Eighteenth-century German Literature Research Articles

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

Mind over Body? Stigma, Staring, and the Self

Mind over Body?Stigma, Staring, and the Self Anna C. Spafford Novelty is fragile and staring volatile because the longer we look, the more accustomed a once surprising sight becomes … Seeing disability reminds us of what Bryan S. Turner (2006) calls "ontological contingency," the truth of our body's vulnerability to the randomness of fate. Each one of us ineluctably acquires one or more disabilities—naming them variably as illness, disease, injury, old age, failure, dysfunction, or dependence.1 The eighteenth-century German literary canon does not, as a rule, focus specifically on unexpected bodies in central characters, with some notable exceptions such as those discussed by my esteemed colleagues in this forum. This being said, there is an emphasis on stigma across literary genres and periods in this century of German literature. This thematization of stigma and the precarity of individual existence culminates in an intense interest in psychological pathologies in Sturm und Drang as well as Weimar classicism. This interest has problematized distinctions between mind and body and emphasized the influence of an individual's social and material context on their psychology. In this forum entry, I attempt to outline parallels in the portrayal and function of various stigmas in this broad literary period, which is credited with the development of modern individuality. I posit that Garland-Thomson's theory of the extraordinary body is an extension of this modern individual, who, contrary to popular understanding, is in fact born of, sustained, and afflicted by stigma. When we think of the individual in eighteenth-century German literature and especially the literature of the Goethezeit, we think of an individual with agency. All men, according to Locke, are Adam—created in God's image and sovereign over their inheritance. According to Kant, every individual is charged to use his own mind. With the rise of Lutheranism and especially among Pietists, it became the individual's responsibility to find his or her own private way to God. In literature, we see the creation and rise of the novel—an individualistic endeavor if ever there was one. In sentimental works, Enlightenment values and pure emotions lead the hero or heroine to a good life of moral steadfastness in the face of an immoral world. Gellert's Swedish Countess weathers political intrigue and physical capture. She witnesses incest and suicide—all unscathed. Her happy ending is directly attributed to her strength of character. Almost fifty years later, Caroline von Wolzogen's Agnes von Lillien suffers similar adverse circumstances, with similar reward. [End Page 141] Even if we look to the Sturm und Drang, where plots are characterized by human volatility and suffering, we find stories of individual strength where our protagonist is strong, just not strong enough. Karl Moor in Schiller's drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) is an excellent example of strong individuality that becomes bent towards its own destruction. Then we have Weimar classicism. The Bildungsroman: What greater act of individual strength is there than one's own journey to self-discovery? Gnothi sauton—know thyself. Any weakling—even Faust!—can conquer the world when given enough power. The true challenge of life becomes self-knowledge. Given this focus on individual fortitude in German literature of the mid- to late eighteenth century, we might want to characterize this period as one that neglects stigma and in which few, if any, extraordinary bodies may be found—existing only on the margins of these narratives: characters weakened with age, oddly androgynous youth. And yet we know from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Erving Goffman—one of her major theoretical inspirations—that stigma is a universal human experience. It is the nature of norms that deviation is the norm. Being the focus of attention—positive or negative—is an isolating experience. While Kant and Locke's ideals portray individual human fortitude of momentous proportion, they both knew themselves to be writing counterfactual narratives. Private property ought to exist. People ought to think for themselves and not just follow their local thought leaders. Similarly, the agency shown in late eighteenth-century literature demonstrates the difficulties of individuality: Gellert's countess only demonstrates her tempered morality by being forced to operate as a beleaguered...

Teaching Eighteenth-Century German Literature in the Era of #MeToo: Gender and the Enlightenment Canon

ABSTRACT This article presents the course ‘Seduction and Destruction: 1772­–1808’, which I taught at Bristol in 2017, at the time of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and ensuing #MeToo debate. I argue for the examination of gender ideologies as a way into more traditionally studied eighteenth-century concepts and movements such as Aufklärung, Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. I offer an overview of the texts we studied on the course, and consider to what degree these texts can be seen to critique the gender norms and sexual power dynamics of their own day. Finally, I consider the strengths and challenges of the course at the time, and what made it attractive to students who might otherwise have shied away from eighteenth-century literature.

Metaphorical Contracts and Games: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Schiller’s Fiesco

The question of how to devise and justify political order for a secular age is still at the heart of political discourse today. Social contracts provided an early political and philosophical answer to these issues, but they also manifested themselves in eighteenth-century German literature: This article will examine how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller engaged with the specific propositions of contractarianism (in particular Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan) in selected scenes in Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa (1783), respectively. In their interpretation of contractarian scenarios, Goethe and Schiller isolate the notion of utility which, they argue, reduces complex social cooperation and interaction to game-like scenarios, exclusively driven by calculation and rational decision making. Goethe’s and Schiller’s morally inflected deconstruction of Hobbes’s thought experiment affords an insight into alternative models of social togetherness which place an emphasis on Bildung, evolution, mutuality, and recognition.

