Abstract
276 Reviews formed a unified whole, he fulfilled the role of a living symbol of a single person inwhom the totality of knowledge might be embodied. In doing so he sustained the universalizing claims of Bildung postulated in Weimar Classicism. The book is excellently documented and written in a refreshingly supple and jargon-free style. It is beautifully produced to the high standard that one expects from de Gruyter; and it is not only a landmark inHumboldt research, but a major contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history. Trinity College Dublin Andrew Cusack Heine und die Nachwelt: Geschichte seinerWirkung inden deutschsprachigen Lan dern. Texte und Kontexte, Analysen und Kommentare, vol. 11:1907-1956. Ed. byDietmar Goltschnigg and Hartmut Steinecke. Berlin: Schmidt. 2008. 733 PP. 79. ISBN 978-3-503-07992-6. The volume covering the second fifty-yearperiod of theGerman-language recep tion of Heine has exactly the format of its predecessor (reviewed inMLR, 104 (2007), 1178-80), with 124 annotated texts introduced by 184 pages of annotated introduction. Itbegins in thewake of the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of 1906 with ongoing arguments about erecting amonument despite the emigration of the Loreley Fountain toNew York. The anti-Semitic drumbeat accompanies this dispute and becomes shriller during and after the First World War. Into this period fall thedisorienting and long influential assaults on Heine byKarl Kraus, the Jewish polemicist who applied an extensive repertoire of anti-Semitic tropes to a campaign of deriding the popularity ofHeine's early poetry with the general public and his alleged responsibility for the deterioration of journalistic discourse. The account is consistently critical because it is in the hands of Dietmar Goltschnigg, whose meticulous studyDie Fackel inswunde Herz: Kraus uber Heine. Bine 'Erledigung'? (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 2000, reviewed in MLR, 97 (2002), 1025-26) is themost systematic defiance ofKraus's sacred-cow status in thismatter, which nevertheless still finds its ingenious defenders, most recently Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and JewishSelf-Fashioning inFin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2008). To this discourse accrued amodernist disdain forHeine as a poet that continued into the second half of the century. All of this invective,whether anti-Semitic or aesthetic, is a testimony toHeine's endurance in German culture; no one would beat a dead horse so tirelessly. This endurance presented some problems to the Nazi purpose of extirpating Heine from the consciousness of theGermans. These efforts,described indetail by Steinecke, aremarked by some of the farcical moments often characteristic ofNazi cultural policy, such as the proposals tomake theHeine Lieder of Schubert, Schu mann, and others performable bywriting new texts to them,while others thought this impractical and accepted that the great German music would just have to be sacrificed to the greater cause. Rational discourse about Heine had, of course, gone into exile,where therewas, tobe sure,more assertion and declarations of solidarity MLR, 105.1, 2010 277 than analysis and criticism, as well as some tension between those who claimed him for Jewishness or Zionism and those who associated him with theMarxist cause. Steinecke exposes some long-lived canards as unfounded in evidence, such as that the Loreley poem appeared inNazi songbooks as author unknown' or that his works were included in the book-burnings. Steinecke then reviews theweak status and sometimes stillhostile views ofHeine in both theAdenauer restoration and among Swiss critics, as well as the vigorous instrumentalization of him in the Soviet Zone and the German Democratic Re public. This, too, was not without its farcical moments, such as the decision not to publish the papers of the elaborately prepared anniversary conference of 1956 because the organizer, Wolfgang Harich, had been arrested forhis stance towards the suppression of theHungarian uprising. There ismuch of potential interest in this precise and informative study;we may expect this to continue to be the case in the third volume now in preparation, which will bring the story close to our own time. Yale University Jeffrey L. Sammons Mythologische Subtexte in Theodor Fontanes 'Effi Briesf. By Holger Ehrhardt. (Medien ? Literaturen ? Sprachen inAnglistik/Amerikanistik, Germanistik und Romanistik, 6) Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2008. 305 pp. 48.10; ?31.30. ISBN 978-3-631-56612-1. The...
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