The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century : More than a Bestseller [1 ed.] 9781443857277, 9781443897662

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The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century

The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century: More than a Bestseller Edited by

Daniela Richter

The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century: More than a Bestseller Edited by Daniela Richter This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Daniela Richter and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9766-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9766-2

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Daniela Richter Chapter One ............................................................................................... 15 Looking East: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Benedikte Naubert’s Walter von Montbarry Julie Koser Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 45 Wilhelmine Culture in the Shadow of the Pyramids: The Historical Novels of Georg Ebers Daniela Richter Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 71 Hermann Sudermann’s Katzensteg: Naturalism, Liberalism, and the Historical Novel in the Age of Nationalism Jason Doerre Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 97 “Ersticken im Stofflichen”: Characters as Collectives in Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein and his Theoretical Writings Carl Gelderloos Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 127 “Free-Forming” the German Historical Novel: The Paradigmatic Cases of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945) Vassilaki Papanicolaou Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 159 Narrating the Berlin Wall: Deconstructing Nostalgia in Post-Wende Novels Sean Eedy

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 185 The Reception of German Medieval Mystics in Popular Fiction Debra L. Stoudt Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 217 The Other Witch Craze: The Early Modern Persecutions in Recent Historical Fiction Waltraud Maierhofer Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 245 The “Women-in-Trade” Novel—Popular Historical Fiction in Germany: By, About and For Women Katya Skow Contributors ............................................................................................. 267 Index ........................................................................................................ 271

INTRODUCTION DANIELA RICHTER

On its front page, the weekly news journal Die Zeit from July 21, 2016 featured an illustration of the world map going down a water fall. Looming large above it was the headline “Worauf wir uns noch verlassen können” (“What we can still rely on”)1. The paper was referring to the seemingly incessant stream of unsettling news that week, beginning with the massacre in Nice, France, the military coups in Turkey and its defeat, and the case of a seventeen-year old Afghan refugee, attacking train passengers near Würzburg, Germany. In the face of these atrocious events, the section entitled Politik featured an article by Gero von Randow, in which he turns to literature for advice during these trying times. Among the books he refers to is Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von gestern (The World of Yesterday, 1939-1941) and Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), both of which look back to a tumultuous and horrific past and try to make sense of it. The article ends with “Nein, es ist nicht alles schon da gewesen. Die Vergangenheit belehrt uns auch nicht über die Zukunft. Wohl aber darüber, was man falsch machen kann.” (“No, it has not all been here before. The past does not teach us about the future. But it does teach us about what we can do wrong”). The lesson that von Randow draws from the above mentioned writers is the importance of maintaining a sense of rationality and objectivity, especially when it is so easy to give in to feelings of panic and blind hatred. Even though this article does not constitute a scholarly reading of literature, it does nevertheless reaffirm the relevance of literature, in particular literature that conveys a historical dimension. Literature is not only a source of personal entertainment, but can provide guidance, helping us to make sense of what is happening around us and our role in this world. The treatment of German historical fiction, and the historical novel in particular, within scholarly literature is generally not very enthusiastic. The traditionally skeptical and often denigrating stance of literary scholars and critics stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming popularity which this genre did and does experience since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. In fact, the historical novel has become so popular on the German

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Introduction

literary market, that it has been given its own section in every book store. This popularity of historical novels is part of a larger infatuation with history also reflected in an increased offering of historical TV-series, such as Showtime production The Tudors (2007-2010), which did very well when broadcast in Germany, or the popular German TV production Die Wanderhure (The Whore, 2010) and its sequel Die Rache der Wanderhure (The Revenge of the Whore, 2012). In addition, more historical documentaries, such as Terra X and the ZDF-series Die Deutschen (20082010) have long been a staple in the German TV program, but also ever more spectacular historical exhibits and museums, which aim at directly engaging their visitors.2 Narrating history is clearly an endeavor in which both writers of fiction and historians have staked their interest. As one surveys academic writings on historical fiction, one central question becomes apparent: what does historical fiction contribute to the depiction of a historical subject that historiography cannot or does not want to deliver itself?3 This is a question more often investigated by historians than literary scholars.4 According to Katja Stopka, historians explore and value historical fiction for its ability not only to reach a general and large audience, but also for its greater ability to give voice to individual and personal experiences, especially regarding difficult subjects connected with trauma and experiences of war, genocide, and terrorism (86). British historian Brian Hamnett thinks along similar lines and values historical fiction for its ethical and artistic dimension and its ability to shed light onto the complex relationship between “religion and culture, law and violence, and the individual and society” (31). He argues that historical fiction provides causality to seemingly disconnected series of events in the past (31). According to Hamnett, historical fiction is also preserving regional histories, cultures and identities, an endeavor that is it at the same time a “pan-European enterprise,” with writers of historical fiction reading and influencing each other (55). Some historians, like Rudy Koshar, have paved a new way by reading non-textual historical markers as historical text. His work on German monuments thus looks not so much at the buildings themselves, but at the narrative of memory of which these so-called Erinnerungsorte ‘places of remembrance’ constitute a considerable part. Koshar’s analytical gaze encompasses the “interactions between consumption, leisure, and memory” (7), the same nexus at which we find historical fiction, to create a more comprehensive and multi-faceted account of memory culture in Germany.

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Projects like these are predicated on a shift within historiography itself, in which Hayden White and his Metahistory (1973) played a key role. White, who used terms such as ‘poetics’ and ‘imagination’ in his account of nineteenth-century European history, presented all historical writing as discourse shaped by the concerns of its time, and not as an objective reporting of dates and facts. Literary scholarship, for a long time, regarded the historical novel as nothing other than trivial. Its popularity among readers became one of the leading arguments against the genre. The accusation that writers use history merely as a colorful backdrop or costume in their novels, is one that has remained constant throughout the ages. At times, the more acerbic opponents of the genre, such as nineteenth-century critic Rudolf von Gottschall, even termed it an aesthetic virus (55). In recent decades, scholarly focus has begun to broaden its scope and has increasingly turned its attention to popular forms of literature.5 Literary scholars have found creative ways to bridge the chasm between canonical literature and the vast amount of non-canonical works, a chasm that has been traditionally considered very wide within German literary studies. Günter Mühlberger’s and Kurt Habitzel’s Projekt Historischer Roman at the University of Innsbruck, is one of those early projects that took a completely new route towards investigating literature. Working with a database containing 6300 historical novels written between 1780 and 1945, Mühlberger and Habitzel used statistical analysis to arrive at an overview over trends, themes and publication numbers of historical novels within that time frame. Significant peak periods were thus identified and the historical periods, which were favored by writers at a particular time. This new approach to literary scholarship paved the way, particularly within nineteenth-century literary studies, to work with texts, such as journal publications, in the form of databases. This immense corpus of texts, which heretofore had been inconceivable to tackle, was now opened up to reveal new insights, especially on topics, such as representation and public reception of any given issue. Wolfgang Hardtwig’s and Erhard Schütz’s collection of essays Geschichte für Leser: Populäre Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert (History for Readers: Popular Historiography in Germany in the 20th Century, 2005) represents a combined effort by historians and literary scholars to approach non-academic historical writing. Hardtwig articulates the opportunities for a new analytical approach which the study of these works initiates despite the fact that the works discussed in this collection encompass works of historical philosophy, memoirs and

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Introduction

biographies, and therefore cannot be termed historical fiction per se. The essays ask completely new questions, and explore issues such as the critical and reader reception of these works, the mechanisms underlying this reception, and the publishing background (15). This trend towards a greater collaboration between history and literary studies is written into the projects featured in Barbara Korte’s and Sylvia Paletschek’s series Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen/ History in Popular Cultures whose first volume History goes Pop: Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres (History goes Pop: About the Representation of History in Popular Media and Genres) appeared in 2009. The series in general, and this volume in particular, uses the term Geschichtskultur ‘history culture’ as the base for its individual essays, which explore a wide array of cultural expressions, such as historical fiction and non-fiction, comics books, computer games, documentaries and films, as well as museum exhibits and historical reenactments. The premise of Geschichtskultur, allows for an examination of the public’s historical consciousness and the different interpretations of history at different points in time (11).6 All essays share a focus on popular media, which is crucial in the dissemination and development of Geschichtskultur. These media allow for general access to historical material presented in an entertaining way and thus allow people to engage with it in a multi-sensory fashion. Central to this approach is the understanding that this kind of popular dissemination is at the same time configuring historical knowledge itself (Korte, Paletschek, “Geschichte” 15). In literary scholarship studies such as Brent Peterson’s History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation (2005) also follow new trajectories to present literature within a wider context of forms of cultural expression. Peterson’s interest in the development of nineteenth-century nationalism in Germany is based on White’s concept of the inherent constructed nature of historiography. Therefore, Peterson leaves aside the old debate about fact vs. fiction in order to focus on the larger cultural process that created in the minds of the Germans the notion and image of one German nation combined with a sense of identification with that same nation and its cultural and historical heritage. As Peterson demonstrates, this process was very much influenced and shaped by historical fiction. Hans-Edwin Friedrich’s recent collection of essays Der historische Roman: Erkundung einer populären Gattung (The Historical Novel: Exploration of a Popular Genre, 2013) widens the scope to look at works of popular historical fiction from Victor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard in the

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middle of the nineteenth century, to contemporary German writers such Iny Lorentz, Tanja Kinkel, and Christian Kracht. Even though the individual essays do not necessarily present us with drastically different methodological approaches, the fact that popular historical fiction is examined using the established analytical methodology of the field of literary scholarship represents an encouraging and important step in and of itself, pointing the way towards expanding the field of literary scholarship in general and the study of historical fiction in particular. This is also the task in which this present collection of scholarly essays participates. Chronologically it draws an even wider arc than the works previously mentioned by going back to the late eighteenth century and extending to contemporary historical fiction. This collection also draws a wide arc by encompassing popular historical novels as well as works by canonical writers. Even though the approaches taken by the scholars in the individual essays differ widely, all essays are united in their emphasis on contextualizing the historical novels in terms of the historical period which they portray, the period of their publication, and the respective writers’ creative vision. The scholars’ multi-faceted perspectives allow for a representation of the historical novel with its tenuous and numerous ties to often contradicting concepts and fields of interest; fact and fiction, personal and communal, past and present. Whereas the beginnings of the German historical fiction in general lie in the Middle Ages with Heinrich von Veldeke’s Aeneasroman (1170), the genre of the historical novel, as we know it today, has its beginnings in the late eighteenth century. According to Hugo Aust, the genre develops in tandem with a change in historiography towards a more empirical methodology. While historiography was thus beginning its process of specialization, the historical novel developed in the opposite direction, disseminating historical material in a way that it reaches and educates a general readership. Julie Koser’s essay on Benedikte Naubert, widely considered to be the foundress of the German historical novel, therefore marks the beginning chapter in this collection. Naubert, who published anonymously, wrote during the late eighteenth century, a period when literary production in tandem with the literacy of the upper and middle classes was increasing dramatically. Young women were a new and growing group of readers, and among the most voracious readers of historical fiction. By situating Naubert within this realm of a booming popular literature, Koser is expanding the time frame for a popular historical culture as stipulated by other scholars such as Korte and Paletschek, who see its beginning within the nineteenth century (18). Naubert’s reflections on historical fiction and

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its role in society show that this rare prolific and published female writer felt herself part of a distinct historical literary movement. As a true member of the Enlightenment, Naubert moreover stressed the educational value of her novels while also being keenly aware of the precarious tightrope she walked between the realms of fact and fiction. In a close reading of Naubert’s novel Walter von Montbarry (1786), which takes place during the time of the crusades, Koser highlights the inherent tensions and juxtapositions in the depiction of the Oriental/Muslim and European/Christian. As Mühlberger and Habitzel note, it is around the middle of the nineteenth century, after a brief hiatus, that the historical novel experiences a second surge in popularity (11). This period is the focus of the essays by Jason Doerre and Daniela Richter. During this period the form of the historical novel was reconfigured by writers in different, and often contrary, ways, a development that resulted in a large variety of subgenres.7 One of these subgenres was the so-called Professorenroman, which is the focus of Richter’s essay. The nineteenth-century German Egyptologist Georg Ebers is the most prolific representative of this subgenre. His bestselling novel Uarda: Historischer Roman aus dem alten Ägypten (Uarda: Historical Novel from Ancient Egypt, 1877) is, despite its setting in ancient Egypt, a reflection on contemporary social and political concerns, as they were perceived by the German Bildungsbürgertum ‘educated middle class.’ Despite the predominant entertainment value of the novel—very popular with female readers because of the prominent romance plot—Uarda can also be read as social commentary on such issues as the Kulturkampf ‘cultural struggle’ and the perceived juxtaposition of science and religious faith. Besides presenting contrasting views on faith and institutionalized religion, Ebers also negotiates in the novel his ideal of political leadership through the character of Ramses II. By depicting Egypt’s political situation in ways that parallel that of the German Empire, Ebers has his pharaoh work towards peace and national stability, even expressing his own role within the state in strongly democratic terms. As the Professorenroman already indicates, two dominant trajectories become visible in the historical novel of the nineteenth century. The first is the interest of the German bourgeoisie in self-representation and the second is the dominance of national themes, even in those novels, whose plots are situated in non-German contexts (Aust 88-89). First and foremost among these was Gustav Freytag novel cycle Die Ahnen: Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (The Ancestors: Images of the German Past,

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1859-1867), which aimed at drawing a panoramic picture of the German past. Other historical novels focused on reflecting national history through the lense of local and regional history, such as Theodor Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm (Before the Storm, 1878). This is also the approach of Hermann Sudermann, whose novel Katzensteg (Cat’s Bridge, 1890) is explored in the essay by Doerre. Sudermann’s novel critically engages with the theme of nationalism in a narrative style that lets Doerre argue for its inclusion into naturalism, a literary movement usually associated with drama, not prose fiction. Doerre’s reading of the novel furthermore challenges existing conceptions of the nineteenth-century German historical novel by elaborating on the political left-liberal criticism expressed by Sudermann. In his narrative, which is based on a local legend from East Prussia, Sudermann positions his educated, rational main protagonist, a decorated officer of the Napoleonic Wars, and the narrow-minded, boorish village population around the question of nationalism. Through a close reading of the novel as well as his comprehensive contextualization of Katzensteg within Sudermann’s oeuvre and the critical reaction to both, Doerre emphasizes the politically critical and subversive potential of nineteenth-century historical novels. Following a second larger hiatus during the time of World War I, publications of historical novels again increased in its aftermath (Mühlberger, Habitzel 12). Not surprisingly, it is the theme of war which dominates these novels as can be seen in the essays by Carl Gelderloos and Vassilaki Papanicolaou. In this period there is again a greater diversification of the genre ranging from the Bildungsroman ‘novel of education’ to the generational or family novel, as exemplified by Joseph Roth, to the war novel and even forays into the genre of the legend (Aust 113). As the essays in this collection demonstrate, this period saw the greatest degree of experimentation with concepts of narrativity and character depiction. Gelderloos focuses in his chapter on Alfred Döblin and that writer’s reinterpretation of the biographical genre in his novel Wallenstein (1920). Döblin radically reconfigured the concept of the historical character. By drawing on Döblin’s theoretical writings, Gelderloos investigates the various implications of this new conceptualization of subjectivity in the context of the historic epic. Döblin breaks with the traditional focus on the interiority of the literary subject and, by subverting the dichotomy between exterior and interior, configures his protagonists as collective beings, whose actions are depicted as encompassing more than the single individual. Acting against this notion of collectivity is a tendency towards

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fragmentation and both together result in a complete destabilization of the subject. Döblin’s renegotiation of the character of Wallenstein, emerges as part of a larger project aimed at reconfiguring the individual subject in other literary genres as well. The urge to rethink narrative conventions is also at the center of Papanicolaou’s essay on Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). Papanicolaou argues for a reconsideration of these two novels as historical novels by critically engaging with elements and aspects of the historical novel as he sees them reflected in both works. Both Broch and Hesse aimed at portraying history as a process rather than a series of individual events and persons. Both writers emphasized a universalist approach to the depiction of characters and societies, and introduced an element of spirituality. The figures of both Gautama Siddhartha and Virgil are, similar to Döblin’s Wallenstein, presented as fragmented and are often represented through secondary allegorical characters. There is a strong tendency towards escapism in both works, but it carries positive connotations, symbolizing the writers’ efforts to break with historical determinism and thus implicitly illustrating their attempt to break free from the conventions of the historical novel as a genre. The theme of liberation carries over to the following essay by Sean Eedy on the theme of nostalgia in post-Wende novels. Novels dealing with the theme of the German reunification and its aftermath have so far been largely relegated to their own separate niche within German literary studies. Discussing them in the context of the German tradition of the historical novel, indicates the next logical step in the process of further integrating these works into the larger literary framework and points towards a new way of positioning post-Wende fiction in the future. By focusing on Christa Wolf’s Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), Thomas Brussig’s Helden Wie Wir (Heroes Like Us, 1996) and Ingo Schulze’s Neue Leben: Die Jugend Enricho Türmers in Briefen und Prosa (New Lives: The Youth of Enricho Türmer in Letters and Prose, 2005), Eedy analyses the connection between memory, nostalgia and historical authenticity. The essay illustrates the complex and nuanced ways in which each author approaches the East German past. Far from producing simplistic Ostalgie, each writer reflects on the inherent subjectivity and general imperfection of memory. In fact, all three writers consciously draw attention to the constructed nature of memory and nostalgia, while at the same time stressing the authenticity of memory as perceived reality. Each work employs a variety of narrative perspectives and/or narrative levels to portray the inherent struggle of coming to terms with the East

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German past. This complicates the long standing conflict between historical truth and fiction, a dichotomy which the historical novel has been negotiating almost since its beginning. The generational differences between Brussig and Schulze on one hand and Wolf on the other hand, add another layer to Eedy’s reading of the three novels. The final three essays focus on the popular historical novel in Germany throughout the last two decades. These works share several things in common, such as their thematic focus on the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. This thematic trend began in Germany with the publication of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in 1982 (Friedrich 7). The trend continued with the successful 1986 novel The Physician (in German: Der Medicus) by American writer Noah Gordon, followed in 1989 by Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. In 1993 Tanja Kinkel was among the first German writers to produce a historical bestseller with Die Puppenspieler (The Puppeteers). Ever since then, there has been a steady and ever increasing offering of German popular historical novels, whose plots are mostly set within the German-speaking region. These novels, long a staple on the German literary market, have only recently made their appearance in academic literature, which, at this point, is still trying to create a conceptual framework in which to categorize and further analyze this ever growing corpus of novels. The essays in this volume can be seen as part of this scholarly endeavor. Katya Skow’s, Waltraud Maierhofer’s and Debra Stoudt’s analysis is based on a large number of historical novels published within a given time frame of about fifteen to twenty years. They each chose one theme to trace throughout their selection of novels in order to analyze the development of this topic as well as to further contextualize these novels by looking at their reception, the authors’ own creative vision and other forms of cultural institutions and events which also provide information on these historical themes. Debra Stoudt’s essay on the depiction of German mystics in popular historical fiction is comprehensive in its chronological approach, taking stock of all historical novels dealing with German mysticism and its representatives not only in German-language novels, but also including Danish, Dutch and English-language publications. The depiction of German mystics, such as Hildegard von Bingen and Meister Eckhart, began in the early twentieth century. After a hiatus between 1940 and 1990, they are now again regularly appearing as main protagonists in historical novels focusing on the Middle Ages. The German mystics make attractive protagonists for writers of historical novels, because of their well documented lives and the writings they left behind. Moreover, they

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Introduction

appear predestined as protagonists by their position within society. Mystics, like Hildegard or Meister Eckhart, were what we would today consider a public person, already famous or infamous during their life time. In addition, they were connected to various social groups. They tended to come from aristocratic families, belonged to the educated elite, and stood between the religious and secular powers of their time, often opposing one or all of them. In the detailed synopses of the different novels, Stoudt describes the way in which each historical novel approaches these historical figures. A trend towards greater historical accountability on the part of the fiction writers becomes apparent as writers are increasingly providing glossaries and even references to the individual writings they consulted. Another important insight is that these religious figures, who lived lives of relative seclusion, are not portrayed as such, but as political activists who challenge the existing power structures. Historical writers are thereby creating fictional characters which make it easier for contemporary readers to relate to. The trend towards depicting characters who oppose existing power structures, particularly in novels situated within the German medieval or early modern period, is a central issue in the essays by Skow and Maierhofer as well. Both scholars look at popular historical novels published in Germany within the last twenty years and focus in their analysis on the issue of gender. Waltraud Maierhofer analyzes the theme of the witch hunts in recent publications of historical novels. Beginning in the 1970s, in connection with the rise of the feminist movement, the topic of the witch hunts gained prominence also within the realm of popular literature and culture. The witch hunts are not only among the most thoroughly researched historical topics, but are also widely commemorated through cultural events, such as exhibits, plays, guided tours and institutions, such as museums and research centers. Maierhofer provides an overview over witch hunt novels in both adult and young adult fiction from the 1990s until today. She positions the novels within a comprehensive framework consisting of author statements, references to internet fora, such as histo-couch.de, as well as cultural events and institutions. Regarding the topic of witch hunts, there is also a tendency for the respective authors to work very closely with historical source material, often citing specific archives. In some cases, the novels are shown to take on a scholarly role as well by making archival material public for the first time. Over the years, the theme of the witch hunt has moved away from a purely feminist focus. Today, both male and female authors write about this topic featuring both male and

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female protagonists who are portrayed as victims of these persecutions. Particularly in the works of young adult fiction, the authors connect the theme of the witch hunt to contemporary times, and present their characters and plots in the wider context of scapegoating and bullying, thus consciously emphasizing the deeper, social and psychological processes underlying these historical occurrences. Finally, Katya Skow’s essay focuses on the issue of gender as she looks at historical novels written by German female writers within the last fifteen years and their mostly female readership. Her interest lies in female protagonists of historical novels mostly focused on the Middle Ages, who are presented as professionals in a wide array of fields, most of them traditionally associated with men. The basis for Skow’s analysis consists of about nineteen historical novels which thematize women’s professional roles. This focus is reflected in the title of these novels, such as Die Safranhändlerin (The Saffron Trader, 1997) or Die Pelzhändlerin (The Fur Trader, 2004). Apart from a close reading of the various plots, factors such as the titles, which are analyzed from a sociolinguist point of view, and the books’ appearance, particularly their cover illustrations, are also taken into consideration. Skow sees these novels as potentially influencing women’s sense of identity by giving preference to their roles as mothers over their professional roles. The essay provides a critical reading of these novels, which Skow sees as providing unassuming readers a false sense of women’s history. Throughout all these different essays, the historical novel emerges as a genre that continues to engage not only vast numbers of readers, but is increasingly capturing the interest of academic scholarship as well. Apart from its portrayal of distant pasts, the historical novel has an even closer relationship to the time period in which it was written and has proven itself as a particularly valid indicator for studying a period’s social culture. Given the currently lively and vast scene of German historical fiction, the task of accounting for it from a scholarly perspective has only just begun.

Notes 1

All translations, if not otherwise indicated, are by the author. See Elke Göttsch-Elten for a more detailed discussion of the phenomenon of Germany’s current historical enthusiasm. Korte’s and Paletschek’s series of scholarly monographs and collections of essays entitled Historische Lebenswelten in populären Wissenskulturen/History in Popular Culture, which started in 2009 is wholly dedicated to this intersection between popular culture and history. 3 The comparison between historiography and historical fiction has been a crucial issue in scholarship for some time. For more detailed discussions refer to Berger, 2

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Brook, Hamnett, Korte and Paletschek, Lämmert, Maurer, Peterson, Stark, Stopka and, of course, Hayden White. 4 In his article “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Literatur für die Geschichtswissenschaft: A Historian’s View” (About the Usefulness and the Disadvantages of Literature for the Field of Historiography: A Historian’s View) Gary Stark articulates the great importance which literature has played in historical research. Writers of fiction were and are regarded as “both influential shapers and sensitive registrars of the larger intellectual currents and general mental climate of their times” (19). 5 Evidence of this new attention to popular genres can be found in Lynne Tatlock’s Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation” (2010), Charlotte Woodford’s and Benedict Schofield’s The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century (2012), and Helmut Schmiedt’s Dr. Mabuse, Winnetou & Co.: Dreizehn Klassiker der deutschen Unterhaltungsliteratur (Dr. Mabuse, Winnetou & Co.: Thirteen Classics of German Entertainment Literature, 2007). 6 Korten and Paletschek explain that this approach to studying history is very recent in the German academic context, but has a longer tradition in AngloAmerican scholarship. In the future the authors envision a continuation of this type of scholarship across national boundaries. 7 Together with this variety of historical novels, there was also a proliferation of historical fiction in general and non-fiction historical texts, much of which was presented in periodicals. In their article “Nineteenth-Century Magazines and Historical Cultures in Britain and Germany,” Korte and Paletschek point to the pivotal role of periodical publications in the widespread dissemination of historical fiction, but also of information on events, exhibits, and recent archaeological discoveries.

Works Referenced Aust, Hugo. Der historische Roman. Stuttgart, Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1994. Print. Berger, Stefan. “Professional and Popular Historians: 1800-1900-2000.” Ed. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek. Popular History Now and Then: International Perspectives. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 13-30. Print. Brook, Madeleine. “’Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht’: August the Strong, the Eighteenth-Century and Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel.” German Life and Letters 65.2 (2012): 147-160. Print. Die Zeit 21 July 2016. Web. 23 July 2016. Döblin, Alfred. Aufsätze zur Literatur. Freiburg: Walter Verlag, 1963. Print. Gottschall, Rudolf von. “Der archäologische Roman: Ein literarischer Essay.” Nord und Süd: Eine deutsche Monatsschrift 32 (1885): 35-55. Print.

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Göttsch-Elten, Silke. “Tanja Kinkel, “Die Puppenspieler” (1993).” Der historische Roman: Erkundungen einer populären Gattung. Ed. HansEdwin Friedrich. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2013.201-214. Print. Hamnett, Brian. “Fictitious Histories: The Dilemma of Fact and Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel.” European History Quarterly 36.1 (2006): 31-60. Print. Hardtwig, Wolfgang, Erhard Schütz. Geschichte für Leser: Populäre Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20.Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. Print. Korte, Barbara, Sylvia Paletschek. “Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres: Vom Historischen Roman zum Computerspiel.” History Goes Pop: Zur Repräsentation von Geschichte in populären Medien und Genres. Ed. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 9-60. Print. —. “Nineteenth-Century Magazines and Historical Cultures in Britain and Germany.” Popular History Now and Then: International Perspectives. Ed. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 73-103. Print. Koshar, Rudy. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Lämmert, Eberhard. “Geschichte ist ein Entwurf”: Die neue Glaubwürdigkeit des Erzählens in der Geschichtsschreibung und im Roman.” The German Quarterly 63.1 (1990): 5-18. Print. Maurer, Kathrin. “Footnoting the Fictional: Historical Novels and Scholarly Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Angermion: Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism 2.2 (2009): 45-56. Print. Mühlberger, Günter, and Kurt Habitzel. “The German Historical Novel from 1780-1945: Utilising the Innsbruck Database.” Reisende durch Zeit und Raum. Der deutschsprachige historische Roman. Ed. Osman Durrani and Julian Preece. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 5-19. Print. Paul, Ina Ulrike, Richard Faber. “Literarizität und Historizität. Der historische Roman.” Der historische Roman zwischen Kunst, Ideologie und Wissenschaft. Ed. Ina Ulrike Paul and Richard Faber. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013. 9-17. Print. Peterson, Brent. History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the NineteenthCentury Nation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Print. Schmiedt, Helmut. Dr. Mabuse, Winnetou & Co.: Dreizehn Klassiker der deutschen Unterhaltungsliteratur. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. Print.

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Stark, Gary D. “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Literatur für die Geschichtswissenschaft: A Historian’s View.” The German Quarterly 63.1 (1990): 19-31. Print. Stopka, Katja. “Fiktionale Zeitgeschichten: Ein Plädoyer für eine historiographische Annäherung an die Literatur.” Der historische Roman zwischen Kunst, Ideologie und Wissenschaft. Ed. Ina Ulrike Paul and Richard Faber. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013.79-92. Print. Tatlock, Lynne, ed.. Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation.” Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Print. Woodford, Charlotte, and Benedict Schofield, eds. The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Print.

CHAPTER ONE LOOKING EAST: CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN BENEDIKTE NAUBERT’S WALTER VON MONTBARRY JULIE KOSER

Writing during one of the most transformative periods in modern German history, Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819) was strategically poised on the cusp of two significant cultural developments: the rise of the historical novel and the gradual autonomy of history and Orientalism as academic disciplines in their own rights. The author of more than thirty historical novels, two collections of fairy tales, numerous short stories and poems, as well as countless contributions to literary journals, Naubert is decidedly the most prolific woman writer in the period spanning the Enlightenment to Romanticism. Despite the notable success and popularity of her works during her own lifetime, it was not until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that German feminist scholars exhumed Naubert and her impressive body of work from relative literary obscurity and drew renewed attention to her formative contribution to German culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 While scholarly inquiries into Naubert’s fairy tales have resulted in extensive cataloguing and analysis, far fewer works have tackled her sizeable corpus of historical novels, despite Naubert’s title as the founder of the modern German historical novel.2 Within this nascent field of research, Naubert’s participation in Orientalist discourses of the Enlightenment via the genre of the historical novel has remained buried until now.3 This chapter addresses this scholarly lacuna in its examination of cross-cultural encounters between Christians and Muslims of the Crusades and the trope of the “enlightened sultan” in Naubert’s novel

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Walter von Montbarry. Großmeister des Tempelordens (“Walter de Montbary. Grand Master of the Knights Templar”; 1786). The details of Naubert’s life and career distinguish her in many regards from contemporaries. Born 1756 in Leipzig, Christiane Benedikte Eugenie Hebenstreit was raised in a family culture that valued education and intellectual inquiry.4 After the death of her father, a professor of medicine and a practicing physician, Naubert’s mother and older half-brothers assumed responsibility for her education, which provided her with a solid foundation in philosophy, history, and the classical languages Greek and Latin, all subjects uncharacteristic for the education of most eighteenthcentury women. Beyond the instruction she received from her siblings, Naubert was also an autodidact, who taught herself English, French, and Italian, skills which later proved indispensable in conducting research for her historical novels. The family’s extensive personal library offered her unfettered access to a seemingly limitless and diverse source of materials and provided her with inspiration and resources for her literary pursuits.5 Further solidifying Naubert’s iconoclastic status are the circumstances surrounding her literary activity. At the age of twenty-three, she published her first novel, Heerfort und Klärchen (“Heerfort and Little Clara”; 1779), launching a successful career spanning almost four decades, even as her eyesight began to fail toward the end of her life. Like many women writers of this period, financial concerns most likely factored into Naubert’s decision to put pen to paper to support her family after the deaths of both older brothers (Henn, Mayer and Runge 337). Yet, her decision to marry later in life—she was forty-one—and the fact that she had no children of her own,6 not only set her apart from most women of her time but also enabled her to immerse herself in her writing and to maintain a lengthy career, albeit under the veil of anonymity. These personal details may account, in part, for her ability to publish multiple novels a year, in addition to her short stories and fairy tales. This is a particularly impressive accomplishment when one considers that her historical novels range between 300 and 1,000 pages in length.7 Naubert’s astounding literary productivity is complemented by the equally remarkable range of subjects and historical periods covered in her novels evincing the author’s vast body of knowledge. Her novels present historical events spanning from the fifth century as in Eudocia, Gemahlinn Theodosius des Zweyten. Eine Geschichte des fünften Jahrhunderts (“Eudocia, Wife of Theodosius II.”; 1806/1807), to the early eighteenth century as with her work Fontanges, oder das Schicksal der Mutter und der Tochter. Eine Geschichte aus den Zeiten Ludwig des Vierzehnten („Fontaine, or the Fate of a Mother and Daughter. A Story from the Times

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of Louis XIV”; 1805). However, it is the period of the European Middle Ages and the events surrounding the Crusades in particular which held a special fascination for Naubert as evidenced by works such as Walter von Montbarry, Konradin von Schwaben. Oder Geschichte des unglücklichen Enkels Kaiser Friedrichs des Zweyten (“Conradin of Swabia. Or the Story of the Grandson of Emperor Frederick II”; 1788), Konrad und Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Großmeister des deutschen Ordens (“Konrad and Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, Grand Masters of the German Order”; 1792), and Heinrich von Plauen und seine Neffen, Ritter des deutschen Ordens. Der wahren Geschichte getreu bearbeitet (“Heinrich von Plauen and his Nephews, Knights of the German Order. Faithfully Recounted According to the True Story”; 1793).8 Indeed, in the opening lines to Walter von Montbarry the narrator conveys his9 and the readers’ shared enthusiasm for this enigmatic yet compelling world of the distant past: Wüßte ich, meine Leser! daß ihr jenen Trieb, der mich von meiner Kindheit an zu den Begebenheiten der Vorwelt hinriß, und mir so manche Stunde der Wonne und seligen Schwermuth gewährte, mit mir gemein hättet; wüßte ich, daß ihr gern in dem heiligen Dunkel weiltet, das die Zeiten des grauen Alterthums deckt, und euch an den seltsamen Gestalten ergöztet, die die Geschichte aus jenen Dämmerungen hervorgehen heißt, ich würde glauben, der bloße Titel dieser Blätter müßte eure Neugier reizen, und ihr würdet es gern sehen, daß ich noch einmal die Feder ergreife, um euch etwas von längst verflossenen Zeiten zu erzählen; Mährchen oder Wahrheit, oder wie es euch dasselbe zu nennen beliebt. (Naubert, Walter von Montbarry 1.7)10 If I had known, my readers, that you shared the same desire, which transported me since my childhood to events of the distant past, and which afforded me so many hours of joy and blissful melancholy! If I had known, that you too lingered gladly in the sacred darkness that covers the dusty ancient times and enjoyed the curious characters, which history calls forth out of that twilight! I would believe that the sheer title of these pages must excite your curiosity and that you would like to see me grab once more my quill in order to tell you something of these long bygone times, fairy tale or truth, or whatever you prefer to call it.

It is the murky distance separating Naubert and her readers from the medieval period that enables the author to exploit the tension between past and present, history and fiction, fairy tale and truth in her examination of human nature and negotiation with Europe’s fraught relationship with the Orient.11 Unlike the reception of the Middle Ages in Romantic circles, Naubert’s investment in literary portraits of the period resisted idealizing the past and privileged instead a pragmatic depiction of humanity:

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“Menschen, bloße Menschen, wie sie jetzt sind und wie sie jemals waren, werdet ihr sehen. Vielleicht hier und da einen Zug von Tugend, welcher jetzt aus der Mode gekommen ist, aber auch auf der andern Seite, Unordnungen, von welchen unsere Zeiten, dem Himmel sei Dank nichts wissen” (“People, just people, as they are now and as they always have been. Perhaps here and there a trace of virtue, which is no longer fashionable, but on the other hand also disorder, of which our period thankfully knows nothing”; 1.8).12 Naubert’s historical novels, with their emphasis on the religious conflicts between Eastern and Western societies of the Middle Ages as well as broader issues concerning humankind, reveal not only the shared interests of late eighteenth-century German readers for historical subjects and foreign regions but also the author’s mobilization of the historical novel as a vehicle for social commentary. Expanding the scholarship on Naubert’s historical novels, I turn a critical lens on the figure of the “enlightened sultan,” or “humane infidel,” in Walter von Montbarry, set amidst the political rivalries and religious wars of the Second and Third Crusades between Christian Europe and the Arab Muslim world. In doing so, my reading exposes the tension between the Enlightenment’s promotion of humanist and universalist ideals and the “othering” of the Orient at work in the German cultural imagination as well as the implications of this friction for an enlightened European identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this chapter offers a brief examination of Naubert’s relationship to the still porous concepts of history and fiction as they existed in late eighteenthcentury German culture. Only a few decades later the institutionalization of history would assert a decisive division between history and fiction in an attempt to reclaim historical writing as the exclusive purview of formally trained intellectuals. By recalibrating the focus of research on the historical novel to include the works of a late eighteenth-century German female author, this chapter joins a growing chorus of scholarly voices proposing a reconsideration of the German historical novel’s origins and trajectory. Such a proposition necessarily problematizes claims that discount works of historical fiction published prior to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as employing history merely as decorative drapery and as products of “second- and third-rate writers” (Lukács 30).13 Rather than displace Sir Walter Scott as an influential literary architect of the genre,14 this chapter participates in recent efforts to expand the existing framework of thought about the historical novel’s early life by engaging with an author, whose historical works may better our understanding of the protean nature of the genre as it

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existed in the margins between late eighteenth-century Aufklärungshistorie (“Enlightenment history”) and early nineteenth-century historicism.

Naubert and the Eighteenth-Century Historical Novel The hybridity characterizing the historical novel as a genre instantiates the ambiguous relationship between history and fiction writ large. From Aristotle’s definition in his Poetics (335 B.C.E.) of the roles performed by historian and poet, to Hayden White’s controversial erasure of the conventional boundaries separating history and fiction in Metahistory (1973), to Paul Ricoeur’s attempt to strike a balance between these two extreme views in Time and Narrative (1985), historians and literary critics stridently have sought to apprehend and decipher the history-fiction enigma. More recently scholars have embraced the porous boundaries of this dyadic structure, or what Brian Hamnett calls “the uneasy relationship between creative imagination and historical accuracy” embodied by the historical novel and more specifically by the historical novel of the late eighteenth century (Hamnett 3).15 It is the nebulous region surrounding history and fiction which Naubert inhabited and exploited in her historical novels. The historical novel in the concluding decades of the eighteenth century played a critical role in shaping the German public’s ability to draw critical connections between the past and present. History, as it was being conceived of at the end of the 1700s, had not yet been solidified into a rigorous academic discipline, as it would develop under the guidance of the historian Leopold von Ranke. While an overriding transformation in the approach to historical analysis and interpretation began to take shape in the second half of the eighteenth century, it was only in the early part of the nineteenth century that the formal process to institutionalize history as the exclusive domain of university scholars and intellectuals accelerated and assumed dominance (Gooch 5).16 Prior to this paradigm shift, literary genres like the novel served an important function in satisfying the public’s interest in historical subjects (Hamnett 5). Understood within the context of the Enlightenment, fictional works engaging with historical events and figures simultaneously played a crucial role in the moral and intellectual development of an emerging German middle-class (Bödeker, Iggers, Knudsen and Reill 13). Reviewing Naubert’s “mit Dichtung stark vermischte Geschichte” (“history tightly commingled with literature”; Ak. 459) Philippe von Geldern. Oder Geschichte Selims, des Sohns Amurat (“Philippa of Guelders. Or the Story of Selim, Son of Murad II”) in the 1793 edition of Neue allgemeine

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deutsche Bibliothek, an anonymous critic articulates the public’s overriding ambivalence toward the fusion of history and imagination: Und wenn es auf der einen Seite nicht zu leugnen ist, daß bey jungen Leuten durch dergleichen Erzählungen, die Darstellung historischer Thatsachen verwirret werden, und ihr Gedächtniß Scenen aus dem Roman in die Geschichte hineintragen, und damit verweben kann, so wahr ist es hingegen, und Rec. hat es aus Erfahrung, daß denkende Frauenzimmer sogar, sich Mühe gegeben haben, nachdem sie einen dergleichen historischen Roman gelesen, denselben mit der Geschichte zu vergleichen; und dadurch als eine natürliche Folge, ihre Bekanntschaft mit der letztern verstärket haben. Und ist dieses nicht schon genug, um dieser Gattung von Romanen einen Vorzug vor so vielen andern, einzuräumen, mit denen in jeder Messe das lesesuchtige Publikum überhäuft wird? (Ak. 460) Even if, on the one hand, it cannot be denied that such stories confuse young people’s understanding of historical facts and that their memory inscribes scenes from the novel into history and can thereby interweave the two, it is just as true, and the reviewer has it on personal authority, that even ladies of intelligence, after having read such a historical novel, have made the effort to compare it with history. A natural consequence of this process is that their knowledge of history has thereby been increased. Is this not enough to acknowledge the virtue of this genre of novel above so many others with which the public, already consumed by reading mania, is inundated at every book fair?

The interweaving of fact and fiction undertaken by the historical novel is perceived at once as potentially dangerous but also edifying: the negative effects are offset by the pedagogical benefits. Touting the positive influence historical novels can have on young female readers, the reviewer simultaneously complicates the educational gains by giving voice to social concerns of Lesewut (“reading mania”) to which the female reader was considered particularly susceptible. This Janus-faced response is not only indicative of the broader public’s attitude toward the production and acquisition of knowledge but it also conveys the gendered discourse informing late eighteenth-century discussions of the novel as a genre.17 While Naubert shared the optimistic view, “daß Intereße und Belehrung gewinnt, wenn Dichtung an Wahrheit geknüpft wird” (“that interest and instruction win, when fiction is tied to truth”; qtd. in Dorsch 29), her preference for anonymity suggests a strategic maneuver to efface the gendered transgression implied by her engagement with history and the act of writing. Despite the potentially harmful influence of the novel on both female and male readers, Naubert’s historical novels played an important

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role in the transmission of historical knowledge and the education of society outside institutionalized forms of history (Blackwell 154-55). As scholars successfully have demonstrated, the historical novel found firm footing as an emerging genre in the last two decades of the 1700s. Mapping the historical novel’s trajectory,18 the University of Innsbruck’s database Projekt Historischer Roman (“Project Historical Novel”) has proved invaluable in determining the prevalence of the historical novel in the eighteenth century. More specifically, the database has enabled scholars to pinpoint the first use of the designation “historischer Roman” (“historical novel”) to the mid-1780s and conferring upon Naubert’s 1785 novel Geschichte Emma’s Tochter Kaiser Karls des Grossen und seines Geheimschreibers Eginhard (“History of Emma, Daughter of Emperor Charles the Great and his Scribe Eginhard”) the status of breakthrough historical novel (Mühlberger and Halbitzel 7, 9). Mining this data, Marianne Henn has provided a gendered contour to the literary landscape of the genre noting that Naubert, as the only female author to publish between 1780 and 1799, was solely responsible for twenty percent of the more than 128 historical novels appearing during this period (“geschichtliches Erzählen” 287).19 Thus, Henn provides compelling evidence for what scholars have long claimed to be the case, namely Naubert’s standing as the founding mother of the German historical novel. Cognizant of the mounting tension between history and literature, Naubert approached historical fiction with caution. Reflecting on her role as author in an 1817 letter to friend and publisher Friedrich Rochlitz, Naubert acknowledged the tightrope she had walked in her long career: “Die Geschichte ist meine Fürstin; ich kenne die Ehrfurcht, mit welcher ich mich ihr nahen muß, besonders, wenn sie verschleiert erscheint; mit ihren Zofen der Sage und der Legende kann ich mir schon eher etwas erlauben” (“History is my sovereign; I recognize the deep respect with which I must approach her, especially when she appears shrouded. With her maids the saga and legend, I can allow myself more liberty”; qtd. in Dorsch 113). Whereas the fairy tale, legend, and saga offered Naubert more creative freedom to construct sympathetic protagonists and compelling narratives, the historical novel was far more rigid in the limits it imposed on its author. It was only when sources remained silent or details appeared aporetic that Naubert allowed herself the license to imagine what could have or might have been. In all other regards she claimed to abide by the strict code “die wahre Geschichte nie zu entstellen” (“never to distort the true history”; qtd. in Dorsch 110).20 Naubert’s attitude toward the historical novel acutely gauged the sea

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change in perspectives that had begun to take root in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Naubert’s novels evince the amorphous yet tentative union of historical fact and literary imagination characteristic of the 1780s. Her distinctive hybridization of the historical novel, what Kurt Schreinert named the “Zweischichtenroman” (“two-level novel”), sought to strike a balance by fusing the personal lives of fictional protagonists with prominent political events in European history (26). As the titles of her novels almost always confirm, her eponymous hero(ine)s are not the imposing figures recorded in the annals of history but ancillary characters often situated on the periphery of transformative historical events or invisible players shaping the unfolding of events. Naubert’s preference for the average hero, whose personal life was directly impacted by political events, facilitated not only the readers’ identification with the protagonist but also focused their engagement with historical events through this personal lens. By privileging the portrayal of an average individual within the framework of history, Naubert’s works exhibit what Georg Lukács deemed the defining quality of the nineteenthcentury Scottian historical novel: What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events. What matters is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality. (Lukács 42)

Naubert’s hybrid technique of interweaving personal, fictional narratives with near faithful renderings of the conventions of a specific historical moment broadened readers’ understanding of the past as well as developed their ability to reflect critically on the virtues and social norms informing their own behavior in the present. In Walter von Montbarry, Naubert resists merely projecting eighteenth-century German virtues onto the European societies of the Middle Ages. Instead her narrator takes great pains to contextualize the historical circumstances dictating the characters’ seemingly irrational behavior and raise the readers’ awareness of the social and political forces to which they are subjected. Thus, when the novel’s narrator interrupts events to comment on the extreme piety of one of its historical characters, he not only imparts information about medieval Christian society but more importantly cautions contemporary readers against rashly assuming a moral high ground vis-à-vis the past: “aber wo ist der Weise, welcher im Stande ist, sich gänzlich über die Vorurtheile seines Jahrhunderts zu erheben? der nicht zuweilen, gern oder ungern sich

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nach demselben bequemen muß?” (“but where is the sage, who is capable of elevating himself above the prejudices of his century? who at times must adjust either willingly or begrudgingly according to the prejudices”; WvM 1.96-97). As a whole, Naubert’s novels emphasize basic human principles and shared experiences regardless of historical or cultural contexts and necessitated readers to examine their own beliefs and behaviors through a similar lens. If Naubert’s novels not only transmitted historical knowledge but also fostered critical engagement with eighteenth-century cultural norms and social institutions, what critiques do her portrayals of the protracted violence and religious antagonism between Christians and Muslims perform? Examining the construction of the Oriental Other in this work raises pressing questions about Enlightenment discourses in which the historical novel participated in its construction of both an imagined Orient, and German society of the late eighteenth century. In what ways do Naubert’s fictional and historical figures complicate exoticized myths and demonizing narratives of the Orient and the Oriental Other of previous centuries? At the same time, how do these literary encounters between East and West and more importantly Naubert’s deployment of the trope of the “enlightened sultan” problematize Western Europe’s assertions of its status as an enlightened, rational, and secular society around 1800?