"Goethe Boom" Films: Bildung Reloaded

"Goethe Boom" FilmsBildung Reloaded Bridget Swanson The project of German reunification in the 1990s coincided with a marked decline in film adaptations based on German canonical texts. The move signified a turn away from classical literary adaptations and broke with a longstanding trend in the German film industry. Whereas previous eras of cultural crisis and change, such as during the 1930s and 1970s, had often prompted renewed interest in classical adaptations, changes in funding structures in the early 1990s shifted the German adaptation industry's attention away from eighteenth-century Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) to the works of contemporary bestselling authors. With these sorts of book-to-film endeavors proving economically successful on the global market, in part due to financially advantageous changes in the book publishing industry,1 such adaptations promised Germany's film industry a strengthened foothold in commercially successful entertainment cinema. From Joseph Vilsmaier's Schlafes Bruder (Brother of Sleep, 1995) to Tom Tykwer's Parfüm. Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1995), the adaptations created during this era indeed garnered national and international acclaim, with Caroline Link's Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001) even winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. At this point, it seemed that the relevance of Weimar classicism had waned. Starting in the early 2000s, however, German film studios began to return to canonical texts and have released numerous adaptations based on the works of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Kleist, among others. Loosely grouped under the umbrella term "contemporary classical adaptations," these films range from more conservative theater-based productions like Leander Haußmann's Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 2005), to modernizations such as Christoph Stark's Julietta (2001), Sebastian Schipper's Mitte Ende August (Sometime in August, 2005) and Uwe Janson's Werther (2008), to biopic-oriented heritage films like Philipp Stölzl's Goethe! (Young Goethe in Love, 2010) and Dominik Graf's Die geliebten Schwestern (Beloved Sisters, 2014). As suggested by Paul Cooke, Randall Halle, and Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher, the cultural shift toward eighteenth-century German literature in the early twenty-first century complicates scholarly treatments of the current transnational German film market.2 Whereas these scholars outline contemporary German film output as increasingly outward-looking, with Germany's traumatic twentieth-century past and contemporary multiculturalism often [End Page 351] stylized for consumption by global markets, the contemporary classical adaptations discussed here point toward a pervasive national preoccupation with two intertwined endeavors that can be traced back to production and reception processes of the eighteenth century. First, German cinema has sought to rival Hollywood's successful "Shakespeare boom" period via acts of emulation and appropriation reminiscent of Enlightenment-era German literary practices. Second, the contemporary German film industry has been engaged with concerns about the perceived need and mandate for the media literacy of young Germans—doing so in a manner that co-opts aspects of the discourses of Bildung inherent to the very texts upon which the contemporary classical adaptations were based. The resulting adaptations are thus culturally unique compared with earlier eras of German Literaturverfilmungen, as they emphasize, across both aesthetic and industrial lines, figurations of transnational pop culture, national Bildung, and pedagogy. In terms of the appropriative practices at play in the initial emergence of this genre, eighteenth-century Shakespeare emulation resurfaces as twenty-first-century Shakespeare boom emulation. That the German film industry has channeled Hollywood Shakespeare film adaptations to create contemporary cinematic fare based on Germany's literary trove is, from a film historical perspective, distinctive, contrasting with most other national cinema contexts. Here, filmmakers imitate the translocation and modernization of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (2006) and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) and fit Shakespeare's works to their geographical and linguistic contexts, examples of which are described at length by Mark Thornton Burnett, Maurizio Calbi, and Sonia Massai.3 However, in Germany, where the Hollywood Shakespeare boom films garnered the greatest profits of any foreign market, several German critics and filmmakers immediately responded with laments that "die Amerikaner und die Engländer 'ihren' Shakespeare rauf und runter verfilmen, mal klassisch, mal...

Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies

Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies Eleoma Bodammer The Forum topic "(New) Directions" is an opportunity to draw attention to the need to integrate disability studies more into Goethe scholarship and research on eighteenth-century German literature. However, going in a new direction within the discipline should not only mean an impulse for discussion; it should have a transformative impact that causes positive changes in the place where the discipline is housed, namely, at the university itself. My thoughts on this new direction therefore play out against the need for and move toward broader, more inclusive perspectives in the field of German studies and its institutional frameworks. Admittedly, I reflect on this topic from the distinct perspective of German in the United Kingdom. As German studies expands to explore wider and newer fields, academics are using the many opportunities available to openly and publicly reflect on this transformation, for example, via blogs, social media, and in new spaces in academic journals, such as the Forum section of the Goethe Yearbook. In such spaces, amplifying the voices of those with protected characteristics (in the UK, the Equality Act 2010 lists these as age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation) and reflecting on positionality is also part of this new approach to diversifying both research and the curriculum. Furthermore, as with other "expanding" German studies pathways (e.g., gender and race) that address underrepresentation, a more emphatic focus on disability should be intersectional and can also have a transformative and inclusive impact on university curricula, pedagogy, assessment, and course design. Disability studies and literary disability studies scholars are often agents of change and academic activists. As such, they are sensitive to the real-world relevance of their research focus. Whether identifying as disabled, not disclosing, or nondisabled allies and advocates, they often bring a commitment to challenging prejudice, stigma, injustice, and bias in relation to disability, to supporting disability pride and visibility, and to amplifying the voices of disabled people. These individuals can actively bring about institutional change by creating opportunities for disabled people (or people with disabilities) to teach and conduct research, and by educating the next generation of students to use disability theory for literary study and to be knowledgeable about inclusive terms and ableist structures.1 Disability studies scholars [End Page 307] can transform work environments both within and outside the academy, for example, by fighting for civil rights, accommodations and adjustments, physical access, safe spaces, content warnings, universal and equitable design, fair assessment, etc., and by attending to language that may intend to assure fairness and "objectivity," but nevertheless often fails to secure inclusiveness.2 The academic discipline of disability studies generally seeks to go beyond research, aiming instead to serve as a holistic approach that informs many aspects of academic life. Much can be gained from examining the eighteenth-century concept of Behinderung before it evolved into a collective idea in the twentieth century through examining period-specific uses of alternative words and concepts. According to Felix Welti in Behinderung und Rehabilitation im sozialen Rechtsstaat (Disability and Rehabilitation in the Social Constitutional State, 2005), the terms Behinderung and Behinderte have only been in use in the modern-day sense of disability and disabled people in Germany since around 1919, just after World War I, after being popularized by the Otto-PerlBund, a self-help group for physically disabled people in Berlin. Welti maintains that the word Gebrechen (affliction) was the term most commonly used as an overarching term for disability prior to the modern era.3 Grimms' Wörterbuch defines "Behinderung" and "behindern" as preventing someone from doing something (in the sense of "verhindern"), deriving from the Latin "impedimentum" and "impedire."4 Similarly, the online Adelung dictionary classifies "behindern" as to impede, in the context of legal impediments.5 The online Goethe Wörterbuch defines "Behinderung" in relation to its use in a theater context for an incapacity caused, for example, by illness, and clarifies the meaning of "behindern" through the example of preventing others from developing or educating themselves.6 Alternative words, such as the word "Invalide" are...

Sturm und Drang Comedy and the Enlightenment Tradition

Breaking with the traditional view of Sturm und Drang comedy as a radically new beginning in the history of the comic genre, this article highlights important continuities that define German comedy from the Enlightenment through Sturm und Drang. More precisely, this article traces the variations on the central theme of vice that extend from the Enlightenment poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched to Sturm und Drang plays by Lenz and Wagner. At the center of the analysis are the comedies Das Testament (1745) by Luise Gottsched, Minna von Barnhelm (1767) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Der Hofmeister (1774) by J. M. R. Lenz, as well as the drama Die Reue nach der That (1775) by Heinrich Leopold Wagner. Through these readings, Sturm und Drang's innovations become legible as the continuation of a well-established tradition of variations on a stable theme—a perspective that revises our understanding of the history of German comedy and that bears broader implications for the periodization of eighteenth-century German literature.

The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective ed. by Carl Niekerk

Reviewed by: The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective ed. by Carl Niekerk Samuel Heidepriem Carl Niekerk, ed. The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective. Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2018. 422 pp., 2 illustrations. Over the last two decades, the historian Jonathan Israel has undertaken an ambitious multivolume project to change how we understand the Enlightenment. Where previous scholarship emphasized the diversity of separate national Enlightenment traditions, Israel regards it as an integrated, pan-European phenomenon with two prominent strands: a radical camp, populated by principled atheists and freethinking rebels who brooked no compromise with established monarchical and clerical power, and a moderate wing, which shared many values with the radicals but did not hesitate to accommodate the status quo. Israel argues we have given too much credit to moderates like Voltaire and Kant, while the real intellectual core of the Enlightenment—as well as its ongoing normative legacy—lies with radicals such as Diderot, and above all Spinoza. The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective takes Israel's project as an occasion to bring late eighteenth-century German literature and culture into this debate. "This collection seeks to demonstrate," writes editor Carl Niekerk, "not only how a more explicit articulation of a cultural perspective can enrich our understanding of both the Radical and Moderate Enlightenment, but also how literature and culture have their own roles to play in the debates about these movements." This perspective addresses areas overlooked by Israel, who tends to subordinate the heterogeneity of cultural history to canonical thinkers and big ideas. For Israel, the essence of true Enlightenment is Spinozist philosophy, adherence to which distinguishes the movement's subsequent radical and moderate representatives. The essays in The Radical Enlightenment in Germany demonstrate that this is not so simple, though the volume is not expressly polemical in nature. The case against Israel has already been made vigorously by Anthony La Vopa, Keith Baker, and Samuel Moyn, among others. Instead, the contributions in this collection lend necessary complexity to Israel's categories and narrative, while granting that his theory may likewise have something of value for German literary and cultural studies. One cue the volume takes from Israel is to broaden the range of figures typically considered representative of the Enlightenment. Chunjie Zhang's essay on Matthias Christian Sprengel argues that this relatively obscure historian pioneered a form of "historical realist" writing that communicated radical Enlightenment ideas in a sober, nonincendiary style. Similarly, Peter Höyng takes Israel's work as an opportunity to present the biography of monk-turned-Jacobin Eulogius Schneider as emblematic of Enlightenment's often violent dialectic. Both essays complicate Israel's distinction between radical and moderate Enlightenment, the porousness of which is a running theme throughout the volume. John McCarthy proposes Christoph Martin Wieland as an archetypal "radical moderate" who promoted the ideals of radical Enlightenment within existing institutions. Paul Spalding argues it is likewise with French General Lafayette and those who supported him during his imprisonment in Prussia and Austria: despite class, military distinction, and other markers of establishment, all did their part to advance radical values. The volume further challenges the division between radical and moderate Enlightenment in the contexts of literature, gender and sexuality, and media. Niekerk's piece reads Lessing's domestic dramas as vehicles for communicating, problematizing, and otherwise reconfiguring the categories of the radical, moderate, and counter-Enlightenment. The essay reinforces Niekerk's argument from [End Page 376] the introduction that literature offers a platform for staging Enlightenment ideals in concrete situations, and thus constitutes a privileged site for considering questions of theory and practice. Continuing this line, Gabriela Stoicea reads Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (1771) as an illumination of Enlightenment tensions surrounding the education, autonomy, and wider social role of women, topics on which iconic Enlightenment males (including, Stoicea points out, Spinoza) are notoriously inconsistent in their radicalism. La Roche's novel is also significant for Monika Nenon, whose essay examines the radicalization of the epistolary form in the German reception of Rousseau's Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Ann Schmiesing's essay shows radical and moderate Enlightenment blended in the career of Theodor...

