New German critique: Mark M. Anderson on German literary history.

A NEW HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE

EDITED BY DAVID E. WELLBERY (EDITOR IN CHIEF), JUDITH RYAN (GENERAL EDITOR), HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT, ANTON KAES, JOSEPH LEO KOERNER, AND DOROTHEA VON MUCKE (EDITORS)

CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1,004 PAGES, $45.

In 1989, as the theory wars over deconstruction and poststructuralism were beginning to ease up, Harvard University Press published A New History of French Literature. Edited by Denis Hollier, the volume did away with the traditional taxonomies of literary movements and writers by organizing itself as one long series of dates, each of which testified to a signal moment in French literary history. Apart from its novel presentation (itself no mean achievement in the often dusty realm of reference works), this editorial technique had the advantage of stressing the contingent, "happening" quality of literature: literature in the making rather than as a collection of timeless and fixed "great works." And because each entry was written by a different scholar, the encylopedia offered a cornucopia of French literary criticism at the time, a "tasting menu," as it were, of leading critics, sensibilities, and methods. Literary history became an encounter.

Fifteen years later, A New History of German Literature uses the same structure of momentous dates and subjective critical perspectives to similar effect and gain. "Every poem is datable," wrote the poet Paul Celan, by which he meant (as editor in chief David Wellbery writes in the introduction) that the "meaning of literary texts ... is inseparably tied to the singularity of their moment, to their primary historical character as contingent events." This conception of history owes much to Walter Benjamin, who emphasized the breaks in the temporal continuum in order to disrupt the monumentalizing and ossifying tendencies of traditional historicist views and to make history come alive for each human subject. In practice, this approach can be disorienting. Students of German literature will search the table of contents of A New History of German Literature in vain for such terms as Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, and even, believe it or not, the name Goethe. We find instead enigmatic and somewhat mystifying titles, such as "Contagious Violence," "Pathologies of Literature," and (my favorite) "An Alien Fallen from the Moon," which come coupled with precise but equally enigmatic dates: "circa 1200," "1774, January-March," or "1796, June 10." Only by scouring the index or reading the entries in question can the reader discover that these titles and dates refer to the composition of the medieval epic Nibelungenlied, to Goethe's breakthrough novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and to the arrival in Weimar of Romantic author Jean Paul, dismissed by Schiller as an "alien" to classical German literature.

The use of these titles is somewhat of a tease (they provide, in essence, the poetic half of traditional academic titles, leaving off the descriptive half that usually follows the colon), but speaks to Wellbery's stated desire to enliven and disrupt conventional histories. Goethe, that "towering figure of the German literary tradition," is to be met in this encyclopedia not in his monumentality but at three or four moments of his career: "We see him writing his Werther, censoring his own Roman Elegies, declaring his Faust complete; in one entry, we even see him hiding behind a curtain to listen to F. A. Wolf lecture on Homer." Although this strategy sometimes descends into the anecdotal and arbitrary, more often than not the entries succeed in illuminating the "dynamics of their various subject matters," as well as testifying to the theoretical paradigms, insight, and sensibility of the individual contributors.

Interdisciplinarity and methodological eclecticism are the rule. This is very much a "German studies" account of German literature, reflecting the state of a discipline that has moved increasingly toward the study of literature and language as cultural forces in a historical and social context. Readers will find articles on the Crusades and Luther, on Wagner's Ring cycle and Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will, on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the New German Cinema of the 1970s--all written by Germanists currently working in American German departments. But readers will also find "visiting" scholars from other fields, some quite unexpected: early-modern historian Anthony Grafton on Johannes Reuchlin and the Kabbalah; pop music critic Greil Marcus on Dada; historian of science Lorraine Daston on Lichtenberg's aphoristic mode; Arthur C. Danto on Hegel and the "end of art"; even the Harvard executive editor himself, Lindsay Waters, on Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

