German Modernist Research Articles

SYNAESTHETIC METAPHORISATION IN R.M. RILKE'S POEMS AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS INTO RUSSIAN

The article deals with the phenomenon of synaesthetic metaphorisation in Russian and German. Synaesthesia as an intermodal phenomenon is described. A brief characteristic of empirical adjectives (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory perception) is presented. Primary synaesthesia as a transfer of a feature of one type of perception to another and secondary synaesthesia as a transfer of a feature of one type of perception to human psychological experiences, emotions and feelings are described. The article provides examples of primary and secondary synaesthetic metaphorization identified in the poems of the German modernist poet R.M. Rilke and their translations into Russian, performed by Russian poet-translators in the late XIX century and early XX century. An attempt is made to identify potential semes actualized by reference nouns as a part of adjective sememes, and to describe the change in the meaning of the latter. The article compares the use of synaesthetic metaphors in the original and translated languages.

Between imitation and thematization of music: towards an intermedial utopia in late German modernist literature

Between imitation and thematization of music: towards an intermedial utopia in late German modernist literature

A Pariah Among Parvenus: Anne Fischer and the Politics of South Africa's New Realism(s)

While scholars have begun to explore the complex afterlives of “new realism” in Europe and the Americas following the collapse of Weimar democracy, its reception on the African continent has received far less attention. Looking to the unheralded documentary work that Anne Fischer, a German- Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in the early years of the Second World War, this essay examines how she and South African contemporary Constance Stuart Larrabee variously employed German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In considering these women's work, the text sheds light on how issues of race, class, and gender inflected Fischer's experience of exile and, in turn, how she mobilized her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus

On the Interplay between Poets’ and Philologists’ Translations of Chinese Poetry into German

‘[I]t has unfortunately become a fashion that people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology […], take hold of the sinological works of others and exploit them merely for business reasons’, complains the sinologist Leopold Woitsch in 1924, referring to Albert Ehrenstein's newest translations of Chinese poetry. The debate on who could authoritatively translate Chinese poetry was fiercely contested in German modernist circles and still rages to this day. Most scholars still contrast ‘poetical’ and ‘scholarly’ translations of Chinese poetry, either claiming that the former in an intuitive way come closer to the original, or criticizing the work of the poets who did not possess the linguistic and cultural background knowledge to dare approach Chinese poetry. However, it is exactly the interaction between the two modes that shaped the German reception of Chinese poetry in the twentieth century. Referring to a number of examples from the early-twentieth-century adaptations of Tang poetry, this article offers a more differentiated perspective on the cooperative and competitive relations between poets’ and scholars’ translations of Chinese poetry. Against the background of controversies surrounding ‘legitimate’ translations which shaped literary modernism in the early twentieth century, I show how the poetic and scholarly approaches were (and remain) closely interconnected, and discuss the thematic and aesthetic implications of this interrelationship.

Alvar Aalto, Ernst Neufert, and Architectural Standardization in Germany and Finland, 1933–45

Not long ago, many historians believed that the first great era of German modern architecture ended abruptly with Hitler’s rise to power. According to this narrative, the demise coincided with the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the subsequent emigration of leading architects such asWalterGropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Today, we know that the story is far more complicated. On the one hand, historians such as Barbara Miller Lane and Winfried Nerdinger have shown that the Nazis’ views of modernism were more nuanced than was once believed, and that many German modernist designers courted and were granted government patronage under the Nazi regime. On the other hand, we still know little about the transnational architectural networks that sustained the Nazis during World War II. A case in point is the professional relationship between the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the German industrial builder Ernst Neufert, who worked for Albert Speer from 1938 to 1945. In Alvar Aalto, Ernst Neufert, and Architectural Standardization in Germany and Finland, 1933–45, Nader Vossoughian examines the history and genesis of that relationship, particularly its relevance to wartime debates about standardization.

