Der oft steinige Weg zum Erfolg: Literatur aus Deutschland im niederländischen Sprachraum 1900-2000 by Leopold Decloedt

Abstract

II90 Reviews tures and ideological foundations. Erinnerungskultur isprominent with Adam Muller Guttenbrunn's Lenau trilogy: Lenau as a symbolic figure (rather than as awriter) embodies the lost culture of the Banat Swabians. Of interest more in theDutch context are contributions on Friedrich Markus Huebner, Sophie van Leer, and Grete Weil. All the essays are at least competently written and show commitment to their sub jects, and within their own remits the authors balance their treatments admirably. The book iswell produced; the illustrations, though few, add to its value. Anyone seeking information about the authors dealt with will be well served. But thewhole is, as often, less than the sum of the parts, because editors and contributors have differing criteria for inclusion, on which they seem scarcely to have reflected. The choice of subjects seems arbitrary; the authors (mainly Germanists, predominantly with some Nether lands connection) address their subjects in any way they wish, biographical, literary critical, socio-historical, depth-analytical; essays vary greatly in amount of detail. CARDIFF UNIVERSITY ALFRED D. WHITE Der oft steinige Weg zumErfolg:LiteraturausDeutschlandimniederlandischen Sprach raumI900-2000. Ed. by LEOPOLD DECLOEDT. (InternationaleForschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 76) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2004. 214 pp. E45; $56. ISBN 90-420-I90I-8. This volume, the by-product of aViennese database project on Dutch writings about German literature, is a collection of survey essays by Dutch and Belgian Germanists, plus a couple of neerlandici, concerning responses inHolland and Flanders to some twentieth-century German authors. It is really not themost systematic of books. 'Der oft steinige Weg . . .' is a catchy enough title, but unconnected to the volume's con tent, which has nothing to do with either rocky paths or success. Nor could I find the phrase as a quotation in any of the essays (though maybe I overlooked it). The book's subtitle ismore accurate, but also a pointer to problems. The indefinite 'Literatur aus Deutschland' reflects the fact that the selection of individual writers towhom essays are devoted-Heinrich Mann, Brecht, Ernst Junger (two chapters), Enzensberger, Christa Wolf, and Grass-is random. The faint evasiveness of 'im niederliindischen Sprachraum' relates to inconsistencies about how Flanders is to be included: sepa rately, jointly, or not at all. And the absence of the term 'reception' from the title, in a book where the word occurs repeatedly, may have to do with obvious divergences among the authors about what constitutes reception of literature in a foreign culture. Specifically, do writings by Germanists in Dutch-based academic journals (as op posed, say, to reviews in the Dutch public press) represent a national reception worth the name? The inconsistencies go further. Most chapters end with long bibliographies of translations and reception material, but a couple do not. Most chapters are thoroughly referenced, but not all. Quotations from Dutch reception texts are given inGerman translation, and the originals are generally reproduced in footnotes; but one chapter neglects to do this. To some extent one sympathizes with the editor in his likely struggles with recalcitrant contributors, though that does not explain the patchy proof-reading. The volume's most engaging anomalies arise from the relationship between later essays in the book and the first one, Matthias Prangel's careful questionnaire-based enquiry into the German literary knowledge of some Dutch schoolteachers. The sur vey produces lists of what can be taken, with due circumspection, to be currently the best-known twentieth-century German authors and titles among an educated middle class Dutch (not Flemish) readership-47 authors named at least once and i i8 titles MLR, IOI.4, 2oo6 I I9I named at least twice by the 54 respondents. Heinrich Mann, Ernst Jiinger, and En zensberger, three of the book's six individual subjects, figure nowhere in these lists, and Christa Wolf is named just once. Of the six, only Grass and Brecht are among the top ten authors and top thirty titles. It is particularly when the Enzensberger chapter, by Karel Hupperetz, informs us that its subject 'hat seit den fiinfziger Jahren wie kaum ein anderer Autor das Bild, das man sich im niederlandischen Sprachraum von der deutschen Literatur gemacht hat, mitgepragt' (p. I43), or when, later, an equivalent claim...