A New History of German Literature is large: In just over a thousand pages it winds its way over a thousand years of history, across different genres, disciplines, and cultures, from the tenth-century magical formulas written in alliterative Old High German to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel Austerlitz. But despite its gargantuan scope, the focus on single moments makes the reader aware of just how fragmentary and subjective the New History is. There are clear winners and losers. An astonishing amount of space (some 340 pages) is allocated to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque--periods that are virtually untaught today in most German literature departments throughout this country. A welcome corrective to this curricular gap, the articles in the section provide a rich portrait of historical, scientific, and social forces in the pre-Enlightenment development of German literature. The other clear winner, at more than four hundred pages and nearly seventy articles, is the twentieth century. In addition to entries on individual texts by Kafka, Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Paul Celan, we find essays on Hitler's Mein Kampf, Daniel Libeskind's new Jewish Museum in Berlin, and "spectacles of multiculturalism" and Turkish identity politics in contemporary Germany.

The problem with these riches is that little space is left over for the rest of German literature. Only 170 pages are devoted to the Enlightenment, Classical, and Romantic periods from 1750 to 1821--arguably the most important phase of German literature, when it developed into a modern idiom and a European force, a "world" model for other literatures. (The imbalance is particularly odd since Wellbery's own specialization is in this period.) The real loser is the post-Romantic nineteenth century, from Heine to Hauptmann, not only because it receives a scant hundred pages but because much of this section doesn't specifically deal with literature. One welcomes, to be sure, articles on Schubert's Winterreise, Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will, Marx's "Communist Manifesto," and Wagner's Ring--texts that are all interesting in their own right and that have played an incalculable role in the development of German literature. But the heart sinks when one considers the omissions: nothing substantial on Heine's poetry or his Judaism; nothing on the Realist authors Storm, Grabbe, and C. F. Meyer; only passing reference to Gerhart Hauptmann, the Zola of German Naturalism; and nothing at all on the Jewish genre writers Auerbach, Franzos, and Sacher-Masoch.

To be sure, every literary history has to make choices, and writers' reputations rise and fall over time. But the real issue is the "German studies" approach behind so many of these articles, which tend to put aside formal literary questions (genre, prosody, figural language, stylistics, etc.) in order to probe connections with nonliterary realms. The editorial mandate to choose a specific date almost automatically pushes the contributors away from a text's formal literary features in favor of a historical event in which its ideological or extraliterary significance can be understood to crystallize. This technique works best when larger issues are addressed, in particular for the medieval and early modern periods, whose specialists have long employed historical and interdisciplinary methods. The fascinating article "The Culture of the Book," on Renaissance Nuremberg, by Tracy Adams and Stephen G. Nichols, is a case in point: It not only sketches a miniature portrait of that city's "world" significance for early modern Europe, but also suggests how knowledge of Renaissance book culture can expand and transform our present-day notion of authors and readers. A manufacturing and trading center located at the crossroads of twelve trade routes, Nuremberg was also the "de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire," the site of Germany's first municipal library, and the printing capital for its flourishing Humanist studies. Marion Aptroot's article "The Emergence of Yiddish Literature" uses the scholarly debate over a collection of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew script in order to point out the linguistic and ideological stakes in determining the border between Middle High German and Yiddish. Are these manuscripts, discovered in the late nineteenth century in a Cairo synagogue, essentially German texts written in Hebrew letters, or are they Yiddish texts in a Jewish literary tradition that borrowed elements from the surrounding German culture? Orrin Robinson's model essay "Luther's Bible and the Emergence of Standard German" convincingly tempers the widespread view that Luther's translations and writings "created the German language" (as Heine put it), allowing us to see them as part of a broader literary development as well as a decisive intervention in their own right. In these and many other essays (on monastic scriptoria, medieval court life, Old Norse literature, mysticism, and scholastic theology), we find a felicitous mix of broad historical knowledge, philosophical insight, and traditional philology, which, to this reader at least, proves exhilarating as well as convincing.