The Orient in the German Imagination around 180021 The “Orient,” as both a geographical region and a constructed myth, has long captivated the German cultural imagination. The tentative relationship between German-speaking territories and regions of the Levant was characterized by protracted military conflict as well as an intense, sustained fascination with all things Oriental. The period bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marked a defining moment in Germany’s engagement with the Turkish, Arab, and Persian worlds as members of both literary and intellectual communities trained their artistic and scholarly lenses on their neighbors to the East. These fictional, historical, and academic encounters with the East not only contributed to a growing body of knowledge produced about the history, cultures, and peoples of the Near and Middle East but also served as a vehicle for selfreflection and social critique of the institutions and practices defining Western civilization (Syndram 328). Focusing on the crusading culture structuring European-Levantine relations in the Middle Ages, Naubert applies pressure to the over-determined images of the righteous, benevolent Christian juxtaposed with the savage, despotic Saracen that

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dominated the German imagination up to the eighteenth century.22 By destabilizing the binarisms of East and West, Muslim and Christian, barbaric and civilized, Naubert’s novels participated in humanist discourses of the late Enlightenment transcending ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions and asserting the universal principle of a shared humanity in its reimagining of cross-cultural encounters between Christians and Muslims. Since the appearance of Edward Said’s seminal work on the imagined and actualized colonization of the Near, Middle, and Far East by French and British powers, scholars have sought to address the perceived oversight in Said’s assertion that the Orient of the Germans was never “actual” but only scholarly (Said 19). While research by German historians and literary scholars has since established Germany’s lengthy and substantive engagement with the Ottoman Empire and Middle East, Said was correct in acknowledging the instrumental role German intellectuals performed in constructing Orientalist discourses of the nineteenth-century that would be mobilized by Europeans to justify their colonial aspirations.23 These critical works have proved invaluable in reconstructing Germany’s “actual” colonial past and active participation in the production of Orientalist discourses, yet their focus has centered almost singularly on works by male explorers, authors, and intellectuals. Far less attention has been paid to the contributions by German women writers to images of the Orient around 1800.24 Although Naubert wrote during a period in which there were no German colonial enterprises, her novels, which thematized the Crusades, evoked images of the holy wars as a shared colonial undertaking in which German, as well as French and British crusaders, actively participated. Thus, her critical evaluation of these military campaigns and the rhetoric mobilized to justify the violence and bloodshed, necessarily implicates Germans as well as their European counterparts. The popularity of her novels portraying historical events linking Germans with the Near and Middle East must therefore be read alongside more formal, scholarly discourses as participating in the construction of what Kontje terms “German Orientalisms.” Defining Germany’s historical and fictional encounters with the Near and Middle East are the martial conflicts of the Crusades. The participation of German crusaders in these religious military campaigns constituted one of the earliest forms of German contact with the Orient with lasting implications for portrayals of the Muslim world. Depictions of the East, which dominated European Christian discourses of the medieval period, were a fusion of hostile crusading rhetoric bent on demonizing the Muslim infidel to shore up financial and public support for the centuries-

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long military campaigns to reclaim Jerusalem, and critiques of the Crusades that privileged “cross-cultural compatibility and interfaith collaboration” (Berman 59). This more secular attitude toward the Eastern Other was aided by ambivalent European encounters with the twelfthcentury Ayyubid Sultan Saladin (1137-1193), whose decisive victory at the Battle of Hattin (1187) resulted in the Christians’ loss of Jerusalem and the signing of the Treaty of Jaffa (1192) bringing the Third Crusade and all hopes of reclaiming the Kingdom of Jerusalem to an end.25 The trope of the “enlightened sultan” embodied by Saladin that emerged tentatively in the late Middle Ages would become more pronounced and a distinguishing characteristic of Enlightenment Orientalism. However, negative stereotypes of Muslim Turks and Arabs persisted in literature and were manifested by early modern depictions of the savage, morally bankrupt, and despotic Saracen. The endurance of these archetypes was facilitated in part by protracted conflagrations between Ottoman Turks and European Christians in Eastern Europe from the Battle of Varna (1444) to the Austro-Ottoman wars of the eighteenth century. The proximity of these conflagrations could not be overlooked. While fears of Muslim Arabs during the Crusades were mediated by time and distance, new tensions between European Christians and Muslim Turks in Eastern Europe and the Near East took on a greater immediacy and served to renew interest in the Eastern Other. Despite the protracted antagonism characterizing relations between European Christian and Turkish and Arab Muslims, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a rise in the Orient’s status among Europeans as both an exoticized and fetishized commodity. The European fascination with all things Oriental, manifested in the phenomena commonly referred to turquerie and chinoiserie, coincided with the decline of the Ottoman Empire as a political and military threat to German and Austrian interests and resulted in new images of the Eastern Other (Kontje 61; Wilson Kreuzzugsideologie 18). By the end of the eighteenth century, tensions between the German states of the Holy Roman Empire and neighboring Ottomans had eased and relatively friendly ties were maintained through shared commercial interests, tenuous military compacts, and uneasy political alliances (Berman 112-13). This opening up of economic channels and political dialogues between East and West facilitated closer engagement with and exchange of information about the respective cultures helping to counter the demonized image of Islamic culture that had dominated European attitudes in previous centuries. Such receptiveness enabled even Johann Gottfried Herder, whose views on race are problematic at best, to present a positive, if not

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ambivalent, assessment of Arabic culture in the nineteenth volume of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (“Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind”). Herder at once praises the moral benefits promoted by certain Islamic tenets such as compassion and physical purity while denouncing others, including polygamy and despotism (Herder 3.1.779).26 Following this trend, literary works thematizing the Crusades retained their popularity but lacked for the most part the vitriolic tenor of the Middle Ages. Instead, authors “used religious difference to articulate new views of religious tolerance but also, more generally, new social and political norms” (Berman 127). It is within this new cultural paradigm, that the trope of the “enlightened sultan” found new footing and assumed a critical function. The image of the barbaric Muslim dominating the literary, religious, and political discourses of the medieval and early modern periods underwent a striking conversion in the middle of the eighteenth century. Beginning with the figure of the “enlightened sultan,” popularized by the Türkenopern (“Turkish operas”) of the 1760s and taking on greater significance with the appearance of the “humane sultan” in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Enlightenment play Nathan der Weise (“Nathan the Wise”; 1779), the Oriental Other ceased to be a source of ridicule or a source of fear (Wilson, Kreuzzugsideologie 36). Literary manifestations of the “noble Saracen” minimized the crusading rhetoric of the Middle Ages and privileged instead the portrayal of a benevolent Muslim ruler as a vehicle for transmitting and promoting Enlightenment principles. Negative stereotypes persisted but were strategically projected onto minor characters in order to elevate the “enlightened Muslim” as a paragon of virtue and compassion. Here, too, Naubert’s novel relies on Saladin’s brother Asad to serve as the foil to the benevolent Saracen ruler. The juxtaposition of the cruel, savage heathen with the noble infidel not only exemplifies the “tension between competing ideas of inclusion and exclusion that characterize Enlightenment thought” but also “functioned to articulate a range of ideas and ethical concerns that preoccupied European societies at the time” (Berman 114-115). The co-existence of these figures and their competing symbolic power conveys the ambivalence that continued to define European Orientalist discourses around 1800. As Berman argues, positive portrayals of Muslim Turks and Arabs were not always reliable signifiers of German tolerance: “The depiction of the sultan as adhering to German ethical ideals serves to highlight the superiority of those ideals, while the stubbornly negative characterization of Osmin marks the persistent impression of the Islamic/Turkish context as inferior” (130).27 Even Naubert’s attempts to positively represent

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figures from Near and Middle Eastern culture are caught in a precarious double-bind. By representing the “enlightened Muslim Other” as tolerant of and even embodying the ideals of Western culture and Christian values, Naubert, like Lessing, could not extricate herself entirely from dominant narratives privileging a Eurocentric worldview. Yet, even as positive representations of the Turk or Arab risk a devaluation of Near and Middle Eastern cultures, the figure of the “enlightened sultan” served to criticize the failures and faults of European society. Like its Western counterpart, the “noble savage” of the New World, the “enlightened sultan” of the Old World functioned as a vehicle for social criticism as well as a repository for German fantasies of an idealized past and present.28 Exemplifying the power of the “enlightened sultan” as an instrument for social commentary is Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise, in which the message of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence accompanies a critical appraisal of all religious institutions and dogmatic practices asserting moral authority and superiority. Lessing’s staging of Saladin as merciful and just paired with the Christian crusader, who acknowledges his misjudgment of his Muslim and Jewish counterpart(s), proved a powerful template for subsequent literary engagements with the Middle East. To be certain, Naubert’s deployment of this paradigm in Walter von Montbarry and her novel’s critique of the violence committed by European crusaders against their Middle Eastern counterparts in the name of Christianity can be traced directly to Lessing’s play.29 In her narrative rendering of a shared European-Middle Eastern history, Naubert’s portrait of the legendary Arab Muslim sultan Saladin juxtaposed with a cast of historical and fictional European Christian characters exemplifies the ambivalence emblematic of Enlightenment Orientalism.

The “Enlightened Sultan” as Social Critique in Walter von Montbarry The unfavorable assessment of the religious wars waged for control of the Holy Land and the uncompromising critique targeting the abuse of power by Western secular and ecclesiastical institutions that takes shape in Naubert’s 1786 historical novel Walter von Montbarry is a direct result of the author’s strategic positioning of Christian and Muslim figures, both historical and fictional, amidst the martial conflicts comprising the Third Crusades (1187-1192) and competing bids for control of Jerusalem. Opening in 1174, Part I of the novel traces the story of the fictional Walter von Montbarry, the illegitimate son of English King Henry II and future

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Grand Master of the Knights Templar, from his childhood at the castle of Graf Theodorich von Flandern (“Thierry, Count of Flanders”) in Burgundy to the mysterious death of the Grand Master of the Templars Arnold von Toroggio (“Arnold of Torroja”) in 1184.30 Part II covers Walter’s assumption of the title Grand Master, a series of campaigns including the fall of Jerusalem (1187) and Siege of Acre (1189-91), and concludes with Walter’s violent death during a final campaign to wrest the city of Jerusalem from Saladin’s control. The protracted antagonism between European Crusaders and Saracens results in a relationship of mutual respect and admiration between Walter and Saladin, despite the friction between their respective cultures and religious institutions, which suggests an alternative constellation for Western-Eastern encounters. Naubert’s placement of her fictional hero Walter von Montbarry within the historical context of the Crusades not only exemplifies the unique feature of the author’s innovative “Zweischichtenroman” but exhibits the author’s extensive knowledge of key figures, political tensions, military battles, and foreign locations directly linked to the events of the Third Crusade.31 Included among the impressive cast of historical actors with whom her protagonist engages are Richard I, King of England (1157-99); Philip II, King of France (1165-1223); Leopold V, Duke of Austria (1157-94); Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem (1161-85); Raymond III, Count of Tripoli (1140-87); Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (1128-90/91); Pope Celestine III (1106-98); a series of Knights Templar, and countless supporting fictional characters. Yet more important than Naubert’s familiarity with the historical figures and events is the opportunity she offers her readers to engage with the history and culture of the Middle East as it related to and informed the political and cultural landscape of European history. Thus, the reader is transported not only to the Christian fortresses of Tiberias, Acre, and Antioch, the court of King Baldwin, Saladin’s serail,32 the island of Cyprus, and the secluded region of the legendary Assassins, the audience is also swept off to the grave of King Henry II in the abbey at Fontevraud, to the courts of Philip II in Rouen and Leopold V in Vienna, and to a papal audience before Celestine III. Bridging East and West together through the strategic deployment of her fictional protagonist and cast of historical figures, Naubert attempts to navigate the complex network of cultural transfers linking Orient and Occident in the German imagination. Guiding the novel is the narrator’s condemnation of the Crusades and European claims to moral and religious superiority over their vilified Muslim counterparts in a grab for power in the Holy Land. The underlying motivation for the novel’s protagonist to take up the cross offers insight

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into Naubert’s efforts to problematize entrenched narratives pitting Christian against Muslim. Walter’s decision to become a Templar is not merely based on religious conviction but personal interests: he joins the military order to exact revenge against his enemy Philip von Flandern (“Philip I, Count of Flanders”), who has been sent on crusade to Palestine by Pope Alexander III to atone for the murder of Walter’s idol Andreas von Montbarry (“André de Montbard”), a Grand Master of the Knights Templar and the brother of his guardian and adopted mother, Hunberga von Flandern (“Humberga de Montbard”). Thus, Naubert distances Walter and his actions from the Church’s vitriolic rhetoric while simultaneously discrediting a commonly-held assumption that all European crusaders were motivated by religious devotion. Indeed, as Herder observed with palpable disapproval in his historical analysis of the Crusades, not all crusaders were devout or virtuous individuals: financial incentives were a primary motivator in the Church’s recruitment of able bodies (3.805-06).33 If Naubert’s careful distancing of her hero from the reactionary stance of the Church tentatively suggests the author’s disdain for the Church’s call to arms against Arab Muslims, then the narrator’s commentary on Walter’s misspent life in the second part of the novel erases all doubt as to the author’s attitude toward the Crusades. Sailing back to Europe after the fall of Jerusalem to muster troops to help retake the city, Walter reflects on his role in the bloodshed and is forced to consider that his life has been wasted chasing a shadow and daß man besser thun würde, den Sarazenen ein Land nicht länger zu bestreiten, das bereits so viel Blut gekostet hatte, und dessen ruhige Besitzung für die Christen keinen andern Nutzen haben konnte, als jährlich eine Menge müßiger Pilger an sich zu ziehen, welche Gott durch Sorge für ihre Familien, und Fleis in ihren Berufsgeschäften weit wohlgefälliger als durch die heißeste Andacht bey dem heiligen Grabe hätten dienen können. (WvM, 2.161) that one would do better to no longer challenge the Saracens for a region, which had already cost too much blood, and whose uninterrupted possession could have no other gain for Christians then to draw a mass of idle pilgrims every year, who could have pleased God more by their care for their families and diligence in their professions than by the most fervent devotion at the Holy Sepulchre.

At the same time, the novel’s enlightened protagonist readily turns the critical lens on himself and exposes the unsettling truth behind the myth he accepts unquestioningly in order to rationalize both his thirst for vengeance but also the blood he shed in the name of an idealized

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Christianity (WvM 2.161). That this assessment comes from the novel’s hero, who has demonstrated at every turn his virtue, honesty, loyalty, and compassion in contrast to his fellow Christians, deals a striking blow to the legacy of the Crusades and the Church’s proclamation of a just and righteous war. Even this clear condemnation of the holy wars appears tempered when compared to the scathing critique articulated a decade later in the opening chapter of Naubert’s novel Friedrich der Siegreiche, Churfürst von der Pfalz. Der Marc Aurel des Mittelalters. Treu nach der Geschichte bearbeitet (Frederick the Victorious, Elector Palatine. The Marcus Aurelius of the Middle Ages. Faithfully Recounted According to History, 1796). Assessing the lingering effects of the Crusades and “die abscheuliche Politik des päbstlichen Hierarchen” [the abominable politics of the Papal hierarch] (1.2) in Europe well into the fifteenth century, the narrator resolutely denounces the unchecked power of the Church: Es war ein leichtes, den frommen Wahnsinn der Fürsten für solche Don Quixotterien zu erhitzen, und den dummen, fanatischen Pöbel mit mönchischen Phrasen und lügenhaften Mährchen vom neuen Jerusalem, und den irrdischen und ewigen Schätzen zu gewinnen. — Der allgefürchtete Bannstrahl trieb Fürsten, und tausende ihrer Unterthanen gegen die siegreichen Sarazenen.—Die armen Schwärmer bluteten dort für die Grillen des heiligen Barbaren, und erlagen schwärmerisch für ein Ziel, an welchem sich nur die Raubsucht des römischen Hierarchen und seiner Pfaffen würde gesegnet haben. (1.2-3) It was easy to inflame the pious mania of the princes for such Don Quixotery and to win over the ignorant, fanatical masses with monkish expressions and deceitful fairy tales of a new Jerusalem as well as earthly and eternal treasures. — The all-feared anathema drove princes and thousands of their subjects against the victorious Saracens. The poor enthusiasts bled for the whim of the holy barbarian and eagerly succumbed to this senseless idea for a goal, which only the rapacity of the Roman hierarch and his priests would have blessed.

Less a public censure for the violence perpetrated against Muslim victims, this unrestrained assessment is a memorial to the Christian victims of the Church’s insatiable desire for power. Yet, it is the secular pawns of the Church, the European and Frankish Levantine princes, who receive closer scrutiny in Naubert’s portrayal of the Third Crusade in Walter von Montbarry. Naubert devotes considerable attention to depicting the character of the politically powerful crusading princes and the motivations underlying their decisions to take up the cross. Naubert is careful not to idealize these

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larger-than-life historical figures; rather, she portrays their strengths as well as their weaknesses. Cataloguing and examining the welldocumented political and personal tensions between the European nobility, which contribute to many of the Crusade’s failures, the novel locates the impetus for their armed pilgrimages not in religious devotion or an altruistic sense of duty to protect European settlers of the Levant. Instead, men are presented as driven by their desire to accrue greater wealth, to expand their territories, and to secure their reputations in the annals of history (WvM 2.291). Whether it is the personal hostility between Richard I and Philip II over Richard’s rebuke of the French king’s sister Alice as a potential bride (2.307-313), political machinations over disputed territories (2.453-54) resulting in Philip’s sudden departure during a bid to reclaim Jerusalem (2.447-48), or the enmity between Richard and Leopold V over the Siege of Acre and the Austrian Duke’s taunting accusations that Richard was an accomplice in the assassination of Konrad von Montferrat (“Conrad I, King of Jerusalem”; 2.454), the novel exposes not only the fractured, dystopian landscape of European politics but also the direct impact this disorder has on the military campaigns and inhabitants of the East. In a similar fashion, Naubert’s work turns a critical lens on the Christian court of King Baldwin IV in Jerusalem, which materializes as a further instantiation of European hypocrisy and corruption (1.46-47). Time and again, the novel’s protagonist, accompanied by other “upstanding” figures such as Odo von St. Amantis (“Odo de St. Amand”), Grand Master of the Templars, and Raimund von Tripoli (“Raymond III, Count of Tripoli”), paints a picture of a morally bankrupt and decadent Christian kingdom ruled by immorality and greed. Odo gives voice to the mounting frustrations of well-intentioned crusaders in his unflinching condemnation of Baldwin’s court, where ein schwacher König sich von einer lasterhaften Gemahlin beherrschen lies [sic], wo der Prinz, der nach seines Vaters Tode die Krone tragen sollte, in Weichlichkeit und Entfernung von Reichsgeschäften erzogen ward, wo das Oberhaupt der morgenländischen Kirche, der Patriarch, zugleich die Stelle des ersten Liebhabers der Königin vertrat, wo man die gröbsten Ausschweifungen mit heuchlerischen Andachtsübungen zu büßen suchte, und üppige Tänze und närrische sinnlose Spiele, mit Wallfahrten und langen Gebeten abwechseln ließ. (1.295) a weak king allowed himself to be ruled by his licentious wife, where the prince, who is supposed to wear the crown after his father’s death, was being raised coddled and distanced from matters of the kingdom, where the leader of the Eastern Church, the patriarch, also occupied the position

32

Chapter One of the queen’s favorite lover, where one sought to atone for the coarsest debaucheries with hypocritical acts of devotion, and wanton dances and foolish, absurd games alternating with pilgrimages and lengthy prayers.

The excesses of Heraklius, the Patriarch of the Latin Catholic Church,34 along with subsequent scenes portraying the ecclesiastical figurehead’s proclivity for pomp, vanity, and earthly pleasures (1.414-17), not only discredit the efficacy of the Frankish Levantine rulers to maintain peace and protect Christian settlers, but also undercut the Church’s claims to moral authority as justification for declaring a holy war against the alleged Muslim infidel. Even as Odo articulates his disdain for the irreverent practices of court culture in Jerusalem, the members of the military orders of the Knights Templars and Knights Hospitaller are no more immune to greed, vanity, disloyalty, and betrayal than their counterparts at court. The narrator notes that the Templars, like the rest of society, are comprised of three kinds of individuals: “blos alltägliche Geschöpfe, weder gut noch böse; verschiedene von ihnen mehr als alltäglich böse, und einige wenige, etwas mehr als mittelmäßig gut” (“merely ordinary creatures, neither good or bad; some of them more than ordinarily bad, and a few a bit less than moderately good”; 1.311). It is the second category, which receives the narrator’s attention. From this class of creature emerges Terrikus von Tremelai,35 here a jealous Templar who, the reader learns, betrays his Grand Master in the hopes of assuming power. Odo, who has been captured in battle by Saladin’s nephew and imprisoned by his merciless brother Asad, the “Osmin” figure of Naubert’s novel, is left to die in captivity by Terrikus, who has intentionally negotiated in bad faith for the Grand Master’s release.36 It is only the loyal Walter, who willingly forsakes his freedom to accompany his Master into prison. Naubert seizes on the documented historical imprisonment of the Templar by Saladin as an opportunity to imagine a more enlightened, humanizing encounter between Christian and Saracen. Juxtaposing the act of disloyalty by a fellow Christian with the appearance of a merciful and honorable Sultan Saladin, Naubert presents her reader with an enlightened alternative to the trope of the barbaric infidel that simultaneously challenges Western audiences to reassess the image of the benevolent, righteous Christian. The novel’s stern critique of European Christianity and its political and social institutions is amplified further by its strategic deployment of Saladin, a devout Muslim and formidable military opponent, who reveals himself to be the most “Christian” of all.37 Remaining true to the historical accounts of the Sultan, Naubert neither conceals Saladin’s capacity for cruelty nor does she convert her “enlightened sultan” to Christianity as a

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means to demonstrate his virtue and humanity. Saladin appears as both the fierce opponent of the Christian crusaders and a devout Muslim, which allows his acts of kindness, integrity, and tolerance to subvert overdetermined, negative narratives of the Muslim Other promulgated by crusading rhetoric. Exemplifying the novel’s strategic adoption of the “humane heathen” is Saladin’s first unmediated appearance in the novel. Entering the prison cell of the weakened and dying Templar Odo, Saladin approaches his adversary with kindness and humility: “so bückte er sich zu ihm nieder, und faßte seine Hand, indem er mit sanfter Stimme sprach: Wie Odo? ihr hört mich nicht? Soll Saladin euch bitten, die Freyheit von seinen Händen anzunehmen?” (“so he knelt down to him and grasped his hand, while he spoke in a gentle voice: How Odo? You don’t hear me? Should Saladin implore you to accept freedom from his hands?”; 1.368). The body language and physical gestures of compassion but also equality signified by the act of kneeling, the grasping of Odo’s hand, and the calming sound of his voice establish the overwhelmingly positive tone for subsequent encounters between Saladin and the novel’s protagonist Walter. Further conveying Saladin’s intrinsic goodness is his inability to control his emotional reaction upon seeing the physical deterioration of his once powerful opponent (1.369). Determined to right the wrong resulting from his brother’s “unmenschliche Grausamkeit” (“inhumane cruelty”; 1.371), Saladin personally oversees Odo’s recovery at his palace in Damascus “als ob er sein Bruder gewesen wäre” (“as if he had been his brother”; 1.370). Thus, the treacherous bonds of Christian brotherhood have been replaced, or at the very least supplemented, by a more genuine bond of mutual respect, admiration, and humanity between Christian and Muslim. Naubert turns Western stereotypes on their head when the “humane heathen,” rather than the “enlightened Christian,” articulates an inclusive, universalist view of religion based on a guiding moral principle shared by all human beings. Even as Odo and Saladin develop a shared understanding of and appreciation for one another, the Templar is incapable of overcoming his distrust of his Muslim counterpart, sentiments with which he has been indoctrinated his entire life. Odo refuses Saladin’s offer to care for Walter after his death explaining that: “Eure Güte und Tugend ist verführerisch, wiebald könntet ihr durch dieselbe das Herz eines Jünglings verblenden! Walter ist ein Christ, und er soll es bleiben” (“Your goodness and virtue are seductive. How quickly you could blind the heart of a youth with these same qualities! Walter is a Christian and he shall remain one”; 1.373).38 While the Christian remains entrenched in his rigid, oppositional views of religion, it is Saladin who transcends the ideological divide by

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demonstrating tolerance. Upon Odo’s death Saladin swears “bey dem Gott den du und ich verehren, bey dem Gott der dich und mich, den Todten und den Lebenden mit Einem allgegenwärtigen Blicke durchschaut” (“to the God whom you and I worship, to the God who sees through you and me, through dead and living with one omnipresent eye”; 1.379) to fulfill the promises he made to his Christian friend. A similar sentiment is uttered again by Saladin before his death, when he expresses to Walter’s love interest Matilde von Tripoli (the fictional daughter of the historical Frankish Count Raymond of Tripoli) his desire to be reunited with his Christian and Muslim friends in the afterlife: “ich gehe hin zu dem Gott, den du und Walter verehren, und den Odos Tod mich kennen lehrte; . . . Wenn wir uns wiedersehen, werden wir alle Freunde seyn, Christen und Sarazenen, alle, alle vor einem Gott stehen! O des großen, des herrlichen Tages!” (“I am going to the God, whom you and Walter worship, and to whom I was introduced by Odo’s death. . . . When we see one another again, we will all be friends, Christians and Saracens, everyone, everyone will stand before one God! O the greatness, the glory of that day!”; 2.481). Saladin’s repeated invocation of a shared God, namely the Christian God of his beloved Odo and Walter, is ambiguous at best. While the sultan’s use of the singular, to speak of the deity under whom Christians and Muslims will one day be united, appears to privilege Christianity, these scenes in conjunction with the novel’s overwhelmingly negative assessment of European Christians suggest Naubert’s promotion of an enlightened, universalist view of religion that judges the virtue of an individual not by the name of their god but by the qualities they demonstrate and the principles by which they live. Given Naubert’s respect for historical accuracy and cautious, judicious use of probability and speculation in her historical narratives, as well as the eighteenthcentury public’s familiarity with the historical Saladin, it seems highly unlikely that Naubert intended to re-conceptualize the Islamic sultan as a secret convert to Christianity. Far more probable is Naubert’s mobilization of a tolerant and accepting Saladin to promote the Enlightenment ideals of inclusion, equality and tolerance—principles associated with the Humanitätsideal (“ideal humanity”) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—thereby aligning her novel’s portrayal of the Eastern Other with those in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (“Iphigenie in Tauris”; 1786) rather than the xenophobic rhetoric promulgated in conservative Orientalist discourses of period.39 Taken as a whole, Naubert’s invective representation of European Christians, both secular and spiritual, accompanied by her portrayal of the humane and tolerant Arab Muslim discredits the crusading rhetoric of

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previous centuries and uses the behavior and actions of Europeans in the Levant to mirror back the moral failings of European society. At the heart of Naubert’s portrayal of both positive as well as negative examples of crusading Christians and Saracen warriors is the belief in striving for an ideal humanity that transcends faith, ethnicity, and geography and which ultimately unsettles European Christianity’s claims to moral superiority over an ostensibly inferior, Oriental Other. As an emerging genre, the eighteenth-century historical novel, with its, as Hamnett termed it, “uneasy” relationship between fact and fiction, made history accessible to a wider segment of the population as a vehicle for edifying the public about historically and culturally significant events. Strategically exploiting this tension between history and imagination, Naubert’s innovative “Zweischichtenroman” enabled the author to explore an alternative form of cross-cultural contact between East and West that challenged the dominant narratives of previous centuries while simultaneously encouraging readers to turn a critical lens on their own prejudices and practices as “enlightened Europeans.” The genre of the historical novel in tandem with the narrator’s claims of offering readers a historically accurate view into life during the times of the Crusades lent Naubert’s rendering of the “enlightened sultan” greater authority and enabled her to promote a view of humanity, compassion, virtue, and tolerance as both universal and timeless human qualities.

Notes 1

Naubert’s strict adherence to anonymity in publishing her works may account in large part for her exclusion from the German literary canon. This is despite the fact that—against her wishes—her identity was made public almost two years before her death when an article appeared in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt naming Naubert as the author of popular historical novels Walter von Montbarry and Thekla von Thurn, among numerous others (Schütz 291). 2 Early twentieth-century scholars primarily engaged with Naubert’s historical novels either as Frauenliteratur (women’s literature) or Trivialliteratur (entertainment literature). The former categorization persisted into the 1980s despite Christine Touaillon’s assertion in 1919 that Naubert’s historical novels were the “Vorläufer des modernen historischen Romans” (“forerunner of the modern historical novel”; 434). In the intervening decades, Touaillon’s assessment has been taken up by scholars such as Schreinert, Kurth, Blackwell, Aust, and most recently Henn. Henn assigns Naubert the title of “Begründerin” (“foundress”) of the genre within the German literary tradition. For additional scholarship on Naubert’s historical novels, see among others Runge, Maierhofer, and Blackwell.

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Thus far, only Oerke has examined Naubert’s relationship to the imagined Orient; however, her inquiries have focused primarily on Naubert’s fairy tale collection Alme, oder Egyptische Mährchen (Alme or Egyptian Fairy Tales, 179397) with only brief references to Naubert’s historical novels. 4 Carl Wilhelm Otto August von Schindel’s entry on Naubert in Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (German Female Writers of the Nineteenth Century) offers the first extensive sketch of Naubert’s life. For a more recent and comprehensive biographical summary, see Henn, Mayer and Runge 337-76. 5 A catalogue detailing the contents of the Hebenstreit family library, which was auctioned off after the death of Naubert’s younger brother in 1803, is held by the University of Leipzig library. The content of the family collection is said to have comprised of some 3,000 volumes of scholarly and literary works (Henn, Mayer and Runge 338). In addition to the family library, Blackwell asserts Naubert had access to the University of Leipzig’s library via acquaintances and also received newly published books from her publisher in place of an honorarium for her novels (157). 6 In 1806 Naubert and her second husband Johann Georg Naubert adopted her orphaned nephew Ernst Eduard Wilhelm Hebenstreit, to whom Naubert would later dictate her novels when her failing eyesight prevented her from writing (Henn, Mayer and Runge 340). 7 In Naubert’s writing period before her marriages, she was able to publish up to five works in certain years (Henn, Mayer and Runge 339). 8 For a comprehensive list of Naubert’s works including historical novels, see Gallas and Runge 119-39. 9 Due to Naubert’s authorial preference for anonymity, the ambiguity surrounding the gender of her narrators, and the assumption held by contemporaries that a male author composed these novels, I have opted to retain the masculine pronoun, as other Naubert scholars have done, when referring to the novel’s narrator. 10 Further references to Naubert’s novel are indicated by the abbreviation WvM. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 11 I deploy the terms “Orient” and “oriental” in this chapter with the awareness that such terms are problematic at best. In strategically taking recourse to such ideologically-laden terms, my intention is not to perpetuate their unreflective use. Rather, I mobilize these concepts in my analysis of Naubert’s novel to highlight the constructed nature of an imagined “Orient” and “Oriental Other,” which served at once as a repository for eighteenth-century German fears and fantasies of the Near and Middle East but also as a vehicle for social commentary about the tension between Enlightenment principles and the realities of German and European practices. 12 Naubert’s preference to portray the beliefs and customs of the historical period as they really existed, rather than a romanticized notion of the past, instantiates one of the fundamental tenets of Georg Lukács’ theory of the historical novel (Lukács 45).

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While Lukács rightly acknowledges the Enlightenment’s contribution to problematizing the intersection of literature and history, he focuses his analysis almost exclusively on the historical drama of the Storm and Stress period, exemplified by Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which proved instructive for Scott’s invention of the historical novel (22). 14 The question concerning the influence Naubert’s works exerted over Scott remains a source of contention for proponents of Scott. See for example Brown 128; Müllenbrock and Reitemeier 131-45; and Reitemeier 251. 15 Hamnett’s engagement with the historical novel is informed by Ricoeur and builds on Linda Hutcheon’s assessment of the historical novel as an “uncertain category” (49). 16 Hamnett locates the boundaries of this intense period of institutionalization between 1810 and 1870 (32). Indeed, most scholars identify the creation of formal Lehrstühle (professorships) for history, which signaled the elevation of the study of history from its subordinate status to disciplines such as theology, law, or philosophy to an academic field in its own right, as the critical turning point. See also Ziolkowski and Jarausch among others. 17 For a discussion of women readers, the novel, and reading mania see Schön and Sauder. For an assessment of gender, genre, and the devaluation of the novel around 1800, see Bürger. 18 This movement toward the Digital Humanities is exemplified by Franco Moretti’s quantitative, systematic approach to literary analysis in Atlas of the European Novel and Graphs, Maps, Trees (1998). 19 Runge, whose analysis of the Innsbruck database statistics challenges previous assumptions about the “feminization” of the novel by demonstrating that more men than women published novels during this period (“Schweizerische Gedichte” 34). 20 In this letter to Moritz Kind from September 1817, Naubert responded to Kind’s concerns about the availability of reliable sources for her portrayal of the man in the iron mask in her novel Fontagnes. 21 This sketch of Enlightenment Orientalism is in no way intended to be an exhaustive assessment of Oriental discourses around 1800. Rather, this brief overview is meant to give richer contour to the discursive terrain Naubert traversed in her historical fictions portraying Islamic culture of the Near and Middle East. I wish to thank Melda Baysal Walsh for our productive conversations about German writers and the Orient, which proved helpful in thinking through the complex relationship between East and West. 22 The term “Saracen” is specific to the context of the early Crusades as a designation for Muslim writ large. Naubert deploys this term to refer to Saladin and the Arab Muslims of the Levant in her novel. 23 See Marchand. 24 Most scholarship on women’s fictional literary engagements with the East centers on the works of Karoline von Günderrode. See for example, Solbrig, Hillard, and Hilger.

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25 See Lyons and Jackson for an authoritative history of the Ayyubid Sultan. For an assessment of Saladin’s legacy within Western culture, see Tyerman. 26 In a footnote, Herder cites the eighth volume of Johann David Michaelis’ Orientalische und exegetische Bibliothek as offering “gute Bemerkungen” (“good remarks”; 3.1.779; Manuel 328) on this topic. All English translations of Herder are by Frank E. Manuel. 27 See also Wilson, Kreuzzugsideologie 28. 28 For a critical discussion of the “noble savage” in the New World, see Zantop. As Kontje notes, “The Orient plays a crucial role in Herder’s efforts to define national identity in the context of universal history. While Georg Forster’s tales of the South Pacific fueled the German imagination with images of pristine sites previously untouched by Western civilization, the East was both a site of modern colonization and ancient culture, Europe’s closest and oldest Other, but also its spiritual mother” (65). 29 In describing the virtuous qualities exhibited by the Knight Templar Konrad von Stauffen, a close friend and confidant of the novel’s titular protagonist, the narrator draws a comparison to the historical figure Kurt von Stauffen, “den Leßing so meisterhaft schildert” (“whom Lessing portrays so expertly”; 1.409) and notes that “Mein Konrad war stolz, edel, kühn und unbiegsam, wie der Geliebte der schönen Recha” (“My Conrad was proud, noble, brave, and firm, just like the beloved of the beautiful Recha”; 1.409). Although this reference pertains only to the figure of the crusader, Naubert’s familiarity with Lessing’s positive portrayal of Saladin would most certainly have influenced her own conception of Saladin. 30 Schreinert suggests the 3rd Early of Salisbury, William Longespée, an illegitimate son of Henry II of England, and a certain Walter, who was Grand Master around 1190, provided the inspiration for Naubert’s protagonist (55). Regarding this unknown historical knight, Naubert likely drew from details surrounding the life of Gerard of Ridefort, who became Grand Master after Arnold of Torroja and was beheaded by Saladin during the campaign at Acre between 1189 and 1191. For details about Ridefort, see Barber. In striking contrast, Naubert’s Walter is betrayed and murdered by fellow Templars during an attack on Jerusalem led by Richard I. 31 It should be noted that while Naubert strove for historical accuracy, her novels are riddled with anachronisms. Whether this is a result of the sources to which she had access, and more broadly the state of historical scholarship in the eighteenth century, or the mere product of her creative license is not entirely clear. For a detailed assessment of the historical inaccuracies and fusion of fact and fiction in Walter von Montbarry, see Schreinert 50-60. The historical anachronisms of Naubert’s novel, however, do not foreclose its consideration as a historical novel, given its ability to capture accurately the spirit and attitudes of the historical moment. See Lukács 50. 32 While Naubert’s novel gestures toward the German public’s fixation with harem culture—popularized in Europe by the translation of portions of One Thousand and One Nights first by Frenchman Antoine Galland beginning 1704 and then into German by August Bohse around 1711—the few scenes set in the serail of Saladin

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resist fetishizing the harem as a site of unfettered sensuality, unrestrained pleasures, and moral deprivation, tropes commonly found in literary representations spawned by the Turcomania of the period. For a thoughtprovoking assessment of harem culture in the German cultural imagination, see Melda Baysal Walsh’s doctoral thesis “Exotik, Erotik und Haremkultur.” 33 Overall, Herder’s negative assessment of the Crusades and the ostensible advances of these military campaigns reflect the critique Naubert mounted in her novel some five years earlier. See book twenty, part three “Kreuzzüge und ihre Folgen” (3.1.805-15), in which Herder refers to the Crusades unfavorably as “Raserei” (“infatuation”; 3.1.309; Manuel 377) and “wild[e] Schwärmerei” (“wild fanatics”; 3.1.815; Manuel 383). The military orders founded during the Crusades fared no better than the Crusades themselves in Herder’s historical appraisal (3.1.811). Scholars have documented Naubert’s familiarity with Herder’s works as they pertained to the relationship between history, national identity, and Volkslieder (Dorsch 24; Runge, “Wunder” 176-78; Brown 86). Whether Naubert was familiar with Herder’s 1774 pamphlet Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (“Another Philosophy of History Concerning the Development of Mankind”) has yet to be determined. Needless to say, the sentiment shared by Naubert and Herder appears common for the period. 34 Naubert’s searing depiction of Baldwin’s court and the Latin Patriarch is not without precedence, as the Heraclius of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise demonstrates. 35 Although Naubert’s narrator asserts Terrikus’ familial tie to the fourth Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay, this character appears to be based loosely on a historical figure known only as Terricus, Grand Commander of the Templars after the Battle of Hattin (1187), one of the few Templars reported to have survived the encounter with Saladin’s army. See Barber 115-16. 36 The historical Odo de St. Amand was captured in the Battle of Marj Ayun in 1179 and died shortly thereafter in Saladin’s captivity. See Barber 108-09. Naubert has confused Belvoir and Beaufort (Belfort) castles as the site of the violent encounter between the Christians and Saracens, resulting in her character Odo’s capture. While the date (1182) and circumstances described by the narrator suggest Belvoir, the narrator names Belfort near Sidon as the site of battle. 37 I have chosen to focus on a handful of scenes exemplifying Naubert’s use of the “enlightened sultan” as a vehicle for social commentary. There are numerous scenes which similarly foreground the Muslim Sultan’s moral authority over his European Christian counterparts. For example, Richard I’s observations, when speaking about his enemies, that Europe lacks rulers like Saladin who demonstrate mercy (2.458) or his mocking assessment of Pope Celestine III, in which he notes that Saladin would make a better pope (2.459), support this reading. 38 Odo’s fears are not entirely unfounded as Saladin later encourages Walter to abandon his oath to the dishonest Templars, who have repeatedly proven their disloyalty and immorality, and to join him in Jerusalem (2.402). However, this scene is less an indictment of the Muslim sultan and more a commentary on the hypocrisy of the Christian military order.

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39 See Wilson’s “Enlightenment Encounters” for a discussion of Christoph Meiners and Johann Gottfried Herder and conservative Enlightenment discourses about the Middle East.