The Economics of Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Germany and Britain

The relative backwardness of eighteenth-century German literature and the presumed ambivalence of German writers towards political power have traditionally been explained by the lack of a copyright law in Germany, which meant that German writers, in contrast to their British contemporaries, were often financially dependent on the state. This paper argues that the differences between British and German writers in economic terms have been overstated. British copyright law did not in fact serve the interests of writers to the extent that has traditionally been supposed. In Germany and Britain the situation of writers was determined more by the underlying economics of the publishing trade, especially the high cost of book production, which enabled publishers to pursue monopolistic practices and tilted the tables in favour of publishers and against writers. This argument has further implications for our understanding of the politics of German literature in the late eighteenth century.

Bad Habits of the Heart: Werther’s Critique of Ill Humor in the Context of Contemporary Psychological Thought

The importance of contemporary psychology and philosophical anthropology to an understanding of late eighteenth-century German literature has been highlighted in several major studies published in the last four decades.1 Although Werther has been interpreted in the context of diverse aspects of contemporary psychophysiological thought,2 the discussion of ill humor (uble Laune) in the text has not been subjected to renewed scrutiny against this backdrop. This article endeavors to close this gap, placing Werther's views on ill humor in their contemporary psychological context and exploring anew their significance for the novel as a whole. In so doing, it challenges the interpretation of in Werther put forth by Stuart Atkins in 1948 in his seminal article J. C. Lavater and Goethe, and largely unquestioned sincenamely, that Werther succumbs to the very vice against which he inveighs.3 Situating the treatment of in Werther in the context of contemporary psychology, this article urges reassessment of this position, in particular because discussions of ill humor by eighteenth-century German psychologists raised issues of free will and responsibility that render Atkins's interpretation problematical. Furthermore, this article also highlights the importance of the theme of ill humor in underscoring the ambiguity of Werther's suicide.Werther's Speech in the Light of Contemporary Psychological Discussions of 111 HumorIn his letter of July 1,1771, Werther relates delivering his impassioned speech on to an audience of Lotte, the old pastor of St. and his wife, their daughter Friederike, and her suitor Herr Schmidt, whose apparent ill humor and its assumed impact on the assembled company have served to provoke Werther's indignation. Werther's curiously precise description of in this speech as innerer Unmuth uber unsere eigene Unwurdigkeit, ein Misfallen an uns selbst, das immer mit einem Neide verknupft ist, der durch eine thorichte Eitelkeit aufgehetzt wird (an inner with our own unworthiness, a with ourselves forever tied to envy that is stimulated by foolish vanity),4 has been the source of some critical debate. The most straightforward part of this statement, the identification of ill humor as dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness and displeasure with ourselves, refers to a tendency inherent in to be self-perpetuating that was also remarked on by contemporary writers on psychology. Dissatisfaction and ill humor lock us in a vicious cycle, for we become bad-tempered over our bad temper. In a contribution to his own journal of psychology from 1788, Karl Friedrich Pockels describes how the shame felt by victims of bose at their bad behavior generates more of the same because it produces a defensive response:Wir fuhlen es nicht selten, das wir dabei gefehlt haben, das wir in unsrer bosen Laune zu weit gegangen sind;-allein diese innere Scham bringt uns oft noch mehr auf. Wir wollen nicht gern das Ansehn haben, als ob wir gefehlt hatten, und wir suchen alsdenn eine noch grosere Hitze zum Beweise unsrer gerechten Sache zu machen.5[We often realize that we've made a mistake, and that we've gone too far in our bad mood-but this inner feeling of shame just makes us more irritable. We don't want to be seen to have done wrong, so we try to defend the justice of our cause by being even more ill-tempered.]Similarly, for Lavater in his Jonah sermons, the defensiveness that characterizes sufferers of threatens to undermine their entire moral character:Ach! wenn man einmal unzufrieden gethan hat, einmal murrisch und launisch gewesen, so will man es nicht gestehen, und die erste uble Laune mit der zweyten rechtfertigen und gleichsam bedecken. Man will den andern abschrecken, uns Vorwurfe zu machen; Man fugt Unrecht an Unrecht; Man will Sunde durch Sunde verdrangen.... So schrecklich zerruttet Unzufriedenheit und uble Laune das Herz, und den ganzen Character des Menschen. …