For the modern period, however, this interdisciplinary, even-driven conception of literary history is decidedly mixed, and reflects more the current interests of American Germanistik than German literature per se. Large chunks of the history of poetry and drama largely disappear, to be replaced by film, photography, philosophy, and politics. David Bathrick's discussion of songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann rightly focuses on issues of censorship and East German party politics (Biermann's poetry is not formally interesting), but the lack of any sustained discussion of Else Lasker-Schuler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bertolt Brecht, Ingeborg Bachmann, Johannes Bobrowski, Gunter Eich, or Ernst Jandl as poets makes it impossible to follow the internal, formal development of a genre that was vitally important to German readers throughout much of the century. (Here I can cite my own contribution--mea culpa--as an example: Though Ingeborg Bachmann's poetry is arguably better, in sheer literary terms, than her novel cycle Todesarten, I was commissioned to write on the latter, no doubt because of its greater resonance for German feminist discussions of patriarchy and fascism.) Is this political tendency the result of a "Benjaminian" attempt to break open German literature for new readers and surprising uses, or merely the reflection of poetry's waning influence in the age of the artwork's "mechanical reproducibility"? Ironically enough, Walter Benjamin (like Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem) wrote poetry himself, and no doubt he would have lamented the loss of this tradition.

This loss is also a gain, though, since it is intimately connected with the expansion of the traditional study of German literature to include what has become known simply as "visual culture." A fascinating article on Bauhaus photography and typography by Brigid Doherty (a trained art historian who currently teaches in the Princeton German department) has little to do with literature; indeed, it discusses the end of literature (as in Moholy-Nagy's 1923 prediction that "photography will lead in the near future to a replacement of literature by film") and serves as a reflection of the current move toward visual culture in American literature departments. The same can be said of the (excellent) articles by Anton Kaes on German Expressionist cinema, by Eric Rentschler on the German Heimat films and the Holocaust, and by Edward Dimendberg on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new "architecture of commemoration." These topics have all become vital areas of contemporary American Germanistik, compelling to students and a rich terrain for New Historicist or cultural-studies methods: archival research, heterogeneous juxtaposition, and an eye toward popular culture and ideological conflict.

In a few places, A New History of German Literature falls into topical anecdote or mere theorizing at the expense of literary history. For example, the political importance of Mein Kampf is unquestionable. But its impact as a text on German literature, or even on German readers, is never clearly demonstrated in an article that highlights instead a piquant but irrelevant detail of the book's reception history (starting on May 1, 1936, it was distributed to all newlywed couples in Germany). "All this," we are told, "was part of the Nazis' effort to create a new aural and visual space in which Germans would be ... encouraged to assume social and racial identities as so-called Aryans in the 'thousand-year' Reich"; later the author questions whether Germans actually read the book, noting that they "kept and discarded [it] opportunistically." One wonders just how important the "Carnival of Cultures" in Berlin in 2000 will prove to be in the long run for Turkish and other immigrant groups' identity; its importance for German literature is not even discussed. Finally, given the hostility of deconstructionist critics to historical contextualization, one might ask why they make an appearance in what is, for all its theoretical self-consciousness, an Enlightenment attempt to order and make (new) sense of the past. Carol Jacob's brilliant reading of Enlightenment philosopher Johann Hamann predictably winds up concluding that despite his religious conversion and use of scripture, his prose remains caught up in the aporia of language (its "unencompassable figures") and fails to bring about aesthetic closure. And however suggestive it is to see Heine's writing as an allegory of the "instability" and "unidentifiable" nature of the poetic self, one longs for a cogent discussion of The Book of Songs, arguably the most popular German work of the nineteenth century, as well as its fraught and fateful significance for generations of German and Jewish readers.

To these minor details one must also add the publisher's unfortunate decision not to send final page proofs to the contributors for correction, which resulted in numerous factual errors, omissions, and stylistic inconsistencies, marring an otherwise elegant volume. Cost-cutting measures seem to have hampered this project throughout its decade-long gestation. Given the importance of visual materials in the editors' conception of literary history, the almost complete lack of illustrations is unfortunate, though no doubt also necessary for reasons of space and finances. These material details, however, should not diminish the stunning intellectual achievement and pedagogical usefulness of A New History of German Literature. One can only wish that its absorbingly fresh account of literature and the interpreting process--"here and now," as Wellbery puts it with infectious enthusiasm in his essay on Goethe's Faust--will reach the broadest possible audience.

Mark M. Anderson is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University.