Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus by Patrick Fortmann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus by Patrick Fortmann Michael Swellander Fortmann, Patrick. Kristallisationen von Liebe. Zur Poetik des Gefühlswissens zwischen Romantik und Realismus. Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2021. 344 pp. Patrick Fortmann's Kristallisationen von Liebe contributes to the study of love as a discourse or code (Foucault, Barthes, and Luhmann) and to literature's privileged place in such studies with an intricate argument identifying German literature around 1830 as a site to observe transformations in the understanding of love in a multiplicity of fields. If, as Fortmann writes in the book's introduction, the Western European understanding of love was shaped by philosophy, theology, rhetoric, medicine, and literature until 1860, after which it has been predominately influenced by experimental psychology and neuroscience, then Heinrich Heine's poetry, Young Germany's prose, and Georg Büchner's dramas, with their modernizing drive, show this understanding in flux. Readers of Vormärz literature will welcome Fortmann's book for rehabilitating love as a central issue for these authors, whose reflections on history, revolution, and political journalism have received much more attention. It was, in fact, to a considerable degree through discussions of love that these authors developed their thoughts on these seemingly weightier subjects in their literary work. The common interest of Heine, Young Germany, and Büchner in love, however, does not make comparing their reflections on it easy, as they have different and not always compatible goals in thematizing love. Büchner, for instance, found Young Germany's openly ideological approach to literature wrong-headed. Furthermore, while Heine's poetry intervenes primarily in the literary discourse of love, a play like Woyzeck engages the expectations of tragedy but also aspires to comment on sociological reality. Fortmann characterizes his methodology for comparing these disparate works as "crystallization," a figure he takes from Stendhal's On Love (1822), in which the author describes the superlative praise of a would-be lover to the salt crystals that form on a branch left in a salt mine. Through the crystals, or hyperbole as it were, one glimpses the object they encase. Fortmann's readings of Heine, Young Germany, and Büchner would then treat their texts as distinct, contemporaneous literary crystallizations around the concept of love. The cultural narrative Fortmann glimpses through this literary crystallography is love's modernization: its old mythologies are ironized (Heine), secularized (Young Germany), and demystified through a materialist focus on physiology (Büchner). Chapter one, "Poetische Mythologie der Liebe—Heinrich Heine," shows Heine wrestling in Buch der Lieder (1827) with Zerrissenheit, the prominent post-Napoleonic literary theme of time being out of joint. One way Heine explored Zerrissenheit, argues Fortmann, was through his distanced, ironic treatment of classical and Romantic "mythologies" of love. Heine's interest in these mythologies, which Fortmann helpfully connects to A. W. Schlegel's lectures on poetry from the turn of the nineteenth century, differs from the Romantic interest in a "neue Mythologie," which would revivify old myths in modernity and [End Page 190] promote a sense of cultural wholeness. Rather, Heine alludes to figures like the classical sphinx and Romantic flowers—"das alte Märchenwald," which Fortmann correctly notes Heine regarded with recognition and distance—to show a historical split between the idealized love communicated by these symbols and a corporeal, consummated love inaccessible to them. Fortmann argues that Heine's book gestures toward a future where love would have an inherent right to exist ("Eigenrecht der Liebe") after overcoming the mythological apparatus of classicism and Romanticism. Chapter 2, "Emanzipation der Liebe durch Prosa—Das junge Deutschland" is the most eye opening of Kristallisationen der Liebe, not least because it discusses the most important Young German novels at length, which have rarely received such sustained comparative attention. A comparative approach is necessary to elucidate the Saint Simonian motto, "Wiedereinsetzung des Fleisches," which recurs in slightly different formulations among Young German writers but is understood differently by each. Fortmann divides the chapter into three subsections, discussing Heinrich Laube's politicized notion of "democratic," as opposed to "aristocratic" love in his Liebesbriefe (1835) and Die Poeten (1833), Theodor Mundt's hope for a reconciliation of the...