Works Referenced Ak. Rev. of Philippe von Geldern, oder Geschichte Selims des Sohns Amurat. Zwey Theile, by Benedikte Naubert. Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 2.2 (1793): 459-60. Retrospektive Digitalisierung wissenschaftlicher Rezensionsorgane und Literaturzeitschriften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts aus dem deutschen Sprachraum. Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld 2000-2012. Online Database. 11 Aug. 2014. Aust, Hugo. Der historische Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. Print Barber, Malcolm. The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Print. Baysal Walsh, Melda. “Exotik, Erotik und Haremkultur: Zur GenderProblematik im deutschen Orientalismus des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.” Diss. University of Maryland, 2014. Web. Beaujean, Marion. Der Trivialroman in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die Ursprünge des modernen Unterhaltungsromans. Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1964. Print. Berman, Nina. German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000-1989. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Print. Blackwell, Jeannine. “Die verlorene Lehre der Benedikte Naubert.” Untersuchungen zum Roman von Frauen um 1800. Ed. Helga Gallas and Magdalene Heuser. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. 148-59. Print Bödeker, Hans Erich, Georg G. Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill. Introduction. Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Georg G. Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. 9-22. Print. Brown, Hilary. Benedikte Naubert. 1756-1819, and her Relations to English Culture. Leeds: Maney, 2005. Print. Bürger, Christa. Leben Schreiben: Die Klassik, die Romantik und der Ort der Frauen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Dorsch, Niklaus, ed. “Sich rettend aus der kalten Würklichkeit”: Die Briefe Benedikte Nauberts. Edition. Kritik. Kommentar. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Print.

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Gallas, Helga and Anita Runge. Romane und Erzählungen deutscher Schriftstellerinnen um 1800: Eine Bibliographie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993. Print. Gooch, G. P. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1959. Print. Hamnett, Brian. The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print. Henn, Marianne. „Frauen und geschichtliches Erzählen im 19.Jahrhundert. Von Benedikte Naubert zu Ricarda Huch. Eine (statistische) Auswertung.“ Geschichte(n)-Erzählen: Konstruktion von Vergangenheit in literarischen Werken deutschsprachiger Autorinnen seit dem 18.Jahrhundert. Ed. Marianne Henn, Irmela von der Lühe, and Anita Runge. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. 287-303. Print. Henn, Marianne, Paola Mayer, and Anita Runge. Afterword. Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen. By Benedikte Naubert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. 337-76. Print. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit.” Werke. Vol. 5.1 Ed. Wolfgang Pross. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002. Print. —. Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Trans. Frank E. Manuel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Print. Hilger, Stephanie. “Staging Islam: Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der prophet von Mekka.” Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805. Ed. Stephanie Hilger. New York: Rodopi, 2009. 91-118. Print. Hillard, K.F. “Orient und Mythos: Karoline von Günderrode.” Frauen: MitSprechen MitSchreiben. Ed. Marianne Henn and Britta Hufeisen. Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1997. 244-55. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographical Metafiction.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50. Print. Jarausch, Konrad. “The Institutionalization of History in 18th-Century Germany.” Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Georg G. Iggers, Jonathan B. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. 23-48. Print. Kontje, Todd. German Orientalisms. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Print. Kurth, Lieselotte E. “Historiographie und historischer Roman: Kritik und

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Theorie im 18. Jahrhundert.” Modern Language Notes 79.4 ( 1964): 337-62. Print. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Print. Lyons, Malcom Cameron and D.E.P. Jackson. Saladin: The Politics of the Holy War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Print. Maierhofer, Waltraud. Hexen—Huren—Heldenweiber: Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. Print. Marchand, Suzanne L. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. New York: Verso, 1998. Print. —. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New York: Verso, 2005. Print. Mühlberger, Günter and Karl Halbitzel. “The German Historical Novel from 1780 to 1945: Utilising the Innsbruck Database.” Trans. Manfred Nikolussi. Reisende durch Zeit. Der deutschsprachige Roman. Ed. Osman Duranni and Julian Preece. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 5-19. Print. Müllenbrock, Heinz-Joachim and Frauke Reitemeier. “Benedikte Naubert und Sir Walter Scott: Further Suggestions Towards a Genealogy of the Historical Novel.” The Corvey Library and Anglo-German Cultural Exchanges 1770-1837. Ed. Werner Huber. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004. 131-45. Print. Naubert, Benedikte. Friedrich der Siegreiche, Churfürst von der Pfalz: Der Marc Aurel des Mittelalters. Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1796. HathiTrust. Web. 8 Nov. 2013. —. Walter von Montbarry. Großmeister des Tempelordens. 2 Vols. Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1786. Bibliothek der deutschen Literatur. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1990-94: fiche 17286-17287. Oerke, Catharina. Gattungsexperiment und Ägyptenkonstruktion: Benedikte Nauberts Alme, oder, Egyptische Mährchen (1793-1797). Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2006. Print. Reitemeier, Frauke. Deutsch-englische Literaturbeziehungen: Der historische Roman Sir Walter Scotts und seine deutschen Vorläufer. Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001. Print. Runge, Anita. “Gattung und Geschlecht – Zusammengestellt von Anne Fleig und Helga Meise - Konstruktion von Geschichte und Geschlecht

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im Geschichtsroman von deutschsprachiger Autorinnen um 1800: Das Beispiel Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819).” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 29.2 (2005): 222-40. Print. —. Literarische Praxis von Frauen um 1800: Briefroman, Autobiographie, Märchen. New York: Olms, 1997. Print. —. “Schweizerische Geschichte in Familiengeschichte: Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg von Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819).” Familiengeschichten: Biographie und familiärer Kontext seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Christian von Zimmermann and Nina von Zimmermann. New York: Campus, 2008. 29-44. Print. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Print. Sauder, Gerhard. “Gefahren empfindsamer Vollkommenheit für Leserinnen und die Furcht vor Romanen in einer Damenbibliothek.” Leser und Lesen im 18. Jahrhundert: Colloquium der Arbeitsstelle Achtzehntes Jahrhundert, Gesamthochschule Wuppertal, Schloss Lüntenbeck, 24-26 Oktober, 1975. Ed. Rainer Gruenter. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1977. 83-91. Print. Scheibler, Victoria. Phantasie und Wirklichkeit: Benedikte Naubert im Spiegel ihrer späten Romane und Erzählungen (1802-1820). New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Print. Schindel, Carl Wilhelm Otto August von. “Naubert (Christiane Benedicte Eugenia).” Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Zweiter Theil. M-Z. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1825. 32-47. Google Books. Web. 1 Aug. 2014. Schön, Erich. “Weibliches Lesen: Romanleserinnen im späten 18. Jahrhundert.” Untersuchungen zum Roman von Frauen um 1800. Ed. Helga Gallas and Magdalene Heuser. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. 2040. Print. Schreinert, Kurt. Benedikte Naubert: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des historischen Romans in Deutschland. 1941. Nendeln: Kraus, 1969. Print. Schütz, Friedrich Karl Julius. “Benedikte Naubert.” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 36 (20 Feb. 1817): 290-94. Google Books. Web. 8 Aug. 2014. Solbrig, Ingeborg. “Die orientalische Muse Meletes: Zu den MohammedDichtung Karoline von Günderrodes.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 33 (1989): 299-322. Print. Syndram, Karl Ulrich. “Der erfundene Orient in der europäischen Literatur vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Europa und

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der Orient: 800-1900. Ed. Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik Budde. Berlin: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1989. 324-341. Print. Touaillon, Christine. Der deutsche Frauenroman des 18. Jahrhunderts. 1919. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1979. Print. Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2006. Print. Wilson, Daniel W. “Enlightenment Encounters the Islamic and Arabic Worlds: The German ‘Missing Link’ in Said’s Orientalist Narrative (Meiners and Herder).” Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture. Ed. James Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. 73-88. Print. —. Humanität und Kreuzzugsideologie um 1780: Die ‘Türkenoper’ im 18. Jahrhundert und das Rettungsmotiv in Wielands ‘Oberon,’ Lessings ‘Nathan’ und Goethes ‘Iphigenie’. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Print. Zantop, Susanne. Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Print. Ziolkowski, Theodore. Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Print.

CHAPTER TWO WILHELMINE CULTURE IN THE SHADOW OF THE PYRAMIDS: THE HISTORICAL NOVELS OF GEORG EBERS DANIELA RICHTER

Only very few popular German historical novels of the nineteenth century have survived to this day despite their immense popularity at that time.1 Even though the historical novel’s attracted impressive numbers of readers, literary critics were never very fond of the genre. Thus Hartmut Eggert terms the German historical novels part of the literary heritage that one is hesitant to show off (342). Although only very few novels are considered literary masterpieces, these novels are interesting in the broader cultural context of the time period. The Pharaonenroman ‘pharaonic novel’ represents an exception from the majority of nineteenth-century German historical novels. The Pharaonenroman, transported its readers back to ancient Egypt, whereas most other historical novels of the period clearly favored the Middle Ages, such as in Wilhelm Hauff’s Lichtenstein (1826). Ancient history was only featured if it included German ancestors, such as in Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (“A Struggle for Rome”; 1876). These periods were particularly attractive for the German middle classes striving towards national unity and seeking cultural roots of a united Germany (Eggert 342). The Pharaonenroman was moreover different than other historical novels, because it was written by professional historians, Egyptologists and archaeologists, and Georg Ebers (1837-1898) was its most famous proponent. About half of Ebers’ thirteen historical novels—most of them published in three or two volume editions between 1864 and 1897—are situated in ancient Egypt and were bestsellers at that time. Already his very first Egyptian novel reached 18 editions by 1900 and was widely translated. After 1877, Ebers published a new novel every year, which, due to the

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prominent role that romance played in the plot, quickly became a staple on teenage girls’ and young women’s Christmas wish lists.2 They were considered the female equivalent to the more masculine Karl May novels (Fischer 262; Marchand “Race” 211). Even though Ebers’ novels represent a link between academia and popular culture, these two fields appear separate within the novels themselves. Ebers’ romantic stories of pharaohs, princesses and morally upright warriors constitute the narrative, while historical explanations and scholarly references are restricted to the massive apparatus of foot- and endnotes accompanying each of his novels. Believing in educating his readership, Ebers scrupulously and continually updated his footnotes throughout the various editions of his novels to always reflect the newest state of research (Salama 231; Fischer 359). This phase in which historians, like Ebers, felt deeply invested in communicating their insights to a general audience is short-lived. This sense of communal service is apparent only in this first generation of German Egyptologists consisting of Richard Lepsius (1810-1884), the founder of German Egyptology, Ebers himself and Heinrich Brugsch (1827-1894). Besides their academic writings, all three men published a wide variety of non-academic texts, such as travel reports, massive illustrated coffee table books showcasing the monuments of Egypt, and travel guides; Ebers wrote the first Baedeker guide book on Egypt. Ebers is special by being the only one to write historical fiction. Historian Stefan Berger points out that this was only a brief trend and by 1900 there appeared a clear division between professional and popular historiography, with representatives of the first group showing open disdain for these academics who would straddle both spheres (18).3 Closer attention to the Pharaonenroman is also warranted because of the special role which archaeology played in the Wilhelmine era. In contrast to Britain, where archeology was largely funded by private individuals—see Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon—this development was driven and financed in Germany by the Prussian king and later the German emperor. German archaeology under Emperor Wilhelm II therefore seems “a profession . . . deeply indebted to the nationalist exhibitionism that accompanied the founding of the Second Reich” (Marchand “Kulturpolitik” 300). It became another area in which Germany wished to rival France and Britain. This deep connection between archaeology and national politics, remained intact into the early twentieth century, as a 1902 letter by Baron von Wangenheim, a high ranking diplomat serving at the Sublime Port, shows:

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The idea of Germany’s gradual spiritual conquest of Asia Minor is thoroughly sound and capable of development. The interim intellectual goals already pursued, or to be pursued, by our schools, our doctors, and our archaeologists could very well become, in the course of time, the crystallization point onto which German economic and colonizing undertakings are grafted (qtd. in Marchand “Kulturpolitik” 318).4

Maybe it was precisely this close connection between national and international politics, and national archaeology projects that prompted these early archaeologists to widely disseminate their knowledge and newly acquired artifacts. They saw themselves as being in the service of the German nation and not just their academic field. Following Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, German philologists, first among them at that time, Richard Lepsius, began turning their attention towards hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian culture. Until that moment, ancient Egypt had always remained mystical and its longstanding association with “esoteric and pre- or non-biblical wisdom” had made it a favorite repository for non-Christian believes and all sorts of cult movements (Marchand Orientalism 195). From the beginning, German Egyptologists, in contrast to the earlier philologists, did not rely solely on ancient texts but were now funded by the Prussian state to travel to Egypt to bring back large amounts of artifacts to stock the museum collections at home. This was perceived by both the archaeologists and the state as a valuable demonstration of Germany’s prowess on the international stage.5 In this essay, I want to explore Ebers’ Pharaonenroman as a cultural product bridging professional scholarship and popular culture. Focusing especially on Ebers’ second novel Uarda: Historischer Roman aus dem alten Ägypten (Uarda: Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt, 1877), I want to take a closer look at how Egyptian history functions in the novel. How does Ebers connect it to Germany in the late nineteenth-century? My analysis thus focuses on the political context of the novel, especially the portrayal of the ruler, and the issue of religion. To contextualize my argument, I will begin by offering some background information on the author, the general conception of the Orient within German nineteenthcentury popular culture and the critical reception of the Pharaonenroman as exemplified by Ebers.

Ebers, the Egyptologist and Writer In 1837 Georg Moritz Ebers was born in Berlin as the youngest of five siblings into an affluent family of bankers and porcelain manufacturers.6 In 1828, Ebers’ father had converted from Judaism to the Lutheran faith.

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He committed suicide shortly before Ebers was born, leaving his mother to raise the five children on her own. Ebers’ mother, a native of Rotterdam, was famous in Berlin for her salon, where members of the intelligentsia, among them Hegel, the Grimm brothers, and Alexander von Humboldt gathered regularly. Ebers initially studied philosophy and law at Göttingen, but after just one semester, in 1858, he suffered a serious infection, which kept him bedridden for several years. During this period, Jacob Grimm persuaded Richard Lepsius to tutor Ebers at home, where he now wanted to pursue his interest in Egyptology.7 Lepsius, who had led Germany’s first expeditions to Egypt, was at this time professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin and also in charge of the Neues Museum. Jacob Grimm outlined for Ebers a curriculum consisting of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Italian, English and Hebrew, which would prepare him for a career in Egyptology. It is important to note that the field as such did not have a standardized curriculum yet and thus still shows its close ties to philological studies. As his health improved, Ebers was able to occasionally attend Lepsius’ lectures at the university and completed his dissertation in 1862. The following year brought a trip to Leiden, which together with Paris and Turin was a point of attraction because of its papyri collection. It is important to note here, that at this point papyrus artifacts reigned supreme in Egyptology, meaning that text-based scholarship was dominant in this field, not the study of architecture, sculptures or objects of daily life. 8 In the beginning, reliance on the original ancient Egyptian texts was so scant, that they were considered credible sources only if they agreed with classical Greek and Latin sources and the Bible (Marchand Orientalism 203). It might surprise us today to see the Bible mentioned in this context, but during Ebers’ time Biblical studies leaned heavily into a historical direction (Marchand German Orientalism 194). It is therefore not surprising that Ebers’ first scholarly work, Aegypten und die Bücher Moses (Egypt and the Books of Moses), was a commentary on the book of Genesis as seen from the standpoint of Egyptology. Ebers began his academic career in Jena and one year later moved on to Leipzig where he attained a full professorship in 1875. There, he established himself in the field by acquiring and in 1874 translating the Ebers papyrus, a medical document dating back to the 16th century BC. Even though Egyptology was rarely pursued as a major by students, lectures in those fields were widely popular and well attended. This required scholars, like Ebers, to engage with their subject in more creative ways and to make it thus more accessible and attractive to a non-specialist

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audience. Ebers’ non-academic writing has to be seen as part of this effort to widely disseminate knowledge of both ancient Egypt and the existence of the field of Egyptology as such. Following his two journeys to Egypt, the first in 1869/70, where he attended the festivities celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal, and the second in 1872/73, Ebers published travel reports and guides, such as Durch Gosen zum Sinai (Through Gosen to the Sinai, 1872) and the Baedeker guide to Egypt, which he wrote on his second journey. In contrast to his fellow Egyptologists, Ebers also wrote historical fiction. He began writing his first novel during the time of his illness. Eine ägyptische Königstochter (An Egyptian Princess) was thus published in 1864. It was immensely successful, had reached its 18th edition by 1900 and was translated into fourteen languages (Marchand Orientalism 204). Despite this great success, Eber did not write his second novel, Uarda, until 1877, a time when he was again forced to stay at home because of health problems. This novel also became a bestseller and had sold 65 000 copies by 1926 (Marchand “Popularizing” 182). Ever since the publication of Uarda, Ebers continued writing novels at regular intervals, with one work appearing every year from then on until 1897. As mentioned earlier, each of the novels featured extensive footnotes, which generally enhance the descriptive and visual nature of the text, as Kathrin Maurer suggests (“Footnoting” 53). It is interesting to see that, that whereas the footnotes in Eine ägyptische Prinzessin are mostly based on Herodot and other classical sources, the footnotes in Uarda are based on original Egyptian texts and Ebers’ personal impressions gathered during his travels to Egypt. This signals a major shift within the field of Egyptology away from second-hand information and towards a greater reliance on authentic Egyptian sources. Ebers’ novels were all published by Eduard Hallberger, who also published the popular illustrated weekly magazine Über Land und Meer (Across Land and Sea, 1858-1923), which also featured texts by writers such as Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Fontane, Karl May and Paul Heyse. Despite his great interest in educating his readers, Ebers tends to sacrifice historical chronology and veracity in order to realize his own artistic visions (Salama 218). His Pharaonenromane all center on a romantic plot often involving characters not directly based on actual historical persons. In 1888, Ebers was forced by his deteriorating health to retire prematurely to his estate in Tutzing, near Munich, where continued his career in fiction writing for another ten years until his death in 1898.

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The Popular Orient in Nineteenth-Century Germany Despite the valid scholarly information conveyed in his novels, Ebers’ works of fiction are also a manifestation of the popular Orientalism in nineteenth-century Germany. As already pointed out earlier, archaeology at that time was permeable towards both popular and academic influences. One example of this is the use of media made by archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) in the depiction of his excavations. Through his use of film, photography, and up-to-date newspaper reporting Schliemann cleverly crafted the legend of the amateur archaeologist who defied the established academics and who succeeded in discovering the site of ancient Troy, with only his copy of Homer’s Illiad in hand.9 Nineteenth-century museums and their exhibits represent another nexus of academic archaeology and the realm of popular spectacle. In contrast to the neutral conception of exhibition space today, Richard Lepsius designed the Neue Museum in Berlin in a way that recreated the original ancient Egyptian monuments: The courtyard was modeled on the innermost room of the Ramesseum, the funerary temple of Ramses II on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes, and views of Egyptian architecture were painted on the walls. Colossal Egyptian sculptures were displayed in these imposing surroundings, to the extent that it was impossible for a layman to tell the difference between originals and copies (Haslauer 86).10

Such visual reconstructions are contrary to our understanding of history today, which emphasizes the original artifact over any conjectures about the former look of the surrounding edifices.11 What strikes us today as kitschy and historically doubtful, was then considered part of scholarly practice. Within nineteenth-century literature the Orient emerged in the German-speaking area with the 1824 translation of the Die Märchen aus 1001 Nacht (Arabian Nights) and other Oriental fairy tales by Wilhelm Hauff. Ancient Egypt in particular, was featured prominently not only in literature, but also in music since the late eighteenth century for example in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791) and then later in the opera Aida, which Verdi composed for the opening of the Suezcanal in 1869. It is however through various forms of visual depictions that ancient Egypt was presented to the general population in Germany. Before 1822, when Champollion deciphered the Rossetta stone, any insight into ancient Egypt had been solely based on visual representations of Egypt’s

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monuments, temples, and pyramids (Salama 203). It is therefore not surprising that ancient Egypt influenced material culture mostly through its look, prompting what some term Egyptomania in the design of furniture, porcelain, and general interior design, as well as fashion, architecture and the advertising posters for products like cigarettes and coffee.12 On the performative side were the so-called Völkerschauen organized by Carl Hagenbeck, the founder of the Hamburg Zoo. The Völkerschauen were akin to traveling circus groups, which consisted of members of foreign ethnicities, often tribal groups from Africa or the Middle East. As Marchand remarks, all these various representations of the Orient focused mainly on the “decorative, picturesque, exotic and sensuous Orient, one of costumes, colors, weapons and exotic animals” (“Popularizing” 180).

The Reception of Georg Ebers’ Novels Then and Now Despite the general excitement in the late nineteenth century about anything archaeological and Egyptian, the reception of Ebers’ novels was both negative and positive. Within the ranks of his Egyptologist colleagues, Ebers was praised for his service to the discipline. His obituary in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde (Journal for the Egyptian Language and History) put Ebers’ academic work on par with his efforts at making Egyptology accessible to the general public: Denn was er neben der eigentlichen gelehrten Arbeit durch sein persönliches Wirken geleistet hat, das hat nicht weniger die Wissenschaft gefördert als diese. . . . Denn er sah das Altherthum nicht an als ein Trümmerfeld, dessen einzelne Steine und Mauern wir zu messen und zu beschreiben haben, sondern ihn ließ die schöne dichterische Phantasie, die ihm gegeben war, statt der traurigen Reste die alte Herrlichkeit wieder in Glanz und Leben schauen. (Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 141). What he accomplished through his personal activities besides his actual scholarly work, has not served science in any lesser way … For he did not see the ancient past as a heap of rubble, which we have to measure and describe, but instead his own poetic imagination, a true gift, allowed him to see again the old glory in all its beauty and vitality beyond the sad remains.

As grateful as the scientific community was for Ebers’ service, the younger generation, for example his own doctoral student Adolf Erman, would not see his fictional writing in such a positive light. Erman differed

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from Lepsius and Brugsch both in his scholarly approach (he completely rearranged Lepsius’ museum exhibition) as well as in his approach to popular outreach. To him Ebers’ fiction presented the reader with “inauthentic and prettified” versions of the original inhabitants of ancient Egypt (Marchand “Race and Religion” 224). He did however concede that Ebers’ works might at that time have been the only way to introduce German readers to this subject matter, since “one has to ask oneself, if the public would have found them [ancient Egyptians] so attractive, if he had left about them the smell of the Orient” (Marchand “Race and Religion” 224). Erman interpreted his pedagogical role differently and, instead of writing historical fiction, he rewrote the standard school textbooks on the topic of ancient Egypt. Egyptology had become an established discipline for which historical fiction was no longer an adequate instrument of pedagogy. Within late nineteenth-century literary circles, Ebers’ novels and the genre of the Professoren/Pharaonenroman in general, were openly attacked. The criticism revolved around the lack of sensitive treatment of historical material especially as far as the conceptualization of the novel’s characters is concerned. Taking the example of Uarda and its main characters, literary critic Rudolf von Gottschall states: Solche ideale Naturen, wie jener ägyptische Faust und die hochgesinnte Prinzessin können unmöglich in einer geistigen Stickluft gedeihen, die der Dichter uns sonst aus allen seinen wissenschaftlichen Hilfsmitteln chemisch analysirt hat . . . Auch der Materialist Nebsecht entwickelt so moderne Anschauungen, als wäre er bei Büchner und Moleschott in die Schule gegangen. Dergleichen ist doch auf keinem Papyrus zu lesen. (50) Such ideal characters, as this Egyptian Faust and the high-minded princess could hardly flourish in such stuffy air as the one which the author has analyzed for us in microbial detail with the assistance of all his scientific instruments . . . Also the materialist Nebsecht, who develops such modern views as if he had attended lectures with Büchner and Moleschott. None of this can be read on any papyrus.

The one positive representative of the archaeological novel for Rudolf von Gottschall is Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) where the focus is on the depiction of the age and culture rather than on the characters (41). Otto Kraus is another contemporary critic of Georg Ebers. His review, which in 1884 appeared in the series Zeitfragen des christlichen Volklebens (Timely Questions of Christian Popular Life), addresses the Professorenroman in general, but really only discusses Ebers, which

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shows Ebers’ prominent status in regard to the genre. He denigrates Ebers’ novels as part of trendy literature popular with the “ungezählten, urtheilslosen, oberflächlichen Masse unterhaltungsgieriger Lesern” (“the numerous, superficial masses of readers who lack any judgement and are greedy for entertainment”; 6). He also criticizes Ebers for using ancient Egyptian culture and history merely as a backdrop: “Wenn der Roman also 528 vor Christus beginnt und in Egypten, Persien und Kleinasien spielt, so kann man getrost an das Jahr 1864 und an Deutschland denken” (“If the novel begins in 528 BC and takes place in Egypt, Persia or Asia Minor, one can really think of 1864 and Germany”; 8). Given the title of the series, it is not surprising that Kraus’ main criticism against Ebers, is his liberal conception of the different religious denominations: “Man erhält den Eindruck bei Ebers: gute Menschen hat es zu allen Zeiten und bei allen Völkern gegeben. Daß aber die Zeiten vor der Erscheinung des Sohnes Gottes im schneidensten Gegensatz zu der Zeit seit der Geburt des Sohnes David stehen, davon merkt man bei ihm nichts” (“With Ebers, one gets the impression that good people have existed at all times and among all peoples. But the fact is completely lost, that the time before the appearance of the Son of God stands in the starkest contrast to the time since the birth of the Son of David”; 12). Marchand on the other hand praises Ebers’ liberal mindset, which allows him to positively portray all kinds of religious convictions no matter if Christian, Judaic or ancient Egyptian polytheism. She values Ebers for his “genial and patient commitment … to battle prejudices in their own, nonconfrontational way” (212). He is a laudable exception within a scholarly field which, because of its close ties to Biblical and theological studies, was at this time still ridden with anti-Semitic tendencies. In the various forewords to his works, Ebers himself responded to critics such as von Gottschall or Krause. In regard to his protagonists, Ebers states “hier wird mancher Anachronismus mir unterlaufen, wird Vieles modern erscheinen und die Färbung unserer christlichen Empfindungsweise zeigen” (“some anachronisms will creep in, many things will appear modern and will show the color of our Christian mentality”; Uarda viii). In general, Ebers appears rather unconcerned by the criticism his fictional work received and which was often leveled against him as an Egyptologist. His main goal was “todtes Wissensmaterial für mich und Andere “lebig” zu machen” (“to make dead scientific material come alive for myself and others”; Eine ägyptische Königstochter 232). In regard to the relationship between historiography and historical fiction, Ebers remarks in a foreword:

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Chapter Two Der historische Roman soll wie jedes andere Kunstwerk zunächst genossen werden. Niemand nehme in die Hand, um aus ihm Geschichte zu erlernen; aber viele Leser, das ist der Wunsch des Autors, mögen sich durch sein Werk zu eigener Forschung, der die Anmerkungen den Weg weisen sollen, anregen lassen (Eine ägyptische Königstochter 238). The historical novel, like any other work of art, should first and foremost be enjoyed. Nobody should reach for it in order to study history; but many readers may, that is the author’s wish, be inspired to pursue further studies on their own, to which the footnotes may lead the way.

He freely admits to using the historical material rather loosely as “den Denkmälern nachgebildete Kostüm” (“costums designed on the basis of the monuments”; Uarda ix). But it is the inner life of his characters that is of greater importance to him, therein lies the story he wants to tell (ix).13 Ebers’ reception among scholars today is mixed as well. Those scholars and critics interested in canonical literature, do not see much value in both the genre of the Professorenroman and Ebers’ work in particular. Hartmut Eggert even goes so far as to see them as signs of an age that has lost its orientation: Diese Werke zeigen nicht nur an, wie sehr der ‘Humus’ aufgebraucht war, aus dem der historische Roman sein üppig wucherndes, aber nährstoffarmes Leben bezogen hatte, sondern sie signalisieren die Zerstörung geschichtlichen Bewuȕtseins und eine Orientierungslosigkeit in der Gegenwart. (352) These works do not only indicate how much the rich soil had been used up, from which the historical novel had drawn its wildly growing, but hardly substantive existence, instead they signal the destruction of any historical consciousness and the lack of orientation in the present time.

Apart from such scathing criticism, there are signs for a more favorable scholarly engagement with works of popular historical fiction in general. The extreme popularity of contemporary historical fiction, has resulted in some insightful articles such as as Silke Göttsch-Elten’s piece on Tanja Kinkel’s novel Die Puppenspieler. Göttsch-Elten embraces criticism’s dictum that these works of popular fiction do not deliver an authentic historical portrayal of persons or historical periods. Instead she highlights the way in which historical data is reframed and intermeshed with fictional elements in order to make the historical plot accessible for a general readership (213). Most scholars, who turn to Ebers and his fiction today, view him in the context of cultural studies rather than literary aesthetics. These scholars

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take a neutral view in regard to the novels’ literary quality and instead focus on their social impact and the tenuous relationship between historiography and fiction. Hans Fischer’s monograph on Georg Ebers is focused more on Ebers’ two-fold role as novelist and archaeologist and the connection between the two. His view of the Professorenroman as “unterhaltsamen kulturgeschichtlichen Kompendium und damit . . . [ein] Bildungsinstrument für den Leser” (“an entertaining cultural-historical collection . . . [an] educational instrument for the reader”; 262) is in line with Ebers’ own thoughts on the subject. The 2007 article by Dalia Salama takes a closer look at the way in which Ebers fictionalized historical data. She concludes that the historical period provides a setting in which Ebers reflects problems and issues of his own time period (231). Moustafa Maher compares Ebers’ pharaonic novels to those of Egyptian author Naguib Machfus (1911-2006) without really reflecting on Ebers’ perspective in greater detail. The most recent scholarly work on Ebers is by historian Suzanne Marchand, who focuses on Ebers’ depiction of racial and religious stereotypes in her 2013 article. Coming from a historical rather than a literary angle, she highlights Ebers’ liberal standpoint as transcending the stereotyping tendencies inherent in philological scholarship at the time, which were not necessarily due to the individual scholar’s personal prejudices, but more reflective of the prejudices already inherent in the ancient source material (Marchand “Race” 212).

Georg Ebers’ Novel Uarda: Wilhelminian Idealism and Anti-Catholicism Uarda was Ebert’s second novel and was published in 1877. The novel was an immediate success and, like his first novel, it was later turned into a play/ballet, which premiered at the newly opened Victoria-Theatre in Berlin (Fischer 388).14 Uarda is the only novel by Ebers whose plot is situated at the time of the New Kingdom, in the thirteenth century BC, and thus free from the Greek and Roman cultural influences so typical of his other Egyptian novels.15 This general preference for the time period around the demise of ancient Egypt, when its culture is already heavily influenced by its Greek and Roman invaders, is a pedagogical choice on Ebers’ part as he explains in his foreword to his first novel: Habe ich schon in der ersten Auflage meinen dem Herodot entnommenen Stoff so disponiert, daß ich den Leser zunächst, gleichsam einleitend, in einen griechischen Kreis führe, dessen Wesen ihm nicht ganz fremd zu

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Chapter Two sein pflegt . . . Durch diesen hellenischen Vorhof gelangt er vorbereitet nach Aegypten. (Eine ägyptische Königstochter 77) In my first edition I already arranged my plot, which is based on Herodotus, to lead my reader into a Greek context, whose nature should not be foreign to him. … Through this Hellenic antechamber does he, thus prepared, reach Egypt.16

In contrast to Ebers’ other novels, Uarda is not solely based on Greek or Roman historical sources, but on a heroic epic poem by the scribe Penta-our, which celebrates Ramses II’s miraculous victory in the Battle of Qadesh (Syria). This poem had been transmitted on a papyrus known as Papyrus Sallier III and was first translated in 1856 by Emmanuel de Rougé (Fischer 283).17 Besides this original Egyptian text source, Ebers also explains in the foreword that the novel was based on his travels in Egypt and the impressions he gathered there (vii). The plot of Uarda centers on two young protagonists, the priest and poet Pentaur and Princess Bent-Anat, the favorite daughter of Ramses. The character of Pentaur only takes his name from a documented historical figure, about whom little else is known. The character of BentAnat is based on Ramses II’s favorite daughter, about whom there exist both textual references as well as relief depictions.18 In addition, the novel involves a large cast of characters showing the wide spectrum of ancient Egyptian social groups, from royalty, the priestly caste, and physicians to embalmers, the lowest of the low. The plot features several intertwining plots all culminating in the romantic plot line around Bent-Anat and Pentaur. The prominent and famous figure of Ramses II is however relegated to a secondary position. Just looking at the basic plot of Uarda, one can detect some key aspects of the historical novel as outlined by Georg Lukács in his seminal 1937 work Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel). One of the central aspects of Lukács’ theory is the concept of the protagonist as a middle hero, someone who has access to and sympathizes with the conflicting parties of characters (292). In the case of Ebers’ novel, the main protagonist is the priest Pentaur, who, translated into the Wilhelmine context, would constitute a member of the Bildungsbürgertum ‘educated middle class’. As the true middle hero, Pentaur stands between the priestly caste and the royal family, and even though he is not in a dominant position until the very end, he is instrumental in bringing about social and political change. Another key element in Lukács’ theory is the depiction of class struggle as driving momentum in human progress (291). In Uarda, social

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struggle takes place among the various social groups, such as the priests, the royal family and their subjects. This novel ends with Pentaur, the progressively thinking and highly educated middle hero, who is able to bridge the conflicts between the various factions, taking over political power, which implies an improvement in the country’s general political, social and moral situation. Ebers situates the plot of Uarda during the reign of Ramses II, who ruled for 66 years from 1279 until 1213 BC (Tignor 70). Ramses is considered a well-documented pharaoh in Egyptian history, whose reign was marked by aggressive expansionism, which led to numerous wars against neighboring communities and states. Under Ramses’ rule, Egypt’s boundaries were pushed far to the East and South. His countless victories were documented, and celebrated on the walls of the many monuments and temples he built during his reign. His temples at Abu Simbel, Karnak, Luxor, Medinet Habu, and the Ramesseum give ample testimony about to this period of Egyptian political and cultural dominance in the region. As chronologically remote as it was, the way Ebers describes this period in his novel, makes it appear quite relatable to nineteenth-century Germans. As Göttsch-Elten claims, “Geschichte ist nicht mehr und nicht weniger als aus der Gegenwart gedeutete Vergangenheit” (“History is nothing more and nothing less than the past interpreted from the perspective of the present”; 213). The same is true for Ebers’ Egyptian novels. Fischer outlines some of these parallels, such as the conflict between the priests and pharaoh, which parallels Bismarck’s Kulturkampf ‘culture struggle.’ Another parallel would be the social struggle in ancient Egypt and the rising conflicts of the working class in industrial Germany (Fischer 378). Even the immense rate at which monuments, temples and obelisks were erected to celebrate and commemorate Ramses and his political and military power, is something that nineteenth-century readers could identify with. In his From Monuments to Traces, Rudy Koshar portrays the late nineteenth century as extremely productive in terms of the national monuments that were built, of which two thirds were dedicated to Bismarck and Emperor William I. This public (self)veneration of the ruler and the ruling elite is something that Ebers’ readers could have viewed in a positive way, seeing it as an act of rooting their period’s enthusiasm for national monuments within ancient tradition. I do not believe that the choice of Ramses’ reign as the setting for Ebers’ novel is coincidental. At the dawn of the German empire, Ebers writes about Ramses II, a pharaoh known not only for his military prowess, but for his ability to foster a period unrivaled for its cultural flourishing. Ramses created a stable and unified state after a period of

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religious and political division. Culturally this was a time when Egypt developed an intellectual and artistic culture independent of the heretofore strict censorship of the priests (Tignor 60), a secular age so to speak similar to what Ebers saw developing in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Germany had undergone severe political unrest in the first half of the nineteenth century culminating in the failed March Revolutions of 1848 and had led several military campaigns against the AustroHungarian Empire and then France, which redefined its borders. Internally the German Empire marked a new beginning as being a constitutional monarchy, which together with the introduction of voting rights—albeit not extending to every member of the population—somewhat relaxed the political tensions of the previous decades. Berlin’s increase in cultural stature as the new capitol city parallels Ramses’ reinstatement of Thebes as Egypt’s capitol. Interestingly, Ebers chooses to depict Egypt not in the fullness of its power, but at its onset. The novel ends with Ramses defeating his various adversaries—consisting of political competitors and the stringent priestly caste—and thus preparing the path towards the flourishing of Egyptian culture for which his reign would be later known. The focus is shifted from Ramses the conqueror towards Ramses, the peace maker, winning the battle against the Hittites with whom he signs a treaty afterwards, (Grimal 257). War is not glorified in the novel and Ebers has one of the characters criticize Ramses: “‘Spender des Lebens’ nennt er sich. Nun ja! Er weiȕ Neues zu schaffen; ‘Wittwen’ meine ich, denn die Männer läȕt er hinschlachten.” (“‘Giver of Life’ he calls himself. How now! He does indeed know how to create new things; widows, I mean, since he has the men butchered”; Uarda 165). The human cost of war is thus strongly emphasized throughout the novel. In order to emphasize Ramses’ role as peacemaker, Ebers manipulates historical data. In Ebers’ novel the peace treaty with the Hittites follows immediately after the Battle of Qadesh, whereas in reality, there are sixteen years and additional wars between these two events (Fischer 283). One can detect parallels to Germany at Ebers’ time, with the FrancoPrussian War of 1870 and the battle of Königsgrätz in 1866. At the end of the novel, Ebers creates an ideal vision of the state following a course of peaceful growth with a benign and wise father-figure at the helm. Ebers also lets Ramses articulate his own understanding of leadership, which interestingly enough, sounds rather middle-class with its emphasis on hard work:

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Sie nennen mich einen Gott . . . aber nur in dem Einen fühl’ ich mich wahrhaft göttlich, daȕ ich mich zu jeder Stunde im gröȕten Maȕstabe durch meine Arbeit nützlich erweisen vermag, hier hemmend, dort fördernd. Gottähnlich bin ich allein, weil ich Groȕes wirke und schaffe. (Uarda 2: 87) They call me a god . . . but only in one thing do I feel truly god-like, that is when I am at every hour able to be highly useful through my work. In one instance I am preventing something, in another I am supporting. I am only god-like, because I create and accomplish great things.

Ebers also has Ramses outline his vision of the state as he speaks to his sons and heirs: Das Getriebe des Staates gleicht den ineinandergreifenden Rädern, die ein Schöpfwerk im Nil treiben. Wenn Eines versagt, so kommt das Ganze zum Stillstand . . . Ein Jeder von euch, das behaltet im Sinn, ist ein Hauptrad im Kunstgetriebe des Staates und kann nur nützen, wenn er den leitenden Mächten sich widerstandlos fügt. (Uarda 3: 204) The mechanism of the state is similar to the interlocking cogs of a water wheel at the Nile. If one fails, everything comes to a halt . . . Every one of you, that you must remember, is a main cog in the artful mechanism of the state and can only be useful, if yielding to the leading powers without resistance.

It appears doubtful that Ramses II harbored such progressive democratic ideals or ever thought of himself as part of anything as mundane as a water wheel. Yet, the passages are remarkable because they indicate Ebers’ vision of what a just monarch should be. Not only the more obvious fact of his vision of the state as dependent on a variety of political and social agents which form a complex system of interlocking cogs and wheels, but even the fact that Ramses is portrayed as a father giving advice is something that a nineteenth-century reader would have found both appealing and familiar, given the prevalence of father-, as well as, mother-figures in German nationalist fiction at that time as exemplified by Brent Peterson’s analysis of novels depicting Prussian Queen Louisa. The novel ends with Ramses fulfilling his own advice, by preparing a new age of peace after having gathered glory and fame in warfare and relinquishing the throne to the next generation, symbolized by the figure of Pentaur. This new generation to which Pentaur, but also the physician Nebsecht, belong, is marked by a sense of feeling torn in ways that we do not see in Ramses and his peers. Particularly through the character of the

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physician Nebsecht the juxtaposition between science and religious faith is articulated. For the physician, science is the new religion. Ebers presents a nuanced discussion of religion by way of his three prominent characters, Pentaur, Nebsecht and Ameni, who personify three different mindsets in regard to religion. Ameni is the high priest of the temple and his role in Ramses’ realm resembles that of a Catholic pope. Nebsecht is a physician—Ebers explains that the medical profession and the priesthood went hand in hand at that time—and represents the atheist mindset, solely relying on scientific insights. Finally, Pentaur the poet, is the young protagonist of the novel and Ameni’s favorite student. He is being groomed by Ameni to be the next high priest. Through these three different characters, Ebers illustrates and negotiates different perspectives on the role of faith not such much during the time of Ramses II, but rather the late nineteenth century. It is hard to miss the parallels to Catholic culture in Ebers’ depiction of the Egyptian priests. One dominant aspect of nineteenth-century religious life in Germany was the Kulturkampf during which Bismarck curtailed the influence of the Catholic Church in social and political matters, and which initiated a general campaign against everything Catholic. Ebers appears to share these anti-Catholic sentiments, which becomes apparent in his negative character depiction of the high priest Ameni. He is a character who sees faith solely as a means to gain and exercise social and political power: “Sein Lebensideal, die unbeschränkte Herrschaft der priesterlichen Idee über die Geister und der Priesterschaft selbst über den König” (“His goal in life was the unlimited rule of the priests over the minds and the community of priests themselves, even over the king”; Uarda 1: 136). What Ameni fears is an uprising of the lower social classes (22) and he uses the priesthood as a way to limit general access to knowledge: “Das Wissen zu hüten als der Eingeweihten ausschließliches Eigenthum” (“To guard the knowledge as something which only the initiated possess”; Uarda 1: 27). This emphasis on knowledge as liberating and empowering is another notion of post-Enlightenment Germany rather than ancient Egypt. Ebers’ critical comment on the mediating role of the priest in Catholicism portrays the priest as someone who consciously withholds knowledge from the general public in order to stabilize his own dominant position. This kind of negative depiction echoes what historian Thomas Nipperdey describes as the typical anti-clerical discourse in nineteenthcentury Germany, which regarded all member of the clergy as “the cement for a damnable status quo, the enemies of freedom and emancipation” (391).

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The characters of Nebsecht, the physician, and Pentaur, the young priest and poet, are by far more favorably drawn. Both characters symbolize the next generation, the harbingers of progressive thought. Both are members of the intelligentsia and initially take pride in this position to the point of arrogance. The physician repeatedly refers to the lower classes as “Sinnenmenschen” ‘sensual beings’ and “Thiere mit Bewußtsein!” ‘animals equipped with consciousness’ (Uarda 2:6). Pentaur „stellte den gemeinen Mann . . . tief unter die nach geistigen Zielen strebenden Standesgenossen” (“put the common man ... far below those peers who are striving for intellectual goals”; Uarda 1: 80). This mindset, which relies solely on man’s intellectual capacities as a way of reaching one’s full potential, is part of nineteenth-century German social culture, which Nipperdey describes as Bildungsreligion (389). Its influence is apparent in the theories of Ludwig Feuerbach, who viewed religion as “man’s basic need . . . to relate to himself” (Nipperdey 392). Whereas both Nebsecht and Pentaur are united by their general belief in Selbstverwirklichung ‘self-fufillment’, there are definitive differences in both characters’ perspectives on spirituality and faith. For the physician, faith is directly opposed to knowledge. For him, religion is equal to superstition, and it only hinders his thirst for knowledge. He is not afraid to commission the stealing of a human heart from a body at the embalmers’ hall. This violates the belief of the ancient Egyptians that the body be buried with its vital organs intact, otherwise its afterlife would be forfeited. But Nebsecht only cares about the chance to gain more insight into the human heart by dissecting the actual organ: “Mich kümmert es nicht . . . ob das, was ich beobachte, gut oder schlecht, schön oder häßlich, nützlich oder unnütz erscheint, ich will nur wissen, wie es ist, weiter nichts” (“I do not care ...if that which I am observing is good or evil, beautiful or ugly, useful or useless, I only want to know how it is and nothing more”; Uarda 2: 162). In Germany, this perspective gained momentum in late nineteenth-century, when, as Nipperdey suggests, “science became the new measure, even in the search for meaning and happiness. The path of science was the path of truth, of freedom and humanity; reason took the place of religion” (393). Ebers, however, problematizes this particular way of thinking confronting the character of the physician with two major crises, love and death. Nebsecht, who prizes rationality and intellect above all, is thrown into an existential crisis as he falls in love: Das Thier in mir, die gemeinen Triebe, deren Träger das Herz ist, das mir die Brust an ihrem Lager zersprengte, die haben die anderen feinen und reinen Regungen hier, hier in diesem Hirn überwuchert und an der

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Chapter Two Schwelle des Augenblicks, in dem ich wissend zu werden hoffe wie der Gott, den ihr den Fürsten alles Wissens heißt, muß ich erfahren, daß das Thier in mir stärker ist, als das, was ich meinen Gott nenne (Uarda 2: 31). The animal within me, the common urges, whose place is in the heart, which is about to explode within my chest, these urges have overpowered the other finer and purer sentiments here in my brain. At the threshold of the moment in which I was hoping to become all-knowing as the god, whom you call the prince of all knowledge, I have to make the experience that the animal within me is stronger than that which I had called my god.