In This Issue

Given the scarcity of primary evidence, direct connections between geometry and the art and architecture of the early modern Islamic world have often been difficult to determine with historical accuracy. In From Measuring to Estimation: Definitions of Geometry and Architect-Engineer in Early Modern Ottoman Architecture, Gül Kale examines various definitions and uses of geometry in the Ottoman world through a close reading of a unique book on architecture written around 1614 by the scholar Caʿfer Efendi, a friend and associate of the Ottoman chief architect Mehmed Agha. A contextual analysis of Caʿfer's remarks on various definitions of geometry and the architect-engineer, and the connotations of these terms for early seventeenth-century readers, sheds light on the different degrees of geometrical knowledge then seen as required for sound architectural and artistic practice. Further, Kale argues that the links Caʿfer and his associates established among estimation, reason, and proportion offer insights into the role of cognitive faculties in Ottoman architectural and artistic processes.In The Theory and Practice of Eclecticism in Eighteenth-Century European Architecture, Kristoffer Neville links an early modern method of eclectic thought to contemporary architectural theory and practice. The eclectic mode promoted the selection and combination of elements from different traditions to create new work, work ostensibly more perfect than the individual sources on which it was based. A related approach has long been acknowledged in major projects by the architects Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, and Balthasar Neumann, all active in the first half of the eighteenth century, but a conceptual basis for this commonality has not been recognized. Neville excavates the intellectual foundations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century eclecticism and shows how these were absorbed into architectural theory, articulating a concept that was widely valued in the German lands during the eighteenth century.Enlightenment-era France gave rise to the world's first deaf and blind schools: the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, founded in 1760, and the Institute for Blind Youth, founded in 1784. During the 1789 Revolution, both schools were nationalized, and disability education became the duty of the state. Housed at first in private homes and various government-expropriated properties, the two institutions eventually received renovated or rebuilt quarters in the decades after the Revolution. These projects, designed by the well-known architects Antoine-Marie Peyre and Pierre Philippon, remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture. In From Outcast to Citizen: Disability, Education, and Architecture in Postrevolutionary Paris, Sun-Young Park argues that these institutions were at the forefront of contemporary discourses on education and hygiene and were key sites for the development and testing of new ideas about citizenship and social progress in the postrevolutionary era.Direct evidence for Le Corbusier's encounters with the writings of nineteenth-century German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper is limited to a few brief early mentions in the archival record, and connections between the two men have been mentioned only rarely by historians and others interested in Le Corbusier's work. In Untangling the Threads of Gottfried Semper's Legacy in Le Corbusier's Formative Years, José Miguel Mantilla argues that these connections merit closer attention, given Semper's stature, even in the early twentieth century, and his impact on many of those from whom Le Corbusier adapted his own ideas. Le Corbusier's ideas concerning links between artistic style and the spirit or psychology of an era, his belief in architecture's autonomy in relation to technique and use, and his conversion from the vernacular and medievalist forms emphasized by his mentor Charles L'Eplattenier to Greco-Roman classical ones all seem at least indirectly indebted to Semper's theories. Mantilla explores the connections between the men, particularly in regard to issues of artistic creation.Not long ago, many historians believed that the first great era of German modern architecture ended abruptly with Hitler's rise to power. According to this narrative, the demise coincided with the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the subsequent emigration of leading architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Today, we know that the story is far more complicated. On the one hand, historians such as Barbara Miller Lane and Winfried Nerdinger have shown that the Nazis' views of modernism were more nuanced than was once believed, and that many German modernist designers courted and were granted government patronage under the Nazi regime. On the other hand, we still know little about the transnational architectural networks that sustained the Nazis during World War II. A case in point is the professional relationship between the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the German industrial builder Ernst Neufert, who worked for Albert Speer from 1938 to 1945. In Alvar Aalto, Ernst Neufert, and Architectural Standardization in Germany and Finland, 1933–45, Nader Vossoughian examines the history and genesis of that relationship, particularly its relevance to wartime debates about standardization.

On the Matter and Intelligence of the Architectural Model: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Psychophysiological Theory of Architecture and Konrad Wachsmann’s Design of a Space Structure

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the modernist concept of ‘space’ in architecture became a subject of inquiry for architectural critics and historians. One curiosity arising within the discourse suggested that the thinking of the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was foundational for the concept of ‘space’ that developed in German aesthetics throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, eventually informing modernist architectural theory. This essay looks at the way Schopenhauer used architectural models, not only to clarify his understanding of space, but also to demonstrate what was for him the much more important notion of ‘Idea’. It then turns to the German modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann, who was most famous for his seminal book, The Turning Point of Building (1961), which advocated the industrialization of building as a project for architecture. The essay asks if Schopenhauer’s distinction between ‘space’ and ‘Idea’ can illuminate the new ‘understanding of space’ that Wachsmann thought would arise as a consequence of a systematic industrialization of building. Discussion will focus on a particular section of Wachsmann’s book that gives an account of his design of a space structure commissioned by the US Air Force in 1959, taking that project as exemplary of his thinking, working methods and values. It will also take note of the way in which the space structure stimulated the imagination of the American artist, Robert Smithson, who began to envisage the entire planet as encapsulated in an enormous virtual grid – one that was, like a Schopenhauerian ‘Idea’, supposedly constituted out of mind and matter. To end the essay looks briefly at the notion of ‘field,’ which, many architects argued at the time, would supersede ‘space’ as the conceptual mainspring of theory and practice.

