Grundlagen der Biographik: Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens by Christian Klein (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.4, 2004 1119 valuable purpose of teaching reading. The book has a pleasant appearance and is, on the whole, well produced. Any future printing might repair 'Gervinius' (p. 31), 'fiance[e]' (p. 81); 'it it' (p. 110), and a note scrambled by the word processor(p. 198). New Haven, CT Jeffrey L. Sammons Grundlagen der Biographik: Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens. Ed. by Christian Klein. Stuttgart: Metzler. 2002. vi +282 pp. ?29.90. ISBN 3-47601904 -7. To compare this volume with another recent collection on biography, Peter France's and William St Clair's Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni? versity Press, 2002; reviewed in MLR, 99 (2004), 727-28), instructively illustrates the major differences between the Anglo-Saxon approach and that adopted by the Germans. The English volume, conscious ofthe problems besettingthe modern biographer and enunciating caveats, is nevertheless aware of an unbroken tradition, one that even takes in its stride attempts, at regular intervals, to declare the genre dead. It is not a celebration ofthe genre?far from it?but it does set out notions of lifestructure and narrative artistry about which its German counterpart is much more hesitant. Grundlagen der Biographik, by contrast, is an attempt to rehabilitate a genre which, until about twenty years ago, was often regarded in Germany as questionable or even frivolous, certainly not scholarly. While readability and lightness of touch are not despised in the English account, in the German they tend to imply affinities with the narrative structures of the nineteenth century and as such are to be avoided at all costs. The German biographical tradition up to 1933, like much else leading up to that date, is presented as problematic, much of it even irrelevant. While one may sympathize with the view that notions of an integrated life are not easy to maintain in a century like the twentieth, with all its changes and disasters, it is a matter of regret that the German biographical tradition is seen in this volume largely as a discontinuous line. One contributor therefore quotes (p. 140), seemingly with approval, Jan Romein's dictum of 1946, that biographies are favoured by times of insecurity and collapse of values. Yet no one mentions those German biographies, such as Friedrich Sengle's classic Wieland (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1949), which did try to connect with the best traditions of older biographical writing. But no matter. The big voices that declare individual identity a myth, the author dead, wholeness fragmentary,narrative omniscience a fiction(Foucault, Barthes, Bourdieu), plus New Criticism and New Historicism, are still attended to with some deference. They are not allowed to disqualify the genre, but they warn against any easy solutions. Thus the contributions talk much good sense about the notion of a cohesive 'subject' (or its absence), about the effectsof environment or society, social or collective memory, the 'Inszenierungscharakter des Lebens' (p. 85), the impossibility of objectivity. There is, by the same token, a nervousness about the notion of a non-scholarly biography, or at least a non-serious biography. There is a search for a poetics of biography that might restore the genre to respectability. Most of this one will find enunciated in the firsthalf, in the contributions by Christian Klein, Peter-Andre Alt, Sigrid Weigel, and Thomas Anz. Yet these more abstract and theoretical notions are put to the test in concrete case studies or accounts from the biographer's own practice. None of this will be unfamiliar to anyone who has attempted the art of biography. Gary Schmidt, writing on Thomas Mann, deals with the ambivalent relationship between life and work, the guises the author adopts to mask the private and the personal, while not excluding it either (there is an excellent discussion of Der Tod in Venedig). Werner Altmann, 1120 Reviews by contrast, shows how Lorca's homosexuality was systematically written out of ac? counts of his life produced under Franco, but also since then. The story becomes even more interesting when three practising biographers sum up their experiences or establish general principles. The Thomas Mann scholar Hermann Kurzke stresses the emotional involvement, the feeling, the passion, the enthusiasm, that go into the experience...