For the intellectual Nebsecht love is a curse, because he sees it as distraction from his true pursuits. He feels that love reduces him, puts him on the same level as everyone else, robs him of his special status (Uarda 3: 226). The ultimate crisis however is death. As he dies at the end of the novel, Nebsecht’s overreliance on his own intellectual capabilities fail and he is left without comfort and direction: “Lebe wohl, Freund. Die Reise beginnt; wer weiß wohin?” (“Farewell, friend. The journey begins; who knows where it is going?”; Uarda 3: 227). Ameni and Nebsecht represent the extreme opposites on the issue of faith. It is the character of Pentaur, the artist, who provides a compromise for this dilemma with his more nuanced conception of religious faith. In this regard as well as in the social position he inhabits in the plot, Pentaur represents the middle hero which Eggert describes as having evolved from Scott’s initial paradigm: In zahlreichen historischen Romanen nach der Jahrhundertmitte hat sich der ehemals mittlere-mittelmäȕige Held zu einem parteiergreifenden Idol verwandelt, der ein verläȕlicher und selbstbewuȕter Untertan seines jeweiligen Souveräns ist. Darüber hinaus ist er mit einem Ensemble fester Merkmale ausgestattet: überzeugter Patriotismus, der zum Orientierungsmaȕstab seines Handelns wird; persönliche Tüchtigkeit; weitgehende wirtschaftliche Unabhängigkeit, die aber wiederum nicht so groȕ ist, daȕ sie politische Macht bedeutet; Bewuȕtsein des eigenen Wertes bei genauer Beachtung der Standesunterschiede; seelische und intellektuelle Unkompliziertheit, die eine naïve menschliche Verbundenheit mit der höher gestellten, geschichtlichen Persönlichkeit, deren Vertrauen er erwirbt, ermöglicht. (345) In numerous historical novels from the middle of the nineteenth century, the former middle-mediocre hero has evolved into a protagonist who takes sides, who is a reliable and self-confident subject to his respective ruler. Furthermore, he is furnished with a variety of standard characteristics:

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deep-rooted patriotism, which becomes the measure of his actions; personal work ethic; relative financial independence, which however is not so grand that it infers political power; consciousness of his own value in the face of social class differences; lack of spiritual and intellectual complications, which enables him to connect in a naïve way with the higher ranking historical personality, whose trust he earns.

The character of Pentaur does indeed fulfill many of these characteristics. His social background, which remains somewhat vague until the end, is presented as between the lower and higher classes. Moreover, in terms of faith, he stands between the polar opposites of the high priest and the atheist, able to relate to both of them. His own spiritual position changes and develops in the course of the novel. Whereas he is initially a true disciple of Ameni, deeply immersed in preparing himself for the priesthood, he soon begins to ponder and question the deeper questions underlying the power structure of the priestly role. In an act of initiation, Ameni imparts to him Akhenaton’s religious belief system which focused on the monotheistic status of the sun god Ra. Even though Egypt had gone back to its traditional polytheism after Akhenaton’s death, Pentaur secretly agrees with this notion and translates it into a kind of pantheistic construct: Wir wissen, daß die Gottheit Eins ist, wir nennen sie, das All, die Hülle des Alls, oder schlechtweg Ra. Aber unter Ra verstehen wir etwas Anderes wie die Sinnenmenschen, denn uns ist das Universum Gott und in jedem seiner Theile erkennen wir eine Erscheinungsform des höchsten Wesens, außer dem nichts ist in der Höhe und Tiefe. (Uarda 2: 17) We know that the deity is one, we call it the universe, the shell of the universe or simply Ra. But we understand Ra differently than the lower sensual beings, since for us the universe is god and in every part of it we recognize the appearance of the highest being, besides which nothing exists in the depths and in the heights.

Pantheism, the view that God is present throughout all His creation, is the central element of Pentaur’s spirituality. He thus has his most profound encounter with the supernatural in the mountains on the Sinai peninsula, not in the sacred halls of the temple: “Statt des schweren Weihrauchduftes zog er leichte und reine Lüfte ein und mächtiger als dort der priesterliche Gesang griff ihm hier das tiefe Schweigen des Hochgebirges in die Seele” (“Instead of the heavy incense he inhaled light and pure air and his soul was more powerfully affected by the deep silence of the high mountains, than by the chanting of the priests”; Uarda 3: 73). The effect that nature has on Pentaur, reaches a climax in a baptismal scene, during which

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Pentaur bathes in a clear mountain stream (Uarda 3: 71). Through this baptism Pentaur progresses from his old polytheistic believes towards an ultimate acknowledgement of one god, a development which finds its expression in Pentaur’s later inability to pray to the Egyptian gods: “Zu euch . . . bete ich nicht! Hier, wo mein Blick wie der eines Gottes die Ferne umfaßt, hier fühl‘ ich den Einen, hier ist er mir nah, hier ruf‘ ich ihn an” (“To you . . . I am not going to pray! Here, where my gaze can behold the distance like a god, here I feel the One, here he is close, here I will call on him”; Uarda 3: 74). By having Pentaur encounter Moses during that same scene, Ebers fortifies the link he thus created between ancient Egyptian polytheism and the Judeo-Christian faith. Moses himself features in the novel as a former temple student, who left after having been initiated by Ameni into the mysteries of the one God. The significant fact is, that both Pentaur’s pantheism and Moses’ Judaic monotheism are presented by Ebers as having developed from the same root. There are other instances in which Ebers suggests a connection between Judaism and Christianity and earlier Egyptian believes.19 As Nebsecht dies, Pentaur is able to articulate his newly found faith: Zur Ruhe . . . kommen wir Alle, aber vielleicht nur, um uns jenseits der Todesstunde rüstiger und ohne Ermüdung zu rühren. Wenn etwas, so lohnen die Götter ein redliches Ringen nach Wahrheit und ernste Arbeit, und wenn einer, so wird Dein Geist mit der Weltseele Eins werden und mit den Augen der Gottheit den Schleier durchdringen, der ihm hier das Geheimnis des Seins verhüllte (Uarda 3: 225). We all will rest in peace . . . but maybe only so that beyond the hour of death we can exert ourselves even more resolutely and without tiring. If anything, the gods will reward an honest striving for truth and serious work, and if anyone at all, so will your spirit become one with the soul of the world and will pierce the veil with the eye of the godhead, who here on earth kept his secrets hidden.

This curious mix of Protestant work ethics and a pantheistic concept of the godhead constitutes Pentaur’s new faith. This closely resembles the notion of Bildungsreligion with its emphasis on self-development and work “Work and the family . . . were the realities of life, of ‘morality’. They became something which made life worth living, gave it meaning, and something which could stand firm in the face of death” (Nipperdey 397). Of the three visions of religious life offered in the novel, Ameni’s focus on religion as a traditional institution aimed at gaining political and

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social power, Nebsecht’s faith in scientific progress, and Pentaur’s Bildungsreligion, it is clearly the latter one that most captured Ebers’ interest. Moreover, Pentaur’s spiritual journey across the Sinai allowed Ebers to play with some of the theological theories of his time which aimed at recovering roots of the Judeo-Christian belief system in ancient Egyptian cults. Some of these sought to establish Pharao Akhenaton’s monotheistic worship of the sun god Aten, as a precursor to both Judaism and later Christianity. That Ebers was interested in such theories is clear from a letter in which he expresses his desire to uncover “die Quellen, aus denen Moses seine ewig gültiges Gesetz zu schöpfen wußte” (“the sources from which Moses knew to create his eternally valid law”; Fischer 126). This goal of Ebers’ can be seen in the context of a general trend in German academia “to recognize religion as anthropology, and to translate and raise religion into a science” (Nipperdey 393). Ebers’ novels, whatever one might think of their literary aesthetic deficiencies, are remarkable as means of bringing the yet unknown realm of ancient Egyptian culture and history to the general public in a way that is both educating and entertaining. But more than that, these novels allow us a glimpse inside the nineteenth-century German Bildungsbürgertum and its debates, struggles, but also its dreams for the future. Contrary to Nietzsche’s claim of “Gott ist tot” ‘God is dead,’ Ebers’s novels are testimony to the fact that discussions on religion were not dead at all but, in fact, formed a dynamic field of intellectual as well as popular discourse. In Ebers’ novels we can also read beyond the debates and controversies and learn about the aspirations of Germany’s middle classes for the future of this newly minted German Empire. The portrayal of Ramses II presents us not so much with an authentic historical figure, but an ideal. The same is true in regard to the depiction of Pentaur, who as a figure, with which the middle-class reader was supposed to identify. He represents the ideal Bildungsbürger, uniting artistic, intellectual and spiritual interests and talents. Works of historical fiction work in two ways, “to maintain an imaginary connection with the past at the same time as the retrospective national utopias … enabled emerging nation-states to modernize and thus to break with that history” (Peterson 12). The novel’s ending which elevates Pentaur to the ruling class can therefore be read as an expression of the hopes of the educated middle class to participate in shaping this new German Empire and its culture. As Eberhard Lämmert states “Die Geschichte im Roman ist immer auch Zukunft” (“history in a novel is always also pointing to the future”; 16). It is the nature of the historical novel that enabled writers such as Ebers to express both their criticism as

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well as their dreams in a more liberal fashion than the conventional realist novel of the nineteenth century allowed.

Notes 1

According to Müller, about 750 historical novels were published in Germany within the second half of the nineteenth century (694). 2 Nineteenth-century critic Otto Kraus reports in his critical review of Ebers that „die Ebers’schen Romane gehören hiernach als stets frischer Artikel auf den Weihnachtsmarkt der Buchhändler und die deutschen Hausfrauen und ihre Töchter sind bereits daran gewöhnt, sich zu Weihnachten „etwas von Ebers“ zu wünschen“ („Ebers’ novels are thus a staple in every bookseller’s Christmas offerings and German housewives and their daughters are already accustomed to wish for „something by Ebers“ for Christmas“; 29/30). 3 Adolf Ermann, a student of Ebers, would later criticize Ebers for his novel writing in particular (Marchand, “Race” 224). 4 Marchand’s detailed description of the diplomatic maneuvers involved in gaining excavation rights for such sites as Babylon, clearly demonstrates the close intertwining of archaeology with Germany’s foreign politics (cf. “Orientalism as Kulturpolitik”). 5 With the artifacts from Germany’s first expedition to Egypt from 1842-1845, which Lepsius refers to as “Ausbeute” (11) (loot) and “Ernte” (23,121) (harvest), he was eager to stock Berlin’s Neues Museum. Already during his expedition, Lepsius drew up detailed plans for the design of the exhibition space (Lepsius 362, 371), remnants of which can still be seen in the Neue Museum today. 6 All biographical information is based on Pietschmann, Richter, Marchand “Race and Religion,” Fischer, and Salama. 7 As Pietschmann emphasizes, this personal tutoring remained the predominant way in which German Egyptologists were trained for several generations. Given the scarcity of academic chairs in Egyptology throughout Germany and the relative unknown status of the field itself, young academics had to make personal connections to Lepsius, Brugsch and Ebers to establish themselves in the field. Ebers seems to have taken special pleasure, even after his early retirement, in fostering young academics in the field. 8 In his popular 1855 travel text Reiseberichte aus Aegypten, Heinrich Brugsch, a contemporary of Ebers, meticulously transcribes and translates page after page of temple inscriptions. 9 For a detailed discussion of Schliemann’s use of media, see Maurer “Archaeology as Spectacle: Heinrich Schliemann’s Media of Excavation.” 10 After the renovations of the Neues Museum by British architect David Chipperfield which were finished in October 2009, the original design is again visible at least in parts. 11 It is however important to note that efforts were already made at that time to be as authentic as possible in such recreations. Haslauer remarks that in the case of the murals in the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna, painters Gustav Klimt and

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Hans Makart based their paintings either on their own travels to Egypt or illustrations in works such as the French Déscription de L’Égypte, which were published following the French expedition to Egypt from 1898 to 1901 (90). 12 For more information on ancient Egyptian influences on architecture see James Stevens Curl. For the use of ancient Egyptian visual elements and iconography in nineteenth-century German advertisement see Wolf Dieter Lemke. 13 Marchand claims that Ebers wrote his first novel because there was not enough data available yet to write a conclusive history on Egypt during the time of the Persion ruler Cambyses. Instead Ebers fictionalized the historical information he had and created his first novel Eine ägyptische Königstochter ‘An Egyptian Princess’ (Marchand “Race” 213). 14 The play however was no success, due to an overload of philosophical dialogues (Fischer 392). 15 Ebers situated his other Egyptian novels much later, when Egypt was under the rule of the last pharaoh Psamtik III (sixth century BC) or even later under the Ptolemies (100 BC). 16 This is also indicative of the development of Egyptology in the late nineteenth century. Until the 1890s German Egyptology was still mostly reliant on the Old Testament and the classical historians, such as Herodotus (Marchand German Orientalism 194). Not only was there a connection to Christianity in terms of the sources, but also in terms of the stated purpose of archaeological research, which Ebers himself describes as focused on finding the historical basis to Mosaic law, so as “to utterly clarify the sources from which Moses formed his eternally valid law?” (Fischer 126). 17 Ebers includes his own translation of the poem as part of the plot in Uarda. 18 A detailed comparison between actual ancient Egyptian history and the plot of Uarda is neither the goal of this chapter, nor within the ability of its author. For a detailed comparison of this kind, refer to Fischer. 19 Pentaur begins his prayer on Mount Sinai by invoking the one god three times, which parallels the Trinitarian concept of Christianity (Uarda 3: 74-75).

Works Referenced Berger, Stefan. “Professional and Popular Historians: 1800-1900-2000.” Ed. Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek. Popular History Now and Then: International Perspectives. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. 13-30. Print. Brugsch, Heinrich. Reiseberichte aus Aegypten. 1855. Hildesheim: Olms, 1977. Print. Curl, James Stevens. The Egyptian Revival: An Introductory Study of a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste. Winchester, MA: George Allen & Unwin, 1982. Print. Ebers, Georg. Eine ägyptische Königstochter: Historischer Roman. 8th ed. Stuttgart: Eduard Hallberger, 1879. Kindle.

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—. Uarda. 9th ed. Leipzig: Eduard Hallberger, 1881. Print. —. Kleopatra: Historischer Roman. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 1894. Kindle. Eggert, Hartmut. “Der historische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Handbuch des deutschen Romans. Ed. Helmut Koopmann. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1983. 342-355. Print. Fischer, Hans. Der Ägyptologe Georg Ebers: Eine Fallstudie zum Problem Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994. Print. “Georg Ebers: geb. 1.März 1837, gest. 7. August 1898.” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde. 36 (1898): 140-142. Print. Göttsch-Elten, Silke. “Tanja Kinkel, “Die Puppenspieler (1993).” Der historische Roman: Erkundungen einer populären Gattung. Ed. HansEdwin Friedrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2013.201-214. Print. Gottschall, Rudolf von. “Der archäologische Roman: Ein literarischer Essay.” Nord und Süd: Eine deutsche Monatsschrift 32 (1885): 35-55. Print. Haslauer, Elfriede. “Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Vienna: A Phantasm?” Visual Resources 23.1-2 (2007): 85-103. Print. Koshar, Rudy. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Kraus, Otto. “Der Professorenroman.” Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens 9.4 (1884): 195-256. Print. Lämmert, Eberhard. “‘Geschichte ist ein Entwurf:” Die neue Glaubwürdigkeit des Erzählens in der Geschichtsschreibung und im Roman.” The German Quarterly 63.1 (1990): 5-18. Print. Lemke, Wolf-Dieter. Staging the Orient: Fin de Siecle Popular Visions. Beirut: 2004. Print. Lepsius, Richard. Briefe aus Aegypten, Aethiopien und der Halbinsel des Sinai. Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, 1852. Print. Maher, Moustafa. “Der deutsche pharaonisierende Roman zwischen Literatur und Kultur.” Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien. Vl. 20.21 (2003): 49-53. Print. Marchand, Suzanne. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. —. “Orientalism as Kulturpolitik: German Archaeology and Cultural Imperialism in Asia Minor.” Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasion Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Ed. George W. Stocking Jr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 298-336. Print.

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—. “Race and Religion in the Novels of Georg Ebers.” Wort Macht Stamm: Rassismus und Determinismus in der Philologie. Ed. Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. 211-226. Print. Maurer, Kathrin. “Archaeology as Spectacle: Heinrich Schliemann’s Media of Excavation.” German Studies Review 32.2 (2009): 303-317. Print. —. “Footnoting the Fictional: Historical Novels and Scholarly Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Angermion: Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism 2.2 (2009): 45-56. Print. Müller, Harro. “Historische Romane.” Bürgerlicher Realismus und Gründerzeit, 1848-1890. Ed. Edward McInnes and Gerhard Plumpe. München: Hanser, 1996. 690-707. Print. Nipperdey, Thomas. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck: 1800-1866. Transl. Daniel Nolan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983. Print. Peterson, Brent. History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the NineteenthCentury Nation. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2005. Pietschmann, Richard. “Ebers, Georg.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1910). Web. 14 June 2016. Richter, Karl. “Ebers, Georg Moritz.” Neue deutsche Biographie 4 (1959): 249-250. Web. 14 June 2016. Salama, Dalia. “Georg Ebers Roman Eine ägyptische Königstochter: Pharaonisierendes im 19. Jahrhundert.” Orientdiskurse in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Klaus-Michael Bogdal. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. 204-241. Print. Tignor, Robert L. Egypt: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.

CHAPTER THREE SUDERMANN’S KATZENSTEG: NATURALISM, LIBERALISM, AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL IN THE AGE OF NATIONALISM JASON DOERRE

Der sozialkritische Roman ist geradezu ein integrierender Bestandteil, ein wichtigstes Inventarstück der Demokratie —Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen The socially critical novel is simply an integrative component, an important fixture of democracy

The name Hermann Sudermann no longer has the same appeal it once had in the field of German literature. Scholarly interest about him and his work has been but a trickle after his death in 1928, reducing the once internationally renowned German author's name to a footnote in German literary history. In his own time, however, he embodied it. Another author of the time, Hanns Heinz Ewers, for example, writes in 1906 that Sudermann was hailed at the pinnacle of his career to such an extent that one journal, making comparison to Goethe, wrote: “Früher warst du der Mann, jetzt ist's der Sudermann” ‘Once you were the man, now it’s Sudermann’ (163). The sensation that Sudermann stirred at the turn of the century was largely due to his theatrical triumph following the debut of his breakthrough play “Die Ehre” (Honor) on November 27 1889, which established him firmly next to Gerhart Hauptmann as a pillar of the newest Sturm und Drang ‘Storm and Stress’ of German literature: naturalism. About the same time, in the autumn of 1889, Sudermann had just finished a book-length manuscript of Katzensteg (Cat’s Bridge), his second novel, about a soldier who returns to his East-Prussian homeland after dutifully

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serving his country with honor in the Napoleonic Wars only to find himself unwelcome by the community due to the treasonous misdeeds of his father. This work further exhibits the characteristics of literary naturalism that won him fame in the theater world—this time in the form of a historical novel. The subgenre of the historical novel had established itself as a popular literary form during the era of realism in the nineteenth century, but was not the chosen genre for authors typically associated with the literary naturalism movement at the end of the century. The realism of the era in which the historical novel flourished goes further than simply describing the aesthetics of the time; it defined a way of life in nineteenthcentury Germany. Not only did it encompass the visual arts of this period, realism was also evident in the politics of the time—one only need to think of Bismarck’s Realpolitik. A closer examination of this term and its era shows that beneath its fictitious assertion of mimetic correspondence to the outside world, or pragmatic nature, lies its great fiction.1 The historiography of realism advanced the nationalist cause; realist politics claimed to be in service of truth, and literary realism depicted only the prescribed values of specific classes. The appearance of Sudermann’s novel came at a time when nineteenth-century realism’s long-standing dominance in German literature—as well as in German society at large— was being upset by modernity, including its offspring, literary naturalism. Historicizing literary epochs presents problems, and in doing so one is prone to commit the fallacy of periodization, whereby eras are presented as clearly transitioning from one to another. A close reading of Katzensteg reveals that it is no simple work to categorize. The transitional nature of the novel, being both a work of nineteenth-century realism and yet one of modern naturalism, is revealing with regard to German literary production by demonstrating the passage between literary realism and naturalism not as a clear break but rather as a process. The significance of naturalism in relation to its predecessor is its expressed goal of reproducing nature in the form of art, as well as its inclusion in the literary treatment of previously taboo content. Many proponents of this movement did not see themselves overcoming realism, but rather as instigating an intensification of it by treating topics in an unsanitized manner. In other words, advocates saw this more as a rebellion within the structures of realism, rather than an insurrection against it. With its reliance upon the popular generic vehicle of the historical novel, Katzensteg separates itself from other works of nineteenth-century historical fiction by offering a sharp critique of German nationalistic chauvinism, which was a standard feature in many of the great works of the genre.2

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This chapter intends to provide a long-overdue reappraisal of the largely overlooked historical novel Katzensteg. In doing so, I will pay particular attention to several aspects. First, I seek to establish Katzensteg’s significance to the genre of the nineteenth-century historical novel as it appeared at the crossroads between realism and naturalism. Historical fiction accounted for a significant portion of all literature read in the nineteenth century, and any author at this time hoping to sell his/her work was certainly conscious of this reality. I argue, however, that Sudermann’s Katzensteg differs from the mainstream of historical fiction with regard to its content. The second aspect that will be treated in this chapter is the ideology, and social criticism embedded in the work. Sudermann’s depiction of Prussian society during the Napoleonic Wars, I argue, makes this work stand out among nineteenth-century historical novels. Rather than disseminating völkisch ideology that was becoming increasingly visible in German culture at the end of the nineteenth century, Katzensteg, provides a distinct left-liberal criticism of these tendencies. Third, I wish to provide a history of the novel Katzensteg itself, in order to substantiate its importance to the landscape of German literature in the nineteenth century and beyond. Perhaps an additional overarching objective of this examination of an all-but-forgotten work and author is to exemplify the utility of re-assessing works of literature that were once widely read but are now left largely ignored.

The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in the Age of Nationalism The historical novel and nationalism are both products of the nineteenth century. Blossoming from the wake of the Napoleonic wave that swept Europe at the century’s outset, historical fiction, served as a faithful companion to nationalist projects that figured prominently in this era. Benedict Anderson has established that novels play an integral role in fostering the sense of an “imagined community,” which forms the core of national consciousness. With this in mind, historical fiction is especially significant for the study of nationalism in the nineteenth century because it accounted for much of what was read. Perhaps the most influential study of the German historical novel is still Georg Lukács’s from 1937, Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel), which contends that at the heart of the historical novel lies a continuity between past and present. According to him, meaning is produced by a combination of history within the novel and the novel existing in history (Roberts 56). Thus, the past is not only seen through the prism of the present, it also serves the interests

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of the present (Müller 61). This echoes Walter Benjamin's conception of history, when he writes that “die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet” (“history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled with the presence of the now”; 137). Benjamin implies that past eras are invoked for the present, and likewise the present can be written onto the past. All of this seems especially true in the case of Germany after the Napoleonic Wars, when the idea of German nationalism was set into motion. Two of the great intellectual undertakings in the nineteenth century that would support this project were the productions of a national history and a national literature, and by the time Germany was finally unified in 1871, there was no dearth of scholarly works pertaining to these subjects. The hybridization of history and literature is especially consequential to this time period. Because of its genesis, nature, and typical subject material, the nineteenth-century historical novel has undeniably assisted with the rise and spread of national consciousness, and much has been written about it. This is plain to see among the most widely read authors of historical fiction in the late nineteenth century, such as Gustav Freytag and Felix Dahn. Nationalistic tendencies of German historical fiction have made this body of literature appear dubious in light of events during the first half of the twentieth century spawned by radical nationalism. This chapter contends that Hermann Sudermann’s historical novel, Katzensteg, provides an alternative possibility of the nineteenth-century German historical novel. By exemplifying the continuity between the past and the present, as Lukács stresses, Katzensteg not only provides a left-liberal critique of German nationalism in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, but it also critiques the practice of history within the discourse of late nineteenth-century historical nationalism. Because of the author's relative obscurity today, as well as to gain a better grasp of the content in Katzensteg, this essay will begin with a brief biographical overview before turning to the novel and the intersecting discourses of liberalism, nationalism, fiction and history.

Hermann Sudermann—Literary Beginnings “Fern, fern an der russischen Grenze Deutschlands gottvergessenem Winkel,” writes Hermann Sudermann in his 1922 memoir Bilderbuch meiner Jugend (Picture Book of My Youth), “Wartete meiner noch immer die Heimat” (“Far, far away on the Russian border of Germany’s godforsaken corner, my homeland was still awaiting me”; 243). Born in

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the furthest region of East Prussia in 1857, he went on to attend the University of Königsberg, before resettling to the metropolis Berlin, where he resided for the remainder of his life. Sudermann became actively involved in the politics of Imperial Germany through his initial profession in the 1880s as editor of the weekly newspaper Das Deutsche Reichsblatt that functioned as the mouthpiece for the liberal Secession, a political faction of left-wing German liberals who had broken away from the more conservative national liberals. In his memoirs, he recounts his conversion to this brand of liberalism, while listening to a session in the Reichstag and seeing Heinrich Rickert, “Führer der ‘Sezession,’ die sich unlängst von den Nationalliberalen getrennt hatten. Den liebte ich” (“Leader of the ‘Secession,’ which had recently split from the National Liberals. This man I loved”; Bilderbuch 365). In the 1880s Sudermann steadily rose to prominence in the Berlin literary scene by writing novellas and short stories for various periodicals of the liberal press, then graduating to novels, and finally gaining success with the production of his breakthrough play, “Die Ehre” in 1889. From the beginning, he was identified by critics as a representative of the burgeoning German literary naturalism, then at the forefront of contemporary German literature. By addressing modern, taboo topics through its representation of social hypocrisy, scandalous behavior, and rebellion, German naturalism soon gained international attention. All of this tested Wilhelmine Germany's tolerance for socially critical art. Some of Sudermann's theatrical works were deemed by authorities as too subversive and subsequently censored.3 Although widely considered an early proponent of literary naturalism, it is an oversimplification to lump the life and work of Hermann Sudermann wholesale under this label. Unfortunately, his seemingly expansive oeuvre has been relegated to this designation in the rare cases that his name is even mentioned in literary histories written after his death. Perhaps a more suitable characterization of the author would be that he was able to capture the Zeitgeist of left bourgeois liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sudermann himself hints at this in an address titled “Literarische Wandlungen in Deutschland” ‘Literary Transformations in Germany’ at the Literary Congress in 1895, when he says, “Ich bitte Sie, meine Damen und Herren, werfen Sie mir nicht das Wort ‘Naturalismus’ entgegen” (“I am begging you, ladies and gentlemen, do not throw the word ‘naturalism’ at me”; 166). Rather than focusing on the mere formalistic tendencies of recent literature, he advocates a perspective of German literature at the turn of the century that considers it within the dialectical progression of literary activism:

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Chapter Three Nur manchmal, wenn wir die Werke jener Dichter aus dem Schranke holen, die sich in den Dreißiger-Jahren zum sogenannten “jungen Deutschland” zusammentaten, oder derer, die Anno 1848 blutdürstige Lieder schrieben, oder derer, die in den Sechziger-Jahren ihre Ideale von bürgerlicher Freiheit in die Welt hinaus riefen, dann sagen wir wohl mit einem neidischen Seufzer: “Wie waren sie jung! Wie waren sie heiß! Wie leicht ward es ihnen, sich von ihrem Schreibtische aus das Leben nach ihren Träumen zurecht zu legen!” (“Litterarische Wandlungen” 166) Sometimes when pulling from the shelf the works of those poets who came together in the 1830s as Young Germany, or those who wrote blood-thirsty songs in the year 1848, or those who shouted their ideals of bourgeois freedom out into the world in the 1860s, we say then, with an envious sigh: “How they were young! How they were fervent! How easy it was for them from the safety of their writing desks to position their lives in accordance with their dreams!”

Here, one can see that for Sudermann the importance of naturalism, or any burgeoning movements of German literature in the nineteenth century for that matter, has to do with the continuity of certain ideals and not with formalistic tendencies or technique. Nevertheless, even as Sudermann took on politically charged themes in many of his works and activities—this is especially evident in his actions in opposition to the so-called Lex Heinze4—he was lambasted by critics who accused him of opportunism, frivolousness, and of being beholden to fashionable trends. Today, it matters less if these assertions were justified. More important for literary history is that Hermann Sudermann was an influential figure of literature evidenced by the numerous editions of his works, the ubiquity of his plays on stages across Germany and beyond, as well as the amount of critical attention he received. One must ask what it was about these works, or about the author, that found such appeal in German society at this time, and what might have brought about his erasure. One significant aspect of Hermann Sudermann to consider was his prominence within the milieu of German liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century. His literary success hinged upon the thematization of relevant social and political issues of the day from a left-liberal perspective such as divorce, women’s rights, class differences, the resocialization of convicts, etc. This formula touched a nerve not only in the German-speaking world, where for many years his dramas were among those most performed, but also in the United States, where the sensation of Sudermann helped initiate a new interest in German literature (Kerr 12). For the sake of clarification, it is necessary to illustrate first the basic underpinnings of what I call a left-liberal perspective. Liberalism can refer

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to either a loose ideology or to an organized political movement. Although Sudermann briefly worked within the political sphere, the term liberalism in this chapter will refer to the ideology that permeates the novel Katzensteg. Some basic characteristics are: 1) It is humanistic in its belief that all humans deserve treatment as human beings. 2) It is individualistic in so far that the individual is perceived as an autonomous agent, which makes it 3) antiauthoritarian by nature because of its insistence on individuality in society. 4) It is universal in its humanism, individualism and antiauthoritarianism; therefore it shuns “isms” such as jingoism and nationalism. 5) Lastly, it is rational and believes that the humanistic use of reason can correct human wrongdoings and error (Röpke 11–20). As we will see, these features are especially prominent in the early work of Sudermann, to which this essay will now turn.

The Publication and Initial Reception of Katzensteg Katzensteg, along with Frau Sorge (Dame Care, 1887) and Litauische Geschichten (Lithuanian Stories, 1917), remains today one of the author’s most recognizable titles. By the time of his death in 1928 it had sold over 200,000 copies, not counting those editions that had been translated into numerous languages abroad (Elster). Katzensteg, like Frau Sorge, first appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt as a serial novel in installments thereby introducing Sudermann to a sizeable readership. A contemporary poet, Julia Virginia Laengsdorff, remembers her first encounter with Sudermann: Wann mir der Name Sudermann zum erstenmal ins Bewußtsein trat, das weiß ich noch, als wäre es gestern gewesen. In Zeitungsfortsetzungen erschien ein Roman, den meine Mutter mit höchstem Interesse las, der vor meine Augen aber ängstlich gehütet wurde. Als ich durch einen glücklichen Zufall eine Folge dieses “Katzensteg” doch einmal zu Gesicht bekam, stand darunter besagter Name. Gierig verschlang ich die Spalten. When it was that the name Sudermann first entered my conscious mind I can still recall as if it was yesterday. My mother was reading a novel published as a serial in a newspaper with great interest and which she was anxiously guarding from my eyes. When, by coincidence, I was finally able to set my eyes upon an installment of this “Katzensteg”, there I saw the name “Sudermann.” Voraciously, I devoured the columns.

Although getting literary works of fiction published in the Rudolf Mosse Press was no small feat for the former parliamentary correspondent, his

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sensational breakthrough in 1889 made many eager to get their hands on anything they could from him. According to his diaries, Sudermann had already completed a manuscript of Katzensteg in the spring of 1888. In one entry on May 27 1888, he recounts reading the first half of the novel to an audience in a West Berlin literary salon: “Erste hälfte des Katzenstegs unter großem Erfolge vorgelesen . . . Zeit erste reine Freude” (“Did a reading of the first half of Katzensteg with great success. First moment of pure joy”; Diaries). Although the diary entry says nothing about what aspects of the novel pleased his audience, it is clear that Katzensteg has more pronounced elements of the incipient literary movement of naturalism than do some of his early plays, making it one of the most naturalist of all his works. It was among the vanguard of this movement in 1888, considering that the breakthrough work of German literary naturalism—Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Vor Sonnenaufgang” (Before Sunrise, 1889)—appeared for the first time over a year later. Typical naturalist themes such as alcoholism and genetics, for which Hauptmann’s work is known, also figure prominently in Sudermann’s novel. Katzensteg, however, was only taken seriously after he took the Berlin theater milieu by storm in 1889 and, with his trademark beard, became an iconic figure in Berlin culture practically overnight. The enormous success now drew attention to him in a way that was unthinkable before. One of Germany’s most prominent authors in the second half of the nineteenth century, Paul Heyse, for instance, writes to Sudermann in a letter dated January 28 1890, after seeing “Die Ehre”: Lieber Herr Sudermann, ich schreibe Ihnen, um für eine alte Unterlassungssünde, nur umso drückender, da sie dreimal verjährt ist, Ihre Absolution zu erbitten. Im November 1886 schickten Sie mir Ihre “Frau Sorge”. Um diese Zeit des Jahres häufen sich bei mir die neuen Bücher dergestalt dass ich den Berg von Dankesschulden nur langsam abtragen kann. Ihr Roman theilte mit anderen das Schicksal, für eine spätere Lectüre zurückgelegt zu werden, und da ich selten die Musse habe, auf diesem Gebiet neue Bekanntschaften zu machen, weil zu viel alte Freunde einen Dank von mir für ihre neueste Gabe erwarten, gerieth Ihre Buch in Vergessenheit. (Heyse) Dear Mr. Sudermann, I’m writing to you for absolution regarding an old sinful negligence on my part which is all the more pressing because it is three years past due. In November 1886 you sent me your “Frau Sorge.” Around this time of year new books pile up around me to such an extent that I am only able to slowly chip away at this mountainous debt of gratitude. Your novel shared the fate of many others that were laid aside to be read later, but because I seldom have leisure to make new acquaintances in this field, because too many old friends are expecting a thank you for

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their latest gift, your book was forgotten.

As evidenced in this passage, the author’s earlier attempts to attract the attention of the literary establishment were unsuccessful until the theater changed his fortunes. Sudermann, however, was savvy to capitalize on this newly found fanfare, as can be seen in his further correspondence with Heyse, who, now with the rising star in sight, did not ignore the copy of Katzensteg sent to him. In another letter dated early in 1890, Heyse writes to Sudermann, stating that his busy schedule had been keeping him from other activities; however, a gesture of praise for the author of Katzensteg was for him obligatory (Heyse). Hermann Sudermann’s immediate limelight was fortified through the publication of his novels Frau Sorge and Katzensteg in book format, which also served to somewhat satiate the public’s newly found interest in him. Critics were keen to evaluate these earlier works in comparison to “Die Ehre” and formulate hypotheses to explain the enigmatic rise of the newcomer to the scene. The famed literary critic and astute social observer, Fritz Mauthner notices in an 1890 critique of Katzensteg how Sudermann’s success arrived at a time in which other social customs were in flux. He writes, Der Adel hat keines seiner Vorrechte so schnell und so gern aufgegeben, wie das lastenreiche Vorrecht des “Obligiertseins.” Noblesse oblige gilt nicht mehr. Es heißt jetzt häufiger: Reichtum verpflichtet, Glück verpflichtet, Erfolg verpflichtet. So wird auch Hermann Sudermann durch den starken und nachhaltigen Erfolg seines Schauspiels “Die Ehre” genötigt sein, in seiner Kunstübung nur Hohes und Bleibendes anzustreben. Der neue Name wird mit ganz neuer Betonung ausgesprochen . . . So beeifern sich Buchhändler und Zeitungen, um den glücklichen Künstler mit seiner Vergangenheit zu verfolgen. (297) The aristocracy gave up none of its privileges more quickly and more readily than the weighty privilege of obligation. Noblesse oblige is no longer valid. More often it is now said: obliged by wealth, obliged by happiness, obliged by success. Thus Hermann Sudermann will feel compelled to strive for elevation and endurance in the practice of his artistry. The new name is pronounced with an entirely new emphasis. Thus booksellers and newspapers go to great lengths to pursue the serendipitous artist with his past life.

This loaded passage hints at the immense success Sudermann reaped with the wave of literary naturalism in Germany, but it also points to those characteristics that earned him the reputation of “Modedichter” ‘fashionable writer.’ Although there have certainly been other authors who

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likewise fall under this label, Sudermann especially came to embody the intersection of fashion and literature. Much of his early success was due to his astute ability to incorporate prevalent social topics into en vogue literary forms, as is evidenced in his treatment of German nationalism in Katzensteg with the style of the nascent literary naturalism.5 At the time of Katzensteg’s publication, however, naturalism was not necessarily the term readily used to describe the tendencies of some newer works of literature. Still, Mauthner, in his review of the novel, appears to recognize traits in Sudermann that hint at a disruption of nineteenth-century literary realism. He writes, Die zweite Überraschung für den Leser, welcher den “Katzensteg” deshalb zu lesen unternahm, weil das realistische Drama ihn auf den Dichter aufmerksam gemacht hatte, muß der romantische Zug des Ganzen sein. Romantisch im guten und auch im bösen Sinn ist das Buch, und ist doch wieder ein neues Zeugnis für die moderne Rücksichtslosigkeit seines Verfassers. (298) The second surprise for the reader, who has undertaken to read “Katzensteg,” due to the fact that the realistic drama drew his attention to the author, has to be its romantic characteristic on the whole. The book is romantic both in a good and bad sense, and is yet again a new testimony of the author’s modernist recklessness.

As an agent of his time, Mauthner does not see beyond the scope of realism; nevertheless, he identifies what he calls the “moderne Rücksichtslosigkeit” ‘modernist recklessness’ in order to describe the tone, even if he does not go on to elaborate what prompts this opinion about Katzensteg. Other contemporary reviewers of Sudermann’s Katzensteg, such as Konrad Alberti, who is considered a standard bearer of German naturalism, also conceptualized the early works of Sudermann as belonging to the traditions of realist literature. Alberti issues the imperative in his review of the novel that “der deutsche Realismus darf und muß von jetzt an Hermann Sudermann unter seinen begabtesten Vertretern nennen” (“from now on German realism may and must name Sudermann among its most talented proponents”; “Hermann” 437). That which Mauthner describes as “Rücksichtslosigkeit,” however, is held in esteem by the younger Alberti, who sees Sudermann’s treatment of a new topic in his breakthrough play “Die Ehre”—the underclass of Berlin—as the true genius of the work. This, of course, is a key feature aimed at demarcating naturalism from realism, but at the time the two were not exactly exclusive from each other. For critics such as Alberti, the aesthetic objective is not a caesura

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from realism, but rather an intensification of it. Echoing Arno Holz’s aesthetic formula of naturalism (naturalism = nature - X), Alberti writes in another article, “Der Realismus ist nichts anderes, als der ästhetische Ausdruck des mathematischen Gesetzes, daß das Ganze größer ist, als jeder seiner Teile” (“Realism is nothing else than the aesthetic expression of the mathematical law that the whole is greater than any of its parts”; “Realismus” 126). Formulations and theorizations about aesthetics such as this are characteristic of the era of naturalism, which, in contrast to other literary movements, was vigorously programmatic. Such activity enticed authors to test the formulas already prescribed in literary journals, thereby supplying a demand for the aesthetic. The era of naturalism, then, produced the optimal conditions for the rise of the “Modedichter,” who were responding to these expressed desires. Even though Sudermann later became the scapegoat of critics who delivered such accusations against this era, others in his literary cohort were no less motivated to capitalize on the demand. For example, in an article from 1898 titled “Modedichter und Dichtermoden” ‘Fashionable Writers and Fashionable Writing,’ one literary critic writes, “Der Primus [der Modedichter] ist wohl Hauptmann, als zweiter aber sitzt schon seit langer Zeit Hermann Sudermann” (“At the top of the class [of fashionable writers] sits Hauptmann, but Sudermann has long been sitting in the second seat”; Zickel 332). In any case, Alberti’s review of Sudermann’s Katzensteg articulates his overall satisfaction with the novel, calling scenes containing naturalistic elements masterpieces of poetic realism and he concludes his assessment in stating, “Trotz einiger Schwächen zählt der Roman doch an Kraft und Feinheit zu den besten Leistungen der deutsch-realistischen Litteratur” (“Despite a few weaknesses, the novel’s force and acuteness, it still counts among the finest accomplishments of German realistic literature”; “Hermann” 436– 37). A third critique of Katzensteg by the notorious Maximillian Harden offers another perspective on the novel and the contemporary discourse of naturalism. Already present in Harden’s treatment of Sudermann’s work is a dismissiveness that later provoked the author to respond with an invective tract against the critic that eventually erupted into a public debate about literary criticism.6 Much of the derision that Harden and his fellow critics directed at Sudermann was due to the latter’s enormous success, which prompted these critics to use the term “Modedichtung” against him. This resentment is immediately apparent in Harden’s critique, with such side commentary as “der forsche Herr, der selbst beträchtliche Spesen für seine “Ehre” nicht scheut, ist schnell auf der Bühne heimisch geworden” (“The outspoken gentleman who does not shy away from

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considerable expenses of “Ehre” has rapidly become familiar on the stage”; 225). Similar to Mauthner and Alberti, Harden treats Sudermann’s Katzensteg not on its own merit, but rather in connection with the author’s rise to success at the theaters with his play “Die Ehre.” Beyond the obvious contempt for the new Sudermann fascination in Germany, Harden manages to make some thought-provoking points in regard to the connection between Sudermann’s biography and the themes and stylistic elements in his early works. He takes note of the East-Prussian setting in Katzensteg, which was the homeland of the author, as well as the setting for his first novel Frau Sorge. After “Die Ehre,” which was set in Berlin, capturing, as Harden puts it, “Die Auswüchse des neudeutschen Lebens” ‘The outgrowths of the new German existence’ in the growing metropolis, Sudermann overwhelmingly set his works in East Prussia. This pastoral region is perhaps not as suitable for depicting modernity’s effect on urban life as are the settings for other notable works of naturalism such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Die Ratten” (“The Rats”; 1911) and Johannes Schlaf’s and Aron Holz’s “Die Familie Selicke” (“Family Selicke”; 1890). Harden convincingly attributes the fixation with the themes of homeland and hardship to the author’s biography, as he briefly—albeit accurately—narrates what could have been a story by Horatio Alger from Sudermann’s humble beginnings in the backwaters of East Prussia and destitution as a starving artist in Berlin, to his eventual rags-to-riches success in the literary world. Later in life Sudermann would return to this personal narrative with his memoir Bilderbuch meiner Jugend in 1922. Harden recognizes and connects this background narrative of progress to the themes in Sudermann’s early works such as Katzensteg, prompting him to withhold the designation of realist, and instead labels him an idealist. He writes, Idealist ist der Dichter der “Sorge”, der “Ehre”, des “Katzensteg”; nicht darstellen will er, nicht die Welt zeigen, wie sie ist, und uns die Schlußfolgerung aus diesem Erdenzustand selbst überlassen: mit vollem Bewußtsein stellt er sich in den Dienst einer selbst gefundenen oder von außen her empfangenen Idee. (226) The author of “Sorge,” “Die Ehre,” and “Katzensteg” is an idealist; he does not wish to depict the world as it is, and leave to us the inferences of the state of affairs on earth. With full awareness he puts himself in the service of a self-invented idea or externally conceived idea.

