Psychological Models of Masculinity in Döhlin, Musil, and Jahnn: Männliches, Allzumännliches by Roger Kingerlee (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 257 from some considerable tightening up: too much space is devoted to announcements of what is to follow, and too many unproductive detours into what little secondary literature there is on Hermann distract from the central findings of the study. In short: if the dissertation had been turned into a book (and a much shorter one at that), its impact on future debates could have been increased considerably. But even as it is, Godela Weiss-Sussex's study succeeds in re-evaluating Hermann as an author at the height of the literary fashions and the socio-cultural debates of his time: the time, that is, when Berlin was transformed into the firstreal metropolis in the German lands. National University of Ireland, Maynooth Florian Krobb Psychological Models of Masculinity in Doblin, Musil, andjahnn: Mdnnliches, Allzumdnnliches . By Roger Kingerlee. (Studies in German Language and Litera? ture, 27) Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Mellen. 2001. xviii + 391 pp. ?79.95. ISBN 0-7734-7493-5 (hbk). This book aims to do more than extend the application of gender critique to some classic modernist texts. Kingerlee adopts a critical stance towards the perspectives on male sexuality established by Klaus Theweleit in Mannerphantasien (Frankfurt a.M.: Roter Stern, 1977), Andrew Webber in Sexuality and the Sense of Self in Musil and Trakl (London: MHRA, 1990), and Maria Tatar in Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and provides readings of Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Jahnn's Perrudja which bring out the senses in which these texts themselves present a critique of aggressive or 'heroic' masculinity. That critique, he rightly observes, owes much to the analytical discussion of human personality prompted since the 1880s by the writings of Nietzsche, Ernst Mach, Freud, Jung,and a number of other psychological theorists. It is a consistent strength of Kingerlee's textual analysis that he is able to relate specific motifs and specific perspectives on gender reliably to theoretical assumptions which were current when the literary works in question were being written, including works on Taoism which strongly influenced thinking about the complementarity of male and female principles. At a distance of time, the stereotypical character of these assumptions is readily apparent. Freud, for all the liberating potential of his notion of polymorphous sex? uality, clove to normative conceptions of active masculinity and passive femininity; Adler preserved this assumption within his analysis of dominant and submissive per? sonality types; Jung provided the similarly dichotomous model of the unconscious anima/animus; and even the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who did much to expose untenable assumptions about gender identity in the 1920s, retains an inherited conception of 'effeminacy'. Such stereotypes are understandably echoed by the literary authors under discussion here: the habitual attitudes of Doblin's protagon? ist Biberkopf towards women and the realm of nature (with which 'the feminine' is also stereotypically associated) are brutally domineering, Musil is candid about the predatory aspect of his protagonist's sexuality, and the conventional understanding of effeminacy is a frequent reference point forJahnn's discussion of personality traits. But each narrative explores the formation and development of an individual in ways which assist a subtle appreciation of the tensions and cross-currents within sexual identity. Jahnn, a bisexual, provides a particularly revealing account of a male per? sonality which is irreconcilable with the heroic preconceptions of the period around the First World War, and Kingerlee is surely rightto emphasize?against the views of earlier critics?what the failure of Perrudja's personal relationships shows us about the complex impulses at work in his psyche. 258 Reviews The specific senses in which the imagery and organization of these literary texts challenge and interact with the conventional thinking of their time could have been pursued further.In places Kingerlee appears to rest content with linking the narrative content to the thinking of Jung or Adler in particular. But by examining these three texts alongside each other, he provides an illuminating study of the contribution that literary writing was making in the 1920s to the revision of gender assumptions. The book would have benefited from closer editorial attention to detail in some...