Die Genese der idealen Gesellschaft: Studien zum literarischen Werk von Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) (review)

Jesko Reiling, Die Genese der idealen Gesellschaft: Stuthen zum literarischen Werk von Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010.322 pp. Johann Jakob Bodmer and his literary partner Johann Jakob Breitinger- yoked with their Leipzig antagonist, Gottsched - have been accorded a prominent place in traditional histories of eighteenth-century German literature, even if nowadays one is unsure what their contribution was. This study by Jesko Reiling of Bodmer's post- 1740s Biblical epics and political dramas (that is, works produced after the major critical writings) is part of an ongoing revaluation that seeks to make that contribution more precise. For instance, the recent collection by Anett Lutteken and Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, Johann Jakob Bodmer und Johann Jakob Breitinger im Netzwerk der europaischen Aufklarung (Gottingen, 2009), has as its focus the connection of the Swiss with the larger eighteenth-century Europewide literary transformation, as the title indicates. It is a good place to start, with thirty-two articles (including a chapter by Reiling on Bodmer's Klopstock, Gottlob David Hartmann). In the present study, Reiling proposes a value-free assessment of Bodmer's epics and dramas, beginning with the Noah epic in the 1740s and concluding with the historically-based political dramas (published 1768-69). Fully the first third of the book, however, consists of poorly organized background, which, absent some prior acquaintance, one may have difficulty navigating. Moreover, the book lacks a chronology, not simply of Bodmer's oeuvre but even of the works under consideration. One can keep straight Julius Casar and Nero, even Marcus Brutus, but Die Tegeaten, Italus, Pelopidas, Tarquinius Superbus, Thrasea Pa tus? The book also has the irritating convention of indicating on first mention of a work an abbreviated reference to it in a footnote. After a while, one loses track of which work is meant when consulting a note. Nevertheless, awaiting more research, this study too is a good start. In his introduction Reiling addresses the uniformly negative canonical judgment of Bodmer's literary works. No less than Friedrich Sengle concluded of the dramas that they are nicht allein durch die Schwache des Poeten Bodmer, sondern gewissermassen grundsatzlich undramatisch, undichterisch . (238). The contemporary reaction was no better. Of Noah, for instance, it was noted that [d]ie erste Welt wird zum Spiegel oder Abbild der zweiten Welt, with clearly recognizable modern events verpflanzt in the antediluvian era (143). Thus, before the Flood, Noah in a dream travels for fifty days around the earth with the angel Raphael, who reveals to him the perversions of mankind, all strikingly modern. Of the political dramas Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg wrote that it was useless to judge diese Schauspiele nach den bekannten Regeln des Dramas. He noted that they were durchwurzt mit Staatsbetrachtungen aus dem Montesquieu und Rousseau (239). Such objections, according to Reiling, miss the core of what Bodmer was attempting: namely, not to be entertaining but, instead, to be instructive. He places Bodmer's literary output within the rise of Empfindsamkeit, following, among others, Gerhard Sauder, according to whom this movement was influenced by English moral sense theory, and Friedrich Vollhardt, who has noted the influence of natural rights discourse (3). Reiling's intention is to provide a gesellschaftstheoretische Lesart (8), drawing on what Heidemarie Kesselmann has called the gesellschaftskritische Tendenz of Bodmer's works (8). Agreeing with Peter Hohendahl and others, Reiling finds that the conceptions of virtue, equality, and morality in sentimental literature were a critique of class-based or absolutist politics, not (as per Sauder) a Fluchtphanomen (9). The first part of this study examines Character, Bodmer's analysis of moral types. …

‘Das Orakel der Deisten’: Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklärung by Mark-Georg Dehrmann

