongly supporting a model based on local diversity within a larger unity, “a living federal state of the most distinct individual peoples (ein lebendiger Föderativstaat der verschiedensten Völker-­ Individuen).54 This vision is based on the past, however, and Eichendorff argues that the aristocracy in the eighteenth century had already either degenerated into decadence or walled itself off in anachronistic isolation. New growth sprouts from the rubble, but the palace has not been rebuilt. Hence the final line of Durande Castle is cautionary: “But you beware” (Du aber hüte dich). Just because tentative signs of natural regeneration have arisen out of past destruction does not mean that now is the time for a new revolution. Repress the wild beast within and wait for guidance from above, Eichendorff advises. At the same time, he leaves readers with a sense that there is no new aristocracy to lead progressive reform and that the people’s violent impulses cannot be checked indefinitely. As a result, there is an elegiac cast to Eichendorff’s conservatism. The time was out of joint, but, like Hamlet, Eichendorff came too late to set it right.

Chapter 7

Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany

On January 18, 1871, King William I of Prussia was crowned German Emperor in the Gallery of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Prayers were said, psalms recited, and a military band and chorus greeted the proclamation of the emperor with a rousing rendition of “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.”1 Germany’s long-­ sought goal of political unification had finally been attained, although the process had not followed the course that many on the left would have liked. Early nineteenth-­century nationalism had natural affinities with liberalism, as it was conceived in opposition to the entrenched authority of the Old Regime.2 Despite later efforts to vilify the French and cast a heroic glow over the German participation in the Wars of Liberation, many Germans in areas occupied by France had experienced liberal reforms that made them want more of the same after Napoleon was defeated.3 From the Wartburg Festival of 1817 to the Hambach Festival of 1832, liberals combined nationalist enthusiasm with demands for freedom of the press and popular sovereignty.4 In the spring of 1848, those demands seemed about to be realized, as crowds took to the streets of Berlin and won Frederick William’s approval to establish a democratic government in a unified Germany. Elections were held, and the delegates assembled in Frankfurt, where, after much bickering, they agreed on a constitution and presented it to the king. He promptly rejected the parliament’s proposal to crown him as king of a constitutional monarchy, however, and the forces of reaction triumphed again. Not the least of Otto von Bismarck’s achievements after his appointment as the Prussian minister-­president in 1861 lay in his ability to harness growing nationalist sentiment for unification while uncoupling German nationalism from its liberal agenda.5 He did this by initiating a series of three wars that resulted in quick and decisive victories—­over Denmark in 1864, against Austria in 1866, and against France in 1870. The crowning ceremony of the German Emperor in the symbolic center of French power was a 143

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calculated insult designed to add maximum public humiliation to France’s military defeat. The long history of German particularism did not end with political unification. The boundaries of the new state were not coterminous with those of the peoples who felt that they were part of the German nation. By adopting the kleindeutsch solution to the problem of German unity, Bismarck excluded Austria from the German Empire, thus marking an end to a centuries-­long pan-­ German tradition that had seen the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation centered in Vienna. The balance of power had now shifted decisively toward Prussia, and Austria would rejoin the Reich only when Hitler declared the Anschluss of 1938. Regional differences remained strong even within the smaller German state that Bismarck forged in the wake of the Franco-­Prussian War. The imperial constitution of April 1871 “was emphatically devolved in character,” explains Christopher Clark, who continues, “Indeed, it was not so much a constitution in the traditional sense as a treaty among the sovereign territories that had agreed to form the German Empire.”6 In David Blackbourn’s words, “The federal Empire resembled more closely the present-­day European Union than it did contemporary federal (but republican) states such as the USA or Switzerland. None of this was magically transformed after 1871: the Empire remained distinctively federal down to its disappearance in 1918.”7 The cultural task confronting the new state was to find a way to forge a sense of collective national identity that transcended local loyalties. In the process, interest in national unity had to be expanded from the cultural elite to the common people, in a process that George Mosse dubbed the “nationalization of the masses.”8 As in previous periods of nationalist enthusiasm, Germans looked to the past for inspiration. This time, however, the monuments erected to national glory were truly monumental in size: the statue of Hermann in the Teutoburg Forest rises more than fifty meters above the surrounding trees; the Monument to the Battle of Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) outside Leipzig soars to nearly one hundred meters; the Kyffhäuser Monument, with its larger-­ than-­life statue of Barbarossa, is carved into the sandstone of a Thuringian mountain.9 Other symptoms of this trend toward what Jost Hermand calls “a national maximalism” include a series of Germanic superheroes, such as Wagner’s Siegfried, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Karl May’s Old Shatterhand, and the Gothic knights of Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (A battle for Rome, 1876), an immensely popular novel that pitted tragically heroic Germans against decadent Romans and duplicitous Greeks at the time of the Völkerwanderungen.10 As Dahn’s novel suggests, the glorification of Germany’s national heroes was accompanied by the denigration of its alleged enemies. Gustav Freytag’s best-­

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selling Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) centers on the conflict between upstanding German businessmen and slovenly Poles; it also includes disturbing elements of antisemitism.11 Suspicion of peoples considered alien to German culture combined with hostility toward internal foes. Hans-­Ulrich Wehler notes that Bismarck “developed a technique of political rule which has been described as one of ‘negative integration.’ . . . Thus political Catholicism, parliamentary liberalism, Social Democracy and liberal Judaism were built up as the true ‘enemies of the Empire.’”12 According to one view, local loyalties and nationalist sentiments could coexist and even reinforce one another. The thriving Heimat movement of late nineteenth-­century Germany encouraged local patriotism, not in opposition to the recently unified nation-­state, but as a way of establishing a collective unity rooted in local diversity. “Germans imagined nationhood as a form of localness,” writes Alon Confino, who explains, “While fatherland and nation represented Germany as the one and only, Heimat represented Germany as the one and many.”13 In this spirit, Lynne Tatlock reads Gustav Freytag’s multivolume historical novel Die Ahnen (The ancestors, 1872–­80) as a work that uses the provincial setting of Thuringia as a model for German identity rooted in the local and yet, for precisely that reason, part of a larger national unity.14 Others, however, took a less sanguine view of the relation between the new Prusso-­ centric empire and its peripheral regions. Lionel Gossman argues, in his magisterial study Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, that the intellectuals who gathered at the University of Basel—­including Johann Jacob Bachofen, Jacob Burckhardt, and Friedrich Nietzsche—­preferred the decentralized structure of the old regime to the new drive for unity emanating from Berlin.15 Nietzsche’s “untimely” lack of enthusiasm for the Prussian victory over France continues the Goethean tradition of skepticism toward nationalist saber rattling and preference for regional autonomy against central authority. Late nineteenth-­century German literature or “poetic realism” is often associated with the merely local, with a minimalist focus on the small and humble rather than the grandiose and bombastic. In his preface to Bunte Steine (Colorful stones, 1853), Adalbert Stifter contends that true greatness lies in lives devoted to the virtues of simplicity and moderation. Violent passions are like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in nature—­spectacular, to be sure, but exceptions to “the gentle law” (das sanfte Gesetz) that governs everyday life.16 Stifter’s comments capture not only the deliberate repression of strong emotions in his own fiction but also the muted quality of many works of German poetic realism. One thinks of the slightly cloying melancholy that pervades Theodor Storm’s Immensee (1849; rev. ed., 1851), the programmatic provin-

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cialism of Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (A Village Romeo and Juliet, 1856; rev. ed., 1875), and Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s insistence that the nineteenth-­century novelist should strive to rescue fleeting moments of residual poetry—­“grüne Stellen”—­from the increasingly prosaic landscape of modern times.17 Toward the end of the century, this concentration on the local inspired a reactionary nostalgia for the old-­fashioned Heimat still untouched by modern times. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl worried that industrialization and urbanization would erode healthy rural traditions in Germany’s richly diverse regions; Friedrich Tönnies lamented the erosion of traditional communities united in a feeling of Gemeinschaft by the impersonal forces of modern Gesellschaft. Ludwig Ganghofer specialized in sentimental stories about robust villages in southern Bavaria that were threatened by encroaching modernization; his Gewitter im Mai (Thunderstorms in May, 1904), for instance, combines romantic entanglements with a tragic accident caused by the introduction of electricity into an Alpine village. Such works have long been used to argue for the relative insignificance of German literature of the period that produced such towering figures as Tolstoy, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. In frequently cited comments, Erich Auer­bach brushes German realism aside, with a disdainful flick of the wrist, to focus on the more substantial achievements of other European novelists, particularly the French.18 Such assessments are often based on the tacit assumption that German literature of the later nineteenth century is a national literature manqué, defined by its lack of a single national capital and its stubborn provincialism—­in short, by its failure to be French. As David Blackbourn and James Retallack argue in the introduction to their previously cited volume Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place in German-­Speaking Central Europe, 1860–­1930, we need not focus “on the ‘aberrant’ character of Imperial Germany, as though strained or divided loyalties arise only where ‘normal’ patterns of modern social and political development have been derailed.” Today’s historians—­including literary historians—­are “more likely to start from the assumption that multiple or hybrid identities are the norm.” Blackbourn and Retallack urge both an expansive perspective that places German national history “in a European or even global frame” and a narrower focus that allows us to “zoom in on German history at the subnational level.”19 Their lens reveals people experiencing the tension between stasis and mobility: they note, on the one hand, “the slowness of change, the feeling of embeddedness, the preference for one’s homeland” among German speakers of the period and, on the other, a new sense of motion “by people who felt unmoored, adrift, at sea” and “movement by people whose principal identity did not remain constant from

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birth to death but grafted with others to create something new—­which in turn was reseeded, cultivated, and uprooted all over again.”20 Recent scholarship on imperial Germany has focused on its “worldly provincialism,” to borrow H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl’s felicitous phrase.21 In addition to negotiating between the pull of old loyalties to their local provinces and a new allegiance to the nation-­state, nineteenth-­century Germans were becoming increasingly aware of Germany’s imbrication in European and world affairs. New industries drew millions to Germany’s rapidly expanding cities, while population growth, political and economic crises, and the lure of new land sent millions more to North America. Near-­universal literacy and better postal services meant that even those who stayed at home could correspond regularly with friends or relatives who had left for the New World; they could also read articles about foreign cultures that were a regular feature of new family periodicals such as Daheim (At home) and Die Gartenlaube (The garden bower).22 New products from overseas colonies (Kolonialwaren) were now available at local stores, and exotic peoples were on display at Völkerschauen. World commerce expanded as sailing ships gave way to steamships, and the newly united German Empire soon scrambled to strengthen its navy and acquire new territories abroad. As a result of these developments, the allegedly provincial literature of imperial Germany is shot through with references to the larger world. Susanne Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies helped spark widespread interest in literary representations of Germany’s desire for overseas colonies in the century that preceded national unification, and critics have since explored the increasingly global scope of the German literary imagination during the imperial period.23 In turn, real and imaginative journeys to far-­flung places transformed the provincial landscape: the sites that reactionary writers sought out as stable refuges from a world in motion were increasingly drawn into the maelstrom, “producing locality in new, globalized ways.”24 Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of our contemporary process of globalization, in other words, is equally suggestive for the understanding of imperial Germany. There, too, it was becoming increasingly “unlikely that there [was] anything mere about the local.”25 The persistence of regionalism in the unified nation-­state, in tandem with the expanding interaction between the European nation and the non-­European world, suggests that the Janus-­faced nature of the ancient Roman Empire resurfaced in a new guise in imperial Germany. For many years, historians of nineteenth-­century Germany focused on Prussia’s inexorable rise to power and the founding of the nation-­state.26 As Mack Walker points out in his innovative study of German hometowns and as Lionel Gossman confirms in his previ-

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ously mentioned account of the Basel intellectuals, there was also another Germany in the nineteenth century, an “individualized country” of semiautonomous principalities and thinkers who carried the legacy of German particularism into the modern era.27 The term empire takes on two different meanings as a result of these developments. On the one hand, it becomes synonymous with the “new imperialism” emerging from European nation-­states that sought, in competition with one another, to establish colonies in the non-­ European world.28 Studies of nineteenth-­century culture and imperialism focus on the European conquest of colonies for political power and economic gain, along with the attendant ideologies of cultural superiority and racial difference. On the other hand, the long-­lasting legacy of German particularism continued the tradition of empire in the sense of a nonexpansionist federalism into the twentieth century, as evident in the persistence of regionalism within imperial Germany, a tendency that was even stronger in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, as we shall see in the discussion of Kafka in the next chapter. In this chapter, I focus on only two of the many nineteenth-­century German realists, although arguably two of the best, Gottfried Keller (1819–­90) and Theodor Fontane (1819–­98). Although exact contemporaries in terms of their age, they stand at opposite poles of imperial Germany: Fontane was Prussian to the core and, thus, at the center of the new Reich, whereas Keller was Swiss and, thus, outside the Reich’s political boundaries. Yet the opposition is not as simple as it might seem. Fontane, a local product of preunification Prussia and a cosmopolitan, worked for a substantial period as a foreign correspondent in London, while Keller spent many of his formative years in Germany and considered himself part of the German Kulturnation. Their literary works, often viewed as typically “Swiss” or “German,” were more often about peripheries and hybridity than centers and homogeneity. They reflect tensions between local traditions and modern nationalism at a time marked by both accelerating global commerce and Germany’s nascent participation in European imperialism.

Gottfried Keller: A Swiss Liberal for the German Kulturnation Both versions of Keller’s semiautobiographical novel Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich), begin with a strong sense of place and tradition. The original novel, first published in 1854–­55, opens with a loving evocation of Keller’s native Zurich. Keller stages the scene much as a photojournalist might today. Inviting the reader to step aboard a boat in the town of Rapperswil on the shores of Lake

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Zurich and to drift slowly down to the city, where the lake narrows into the Limmat River, the narrator evokes a sense of stasis and harmony between the landscape and its inhabitants, lingering on the image of a monastery and castle reflected in the still waters. The first people who swing into view are elected representatives. The men are not particularly stylish nor exceptionally eloquent or erudite, “but a certain radiance from their lively eyes expresses prudence, experience, and the fortunate ability to make the right decision without fuss or bother.”29 The opening paragraphs thus introduce Zurich as a city steeped in the living tradition of Swiss democracy, characterized by the beauty of its surroundings, the antiquity of its customs, and the wisdom of its leaders. The revised version of Green Henry (1879–­80) begins with a description of the cemetery in the ancient village where the father of Heinrich Lee, the novel’s protagonist, was born. So many generations have been buried there that every molecule of soil was once part of a human body that tilled the land in centuries past. Even the disintegrating boards of the coffins come from trees that once grew on nearby hills, just as the linen shrouds were spun from flax grown in local fields. A family once gave the village its name, countless generations ago, but the last heir to the line of self-­appointed nobles is long since dead and forgotten. “The children of yesterday’s beggars are the rich men of today in the village, and tomorrow their descendants will be toiling in the middle classes, eventually either to sink back into beggary or to rise to prosperity again.”30 The wheel of fortune turns as generations come and go, but the village and its cemetery remain the same. The seemingly idyllic worlds of both Zurich and the village are soon exposed as deceptively fragile.31 Heinrich, already stigmatized as a boy by his strange green clothing and lack of a father, is permanently expelled from school in Zurich for a relatively mild infraction. He seeks refuge in his father’s village, only to discover that the natural beauty that makes it seem like paradise to him cloaks a harsh reality for the local residents. Women who married and moved only a few miles away see their closest childhood friends only on rare occasions; men intent on business do not take time to stop and visit with half-­ forgotten relatives. The narrator notes that recent improvements in roads and transportation have since revitalized social life in the region, but Heinrich’s visit takes place during an earlier time, when the old ways condemned country women to lives of bitter resignation and sentenced men to toil in grim self-­ absorption. Heinrich’s personal experience in the country is by no means entirely negative. He is accepted into his uncle’s family, has time to develop his interest in painting, and falls in love with a chaste schoolgirl (Anna) and a seductive young widow (Judith). Yet we are never given the impression that life

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in the country offers a thoroughly positive alternative to life in the city, and the opposition between the two is not as clear-­cut as it first appears. Heinrich’s uncle is from the city but has decided to retire to the country village. Anna’s father, of peasant stock and with little in the way of education, would like to rise above his humble origins and pushes his fragile daughter into a French finishing school, which transforms the lively teenager into a pretentious and slightly prudish young woman. Judith lived in the city when she was married and is tolerated as an outsider in the village; she will eventually emigrate to America. Even the traditional village rituals have begun to seem out of place. When Heinrich’s grandmother dies, her otherwise abusive second husband decides to host an old-­fashioned wake complete with dancing, a decision that astonishes Anna’s father: “So we have to dance, too? I thought this custom had finally been done away with, and we are certainly the only village far and wide that still practices it now and then!” (2:289). A once-­honored tradition has become an embarrassing anachronism in the rapidly changing rural landscape. People are on the move in Keller’s works, not just between village and town or from one country to the next within Europe, but also to the far corners of the earth.32 In addition to his autobiographical novel, Keller is best known for his anthology of novellas, Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla, 1856, 1873–­75). His tales of life in a fictitious Swiss village follow in the footsteps of Berthold Auerbach’s popular Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Village Tales from the Black Forest, 1843–­54) and Jeremias Gotthelf’s similar stories about life in rural Switzerland. Such stories typically set the stasis of traditional village life against the mobility of the modern world, but that is not the case in The People of Seldwyla. In the preface to the first volume of Keller’s work, the narrator informs us that Seldwyla’s townspeople can be found all over the world today, “in Australia, in California, in Texas, as in Paris or Constantinople.”33 The eponymous hero of Pankraz der Schmoller (Pankraz the Pouter) leaves town as a young man and passes through New York on his way to work for the British in India. He later spends time in the French Foreign Legion in Northern Africa before returning home, only to move away from the village with his mother and sister, to the Swiss canton’s capital city. There he pursues a successful career, much like Wenzel Strapinski, the poor Silesian mistaken for a Polish aristocrat in Kleider machen Leute (Clothes Make the Man), who remains in Seldwyla just long enough to make his fortune and then leaves town, taking every penny with him. Far from offering a refuge against a hostile world, Seldwyla is the place people go when they have nowhere else to turn. In A Village Romeo and Juliet, the bankrupt farmer Manz and his wife move into town and try to eke out a marginal existence in a pathetically shabby

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bar; when not behind the counter in the largely deserted inn, Manz joins dozens of other bankrupt denizens of Seldwyla to fish for his dinner in the local stream. Even the mysterious black fiddler (“der schwarze Geiger”) would like nothing better than to leave home, but he has been tricked out of his rightful inheritance and is thus condemned to stay: “I lost the miserable pittance I could have emigrated with.”34 The forces of global capitalism push their way into the most isolated Swiss villages, as Das verlorene Lachen (The lost laughter) reveals.35 In the mid-­nineteenth century, the canton of Zurich was a center of the silk industry, and Keller devotes the final novella of The People of Seldwyla to the story of Justine Glor von Schwanau. The narrator describes the Glor family business, a silk-­weaving firm, as a typical cottage industry, in which women in the Swiss countryside work to better their financial lot by weaving silk into cloth. Couriers bear bundles of the finished product back into town and deliver new raw materials to the countryside. Meanwhile, men in the cities’ textile factories work at machines that produce heavier fabric of higher quality. The constant movement of raw materials and finished goods between city and country within Switzerland is linked, in turn, to a global network of agents “offering silk thread from various parts of the world” and of others “who handled the export of finished fabric to other parts of the world.”36 The Swiss weavers have to modify their locally produced goods in accordance with the changing taste of foreign consumers. If all goes well, fortunes can be made, but if one link in the global chain of supply and demand snaps, the entire system can fall apart. Just such a calamity befalls the company in question: “For one of those grim crises from overseas broke upon the whole business world and in the process shook the House of Glor to its apparently solid foundations, with such sudden fury that it was nearly destroyed and survived only with great difficulty.”37 Both the Swiss village and the Swiss city are thus entwined in a global network that undermines any pretense toward idyllic self-­sufficiency.

Between Germany and Switzerland To the relations between the city of Zurich and the surrounding countryside and between Switzerland and the rest of the world comes a third tension of central importance to Heinrich Lee and his author: that between Switzerland and Germany. As noted earlier, Keller was Swiss, not German. This fact nevertheless fails to account for the complexities of his relationship with the larger German-­ speaking world. Keller spent nearly a decade of his most formative years in

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Germany. In April 1840, when he was only twenty, Keller moved to Munich to become an artist; by the time he returned two and a half years later, he had realized that he was not destined to become a great painter.38 In October 1848, he again left for Germany, this time supported by a stipend from the city of Zurich. He attended classes sporadically at the University of Tübingen until April 1850 and then moved to Berlin, where he remained until November 1855.39 There was never a question of Keller becoming German in any legal sense of the term; he was proud to be Swiss and always sought out the company of his fellow expatriates when he moved to a new German city. He did develop lasting friendships with German artists and intellectuals, however, and felt that he was part of the larger Germanic cultural realm. For this reason, he refused to write in his local Swiss dialect, opting for standard High German instead.40 There was a critical political difference between Germany and Switzerland during the mid-­nineteenth century: while Switzerland moved toward national unity and a representative democracy, Germany remained politically fragmented and hostile to liberal reform. During the 1840s, many liberal democrats—­such as Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben—­sought refuge from repressive German governments in Zurich. There they made a lasting impact on the political views of young Gottfried Keller, who first gained notoriety as a poet and left-­wing firebrand.41 If we return to the opening pages of the first version of Green Henry, we find images of both pan-­German unity amid the Swiss landscape and contemporary political differences between the two nations. We pass by a colossal statue of Charlemagne, who is said to have founded the church and former monastery where it is displayed, reminding us that Switzerland, together with Germany, was part of his European empire. Slightly earlier, however, the boat that we have been invited to board in our imagination floats by the island where Ulrich von Hutten is buried; the German humanist and patriot was forced to flee to Switzerland in 1523 to escape persecution by the Catholic Church. When we reach the city of Zurich, we find Hutten’s contemporary counterpart in a pensive German professor making his way to class: “His heart is not here; it remains in the north, where his learned brothers—­reading tattered parchments and conjuring dark demons—­seek to found a fatherland and its law” (2:12). This image captures both the scholarly activities of German intellectuals intent on reclaiming their medieval heritage and the political aspirations of liberals banished to Switzerland because they dared to dream of a united country ruled by common law. Heinrich has occasion to ponder his personal feelings about the relationship between the two countries when he is about to leave Switzerland for the

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first time and cross over into German territory. The Rhine serves simultaneously as the political border that divides Switzerland from Baden and as a symbol of the common culture that unites them. In keeping with this double role, the river appears both magically beautiful and potentially threatening. After the coach has stopped for the night on the Swiss side of the border, Heinrich goes down to the moonlit river. A young fisherman who sits singing in his boat agrees to take Heinrich out onto the water: “The night was beautiful; the dark forests of the German riverbank stood out against the bright sky” (2:37). They approach the opposite shore, and Heinrich notes that there is little physical difference between Baden and Switzerland, yet the political difference is significant: “A guard from the German customs union had been stalking the boat for some time with a cocked gun to see where it might come ashore” (2:39). The guard’s rifle barrel glints in the same moonlight that illuminates the river Rhine. As Heinrich notes in the second version of the novel, recent historical developments have made him forget that in crossing the Rhine, he simply passes “from one region of the old Alemannic country to another, out of the old Swabia into the old Swabia” (401; 3:494). Heinrich approaches the Rhine as an ardent enthusiast for all things German: “He loved his Helvetian fatherland. . . . But everything that he associated with Germany was cloaked in a romantic fragrance” (2:37–­38). The Switzerland that he knows seems cold and prosaic; the Germany that he imagines has retained “the original passion and depth of Germanic life” (2:38). His favorite writers are all German, and here he hopes to hear and speak the accent-­free High German that he knows only from literature. Reality inevitably disappoints: as soon as Heinrich sets foot on German soil, he is accosted by armed border guards. When he stops at an inn on his way to Munich, Bavarian officials in the service of the king rudely knock Heinrich’s hat from his head in an effort to teach the Swiss republican proper respect for royal authority; the incognito king himself repeats the gesture when Heinrich arrives in the city. In a letter to his publisher, Keller admitted that the episode with the king was somewhat fanciful but poetically necessary, “to sum up the first prosaic impression that authoritarian Germany made on the young idealist, who had come looking for the land of intellect and poetry.”42 It is thus doubly ironic that Heinrich should think of Germany as the “land of the future” (2:39; Land der Zukunft). As the novel’s editors note, “The land in which he seeks to realize his hopes for the future is mired politically and intellectually deep in the past, and he will find no personal future there either.”43 A largely critical portrait of the Bavarian kingdom emerges in the course of Heinrich’s stay “in the great capital city” (2:52). Munich, the unnamed city

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to which Heinrich refers, is, of course, not the political capital of Germany as a whole, but King Ludwig I (1825–­48) did hope to make it a leading center for the arts, and it aspired to be the unofficial cultural capital of the German lands.44 Artists come to the city from the farthest reaches of the German-­speaking regions, to hone their skills and—­perhaps—­make their fortunes. Soon after arriving from Switzerland, Heinrich makes friends with Ferdinand Lys, who has come from Amsterdam, and with Erikson, “a child of the northern waters, a true giant, who did not know himself whether he was really a Dane or a pure German” (2:546). Ironically, these three artists from the periphery of the German-­speaking regions in Europe seem more typically German than those at its center: “Each of them came from a home where, in distinctive and ancient festivals, the German character still lived in customs, linguistic usage, and a personal sense of independence” (2:561). All three are alienated by daily encounters in Bavaria with the hypocritical combination of superficial politeness and deep-­seated hostility. The growing sense of dissatisfaction with life in the German capital culminates in the Mardi Gras parade that is supposed to unite everyone in an elaborate patriotic celebration. Keller based his description of the festival on an actual event that took place in Munich in early 1840, shortly before his arrival in the city. He depicts an early example of the sort of patriotic historicism that finds its most famous expression in Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nuremberg (1868). The parade glorifies Germany’s imperial past at the time of Kaiser Maximilian I and features modern Bavarians dressed up as local and national heroes such as Hans Rosenplüt, Hans Sachs, and Albrecht Dürer. Its glorification of the Holy Roman Empire would have delighted romantic conservatives, but Keller responds less enthusiastically. Anticipating Nietzsche’s critique of stale historicism in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873), Keller questions the premise behind the veneration of the past: “Strange time in which people who want to uplift themselves in joy put on the cloak of the past, just to seem respectable! . . . When will a time come again, when we turn on our own axis and are satisfied with our own present?” (2:577). The critical depiction of the festival parallels Heinrich’s personal misfortune, in which a misunderstanding fueled by jealousy and alcohol leads to a duel that leaves his friend Ferdinand Lys mortally wounded and Heinrich deeply depressed. The Swiss staging of Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell offers a positive alternative to the German parade. Amateur performances of Wilhelm Tell by local Swiss villagers had become popular in the 1830s and 1840s, so Keller

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once again bases his fiction on historical events.45 As in the case of the Mardi Gras celebration in Munich, the Swiss villagers look to the past in their patriotic festival, but with a diametrically opposed political purpose: the Bavarians glorify an emperor and king who ruled over a feudal social order, whereas the Swiss celebrate the band of brothers who joined together to resist Austrian tyranny and thus become the founding fathers of Swiss democracy. In Keller’s view, it is not at all ironic that the script for this uniquely Swiss event was written by a Swabian whose knowledge of Switzerland was based only on books and postcards. In the essay Am Mythenstein (At the Mythenstein, 1861), written to commemorate the dedication of a monument to Schiller in Switzerland, Keller notes that though the German author had never seen Switzerland with his own eyes, “it is all the more certain that his spirit strolled on its sunny slopes and rode with the storm through its rocky chasms.”46 Convinced that Schiller was present in mind if not in body, Keller and his fellow Swiss citizens are more than happy to accept the gift of their own founding myth in the words of the German genius: “A great poet shakes a play out of his cornucopia, and an old federal state that has a noble prehistory and a history . . . but is lacking a transfiguring work of national literature is given just this in the most beautiful classical form.”47 Far from stressing the opposition between Switzerland and Germany, Keller’s narrator describes the relationship in terms of mutual enhancement. Switzerland provides the raw material of history that Schiller refines into art of the highest quality. When the native Swiss receive their local history transformed into a finished product, there is no sense of alienation but, rather, a sense of recognition of their own past purified, literally aufgehoben (lifted up) into a new and better artistic form. The amateur performance of the play, in turn, is presented not as an imaginative flight to a foreign realm but as living history, a poetic transfiguration of everyday life: “Particularly the character of Tell corresponds completely to truth and to life” (2:393). The performance is staged in the very villages and landscapes where the historical events took place, “as if it were part of reality,” (2:400) and “the roles were not spoken theatrically and with gesticulations but, rather, more like speeches in an assembly of the people” (2:403). Some scenes are even repeated without disturbing the sense of reality, and the man who plays Wilhelm Tell trembles in earnest when he takes aim at the apple. Keller joined with many nineteenth-­ century liberals who embraced Schiller as a champion of their cause, although he did not share the corresponding disdain with which some regarded Goethe as a sycophantic servant

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of princely authority (Fürstenknecht). Heinrich’s father, who spent his formative years in Germany, returns to Zurich imbued with liberal ideas and carrying a copy of Schiller’s works, which he shares with his fellow citizens. Long before Heinrich spends a month immersed in the works of Goethe, he has read and reread Schiller’s works in his father’s edition. The liberals seem to have forgotten or perhaps did not know that Schiller was hardly an unambiguous ally in their cause. Although he greeted the initial phase of the French Revolution more sympathetically than Goethe, Schiller made an abrupt about-­face when he learned of King Louis XVI’s arrest. He even toyed with the idea of traveling to Paris and speaking on behalf of the French king when the ruler was put on trial in December 1792.48 After the king was executed, Schiller was literally sickened with disgust. “For the past two weeks, I have been unable to read any French newspapers,” he wrote to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner on February 8, 1793, adding, “That’s how disgusted I am with these miserable knackers” (so ekeln diese elenden Schindersknechte mich an).49 It might seem curious that Schiller chose to write a drama about Wilhelm Tell ten years later, as the Swiss patriot was a favorite of the revolutionary French. As Dieter Borchmeyer has shown, however, Schiller appropriated the story of Wilhelm Tell for his own political purposes. Borchmeyer distinguishes between two concepts of revolution around 1800: one, with which we are most familiar, involved the radical overthrow of the existing order, but the other, older concept conceived of revolution as a turning back to an original state of affairs.50 This conservative view inspired Egmont’s effort to restore old traditions and local autonomy against the encroaching Spanish Empire, just as Goethe’s Goetz defends his traditional independence as an imperial knight against the rising power of the new territorial states. At first glance, it appears that Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell follows Goethe’s lead in using a revolutionary theme for conservative ends. Like the Dutch, the Swiss seek to restore their local autonomy against imperial aggression, although the enemy in this case is the Hapsburgs of Austria rather than those of Spain. In the end, however, Schiller’s aristocrats signal their willingness to give up their privileges of birth in the name of a new egalitarian future: “The old order falls, the times change, / and new life blossoms from the ruins. . . . the aristocracy steps down from its old castles / and swears the citizen’s oath to the cities, . . . the nobility’s glory falls, / and freedom raises its flag in victory.”51 Thus Schiller preserves the revolutionary ideals while avoiding revolutionary violence, transforming Swiss society from within rather than casting it aside in the name of a radically new order.

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Swiss Federalism versus German Imperialism Schiller’s model of evolutionary movement toward greater democracy fits in well with developments in nineteenth-­century Switzerland. In Keller’s youth, the various cantons of Switzerland had been allied in a loose federation, or Staatenbund. In the mid-­1840s, a number of the Catholic cantons sought to break away from the alliance by forming their own federation, or Sonderbund, which provoked the brief Sonderbundskrieg of 1847.52 Keller fought on the side of the secular liberals against the separatist movement. They favored constitutional reforms that would guarantee the “political equality of all or almost all citizens, separation of powers, the right to petition, freedom of the press, commerce, and industry.”53 Conservatives, who were closely allied with the Jesuits, sought to retain the class privileges and guild rights of the old system. At the heart of the conflict in the relatively small world of Swiss politics lay the dispute “between the political philosophies that divided all of Europe into two camps in the run-­up to the Revolution of 1848.”54 Eichendorff and Friedrich Schlegel, as we have seen, stood firmly on the side of the Restoration, whereas Keller’s allegiances were with the liberals, who won in Switzerland: the constitution of 1848 transformed the Staatenbund into a Bundesstaat, and Switzerland became a bastion of republican democracy at a time when the rest of Europe was ruled by the leaders of the conservative Restoration.55 When advocating for their view of the future, both liberals and conservatives appealed to the imperial past, although in very different ways. In their opposition to what they believe are the homogenizing and centralizing tendencies of the modern nation-­state, Eichendorff and Schlegel invoke the federated structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Keller also favors a federalist political model. Approving of the Swiss struggle for local autonomy against Hapsburg Austria that Schiller stages in Wilhelm Tell, Keller has the protagonist of the novella Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten (The banner of the seven righteous men, 1877) spell out his vision of the Swiss nation as a confederation based on the principle of “diversity in unity” (Mannigfaltigkeit in der Einheit): “How pleasant it is that there is no single monotonous Swiss type but, rather, that there are people from Zurich and Bern, from Unterwald and Neuenburg, Graubund and Basel—­and even two kinds of Baseler!”56 The difference between the romantic conservatives and Keller is that whereas the former use the past to support the neo-­feudal Restoration, he favors democratic reform within the various Swiss cantons. Although Keller disapproves of the antidemocratic tendencies of particular German governments, he embraces and participates in a common German

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culture. In an early poem, he even celebrates his sense of dual Swiss and German identity, inspired by a pensive moment on the banks of the Rhine. Wohl mir, daß ich dich endlich fand, Du stiller Ort am alten Rhein, Wo, ungestört und ungekannt, Ich Schweizer darf und Deutscher sein! (I am glad that I finally found you, You quiet place on the old Rhine, Where, undisturbed and unrecognized, I can be Swiss and German!)57 A still earlier essay more clearly spells out Keller’s understanding of the relationship between Switzerland and Germany. He begins by rejecting ethnic nationalism: some claim that the German speakers of Switzerland are descended from the same peoples who became modern Germans and that the Swiss Germans therefore have no distinct national identity; the same could be said of the French and Italian regions in Switzerland. Although Keller makes use of a similar argument in the previously cited passage from Green Henry in which he cites the common Alemannic ancestors of his contemporary Swabians and Swiss as evidence of their close affinities, he here ridicules the claim that national identity rests on a people’s common genealogy. If you trace any people’s origins back to the beginning, he claims, you will find that they all descend from Adam. Keller goes on to insist that the Swiss have a distinct national identity, but not because of their common forefathers: “The Swiss national character does not lie in the oldest ancestors, nor in the legends of the land, nor in any other material thing but, rather, in the love of freedom, of independence; it lies in the exceptional attachment to the small but beautiful and precious fatherland.”58 Keller concludes his essay by insisting that it does no harm to Switzerland’s political independence when its artists and writers follow the lead of their more culturally advanced neighbors; hence the Swiss can embrace Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in a spirit of gratitude, and Keller’s protagonist can express his reverence for Goethe without reservation. In Keller’s view, pride in Switzerland’s liberal traditions does not or at least should not foster national chauvinism. “The suggestions and actions of the narrow-­minded and one-­sided patriot will never be really useful to his fatherland,” writes Keller in a series of fragments on patriotism and cosmopolitanism that were originally intended for the description of Heinrich Lee’s homecoming.

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But Keller also rejects “the one-­sided cosmopolitan whose heart belongs to no particular fatherland.”59 Just as getting to know new people helps us better understand ourselves, we develop a new appreciation of our home when we travel abroad: “Thus you should mistrust anyone who boasts of knowing and loving no fatherland, but you should also mistrust anyone for whom the world is sealed off by the borders of his country.”60 To love one’s own country is well and good, but “this admirable quality must be purified by love and respect for the foreign, and without the grand and profound foundation and the clear vision of the cosmopolitan, patriotism (I intentionally do not say love of the fatherland this time) is a barren [and] unfruitful and dead thing.”61 Gottfried Keller balanced his Swiss patriotism with respect for foreign cultures. In this context, we can understand his otherwise perplexing comments in a public toast of 1872 in which he suggested that, at some point in the future, Switzerland might become part of Germany, just as the German Empire had recently annexed Alsace. Keller was immediately attacked as a traitor by those who mistakenly believed that he favored the violent conquest of Switzerland by the new German Empire. He quickly responded with an open letter in which he sought to clarify his position.62 Keller insists that he by no means advocated the immediate annexation of Switzerland by Germany. If such a union were to occur—­it might happen in a few years or in five hundred years or never at all—­it would be during a time in which “the German Empire could tolerate forms of government that were necessary for the Swiss”—­that is, an empire that had room for Swiss democracy.63 Keller’s vision of a potential union of Germany and Switzerland is based on a model of Swiss federalism writ large, not advocacy of German imperialism. His comments recall Heinrich Heine’s preface to Germany: A Winter Tale, in which he says that he would welcome a German conquest of the world if it were done in the name of finishing the liberal reforms that started during the French Revolution. “If we complete what the French have begun, if we surpass them in deed as we have already done in thought; . . . if we quash servitude . . . ; if we rescue the god that dwells on earth, within us, from his abasement; . . . if we restore dignity to the impoverished people,” then Heine would be more than willing to accept “universal dominion on the part of Germany” over “the whole of Europe, the whole world,” and “the whole world will become German!”64 In Keller’s vision, the whole world (or at least the German-­speaking regions of Central Europe) will become Swiss, in the same sense of extending the principles of liberal democracy to a pan-­German federation. Together with Heine, Keller enlists the universal structure of the old Holy Roman Empire in envisioning a liberal-­democratic utopia, just as Schlegel and Eichendorff used the

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imperial model to voice conservative ideals. By the time Keller was writing, however, German imperialism had entered a new phase, as the Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria, and France that set the stage for national unification also sparked a desire for overseas colonies. For reflections on the new German Empire, both within Europe and beyond, we turn to the work of Theodor Fontane.

Theodor Fontane: A Prussian Cosmopolitan When Theodor Fontane published the first volume of his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Ramblings in Brandenburg) in November 1861, critics welcomed it as a worthy contribution to the growing genre of German Heimatliteratur. “The love of the homeland finds the richest nourishment in these depictions, which, inspired by the love of the homeland, must warm the heart of anyone whose heart can still be touched by a patriotic appeal,” wrote one enthusiastic critic.65 Such praise must have pleased the author, who had been inspired to begin the project by a “growing desire to give artistic form to life in the fatherland, .  .  .  in the smallest possible format, of course.”66 The region along the Rhine has been the primary focus of patriotic attention until now, Fontane continues, but “every speck of the German soil” deserves its due, “for every speck of soil is home to many thousands.”67 Comparing himself to a prince who breaks the spell of a sleeping beauty, Fontane sallies forth to save the sandy soil of Brandenburg-­Prussia, “to redeem ‘locality’ like the princess in the fairy tale.”68 Over a period of nearly three decades, Fontane went on to publish five thick volumes about the Prussian landscape and its people, yet he was adamant in his insistence that he was not merely a provincial writer. He distanced himself from Theodor Storm by claiming that the characteristic setting of Storm’s fiction in the Schleswig-­Holstein landscape around his native city of Husum was too local, nothing but local, “Husumerei” or “provincial inanity” (Provinzialsimpelei).69 Fontane felt, fairly or not, that he had a broader, more cosmopolitan perspective on the world than his fellow German writer. He frequently played up the significance of his French Huguenot heritage, though his ancestors had moved to Prussia generations earlier and though he spoke only imperfect French.70 If Fontane’s ancestral ties to France were imaginatively embellished, his experiences in England were real: he lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London for extended periods during the 1850s. It has been argued, plausibly, that England was to Fontane what Italy was to Goethe (and

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what Germany was to Gottfried Keller), a place that enabled him to expand his cultural horizons and gain critical distance from his native land.71 For the majority of his adult life, however, Fontane lived in Berlin at a time when its population was expanding as rapidly as its economic and political power. In the last decades of Fontane’s life, imperial Germany sought to assert its strength against European rivals and to expand its reach beyond European shores, even as Prussia consolidated its position of authority among the formerly independent German provinces. Characters in three different Fontane novels observe, “Berlin is becoming a cosmopolitan city” (Berlin wird Weltstadt).72 The global and the local stand in a reciprocal relationship in Fontane’s fiction. Fontane’s final novel, Der Stechlin (The Stechlin, 1897), takes its title from the name of a small lake in the Brandenburg countryside that is seemingly no different from the hundreds of lakes and ponds that dot the district. According to local lore, however, the little lake is mysteriously in tune with events occurring halfway around the world: when there is seismic activity in Iceland, Java, or Hawaii, the Prussian pond bubbles up, just as it is said to have registered the famous earthquake in Lisbon more than one hundred years ago. Lake Stechlin serves as a metaphor for the human interactions in the novel, which combine locally rooted individuals with more cosmopolitan characters. It centers on the figure of an old Prussian aristocrat, Dubslav von Stechlin, who has spent most of his life within the narrow compass of his ancestral lands, but whose son marries a woman born in England to a Swiss mother whose sister was briefly married to an Italian aristocrat. Other characters in Fontane’s earlier fiction have similar international connections: Gordon Leslie in Cécile (1887) is a German-­speaking, world-­traveling Scottish engineer who served in the Prussian army.73 In Quitt (1891), Lehnert Menz flees to America after shooting his rival, only to die in a hunting accident in the Ozark Mountains. After divorcing his wife and killing his former friend in a duel, Baron Geert von Innstetten in Effi Briest (1895) flirts briefly with the idea of running away to Africa.

