The Modern Restoration: Re-Thinking German Literary History 1930-1960 by Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, Matthew Philpotts

Abstract

592 Reviews The Modern Restoration: Re-thinking German Literary History I930-I960. By STE PHEN PARKER, PETER DAVIES, and MATTHEW PHILPOTTS. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2004. x+393 pp. E98. ISBN 3-II-OI8II3-4. This revaluation of German literary history in the middle decades of the twentieth century is long overdue. It represents the culmination of a collaborative three-year project funded by the AHRB in which Stephen Parker and his colleagues set out to scrutinize the I930-60 periodization for the first time. This takes forward the pioneering work of Hans Dieter Schifer and Frank Trommler, who, in the 1970s, both questioned the significance of political date boundaries (933, I945) for the development of German literature at the time and posited instead a period of artis tic conservatism or 'restoration' between 1930 and I960. Their work importantly revealed aesthetic continuities across the political caesuras of I93 3 and I945, and be tween writers across the geographically and politically fragmented literary landscape of the Nazi era. Parker, Peter Davies, andMatthew Philpotts characterize their 'restorative' period model with two key parameters that are set against the background of an ongoing crisis from the late I920S onwards (economic depression, the rise of Nazism, exile and dictatorship). The first parameter is the 're-assertion of the conventional bour geois institution of literature', which sees a broad shift from 'Sachlichkeit' towards 'Innerlichkeit', from the mere 'Schriftsteller' or 'Journalist' to an elitist notion of the 'Dichter', and a renewed emphasis on the importance of literary tradition. The second is the 'search for stability of meaning' which seeks to resecure the relationship between author, text, and reader that had been partially undone by certain avant garde movements. This periodization thesis isexplored in two complementary parts. The first presents a highly illuminating synchronic study of three sets of literary journals between 1930 and I960: at 1930 (Die Kolonne, Die Linkskurve, Die literarische Welt), between 1933 and 1945 (Das innere Reich, MaJ3 und Wert, Das Wort), and after 1945 (Der Ruf, Merkur, Sinn und Form, Aufbau). The authors uncover similarities between the aesthetic programmes of a range of journals in the period and show how these publications reflected and helped shape an ostensibly 'restorative' literary climate around I930, which persisted into the following decades. By taking account of the ideological agendas within the journal corpus and their role in shaping literary historical change, the authors guard against the excessive privileging of aesthetic criteria-a criticism that has been levelled against Schiifer. The second part offers a diachronic dimension to the project, tracing the development of five authors whose literary careers traverse the I930-60 period and who hail from a range of ideologies and backgrounds: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Giinter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Eich and Huchel convincingly fit the restorative paradigm, since they belonged to the young generation of 'non-Nazi' writers at the centre of Schafer's thesis. Becher, Benn, and Brecht accord less comfortably with it. There seems to be an over-reliance on the programmatic statements of editors, critics, and writers alike as evidence of the 'restorative dominant', with too little empirical proof derived from the literature itself. More fundamentally, the underlying dialectic between 'conservation' and 'innova tion' in the period model seems too rigid and broad-brush. It assumes engagement with tradition to be a restorative gesture and obscures more subtle and complex rela tionships between poets and tradition. The analysis of the journals frequently yields contemporary evidence of amore nuanced understanding of the interplay between tradition and innovation; examples are the contributions byWilly Haas inDie litera rische Welt (p. 63), Thomas Mann inMaJ3 und Wert (p. 96), and Hans Paeschke and Hans Egon Holthusen in Merkur (pp. 147 and I50). Philpotts in fact argues that T. S. MLR, IOI.2, 2006 593 Eliot's reconciliation of tradition and originality is 'paradigmatic for the pOst-I930 consciousness' (p. I5 I), but without taking this insight further. If Eliot's position is representative of the period, then its (in)compatibility with the restorative paradigm needs explaining, as do the clear historical continuities with the pre-I930 period. These tensions suggest that the binary model of literary evolution used by Parker, Davies...