К МОДЕРНИСТСКОЙ ПОЭТИКЕ И ПОЭТОЛОГИИ ПРОГУЛКИ: Р. М. РИЛЬКЕ, Р. ВАЛЬЗЕР, Т. БЕРНХАРД, П. ХАНДКЕ

The paper examines walking as a subject of representation and reflection in German modernist li­terature. It analyzes fiction by Swiss and Austrian writers (R. M. Rilke, R. Walser, Th. Bernhard, P. Handke). This cultural practice is considered from several points of view: as a form of a modern person idling, a literary topic, a narrative model, a form of modernist poetology. The choice of subject matter is determined by cultural, historical-literary and style factors. The imagery of walking and wandering has had a long tradition in literature of the Alpine region (the so called “Alpen-Literatur”), being revised in the 20th century by modernist writers, who preserved but deconstructed its key topics. Poetics of the writers under research has some common features: a focus on search for the self, subordination of principles of composition to informal logics of the narrating I, lack of plotting, reduction of the objective world, preference for abstract vocabulary, inclusion of references to abstract art (avant-guard paintings and graphics, atonal music). This research aims to reveal genetic, typological and unique (national, author’s) features of modernist poetics and poetology of walking. The following features of the modernist poetics of walking have been identified: the domination of aesthetic issues over the pragmatics of movement in space, prevalence of the imagined landscape over real, replacement of topography and close interconnection of walking and writing. In the modernist prose, thus, a walking person is a professional writer, and a ramble submits to intentions to compose a text about the walk.

Remediating Fassbinder

Abstract Two stage productions based on screenplays by Rainer Werner Fassbinder— The Marriage of Maria Braun directed by Tomas Ostermeier and In a Year With 13 Moons directed by Robert Woodruff—span a range of possibilities for film-to-stage adaptations. Fassbinder provides an interesting case study because over the course of his career, he created numerous adaptations for the stage, screen, and television. While Ostermeier’s epic theatre adaptation re-situated Fassbinder within the context of German modernist and avant-garde theatre, Woodruff’s production demonstrated that live, intermedial performance is capable of reconciling Fassbinder’s practice of enfranchising multiple textualities, including the dramaturgical, theatrical, cinematic, and televisual codes of representation he was constantly re-deploying. Focusing on performative elements, such as acting style, mise-en-scene, and hypermediacy, as well as extra- and para-textual dimensions, this paper provides an overview of the aesthetic categories of production, reception, and intention as they pertain to theatrical adaptations of ‘art-house’ films.

Larson Powell. The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 256 pp.

Review of Larson Powell. The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Doblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 256 pp.

Transposing Music: An Intermedial Perspective on German Modernist Poetry

Conventionally, music is said to require three interrelated modes of receptivity: the formal analysis of its sonic structures, the hermeneutic deciphering of its semiotic meanings, and the performance of its actual works. However, as I argue in this essay, there is a fourth process that partly encompasses aspects of these modes but adds to them in multiple ways that are crucial to the experience of music. This mode of receptivity pertains to the possibility and limits of the transposition of the sonic language of music into other media, aesthetic practices, and signifying systems. German modernist poetry addresses this topic in its self‐reflexive exploration of music beyond the parameters of melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, and timbre in order to intersect with other arts, forms of human experiences, and historical self‐articulations.

