The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around 1900 by Carsten Strathausen (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.4, 2005 1147 at the height of Germany's late nineteenth-century hegemony. Bernd sees it as his task to redress the balance. Storm was, or so he would have us think, a Danish writer in essence, though one whose exclusive medium was German. As Bernd sets it out, all this is convincing enough. Yet doubts persist. In the firstplace, the texts prove next to nothing. 'We notice that he also, from the begin? ning, found his vocation in poetry by composing in the same manner as the Danish verse-melody,' Bernd writes on p. 85. This may perhaps be true of 'Oktoberlied', for instance, in that there is persuasive evidence that it is indeed a 'drinking-song' closely related in both theme and treatment to the spate of similar lyrics published in newspapers during the Schleswig War of 1848 and reprinted in the early 1850s in collections such as Koch's Fcedrelandsk Vise-Bog (Haderslev, 1850). But the evidence of Danish input is too slight to counteract the established view that Storm's lyricvoice is an essentially German one. When it comes to the prose works, the question is more open, though here again the texts prove next to nothing despite Bernd's effortsto demonstrate otherwise. Der Schimmelreiter, for instance, might just as well be 'Eng? lish' in that its setting and the character of its protagonist share something with Philip Hepburn in remote Whitby in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Sylvia'sLovers of 1863. Yet surely this is simply because both authors possessed an acute sense of the interplay of place and personality, rather than a common literaryculture. Bernd's detailed demon? stration of the Danish elements in Storm's education and professional life is certainly interesting; less convincing is his claim that Storm's Novellen are 'Danish' in any but the loosest sense. His conception of the Novelle may indeed echo the 'everyday tales' of Thomasine Gyllembourg, whose theory of the genre was so similar to his own and whose 'everyday stories' pre-dated his, but, alas, there is no hard evidence to prove that Storm actually read any of her stories or those of Steen Steensen Blicher, her contemporary and, like her, a writer whose reputation for compressed, highly charged fiction was well established by 1840, a whole decade before the appearance of Immensee. No doubt Bernd has good justification for claiming that Storm may have read such Danish masterpieces as Blicher's En Landsbydegns Dagbog (1824), a remarkable work which he quaintly describes as 'another door that could give us an insight into the workshop in which Immensee was created' (p. 157). Yet he seems to be unable to come up with conclusive proof that any such link existed. Towards the end of Bernd's fascinating study there is, however, one telling clue. At the end of Storm's life, Johannes Magnussen, a Danish writer, successfully sought his approval for the translations he was making of his novellas. Like Storm, Magnussen was a native of Husum, and Storm co-operated readily, even commenting on the Danish renderings of his texts. This little fact?one wishes it were supported by hard evidence?comes as something of a relief afterso much speculation: Storm, it seems, could at least read the Danish versions of his own stories! A footnote indicates the source of this telling detail: it comes from an article by Dieter Lohmeyer published in 1984. University of Bristol Peter Skrine The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around igoo. By Carsten Strathausen. (Stu? dies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures, 126) Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. 321 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-80788126 -0. In this study Carsten Strathausen asks 'what aesthetic strategies German poets mobilized around 1900 in order to resist both the epistemological power of philosophy on the one hand and the increasing cultural appeal of photography and film on the other' (p. 7). Identifying attention to the relationship between language and vision 1148 Reviews as an area of common ground between German Aestheticism and philosophy after the 'linguistic turn', he argues that poetry around 1900 reflects and modifies 'the philosophical effortto voice the potentiality of language to...