Effi Briest: Psychographic Realism Fontane remarked in a letter, “It was as if I wrote the book—­Effi Briest, that is—­with a psychograph. Later on, when I made corrections, it was hard work, but the first draft was effortless.”74 A psychograph was a device that supposedly enabled a medium to receive communications from the spirit world, usually featuring either a suspended weight or an indicator that would spell out mes-

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sages by pointing to letters of the alphabet. In an earlier letter, Fontane stated that his entire poetic production was “psychography and criticism, creations of darkness adjusted in the light.”75 The image of the artist as a spiritual medium evokes what has become a romantic cliché: Goethe, for example, claimed that he wrote Werther in four weeks, “without an outline,” and “quite unconsciously, like a somnambulist.”76 But Fontane goes on to explain that the initial inspiration must be subjected to a conscious critique; the “creation of darkness” (Dunkelschöpfung) must be drawn into light, or—­to describe the creative process in literary-­historical terms—­romanticism must yield to realism. Fontane’s comments help us to place his work in general and Effi Briest in particular in a broader cultural context. As Gerhart von Graevenitz observes, Fontane’s work is deeply rooted in the culture of nineteenth-­century Prussia and, thus, in the age of literary realism.77 When viewed, as Erich Auerbach does in Mimesis, as a positive achievement, nineteenth-­century realism marked a major advance toward the “representation of reality in Western literature.” From Robert Alter’s perspective, however, nineteenth-­century realism is better understood as a deviation from a tradition of the self-­conscious novel, which extends from Cervantes to Sterne and Diderot and resumes in the modern era. As he argues, realism arose in response to the sense of historical change sparked by the French Revolution. The move from history “as an unbroken continuum, fundamentally unchanging from age to age” to a “sense of history as continuous, perilous change” was perceived as a threat against which realism was constructed as a bulwark: “Novel-­writing was seized as a means of containing the mounting chaos of the contemporary world, recasting it in the molds of the imagination and thus transforming it, even as the deadly weight of its real menace was still felt in the finished fiction.”78 In this spirit, Russell A. Berman describes German realism “as the repression of the romantic past,” noting further, “Realism in German literature had, in effect, always represented an effort to control, to bridle, and to dismiss the romantic legacy . . . with its capacity for imagination in art, as well as in politics.”79 In Effi Briest, however, we witness the return of the repressed, as the realistic novel is haunted by an entire catalog of things and people that seem strange, supernatural, or exotic from the perspective of provincial Prussia, including, of course, the Chinese ghost. The novel that Berman aptly describes as marking “the end of realism” thus stands on a threshold that could also be characterized as the advent of modernism. In philosophical terms, modernism marks the moment when inexorable historical progress, of either the spirit (Hegel) or matter (Marx), yields to the stasis of the will as explained by Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche’s

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“eternal recurrence,” or to Freud’s “repetition compulsion.” There is the growing sense that individuals are in the thrall of desires they do not understand and cannot control, that civilization is shadowed by atavistic impulses, that a regressive “death drive” checks the progress of the “pleasure principle.” In psychological terms, as Graevenitz describes it, modernism signals the replacement of the coziness (Behaglichkeit) valued by Germany’s poetic realists with a pervasive feeling of dread or anxiety (Ängstlichkeit).80 In the rapidly changing world of nineteenth-­century Germany, there was much to fear: political revolution, financial chaos, the rise of the proletariat and the collapse of patriarchy. These philosophical and psychological threats, in turn, were mapped onto landscapes that were both real and symbolic, the objective correlatives of psychological states. The quest for power that drove Prussia to preeminence among the German provinces also sent it chasing around the globe in search of new colonies, but the outward movement could collapse back on itself, and the sense of progress could be transformed into dialectical stasis, as the ghosts of the romantic past that were projected onto the new “dark continents”81 could return to haunt the imperial homeland. Effi Briest sets the anxieties of modern Germany against a global backdrop, even as it explores tensions within the Prussian aristocracy in a more narrowly circumscribed provincial setting. The central conflicts in Effi Briest turn on questions of social class and gender roles. The teenage Effi Briest blithely agrees to an arranged marriage with a man twice her age, because she is an obedient child, because marriage is inevitable, and because the specific individual matters less than the type. “Of course he’s the right one,” she explains to her friend Hertha, who has her doubts about this sudden engagement. “Provided,” Effi continues, “he is an aristocrat and has a position and good looks, naturally.”82 Effi is a proud member of an aristocratic family that is not only very old but also historically significant, as one of her ancestors had played a prominent role in a military engagement leading up to the Prussian victory at the battle of Fehrbellin in 1675. That her future husband had once been in love with her mother does not particularly trouble Effi, although perhaps it should: Baron von Innstetten marries Effi as a kind of consolation prize for the love match he was denied because he was considered too young to marry Effi’s mother. Now approaching middle age, Innstetten is more interested in advancing his career than wooing his young wife. Soon bored in the provincial town where her husband is stationed, Effi is lured, by an experienced seducer, into an affair, for which she is punished harshly by her husband and parents when the truth is discovered years later. Although Innstetten is to blame for his failure to love and forgive his wife, he is also something of a victim of the system in which he lives. Social consider-

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ations made it impossible for him to marry his first love and compel him to divorce his wife when he discovers evidence of her infidelity, though he still loves her, and to fight a duel with her seducer, a friend with whom the baron is not particularly angry. In the end, Effi dies young, and Innstetten is left a sad and lonely man. Effi Briest is a tragic variant of the social novel, just as Green Henry is a tragic bildungsroman, particularly in its first version. The bildungsroman focuses on the development of one individual; the social novel explores group dynamics. Effi Briest is a novel not only about what can and cannot be done in late nineteenth-­century Prussian society but about what can and cannot be said.83 When Effi makes the obligatory social rounds among the aristocratic families in Kessin, the women talk about the weather while casting a critical eye on Effi’s outfits. That which is left unsaid matters more than the content of their desultory conversations. The ultimate verbal taboo concerns anything to do with sex, yet that is precisely what the novel is about. Effi Briest marries Geert von Innstetten on October 3. Nine months later to the day, on July 3, Effi gives birth to a baby girl, but we hear nothing about the wedding night. Effi is even unable to tell her mother, in so many words, that she is pregnant: her statement “What I recently hinted at is now a certainty” is as close as she comes (71; 15:114). Those who make even the most oblique reference to the unspeakable realm of the body and its desires are quickly censured. Early on, Effi makes reference to rhubarb leaves that are bigger than fig leaves, eliciting an immediate “Shame on you!” from her proper girlfriend, who is shocked that Effi would allude to the plant that Adam and Eve used to hide their nakedness (12; 15:16). Effi’s mother is similarly indignant at her husband’s repeated double entendres on the wedding night: “This is a wedding, not a shooting party,” she splutters. “Whereupon,” notes the narrator, “Briest replied he couldn’t see much difference; and anyway he was feeling happy” (26; 15:39). More often, however, Effi’s father invokes his standard formula for a topic that cannot be openly discussed: “Ah Luise, that’s enough . . . that’s too vast a subject [das ist ein zu weites Feld]” (217; 15:350). Given the conventions of nineteenth-­century fiction, one can hardly expect graphic depictions of sexual intercourse or of Effi’s adulterous rendezvous with Major von Crampas. In comparison with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Goethe’s Elective Affinities, however, Fontane’s reticence to depict any sort of erotic encounter in Effi Briest is striking. On a first reading of the novel, it is quite possible to miss the point where Effi begins her affair with Crampas, just as readers of Heinrich von Kleist’s Marquise von O have to go back to discover the dash that marks the rape that leads to the protagonist’s mysterious preg-

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nancy. One suspects that Fontane avoids open discussion of sexual acts and desires not as a matter of Victorian prudishness but, rather, as a deliberate strategy to make us read between the lines, just as the members of Prussian society glean insights by inference about each other rather than direct disclosure. Telling, in this regard, is Fontane’s revision of the climactic duel between Innstetten and Crampas. In an earlier, more extensive version of the scene, Crampas was to have extended his hand to Innstetten in a gesture of reconciliation. In the completed novel, however, he is only permitted a futile effort to speak: “‘Would you . . .’ These were his last words” (178; 15:286).84 Fontane maps the interpersonal relations in Effi Briest onto a symbolic landscape. The novel’s plot revolves around three different places in Prussia: Hohen-­Cremmen, the ancestral home of the von Briest family; Kessin, a small town in East Prussia on the shores of the Baltic Sea; and Berlin. The distances between these locations is not vast, even by nineteenth-­century standards. One night when Effi and Innstetten go out to dinner near Kessin, their host takes them outside to watch the Danzig express train rush by on its way to Berlin: “‘At six-­fifty it gets into Berlin,’ said Innstetten, ‘and an hour later, if the wind is in the right direction, the folk at Hohen-­Cremmen will hear it rattling past in the distance. Would you like to be on it, Effi?’” (64; 15:103). Effi says nothing, but he notices tears in her eyes, for indeed she wants nothing more than to return home. For Effi Briest, Hohen-­Cremmen signifies family tradition and safety, the place where she grew up as a beloved only child, and the place to which she longs to return after she has lost everything—­her husband, daughter, reputation, and health. In a conversation with Crampas, Effi recalls a poem that she memorized as a child, about an old woman who is surrounded by enemy troops with her granddaughter and prays that God might build a wall around them for protection. That very night, it snows so hard that the house is hidden, and the enemy passes by, leaving them in safety (110; 15:177).85 Crampas is visibly shaken, recognizing in Effi’s anecdote an indirect or perhaps even subconscious reference to her fear of his seduction. More than a response to a specific threat, however, Effi’s childhood memory reflects her constant wish to return to the safety of her home and family. Yet the safety she seeks is an illusion: her parents expel her from the garden of her youth when they arrange her marriage with Innstetten, and they bolt the gate when they learn of her affair, putting fears for their own reputation above the needs of their daughter. She finally returns only to die, buried beneath her simple gravestone, as the old woman’s home was buried in the snow. If Hohen-­Cremmen represents the deceptive idyll of private security, Berlin stands for public success. Innstetten’s promotion from the province to Ber-

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lin marks a major step forward in his career. Effi Briest is set in the years 1878–­ 86, the period in which Berlin was undergoing its transformation from a provincial Prussian capital to the center of the new German Empire.86 Events in the novel are punctuated by the memory of Prussian victories now celebrated as national holidays—­Sedan Day on September 2, marking the capture of Napoleon III in 1870 during the Franco-­Prussian War, and Königgrätz on July 3, commemorating the Prussian defeat of the allied Austrians and Saxons in 1866. As noted earlier, Effi’s daughter happens to be born on July 3, prompting the doctor’s tactless comment that it is a shame that she did not give birth to a boy on the anniversary of the famous battle. “But there’s enough time for the other,” he proffers, “and the Prussians have plenty of victory anniversaries” (84; 15:135). Rumors that Innstetten might be appointed as the new ambassador to Morocco remind us that German imperial power also extends abroad. For Effi, Innstetten’s promotion to Berlin means a rise in social status as well, which she celebrates by indulging in fashionable clothing, an apartment in an appropriately upscale part of town, and appearances at gala performances of the opera. As in the case of Hohen-­Cremmen, however, the promise of Berlin is not fulfilled. When the old affair is revealed, Effi is banished to a lonely apartment and condemned to a life of enforced idleness, while Innstetten can only smile bitterly when he receives news of a further promotion he once ardently desired. Berlin thus represents the pinnacle of society for Effi, the top of the career ladder for Innstetten, and the geographical and political center of Prussia and the German Empire. Kessin, in contrast, lies on the margins, in multiple senses. It marks a stepping stone on the path to Berlin for Innstetten and lies halfway on the route from Hohen-­Cremmen to Siberia, at least in Effi’s vivid imagination. Kessin is located on the east-­west border between Germany and Poland and on the north-­south line between Central Europe and the Baltic Sea. Kessin’s liminal geographical position also marks a cultural dividing line between those who live on the coast and those who live inland. “If you go inland, what you find are so-­called Kashubians, whom you may have heard of,” explains Innstetten to Effi, “a Slav people who have been here for a thousand years and maybe much longer” (32–­33; 15:50). The coastal inhabitants, in contrast, look out toward new lands opened up by European explorations: “What concerns them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all corners of the globe” (33; 15:50–­51). On one side of Kessin is an ancient people deeply rooted in the local territory; on the other are cosmopolitans linked, by modern commerce, to the far ends of the earth. Both peoples are united in their strangeness, in their differ-

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ence from the Prussian norm. Poles are not to be trusted, Innstetten explains to his young wife. The people of her native Brandenburg say what they mean and mean what they say: “When they say yes they mean yes and when they say no they mean no, and you can rely on them. Here nothing is clear-­cut” (32; 15:50). The inscrutable Poles live in a landscape that bears traces of ancient pagan rituals: rumor has it that a Wendic temple once stood not far from Kessin, and Effi shudders at the sight of stones that Germanic tribes once used for human sacrifice. Ancient primitivism finds its modern equivalent in foreign exoticism. Effi is thrilled to hear that the provincial seaport boasts a decidedly international population: “But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwater, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new world. All sorts of exotic things.” She wonders what sort of people she might find there, “perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.” The very thought of a Chinese man is enough to make Effi shiver: “A Chinaman, I think, is always a bit sinister” (33; 15:51–­52). With the mention of the Chinese man, we encounter the most prominent and widely discussed instance of the exotic in Effi Briest.87 The story of the Chinese ghost that allegedly haunts the attic of the couple’s house in Kessin is told only in bits and pieces, with significant gaps. The former owner of the house was a certain Captain Thomsen, who retired to Kessin after plying the seas between Shanghai and Singapore. He brought with him the stuffed crocodile, shark, and ship model that decorate the house, as well as a younger woman, who was either his granddaughter or niece, and a Chinese servant, who was also a personal friend. The young woman was later married to another sea captain, but she disappeared on the wedding night. Two weeks later, the Chinese servant died and was buried near the local cemetery but not in it (because he was not a Christian). People in town speculate that he might have been in love with the young woman and possibly died of a broken heart when she married another man, but no one is entirely sure. His ghost is said to haunt the house where Effi and Innstetten live. Because crucial aspects of the story remain shrouded in mystery, attention shifts from the irresolvable enigmas to the way in which individual characters respond to the tale. There is a perfectly logical explanation for the ghost in the attic: the curtains are too long and rub against the floor when there is a draft. Why, then, does Innstetten persist in spreading the rumor that the house is haunted? According to Major von Crampas, there are two reasons (neither of which puts Innstetten in a particularly good light): to further the baron’s career and to frighten his wife. Innstetten believes that if he is to advance to the highest ranks of the Prussian government, he needs something to distinguish him

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from his fellow administrators. He tells the story of a prominent Prussian family haunted by a mysterious “white lady” and decides that his own Chinese ghost might provide just the touch of eccentricity necessary to impress his superiors. The second reason, as Crampas speculates to Effi, is to “educate” the baron’s new wife. “Improve me by exposing me to a ghost?” (Erziehen durch Spuk?), Effi queries, to which Crampas responds that the baron’s goal would be to keep his pretty, young, lonely, and bored wife frightened so that she is not tempted to get out of line during his frequent absences: “a ghost is like a cherub with a sword” (97; 15:156). The plan works wonderfully at first, at least from Innstetten’s point of view, but soon backfires. Effi spends her first night alone in the house in a state of abject terror as she listens to the mysterious sounds emanating from the attic, but her discussion with Crampas about the matter soon changes her fear of the ghost into resentment of her husband. The plan provides Crampas with a lever that enables him to pry Effi away from Innstetten and toward himself, as Crampas’s plausible speculations about Innstetten’s motives establish the former’s clandestine solidarity with Effi. Before long, the practiced seducer has accomplished his goal, despite the story of the Chinese ghost—­or, actually, partly because of Effi’s anger about it. The episode raises larger issues about the way in which characters approach the irrational and the exotic. Reason reassures us that there are no such things as ghosts, yet we suspect, as Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, that “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”88 Kessin is rife with mystery; the Chinese ghost is only one contributing factor to an uncanny atmosphere that permeates the coastal town. For the sake of convenience, we can organize the mysterious or irrational elements into four broad categories. The first are associated with ancient peoples and their religious rituals, including the Wends, the Kashubians, the early Germans, and the Aztecs featured in the Heine poem “Vitzliputzli” cited by Major von Crampas. To these elements, we can add a second subcategory of superstitions, weird behavior, or religious faith among the lower classes or stigmatized social groups, such as Frau Kruse’s fixation on her black hen or Roswitha’s veneration of the saints and familiarity with Catholic rituals; Crampas also mentions a gypsy prophecy about his death. Third, references to romantic or neo-­ romantic art recur regularly in this otherwise realistic novel—­to the dream sequence in Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, the underwater city in Heine’s Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), and Goethe’s Faust. Marietta Tripelli’s repertoire consists almost exclusively of romantic Lieder; Innstetten sometimes asks Effi to play excerpts from Wagner’s Lohengrin or Die Walküre on the piano. On the eve of her marriage, Effi’s cousin Dagobart takes her to see Arnold

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Böcklin’s painting Die Insel der Seligen (Isle of the dead), with its erotically charged images of nymphs and centaurs. Fourth and finally, Effi meets the half-­Spanish druggist Alonzo Gieshübler and his servant Mirambo, named after an African bandit, adding to the list of exotic people and places from around the world that begins with Effi’s offhand reference to unfaithful Turkish women punished by drowning in Constantinople and with her purchase of a Japanese screen on the eve of her wedding and continues through her subsequent allusions to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Taken together, its various exotic references give Effi Briest a worldly air that belies the provincialism of its Prussian location. Its allusions to places brought into public consciousness by European imperialism are in keeping with the novel’s setting in the 1880s, but they are also slotted into preexisting structural categories for the irrational or mythic. Yesterday’s Germanic ritual is repeated in Africa today—­and Fontane drew many of his references to Africa from Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent.89 In a sense, however, there is only a single binary opposition in Effi Briest, although it is one that takes multiple forms: the primary distinction between realism and romanticism encompasses a wide spectrum of distinctions that are at once geographical (between Europe and the rest of the world), religious (between Protestants and Catholics, Christians and heathens, Christians and Jews), cultural (between civilization and primitivism, the educated upper classes and the superstitious commoners), racial (white Europeans versus Asians, Africans, and Aztecs), psychological (conscious versus unconscious), sexual (male versus female), and moral (discipline versus debauchery). This is not to say that each of the categories can be reduced to the other, but they are interrelated, forming part of a complex pattern of ideas and associations that are mutually implicated and, thus, can quickly jump from one to the other. In Anne McClintock’s words, the evolving categories of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-­century European thought “come into existence in and through relation to each other—­in if contradictory and conflictual ways. . . . the formative categories of imperial modernity are articulated categories in the sense that they come into being in historical relation to each other and emerge only in dynamic, shifting and intimate interdependence.”90 For those who establish such distinctions, everything depends on maintaining clear boundaries and keeping oneself on the right side of the fence. At one point, Innstetten disingenuously ridicules Effi’s fear of the ghost by saying that the germs in the air are more dangerous than any spook in the house (58; 15:92). He alludes to Robert Koch’s recent discovery that marked a major advance in the history of medicine. Yet the same scientific discovery also pro-

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vided a new vocabulary for cultural prejudices: doctors in Africa sought to control foreign bacteria as a defense against the danger of being infected by the “sick continent,” just as bacteriology provided a new pseudoscientific vocabulary for racists worried about the infectious effects of miscegenation on white Europeans.91 In Effi Briest, modern science wields a double-­edged sword, cutting through old prejudices even as it buttresses the new. Thus it is fitting that the local chemist Gieshübler is jokingly referred to as an alchemist on more than one occasion. Inevitably, carefully drawn distinctions begin to blur; dreams and desires disrupt the controlled facade of waking reason. The key question for Effi Briest lies not in the various binary oppositions themselves but in how specific individuals in a particular social setting come to terms with the alien within. In exploring individual psyches, Fontane also exposes collective cultural fears and prejudices, most significantly in his portrait of the Prussian Baron von Innstetten. Innstetten’s entire existence is based on a deadly combination of ambition, renunciation, and repression. He gets up early and disapproves of those, such as his young wife, who sleep in late; he obeys the law and frowns on those, such as Crampas, who are willing to break it. His erect posture and impeccable grooming reveal him as a man who places self-­discipline above all else, as do his fellow Prussian officers. Innstetten’s friend and second, Wüllersdorf, reports that terrible scenes he witnessed with Crampas’s widow in the wake of the duel between Crampas and Innstetten reinforce his belief that constant vigilance against wayward passions is essential for Prussian society: “One more lesson in the importance of being careful” (180; 15:289). Innstetten’s discipline extends to his sexual desires, to the point that they barely seem to exist. As far as we know, he has not been involved with any other women in the nearly two decades that pass between his renunciation of Effi’s mother and his marriage to her daughter. The birth of a child precisely nine months to the day after their wedding night suggests that Innstetten performed his marital duty as punctiliously as he fulfills his social obligations and professional responsibilities, but the fact that the couple still has only one child seven years later gives the impression that he may not repeat very often the tired caresses that Effi finds so dissatisfying. Even after their divorce, there is no indication that the baron visits prostitutes or seeks a second wife. Innstetten’s remorseless self-­discipline extends to his penchant for disciplining others. It may be self-­serving of Crampas to point it out, but there is no reason to doubt his contention that Innstetten carefully cultivates the mystery shrouding the Chinese ghost to keep his wife in a state of nervous tension. When it suits his purposes, Innstetten indulges in exoticism, but he mostly

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strives to domesticate the foreign. As Effi’s polite but exhausted letters to her parents reveal, her honeymoon to Italy with the baron has been carefully scripted in advance, as Innstetten plays the role of teacher to his ignorant bride. “They must be passing Regensburg by now,” smirks Effi’s father soon after the newlyweds leave on their journey, “and I think we can take it he’ll run through the principal art treasures of the Valhalla collection for her, without getting off the train of course” (27; 15:41). Innstetten and his young bride return to Prussia after they have checked off all the required churches and artworks of Italy, but as Innstetten insists, the journey is not complete until it has been organized into a retrospective album that can be studied for further edification. “Such a recapitulation was really essential, for it was only then that one made everything lastingly one’s own,” explains Innstetten to Effi, who finds his plan deadly dull and eagerly agrees with Crampas’s suggestion that they put on a play instead (104; 15:167). In Effi Briest, if the foreign cannot be repressed, domesticated, or used to manipulate others, it can be ridiculed as an object of prejudice. Innstetten condescendingly agrees with Effi’s claim that there is always something frightening and horrible about a Chinaman, but he also instructs her about dangers that lie closer to home, the unreliable Poles and half-­Poles that populate his district around Kessin and threaten to seduce his wife. The disparaging comments about Slavic peoples go hand in hand with the antisemitism that crops up from time to time in the novel. Innstetten is a Wagner fan, which seems out of character for the otherwise so tightly controlled man and prompts speculation about what draws him to the romantic artist and his passionate music: “Some said it was his nerves, for down to earth as he might seem, he was actually of a nervous disposition, others put it down to Wagner’s stand on the Jewish question. Probably both were right” (75; 15:120). We cannot be certain that the narrator’s suggestion that Innstetten shares Wagner’s antisemitism is correct, but if he does, he is not alone. Effi’s father makes the snide comment that his granddaughter might grow up to marry a wealthy banker, adding, “a Christian one I hope, if there are still any left” (163; 15:263). The old Baron von Güldenklee makes a point of mentioning that he is not going to mention that Louis Napoleon’s Catholic wife, “or let’s say rather his Jesuit wife,” was having an affair with a Jewish banker (49; 15:76). He then proceeds to offer an elaborate toast in which he rejects Lessing’s famous parable of religious tolerance in Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) as “a Jewish story, which, like all that liberal fiddle-­faddle, has caused and continues to cause nothing but confusion and disaster” (113; 15:181). Güldenklee advocates exclusive loyalty to Prussia as the alternative to religious diversity.

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Scandinavia stands in Effi Briest as the positive counterpart to such denigrated peoples as the Jews, Poles, and Chinese. Shortly after their move to Berlin, Innstetten and Effi decide to take a vacation on the north German island of Rügen, after they realize it is too late to attend the Passion Play in Oberammergau as they had originally planned. When Effi discovers, by coincidence, that a nearby village is named Crampas, she becomes unhappy, as she is confronted with the memory of the affair that she is trying to repress. Without understanding the source of Effi’s discomfort, Innstetten suggests that they continue further north to Copenhagen, where they encounter a family of the Danish nobility, whose daughter, Thora von Penz, transfixes Effi with her Nordic beauty: “Effi could not stop looking at her big blue eyes and flaxen hair” (155; 15:250). When she returns to Germany to spend an additional week’s vacation with her family, she waxes rhapsodic about Thora’s “typically Scandinavian” beauty, to which the assistant schoolmaster Jahnke enthusiastically agrees: “Yes, that’s what they’re like; Germanic through and through, far more German than the Germans” (159; 15:411–­12). Jahnke, whose sole interests lie in the Hanseatic League and Scandinavia, has given his twin redheaded daughters, Bertha and Hertha, names rooted in Germanic mythology, just as the local Lutheran pastor names his lymphatic blonde daughter after the Nordic goddess Hulda. Geert von Innstetten’s unusual first name also has hints of Germanic heroism, as it is a Low German nickname for Gerhard, meaning “he who is bold with a spear,” which goes back to the Middle Ages.92 Some of the sentiments expressed by the characters in Effi Briest reflect the opinion of its author. In a positive review of Gustav Freytag’s best-­selling novel Debit and Credit, Fontane approvingly noted Freytag’s denigration of the Poles: “The Polish mismanagement of their affairs [Polenwirtschaft] dooms them to failure; Prussia is the state of the future.”93 Toward the end of his life, Fontane was increasingly prone to antisemitic outbursts. “Despite all their gifts,” he wrote about the Jews in a letter of May 12, 1898, just a few months before his death, “they are a terrible people, . . . to whom from the very beginning clung a kind of base arrogance that is now incompatible with the Aryan world. What a difference between the criminal worlds of the Christians and the Jews! And it is all ineradicable.”94 Fontane’s comments about Prussian or “Aryan” superiority over slovenly Poles and the fundamentally flawed Jewish people are troubling, to say the least. Fortunately, however, his fiction proves subtler than some of his unguarded comments. In his novels and novellas, one finds a repeated interest in those pushed to the margins of Prussian society, particularly women of unconventional origins. The eponymous heroine of Grete Minde (1879) is regarded

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suspiciously by the local townspeople because her mother was a Spanish Catholic. The same is true of the orphan Hilde, the daughter of gypsies, in the historical novella Ellernklipp (1881) and of the converted Catholic wife of Abel Hradscheck in Unterm Birnbaum (Beneath the Pear Tree, 1885). Frau von Carayon and her daughter Victoire are French emigrés and, thus, outsiders in Prussian society in Schach von Wuthenow (1882), and Cécile in the novel of that name is a Polish-­Catholic woman driven to an early death. In L’Adultera (1880), Melanie von der Straaten, who has parents from the French-­speaking part of Switzerland, is shunned by Berlin society when she divorces her husband to marry a Jew, and Die Poggenpuhls (The Poggenpuhl Family, 1896) deals openly with antisemitic prejudice. Fontane’s sympathetic portrait of the social outcast Effi Briest thus fits a pattern found elsewhere in his works. As Effi is the first to admit, she is guilty of marital infidelity, yet Fontane allows us to understand and even sympathize with the forces that drove her to have an affair. She feels remorse for what she has done, jumps at the chance to end the relationship, and—­unlike Madame Bovary—­never has another. Thus her punishment seems excessively harsh: not only is she divorced immediately and without being given the chance to speak on her own behalf for an affair that lies nearly seven years in the past, but she is also denied custody of and even the right to visit her only child. Her parents, who, after all, arranged her marriage in the first place, reject her out of hand when they receive the news of her divorce. Effi is not only cut off from all contact with her former social circle in Berlin but even forbidden to perform charitable actions for the poor. Effi Briest is thus, in the first instance, a novel about a harshly punitive Prussian society that shows no pity for its most vulnerable members. It is also, however, about the emptiness of the social conventions that motivate Innstetten to divorce his wife and fight a duel with her former lover. As he admits to his confidant Wüllersdorf, the baron would gladly forgo the duel and forgive his wife if propriety did not demand satisfaction. He feels that he must subordinate his personal feelings to “that, let’s call it that social something which tyrannizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or time limits. I’ve no choice. I must” (173; 15:278). We are here far removed from the smug celebration of Prussian superiority voiced in Güldenklee’s toast. According to official ideology, Prussia leads the newly formed German Empire, establishing its recent victories as national holidays, and confident that more victories will soon follow. By the end of Effi Briest, in contrast, we are left with an image of Prussia united only in prejudice; it crushes its victims without remorse and leaves its would-­be victors with a sense of emptiness and despair.

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Fontane hints at a positive alternative in the figure of Effi Briest. While Innstetten and his ilk repress themselves and oppress others, Effi is open to romance and romanticism. She has a vibrant imagination and is thus as sensitive to poetry as she is susceptible to ghosts. Crampas appeals to her sense of adventure, her willingness to break the rules and explore the repressed desires beneath Prussian discipline. Her passions lead to her downfall, but they are also the source of her redeeming compassion for others. While Innstetten is driven by ambition and a fatalistic adherence to a social code that he knows is bankrupt, Effi expresses spontaneous sympathy with the weak and persecuted, the abused woman Roswitha and the dog Rollo. Her slow decline lends an aura of deep sadness to a novel that might otherwise have drifted toward satire. She blames herself and exonerates Innstetten on her deathbed, but her marble gravestone stands as a silent reproach to the gloating power of Prussian society and the new German Empire.

Conclusion Taken together, Keller and Fontane offer two ways of responding in literature to the political changes of imperial Germany. Keller, looking north to the newly founded German Empire, takes pride in the tradition of Swiss democracy even as he envisions a hypothetical pan-­German federation of the future that might permit cooperation in the realm of politics to match the productive collaboration between German and Swiss writers in the realm of culture. Fontane, writing his novels in the center of the German Empire, tempers triumphalism with caution, depicting the Prussian leaders as slaves of prejudice or stale convention and characterizing their subordinates as victims of arbitrary and merciless power. He sets Effi Briest in a cold Prussian landscape that shimmers with the heat of repressed passion, and his fictional “psychograph” thus exposes the collective fears and fantasies of the German Empire, registering disturbances on the colonial periphery and among the socially stigmatized. Fontane’s self-­ appointed role as the seismographic sensor of the Prussian psyche makes him the direct precursor to Thomas Mann, who made a literary career out of characters who struggle, often in vain, to control unruly desires associated with dark depths of the soul and places far down on the map. Mann admired Fontane greatly and often reread his work with enthusiasm in later years; thus we must take with a grain of salt Mann’s contention, in a 1910 essay, that Fontane’s fiction lacks chthonic passion, “the foreboding musicality, the fertile metaphysicality, the murky depths” (das ahndevoll Musikalische, das brünstig Metaphy-

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sische, die trübe Tiefe).95 Given the previously noted array of precisely such elements bubbling up from the Prussian swamps and surfacing from distant shores in Fontane’s fiction, it may well be that the young Thomas Mann was suffering from the “anxiety of influence,” stressing the superficiality of Fontane’s prose in order to underscore the profundity of his own. Fontane’s famous Plauderton (conversational tone) casts a thin veil of decorum over a world of deadly desire, while still retaining a place for compassion and peace.

Chapter 8

Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations

The Prussian victory at Königgratz on July 3, 1866, marked a major step on the path toward national unification, but it simultaneously excluded Austria from the new German state. In the following year, the old Austrian Empire became a dual monarchy that combined “the Kingdom of Hungary and a territory centred on the Austrian lands and often called Cisleithania.”1 The multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional lands grouped together in the western half of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire were the antithesis of a modern nation-­state, for which reason some say that the empire skipped the “normal” path toward political modernity, even as its subjects produced strikingly modernist works of art.2 The empire established in 1867 survived until 1918, when it was torn apart by war and a rising tide of ethnic nationalism. Thereafter, German-­ language Austrian authors looked either back nostalgically to “the world of yesterday,” giving rise to what Claudio Magris describes as “the Hapsburg myth,” or forward to the time when Austria would finally attain what it had been denied in 1871, incorporation into a pan-­German nation-­state.3 The Nazi Anschluss of 1938 fulfilled that dream, which would explain the notorious jubilation on the part of many Austrians when German troops marched into Vienna, although the consequences for others, particularly the Austrian Jews, were disastrous. Thus described, it would seem that German-­language modernists fall neatly into two categories: those who lived in a state that was home to at least part of the modern German nation and those who dwelled in an old-­fashioned empire. In one category would be Thomas Mann, the self-­appointed voice of the German nation, and in the other would be Kafka, the multiply marginalized outsider. In this chapter, I argue that the actual situation was rather different. The contrast between imperial Germany and the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was not as sharp as it might seem, as the German state formed in 1871 was also a federation of semiautonomous regions, although there was a move toward greater centralization under Prussian hegemony. Recall Lionel Gossman’s ob177

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servation (already cited in chapter 7) that German intellectuals were divided by those who welcomed the new Reich and those who did not, including Bach­ ofen, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche.4 Mann belongs to the next generation of what might be called “Prusso-­skeptics,” defending a vision of Germany rooted in his childhood memories of Lübeck and his residence in Munich, the countercultural antithesis of Berlin.5 For this reason, Mann undertakes the paradoxical strategy of claiming his centrality within German culture by emphasizing his marginality; that is, he plays up his birth in Lübeck, his mother’s Brazilian origins, his wife’s Jewishness, and his children’s racial mixture, to argue for a more inclusive sense of German identity rooted in an older concept of empire, against what he feels are the homogenizing, centralizing, imperialist tendencies of the modern state (by which he meant Britain, France, and Prussia up to 1918 and the Nazis and Joseph McCarthy’s America later).6 Thus there are more affinities than differences between Mann and his Austrian counterparts. His explorations of “deviant” individuals (artists, homosexuals, Jews) who are nevertheless in touch with the national community, broadly defined, are related to Kafka’s explorations of alternative forms of collective identity—­among authors of “minor literatures,” for instance, or speakers of Yiddish; among those who band together to form alternative communities (The Great Wall of China) or those who survive in the mainstream by subversive mimicry (A Report to an Academy). When Mann was speculating, in his 1918–­19 diaries and in published essays, about the possibility of a postwar, pan-­German federation that would include German-­speaking Austria, Robert Musil was doing the same.7 In this spirit, Mann claimed, in a 1926 essay, that the “heir and continuation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation . . . was actually not Prussia-­Germany but, rather, Austria.”8

Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka: Antipodes and Affinities On August 1, 1921, Thomas Mann noted in his diary that he had had tea with the recitation artist Ludwig Hardt, “who read me the prose of a man from Prague, Kafka, strange and noteworthy [merkwürdig] enough. Otherwise quite boring.”9 A few weeks later, Mann notes that he is “very interested in the work of Franz Kafka,”10 marking the beginning of Mann’s lifelong fascination with the writer from Prague. When asked in 1930 to identify an unjustly forgotten author, Mann singled out Franz Kafka, “the German-­Bohemian, whose works I love greatly,” and noted that his friend Hermann Hesse had once dubbed “this lonely man the secret king of German prose.”11 In 1935, we find Mann reading Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) with great enthusiasm: “I would

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say that K’s literary remains constitute the most brilliant German prose in decades. What is there in German that wouldn’t be Philistinism in comparison?”12 Kafka, for his part, was an ardent admirer of Mann’s work, from the time that he read Tonio Kröger in 1903 until the end of his life: “Mann belongs to those for whose writings I hunger.”13 Only in 1952, as he read Gustav Janouch’s notoriously unreliable Conversations with Kafka, did Mann distance himself from Kafka, calling him a “pious Jew, very alien after all.”14 Despite their admiration for each other’s works, it is difficult to imagine two authors more different in their creative process, attitude toward the reading public, and sense of self-­importance than Thomas Mann (1875–­1955) and Franz Kafka (1883–­1924). Kafka worked for an insurance company by day and wrote in sporadic bursts of midnight inspiration; Mann was able, from an early age, to devote his full energies to his own work, dedicating each morning to the production of another page of measured prose. Mann prided himself on his ability to complete long works under the most difficult circumstances; Kafka rarely finished anything. Kafka seldom read in public; Mann entertained large audiences. Mann’s novels were featured by the Book of the Month Club; Kafka requested that his manuscripts be burned. When the First World War broke out, Mann felt compelled to write a five-­hundred-­page political essay about why he was a “nonpolitical man”; Kafka went swimming.15 Mann, a Protestant, believed that he represented the entire German nation; Kafka felt alienated even from his fellow Jews: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”16 Kafka and Mann nevertheless shared common origins in cities on the edges of empires. Mann was born four years after the founding of the German Empire, the privileged son of a patrician family in the Hanseatic city-­state of Lübeck, at a time when political power was increasingly concentrated in Berlin. He grew up in the decades when the German Empire was flexing its muscles, expanding its power within Europe and seeking overseas colonies commensurate with its new status. According to Fritz Fischer, just such imperial ambitions inspired Germany to provoke the First World War.17 As he argues, Germany sought not only to secure its hegemony in Central Europe but also to extend its reach from Berlin to Baghdad and possibly even Bombay, while establishing a contiguous swath of colonies across Africa. In the end, of course, Germany lost the war and all of its colonies, stoking resentment that Hitler and the Nazis skillfully exploited, as they founded a frightening new empire, the Third Reich. Thomas Mann, who had indulged in a vehement outburst of patriotic sentiment in the fall of 1914, soon distanced himself from the more aggressive sort of imperialism that he witnessed among the major combatants during the First World

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War—­including Prussia-­led Germany—­and went on to lend his support to the Weimar Republic and his fervent opposition to Nazi Germany, in the name of an older imperial tradition that he had experienced in Lübeck and found confirmed in the work of Goethe. Kafka grew up as a subject of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire in the city of Prague, as far removed from the capital of Vienna as was Mann from the city of Berlin. While the “nation of provincials” worked to create a sense of unity among the native German speakers of its various regions, the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was so diverse that any sort of collective nationalism was out of the question. Thus the nationalist sentiments that imperial Germany hoped to enlist in the quest for a sense of transregional loyalty to the new Reich worked as a threat to the fragile unity of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. When Serbian nationalists assassinated the heir to the imperial throne, they started the chain of events that led to the First World War, and Kafka ended his life as a citizen of the newly independent Czech Republic. Mann and Kafka adopted contrasting strategies to respond, in their literary works, to their changing political contexts. Even as a beginning writer, Mann sought to establish himself as the voice of the German nation, and he clung to this identity even when—­particularly when—­he found himself in exile.18 Despite strategic shifts in his political alliances in a career that stretched from imperial Germany to the Cold War, Mann remained consistent in his vision of German identity based on respect for regional diversity and in his opposition to a form of imperialism that sought to conquer foreign countries and to stifle internal dissent. In this regard, he was correct to view himself as Goethe’s heir: Goethe enlisted the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire in his critique of modern French nationalism; Mann followed suit, deploying the Goethean model against twentieth-­century imperialism and totalitarianism. While Mann sought to place himself at the moral center of the nation even while physically absent, Kafka dwelt in the margins, responding obliquely to local tensions in Prague and within a larger European context. Three factors are of particular importance for the work of Franz Kafka: his place within the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, his relation to the German-­language literary tradition, and his role as a Jew at a time of rising antisemitic nationalism.

Locating Franz Kafka Thomas Mann traveled; Franz Kafka remained largely at home. Mann left his native city in his late teens, moving to Munich and living for extended periods

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with his brother, Heinrich, in Italy; he later toured widely within Europe, giving lectures and on vacation. In 1934, he sailed to the United States for the first of four times before accepting a yearlong position at Princeton University; he then moved to California and became an American citizen.19 Kafka shared Mann’s wanderlust, but his travel was limited to a few short trips within Europe.20 Many of Kafka’s close relatives had access to mobility that Kafka lacked, as he was acutely aware. His father had moved from a Bohemian village to Prague a few years before Kafka was born. His father’s oldest brother emigrated to South America; another brother moved to New York. Relatives on his mother’s side of the family joined in the Jewish diaspora: one of her brothers directed the railroad in Spain; another worked in the Belgian Congo and later lived in China, Paris, and Canada.21 But Kafka stayed put, living and working in the city of his birth for the majority of his life. “Kafka was ‘local’ like Yeats,” writes his early biographer Klaus Wagenbach, who cites an anecdote by Kafka’s Hebrew teacher Friedrich Thieberger that underscores this point: “One day we were looking out of the windows onto the Ringplatz. Kafka said to me: ‘Here was my Gymnasium, over there, facing us, my university, and just a bit further to the left, my office. This small space,’ he said, drawing a few small circles with his finger, ‘encloses my entire life.’”22 Like Lübeck, Prague was an old city with a proud history. Lübeck was one of the wealthiest cities in northern Europe during the heyday of the late medieval Hanseatic League, and Prague blossomed during the same period. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the largest city in Central Europe, and the site of the oldest university north of the Alps.23 In modern times, the history of the two cities diverged: although Lübeck maintained slow but steady development in the course of the nineteenth century, it was eclipsed in significance by the rapid rise of Hamburg as imperial Germany’s major port. Prague, in contrast, enjoyed explosive growth in the late nineteenth century, as the center of new manufacturing and textile industries.24 New laws passed to protect factory workers soon gave rise to insurance agencies of the sort that counted Kafka among their employees.25 The Industrial Revolution set into motion the political and cultural conflicts that would play a central role in Kafka’s life. At the time of his birth, the Kingdom of Bohemia was part of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. Native German speakers, many of whom were Jewish, played leading roles in industry, finance, culture, and politics. As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, however, more and more Czech workers moved to Prague, settling in the suburbs that sprang up around the German-­dominated old city.26 In the decades leading up to the First World War, the overall population of the city grew, while

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the percentage of German speakers shrank: in 1846, Germans made up 38 percent of the population; by 1880, that percentage had dropped by more than half, and by 1910, German-­speakers comprised only 7.4 percent of the total population.27 The Germans were subjects of the multinational Austro-­ Hungarian Empire but were also members of a transnational intellectual community that extended across political boundaries, linking the German-­speaking writers in Prague to their peers in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.28 The Czechs, in contrast, were fervently nationalist, seeking and eventually succeeding in setting up a modern nation-­state carved out of the imperial ruins. The Jews, who had enjoyed a relatively high degree of emancipation and integration into late nineteenth-­century Austro-­German society, found themselves increasingly caught between antisemitic and anti-­German Czechs, on the one side, and a rising tide of equally antisemitic German nationalism, on the other. As a result of the complex and volatile cultural, ethnic, and political situation in turn-­of-­the-­century Prague, it is impossible to delimit Kafka’s identity to a single category. He was not Czech, although he spoke the language, which eventually enabled him to keep his job in the postwar Czech Republic.29 He was Jewish but was alienated from the religious tradition of his ancestors. His father was what was known as a “four-­day Jew,” meaning that he attended synagogue only on the four High Holy Days and did not understand most of the Hebrew liturgy.30 Kafka was bored by his infrequent trips to temple as a boy, and only later in life did he seek to reconnect to his Jewish roots. He was a native speaker of German and a subject of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire for most of his life, but he felt no particular loyalty to that empire, which he once derided as “this gigantic dying village” (dieses absterbende Riesendorf).31 Kafka respected such Austrian authors as Grillparzer, Stifter, and Hofmannsthal, but he also admired such German authors as Goethe, Kleist, and Thomas Mann, not to mention Dickens and Flaubert. Stated negatively, therefore, one could agree with Scott Spector that Kafka and his fellow writers of the Prague circle did not have one particular identity but, rather, that they dwelt “in the uniquely charged spaces between identities—­social identities, but also national, spiritual, and political identities.”32 Julian Preece makes much the same point from a positive perspective: “Kafka is the most cosmopolitan of all German-­language writers, . . . Jewish, German, Czech, . . . a speaker of French and Italian in addition to his native German, Czech, and Yiddish, which he learnt as an adult; steeped in both Jewish lore and German literature and surrounded by the sound of Czech for most of his life, Franz Kafka was first and foremost an internationalist and a European.”33 Kafka did not tend to look on the bright side of life. Thus he viewed his

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relationship to Judaism and German literature in largely negative terms. “I have never lived among German people,” he once wrote,34 expressing a feeling of isolation that carried over to his belief that he stood on the periphery of German literature as well. Kafka’s sense of distance from the German literary tradition is nowhere more evident than in his relation to Goethe. Like Thomas Mann, Kafka was a lifelong reader and admirer of Goethe, but the similarity ends there. Mann wanted to assume Goethe’s role as the conscience of the nation and its most important writer. Kafka’s feelings toward Goethe were more ambivalent, mixing boundless love with bitter resentment. Goethe’s oeuvre was not just a personal favorite for Kafka but was also required reading at school, which gave Goethe a nimbus of official culture and thus made him something of a dreaded father figure.35 Veneration of Goethe played a particularly important role in German-­Jewish culture. Berlin-­based Jews, including Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Varnhagen, and Henriette Herz, helped to found the nineteenth-­century Goethe cult, and Goethe idolatry became a matter of faith for generations of Jews aspiring toward assimilation into German society.36 From the beginning, however, German Jews also sounded notes of skepticism regarding Goethe: Heine’s irreverent depiction of the living monument in The Romantic School is topped by Ludwig Börne’s open hatred, and even Richard Friedenthal’s great Goethe biography of the early 1960s—­ written in England after he was forced to flee Germany as a Jew in 1938—­adopts a deliberately anti-­hagiographic tone, while noting that Goethe was no friend of the Jews.37 Kafka, too, resented the overbearing presence of Goethe in German literature, noting that “Goethe probably retards the development of the German language by the force of his writing.”38 Goethe’s seemingly effortless creativity taunted Kafka, who, as Goethe’s tormented reader, soon came to view Goethe as a personal adversary: “This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.”39 Kafka even contemplated avenging himself by writing an essay about “Goethe’s Frightening Nature” (Goethes entsetzliches Wesen).40 Kafka’s relationship to Judaism was no less fraught. One might say that he spent his entire adult life trying to come to terms with the sense of alienation from Jewish tradition that he experienced as a boy.41 In this regard, his struggle was shared by many Jews of his generation who grappled with the “Jewish question” (Judenfrage): where and how should Jews fit into mainstream Christian-­German culture, if at all? As Kafka put it, many Jews of his generation sought to escape their Jewishness by writing in German, “but they still clung to the Jewishness of their fathers with their little rear legs and found no

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new ground with their little forelegs.”42 In an effort to bridge the gap, Kafka looked to some of the ideas circulating in his contemporary society. When Max Nordau, who claimed that Western European Jews had degenerated into sickly city dwellers, proposed a program of physical fitness to toughen up the Jewish body, Kafka responded by doing daily calisthenics, shunning alcohol and meat, and extolling the virtues of nudism and simple nature.43 When Martin Buber praised Eastern European Jews for having retained their religious traditions and organic communities, while lamenting Western Jews who had lost their faith and their extended families in the effort to assimilate into modern Christian society, Kafka responded by learning Hebrew and developing an interest in the Yiddish theater and the Hasidic communities of Eastern Europe. When Theodor Herzl suggested that the Jews needed to move to a new Zionist homeland, Kafka expressed interest. Although he was never as ardently committed to Zionism as his friend, Max Brod, he explored Zionist thought and even toyed with the idea of emigrating to Palestine.44 Kafka thus rests on the margins or between identities in multiple ways—­as a subject of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire far from the capital of Vienna and surrounded by a growing number of increasingly militant Czech nationalists, as a German-­language writer who “never lived among German people” and felt compelled to write within a literary tradition occupied by the domineering figure of Goethe, and as a Jew who was alienated from the religion of his parents and struggled to overcome his perceived bodily weakness or to explore alternative forms of Jewish community. The critical shift toward viewing Kafka in his historical context challenges those who once regarded him as the disembodied voice of existential angst, the writer who seems to come from nowhere in particular and speak to everyone in general.45 “Kafka comes home” is David Damrosch’s convenient phrase to sum up efforts to locate Kafka’s work within a particular place and time.46 Such efforts do not imply that a simple key will unlock the meaning of Kafka’s mysterious prose, to reveal that the nameless castle is “really” the Hradschin (Prague’s Castle) or that Joseph K. is Franz Kafka in disguise. Nor do they deny the unique circumstances of Kafka’s family life or, conversely, his ability to create enigmatic works of literature that resonate with readers far removed in place and time from the circumstances in which he wrote. These readings do suggest, however, that Kafka’s deliberately deracinated prose exists in an indirect relation to the reality it negates. As Mark Anderson puts it, “Negativity does not mean nothing; it exists in relation to something.”47 That something is the city of Prague at a time of changing demographics, crumbling empires, and the rise of antisemitic nationalism.

