Johannes Scherr: Mediating Culture in the German Nineteenth Century by Andrew Cusack

Abstract

Reviewed by: Johannes Scherr: Mediating Culture in the German Nineteenth Century by Andrew Cusack Osman Durrani Johannes Scherr: Mediating Culture in the German Nineteenth Century. By Andrew Cusack. Woodbridge: Camden House. 2021. 214 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–64014–057–8. While researching the cultural historian Johannes Scherr (1817–1886), the author of the present volume was often asked why he had chosen such an obscure and now almost entirely forgotten person as the focus of his labours. The immediate answer was that Scherr was widely read and translated and continuously republished during the nineteenth-century Gründerzeit and beyond, when his books outsold those of Gustav Freytag and Jacob Burckhardt. His versatility is another factor: besides monumental surveys of past epochs, he found time to write fiction, biographies, gender studies (Frauenwelt, 1880), reviews, translations, and essays on many topical subjects. In his early days he served as a regional deputy in the doomed Württemberg Assembly of 1848–49, narrowly escaping a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour for his support of democracy. His status as a refugee in Switzerland, where he eventually obtained a teaching post at the Zurich Polytechnic, marks him out as a ‘liminal’ man, a permanent exile, whose unstable world-view may be linked to the experience of deracination. What was Scherr’s contribution to scholarship and what makes him interesting to today’s readers? On the first point, Andrew Cusack struggles to present him as a progressive spirit. It is evident that in common with Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Scherr refused to treat the past as a cosy collection of museum pieces, but there [End Page 137] the similarity ends, and the tub-thumping style in which he couched his robust, at times embarrassingly patriotic, views is hard to ignore. One example should suffice to indicate that any attempt at rehabilitation will be an uphill task: ‘Seitdem die jungdeutsche Französelei vorübergegangen [. . .] ist es uns mehr und mehr zum Bewußtsein gekommen, daß die Idee des Vaterlandes die Seele aller Kulturarbeit sein müsse’ (Allgemeine Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (1861), cited p. 100). While Cusack stresses Scherr’s ‘liminality’, it will be remembered that many of his contemporaries, including Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh, faced far greater challenges as victims and outcasts. Scherr’s trajectory was less dramatic than theirs. The man who started off as an icon of the Vormärz movement, promoting and translating George Sand, eventually opted for a measure of conformity in response to the clarion call of Bismarckian nationalism. Yet it would be simplistic to present him as no more than the barometer of a turbulent sociopolitical environment. Theodor Lessing identified his inconsistencies: Weltbürger beside Vaterlandfanatiker, Fortschrittsgläubiger and yet also Verzweiflungspessimist (p. 5). It is the exploration of these striking paradoxes that makes this a valuable study of a figure who, by Cusack’s own admission, was no more than a ‘personality of second rank’ (p. 55). Scherr’s bluster may have been the inevitable consequence of his compulsive productivity, derisively described as Vielschreiberei, a habit ingrained in him during his exigent years in Stuttgart. He suffered the consequences of having been raised in Württemberg, with the result that his literary style displays both ‘Ur-Swabian coarseness’ and archaisms and far-fetched analogies as favoured by the ‘Young Germans’ (p. 56). In addition to ‘programmatic wavering’ between nationalism and cosmopolitanism (p. 101), there are unresolved dissonances in his attempts to distinguish between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ cultures, no less than in his thoughts on gender: while campaigning for women’s rights, he opposed the recruitment of female students. It is entirely appropriate that Cusack should leave us with several oxymoronic labels, ‘aristocratic democrat’, ‘world citizen and fanatical patriot’, ‘believer in progress and pessimist out of despair’ (pp. 134, 141), that invite further enquiry into a tantalizingly evasive figure whose influence, via the likes of Oswald Spengler, extends well into the twentieth century. Osman Durrani University of Kent Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association