Idealism, of course, is the polar opposite of the pragmatism, characteristic in the age of realism. Another valid observation of Harden in his critique of Sudermann’s Katzensteg is the overbearing theme of individual honor.

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In comparatively evaluating the novel to Sudermann’s drama, he writes, “Vielleicht mußte Sudermann sein Thema für diesmal im Stich lassen, um sein Schauspiel schreiben zu können; offenbar ist die ‘Ehre’ aus dem ‘Katzensteg’ herausgewachsen” (“Perhaps Sudermann had to abandon his theme this time in order to be able to write his play; “Die Ehre” obviously grew out of ‘Katzensteg’”; 226). Furthermore, Harden is quick to join Mauthner’s recognition of romantic characteristics in Sudermann’s novel. In ranking Sudermann and his novel among the landscape of contemporary German literature, he issues an ambivalent judgement. Harden writes: Eine eigenthümliche und . . . ganz moderne Dichtung konnte so entstehen, wo wir jetzt nur eine märchenhafte Robinsonade erblicken, freilich eine, die uns ein Dichter erzählt. Es wäre Unrecht, wollten wir Sudermann einen der bedeutendsten unter den jüngeren deutschen Erzählern nennen; unsere Armuth verschleiert keine Komparation; nennen wir ihn also einfach einen starken Erzähler. Der Positiv ist hier viel mehr als der nichtssagende Superlativ. (226) A curious and altogether modern literature could only emerge where we now only see a fairytale-like robinsonade; of course one that is told by a poet. It would be unjust if we would call Sudermann one of the most important among the younger German writers; our poverty veils no comparison. We will simply call him a strong writer. The favorable here means much more than the nondescript superlative.

What can be extrapolated from these early reviews of Katzensteg is that there was much fanfare about the author at the time of the book’s publication, and these three prominent critics all look to this work in order to make larger claims about the direction of German literature at the time. Even though it is assumed that Sudermann is part of the realist literary tradition, one can discern that they take notice of changes brought about in German literature by the youngest of these movements represented by Sudermann and Hauptmann. Oddly enough, it is even more striking that all three critics fail to adequately address Sudermann’s social critical stance in the novel, as well as its historical content in general. Instead they focus on the celebrity of the author, and the more trivial aspects of the novel, such as the love story, the father-son conflict, and mechanical details. It is quite plausible that an observer of the time might have easily overlooked the significance of historical fiction given its ubiquity. Nevertheless, the narrative’s searing criticism of nationalism and blind subservience to the collective is what makes this novel stand apart from other historical fiction, and this chapter will now analyze those features.

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Katzensteg: A Liberal Critique of Nationalism? The left-liberal worldview espoused in Katzensteg, characteristic of the earlier works of Sudermann, takes an especially critical stance vis-à-vis the expression of German nationalism. In doing so, he could not have chosen a more appropriate historical background: the Napoleonic Wars. These so-called Befreiungskriege ‘German Wars of Liberation’ were the catalyst for a national consciousness that would dominate German history during the long nineteenth century, from Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation, ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ in 1808 to the First World War. It comes as little surprise, then, that the historical impetus for German nationalism became a familiar theme for historical fiction throughout the era. Although the memory of the Wars of Liberation was commonly used as a symbol of German national might and glory throughout the course of the nineteenth century, accounts such as Katzensteg show that this memory was not universal. On the contrary, the recollection of such events in the context of national history is always subject to the influence of the current political climate and events at hand. Many years after its publication, Sudermann was asked about the veracity of his historical novel in a newspaper article in honor of his seventieth birthday. There he states, Ich werde noch heute gefragt, ob mein Roman “Der Katzensteg,” der von einer Episode der Franzosenkämpfe 1806-1807 ausgeht, irgend einer geschichtlichen Begebenheit—wenn auch wesentlich schwächerer Art— zugrunde liegt. Ich kann darauf immer nur erwidern, daß allerdings in meiner weiteren Heimat . . . eine alte Sage im Volke umläuft von einem Verrat, der in den schlimmen Tagen von 1806/07 vielen braven Deutschen das Leben gekostet haben soll. Aber diese Erzählung war (wie es bei dem, was sich im Volke weitererzählt, häufig der Fall ist) ganz unbestimmt und ohne feste Form, ohne Zeit und Ort. Immerhin hat dieses Wenige genügt, um mir den ersten Anstoß zu meiner Fabel vom „Katzensteg“ zu geben. (“Sudermanns 70. Geburtstag”) I am asked to this day still whether my novel Der Katzensteg, which is about an episode during the fight against the French in 1806 – 1807, is— however loosely—based on any sort of historical occurence. As a response, I can only repeat that in my homeland indeed . . . an old tale circulated among the people about a betrayal in the hard times in the years 1806/07 that is said to have cost many honest Germans their lives. But this story was (as is often the case with those that are told and retold by the people) entirely vague and lacking concrete form, time, and place. All the same, this little bit was enough to serve as an impetus for my fable Katzensteg.

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Although Sudermann does not provide any concrete details about the folk story that allegedly inspired his novel, it is not unthinkable that there were tales in the oral tradition that were exchanged about the Napoleonic campaign and the heroes who fought against the French invaders. Later in the century, however, when Germans and Frenchmen were embroiled in another armed conflict, East Prussia was far removed from the realities of battle. Only with the First World War would East Prussia once again see the horrors of war. But before this time it was the years of the Napoleonic invasion that loomed large in the East Prussian imagination. In his memoirs, for instance, Sudermann recounts his fascination with the tales his grandmother told him about her experiences during the Battle of Friedland in East Prussia and her having seen Napoleon (Bilderbuch 39). The liberal representation of history in Katzensteg brings forth a notably more complex account of the Wars of Liberation than the typical nationalistic narrative of Germany's triumph over foreign invaders. Sudermann uses this sacred national memory to inveigh against what he sees as a reactionary nationalism that persisted in Prussian and German society from the wars up to the time he wrote the novel. Katzensteg is about the young baron, Boloslav von Schranden, a lieutenant who heroically volunteers to serve the Prussian crown in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars. His story begins as he is leaving his company to return to his East-Prussian homeland, where we learn that his father has died and the villagers are refusing him a proper burial. The reason for this is the rumour that in 1807 his father committed treason by leading Napoleonic forces to ambush a group of Prussian soldiers on a bridge called the “Katzensteg” ‘cat walk’. As the story unfolds we find out that as a baron, Boloslav’s father is perceived as a tyrant in the small village of Schranden. Perhaps more consequential is that he was also a Polish sympathizer, which provoked him to support the French in hope of establishing an independent Poland. This, in turn, provoked the villagers to set flames to his castle and refuse him the honor of burial. Boloslav, though never having loved his father, resolves that his personal integrity rests upon giving him a proper burial. Having moved away from Schranden while still a child, Boloslav makes his homecoming after many years to a village that has by then displaced its hatred for the father onto him. He is thus ostracized by the villagers, with no prospect for other social contact except for his father’s mistress, Regine, who is also a persona non grata in the village due to her association with the baron. At the beginning of the novel there is a short narration that historically orients the main story and provides commentary. While foreshadowing some of the themes that are essential to the main story, Sudermann’s

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liberal worldview becomes apparent. The story is established in the time following Napoleon’s first exile through a rational perspective not clouded by jingoistic intoxication. Instead of romanticizing the heroics of the German armed forces on the battlefield, the events are illustrated with humanistic realism in terms of their destruction and cost to life. Present also is a comparative perspective of the convivial atmosphere during the great victory celebrations and homecomings, as well as the great sorrows that these events overshadow. Here the text contests the simplicity of triumphal narratives of the German Wars of Liberation and exposes their myopia. For example, the narrator points out that Russian Cossacks who helped drive the French army out of the German fatherland were celebrated as liberators. One year later, however, as they crossed German territory en route back to their motherland, they were only accepted out of a sense of duty; this emphasizes the superficial and ephemeral nature of patriotic fervor. Furthermore, it is suggested that the accounts that exalt these battles are the boorish fantasy of those unfamiliar with the brutalities of war. The soldiers who were coming home from the battle fields were nicht hoch und herrlich, wie die Phantasie der heimgebliebenen sie sich ausgemalt, ein Strahlendiadem über dem Haupte, den wallenden Mantel gleich einer Toga um den stolzen Leib geschlagen,--stumpf und dumpf wie abgetriebene Säulen, schmutzig und zerlumpt, von Ungeziefer strotzend, die Bärte von Staub und Schweiss zusammengeklebt, so kehrten sie heim. (6- 7) not high and splendid, such as the fantasy of those who remained at home had envisioned—a shiny jeweled crown upon the head, a flowing cloak resembling a toga thrown around the prideful body. Lackluster and gloomy like collapsed pillars, filthy and tattered, infested by vermin, the beards stuck together by dust and sweat—that is how they returned home.

This depiction of the Prussian liberators is contrasted against the fantasies of the nationalist imagination, and its embodiment in the various sorts of memorials erected throughout the nineteenth century. In another passage the narrator addresses some of the postwar stress issues experienced by the returning soldiers. He writes: Freilich ganz mit einem Male ließen die aufgestachelten Leidenschaften sich nicht zur Ruhe bringen. —Die Faust die bisher das Schwert geführt, braucht Zeit, um sich wieder an die Pflugschar oder das Richtmaß zu gewöhnen, und nicht jedermanns Sache ist es, die wilde Ungebundenheit des Biwaks am frommen Herdfeuer zu vergessen. (7) Indeed, not all the stirred up fervor can suddenly be brought to rest. The

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fist, which until then had wielded the sword, needs time to adjust once again to the plowshare or the standard measure, and it is not for every man to forget the wild freedom of the bivouacs whilst sitting by the calm open hearth at home.

This description is strikingly similar to the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder that only became a clinical condition, initially known as shell shock, after the First World War, some thirty years after this account was written. Despite the extreme horrors of war, the narrator concludes that all of the spilled blood was not enough to wash away the hatred and thirst for revenge. Also discernible in these passages is the use of realism and historical fiction in order to expose the fictionality of the Germa national narratives popular at the time. Despite the fact that much has been written about the overlapping of history and literature, there endures a commonplace belief that history somehow represents truth. In his study, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Hayden White demonstrates that beyond the historian's claim of recreating what happened in the past, the writer of history still relies on the fabrication of narrative, as do authors of fiction. He writes, “I will consider the historical work as what it most manifestly is—that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2). By using select nineteenth-century historians, White is able to argue this point convincingly because in the nineteenth century the literary component to the practice of history was highly identifiable. While the historian Gordon Craig praises the author of fiction Theodor Fontane for his historical methods, historian Theodor Mommsen was the first German to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (Peterson 30). Taking the relationship of history and literature into consideration, Sudermann's Katzensteg contributes to the historical discourse of the Napoleonic Wars by positing a counter-narrative to nationalist versions.7 Adopting the morose tone that the introductory narration establishes, the novel addresses many aspects of nineteenth-century historiography. The site and the memory of what happened on the Katzensteg take on a degree of significance such as that which Pierre Nora has described as lieux de mèmoire ‘places of memory.’8 According to Nora, these are places, events or myths that serve to formulate the collective consciousness of a nation. Nora writes: Our interest in lieux de mèmoire where memory crystallizes and secretes

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The fictional Erinnerungsort ‘place of memory’ of the bridge is wryly described by figures in the story: “Der Katzensteg ist nämlich der Weg, auf dem der Baron Anno sieben die Franzosen, die das Schloss Schranden besetzt hielten, den Preußen in den Rücken geführt hat” (“For it is the cat walk on which the Baron in the year [180]7 led the French, who were occupying the Schranden Castle, into the backs of the Prussians”; 17). When Boloslav, who is still in France, learns of these events he is told: “Von dem Schrandener Überfall wirst du doch wohl gehört haben—der steht ja in jedem Kalendar” (“You will have surely heard of the ambush at Schranden—it is written on every calendar”; 1928, 17). Here we see the “Katzensteg” being calendrically inscribed into history, making it an unforgettable marker in the national mythology. Pierre Nora suggests that the calendar has a significant role in projects of collective memory such as during the French Revolution. This is because “the most fundamental purpose of the lieux de mèmoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial ... all of this in order to capture a maximum meaning in the fewest signs” (Nora 13). The “Katzensteg” and what it symbolizes in the novel may very well be on a smaller scale than the many Erinnerungsorte established in nineteenth-century Germany, but it reflects this process of nation and memory. One needs only to think of the Hermannsdenkmal in Detmold symbolizing the Germanic defeat of the Romans in the year 9 AD, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig commemorating the victory over Napoleon, or the Walhalla near Regensburg memorializing 2,000 years of Germanic heroism. The “Katzensteg” marks the sacrifice of Prussian defenders and the treachery of the enemies. Throughout the nineteenth century in Germany, Erinnerungsorte were archived in monuments, national holidays and also the growing body of national literature. This process is also evident in the novel, whereby an unidentified poet has memorialized this site of memory in a poem: “Unsern gnäd’gen Herrn von Schranden,/Der uns bedeckt mit Schimpf und Schanden,/ Die uns gemacht zu Hohn und Spott,/Schlag mit der Pest, o Herre Gott!” (“Our merciful Lord of Schranden/Who covered us with ignominy and degredation/That turned us into ridicule and mockery/Smite him with the plague, dear Lord”; 16). But there are more symbols of nationalist mythology in the text that

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correspond to the German nationalist discourse of the nineteenth century. In most cases where they appear, these signifiers are stripped of their sacred status in the pantheon of the German nation, and exposed as irrational. For example, the tavern in which the villagers go to drink and espouse their jingoism is called “Der schwarze Adler” ‘The Black Eagle’. This name, of course, is an absurd rendering of “Der Hohe Orden vom Schwarzen Adler”—the highest honor of the Prussian military. Furthermore, oak trees, a symbol of German greatness, appear throughout the story. The oak had a special place in the discourse of German nationalism because of its presence as an engraving on the legendary Prussian military honor, the Iron Cross. This tree, however, does not appear in the story in such a venerable state, but rather surfaces ignominiously as the material for a tavern Stammtisch ‘meeting and drinking table’ on which the Schrandener inebriate themselves and boastfully reminisce about their battle experiences. In another scene in the novel Boloslav spots a once mighty oak tree that has been reduced to a stump, which renders a feeling for the transitory nature of greatness and the possibility of its desecration. The contrast of these images of the oak tree to the one in the nationalist imagination helps to reveal the mythological nature of the glorifications and idealizations that were essential to the overall nineteenth-century nationalist project. The figure of Boloslav is dichotomously juxtaposed to the villagers of Schranden. The starkly contrasting duality of the protagonist and his adversaries is one of rationality versus irrationality, fact versus myth, as well as a sense of patriotism for its own sake versus a patriotism driven by personal interests. In summary, Boloslav is a reasonable, well-mannered and educated figure while the villagers are an uncouth, narrow-minded horde. The protagonist's sense of love for the fatherland is an enduring commitment that is backed up by action; he is a decorated war hero. The Schrandeners, by distinction, are the masses, easily influenced by truculent appeals to patriotism, which is only exacerbated by the copious amounts of alcohol with which the tavern keeper supplies them. The inability of the villagers to disassociate the son from the deeds of his father epitomizes an irrational logic that is antithetical to the conceptualization of the autonomous individual in society since the Renaissance. Boloslav von Schranden’s three archenemies in the novel are the tavern owner, Merckel, his son Felix, and the pastor, Götz. All three of these men are respected by the villagers as patriots, and act as guardians of the memory of what took place on the “Katzensteg.” Boloslav’s rational objectivity in engaging with this site of memory, when contrasted to the völkisch subjectivity of his enemies, poses two competing historiographies.

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Nineteenth-century Prussia saw the formation of the modern discipline of history. The two most recognizable trends of this at the end of the nineteenth century were those posed by the official historiographers of Prussia, Leopold von Ranke and his successor Heinrich von Treitschke. Ranke’s history is one of mimesis that is only interested in the past; “wie es eigentlich gewesen” ‘as it actually happened’ is his famous dictum. Treitschke, on the other hand, wrote history that was much concerned with the present; his was a history that looked forward with a national purpose. In Katzensteg, Boloslav takes on the role of the historian. In order to determine the veracity of the conventional story of the events at the “Katzensteg,” he begins researching the letters and documents that his father had left behind. With Rankean precision, Boloslav reconstructs the circumstances of the events. What he finds is “eine Geschichte, die nachwies, dass Eberhard von Schranden, weit entfernt, die teuflische Rolle gespielt zu haben, die das Gerücht ihm zuwies, einfach ein Opfer der Ereignisse gewesen war” (“a story which proves that Eberhard von Schranden, far from having played the sinister role the rumor attributed to him, was merely a victim of circumstances”; 135). Although a cruel man from the perspective of the Prussian villagers, Baron von Schranden sympathized with the misery of the “elend geknebelte und zerfleischte Polentum” (“abjectly oppressed and mangled Polish”; 26). The opposing versions of the Baron and what happened on the “Katzensteg” in 1807 demonstrates the purely subjective nature of official histories. Had the outcome of the war been different, the Baron would have been regarded as a hero in another national narrative. Instead, his place in history is that of the loser who was subsequently vilified. Even though Boleslav has gathered the evidence to mitigate his father’s culpability in the sneak attack on the bridge, he sees little hope in enlightening the unenlightened and burns the letters. His pessimism concerning the value of truth for truth’s sake echoes Nietzsche. After all, what good is it to compile facts if in the end no substantial changes will come of it? By burning the letters Boleslav follows the call to live one’s life “unhistorically” as advocated in Nietzsche’s 1874 essay on history.9 At the end of Katzensteg, Napoleon escapes from the island of Elba and Boleslav answers the call to serve the fatherland once again as a captain in the East Prussian militia. Since the villagers of Schranden have proven themselves a backward and incorrigible group, he has nothing left to bind him to his home. The final part of the novel is distanced and unenlightening about the further events of Boleslav von Schranden’s life. It reads, “Von den weiteren Schicksalen Boleslavs weiss man nicht viel” (“Not much is known about the later fate of Boleslav”; 272). All that we

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learn is that while serving in the militia he is granted the permission to transfer to the army and be involved in the great battles, while the Prussian militia in Schranden is removed from the great stage of world history. The final line informs us, “Bei Ligny soll er gefallen sein” ‘He allegedly fell at Ligny’ (272). The obscure language of this passage concerning Boleslav's fate calls to mind what one might find on the official death rolls of the Prussian military. This leaves the sense that the transgressions of the masses vis-à-vis Boleslav will never be atoned and that the memory of the actual hero will fall into oblivion. All the while one can only assume that the self-described patriots of Schranden, far away from the theater of war, will continue imbibing in the village tavern, retelling embellished stories of past battles that will eventually constitute the collective memory of the past. This pessimistic outlook calls to mind Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality with the dominance of slave morality over a noble class. Even though he might be no match for the dominating inferiority of the horde, Boleslav chooses to suffer rather than succumb to the will of the Schrandeners. In the novel, the protagonist comes to appreciate the nature of Regine, who is cast off as a sinner against community and fatherland. However, her animalistic traits are depicted as superior to the herd mentality of the villagers. Here Katzensteg exhibits an intersection of naturalism’s primary tenets and Nietzsche’s philosophy of individualism. The natural individual, unadulterated by communal values, is regarded higher than the dominating collective. By refusing her a Christian burial in Schranden, Boleslav saves her individual legacy from being subsumed by the rabble. Through the example of Regine’s nature, Boleslav also discovers the virtue of standing apart from the crowd. In a moment of revelation after burying her, Boleslav ponders, Nein, kein Tier und kein Dämon war sie gewesen, sondern nichts wie ein ganzer und großer Mensch. Eine jener Vollkreaturen, wie sie geschaffen wurden, als der Herdenwitz mit seinen lähmenden Satzungen der Allmutter Natur noch nicht ins Handwerk gepfuscht hatte, als jedes junge Geschöpf sich ungehemmt zu blühender Kraft entwickeln konnte und eins blieb mit dem Naturleben im Bösen wie im Guten. Und wie er dachte und sann, ward ihm zumute, als ob die Nebel sich lichteten, welche den Boden des menschlichen Seins vom menschlichen Bewußtsein trennen, und er sähe eine Strecke tiefer, als der Mensch sonst pflegt, in den Abgrund des Unbewußtsein hinein. Das, was man das Gute und das Böse nennt, wogte haltlos in den Nebeln der Oberfläche umher, drunten ruhte im träumender Kraft das—Natürliche.” (268) No. She had not been a brute or a devil, but simply a grand and complete human being. One of those perfect, fully developed individuals such as

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In this passage, the social constructions of good and evil are dissolved, leaving only the pure virtue of individual, unadulterated nature. Heavily imprinted with the vocabulary of Nietzsche (“Gute und das Böse” ‘good and evil,’ “Herdenwitz” ‘herd wit’), as well as terminology of naturalism (“Vollkreaturen” ‘fully developed individual’) and “das Natürliche” ‘nature,’ one can see the relevance of the novel at the time of its publication and how it might have struck a nerve. Furthermore, the example of Katzensteg also shows how two intellectual currents could be used as a weapon against the standardizing collective elements in Wilhelmine Germany. In contrast to many other nineteenth century historical novels, Katzensteg takes a critical stance against pseudo-patriotism and national mythology. Considering it was written during an era when Germany seemed destined for its own place in the sun, one should not underestimate the inherent provocation of criticizing Prussia's past glories. Although this work has received little attention in literary histories, Katzensteg, I argue, should be recognized for its treatment of German nationalism in this era. Just as Lukács identifies the significance of the historical novel in the time it was written, we can make most sense of Katzensteg in the milieu of Imperial Germany in the 1880s. This period saw the proliferation of an aggressive völkisch thought, a nationalist historiography under scholars such as Treitschke, and a government that became increasingly irrational and nationalistic with the ascendance of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the throne in 1888. The sparse attention that Sudermann and Katzensteg have received since the end of the Second World War has overlooked the aspects that make it stand out as a historical novel. Although the story of Katzensteg has proven worthy of re-telling in numerous film adaptations throughout the twentieth century, it has not survived the test of time in its original form as a historical novel. Much of this I believe has to do with the fact that the book was never recognized for its merits as a historical novel in the first place. Instead, this aspect of Katzensteg was overshadowed by the success of Sudermann’s dramas, as

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well as the overwhelming amount of critical attention being paid to style and mechanics. This does not come entirely as a surprise, because it was first in the twentieth century that writers such as Georg Lukács and Alfred Döblin began to see that there was more to the historical novel than the text. More than being a literary work set in the past, the historical novel has more to do with the era in which it was written. Katzensteg bears a zestful tone of social criticism that is indicative of a left-liberal opposition to the iron-fisted Bismarckianism or Hohenzollerntum ‘Hohenzoller mania’ of the time. The rebellious spirit of the young German authors found its apotheosis in the late nineteenth century in literary naturalism, which was not only pushing against the social order in Wilhelmine Germany, but also breaking from the previous order of literary conventions. Katzensteg, as well as many other works of Sudermann, is an example of a once impactful literary text that has much to convey about the time in which it was written, and there are certainly other nineteenth-century historical novels which— after being reassessed—could do the same.

Notes 1

For more on nineteenth-century German realism see Robert Holub. For a detailed account of this see Brent Peterson. 3 The two most prominent examples are his plays “Sodoms Ende” (Sodom’s End; 1891), which was censored on the grounds of “Unsittlichkeit” (“Immorality”), and “Johannes” (John the Baptist;1898) for its representation of biblical figures. 4 The Lex Heinze was a controversial law in Wilhelmine Germany, introduced in 1900. It threatened freedom of expression in the arts and sciences by targeting what it deemed to be a growing immorality in society. Sudermann was instrumental in the opposition of this law by gathering artists, scientists and intellectuals under the organization of the Goethe-Bund ‘Goethe Association,’ which ultimately succeeded in forcing proponents of the Lex Heinze to a compromise that removed its most contentious aspects. 5 Another prime example of adapting fashionable social themes in literary works is his second play “Sodoms Ende” that thematizes sexual depravity and decadence in the salon milieu of West Berlin, thereby utilizing the discourses of social decay at the turn of the century. 6 In response to what he perceived as a growing tendency of unnecessary harshness in literary criticism, Sudermann wrote a series of articles in 1902, published under the title Die Verrohung in der Theaterkritik (The Barbarization in Theater Criticism), which in turn provoked responses from Harden and other critics who were targeted. 7 See Heinrich von Treitschke. 8 This will be referred to with the German term Erinnerungsort. 9 See Friedrich Nietzsche. 2

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Works Referenced Alberti, Conrad. “Der Realismus” (1888). Literarische Manifeste des Naturalismus 1880–1892. Ed. Erich Ruprecht. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962. 122–124. Print. —. “Hermann Sudermann. Der Katzensteg. 1890.” Die Gesellschaft: Münchener Halbmonatschrift für Kunst und Kultur 6 (1890): 436-437. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Walter Benjamin Erzählen. Schriften zur Theorie der Narration und zur literarischen Prosa, Ed. Alexander Honold. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. 129–140. Print. Döblin, Alfred. “Der historische Roman und wir.” Alfred Döblin: Aufsätze zur Literatur. Ed. Walter Muschg. Freiburg im Breisgau: WalterVerlag, 1963. Print. Elster, Hans Martin. “Nach Hermann Sudermanns Tod.” Schleswiger Nachrichten. 1 December 1928. N. pag. Hermann Sudermann Manuscript Collection, Cotta Archive, German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. 18 October 2012. Ewers, Hanns Heinz. Führer durch die moderne Literatur. 300 Würdigungen der hervorragendsten Schriftsteller unserer Zeit. Hannover: Revonnah Verlag, 1906. Print. Harden, Maximilian. “Hermann Sudermann.” Die Nation: Wochenschrift für Politik, Volkswirtschaft und Literatur 7 (1889/90): 225–227. Print. Hausrath, Adolf. Treitschke: His Doctrine of German Destiny and of International Relations. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1918. Print. Heyse, Paul. Four Letters to Hermann Sudermann, 1890–1892. Hermann Sudermann Manuscript Collection, Cotta Archive, German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. 2 December 2011. Kerr, Alfred. Herr Sudermann, der D . . Di . . Dichter: Ein kritisches Vademecum. Berlin: Verlag Heliantbus, 1903. Print. Laengsdorff, Julia Virginia. “Erinnerungen an Hermann Sudermann.” Merkur. 7 March 1929. N. pag. Hermann Sudermann Manuscript Collection, Cotta Archive, German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. 18 October 2012. Lukács, Georg. Der historische Roman. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955. Print. Mauthner, Fritz. “Der Katzensteg.” Deutschland” Wochenschrift für Kunst, Litteratur, Wissenschaft und soziales Leben (1889/90): 297-

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298. Print. Müller, Harro.”Possibilities of the Historical Novel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems and Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson. New York: Berg Publishers, 1991. Print. Neumann-Hofer, Otto. Letter to Hermann Sudermann, 12 January 1887. Hermann Sudermann Manuscript Collection, Cotta Archive. German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. 29 October 2012. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970. Print. Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de M`emoire." Trans. Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. Print. Peterson, Brent. History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the NineteenthCentury Nation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Print. Roberts, David. “The German Historical Novel in the Twentieth Century: Continuities and Discontinuities: I—Theoretical Questions.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems and Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson. New York: Berg Publishers, 1991. Print. Röpke, Wilhelm. Das Kulturideal des Liberalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag G. Schulte-Bulmke, 1947. Print. Schulze, Hagen. “Napoleon.” Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Ed. Etienne François and Hagen Schulze. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003. 28–47. Print. Sudermann, Hermann. Bilderbuch meiner Jugend. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1922. Print. —. Katzensteg. Berlin: Cotta, 1928. Print. —. “Litterarische Wandlungen in Deutschland: Vortrag gehalten auf dem litterarischen Kongress in Dresden.” Jung-Deutschland und JungElsaß: Halbmonatschrift für Dichtkunst und Kritik 3 (1895): 165–168. Print. —. Tagebücher (Diaries) I–X. 1885–1928. Hermann Sudermann Manuscript Collection, Cotta Archive, German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. 19 January 2012. “Sudermanns 70. Geburtstag und der Film.” Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt 18 (September 1927). N. pag. Print. 18 October 2012. Treitschke, Heinrich von. Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Erster Teil. Bis zum zweiten Pariser Frieden. Leipzig: F.W. Hendel Verlag, 1928. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Print.

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Zickel, Martin. “Modedichter und Dichtermoden: (Sudermann, Johannes; Maeterlinck, L'Intruse).” Neuland: Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kunst 2 (1898): 332–334. Print.

CHAPTER FOUR “ERSTICKEN IM STOFFLICHEN”: CHARACTERS AS COLLECTIVES IN ALFRED DÖBLIN’S WALLENSTEIN AND HIS THEORETICAL WRITINGS CARL GELDERLOOS

Alfred Döblin’s long historical novel Wallenstein, published in 1920, narrates the Thirty Years’ War from just after the battle of White Mountain in 1620 to a mythologized version of the death of Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II in 1637. In Döblin’s version, Ferdinand dies alone, in the forest, at the hands of a goblin. As a representation of history, Wallenstein has occasioned praise and befuddlement amongst contemporaries and later critics for its subversion of a clear historical narrative and the way it overwhelms the easy discernment of causal relations, temporal sequence, and partisan alignments through an accumulation of descriptive detail, accounts of mass processes, and complex involutions of interpersonal feuds—what Döblin perhaps meant when he called for “Tatsachenphantasie” ‘fantasy of fact’1 in 1913, and what the contemporary reviewer Lulu von Strauss und Torney dubbed the novel’s “Ersticken im Stofflichen” ‘suffocation in the material’ (qtd. in Schuster and Bode 112–113). Wallenstein was seen as grotesque and overwhelming when it first appeared, its presentation totally out of joint with the history it was representing, with some reviews acknowledging its radicality as well as its difficulty,2 while later commentators have praised the novel’s savvy, modernist, or even postmodern approach to historiography and narrative, lauding the ways in which Wallenstein indicates the fundamental contingency, horror, or absurdity of history and the corresponding need for it to be narrativized.3 My contention, however, is that the novel’s contribution as a literary representation of history is to

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be found not primarily on the level of its complexly narrated plot but rather in its approach to character. In a 1929 essay written to accompany August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit, Döblin characterizes the distinction between individual and collective as a question merely of the scale of observation.4 Similarly Wallenstein, by shifting the view upwards to the supra-individual level of mass processes and downwards to the sub-individual level of fragmentary drives and body parts, frustrates any attempt to fixate on autonomous individual as stable source of meaning or historical causality.5 Wallenstein thereby advances an epic poetics concerned with what Döblin would dub the “Kollektivwesen” ‘collective being’ or “Massenwesen” ‘mass being’.6 Yet in contrast to Georg Lukács’s influential theorization of the middling protagonist of the historical novel, Wallenstein’s characters function as mass beings not by virtue of their typicality but through descriptive registers that evoke an excess of materiality and a violence that ruptures the contours of the individual body in order to destabilize the very distinctions upon which the individual subject might be predicated. By closely attending to the ways in which this historical novel reconfigures characters as “Massenwesen,” this essay seeks to illuminate a crucial and overlooked moment of the modernist re-appropriation of the epic. From the reconsiderations of history’s relationship to narrative that marked the so-called crisis of historicism in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, to the glut of biographies lambasted by Siegfried Kracauer in 1930, to the surge of interest in historical novels in the Weimar Republic and exile—history and historiography were a focus of modern German thought and literature.7 Döblin contributed prolifically to the genre of the historical novel,8 and Wallenstein certainly lies within this broader constellation. Yet in many important respects Döblin’s novel also defied the strategies which history was habitually made to serve: Wallenstein does not rely on the coherence of the individual biography to organize the chaos of historical experience and meaning nor, with its spectacular violence and protracted depictions of the miseries of war, does it seem especially vulnerable to the accusations during the following decade that exiled German writers had allegedly turned to history to escape the present. Rather, by depicting characters in ways that frustrate a sustained focus on them as individuals, Döblin’s novel must be understood as a major contribution to a modernist discourse of the epic. From Georg Lukács’s Die Theorie des Romans (The Theory of the Novel, 1916) to Brecht’s epic theater, the heterogeneous discourse of the epic served a diverse and often contradictory array of purposes and positions. Speaking broadly, the idea of the epic enabled the theorization

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of relationships between narrative and society that pivoted on the category of masses rather than individuals. Crucially, this turn away from the bourgeois individual also involved the reconceptualization of subject matter, representational strategies, audience, media, and the artist, as well as a reconfiguration of the relationship among these terms. The epic turn from psychological interiority and individual reception towards the masses thus proceeded in tandem with the increasing intermediality of literature and the figurative dislocation of the writer from the Stube to the Strasse. The turn from individual interiority towards the epic’s treatment of masses9 implies an ambivalence between plot and character that often tends to be resolved with an emphasis on plot rather than character. Lukács, discussing in his Theorie des Romans the deep historical shifts that necessitated the self-aware form of the novel, writes, “The autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men have made an unbridgeable chasm; . . . when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one another” (66). This radical historical-philosophical disjunction is analyzed by Lukács as a broken relationship between interiority and adventure with deep implications for both character (insofar as the individual, interior particularity becomes the privileged space for character depiction once the space of the social has lost its epic wholeness) and plot, which is confronted with the problem of arbitrariness once every action is no longer capable of being seen as a “well-fitting garment for the soul” (30).10 Yet the radical fissure between interiority and adventure would come to be theorized chiefly in terms of plot and narrative rather than character. Lukács himself indicated this ambivalent predilection by declaring that protagonists of novels are by definition seekers. The individual’s suddenly problematic place in the modern absence of a closed, given totality entails both the need to give a narrative form to life and the particular, searching psychology of the novel’s heroes (51). In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin’s discussion of narrative in the epic and the novel focuses on memory—the exemplary Gedächtnis ‘memory’ of the epic contrasted to the individualized Eingedenken ‘remembrance’ of the novel—and thus implicitly privileges the narrative of events, of the “Lauf der Dinge” ‘the course of events’ (“Der Erzähler” 453).11 But if the relationship between the epic and the novel pivots in some way on the shifting relationships among interiority, exteriority, and individuality, then the category of character remains potentially as central to this question as do those of plot and narrative. Döblin, I want to suggest, advanced the theorization and practice of the modernist epic precisely by attending to the possibilities and implications

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of character depiction.12 In particular, Wallenstein troubles a discourse of subjectivity predicated on the categories of insides and outsides by subverting the very spatial distinction between these categories in the bodies of its characters. Wallenstein must therefore be read as a touchstone of a resurgent discourse of the epic within German modernism because of the way it constructs a relationship among masses, history, and narrative upon the violently unstable bodies that populate its pages. My contention is that Döblin’s evolving theory of the epic, which drew on a critique of the novel form and his essayistic insights into embodied subjectivity, allowed and even compelled him to experiment with a kind of characterization that relates the individual and the collective in surprising ways. Major figures of the Thirty Years’ War—Emperor Ferdinand, Wallenstein, General Tilly—convey their broader social context not as symbols, national types, or representations of values, but rather through strategies of embodiment, fragmentation, incorporation, and integration, in other words, by disrupting the stability of characters as autonomous individuals bearing historical agency. What Döblin would later call the “Kollektivwesen” will be essential to understanding the functioning of characters in Wallenstein, because the concept illuminates the representative strategies—and their underlying ideas—which Döblin used to link historical individuals to larger historical processes. Döblin scholarship tends to be heavily weighted towards Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), despite decades of prolific literary production both before and after the city novel’s publication. This essay therefore aspires to contribute to the ongoing work of rounding out Döblin scholarship—not merely in the belief that the earlier and later works are worthwhile in their own right, nor in the pragmatic sense that a fuller reckoning of Döblin’s poetics will help us understand the city novel better. Above all, Döblin’s capacious interdisciplinary writing, his dizzyingly prolific production, sustained influence, and ongoing interrogation of the relationship among aesthetic, subjective, scientific, and philosophical categories means that the relative neglect of works like Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, 1916), Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek’s Struggle with the Steam Turbine, 1918), Wallenstein (1920), and Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Seas and Giants, 1924) represents a major omission in the study of German modernism. This period of Döblin’s writing is particularly crucial for a consideration of the return to the epic in the context of the development of the German historical novel.

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“Nachdem die Böhmen besiegt waren, war niemand darüber so froh wie der Kaiser” (“After the Bohemians had been defeated, nobody was happier about it than the Emperor”; 9). The novel begins with a statement that teeters between the world-historical and the personal. The subordinate clause that opens the nearly 900-page tome establishes the setting as shortly after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, while the main clause shifts to Emperor Ferdinand as the counterpoint to this historical event. The second sentence moves from Imperial affect to Imperial appetite as it expands on Ferdinand’s happiness: “Noch niemals hatte er mit rascheren Zähnen hinter den Fasanen gesessen, waren seine fältchenumrahmten Äuglein so lüstern zwischen Kredenz und Teller, Teller Kredenz gewandert” (“He had never sat with swifter teeth behind the pheasants, his wrinkled little eyes had never wandered so lustfully between credenza and plate, plate credenza”). The scene continues its fragmentary depiction of excess, introducing in passing major figures of the court by foregrounding an animal corporeality and detached scraps of raiment and garb (9). If the first sentence involves the Emperor’s affect but not his agency in the military victory, later passages replace him as a grammatical subject entirely, granting his body parts autonomy and agency of their own. “wer ißt, liebt keine Pausen; was schluckt, muß spülen. Ferdinands Lippen wollten naß sein, sein Schlund naß, sie verdienten’s reichlich, droschen ihr Korn” (“he who eats does not love pauses; what swallows must swill. Ferdinand’s lips wanted to be wet, his gorge wet, they had amply earned it, threshed their grain”; 9). Contemporary reviews of Döblin’s novel found that the emphasis on bodies, appetites, and drives of such scenes made the novel a grotesque (Koepke 13; Schuster and Bode 83, 102, 107, 112-113). And indeed, even where the passage seems to return to the level of historical event, a mythological, allegorical framing prevents both a clear historical overview—the novel lacks historical dates—and a definite identification of narrative perspective: “Die Böhmen geschlagen, Ludmilla und Wenzel, die heiligen, hatten die Hand von ihren tollen Verehrern gezogen: da saßen sie auf dem Sand, haha, samt Huß, allen Brüderschaften, ihrer Waldhexe Libussa, dem Pfalzgrafen Friedrich” (“The Bohemians defeated, Ludmila and Wenceslaus, the saints, had withdrawn their hands from their mad worshippers; there they sat in the sand, haha, along with Hus, all brotherhoods, their forest witch Libuše, the Count Palatine Frederick”; 9). The defeated party is represented through oddly personalized figures from Czech lore and history, while the narrator’s amused interjection suggests at least a partial focalization through Ferdinand. In Ludmila, Wenceslaus, Hus, and Libuše we have at least the lineaments of a national collective,

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but the elliptical, allusive image withholds any meaningful overview of history, national or otherwise. Where the depiction of the banquet collapses into fragments and drives, the immediate effect of this apparently bigger historical picture is similarly to frustrate a grasp both of the contours of the novel’s plot from the outset and of a specific eventnature of history.13 What is one to make of such an account of the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War? The brief allusion to the defeated Friedrich, which had seemed to be setting the historical stage, quickly turns back to the celebratory gluttony. Enthusiastic exclamations that shift from Ferdinand’s hypothetical voice (9) to narrative interjection (9,10,12) reinforce the partial focalization through Ferdinand. In doing so, the narrative strategies of this opening passage suggest two alternate readings. On the one hand, the thematic overlay of the banquet and the victory, both causes of the Emperor’s enthusiasm, contributes to a richly suggestive psychological character sketch of Ferdinand—he is inhabited by lusty drives for consumption, power, and pleasure, and inhibited by his constitutional inability to take the active role in realizing these. On the other hand, the text’s fragmentary depictions of both history and individual bodies marks a rapid level shifting among disparate elements—food, clothing, individual bodies, world-historical processes—that eludes the grasp of a kind of reading that would locate historical meaning or causality in individual psychology, motivation, and action. It is this tension between individual character and strategies of depiction that frustrate any sustained focus on individuals that I wish to explore here. Indeed, the relationship between individual and social context is a central question of the novel form in general, and especially of the historical novel. How might a historical novel convey broader processes of history or salient features of a given historical moment through the representative possibilities of prose fiction and the conventional narrative reliance on individual character? When Georg Lukács, in his 1916 Theorie des Romans, suggests that it is precisely the individual biography that can anchor a narrative to the unmoored “transcendental homelessness” of the modern subject (41), we may see this as a local inflection of a broader aesthetic and epistemological moment. Wilhelm Dilthey, in his “Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft” (Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason) describes the individual biography as a privileged form that can make the passage of time—itself inaccessible to direct experience— meaningful (195). Where the act of fixing a moment means that it is necessarily withdrawn from the “flow of time” (Dilthey 193), the context of a biography provides a meaningful whole that lends significance to the

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isolated moments (199). And Rüdiger Campe has traced the relationship between form and life back to Friedrich Blankenburg’s theory of the novel in order to show how the modern novel poses form not as a question of poetic category but rather as a question of the fundamental need to give form to life. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel theorizes the relationship between history and life as one of rupture and narrative re-contextualization. In his essay “Die historische Formung” (Historical Formation), Simmel uses a complex and vivid image of a carpet whose connections mostly run beneath the visible surface but nevertheless form the meaningful patterns we can see. The historian however is interested not in the unbroken patterns of the surface, but in the connections organized by a unifying concept (330). Indeed, when Siegfried Kracauer analyses the ideologically dubious flood of post-WWI biographies as the “neobourgeois art form” in a 1930 essay, this critique indexes both the prevalence and the senescence of the idea that an individual Lebenslauf can give aesthetic form to the chaotic manifold of the experience of time and history. Kracauer criticizes biographies as a kind of escapism that would seek to avoid the fraught insights into history provided by the World War, technological change, and the problematization of the autonomous individual subject. In linking the privileging of a particular aesthetic form to a view of history that is itself the result of a historically-specific subject position—that of the bourgeoisie—Kracauer’s essay shares features with Lukács’s 1936 study, Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel). Drawing on Walter Scott as a prime example, Lukács characterizes the historical novel as a specifically bourgeois form that could arise only in the post-Napoleonic era, once history as a total process became visible (9–23). In further developing the question of the relationship between individual experience and social world addressed in Theorie des Romans and the idea of classspecific epistemologies explored in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), Lukács characterizes the classical historical novel as one centered on a typical, middling protagonist, linked to a pragmatic, living knowledge of the age through the category of Volkstümlichkeit.14 Heroes like Scott’s Edward Waverley are able to represent social processes and changes of their time precisely because of their average quality (25–35). World historical figures such as Mary Stuart, on the other hand, appear only on the margins of the plots (33). By foregrounding the characters of Wallenstein, Ferdinand, Maximilian, and other prominent individuals, Döblin’s novel would seem

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to take precisely the opposite tack, yet his epic is not a history of great men. Wallenstein does not present us with a Thirty Years’ War that is the result of the conscious conflict of historical agents. In contrast to the biographies with which Kracauer takes issue, Wallenstein does not rest upon a bedrock of supposed historical facticity to provide epistemological stability to the experience of history, nor does it organize its events, processes, and material with recourse to the form of the individual biography. Rather, Döblin’s novel turns to history in order to rethink the categories of individual and character as a key step in his development of the modern epic. The way that the characters in Wallenstein function as Kollektivwesen suggests a different relationship between individual and collective/mass than the typical representation found in Lukács. Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, Döblin developed a sustained critique of the nineteenth-century psychological novel. Significantly, he articulated this critique in the conjoined terms of aesthetics, psychology, and a philosophy of nature. A reductionist idea of plot and narrative causality, on the one hand, and a notion of the autonomous subject guided by psychological interiority, on the other, formed the tandem targets of his attack. In his 1913 essay, “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker. Berliner Programm” (To Novelists and Their Critics: Berlin Program) for example, Döblin rejects the attribution of individual action to internal emotional states such as “rage,” “love,” and the like, which are themselves convenient narrative fictions that condense a host of disparate processes (120). Calling for a “Tatsachenphantasie,” Döblin exhorts the novelist to follow the example set by psychiatry by merely noting the processes and movements of subjective mental and physical life (Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur 119–120), rather than hastily imposing a signifying framework onto these processes and movements. Fifteen years later, in his extended philosophical essay, Das Ich über der Natur (The I Above Nature), Döblin probes the individual subject with the eyes of an anatomist, rejecting not just a classical psychic interiority, but also the very notion of any interior at all. Instead of a “hole for the thinking soul,” Döblin’s monist exploration of selfhood merely finds within the human body connection, integration, and a pervasive embodiment that links internal organs, thought, perception, and extended cosmos (114-115). Common to these various explorations is a rejection of a dualist model of human subjectivity that would locate autonomous, stable subjects within their bodies, in favor of a monist option that sees subjectivity as necessarily both embodied and material. Döblin’s monist conception of the materiality of subjectivity is linked to the idea of a Tatsachenphantasie and to the concept of the Kollektivwesen. This is especially significant for

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Wallenstein where, as we shall see, the category of character is reconfigured precisely by means of paratactic listings, an expansive accumulation of images of bodies, material objects, and social processes, and a spatial logic of embodiment, fragmentation, and rupture that undermines the contiguous bounds of the contained, autonomous individual. These strategies reflect the way that Döblin’s thoughts on subjectivity and literary character were developing in dialogue with his philosophy of nature. In particular, characterization in Wallenstein suggests a significant ambivalence in the concept of Leben ‘life’ as it relates to Form ‘form’. On the one hand, individual lives as biographies are an organizing principle for Wallenstein. Main characters like Wallenstein, Emperor Ferdinand, and Maximilian serve as centers of accretion and condensation that structure the manifold events and processes of the Thirty Years’ War. Yet on the other hand, Leben ‘life’ considered not as biography but as biology taps into a more vitalist register in Döblin’s thought, tied to the idea of unrestrained growth and change.15 Where life as biography provides form, life as biology destroys it.16 Thus, to return to the example of the opening banquet, Ferdinand’s celebration may well be the vessel for presenting the history of the war up to that point, yet the corporeal fragmentation and excess threaten to spill over at every turn.17 As we shall see, the bodies depicted in Wallenstein serve as centers of meaning, by containing and binding mass processes and social movement, but they also, in being overrun and ruptured by movements they cannot fully contain, frustrate the desire for narrative, semantic, and historical closure. In its depictions of life and bodies Wallenstein develops a strategy of characterization that portrays individuals as Kollektivwesen.18 Early in the novel, a depiction of Vienna surveys the city as a whole in order to then zoom in on the figure of Ferdinand. Im Ring seiner Mauern Wälle und Basteien lag Wien; Häuser, Türme, Kirchen gemauert an Häuser, Märkte, Gäßchen, überschwellend gegen die Donau, jenseits den Werd mit Steinen bedrückend, mit tastenden Fingern nach der Vendedigerau, dem Rustschacher, den beiden weiten Galizinwiesen (78). In the ring of its walls, ramparts and bastions lay Vienna; houses, towers, churches walled up against houses, markets, lanes, spilling over towards the Danube, oppressing the Werd beyond with stones, with groping fingers towards the Venediger Au, the Rustschacher, both broad Galizin meadows.