272 Reviews An interesting analysis of Burkhard Waldis's Deparabell vam verlorn Szohn (1527), which introduces a repentant brothel-keeper to serve as a stark contrast to the self-righteous elder brother, thus exemplifying the inadequacy of a works-based approach to justification, is followed by discussion of a Catholic response to this text. The study concludes rather disappointingly with a very short discussion of sub sequent developments, mentioning the influence of Jesuitdrama, and the changes brought about by the introduction of fixed stages and troupes of professional play ers. Although Washof wants clearly to distinguish the earlier from the later plays, the brief treatment suggests an over-simplified discontinuity. For themost part this is a useful and clearlywritten study,which offers an introduction to the genre and discusses little-known plays. But one cannot help wondering whether the dramatic strategies employed by thewriters to convey theirhomilies would not have merited greater attention. King's College London Anna Linton 'Das Orakel der Deisten: Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklarung. By Mark Georg Dehrmann. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2008. 499 pp. 52. ISBN 978-3 8353-0233-4. Shaftesbury has long been cited as a major influence on eighteenth-century Ger man literature and thought, but no comprehensive study of his reception has yet existed. Mark-Georg Dehrmann's monograph remedies this deficiency. A Whig and opponent of High Church Anglicanism and royalist Toryism, Shaftesbury was perceived by some inGermany as a dangerous subversive (J.L. Mosheim called him 'das Orakel der Deisten'), and by others as a progressive thinkerwho based morality on secular principles. Leibniz, who discovered him in 1709, shared his Platonic proclivities and welcomed him as an ally in the defence of optimism against the scepticism of Bayle. Gottsched praised him forgrounding taste not on courtly convention but on our natural appreciation of cosmic harmony. Towards themiddle of the century,Gleim, Ramler, and Sulzer found confirmation of their own Empfindsamkeit in Shaftesbury's rhapsodic sentiments, and through the Berlin theologian J. J.Spalding, Shaftesbury influenced the rise of neology, that tendency in Lutheran thought to reduce Christian theology to natural reli gion. Mendelssohn, Nicolai, and Lessing were impressed by Shaftesbury's informal manner, and his dialogic style, subtle irony, and elegant diction were imitated by Mendelssohn inhis Briefe tiberdie Empfindungen. Contrary to received opinion, Shaftesbury's influence rapidly waned during the second half of the century. From the start, his reception had been partial and diffuse. Until a more or less complete translation of his Characteristics appeared in 1776-79, readers without access to the original had to rely on second-hand accounts and scattered translations of thework's constituent items such as 'The Moralists' and the 'Letter concerning Enthusiasm'. His unsystematic thought had MLR, 105.1, 2010 273 limited appeal to German philosophers, and his ideas were often assimilated to Wolffian rationalism. Two figures nevertheless continued to take him seriously, namely Wieland and Herder. He played a vital part inWieland's 'metamorphosis' in the early 1760s from ethereal religiosity to a combination of Platonic idealism and wry scepti cism, andWieland's fundamental concepts of 'moral grace', kalokagathia, and the 'virtuoso' are avowedly borrowed from Shaftesbury. In the frequent deflations, in Wieland's novels and poems, of obsessive idealists and Schwarmer, Shaftesbury's 'testof ridicule' is applied as a heuristic device to overcome delusion and restore the victim to normality. In short, from his 'metamorphosis' onwards, Wieland remained Shaftesbury's closest German adherent. For over a century, Shaftesbury's definition of the poet as 'a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove' has been described as a major inspiration of the Sturm und Drang cult of genius and ofGoethe's presentation of Prometheus as a rebel against divine authority. It has also been claimed that Shaftesbury was the main source of the nature pantheism ofHerder and Goethe in the 1780s (thereby providing an Aryan substitute for Spinoza as an ancestor ofWeimar classicism). But as Dehrmann convincingly demonstrates, the young Herder's image, subse quently adopted byGoethe, of the genius as a defiant Prometheus stealing fire from heaven is derived not from Shaftesbury, whom he had not yet encountered, but fromEdward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. And although Herder's 'Hymn...

Die Bibel auf der Bühne: Exempelfiguren und protestantische Theologie im lateinischen und deutschen Bibeldrama der Reformationszeit by Wolfram Washof