Modernism after Wagner

The project of art historian Juliet Koss's recently published monograph Modernism after Wagner is a double genealogy of sorts. To a lesser extent, Koss is interested in revisiting and reexamining the history of the term Gesamtkunstwerk, most famously (or infamously) associated with the theoretical and artistic work of Richard Wagner. It is this association that, in Koss's estimation, contributed to the devaluation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in twentieth-century aesthetic discourse. She claims that, due to the growing association of Wagner's oeuvre and thought with fascism, the term became adopted as shorthand in modernist discourse for an artwork that demands a passive and emotionally overwhelmed audience response. Far more, however, Modernism after Wagner proposes a reconsideration of the range of ideas that underlie Wagner's formulation of the “total work of art,” ideas that, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, become increasingly dissociated from the composer and the label Gesamtkunstwerk. Koss identifies what she takes to be the two most significant of these ideas: the unification of different art forms in a total artwork (one that still retains each art form's distinctness) and a model of spectatorship that requires empathetic and active engagement. Her thesis is that these ideas remained central not only to late nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse and artistic production but also to modernist debates and artwork in the first decades of the twentieth century.1 She is, in essence, constructing an alternative history of the Gesamtkunstwerk, one that looks beyond terminology in order to unearth conceptual affinities and that seeks to move the Gesamtkunstwerk from a peripheral and disreputable position to a central (if often obscured) place in German modernist artistic production and discourse.

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) by Larson Powell

Reviews Mein); Raabe's engagement with Schopenhauer (Soren Fauth), Schiller (Gabriele Henkel), and Thackeray (JeffreySammons); references toWolfenbuttel (Herbert Blume), aswell as rereadings of selected works from theperspective of the period's family journals (Christof Hamann), Homer's epics (Heiko Ullrich), Clemens Lugowski's theory of the novel (Heinrich Detering), and the twentieth-century detective novel (Julia Bertschik). Not all contributors succeed in significantly advancing often well-established knowledge; some resort to rather extensive commentary, others summarize findings or extend lines of enquiry developed more extensively elsewhere. The editors' brief preface wisely resists the temptation of retrospectively imposing coherence on this successful collection of interesting chapters, which often demonstrate the wider relevance of contemporary Raabe research fornineteenth-century literary and cultural studies overall. University of Nottingham Dirk Gottsche The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilkey Benn, Brecht, and Doblin. By Larson Powell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. vii+256 pp. $65; ?35. ISBN 978-1-57113-382-3. For Larson Powell, 'the intellectual techno-rave' is decidedly over. Against the 'thinkliness' of cultural-studies accounts of the world and the text, grouped together here as so many 'Imaginary Theories', Powell poses the 'thingliness' of the natural world. Drawing on Adorno's aesthetics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Luhmann's systems theory, he protests against the exclusion of nature, technology's repressed other, from studies ofmodernity. A diverse theoretical manifesto (variously referencing Kant, Bataille, Kafka, Langs Metropolis, Eagleton, and Jelinek) is followed by studies of fourmodernist writers. These begin with Rilke's short work on painting, Worpswede, inwhich landscape is seen to recede in anticipation of the indifferent Thing of the Dinggedichte. Throughout, Powell's locating of the subject within nature offers refreshing challenges to widely held views, for instance of Rilke's destabilized lyrical subject: the poem Archaischer Torso Apollos' is shown to offer a potential retrieval of voice in the famous imperative to change. The place of the subject figures equally in the comparative reading of Benn's Tkarus' with Goethe's 'Prometheus' and Nietzsche's 'Dionysios-Dithyramben'. Here, Benn's autopoietic subject is situated within modernity's destructive self-referentiality. But it is theDoblin chapter that offers themost pointed critique of technology's fantasies?repeated by contemporary theory?of sovereign self-construction. Addressing itself to a postcolonial and natural Real, Doblin's Die drei Spriinge des Wang-lun is presented as handling more irreducible traumata than those thematized by an academy locked in 'self-styled subversion'. The concluding chapter on Brecht turns to a different mode of subversion: Luhmannian terminology adds to the established political reading a definition of his poetry as second-order observation, which can index and challenge systemic blind spots. MLR, 105.4, 2010 1185 The backbone of the book, Powell's critique of the 'technological sublime' and the related prevalence of 'rhetorical figurality' in cultural studies, is delivered with an often extraordinary rhetoric of its own: Lyotard's sublime is likened to 'self-parodying camp', and JudithButler's gender performativity to 'the "lifestyle" sections of the newspapers'. Meanwhile a theory of gender underlies the project, as Powell comments on Rilke's 'emancipated' Madchen and Nietzsche's hysterical Ariadne. But the gendering of nature and the articulation of psychoanalytic theory around familial models require further critique. The lack of paternal authority inWang-lun is diagnosed as a cause ofmania; this apparent valorization of the (hetero)norm carries through in repeated references to nature's motherliness, and one aside that casts all transsexuals as psychotic. Powell's theoretical agenda occupies as important a place as the subsequent textual analyses. In this sense, those reading for the poetry may be frustrated. However the close readings that do feature are illuminating: an examination of syntax and movement in Rilke's 'Der Ball' elucidates Lacan's extimacy, and Benn's rhythms,metaphors, and metonymies are related indetail to his competing subject-positions. Although its theoretical density may appear forbidding, the book will be of interest to those working on the radical potential of the 'other' (for instance nature) to disrupt totalizing systems. Moreover, as a manifesto for reading literaturewith, or indeed as, theory, it isworth the challenging read. Newnham College, Cambridge...