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Minor Literatures and the Yiddish Language Some of Kafka’s most direct comments about literature in social context come in his long, often cryptic, and frequently cited diary entry of December 25, 1911. Kafka opposes “major” literatures such as German to “small” or “minor” literatures (“kleine Literaturen”) such as Czech or “Jewish” (Kafka had recently been introduced to a Yiddish theater troupe by his friend Jitzak Löwy).48 Minor literatures forge a sense of unity in a nation otherwise distracted and divided, Kafka contends; they instill a sense of pride that “a nation gains from a literature of its own . . . in the face of a hostile surrounding world.”49 Minor literature thus becomes a means to the end of raising national consciousness, of establishing an imagined community. Minor literatures can create this sense of solidarity because the body of writing in them is relatively small and has no dominating individual talents (Kafka is clearly thinking about Goethe). A national literature soon emerges, sustained by a lively publishing industry. Finally, Kafka adds a note about the political status of a minor literature: because “the inner independence of the literature makes the external connection with politics harmless,” the literature “can be disseminated throughout the land by clinging tightly to political slogans.”50 This diary passage seems to suggest that minor literature is so intrinsically autonomous, so neatly divorced from politics, that it can appropriate overtly political language from another context into literature that is immediately comprehensible to the community and yet no longer part of a directly political message. As Ritchie Robertson puts it, Kafka “thinks that literature has an inner autonomy which cannot be affected by the external link between literature and politics. . . . He certainly does not mean that literature should be transformed into propaganda.”51 In many ways, Kafka’s comments on minor literature bear a striking resemblance to the arguments that Goethe sets forth in his “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser.” Goethe there describes German literature as a kind of minor literature in implicit opposition to the French, citing all the factors that have prohibited its development: political fragmentation, difficult circumstances for writers, and the absence of a towering genius (modestly not describing himself). Yet Goethe insists that what others perceive as weakness is, in fact, a source of strength; he cites the collective talents of German writers at work on the project of the national literature, similar to Kafka’s description of a community of writers forging a new minor literature. But times have changed: the minor German literature that was just beginning to emerge from the shadow of French cultural hegemony around 1800 has been transformed into a major

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literary canon in Kafka’s time, and the band of more or less equal brothers who worked together to build the national literature have been elevated into a new nobility, with Goethe as king. As a result, the tables have turned: Goethe can make positive contributions to Germany’s nascent national literature, whereas Kafka is condemned to write in a literary tradition that has become fraught with cultural authority and in the shadow of a giant who inspires emulation yet cripples creativity. Hence Kafka’s often-­cited statement of the predicament he shares with his fellow Jewish authors in Prague: “They lived between three impossibilities: . . . the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, and the impossibility to write any other way.”52 The passage in Kafka’s diary inspired Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s influential book about Kafka’s minor literature. According to them, “a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”53 Kafka, they contend, writes in something called “Prague German,” a language infused with a fluid mix of Czech and Yiddish, which allows him to undermine the dominant literary language from within. His German is thus “deterritorialized” and politically subversive, the devious revenge of an oppressed minority against the authorities. The French critics thus articulate a literary strategy that many have found pertinent to the situation of colonial or postcolonial writers working within and against the language of an imperial power. In the case of Kafka, however, they are simply wrong. As Stanley Corngold summarizes, minor literatures for Kafka are Yiddish and Czech, not German; aside from a few minor local inflections, Kafka wrote classical High German, not some sort of Prague pidgin; and Kafka was not a political rebel but a writer of “gnostic ecstasy.”54 Kafka may not have been a political activist, but he was certainly aware of political events and concerned about contemporary problems, such as conditions in the factories he visited for his job with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute.55 The main question in this context centers on the question of Kafka’s alleged use of Prague German. Like any other part of the German-­ speaking world, Prague had its regional idioms and accents. Klaus Wagenbach notes that Kafka had recognizable Prague-­German speech patterns, which are reflected, from time to time, in his early work.56 This is hardly surprising and no different than the traces of Plattdeutsch in Thomas Mann’s prose, occasional Swiss idioms in Keller’s work, or echoes of Berlin’s patois in Fontane’s novels. Yet no one fluent in German would argue that Fontane, Keller, or Mann wrote in dialect, and the same is true for Kafka. The difference between the High German spoken in Prague and the regionally inflected High German spoken in Lübeck, Zurich, or Berlin lay in its social context

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rather than in its linguistic content, that is, in the fact that the German speakers of Prague were a shrinking minority in a predominantly Czech population. As a result, according to philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner, Prague’s German speakers overcompensated for their isolation by cultivating a form of “paper German” so carefully purged of local inflection that it seemed artificial and sterile.57 In this sense, written Prague German was diametrically opposed to the sort of Creole described by Deleuze and Guattari, as it was characterized by an extreme purity rather than being “a fluid language intermixed with Czech and Yiddish.”58 In the same year that Kafka wrote his diary entry about minor literatures, he also gave a lecture on the Yiddish language. For generations of Jews seeking to assimilate to German culture, Yiddish, or German inflected with Yiddish idioms and speech patterns known by the derogatory term mauscheln, was a language to be avoided at all costs, because it identified the speaker as a member of a stigmatized minority, an uncouth Eastern European Jew (Ostjude).59 Kafka begins his talk by acknowledging this prejudice directly: “Many of you are so frightened of Yiddish that one can almost see it in your faces. . . . Our Western European conditions, if we glance at them only in a deliberately superficial way, appear so well ordered. . . . From within such an order of things who could possibly understand the tangle of Yiddish—­indeed, who would even care to do so?”60 Yet there is no need for fear, he reassures his listeners, or to worry that poems written in Yiddish will sound like gibberish to the German speakers of Prague. Anyone who knows German can understand Yiddish, he contends, although Yiddish cannot be translated into German. The reason lies in the peculiar nature of Yiddish, which Kafka characterizes not as a discrete language that can be neatly isolated from all others but, rather, as a language that “consists solely of foreign words. But these words are not firmly rooted in it, they retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adopted. Great migrations move through Yiddish.”61 There is, as yet, no Yiddish grammar, because the language is in a state of constant flux, continually borrowing words from other languages and combining them in original ways. Kafka thus describes Yiddish in terms that contrast sharply with Mauthner’s concept of Prague German: the “paper language” anxiously strives for purity at the risk of sterility, while Yiddish revels in its impurities.62 To use, once again, the medical metaphor that was adapted into racial discourse at the time, Prague German works to defend itself against the infection of foreign bacteria, whereas Yiddish functions like a virus, drawing strength from the multiple languages on which it feeds.63 And here we do find in Kafka’s work an anticipation of today’s postcolonial celebrations of linguistic impurities

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within a standardized language. Feridun Zaimoğlu writes of the expressive potential of an otherwise denigrated “Kanak Sprak,” for instance, while Zafer Şenocak dreams of a “bastard” language that would combine elements of German and Turkish into a new hybrid mixture.64 Thus Deleuze and Guattari might have been better served by using Kafka’s “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language” in support of their understanding of minor literature as a subversive presence within a dominant culture. What Yiddish and minor literatures have in common, however, is their ability to create and sustain a sense of belonging that contrasts with the alienation Kafka feels in relation to the literary tradition of Goethe and the religious tradition of the Jews. Both offer fantasies of totality, of nurturing community, of universal understanding—­ precisely those things that Kafka’s liminal status denies him.

The Chinese Wall and a Talking Ape Two contrasting yet interrelated models emerge from Kafka’s reflections on minor literature and the Yiddish language. The first envisions a small, supportive, homogeneous community defined by its opposition to its overbearing neighbors. The second outlines an alternative vision of a language that thrives in the shadows, feeding on linguistic bits and pieces of other languages to create a new, malleable idiom that is neither exactly the same as any of the languages on which it draws nor independent enough to have an identity of its own. Before turning to Thomas Mann, I here look briefly at the way these ideas inform Kafka’s literary works, focusing on two short stories: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China) and Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy). Kafka wrote The Great Wall of China in the spring of 1917, during a period when his interest in Zionism was on the rise, the war was at its peak, and the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was in decline. One fragment of the story was published separately as Eine kaiserliche Botschaft (An Imperial Message) on Rosh Hashanah, September 14, 1919, in a Prague weekly for Jewish nationalists, Selbstwehr (Self-­defense); the same fragment was included shortly thereafter in the anthology Ein Landartz (A Country Doctor).65 An Imperial Message is a parable about a dying emperor who has a message intended “just for you.” He whispers the message to a messenger from his deathbed, but the man can barely force his way through the throng in the room, let alone make his way out of the vast palace. Even if he could, he would find himself within another palace and yet another, so that thousands of years would pass before he

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could escape even the capital city, and he would never, ever reach you. The messenger’s efforts would seem to be unnecessary as well as futile, because the message is conveyed magically, as if by mental telepathy, to its intended recipient, who receives it in a dream vision: “But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.”66 Still, there is no guarantee that the dream corresponds to the emperor’s message; it might, but it might also be a figment of your imagination that has nothing to do with what the emperor wanted to tell you. This one-­page parable captures an uncertainty surrounding relations between the emperor and his subjects that carries over to the fragmentary story as well. The narrator of the tale, who comes from the farthest reaches of southern China, “almost on the borders of the Tibetan Highlands,” repeatedly insists on his people’s utter loyalty to the emperor.67 At the same time, they remain in complete ignorance about the current state of affairs: “They do not know what Emperor is reigning, and there exist doubts regarding even the name of the dynasty.”68 The veneration for the emperor—­whoever he may be—­is absolute, but “the Emperor derives no advantage from our fidelity.”69 It is not even clear if the emperor is actually in charge: the decision to build the Great Wall was made by the high command, we are told, even though the “honest, unwitting Emperor . . . imagined he decreed it!”70 Nor is it even certain whether the emperor they revere is still alive or has long since been replaced by a successor. On one level, at least, it would therefore seem plausible, as Robert Lemon has argued, that Kafka’s The Great Wall of China is about “the faltering Habsburg dynasty, invoking not only Franz Josef’s death the previous year but also the rumors about the monarch that circulated before his actual demise.”71 The Great Wall of China, we are told in Kafka’s story, is designed to protect the empire from the people of the north, who are depicted as hideous ogres. The narrator admits that he and his people have never actually seen one of these northerners and never will see them as long as they remain at home in the south, for the land is simply too vast for them to traverse. Nevertheless, the people of the south journey to join people from other parts of China to work on the wall, though the project is undertaken in a way that renders it useless as a bulwark against invading enemies. Groups work for periods of five years to build five-­hundred-­yard segments of the wall. The groups work in pairs, so that the walls built by two groups join into a single unit. But these longer stretches of the wall do not connect at either end with any other segments; instead, large gaps are left, through which enemy armies could easily ride. What is the reason for constructing the wall in this piecemeal fashion? Pragmatic considerations offer one answer: the workers are far from home and cannot be expected to

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work indefinitely, but they can complete the limited portions of the wall in the allotted five-­year period. Work on the project, moreover, fosters a sense of group solidarity: “Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a current of blood [ein Reigen des Volkes, Blut] no longer confined within the narrow circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning throughout the endless leagues of China.”72 The work of these individual groups, however satisfying, does nothing to further the ostensible larger goal of keeping out the northern barbarians—­if they indeed pose a threat at all. Building the noncontiguous wall segments creates a sense of collective identity that is described in the language of ethnic nationalism. Although the laborers ostensibly work to draw a perimeter around the threatened empire, they actually create islands of solidarity that do nothing to firm up the imperial border. In fact, if we continue the parallel with the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, individual teams of workers have the effect, if not the intent, of establishing the sort of regional or national loyalties that were tearing apart the empire from within. To be sure, the workers come from different regions of China and form temporary alliances for the good of the entire empire, whereas nationalist movements tend to be formed among people from a single area who have or imagine they have ancient origins. The work is organized, however, in a way that results in the fragmentation of the collective project and that thus opens the door to foreign invaders, even as individual groups of workers revel in their common identity and the delusional belief that they are contributing to the defense of the empire.73 The publication of An Imperial Message on Rosh Hashanah in a journal intended largely for Jewish readers would suggest that it may also be addressing questions raised by the Zionist movement. For instance, in the collaboration between workers from both the east and west of China, Ritchie Robertson finds “a clear reference to the Eastern and Western Jews,” invoking Martin Buber’s call for a revitalization of diasporic Western Jews through an alliance with communities of Eastern European Jews still in touch with religious tradition.74 The ecstatic references to the blood brotherhood of the worker teams in their beloved Chinese landscape is likely to give today’s reader pause, as it inevitably recalls the rhetoric of “Blut und Boden” central to Nazi ideology.75 At the time, however, it was not unusual for Zionists to deploy the language of ethnic or völkisch nationalism that would, in the future, be used against the Jews.76 Thus one need not limit the possible referent of The Great Wall of China to either hopes for the revival of a Jewish community or the forging of a national identity among the Czechs or other such groups in the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, for the model is distant enough and abstract enough to be

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applied to both. In fact, Kafka explicitly refers to writing within both Czech and Jewish communities as examples of “minor literatures” that express and consolidate national identities. Nevertheless, ironies and qualifications result from the juxtaposition of Czech and Zionist nationalism, which were already incompatible in 1917. The Czechs could reasonably hope to establish a sovereign nation-­state after the collapse of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, which they did between the time Kafka drafted The Great Wall of China and his publication of An Imperial Message. The Jews, in contrast, could hardly expect to build their new homeland within Europe; their segment of the wall, to use the metaphor of the story, would have to be set up elsewhere, and even that would have to wait until long after Kafka’s death. As Clement Greenberg suggests, the building of the wall could refer to traditional Jewish communities in Eastern Europe who sought to fence themselves off from surrounding Gentile societies.77 In the long run, such attempts to isolate the Jews from historical developments in Europe proved futile; in the short run, it is difficult to imagine that Kafka, the cosmopolitan European, would have anything less than ambiguous feelings about the prospect of returning to the sort of Eastern European village that his father had fled. In sum, The Great Wall of China addresses obliquely both the fragile condition of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire near the end of the First World War and the possibilities and pitfalls of the new ethnic nationalism for groups like the Czechs and Jews. While the work reflects Kafka’s engagement with Zionist thought, it suggests that his interest stopped short of an unqualified endorsement. An intact, homogeneous community of the sort that he describes in his comments on minor literatures and that he envisions among the workers on the Great Wall of China remains appealing, but it has the status of a utopian ideal that contains within it the seeds of the possible destruction, rather than the salvation, of the Jews. The portrait of groups that can plausibly be associated with the Jews in Kafka’s other works is not necessarily positive: Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse (Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk, 1924) employs the language of ethnic nationalism to describe the Mausvolk in ways that correspond closely to antisemitic stereotypes,78 and the (Jewish) jackals who so despise the Arabs for their unclean habits in Jackals and Arabs are driven like dogs to the stinking flesh of a dead camel, in a story that seems an unmitigated exercise in Jewish self-­hatred.79 For this reason, Kafka’s fiction also explores the alternative possibility of partial assimilation suggested by his short essay on the Yiddish language. There, as we recall, Kafka envisions not a “pure” language but, rather, a language that exists on the margins of others, borrowing freely to create a fluid

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dialect that lives like a virus, being both distinct from and yet dependent on multiple host languages. Minor literatures forge discrete national communities; Yiddish adapts elements from other languages to survive and thrive as an impure idiom. If we think in terms of responses to the “Jewish question,” minor literatures express the Zionist desire for a separate homeland for the Jews, whereas Yiddish swings toward the opposite pole of assimilation into Christian-­ European culture. The process of assimilation is never complete, however: Yiddish is not German, but it needs German and other languages for its existence; the Jew can ape Christian culture, but he remains a Jew—­though not entirely a Jew, in the sense of someone who is unself-­consciously part of an uninterrupted tradition, a member of an intact community. In other words, he is like Red Peter, the talking ape of A Report to an Academy. Kafka wrote A Report to an Academy in April 1917, just a few weeks after putting aside “The Great Wall of China.”80 It tells of an ape who is captured in the African jungle by members of the Hagenbeck Zoo and shipped to Europe under appalling conditions, a sad but not unusual story in the long history of animal abuse. In fact, J. M. Coetzee has his fictional alter ego, animal rights activist Elizabeth Costello, cite Kafka’s work as a prime example of man’s inhumanity to animals: “When Kafka writes about an ape, I take him to be talking in the first place about an ape.”81 But this ape is different: by careful observation and skillful mimicry, he overcomes his animal instincts and learns to talk. He is therefore able to escape the normal fate of life behind bars destined to animals captured for the zoo; he becomes, instead, the star of a variety theater. Red Peter narrates his life history in a self-­satisfied monolog as he slouches in an armchair after a show, a glass of red wine at his side, anticipating the ministrations of his chimpanzee call girl. When Kafka published “A Report to an Academy” in the fall of 1917 in Der Jude (The Jew), a monthly journal edited by Martin Buber,82 readers recognized it as a coded reference to the process of Jewish assimilation. Max Brod probably spoke for many when he called it “the most brilliant satire of assimilation ever written.”83 As in the case of The Great Wall of China, however, the exotic setting of A Report to an Academy allows for other, complementary interpretations. The reference to Red Peter’s capture on the Gold Coast of Africa recalls slaving missions to the same area, and there is a close connection between the traffic in human beings that resulted from the process of European imperialism and the capture of exotic animals to be displayed as trophies of foreign conquests. Such displays could also feature foreign peoples; spectators paid admission to view Völkerschauen featuring Africans, American Indians, and “Eskimos” in their native garb and facsimiles of their native habitats.84

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A Report to an Academy thus establishes an implicit link between the intra-­ European “Jewish question” and overseas empire; the process of Jewish assimilation finds a direct parallel in colonial mimicry. Common to both processes is the sense of living on the threshold between identities. Red Peter knows that prior to his capture, he lived like any other animal in the African jungle. But at the outset of his monologue, he confesses that he is unfortunately unable to describe his former life, because his “memory of the past has closed the door against [him] more and more” in the five years since his capture.85 His personal development parodies the process of Darwinian evolution but also harkens back to a quandary confronting many in the romantic era. When Rousseau sets out, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, to describe “man in the state of nature,” he laments that “the whole progress of the human species removes man constantly farther and farther away from his primitive state.” The very faculty of reason that allows us to pose the question of what man was like before he was corrupted by civilization makes it impossible to provide an answer: “Through studying man we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him.” Thus the great champion of natural man concedes that it is virtually impossible to “attain a solid knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, and which will probably never exist, yet of which it is necessary to have sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily.”86 Like so many romantics, Red Peter realizes that he can’t go home again. As Schiller observes, young Werther’s carefully staged performance of Homeric simplicity was nothing like the original: “They felt naturally; we feel the natural. . . . Our feeling for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health.”87 Red Peter also can never pass for human. He speaks in a flawless parody of academic discourse, but he is still a talking ape; he sips wine like a sophisticated connoisseur, but he urges his interlocutor to sniff his fur and is eager to drop his drawers in public to display his scars. Read as a metaphor for Jewish assimilation, Red Peter’s performance has an element of self-­mockery, even self-­hatred, suggesting that the Jew who tries to blend into Christian society will inevitably betray himself in a most embarrassing way. The same is true if we view Kafka’s work as a commentary on colonial mimicry: like the imperial subject, Red Peter is “almost the same” as his human captors, “but not quite”—­ “almost the same,” that is, “but not white.”88 For the most part, Red Peter seems quite content with his new life on stage, but the sight by day of the “half-­ trained little chimpanzee” who comforts him at night reminds him all too painfully of the emotional cost demanded by the process of civilization: “She has the insane look of the bewildered half-­broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”89

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At the same time, the act of mimicry can have a “profound and disturbing” effect on “the authority of colonial discourse,” as Homi Bhabha argues: “The reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double.” As a result, “mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.”90 Red Peter’s account of his early achievements among the sailors ridicules them as much as his own actions make him the object of unintentional humor. “With an effort,” Red Peter recalls, “I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European,”91 but his major accomplishments consist of learning how to spit, smoke, and swill schnapps. True, he later progresses from rotgut to red wine and expands his vocabulary considerably beyond his initial spontaneous cry of “Hallo!” Yet we are left with the sense that the average European’s level of culture is not exactly exalted. The references to Africa in A Report to an Academy and to China in The Great Wall reflect Kafka’s interest (noted earlier in this chapter) in a distant world that he was unable to visit but that serves as the setting for many of his works. These stories are more than the imaginary journeys of a tourist manqué, for he uses them to explore the dynamics of power in an age of global capitalism and empire. In Kafka’s incomplete first novel, Karl Rossmann’s banishment to America lands him in a world of ruthless capitalism, where captains of industry such as his uncle exploit workers living in abject poverty. The threatening sword that Karl sees in the hand of the Statue of Liberty when he enters New York Harbor anticipates the series of misadventures that will send this voyager to the “land of unlimited opportunity” on a nightmarish journey that leads to his debasement as “Negro” in the Theater of Oklahoma. Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie (The Penal Colony, 1919) offers an unflinching gaze at the mechanism of a public torture device in an unnamed francophone colony somewhere in the tropics. If reduced to a single common denominator, Kafka’s work can be considered a sustained exploration of the dynamics of power, depicting those who wield it, sometimes with sadistic glee; those who submit to it, sometimes with masochistic pleasure; and those who find a way around it and manage to survive. In early works such as Das Urteil (The Judgment, 1913) and The Metamorphosis, conflicts are staged in the family, between fathers and sons; later works expand the inquiry into areas explored in this chapter, including nationalism and imperialism, Zionism and the fate of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. Although Kafka imagines the possibility of minor literatures within nurturing communities and champions Yiddish as a medium of universal understanding, his fiction tends to enact dilemmas rather than envision harmony. In Kleine Fabel (A Little Fable), the cat explains that the mouse only has to run in a different

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direction to escape, but the cat eats the mouse before it has a chance. In Der Process (The Trial), the man from the country waits a lifetime before the Law, only to be told, as he is dying, that the gate he has never entered was made only for him. Joseph K. learns of the theoretical possibility of an acquittal but is told that no one knows if such an acquittal has ever been granted. He can hope for a temporary reprieve from his trial, but with the near certainty that he will be rearrested and the process will begin again. The artist in Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) explains, just before he dies of starvation, that he was not opposed to eating per se, just that he never found a food that he wanted to eat. “Where is the master going?” asks the servant in Der Aufbruch (The Departure). “‘I don’t know,’” he responds; “‘just out of here, just out of here [nur weg von hier, nur weg von hier]. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.’”92 Red Peter is another character who seeks survival through lowered expectations. As he explains, he has long since given up any hope for freedom: “No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; . . . To get out somewhere, to get out!”93 Kafka was not able to escape that small space that circumscribed his life in the city of Prague. Yet, from his limited perspective, he was able to use his writings to explore the forces at work in a much wider world.

Continuity and Change in the Work of Thomas Mann During the last decade of Kafka’s life, Thomas Mann—­who was known until that time as the author of a remarkably successful first novel, a disappointing second novel, and a series of short stories—­emerged as a prolific political essayist. Mann’s views also underwent a dramatic change in the course of those years, as the patriot who welcomed Germany’s entry into the First World War and denounced Western democracy reversed course to defend the Weimar Republic and oppose National Socialism. The stages of Mann’s political development are well known: in the fall of 1914, he wrote and published “Gedanken im Krieg” (Thoughts in war), a short essay in which he greeted the war as a source of purification, liberation, and hope. The tone turned somber in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, as Mann fought to defend a conservative vision of Germany that he knew was doomed. The turning point came four years later, when Mann confounded friend and foe alike by voicing his public support for the Weimar Republic. Then, in the fall of 1924, Mann published Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), reclaiming his place as one of Germany’s leading writers. In a sad irony, that novel set in a tuberculosis sanatorium appeared just months after Kafka died of the same disease.

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Mann’s political evolution between the years 1914 and 1924 and his subsequent role as one of the most outspoken German opponents of the Third Reich have been justly hailed as a bright light in the darkest period of German history. As Philipp Gut puts it, “Mann owes his elevated place in the cultural memory of the Germans to the fact that during those years [of Nazi rule] he stood decisively on the right side.”94 To be sure, Mann’s moral authority has not gone unchallenged. Many Germans who suffered through the war years in Germany resented what they felt were his high-­handed denunciations of their complicity with the Nazi regime, uttered under the balmy skies of Southern California. Others have claimed that Mann was, at best, a reluctant participant in political discussions, saving his real passion for fiction steeped in Schopenhauerian pessimism.95 Still others have pointed out moments of racial prejudice in his diaries and antisemitic stereotypes in his fiction that tarnish his otherwise admirable political development and unquestioned literary genius.96 When reading and rereading Mann’s major political essays of the 1920s through the 1940s, however, it is difficult not to admire their eloquent and passionate defense of a cosmopolitan humanism against one of the most barbarous regimes the world has known. Did Mann really change his political point of view? Curiously, the very work that would seem to mark his most dramatic shift from a denunciation of the West to an embrace of its values contains a preface in which Mann insists that he has not changed, at least not in any fundamental way: “I am not aware of any change of mind [Sinnesänderung]. I may have changed my thoughts [Gedanken], but not my mind [Sinn].”97 The distinction may seem sophistical, but Mann insists that what can, on one level, be called change—­from rejection to acceptance of democracy—­is consistent, on another level, with his deeper principles. As I will argue in the following pages, Mann’s political evolution between 1914 and 1924 cannot be reduced to a simple shift from East to West in his alliances, from loyalty to the second German Empire to an embrace of the modern nation-­state. What Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have argued for the course of world history in general—­that a linear narrative does not do justice to the complexity of political forms and the persistence of empire into modern times98—­is true in the particular case of Thomas Mann. Always the dialectical thinker, Mann’s political thought shows how the liberal nation-­ state can be inverted into a model of imperialist totalitarianism, on the one hand, while the local cosmopolitanism of an older, federalist model of empire contains the seeds of racist nationalism, on the other. Thomas Mann liked to claim that he was descended from Nuremberg artisans of the sort immortalized in Wagner’s Meistersinger, which, if not liter-

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ally true, was figuratively the case, for it signaled his place as a burgher from Lübeck within a German tradition of self-­ruled city-­states.99 As he explains in an autobiographical essay of 1926, he was indelibly imprinted by his childhood experiences as a member of the patrician class in the Hanseatic city-­state: “My art, my entire productivity, as important or unimportant as it may be, is not the product of some sort of bohemian, deracinated virtuosity but, rather, a form of life, Lübeck as a form of intellectual life [geistige Lebensform].”100 Mann writes in this essay of his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in which he draws on his family history to narrate a multigenerational saga set in what is clearly Lübeck, although the city is never explicitly named. For this reason, Mann explains, some readers mistook the novel for another work of Heimatkunst, art that focused narrowly on local history. In fact, Mann contends, his major artistic influences were international; the setting is local, but the spirit is cosmopolitan. Yet, Mann concludes, precisely this combination makes his work typically German in the best sense: it is not nationalistic in a narrow-­minded, exclusionary sort of way. His burghers are Weltbürger, citizens of the world. The city-­state’s cosmopolitan spirit is threatened, however, by the encroaching power of imperial Prussia. Buddenbrooks is set in the years between 1835 and the late 1870s; it depicts the decline of a patrician family in a Hanseatic city-­state against the rise to power of the Prussian-­dominated German Empire. Already in the opening scene, some of the burghers gathered together in the Buddenbrook home voice concerns that the new German trade federation will infringe on the city-­state’s local autonomy; by the end of the novel, the Prussians have marched into the city like an invading army. The last of the Buddenbrooks, the effeminate, sickly, and artistically inclined Hanno, can neither abide nor withstand the new Prussian authorities, who instill an atmosphere of malodorous masculinity and harsh discipline into a school that once exuded a gentler spirit of classical humanism. The opposition between Lübeck and Berlin continues to play an important role in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.101 On the surface, this work pits Germany against France and its allies, condemning the arrogance of a Western democratic tradition that assumes universality (rather than local specificity) for its values and criticizing the hypocrisy of governments that preach world peace and practice world conquest. If we read more closely, however, we discover the same intra-­German tension that informs Buddenbrooks. Writing Reflections during the First World War, Mann recalls, looking back at his formative years, that he grew up “in a politically independent, oligarchical city democracy of the northwest . . . of strongly conservative stamp.”102 He later settled in Munich, the city of Germany’s cultural avant-­garde, which was also sheltered

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from “the sharp air of the Prussian-­American metropolis.”103 As a result, Mann maintains that he “slept a little through” (ein wenig verschlafen) the fateful “metamorphosis of the German burgher into the bourgeois” in the decades after 1871.104 He regards Bismarck’s drive to unify Germany as a “perversion, hardening and falsification of a stateless culture into a cultureless state,”105 and he views the subsequent “Americanization of the German lifestyle”106 as a further sign of the corruption that has tainted the atmosphere of imperial Germany. Thus the essay that begins as a strident defense of Germany’s national character turns into a lament about the corruption of that character under pernicious Prussian influence. Mann’s political thought develops within the broader context of ideas that go back to the eighteenth century and beyond. As we have seen, empires can show two faces to the world, the one relatively benign, the other malignant. The Holy Roman Empire and its Austro-­Hungarian counterpart were diverse confederations of semiautonomous political units—­city-­states, duchies, bishoprics, kingdoms—­under the aegis of a supreme but often distant imperial authority. Critics could justly accuse these political organizations of being dysfunctional, hierarchical, antidemocratic, and deeply conservative, but their apologists could praise their respect for local traditions in a decentralized government that had little or no interest in foreign conquest. Then again, less forgiving observers can rightly point out that empires are established by the takeover of other peoples’ territory and maintained by the threat of violent reprisals. One need only recall the precarious position of seventeenth-­century Silesia during the Counter-­ Reformation, and postcolonial critics of the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire have also argued that we can speak of “internal colonization” within that realm.107 Proponents of the modern nation-­state sought democratic reforms that would sweep away the arbitrary injustice of the old regimes. Lateral bonds between equal citizens replaced unwieldy imperial hierarchies; universal human rights trumped hoary local traditions. Very soon, however, the new European nation-­states started to act suspiciously like empires of old. A little more than a decade after French citizens stormed the Bastille and executed their king, they watched Napoleon crown himself as their new emperor. He embarked on wars of conquest that sent French troops marching from Paris to Prussia, Russia, and Spain. By the late nineteenth century, the “new imperialism” drove European nation-­states, in fierce competition with one another, to colonize vast areas on foreign continents and to cause untold misery to countless millions. By opposing Lübeck’s local cosmopolitanism to Prussian imperialism, Mann places himself within a venerable tradition of German thought. Goethe,

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who also came from a semiautonomous city-­state (Frankfurt), consistently defended the virtues of German particularism. His Egmont, we recall, resists the imperial power of Spain in the name of preserving the Netherlands’ ancient traditions; Egmont is thus a kindred spirit of the Buddenbrooks and their fellow Lübeckers, who resent the Prussian infringement on their rights. Mann enlists Eichendorff as an ally in the later portions of Reflections, resurrecting the romantic nostalgia for the Holy Roman Empire as a bastion of organic localism, against the soulless machinery of the modern state. Mann’s major influences also include Nietzsche and Wagner, both associated with the resistance to Prussian centralism that Lionel Gossman identifies among intellectuals and artists at the University of Basel.108 We could add to these the previously mentioned Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who worried that industrialization and urbanization would erode healthy rural traditions in Germany’s richly diverse regions, and Friedrich Tönnies, who lamented the loss of traditional communities united in a feeling of Gemeinschaft by the impersonal forces of modern Gesellschaft. Finally, Julius Langbehn, the author of the immensely popular book Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as educator, 1890), also rejected the growing power of Berlin and the centralization of the new Reich, while stressing the importance of indigenous German cultures bound by common blood and rooted in their native soil. “The true artist cannot be local enough,” he proclaims in that book, adding, “Art needs localism and provincialism.”109 The mention of Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher in this context should give us pause, for his antimodern tirade is saturated with antisemitism, in the spirit of a new, racially charged, völkisch nationalism. Some of the earlier individuals I have cited are more respectable but have their troubling aspects as well. Goethe opposed democratic reforms and Jewish emancipation. Eichendorff’s political mentor, Friedrich Schlegel, quickly abandoned his youthful radicalism and supported Metternich’s reactionary regime, even as Eichendorff mocked the democratic aspirations of German liberals. Nietzsche did not share Wagner’s antisemitism, but his glorification of the “blonde beast” and its “will to power” played into the hands of those who did. In Langbehn, however, the dangerous potential of the German conservative tradition comes to full flower.110 Langbehn espouses an essentially biological understanding of the German people, united by ties of blood and sustained by their bond with the land. His stress on the importance of tribal homelands in the German provinces goes together with his hatred of Berlin and rejection of the trend toward centralization in the German Reich. Langbehn’s belief in the purity of the German racial lineage inspires his disdain for those, such as the Poles and other Slavic peoples, who do not enjoy the same bloodlines. Healthy peasants in touch with

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the German soil and the German soul provide a positive counterweight to urban intellectuals who either are or might as well be Jews. Fulminating against democracy’s tendency to reduce society to the lowest common denominator, Langbehn envisions a new German aristocracy under a charismatic führer figure who will guide his people to their tragic-­heroic destiny. It was a short step from here to Stefan George’s vision in his 1928 poetry collection, Das neue Reich (The new Reich). Looking back to a vaguely defined imperial past and toward a future that seems suspiciously like the Third Reich, George displayed a fascination with the irrational, war, and violence; a fear and loathing of women and the feminized masses; an aversion to miscegenation (Blutschmach) and a yearning for racial purity; and a vision of a future “secret Germany” modeled on his coterie of disciples joined in rapturous devotion to their charismatic leader.111 Common to both the appealing and disturbing aspects of the German intellectual tradition on which Mann draws is a resistance to the universal in the name of the particular, a defense of the locally specific against the homogenizing and centralizing tendencies of the modern nation-­state, and a rejection of foreign aggression in the name of national integrity. As noted earlier, the very notion of Kultur that Mann so ardently defends is nationally specific by definition and is therefore unsuitable for export, in a way that contrasts sharply with the universal claims of Zivilisation. Pride in Germany’s indigenous culture thus provides Mann with a convenient vantage point from which he can expose the hypocrisy of an ideology that legitimates violent conquest in the name of universal human rights. By the same token, however, the concept of culture as nationally specific lends itself to ethnic essentialism and racist nationalism of the sort that would soon be utilized to justify the suppression of minorities and even genocide. Perversely, in other words, the ideology that begins with respect for difference among discrete national traditions—we do not impose our culture on you, so do not impose your civilization on us—­leads to utter intolerance for domestic dissent. The Nazi era began with a program of Gleichschaltung, designed to crush its political enemies, and ended with the effort to solve the Jewish problem, once and for all, by eliminating the allegedly alien people from the German Volk. A parallel and equally perverse dialectic informs the attitude toward external foes that dominates this body of German thought. Langbehn and his fellow conservative Paul de Lagarde explicitly reject German efforts to acquire overseas colonies, insisting instead on the pressing need for more Lebensraum for the German people within Europe.112 Such arguments could be said simply to move the target of imperial aggression closer to home, yet the motivation

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Lagarde describes is quite different. The German quest for an overseas empire merely mimics the expansionist tendencies of Western European nations and is thus out of character with German culture. The acquisition of more Lebensraum within Europe, in contrast, would extend Germany’s agricultural base and therefore enable its economic self-­sufficiency, or “autarky,” as the Nazis would call it.113 Imperialist nations press forward in the name of global capitalism; Lagarde looks back to a preindustrial age of agrarian self-­sufficiency. The conquest of contiguous lands to the east is a means to the end of restoring a pan-­Germanic state in Mitteleuropa, not world conquest. In fact, however, intra-­European aggression soon served as the starting point for further expansion. Whether or not we accept Fritz Fischer’s thesis that the German generals deliberately provoked the First World War, he nevertheless demonstrates that German designs on Central European territories were not opposed to but, rather, went together with plans for a global empire.114 In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler rejects the need to reclaim the colonies that Germany lost in the war, but within little more than a decade, the desire to bring ethnic Germans “Heim ins Reich” turned into a struggle for world domination. The German imperial tradition of tolerating internal diversity and opposing external aggression had mutated into its opposite.

From the German Empire to the Weimar Republic Mann had begun to write Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in the fall of 1915. He finished the essay in December 1917 and added a preface the following spring.115 In that preface, Mann already strikes an elegiac chord, conceding that he has been devoting his energies to a lost cause, the defense of an old German tradition that would soon be swept away. The diaries that we have for Mann pick up in September 1918. He is awaiting the publication of Reflections with some trepidation, as he fears that the work will seem outdated by the time it reaches the bookstores. He consoles himself with the idea that the book, although an immediate anachronism at the time of its publication, will at least provide a faithful record of the period in which it was written: “The book is historic at the time of its appearance, but it will also remain historic.”116 A few days later, however, Mann sounded a less defiant note: “In any case, the book will be devoured by coming events.”117 Mann was certainly correct about the political turmoil to come. Within a matter of weeks, the First World War came to an end. The Austrian and German Kaisers abdicated, and a new German republic struggled to survive challenges

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from Spartacists on the left and disgruntled members of the military on the right. In Munich, Kurt Eisner proclaimed a socialist republic in early November; his party was defeated at the polls in January and February, and he was assassinated on his way to deliver his resignation speech. A radical group of anarchists and communists led by Ernst Toller, Gustav Landauer, and Erich Mühsam proclaimed the Socialist Republic of Bavaria in April, only to be crushed by the paramilitary troops of Ritter von Epp’s Freikorps, who then indulged in an orgy of brutal reprisals in which hundreds died.118 The political upheavals in Munich took place almost literally on Thomas Mann’s doorstep. His diaries of the period offer an eyewitness account of the events, even as they record his plans to resume work on The Magic Mountain and more mundane details about his regular haircuts and painful trips to the dentist. Throughout these months, Mann maintained a consistent sense of outrage against the Entente Powers, confusion about the state of affairs in Germany, and uncertainty about the future. “What will happen with Germany,” he wonders in September 1918, further specifying, “What will happen in Germany?”119 In retrospect, we know that the Weimar Republic would be formed in the following year and that Mann would come to its support in 1922. But how did he move from the antidemocratic diatribe of Reflections to the prodemocratic speech of that year? Had Mann undergone a political conversion that turned him from a reactionary Saul to a prodemocratic Paul? Or had his political views retained—­as he insisted—­a deeper consistency beneath the superficial change? For an answer, we turn to the aforementioned diaries. Mann destroyed almost all of his diaries written prior to 1933, but he saved those of the years 1918–­21, presumably because he needed them for the portions of Doctor Faustus that were set during those years. Mann’s biographer, Hermann Kurzke, concludes that because Mann’s political opinions shift rapidly in his postwar diaries, they should not be taken seriously; they are, in his opinion, mere experiments in political thought, trial balloons that float far above political reality.120 However, Mann’s comments on the events of 1918–­19 reveal an inner consistency: they pick up ideas from his prewar period and anticipate his political positions of the years to come. Mann’s anger at the Entente Powers and their allies, including the United States, remains white hot in these diaries. That anger would cool when, decades later, he became an American citizen, but Mann never altered his belief in the fundamental consistency of the German character. Thus, in the much later Doctor Faustus, his reckoning with National Socialism, he collapses historical progression into a timeless present in which medieval demons continue to haunt modern Germany. In the immediate wake

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of the First World War, however, Mann was preoccupied with the question of finding a new form of government commensurate with the unchanging essence of the national character. A return of the emperor is not what Mann had in mind. Already in his second novel, Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness, 1909), Mann had portrayed German royalty, with gentle irony, as a benevolent anachronism, and his postwar diaries make it clear that he does not want to turn back the clock. The Bavarian Socialist Republic declared in November 1918 was certainly not an option that Mann endorsed. In a notorious outburst of antisemitism, Mann reacts in anger at the idea of “Munich, like Bavaria, ruled by Jewish intellectuals.” “That is the revolution!” he notes with disgust in his diary, claiming, “They are practically all Jews!”121 Readers might therefore be surprised when, in a diary entry a few months later, Mann seems to welcome the far more radical Soviet-­ style government of the Räterepublik: “I’m ready to run out into the street and scream ‘Down with the Western democracy of lies! Long live Germany and Russia! Three cheers for communism!’” As the context makes clear, however, Mann’s hypothetical willingness to embrace communism is really an expression of his heartfelt hatred of the Western allies’ “Entente-­Imperialism.”122 In any case, it seems highly unlikely that the meticulously tailored and tightly wrapped Mann would really soil his spats in the street; he finds the very thought of a government in control of a debauched and drunken mob repulsive—­for which reason he regards the thugs who began to swarm toward the Nazi Party with equal disdain. Thus Mann does not consider socialists, communists, or fascists to be viable options for government in the immediate postwar years. What consistently interests him is the restoration of a German state in Central Europe that would include lands that belonged to imperial Germany and the German-­speaking portions of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. “Very significant and pleasing the founding of a German-­Austrian state!” he wrote in early October 1918, predicting, “They will be a future component of the German Reich.”123 On November 10, the day before the war ended, Mann confided to his diary that he had “nothing against an independent German state that included Austro-­Germany and nothing against the collapse of the dynasties and the empire.”124 Later that month, he noted again that he “would be satisfied if the German Empire dissolved and was replaced by something like an unpolitical-­powerless federation of republics [ein unpolitisch-­ machtloses Nebeneinander von Republiken] with Bavaria plus Germany-­Austria (or these two as distinct units).”125 Mann was not alone in his dream of a new pan-­German union: “From both the Austrian and the German sides it was taken for granted that what was

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impossible in 1848–­1849 would now become realized, and an Austria consisting now exclusively of Germans would take its place with the other German Stämme in one unified democratic state.” Members of the provisional Austrian government signaled their willingness to join in a greater German Reich in the immediate wake of the war, but the measure was never adopted by the German government and was officially forbidden by the victorious allies on September 2, 1919.126 Months later, in the midst of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920, Mann’s imagination once again ran wild. “I strongly disapprove of Kapp,” he noted in his diary,127 but he also confessed that he would not mind if the current regime collapsed, because its fall would be the necessary precondition for the rise of a new pan-­German empire: “Annexation of German-­Austria [Anschluß Deutsch-­Österreichs] and the Tyrol to southern Germany. Independent development of Prussia in accordance with its character and taste. The ‘Reich’ once again an idea, dream, hope [Das ‘Reich’ wieder Idee, Traum, Hoffnung].”128 Mann did not keep these ideas to the privacy of his diaries; as late as December 1920, he published a one-­paragraph essay titled “Heim, ins Reich!” in which he proclaimed that he was “convinced that the annexation of Austria to Germany was just a matter of time.” “I confess from the bottom of my heart,” he continued, “the desire that it should happen soon.” The phrase “Heim ins Reich” was subsequently discredited, as Hitler used it as an excuse for the forced annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and to justify naked aggression against Poland in the name of bringing Danzig back into the fold of the German nation. But in 1920, Mann envisioned a peaceful coalition, not a violent conquest: “The unified Germany that will include Austria as one of its provinces will be federalist.”129 Mann’s dream of a peaceful, pan-­German federation in Central Europe was not fulfilled. Meanwhile, the reality of life in the Weimar Republic was becoming more troubling. Communist insurgents tried, on multiple occasions, to overthrow the government from the left, while right-­wing militants attacked the republic with a series of violent acts that culminated in the assassination of minister of foreign affairs Walther Rathenau on June 22, 1922. The murder provoked widespread outrage and triggered an “outpouring of grief and countless demonstrations all over Germany in which millions affirmed their support for the republic.”130 Thomas Mann joined the chorus, to the surprise and consternation of his fellow conservatives. Over the course of the summer, he transformed an essay originally conceived as a tribute to Gerhardt Hauptmann on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday into a pledge of allegiance to the Weimar Republic; he delivered the speech in Berlin on October 13, 1922. “When sentimental obscurantism organizes itself into terror and violates the land with

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repulsive and idiotically murderous deeds, then the state of emergency can no longer be denied,” proclaimed Mann in “The German Republic.” “My goal,” he continued, “is to win you over to the republic and for what is called democracy and what I call humanity.”131 That Mann made the move to support the Weimar Republic against right-­ wing acts of terror is laudable; how he justified the decision in light of his previous publications is more ambiguous. When the war began, Mann defended the depth of German culture against the superficial rationality of French civilization. Structuring his argument along the lines of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Mann viewed the German entry into the war as a manifestation of Dionysian madness controlled by iron discipline: “But civilization is reason, enlightenment, . . . intellect, . . . the sworn enemy of drives, passions; it is anti-­demonic, anti-­heroic, . . . anti-­genial.”132 To win over his skeptical audience of conservative students and to convince the broader reading public of the consistency of his Weltanschauung, Mann has to argue that the sort of democracy he now advocates in 1922 has the same passion that motivated the German mobilization for war in 1914. He also wants to convince his audience that the democracy he supports is specifically German and not an expression of the allegedly universal values that he excoriated in his earlier essays. To do so, he enlists an unusual pair of poets: the German romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and the American Walt Whitman. Uniting the two, Mann insists, “is love—­not some sort of pale, anemic, ascetically empathetic reason but, rather, in the sense of the obscene root symbol [Calamus] that Whitman chooses for the title of his wildly pious series of songs” in celebration of an “erotic, all-­embracing democracy.”133 So much for the passion. That Novalis, the quintessentially German romantic, should share the American’s enthusiasm for democracy is surprising but true, Mann insists, and his audience can thus rest assured that the republic he defends is appropriate for the German nation and not just “something for clever Jewish boys” (eine Angelegenheit scharfer Judenjungen).134 Mann’s seemingly gratuitous antisemitic aside—­which he repeats later in his essay—­might be explained, if not excused, as a sop that he casts to the rabid reactionaries in his audience, a cheap rhetorical trick designed to win the skeptical over to his side. In fact, however, the disparaging references to the Jews are part of a larger plan designed to underscore the national specificity of the Weimar Republic. The Jews fill the slot occupied by the French in “Thoughts in War” and Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, and within the logic of this sort of ethnic nationalism, there is little difference between the two: in antisemitic parlance, the Jews were “rootless cosmopolitans,” cut off from the vital energy of a people bound to a particular place and joined by common blood, just as the