MLR, 105.1, 2010 271 essential reading for those interested in the variegated oeuvre of the man who referred to himself (perhaps rather toomodestly) as 'Der Strieker. University of Reading Neil Thomas Die Bibel auf der Buhne: Exempelfiguren und protestantische Theologie im lateini schen und deutschen Bibeldrama der Reformationszeit. ByWolfram Washof. (Symbolische Kommunikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme. Schriften reihe des Sonderforschungsbereichs, 496,14) Minister: Rhema. 2007. 536 pp. 56. ISBN 978-3-930454-63-1 Martin Luther's evaluation of theApocryphal books Judith and Tobias as praise worthy didactic dramas has often been taken as constituting an authorization for his contemporaries towrite biblical plays. And many did so. In this study Wolfram Washof considers 120 dramas written during theperiod of confessionalization (de fined here as 1520s to 1570s), themajority by Lutheran authors who recognized the homiletic possibilities of thismedium. Unlike some earlier studies,which sought to evaluate the dramatic merit of these plays (and often found themwanting), Washof follows the tendentious aims of the authors, focusing on the doctrines and ethical values they intended to disseminate. Nor ishe interested in tracing dramaturgical influences in any detail, although he does set the plays briefly in context alongside theFastnachtspiel, thePassion play, and theRoman palliata, which had experienced a humanist revival. The study isdivided into three parts. The firstdiscusses the somewhat confusing contemporary terminology associated with the genre, the playwrights' social posi tion, and the question ofwhether it was legitimate forChristians toperform drama, which, asWashof points out, was not unproblematic. Although such background material makes this a useful work for anyone coming to Reformation drama for the first time, some clearer definitions would have been welcome on occasion, for example the distinction between typology and allegory. This part also sets out the Lutheran loci (themes), subdivided into dogmatic and ethical/didactic topics, which Washof regards as central to the dramas. They provide the structure for the main body of the study,where each theme is illustrated by specific plays, with the section focusing on the ethical/didactic loci occupying by far the greatest space. These loci, a term borrowed from Philipp Melanchthon's dogmatic writings, are drawn from Paul Althaus's studyDie Theologie Martin Luthers (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1962), which gives the work a strong Lutheran bias. Washof justifies this bias by claiming that although therewere doctrinal disagreements between Lutherans, Calvinists, and Zwinglians, for example about the real presence in the Eucharist, these do not generally make theirway into biblical drama. When he emphasizes the role played by drama in confessional battles, one is therefore forced to con clude that he is limiting thismerely to points of contention between Protestants and Catholics. This is illustrated in the chapter on justification, which examines polemical workings of theparable of the Prodigal Son, a popular subject fordrama. 272 Reviews An interesting analysis of Burkhard Waldis's Deparabell vam verlorn Szohn (1527), which introduces a repentant brothel-keeper to serve as a stark contrast to the self-righteous elder brother, thus exemplifying the inadequacy of a works-based approach to justification, is followed by discussion of a Catholic response to this text. The study concludes rather disappointingly with a very short discussion of sub sequent developments, mentioning the influence of Jesuitdrama, and the changes brought about by the introduction of fixed stages and troupes of professional play ers. Although Washof wants clearly to distinguish the earlier from the later plays, the brief treatment suggests an over-simplified discontinuity. For themost part this is a useful and clearlywritten study,which offers an introduction to the genre and discusses little-known plays. But one cannot help wondering whether the dramatic strategies employed by thewriters to convey theirhomilies would not have merited greater attention. King's College London Anna Linton 'Das Orakel der Deisten: Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklarung. By Mark Georg Dehrmann. Gottingen: Wallstein. 2008. 499 pp. 52. ISBN 978-3 8353-0233-4. Shaftesbury has long been cited as a major influence on eighteenth-century Ger man literature and thought, but no comprehensive study of his reception has yet existed. Mark-Georg Dehrmann's monograph remedies this deficiency. A Whig and opponent of High Church Anglicanism and royalist Toryism, Shaftesbury was perceived by some inGermany as a dangerous subversive (J...

Just 'Farewell Performances'? Curiosity in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and its Role in the Creation of a Specific Genre of Political Theatre

This article focuses on curiosity's career in eighteenth-century German literature, thus counteracting the commonly held view that curiosity left the centre stage in cultural and literary debates quickly after 1700. Examining texts ranging from the anonymous Centi-Folium Stultorum to works of manifold genres, types, and backgrounds by authors such as Lang, Schnabel, Gellert, Loen, Belach, Frederick II, Haller, Vulpius, Seume, Breitinger, Grosser, Keilhacker and Borkenstein, it shows that curiosity's role after 1700 was far from being reduced to just a brief 'farewell performance'. In fact, its position within eighteenth-century culture remains highly complex; while early modern debates about curiosity were unforgotten and continued to be reflected in literary works, 'practices' of curiosity spread, Neugier was hailed as a key element in securing literature's success as one of the Artes populares, and it played a pivotal part in creating a particular and innovative type of early Enlightenment political drama that has (wrongfully) received hardly any attention as of yet although it dared to stage the rationale and strategies behind contemporary European politics of war.

Animal Troubles: Goethe and the Reynard the Fox Tradition

Goethe's 'Reineke Fuchs' is commonly regarded as a work of classical serenity, and although this view accords with Goethe's later reflections on 'Reineke Fuchs', it fails to recognize the concrete textual differences that set Goethe's epic apart from his models and which were conceived as a provocation. This essay outlines how Goethe's numerous changes transform Gottsched's 'Reineke der Fuchs' into a subversive response not only to the tradition of Reynard the Fox, but also to debates about the significance of rhetoric and the function of figurative language in eighteenth-century German literature.

“Eviva il Coltello”? The Castrato Singer in Eighteenth-Century German Literature and Culture

This article investigates how eighteenth-century writers used the figure of the castrato as a privileged metaphor for the negotiation of class conflicts, gender concepts, and the nature of art. A reading of Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse's novel Hildegard von Hohenthal shows that Heinse uses the character of the (fake) castrato to celebrate the artificiality of gender, desire, and art, but his novel leaves class boundaries intact. Friedrich Schiller's poem “Kastraten und Männer” attacks aristocratic supremacy but naturalizes gender codes and equates masculinity and art.

