Michel Henri Kowalewicz (review)

Abstract

550 Reviews lysis, particularly of the many Adieu, Welt' passages in several of the novels, but most prominently in the Winterndchte-Sommertage?Solbach, like Alewyn and others, finds this novel 'Dilogie' his most successful work, and devotes farmore attention to it than to the other works?reveals that his obsession with the transience of worldly things is no mere literarygame, but mirrors Beer's own primal fears. As with Grimmelshausen, Solbach argues, there can be no question about the primacy of the religious intent in the later novels. Even in the early parodies of Ritterromane, where the primary ob? ject of Beer's attack was the Amadis, the basis for criticism was a moral, not literary, consideration: 'Das ungeheuer AnstoOige des Amadis ist [. . .] seine grofieliterarische Verfuhrungskraft, die auf dem Prinzip tauschender Rhetorik beruht und sich auf das Sinnliche richtet, wie auch seine fehlende moralische Absicht' (p. 102). In the Willenhag-Dilogie, Beer's most mature fictional work, the religious aspect dominates the novel. It is highly significant, Solbach argues, that Beer has the narrator of the novel translate two chapters from Thomas a Kempis's Imitatio Christi. This popular work's emphasis on experience and an active lifeamong like-minded, religious individuals, on brotherly care for one another, on common soul-searching, together with its sober, simple tone, must have appealed to Beer, who, in all his fiction,clearly sought a solution forwhat Solbach takes to be his sense ofa missing God. 'Dieser Umstand der abwesenden Prasenz Gottes istfiirdie Protagonisten Beers [...] die grundlegende Definition ihrer Lebenssituation' (p. 415). The oft-repeated motif of turning away from the world, expressed not just by Beer's protagonists but by most signifi? cant figures in the novel, is, again, no mere literary device, but expresses a reaction to Beer's experience ofthe seductive world that his novels attempt to unmask. Becoming a hermit, or at least seeking rural isolation, is an act that implies moral meditation, escape from a material world. This motif is, Solbach argues, the structuring element ofthe Sommer-Tdge forall the figureswho come and go in the novel. 'Thomas eroffnet fiirBeer in De Imitatione Christi die zentrale Philosophie der Willenhag-Dilogie, die auf seiner Auffassung der Einsamkeit als Bedingung der Moglichkeit zur Hinwendung zu Gott griindet' (p. 404). Solitude is also viewed by Wolfgang, the narrator, as a medicina mentis against the corruption of the world, just as the comic happenings described in many a scene were intended (and billed) as medicine for melancholia. Aside from his nuanced reading of Beer's fiction, Solbach also provides new, im? portant findings of a more philological nature. He provides convincing if not final evidence that Beer was not the author of Die andere Ausfertigungneu-gefangenerpolitischerMaul -Affen, a work attributed to him by Arnold Hirsch and later by Alewyn. He provides other interesting and significant insights, particularly into earlier no? vels of Beer that have received almost no critical attention, and in so doing reveals narratological and thematic patterns that recur in all Beer's works. The book is an enormous step forward in Beer research, and will have to be reckoned with in all future scholarship on Beer and on the development of the German novel. I have only one fault to find: unaccountably there is no index. Spring Island, South Carolina James Hardin Lessing et la culture du Moyen Age. By Michel Henri Kowalewicz. (Spolia Berolinensia , 23) Hildesheim: Weidmann. 2003. 416 pp.; 34 plates. ?49.80. ISBN 3615 -00280-6. As a man of the Enlightenment, Lessing was not spontaneously drawn to the Middle Ages. His interest, so far as it went, was that of a polymath and, in his later years, a custodian of medieval manuscripts. This book seeks to demonstrate that, along with Gottsched, Bodmer, and Breitinger, he nevertheless contributed significantly to the MLRy 100.2, 2005 551 medieval revival which reached its height in the nineteenth century. But whereas the Swiss were motivated, in their editions of medieval poetry,more by patriotic zeal than by a desire forscholarly objectivity, Lessing, like Gottsched, helped to establish those more rigorous methods which, in the hands of Lachmann and other later philologists, would eventually revolutionize medieval studies. Of the book's...