Vienna is both contained in its walls and overflows it, and the way the city exceeds its frame here indicates the shifting among levels and scales

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that marks the passage as the floating perspective moves through the city’s streets (78-79). Each sentence describes a visual scene with no connection to the next except for spatial adjacency and horizontal coordination within the urban social space. The way that each sentence treats a different social groupings—such as soldiers, students, “Bürgerfräulein” ‘young bourgeois ladies’, nuns, cripples, pages, Cossacks, a burial procession—suggests a working ecosystem. And indeed, the sense of bustling purpose recalls the descriptions of the modern metropolis in Döblin’s 1924 essay, “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters” (The Spirit of the Naturalistic Era), where he writes, “Die Städte sind Hauptorte und Sitze der Gruppe Mensch. Sie sind der Korallenstock für das Kollektivwesen Mensch” (Cities are the principal seat of the human being. They are the coral reef for the human collective being”; 180). Comparing cities to a “Korallenstock” ‘coral reef’ suggests the biological perspective at play here, and the concept of the “Kollektivwesen” is in fact developed in the same essay in order to rethink the status of technological modernity from a longer perspective than that of a classical “scholastisch-humanistische Schulbildung” (“scholastichumanist education”; Döblin, “Der Geist” 168), which obstructs an accurate view of the present. In contrast to the transcendence that marked the earlier “metaphysical period,” increasing observation of the physical world gradually leads to the technological existence of the “naturalistic era” (Döblin, “Der Geist” 169-170). In setting out to undo the sentimental dichotomies of culture and civilization, past and present, Döblin thereby also undermines the distinction between nature and technology (168). In describing the social drive (“Gesellschaftstrieb,” 170) of human beings towards greater complexity and agglomerations, he asks: “Was ist das biologisch gesehen?” (“What is this, seen biologically?”; 170). He answers this question in terms of the “Tierart Mensch” ‘animal species of the human’ and the “Kollektivwesen,” which allows him both to position his discussion of technology as a phenomenon that is the expression of nature, on the one hand, and to sweep not just bourgeois humanism but modern European culture in general into a relatively marginal corner (171). The concept of the Kollektivwesen must therefore be seen as a key moment in Döblin’s sustained criticism of the autonomous bourgeois subject (Becker 47). In situating the Kollektivwesen in the metropolis as the expression of a biological drive, Döblin is able to attack the notion of the contained individual from both sides: in terms of an embrace of mass, urban, technological society, and in the rejection of a transcendent human privilege vis-à-vis nature.19

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I suggest, therefore, that such depictions of characters in Wallenstein be read as an early engagement with this concept. In reworking the literary category of character in his depiction of historical individuals, Döblin is furthering the critique of character and the conception of individuality upon which it rests that he had announced in his 1913 “Berliner Programm.” In the following passage, Ferdinand is depicted as the symbolic and spatial center of Imperial Vienna, yet he cannot really be dissociated from the chaos of the streets, the materiality of the court, or the nestled symbolic order of the city. He is a kind of “Kollektivwesen,” and this association is reinforced by how marginal Ferdinand himself actually is in the depiction of the court. He is not named directly, and mention of him is conveyed either through the symbolic apparatus of royal titles or through the names of a retinue entrusted with his body and soul: Breit fußte neben dem Augustinerkloster an der Mauer das riesige Massiv der Burg, viereckig, ellbogenartig die Ecktürme ausstemmend, drei hohe Stock ragend. Darin hauste der Gewaltigste des Heiligen Römischen Reiches inmitten seines ungeheuren Trosses, beschützt von der Trabantengarde und den kaiserlichen Hatschieren, hundert Mann samt Fourieren und Trompetern unter Don Balthasar, ihrem Kapitän. Benedicite und Gratias an der Tafel sagten sieben Kapläne. Für seine Küche sorgten Mundköche Meisterköche Unterköche Bratenköche Suppenköche Küchenträger Holzmacher Adjunkten. . . . Um die Seele des Kaisers mühten sich neben dem Beichtvater der Pater Johann Weingartner, der Hofkaplan Paul Knorr von Rosenrot. . . . Seinen Leib hatte er großen Ärzten anheimgegeben, Managetta war Doktor der vier Fakultäten, dazu Mingonius, Mahlgießer, Johann Junker. (80-81) Beside the Augustine cloister on the wall the castle’s gigantic massif rested widely with its four corners, splaying its corner towers out like elbows, rising three tall stories high. Within resided the most powerful one of the Holy Roman Empire amidst his formidable retinue, protected by the trabants and the imperial hartschiers, a hundred men along with foragers and trumpeters under Don Baltasar, their captain. Benedictions and grace at table were said by seven chaplains. Personal chefs master chefs sous chefs roasting chefs soup chefs waiting staff wood splitters and general assistants looked after his kitchen. . . . In addition to his confessor Father Johann Weingartner, Court Chaplain Paul Knorr von Rosenrot labored on the soul of the Emperor. . . . His body he had committed to great doctors, Managetta was a doctor of the four faculties, Mingonius, Mahlgiesser, Johann Junker in addition.

As a “Kollektivwesen,” Ferdinand mobilizes and contains larger social impulses, and his body, appetites, habits, and soul are dispersed

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throughout the social, institutional space of the court. Conversely, the text ties broad social phenomena to his person and his body. During the rising unrest that results from the depredations of Wallenstein’s army in the Imperial lands, the curses directed towards Emperor Ferdinand are compared to rodents gnawing away at wood, a simile that is in turn literalized as the curses are said to bite and claw at the Emperor’s clothes and body: “Schreie, Drohungen; wie wenn Mäuse an einem Schrank beißen, so knisterten, knackten, knatterten um Ferdinand die leisen scharfen Verwünschungen, rissen mit blitzschnellen Krällchen an seinen Schuhen, Strümpfen, ließen sich durch kurze Stöße nicht verjagen in ihrer Wut, knabberten, liefen an, kratzten, krallten, bissen” (“Screams, threats; as when mice bite at a cupboard, the hushed sharp imprecations creaked, clicked, crackled about Ferdinand, tore at his shoes, stockings with lightning-fast little claws, couldn’t be chased away with quick kicks”; 378). Later on, in the tumultuous wake of rapid victories and rising tensions at court over Wallenstein’s increasing power, Ferdinand becomes a fluttering standard: “Ferdinand der Andere, des Römischen Reiches Mehrer, rauschte als glöckchenklingelnde bänderwerfende Riesenstandarte in Purpur über ihnen, in den Boden gerammt, häuserhoch am Mast, an der sein Ungestüm zerrte, als wollte er sie hochtragen” (“Ferdinand the Second, Augmenter of the Roman Empire, rustled above them as a bellringing ribbon-flinging giant standard in purple, driven into the ground, as tall on its pole as a house, which his boisterousness yanked at as though it wanted to carry it aloft”; 392-393). This description represents a stark contrast to his feeble, evacuated physical state at the time.20 The discrepancy between Ferdinand’s body and personality, on the one hand, and his office on the other is a major theme of the novel. During his arranged wedding to Princess Eleonore of Mantua, the Emperor’s feeble and creaturely self all but disappears into the social vestments of his collective role: In der Hofkirche zu Innsbruck begegneten sie sich, von Priestern einander zugeführt; sie sahen sich vor dem Altar zum erstenmal. Die Prinzessin blickte weg, erschüttert von dem gramzerrissenen, halb hilfeflehenden, halb stumpfen Gesicht, das über den ungeheuren Prunkmänteln, über den millionenwerten Halsketten Agraffen Spitzen Bordüren und Ringen sich bewegte; das verquollene ältliche graubärtige Wesen, versteckt in der Schale, mißtrauisch und leidend. (142-143) In the Hofkirche at Innsbruck they met each other, brought together by priests; before the altar they saw each other for the first time. The Princess looked away, shaken by the grieftorn, half imploring half lethargic face which moved above the immense pomp cloaks, moved above the

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necklaces, agraffes, lace trim and rings worth millions; the swollen elderly graybearded creature, hidden in its shell, mistrustful and suffering.

On the one hand this passage expresses the lack of fit between Ferdinand the man and the expectations of his office. The grotesque mismatch between his creaturely, helpless mien and the emblems of his imperial office, “millionenwert,” ‘worth millions’ plays to the characterization of the Emperor as a “furchtbar-groteske Schwächling,” ‘terrible-grotesque weakling’ as Lulu von Strauss und Torney has it in her review (qtd. in Schuster and Bode 111). Yet, on the other hand, the novel’s repeated depiction of its main characters as assemblages suggests that this mismatch is due not to Ferdinand’s weaknesses alone, but must also be read as a de-emphasis of an individual character’s particularity in order to show the essentially social, collective nature of all characters. As a Kollektivwesen, Ferdinand embodies aspects of his office and his empire, and the text’s literalization of metaphors that compare the Emperor to a standard or his detractors to mice suggests that embodiment and corporeality provide ways of linking the individual character to the historical collective that are distinct from either symbolic representation or the Volkstümlichkeit linked to historically situated praxis that is so central for Lukács. Just as the novel’s opening passage shifts the view away from the individual in two directions—upwards to the symbolic figures of a national community and downwards to the fragmentation of body parts— depictions of Ferdinand in the novel also involve an affective dimension. Thematically the Emperor can be said to be the object of his own affects; this holds true on the stylistic level as well, as innumerable moments in the novel cast Ferdinand as an object to which things—both outside events and inner states—happen. Especially at moments where he is faced with a decision regarding his shifting dependencies on Bavaria and Wallenstein, we come across sentences like: “Und dann, gerade wie der Fürst eine Pause machte . . . . , sauste urplötzlich der Gedanke Bayern über ihn, als wenn ihn die Riesen geworfen hätten, die an der Decke nicht gehalten wurden, beinbewegend ihn mit den platten Fußsohlen betrampfelnd” (“And then, just as the Prince paused . . . the thought of Bavaria suddenly swept over him, as though he had been tossed by the giants who weren’t held to the ceiling, moving their legs trampling him with the flat soles of their feet”; 324), or “ein feiner kurzer Schmerz wirbelte durch ihn” (“a fine quick pain swirled through him”; 463), or “Als der Kaiser vier Tage hatte verstreichen lassen, . . . ließ er noch einmal das Theater der Beschuldigungen, Bedingungen, des Grolls, der Wildheit an sich passieren” (“When the Emperor had let four days elapse . . . , he once

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more let the theater of incriminations, stipulations, resentment, truculence pass before him”; 564). So in one direction, Ferdinand is dispersed through the material connections of a larger social context—whether this is the city of Vienna, the networks of allegiances and unrest that mark the warring lands, or the opulence of his symbolic office—while in the other direction his autonomy and agency are fragmented into affects, drives, and passions. Either way, the possibilities for any kind of successful, intentional interface between individual subject and historical processes are sharply curtailed. Ferdinand’s status as a Kollektivwesen embodying political conflict on both a supra- and sub-individual level prevents him from acting. Yet this also indicates the epic strategy of representation towards which Döblin was working, in order to narrate mass historical processes without subordinating them to the convenient narrative fiction of individual motivation. This dual movement between sub-individual tendencies and a larger collective aspect also marks the Emperor’s counterpart, Wallenstein. Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, who commanded the Imperial armies while aggrandizing his own fortunes and reshaping the way wars were waged in Europe, is also subject to his own affects and body. He specifically suffers from a condition referred to in the novel as “der Schiefer” ‘the splint’. In moments of setback or frustration, his emotional state finds physiological expression: die Gicht war ihm in den Kopf gestiegen, seine Augen geschwollen, tiefrot, das Gesicht tiefblaß. Er saß, lag brütend herum; auf Pantoffeln mußte man gehen. Brüllte, sobald sich ihm einer näherte in Sporen oder mit Hunden; in furchtbarer Gereiztheit schleuderte er Becher, Gläser, fiel Unbedachte mit Peitsche und Degen an. (241) The gout had risen to his head, his eyes swollen, deep red, his face deep pale. He sat, lay about brooding; one had to walk in slippers. Roared as soon as someone approached him in spurs or with dogs; in a terrible temper he hurled cups, glasses, attacked the incautious with whip and rapier.

These attacks express the tyrannical character of Wallenstein, but they also illustrate his helplessness in the face of this state. In expressing his affect through outbreaks of gout, his body takes on a life of its own. After he is dismissed by the Emperor in the wake of the 1630 Diet of Regensburg, his condition is particularly severe:

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Sieben Tage lang ließ Wallenstein alle Arbeit liegen. Gelähmt vor Wut an Armen und Beinen. . . . Jetzt trampelte er nicht auf seinen Hut, sondern zerriß ihn. Er war völlig blind. . . . Der lange magere Herzog war ein sterbendes Untier zwischen seinen Laken und Kompressen, den Tod wünschte er sich herbei, zerreißen wollte er den Bayern, den Kaiser, die Jesuiten, die Franzosen. An seinen dünnen Unterschenkeln brachen Gichtgeschwüre auf, das erleichterte ihn; seine Augen verschwollen rot und liefen; sie standen wie Beulen zwischen den fleischlosen Wangen, neben der hohen Nase. (569-570) For seven days Wallenstein let all work rest. His arms and legs lamed with rage. . . . Now he did not trample on his hat but tore it to pieces. He was completely blind. . . . The long lean duke was a dying beast amongst his sheets and compresses, he wished for death, he wanted to tear the Bavarian to pieces, the Emperor, the Jesuits, the French. Gouty ulcers broke open on his thin shanks, this relieved him; his eyes swelled red and ran; they stood like bulges between his fleshless cheeks, beside his high nose.

The physiological indices of his inner state both express and give relief to his anger. The hapless detail of his thin legs contrasts with the potency of his rage, while the fact that he is metaphorically blinded by anger is augmented and muddled by the description of his eyes’ physical swelling. The multiple objects of his actual and imagined “ripping to shreds”—his hat, on the one hand, and his adversaries, on the other—overlay his bodily surroundings with his political surroundings, and the creaturely tenor of the description of Wallenstein as a dying beast, or of his swollen eyes undermines the calculating mastery by which he is frequently characterized. The effect of such scenes is one of bodily and affective fragmentation: the dissolution of Wallenstein into pieces, drives, and tendencies is tied to a laming incapacitation.21 Like Ferdinand, Wallenstein is also portrayed as a larger collection of forces. In particular, the way that he mobilizes fiscal, material, and martial resources on a vast transregional scale earns him the repeated narrative epithet of “machinery” (424, 446, 470-471, 740). The mechanical register conveys not only efficiency and impersonality, but also a decentralization and dispersal of the effects of the novel’s titular character. If Ferdinand is a Kollektivwesen in his imbrication with the court, his office, and the extent of his power, Wallenstein increasingly functions as a collective being as his influence spreads. Through long passages of the novel, especially as Wallenstein equips, arms, and readies the imperial armies, the more we read of Wallenstein as effect, system, and machine, the less we see of him as an individual character. And when the narrative does return to depictions of Wallenstein the individual, the individual focus

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tends to be frustrated by the fragmentariness of his affects and drives. Indeed, there is something mechanical at play in the corporeal eruptions that indicate Wallenstein’s rages. While these characterizations do partly function on a level of psychological characterization—Wallenstein the machine and Ferdinand the weakling—my contention is that their primary function is in fact to move the focus away from the psychologically driven individual and towards other ways of articulating the relationship between single character and the historical collective. This would be in line with Döblin’s discussion, in various texts that lay out his philosophy of nature in the 1920s, of the individual ontological unit as such. In an essay entitled, “Das Wasser” (Water), published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922, Döblin explores the fluid element in order to deny the stability of individual bodies of any kind, whether physical or conceptual. Was ist das: Meer? Wer ist das? Es ist gar nicht „das Meer.“ Diese Wellen sind keine Einzelwesen. Ich treffe im Wasser nie auf Einzelwesen. Es ist so biegsam, ineinander geschmolzen, ineinandergehend. Ich komme auf keinen Teil, den ich isolieren kann. . . . In der Flüssigkeit sinken die Grundteile zu tieferer Anonymität zurück. Die schärfere hitzigere Wallung der Körper, ihre Isolierung und Flucht voneinander nimmt ein Ende. (“Das Wasser” 854–855) What is that: ocean? Who is that? It is not “the ocean” at all. These waves are not individual beings. In the water I never encounter individual beings. It is so pliable, fused into each other, moving into each other. I come across no part that I can isolate. . . . In liquid, the basic components sink down to a deeper anonymity. The sharper more heated churning of bodies, their isolation and flight from each other, comes to an end.

Water here functions as a model for the ontological relationship between particle and fluid, mass and individual. The indivisible material extension of subjectivity is a theme which Döblin would develop in more detail over the course of the 1920s, most notably in his 1927 book-length treatise, Das Ich über der Natur, in which he will repeat more or less verbatim the above passage from “Das Wasser” (22–23). This confluence alone begins to suggest how tightly intertwined his considerations of the individual human subject were with his monist philosophy of nature. Another essay from 1922, “Die Natur und ihre Seelen” (Nature and its Souls), gives a sense of the social stakes of this materialist conception of subjectivity. Mit diesem Salz, diesem Wasser, diesem Eiweiß verbreitern wir uns in die Welt. Mit dem Meer, den Wüsten, den Bergen, den Felsen, den Winden.

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Darum kann man die Welt durchfühlen. Darum ist man nicht diese halbkomische bürgerliche Figur, die froh ist ihren Rock zu tragen, sondern ausgebreiteter, ernster und zugleich dunkler, anonymer. Anonym: das Zauberwort. Das führende Wort. Die Person spielt keine Rolle. . . . Das Leben und die Wahrheit ist nur bei der Anonymität. (“Die Natur Und Ihre Seelen” 9) With this salt, this water, this protein we widen into the world. With the ocean, the deserts, the mountains, the cliffs, the winds. This is why we can feel through the world. This is why one isn’t this half-comical bourgeois figure who is happy to wear its frock, but is rather more dispersed, more serious and also darker, more anonymous. Anonymous: the magic word. The guiding word. The person is of no importance . . . Life and truth are only in anonymity.

The appearance of the “half-comical figure” of the bourgeois recalls the scornful dismissal in “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker” (1913) of the self-delusions of an outmoded Belletristik ‘fiction,’ based upon the hegemony of the autonomous individual and the unaware narrative fictions of individual psychological motivation. In all of these instances, Döblin’s attack is on the idea of a contained individual on every level— ontological, psychological, literary—and the snide mention of the Rock ‘frock’ suggests the perceived cultural, social context in which Döblin was intervening—the autumn years of a long-dominant and self-satisfied bourgeois humanism, which he will eagerly bury and summarily elegize in “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters.” This tight analogy among various critiques of the individual unit suggests precisely why representative strategies of collectivity and embodiment should serve to advance the portrayal of characters in Wallenstein, and why the category of character itself should be a privileged one for Döblin’s developing conception of epic narrative. By deploying various devices that undermine the solidity of individual bodies and individual motivation—particularly corporeal and affective fragmentation, on the one hand, and collective dispersal, on the other—the historical novel is able both to portray history as a process unmoored from individual motivation or decision, and to challenge what was seen as the primacy of psychological interiority and conscious motivation within literary representation. For a final example of how Wallenstein reworks character as something both fragmentary and collective, we should consider the case of Tilly, general to Prince-Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria and of Bavaria’s Catholic armies. Where Ferdinand might be said to be an assemblage of parts and symbols and Wallenstein is described as a machine, Tilly is a

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battlefield. The first major appearance in the novel of Tilly—“der flinke alte Brabanter, der Freiherr von Marbiß und Tilly, Johann Tserclaes,” (“the deft old Brabanter, Freiherr of Marbiss and Tilly, Johann Tserclaes”; 291)—presents him as a living battlefield: “Der Brabanter, steif, gespenstig, mit einer weißen Schärpe, zwei Pistolen und einen Dolch im Gurt, kurze weiße Haare; an den Haarspitzen schwankten ihm wie Ähren die Tausende erschlagenen Menschen” (“The Brabantian, rigid, ghostly, with a white sash, two pistols and a dagger in his belt, short white hair; on the tips of his hair the thousands slain waved like ears of corn”; 292). The description of Tilly’s physical appearance quickly gives way to the phantasmic and ghoulish spectacle of his dead enemies, clinging to and covering his own body: Sein bleiches spitzes Gesicht, buschige Brauen, starrer borstiger Schnurrbart, überrieselt von den verstümmelten Regimentern eines Menschenalters; sie hielten sich rutschend an den Knöpfen seines grünen Wamses, an seinem Gurt. Seine knotigen Finger bezeichneten ein jeder die Vernichtung von Städten; mit jedem Gelenk war ein Dutzend ausgerotteter Dörfer bezeichnet. Über seine Schultern schoben sich her, zappelten die Körper der gemetzelten Türken, der Franzosen, der Pfälzer, und doch sollte er damit erscheinen vor Gericht einmal, samt ihren Pferden und Hunden, die über ihm hingen kreuz und quer, einer vor dem andern, über dem andern, eine ungeheure Last, so daß sein Kopf samt dem Hütlein darunter verschwand. (292) His sharp pale face, bushy brows, stiff bristly mustache, sprinkled by the mutilated regiments of a generation; slipping down, they held onto the buttons of his green doublet, onto his belt. Each one of his knobbly fingers marked the annihilation of cities; with every joint a dozen eradicated villages were designated. The bodies of the slaughtered Turks, French, Palatines shuffled, flounced over his shoulders, and yet he was supposed to appear with all this before Judgment one day, together with their horses and dogs, which hung over him this way and that, one in front of the other, over the other, a monstrous burden, so that his head along with his little hat disappeared beneath them.

The bodies of the dead and the cities and villages he has destroyed accrue to his own physique in a kind of delayed reckoning of his violence. The effect of this passage is, first of all, to preserve the effects of his past actions by representing them as properties of his physical body. The accumulation of battles and victories that would go towards the making of a general while remaining invisibly in the past is here added to and made visible on Tilly’s stature. As a Kollektivwesen, he is the sum of his actions and preserves the ghostly collectivities which his actions had destroyed.

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This strategy for invoking a relationship between historical individual and social collective is far removed from Lukács’s analysis in Der historische Roman. This account of Tilly has him not so much reflecting, representing, or concentrating historical processes as embodying them. The sense of embodiment is heightened by the anatomical register of the following lines. Ein Mammut, belastete er den Boden; aber eisig hielt er sich, hörte nicht das Gebrüll der Menschen, das markerschütternde Schreien Schrillen Pfeifen der Pferde, die sich alle an ihn hielten, ihr Leben aus ihm saugen wollten, aus den feinsten Röhrchen seiner Haare; herumlangende Pferdehälse, nüsternzitternd, scheckig, schwarz; zerknallte Hunde, die nach seinem Mund, seiner Nase schnupperten, gierig seinen Atem schlürften. Er mußte längst ausgeleert sein, sie sogen an einem dürren Holz, er klapperte drin und sie brachten ihn nicht zum Sinken. (292-293) A mammoth, he burdened the ground; but icily he maintained himself, did not hear the people yelling, the bloodcurdling screams, shrill whistling of the horses that all held onto him, wanted to draw their life from him, out of the finest capillary tubes of his hair; horse necks reaching around, nostrils quivering, brindled, black; dogs, who had been shot, who sniffed at his mouth, his nose, eagerly slurped his breath. He must have long been emptied, they sucked at brittle wood, he rattled inside and they did not make him fall.

The bodies of Tilly’s vanquished no longer merely cover his body as the visual reminder of an otherwise invisible history, they are physically incorporated into his body in a parasitic way. Sucking life from him, the bodies of humans and animals stand in a contradictory relationship to the one who took their lives in the first place. While this portrayal certainly depends on a synecdochal concentration—so that “Tilly” already stands for all the armies under his control (293)—the grotesque corporeal relationship between Tilly the individual and the masses of the dead goes much further. Symbolically, the fact that he drags a trail of dead behind him is certainly a figurative way of maintaining the presence of a history that is by definition absent. Yet Tilly must also be seen as a prefiguration of a key image in Döblin’s next novel. A scene in Döblin’s 1924 science fiction work Berge Meere und Giganten depicts the construction of the titular giants, enormous living defensive turrets made by the violent fusion of human, animal, and plant bodies—the giants are organs, bodies, landscapes, and ecosystems all at once (517-518). Key details of the passage from Wallenstein, in particular the images of horses and dogs eating from a

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gigantic human body and the focus on digestive processes marks it as a direct precursor to the giants of the science fiction novel. This convergence—a shared image that depicts both a historical individual from the 17th century and a futuristic organic technology from the 27th century—supports the claim that the literary and aesthetic stakes of the Kollektivwesen as a strategy for representing the relationship between individuals and masses must be read in the context of Döblin’s philosophical examination of the individual as such. In Döblin’s conception, developed in essays on literature but also in philosophical writings such as Das Ich über der Natur, subjectivity is corporeal and material. Thought is described as an Aneinanderhaften ‘adherence’ and an Aneinanderhaken ‘linking together’ of matter, and perceptive organs are characterized with the neologism, “Ausgeweide” ‘extestines’ (Das Ich über der Natur 44). The underlying idea is of a material, bodily integration among all things, with subjectivity as the origin, result, and, effectively, as the synonym of this process. For Döblin materiality and embodiment themselves exhibit particular features that effectively preempt a stable or static delineation between individual and mass. Thus the individual is inherently social and collective, in a more fundamentally ontological way. So when Tilly dies some four hundred pages after his first major appearance, we must read the scattering of souls that results as an early articulation of the material entanglement of subjectivities, an idea that is crucial to Döblin’s thought over the course of the 1920s. Da löste sich das Gespensterheer von dem warmen blutsickernden kleinen Körper. Zappelnde Rümpfe der gemetzelten Türken Franzosen Pfälzer, der jaulenden hängenden zertretenen Hunde, kletternden Pferde, die mit den Hufen sich an ihm hielten. Zwischen ihnen gezogen matt, noch naß, seine eigene erstickte Seele. Verknäult flogen sie, unaufhörlich rufend, durch die verschneite Luft, ihrem dunklen Ort zu. (689) Then the ghostly army freed itself from the warm little body seeping blood. Flouncing torsos of the slaughtered Turks French Palatines, of the yowling hanging downtrodden dogs, climbing horses that held onto him with their hooves. Between them drifted feebly, still wet, his own smothered soul. Entangled they flew, ceaselessly calling out, through the snowy air, towards their dark place.

The “tangle” of ghosts that departs with Tilly’s soul is thus a strategy of literary representation meant to depict the broader social context of a historic individual. As a way of representing a Kollektivwesen, it is also a comment on the necessary entanglement of individual subjectivities. In

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this latter sense it proves to be a local instance of a guiding image in Döblin’s work. Whereas the tangle here evokes the relationship among historical subjects, inextricable even in death, Döblin used it elsewhere to describe the poetic process and the constitution of the self. In his late essay “Epilog” (1948), Döblin characterizes the initial moment of artistic creation in terms of the suggestive power of an individual image: “Da fesselte mich zu irgend einer Zeit eine Meldung, eine Schilderung . . . Ich kann auch sagen, mir fiel ein Faden in die Hand, das Ende eines Knäuels, und ich fing an, das Ganze aufzurollen, bis ich ans Ende gelangt war” (“Then at some time a note, a depiction would fascinate me . . . I can also say a thread fell into my hand, the end of a tangle, and I began to unravel the whole thing until I had gotten to the end”; 287-288). The tangle that accompanied Tilly’s soul is here a way of describing an inchoate mass of material that can be initially organized by a single image and unrolled in the epic work from potentiality into actuality. In “Der Bau des epischen Werks” (The Construction of the Epic Work) Döblin describes the genesis of Wallenstein in a similar way: Ich fühle, das widerfährt mir; es ist als ob ich einen wirren Knäuel in der Hand gedreht habe, und jetzt habe ich das Ende gefaßt (“I feel, this happens to me; it is as if I have turned a confused tangle in my hands and now I’ve grabbed the end of it”; 232, italics added). This passage takes up the nowfamiliar image from “Epilog”—the moment of epic inspiration likened to finding the end of the thread—but by adding the adjective “wirr” ties it to the thematic complex of subjectivity that is also central in this essay. Describing the process of writing Berge Meere und Giganten and especially the accumulation of raw documentary and factual materials,22 Döblin writes that the writing of an epic may result in a kind of selfdiscovery: “Eines Tages entdeckt man auch etwas anderes neben der Rhone, den Tälern und den Nebenflüssen: man entdeckt sich selbst. Ich selbst—das ist das tollste und verwirrendste Erlebnis, das ein Epiker haben kann” (“One day one also discovers something else besides the Rhone, the valleys and the tributaries: one discovers oneself. I myself— that is the wildest and most confusing/entangled experience an epic writer can have”; 226; emphasis added). Given the pervasiveness of the imagery of entanglement to describe both subjectivity and the epic process, the use of “verwirrendste Erlebnis” must here be read not simply as “the most confusing” but as “the most entangled experience.” In Wallenstein, the basic idea of the Kollektivwesen is generated through logics of fragmentation and incorporation that undermine the solidity of the centered, individual character; this in turn bears on the articulation of character and history, individual and collective. If we view .

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the concept of the Kollektivwesen as the expression of Döblin’s sustained critique of bourgeois subjectivity, then it also becomes clear that the collective integration of the individual character represented by the Kollektivwesen on the one hand and the turn away from the subject towards the materiality of the object world in his early call for “Depersonation” and “Tatsachenphantasie” (“An Romanautoren” 122) on the other are but two sides of the same token. The discovery of the Ich as the most “entangled” experience an epic writer can have bespeaks the necessary entanglement of the I within various collectives, an entanglement enabled by the subject’s object status in the world of facts. “Der wirkliche Dichter war zu allen Zeiten selbst ein Faktum. Der Dichter hat zu zeigen und zu beweisen, daß er ein Faktum und ein Stück Realität ist” (“The real writer has always been a fact himself. The writer has to show and to prove that he is a fact and a piece of reality”; “Der Bau des Epischen Werks” 227–228). If Döblin had energetically externalized subjectivity in “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker” by declaring, “I am not I, but rather the street, the lanterns, this and this event, nothing else” (121), here he draws the conclusion from this expulsion of subjectivity into the world by including the self among the facts that must be assimilated and incorporated by the epic poet. Despite the fact that the modern epic writer no longer has access to an immediate, listening public, the incorporation of massive amounts of documentary and linguistic material means that a social collective is present in the work as a bifurcation of the writer into the Ich and the dichtende Instanz (“Der Bau des Epischen Werks” 233). This conception would not work were it not for the fact that facts and the object world more generally have for Döblin a certain sufficiency unto themselves. “Ich gebe zu, daß mich noch heute Mitteilungen von Fakta, Dokumente beglücken, aber Dokumente, Fakta, wissen Sie, warum? Da spricht der große Epiker, die Natur, zu mir, und ich, der Kleine, stehe davor und freue mich, wie mein großer Bruder das kann” (“I admit that even today communications of facts, documents make me happy, but documents, facts, do you know why? There the great epic writer, nature, speaks to me, and I, the small one, stand in front of it and am happy at what my big brother can do”; “Der Bau des Epischen Werks” 226). The idea of nature as “der große Epiker,” in turn, would be incomprehensible without the way that, for Döblin, subjectivity is already fundamentally material, collective, and distributed. The Tatsachenphantasie that calls for an attention to processes, material, things, is therefore not a rejection of subjectivity but rather a theory of subjectivity. When Döblin writes in 1913, “I am not I, but rather the street,

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the lanterns, this and this event, nothing else,” this must be read as an early articulation of the idea expressed in “Die Natur und ihre Seelen,” where we read, “With this salt, this water, this protein we widen into the world. With the ocean, the deserts, the mountains, the cliffs, the winds. This is why we can feel through the world” (9). It is through this particular view of the material articulation of world and subjectivity, developed at length in Das Ich über der Natur, that subjectivity for Döblin is essentially already collective. The fundamental “Aneinanderhaften der Dinge” he will describe in that work (200-204) also gives us a way to return to our starting point, which was a consideration of how depiction of individual characters might relate to the questions of form and life that guided contemporary theorizations of both history and literature. When Döblin writes that a good novel must be capable of being cut into pieces like an earthworm, and each piece must be self-sufficient enough, vital enough to keep moving (“Bemerkungen zum Roman” 124–125), we can hear not only an echo of the rejection of the individual unit within the fluid mass of “Das Wasser,” but also a complication of the typical relationship between life and form. Where the classic articulations of this relationship saw the individual biography as a premade form suited to contain the messy, inexperienceable heterogeneity of the passage of time, theorized the novel as a form that gives form to life, or drew upon the organic wholeness of the body as an analogy for the organic unity of the work of art, here it is a different, more vital kind of Leben that provides its own form. If the individual unit is a fiction, then aesthetic representation can essentially start and end anywhere, much like Döblin described the relationship of his individual novels to each other. “Los vom Menschen!” “Los vom Buch!” (“Away from the human! Away from the book!”)23—these two slogans can serve as shorthand for Döblin’s epic project. Wallenstein and the essays I have discussed here show how these twin projects reinforce one another analogically: the individual subject, the individual body, and the individual work are recast as containers in need of rupturing. The critique of a kind of narrative that would grant explanatory force to psychological interiority draws on Döblin’s view of materially dispersed subjectivity, and his rejection of a particular version of individual subjectivity in turn gains leverage by suggesting that depictions of affects like “Zorn” and “Liebe” are themselves convenient and tidy narrative fictions. Underlying these linked critiques is a common topology—things exceeding their frames and bodies rupturing their boundaries. In Döblin’s programmatic essays about art and nature, this spatial figure appears as the earthworm that remains vital when divided into pieces, as the frequent invocation of the closed Stube of the

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bourgeois poetaster, and as the refusal of the self-sufficiency of the individual body or even material particle (“An Romanautoren” 118; “Der Bau des epischen Werks” 228). Characters in Wallenstein are able to function as Kollektivwesen because of this frame-rupturing tendency that draws on fragmentation and autonomous affects, on the one hand, and a cumulative invocation of materiality, on the other hand. This is what we can understand when Döblin calls in 1913 for a fantasy of fact, and this emphasis on material, facts, documents, and objects that is so central to Döblin’s articulation of the epic in turn enables the conception of subjectivity contained in the Kollektivwesen. These tangled implications of objectivity and subjectivity, spatial rupture and temporal development, individual and collective, that characterize the epic for Döblin might allow us in turn to usefully complicate our picture of German modernist aesthetics. In particular, the development of Döblin’s poetics suggests, in both biographical and conceptual ways, a tighter entwinement of Expressionism’s subjective revolt against bourgeois strictures and Neue Sachlichkeit’s stance of documentary objectivity. Döblin’s own work during the period runs the gamut between works closely associated with Expressionism, such as “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume” and “Jagende Rosse,” and pieces such as Berlin Alexanderplatz and Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord, in which the incorporation, often via montage, of documentary and non-literary material, recalls the concerns and strategies associated with New Objectivity. His styles and techniques during this period evince a similar spread. Yet what I hope to have shown with reference to Wallenstein is that the incorporation of objects, the emphasis on materiality, and the probing of various conceptions of subjectivity are but various aspects of the same epic project. The turn away from the human subject and towards the object world is an attempt to rework the idea of subjectivity in opposition to the notion of the contained, autonomous individual, associated with psychological and moral interiority and an outmoded humanist poetics. The exploration of the individual, in turn, is a key part of Döblin’s monism, which distributes subjectivity throughout nature at the same time that it renders it material. The epic project thus runs much deeper in Döblin’s work than a revision of the novel form; rather, it involves a nearly cosmological view of subjectivity and nature itself. The return of the idea of the epic is a prominent feature of German modernism and served diverse projects that sought to link aesthetic experience to the experience of modernity in ways not available through existing forms. Döblin’s work, particularly the major

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novels that appeared before Berlin Alexanderplatz, stands amidst this epic negotiation of subjectivity, experience, narrative, and modernity. In Wallenstein, the genre of the historical novel—with its heightened emphasis on the often violent mass processes of history, its documentary and descriptive possibilities, and its imbrication of individuals, offices, institutions, and material networks—provided Döblin with a way to develop his poetics, particularly his entwined critiques of a particular novel form and a particular conception of individual subjectivity. Paradoxically, perhaps, world-historical figures from a seventeenthcentury conflict, when depicted as Kollektivwesen, enable parallel reconfigurations of subjectivity and character that must be seen as central both to Döblin’s poetics and to German modernism’s return to the epic.

Notes 

1

“An Romanautoren” (122). All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. For contemporary reviews of Döblin’s novel, see Schuster and Bode, 81-113. 3 See for example Axel Hecker (1986), Bernd Hüppauf (1991), Harro Müller (1995), Steffan Davies (2009), and Reiner Niehoff (2010). 4 “Das Individuum und das Kollektivum (oder das Universale) sind dann … Angelegenheiten der wechselnden Entfernung.” (“The individual and the collective (or the universal) are then . . . a matter of varying distance”; “Von Gesichtern, Bildern und ihrer Wahrheit” 11). 5 Indeed, Döblin criticized Schiller’s depiction of Wallenstein precisely for its “barbarisch-rohe Kausalitätsgesetz” ‘barbaric-crude law of causality’ (“Überfließend von Ekel” 111) 6 Unlike Ernst Jünger, in whose 1932 book-length essay Der Arbeiter the idea of the chaotic mass served as an opposite, negative pole to the tight collective made up of types, Döblin did not tend to differentiate strongly between the collective and the mass, using both as positive counterpoints to the self-contained bourgeois individual. For further discussion of Döblin’s positive use of a term that his contemporaries tended to treat negatively and associate with irrationality, see Becker (48). 7 For a detailed and important study of the relationship between the crisis of historicism around the turn of the century and the German historical novel, see Kittstein. For a discussion of the booming market in historical fiction and biography during the Weimar Republic, see Streim (84). 8 Besides Wallenstein one must also take Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1916), the Amazonas trilogy (1937-1938), and November 1918 (1939-1950) into account. 9 From the Innen of the novel to the Außen of the epic, in Benjamin’s terms: he contrasts in his 1930 review of Berlin Alexanderplatz the self-reflexive interruptions of narrative found in Gide’s “roman pur” to the “epic stance” of “Erzählen” (“narration”/“storytelling”). The novel is the form of the isolated 2

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individual, while Döblin’s epic used montage to rupture the closed boundaries of the novel. (“Krisis des Romans” 230–232). 10 The language of interiority and exteriority is central in Lukács’s depiction of the altered relationship between individual and world: “That is why philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determines the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed” (29). 11 For a discussion of Benjamin’s essay in the context of the contemporary crisis of narrative and the turn to the epic, see McBride (41–61). 12 Wallenstein’s emphasis on character over plot should not surprise, given Döblin’s repeatedly voiced suspicion of narrative concatenation and causality. In “Bemerkungen zum Roman,” (Notes on the Novel) for example, he writes, “Der Roman hat mit Handlung nichts zu tun; . . . Vorwärts ist niemals die Parole des Romans” (“The novel has nothing to do with plot. . . . Onward is never the motto of the novel”; 123). 13 Ursula Kocher has described this opening scene as akin to a battle; the fragmentation, shifting viewpoint, and lack of narrative commentary deny the reader access to the whole of the scene, in a way that is indicative of how the novel works more generally (62). 14 “Volkstümlichkeit” means something like “popularity,” but in the sense of “relating to the people.” In positing an immanent development in Lukács’s aesthetic framework rather than a series of heteronomous breaks and reversals, I am following Fredric Jameson’s reading of Lukács (161–163). 15 For a more detailed study on the relationship between Döblin’s philosophy of nature and Wallenstein’s conception of history see Mayer. 16 For a detailed study on the guiding cultural tropes that opposed life to form, from Lebensphilosophie to the novels of Neue Sachlichkeit, see Lindner. 17 For more on the spatial strategies Döblin used to undermine integral bodies in order to advance his conception of subjectivity, see my article on Berge Meere und Giganten: Gelderloos, Carl. “‘Jetzt Kommt Das Leben’: The Technological Body in Alfred Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten.” German Quarterly 88.3 (2015): 291–316. 18 In so doing, Döblin’s work parts with a long-dominant paradigm that draws on a biological register to vouchsafe the idea of an organic unity for the artwork. On the issue of the “immanent unity of the aesthetic object as a closed and self-sufficient structure” (Woloch 11), Döblin’s physiologically-informed vitalism mobilizes more modern registers of biology to emphasize the form-rupturing, recombinatory, and diffuse potential of organic growth. 19 On the biological basis of Döblin’s thought about (and depictions of) “masses,” see also Midgley 56. 20 In Döblin’s 1919 essay on the Thirty Years’ War, he directly addresses the question of a synecdochal historiography whereby royalty stands in for a nation. He finds this synecdoche problematic, and its political and economic implications troubling (50).

