Der populäre Pakt. Verhandlungen der Moderne zwischen Operette und Feuilleton by Ethel Matala de Mazza

Abstract

Reviewed by: Der populäre Pakt. Verhandlungen der Moderne zwischen Operette und Feuilleton by Ethel Matala de Mazza Sean Franzel Der populäre Pakt. Verhandlungen der Moderne zwischen Operette und Feuilleton. By Ethel Matala de Mazza. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2018. Pp. 480. Cloth €25.00. ISBN 978-3103972344. This book is a sustained exploration of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “small” forms across journalism, criticism, and popular theater. Ethel Matala de Mazza foregrounds the function of a range of “minor” genres in reflecting upon the democratic promise to involve mass publics in cultural and political life, what she calls the “popular pact.” A central goal of this book is thus to reconstruct the history of modernity as a discontinuous, fractured history of distinct public spheres; as Matala de Mazza proposes, small forms’ mosaic-like structure better captures such [End Page 612] historical discontinuities than grand narratives. The public spaces (Öffentlichkeiten) of modernity enable contestations and negotiations (Verhandlungen) between different representational modes and media. Tracking these negotiations entails attending to how “low,” popular forms play themselves off of “high,” serious forms, and how the self-images of mass culture remain ambiguous and capable of accommodating various political status quos. The concerns of this book draw on Matala de Mazza’s substantial comparatist work on figurations of the political body. This book is likewise an important touchstone for a growing body of recent studies of small forms (the author plays a leadership role at the Berlin-based Graduiertenkolleg on the “Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen”). Der populäre Pakt is a compelling mixture of intellectual and cultural history, with a clear emphasis on the Frankfurt School and its interlocutors (Lukács, Weber, Schmitt). But rather than providing a genealogy of an intellectual school, the book is a history of specific engagements with popular culture in particular historical and medial contexts. It is also a genealogy of a set of critical forms. It is here that Siegfried Kracauer, and to a lesser extent Heine, Benjamin, and Karl Kraus, are revealed as heroes of the book (Adorno less so). Matala de Mazza deliberately does not ground the project in a larger social-theoretical framework (a familiar component of other Foucauldian, Weberian, or Luhmannian habilitation-like books), but she makes sure to highlight the productive relationships of a variety of “minor” literary/critical forms— feuilleton, tableau, physiology, etc.—to the nascent social thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similar to Gerhart von Graevenitz’s 2014 monograph on Fontane, this book probes the relationship of nineteenth-century literary aesthetics to social theory in original ways. The structure of Der populäre Pakt is intriguing. It opens in the 1920s, cycles back to the early nineteenth century, and then winds its way back into the 1930s. Matala de Mazza stages a recursive network of shared concerns, medial formats, and ambivalent political constellations. She thereby enriches the story about how canonical twentieth-century figures engaged with the previous century and how nineteenth-century constellations continue to remain relevant in later historical periods. The first of the book’s three parts is an extended study of Kracauer, beginning with his feuilleton series in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer develops his poetology of the small form in response to the new mass publics of the 1920s. Matala de Mazza reconstructs Kracauer’s dialogues with Weber and Schmitt about the modern Verwaltungsstaat and she draws out similarities between the feuilleton format and the “Revue” as a genre of popular theater: both rely on the structuring principle of “bunte Mischung.” This first part closes with a reading of Kracauer’s book on Jacques Offenbach that he wrote in Parisian exile. Kracauer’s treatment of Offenbach’s world as an inverse image of the 1930s enables the book’s pivot back to the nineteenth century. The second part opens by surveying attempts to reconfigure popular festivity in [End Page 613] the wake of the French Revolution amidst debates about the possibilities of a new civic theater (Mercier, Diderot, and Rousseau). Along with exploring revolutionary festivals, the author presents the Parisian carnival as an interesting case study of the ambivalent “negotiations” of modern cultural politics. Carnival mixes old and new festival cultures and...