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French saw their values as universal, rather than nationally specific. Both share the gift of gab that betrays a lack of true German profundity. Thus “civilization’s literary man” (der Zivilisationsliterat)135 is just another name for a clever Jewish boy. Mann’s use of Novalis in defense of the Weimar Republic bears scrutiny as well. As I noted in chapter 6 of the present study, Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe” seems, at first glance, to glorify the medieval monarchy rather than to support modern democracy. Mann challenges received opinions by adopting the thesis of Ricarda Huch, whose Die Blütezeit der Romantik (The heyday of romanticism, 1900) and Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik (The spread and decline of romanticism, 1902) distinguish between the politically progressive early romantics and the conservatives who followed. “Hardenberg’s ‘Europe or Christianity’ was not reactionary,” insists Mann in a short essay written in 1924 on the occasion of Huch’s sixtieth birthday.136 Novalis begins his essay with a nostalgic evocation of the past but ends it with a call for a postrevolutionary future, in which international strife will cease in a newly unified Europe. Novalis nevertheless laments that the Reformation divided Christianity into two factions and divorced the letter from the spirit of religion; he praises the mystical unity of medieval Europe and denounces the Enlightenment in ways that anticipate Mann’s distinction, in Reflections, “between the people [Volk] as a mystical character and the individualistic mass,”137 between German culture and French civilization. Behind Mann’s open citation of Whitman lie the ideas of Hans Blüher, whose Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (The role of eroticism in male society, 1917–­19) argues that strong societies are founded on passionate bonds between men, while it insists that Jews lack the masculine strength necessary for a powerful state. As a result, “The German Republic” is as ambivalent, in its own way, as “Christianity or Europe”: Mann embraces democracy in no uncertain terms, ending his essay with a resounding cheer for the Weimar Republic: “Es lebe die Republik!” He does so, however, in a way that seeks to make the universal principles of democracy compatible with nationally specific German culture, particularly stressing the passions it inspires, in a way that opens him to charges of irrationalism and antisemitism. About the latter accusation, he seems unconcerned in this context (although he was elsewhere at pains to insist that he was a friend of the Jews), but he does signal discomfort with the former charge. In the previously cited passage in which Mann condemns the acts of terror that have arisen out of the spirit of “sentimental obscurantism,” he goes on to wonder if he might be partially to blame: “I . . . must fear that, out of a need for intellectual freedom, I provided weapons for obscurantism.”138 “The German

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Republic” is intended to exorcise the irrational demons from his political thought by voicing a clear-­cut commitment to democracy, but the shades of his recent past continue to haunt this essay and his subsequent work. Two years after he delivered his controversial defense of the Weimar Republic, Thomas Mann finally published The Magic Mountain. More than a decade had passed since he first conceived of the novel as a brief comic counterpart to Death in Venice, years that had been devoted primarily to political essays, in addition to two minor works, an autobiographical poem, and a story about his dog. Now Mann reclaimed his place in the public eye with a monumental novel that won widespread critical acclaim. From this point on in his career, there would be a symbiotic relationship between his fictional and nonfictional works. Thus The Magic Mountain marked not an abrupt end to the concerns of the previous decade but, rather, a continuation of politics by other means. In The Magic Mountain, Mann splits apart the precarious fusion between Western reason and Germanic profundity that he describes in “The German Republic,” to return, from a different point of view, to the dichotomy that had once informed his wartime journalism. Settembrini dominates the first half of the novel, as a representative of Enlightenment thought and liberal politics, civilization’s literary man, this time portrayed with gentle irony rather than the dripping scorn of Reflections. That negativity has now been shifted to Naphta, who opposes Settembrini at every turn. The Dionysian passions that Mann embraces as an expression of German culture in 1914 and tries to enlist in defense of the Weimar Republic break out again in Naphta’s reckless embrace of totalitarian terror, while Settembrini’s Western-­oriented liberalism appears in a milder light. Yet Settembrini’s all-­too-­reasonable liberalism cannot do justice to the dark and dangerous forces that Naphta perceives. The two ideologues thus stake out irreconcilable positions, neither of which can be unequivocally embraced. Instead, Mann offers tantalizing glimpses of a third path, a synthesis—­appropriate to Germany as the “land of the center”—­that is most clearly formulated in the italicized insight that Hans Castorp derives from his vision in the snow: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”139 In other words, one must acknowledge the force of irrationality and death in a way that Settembrini does not, but refuse to surrender to its power, as Naphta does. Castorp quickly forgets what he had learned, however, and the novel ends on a note of tenuous hope, set against the near-­certainty of Castorp’s death on the battlefields of the First World War. Mann derived many of the ideas that inform Naphta’s political opinions from Heinrich von Eicken’s Geschichte und System der Mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung (History and system of the medieval worldview).140 Mann read the

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book with great intensity in April 1919, just as he was about to resume work on The Magic Mountain and during the days in which the political turmoil in Munich was at its height. Mann’s fascination with a book about the Middle Ages might seem odd under such circumstances, but it provided him with information about a prenational era at a time when he was intensely interested in what sort of government would replace Germany’s Second Empire. At this point, Mann favored the establishment of a pan-­German federation while fiercely rejecting the democratic nation-­states of the West. As noted earlier, he also toyed, briefly and half seriously, with sympathy for the communists, largely because he felt that anything would be preferable to the imposition of the Entente’s hegemony over defeated Germany, but also because they advocated a postnational political organization that seemed another potential alternative to Western democracy. Mann notes in his diary that reading Eicken’s history “is stimulating mainly because I find the ascetic state of God [Gottesstaat] analogous to the communist world culture [Weltkultur] of the future,” although Mann predicts that “its demand for absolute power would also fail due to human nature.”141 The debates between Naphta and Settembrini turn on the question of finding an appropriate political form for the states of modern Europe. They take place on the eve of the First World War within the context of the novel, but they raise issues that preoccupied Mann and his contemporaries in its immediate aftermath. Settembrini is an Italian patriot and supporter of the French Revolution, who champions the virtues of the modern nation-­state; Naphta prefers forms of government that preceded and might eventually supersede the nation. Thus he defends the otherwise contradictory combination of medieval Catholicism and modern communism, as both are based on a world order that transcends the boundaries of discrete nations. Settembrini looks back approvingly to the time when “a sense of national honor began to solidify against hierarchical pretension”; Naphta rejects his “nationalist mania” for “the world-­ conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church.”142 Settembrini attacks the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire as “a mummified version of the Holy Roman Empire”143 and an enemy of Italy; Naphta derides the capitalist economy of the nation-­ state. He shares the medieval rejection of usury and welcomes the idea that “these economic principles and standards have been resurrected in the modern movement of communism.”144 Settembrini insists on the supremacy of civilization over barbarism, the West over the East, enlightenment over obscurantism, and democracy over tyranny; Naphta argues for the primacy of the community over the individual, faith over reason, “discipline and sacrifice, renunciation of the ego and coercion of the personality.” As Settembrini becomes increasingly

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agitated, Naphta drives home his point: “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—­terror.”145 Naphta commits suicide before he can do any harm to others, but his ideas cast an ominous shadow over the future course of German history. Mann will return to some of his ideas, in caricatured form, in the intellectual debates among the members of the Kridwiss circle in Doctor Faustus, which are set during the same period of the early 1920s in which Mann was completing The Magic Mountain. They dabble in the sort of irrationalism that Mann found increasingly alarming as the National Socialist movement gathered steam and that, from the perspective of the 1940s, seemed more than a little “politically suspicious,” as Settembrini might have said.146 Germany’s Third Reich combined the worst aspects of the different forms of governments that Mann had pondered over the course of the previous decades. In Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann rejects the centralizing tendencies of the imperialist nation-­ state “that is leveling all national culture into a homogeneous civilization.”147 Nazi Germany took the “leveling” tendencies that Mann had perceived in Western democracies to an extreme, as it sought to eradicate all forms of internal difference, beginning with the persecution of political dissidents and ending with the annihilation of all those deemed unworthy of living among the “master race.” The idea of a nationally specific culture, an idea that Mann found rooted in a venerable German tradition extending back to Goethe and Herder, now lent ideological support for genocidal racism. The imperialist aggression that Mann had mocked among the purveyors of Western civilization’s universal values was child’s play in comparison with the blitzkrieg that Hitler unleashed in the opening months of the war. Mann hated totalitarianism above all things, and he remarked more than once that Hitler had taught him how to hate.148 “I earnestly think that there has never been such a threat to freedom in the world as at present,” Mann stated in a radio interview recorded in English in the late spring of 1940.149 “I still have a profound faith in freedom,” he insisted, recalling that he had “once expressed this faith in a little book called ‘The Coming Victory of Democracy.’” Linking democracy to “the highest human attributes, .  .  .  the dignity of mankind, . . . truth and justice,” Mann claims that it must confront the unprecedented evil that has arisen in Europe: “Democracy’s task is to defend civilization against barbarism.”150 Here we find a clear statement of the shift in values that Philipp Gut identifies as central to Mann’s political evolution, from a defense of German culture against Western civilization to an embrace of the allied forces of Western culture and civilization against Nazi barbarism.151 Even in this short statement for an American audience, however, we find

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evidence of core beliefs that long antedate Mann’s support for American democracy. When Mann expresses his “utmost faith that in America the absorption and assimilation of immigrants is nearly inexhaustible,”152 he touches on a theme that resurfaces regularly in his essays of the 1930s and 1940s, in which America’s diversity and cosmopolitanism serve as a model of the way Germany ought to be. As Mann argues in “Deutschland und die Deutschen” (Germany and the Germans, 1945), Germany has made the mistake of embracing an “arrogant provincialism,”153 in which being German means being “only German, and nothing else and nothing beyond that,” a “racial and anti-­ European” understanding of national identity that “is always very near the barbaric.”154 Mann contends that Germany ought to be more like Goethe, who rejected militant nationalism in favor of “the super-­national world Germanism, world literature” (das Übernationale, das Weltdeutschtum, die Weltliteratur).155 Instead, the “Germans yielded to the temptation of basing upon their innate cosmopolitanism a claim to European hegemony, even to world domination, whereby this trait became its exact opposite, namely the most presumptive and menacing nationalism and imperialism.”156 As Mann put it in one of his radio addresses to the German people, they were going about things backwards: “Instead of making Germany European, they wanted Europe to become German.”157 Thus Mann ends “I Am an American” with a vision of postwar Europe as “a Democracy of free peoples who are responsible each one to the other—­a European Federation in fact.”158 Even Europe seems provincial today, Mann notes when addressing the Germans in another wartime radio broadcast.159 “Germany and the Germans” ends, therefore, with a vision of a German diaspora, in which German national identity will become aufgehoben, canceled and preserved within the greater unity of a “world state” (Weltstaat).160 In “Germany and the Germans,” Mann, seeking the source of Germany’s Sonderweg, identifies two culprits, Luther and Bismarck. Luther’s insistence on the “priesthood of all believers” encouraged European democracy, but his rigid distinction between religious freedom and political subservience crushed any potential for liberal reform. Bismarck took advantage of the Lutheran tradition of obedience to authority, when he used the desire for national unification to forge a Reich that had nothing in common with the liberal nation-­state of the French Revolution: “It was purely a power structure aiming toward the hegemony of Europe.” Mann’s harsh assessment of “the Unholy German Empire of the Prussian Nation” (das unheilige Deutsche Reich preußischer Nation)161 in 1945 echoes his anti-­Prussian polemic in Reflections of a Nonpoliti-

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cal Man, which, in turn, gives theoretical expression to ideas already implicit in Buddenbrooks. His idea of a European or even global federation of nations, which Mann floats in his polemics against Nazi Germany, recycles ideas voiced in his diaries of 1918–­19 and looks back to a long tradition of German cosmopolitan thought that includes Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche. There is nothing new, in other words, in the fundamental principles that govern Mann’s thought in the struggle against Hitler and Nazi Germany, although there is a pragmatic shift toward support of Western democracy in general and the United States in particular as the best way to defend the values that he holds dear. Mann’s bold declaration “I am an American” is another way of saying “I am a German” (of the proper sort): “As an American I am a citizen of the world (Weltbürger)—­and that is in keeping with the original nature of the German.”162 Once again, Mann is simply adapting ideas expressed long before his alleged conversion to democracy. In Reflections, Mann already insists that he is a proper German in the best sense precisely because he is an improper German, a Hanseatic senator’s son with a little drop of his mother’s Latin blood. Thus Mann speculates “that perhaps, without some foreign admixture, no higher German character is possible; that precisely the exemplary Germans were Europeans who would have regarded every limitation to the nothing-­but-­ German as barbaric.”163 In Reflections, one also finds the anti-­Prussian polemic that Mann adapts to his critique of Nazi Germany and will adapt, again, to his critique of the totalitarian tendencies in the postwar German Democratic Republic and McCarthy’s America. Mann’s repeated references to his mother’s Portuguese “blood” leads me to a final comment here on the inner consistency of his thought. Mann’s proud insistence on his mixed ethnic background flies in the face of the racist orthodoxy of late nineteenth-­century thought. Arthur de Gobineau insists, “In all countries there is a secret revulsion against the crossing of blood”; Langbehn decries “blood mixtures” and condemns “mulattos”; Houston Stewart Chamberlain links the fall of Rome to racial chaos and ascribes the rise of the Germans to their racial purity.164 By foregrounding his racial impurity, Mann turns the language of racial degeneration into its opposite. Rather than saying he is a German artist despite the fact that he is not rassenrein (racially pure), he claims, in Reflections, that he is German in a higher sense because of his racial blood mixture, just as he links Tonio Kröger’s artistic sensitivity to a heritage that combines the sober German respectability of his father with his mother’s fiery Latin blood. Such arguments seem almost calculated to please no one: rather than rejecting as hogwash the very notion of “hot Latin blood”

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or embracing then-­popular notions of racial purity, Mann uses the language of racial essentialism to formulate his argument for a better, more ethnically diverse Germany. Through racially charged statements about himself, Mann turns potential stigma into a sign of distinction.165 Matters become more complicated when he writes about the Jews. Here again, Mann employs the language of racial difference. As he notes in a diary entry of October 27, 1945, the Jews are different, a breed apart from ethnic Germans: the Jews are “after all a single, distinct race” (doch ein Geblüt).166 We recall his final comment about Kafka: “Pious Jew; very alien after all.” As many other remarks in his diaries and letters make clear, Mann did not define that difference in a particularly appealing way: he presents Jews as having an acid wit that has a corrosive effect on the more sentimentally inclined Germans; as such, they serve a useful purpose, bringing balance to an otherwise lachrymose lot, but they are a bitter medicine best taken in small drafts.167 Characters identified as Jews or coded in ways that make their Jewishness highly probable abound in Mann’s fiction, including the rival Hagenström family in Buddenbrooks, the radical reactionary Naphta in The Magic Mountain, and the garrulous impresario Saul Fitelberg and the abrasive intellectual Chaim Breisacher in Doctor Faustus. Fitelberg is slightly ridiculous, jabbering on in a mix of German and French, but the other characters are described as threatening, physically repellant, and ideologically dangerous. If we remain within the paradigm of a conversion narrative, such antisemitic caricatures seem out of place, as do Mann’s repeated references to his own racial mixture and that of his children and grandchildren, not to mention his seemingly unmotivated jabs at “clever Jewish boys” in the midst of his otherwise loving embrace of Weimar democracy. But if we consider the deeper consistency of Mann’s thought—­as he urged us to do—­such slips are part and parcel of a larger worldview. Mann remained convinced that there are fundamental differences between nations and peoples; he also believed that those differences should be incorporated into a political order based on the principles of cosmopolitan federalism rather than totalitarian imperialism. Coupling these core values with a pragmatic flexibility regarding which particular government was best suited, at any given time, to defend them enabled Mann to become an admirable opponent to evil and defender of democracy. At other times, those same principles led him to oppose democracy, in the name of Germany’s unique cultural traditions, and to defend ethnic diversity, in the language of racial difference. In “Germany and the Germans,” Mann argued against the facile distinction between a “good” and “bad” Germany. The ten-

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dencies are rather inextricably mixed together, he insisted, and—­as Germany’s most representative writer—­the same is true of himself. Mann claimed, “It is all within me, I have been through it all”—­or, literally, “I experienced it in my own [racially mixed] body” (ich habe es alles am eigenen Leibe erfahren).168 Gustav von Aschenbach already cautions those who would enshrine the works of a troubled writer in the national culture, and Mann does the same. In one of his best moments, he reminds readers of the impulses that inform some of his worst.

Chapter 9

Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich

Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) opens with shots of Hitler descending godlike from the clouds into the city of Nuremberg to attend the Nazi Party rally of 1934. Viewers follow along as Hitler’s motorcade makes its way through ecstatic crowds, watch the city awaken as the camera lingers on picturesque buildings draped in swastika flags, and have a front-­row seat as Hitler greets flustered women dressed in traditional folk costumes. The party congress proper opens with a speech in which Rudolf Hess expresses his deep gratitude to Adolf Hitler for what he has already achieved and what is sure to follow: “Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a Heimat [homeland]. To be a Heimat for all Germans in the world!” What sort of Heimat does Hess have in mind? One of the tightly choreographed scenes that follows suggests an answer. A speaker, shot from a low angle to emphasize his visionary leadership, calls out, “Comrade! Where are you from?” “From Friesland!” answers a young man. The identifications continue: “And you, comrade?” “From Bavaria!” “And you?” “From Kaiserstuhl!” The individual responses eventually end, and a thundering chorus of united voices chants, “One folk! One führer! One Reich! Germany!” (Ein Volk! Ein Führer! Ein Reich! Deutschland!). The stress on the collective German Heimat in Hess’s speech, followed by the identification of specific locales within the German landscape, encourages us to reflect on the relation between the local and the national in the Third Reich. As Celia Applegate observes, the Heimat movement, which was instrumental in cultivating, in the nineteenth century, a sense of national identity in and through the local, did not thrive during the Nazi era. Heimat celebrated local differences, whereas the Nazis sought what has been aptly termed, in another context, “the obliteration of localism.”1 “If ever a state merited being called totalitarian,” summarizes Richard J. Evans, “then it was the Third 215

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Reich.”2 In a political system that favored “the gigantic and national” over “the small and local,” the Heimat movement was doomed: “Against the claims of locality, . . . the Nazis insisted on the absolute priority of the nation, which they defined from a fictive center—­the Führer—­on outward and downward. In the face of such a world view there remained little point to the cultivation of Heimat at all.”3 What, then, are we to make of the emphatic insistence on local origins by those individuals singled out in Leni Riefenstahl’s slick piece of political propaganda masquerading as a documentary?4 Triumph of the Will suggests that regional diversity was not only tolerated but actively celebrated, albeit within strictly conceived limits. The brief scene in Riefenstahl’s film finds its extended counterpart in Josef Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (Literary history of the German tribes and landscapes, 1912–­ 18). Although that multivolume work was completed before the advent of the Third Reich, it anticipates the belief in the formative influence of “Blut und Boden” on the national culture and was thus easily adopted by the new regime.5 As a curious footnote to history, Nadler studied with one of Kafka’s professors at the University of Prague;6 more ominously, Thomas Mann cites Nadler’s work with approval in 1926 when discussing the decisive influence of Lübeck on his view of the world.7 Nadler begins his work with a section on Germanic “tribes and landscapes” (Stämme und Landschaften). “In the first century BCE, the Germans were still homeless [heimatlos]” (emphasis in original), he explains, but five hundred years later, everything had changed: “Everyone now had a homeland. The landscape, so essential to everyone and created almost solely for a very particular tribe (or biological type, Stammesart), had now received its people, who would grow ever more firmly rooted through the centuries with its soul to this soil (Scholle).”8 The characters in Triumph of the Will thus proclaim their tribal origins as members of the Germanic people grown one with their native land. Equally important, however, are those individuals, groups, and places that are conspicuous by their absence in this scene and the film as a whole—­Socialist Berlin, political dissidents of any stripe, the physically or mentally disabled, Jews. The collective rapture captured in Riefenstahl’s film occludes its dark negative, the spirit of hatred and violence directed at those whose deviance is deemed dangerous to the forced homogeneity of the Nazi nation. In this chapter, I consider the theme of Heimat in the work of Siegfried Lenz (1926–­2014) and Günter Grass (1927–­2015). As almost exact contemporaries, both men underscored the significance of their date of birth in shaping their view of the world. “I was thirteen when the war began,” recalls Lenz.9

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“My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war broke out in several places at once,” echoes Grass.10 In Kopfgeburten (Headbirths, 1980), Grass spins out a fantasy about what might have happened if he had been born ten years earlier: “In 1933 I’d have been sixteen and not six; at the outbreak of the war twenty-­two and not twelve. Subject to immediate call­up, I would probably, like most of my age group, have been killed in the war.”11 As it was, both men spent their formative years in the Third Reich and were just old enough to have served in the German military. Lenz was drafted into the Germany navy near the end of the war and deserted when his ship ran aground in Denmark. According to documents released in 2007, he was a member of the Nazi Party, but Lenz insisted that he had been enlisted, together with many others, without his knowledge or consent.12 Grass made a notoriously belated confession, in his 2006 autobiography, that he had served as a member of the Waffen-­SS in the final months of the war; he had always been open about his experience as a teenage soldier who believed, to the bitter end, in Germany’s ultimate victory (Endsieg). Both men atoned for their sins in the 1960s, campaigning together for Willi Brandt and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) and urging their fellow Germans to come to terms with the Nazi past. As important as the timing of their births for their subsequent careers were the places in which these writers were born. Lenz and Grass grew up in regions of Germany that were no longer part of the divided nation after the war: Lenz was born and raised in the town of Lyck in East Prussia (today’s Ełk, Poland), and Grass came from Danzig (today’s Gdansk, also in Poland). Both writers used their fiction to summon up the homelands of their childhood, bygone worlds whose memories were tainted by associations with the Nazi past. These writers’ works are thus infused with nostalgia for a homeland that no longer exists and with warnings against those who would use that nostalgia for nefarious political purposes.

Siegfried Lenz: The Joys of Duty and the Language of Silence “World literature depends on a circumscribed space, presupposes proximity, an easily surveyed topography,” writes Siegfried Lenz in a review of a book about Danish literary history. He continues, “The centers lie on the periphery. One can probably say that, in the broadest sense, provinciality is a decisive requirement for world literature.”13 Lenz practiced what he preached. He scored his first literary success with the publication of So zärtlich war Suleyken (So tender was Suleyken, 1955). That slim collection of short stories is a homage to

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his lost Heimat, evoking the landscape and the people of his native Masuria. In its accessible style and often jocular tone, it could be seen as the literary equivalent of the Heimatfilme beginning to be popular in the German cinema of the time.14 More than two decades later, in the far more voluminous and ambitious Heimatmuseum (Heimat Museum, 1978), Lenz returned to the site of his East Prussian homeland. In a review of that novel, Horst Bienek groups it with Grass’s Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977) as example of a new kind of Heimatliteratur, one that was less sentimental about the past and more critical about the potential for ideological abuse inherent in the concept and the genre.15 In the briefest of outlines, Lenz’s very long Heimatmuseum tells the story of Zygmunt Rogalla from the town of Lucknow in East Prussia (the autobiographical echoes of the protagonist’s name and place of birth are unmistakable, although Zygmunt, born in 1905, is a generation older than his author).16 After the First World War, Zygmunt’s great uncle Adam collects artifacts from the surrounding region for a local Heimat museum. Zygmunt serves as his assistant and then takes over the museum’s directorship after his great uncle dies in a hunting accident. As Russian troops advance on the region toward the end of the Second World War, Zygmunt and the other ethnic Germans must flee to the West. After the war, Zygmunt reopens the museum in Schleswig-­Holstein with the aid of his fellow refugees. When he learns that an unreconstructed Nazi from his former village is destined to be named director of the new Heimatverein (homeland association), Zygmunt decides to destroy the museum. He is badly burned in the process, and as he recovers in the hospital, he tells his story to Martin Witt, a friend of his daughter. Heimatmuseum pits a healthy concept of the homeland, as the site of popular tradition and local lore, against Nazi efforts to enlist the museum for their cause. As Zygmunt repeatedly insists, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that one might feel a certain fondness for one’s place of birth, and such affection does not necessarily preclude an interest in the wider world. He admits to his patient listener “that this word [Heimat] has gotten a bad reputation, that it was misused, so seriously misused that you can hardly pronounce it without risk today.” But to Zygmunt, Heimat is a place where he feels a sense of protection (“Geborgenheit”): “It is the place where you feel safe, in language, in feeling—­yes, even when you are silent.” Against those who “would make Heimat responsible for a certain kind of arrogant narrow-­mindedness, who accuse it of xenophobia,”17 Zygmunt insists that knowledge of the world, “Weltkunde,” always begins with knowledge of the homeland, “Heimatkunde” (15). In keeping with his belief that the homeland belongs to everyone, Zygmunt puts the original relics on display when he takes over the museum (his

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uncle had exhibited only facsimiles of the more valuable pieces), and he even allows visitors to touch the objects, in a tactile act of reverence for items that are rooted in communal experience and, thus, part of the collective memory. Things take a bad turn as the Second World War approaches and as the Nazis come to power. Lucknow lies in a German-­Polish border zone, and the museum originally displayed artifacts from both Germanic and Slavic peoples. Such tolerance is no longer desirable in the newly nationalist atmosphere. Already in a plebiscite of 1920, the Masurian townspeople voted overwhelmingly to be part of Germany rather than Poland, and the pressure to toe the new ideological line has only grown greater. A visiting Nazi official inspects the Heimat museum and concludes that although it contains interesting materials, its “touchingly random” collection, with its “lack of an appropriate political perspective” on historical developments (“Tendenzlosigkeit”), makes the museum unworthy of official support (368). The Nazis would like to transform the museum into a “heroic display,” “an ideological temple” in service of a new spirit of “militancy and ethnic pride,” or “Wesensstolz” (369). In the place of the eclectic mixture of Germanic and Slavic artifacts, the Nazis prefer an image of Masuria as a “purely German outpost in the East since time immemorial,” under whose hills can be discovered ancient “buried proofs of the German people, of the German race [deutschen Volkstums, deutscher Eigenart]” (370). Although one must sympathize with the anti-­Nazi sentiments of Lenz’s Heimatmuseum, that novel leaves much to be desired. The narrative frame is undeveloped, and Martin Witt remains little more than a name, a bottomless receptacle into which Zygmunt Rogalla pours his ceaseless narrative flood. Clumsy efforts to create a sense of immediacy—­“What was I saying?” “Where was I?”—­soon grow tediously repetitive. Siegfried Lenz could do better, had done better, as Horst Bienek notes, with a sense of polite exasperation, at the end of his review. Thus I now turn from the heartfelt but hapless Heimatmuseum to the work that justly established Lenz’s international fame, Deutsch­ stunde (The German Lesson, 1968). Lenz’s The German Lesson also employs a narrative frame, although with considerably more skill than the later Heimatmuseum. The protagonist of The German Lesson, Siggi Jepsen, is an inmate in a correctional facility for juvenile delinquents. It is 1954; the prison is in Hamburg. Siggi’s German teacher assigns him and his fellow prisoners an essay on the topic of “the joys of duty.” Siggi decides to write about his father, a policeman in the little town of Rugbüll near the German-­Danish border, who was ordered by the Nazi authorities during the Second World War to enforce a decree that forbad a local artist, Max Ludwig Nansen, to paint. The father fulfills his duty punctiliously, even obses-

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sively, without giving a thought to whether or not the ban is justified, and the son devotes himself with equal ardor to the writing of his essay. One class period is not enough to complete the assignment, nor is a second day, a week, or even a month. In the end, Siggi Jepsen spends the better part of a year, in solitary confinement, completing the essay, which grows into a novel. He finally submits his work to the authorities and is released to an uncertain future. The German Lesson was a huge popular success in Germany and was translated into more than twenty foreign languages, making Lenz one of the best-­known German authors of his generation.18 On rereading the novel today, it is easy to understand why: Lenz tells a compelling story, with sharply drawn characters set against the hauntingly beautiful landscape of a northern German coastal village. The German Lesson delights but also instructs, reminding its readers that the “banality of evil” among little men like Siggi’s father made the Nazi atrocities possible. By continuing his narrative into the postwar period, Lenz underscores how quickly all but the worst perpetrators were rehabilitated, while leaving innocent victims like Siggi Jepsen with lasting psychological trauma. The German Lesson also benefited from good timing, as its release in late 1968 coincided with the protest movements that demanded a belated reckoning with the repressed iniquities of an older generation. It is no wonder, then, that the book became a runaway best seller in Germany, as it delivers the joy of a good, old-­fashioned Schmöker (entertaining novel) even as it reassures readers that they are fulfilling their civic duty. Hard-­bitten critics may be accused of cynicism when they wonder if a novel that pleased such a broad audience might not be lacking in aesthetic quality or in the depth of its engagement with the German past, but such suspicion is warranted in this case. A comparison with Grass’s The Tin Drum is instructive: Lenz began work on his novel in 1964, just five years after the publication of Grass’s novel, and Lenz’s indebtedness to the earlier work is clear.19 Both novels feature a 1950s narrative frame in which an incarcerated narrator recalls the war years. Both relate history from the bottom up, focusing on the family, as perceived by a child or adolescent, in locations far removed from the center of power or the major theaters of the war. Both narrators celebrate a significant birthday in the course of telling their stories: Oskar Matzerath turns thirty, and Siggi Jepsen turns twenty-­one. Yet the reader is likely to note the two works’ differences more than their superficial similarities. Lenz’s novel lacks the stylistic brio of The Tin Drum, its irrepressible linguistic inventiveness as well as its scabrous sense of humor. Lenz’s story also lacks the moral ambiguity that features so prominently in Grass’s novel. On the one hand, Oskar Matzerath, who barely escapes his father’s decision to commit him to an

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institution because of his physical deformity, is a potential victim of the Nazis; he also takes a turn as a resistance fighter, when he disrupts the Nazi rally in Danzig with his drumming, a scene memorably captured in Völker Schlöndorff’s filming of the novel. On the other hand, Oskar entertains the Nazi troops in France and tries to stab his pregnant lover with scissors in an effort to abort her child, in one of several incidents that make it impossible to sympathize with him in any unqualified way. In contrast, The German Lesson divides characters neatly between good and evil: we sympathize with Siggi Jepsen from start to finish and shake our heads at his stubborn father’s insistence on obeying the letter of the law. Both parents are harshly insensitive to the emotional needs of their children, and Siggi’s mother, Gudrun Jepsen, is little more than a caricature of a Nazi ideologue, with her aversion to “gypsy” music, fear of physical illness, and rejection of Nansen’s “degenerate” art.20 Finally, the central conflict in The German Lesson centers on a romantic cliché, pitting the visionary artist-­genius against the duty-­bound Philistine who only feels comfortable when he is wearing his uniform. The ambivalence in The German Lesson is mainly found in the theme of the Heimat. As previously noted, one of the novel’s strengths lies in its ability to summon up the local landscape of the German-­Danish border region, with its grass-­covered dikes, muddy tidal basins, and ever-­changing skies. Even if readers from other parts of Germany were not familiar with the region from vacation excursions, they had almost certainly read Theodor Storm’s classic novella set in that landscape, Der Schimmelreiter (The rider of the white horse, 1888).21 Siggi feels a sense of fierce pride in his local origins: “I am not writing about any old place, but about my place; I am not searching for any old misfortune, but for my misfortune; in short, I am not telling just somebody’s story, some story that doesn’t commit me personally.”22 In this novel as in Heimatmuseum, however, loyalty to the homeland can easily be channeled into Nazi ideology. Siggi’s maternal grandfather, Per Arne Schessel, studies local lore as his personal hobbyhorse and occasionally treats his fellow villagers to an evening slide show—­projected onto the back of a map of Schleswig-­Holstein—­about the region’s history, culture, and landscape. He is joined in his enthusiasm by Asmus Asmussen, an honorary member of a neighboring Heimat association who is currently serving on coastal patrol in the German navy. While on shore leave, he is invited by Schessel to deliver a guest lecture on “sea and homeland,” for, as he insists, they are defending not an arbitrary ocean but, rather, “one’s own, one’s homeland sea [ein heimatliches Meer]” (125; 149). Even the ship must be kept in tip-­top condition, for it is a bit of the homeland floating on the ocean. Having no patience for the “damned folkloristic stuff” (68; 84) that

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his grandfather inflicts on his audience, Siggi mocks the “narrow-­mindedness into which people are lured by local patriotism [Heimatsinn],” which he derides as an “arrogance born of narrowness” (134; 163). For his grandfather and Asmussen, pride in one’s local roots serves as a convenient justification for condemning the rootlessness of others. These include Americans—­“Because they’re at home everywhere, they’re at home nowhere” (130; 158)—­and the painter Max Ludwig Nansen, who is said to be under the evil influence of his friend Dr. Theodor Busbeck. “Nobody knows the slightest thing about him,” complains Siggi’s mother, who continues, “He doesn’t belong anywhere. Rootless—­that’s what he is, a slightly superior sort of gypsy” (181; 218). In fact, however, Nansen is as much a product of the Heimat as any of the older generation. He was born and raised in the area and has known Siggi’s father since childhood, even once rescuing him from drowning. Although the Nazi authorities forbid him to paint, on the charge “that he’s become alienated from the healthy instinct of the people [dem Volkstum entfremdet]” and thus “a danger to the State and undesirable, simply degenerate” (104–­5; 127–­28), his art is and always has been deeply rooted in the local landscape. As a beginning artist, he traveled to major centers in Germany and Europe, but he never felt at home, and his art did not find acceptance. He eventually returned to his native village of Glüserup, where he completed “a number of woodcuts entitled ‘Grotesque and Legendary Motifs of the North Country,’” which were published in 1914 in the tellingly titled journal Wir (We) (164; 197). Rejected, on medical grounds, from military service, he continued to paint and live in the isolated North Friesian countryside, remaining allergic to urban centers even after his work began to receive critical acclaim. He and his wife joined a “nationalist movement” (Völkische Bewegung) early on, and Nansen became a Nazi Party member “only two years later than Adolf Hitler” (164–­65; 199). Although Nansen “at first welcomed the events of the year 1933” (165; 198–­ 99), he soon declined an offer to direct the Prussian Academy of Arts, on the grounds that he had become allergic to the color brown. When the regime confiscated some eight hundred of his paintings, Nansen canceled his membership in the Nazi Party. Lenz thus casts his artist-­hero as an antiurban Heimatkünstler of the sort that Julius Langbehn would have welcomed; Nansen’s political sympathies lie dangerously close to the Nazi movement in its early phases. Nansen redeems himself, however, by spurning the Nazi invitation to serve as Prussian art director, quitting the party, and serving as a kindly father figure to Siggi Jepsen when Siggi’s own father becomes an ogre. The Nazi rejection of Nansen’s art further serves to mobilize our sympathy, for we know that what the Nazis re-

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jected as “degenerate” counts today as the work of modern genius, and we assume that anyone rejected by the Nazis must also have rejected them. Yet matters are considerably more complicated and less exculpatory in this case. From the time of the novel’s publication, it was obvious that Lenz had based his portrait of Max Ludwig Nansen on the north German painter Emil Nolde, and Lenz’s account of Nansen’s early involvement in and later rejection of the Nazi movement corresponds to the account that Nolde published in his postwar autobiography. Recent scholarship has shown, though, that Nolde’s engagement with the Nazi Party lasted far longer and went much deeper than he cared to recall after the war. In a document dated December 1938, Nolde complained about the “excessive foreign influence” (Überfremdung) on German art, singled out the Jews for particular scorn and concluded with expressions of fervent loyalty to the führer, folk, and fatherland.23 Far from resisting the Nazi regime, Nolde supported it enthusiastically and was bitterly disappointed that the Nazis failed to enshrine his art as the authentic expression of the Nordic race. Only after the war did he remove blatantly antisemitic comments from his autobiography, in an act of self-­censorship that went unnoticed for decades. In light of these revelations, argued Jochen Hieber in the Frankfurt Allge­ meine Zeitung, we must revise our understanding of Nolde/Nansen as an artist-­ hero, an anti-­Nazi resistance fighter, as Nolde intimated in his revised autobiography and as Lenz portrayed him in his best-­selling novel.24 In fact, Nolde never left the party, and he resented the fact that he was passed over, in favor of his rival Max Pechstein, for the directorship of the Berlin art academy. When asked in April 2014 (a few months before Lenz’s death) about the recent revelations about Nolde, Lenz conceded that Nolde was a problematic individual whose portrait played an ambivalent role in The German Lesson and whose politics were “slightly catastrophic” (ein bisschen katastrophal). Above all, Lenz lamented the fact that Nolde never apologized for his support of the Nazi Party.25 Lenz can hardly be blamed if his portrait of the artist in The German Lesson does not reflect damning revelations that came to light more than four decades after the novel was published, and we should not reduce the fictional character to his real-­life model. As Ulrich Greiner points out in a sharp rejoinder to Hieber’s accusations, Lenz’s primary goal in The German Lesson was to expose the consequences of blind obedience to corrupt authorities. For artistic purposes, therefore, he needed the figure of Nansen as a positive counterpart to Siggi’s father. Nansen’s character was, to be sure, inspired by Nolde, but it would be a crude misunderstanding of the nature of literature to assume a one-­ to-­one correspondence between life and art.26 Let us restrict ourselves to the evidence in the text. As noted, Lenz makes no secret of Nansen’s initial sym-

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pathy for the Nazi movement or of his party membership. In spirit, Nansen’s art is infused with the same reverence for the Heimat that Schessel and Asmussen express more crudely during the meetings of the local homeland association; the Nazis reject Nansen’s art on the basis of its expressionist style, not its Germanic content. The bohemian friends of Siggi’s older brother see this clearly. When Nansen’s art is rehabilitated after the war, causing him to become an international celebrity, the young rebels mock his “quest for man’s primal condition, all very Germanic” (435; 520). Siggi tries to defend his hero, but the rebels scornfully reject the art that transforms the local landscape into a Germanic myth, replete with waves slapping in “stave rhymes” (435; 520; Stabreime, translation modified) on the north German beaches. One of them comments, “Your friend Nansen is the very type I regard as a disaster: back-­to-­ the-­land [heimatbewußt] and all that, visionary, and political” (438; 524). This is doubtless the sort of comment that Lenz had in mind when, decades later, he referred to Nansen as an ambivalent figure in The German Lesson: the artist is admirable as an individual and in his dedication to his craft, yet compromised by his past and the content of his art. Still, our close identification with Siggi’s perspective makes it easy to rally with him to Nansen’s defense against the disaffected youths, and Nansen’s defiantly sarcastic rejection of the Nazis seems calculated to excuse his early sympathy for the movement as a mistake that he quickly corrected when they showed their true colors (brown). The only explicit reason given for his earlier decision to leave the Völkische Bewegung is that he discovered “that the innermost circle of the movement had homosexual affiliations” (164; 198). There is no mention, here or anywhere else in the novel, about the Nazis’ antisemitism, nor is there a single Jewish character, with the possible exception of “the vaguely Jewish and conspicuously cosmopolitan art dealer Teo Busbeck.”27 The absence or perhaps deliberate avoidance of Jewish characters and antisemitism in a novel often hailed as one of the most important postwar efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past is striking and not a little disturbing. Siggi’s mother, the most two-­dimensional representative of Nazi ideology in the novel, harbors prejudice against physical and mental illness, modern art, and “Gypsy” music, but the word Jew never crosses her lips. Perhaps there were no Jews in the little town of Rugbüll, one might argue, but how many gypsies were there? Schleswig-­Holstein in general and the north Frisian area in particular were strongholds of Nazi support;28 thus it is inconceivable that a family like the Jepsens or their neighbors would have been unaware of the massive antisemitic propaganda in the Third Reich. Why, then, does Lenz’s The German Lesson remain stubbornly silent about the persecution of the Jews?

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One can only speculate about Lenz’s motivations, but the effect is to contribute to what Ernestine Schlant has termed “the language of silence” in postwar German literature that tries but fails to come to terms with the Holocaust.29 The German Lesson leaves us with an ambivalent feeling of an unpleasant sort: we are manipulated into sympathy for a former Nazi Party member who shares the movement’s reverence for the sea and soil of the local homeland, we join with the narrator in righteous indignation against a local policeman’s obsessive sense of duty, and we close the novel feeling that we have engaged in a serious fashion with evils of the Nazi past—­all without even a passing reference to the persecution and murder of millions of Jews.