German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading: Musäus's Richardson Satires

German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading: Musäus's Richardson Satires John P. Heins Over the last tiiirty-five years or so, scholars ofeighteenth-century German literature have attempted to expand earlier conceptions ofliterary and cultural value by filling in the picture ofthe print culture ofthat era. Where previously the artistic triumphs ofGoethe and Schiller's Weimar classicism provided the privileged object of interest for most scholars, in more recent decades a fuller variety of literary movements and cultural expressions has been subjected to renewed and more broadly conceived scholarly exploration. In particular, the field ofsentimentalism {Empfindsamkeit) has benefited gready from diis new attention.1 The centrality of this movement to eighteenth-century German literature and thought has been reestablished , particularly in the relation of the movement to questions of genre and thus to the hierarchies ofprint culture, as well as to larger 1 Among book-length studies, see especially Georgjäger, Empfindsamkeit undRoman: Weltgeschichte , Tlteorie und Kritik im 18. undfrühen 19.Jaltrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969); Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit,vol. 1 (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1974);WolfgangDoktor,.D¿e.Krií¿* derEmpfindsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1975); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Dereuropäisc/ie Roman der Empfindsamkeit (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977); Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit· ZurGeschichteânes Gefühls in derLiteraturdes 18.Jalirhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). I would like to thankAlex and Karen Winter-Nelson for facilitating the first version of this article, and Margaret Gonglewski and Walter Rankin for enabling die final version. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3, April 2004 420 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION questions of literary representation and of the role of the arts in modern societies.2 What a literary representation is, and how one does or should respond to it, are questions central to debates around die sentimental novel, and, not coincidentally, central to quixotism. Since the publication of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the early seventeenth century, the "quixotic problem" experienced awide variety of expressions in European cultures as writers used the quixotic figure to explore die relationship ofliterature to the empirical realm. In the eighteenth century especially, die literary engagementwith quixotism addresses die function ofaesthetic illusion as it satirically or humorously portrays the purported effects ofreading imaginative literature. The quixote is the literal-minded reader who mistakenly believes diat die world portrayed in literature is literally true, and then interprets die empirical world according to die terms and forms supplied by the particular category ofliterary fictions.3 Eighteenth-century Germanlanguage portrayals of this literal-minded reader, the quixote, are generally intended satirically, in contrast to the portrayal of Don Quixote as a heroic and noble dreamer in later periods.4 A particularly significant eighteenth-century German variant of quixotism is, in fact, the satirical portrayal of sentiment; in the German context, we may risk the generalization that quixotism and sentimentalism tend to appear together. Perhaps more than in other national literatures in the eighteenth century, in German literature the quixote is the unwitting victim of sentimental novels.5 The On the relationship ofsentimentalism to the novel genre, in addition toJäger (above) see also Dieter Kimpel, Der Roman der Aufklärung (1670-1774), 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) and Wilhelm Vosskamp, Romantheorie in Deutschland: Von Martin Opitz bisFriedrich von Blanckenburg(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973). On the emerging stratification ofthe print market, see Helmuth Kiesel and Paul Munch, Gesellschaß und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert: Voraussetzungen undEntstehungdes literarischen Markts in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 1977). My definition here differs from other recent definitions because it prioritizes misreading over the naive belief in ideals and the reader's tragi-comic sympathy (Jürgen Jacobs, Don Quijote in derAufklärung [Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1992]), the idealistic madness and the form of die quest (Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England- TlteAestlielics ofLaugliter [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]), and idiosyncratic reason (Wendy Motooka, The Age ofReasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in EigliteenthCentury Britain [London: Roudedge, 1998]). Jacobs, above; Theo In der Smitten, Don Qiixote (der "riclitigc" under der "fabelte") und sieben deutscheLeser (Bern: Lang, 1986). See especiallyJacobs, and Lieselotte Kurth, Die zweite Wirklichkeit: Studien zum Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), for informative discussions of eighteenth-century German quixotism, neither of which, however, exhausts die question...

Warm brothers: queer theory and the age of Goethe

In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write of the phenomenon of men who evoke sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the period, men identified as warm brothers wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and developed particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion. There is much evidence, Robert D. Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were coalescing around a queer proto-identity. Today, we might consider canonical author of the period such as Jean Paul homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller. But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others. Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon and the history of sexuality.

Entertaining the Third Reich: illusions of wholeness in Nazi cinema

In this persuasive reversal of previous scholarship, Linda Schulte-Sasse takes an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, examining Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies. Like other Nazi artistic productions, Nazi film has long been regarded as kitsch rather than art, and therefore unworthy of critical textual analysis. By reading these films as consumer entertainment, Schulte-Sasse reveals the similarities between Nazi commercial film and classical Hollywood cinema and, with this shift in emphasis, demonstrates how Hollywood-style movie formulas frequently compromised Nazi messages. Drawing on theoretical work, particularly that of Lacan and Zizek, Schulte-Sasse shows how films such as Jew Susss and The Great King construct fantasies of social harmony, often through distorted versions of familiar stories from eighteenth-century German literature, history, and philosophy. Schulte-Sasse observes, for example, that Nazi films, with their valorization of bourgeois culture and use of familiar narrative models, display a curious affinity with the world of Enlightenment culture that the politics of National Socialism would seem to contradict. Schulte-Sasse argues that film served National Socialism less because of its ideological homogeneity than because of the appeal and familiarity of its underlying literary paradigms and because the medium itself guarantees a pleasurable illusion of wholeness. Entertaining the Third Reich will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those engaged in the study of cinema, popular culture, Nazism and Nazi art, the workings of fascist culture, and the history of modern ideology.

Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony

Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony