The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Erotics of War in German Romanticism Adrian Daub Patricia Anne Simpson, The Erotics of War in German Romanticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 293 pp. In The Erotics of War in German Romanticism, Patricia Anne Simpson convincingly locates a strand of “romantic” literature and thought in dialogue both with the Napoleonic Wars and the new soldier-culture they brought into existence. The nature of soldierly activity, the construal of a community’s relationship to those soldiers, and the perceived relationship between war and sexual difference, Simpson points out, were subject to a radical shift between Lenz’s Die Soldaten (or Lessing’s Minna) and the “romantic” period under consideration in this study. Of course, the subsumption of authors so diverse as Hegel (including the Hegel of the Encyclopedia), Kleist, Hölderlin, Goethe, Schinkel, and even Hotho under the label “romanticism” is somewhat problematic—but the author offsets this potential liability quite skillfully by grounding these authors’ exceedingly varied responses to war in the way such war was in fact conducted and thought about. This allows this study to strike a breathtaking arc from von Clausewitz and Schinkel, via Hölderlin and Kleist, to the famous Iron Cross medal, [End Page 264] eventually winding its way to the painting of a parade “Unter den Linden” that graces the book’s cover. The first chapter traces a trajectory from Kant’s implicit gendering of war through the category of the sublime, via Fichte’s explicit gendering of the (German) nation in his Reden an die deutsche Nation to Hegel’s discussions of femininity, desire, and the sittlich community in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. Chapter Two treads perhaps the most familiar ground, exploring the conjunction of (homo)erotic community, war, and aesthetic beauty in Hölderlin’s Hyperion. Chapter Three, by contrast, offers up a highly unusual, though extremely productive pairing: Karoline von Günderrode and Carl von Clausewitz. The link Simpson establishes here revolves around the figure of the duel, a frequent motif in Günderrode’s heroic poems and stories and, according to Clausewitz, the paradigmatic constellation of war. It is precisely through the duel that Günderrode is able to subvert the static gender binarisms that emerged from (and tacitly subtended) the rhetoric of national liberation. Chapter Four turns to what is perhaps the most central intersection of the warrior figure and questions of gender in the period in question: Kleist’s Penthesilea. Simpson demonstrates that the play clearly unsettles the consignment of feminine desire to the domestic, private sphere by essentially “collaps[ing] into identity” (129) the erotic and war. Of course, Simpson argues, Kleist’s play ultimately comes to negate that unsettling, reinstating a stable gender binary. In particular, she points out how, through the categories of individuality and universality, Hegelian critiques of Kleist tend to recuperate the association of nation and masculinity. The same critiques turn crucially on the relationship between history and (classical) allegory, a question that comes to the forefront in Simpson’s masterful fifth chapter. Drawing on a whole range of objects, from Ernst Moritz Arndt patriotic lyric poetry, Goethe’s 1814 play Des Epimenides Erwachen, Schinkel’s paintings and architecture, to the iron jewelry of the “Berliner Königliche Eisengießerei,” Simpson shows how questions of gender and nationality came to be aligned in the Wars of Liberation and their immediate aftermath—an alignment that Goethe viewed with skepticism. In her final chapter, Simpson explores Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Dies Buch gehört dem König in order to show how a specifically feminine agency could be asserted in public discourse. The wide range of texts and the thorough analyses make this book an important addition to the field of romanticism and gender. But while the wealth of detail and the sheer brilliance of the individual readings could have easily proved exhilarating, the extreme terseness, even dryness, of Simpson’s prose tends to throw a blanket over any burgeoning excitement. The book is well copy-edited and thoughtfully put together, but there is something almost forbidding about its style and the presentation of its objects. A reader (this reader, for certain) might expect more of...