The place of nature in Godard's late films

The place of nature in Godard's late films

Book Review: The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature. Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. By Larson Powell. Rochester, NY: Camden House 2008. Pp. 256. £35.00

Book Review: The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature. Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. By Larson Powell. Rochester, NY: Camden House 2008. Pp. 256. £35.00

The trace of Jewish suffering in Johannes Bobrowski’s poetry

Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) is a significant German modernist poet and novelist whose work directly engages the problematic question of German “Schuld” (guilt) in respect of the Holocaust. Although Bobrowski’s poetry not only deals with the German-Jewish question, but with universal themes of history, memory and trauma, he is largely unknown in the Anglophone world, partly because of his isolation in communist East Germany at the time. This article seeks to trace Bobrowski’s nuanced and complex engagement with German history and his own personal implication in the genocide through a detailed analysis of his most significant “Jewish” poems. A key idea for Bobrowski was the need for memory and direct engagement with the traumatic past, as this offered the only hope for redemption. The article presents a number of original English translations of these symbolist and hermetic poems, and thereby makes Bobrowski’s writing available to a wider range of readers.

Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (review)

Reviewed by: Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism Mark Grzeskowiak Ehrhard Bahr . Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. 378 pp. US$ 39.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25128-8. Ehrhard Bahr's book is a thoroughly researched "collection of case studies" on an important group of German intellectuals and artists living in Los Angeles during the Second World War. According to Bahr, the work of exiles such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Arnold Schoenberg can be read within the context of a broader "crisis of modernism," and he persuasively argues that the "exile culture" that existed in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1958 "deserves its place among the global cityscapes of modernism." Weimar on the Pacific differs from previous scholarship in German exile studies in both its language (i.e., it is written in English) and in its exclusive focus on exiles living in the city of Los Angeles during the war. Bahr has based his definition of a particular "crisis of modernism" on British cultural historian Raymond Williams's contention that modernism can be understood as a response to dramatic changes "in the media of cultural production" in the nineteenth century and on Russell A. Berman's tripartite division of German modernist prose writing into "fascist modernism, leftist modernism, and a modernism of social individuality." Rather than present his readers with "another publication on German exile literature," his objective in Weimar on the Pacific is to examine "a particular chapter in the cultural history of Los Angeles" and the "specific German answer" to modernism that found expression there in architecture, film, music, philosophy, and theatre. For some exiled artists, this crisis in modernism provoked a retreat from modernism. Bahr's chapter on Franz Werfel, for example, shows how the Prague novelist and poet alternated between modernism and antimodernism while in his Californian exile. The same can be said of the novelist Alfred Döblin, whose Karl und Rosa, with its message of religious redemption over politics, also indicates a renunciation of modernism. On the other hand, and as is demonstrated in close readings of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, and Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Bahr is also able to demonstrate how some of the artists exiled in Los Angeles overcame this crisis and reconstituted modernism in light of their new historical and political situations. In the case of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, for example, Bahr shows how the composer combined traditional liturgy with modernism to produce an oratorio intended as a "commemoration of Jewish identity during a period of persecution." In the case of Doktor Faustus, Bahr employs Walter Benjamin's concept of antinomic allegory to argue that Mann's protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, needs to be read "dialectically" against a background of fascist Germany and modernist art, rather than to be simply identified with either. The employment of a "dialectical reading" is central to Bahr's approach. Drawing upon Brecht's assertion that "emigration is the best school of dialectics," Bahr argues [End Page 482] that the exiled artists and intellectuals treated in his book adopted a "dialectical stance" towards Los Angeles, with its ocean-side bungalows and lush gardens, and that this distancing allowed them to see their new home as a "cityscape of modernism," rather than as a "natural paradise." In this sense, according to Bahr, the dialectic functioned as both a "structural and an intellectual argument in art and literature." To support the latter (intellectual) argument, Bahr relies heavily upon Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which provides a general philosophical backdrop to the book's various case studies. Bahr sees in the Horkheimer/Adorno study "a comprehensive assessment and analysis of modernism and its crisis in the 1940s," and it of enormous benefit to his book that his analysis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment not only addresses its philosophical argument, but also attempts to place it within a specific historical setting. Despite its reliance on close reading and at times...

