‘Blüthenstaub‘: Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis ed. by Herbert Uerlings, and: Novalis: Das Werk und seine Editoren ed. by Gabriele Rommel (review)

Abstract

1042 Reviews What does Honold tell us about Holderlin? The firstchapter afterthe introduction unearths a new source from which Holderlin informed himself about the excavations at Olympia, so that the knowledge he displays in Hyperion can be called 'state of the art'. The next chapter concerns firstthe Olympic ideal of athletic contest (or agon) and its impact, via Rousseau's Emile, on Holderlin and the German pedagogical reform? ers. The chief text is again Hyperion, though there are now references to a number of poems. The textual evidence for the presence of the agon ideal in Hyperion is rather slender, and rests on careful readings of a few passages. (There unfortunately seems to be no evidence that Holderlin ever applied his Rousseauite ideals in his activity as a Hofmeister.) This second chapter also explores the sexual ramifications ofthe Olympic ideal ofthe beautiful male body, and how this ideal gives rise to tensions in Hyperion, especially in the relation between the hero and Alabanda. Honold here gestures to? wards a comprehensive interpretation ofthe novel, based on some ideas ofWolf Kittler and Peter Sloterdijk, but, given the book's odd style,this interpretation is leftundeveloped . In the last chapter, the focus is on Holderlin's late unfinished hymn 'Der Ister', and revolves around some inevitably speculative arguments about its connection to the myth of the foundation of the Olympic Games by Hercules. The interpretation, we learn, is also to be presented in a forthcoming article in the Holderlin-Jahrbuch. Honold's subject, however, extends beyond Holderlin to the entire range of (not only German) philhellenism, down to the 1936 Olympics and the architecture ofthe Langemarck-Halle, where lines from Holderlin appear in glorification of the dead of 1914. Hence the archaeology chapter contains sixteen pages on the excavation of Olympia after Holderlin's time, and the next one a discussion of Coubertin's revival ofthe Olympic Games, which were inspired, Honold tells us, by the Bayreuth Festival and by English public schools. The book thus fails into the tradition of Cultural Studies, with both its trademark interest in institutions and its floating methodology. On the positive side, this method embeds the study of texts in a wider study of a nation's culture, and it is able, as here, to provide a showcase for vast erudition, ranging from standard themes to an exploration of the most offbeat learning. But the method's disadvantage is the vagueness of focus, even whimsicality. The decon? struction of the distinction between text and context seems to have given a licence for infinite digression. For all Honold's indefatigable research and the ingenuity of his interpretations, it remains to be seen whether a book written in such a mannered, occasionally pretentious, style will be able to make a lasting contribution to its subject. Queen's University, Canada David Pugh 'Bliithenstaub': Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis. Ed. by Herbert Uerlings. (Schriften der Internationalen Novalis-Gesellschaft, 3) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2000. viii + 432pp. ?60. ISBN 3-484-10827-4 (hbk). Novalis: Das Werkund seine Editor en. Ed. by Gabriele Rommel. Halle: Forschungsstatte fiir Friihromantik und Novalis-Museum SchloB Oberwiederstedt. 2001. 271pp. ?25.56. ISBN 3-9805484-6-5. The firstof these two weighty volumes contains the proceedings of the third interna? tional Novalis conference, held in 1999. Eighteen papers apply the convenient pollen metaphor to the task of evaluating what others have made of Novalis's writings, in three main groups: literary reception in Germany and abroad from late Romanticism to classical modernism and postmodernity; Novalis's reception by cultural interest groups such as Roman Catholicism and anthroposophy; and his reception of and in music and the finearts. As is almost always the case with such collections, the achieve? ment is mixed. The literarystrands inevitably dominate. Within them, explorations of MLRy 98.4, 2003 1043 Novalis's relation to broadly modernist writers (Musil, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, Jiinger, Seghers, Hilbig, Benn, Bachmann, and others) far outweigh the rest, followed by the postmoderns (Derrida, Strauss, Bernhard) and at a distance the solitary late Ro? mantic Heine, with the non-Germanophones (English and American, Italian, Polish, Russian) forming their own category. Here we acquire plenty of new information. Herbert Uerlings, in one...