Günter Grass: A Rootless Cosmopolitan Resists Reunification On February 2, 1990, Günter Grass delivered his “Kurze Rede eines vaterlands­ losen Gesellen” (“Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan”), at a conference devoted to finding “new answers to the German question.”30 Less than three months earlier, Germans and the rest of the world had been astonished by the opening of the Berlin Wall; at the time of the conference, momentum was already building toward the national reunification that would take place in October. The train had already left the station, as Rudolf Augstein insisted a few weeks later, but Günter Grass refused to get on board.31 As Grass insisted in his short speech, he much preferred that the solution to the current crisis would preserve the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic within a larger German confederation, rather than merge the two Germanys into a single nation-­state. He spelled out his reasons in five main points: first, the two Germanys could be allies rather than enemies, in a partnership that might seem less threatening to Germany’s neighbors than a single powerful state in the heart of Europe; second, such a confederation would respect the historical differences that had developed in the two Germanys over the past forty years of political division; third and fourth, a German confederation could be more easily integrated into a larger confederation of European nations, while preserving the cultural diversity of its own distinct regions; fifth, a confederation of East and West Germany could serve as a model for similarly divided nations such as Korea, Ireland, and Cyprus. Grass went on to remind his listeners that a single German nation-­state was historically the exception rather than the rule and that terrible crimes had been committed in the name of Germany when it had been unified. Auschwitz serves Grass as the one-­word refutation for any effort to reestablish a single German nation.32

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As we know, the German majority rejected Grass’s arguments, and those in East Germany who voted overwhelmingly for reunification could be excused for considering it presumptuous of Grass to speak on their behalf. Grass soon saw the writing on the wall: his since-­published diaries of 1990 offer an increasingly lugubrious commentary on a political process that many experienced with joy. Yet if Grass seems a cantankerous outsider in his immediate historical context, he is in the mainstream of the German tradition that has been the focus of this book. Grass’s calls for a pan-­German confederation after the fall of the Berlin Wall echo similar comments by Thomas Mann in the wake of the First World War, while his plea for the vitality of the German Kulturnation within a framework more reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire than the modern nation-­state recalls arguments made by Goethe and the German romantics.33 Grass’s vision of a cosmopolitan German state whose borders open freely to the rest of Europe and the world beyond is in sympathy with ideas voiced by Heine and the older Thomas Mann, while Grass’s corresponding stress on the importance of local autonomy links him to the Silesian authors of the seventeenth century, with whom he felt a strong affinity. In his short speech, Grass styles himself as a “rootless cosmopolitan,” proudly adopting an epithet hurled by the Nazis at Jews and others who failed to share their fervent and exclusive devotion to the German nation. In doing so, Grass adapted to a particular historical moment the sense of displacement that informed his entire adult life. Like Lenz, Grass grew up in a place that had since ceased to exist, at least in the way that he experienced it in childhood: the Langfuhr suburb of the independent city-­state of Danzig. Langfuhr was “so big and so little that whatever happens or could happen in this world, also happened or could have happened in Langfuhr.”34 As Grass stressed in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature and stated many times in his career, he could be considered a Heimatdichter: “My lost Danzig was for me . . . both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and navel of the world.”35 In a speech delivered in Princeton in 1966, Grass already declared, “I cling completely provincially to German circumstances” (ich [klammere] mich ganz und gar provinziell an deutsche Verhältnisse).36 The city of Danzig and the suburb of Langfuhr that Grass knew as a child and adolescent are forever lost, not due to a general process of modernization or the inevitable process of aging, but because of the defeat that led to the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from the now-­Polish city of Gdansk. The lost city could not serve Grass as a source of nostalgia, for he grew up in an overcrowded apartment with a picture of Hitler on the wall, a father in the Nazi Party, and a childhood that ended when the war began. The city of his childhood that Grass

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evoked in his fiction was anything but the site of a homogeneous, sustaining community; rather, it was a place of constant strife between Poles and Germans, Protestants and Catholics, and the various minorities in and around the city—­Roma, Sinti, Kashubians, and Jews. Late nineteenth-­century authors such as Ludwig Ganghofer and the directors of the 1950s Heimatfilme imagined the homeland as a place apart from modern times, a refuge, albeit a threatened one, from political strife. Danzig, in contrast, stood at the center of the international conflict that left its indelible mark on Günter Grass. The lost world of Langfuhr that Grass re-­creates in his fiction serves as a microcosm of the conflicts that would soon engulf Europe and extend around the world. The Nazi pretense for provoking open conflict with Poland was that they wanted to bring Danzig “Heim ins Reich,” as if the city’s citizens yearned as one to return to the fold of the totalitarian state. Grass’s Danzig trilogy exposes this lie, showing the price that individuals paid if they failed to conform. The Jewish shopkeeper Sigismund Markus dreams of escaping to England but is driven instead to commit suicide during the pogrom of “Kristallnacht.” The Polish sympathizer and reluctant partisan Jan Bronski is summarily executed for his effort to defend the Polish Post Office. Oswald Bruneis, a teacher who fails to display the required enthusiasm for the new Nazi Reich, finds an early death in a nearby concentration camp. His adopted gypsy daughter, Jenny, is the target of vicious attacks by her fellow schoolmates, as is Eddie Amsel, a boy of partial Jewish descent who is violently assaulted by a gang of vindictive youths. Even those who rally to the Nazi cause come to regret it, sooner or later: in Dog Years, Walter Matern bitterly rues his brief membership in the SA; in Cat and Mouse, Joachim Mahlke deserts the army after he finds that his heroic exploits on the battlefield are not enough to make him a hometown hero; and in The Tin Drum, Alfred Matzerath rejects Hitler in a drunken stupor and chokes to death on his own Nazi insignia. Like Thomas Mann, Grass resisted Nazi totalitarianism and imperialist aggression, although Grass does not focus on the artists and intellectuals of the decadent upper crust but shows how ideologies infiltrate the narrow worlds of little people.37 In Doctor Faustus, Mann’s characters dabble in politically irresponsible speculations about the demonic nature of the German soul. Grass’s figures experience history on the local level, as a series of disjointed events. Thus Grass repeatedly distanced himself from grand Hegelian narratives about the course of history writ large, preferring, like his mentor Alfred Döblin, “to smash coherence to pieces, so that reality can emerge.”38 Throughout his career, Danzig remained at the center of Grass’s literary imagination, just as his moral compass continued to point at the events of Germany’s Nazi past. In an

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interview with Die Zeit just a few days before his death, Grass once again recalled that he had “lost his Heimat Danzig due to the terrible war that the Germans unleashed” on the world. It took him some time as a young author, he continued, before he discovered “that I concentrate best and write to the best of my ability when I conjure up what I have absolutely lost.”39

The Flounder: Local History in Global Context In the mid-­1970s, Grass decided to mark his fiftieth birthday with the publication of a major new novel. He had thrown himself into politics for the past decade, and many believed that his literary works had suffered as a result. Some critics felt that his third novel, Örtlich betäubt (Local Anaesthetic, 1969), did not measure up to the high standards of The Tin Drum and Dog Years, while Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail, 1972) was more an autobiographical essay than a work of fiction. The Flounder appeared in August 1977, after an aggressive advertising campaign that included sending some four thousand complimentary copies to potential reviewers, as well as a series of public readings by Grass. The effort paid off: the novel “dominated the bestseller charts for months” in Germany and scored great popular success in its various translations.40 From the beginning, however, the critical reception of The Flounder was mixed, ranging from those who declared it the “book of the century” to those who cast it aside as either shocking or boring. Some marveled at the novel’s exquisite narrative complexity, while others declared it an overly ambitious, baggy monster. Feminist critics sharply condemned The Flounder.41 The novel presents itself as a sympathetic response to the second-­wave feminist movement of the 1970s, claiming that men have made a mess of world history and suggesting that it is time for women to take the lead. Unfortunately, though, Grass’s novel is based on a misogynist fairy tale, portrays modern feminists in an unsympathetic light, and resurrects a series of pseudohistorical female characters who do more to support than to subvert negative stereotypes. If you disregard its narrative pyrotechnics and bracket out its efforts to intervene in contemporary feminist debates or to invent a matriarchal theory of history à la Bachofen,42 The Flounder is a historical novel focused on a specific local area—­“It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary”43—­and on a particular clan or tribe, the Pormorshians, or, as they are later known, the Kashubians. The genre is as old as the Song of Anno, which, as we recall, traces the origins of the Germanic tribes out of the legacy of classical antiquity. It

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reached a monumental scale in the nineteenth century—­in such works as Gustav Freytag’s multivolume novel cycle The Ancestors, which traces the history of a Thuringian clan from the late Roman Empire to the Revolution of 1848—­ and continues to inform the stress on tribal origins in the racist nationalism of Josef Nadler and Leni Riefenstahl. The Flounder works within but mainly against this tradition, in a number of important ways. Grass’s novel does not present history in a triumphalist mode, tracing the roots of a Germanic tribe back to legendary exploits that anticipate modern heroics. His Pomorshians are a malleable lot, easily mixed with “vestiges of peoples that had passed through” the region: “Gepidic Goths, who had been pretty well stirred together with us Pomorshians, and Saxons who had fled from the missionary zeal of the Franks. Slavic Poles trickled in from the south. And the Norse Varangians raided us whenever they felt like it” (107; 139). An ethnic group identified as the ancient Pomorshians or modern Kashubians remains identifiable despite the admixtures of peoples from prehistoric times to the present—­“After all, we Kashubians are all related by way of a country lane or two” (500; 640)—­but they are not the ancestors of a modern nation-­state. Instead, they remain the perennial victims of foreign aggression. The Varangian Vikings are only an early example of a marauding people that wreaks havoc on the local residents in and around the city known variously as “Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danczik, Dantzig, Danzig, Gdańsk” (109; 140), depending on which group conquered it last. In chapter after chapter, Grass portrays Danzig as the site of internal strife between different social classes and as a pawn in the conflicts of larger European powers. I here briefly outline the history of the city and its peoples that emerges in The Flounder. In the beginning, the Pomorshians lived outside of history, pursuing their traditional way of life for centuries as civilizations rose and fell to the south: “Hordes and clans join to form nations. Hero-­kings rule. Empire borders on empire” (32; 44). When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Goths began their wanderings, but the Pomorshians stayed put, still cut off from the course of history. Finally, in 997 AD, a subsequently sainted Bohemian missionary to the region, Bishop Adalbert of Prague, was murdered by his Pomorshian lover, the heathen priestess Mestwina. Adalbert had been acting under the aegis of the Polish king Wladislaw, who sought to extend his power into the Vistula region. The Poles avenged Adalbert’s death by executing Mestwina and forcibly baptizing the Pomorshians. Even though the narrator notes that the Poles mistakenly blamed the ancient Prussians for Adalbert’s murder, the event had lasting repercussions for the actual perpetrators: “For the first time you lazy, unconscious Pomorshians, who have never done anything to prove you

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existed, have really taken action; with a political murder you enter history” (104; 132). The antiheroic characterization of the Pomorshians as the unwitting victims of larger conflicts sets a pattern for the subsequent centuries of their history. The second chapter of The Flounder takes place in the fourteenth century, as the Teutonic Knights move into Danzig from the west and battle against allied Lithuanians and Poles to the east. We jump next to the time of the Reformation, when struggles between the Hanseatic League and the Polish Crown get mixed up in confessional conflicts between Lutherans and Catholics and in civic strife between patricians and guildsmen. The fourth chapter centers on the previously mentioned meeting between Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. Opitz plays a dangerous diplomatic game, working for both Protestants and Catholics in an effort to promote peace and secure the safety of his ravaged Silesia. In the late eighteenth century, Prussia assumed control over Danzig as Poland was partitioned between its neighboring powers; a few decades later, the French marched in under Napoleon’s leadership. And so it continued: the Prussians regained the city after Napoleon’s ill-­fated march into Russia, only to lose it again after the German defeat in the First World War; Hitler brought Danzig back into the German Reich to begin the Second World War, but Russians drove out the Germans when it ended. Grass devotes a chapter to each of these episodes in his fictional history of Danzig and the Kashubians, concluding with the murder of a refugee driven from Danzig to Berlin and with the death of a dockworker shot by the Polish police during the Solidarity protests of 1970. The Flounder presents history in the tradition established by Walter Scott, placing fictional characters in the foreground of events that have since entered the history books. “Come to think of it, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler had been in the same place” (112; 144), notes the narrator, but aside from a cameo appearance by Frederick the Great, these genuinely historical figures remain in the background. In keeping with Grass’s long-­standing convictions, the narrative is anti-­Hegelian as well as antiheroic, undermining any notion of historical progress or continuity. Grass repeatedly interrupts the chronological sequence of events, jumping back and forth across centuries to anticipate the future and recall the past: “We are contemporary only for the time being. No date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place simultaneously” (123; 158). This narrative technique allows Grass to juxtapose events from different historical eras to reveal continuity in the midst of change. Thus, in his second chapter, Grass cuts between the Teutonic Knights, whose “first contribution to the history of the city of Danzig” was to execute sixteen

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Pomeranian knights (the narrator suspects that they may also have butchered “over ten thousand urban Pomorshians” [114; 146]), and the Polish police, who shot the protesting shipyard workers. The more things change, the more they stay the same: medieval guild workers rose up against the patricians, only to be swatted back down, and modern dockworkers suffered the same fate. “All the same,” claims Grass’s narrator, “one thing has changed in Danzig or Gdańsk since 1378; today the patricians have a different name” (120; 154). Although Grass was well known for his advocacy of small steps toward incremental change rather than political revolution or quiescence to the status quo, a generally pessimistic tone pervades The Flounder. The fifth chapter focuses on Amanda Woyke, who is said to have introduced the potato to Kashubia. Although her efforts save thousands from malnutrition and starvation, she never gains her freedom: “born a serf in 1734 in Zuckau-­the-­Cloisters when it was still Polish,” she “died in Preussisch-­Zuckau, a serf of the state farm, in 1806” (291; 371). A similar fate befalls Fritz Bartholdy in the following chapter. The young would-­be revolutionary is inspired by the French to found a Jacobin club and proclaim the Republic of Danzig, but he is arrested for his efforts and condemned to life in prison. His beloved, Sophie Rotzoll, works tirelessly for his release, and hopes rise when the French occupy the city in 1807, but the nation that had once inspired Bartholdy’s quest for freedom leaves him to languish in jail: “And when Graudenz fell into Prussian hands, a royal decree lost no time in confirming his status as prisoner. The systems changed without a hitch. Petition after petition . . . failed to set the poor fellow free” (376; 478). Looking back at the guild workers’ failed revolt in the Middle Ages, one modern observer concludes that “the time wasn’t ripe yet,” but another looks to the much more recent “uprising of the Polish shipyard workers in December 1970 against bureaucratic Communism” and concludes “that then as now the time is always unripe” (144; 183). Catholics oppressed their fellow Catholics back then, and Communists oppress their fellow Communists today: the names and dates change, but the pattern remains the same. In The Flounder, the Nazis play a peripheral role (as opposed to their dominant presence in what Katharina Hall refers to as the “Danzig quintet”),44 yet they are not entirely absent. Nazi archaeologists unearth prehistoric terra-­ cotta figurines and conclude that they present “early Slavic testimony to the existence of an inferior, degenerate, worthless race” (99; 125). A teacher in the 1930s is persecuted as “a tacit opponent of National Socialism” because he prefers to focus his energies on a medieval saint rather than on recent battles in Tobruk or Stalingrad (164; 208). Lena Stubbe, the socialist heroine of the seventh chapter, is beaten to death in the Stutthof concentration camp while trying

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to save food for other starving inmates. There is even a passing reference to “a certain three-­year-­old boy, pounding furiously on his tin drum,” amid the cacophony of the Nazi rallies (451; 571). Within the larger context of The Flounder, however, Grass suggests that the Nazis present only a particularly egregious example of a typically male tendency to “think things to the end,” to “resolve with masculine realism on / the final solution [Endlösung]” (95; 121). In this regard, Grass’s novel bears comparison with Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, the first volume of which appeared in the same year as The Flounder. Ostensibly an analysis of the misogynist mentality of the protofascist Freikorps officers of the 1920s and 1930s, Theweleit’s work expands to an indictment of men under all forms of patriarchal rule: “Is it useful to apply the term ‘fascist’ to ardent party members and functionaries, and to regard the remainder as deluded, opportunistic, or forced into compliance? Or is it true, as many feminists claim, that fascism is simply the norm for males living under capitalist-­patriarchal conditions?”45 Many of the same feminists have justly claimed that the underlying misogyny of The Flounder vitiates its open indictment of the male cause, but the novel shares with Male Fantasies a “universalizing” understanding of fascism as a particular manifestation of a general trend, rather than as the perversion of a deviant minority.46 The focus in The Flounder remains resolutely local (more precisely, on a particular region that lies in the crossroads of intra-­European conflicts), but it also expands to a global perspective. Seemingly random lists of contemporary events “on the Golan Heights, in the Mekong Delta, and now, too, in Chile” (93; 118) establish a bridge between the present and the past, between historically and geographically remote events and the Vistula estuary. Then as now, there as here, men seek to dominate the world: “The affairs and achievements of today: Calcutta. The Aswan Dam. The pill. Watergate. These are men’s ersatz babies” (396–­97; 503). To make history is to be on the move: the Germanic Völkerwanderungen started a process that continues across the centuries, crushing the Kashubians under successive waves of foreign invaders. By the time of the Reformation, those movements extend beyond Europe’s borders, to other parts of the world. Just as Grass displays a sovereign indifference to chronological sequence in the narration of events in The Flounder, he also feels free to move across geographical space. He mixes his account of Danzig during the Reformation with references to Vasco de Gama’s discovery of a route around Africa to India. Margarete Rusch, the protagonist of chapter 3, is born in 1498, the same year in which de Gama makes his journey; she later marries her daughter to a man with trade connections to the Indian subcontinent, so that she has access to a steady supply of pepper for her cooking. Two

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centuries later, Amanda Woyke encouraged the cultivation of potatoes in her native Kashubia, continuing the spread of the tuber that “Raleigh or Drake is supposed to have brought . . . to Europe” (303; 386). She carries on a correspondence with Benjamin Thompson, a man born in Massachusetts but later known as Count Rumford of Bavaria. More typical are the Kashubians who move in the other direction: from time to time, The Flounder mentions those who leave Danzig to seek their fortune in the New World, just as Oskar Matzerath in The Tin Drum speculates that his grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, may have made his way from the waters of the Vistula to banks of the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York. As European influence expands throughout the world, global inequity increases. One of the running subthemes of The Flounder is the shocking degree of poverty in India. The narrator speaks in the voice of all the men in the novel, and the historical Vasco de Gama is thus shadowed by the modern Vasco, whose trip to India draws directly on Grass’s experiences in the early 1970s. In the slums of Calcutta, the narrator finds a level of abject misery that defies imagination and inspires a sense of shame: “All you can do is walk through, step across, look away” (186; 237). “More than half of mankind [is] undernourished” there, while the babies of the “First World” grow fat (333; 423): “European infants, with their specially prepared food, consume nine times as much protein, carbohydrates, and calories (or barely peck at them and let the rest spoil) as is left for the infants of India” (273; 347). The companies that produce powdered milk actively discourage breast-­feeding in Africa, in order to increase their profits, a practice that “can only be termed criminal” (275; 350). Indian boutiques in Hamburg sell clothing at prices so low that “there’s got to be exploitation” in the sweatshops where they are produced, “that cheap labor in Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, and so on” (343; 438). Grass would go on to chronicle Third World poverty in the words and images of Headbirths and Zunge Zeigen (Show Your Tongue, 1988), while noting elements of intra-­Indian exploitation of the poor by the rich in Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad, 1992). As a result, the centuries-­long oppression of the downtrodden Kashubians that Grass chronicles in The Flounder stands both for the process of European imperialism that starts at home and expands overseas and for local inequities that can arise anywhere around the globe: “This book deals with the history of human nutrition. It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary, though actually it might just as well take place at the mouth of the Ganges or here on the banks of the Hooghly River” (183; 234). The relentless history of conflict between different peoples and political factions that Grass chronicles in The Flounder extends ultimately to the human

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conquest of nature. The popular version of “The Fisherman and His Wife” slanders women as insatiable harpies, but in Grass’s suppressed version of the fairy tale, the male penchant for violent conquest takes center stage: “He wants to be unconquerable in war. . . . He wants to attain goals, to rule the world, to subjugate nature, to rise above the earth” (349; 445). The result of this Faustian striving has been as devastating to the environment as it has to its human victims. In subsequent works, such as Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986), Totes Holz (Dead wood, 1990), and The Call of the Toad, Grass returns to the theme of impending ecological catastrophe that he sounds for the first time in The Flounder. Shortly before he is about to be dropped back into the polluted waters of the Baltic Sea, the flounder imagines a world without humans: “Nature would owe you a debt of thanks. Our planet would have a chance to regenerate. . . . Once again the oceans would breathe easy” (401; 509). In the view expressed here, the precondition for the healing of the planet is the eradication of human life. It is thus unsurprising that Grass’s late work takes on an increasingly apocalyptic tone.

Coda Günter Grass’s sudden death on April 13, 2015, after a brief illness, prompted a predictable outpouring of grief and lengthy obituaries about his long career. No one questioned that Grass had been a defining figure in the history of Germany’s postwar literature. No one doubted his commitment to democracy, although some wondered if his fiction had suffered as his focus shifted to contemporary events. Thus many remembered him as an author whose best book was his first book. Alongside the many accolades of his work and fond memories of private moments, there was a sense, among some, that Grass had outlived his time. In an editorial published in the New York Times on the day after Grass died, Jochen Bittner, an opinion writer and political editor for Die Zeit, confessed that he “didn’t much like the work of Günter Grass,” and went on to make it clear that he didn’t much like the man either.47 Bittner portrays Grass as a self-­righteous hypocrite, who condemned others loudly for their complicity in the Nazi past while he remained silent about his own membership in the Waffen-­SS until very late in life. Even more outrageous than his ham-­fisted critique of Israel in the poem “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said,” 2012), argues Bittner, was Grass’s delusional belief that “he spoke for all of Germany” when he voiced his personal opinion. Self-­appointed spokesmen for the German nation such as Thomas Mann and Günter Grass may have

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served a useful purpose in times when “the country needed intellectual leaders who epitomized certainty, however vain they came across,” Bittner concludes, but in our ambiguous and rapidly changing world, that time is past. While it may seem tasteless to rush into print with a denunciation of a man who had literally died the day before, Bittner broaches topics that seem sure to recur in future discussions of Grass’s life and work. His long concealment of his SS membership did leave a lasting stain on his legacy. His public insistence that Israel posed a threat to world peace went far beyond the sort of polite criticism of particular Israeli policies that have gradually become permissible in German political discussions. Grass thus inevitably raised suspicions that deep-­seated prejudices of the former SS soldier had risen to the surface in his final years and were now being recorded with the author’s “last ink” (mit letzter Tinte).48 Nevertheless, acknowledging Grass’s shortcomings should not obscure his substantial contributions to the political discourse and literary scene of postwar and postreunification Germany, which can be stressed by four concluding points. First, while Grass was wrong to be less than entirely forthcoming about his own involvement in the Nazi past, he was right to challenge his fellow Germans to confront that past, at a time when many who had done far worse were being far less open than he was. Second, Grass was a refugee who refused to succumb to revanchism. He devoted his literary career to the re-­ creation of a lost homeland that was caught in the crosshairs of history, rejecting the sentimental yearning for a safe haven he had never known. He then used his own experience of displacement to argue, early and often, for a new understanding of Germany as a land of immigration (“Einwanderungsland”) and ethnic diversity, in a way that was diametrically opposed to the ideology he had absorbed in his youth.49 Third, Grass spoke as a prophet of doom and an advocate of change. He foresaw the catastrophic potential of nuclear war and global warming and did his best—­like his patron saint Sisyphus—­to fight against the force of gravity. Fourth and finally, Grass remained a creative writer as well as a political polemicist, believing, to the end, in the liberating potential of the literary imagination.

Chapter 10

Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past

In the years after German reunification, readers and critics awaited the definitive Wenderoman, the novel that would immortalize the events of 1989–­90 in the way that The Tin Drum had done for the Second World War.1 In this case, the story to be told was a happy one—­not Germany’s descent into madness, its provocation of war and perpetration of unspeakable crimes against humanity, but the peaceful reunion of a people that had been divided by unnatural political boundaries. “What belongs together will grow together” (Es wächst zusammen, was zusammen gehört), proclaimed former German chancellor Willi Brandt in November 1989, and his prophecy has proven correct in subsequent years: although disparities between the former East and West remain, a single, sovereign German state has been in place since the celebrations of October 3, 1990. Novels have been written and films directed about the process of reunification, although frequently not in a triumphant mode. The film Good Bye Lenin (2003) evokes a wistful image of the GDR that might have been, while Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) casts a harsh light on the police surveillance state that actually existed. Günter Grass’s novel Ein Weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995) portrays the process of reunification as a hostile takeover of the East by the West, while Ingo Schulz’s Simple Stories (1998) offers an East German perspective on the often-­traumatic effects of reunification. Despite these and many other critical commentaries on the German Wende, or turn toward national unity, there have been moments of unmitigated ecstasy. “Wir sind Papst!” screamed the tabloid press when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was named pope in 2005, initiating a decade of good news that included the successful hosting of the World Cup soccer tournament in 2006, the pop singer Lena’s victory in the 2011 Eurovision song contest, and the German soccer team’s triumph in the 2014 World Cup. Such events seemed sources of legitimate pride and harmless patriotism for a nation that has long labored beneath the burden of the Nazi past, resuscitating the hope that Germany might someday be a “normal” nation. 237

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The process of German national reunification is part of the story of the past few decades, but only part. Germany has become an integral member of the European Union, giving up its national currency and opening its borders to other cosigners of the Schengen Agreement. To some, nationalism is on its way to becoming a thing of the past, as Europeans join together in a cosmopolitan community that transcends national borders; others observe that the European Union has raised new fences even as it opens up the old, establishing a perimeter around Fortress Europe designed to keep new immigrants out and existing minorities down.2 While the appeal of anti-­immigration movements fueled by barely concealed racist sentiments has grown among certain segments of today’s Europe, other Europeans have long since accepted the inevitability and desirability of a more mobile and diverse society. Now as in the past, people move and mix; notions of national identity based on ethnic “purity” are as delusionary today as they were in previous centuries. The novels of Yadé Kara (cited in chapter 2) combine the story of German unification with that of European diversification, countering the centripetal pull of the nation with the centrifugal forces of a global diaspora. Fatih Akin’s acclaimed films and Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s prizewinning fiction portray characters of mixed heritage who move across national borders, destabilizing notions of a natural or normal national identity. In this chapter, I discuss two best-­selling novels of the early twenty-­first century: Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005) and Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012). As has frequently been the case among writers of previous generations, both contemporary authors write about Germany from the perspective of its periphery: Kehlmann, “the son of a prominent German-­Jewish theater director,”3 was born in Munich but raised in Austria; Kracht is Swiss but “grew up in the south of France, the United States and Canada and has since resided all over the world.”4 Kracht’s acclaimed first novel, Faserland (1995), follows its perpetually inebriated protagonist on a southward journey from Germany’s northernmost fish kiosk on the island of Sylt to Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Munich, before he eventually crosses the border into Switzerland. The word Faser means “fiber” or “thread”; thus the title Faserland suggests a land that is coming apart at the seams, a nation in tatters, a problematic fatherland pronounced with a thick German accent. In the more recent Imperium, Kracht shifts the focus from Germany’s present to its imperial past, telling the tale of a Wilhelmine oddball who sails to Germany’s colonies in the Pacific around 1900. Kehlmann also writes a work of historical fiction, although his is set in Germany’s precolonial era, combining an account of Alexander von Humboldt’s explorations in

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South America with episodes from the life of the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. The success of Measuring the World and Imperium is symptomatic of a widespread recent interest in German imperialism, for which I can suggest several reasons. Historians want to set the record straight: although Germany began to acquire overseas colonies later than other major European powers and lost them sooner, there was a period of several decades in which Germany was a major player on the global stage.5 Investigations of German colonialism inevitably raise questions about possible links between Germany’s Second Empire and its third: did imperial Germany’s participation in the scramble for Africa prefigure its quest for Eastern European Lebensraum? Did the Herero massacre set the stage for the Holocaust?6 The increasingly diverse societies in today’s Germany, Austria, and Switzerland also prompt investigations of the past. Although minorities in German-­speaking countries are more likely to be the descendants of postwar Gastarbeiter or more recent economic or political refugees than to be former colonial subjects, they raise issues of religious difference and ethnic diversity common to other postcolonial European countries. Specific to Germany is the still-­recent history of reunification in 1989–­90, which, as noted, was perceived by some as the West German colonization of the East. Global tensions in the post-­9/11 world add to the renewed interest in imperial politics. Germany has sometimes been a reluctant participant in the “coalition of the willing” assembled to combat the threat of global terrorism, while revelations of wiretapping by the US National Security Agency is one of many instances that have left embittered German officials feeling like abused subjects of an imperial power. The recent scholarly interest in the literature of travel, colonialism, and cross-­cultural encounters is matched by ongoing popular interest in the same. Thus it is not astonishing that together with films and novels about national unification, we find popular fiction about Germany’s imperial past.7

Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World “What a wonderful country Germany must be,” exclaimed Tom LeClair in his review of Measuring the World for the New York Times, where a novel on the intellectual level of a work by Thomas Pynchon can displace Harry Potter and the potboilers of Dan Brown from the top of the German best-­seller lists.8 Measuring the World was one of the great publishing success stories of early twenty-­first-­century Germany.9 For thirty-­five consecutive weeks, it remained

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at the top of Der Spiegel’s list of best-­selling novels; more than a million copies were sold in Germany even before the paperback edition appeared, and it was quickly translated into over forty languages. The work garnered critical praise as well as popular success, winning Kehlmann several literary prizes and soon inspiring a burgeoning critical industry. Despite positive reviews and some success abroad, Measuring the World was not an international blockbuster on the scale of previous postwar best sellers such as Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985) or Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995), perhaps because foreign readers were less likely to be familiar with Humboldt and Gauss or because it does not deal directly with the Nazi past.10 Reviewers marveled at the phenomenon of a German writer with a sense of humor, perhaps revealing their own prejudices more than insight into contemporary German fiction. Measuring the World does have a light touch and a marvelous sense of humor, but it also broaches questions of a more serious philosophical and political nature, concerning the effort to map the world and to determine Germany’s place within it. Measuring the World begins with a border crossing. Professor Gauss has reluctantly agreed to leave his home in Göttingen to attend a conference in Berlin. Accompanied by his son, Eugen, Gauss arrives at the Prussian border, where a gendarme demands to see their passports. Eugen can only produce a letter from the Prussian court that grants him permission to travel with his father to Berlin. Gauss has nothing: “No passport, asked the gendarme, astonished, no piece of paper, no official stamp, nothing?”11 Gauss impatiently observes that the last time he had crossed the border, twenty years ago, there had been no need for a passport, while Eugen tries to explain that his father has been invited by the Royal Society and, thus, could almost be considered a personal guest of the king. The gendarme is unimpressed and demands again to see Gauss’s nonexistent passport. At this point, a stranger at a neighboring table shouts that Germany will soon be free and that scraps of paper will no longer be necessary when traveling from one part of the nation to the next. He runs out the door, pursued by the outraged gendarme, and Eugen takes the opportunity to lift the barrier that marks the border crossing. “Then they drove onto Prussian soil” (8; 12). In a few deft strokes, Kehlmann sketches the characters and fills in the political setting. We meet the self-­absorbed Gauss, his long-­suffering son, and a humorless policeman who sets off in pursuit of a political dissident in a slapstick scene worthy of the Keystone Cops. The year is 1828, during the reactionary Restoration that followed on the heels of the revolutionary era. As a university student, Eugen is immediately suspected of political radicalism, a suspicion

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that his favorite book, Friedrich Jahn’s Deutsche Turnkunst (German gymnastics, 1816), would have confirmed had his father not tossed it out of the carriage window. In Berlin, Eugen will drift into a clandestine meeting of revolutionary patriots, only to be arrested and barely escape a long prison sentence by being banished to America. Thus Kehlmann evokes the period of Prussian ascendency, in which the authoritarian government of an increasingly dominant German province works to suppress the aspirations of liberal nationalists. Gauss remains oblivious to the political situation, just as, as a young man, he had been unaware of Napoleon’s existence until long after the French general had begun his conquests. Now, years later, Gauss proudly tells the gendarme that Napoleon had decided not to bombard Göttingen because he wanted to spare the life of the mathematical genius, blithely unaware that the mere mention of Prussia’s former archenemy would further provoke the Prussian official. Gauss has no sympathy with the anti-­Prussian patriots; he declares Jahn’s book worthless, after a cursory examination, and remains unmoved by the disturbance provoked by the political dissident, calmly finishing his soup while Eugen engineers his escape. Gauss will later do little or nothing to free his son from the clutches of the Prussian police, accepting Eugen’s banishment as inevitable, apparently without deep regret. Gauss would therefore seem to be the proverbial nonpolitical German, keeping his head in the clouds (with his mathematical speculations) while ignoring injustice on the ground. Yet Gauss, as portrayed in Kehlmann’s novel, is not quite as naive as he seems at first glance. As the child of a lower-­class family, he experienced injustice at an early age, being beaten at school by a tyrannical teacher for no good reason and expected to perform mathematical tricks like a trained monkey for an arrogant and ignorant aristocrat. Later, Gauss will drive a hard bargain with a count who receives him with the condescension of a mighty lord, even though Gauss can see through his pretensions, and Gauss understands that his son’s corrupt prison guard in Berlin wants to be bribed, even though Humboldt refuses to believe it. Gauss’s seeming political indifference is actually a reflection of a deeper pessimism. He knows that princes will soon be as obsolete as the barber who yanks out the wrong tooth with filthy pliers, but he also knows that he is doomed to live now, not later. The sense of pessimism that informs Gauss’s view of his life and times carries over into his scientific work. Gauss is aware that he is smarter than his contemporaries, and he knows that his maps and measurements are more precise than anything that has been done before. But he is also aware that the world is in a state of constant flux and that any attempt to pin it down will inevitably fail. Early on, he realizes the limitations of Euclidean geometry: paral-

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lel lines eventually meet; “space was folded, bent, and extremely strange” (80; 96). Anticipating the insights of Einstein, Gauss senses that there is no firm ground in the physical universe: “Space was certainly empty, but it was curved” (211; 246). What is true of space is also true of time: “Space curved and time was malleable” (187; 220). When Daguerre fails to capture, in an early photograph, the moment when Humboldt and Gauss first meet, the photographer exclaims, “Now the moment had been lost forever!” But Gauss refuses to share his exasperation: “Just like all the others, said Gauss calmly. Like all the others” (11; 16). In Gauss’s view, our attempts to comprehend the world are largely futile: “Reason shaped absolutely nothing and understood very little” (187; 220). Gauss does understand that time keeps moving and that even the best that his unfortunate era had to offer in this “curiously second-­class universe” (242; 282) would not last. In comparison with Humboldt, Gauss has a relatively uncomplicated attitude toward sexuality, enjoying the pleasures of a Russian prostitute and those of his first wife. But his wife dies in childbirth, the prostitute ages and eventually returns to Russia, and even his beloved mother grows old before his very eyes. Gauss thus combines a baroque awareness of the transitory nature of life with a modernist sense of the limitations of human reason when confronted with a vast and malleable universe. No religious faith relieves his deep sense of melancholy, and he has no hope for political progress in a world that is fundamentally flawed: “The world seemed so disappointing as soon as you realized how thinly it was woven, how crudely the illusion was knitted together, how amateurish the stitches were when you turned it over to the back” (47; 59). Against such a worldview, Humboldt’s boundless reverence for nature and his tireless faith in the human ability to comprehend and quantify it seem naive. Humboldt is a child of the Enlightenment, infused with romantic sensibilities. He marvels at nature’s wonders, particularly as they are revealed in the South American wilderness, even as he seeks to measure the world with ever-­ greater precision. He takes pride in having “forcibly imposed a web of numbers over reluctant nature” (97; 116), and he proclaims late in life that “the end of the road was in sight, the measuring of the world almost complete” (204; 238). While delivering his famous lectures on the cosmos, Humboldt works himself into a state of prophetic rapture: “The cosmos would be understood, all difficulties pertaining to man’s beginnings, such as fear, war, and exploitation, would sink into the past, . . . Science would bring about an era of the general good, and who could know if one day it might not even solve the problem of death” (204; 238–­39).

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Clearly, sadly, Gauss was right: the Kantian vision of perpetual peace was not realized then and has not been realized yet, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity has rendered efforts to fix the world onto a static grid futile. In the first instance, Kehlmann uses Humboldt’s optimism as a boundless source of comedy. His Humboldt is a master of denial as well as self-­discipline, insisting that he is not seasick even as he vomits, gagging on ant paste as he proclaims it a potential solution to the problem of providing food for the expedition, insisting that the pieces of meat with fingers and toes roasting over the fire could not possibly be human flesh. Humboldt moves through a world of magic, encountering sea monsters and hearing tales of talking fish, hallucinating at high altitude and under the influence of powerful drugs, haunted by encounters with a sentient jaguar and the ghost of a beloved dog, all while insisting on the sovereignty of human reason and conveniently omitting episodes that would dispute this claim from his written records. If Gauss appears as the nonpolitical German, too full of Weltschmerz to present an active challenge to a society that he knows is rampant with injustice, Humboldt is cast as the prototypical Prussian, the humorless German in pursuit of precision at the cost of human emotion, a man who uses the brain as a means of repressing the body. “Did one always have to be so German?” queries Humboldt’s exasperated French traveling companion Bonpland (66; 80). The implicit answer seems to be yes. Bonpland teases Humboldt about the German lack of humor, to which Humboldt provides an indignant and humorless response. One of Humboldt’s first teachers tells him that “anyone innocent of metaphysical anxiety would never achieve German manhood” (15; 21); one of the last people to address him on his journey to Central Asia encourages him to lie about having found a diamond that he did not find: “There was a superficial truth, and then there was a deeper one . . . Germans in particular understood this.” (239; 270). Yet, despite the sarcastic barbs hurled at Humboldt and the Germans, Kehlmann repeatedly reveals the emotional depth that Humboldt is at pains to deny, lending a certain poignancy to the comedy that surrounds this figure. Humboldt’s prudish efforts to prevent Bonpland’s sexual pleasure and Humboldt’s own panic when presented with a complementary prostitute are the negative counterpart to the homosexual desires that Humboldt is forced to repress but confesses in his old age to his brother. In his own way, Kehlmann’s Humboldt is no less a tragic figure than his Gauss: the mathematician knows that the world is incalculable and that death is inevitable; the naturalist proclaims in public that we can measure the world and perhaps even attain immortality, even as his strength ebbs and his sadness grows. But is Humboldt “typically German”? Not a typical individual in any

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sense of the term, the actual Humboldt exuded a boundless physical energy and intellectual curiosity that made him one of a kind, a unique genius on par with Goethe and Gauss.12 He was also not a flag-­waving German patriot of the sort that emerged in the course of his lifetime. Humboldt’s deepest desire was to leave home and travel the world. When he returned to Europe after a five-­year sojourn in the Americas, he moved to Paris, returning to Germany only decades later, when he had run out of money due to the cost of publishing his books and, thus, felt compelled to accept the offer to serve at the court of the Prussian king Frederick Wilhelm III.13 Contemporary witnesses report that Humboldt spoke in a rapid mixture of German, French, Spanish, and English;14 he wrote many of his works in French, and although he never returned to the United States, he maintained, throughout his life, that he considered himself “half an American.”15 As Laura Dassow Walls puts it in her award-­winning study of Alexander von Humboldt, “he abandoned national loyalties to become the paradigmatic cosmopolitan, at home everywhere and nowhere, always passing through, a merchant of knowledge with a bag full of notions.”16 Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos is a thoroughgoing refutation of Mary Louise Pratt’s relatively brief but influential comments about Humboldt in Imperial Eyes, Pratt’s pioneering work of postcolonial studies. In Pratt’s view, Humboldt crafted an image of South America as a wilderness that evoked a sense of the sublime in the European traveler, an earthly paradise that was devoid of significant human civilization and, thus, ripe for conquest. Although Pratt acknowledges “Humboldt’s liberalism, his support for the French and American Revolutions, his vehement, lifelong opposition to slavery,” she concludes that “the Personal Narrative naturalizes colonial relations and racial hierarchy, representing Americans, above all, in terms of the quintessential colonial relationship of disponibilité.”17 To these charges, Walls responds that Pratt has pressed Humboldt into a rigid dichotomy that pits European villains against Amerindian victims. “The effect has been to silence Humboldt all over again,” denying “him the agency to recognize, protest, and on occasion even subvert those networks [of colonial power].”18 The Humboldt who emerges from Walls’s study is a thoroughly positive figure, “the ‘enlightened’ discoverer, the anticonquistador,”19 the champion of human rights and enemy of human bondage, a man without a racist bone in his body, who stood at the center of what Walls terms “‘the Culture of Truth,’ a cosmopolitan, high-­minded, reform-­centered clerisy that sought to rise above divisive sectional and national interests to create a worldwide network of progressive intellectual leaders, authors, and teachers.”20 Walls writes within the context of American studies. Her aggressive effort

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to rehabilitate Humboldt’s image (a largely successful effort, to my mind) serves to highlight the perpetrators of and ideological apologists for nineteenth-­ century American imperialism. Humboldt writes at a time before the fatal divorce of science from the humanities; he thus provides scientific support for his liberal humanism. Once the “two cultures” had taken their separate courses, Walls contends, any protest against American slavery, the eradication of indigenous populations, and the triumphalist rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism was delegated to a literature that had lost “its foundational grounding in natural knowledge.” Meanwhile, “under the banner of ‘science,’ forms of racism proliferated and gathered strength.” The promise that Jefferson and Humboldt had seen in America was betrayed: “Instead of transforming the globe, the United States would racialize, nationalize, and militarize its sense of territorial destiny. Instead of catalyzing the world revolution that would recognize the freedom and independence of all peoples, it worked to contain and eliminate the threats posed by those peoples.”21 Kehlmann is neither a postcolonial theorist nor an Americanist but, rather, a German novelist, and his image of Humboldt thus serves different purposes. In the first instance, his Humboldt is a literary character, and Kehlmann has insisted on the primacy of the artistic imagination over slavish adherence to verifiable fact.22 Although his portrait of Humboldt is not devoid of sympathy and is certainly a source of humor, it is, in the final analysis, far more critical than that of Walls. Humboldt’s willful blindness to his own weaknesses and often-­hilarious denial of the obvious go hand in hand with his effort to fashion a public image for himself. Under the most adverse circumstances in the South American jungles, Humboldt writes eloquent, self-­congratulatory letters to his brother and other prominent European intellectuals. He edits signs of doubt or personal weakness out of his diaries and is not above lying if it serves his purposes, as when he is willing to maintain that he and Bonpland successfully climbed to the top of Mount Chimborazo, although they had stopped well short of the summit. Kehlmann’s Humboldt is fiercely opposed to slavery, denouncing it as “the second greatest insult to Man,” after “the idea that he was descended from the apes!” (203; 238). Yet his efforts to do anything to stop the “peculiar institution” are at once comically and tragically ineffectual. When Humboldt witnesses a slave auction in Trinidad, he buys three men and sets them free. They seem bewildered by his liberal gesture, and the bystanders are openly amused. Thus Humboldt’s abolitionist interventions come to an abrupt halt: “When the next auction took place, Humboldt and Bonpland stayed at home, working behind closed shutters, and only went outside after it was over” (58; 71). Something similar happens during his conversations with Thomas

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Jefferson. At a gala dinner in Washington, Humboldt waxes eloquent about “the burden of despotism” and “the nightmare of slavery” (181; 212), until Bonpland kicks him under the table and James Madison discretely whispers that Jefferson is a slave-­owning plantation owner. Humboldt abruptly changes the subject and does not bring it up again. If Humboldt avoids open conflict for diplomatic reasons in this instance, he elsewhere seems oblivious to the political use that can be made of his scientific research. When Humboldt returns to the White House on the following day, nursing a slight hangover from the previous night’s dinner party, he finds Jefferson in front of “a map of Central America” that “was lying as if by chance on the table.” Jefferson pumps him for information about the nature of the Spanish colonial administration, the size of its army, and the location of its garrisons. Humboldt eagerly answers all questions, even though, as Jefferson points out, “he had been traveling under the auspices of the Spanish crown” and, thus, “might well be bound to silence.” “Oh why, said Humboldt. Who could it hurt?” He takes at face value Jefferson’s self-­deprecating remarks about the United States as “a tiny Protestant community on the edge of the world” and “unimaginably far from everything,” even though the American president is clearly gathering intelligence that could be used for future conflicts: “If one had a great power for a neighbor, one could never have enough information” (182; 213–­14). Earlier, Humboldt adamantly denies the possibility that the Aztec Empire once sacrificed twenty thousand people to dedicate a temple. “If such a thing ever happened,” he protests, “the universe would come to an end,” to which a worker responds that the universe “didn’t give a shit” (172; 202). “So much civilization and so much horror,” said Humboldt. “What a combination! The exact opposite of everything that Germany stood for” (177; 208). Humboldt’s comment is again sadly ironic in light of subsequent historical developments. Measuring the World brings us only into the early decades of the nineteenth century, but the trends are already disturbing. The novel begins in the late eighteenth century, when Germany is described as a politically fragmented nation of farmers ruled by a few obtuse aristocrats. By the time that Gauss sets off for Berlin in 1828, Prussia has risen, from its humiliating defeat at the hands of Napoleon, to become a dominant power, though one that rules through repression inspired by paranoia. The student movement that would seem to be the liberal alternative to Prussia despotism is represented by a few caricatured figures who spout patriotic bombast before being hauled off to prison. The main intellectual inspiration for the movement is not Thomas Jefferson or the leading liberals of the French Revolution but, rather, “Turnvater

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Jahn,” an early proponent of romantic nationalism and the cult of the body, who was also a notorious antisemite and inspired the public book burning during the 1817 Wartburg Festival.23 The intellectual and artistic leaders of Weimar classicism might offer a third path between the rabid nationalism of the student radicals and the Prussian police state, but they, too, are the object of ridicule in Measuring the World: Goethe grants his oracular blessing to the two Humboldt boys, but no one can understand it, and Gauss later identifies Goethe as “the ass who considered himself fit to correct Newton’s theory of light” (134; 158). Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did his best to do away with his little brother as a boy, grows up to become a self-­important Prussian bureaucrat who writes sonnets in his spare time with the regularity of a metronome. Alexander von Humboldt, the liberal cosmopolitan, opponent of slavery, and enemy of empire, ends up as the Prussian king’s cowed servant, whose final expedition is a miserable caricature of his youthful exploits. The man who had once explored the world fearlessly at his own expense with a sole companion now marches into Russia guarded by Cossack troops and accompanied by a growing delegation of academics and journalists. Instead of scaling mountains or pushing into unchartered territory, Humboldt is entrapped by an endless series of social events. Old, sick, and exhausted, Humboldt makes incoherent speeches and no significant discoveries. In the end, he becomes something like Aguirre, the Spanish conquistador turned megalomaniac, whose search for fabulous riches and infinite power ended in disaster. As a boy, Humboldt and his brother had “stumbled on a story about Aguirre the Mad, who had renounced his king and declared himself emperor. He and his men traveled the length of the Orinoco in a journey that was the stuff of nightmares” (15; 21–­ 22). No one in the past two hundred years had dared to repeat Aguirre’s ill-­ fated expedition, but the younger brother said that he “would make the journey” (16; 22). Humboldt does so, passing, on his way toward great scientific discoveries and lasting fame, by the places where Aguirre had gone mad. In the end, when Wilhelm asks his brother if he remembers the time when they had first read about Aguirre, Alexander says that he does but fears that his efforts have been in vain: “He no longer believed the future world would care, he also had doubts about the significance of the journey upriver itself. The channel didn’t produce any benefit for the continent, it was as abandoned and mosquito-­ ridden as ever” (225–­26; 264). We last see Humboldt as he returns home from Russia to Berlin, wondering if, in the end, Gauss had journeyed further in spirit than Humboldt had done in fact: while Humboldt pushed to the ends of the earth, Gauss stayed home and made mathematical calculations based on his quiet observations of the heavens. In retrospect, Humboldt’s seemingly heroic

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exploits in the Amazonian jungles appear to him as ultimately futile as those of his crazed role model Aguirre. We leave Humboldt little better off than Werner Herzog’s final image of the would-­be world conquistador in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), where Aguirre stands on a sinking raft that spins around and around, going nowhere.

