No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. By Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Illus. Pp. xvi + 330.

Abstract

In view of the long and detailed reception history of Shakespeare’s work in Germany, there does not seem to be a great need for more comprehensive studies in this area. To update or even replace the excellent studies by Werner Habicht, Wilhelm Hortmann, Roger Paulin, Simon Williams, and others would require an original approach—which Höfele claims to find in the intellectual tradition of the political right in Germany from the founding of the “German Empire in 1871 to the ‘Bonn Republic’ of the Cold War era” (vii). Unfortunately, Höfele sedulously avoids a differentiated and, above all, truly critical discussion of the most complex phenomenon: “the political right.” Instead, he reduces it to the bland “common set of views and attitudes that is recognizably rightist, i.e. anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal. Without exception, they condemn Western modernity and mechanized mass civilization, upholding in its stead an ideal of organic culture” (viii). It appears that Höfele is aware of alternative views, but often briskly relegates them to a footnote (as, for example, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche [22n73]).