Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahr hundert by Dirk Göttsche (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1051 Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im spaten 18.undimig.Jahrhundert. By DirkGottsche. (Corvey-Studienzur Literaturund Kulturgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 7) Munich: Fink. 2001. 848 pp. ?83.20. ISBN 3-7705-3560-x (pbk). Dirk Gottsche's Habilitationsschrift is bound to become a reference work for nine? teenth-century German studies, whether literary, political, or cultural. Its aim is to contribute to the 'Revision des Fehlurteils, der deutschsprachige Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts habe sich infolge seiner Fixierung auf den Bildungsroman nicht mit der gesellschaftlichen und geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit seiner Zeit auseinandergesetzt' (p. 17). The evidence to the contrary is indeed weighty. In a meticulously structured survey, a huge corpus of mostly unknown Zeitromane, published between the 1790s and the 1890s, is presented, often by detailed content summaries and evaluations, complete with eighty pages of bibliographical information and indexes. Ironically, the very same historical Umbruche that gave rise to so many novels about the times were also partly responsible for the oblivion into which these works sank once conditions had changed. This is true ofa whole body of German Zeitromane from the era ofthe French Revolution. They were not remembered during the Restoration when the model of Goethe's Bildungsroman became dominant, and thus the Young German project of the 'zeitgeschichtlicher Sittenroman' in the 1830s was perceived (by contemporaries and later historiographers alike) as a completely new departure. The failure of the 1848 revolution did not mean that the Zeitroman, flourishing dur? ing the Vormarz, disappeared from the scene, but that it was adapted in ways that suited the new 'biirgerlicher Realismus'. Although this placed strong emphasis on the moral, domestic, and economic virtues of the middle-class individual (as an act of post-revolutionary bourgeois self-assertion), Gottsche argues that the bulk of fiction from the 1850s onwards cannot be described as 'Individualromane', but as a hybrid between this genre and that of the 'Gesellschaftsroman'. Nevertheless, panoramic novels offering a multitude of social portraits and perspectives, such as Gutzkow's Die Ritter vom Geiste, were clearly the losers in a post-revolutionary climate where the aesthetic debate was dominated by neo-classical notions of 'Geschlossenheit'. Gottsche quotes Gustav Freytag to illustrate how these poetic norms were underpinned ideologically by the 'Ideal des "volle[n] runde[n] Menschen", der sich "durch eine ausdauernde und mannliche Thatigkeit in die groBe Kette der kraftigen Men? schen als ein niitzliches Glied" der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft "einfugt"' (p. 51). The production of more relativistic, panoramic forms of the Zeitroman (and one assumes these would have been perceived as comparable to contemporary European develop? ments) did not dry up, but it constituted a second strand, almost entirely represented by Gutzkow and Spielhagen. Interestingly, Gottsche sees Fontane as the heir to this tradition of the 'Vielheits-Roman' (p. 735). The reader is left with a sense that canonical nineteenth-century literature from the German-speaking world, with its preponderance of short narratives as well as lyrical and dramatic works, and with its focus on individuals in their interplay with social reality, must represent one of the most selective textual bodies in any canon. Gutzkow and Spielhagen, Louise Aston, Berthold Auerbach, Caroline Fouque, or Sophie Mereau may just about be known (but will usually not have been read). Gottsche's study would be rewarded by recruiting a readership forthese authors alone, not to mention obscure ones such as Friedrich Albert Karcher (Die Freischdrlerin: Eine Novelle aus der Pfalzer Revolution von i84g (Kaiserslautern, 1851)), Ludwig Rellstab (Die Julius tage (Berlin, 1831)), or Friederike Lohmann die Altere (Jacobine: Eine Geschichte aus der Zeit des Baierschen Successionskrieges (Leipzig, 1794)). University of Exeter Martina Lauster ...