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21

Hoffmann has argued that the autonomy of body parts in Döblin’s work should be seen as indicative of a conflict between the uncontrollable body and a concept of “Geist” that prevailed in Expressionism. By pointing out the psychological, philosophical, and medical centrality of the body for Döblin, Hoffmann shows how the idea of an autonomous human spirit is displaced (58). Hoffmann also suggests that apparent gaps in character motivation and causality could be filled in by attention to the medical texts. This account of the relationship between psyche and body in Döblin’s work can help us make sense of the ways in which the main characters in Wallenstein seemed pinned between their bodies and drives on the one hand, and meta-individual social, historical clusters on the other. 22 For a full reckoning of Döblin’s working process and the sources he used to write his 1924 epic future history, see Sander, Gabriele. “Alfred Döblins Roman Berge Meere Und Giganten – Aus der Handschrift gelesen. Eine Dokumentation unbekannter textgenetischer Materialien und neuer Quellenfunde.” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 45 (2001): 39–69. Print. 23 (“An Romanautoren” 122) and (“Der Bau des Epischen Werks” 245), respectively.

Works Referenced Becker, Sabina. “‘Korallenstock’ Moderne. Alfred Döblins Poetologie der Masse.” Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium: Berlin 2011. Massen und Medien bei Alfred Döblin. Ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 33–50. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows.” Gesammelte Schriften II.2. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 438–465. Print. —. “Krisis des Romans. Zu Döblins ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz.’” Gesammelte Schriften III. Ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. 230–236. Print. Campe, Rüdiger. “Form and Life in the Theory of the Novel.” Constellations 18.1 (2011): 53–66. Print. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft.” Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1958. 191–291. Print. Döblin, Alfred. “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker. Berliner Programm.” Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Ed. Christina Althen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. 118–122. Print. —. “Bemerkungen zum Roman.” Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Ed. Christina Althen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. 122–126. Print. —. Das Ich über der Natur. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1927. Print.

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—. “Das Wasser.” Die neue Rundschau 33.2 (1922): 853–858. Print. —. “Der Bau des Epischen Werks.” Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Ed. Christina Althen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. 215–245. Print. —. “Der Dreißigjährige Krieg.” Schriften zur Politik und Gesellschaft. Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1972. 45–59. Print. —. “Der Geist des Naturalistischen Zeitalters.” Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Ed. Christina Althen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. 168–190. Print. —. “Die Natur und ihre Seelen.” Der neue Merkur 6 (1922): 5–14. Print. —. “Epilog.” Schriften zu Leben und Werk. Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1986. 287–321. Print. —. Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. Print. —. “Überfließend von Ekel.” Der Deutsche Maskenball von Linke Poot. Wissen und Verändern!. Ed. Anthony W. Riley. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987. 106–114. Print. —. “Von Gesichtern, Bildern und ihrer Wahrheit.” Antlitz der Zeit. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003. 7–15. Print. —. Wallenstein. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2008. Print. Fuechtner, Veronika. Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Print. Hoffmann, Torsten. “‘Inzwischen gingen seine Füße weiter’: Autonome Körperteile in den frühen Erzählungen und medizinischen Essays von Alfred Döblin und Gottfried Benn.” Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism. Ed. Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1974. Print. Kittstein, Ulrich. “Mit Geschichte will man etwas”: historisches Erzählen in der Weimarer Republik und im Exil (1918-1945). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Print. Kocher, Ursula. “Totaler Krieg: Zu Alfred Döblins Roman ‘Wallenstein.’” Geschlossene Formen. Ed. Ralph Kray and Kai Luehrs-Kaiser. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 61–76. Print. Koepke, Wulf. The Critical Reception of Alfred Döblin’s Major Novels. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. Print.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. “Die Biographie als Neubürgerliche Kunstform.” Werke, Band 5.3. Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen. 1928-1931. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. 263–269. Print. Lindner, Martin. Leben in der Krise. Zeitromane der Neuen Sachlichkeit und die Intellektuelle Mentalität der Klassischen Moderne. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994. Print. Lukács, Georg. Der historische Roman. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955. Print. —. Die Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1963. Print. —. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1971. Print. Mayer, Dieter. Alfred Döblins Wallenstein. Zur Geschichtsauffassung und Zur Struktur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972. Print. McBride, Patrizia. The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Midgley, David. “‘Wie die Bienen sind sie über den Boden her’. Zu den biologischen Bezügen der Massendarstellungen in Döblins Romanen.” Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium: Berlin 2011. Massen und Medien bei Alfred Döblin. Ed. Stefan Keppler-Tasaki. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. 51–65. Print. Schuster, Ingrid, and Ingrid Bode, eds. Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik. Bern: Francke, 1973. Print. Simmel, Georg. “Die historische Formung.” Gesamtausgabe 13: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen. 1909-1918. Band II. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000. 321–369. Print. Streim, Gregor. Einführung in die Literatur der Weimarer Republik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009. Print. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Print.

CHAPTER FIVE “FREE-FORMING” THE GERMAN HISTORICAL NOVEL: THE PARADIGMATIC CASES OF HERMANN HESSE’S SIDDHARTHA (1922) AND HERMANN BROCH’S DER TOD DES VERGIL (1945) VASSILAKI PAPANICOLAOU

Modernism played an active role in reshaping the identity of the German historical novel, most notably between 1918 and 1945. During this period of great turmoil and war, the literary genre deviated from the easy road of conventionalism and traditionalism to take the more ambitious epistemological direction of the “new” history. Practitioners such as Döblin, Feuchtwanger, Heinrich and Thomas Mann explored the formal possibilities of the historical novel, which became soon acquainted with terms such as “innovation,” “experiment” and “freedom.” Their aesthetic representation of history distanced itself from canonical historiography. The history-as-setting cliché was superseded by the history-as-process concept, where a modernized past became the symbolic vehicle for outlining contemporary concerns. This chapter aims to highlight this period of significant change in the development of the German historical novel by jointly revisiting two important modernist contributions: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). The combined analysis of works which have heretofore been mentioned only sporadically in the context of the historical novel might meet with initial skepticism. However, the selected examples share a set of common characteristics that are representative of the evolution of the literary genre. Indeed, both Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil comply

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with the modernist tendency to use the historical novel’s relative elasticity as a way to orient the genre toward the fulfilment of three recurring goals: to “thematize history as ... construction [in order to] emphasize teleological aspects” (Müller 64); to underscore the immanence of universal humanity in the individual (David-de Palacio 62); to elevate history to spirituality through a form of transcendental idealism. These goals, each of which will be discussed at some length, are reflected in both authors’ primary interest in a pre-Christian historical figure: Broch re-enacts Tertullian’s legend of Virgil as anima naturaliter Christiana ‘a Christian soul by nature’ and Hesse portrays Gautama Buddha as a “brother to such as Christ” (Mileck 162). While the biographical focus on individuals from world history was and is a common habit among modern historical novelists, Broch and Hesse took it one step further by subjecting their chosen historical personalities to a fictitious polychotomous treatment. Virgil and Buddha are both depicted as divided into several allegoric characters, all bound by a spiritual odyssey, seeking the ultimate purpose behind life and finding the answer in God. In both novels, this metaphysical-existential quest ideally takes place at a crucial turning point in the religious history of mankind. Siddhartha’s plot is set in India, during the fifth century B.C., a time that Karl Jaspers termed the Achsenzeit ‘axial age’ to define this period which saw a simultaneous eruption of Eastern religious and philosophical systems from Ancient Greece to Ancient China. Der Tod des Vergil recounts the last eighteen hours of the poet of the Aeneid, after his arrival to Brundisium, in the year nineteen B.C. Due to its temporal proximity with the year of the Lord, and the totalitarian nature of the Augustan regime, this period suggests a historical hiatus between a messianic evolution and an apocalyptic halt, described by Hannah Arendt in terms of “nicht mehr und noch nicht” (“no longer and not yet”; 169-174). The relevance of these pivotal times finds its roots in Hesse’s and Broch’s reminiscence of what Benjamin termed “the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger” (255). The authors developed the foundation of their work under the influence of Oswald Spengler’s fatalistic prophecies of the impending death of Western culture, in a context of social polarization and political uncertainty. These pessimistic conjectures allow for a dual interpretation of Der Tod des Vergil and Siddhartha as both mirrors of the ongoing present and temporal exile, in the sense that the books promote a cyclical vision of history, which gives their authors metaphorical pretexts for both condemning and escaping from contemporary decadence and self-

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destructiveness. By “escaping” I mean, above all, “escape” as the “emerging from bondage into freedom,” and also, albeit to a lesser extent, “escapism” as “flight from reality” (Rao 377).1 On this score, Siddhartha’s withdrawal from society for self-realization and Virgil’s renouncement of an instrumentalized Aeneid for self-catharsis, though often over-interpreted as egoist moves toward political disengagement, should instead be read as Hesse’s and Broch’s symbolic endorsement of a twofold sense of literary freedom. This value-laden concept has first and foremost a strong politicoaxiomatic connotation, which would otherwise not explain the support obtained by Der Tod des Vergil and Siddhartha from U.S. cultural philanthropy, at a crucial stage of their literary recognition process. Broch’s exilic work was first published by Pantheon Books, a New York based publisher founded in 1942 by a group of anti-fascist intellectuals fleeing a Nazified Europe. Decades after its publication, Hesse’s Easterninspired narrative gained international popularity thanks to the antimaterialistic Beat Generation and the Hippie movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, literary freedom sheds light on the authors’ aesthetic line of conduct forged by the modernist belief that, in terms of form and content, artistic liberty can expand its limits beyond conventional constraints and, ultimately, open the ground for innovative experiments. Combining both meanings of literary freedom leads to a paradigmatic formula of paramount importance for a comprehensive approach to the modernist historical novel of the selected periods: for Broch and Hesse— and this is my central point—the longing to break free from historical determinism should analogically be equal to the intention to free the historical novel form from normative and generic shackles. The pros and cons of the modern experimental product born from the authors’ equation is a unique type of historical novel, but which, as noted by Seamus O’Malley, “might sometimes operate with … s[o]me degree of initial unrecognizability” (4). This drawback explains the overlapping of critical voices about the appropriate genre denomination of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil. As a result, both novels are widely regarded as singular works in German literary history that supposedly resist classification into any single genre category. From a theoretical standpoint, this presents a serious obstacle to reading these works as historical novels. To make the task even more challenging, Hesse and Broch both expressed their own genre definitions of their works—which do not refer to the historical novel at all—hence making any different reading of these two novels contrary to the authors’ intention. Thus, a consensual theoretical framework is necessary that legitimately allows for a consideration of

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Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil as historical novels without disregarding the polyphony of genre attributions and the authorial constructions. This classification problem can be elucidated through recourse to extra-literary factors. This kind of debate indeed seems not limited to the modernist historical novel, but might be as old as the historical novel itself, as it is actually inherent in the very nature of the genre. I ultimately intend to show that the concept of historical novel is consistent with the authors’ hybridization experiments and their striving for an autonomous form of literature. Any discussion of the theoretical apparatus necessitates a contextual insight into the books’ genesis. The next step will be therefore to situate Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil within the Interwar and Second World War periods. Following Kracauer’s theory of extrinsic correlations between war and the form of historical novels of the 20’s and 30’s,2 the overall meaning and structure of these works, i.e. their primary symbolic aim, their modern characteristics and their teleological perception of history, cannot be understood independently of the context in which they took form.3 The authors made use of their own personal experience towards universal ends. At the time they were writing Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil, both Hesse and Broch were steadfastly committed to fighting social distress and prejudices on multiple fronts. As advocates of the universal diversity model, they were proponents of values such as pacifism, democracy and unity of humanity and promoted a new integrated, holistic worldview suggesting solutions to the decay of values, political alienation and social dislocation. Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil are inseparable from this humanist engagement and, to advance the exact reverse of Bharati Blaise’s assertion, provide less “an artistic tool to reinforce resolutions that are strongly Romantic and suggestively Christian” than “a doctrinaire solution to the fragmentations of the twentieth century” (Blaise 102). What is at stake here is a rereading of these works as therapeutic parables of the Interwar context; a claim that will be substantiated by reconsidering in this light the authors’ free treatment of several main novelistic components, namely: time, space, characters and language.

Hesse, Broch and the Historical Novel Before delving into the core topics of this chapter, it is critically important to address the authors’ ambivalent relationship with the genre of the historical novel. Indeed, although both writers occasionally expressed open disdain for the genre, their resentment must not be taken at face

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value, considering that it is not an irrefutable, abiding feature of their literary career. At times, both authors demoted the historical novel to the lowest ranks of art; at other times, they lauded its potential by acknowledging its classical heritage and attempting to become themselves practitioners of the genre. It is therefore useful to locate their position on the historical novel in the years during which Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil took shape. In the early days of their literary career, Hesse and Broch, both dissatisfied with traditional forms, attempted to create an idiosyncratic historical novel, situated in Germany’s war times. Between 1907 and 1908, Hesse wrote Berthold, one of several novel fragments written in his early days as a writer. Set during the Thirty Years’ War, this three-chapter fragment follows the unorthodox path of a future priest, caught in a vocational quandary and his subsequent ontological transformation into a fearsome warrior. Like most of Hesse’s narratives, the form of Berthold is governed by heuristic principles and keyed to contemporary concerns of knowledge. But its most original aspect, according to Mark Boulby, lies in the unusual “tendency to conscious breadth of portrayal, to the accumulation of thematically irrelevant material, [which] points to the intention to write a wholly naturalistic, historical novel” (“Narziss and Goldmund” 86). Hesse seemingly wanted to create a new species of historical novel seeking for gnomic and holistic possibilities beyond conformism and rationalism. Broch was driven by the same desire to combine formal innovation and cognition with an entirely valid perception of the contemporaneous sociohistorical reality, when he published his first novel, Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers, 1931-32). Broch initially wanted to title this hybrid of novelistic, epic and lyrical forms Historischer Roman ‘historical novel’ (Gesammelte Werke 8.13).4 For commercial reasons, he then dropped the idea in favor of a title which reflects the quintessential feature of the literary patchwork—the dream-like element, but nonetheless claimed to have achieved the polyhistorical novel. Pioneered by Goethe, polyhistorism means, in Brochian terms, a bridging concept between epistemology, gnoseology and moral philosophy oriented toward the unification of all styles and existential paradoxes of a given epoch. The tripartite structure of Die Schlafwandler embodies the synoptic aims of this interdisciplinary approach. The three volumes of the novel each focus on a problematic protagonist and a different aesthetic: 1888: Pasenow oder die Romantic (1888: Pasenow or Romanticism) focuses on the life of a conservative Prussian army officer and his mental struggle to overcome his sexual frustration and the obsolescence of the old values; 1903: Esch

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oder die Anarchie (1903: Esch or Anarchy) narrates the self-destruction of a book-keeper who, after an unsuccessful stint as circus manager, wrecks his life and capitalistic dreams; 1918: Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (1918: Huguenau or Realism) marks the complete reversal of values, with the ascent of a social predator who becomes an opportunistic impostor, a murderer, a rapist and, ultimately, a reputable entrepreneur. Broch viewed history as a receptacle for multilayered ethical considerations, and the polyhistorical novel, undergirded by the latest scientific developments, was his introductory tool for assisting individuals in unearthing a substratum of moral sense amid the ruins of a fragmented society. Hesse and Broch thus conceive the notion of genre quite in the manner of Bakhtin: not so much in terms of a descriptive category, but rather as a wide world perception. Their debuts as historical novelists represent an effort to redesign the historical novel as “a logical formal transposition of the splintered modern world” (Heizmann 188); in other words, as a construction aimed to inversely emphasize the need for a comprehensive Weltanschauung, encompassing both the rational and irrational forces of history. Their initial attempts at the historical novel genre were followed by a more skeptical stance. Hesse, in his thirties, did not extend the ambitious experiment of Berthold to a full-length historical novel.5 Yet, after the traumatic experience of the First World War, the German-born Swiss author became disenchanted with the genre. In 1935, he retrospectively confesses in Die neue Rundschau “Die historischen Romane, die man in früher Jugend mit Begeisterung gelesen hat, haben sich zum größern Teil später als Talmi herausgestellt, man ist mißtrauisch gegen diese Gattung” (“The historical novels that one read with enthusiasm in one’s early youth later turned out to be shams; one is suspicious of this genre”; Sämtliche Werke 20.44).6 The same year, in the Schweizer Journal, Hesse explains that his distrust arises from the susceptibility of the historical novel to become a mere marketing product in the hands of irresponsible dilettantes and profiteering publishers (SW 20.54). Broch expressed the same concern about the historical novel as being too vulnerable to manipulation, after a similar disillusionment with the genre. During his intellectual crisis of 1933, he reconsidered Die Schlafwandler as a failed experiment. Broch analyzed this setback as a harbinger of the historical novel’s struggle to sustain credibility in a period of impending political crisis. The propagandistic politicization of literature carried out by the National Socialist regime only reinforced his intuition. Like Hesse, Broch ended up disparaging the historical novel by association with a morally degraded art. In his 1933 essay “Das Böse im

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Wertsystem der Kunst” (The Evil in the Value System of Art), he situates the genre in the sphere of influence of kitsch because of its use as an irresponsible flight into an idyllic historic past (GW 6.345). It becomes clear that Hesse’s and Broch’s critical discernment on the historical novel is tied to a peculiar socio-political context. The same conclusion can be drawn from their progressive reappraisal of the genre, which almost coincides with the publication of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil. In Broch’s case, the renewed hope generated by the end of the Second World War may have fostered a positive reassessment of the historical novel. Broch published “Die mythische Erbschaft der Dichtung” (The Heritage of Myth in Literature; 1945), just weeks after Der Tod des Vergil and the capitulation of Germany. In this essay, he has ceased to connect the historical novel with kitsch and instead reintegrates the genre into its original context, the myth, which he refers to as “der Ur-Ahn jedweder erzählerischer Aussage, wenn nicht gar der menschlichen Mitteilung überhaupt” (“the ancient ancestor of all narrative, if not of all human communication”; GW 6.239). Although myth is known for its controversial involvement in the glorification of political agitators, for Broch the belief prevailed that a new literature can only be born from the ancient matrix of myth, which he considers as the archetype of the universal totality. Hesse began to moderate his stance on the historical novel in 1922, around the time he completed Siddhartha. The four years that had passed since the Armistice softened his antipathy to the genre and made room in his estimate for “prachtvolle Ausnahmen” ‘magnificent exceptions’ (SW 20.54). Hesse praises these “exceptional” historical novels in various reviews, which contain valuable information about the characteristics he found appealing in the genre. First in chronological order comes Adalbert Stifter’s Witiko (1865-1867), whose prose Hesse lauds as “modern, aufregend und vorbildlich” ‘modern, exciting and exemplary’ (SW 18.396). The following year, he reread Leon Tolstoy’s ȼɨɣɧɚ ɢ ɦɢɪ (War and Peace, 1864-1869), which he compliments as “eine wunderbar beseelte Welt voll Liebe und tiefer Menschlichkeit” (“a wonderfully animated world full of love and profound humanity”; SW 18.566). This classic historical novel also received Broch’s appreciation for its epic resonance to the Homeric universe. His 1947 essay “Mythos und Altersstil” (Myth and the Mature Style) celebrates Tolstoy as a radical forerunner of the abstract—a modern trend which pervades the style of Der Tod des Vergil itself (Kommentierte Werkausgabe 9.2.224). In 1926, the poetic attractiveness of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-1922), a trilogy of Norwegian historical novels,

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overpowers again Hesse’s aversion for the genre. Like Witiko, Hesse extols the virtues of Undset’s work as “ein Stück Menschentragödie merkwürdig edel, [das] wahrhaft epische Luft atmet” (“a piece of human tragedy remarkably noble, [which] breathes a true breath of the epic”; SW 19.12). Kristin Lavransdatter also bears striking similarities to Siddhartha: the use of modernist tropes, the narrative’s spiritual orientation and the low priority given to historiography. On the latter point, Hesse expresses no real interest in factual history until he speaks highly of an Icelandic historical novel, Guðmundur Kamban’s Skálholt (The Virgin of Skalholt,1930-1932). In 1935, the Nordic saga impresses him with its truthfulness and persuasiveness: interiorly through poetic, humanist depictions of tragic events free from sentimentalism; exteriorly through an anxiously scrupulous fidelity to historical details (SW 20.54). Two years later, Hesse finds in Vincent Sheeans’ Sanfelice (1936) another beautiful balance between efforts in historical work and poetic freedom, and, meanwhile, recognizes Walter Scott’s seminal role in the codification of the nineteenth-century historical novel (SW 20.239). Yet, he reiterates his thought that the traditional historical novel remains dubious as formal category, and only geniuses like Tolstoy and Stifter can “in dieser Gattung nach den Überraschendsten Seiten hin die konventionelle Form zu durchbrechen” (“break through unexpected turns the conventional form in this genre”; SW 20.239). Hesse and Broch thus consistently gauged the quality of the historical novel by this universalistic leaning toward polyphony and polymorphism, two characteristics that pave the way for the breakup of social conventions and traditional forms—a prerequisite for renovating a unified culture and literature. The following analysis attempts to demonstrate, in a theoretically tenable way, that Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil fulfill the requirements of the authors’ definition of the perfect historical novel.

Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil as Free-Form Historical Novels Hesse and Broch were both affected by the literary syndrome that David Cowart cleverly diagnosed as “the dread that the precursors have told all the stories, exhausted the genres, ‘used up’ the very language available for artistic creation” (Literary Symbiosis 1). The authors believed that Kafka had already given birth to the ultimate literature and reached a ceiling beyond which there could be no progress. The only way to escape from this aesthetic cul-de-sac was to foray into the still less explored realm of “Erkenntnis” ‘knowledge’. Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil

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represent the culmination of their efforts to push to its extreme limits the principle that new knowledge requires new form (Boulby, “Siddhartha” 124; Heizmann 197). As a result, Hesse and Broch were themselves convinced to have invented a supreme literary genre through these works. The authors understandably discarded the idea of calling this highest form of literature “historical novel,” a then widely tabooed literary term referring to a declassified type of writing. On May 10, 1945, Broch wrote Aldous Huxley that he does not see Der Tod des Vergil as a “novel” at all (GW 8.215). Neither did Hesse ever employ this term to define Siddhartha. Instead, they both opted for the designation “lyrische Prosadichtung” ‘lyric poetry in prose’. In his “Bermerkungen zum Tod des Vergil” (Comments on The Death of Virgil, 1945), Broch depicts the book as “ein Gedicht, und zwar eines, das sich in einem einzigen Atem über mehr als 500 Seiten hin erstreckt … eine durchaus neuartige und moderne Dichtungsform” (“a poem, and one that extends, in the same breath, to over 500 pages … an absolutely new and modern poetic form”; GW 271). Broch ideally wished his work to be read as a “Lyrischer Selbstkommentar” ‘lyrical self-commentary’ (266), a construction formed ad hoc. Hesse, who claimed to be a poet above all, subtitled Siddhartha “eine indische Dichtung” ‘an Indian lyrical work’.7 Yet, these generic claims subscribe to a minimal formal approach. In fact, the authors had greater aspirations than to simply compose lyrical poetry, for Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil clearly did not aim to be limited to a single literary genre. Tangible evidence of this lies in the antique background of these works, which uncovers transcendental ties to the epic. Broch admits that “seinem Inhalt nach ließe [Der Tod des Vergil] sich noch am ehesten mit den antiken Epen ... vergleichen, da es wie diese das Erzählerische bis ins Kosmogonische steigert (“by virtue of its content, [The Death of Virgil] could be most closely compared to the ancient epics ... since, like them, it elevates the narrative to the cosmogonic”; GW 6.271). Hesse also used to see his Prosadichtungen as “Seelenbiographien” ‘biographies of the soul,’ an epic form in which the hero goes through an inward initiation leading to rebirth (Karalaschwili 10). These statements fuelled speculations that Siddhartha might be an “intellectual biography of the Buddha” (Naik 104), and Der Tod des Vergil “not a historical novel ... but a twentieth-century epic of world history” (Enklaar 220-221). If the first interpretation has been subjected to critical objections,8 the latter ignores Broch’s assertion of an intrinsic connection between the epic and its inheritor, the historical novel (GW 6.239). Such an encounter between genres took place during the prehistory of

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the historical novel in Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs (The Martyrs, 1809), a work which offers instructive analogies to Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil. Like Hesse and Broch, Chateaubriand, whose writing was affected by the political earthquake of the French Revolution, felt the need to create a new and superior literary form: a Christian epic. Soon after the publication of the book, however, readers were struck by the overwhelming presence of novelistic schemes and devices. Chateaubriand denied that Les Martyrs was a historical novel. Since the 18th century, the historical novel was loaded with pejorative connotations due to its essential nature—the unbreakable alloy of fiction and history.9 Given this trend, Chateaubriand viewed the term “historical novel” as a substitute definition for his ambitious literary project. The Vintimille manuscript of Les martyrs de Dioclétien (The Martyrs of Diocletian, 1951)—Les Martyrs’ first version—ascertained that the prose epic turned out to be a camouflage for a book initially intended to be a historical novel. Chateaubriand’s failed transubstantiation from novelistic into epic material counts among the triggering factors of the historical novel’s early shape-shifting propensity. The critical reception of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil reflects a similar situation. Unable to reach a consensus on the genre of these works, most commentators conspicuously disregarded the authorial efforts in submitting a wide range of other labels. Der Tod des Vergil has been sometimes labelled a “Work in Progress” in reference to Joyce, but mostly commented on as a novel with qualifiers such as “esoteric” (Schlant 122), “mythic” (Koopman 120) and “temporal” (Collmann 11). Likewise, Siddhartha has been often discussed as a “Bildungsroman” ‘novel of formation’ (Butler 117), or an “Erziehungsroman” ‘novel of education’ (Beerman 27), besides being occasionally called “a profound spiritual experience” (Mileck 160). None of these terms do justice to the intended polymorphism of the works. This heterogeneity of genre attributions indicates that Hesse’s and Broch’s alleged new literary form was not created ex nihilo, but is rather the composite result of hybridization of traditional forms. As a matter of fact, the Wagnerian concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk” ‘unified work of art’ served as the model for Der Tod des Vergil. Broch’s work was indeed conceived as an absolute, total novel, which materializes the Schlegelian dream of merging lyricism, epic and drama (Bier 26). Hesse implemented the same model in his magnum opus, Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943), and Siddhartha’s mixture of music, Dichtung and Seelenbiographie can also be seen as an attempt at producing a total novel. However, as Bernd Hüppauf notes regarding Döblin’s Wallenstein

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(1920) and its “Kinostil” ‘cinematic style,’ blending the experimental novel with an historical topic—as also occurs in Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil—has a regrettable side effect: the lack of discussion on the place of such works within the historical novel genre (71). Hesse’s Indian tale has been only rarely termed a “historical novel” by literary critics. Rudolph Byrd thus offers only a brief statement on the “emphasis upon an historical figure” (551). The handful of scholars that supported the historical novel thesis for Der Tod des Vergil also focused on a single aspect of the work. Manfred Durzak has provided an essentially contextual reasoning, which rests upon the assertion that Der Tod des Vergil belongs to the historical novel of the Exilliteratur. He recalls that the portrayal of historical figures was a circuitous way of condemning Nazi political leaders. This strategy complies with a fundamental aspect of the historical novel, namely its reverberation of the past in the present (430-442). Cowart has reflected on the role of lyricism as a form of historical representation. Der Tod des Vergil, he suggests, “seems to need its own history-as-rhapsody classification” (History 12), which is consistent with Broch’s rejection of standard taxonomies. Peter Morgan has concentrated on the dialectic between art and history, exacerbated by the vigorous debate between Virgil and Augustus in the novel, an episode that presents the sole anchor point of the plot in history and which serves to mark the entire work as a historical novel. “Broch’s The Death of Virgil,” Morgan adds, “can be read as a ǥhistorical novel’ both in its fictional use of a historical period as a parable of author’s present, and in its thematization of the problematic relationship of socio-political reality and the creative consciousness, or ‘history’ and ǥnarrative’ ” (127). Fritz Wefelmeyer has paid special attention to the modernist use of the internalization of history. In his view, Der Tod des Vergil is a historical novel, if one regards it as the past metaphor of a metapolitical vision of the present conveyed through the lens of an individual consciousness; yet, the problematic absence of a subtitle and a traditional novel scheme prevents him from defining generically the book in absolute terms (243). While these interpretations may contain some valid points, they are also not fully satisfactory. They fail to articulate a synthesis connecting the different facets of the novels in a meaningful way. More importantly, although they do not necessarily avoid the conundrum of providing a proper definition of the historical novel, they miss to rely on a particular theoretical background that would have enabled them to reconcile the concept of historical novel with those of newness and polymorphism. A solution to this problem may come from the mutabilist theory, which combines Lukács’ descriptive approach on the diachronic development of

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the historical novel with Alastair Fowler’s biologically inspired principle of the historical mutability of the genres (46). Its proponent, Pierre Ronzeaud, sets out this theory in the following terms: “Il semble qu’il faille plutôt découvrir, dans la rencontre de ces mutants perpétuels [l’Histoire et le roman], la génération d’une suite discontinue d’hybrides : des romans historiques différents les uns des autres, et tenant plus du mixte monstrueux que de la synthèse idéale” (“It appears preferable to find out, in the meeting of these perpetual mutants [history and the novel], the generation of a discontinuous series of hybrids: historical novels different from each other, and that look more like a monstrous mixture than an ideal synthesis”; 7). Hence, in virtue of its nature, the historical novel is comparable to a “generically modifiable beast,” whose ability to mutate finds three main explanations. Firstly, because of the perpetually mutating history and historiography, the historical novel has likewise incessantly evolved since its emergence. Secondly, it is foremost a novel10: the history of the historical novel is modeled on the history of the novel,11 and, like the novel, fond of generic decompartmentalization. The historical novel, as a chameleonic genre, has historically managed to appropriate the forms and aesthetic tendencies of other literary genres. Thirdly, each historical novel represents the “new novel,” adding its own contribution to the constantly evolving genre, since, contrary to evolutionism, Ronzeaud’s theory postulates that the forms do not engender each other, but rather succeed one another, exteriorly, by dismissing earlier forms.12 This distinction indirectly leads to the possibility that there may be as many types of historical novel as there are conceptions of history (Becker 127). Within this theoretical framework, the protean nature and innate singularity of the historical novel appear fully compatible with Siddhartha’s and Der Tod des Vergil’s perfectionist penchant for polymorphism and newness. From this congruence emerges the formidable flexibility of the historical novel: a malleable genre providing propitious ground for a new type of literature whose form deliberately aims at freeing itself from generic straitjackets and normative constraints. One might be tempted to call this innovative type of literature a “free-form historical novel,” with the compound adjective designating a modern diacritical characteristic born from the authorial determination to convert the form of the novel into an autonomous form of literature.13 In the cases of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil, this project of aesthetic independence finds its relevance in the fictionalization of an individual escape from the deterministic laws governing history, which takes on particular significance in the aftermath of the First World War and during the Second World War. In this regard,

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it may sound contradictory that Hesse and Broch set their work in a period of ancient history to simulate their release from the fetters of history. As the next section reveals, the authors believed like Burckhardt that only the knowledge of the past has the Promethean power to liberate individuals from the constraints of history, or like Bourdieu that the principle of freedom from history resides within history (248); a lesson they learnt from their own war experience and wished to convey to a broad readership.

Cultural Decadence and Literary Humanism The genesis of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil began in the interwar period, with the imponderables of the peacemaking process. The First World War ripped apart the old Pangaea of universal morality into new, questionable fragmentary beliefs, created a historical vacuum that man feared to replenish by repeating the tragic mistakes of the recent past. Alarming socioeconomic symptoms such as hyperinflation, rampant corruption, materialistic excesses and declining individualism justified this concern. Widespread essentialist theses about the devolutionary regression of the Western rational civilization further ignited the insecure feeling of an ominous outcome. Like many European intellectuals, Hesse and Broch were converted to the idea that, at some point in its history, every cultural system, obeying the second law of thermodynamics, exhausts all its energy and concepts, can no more sustain long-term efficiency in the service of mankind, thereby heralding its inexorable collapse. Both authors felt more than ever the nihilistic implications of “God’s death,” which left humanity in a state of moral dereliction and spiritual disorientation. Fortunately, any individual trapped between a disappointing present and an unpromising future could still escape into a safe, familiar and even attractive past. Hesse found refuge in Asia, when he started writing Siddhartha at the end of 1919—a year he recalls as “die Rückkehr aus dem Krieg ins Leben, aus dem Joch in die Freiheit” (“the return from war to life, from yoke to freedom”; GW 11.45). His deep and long-lasting fascination with the culture and religions of the East can be traced back to his Pietist missionary family background, and to the long-standing interest of German idealism in ancient Oriental philosophies. Broch sought asylum at the classic center of European civilization, the position in which T.S. Eliot placed Virgil in 1944. Several factors such as the burgeoning of Virgilian essays and studies, the Bimillenium Vergilianum celebration of 1930, and the mounting popularity of trans-

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historical parallels between the Roman Empire and the Third Reich, were instrumental in Broch’s decision to write a tribute to the poet in 1936.14 Der Tod des Vergil also witnessed its author’s transition from servitude to liberation. On March 13, 1938 Broch was arrested for alleged radical political positions. Not long after his release, he became like Aeneas a fato profugus ‘fugitive by fate,’ leaving the annexed Austria for New York, where he first met with the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, in October 1938 (Weidner 164). For Hesse and Broch, ancient Asia and ancient Rome were not merely imaginary loopholes to avoid the imminent risks of the present, but also places resembling an extensive pool of knowledge as to how to correct post-war humanity, how to help extracting individuals from the Western “Sansara” or “mass hysteria” that strikes mechanistic-capitalistic societies, to refocus priorities on the more overarching issues of life and death. The Upanishads, the PƗli Canon, the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Tao Te Ching and the Analects contained a plethora of antiNietzschean parables teaching meditation, wisdom, pacifism and other humane values promising to curb the scourges of modernity, to repair the broken ties between cultures, to recover the godlike essence hidden within each individual. The Bucolics and the Georgics offered anti-Spenglerian predictions of peace and moral-cultural regeneration, brought messianic consolation in near-death situations, championed a nostalgic return to the old pastoral modus vivendi against urban alienation. Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil can be viewed—to use Genette’s terminology—as hypertexts exploiting the positive merits of the aforementioned hypotexts for putting up ideological resistance to antiSemitic and fascist movements, to false saviors and greedy mind-curers of humanity’s ailments. Both works further the idea that modern man needs first to disillusion himself from the rhetoric of social enslavement in order to aspire to a realistic freedom. In Buddha’s India, deliverance can only be accessed by realizing the deceptive reality of the empirical world and expanding one’s individual consciousness beyond ego boundaries; in Augustan Rome, individuals are granted an illusory freedom by being partakers of a homogeneous divine whole, which is none other than the totalitarian order of a disguised dictatorship. The programmatic intent of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil must be understood in a broader authorial context. While writing these books, Hesse and Broch, who felt irreconcilable enmity toward bellicose and punitive regimes, pleaded for the establishment of a world democracy based on a theoretical humanism. They both supported internationalist initiatives such as the League of Nations. Hesse was a devoted follower of

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the organization since the Bern meeting of 1919 until Germany’s accession in 1925.15 In 1937, Broch drafted a resolution of the League of Nations in which he analyzes the First World War as a hypertrophied form of totalitarianism.16 In 1940, he joined a committee which worked on redefining the ethical aims of a new League of Nations, as the protection of human rights and dignity against nationalist encroachment. Both authors also promoted their liberal convictions through media. From 1919 to 1921, Hesse founded and co-edited with Richard Woltereck Vivos Voco, a monthly periodical encouraging the young readers to transform post-war Germany into a better place.17 The new generation was invited to make the future safer by adopting anti-belligerent, anti-racist attitudes and an early sense of social responsibility. In 1933, at the request of a Viennese radio station, Broch gave a reading on the topic “Die Kunst am Ende einer Kultur” (Art at the End of a Civilization) and, four years later, presented Die Heimkehr des Vergil (The Homecoming of Virgil, 1937), the first version of Der Tod des Vergil.18 On both occasions, he mirrored his epoch with the 1st century B.C. to issue a warning message about the escalation of violence and the breakdown of value-systems, to anticipate that a new culture was about to rise from the ashes of the existing one.19 The following pages further legitimize the consideration of Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil among historical novels as two weapons used to liberate individuals from history’s eternal struggle between sense and nonsense, to paraphrase Feuchtwanger’s definition of the historical novel. The modernist structure of both books is designed to achieve this humanistic objective.

Abolishing Time and Space History encompasses many fields, takes various forms and meanings, and does not mean necessarily nor is limited to historiography. Scholars have often too hastily dismissed the possibility to consider Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil as historical novels due to the scarce historiographical material deployed in these works. During the modernist era, the historical novel had come to resist historification by dismissing the past on which it depends. Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil are clearly part of this tradition. In both works, history means henceforth to attach a low priority to the narration of external historical facts, and to favor an internal characterization of the past through the prism of an individual consciousness typifying man’s involvement and concern with the historical process. Clayton Koelb observes in Der Tod des Vergil—and his remark also applies to Siddhartha—that “The particular historical events

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… though they play a role, are less important than the more general historical problem of how an individual understands his place in the stream of time” (67). This historical-existential balance is the organizing principle that structures the representation of the books’ temporality and topography. Both works involve two different space-times interwoven in a narratological universe. The outer world of reality is reduced to a meager plot: a concatenation of rare individual events or “Geschichtsaugenblicke” ‘moments of history’ (Gautama spreading his teachings in Shravasti or Virgil asking Varius and Tucca to burn the Aeneid), revolving around a limited number of characters and based on a minimalist setting composed with a handful of classical references (titles, names, cultural background) showing a modicum of compliance with historical accuracy. In contrast, the inner world of reality occupies the main body of the text, dictates the movement and thematic role assignment of the chapters, dilates time and subjugates geography through the repeated mental peregrinations of the central protagonist. Siddhartha and Virgil are indeed depicted less as characters than as self-reflexive consciousnesses curving the course of time to prolong their analysis of the existential meanings of the outer world, and to extend their inner conclusions to the realm of space. Time manipulation is made possible, because time is thought by both characters as “Erkenntnisveränderung” ‘mutation of knowledge’ and “in der Erkenntnis wird die Zeit vom Menschen gestaltet” (“through cognition human beings shape time”; Der Tod des Vergil 331)20. The inner reality is perpetual growth, punctuated by transformational stages, toward the acquisition of more knowledge. Hence, once man’s consciousness has gathered the totality of knowledge, reached the state of absolute knowing, time is annulled. In other words, the internalization of history ultimately implies the destruction of time, a logic evoking Hegelian teleology, but also corroborated in the historical-philosophical ideology of both works. The destruction of time is consistent with the total indifference of ancient Indians toward history, which results from their cyclical view of time (Guptara 22); Virgil shared the same belief through his version of the myth of the returning Golden Age in the Fourth Eclogue. By the same token, the circularity of time enables man to break out from the continuing impasse of historical linearity. Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil here expound their thesis about how an individual can master and escape from time by the sole power of his thought. The destruction of space follows a different logic. As Broch explains throughout “Die mythische Erbschaft der Dichtung,” a world that blew itself up does not deserve to be portrayed; instead, the culprit for its

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destruction—human nature—must be depicted, in all its nakedness, because “Nackt ist das Menschliche, wo immer es durchbricht, nackt ist sein Anfang und Ende” (“Humanity is naked whenever it emerges, naked is its beginning and end”; DTV 252). In both works, this moral argument seems to have inspired a mimetic mode of description: the self-destruction of the world is transposed into an unstructured representation of the topography; the naked human nature into a denatured vision of humanity stripped of all superficialities. Indeed, both re-enactments of 5th century India and Augustan Rome resist architectural temptations, are almost exempt from scientific objectivity, which traditionally gave its pseudoepistemological believability to the historical novel. Geographical contours and surfaces are blurred; landscapes are not depicted but conceptualized; urban evocations are often limited to their referentializing function; local color, costumes and objects are more or less banished. Every aspect has been thought of to lose the sense of temporal differentiation, hence to ensure consistency with regard to the universalistic dialectic of the books. Additionally, historicity tends to be systematically overshadowed by the symbolic and legendary nature of topographical discourses, which, in turn, demand interpretative efforts. This includes the notions of West and East, which are redefined by both authors. Siddhartha displays “a superficial Orientalism [that] may be exotic enough to make for a certain immediate appeal” (Butler 124), but also insufficiently exotic to determine, categorically, if the novel promotes an Indian or Buddhist world view (Stephenson 131). Hesse’s middle-ground definition of Orientalism is an implicit criticism toward the Western stubbornness to confuse Indianism with exoticism and his fictitious dematerialized India is another one toward a materialistic German society. Siddhartha’s India is indeed neither Asiatic nor European, neither Buddhist nor Christian, neither philosophic nor religious, but all of these together. Simply put: a timeless, spaceless Hessean Eden, devoid of racial and religious prejudices, and ultimately belonging to the domain of utopia. Likewise, Der Tod des Vergil advocates a return to the sinless creation and has also been defined as “the utopia of an increasing humanism” (Enklaar 224). This interpretation arises from the symbolic meanings of the book’s existential topography. Greece—Virgil’s original destination— represents East and, metaphorically, the poet’s past flourishing life; Brundisium—a port of trans-shipment between West and East—is the border crossing point between his life and his death; however, his death, in itself, is not a place, but means nothing less than the end of West. The teleological dialectic of the novel sheds light on this controversial issue.

