Das verschlafene 19. Jahrhundert? Zur deutschen Literatur zwischen Klassik und Moderne by Hans-Jörg Knobloch, Helmut Koopmann

Abstract

MLR, IO1.3, 2006 887 Kunst-Zigeuner: Konstruktionen des 'Zigeuners' in der deutschen Literatur der ersten Hdlfte des I9. Jahrhunderts. By STEFANIKUGLER. (Literatur- Imagination Realitat, 34) Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 2004. 380 pp. E32.50. ISBN 3 88476-660-o. This is a 2003 dissertation from Herbert Uerlings's research project on cultural alterity and gender difference at Trier. Its reconstruction of the cultural image of the Romanies in Germany thus lays particular emphasis on the discursive interaction of these two kinds of otherness. The textual corpus does not in fact, as the title would indicate, stretch over the first half of the nineteenth century, but from I783 to I832. In a kind of theoretical introduction, the history of anthropological discourse from Grellmann to Riidiger and Biester is discussed. This is followed by four long chapters analysing the representation of the Gypsy inArnim's Isabella von Agypten, Brentano's Die mehreren Wehmiiller, Lenau's Die drei Zigeuner, and Morike's Maler Nolten (first version). Here late eighteenth-century Gypsy anthropology is found to be orientalist and racist in style. Following this, the literature is found to be pleasingly (and increasingly) transgressive and Gypsy-centred. Arnim's novella posits a dual alterity, whereby Gypsy and Jew (Isabella, the Golem, themandrake, and the Barnhauter) incorporate respectively poetic and unpoetic versions of the German state which might have been. In Brentano the myth of the poetic Gypsy reaches its fullest unfolding, asKugler argues that those inveterate border-crossers Michaly and Mitidika symbolize a full-blown aesthetic Habsburg utopia. Lenau's various Gypsy songs are seen to be both the site of crises in masculine self-understanding and images of Bohemian isolation. Finally, Morike's two strong woman Gypsies, Loskine and Elisabeth, are argued to be instruments of a radical counter-discourse against received images of feminine passivity. In a sense, there is a good deal of overlap here with previous scholarship, in par ticular Claudia Breger, Ortlosigkeit des Fremden: 'Zigeunerinnen'und 'Zigeuner' in der deutschsprachigen Literatur um i8oo (Cologne and Weimar: Bohlau, I998; reviewed MLR, 96 (200 I), 905-07), which covers a vast corpus of works including the texts by Arnim and M6rike. A great deal has been written elsewhere on the Gypsies and Jews inArnim, on Brentano's novella and the Gypsies inBrentano, and nearly asmuch ink has been spilt over Grellmann (in particular byWim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution (London and Portland: Cass, I997), pp. 22-9i). That said, this work is to be commended, if not for radical new insights, then at least for the general quality of its literary analysis and observation. The read ings of Brentano and Morike are thorough and detailed; the analysis of Brentano's montage ofMitidika's Gypsy song and the exposure of the gender-psychological di mension inMorike are especially interesting. It is a pity that the book stops where it does, so that, for example, Immermann's 'Gypsy' figures inDie Epigonen (I836) are not treated. DURHAMUNIVERSITY NICHOLASSAUL Das verschlafene I9. Jahrhundert? Zur deutschen Literatur zwischen Klassik undMo derne. Ed. by HANS-J6RG KNOBLOCH and HELMUT KOOPMANN. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2005. 205 pp. E24.30. ISBN 3-8260-2897-x. An uneasiness about the status of nineteenth-century German literature by European standards has been a recurrent neurosis among scholars, recently exacerbated by Heinz Schlaffer's Kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 2002), where, in I57 pages, he dismisses most German literature, but especially that of the nineteenth century, as provincial, belated, and insignificant. An international 888 Reviews conference in South Africa in 2004, the papers of which appear in this volume, seems to have been partly motivated to oppose Schlaffer with claims of the relevance and vivacity of nineteenth-century German literature. In general, there seem to be two ways of doing this. One is to lay claim to the long century from the I770S to the threshold of the First World War, thus upgrading the era with the prestige of the age of Goethe and Romanticism along with the early careers of the internationally acknowledged moderns. The other, which seems to be gaining momentum at present, is to re-examine more comprehensively and appreciatively...