Blueprint for a Cultural Revolution: Hermann Henselmann and the Architecture of German Socialist Realism

Socialist realism, introduced to the East German architectural establishment as their nation's new design culture in 1950, brought with it much more than just the USSR's Stalin-era aesthetic. It presented new models of cultural authority, expectations of architects as socialist role models, and innovative systems of reward and discipline — all of these managed by a centralized design bureaucracy linked to party and state through a complex web of cross-membership. This article examines the Pauline conversion of a former German modernist, the architect Hermann Henselmann, and the rite of passage that yielded a loyal member of the intelligentsia and a poster child for Stalinist human reform. Henselmann's role in a campaign to bring Socialist Realism to West Germany is also considered, along with the results of this cultural initiative.

Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels (review)

REVIEWS it is not clear from his book that he would allow for the mythical way ofthinking to support different thought forms that might help overcome the crisis. The goal ofEllwood's book may be precisely to point out that no matter how big a hero, how glamorous or even charismatic these public personae, they continue to act, preach, and write out hidden agendas—hidden even to themselves—to be uncovered by a critic. But it is not clear ifhe believes that all mythological thinking leads to a continuous and maybe deliberate veiling ofour own shadow, which in turn would prevent us from discovering the "reality" behind it. Did Jung, Eliade, and Campbell really have as a firm objective to stop the world from thinking historically, empirically, and rationally? This does not appear to be the nature of what these authors were examining; myth, a constant invitation to understand the pattern by which we move, is always at least double-sided. Ellwood may have intended to deconstruct the importance ofthe three mythologists , to show their biases, their humanity. Yet he also seems to assume that all mythical criticism is dangerous, since, at its best, it is reactionary and linked in its origins to fascism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism. As Ellwood puts it in his conclusion , "we need to listen to the mythologists in their wisdom," but we "need not expect to be saved by myths" (178). In this regard, his present analysis might be deepened in a further study, where the shadow side could be complemented by examples ofhow Jung, Eliade, and Campbell eventually helped shape new forms ofthinking, some ofwhich are only now emerging, and ofwhich we may be taking account in the future. Metka ZupancicUniversity ofAlabama CLAYTON KOELB. Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. xxviii + 186 pp. In convincing but economic detail and sharply honed prose, Koelb discusses the modernist "historical sense," which he sees as originating with Gustave Flaubert, in definitive contrast with earlier historical fiction writers such as Sir Walter Scott. It embodies a concept ofthe past as discontinuous with the present and therefore as "alien" or "other," longed for nostalgically precisely because it is irrevocably unattainable . He devotes all but the introduction, "The Sense ofHistory," and the conclusion , "The Legendary Angel," to seven self-contained chapters on two French, two English, and three German modernist novels spanning the period 1862 to 1984. After Flaubert's exotic Salammbô and Walter Pater's reflective Marius the Epicurean , Koelb turns to Thomas Mann's long tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, Hermann Broch's intricate, slow-moving 77ie Death of Virgil, and Thornton WiIder 's witty The Ides ofMarch. He closes with Marguerite Yourcenar's beautifully written Memoirs of Hadrian and Christa Wolf's mantic, manic, and feminist Cassandra. In his introductory comments, Koelb argues that the nineteenth century saw a vast expansion of temporal bounds as the age of the earth (and civilization) was moved back thousands ofyears by geology, paleontology, and archaeology, as new acquaintance with the ancient Near East arose, and as the move from farm to city in the Industrial Revolution made links to the past more remote. Flaubert, according to Koelb, "understands the past not as something close and familiar, not part ofthe family circle, but as something needing to be brought close, something distant enough to become a legitimate object oferotic desire" (xvii). This outlook he conVoI . 25 (2001): 180 ??? COHPAnATIST trasts with Scott's historical fiction which attempts to bring "the past close to the reader so that he or she will feel," as Hegel expresses it, "at home therein." But Scott's approach modernizes the past, wrongly making it the offspring, not the progenitor, of the present, thus losing "the pastness ofthe past, which is the very thing that makes it desirable in the present." The author attempts to show that our (Western) conception ofthe relation of past to present has changed within the period in which these seven novels were written. What had been considered an overflowing continuity ("As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be") is now seen as separated by a great gap of time or concept...