Christian Kracht, Imperium Christian Kracht published Imperium in early 2012, to critical acclaim and public controversy.24 The novel is loosely based on an actual individual, August Engelhardt (1875–­1919), who turned his back on imperial Germany to seek a new life in the Pacific islands of New Pomerania, in the Bismarck Archipelago to the east of Papua New Guinea. In Kracht’s version of the story, Engelhardt buys a small island and sets about cultivating coconuts, convinced that modern problems might be solved if only people ate more of the tropical fruit—­in fact, nothing but coconuts. Never having possessed the firmest grasp on reality, Engelhardt grows stranger on his remote island. At first, he dreams of drawing fellow enthusiasts to his refuge and then sending his disciples out into the world to establish a global network of “coconut colonies.”25 Some intrepid travelers start to arrive in the German colony, where they worship Engelhardt as their savior, but he quickly decides that this sort of adulation is not what he had in mind, and he gladly pays their way back to Germany. As he becomes increasingly delusional, the once peace-­loving seeker becomes a paranoid antisemite. Clearly deranged, the man who used to bite his fingernails cuts off his own thumb and eats it; he also develops leprous sores on his shins. Engelhardt’s island idyll is interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. Australian forces capture the colony and suggest that he might return to Germany, but he spits at their offer and stalks into the jungle. American soldiers discover him there at the end of the Second World War. He is old, emaciated, and now missing both thumbs, but he is miraculously cured of his leprosy. The soldiers pep him up with Coca-­Cola, let him listen to music on their transistor radios, give him a white cotton T-­shirt, and offer the former vegetarian a hot dog while they marvel at his fantastic tale: “Sweet bejesus, that’s one heck of a story . . . Just wait ’til Hollywood gets wind of this . . . You, sir, will be in pictures” (178–­79; 241 [English in the original]). As the title suggests, Imperium is a novel about empire—­three different empires, to be precise. Most of the novel is set in Germany’s Second Empire, “at the very beginning of the twentieth century, which until just before the

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midpoint of its duration looked as if it would become the Century of the Germans, the century in which Germany would take its rightful place of honor and precedence at the table of nations” (8; 18). Such delusions of grandeur lead from the Second Empire to the Third Reich, “that Great German Death Symphony,” which “might be comical to watch, were unimaginable cruelty not to ensue; bones, excreta, smoke” (55; 79). During the heyday of German imperialism, entrepreneurs set off “around the globe to create a new Germany” in the Pacific colonies (57; 82). These colonies at the outer reaches of Germany’s Second Empire prefigure the death camps on the periphery of the Third Reich. The narrator evokes the image of his grandparents striding past the Dammtor train station in Hamburg, “as if they hadn’t noticed those men, women, and children laden with suitcases loaded onto trains . . . and sent eastward, out to the edge of the imperium, as if they were already shadows now, already cindery smoke” (171–­72; 231). The American soldiers, finally, slap Engelhardt cheerfully on the back as they proclaim that “this is now the imperium” (178; 240). The narrator then ends the novel by describing the opening scene of a planned movie about Engelhardt’s life, in words that echo the opening paragraph of the book. History thus appears in the book as both repetition and change: one empire has passed away, and another has taken its place. Before commenting on the nature of the new imperialism, however, let us return to the elaborately structured sentence that begins the novel. Beneath long white clouds, beneath the resplendent sun, beneath the pale firmament could be heard, first, a prolonged tooting; then the ship’s bell emphatically sounded the midday hour, and a Malaysian boy strode, gentle-­footed and quiet, the length of the upper deck so as to wake with a circumspect squeeze of the shoulder those passengers who had drifted off to sleep again just after their lavish breakfast. (3; 11) More than one critic has noted elements of a Thomas Mann parody in the voice of the leisurely narrator, who summons up a scene in vivid detail with slightly affected fussiness, although the threefold repetition of phrases also recalls the rhythm of the opening lines of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.26 The reference to a Malaysian servant as a “boy” in the opening sentence is the first instance of a racist mentality that has been said to permeate Kracht’s novel.27 If one reads nothing more than the first paragraph, though, it becomes clear that the narrator is only giving voice to the prejudices of the smugly self-­satisfied colonial masters, who are simultaneously skewered with unmistakable sarcasm. Like Hans Castorp, the first-­class passengers doze under the influence of Por-

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ter beer, their half-­unbuttoned suits stained with yellow curry as they sprawl in the tropical sun: “Sallow, bristly, vulgar Germans, resembling aardvarks, were lying there and waking slowly from their digestive naps: Germans at the global zenith of their influence” (4; 12). At first glance, the novel’s protagonist, August Engelhardt, would seem to have nothing in common with the would-­be masters of the universe. He is described as a harmless eccentric, a shy, bearded, skinny sun worshipper in a shapeless smock. A militant vegetarian and enthusiastic nudist, he regards his overstuffed shipmates with disdain and their pork chops with disgust. Yet the narrator suggests that we would not be amiss to note certain parallels “with a later German romantic and vegetarian who perhaps ought to have remained at his easel” (9; 18–­19), Adolf Hitler. What could August Engelhardt possibly have in common with the future German führer? The real August Engelhardt died in 1919 on a remote Pacific island, just as the discharged Austrian corporal was beginning to ponder greater things. Engelhardt survives the Second World War in Kracht’s version of the story, but in utter isolation and ignorance of historical events. The narrator insists, however, that the parallel between the two figures “is entirely intentional and naturally, pardon the pun, consistent in nuce” (9; 19 [translation modified]). Like Hitler, Engelhardt is a vegetarian and becomes an antisemite; he also has a vision of the world and a messianic desire to extend it to others. But Hitler started a world war and committed genocide; Engelhardt goes insane on a desert island. It would therefore be more accurate to speak of a Hitler parody than a Hitler parallel in Imperium. Like a latter-­day Robinson Crusoe, Engelhardt lords over an imaginary empire, and the German tabloids mockingly portray him in this role: “The Berliner Illustrirte even published a caricature under the headline Der Kokonuβapostel that showed a very muscular Engelhardt clothed only in a palm frond, a scepter in one hand, in the other an orb in the shape of a coconut, black people dressed in the European manner worshipping at his feet” (116; 161). On another level, however, Engelhardt is a “typically German” neo-­romantic, as Thomas Mann might have described him, a blue-­ eyed dreamer from Nuremberg with a Siegfried-­like shock of blonde hair, a nonpolitical visionary, a twentieth-­century Taugenichts. For this reason, perhaps, Kracht stages a series of cameo appearances of well-­known artists who are, in some sense, kindred spirits of August Engelhardt: Kafka, who also dabbled in nudism and vegetarianism; Hermann Hesse, who had close ties to the countercultural community of Ascona;28 and Thomas Mann, an outwardly respectable citizen full of creative impulses and forbidden desires. Hitler makes no direct appearance in the novel, yet he shadows the work like the embarrass-

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ing relative that Mann describes in his essay “Brother Hitler”—­the would-­be artist as criminal, charlatan, demagogue, madman. Like Adrian Leverkühn, Engelhardt wants nothing to do with Germany’s imperial masters, yet he, too, makes a Faustian bargain that brings him into uncanny proximity to the demonic soul of the German people. Mann took his allegory seriously, even though he admitted that he risked elevating Nazi barbarism to mythic grandeur in the process. Although Kracht has been accused of doing the same, of using the ultimate outsider as an inverted image of the mystical inside of the German soul, he does so with a sense of the grotesque and the absurd that contrast markedly with Mann’s pathos and profundity. Imperium is a satire of German imperialism and a send-­up of the German soul, not another journey into the heart of Teutonic darkness.29 America is the last word of Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, and American soldiers announce the dawn of a new empire at the end of Kracht’s Imperium. Despite the sadness and sense of futility that engulf Humboldt and Gauss near the end of Kehlmann’s novel, the final scene offers a glimpse of hope, as Gauss’s much-­maligned son steps out of his father’s shadow and is about to set foot in the New World. Kracht’s novel morphs into a Hollywood movie, as the neo-­romantic German visionary is co-­opted by the American culture industry. Kracht continues his quarrel with American culture in his next novel, Die Toten (The dead, 2016). In a similarly fantastic mixture of fact and fiction, Kracht envisions the leaders of fascist Germany and imperial Japan forging a “celluloid axis between Tokyo and Berlin” to counter the “seemingly omnipotent US-­American cultural imperialism.”30 The novel, which has elements of both tragedy and farce, ends when an aspiring German actress falls to her death from the Hollywood sign, landing hideously disfigured among the cactus below. If we strip away the historical garb and dispense with the somewhat tenuous link to Hitler in Imperium, we find in Engelhardt a modern hippie of the sort that Kracht describes with gleeful venom in Der gelbe Bleistift (The yellow pencil, 2000). Kracht wrote this collection of short essays about various Asian countries while he was working as a correspondent for Die Welt am Sonntag, a weekly German newspaper.31 The book consists of a series of vignettes based on the author’s experiences; they tend to be anecdotal in nature and often stop short of providing what would seem to be crucial information about the places he visits. As Anke Biendarra observes, Kracht cultivates a narrative persona reminiscent of the nineteenth-­century dandy, who adopts a “light, conversational, and ironic” writing style. “When it comes to global spaces ruled by hyper-­capitalism,” however, “his dislike is scathing.”32

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If there are certain parallels between Klaus Theweleit and Günter Grass’s indictment of patriarchy in the 1970s, the same could be said about Kracht’s critique of global capitalism and the concept of Empire in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors of this influential work distinguish between nineteenth-­century imperialism, which they view as an extension of the nation-­state, and Empire, “a new global form of sovereignty” that is “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.” Empire had its origins in Europe and might currently seem to be centered in the United States, yet Hardt and Negri insist that it is not coterminous with that nation or any other discrete nation-­state. Empire is everywhere: “The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits.” Yet Empire does not go uncontested: against the evil Empire stands the “multitude,” an inchoate mass united in the struggle against oppression and from which “new democratic forms and a new constituent power” will emerge “that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.”33 Faith in the multitude’s revolutionary potential is probably the last thing one should expect of Christian Kracht, who gained notoriety in the 1990s as one of several wealthy young writers who had as much sympathy for the oppressed masses as his nineteenth-­century counterpart might have had with the slum dwellers of London or Paris.34 His lack of overt sympathy for the “multitude,” however, does not preclude a critical attitude toward “Empire.” While some readers criticized Kracht for advocating a happy-­go-­lucky hedonism in his first novel, a closer look at Faserland reveals a deeply troubled protagonist who drowns the unresolved traumas of his childhood in rivers of alcohol and outbursts of misogyny and homophobia.35 He is an outsider within a dissipated crowd of jet-­setting pleasure seekers who drift from one party to the next in the empty pursuit of stylish brands that confer social status and drugs that procure oblivion. The same crowd resurfaces in a particularly noteworthy contribution to The Yellow Pencil, “Après nous le déluge.”36 In this vignette, Kracht mocks a motley crew of modern freeloaders who have taken up semi-­permanent residence in Goa, India. As he explains, a few beatniks discovered the coastal province in the early 1960s as they came in search of enlightenment. Hippies soon followed, looking for peace and love as they trekked the land route over Turkey and Afghanistan to India. Now a third generation has flown in from around the globe for fun in the sun and sex on the beach: it includes Jesus freaks, Scots on ecstasy, a few naked Swiss living with a few naked Japanese beneath a sacred banyan tree, a Finnish family that flies back to Helsinki once

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a year to collect their welfare check, a few fat Russian pedophiles, and a half-­ naked Hessian panhandling for a few rupees. Kracht scornfully describes Goa as an anachronistic Disneyland, a virtual paradise, an anti-­Mallorca, where the privileged dropouts of Western civilization live with callous disregard for the customs of the local residents. In addition to being the antipode of imperial Germany’s carnivorous colonialists and a peculiar brother of Hitler in his quest to conquer the world in the name of the coconut, August Engelhardt also anticipates the countercultural dropouts that Kracht encounters on the beaches of today’s India. He, too, is a self-­absorbed, would-­be prophet who sinks into obscurity on his own desert island, only to resurface with a hot dog in his hand and a bottle of Coca-­Cola at his lips. Kracht’s Engelhardt thus not only offers a satirical look at Germany’s imperial past but also prefigures a new kind of imperial subject, the parasitic dregs of Western welfare societies living in self-­ indulgent pseudo-­poverty on the margins of the modern Empire.

Chapter 11

Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature

This book consists of a series of thematically related close readings focused on questions of identity in relation to socially constructed space. I noted at the outset that in terms of authors discussed, this study makes no pretense to systematic coverage of the field of German-­language literature. In retrospect, the same is true regarding the study’s thematic focus. Questions of religion, philosophy, the supernatural, and the paranormal get short shrift. Love, sex, marriage, and the family fall largely by the wayside. This book is silent on the topic of language and language crisis. Only passing reference is made to literature and the environment. The history of the book in relation to technological innovation and the advent of other media remain outside the purview of this study, and one could doubtless almost indefinitely extend the list of topics that this book does not explore. German literary critics sometimes speak of filling a gap in one’s knowledge of a field (Bildungslücke), as if there were a finite number of themes to consider, so that the edifice of our erudition would one day be complete. In fact, however, the field is more like the Internet, infinitely capable of absorbing more data and facilitating endless discussion. Imperial Fictions is an effort to break down the notion of the nation-­state as the primary means of organizing political space and to break open the sense of a single national identity. I have used the term empire as a way to describe heterogeneously organized political space and to explore identities constituted in multiplicity, as various authors reflect in their works on the tensions between local loyalties and larger political affiliations. The nation-­state does not disappear entirely from the picture, but it plays a relatively minor role in German history. In the Middle Ages, individual courts served as cultural centers against the backdrop of rival claims to the imperial throne and tensions between church and state. Power shifted to the imperial cities during the early modern era and from the cities to the territories in the eighteenth century. The French Revolu255

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tion disseminated the idea of the modern nation throughout Europe and inspired German patriots to explore their cultural heritage and dream of political unity. When that unity came, however, it was in the form of a federated structure of semiautonomous regions under Prussian hegemony, each with their local traditions and dialects. In this regard, imperial Germany looked back to the Holy Roman Empire; in other ways, it anticipated the Third Reich, repressing internal dissent and presenting an increasingly belligerent face to the rest of the world. Today’s Federal Republic of Germany was founded in opposition to Nazi Germany’s totalitarian state, supporting human rights and shunning military conflict. It continues to negotiate intra-­German tensions in the wake of reunification, even as it seeks to strike a balance between national interests and its European allies and to assimilate recent immigrants into an increasingly diverse population. Despite all its attempts to problematize and pluralize questions of national identity, Imperial Fictions focuses on writers who mostly would have considered themselves German (among other things) and who wrote in some form of the German language, as it evolved over the centuries. In other words, I am still contributing to the history of the national literature, broadly conceived, even if I am challenging the norm of the nation-­state as the political organization in which that literature was written. In this conclusion, I thus reflect on the relationship between the study of national literatures and world literature today. I do so from the perspective of someone who studies German literature but is not a German citizen and does not live in Germany—­from the perspective, that is, of an Auslandsgermanist. In the past, such figures have sometimes been treated as a curiosity by those within the fold of the fatherland, but literary criticism by non-­German writers is more often simply ignored, particularly if it is not written in German.1 That situation has begun to change in recent decades, however, as literary theory has become a lingua franca for the international community of scholars, essentialist notions of the nation have been challenged, and new academic organizations have arisen for the study of German culture outside the boundaries of the nation-­state (e.g., the German Studies Association and the Internationale Vereinigung für Germanistik). The study of German literature has gone global, but where does it stand in relation to the concept of world literature? World literature is cool today, or, to vary the metaphor, a hot topic in the American academy. As our student bodies have grown more diverse and as the mood (among left-­leaning academics, in any case) has shifted from self-­ congratulatory celebrations of American exceptionalism to painful reflections on the legacy of slavery, the eradication of indigenous peoples, the destruction

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of the environment, and the ongoing inequities in the world economy, Eurocentric “great books” classes have yielded to surveys of world literature. Those who design such courses are acutely aware that “coverage” is even less possible than it was for the study of single national literatures, but they attempt, in various ways, to give voice to previously silenced peoples and traditions, while challenging the assumption of Western cultural supremacy.2 Goethe’s proclamation that national literature meant little already in the 1820s seems more apt than ever today: “now is the time for world literature” (die Epoche der Weltliteratur ist an der Zeit).3 Indeed it is. Yet the study of world literature need not preclude the study of national literatures. As I noted earlier, Goethe’s understanding of world literature depends on the notion of discrete national literatures, and there is no need to force a choice today; there is or should be room for both. Before making the case for the continued study of national literatures, however, I turn briefly to the work of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova. For those who might assume that the study of national literature seems limiting in today’s globalized world, it is interesting to discover elements of residual parochialism in the innovative work of these writers. The study of world literature can expand our horizons, but it can also contract them in new and unexpected ways. Generations of scholars have marveled at the breadth of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, as it takes us on a journey from Odysseus’s scar and Abraham’s sacrifice to the work of Virginia Woolf. But Damrosch’s What Is World Literature makes Auerbach look like a Eurocentric provincial. Damrosch’s book jumps all over the place, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to a Guatemalan testimonial, from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages, from the Aztecs to Kafka. As a publisher might boast, Damrosch covers twice as much in half the length of Auerbach’s tome. The historical scope, geographical reach, and linguistic breadth of Damrosch’s work are dazzling, and his readings are consistently thought-­ provoking. The curmudgeon might argue that Damrosch offers us something of a scattershot approach to literary history, as opposed to Auerbach’s carefully chronological investigation of “the representation of reality in Western literature,” and that Auerbach could at least read the languages of the works that he cites in long passages from the original at the beginning of each chapter, whereas it seems unlikely that Damrosch has mastered Babylonian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and ancient Aztec. One might counter that Damrosch’s study gains a broader, if admittedly partial, scope, even if some textual details are inevitably lost in translation. To his credit, Damrosch urges the importance of language learning and acknowledges the limitations of textual analysis by

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those without access to the original language. In the hands of a less conscientious critic or—­perhaps more to the point—­a cost-­cutting administrator, however, the oxymoronic notion of an Anglophone world literature can be used to justify slashing the budgets for literatures other than English while taking credit for extending the global reach of the local curriculum.4 Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” was an early salvo in his assault on the priestly cult of close reading practiced in the ivory towers of elite institutions.5 Moretti seeks the broad vistas granted by distant reading. He rejects the arcane analysis of individual texts and innovatively uses digital technology to trace the global flows of literary forms. National literatures grow like trees, he contends, branching out from a single trunk into multiple variants, much as modern European languages evolved out of an Indo-­European source. World literature, in contrast, moves like waves, sweeping aside local difference the way Starbucks and McDonald’s have conquered world cultures: “Trees and branches are what nation-­states cling to; waves are what markets do.”6 Moretti goes on to explore the “Darwinian morphospace” of world literature,7 in which literary forms and genres engage in a ruthless struggle for survival. Unlike Damrosch, who welcomes the cultural enrichment that results from literatures “that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in the original language,”8 Moretti laments the cultural impoverishment that results from the global hegemony of relatively few major players: “‘From the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature,’ reads the Communist Manifesto, but that’s not how it is,” insists Moretti: “rather, there arises a planetary reproduction of a couple of national literatures that find themselves in a particularly lucky position.”9 In a sense, Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel reproduces the narrative of the German Sonderweg, although it focuses on the lucky winners in the literary marketplace, who emerge, not coincidentally, from centralized nation-­ states. Jane Austen’s fiction gravitates toward the national capital; Walter Scott patrols the border. Balzac and Dickens place their stamp on Paris and London, and in due course, “two cities, London and Paris, rule the entire continent for over a century, publishing half (if not more) of all European novels” and exerting an irresistible influence over writers elsewhere: “French and English novels become models to be imitated.”10 “In the novels taking place in France, Britain, Russia, and Spain (that is, in long-­established nation-­states), the hero’s trajectory towards the capital city is usually very direct; in the German, Swiss, and Italian texts, the lack of a national center produces by contrast a sort of irresolute wandering (which is however also a way of ‘unifying’ a nation that does not exist yet).”11 In this view, the timid souls of the German

Conclusion    259

Kulturnation wander irresolutely through the wilderness of a politically fragmented landscape, and the British and French masters of the universe stride like Rodin’s Balzac across a continent constrained to follow in their footsteps—­“which is not a nice image, of course. But when you study the market, that is what you find.”12 Moretti tells a tale of two cities, but for Pascale Casanova, there is only one: Paris. Her decidedly Franco-­centric view in The World Republic of Letters once again consigns Germany to a place on the periphery of European culture. Casanova outlines what amounts to a two-­phase theory of literary history. In phase 1, national literatures in the vernacular take shape during the early modern period. This development is directly linked to the rise of nation-­states centered on royal courts, thus placing “belated” nations, such as Germany and Italy, at a distinct disadvantage. By the eighteenth century, the “triumph of French was . . . so complete, both in France and in the rest of Europe, and its prestige so unchallengeable, that its claim to superiority came to be true as a matter of fact no less than of opinion.”13 Having attained hegemony in the competition between national literatures in the eighteenth century, Paris became the center of world literature in the nineteenth: “It was through this very process of emancipation from national politics that Paris became the world capital of literature.”14 Casanova’s phase 2 of literary history begins when authors not fortunate enough to have been born in France realize that the only way to escape the purgatory of provincialism is to move to Paris, where they can ascend to the celestial realm of world literature. “Consecration in Paris is indispensable for authors from all dominated literary spaces,” Casanova asserts, because “Paris has become the place where books—­submitted to critical judgment and transmuted—­can be denationalized and their authors made universal.”15 Thus James Joyce and Samuel Beckett made the pilgrimage from Ireland to Paris in the quest for universality, Kafka escaped the clutches of Prague only when he was posthumously lifted up into world literature by French existentialists, and the Latin American Boom became audible only when it reverberated in French. Casanova’s World Republic of Letters continues a tradition that extends back at least as far as King Frederick II’s De la littérature allemande (On German literature, 1780). In a passage cited by Casanova, the Prussian king frankly acknowledges the supremacy of French literature and urges the Germans to concede defeat: “We are ashamed that in certain genres we cannot equal our neighbors . . . Let us therefore not imitate the poor who wish to pass for the rich, let us acknowledge our destitution in good faith.”16 In a sense, Casanova simply repeats Goethe’s admission, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser,”

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that a nation without a central capital cannot produce a classical literature, but she ignores both his contention that the Germans do not want the sort of upheavals that might produce such national unity and his consistent stress on the cultural benefits of regional diversity. To those not living in Paris, Casanova’s World Republic of Letters recalls the famous map of the world on the cover of the New Yorker magazine, in which everything to the west of the Hudson River fades to a blur. Global cities have their own provincialism. Moretti’s distant readings are so distant that close attention to particular texts is lost: the modern novel substitutes for the entirety of literary history, and he, too, reproduces the narrative of Anglo-­Franco hegemony, if with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. Damrosch, finally, opens a window to world literature in translation that should encourage in-­depth study of other languages and cultures but can result in the new parochialism of an Anglophone globalism. My point here is not to reject these theorists out of hand or to dismiss the various pedagogical models for the teaching of world literature today but, rather, to suggest that in covering more, they also cover less. There is still a place for the study of national languages and literatures in our era of world literature, particularly if the two are conceived as being in a reciprocal relation of mutual benefit. The contributors to David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan’s New History of German Literature, for instance, offer an admirable example of an approach to literary history that is nationally specific, historically deep, informed by knowledge of the original language, open to a wide range of literary genres, and able to place individual writers and texts into literary-­historical context. Heinz Schlaffer’s Short History of German Literature, in contrast, reproduces, in abbreviated form, the prejudices of earlier generations, casting aside entire centuries as unworthy of detailed discussion, to focus on a limited number of the usual suspects. Women writers and minorities have no place in his vision of the national literature. Schlaffer is nevertheless adamant in his insistence that the history of German literature reveals not the essence of the national character but, rather, only the educational history of a cultural elite.17 “The continuity of a German literature from the eighth century to the present suggested by literary histories is an invented tradition.”18 In this regard, Schlaffer is in the mainstream of literary critics and cultural historians today, for whom antipathy toward national essentialism has become an article of faith—­for good reasons. Inventing traditions can help to forge a sense of common community, but what keeps some in can shut others out, like the landlady in Selam Berlin who slams the door in Hasan Kazan’s face when he appears to rent a room or like the Jews sent to their deaths on the edges of the empire in Kracht’s Imperium. For this

Conclusion    261

reason, cultural critics today have turned their attention to the centrifugal forces that scatter nationalist myths of historical continuity and rigid identities, looking to groups that are more hybrid than homogeneous and to individuals who forge new alliances by drawing on transnational cultural flows rather than seeking to center themselves in a single national tradition. Identities constituted in multiplicity across various geographical and virtual spaces are most obviously exemplified by migrants and minorities in today’s Europe, but they do not have a monopoly on overlapping and conflicted allegiances. Hasan Kazan’s reflections on the ways in which he is and is not “typically Turkish” could be reproduced in the mind of an imaginary Bavarian, who might feel a sense of belonging in a variety of ways to his local province, the German nation, the European Union, and the Catholic Church; who might like Leberkäse but loathe Bayern München—­typical for him, as Hasan would say, but perhaps not for his fellow Bavarians. Essentialism can cut both ways. The neo-­national, anti-­immigration parties in today’s Europe can direct hostility toward those who do not look or worship like “real” Europeans, while marginalized minorities, such as those portrayed in Kara’s Café Cyprus, can boast that they are producing new cultural mixtures of a sort that has never been seen before, tacitly setting their cultural hybridity against an oversimplified model of national subjects locked in their homogeneous identities. As Monika Albrecht has argued, the rhetorical move deployed by characters in Kara’s fiction mirrors that of much recent cultural criticism: “Critics first construct a belief in a ‘homogenous German culture’ and then accuse the Germans of not seeing its fictitiousness. They likewise construct the idea of German cultural essentialism and then blame the Germans for this conviction.” Albrecht hastens to add that she “does not suggest that the entire native German public happily embraces people with migrant backgrounds,”19 which points toward a crucial difference between minority and mainstream discourses. Both arguments rely on essentialist notions of the nation, although one group embraces the myth in order to reject newcomers, while the other rejects the myth’s believers in order to assert their innovative, transnational identities. Access to power is not equal between the two camps: those ensconced within the walls of Fortress Europe enjoy comforts denied to those seeking to cross the Mediterranean in leaking boats or living in the poverty-­stricken suburbs of European capitals. Hasan’s statement is an act of defiance, claiming pride in what has been used to stigmatize himself and others like him. By asserting a sense of solidarity with his fellow minorities in London and by setting his group against an allegedly monolithic British majority, Hasan practices

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what Gayatri Spivak calls a “strategic essentialism,”20 aware of the socially constructed character of supposedly natural distinctions and yet willing to use certain myths for the furtherance of social justice. Unlike people in the past who invented traditions to place themselves within the imagined community of the nation, however, Hasan distances himself from the nation to declare his allegiance to a transnational community. If essentialism is the enemy, what is the alternative if we are to continue to speak of national literatures today? Here, it is useful to recall Goethe’s comments on world literature. I noted earlier that they oscillate between assertions of absolute difference between nations and their literatures and encouragement of international exchange. Goethe’s own long literary career pays eloquent testimony to his receptivity to foreign influence and his ability to assimilate the most varied traditions into his work. What is true for Goethe is equally true for the history of German literature. From the decisive impact of courtly French romance on the work of Gottfried von Strasbourg and Wolfram von Eschenbach to Thomas Mann’s productive assimilation of Russian and Scandinavian influences into Buddenbrooks, German literature has always been world literature.21 In the context of my discussion of Goethe, I contrasted Emily Apter’s Against World Literature with Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated. While Apter waves a yellow flag to slow down the circulation of national traditions robbed of their local specificity and linguistic difference in the whirlwind of the world literature curriculum, Walkowitz encourages the acceleration of literary particles that circle the globe and shred national singularities. We find a similar tension within Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s often cryptic but suggestive comments in Death of a Discipline. Like Apter, Spivak defines globalization as “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” and decries “the efforts of the world literaturists, the Encyclopedists,” who are complicit in this process of leveling.22 In response, Spivak reiterates her “concern for the literary specificity of the autochthone” (15), meaning, in Haun Saussy’s gloss on the term, “literally the person ‘sprung from the very earth,’ the person with an absolutely prior claim to home.” Saussy goes on to note that Spivak is playing “a risky game” with this appeal to intact indigeneity, one that is “apt to find itself described as Luddite, anti-­intellectual, nostalgic, essentialist (‘strategically’ or not), hypocritical—­the critique is by now routine.”23 Spivak’s argument is more complicated than it seems, however, which Saussy underscores by noting her advocacy for “the kind of language training that would disclose the irreducible hybridity of all languages.”24 “That gives one pause,” Saussy comments, asking, “How but in a very subtle dialectic does

Conclusion    263

hybridity, of all things, become irreducible? Isn’t it the property, so to speak, of hybridity to wear its conflicted origin on its sleeve, to exist as a dialogue of things to which it might be historically reduced (‘led back’)?”25 We are, in other words, once again moving within the orbit of Goethe’s utterances about world literature, as they circle between assertions of national autochthony and insistence on transnational hybridity, between notions of national literatures as discrete expressions of deeply rooted identities and as permeable sites of ongoing transformation. We could call his comments contradictory or, as I have suggested, strategic, deployed—­first one way and then another—­to counter the opposing excesses of national chauvinism and global homogeneity. Spivak’s paradoxical reference to “the irreducible hybridity of all languages” could be applied with equal profit to the irreducible hybridity of all national literatures. To return to an idea that I broached in the introduction to this study, national literature, thus conceived, is aufgehoben within world literature; that is, it is there both canceled and preserved. Azade Seyhan provides one example of what I have in mind, when she reveals that the fiction of Emine Sevgi Özdamar contains a palimpsest of Turkish idioms beneath the German surface of her prose.26 Tobias Boes offers a second, when he shows how the quintessentially national genre of the bildungsroman is shot through with cosmopolitan elements.27 Randall Halle, finally, has pursued this argument in his insightful comments about contemporary German cinema, in which he underscores the transnational nature of today’s film production and yet insists that national communities and national cinemas persist—­not as repositories of organic authenticity, which they never were, but as sites of irreducible hybridity, which they have always been.28 I began this study by arguing that Hasan Kazan’s postnational identity in Yadé Kara’s contemporary fiction is not as new as it seems, that it can serve as a model for the ways in which identities have been construed in the past. For this reason, I turned to late antiquity, which has been mined by modern nationalists as the mother lode of ethnic origins, but which more recent scholarship suggests was a period in which, as now, identities were mobile, multiple, and strategic. Much of this study has been devoted to the debunking of nationalist myths by examining the contested identities and conflicted landscapes of writers who were subsequently shoehorned into their place in the national canon. By framing a discussion of Germany’s national literature in terms of empires, confederations, and localities rather than the nation-­state, we arrive at a more accurate image of authors who negotiated identities within overlapping and permeable social spaces during different historical periods. The nation remains a central category of literary analysis, but one that has

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existed largely as a figment of the collective imagination in the past and that, as now, was shot through with often conflicting pulls of local patriotism and larger loyalties. Various forms of empire and multiregional confederations describe most of German political history more accurately than does the modern nation-­state; movement of peoples and mixtures of cultures have been the norm, not a recent development. German national literature has played a vital role in expressing the multiple and mobile identities of those within the German lands. At different times, it has served as a reservoir of cultural unity amid political fragmentation, insisted on regional autonomy or voiced civic loyalties, or looked beyond the nation to forge transnational alliances or declare cosmopolitan allegiances. German-­language authors have absorbed and adapted diverse influences from the many literatures of the world, while occasionally defining their difference by resisting foreign influence. Often couched in the language of national essentialism, such calls for the centering of tradition or the expulsion of alien imports are no less rhetorical strategies than appeals to local, regional, or global citizenry. If we understand national literatures as the expression of cultures constituted in multiplicity, the site of fluid and ongoing mixtures rather than the source of rigid identities rooted in an immutable past, they have no need of untrammeled origins as they move toward an inclusively multifarious future.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History. 2. Ibid., 8. Other works in the burgeoning field of empire studies include Hardt and Negri, Empire; Howe, Empire; Münkler, Imperien; Parsons, The Rule of Empires; and Reinhard, Empires and Encounters. 3. Zielonka, Europe as Empire, 1, 15. On the European Union as a kind of empire, see also Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 414, 439, 456; Münkler, Imperien, 253–­54. 4. R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 10. 5. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 29–­30. 6. R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 235. 7. Ibid., 6–­8; Marchand, German Orientalism, xxv–­xxvi. 8. “German lands” refers to the German-­speaking regions of the Holy Roman Empire (T. Brady, German Histories, 4). 9. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition. 10. On the concept of the German Kulturnation and its continuing relevance in postreunification Germany, see Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, 1–­ 21. 11. On the process of the formation of the German canon, see Hohendahl, Building a National Literature. 12. Moretti, Distant Reading, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” and “Style Inc.” 13. Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History.” 14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 4. 15. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 139. 16. El-­Tayeb, European Others. 17. Weigel, “On the ‘Topographical Turn’”; Fisher and Mennel, eds., Spatial Turns. 18. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 23. For a discussion of Lefebvre’s life and works, see Soja, Thirdspace, 26–­52. 19. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 52. 20. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” 21. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 22. Massey, For Space. 265

266    Notes to Pages 8–21 23. Liu, “From Reading to Social Computing.” 24. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 25. Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi Myth”; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. 26. Liu, “From Reading to Social Computing”; Readings, The University in Ruins. On the impact of the digital revolution on scholarly practice, see also Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence. 27. See, for example, the essays in Wiggin and MacLeod, eds., Un/Translatables, as well as those in Beebee, ed., German Literature as World Literature. 28. Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, 6. See also Bhatti, “Some Reflections.” 29. Seyhan, Writing outside the Nation. 30. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. 31. M. Walker, German Home Towns; Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. 32. Tautz, “Revolution, Abolition, Aesthetic Sublimation”; “Die Welt als Intertext.” 33. Shaffer, foreword, ix. See also the essays in Oergel, ed., (Re-­)Writing the Radical. 34. Wellbery, introduction.

CHAPTER 2 1. Kara, Selam Berlin, 5 (hereafter cited in text). 2. On Hasan’s rejection of nationalist stereotypes and the view that he is suspended between two cultures, see Fachinger, “A New Kind of Creative Energy,” 253; Vlasta, “Das Ende des ‘Dazwischen,’” 109. 3. Kara, Café Cyprus, 317–­18. 4. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 9, 18, 19. 5. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 13. 6. Spector, Prague Territories, 32. 7. Adelson, “Migrants’ Literature or German Literature?” 218. See also Adelson, “Against Between.” 8. Halle, German Film after Germany, 6, 20. 9. Blackbourn and Retallack, introduction, 6–­7. 10. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 265–­68. 11. Heine, Germany, 44–­45 (Caput [chapter] 11, lines 1–­12). 12. On the history of Tacitus’s reception in Germany, see Schama, Landscape and Memory, 75–­134; Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, 141–­80; Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book. 13. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 58. 14. Wolfram, The Roman Empire, 1–­13. 15. Geary, The Myth of Nations; Heather, Empires and Barbarians. 16. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 41–­62. 17. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 44. 18. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 57. 19. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity; Bowersock et al., eds., Late Antiquity; Katz, The Decline of Rome.

Notes to Pages 22–28    267 20. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome. 21. Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 24. 22. Chamberlin, Charlemagne, 135. 23. Howe, Empire, 10. 24. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 14. 25. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 33. 26. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 29–­30; Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 17–­20. 27. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 30; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 233–­34. 28. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 107, 18. 29. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 14. 30. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 58. See also duBois, A Million and One Gods, 50–­85. 31. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 67. 32. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 41. 33. Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 74. 34. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 46, 48, 51. 35. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 655. 36. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 7. 37. Parkes, Understanding Contemporary Germany, xxiv; Fulbrook, A History of Germany, 145. 38. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 95. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Ibid., 216. 41. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 355–­79. 42. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 106. See also Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 441; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 233–­34. 43. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 175. 44. Nelson, “Kingship and Empire,” 70. 45. G. Brown, “Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance.” 46. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 320; see also McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past. 47. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 267–­68. 48. Sheehan, German History, 14. See also P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 7, 251, 284. 49. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution. 50. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Borgolte, “Das Reich im mittelalterlichen Europa,” 468. 53. Williams, Emperor of the West, xviii–­xix. 54. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 13. 55. G. Schmidt, “The Old Reich,” 47–­48. 56. Ibid., 45, 54. See also P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 44, 171–­72, 179–­84. 57. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 147, x, 456. 58. Plessner published Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes in 1935; a revised edition, titled Die verspätete Nation, appeared in 1959. For a succinct overview of the Sonderweg thesis and its opponents, see Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 100–­120.

268    Notes to Pages 28–37 59. See Williamson, The Longing for Myth; Lincoln, Theorizing Myth; Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason. 60. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, xxv. 61. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 291. See also P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 3. 62. Mann is cited from Safranski, Romantik, 370. 63. P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 1–­15. 64. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism, 106. 65. Scales, The Shaping, 353–­82. 66. Schama, Landscape, 77. For a lively account of Poggio’s life, see Greenblatt, The Swerve. 67. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 81. 68. Schama, Landscape, 76; see also Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 15–­17. 69. T. Brady, German Histories, 19–­20; see also Scales, Shaping, 504. 70. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 235. 71. Ibid., 246. 72. Ibid., 319. 73. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism, 57. 74. Scales, The Shaping, 70, 97, 269.

CHAPTER 3 1. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, 202. 2. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 37–­68, 301–­27. 3. On the “querelle des anciens and des modernes,” see Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, 67–­106. 4. Goethe, Von deutscher Baukunst (1772), in Sämtliche Werke, 18:115. 5. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 26, 83–­136. 6. Hampe, Germany, 154. 7. Brockmann, Nuremberg. 8. Grass, The Flounder, 247; Der Butt, 314–­15. 9. Gellinek, “Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 200. See also Whitesell, “Martin Opitz’ Edition”; Hellgardt, “Die Rezeption des Annoliedes.” 10. Breuer, “Literarische Sozietäten,” 202–­4; Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 129–­52. 11. Hellgardt, “Die Rezeption des Annoliedes,” 65–­67. 12. Gellinek, “Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 197–­200; Liebertz-­Grün, “Zum Annolied,” 238–­39. 13. Liebertz-­Grün, “Zum Annolied,” 231–­32. Gellinek (“Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 205–­8) suggests that it might have been written in Cologne. 14. Liebertz-­Grün (“Zum Annolied,” 231) suggests 1077–­81 as probable composition dates. Gellinek (“Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 205), proposes 1080–­85. James Schultz (introduction, 4) gives a possible range of 1077–­1101. Haverkamp (Typik und Politik, 79–­102) discusses, at some length, the pros and cons for various dates between 1077 and 1126. 15. Reusner, “Das Annolied,” 218; Arnold, “From Warfare on Earth,” 105.

Notes to Pages 38–47    269 16. Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, 204. 17. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 123. 18. De Boor is cited in Reusner, “Das Annolied,” 216. 19. Ibid., 228–­30, 235–­36. 20. Das Annolied, verse 18, lines 1–­8, 70–­71. 21. Nellmann, Die Reichsidee, 80. 22. Batts, review of Nellmann, Die Reichsidee, 554. 23. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 69–­107. 24. Kontje, German Orientalisms, 111–­18. 25. Uhland, Walther von der Vogelweide, 32. See also Richter, Wie Walther von der Vogelweide ein “Sänger des Reiches” wurde. 26. Rühmkorf, Walther; Hahn, Walther; Jones, Walther. 27. De Boor, Die höfische Literatur, 297; Rühmkorf, Walther, 22–­23; Hahn, Walther, 14–­15. 28. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 12. 29. Auerbach, Mimesis, 139. 30. Walther, Werke, 222. Walther’s poems are generally referred to by the numbers assigned to them in Carl von Kraus’s 1959 revision of Karl Lachmann’s 1827 edition (in this case, 8,4). These poem numbers are included parenthetically at the end of subsequent cites of Werke herein. Schaefer provides translations of Walther’s Middle High German texts into modern German in the cited edition of Walther’s Werke; Jones translates many of the poems into modern English in Walther von der Vogelweide. The translations here are my own, in consultation with both Schaefer and Jones. 31. Walther, Werke, 222. 32. Hahn, Walther, 24–­25. 33. On the grouping of Walther’s political poetry in terms of thematic and formal elements, see F. Maurer, Die politischen Lieder Walthers. 34. Walther, Werke, 224 (8,28). 35. Burdach, “Der mythische und der geschichtliche Walther,” 51. 36. Hampe, Germany, 232–­50. 37. Ibid., 239. 38. Walther, Werke, 224–­26 (9,16). 39. Burdach, “Der mythische,” 51. 40. Hampe, Germany, 243. 41. Ibid., 246–­47. 42. Walther, Werke, 278 (11,30). 43. Hahn, Walther, 121. 44. Jones, Walther, 103; Hahn, Walther, 121. 45. Walther, Werke, 288 (105,13). 46. Ibid., 286 (105,27). 47. Ibid., 286 (106,3). 48. Ibid., 314 (26,33). On these poems, see Jones, Walther, 111; Hahn, Walther, 123. 49. The most prominent supporter of the first view is Burdach (“Der mythische und der geschichtliche Walther,” 62); Rühmkorf (Walther) inclines toward the latter. On this debate, see Hahn, Walther, 120–­21.

270    Notes to Pages 48–54 50. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 48–­51, 81. 51. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 98. 52. Forster, introduction, 4. 53. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 103. 54. Holborn, Ulrich von Hutten. 55. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 100–­102. 56. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 684. 57. Ibid., 582. 58. Greenblatt, The Swerve, 14–­50. 59. Kugler, “Literatur und spätmittelalterliche Stadt.” 60. Rosenplüt, Der Spruch von Nürnberg. See also Simon, “Circa 1450”; Kugler, “Literatur und spätmittelalterliche Stadt,” 404; Brockmann, Nuremberg, 14. The title of Rosenplüt’s poem is often cited as Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg. 61. Füssel, appendix, 634. See also Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400.” 62. Füssel, introduction, 31. 63. Füssel, appendix, 637. 64. Ibid., 666. 65. Schedel, Chronicle, CLXXIII; Füssel, appendix, 653, 661. 66. Schedel, Chronicle, CLXXVIII. 67. Füssel, introduction, 30. 68. Schedel, Chronicle, XCIX; Füssel, appendix, 649. 69. Schedel, Chronicle, CI. See Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 163. 70. Schedel, Chronicle, CI. 71. Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 159. 72. Scales, The Shaping, 269. On the retrospective appropriation of Nuremberg as the national capital, see Brockmann, Nuremberg. 73. Füssel, introduction, 24. 74. G. Müller, Die “Germania generalis,” 286–­89. 75. Forster, introduction, 11. 76. G. Müller, Die “Germania generalis,” 11. 77. Ibid., 41–­43. 78. Gerhard Fink, introduction. 79. Celtis, Norimberga, 20 (hereafter cited in text). I cite the modern German translation of the Latin original; English translations are my own. 80. Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 158. 81. Sassen, The Global City. 82. Füssel, appendix, 663. 83. Brockmann, Nuremberg, 27. 84. Schlaffer, Die kurze Geschichte, 30. 85. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” 86. Heng, “Reinventing Race,” 363. 87. Doyle, “Inter-­imperiality,” 345, 336. 88. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 89. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 314. 90. Wellbery, introduction, xxii.

