Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder by Peter Becher Steffen Höhne Jörg Krappmann Manfred Weinberg

Abstract

Reviews 271 British Library, 2014]). Other censors were simple bureaucrats, and at least one, apparently, exploited his position to read pornographic books before banning them. Even if some censorship is defensible, however, such ‘Bevormundung’, as Bachleitner calls it, is hardly the way to create a mature and enlightened public. It also makes prohibited works seem excessively attractive. Revealingly, censors objected to popular fiction about robbers, ghosts, and so on, because they stimulated the imagination (‘weil sie nur “die Einbildungskraft spannen und beschäftigen”’, p. 104). A more cynical policy would have encouraged adventure fiction to divert people from thinking about real discontents. The case studies partly confirm expectations. They show that negative remarks about Catholicism, whether in Schiller or Fenimore Cooper, led to prohibitions. Pleas for religious toleration were inadmissible: Nathan der Weise and Goethe’s Brief des Pastors von *** an den neuen Pastor zu *** were banned. We also learn something about eighteenth-century reading practices. Wieland’s Agathon incurred disapproval even from the sophisticated van Swieten because of Hippias’s defence of materialism, even though the context shows that Wieland intends his philosophy to seem tempting but reprehensible. Particularly instructive is the case of Werther. It was banned on publication because it might encourage suicide (and there is strong though not conclusive evidence that it did prompt several suicides). In 1786 the ban was lifted, on the grounds that people were less likely to commit suicide from unrequited love than because they were hopelessly in debt or afraid of being punished for fraud, but in 1803 the ban was restored. Bachleitner argues that the habit of reading saints’ lives with a view to imitatio transferred itself to secular literature, supported by the new eighteenth-century practice of empathetic reading. One might extrapolate to the conclusion that the concept of specifically aesthetic experience was only gradually developing. These are just a few of the rewards to be gleaned from this rich and amply documented study. Ritchie Robertson The Queen’s College, Oxford Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder. Ed. by Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne, Jörg Krappmann and Manfred Weinberg. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. 445 pp. Hardback €102.80; ebook €69.95. ISBN 978–3476 –02579–1. It is probably apt to say at the outset that this handbook has an extremely ambitious goal: to do justice to the complexities and intricacies of such rich and diverse a literary landscape across long periods of gradual change as well as the most radical of historical caesuras. The ‘Bohemian lands’ of the title are defined as the area traditionally belonging to the Bohemian crown, namely the kingdom of Bohemia, the margraviate of Moravia and the individual territories of the formerly Polish duchy of Silesia (Přemysl) which became Bohemian vassals during the late Middle Ages. Lusatia and the Silesian duchies seized by Prussia in the First Silesian War (1740–42) do not feature in this volume. The Reviews 272 periods covered are thus the era of Habsburg rule over Bohemian lands since the age of Enlightenment, the Czechoslovak Republic 1918–38 and the Nazi period following German annexation of the Sudetenland and the formation of a Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. As a ‘Nachklang’, remnants of Bohemian German culture after 1945 inside and outside communist Czechoslovakia receive due consideration. This temporal restriction is appropriate as it allows concentration on significant modern developments such as the formation of ‘national’ literatures in the context of emerging modern societies, the configuration around distinct political entities with (multiple) centres and peripheries, and the investigation of these areas’ relationships with external cultural reference points such as the metropoles of German-speaking central Europe. The list of authors at the end of the volume (pp. 418–27) gives an impression of the scale of the task. It comprises close to 700 names including authors who left the region early and made a reputation for themselves elsewhere (such as Rilke and Werfel), authors whose work seems intimately linked to their place of origin but in a manner difficult to define (such as Franz Kafka), authors who were not native to the area, but whose work reflects its conditions and characteristics (such as Ferdinand von Saar...