Notes to Pages 55–62    271 CHAPTER 4 1. Benjamin, Origin, 51; Ursprung, 33. 2. Barner, Barockrhetorik, 12. 3. Martus, “Sprachtheorien”; Breuer, “Literarische Sozietäten”; Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 129–­52. 4. Benjamin, Origin, 48; Ursprung, 31. 5. Schlaffer, Die kurze Geschichte, 41–­44. 6. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 44–­76, 131–­37. For lucid introductions to Benjamin’s notoriously difficult text, see Steiner, introduction; Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 29–­ 77. 7. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. For a multifaceted anthology of essays about Worringer, see Donahue, ed., Invisible Cathedrals. 8. Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik, 18–­52. In her essay “Changing Times,” Bushart expands on her earlier work. See also Jennings, “Against Expressionism,” 88. 9. Worringer, Form in Gothic, xv. 10. Ibid., 9. 11. Ibid., 78–­79. 12. Benjamin, Origin, 55; Ursprung, 37. 13. Benjamin, Origin, 81; Ursprung, 62. 14. Benjamin, Origin, 138; Ursprung, 119. 15. Benjamin, Origin, 160; Ursprung, 139. 16. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema. 17. Steiner, introduction, 24. 18. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 186–­203. 19. Oestreich, “Lohensteins Zeit und Umwelt,” 20. 20. Szyrocki, “Ein barocker ‘Literaturboom.’” 21. Becker-­Cantarino, “Martin Opitz,” 263, 265. 22. T. Brady, German Histories, 259–­90. 23. Ibid., 231. 24. P. Wilson, The Thirty Years War. 25. M. Maurer, “Geschichte und gesellschaftliche Strukturen,” 60–­63; T. Brady, German Histories, 375–­403. 26. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 281–­82. 27. M. Maurer, “Geschichte und gesellschaftliche Strukturen,” 18–­26. 28. T. Brady, German Histories, 128–­29. 29. For detailed accounts of Gryphius’s life, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius; Flemming, Andreas Gryphius; Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius”; Mannack, Andreas Gryphius; Spahr, “Andreas Gryphius.” 30. Flemming, Andreas Gryphius, 21. 31. Gryphius, Gedichte, 5. 32. Flemming, Andreas Gryphius, 43. 33. Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 441. 34. Spahr, “Andreas Gryphius,” 139. 35. During the postwar heyday of formalist literary interpretation, critics tended to

272    Notes to Pages 62–69 downplay or deny the political aspects of Gryphius’s dramas. Particularly influential in this regard were the essays published in Kaiser, ed., Die Dramen des Andreas Gryphius. More recent scholars who have reversed the trend are cited herein, in due course. 36. Mannack, commentary, 1072. The work was probably complete in 1650 but not published until 1657 (ibid., 1074). 37. Schings, “Großmüttiger Rechts-­Gelehrter,” 182. 38. Behrends, “Papinians Verweigerung,” 260. 39. Gryphius, Dramen, 17, act 1, line 41. 40. Ibid., 21, act 1, line 153. 41. Vosskamp, Untersuchungen zur Zeit-­und Geschichtsauffassung. 42. Gryphius, Dramen, 30, act 1, lines 379–­81. 43. Ibid., 22, act 1, lines 165–­66. 44. Ibid., 40, act 2, line 112. 45. Ibid., 42, act 2, lines 156–­57. 46. Ibid., 45, act 2, lines 238–­39. 47. Heselhaus, “Gryphius”; Schings, “Catharina von Georgien.” 48. Gryphius, Dramen, 126, act 1, lines 27–­29. 49. Ibid., 127, act 1, lines 71–­72. 50. Schings, “Catharina von Georgien,” 45. For similar views, see Heselhaus, “Gryphius,” 46; Borgstedt, “Andreas Gryphius,” 52–­54; Borgstedt, “Angst,” 594. 51. For a stress on the political aspects of the play, see Spellerberg, “Narratio”; ­Leine, “Das Martyrium als Politikum.” 52. On the political setting at the time, see Heselhaus, “Catharina,” 38; Spellerberg, “Narratio,” 450; Leine, “Das Martyrium als Politikum.” 53. Gryphius, Dramen, 180, act 3, lines 289–­90. 54. Wiggin, “Staging Shi’ites.” 55. On the parallel between Silesia and Georgia, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius, 88. 56. Gryphius, Dramen, 173, act 3, lines 87–­89. 57. Ibid., 145, act 1, line 604. 58. On the implicit link between contemporary Silesia and the drama set in ancient Rome, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius, 94; Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 464. 59. Gryphius, Dramen, 388, act 4, lines 155–­56. Barner notes that Papinianus’s actual place of birth may have been either Syria or Africa (“Der Jurist als Märtyrer,” 230), but Gryphius makes him a Syrian in his play. 60. For an overview of Lohenstein’s life and work, see Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein; Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein”; Browning, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein.” I am particularly indebted to Newman’s subtle analyses, in The Intervention of Philology, of Lohenstein’s drama in sociohistorical context. See also the excellent anthology of essays in Kleinschmidt et al., eds., Die Welt des Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. 61. Casper was the German family name that was Latinized to Caspari; the patent of nobility was granted to Lohenstein’s father just weeks after his son was elected to a high administrative post in the government of Breslau, so the ennoblement of the Casper family may well have been in recognition more of the son’s accomplishments as a law-

Notes to Pages 70–76    273 yer, administrator, and writer than of the accomplishments of his father (Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 2, 12). 62. Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein,” 642. 63. Ibid., 647–­48. 64. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 1. 65. On this history of the concept, see Goez, Translatio Imperii. 66. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 178, act 5, lines 839–­42. 67. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 105, act 5, line 145. 68. Ibid., 122, act 5, lines 675–­79. 69. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman. 70. Elias, The Court Society, 78–­116. 71. Goethe, Faust I & II, Sämtliche Werke, 7.1:275, part 2, act 2, line 6771. 72. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 134, act 4, lines 343–­45. 73. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 277–­79. 74. Ibid., 275. 75. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 40. 76. Newman, “Disorientations,” 349. 77. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 274. 78. Newman stresses the “more balanced, ‘off-­center’ view of Rome’s ‘Other’ as an equal opponent” that “distinguishes Lohenstein’s play from other versions of Cleopatra’s story” (The Intervention of Philology, 152), and she notes similar sympathy with Rome’s enemies in Sophonisbe. See also Breger, “Die Rhetorik kultureller Differenz,” 271. 79. Loomba and Burton, introduction, 18. 80. Lohenstein, Ibrahim Sultan, act 4, lines 29–­31 (cited from Türkische Trauerspiele, 177). 81. On the role of race in Cleopatra, see Newman, The Intervention of Philology, 128–­58. 82. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 49, act 1, line 759. 83. Ibid., 83, act 2, line 531. 84. Ibid., 66, act 2, line 82. 85. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 89, act 4, lines 309–­10. 86. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 143, act 4, lines 592–­94. 87. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 71, act 3, line 337. 88. Ibid., 50, act 2, lines 282–­83. 89. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 134, act 4, lines 342–­43. 90. For a brief overview of the novel’s composition and content, see Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 62–­68. 91. In “Der Roman des Barock,” Alewyn offers a useful overview of the two major forms of the baroque novel: the picaresque and the heroic, or courtly, novel. 92. Borgstedt, “Nationaler Roman als universal Topik,” 154–­55. 93. Roloff, “Der Arminius des Ulrich von Hutten”; R. Walker, Ulrich von Hutten’s Arminius. 94. Ibid., 48. 95. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman, 91.

274    Notes to Pages 76–84 96. Borgstedt, Reichsidee und Liebesethik, 207. Borgstedt stresses Lohenstein’s position as a leading representative of Protestant Breslau and views his praise of Leopold more as political strategy than as heartfelt enthusiasm. 97. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 16; Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein,” 649–­50. 98. Borgstedt, Reichsidee und Liebesethik, 21–­28. 99. Kontje, German Orientalisms, 50–­54. 100. Borgstedt (Reichsidee, 223) calls this episode “eine der erzählerisch reizvollsten Geschichten des Arminiusromans” (one of the most charmingly narrated stories of the Arminius novel). He devotes several pages (223–­31) to the episode, and Szarota (Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman, 217–­22) also summarizes the story in some detail. 101. Lohenstein, Arminius, 495. 102. Ibid., 465. 103. Behn, Oroonoko, 12. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe also emphasizes Friday’s thin lips and European nose to distinguish him from the negroid cannibals on his island. 104. Lohenstein, Arminius, 465. 105. Newman, The Intervention of Philology, 59–­66. 106. P. Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 751. 107. Ibid., 754. 108. Newman, The Intervention of Philology, 177–­78. 109. Borgstedt, “Nationaler Roman als universal Topik,” 161–­62.

CHAPTER 5 1. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 98–­104, 218, 239. 2. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, 151–­59. 3. Ibid., 187. See also Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische; Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles”; Nutz, “Das Beispiel Goethe,” 625; Kruckis, “Goethe-­Philologie,” 466; Wiedemann, “Deutsche Klassik,” 205. 4. Muschg and Staiger, eds., Weltliteratur. Strich’s book was translated into English as Goethe and World Literature in 1949. 5. Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, 2:135. 6. Damrosch, ed., Teaching World Literature. 7. Friedenthal, Goethe, 527. 8. Goethe, Gespräche, in Sämtliche Werke, 39:710. 9. On the tendency toward ahistorical appropriation of Goethe’s comments on world literature, see Beebee, introduction, 19. 10. G. Schmidt, “Friedrich Meinecke’s Kulturnation,” 610, 620. 11. P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 656–­57. On the sequence of events leading to the final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, see Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, 595–­676; Sheehan, German History, 207–­50. 12. Quoted from Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, 669. 13. Friedenthal, Goethe, 506–­9. 14. Schwartz, After Jena; on Goethe’s immediate reaction to the events of October

Notes to Pages 85–91    275 1806, see Schwartz’s second chapter, “Why Did Goethe Marry When He Did?” (40–­ 51). 15. On the origins of the first three books of Poetry and Truth, see Trunz, “Anmerkungen des Herausgebers,” 599–­607; K.-­D. Müller, commentary, 995–­1005. 16. The bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was executed in 1806 for publishing the anti-­Napoleonic pamphlet Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniederung (see Pinson, Modern Germany, 32). 17. Friedenthal, Goethe, 9; on Wackenroder and Tieck’s depiction of early modern Nuremberg and its influence on subsequent artists, see Brockmann, Nuremberg, 32–­76. 18. Trunz, “Anmerkungen des Herausgebers,” 9:667. 19. Friedenthal, Goethe, 41–­42. 20. Boyle, Goethe, 1:43. See also Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, 145. 21. Friedenthal, Goethe, 33–­34; Boyle, Goethe, 1:53–­55. 22. Goethe, From My Life, 4:150; Sämtliche Werke, 14:212 (this Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of Goethe’s works is subsequently cited in the notes as DKV). The English translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit is divided into two volumes, with parts 1–­3 in volume 4 of Goethe’s Collected Works and with part 4 in volume 5. 23. Goethe, From My Life, 4:148; DKV 14:209. 24. Sheehan, German History, 14. 25. Goethe, From My Life, 4:148; DKV 14:210. 26. Goethe, From My Life, 4:143; DKV 14:201. 27. Goethe, From My Life, 4:156–­57; DKV 14:221–­22. 28. See Stollberg-­Rilinger, “On the Function of Rituals.” Goethe’s description of the coronation ceremony provides a good example of a late phase in the history of the empire, in which “the investiture ritual changed from a staging of imperial power into a site of imperial impotence” (368). 29. Goethe, From My Life, 4:143–­44; DKV 14:202. 30. Goethe, From My Life, 4:157; DKV 14:223. 31. Goethe, From My Life, 4:143; DKV 14:201. 32. Goethe, From My Life, 4:160 (translation modified); DKV 14:227. 33. Plate 12 of Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe depicts the banquet hall with “place settings for the princes who failed to attend in person.” Plate 13 shows “the three ecclesiastical electors officiating at Joseph II’s coronation in 1764.” 34. Goethe, From My Life, 4:197; DKV 14:283. 35. Goethe, From My Life, 4:363; DKV 14:534. 36. Boyle, Goethe, 1:77. 37. Goethe, From My Life, 5:556; DKV 14:779. 38. Goethe, Italian Journey, 46; DKV 15.1:37. 39. Goethe, From My Life, 4:356; DKV 14:523. 40. Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 21–­39. 41. Nägele, “Götz von Berlichingen.” 42. Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen, 82; DKV 4:388. 43. For a summary of this debate, see Borchmeyer, commentary, 788–­90. 44. Goethe, From My Life, 5:551; DKV 14:772.

276    Notes to Pages 92–100 45. Goethe, Egmont, 100; DKV 5:483. 46. Goethe, Egmont, 132; DKV 5:525. 47. Goethe, Egmont, 134; DKV 5:528. 48. For useful overviews of Möser’s life and works, see Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, 297–­338; M. Walker, German Home Towns, 170–­84. On the influence of Möser’s thought on Goethe, see Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 95–­ 98; Fell, “Justus Möser’s Social Ideas”; Lange, “The Nation-­State”; Reiss, “Goethe, Möser, and the Aufklärung”; Woesler, “Möser und Goethe.” 49. Möser, “Der jetzige Hang,” 15. 50. Ibid., 16. 51. Boyle, Goethe, 1:194–­95. 52. Goethe, From My Life, 4:472; DKV 14:700. 53. On the pros and cons behind Goethe’s move to Weimar, see Boyle, Goethe, 1:239–­51. 54. Goethe, From My Life, 4:184; DKV 14:263. 55. Boyle, Goethe, 1:248. 56. W. Wilson, Das Goethe-­Tabu, 292. 57. W. Wilson, “Goethe and the Political World,” 213. 58. On the centralizing tendencies in Prussia and France, see Boyle, Goethe, 2:51. 59. Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 95–­105. 60. Schiller, “Ankündigung,” in Sämtliche Werke, 5:870. 61. Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles”; see also Fohrmann, Das Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 1. 62. David, “Goethe und die Französische Revolution,” 65. See also Müller-­Seidel, “Deutsche Klassik und Französische Revolution.” 63. Boyle, Goethe, 2:273. 64. Goethe, “Response,” 190 (translation modified); DKV 18:320. 65. Goethe, “Response,” 192; DKV 18:324. 66. Goethe, “Response,” 190; DKV 18:321. 67. Borchmeyer, Der Zeitbürger, 98. 68. G. Schmidt, “Staat, Nation und Universalismus,” 51–­54. 69. On Hermann und Dorothea’s popularity as a calculated publishing strategy, see Weisinger, The Classical Façade, 175–­78. 70. For detailed discussion of the work’s genesis in historical context, see Boyle, Goethe, 2:300–­302, 349–­52, 392–­97, 437–­50, 466–­68, 517–­32. 71. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 3–­28. 72. M. Walker, German Home Towns. 73. On the discrepancy between the homebody Hermann and his more experienced and worldly bride, see Elsaghe, “Herrmann und Dorothea,” 526. 74. Saine (“Charlotte Corday”) argues that the figure resembles Adam Lux more closely than it does Forster. 75. Elsaghe, “Herrmann und Dorothea,” 527. 76. Boa, “Hermann und Dorothea,” 30–­31. 77. Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, 307; DKV 8:883. 78. Staiger, Goethe, 251. For critical assessments of Goethe’s alleged avoidance of

Notes to Pages 101–9    277 history in his verse epic, see K.-­D. Müller, “Den Krieg wegschreiben”; Elsaghe, “Herr­ mann und Dorothea,” 529–­31. 79. Mann, Buddenbrooks, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1.1:72. 80. Schiller to Goethe, June 15, 1795, in Goethe, Briefwechsel Schiller Goethe, 113. 81. Schiller to Goethe, July 9, 1796, in Goethe, Briefwechsel Schiller Goethe, 242 (aus einem gewissen realistischen Tic). 82. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 127; DKV 9:577. 83. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 12–­14; Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft, 9–­53. 84. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 174; DKV 9:657. 85. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 305; DKV 9:877. 86. Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft, 164–­70; Janz, “Zum Sozialen Gehalt der Lehrjahre.” 87. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 301; DKV 9:870. 88. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 311; DKV 9:887. 89. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 311 (translation modified); DKV 9:886. 90. For a scathingly critical assessment of Lothario and the other members of the Tower Society, see Schlechta, Goethes Wilhelm Meister. 91. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 19; DKV 9:390–­91. 92. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 345; DKV 9:944–­45. 93. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 345; DKV 9:944. 94. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 345; DKV 9:944. 95. Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft, 180–­83. 96. On the economic transformation of nineteenth-­century Europe and its impact on literature, see Gray, Money Matters. Noyes (“Goethe on Cosmopolitanism,” “Commerce, Colonialism”) has written about the effect of European colonialism on Goethe despite his isolation in landlocked Weimar. 97. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 14, 16. 98. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:679. 99. As reported by Friedenthal (Goethe, 12), Goethe’s father paid the kaiser 313 gulden for the title Rat to assure his status as a Particulier. Friedenthal (177) thus refers to Goethe as “der wohlhabende Sohn des Particuliers” (the wealthy son of the Particulier). 100. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:277. 101. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:681–­82. 102. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 396; DKV 10:713. 103. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:47. 104. Hamm, Goethe und die französische Zeitschrift “Le Globe.” 105. Guthke, Goethes Weimar; see also Noyes, “Commerce, Colonialism.” 106. See Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:531–­21; Müller-­Seidel, “Deutsche Klassik.” 107. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:247. 108. DKV 3:59; see also the commentary to this passage, at 3:1124–­25. 109. On the allegorical nature of characters in Faust II, see Schlaffer, Faust Zweiter Teil.

278    Notes to Pages 109–17 110. Koselleck, Futures Past, 5, 17, 35–­38. 111. Foucault, The Order of Things, 220. 112. Heine, Die romantische Schule, 10. 113. See, for instance, Goethe’s withering assessment of the Nazarenes in “Neu-­ Deutsche Religios-­Patriotische Kunst” (Modern German religious-­patriotic art), DKV 20:105–­29. 114. Goethe, Faust I & II, 260; DKV 7.1:400. See Schöne, commentary, 668. At the end of act 4, Mephistopheles sarcastically comments, “You hear the sound of knightly cudgels” (Faust I & II, 271)—­in the original, “Schon schallts von ritterlichen Prügeln” (DKV 7.1:416). 115. Goethe, Faust I & II, 228; DKV 7.1:353. 116. Goethe, Faust I & II, 228 (translation modified); DKV 7.1:353. 117. DKV 7.1:595. 118. Goethe, Faust I & II, 238; DKV 7.1:367. 119. Schöne, commentary, 614. 120. Gray, Money Matters, 346–­400; Hörisch, Heads or Tails, 11–­12; Schlaffer, Faust Zweiter Teil. See also the earlier criticism in M. Berman, All That Is Solid, 37–­86. 121. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 16. 122. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:470. 123. Schöne, commentary, 681, 675. 124. Schöne, commentary, 692. 125. Jaeger, Fausts Kolonie. 126. Goethe, Faust I and II, 282; DKV 7.1:432. 127. Goethe, Faust I and II, 282; DKV 7.1:432. 128. Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 11; G.-­ L. Fink, “Weltbürgertum und Weltliteratur,” 221. 129. Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 5; Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 3–­4. 130. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:224. 131. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 7. 132. Quoted from Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 22. 133. Quoted from Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 350. 134. Goethe, West-­östlicher Divan, DKV 3:148. 135. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:533. 136. Noyes, Herder, 80. 137. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, 1–­2. 138. G.-­L. Fink, “Weltbürgertum und Weltliteratur,” 185. 139. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 2; see also Noyes, “Writing the Dialectical Structure.” 140. Apter, Against World Literature, 2. 141. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld. 142. Walkowitz, Born Translated, 34. 143. Ibid., 25. 144. Ibid., 54, 61. 145. Noyes, Herder, 297–­311.

Notes to Pages 119–27    279 CHAPTER 6 1. On the “historical myth of liberation,” see Sheehan, German History, 385–­89; Blackbourn, History of Germany, 66–­68. 2. Elon, The Pity of It All, 91–­95. 3. Wieland, Über teutschen Patriotismus, 745. 4. Grimm, Selbstbiographie, 2. By “fatherland,” Grimm means Hessia, not Germany. 5. Kleist, Katechismus der Deutschen, 389. 6. On Kleist’s political poetry, see Maass, Kleist, 173–­91; Kittler, Die Geburt des Partisanen. 7. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology; Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. 8. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; Williamson, The Longing for Myth; Lincoln, Theorizing Myth. 9. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische. 10. Safranski, Romantik, 348–­69. 11. Wehler, The German Empire, 102–­3. 12. Herf, Reactionary Modernism. 13. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 221. 14. Sheehan, German History, 610–­12. 15. Schiwy, Eichendorff, 27. 16. Ibid., 279. 17. Ibid., 152. 18. Behler, introduction, lxxviii–­xciii. 19. The essay was written in 1799 but not published until the publication of the fourth edition of Hardenburg’s works, in 1826. That edition’s editors, Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, changed Hardenberg’s title from “Europa” to “Christenheit oder Europa: Ein Fragment.” See O’Brien, Novalis, 227–­45. 20. For incisive readings of “Europa” and its reception, see O’Brien, Novalis, 227–­ 45; Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus, 224–­55; Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, 569–­78. 21. Behler, introduction, lxxix–­lxxxvi. 22. Schlegel, “Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte,” in Studien zur Geschichte, 190 (hereafter cited in text; all translations are my own). 23. Schlegel, “Signatur des Zeitalters,” in Studien zur Geschichte, 495 (hereafter cited in text). 24. On the distinction between Herrschaft and Verwaltung, see Sheehan, German History, 24–­41. 25. Schiwy, Eichendorff, 317. 26. Ibid., 362. 27. Ibid., 392. 28. Ibid., 396. 29. Sheehan, German History, 235–­50 (quoted from 240). See also Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, 595–­676. 30. Sheehan, German History, 243.

280    Notes to Pages 127–44 31. H. Schultz, commentary, 1105. 32. Schwiy, Eichendorff, 483. 33. Eichendorff, Werke, 5:456 (hereafter cited in text). 34. The novels that influenced Eichendorff include Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798), Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin (1801), Clemens Brentano’s Godwi (1801), and Achim von Arnim’s Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin Dolores (1810); see Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 636–­37. On this cluster of romantic novels, see also Jacobs, Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder. 35. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, in Werke, 2:314 (hereafter cited in text). 36. Kohn, Prelude to Nation States, 165. 37. On the political conflict in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, see Borchmeyer, “‘Altes Recht’ und Revolution.” 38. Schiwy, Eichendorff, 371. 39. Letter of October 20, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 620. 40. Letter of November 26, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 626. 41. Letter of October 1, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 617; see also 656. 42. Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 633. 43. Schwarz, “Joseph von Eichendorff,” 356. 44. Safranski, Schopenhauer, 207, 232. 45. Ibid., 217–­18. 46. Eichendorff wrote Das Schloß Dürande in the winter of 1835–­36. The novella was published in the fall of 1836 but predated to 1837. See Schillbach and Schultz, commentary, 821–­22. 47. On Eichendorff’s novella as an antirevolutionary tract, see Koopmann, “Eichendorff, das Schloß Dürande und die Revolution.” 48. Eichendorff, “Der Adel und die Revolution,” in Werke, 5:391. 49. Ibid., 5:391. 50. Eichendorff, Das Schloß Dürande, in Werke, 3:449 (hereafter cited in text). 51. Schillbach and Schultz, commentary, 829–­30. 52. Eichendorff, “Der Adel und die Revolution,” in Werke, 5:414. 53. Ibid., 5:411. 54. Ibid., 5:410–­11.

CHAPTER 7

1. Craig, Germany, 1866–­1945, 50. 2. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 97; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 487–­88. 3. Sheehan, German History, 253–­74; Blackbourn, History of Germany, 54–­68. 4. Sheehan, German History, 610–­11. 5. Wehler, The German Empire, 27, 102–­3. 6. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 556–­57. 7. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 200.

Notes to Pages 144–51    281 8. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses. 9. On these and other monuments, see ibid.; Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. 10. Hermand, “Zur Literatur der Gründerzeit,” 214 (“ein nationaler Maximalismus”). See also Kontje, “Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom.” 11. On antisemitism in Soll und Haben, see Holub, Reflections of Realism, 176–­85; on the novel as an example of intra-­European imperialism, see Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 29–­56. 12. Wehler, The German Empire, 91. 13. Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor, 188, 184–­85; see also Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 13. 14. Tatlock, “‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.’” 15. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. 16. Stifter, Bunte Steine, 10. 17. Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, 259–­60. 18. Auerbach, Mimesis, 516–­17. 19. Blackbourn and Retallack, introduction, 7–­8. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Penny and Bunzl, eds., Worldly Provincialism. 22. On the representation of the colonies in German family journals, see Belgum, Popularizing the Nation, 142–­82; on migration within and beyond German borders, see Blackbourn, History of Germany, 145–­57. 23. In addition to Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies, see Friedrichsmeyer et al., eds., The Imperialist Imagination; R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire. 24. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 9. 25. Ibid., 199. 26. Sheehan, foreword, xiii. 27. Ibid., xiv. 28. On “new imperialism,” see Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 296. In Empire (93–­ 136), Hardt and Negri discuss the link between the rise of the modern nation-­state and European imperialism. 29. Keller, Der grüne Heinrich I (first version), in Sämtliche Werke, 2:11 (hereafter cited in text; all translations are my own). 30. Keller, Green Henry, 4 (translation slightly modernized); Der grüne Heinrich II (second, revised version), in Sämtliche Werke, 3:15. In subsequent references to this version, pages in the English translation are first, followed by volume and page numbers for the German edition. 31. Major studies of the 1970s and 1980s debunked the popular image of Keller as a harmless humorist of rural Switzlerland. See A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller; Kaiser, Gottfried Keller; Locher, Gottfried Keller. 32. E. Binder, “Heimatträumen.” 33. Keller, Die Leute von Seldwyla, in Sämtliche Werke, 4:12. 34. Keller, A Village Romeo and Juliet, in Stories, 81; Sämtliche Werke, 4:103. See Martini, “Auswanderer, Rückkehrer, Heimkehrer.” 35. A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 182; see also Stingelin, “Es brach eine jener

282    Notes to Pages 151–60 grimmigen Krisen.” Das verlorene Lachen is mistranslated “The Lost Smile” in Stories. 36. Keller, Stories, 219; Sämtliche Werke, 4:534. 37. Keller, Stories, 244; Sämtliche Werke, 4:563. 38. Ermatinger, Gottfried Kellers Leben, 62–­94. 39. Ibid., 188–­250. 40. Böning, “Gottfried Keller und die Mundart,” 669. 41. Ermatinger, Gottfried Kellers Leben, 117–­52; A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 254–­59. 42. Cited from Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1064. 43. Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1059. 44. Ibid., 1063. 45. Ibid., 1172–­74. 46. Keller, Am Mythenstein, in Sämtliche Werke, 7:175. 47. Ibid., 7:164. 48. Alt, Schiller, 2:120. 49. Quoted from Alt, Schiller, 2:122. 50. Borchmeyer, “Altes Recht,” 72. 51. Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, in Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 2:998–­99, act 4, scene 2. 52. Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1361–­85. 53. Ibid., 1366. 54. Ibid., 1384. 55. A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 254. 56. Keller, Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten, in Sämtliche Werke, 5:287. 57. Keller, “Einkehr unterhalb des Rheinfalls,” in Sämtliche Werke, 1:150; emphasis in original. 58. Keller, “Vermischte Gedanken über die Schweiz,” in Samtliche Werke, 7:617. 59. “Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus,” quoted from Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 926. On these fragments, see Steinecke, “Kellers Romane.” 60. “Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus,” quoted from Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 926. 61. Ibid., 927. 62. Keller, open letter to the Basler Nachrichten, April 4, 1872, in Sämtliche Werke, 7:287–­89. On the public controversy caused by Keller’s comments, see, in addition to the detailed commentary in the critical edition (Sämtliche Werke, 7:924–­ 31), Ermatinger, Gottfried Keller, 435–­37; A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 276–­77. 63. Keller, Sämtliche Werke, 7:288. 64. Heine, Germany, v. 65. Quoted from Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 375. In the conclusion to Iron Kingdom (681–­83), Clark also invokes Fontane’s love for the local, provincial Prussia. 66. Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 347. 67. Ibid., 347–­48. 68. Ibid., 358. 69. Ibid., 402. 70. Fontane, Meine Kinderjahre, 17–­20; Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 25–­26, 45, 68–­69.

Notes to Pages 161–77    283 71. Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 227. 72. Fontane, Cécile, in Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Das Erzählerische Werk, 9:36 (hereafter cited in notes as GBA); Der Stechlin, GBA 17:367; Die Poggenpuhls, GBA 17:319. 73. See Baker, Realism’s Empire, 155–­74. 74. Letter to Paul Schlenther, November 11, 1895, cited from Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane, 606. 75. Letter to Emilie Fontane, May 14, 1884, in Fontane, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Der Ehebriefwechsel, 1873–­1898, 3:382. 76. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sämtliche Werke, 14:639. 77. Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane, 9. 78. Alter, Partial Magic, 91, 93. 79. R. Berman, “Effi Briest,” 339; see also Baker, Realism’s Empire, 175–­203. 80. Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane, 33. 81. On Freud’s use of this term, see R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 168–­69, 194–­95. 82. Fontane, Effi Briest, 14; GBA 15:21. Subsequent references to Effi Briest are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by volume and page numbers of the German edition. 83. Ryan, “The Chinese Ghost,” 378; R. Berman, “Effi Briest,” 342. 84. See Hehle, commentary, 15:501. 85. The poem is “Die Gottesmauer,” by Clemens Brentano (Hehle, commentary, 15:471). 86. Ryan, “The Chinese Ghost,” 371–­72; see also Hehle, commentary, 15:498. 87. For important studies of the Chinese ghost in Effi Briest, see Rainer, “Effi Briest und das Motiv des Chinesen”; Schuster, “Exotik als Chiffre”; Utz, “Effi Briest”; Ryan, “The Chinese Ghost”; Baker, Realism’s Empire, 175–­203. 88. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 166–­67. 89. Hehle, commentary, 15:441. 90. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 5, 61. 91. Besser, “Die hygienische Eroberung Afrikas.” 92. Hehle, commentary, 15:411–­12. 93. Cited from Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 329. 94. Ibid., 737. While Nürnberger notes the intensification of Fontane’s antisemitic outbursts in later years, Graevenitz (Theodor Fontane, 69–­82) stresses the consistency of Fontane’s denigration of the Jews and Fontane’s corresponding veneration of the Prussian Junker. 95. Mann, Der alte Fontane, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 14.1:265.

CHAPTER 8

1. Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 65; see also Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 348. 2. Spencer, In the Shadow of Empire, 6. 3. Stefan Zweig’s nostalgic memoire Die Welt von Gestern was first published in

284    Notes to Pages 178–83 1944, two years after he had committed suicide while in exile from Nazi Germany. See also Magris, Der Habsburgische Mythos. 4. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. 5. On this distinction and its importance for the history of German modernism, see R. Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel, 1–­30. 6. Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World. 7. See “Buridans Österreicher” (February 14, 1919) and “Der Anschluβ an Deutschland” (March 1919), as well as discussion, in Spencer, In the Shadow of Empire, 75–­83. 8. Mann, “Verhältnis zu Wien,” in Gesammelte Werke, 12:399. 9. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­1921, 542 (August 1, 1921). 10. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­1921, 547 (August 22, 1921). 11. Mann, “Die Vernachlässigten,” in Essays, 3:176. 12. Mann, Tagebücher 1935–­36, 72 (April 4, 1935). 13. Cited from Alt, Franz Kafka, 141. 14. Mann, Tagebücher 1951–­1952, 162 (January 8, 1952). 15. Kafka’s diary entry of August 2, 1914, reads, “Deutschland hat Rußland den Krieg erklärt.—­Nachmittag Schwimmschule” (Tagebücher, 299)—­in translation, “Germany has declared war on Russia—­Swimming in the afternoon” (Diaries, 301). 16. Kafka, Diaries, 252 (January 8, 1914); Tagebücher, 250. 17. Fischer, Germany’s Aims. 18. Boes, “Thomas Mann, World Author.” 19. On Mann’s long lecture tours across America, see Vaget, Thomas Mann, 219–­ 66. 20. Zilcosky argues persuasively that Kafka’s interest in physical travel in his early years soon turned to a kind of metaphorical travel in his writing (Kafka’s Travels). 21. Alt, Franz Kafka, 22–­29. 22. Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 26. 23. Stölzl, “Prag,” 45–­46. 24. Ibid., 54–­55. 25. Hilsch, “Böhmen,” 7–­8. 26. Stölzl, “Prag,” 54. 27. Alt, Franz Kafka, 33–­42; Robertson, Kafka, 2–­4. See also Hilsch, “Böhmen”; Spector, Prague Territories. 28. Spector, Prague Territories, 12–­13. 29. Alt, Franz Kafka, 474. 30. Stölzl, “Prag,” 67; see also Robertson, Kafka, 5–­6. 31. Cited from Robertson, Kafka, 137; see also Alt, Franz Kafka, 474. 32. Spector, Prague Territories, 5. 33. Preece, “Introduction: Kafka’s Europe,” 1. 34. Cited from Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 47. 35. Robertson, Kafka, 26. 36. Barner, “Jüdische Goethe-­Verehrung vor 1933.” 37. W. Wilson, “Humanitätssalbader,” 157–­58. In Goethe and Judaism, Schutjer offers a nuanced assessment of Goethe’s lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and individual Jews. See also Berghahn, “Ein klassischer Chiasmus.”

Notes to Pages 183–90    285 38. Kafka, Diaries, 152 (December 25, 1911); Tagebücher, 152. 39. Kafka, Diaries, 172 (January 7, 1912); Tagebücher, 172. See also Diaries, 179 (February 8, 1912); Tagebücher, 177. 40. Kafka, Diaries, 176 (January 31, 1912); Tagebücher, 174. 41. For a comprehensive study of Kafka’s relation to Judaism, see Robertson, Kafka; see also Stölzl, “Kafka.” 42. Quoted from Alt, Franz Kafka, 69. 43. Presner, Muscular Judaism; Gilman, Franz Kafka, 101–­68; M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 50–­97. 44. Robertson, Kafka, 13. 45. On the existential trend in Kafka scholarship, see Casanova, The World Republic, 155–­56. 46. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 187–­205. See also Spector, Prague Territories; Alt, Franz Kafka. 47. M. Anderson, introduction, 21. 48. Robertson, Kafka, 14–­17; Alt, Franz Kafka, 227–­36. 49. Kafka, Diaries, 148; Tagebücher, 147. 50. Kafka, Diaries, 150; Tagebücher, 149. 51. Robertson, Kafka, 24. 52. Cited from Alt, Franz Kafka, 131. For a particularly insightful analysis of language politics in turn of the century Prague, see Spector, Prague Territories, 68–­92. 53. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16. 54. Corngold, Lambent Traces, 142–­57. 55. Wagenbach, Kafka, 58–­77. See also Corngold et al., eds., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. 56. Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 39–­40. 57. Wagenbach, Kafka, 55; see also Spector, Prague Territories, 75–­79. 58. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 20. 59. Gilman, Jewish Self-­Hatred; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. 60. Kafka, “An Introductory Talk,” 263–­64. 61. Ibid., 264. 62. Spector, Prague Territories, 85–­92. 63. Besser, “Die hygienische Eroberung Afrikas.” 64. Zaimoğlu, Kanak Sprak; Şenocak, “Bastardisierte Sprache,” in War Hitler Araber?, 32. 65. Alt, Franz Kafka, 579. 66. Kafka, “An Imperial Message,” in The Complete Stories, 5; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 139. 67. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” in The Complete Stories, 243; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 295. 68. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 244–­45; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 296. 69. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 246; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 298. 70. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 242; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 294. 71. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 134. 72. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 238; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 291. 73. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 137; Alt, Franz Kafka, 581.

286    Notes to Pages 190–98 74. Robertson, Kafka, 174. See also Alt, Franz Kafka, 580–­81. 75. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 129. 76. Stölzl, “Kafka,” 70, 75; Robertson, Kafka, 173; Plapp, Zionism, 15–­17. 77. Greenberg, “At the Building of the Great Wall of China.” 78. M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 194–­216. 79. Kafka, “Schakale und Araber,” in Sämtliche Erzählungen, 132–­35; “Jackals and Arabs,” in The Complete Stories, 407–­11. 80. H. Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch, 2:332. 81. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 32. 82. Alt, Franz Kafka, 518. 83. Quoted from Alt, Franz Kafka, 521. 84. On the display of both animals and people, see Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire. 85. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Complete Stories, 250; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 147. 86. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 67–­68. 87. Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 105. 88. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture, 86, 89. 89. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Complete Stories, 259; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 154. 90. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86; see also Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 118. 91. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Complete Stories, 258; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 154. 92. Kafka, “The Departure,” in Complete Stories, 449; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 321. 93. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Complete Stories, 253–­54; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 150. 94. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee, 19. For similarly positive assessments of Mann’s political evolution, see Hamilton, The Brothers Mann; Reed, Thomas Mann; Sontheimer, Thomas Mann und die Deutschen, 95. Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung, 31. See also Fest, Die unwissenden Magier; Görtemaker, Thomas Mann und die Politik. 96. Angress, “Jewish Figures in Thomas Mann’s Fiction”; Darmaun, Thomas Mann; Detering, “Juden, Frauen und Litteraten”; Elsaghe, Die imaginäre Nation; Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World. 97. Mann, foreword to “Von deutscher Republik,” in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 15.1:583 (hereafter cited in notes as GKFA). 98. Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 7. 99. Mann, “Lübeck als geistige Lebensform,” in Essays, 3:26. 100. Ibid., 3:25; emphasis in original. 101. I have presented this argument about Buddenbrooks and the Reflections more fully in Thomas Mann’s World, 26–­44, 65–­84. 102. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 98; GKFA 13.1:152. 103. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 100; GKFA 13.1:154–­55. 104. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 98; GKFA 13.1:152. 105. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 172; GKFA 13.1:260.

Notes to Pages 198–208    287 106. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 100; GKFA 13.1:154. 107. See Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism”; Ruthner, “Central Europe Goes Post-­ Colonial”; Feichtinger, Prutsch, and Csáky, eds., Habsburg postcolonial. 108. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. 109. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 67–­68. 110. On Langbehn and his fellow conservatives, Paul de Lagarde and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, see Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. 111. Norton, Secret Germany. 112. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 46; Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften, 25–­29, 109–­11, 390, 414. 113. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 345. 114. Fischer, Germany’s Aims. In response to Fischer, see Blackbourn, History of Germany, 362–­63; Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 560–­61; Münkler, Der Große Krieg, 12, 26–­27; Wehler, The German Empire, 192–­94, 210. 115. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee, 77. 116. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­21, 26 (October 6, 1918). 117. Ibid., 28 (October 9, 1918). 118. Pinson, Modern Germany, 350–­91; Craig, Germany, 396–­433. 119. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­21, 17 (September 28, 1918). 120. Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben, 273–­74. 121. Tagebücher 1918–­21, 63 (November 8, 1918). 122. Ibid., 177–­78 (March 24, 1919). 123. Ibid., 27 (October 7, 1918). See also 42–­43 (October 22, 1918). 124. Ibid., 66 (October 10, 1918). 125. Ibid., 86 (November 19, 1918). 126. Pinson, Modern Germany, 401. See also GKFA 15.2:213; Münkler, Der große Krieg, 745. 127. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­1921, 397 (March 13, 1920). 128. Ibid., 400 (March 16, 1920). 129. Mann, “[Heim, ins Reich],” GKFA 15.1:326. 130. Weitz, Weimar Germany, 100. 131. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:522. 132. Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege,” GKFA 15.1:27. 133. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:550–­51. 134. Ibid., 530; repeated at 544. 135. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 35; GKFA 13.1:59. 136. Mann, “Zum 60. Geburtstag Ricarda Huchs,” GKFA 15.1:776. See also Kurzke, commentary, GKFA 15.2:472–­78. 137. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 182; GKFA 13.1:275. 138. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:522. 139. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 487; Der Zauberberg, GKFA 5.1:748. 140. Neumann, commentary, 27–­28, 92, 269–­72, 286, 362. 141. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–­21, 211 (April 24, 1919). 142. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 377; Der Zauberberg, GKFA 5.1:579. 143. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 374; GKFA 5.1:575.

288    Notes to Pages 208–16 144. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 396; GKFA 5.1:608. 145. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 393; GKFA 5.1:604. 146. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 108; GKFA 5.1:168. 147. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 174; GKFA 13.1:264. 148. See, for instance, Mann, The Story of a Novel, 163; Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, GKFA 19.1:529. See also Lehnert, “Hitler mit der Seele hassen”; Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben, 443–­87 (“Haß auf Hitler”). 149. Mann, “I Am an American,” in Essays, 5:135. 150. Ibid., 5:132–­33. 151. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee. 152. Mann, “I Am an American,” in Essays, 5:134. 153. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 305; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:262. 154. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 310–­11; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:270–­71. 155. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 312; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:271. 156. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 314; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:274–­75. 157. Mann, Deutsche Hörer, 73 (August 1942). 158. Mann, “I Am an American,” in Essays, 5:135. 159. Mann, Deutsche Hörer, 83 (October 24, 1942); Essays, 5:205. 160. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 319; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:281. 161. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 316; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:277. 162. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 304; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:261. 163. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 48; GKFA 13.1:78. 164. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, 29; Langbehn, Rembrandt als Er­ zieher, 101; Chamberlain, Grundlagen, 279–­81. 165. Detering, “Juden, Frauen, und Litteraten.” 166. Mann, Tagebücher 1944–­1946, 269. 167. Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World, 13. 168. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 318; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Essays, 5:278.

CHAPTER 9 1. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 221. 2. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 708. 3. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 205, 212. 4. On the pro-­Nazi political agenda that informs Riefenstahl’s film, see Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism”; Brockmann, Nuremberg, 190–­200.

Notes to Pages 216–25    289 5. Kurzke and Stachorski, commentary, 368. On Nadler in the context of like-­ minded critics in the Nazi era, see Gilman, ed., NS-­Literaturtheorie. Nadler republished his work, revised in conformance with Nazi ideology, as Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes (1938–­41). 6. Alt, Franz Kafka, 100–­101. 7. Mann, “Lübeck als geistige Lebensform,” in Essays, 3:18. 8. Nadler, Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes, 1:13. 9. Lenz, “Ich zum Beispiel,” in Gelegenheit zum Staunen, 115. 10. Grass, Peeling the Onion, 1; Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 7. 11. Grass, Headbirths, 18; Kopfgeburten, 24. See also Preece, “Biography as Politics.” 12. Garde and Schlusen, “Siegfried Lenz.” 13. Lenz, “Enge als Vorzug,” in Beziehungen, 91. 14. On these films, see Moltke, No Place Like Home. 15. Bienek, “Besuch im Heimatmuseum.” 16. Merchiers, “‘Wie sie uns mit Heimatsinn düngten!’” 17. Lenz, Heimatmuseum, 120 (hereafter cited in text; all translations are my own). 18. Ayren, “Siegfried Lenz,” 356. 19. On parallels between the two novels, see Russell, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutsch­ stunde,” 409–­17. 20. On the tendency toward caricature in The German Lesson, see Ayren, “Siegfried Lenz,” 360, 367; Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 152. 21. On the novel’s setting, see Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 149–­56; on the link to Theodor Storm, Russell, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutschstunde,” 406. 22. Lenz, The German Lesson, 199–­200 (translation modified); Deutschstunde, 241. Subsequent references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page numbers of the German edition. 23. Koldehoff, “Noldes Bekenntnis.” 24. Hieber, “Wir haben das Falsche gelernt.” 25. Kegel, “So jagt der Dorsch.” 26. Greiner, “Emil Nolde und Siegfried Lenz.” 27. Gurganus, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutschstunde,” 64. On the glaring absence of Jews and the theme of antisemitism in The German Lesson, see Hieber, “Wir haben das Falsche gelernt.” 28. Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 151. 29. Schlant, The Language of Silence. 30. Grass, “Kurze Rede,” in Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR, 7–­14; “Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan,” in Two States—­One Nation?, 1–­7. 31. In a televised debate in February 1990, Grass argued against Rudolf Augstein’s assertion that unification was already a foregone conclusion. Augstein was the editor of the news weekly Der Spiegel. See Leinemann, “Gelebte Geschichte”; Jürgs, Bürger Grass, 374–­78. 32. See Grass, “Schreiben nach Auschwitz,” in Der Autor als fragwürdiger Zeuge, 195–­222; “Writing after Auschwitz,” in Two States—­One Nation? 94–­123. Grass repeatedly voices his desire for a German confederation instead of national unification in

290    Notes to Pages 226–39 his diaries of 1990 (From Germany to Germany, 27, 126, 159, 219). See also Brockmann, “Günter Grass and German Unification.” 33. Braun, “Günter Grass’ Rückkehr.” 34. Grass, Dog Years, 309; Hundejahre, 407. 35. Grass, “To Be Continued,” 298. 36. Grass, “Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen,” in Der Schriftsteller als Zeitge­ nosse, 31; see also Cepl-­Kaufmann, “Verlust oder poetische Rettung?” 37. Kontje, “The Tin Drum as Historical Fiction.” 38. Grass, “Über meinen Lehrer Döblin,” in Die Deutschen und ihre Dichter, 76. 39. Grass, “Man muss ins Herz treffen!” 40. Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics, 137–­68. See also O’Neill, “A Different Drummer.” 41. Angress (“Der Butt—­a Feminist Perspective”) led the charge with a harsh denunciation of the novel. See also Brady, McFarland, and White, eds., Günter Grass’s Der Butt; Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics, 163–­68; Finch, “Günter Grass and Gender.” 42. Koopmann, “Between Stone Age and Present.” 43. Grass, The Flounder, 183; Der Butt, 234. Subsequent references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page numbers of the German edition. 44. Hall, “Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet.’” Hall adds Local Anesthetic and Crabwalk to the earlier trilogy of Grass’s works about Danzig (The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years) but, curiously, excludes The Flounder. 45. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1:27. 46. Sedgwick (Epistemology of the Closet, 1) distinguishes between “minoritizing” and “universalizing” understandings of homosexuality. 47. Bittner, “Günter Grass’s Germany.” 48. Grass, “Was gesagt werden muss.” 49. In “Was an die Substanz geht” (in Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen, 329), Grass wrote, “Die Bundesrepublik ist ein Einwanderungsland!” See also his essays on behalf of Europe’s Roma and Sinti, Ohne Stimme (Without a Voice, 2000), and his speech “In Praise of Yaşar Kemal” (1997).

CHAPTER 10 1. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 59–­65. See also Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification. 2. El-­Tayeb, European Others. See also Hassan and Dadi, eds., Unpacking Europe; Gökturk, Gramling, and Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit (an invaluable collection of historical documents on the topic of migration to and minorities within postwar Germany). 3. M. Anderson, “Humboldt’s Gift.” 4. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 164. 5. See, for instance, Graichen and Gründer, Deutsche Kolonien; Honold and Scherpe, eds., Mit Deutschland um die Welt.

Notes to Pages 239–52    291 6. For a particularly nuanced study of links between Germany’s colonial policies and continental wars, see Hull, Absolute Destruction. 7. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978), a work of historical fiction set in Southwest Africa at the time of the Herero massacre, was an early example of the growing body of German colonial fiction. See the Goethe Institute’s research project Schreiben über Afrika for a comprehensive list of contemporary German-­language fiction set in Africa (http://www.goethe.de/ins/za/prj/sua/deindex.htm). 8. LeClair, “Geniuses at Work.” 9. Nickel, foreword, 7; Meller, “Die Krawatte im Geiste,” 127. 10. Stein, “‘Germans and Humor in the Same Book.’” 11. Kehlmann, Measuring the World, 6; Die Vermessung der Welt, 11. Subsequent references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page numbers of the German edition. 12. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 115. 13. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 108. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. Ibid., 107. 16. Ibid., 49. Walls won the 2009 Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. 17. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 130. 18. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 19–­20. 19. Ibid., 14. 20. Ibid., 116–­17. 21. Ibid., 170–­71. 22. Kehlmann, “Wo ist Carlos Montúfar?” 23. Lenz, “Vorturner der Nation,” in Gelegenheit zum Staunen, 27–­37. 24. Kracht won the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literaturpreis for the novel but was accused, in a review by Georg Diez (“Die Methode Kracht”), of dabbling in right-­wing, antidemocratic ideas. Kracht’s publisher and a number of prominent authors, including Daniel Kehlmann, rushed to Kracht’s defense. Diez responded, and a literary tempest raged for the first few months of 2012. The most important contributions to this literary controversy are collected in Winkels, ed., Christian Kracht trifft Wilhelm Raabe. 25. Kracht, Imperium, 55 (English); 80 (German). Subsequent references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page numbers of the German. 26. See, for example, Schütz, “Kunst,” 42; C. Schmidt, “Der Ritter der Kokosnus,” 50. I thank Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young (University of British Columbia) for suggesting the Siddhartha parallel. 27. Diez, “Die Methode Kracht,” 32. 28. On this community and Hesse’s ties to it, see Green, Mountain of Truth. 29. Finlay, “Surface Is an Illusion, but So Is Depth.” 30. Kracht, Die Toten, 28–­30. 31. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 164. 32. Ibid., 168, 170. 33. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii–­xv. 34. Liesegang, “New German Pop Literature.”

292    Notes to Pages 252–63 35. Clarke, “Dandyism”; Knight, “Close the Border.” 36. Kracht, Der gelbe Bleistift, 87–­96.

CHAPTER 11 1. Kontje, “Eulen nach Athen?” 2. Damrosch, ed., Teaching World Literature. 3. Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, January 31, 1827, cited from Goethes Werke, 12:361. 4. Apter, Against World Literature, 8. 5. The essay is now reprinted in Moretti, Distant Reading, 43–­62. Moretti’s sarcastic comment about the “secularized theology” radiating from “the cheerful town of New Haven” is from “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” in Distant Reading, 67. 6. Moretti, Distant Reading, 60. 7. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 74. 8. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4. 9. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 187. 10. Ibid., 186–­87. 11. Ibid., 66. 12. Ibid., 191. 13. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 67. 14. Ibid., 87. 15. Ibid., 127. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Schlaffer, Kurze Geschichte, 15. 18. Ibid., 19. 19. Albrecht, “On the Invention,” 397–­98. 20. Spivac, In Other Worlds, 205. 21. The essays in German Literature as World Literature, edited by Beebee, explore various ways in which the national literature has opened in its development to other literatures of the world. 22. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72, 87. 23. Saussy, “Chiasmus,” 237. 24. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 9. 25. Saussy, “Chiasmus,” 237. 26. Seyhan, Writing outside the Nation, 109, 118–­24. 27. Boes, Formative Fictions, 3. 28. Halle, “German Film, aufgehoben,” in German Film after Germany, 30–­59.

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294    Works Cited Heitner. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, 522–­605. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goethes Werke. Ed. Erich Trunz et al. 14 vols. Hamburg: Wegner, 1948–­60. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. Trans. Cyrus Hamlin. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 7, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, 1–­82. New York: Suhrkamp, 1988. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. “Hermann and Dorothea”: An Epic Poem in Nine Cantos. Trans. David Luke. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 8, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and Frank Ryder, 247–­307. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Italian Journey (1786–­1788). Trans. Elizabeth Mayer. London: Penguin, 1970. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser.” Trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 3, ed. John Gearey, 189–­92. New York: Suhrkamp, 1986. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed. Dieter Borchemeyer et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–­. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Trans. and ed. Eric A. Blackall, with Victor Lange. In Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 9. New York: Suhrkamp, 1983. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years; or, The Renunciants. Trans. Krishna Winston. In Goethe’s Collected Works, 10:93–­ 435. New York: Suhrkamp, 1989. Grass, Günter. Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen. Ed. Daniela Hermes. Göttingen: Steidl, 1994. Grass, Günter. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006. Grass, Günter. Der Autor als fragwürdiger Zeuge. Ed. Daniela Hermes. Göttingen: Steidl, 1997. Grass, Günter. Der Butt: Roman. Göttingen: Steidl, 1993. Grass, Günter. Der Schriftsteller als Zeitgenosse. Ed. Daniela Hermes. Göttingen: Steidl, 1996. Grass, Günter. Die Deutschen und ihre Dichter. Ed. Daniela Hermes. Göttingen: Steidl, 1995. Grass, Günter. Dog Years. Trans. Ralph Manheim. San Diego: Harcourt, 1965. Grass, Günter. Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR: Letzte Reden vorm Glockengeläut. Göttingen: Steidl, 1993. Grass, Günter. The Flounder. Trans. Ralph Manheim. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977. Grass, Günter. From Germany to Germany: Journal of the Year 1990. Trans. Krishna Winston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Grass, Günter. Headbirths; or, The Germans Are Dying Out. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. Grass, Günter. Hundejahre: Roman. Göttingen: Steidl, 1993. Grass, Günter. “In Praise of Yaşar Kemal.” In Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–­2005, ed. Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, 413–­16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Works Cited    295 Grass, Günter. Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1980. Grass, Günter. “Man muss ins Herz treffen! Das letzte Interview mit Günter Grass.” Die Zeit, April 16, 2015. http://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2015-04/guenter-grass-zeitinterview-motivation-schreiben Grass, Günter. Ohne Stimme: Reden zugunsten des Volkes der Roma und Sinti. Göttingen: Steidl, 2000. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. London: Harvill Secker, 2007. Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued . . .” PMLA 115.3 (1999): 292–­300. Grass, Günter. Two States—­One Nation? Trans. Krishna Winston and A. S. Wensinger. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Grass, Günter. “Was gesagt werden muss.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 10, 2012. http:// www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/gedicht-zum-konflikt-zwischen-israel-und-iran-wasgesagt-werden-muss-1.1325809 Grimm, Jacob. Selbstbiographie. In Kleinere Schriften, 1:1–­24. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965. Gryphius, Andreas. Dramen. Ed. Eberhard Mannack. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991. Gryphius, Andreas. Gedichte: Eine Auswahl. Ed. Adalbert Elschenbroich. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968. Hardenberg, Friedrich von [Novalis, pseud.]. Schriften. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. 3rd ed. 4 vols. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981. Heine, Heinrich. Die romantische Schule. Ed. Helga Weidmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985. Heine, Heinrich. Germany: A Winter Tale. Trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring. Bilingual ed. New York: Mondial, 2007. Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1971. Kafka, Franz. The Diaries: 1910–­1923. Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin Greenberg, with Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1948. Kafka, Franz. “An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language.” In Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Anderson, 263–­66. New York: Schocken, 1989. Kafka, Franz. Sämtliche Erzählungen. Ed. Paul Raabe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970. Kafka, Franz. Tagebücher 1910–­1923. Ed. Max Brod. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1949. Kara, Yadé. Café Cyprus: Roman. Zurich: Diogenes, 2008. Kara, Yadé. Selam Berlin: Roman. Zurich: Diogenes, 2003. Kehlmann, Daniel. Die Vermessung der Welt. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005. Kehlmann, Daniel. Measuring the World. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Vintage, 2007. Kehlmann, Daniel. “Wo ist Carlos Montúfar?” In Daniel Kehlmanns Die Vermessung

296    Works Cited der Welt: Materialien, Dokumente, Interpretationen, ed. Gunther Nickel, 11–­25. Rein­bek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008. Keller, Gottfried. Green Henry. Trans. A. M. Holt. London: John Calder, 1960. Keller, Gottfried. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Thomas Böning and Gerhard Kaiser. 7 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–­96. Keller, Gottfried. Stories. Ed. Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1982. Kleist, Heinrich von. Katechismus der Deutschen. In Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, ed. Siegfried Streller, 3:389–­400. Berlin: Aufbau, 1978. Kracht, Christian. Der gelbe Bleistift: Reisegeschichten aus Asien. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012. Kracht, Christian. Die Toten: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 2016. Kracht, Christian. Faserland: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 1995. Kracht, Christian. Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas. Trans. Daniel Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Kracht, Christian. Imperium: Roman. Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 2012. Lenz, Siegfried. Beziehungen: Ansichten und Bekenntnisse zur Literatur. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972. Lenz, Siegfried. Deutschstunde. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1968. Lenz, Siegfried. Gelegenheit zum Staunen: Ausgewählte Essays. Ed. Heinrich Detering. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2014. Lenz, Siegfried. The German Lesson. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. London: Macdonald, 1971. Lenz, Siegfried. Heimatmuseum: Roman. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978. Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von. Cleopatra: Trauerspiel. Ed. Volker Meid. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008. Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von. Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius oder Herrmann. Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1689–­90. Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von. Sophonisbe: Trauerspiel. Ed. Rolf Tarot. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996. Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von. Türkische Tauerspiele. Ed. Klaus Günther Just. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1953. Mann, Thomas. Deutsche Hörer! Radiosendungen nach Deutschland aus den Jahren 1940–­1945. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987. Mann, Thomas. Essays. Ed. Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski. 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993–­97. Mann, Thomas. Germany and the Germans. In “Death in Venice,” “Tonio Kröger,” and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Frederick A. Lubich, 303–­19. New York: Continuum, 1999. Mann, Thomas. Gesammelte Werke. 13 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960–­74. Mann, Thomas. Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe: Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher. Ed. Heinrich Detering et al. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002–­. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1995. Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Trans. Walter D. Morris. New York: Ungar, 1983. Mann, Thomas. The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of “Doctor Faustus.” Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Works Cited    297 Mann, Thomas. Tagebücher 1918–­1921. Ed. Peter de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979. Mann, Thomas. Tagebücher 1935–­1936. Ed. Peter de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978. Mann, Thomas. Tagebücher 1944–­1946. Ed. Inge Jens. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986. Mann, Thomas. Tagebücher 1951–­1952. Ed. Inge Jens. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993. Möser, Justus. “Der jetzige Hang zu allgemeinen Gesetzen und Verordnungen, ist der gemeinen Freyheit gefährlich.” In Patriotische Phantasien, 2:15–­21. Berlin: Nicolai, 1776. Musil, Robert. “Buridans Österreich.” In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, Essays und Reden, ed. Adolf Frisé, 1030–­32. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Musil, Robert. “Der Anschluβ an Deutschland.” In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, Essays und Reden, ed. Adolf Frisé, 1033–­42. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Riefenstahl, Leni. Triumph des Willens. Berlin: Universum Film-­Aktiengesellschaft, 1935. Filmstrip. Rosenplüt, Hans. Der Spruch von Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Campe, 1854. Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. Trans. Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Classics, 1984. Schedel, Hartmann. Chronicle of the World: The Complete and Annotated Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. With introduction and appendix by Stephan Füssel. Cologne: Taschen, 2001. Schiller, Friedrich. “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime.” Trans. Julius A. Elias. New York: Ungar, 1966. Schiller, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert. 6 vols. Munich: Hanser, 1980. Schlegel, Friedrich. Studien zur Geschichte und Politik. In Kritische Friedrich-­Schlegel-­ Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, vol. 7. Munich: Schönigh, 1966. Stifter, Adalbert. Bunte Steine: Erzählungen. Ed. Helmut Bachmaier. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994. Timm, Uwe. Morengo: Roman. Munich: Verlag Autoren, 1978. Walther von der Vogelweide. Werke: Text und Prosaübersetzung. Ed. and trans. Joerg Schaefer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Über teutschen Patriotismus: Betrachtungen, Fragen und Zweifel. In Werke, ed. Fritz Martini and Hans Werner Seiffert, 3:744–­54. Munich: Hanser, 1967.

Secondary Literature Adams, Tracy, and Stephen G. Nichols. “Circa 1400: The Culture of the Book.” In A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan, 158–­64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Adelson, Leslie A. “Against Between: A Manifesto.” In Unpacking Europe: Towards a

298    Works Cited Critical Reading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi, 244–­55. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001. Adelson, Leslie A. “Migrants’ Literature or German Literature? Torkan’s Tufan: Brief an einen islamischen Bruder.” In Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, ed. Gisela Brinker-­Gabler and Sidonie Smith, 216–­29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Albrecht, Monika. “On the Invention of an ‘Essentialist View of Culture’: Thinking outside the Prevalent Cultural Studies Discourse on Culturally and Ethnically Heterogeneous Germany.” German Quarterly 89 (2016): 395–­410. Alewyn, Richard. “Der Roman des Barock.” In Formkräfte der deutschen Dichtung vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, 21–­34. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1963. Alt, Peter-­André. Franz Kafka: Der ewige Sohn; Eine Biographie. Munich: Beck, 2005. Alt, Peter-­André. Schiller: Eine Biographie. 2 vols. Munich: Beck, 2000. Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-­Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Ames, Eric. Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Anderson, Mark M. “Humboldt’s Gift.” Review of Measuring the World, by Daniel Kehlmann. Nation, April 12, 2007. Anderson, Mark M. Introduction to Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Anderson, 3–­22. New York: Schocken, 1989. Anderson, Mark M. Kafka’s Clothes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Angress, Ruth K. [Ruth Klüger]. “Der Butt—­a Feminist Perspective.” In Adventures of a Flounder: Critical Essays on Günter Grass’ “Der Butt,” ed. Gertrud Bauer Pickar, 43–­50. Munich: Fink, 1982. Angress, Ruth K. [Ruth Klüger]. “Jewish Figures in Thomas Mann’s Fiction.” In Horizonte: Festschrift für Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Hannelore Mundt, Egon Schwarz, and William J. Lillymann, 161–­72. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Applegate, Celia. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Arnold, Benjamin. “From Warfare on Earth to Eternal Paradise: Archbishop Anno II of Cologne, the History of the Western Empire in the Annolied, and the Salvation of Mankind.” Viator 23 (1992): 95–­113. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Asmuth, Bernhard. Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1946. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Works Cited    299 Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. Maire and Edward Said. Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–­17. Ayren, Armin. “Siegfried Lenz: Deutschstunde (1969).” In Deutsche Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler, 356–­71. Königstein: Athenäum, 1983. Baker, Geoffrey. Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-­ Century Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Barner, Wilfried. Barockrhetorik: Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970. Barner, Wilfried. “Der Jurist als Märtyrer: Andreas Gryphius’ Papinianus.” In Literatur und Recht: Literarische Rechtsfälle von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Ulrich Mölk, 229–­42. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1996. Barner, Wilfried. “Jüdische Goethe-­Verehrung vor 1933.” In Juden in der deutschen Literatur: Ein deutsch-­israelisches Symposion, ed. Stéphane Moses and Albrecht Schöne, 127–­51. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Origins of Modern Germany. New York: Norton, 1984. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 142–­48. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–­1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Batts, Michael S. Review of Die Reichsidee in deutschen Dichtungen der Salier-­und frühen Stauferzeit, by Eberhard Nellman. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63.3 (1964): 552–­55. Becker-­Cantarino, Barbara. “Martin Opitz.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 164, German Baroque Writers, 1580–­1660, ed. James Hardin, 256–­68. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Beebee, Thomas O. “Introduction: Departures, Emanations, Intersections.” In German Literature as World Literature, ed. Thomas O. Beebee, 1–­22. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Beebee, Thomas O, ed. German Literature as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Béhar, Pierre. “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger im Werk Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein.” In Der Fürst und sein Volk: Herrscherlob und Herrscherkritik in den habsburgischen Ländern der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Pierre Béhar and Herbert Schneider, 269–­91. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2004. Behler, Ernst. Introduction to Kritische Friedrich-­Schlegel-­Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, 7:xv–­clii. Munich: Schönigh, 1966. Behrends, Okko. “Papinians Verweigerung oder die Moral eines Juristen.” In Literatur und Recht: Literarische Rechtsfälle von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Ulrich Mölk, 243–­91. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1996. Belgum, Kirsten. Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube,” 1853–­1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

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Index

Adams, Tracy, 52 Adelson, Leslie, 18 Akin, Fatih, 238 Albrecht, Monika, 261 Alter, Robert, 162 Ames, Eric, 286n84 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 27 Anderson, Mark, 184 Angress (Kluger), Ruth, 290n41 Anno II, archbishop of Cologne, 35–­37 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 17–­18, 147 Applegate, Celia, 10, 121, 215 Apter, Emily, 116, 262 Arminius (Hermann), 3, 12, 19–­22, 29, 55, 76, 98, 111, 124, 144 Arnim, Achim von, 120, 280n34 Arnim, Bettine von, 81 Auerbach, Berthold, 150 Auerbach, Erich, 11, 41, 82, 115–­16, 146, 162, 257 Augstein, Rudolf, 225, 289n31 Austen, Jane, 258 Austro-­Hungarian Empire (1867–­1918), 148, 177–­78, 180–­84, 188–­91, 194, 198, 203, 208 Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 145, 178, 228 Balzac, Honoré de, 146, 258 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 28, 30 Barthes, Roland, 8 Bartlett, Robert, 54 Beckett, Samuel, 259 Beebee, Thomas O., 274n9, 292n21 Béhar, Pierre, 71 Behn, Aphra Oroonoko, 77–­78 Belgum, Kirsten, 281n22

Benjamin, Walter Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), 55–­59, 79 Benn, Gottfried, 111 Berghahn, Klaus L., 284n37 Berman, Russell A., 5, 162, 284n5 Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 193–­94 Bhatti, Anil, 9 Biendarra, Anke, 251 Bienek, Horst, 218, 219 Bismarck, Otto von, 1, 4, 18, 24, 38, 143, 144, 145, 210 Bittner, Jochen, 234–­35 Blackbourn, David, 18, 28, 144, 146, 281n22 Blüher, Hans, 206 Böcklin, Arnold, 168–­69 Boes, Tobias, 263 Boor, Helmut de, 38 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 97, 156 Borgolte, Michael, 27 Borgstedt, Thomas, 76, 79, 274n96 Börne, Ludwig, 81, 183 Boyle, Nicholas, 94 Bracciolini, Poggio, 29 Brady Jr., Thomas A., 30, 31, 61, 265n8 Brandt, Willi, 217, 237 Brentano, Clemens, 120, 280n34 Brockmann, Stephen, 53, 265n10, 270n72, 275n17, 288n4, 290n32 Brod, Max, 184, 192 Brown, Dan, 239 Brown, Peter, 12, 24 Buber, Martin, 184, 190, 192 Bunzl, Matti, 147 Burbank, Jane, 1, 5, 196, 265n3 Burckhardt, Jacob, 145, 178

321

322    Index Burdach, Konrad, 43–­44 Burton, Jonathan, 74 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 109 Caesar, 21, 44 Carl August, duke of Saxe-­Weimar-­Eisenach, 93–­94, 95 Casanova, Pascale, 14, 257, 259–­60, 285n45 Celtis, Conrad, 29, 48, 51–­53 Germania generalis, 51 Germania illustrate, 51–­52 Norimberga, 52–­53 Certeau, Michel de, 8 Cervantes, Miguel de, 56, 162 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 211 Charlemagne, 3, 22, 24, 25–­27, 31, 34, 50, 87, 124, 125, 152 Charles V (1500–­1558), Holy Roman Emperor, 124, 125 Cicero, 31 Clark, Christopher, 24, 144, 282n65 Coetzee, John Maxwell, 116, 192 Columbus, Christopher, 22, 50 Confino, Alon, 10, 145 Cooper, Frederick, 1, 5, 196, 265n3 Corngold, Stanley, 186 Counter Reformation, 10, 59–­60, 69, 7 Dahn, Felix, 144 Damrosch, David, 14, 113–­14, 184, 257–­58, 260 Deleuze, Gilles, 186–­88 Derrida, Jacques, 8 Diaz, Bartolomeus, 50 Dickens, Charles, 146, 182, 258 Diderot, Denis, 162 Dietrich von Meissen, 46–­47 Diez, Georg, 291n24 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7 Dix, Otto, 58 Döblin, Alfred, 227 Dürer, Albrecht, 58, 89, 154 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 81, 82, 107, 108, 109 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 10, 11, 13, 32, 122, 126–­41, 157, 159, 199 “The aristocracy and the revolution” (“Der Adel und die Revolution”), 136, 140

Durande Castle (Das Schloβ Dürande), 135–­41 I too was in Arcadia (Auch ich in Arkadien), 122 Liberty and her lovers (Libertas und ihre Freier), 122 Presentiment and Presence (Ahnung und Gegenwart), 128–­35 Eicken, Heinrich von, 207–­08 Einstein, Albert, 242 Eisner, Kurt, 202 Eley, Geoff, 28 Elias, Norbert, 71, 99 El-­Tayeb, Fatima, 8 Empire as confederation, 3, 5, 64, 132, 198 and conquest, 3, 5, 64, 132, 198 “Empire” (Hardt/Negri), 5, 252–­53 and nineteenth-­century imperialism, 4–­6, 13, 83, 106, 108, 111–­13, 132, 233 Engelhardt, August, 248 Engels, Friedrich, 106, 114 Epp, Ritter von, 202 Epstein, Klaus, 274n11 European Union, 2, 3–­4, 29, 78, 144 Evans, Richard J., 24, 28, 215 Fachinger, Petra, 266n2 Fallersleben, August Heinrich Hoffmann von, 7, 152 Ferdinand III (1608–­57), Holy Roman Emperor, 71 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 121, 124 Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation), 120 Fink, Gonthier-­Louis, 115 First World War, 4, 58, 111, 179, 191, 195, 197, 201, 203, 207–­8, 218, 226, 248 Fischer, Fritz, 179, 201 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 266n26 Flaubert, Gustav, 146, 164, 182 Fontane, Theodor, 10, 13, 148, 160–­75, 186 L’Adultera, 173 Beneath the Pear Tree (Unterm Birnbaum), 173 Cécile, 161 Effi Briest, 161–­75 Ellernklipp, 173 Grete Minde, 172

Index    323 The Poggenpuhl Family (Die Poggenpuhls), 173 Quitt, 161 Ramblings in Brandenburg (Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg), 160 Schach von Wuthenow, 173 The Stechlin (Der Stechlin), 161 Forster, Georg, 100, 108, 115 Foucault, Michel, 8, 109 Fouqué, Baron de la Motte, 33, 133, 135 Francis II (1768–­1835), Holy Roman Emperor, 83–­84 Franz Josef (1830–­1916), emperor of Austria, 189 Frederick I (1175–­98), duke of Austria, 42 Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ (1122–­90), Holy Roman Emperor, 30, 33, 34, 42, 144 Frederick II (1194–­1250), Holy Roman Emperor, 30, 43–­45, 47 Frederick II ‘the Great’ (1712–­86), king of Prussia, 94, 95, 122, 230, 259 Frederick III (1415–­93), Holy Roman Emperor, 50 Frederick III (1657–­1713), elector of Brandenburg, 76 Frederick William III (1770–­1840), king of Prussia, 126, 143, 244 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 152 French Revolution, 4, 22, 83, 84, 85, 96–­97, 98–­101, 103, 105–­6, 108, 112, 117, 127, 134, 135–­37, 139–­40, 156, 162, 208, 255–­56 Freud, Sigmund, 163 Freytag, Gustav, 144 The Ancestors (Die Ahnen), 145, 229 Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben), 145, 172 Friedenthal, Richard, 183, 277n99 Ganghofer, Ludwig, 146, 227 Gaus, Carl Friedrich, 239, 240, 244 Geary, Patrick J., 12, 18 George, Stefan, 200 German conservatism, 11, 94–­95, 115, 122, 124, 141, 156, 157, 160 German empires   —­Holy Roman Empire (800–­1806), 1–­2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 25–­27, 29–­30, 50, 60–­61, 67, 96, 108, 119, 123–­24, 131, 144, 154, 178, 180, 198, 199, 208, 226, 256

end of, 83–­85, 98, 102, 107, 113, 127 federative tradition of, 83, 94, 132, 141, 148, 157 multiple identities/loyalties within, 26–­27, 30–­31, 50, 59, 61, 66–­67, 69–­70, 79, 83, 87 and racial difference, 74–­75, 77   —­Imperial Germany (Second Empire, 1871–­1918), 1, 3, 13, 32, 82, 143–­48, 159, 166, 173–­74, 177–­79, 196–­201, 203, 208, 239, 248–­49, 256 Unification (1871), 18, 143–­44, 160, 177   —­Third Reich (1933–­45), 1, 3, 4, 14, 24–­ 25, 29, 32, 58, 82, 180, 195–­96, 200–­ 201, 209, 215–­17, 239, 249, 256 German identities multiple and overlapping, 18–­19, 146–­47, 255, 261, 263–­64 as poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker), 38, 41, 96, 121, 241, 243, 250 in relation to Switzerland, 151–­56, 158–­59, 174 tragic-­heroic, Faustian, 57–­58, 121 German nationalism anti-­French, 82, 98–­101, 114–­15, 119–­20, 123–­24, 129–­32, 197, 205 and antisemitism, 14, 53, 121, 145, 171–­ 73, 180, 182, 191, 196, 199, 203, 205–­6, 212, 223–­25, 247, 248, 250, 260 (see also Jews) and cosmopolitanism, 9, 14, 32, 40, 52, 53, 62, 82, 85, 86, 90, 101, 113, 115–­16, 159, 160–­61, 169, 178, 182, 191, 196, 197, 210–­12, 226, 234–­35, 244, 247 cultural, 7, 13, 33–­35, 83, 89–­90, 96, 103, 148, 152–­53, 157–­58, 259 ethnic, racist, völkisch, 6, 7, 18, 20–­22, 28, 30–­31, 100–­101, 120–­21, 170, 190–­ 91, 196, 199–­201, 205, 209, 211–­12, 216, 222–­23, 229, 238, 260 liberal, democratic 4, 7, 13, 81–­82, 107, 121, 143, 152, 155–­59, 241, 246 and overseas imperialism/colonialism, 6, 7, 13–­14, 82, 147–­48, 156, 160, 161, 163, 166, 179–­80, 192, 196–­201, 209, 239, 248–­53 symbols of, 19, 33–­34, 123, 130, 144

324    Index German national literature. See also world literature history of, 6–­7, 9, 11–­14, 18, 33–­35, 40, 54, 55–­59, 81–­83, 96, 115, 121, 256 and migrant literature, 9, 18 and ‘minor’ literature, 9, 178, 185–­88, 191–­92 and world literature, 9, 13–­14, 82–­83, 113–­ 17, 256–­64 German particularism, provincialism, and localism, 6, 10–­11, 13–­14, 16, 18, 28–­31, 83, 90–­95, 101–­2, 107, 144–­48, 228, 232 against centralized states, 90, 92, 94–­95, 107, 122, 125–­26, 128, 145–­48, 178, 180, 209 against imperial authority, 60–­61, 66–­69, 72–­75, 91, 132, 197–­201, 227 against universal principles, 92, 95, 99, 115–­17, 132, 141, 200, 206, 209 cities as cultural centers, 10, 48–­49, 50, 94, 101, 255 Berlin, 10, 16, 161, 165–­66, 179 Breslau, 59–­60, 69–­70, 86 Danzig (Gdansk), 35, 62, 217, 226–­28, 230–­32 Frankfurt, 10, 85–­87, 90, 199 Lübeck, 14, 178–­81, 197 Munich, 153–­54, 178, 197–­98 Nuremberg, 10, 34, 48–­53, 85, 86, 196, 215 Prague, 180–­82, 184, 186–­87, 195 Weimar, 95, 108 Zurich, 10, 148–­49, 151 courts as cultural centers, 48, 255 and the German Sonderweg, 28–­29, 83, 258 and Heimat, 100, 121–­22, 145–­46, 160, 215–­16, 218–­19, 221–­22, 227, 235 German republics   —­Federal Republic of Germany (1949–­), 4, 15, 25, 256 Reunification (1989–­90), 12, 15–­17, 32, 225–­26, 237–­39, 256   —­Weimar Republic (1919–­33), 4, 180, 195, 202, 204–­7 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 7, 81 Gibbon, Edward, 21 Gilman, Sander, 289n5 Gobineau, Arthur de, 211

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 11, 13, 31, 34, 40, 55, 79, 115, 119, 120, 134, 145, 155, 156, 158, 160, 180, 182–­86, 188, 198–­99, 209–­11, 226, 244, 257, 262–­63 “Alexis und Dora,” 95 Campaign in France (Campagne in Frankreich), 85 Conversations of German emigrés (Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten), 96 Egmont, 91–­92, 95, 132, 156, 199 Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), 84, 85, 129, 164 Faust, 49, 71, 83, 95, 96, 98, 101, 107–­13, 168 Götz von Berlichingen, 81, 90–­91, 92, 94, 95, 113, 132, 156 Iphigenie, 91, 95 Italian Journey, 85 Hermann und Dorothea, 96, 98–­101, 105, 115 Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), 85, 86–­88, 89, 93, 103 “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser” (“Literarischer Sansculottismus”), 96–­98, 101, 102, 107, 115, 185, 259–­ 60 Roman Elegies (Römische Elegien), 95, 129 The Siege of Mainz (Die Belagerung von Mainz), 85 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), 81, 91, 93, 113, 162 West-­Eastern Divan (West-­östlicher Divan), 109 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Lehr­ jahre), 96, 101–­07, 111, 112, 113, 115, 129 Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wanderjahre), 106, 107, 108 Gökturk, Deniz, 290n2 Good Bye Lenin, 237 Görres, Joseph, 120 Gossman, Lionel, 10, 145, 147–­48, 177, 199 Gottfried von Strasbourg, 41, 262 Gotthelf, Jeremias, 150 Graevenitz, Gerhart von, 162, 163, 283n94 Gramling, David, 290n2

Index    325 Grass, Günter, 10, 14, 32, 216–­17, 225–­35, 252 The Call of the Toad (Unkenrufe), 233, 234 Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), 227 Dead Wood (Totes Holz), 234 Dog Years (Hundejahre), 227, 228 The Flounder (Der Butt), 14, 35, 218, 228–­ 34 From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke), 228 Headbirths (Kopfgeburten), 217, 233 Local Anaesthetic (Örtlich betäubt), 228 The Rat (Die Rättin), 234 Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan (Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen), 225 Show your tongue (Zunge Zeigen), 233 The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), 220–­ 21, 227, 228, 232, 233, 237 “What must be said” (“Was gesagt werden muss”), 234 Gray, Richard T., 277n96 Greenberg, Clement, 191 Gregory VII (1020–­85), pope, 37–­38, 44 Greiner, Ulrich, 223 Grillparzer, Franz, 182 Grimm, Jacob, 119, 120 Grimm, Wilhelm, 120 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel, 55 Grosz, George, 58 Gryphius, Andreas, 35, 55, 59, 61–­69, 79, 122, 230 Carolus Stuardus, 62, 63 Catharina von Georgien, 62, 63, 64, 65–­ 69, 132 Leo Armenius, 62, 63, 64–­65, 66 Papinianus, 62–­63, 64, 68 Guattari, Felix, 186–­88 Gut, Philipp, 196, 209 Guthke, Karl S., 108 Hagen von der Hagen, Friedrich, 33 Hall, Katharina, 231 Halle, Randall, 18, 263 Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis), 123, 205–­06 “Christianity or Europe” (“Die Christenheit oder Europa”), 124–­25 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 33, 129 Hardt, Ludwig, 178

Hardt, Michael, 4, 252, 281n28 Heather, Peter, 12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 162, 227, 230 Heine, Heinrich, 12, 19–­20, 81, 109–­10, 211, 226 Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), 168 Germany: A Winter Tale (Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen), 19–­20, 159 The Romantic School (Die romantische Schule), 183 “Vitzliputzli,” 168 Henry III (1017–­56), Holy Roman Emperor, 36 Henry IV (1050–­1106), Holy Roman Emperor, 36–­39 Henry VI (1165–­97), Holy Roman Emperor, 42–­43, 45 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 89, 92, 93, 114–­ 17, 120, 209 Hermand, Jost, 144 Herwegh, Georg, 152 Herz, Henriette, 183 Herzl, Theodor, 184 Herzog, Werner Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 248 Hess, Rudolf, 215 Hesse, Hermann, 178, 250 Siddhartha, 249 Hieber, Jochen, 223, 289n27 Hirschi, Caspar, 29–­31 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 22, 24, 144, 179, 201, 204, 209, 215, 222, 226, 230, 250, 251 Hofer, Andreas, 131, 132 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 182 Hofmannswaldau, Christian Hofmann von, 59 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11 Holub, Robert C., 281n11 Homer, 23, 90, 98 Howe, Stephen, 22 Huch, Ricarda, 206 Hull, Isabel V., 291n6 Humboldt, Alexander von, 108, 238, 240, 244–­45 Hutten, Ulrich von, 48, 89, 152 Hermann, oder Arminius, 29, 75–­76 Innocent III (1160–­1216), pope, 44–­45 Investiture controversy, 30, 34, 37–­40

326    Index Jahn, Friedrich ‘Turnvater,’ 241, 246–­47 Janouch, Gustav, 179 Jefferson, Thomas, 245–­46 Jenisch, Daniel, 97 Jews in German-­speaking Europe, 88, 119, 181–­84, 187–­88, 190–­93. See also German nationalism, and antisemitism Joseph, archbishop of Austria, 87 Joseph II (1741–­90), Holy Roman Emperor, 95, 97 Joyce, James, 259 Jünger, Ernst, 111 Kaes, Anton, 290n2 Kafka, Franz, 10, 14, 32, 148, 177–­95, 212, 216, 250, 257, 259 America, 194 A Country Doctor (Ein Landartz), 188 The Departure (Der Aufbruch), 195 The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer), 178, 188–­91, 194 A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler), 1 95 An Imperial Message (Eine kaiserliche Botschaft), 188–­91 “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language,” 187–­88, 191–­92 Jackals and Arabs (Schakale und Araber), 191 Josephine the Singer (Josefine, die Sängerin), 191 The Judgment (Das Urteil), 194 A Little Fable (Kleine Fabel), 194–­95 The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), 178, 194 The Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie), 194 A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie), 178, 192–­94 The Trial (Der Process), 195 Kara, Yadé, 10, 32, 238, 263 Café Cyprus, 16–­17, 261–­62 Selam Berlin, 12, 15–­16, 18, 260–­61 Kehlmann, Daniel, 291n24 Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), 14, 238–­48 Keller, Gottfried, 10, 11, 13, 148–­60, 161, 174, 186 The banner of the seven righteous men

(Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten), 157 Clothes Make the Man (Kleider machen Leute), 150 Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich), 148–­ 50, 151–­56 The Lost Laughter (Das verlorene Lachen), 151 At the Mythenstein (Am Mythenstein), 155 Pankraz the Pouter (Pankraz der Schmoller), 150 The People of Seldwyla (Die Leute von Seldwyla), 150, 151 A Village Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe), 146, 150–­51 Kleist, Heinrich von, 121, 182 The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (Die Hermannsschlacht), 120 German Catechism (Katechismus der Deutschen), 119–­20 Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, 168 Die Marquise von O, 164 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 89, 120 Koch, Robert, 169 Kohn, Hans, 131 Kopp, Kristin, 281n11 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 156 Koselleck, Reinhart, 115 Kracht, Christian The Dead (Die Toten), 251 Faserland, 238, 252 Imperium, 14, 238–­39, 248–­53, 260 The Yellow Pencil (Der gelbe Bleistift), 251–­52 Krebs, Christopher B., 21, 29–­30, 266n12 Kurzke, Hermann, 202, 288n148 Lacan, Jacques, 8 Lachmann, Karl, 33 Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, 8 Lagarde, Paul de, 200–­01 Landauer, Gustav, 202 Langbehn, Julius, 199–­200, 211, 222 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 91 Lefebvre, Henri, 8 Lehnert, Herbert, 288n148 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 114 Lemon, Robert, 189 Lenz, Siegfried, 14, 216–­25, 226

Index    327 The German Lesson (Deutschstunde), 14, 219–­25 Heimatmuseum, 218–­19, 221 So tender was Suleyken (So zärtlich war Suleyken), 217–­18 Leo III (750–­816), pope, 25 Leopold I (1640–­1705), emperor of Austria, 70–­72, 76 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4, 89, 115, 120 Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), 171 Liu, Alan, 8 The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), 237 Loeben, Graf Otto Heinrich, 133, 135 Logau, Friedrich von, 59 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 55, 59, 60, 69–­78, 79, 110, 122 Agrippina, 71–­72 Arminius oder Herrmann, 71, 75–­78 Cleopatra, 70, 73–­75, 77, 132 Epicharis, 71–­72 Ibrahim Bassa, 72 Ibrahim Sultan, 72, 74 Sophonisbe, 70, 73–­75, 77, 78, 109, 132 Loomba, Ania, 74 Louis XIV (1638–­1715), king of France, 61 Louis XVI (1754–­1793), king of France, 156 Löwy, Jitzak, 185 Ludwig I (1825–­48), king of Bavaria, 154 Luther, Martin, 4, 29, 33, 60, 62, 63, 76, 86, 89, 124, 210 Lyotard, François, 8 Magris, Claudio, 177 Maier, Charles S., 267n58 Mani, B. Venkat, 9 Mann, Thomas, 10, 11, 14, 29, 32, 121, 174–­ 75, 177–­80, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, 195–­213, 216, 226, 227, 234, 250 “Brother Hitler” (“Bruder Hitler”), 251 Buddenbrooks, 101, 197, 211, 212, 262 “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” 209 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), 207 Doctor Faustus, 202, 209, 212, 213, 227, 251 “The German Republic” (“Von deutscher Republik”), 202, 204–­07 “Germany and the Germans” (“Deutschland und die Deutschen”), 210, 212–­ 13

“I am an American,” 210 “Lübeck as a form of intellectual life” (“Lübeck als geistige Lebensform”), 197 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), 195, 202, 207–­09, 212, 249 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), 28, 57, 99, 179, 195, 197–­98, 199, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210–­11 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit), 201 “Thoughts in War” (“Gedanken im Krieg”), 195, 205 Tonio Kröger, 179, 211 Marchand, Susanne, 5 Marvell, Andrew, 11 Marx, Karl, 91, 106, 114, 162 Massey, Doreen, 8 Mauthner, Fritz, 187 Maximilian I (1459–­1519), Holy Roman Emperor, 50, 154 May, Karl, 144 McCarthy, Joseph, 178, 211 McClintock, Anne, 169 Meinecke, Friedrich, 83 Mereau, Sophie, 123 Metternich, Klemens von, 123, 199 Milton, John, 56, 63 Moliere, 86 Moretti, Franco, 7, 14, 257, 258–­59, 260, 292n5 Möser, Justus, 92–­94 Mosse, George, 144 Mühsam, Erich, 202 Münkler, Herfried, 5, 265n3, 266n12 Musil, Robert, 178 Nadler, Josef, 216, 229, 289n5 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 8 Napoleon Bonaparte, 4, 22, 26, 33, 82, 84, 85, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132, 133, 135, 143, 198, 230, 241, 246 Nation-­State (modern), 1, 17, 78–­79, 196, 208, 226 characteristics of, 2–­3, 8, 13, 26–­27, 31, 45 Negri, Antonio, 4–­5, 252, 281n28 Nellmann, Eberhard, 38–­39 Newman, Jane O., 56, 58, 78, 79, 272n60, 273n78 Das Nibelungenlied, 33, 40

328    Index Nichols, Stephen G., 52 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144, 145, 154, 162, 178, 199, 205, 211 Nolde, Emil, 223 Nordau, Max, 184 Noyes, John K., 114, 117, 277n96 Nürnberger, Helmuth, 283n94 O’Brien, William Arctander, 279n19 Opitz, Martin, 35, 40, 55, 59, 230 Concerning German poetry (Buch von der deutschen Poeterey), 35 Ottoman Empire, 60, 67, 68, 72 Otto von Poitou, 42, 44–­47 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 238, 263 Parsons, Timothy H., 281n28 Pechstein, Max, 223 Penny, H. Glenn, 147 Peter the Great (1672–­1725), czar of Russia, 230 Philip (1177–­1208), German king, 42–­45, 47 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 29 Pindar, 90 Plessner, Helmuth, 28, 267n58 Pratt, Mary Louise, 244 Preece, Julian, 182 Pynchon, Thomas, 239 Raabe, Wilhelm, 11 Rathenau, Walther, 204 Ratzinger, Joseph, 237 Readings, Bill, 9 Remarque, Erich Maria, 58 Restoration (1815–­48), 4, 108, 111–­12, 157, 240 Retallack, James, 18, 146 Reusner, Ernst von, 38, 39 Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ (1157–­99), king of England, 44 Richardson, Samuel, 6 Riefenstahl, Leni, 229 Triumph of the Will, 215–­16 Riegl, Alois, 56 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 146, 199 Robertson, Ritchie, 185, 190, 285n41 Rodan, Auguste, 259 Roman Empire, 12, 20–­25, 26, 31, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 109–­12, 147, 229 as confederation, 22–­24 and conquest, 22

late antiquity (‘Dark Ages’), 21–­22, 24–­ 25 multiple identities/loyalties within, 23–­24, 30–­31 Rosenplüt, Hans, 50, 52, 154 In praise of Nuremberg (Der Spruch von Nürnberg), 49 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 6, 193 Rubeanus, Crotus, 48 Ryan, Judith, 11, 260 Sachs, Hans, 49, 89, 154 Said, Edward, 4–­5 Safranski, Rüdiger, 29, 121 San Marte (A. Schulz), 33 Saussy, Haun, 262 Scales, Len, 30–­31, 51 Schama, Simon, 29–­30, 266n12 Schedel, Hartmann, 52 Chronicle of the World (Weltchronik), 49–­ 51, 53 Scheffler, Johann (Angelus Silesius), 59 Schiller, Friedrich, 11, 13, 55, 81, 82, 83, 95, 102, 103, 157, 193 Die Horen, 95–­97, 101 Wilhelm Tell, 132, 154–­56 Schlaffer, Heinz, 54, 55–­56, 58, 79, 260 Schlant, Ernestine, 225 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 123 Schlegel, Dorothea, 126, 280n34 Schlegel, Friedrich, 13, 32, 122, 123–­26, 135, 157, 159, 199 Athenäum fragments, 123 “Characteristics of the age” (“Signatur des Zeitalters”), 125–­26 Lectures concerning modern history (Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte), 124–­25, 127–­28 Lucinde, 123 On the language and wisdom of the Indians (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier), 123 Schlegel-­Schelling, Carolina, 123 Schlink, Bernhard The Reader (Der Vorleser), 240 Schlöndorff, Völker, 221 Schmidt, Georg, 27, 83 Schönborner, Georg, 61 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 134, 162, 196 Schulz, Ingo Simple Stories, 237

Index    329 Schutjer, Karin, 284n37 Schwarz, Egon, 134 Schwarz, Peter, 84, 274n14 Scott, Walter, 230, 258 Second World War, 82, 111, 119, 219, 230, 248, 250 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 290n46 Şenocak, Zafer, 188 Seyhan, Azade, 9–­10, 263 Shakespeare, William, 55, 56, 58–­59, 89, 90, 103, 168 Sheehan, James J., 26, 87 Simrock, Karl, 33 Soja, Edward W., 265n18 Song of Anno (Das Annolied), 34, 35–­40, 41, 48, 54, 70, 109, 228 Song of Ezzo (Das Ezzolied), 37 Sontag, Susan, 288n4 Spector, Scott, 18, 182, 285n52 Spellerberg, Gerhard, 70 Spengler, Oswald, 57 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 262–­63 Staiger, Emil, 82, 100 Stanley, Henry Morton, 169 Steinecke, Hartmut, 282n59 Stern, Fritz, 287n110 Sterne, Laurence, 162 Stifter, Adalbert, 145, 182 Stölzl, Christoph, 285n41 Storm, Theodor, 160 Immensee, 145 The rider of the white horse (Der Schimmelreiter), 221 Strich, Fritz, 82, 113 Süskind, Patrick Perfume, 240 Szarota, Elida Maria, 71, 76 Tacitus, 20–­22, 31, 33, 50, 120 Annals, 20, 29 Germania, 3, 20–­21, 29–­30 Tasso, Torquato, 56, 86 Tatlock, Lynne, 145 Tautz, Birgit, 10 Theweleit, Klaus, 232, 252 Thieberger, Friedrich, 181 Thirty Years War, 55, 61, 78–­79, 230 Tieck, Ludwig, 85, 123, 280n34 Timm, Uwe, 291n7 Toller, Ernst, 202 Tolstoy, Leo, 146

Tönnies, Friedrich, 146, 199 Uhland, Ludwig, 40 Vaget, Hans Rudolf, 284n19 Varnhagen, Rahel, 183 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 183 Virgil, 23, 25, 78 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 146 Vlasta, Sandra, 266n2 Voltaire, 94 Vulpius, Christiane, 84, 85 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 85 Wagenbach, Klaus, 181, 186 Wagner, Richard, 33, 34, 144, 171, 199 Lohengrin, 168 Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg, 154, 196 Die Walküre, 168 Walker, Mack, 10, 99, 147 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 116, 262 Walls, Laura Dassow, 244–­45 Walther von der Vogelweide, 10, 34, 40–­48, 49, 54 Wars of Liberation, 85, 107, 143 Wehler, Hans-­Ulrich, 145 Wellbery, David E., 11, 260 Whitmann, Walt, 205 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 94, 115, 119 Wiggin, Bethany, 67 William I (1797–­1888), king of Prussia, German emperor, 143 Wilson, Peter H., 29, 78 Wilson, W. Daniel, 94 Winthrop-­Young, Geoffrey, 291n26 Wohlgemut, Michael, 50 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 40, 41, 49, 262 Woolf, Virginia, 257 World literature, 9, 13–­14, 82–­83, 113–­17, 256–­64 Worringer, Wilhelm, 56–­57 Yeats, William Butler, 181 Zaimoğlu, Feridun, 188 Zantop, Susanne, 5, 147 Zielonka, Jan, 3, 78 Zilcosky, John, 284n20 Zola, Émile, 146 Zweig, Stefan, 283n3