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Virgil’s last living moments anticipate the ultimate end of the Old World, which will occur nineteen years later with the birth of Christ. Pervaded by this eschatological atmosphere, Brundisium presents all the characteristics of a Pandemonium: a city of vice, self-derision and religious despair, plunged into antediluvian decadence. The Roman port is no different from Siddhartha’s city of Sansara, as both represent the same archetype of the capitalist, corrupted Western society, denatured by ethical regress and cultural degeneration, peopled by anthropological abstractions and unformed masses. In both novels, the protagonist seeks a self-imposed exile in the natural world, which results from the moral awakening of one’s individual consciousness into contact with the Social Beast, and its subsequent renewed faith in a humanistic redemption. Escaping from civilization is therefore seen as a move toward responsibility, for both Siddhartha and Virgil become aware of the necessity to regenerate morally in a saner environment, to re-form themselves before reforming the world.

Reuniting the “Dividual” Selves War’s devastating effects on Hesse’s and Broch’s sensibility can be gauged by their well-known addiction to psychoanalysis,21 which may not be simply related to an individual or intellectual crisis, but also to a posttraumatic symptom: a dissociative identity disorder caused by the splitting of consciousness between the self and its relationship with history. This sort of schizophrenia of the “historical self” is replayed as an inward drama in Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil, and casts light on the authors’ divided representation of world historical figures. Siddhartha is a biographical tribute to a religious personality, Gautama Buddha, who equals the first Western spiritual pioneers. His secondary status in the story often undervalues his important contribution to the book. Buddha is the only attested historical authority in the novel, but also the eponymous protagonist bears his birth name: Siddhartha. Their homonymy, however, remains a major stumbling block to a definitive interpretation of the Hessean text, since readers cannot resist in confusing both characters and are forced to choose between two options: if seen as historical, Hesse’s Siddhartha becomes one with Buddha; if seen as fictitious, he remains a distinct entity from the sage. Though rarely considered, the first option would define the book as a lengthy meditation of Buddha, who retrospectively recalls the various stages of his human initiation from his childhood to nirvana. Several biographical convergences between both characters support this interpretation.22 In addition, Hesse has repeatedly voiced his preference for Buddha the man

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and not for Buddha the theosophist.23 These combined facts would explain the dichotomization of the spiritual leader into two autonomous entities, with a priority focus on the human Siddhartha and the relegation of the divine Buddha to secondary importance. However, this theory does not hold water given that both characters’ fates cannot be fully superimposed. The Sansara experience (63-71), to just quote one example, does not belong to the existential map of the historical Buddha. Such an interpersonal difference, instead, strengthens a second, more plausible theory: Siddhartha would be less an analogon than an imitator personifying an alternative version of Buddha’s life. This dissociative view of Gautama must be seen in conjunction with Hesse’s own “elastischen, zweiseitigen, bipolaren Denkart” (“elastic, two-sided, bipolar way of thinking”; SW 11.39). As a matter of fact, Siddhartha should best be regarded as a form of theologoumenon, a theological statement based on Hesse’s own convictions. From this vantage point, the brief meeting between Buddha and Siddhartha in the novel (30-33) would symbolize the confrontation of two opposing religious theses within the Hessean self: Buddha as the dogmatic self, shaped by the monocular and rigid vision of familial pietism; Siddhartha as the ideally religious self, personifying the liberalization of eclectic individual beliefs. The secondary figures increase this feeling of inner fragmentation. Each of them embodies a particular ideal or temptation rising up within Siddhartha during his existential journey. The book’s anthroponymic material gives clue to this. The names of the Lotus Girl, “Kamala,” and of the businessman, “Kamaswami,” are derived from kama, which means “desire” and alludes to the Hindu god of human love; the first represents concupiscence, the latter cupidity. “Govinda” and “Vasudeva” are both epithets of Krishna, the Supreme God, and hence epitomize the human aspiration to the divine. These four characters are therefore allegoric personifications of another intrapersonal conflict that Siddhartha tries to resolve: the typical Western dilemma between sensuality and spirituality. Broch uses a similar pattern in Der Tod des Vergil. Lysanias and the anonymous slave appear as hallucinatory autoscopic doubles of Virgil, as visual reduplications of aspects of his psychological self. These three characters represent respectively the child’s self, the slave’s self, the poet’s self. They virtually symbolize the holographic projections of ethical and religious qualities that are the sources of conflicting thoughts within Virgil’s psyche. Der Tod des Vergil shows here its ties with the Schauerroman ‘shudder-novel’ and the Romantic leitmotiv of the Doppelgänger ‘double,’ a term that can be defined as seeing one’s own body at distance. In German folklore literature, the Doppelgänger

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experience is premonitory of imminent death. Lysanias is indeed described as an interstitial character, an angel of death or Hermes Psychopompus, whose task is to carry souls to a safe harbor. He is also the aoratos philos ‘invisible friend’—a proto-Christian denomination for the saints—who progressively releases the thanatophobic poet from his existential concerns. But prior to reaching the afterlife, Virgil’s anxious soul must complete a healing process in order to be purified from all terrestrial dross. Lysanias presents himself as the soul healer, the reincarnation of Telesphoros, the son of Asclepius, the God of medicine. Such an interpretation is supported by the facts that Lysanias was the Delian name to designate Asclepius and its Greek etymology means the “releaser of suffering.” Charondas, Virgil’s doctor, is a native of Cos, Asclepius’s island, but represents the antithesis of Lysanias. His name, which derives from Charon—the ferryman of Hades who carries the soul of Orpheus in the Fourth Georgics—is a euphemism for death: the verb chairo means ‘to rejoice,’ which is contradictory to the chtonian nature of the Greek god. Virgil ironically says to Charondas: “Arzt, der du bist, heile mich, damit ich sterben kann” (“Doctor that you are, heal me so that I can die”; 263). Charondas seems to allude to the false healthcare providers of the Interwar period, while Virgil embodies the myth of the depressed modern man who aspires to escape from the prison of mental illness. Both authors’ interest in onomastics inevitably raises the question of how language can contribute efficiently to the healing process of humanity.

Searching for the Language of God Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil deal extensively with another war epiphenomenon, which one might call “human incommunicability.” The aftermath of the First World War witnessed a return to the post-Babelic linguistic situation: language is no more the Verb of God; it has lost its sacredness and credibility long ago, and since then, spreads tragic misunderstandings that divide mankind. There is more than one hint of this issue in both works. Hesse’s protagonist debates with various Indian masters, but they often fail to reach convergence on ideological matters. Gautama Buddha warns Siddhartha “vor dem Dickicht der Meinungen und vor dem Streit um Worte” (“about the thicket of opinions and the fight over words”; 31). In the like manner, Virgil’s long and arduous exchanges with Augustus on the Aeneid’s fate (284-376) are no cordial negotiations, but rather resemble a logomachy, a “war of words.” The linguistic cacophony raises tangible concerns for both authors. Is

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literature still possible in period of crisis? Which language can translate the urgent need to reunite humanity? For Hesse and Broch, the priority of the new language must be less “die Welt für Wißbegierige zu erklären” (“to explain the world to people who seek for knowledge”), but rather to bring them “Erlösung vom Leiden” ‘deliverance from suffering’ (Siddhartha 31). Such salutary language can be found in God, whether considered as Logos (Der Tod des Vergil) or consciousness (Siddhartha). Both works are driven by this linguistic quest to the primary source of the sacred, but follow two radically different stylistic approaches. In Siddhartha, the sacred is accessible through the experience of wisdom. This experience, however, is untranslatable per se. The protagonist points out to Govinda that “Die Worte tun dem geheimen Sinn nicht gut, es wird immer alles gleich ein wenig anders, wenn man es ausspricht, ein wenig verfälscht, ein wenig närrisch” (“Words are not good for the mysterious meaning; when one utters it, everything instantly becomes a bit different, adulterated and foolish”; 117). Art offers to mediate in this deadlock. Its contribution is noticeable through the use of religious sources to inspire an elemental language that intends to echo sacred times. Hesse’s style is remarkably sober: it eschews cluttered verbiage, sophistication, unnecessary technicalities and, instead, puts emphasis on a synchronic economy of speech and image. This stylistic refinement echoes the oral tradition of the Ancient World. From an ascetic standpoint, however, speech becomes improper, for it interrupts the continuous stream of visual images that is specific to the meditation. Siddhartha ends up abandoning speech in favor of listening (87). Hesse’s prose reflects this change in sensory perception: its driving, powerful rhythm shows preference for assonance and alliteration, hinting at a possible analogy with the meditative stream of the river; elsewhere it adopts a tragic tone, emphasizing the linguistic drama of the untranslatability of the sacred. Siddhartha’s musicality here plays an important role. Ernest Rose notes, “Staccato passages of intensifying enumeration are scattered through the entire book … At times this style assumes the character of a ritual chant” (74). Lyricism increases the feeling of lightness and transparency of an ethereal language suggesting transcendental levitation. Devices borrowed from Biblical and Buddhist texts further elevate the prose to the sphere of hagiography. Siddhartha seemingly puts forward the principle that the textualization of the sacred should be tantamount to the sacralization of the text. Broch is also convinced that art can bring mankind closer to God’s language and, for this purpose, must reintegrate its lost ethicality in making knowledge freely available for humanity. From his Promethean

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belief emerges a novelistic world lost within an impressive paratextual density, defying grammatical and syntactical rules. In contrast with Siddhartha, Der Tod des Vergil indeed develops an extremely complex phraseology comprising uninterrupted, river-like sentences, which share the same purpose with the sacred as both intend to unite. Like Karl Kraus, Broch regards the sentence as a cellular unity composed of microcells— the words—comparable to shards of God containing the wonders of the world (Bier 182). Lyricism plays here the role of a conciliator of antinomies, maintains the challenging balance between syntacticism and semantism, which Virgil sees as a prerogative for reaching the absolute Logos, contemplating the face of God and, eventually, renewing the covenant between the human and the divine: “Den unbekannten Gott zu erwarten, war sein Blick erdwärts gezwungen worden, ihm entgegenspähend, dessen erlösendes Wort, … neu die Sprache zu der einer eidtragenden Gemeinschaft hätte beleben sollen” (“It was to await the unknown god, that his own glance had been compelled earthward, peering to see the advent of him whose redeeming word … should restore language to a communication among men who supported the pledge”; 126). The novel thus promotes a logocentric view of the world, grounded on the necessity of disregarding conventions to recognize God’s presence in language. In Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil, the language of God also helps man to complete his self-formation and quest for absolute freedom in realizing the necessity to come to terms with the holistic unity of everything.

Restoring the Micro-Macrocosmic Continuum Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil are comparable to two giant negentropic metaphors, which strive to reassemble, poetically, the parts of a fragmented post-war world, to retrieve the primal unity that would help mankind to reshape society. The most obvious evidence of this humanistic agenda can be found in the repeated references to the old analogy between the microcosm (man) and the macrocosm (universe), which lies in a belief system instituted by a divinity or a unitary pantheistic structure of the world. Hesse and Broch use this organicist doctrine to re-enact an ancient way of thinking, to transcend human and religious antinomies, and to symbolically invert the egocentric tendency of a modern man considering himself outside the universe as the unique source of value. Hesse tackles this issue in Siddhartha, more than in any other of his works.24 From Oriental mysticism and German Romanticism he borrows the doctrine of a unitary restoration of the divine Great Whole within an

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inherently heteroclite world. This belief unveils Siddhartha’s linkage with the Bildungsroman. The protagonist is engaged in a transformative educational process, whose ultimate aim is to fill the gap between the soul and the world. His first challenging goal is to reconcile Atma (individual soul) with Brahma (cosmic soul) into a consubstantial principle that identifies the microcosm (man and soul) with the macrocosm (universe and God) (10). This God-consciousness principle has a noticeable involvement in the diegesis and stylization of the Indian novel. One early example takes place during the rebellion of Siddhartha against his father, which occurs under starry skies: “Der Brahmane schwieg, und schwieg so lange, daß im kleinen Fenster die Sterne wanderten und ihre Figur veränderten … Stumm und regunglos stand mit gekreuzten Armen der Sohn, stumm und regunglos saß auf der Matte der Vater, und die Sterne zogen am Himmel” (“The Brahmin was silent, and silent so long that the stars were wandering across the small window, changing their patterns … Mute and motionless, the son stood with crossed arms; mute and motionless, the father sat on the mat, and the stars drifted across the sky”; 12). This Romantic scene uses anaphoric and symmetric effects to anticipate the future micromacrocosmic conjunction experienced by Siddhartha during the episode of the transmutation taught by the eldest samana: “Ein Reiher flog überm Bambuswald—und Siddhartha nahm den Reiher in seine Seele auf, flog über Wald und Gebirg, war Reiher, fraß Fische, hungerte Reiherhunger, sprach Reihergekrächz, starb Reihertod” (“A heron flew over the bamboo forest—and Siddhartha took the heron into his soul, flew over forests and mountains, was a heron, ate fish, hungered heron hunger, spoke heron croaking, died heron death”; 16). This spiritual technique is depicted as an intermediary stage to the simultaneous understanding of the self and his physical hierarchical ties with the world. Against the view of man as homo economicus, Hesse endorses the concept of the “total man.” According to Eliade, “man has constituted himself as a religious being, aspiring to the experience of the sacred; this openness to the sacred enables homo religiosus (religious man) to know himself in knowing the world; this twofold knowledge makes him the total man, because religious man thirsts for being” (Vaneck). Transmutation temporarily allays Siddhartha’s unquenchable ontological thirst (14), before his discovery of the eternal cycle of the nature and the universe, sublimated into the parable of the stone (115-118). The stone aspires to universality due to its “thinghood,” its protean evolution, since, for the religious man, the whole Nature is potentially interpretable as cosmic sacredness. This apodictic reasoning has affinity to the omnipresent Tao—the universal and cosmic Order

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immanent and anterior to creation—, but also alludes to Müller’s sensual poetic intuition of the infinite through the mediation of nature. Müller’s influence appears during an epiphanic moment occurring after Siddhartha’s meeting with Gautama: “Blau war Blau, Fluß war Fluß, und wenn auch im Blau und Fluß in Siddhartha das Eine und Göttliche verborgen lebte, so war es doch eben das Göttlichen Art und Sinn, hier Blau, dort Himmel, dort Wald und hier Siddhartha zu sein” (“Blue was blue, river was river, and even though the One and the Divine lived concealed in the blue and the river in Siddhartha, it was the manner and meaning of the Divine to be yellow here, blue here, sky there, forest there, and Siddhartha here”; 36). Prior to regenerating his soul, Siddhartha here makes a tabula rasa of his past beliefs on nature. This spiritual awakening, transposed by iterative devices such as epanaphora and tautology, evolves into a vision of the macrocosmic reality no longer regarded as illusion, but rather as fusion. The sacred word Om crystallizes this new definition of the macrocosm and represents the alpha and omega of Siddhartha’s empirical quest to reach the upper world of consciousness. This articulated sound, produced during a profound religious meditation, echoes the perfection of the soul in its unity with the body, the macrocosm and space-time. In the epilogue of the novel, Om leads Siddhartha to his ultimate transformation: the transfiguration of the individual face into a continuous stream of thousands of faces (119). This instant of divine totality is an attempt to reconcile two different world views: pantheism (God is everything: every part of material is a sample of the divinity) and theopanism (everything is God: there are as many identical absolutes as individualities) (Rose 71). God as unifying principle lies in the cosmos and expresses himself through it; inversely, cosmos has no existence distinct from him or within him. The “beatific smile” synthesizes this idea as symbolic gesture of the unio mystica, or “the mystical experience of Oneness with God that manifests itself in love, service, and even an ecumenical spirit” (Stephenson 133). The intended ecumenicity of Hesse’s prose affiliates Siddhartha to a wide range of religious conceptions that have all in common the belief of a micro-macrocosmic correlation. Broch too shares some of these unitary conceptions in Der Tod des Vergil. The organization of the chapters is inspired by the sophianic universality of the human panorganism as translated in Empedocles’s fragment (17/109): “By earth we see earth, by water, water; by aither, shining aither; but by fire, blazing fire; love by love and strife by baneful strife.” The reunion of these elements, the cosmogonic re-enactment of the world, is Virgil’s poetic response to the atomization of modern society.

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His longing for micro-macrocosmic unity is formulated in explicit terms in the metaphor of the nocturnal beauty, “das Sinnbild seines eigenen Bildes zeigte … die Versinnbildlichung des Ichs im All, die Versinnbildlichung des Alls im Ich, das ineinanderverschränkte Doppelsinnbild des irdischen Seins” (“the symbol of his own image … the symbolization of the self in the universe, the symbolization of the universe in the self, the interlocked dual symbol of all earthly existence”; 114). Virgil’s vision seeks to exceed the boundaries of the microcosm in order to attain to the knowledge of the macrocosm and, ultimately, the knowledge of death. In a similar way to Siddhartha, the poet of the Aeneid must previously apprehend the macrocosm in its totality, to incorporate the macrocosm into his microcosm: “Die Fülle der der Gesichter und Ungesichter … sie allesamt … ihm einverleibt waren von seinem Urbeginn an, als der chaotische Ur-Humus seines eigenen Seins, als seine eigene Fleischlichkeit, als seine eigene Brunst, als seine eigene Gier, als sein eigenes Ungesicht, aber auch als seine eigene Sehnsucht” (“The profusion of faces and nonfaces … were all embodied in him from his primordial origins as the chaotic primal humus of his very existence, as his own carnality, his own ardor, his own greed, his own facelessness, but also as his own yearning”; 36). And like Hesse, Broch marries here two different religious doctrines: man as “a microcosm into a macrocosm” (John of Damascus) with man as microtheos, “a second cosmos, a great universe within a little one” (Gregory of Nazianzus). In Der Tod des Vergil, the idea that man resumes the universe within himself while being an Imago Dei, finds a poetic equivalent in the image of the boat, a metaphor of the immensity within the immensity. Like Siddhartha, this micro-macrocosmic metaphor depicts a cycle of transmutations experienced by the protagonist: “War das Bild des Schiffes sein eigenes Bild … er war selber das unermeßliche Schiff, das zugleich selber die Unermeßlichkeit ist, und er war selber die Flucht, die in diese Unermeßlichkeit zielt, er selber das fliehende Schiff … unermeßlich er selber” (“The image of the ship was his own image … he himself was the immense ship that at the same time was immensity; and he himself was the flight that was aiming toward this immensity; he was the fleeing ship … he himself was immensity”; 72). In this passage, iterative rhetorical figures form invisible chains that suggest a latent desire to link man to totality. This yearning for totality is sublimated into the motif of the “Körperlandschaft” ‘corporal landscape,’ which extends itself as an attempt to retrieve the original unity. Virgil depicts himself as a giant body having already his feet between two eras and his head touching the sphere of stars, an image evoking Schopenhauer’s macranthropos—the

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anthromorphic body representing allegorically the universe as a great man, or the universe containing everything that man contains. Siddhartha’s and Virgil’s metaphysical transformations aim to bring readers closer to the growing awareness that modern man has cut his own ties with the world and, mutatis mutandis, lost his ontological integrity. He is only a partial man, both eccentric and egocentric. One cannot escape the conclusion that Hesse and Broch both deliver here a strong humanist message, whose resonance goes well beyond the borders of Germany. In this respect, Siddhartha and Der Tod des Vergil anticipate a new mutation of the historical novel genre that will occur in post-war works such as Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951): a historical novel exploiting the full potentialities of its humanist and universal values as a means to openly defy the epistemological superiority of official historiography and to become a “hyperhistory.”25

Notes 1

It is not to be associated with “flight from responsibility,” which would echo Kurt Hiller’s 1935 pejorative critique of the historical novelists’ “cowardly” behaviour in interwar Germany (Hiller 145). 2 See Kracauer’s essay “Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform” in the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated June 29, 1930. 3 Still, many scholars seem to disagree on this point: they predominantly view the books as half-mystical, half-romanticized representations of self-projections into a remote past that eventually converge to mainly emphasize the authorial chief concern with individuation. Such an interpretation seems however contradictory to Hesse’s and Broch’s humanist conception of literature. 4 All translations mine unless otherwise noted. Further references to this text are indicated by the abbreviation GW. 5 See Boulby, “Narziss and Goldmund” 86. 6 Further references to this text are indicated by the abbreviation SW. 7 Theodore Ziolkowski claims that “like Hermann Broch, who insisted that his The Death of Virgil was a ‘lyrical work’ and that it be read and criticized as such, Hesse had good reasons for calling Siddhartha ‘an Indic poem’ ” (“Siddhartha” 177). 8 For instance, see Ziolkowski’s argument against biographical interpretations of Hesse’s book (“Siddhartha” 154-155). 9 The bias related to the historical novel’s paradoxical duality is rooted in the old Aristotelian debate on mimesis (Poetics 9, 1451a36-b11). Poetry, whose purpose is not to copy, but to shape reality, is distinct from history as historical account of the past (historia rerum gestarum), which raises the unavoidable issue of truth in regard to the enunciation of human actions done in the past (res gestae). 10 See Döblin’s assertion of the primacy of the fiction in the historical novel (“Der historische Roman und wir” 303).

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11

“In most respects,” as Harry E. Shaw explains, “historical fiction depends upon the formal techniques and cultural assumptions of the main traditions of the novel. Because of this dependence, it does not have a significant history” (23). 12 This theoretical distinction has been coined by Jean Rostand in his essay titled Biologie et humanisme (226-227). 13 Harro Müller recalls, “Since the differentiation of art as an autonomous partial system of modernity, the author [of the historical novel] … possesses the imaginative freedom to use productively the tension between fiction as constructive positing and as reconstructive referentialization, i.e. between fiction as Poiesis and Mimesis” (63). 14 See Ziolkowski’s essay “Broch’s Image of Vergil and Its Context.” 15 See Schickling 311. 16 For a detailed account of Broch’s contribution to the League of Nations, see Wallace’s dissertation (112-151). 17 See Mileck 134. 18 See Broch, Materialien 239. 19 This double-barreled approach also constitutes the thematic common denominator between several other works of both writers, including Demian (1919), Klingsors letzter Sommer (Klingsor’s Last Summer, 1919), Zarathustras Wiederkehr (Zarathustra’s Return, 1919), Blick ins Chaos (A Glimpse into Chaos, 1920), and even earlier satirical tales like Wenn Der Krieg noch zwei Jahre dauert (If the War Goes on Another Two More Years, 1917), and Der Europaer (The European, 1918). Broch’s unfinished works such as Die Verzauberung (The Spell, 1953) as well as “Erwägungen zum Problem des Kulturtodes” (Reflections on the Problem of the Death of Civilization, 1936) and “Adolf Hitler’s Farewell Address” (1944), criticize the bestialization of the masses under the spell of dangerous demagogies, investigate the cathartic effects of death and to convey that the path to freedom begins with self-improvement. 20 Further references to this text are indicated by the abbreviation DTV. 21 For Hesse, see Mileck’s chapter “War and Awakening” 65-127; for Broch, see Lützeler 67. 22 B.Y. Naik notes, “For instance, both men, Siddhartha (the Buddha) and Hesse’s Siddhartha left a wife and a son to find meaning in a life of suffering and deprivation; they became itinerant ascetics and spent several years meditating by the side of a river “to gain a final insight.” In their first steps, Siddhartha and Buddha coincide as both leave their families” (105). 23 See Mileck 162. 24 See Hesse, Betrachtungen 172. 25 See Kemp.

Works Referenced Arendt, Hannah. “Nicht mehr und noch nicht: Hermann Brochs Der Tod des Vergil.” 1946. Hannah Arendt – Hermann Broch. Briefwechsel 1946 bis 1951. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt am Main:

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Jüdischer Verlag, 1996. 169-174. Print. Bachelard, Gaston. L’air et les songes: essai sur l’imagination du mouvement. 1943. Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992. Print. Becker, Colette. Le roman. Paris: Bréal, 2000. Print. Beerman, Hans. “Hermann Hesse and the Bhagavad-Gita.” Midwest Quarterly 1.1 (1959): 27-40. Print. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Print. Blaise, Bharati Mukherjee. The Use of Indian Mythology in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Diss. U of Iowa, 1969. Bier, Jean-Paul. Hermann Broch et La mort de Virgile. Paris: Larousse, 1974. Print. Boulby, Mark. “Narziss and Goldmund.” Hermann Hesse. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall, Pa: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 79-110. Print. —. “Siddhartha.” Hermann Hesse: Mind and Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. 121-157. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. 1992. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print. Broch, Hermann. Der Tod des Vergil. 1945. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. Print. —. Gesammelte Werke. 10 vols. Ed. Robert Pick. Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1953-1961. Print. —. Kommentierte Werkausgabe. 13 vols. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1981. Print. —. Materialien zu Hermann Broch Der Tod des Vergil. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976. Print. Butler, Colin. “Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: Some Critical Objections.” Monatshefte 63.2 (1971): 117-124. Print. Byrd, Rudolph P. “Oxherding Tale and Siddhartha: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Emergence of a Hidden Tradition.” African American Review 30 (1996): 549-558. Print. Chateaubriand, François-René de. Les Martyrs, ou le Triomphe de la religion chrétienne. 1809. Œuvres romanesque et voyages. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Print. Collmann, Timm. Zeit und Geschichte in Hermann Brochs Der Tod des Vergil. Bonn: Bouvier, 1967. Print. Cowart, David. History and the Contemporary Novel. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Print. —. Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century

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Writing. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Print. David-de Palacio, Marie-France. Tragédies de fins d’empires : actualité de la fiction antiquisante romaine en Allemagne autour de 1900. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Print. Döblin, Alfred. “Der historische Roman und wir.” 1936. Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur. Ed. Erich Kleinschmidt. Olten: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1989. 291-316. Print. —. “Der Bau des epischen Werks.” 1929. Aufsätze zur Literatur. Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1963. 109-132. Print. Durzak, Manfred, ed. “Zeitgeschichte im historischen Modell: Hermann Brochs Exilroman Der Tod des Vergil.” Die deutsche Exilliteratur 1933-1945. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973. 430-442. Print. Eliade, Mircea. Interview by Pierre Vaneck. “Mircea Eliade et la redécouverte du sacré.” L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. 30 November 1987. Television. Enklaar, Jattie. “Hermann Broch and Virgil.” The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature. Ed. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 213-227. Print. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print. Guptara, Prabhu S. “The Impact of Europe on the Development of Indian Literature.” Review of National Literatures 10 (1979): 18-34. Print. Heizmann, Jürgen. “A Farewell to Art: Poetic Reflection in Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil.” Hermann Broch, Visionary in Exile: The 2001 Yale Symposium. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Rochester: Camden House, 2003. 187-200. Print. Hesse, Hermann. Betrachtungen. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928. Print. —. Sämtliche Werke. 20 vols. Ed. Volker Michels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001-2005. Print. —. Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung. 1922. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1953. Print. Hiller, Kurt. Profile. Prosa aus einem Jahrzehnt. Paris: Editions nouvelles internationales, 1938. Print. Hüppauf, Bernd. “The Historical Novel and a History of Mentalities: Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein as a Historical Novel.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson. New York: Berg, 1991. 71-96. Print. Karalaschwili, Reso. Hermann Hesses Romanwelt. Cologne: Böhlau, 1986. Print.

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Kemp, Robert. “La vie des Livres – Virgile et Néron.” Les Nouvelles Littéraires Apr. 7 1955. Print. Koelb, Clayton, ed. “The Legendary Self: Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.” Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 67-88. Print. Koopman, Helmut. Der klassisch-moderne Roman in Deutschland. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1983. Print. Kracauer, Siegried. “Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform.” Frankfurter Zeitung 29 June 1930. Print. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. 1986. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Print. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Trans. Hannah Mitchell. Hardmondsworth: Pelican, 1981. Print. Lützeler, Paul Michael. 1985. Hermann Broch: A Biography. London: Quartet Books, 1987. Print. Mileck, Joseph. Hermann Hesse: Life and Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. Print. Morgan, Peter. “The Artist Within and Beyond Language: Art and History in Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson. New York: Berg, 1991. 127-143. Müller, Harro. “Possibilities of the Historical Novel in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives. Ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson. New York: Berg, 1991. 59-70. Print. Naik, B.Y. “Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Recreation of the Buddha’s Life.” Studies in Literature in English. Ed. Mohit Kumar Ray. New Dehli: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2007. 102-110. Print. O’Malley, Seamus. Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print. Rao, Y.M. “Escapism and Escape and Buddhism and Mysticism.” Collected Bodhi Leaves Volume I: Numbers 1-30. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 2010. 377-392. Print. Ronzeaud, Pierre, ed. “Préface.” Le roman historique: (XVIIe – XXe siècles): actes de Marseille. Paris/Seattle: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1983. 7-9. Print. Rose, Ernest. Faith from the Abyss: Hermann Hesse’s Way from Romanticism to Modernity. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Print. Rostand, Jean. Biologie et humanisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Print. Schickling, Marco. “Hermann Hesse’s Politics.” A Companion to the

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Works of Hermann Hesse. Ed. Ingo Cornils. Rochester: Camden House, 2009. 301-323. Print. Schlant, Ernestine. Hermann Broch. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. Print. Shaw, Harry E. The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Print. Stephenson, Barry. Veneration and Revolt: Hermann Hesse and Swabian Pietism. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. Print. Wallace, Donald L. The Death of Civilization: Ethics and Politics in the Work of Hermann Broch, 1886-1951. Diss. U of California, 2006. Wefelmeyer, Fritz. “Geschichte als Verinnerlichung: Hermann Brochs Der Tod des Vergil.” Travellers in Time and Space: The German Historical Novel/Reisende durch Zeit und Raum: Der deutschsprachige historische Roman. Ed. Osman Duranni and Julian Preece. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2001. 243-261. Print. Weidner, Daniel. “‘Without knowing America, you cannot say anything valid about democratic politics.’ Hermann Broch and the Ethics of Exile.” “Escape to Life”: German intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933. Ed. Eckart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. 162-181. Print. Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Broch’s Image of Vergil and Its Context.” Modern Austrian Literature 13.4 (1980): 1-30. Print. —. “Siddhartha: The Landscape of the Soul.” The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study of Theme and Structure. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. 146-177. Print.

CHAPTER SIX NARRATING THE BERLIN WALL: DECONSTRUCTIONS OF NOSTALGIA IN POST-WENDE NOVELS SEAN EEDY

Introduction In her 2001 study of Central European states following the collapse of Soviet-style communism, The Future of Nostalgia, literary scholar Svetlana Boym positions nostalgia within two tendencies she describes as the reflective and the restorative. Boym understands the reflective aspect of nostalgia as that which dwells in the pain or sadness caused by the individual’s inability to recapture the lost home. It is this algia portion of the word nostalgia, derived from the Greek algos ‘pain,’ which is then responsible for “the imperfect process of remembrance” often associated with misrepresentation in nostalgic reconstructions of the past (Boym 41). Her study quite astutely argues that reflective nostalgia is about the individual and cultural memory, revealing that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another. Rather, the reflective is “aware of the gap between identity and resemblance” (Boym 49-50). This is to say that reflective nostalgia does not attempt to rebuild the lost home based on the fantasy of imprecise memory. Instead, the reflective focuses on the distance between the past and present home and the misremembrance of what was lost. Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps” in the pursuit of a singular truth within the historical narrative (Boym 41). This form of nostalgia may be found in a national context in the construction of foundational myths and the conception of a shared experience. This then provides a driving force of unity within the population of a nation-state (Boym 41). As was the

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case with numerous other states in Central Europe during the postcommunist experience of the early 1990s, restorative nostalgia was at the core of claims toward a shared German culture and history. These claims were then used to justify the unification of the Eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Western Federal Republic (FRG) following the Gentle Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989. As Boym herself argues, restorative nostalgia concerns itself with the “reconstructions of monuments of the past,” while the reflective “lingers on the ruins” (41). This chapter questions the representation of memory and nostalgia in (former) East German post-Wende ‘turning point’ literature as addressed in three novels: Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1996), Neue Leben: Die Jugend Enricho Türmers in Briefen und Prosa (New Lives: the Youth of Enricho Türmer in Letters and Prose, 2005) by Ingo Schulze, and famed East German state-poet Christa Wolf’s Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002). 1 Not only are each of these texts set during different points in late GDR history—the months leading to the fall of the Wall, the first seven months of 1990 prior to the implementation of the GermanGerman economic and social union, and one year before the fall of the Wall, respectively—but each approaches the subjects of memory of and nostalgia for the GDR in very different ways. What these novels share is that each author draws attention to the processes of memory and the imperfections of memory in their recreations and representations of the former East German state. Despite the obvious imperfections of memory, each narrative stresses the authenticity and validity of the memories employed. As such, the ways in which these narratives are structured bring Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia into conflict. The restorative, upon which commemorations are based, invokes the singular truth of history which cannot coexist with reflective nostalgia, itself questioning the very notion of truth behind those nostalgic recollections. In the novels discussed here, the apparent plurality of memories conflict with the supposed historical truth provided by the respective narrators as the memories and experiences of secondary characters coexist alongside the singular narrative voice. This serves to bring that truth and thus the foundation of historical memory into conflict. Through a discussion of the narrative styles employed in each of the post-Wende novels introduced above, this chapter explores how each novel approaches nostalgia and the GDR in unified Germany. I argue here that through the creation of an authentic yet imperfect memory and the respective versions of the GDR reconstructed in each novel, each author draws attention to the processes of memory and their imperfections. In

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doing so, these authors deconstruct the notion of Ostalgie, ‘nostalgia for the former GDR,’ as something predicated on a shared and collective East German experience. Although each novel presupposes the truth in their respective reconstructions of the GDR, they each insist at the same time that both memory and experience are unique to the individual. As such, the East German state recreated in fiction loses its claim to collective experience as the respective authors demonstrate the illusory nature of that experience. In spite of the insistence on the authenticity of memory and of this perceived East German experience, the presence of restorative nostalgia creates this notion of shared experience and identity that fabricates the perceived authenticity of memory responsible for its own construction.

Post-Colonial Hybridity in Post-Wende Literature and Nostalgia In his monograph, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia, Germanist and film historian Paul Cooke argues that the outing of numerous IMs (“inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or informal collaborators of the GDR secret service”), turned Stasi, ‘East German secret police’ victims into perpetrators through the findings of the Gauck Agency and the opening of the Stasi files to former East Germans and researchers. As neighbours and friends were proven to have colluded with the regime, this blurred the notion of victimization by the Stasi and shook the foundations upon which the concept of a normal Alltag ‘everyday life’ was built (Cooke 65-7). Famed authors and average East Germans subsequently wrote and published numerous diaries, memoirs, and novels based on their experiences of victimization at the hands of the SED (Socialist Unity Party) regime, including Christa Wolf’s controversial Was bleibt (What Remains, 1990) and Reiner Kunze’s Deckname ‘Lyrik’: Eine Dokumentation (Codename ‘Poetry’: a Documentation, 1990). This trend towards equating the GDR with the Stasi became over-saturating by the mid- to late-1990s and encouraged authors to treat the former GDR with a lighter tone. Effectively, this process of “writing back,” as Cooke describes it, served to deconstruct the notion that the GDR and the Stasi were indivisible, allowing for the reconstruction and representation of the Alltag in literature by former East Germans (73). As convincing as Cooke’s argument is, in his chapter focusing on these victimization narratives and “satirical...perpetrator texts” including Thomas Brussig’s novel, Helden wie wir, Cooke fails to address the processes of memory made apparent by these post-Wende authors (74). Moreover, Cooke does

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not discuss the impact that memory and the attention drawn to the act of remembering has upon narrative, particularly in the case of Brussig’s novel. Nostalgia is dependent upon the act of remembering. Boym’s own notion of reflective nostalgia imparts the importance of distance between identity and memory as the focus of individual and cultural nostalgia. Whereas Cooke views East and West German perceptions of the GDR through his conception of a “positive hybrid position,” that is the borrowing of Western positions and tropes in order to deconstruct those same Western views of the GDR, it is the process and act of imperfect remembering that facilitates the recreation of the lost home (18). By highlighting the processes of memory and the intentional or accidental imperfections of that memory, East German authors question the authenticity of the memories upon which both East German nostalgia and West German stereotypes are based. This is not meant to discredit the very real existence of a perceived shared experience among former citizens of the GDR, but points to the individualist nature of memory and thus to the polyphonic voice of nostalgic recreations and remembrances of the former GDR. Under the conditions of Article 23 of the West German Grundgesetz ‘constitutional law’ allowing for the rapid unification of the two German states, economic, political, and social institutions of the Federal Republic extended unchanged across the former territories of the GDR. This meant that the memory constructions which allowed average GDR citizens to deal with the regime and the patterns of daily life in the East were no longer relevant or applicable to life in the newly unified German state, as argued elsewhere by cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Ten Dyke (155). Having the lives of former East Germans gutted of significance in the new German society at the same time that Western institutions penetrated the East led to criticisms of the processes of unification as a colonization of the former GDR by the West (Cooke 2-3). West Germans, were generally left untouched by these processes having lived for decades with those institutions newly introduced in the East. Besides quiet grumblings over increased taxes or the lack of gratitude on the part of East Germans, little evidence of Western nostalgia emerged in the wake of unification. With little else of value, however, material culture provided tangible evidence of East German lives and their significance. At the same time, this same material culture created touchstones which other former East Germans could readily identify as part of a supposedly shared GDR past. As West German colonization devalued and delegitimized GDR memory and the anticipated repetition of the West German economic

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miracle failed to produce results as quickly and to the promised extent, citizens of the new Eastern states expressed disillusionment and disorientation with their lives in the unified Federal Republic (Dyke 1545). This problem was compounded by the reports of the EnqueteKommission ‘Commission of Investigation,’ formed by the German Bundestag (equivalent to US House of Representatives) in 1992 to assess the legacy and social repercussions of the SED dictatorship. These reports underlined the distinction between the GDR past and the unified present with the purpose of legitimizing the Western democratic system through the perception of a proven history (Cooke 37-9). At the same time that these reports buttressed the Federal Republic at the expense of the GDR, they delegitimized the memories and formative experiences of individual citizens of the former East. The dislocation of East German memory and the formation of an official narrative of the GDR as a dictatorship and police state further devalued the experiences of East German everyday life. Ironically, the dislocation and perceived illegitimacy of East German memory and the accompanying marginalization of East German experience provided the foundation for the collective experience of Ostalgie among many citizens in the new Eastern states. East German nostalgia in the public consciousness and media is predicated on this turn toward the collective East German experience of everyday life.2 The focus on the Alltag then becomes problematic in its ability to whitewash the atrocities of the Stasi and the SED regime (Jarausch 104). Historian Eli Rubin concurs, suggesting that the fetishization of material culture, the everyday, and indeed the phenomenon of Ostalgie itself, is predicated on memory gaps and the obfuscation and decontextualization of the origins of East German socialism (124). This, however, is certainly not the case in the three novels examined below. Each adopts Cooke’s “positive hybrid position” (18) in that the narratives begin from the understanding of the GDR as a totalitarian and/or police state, largely a Western understanding of the former East, in order to deconstruct the reality of that (Western) assumption. Brussig provides a narrator embedded within a keystone cop version of the Stasi. Schulze’s protagonist envisions himself as a dissident writer hoping to be published in the West. Wolf’s protagonist dreams of an oppressive present resulting from an oppressive Nazi past. However, it is the ways in which the memories are negotiated that serves to criticize not only this notion of the GDR, but also the idea of Ostalgie based on the assumption of a shared East German experience.

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Helden wie wir and the Phallus-y of Revolution Thomas Brussig was born in East Berlin in 1964. Following the completion of his vocational training as a construction worker and the Abitur ‘school completion exams’ in 1984, Brussig worked in a variety of fields and positions until the Berlin Wall opened in 1989 (“Biographie”). The publication of Helden wie wir in 1995 was met with a “gewaltig” ‘tremendous’ reception at home and internationally. Brussig has since become an example of German literature for global audiences with his work translated into twenty-eight languages. His second book, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (At the Short End of Sun Avenue) met with a similar response with a film version, Sonnenallee, written by Brussig and directed by Leander Haußmann, released in 1999. However, as the themes of the GDR and the Wende receded from the German public consciousness in the mid-2000s, so too did Brussig withdraw from the literary spotlight until the 2015 release of Das gibts in keinem Russenfilm (There are No Russian Movies) (Kürten). Brussig’s celebrated debut novel, Helden wie wir, follows Klaus Uhltzscht’s upbringing in the GDR by his Stasi agent father and hygieneconscious and state employed mother. Brussig’s narrative explores Klaus’s indoctrination into the socialist order and his employment by the Stasi. Klaus loves and hates both the GDR and the Federal Republic. He fears the Stasi, but his desire to work for them is equally strong. Klaus is characterized as paralleling the forty-year East German mindset through his vacillation “between profound insecurity and salvational flights of fancy” (Schwarz 682). Throughout the story, Klaus claims sole responsibility for opening the Berlin Wall on the night of 9 November 1989 due to the revelation of his grossly swollen penis to the East German border guards. In Klaus’s quest to be recognized as someone greater than himself, he turns to sexual perversion. At last, finding himself at perhaps the height of his status within the Party, having just saved the life of SED General Secretary Erich Honecker, Klaus injures himself at the Alexanderplatz during the rally on 4 November at which the author Christa Wolf spoke (immediately following which Wolf collapsed and was rushed to the hospital providing the basis of her short novel, Leibhaftig, discussed below). His swollen penis, resulting from this injury, suggested that the entire East German state required “a transformation from impotence to courage” without “overcompensation by adopting [the] grandiosity and tyranny” of Klaus’s and the GDR’s perversions (Schwarz 682). In his 2004 article, “The Erection of the Berlin Wall,” Germanist Brad Prager describes Klaus’s exposition to the New York Times reporter, Mr.

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Kitzelstein, as a confession wherein Klaus turns westward for absolution. Prager writes that “the injunction to confess was an important aspect of the history of self-policing” thereby transforming desire into discourse and an important aspect of GDR culture itself (995). However, in this Prager fails to address the need for truth in confession. Addressing Kitzelstein, Klaus begins with a confirmation of the Western perception of the Soviet bloc’s policy of force (the Brezhnev Doctrine), before immediately questioning the same Western dominant understanding of the victory of capitalist democracy in the GDR. Klaus admits his participation, saying that, “es ist wahr. Ich war’s. Ich habe die Berliner Mauer umgeschmissen... Ich werde Ihnen erzählen, wie es dazu kam. Die Welt hat ein Recht auf meine Geschichte, zumal sie einen Sinn ergibt” (“it’s true, it was me: I toppled the Berlin Wall...but shall I tell you what really happened? The world is entitled to my story, especially since it makes sense”; Brussig 7)2 Through the narrative voice, Brussig balances a number of important issues at once: most obviously, Klaus clearly establishes a claim to memory, specifically to those memories associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of a separate and socialist East Germany. That the narrative of November 1989 is negotiated through Klaus’s imperfect recollections of the events is conveyed as Klaus requests that Kitzelstein treat the interview as a voice test. Thus Klaus can “alles sagen, was mir in den Sinn kommt, ohne daß ich dafür festgenagelt warden kann—ist ja nur eine Sprechprobe” (“to say anything that comes into my head without having it pinned on me afterward—this will only be a voice test”; Brussig 13-4). Despite Klaus’s assertion of the truth of his narrative, by requesting that the interview be treated as a voice test, Klaus acknowledges that parts or all of his story may be subject to doubt. The unreliability of Klaus’s memory is foregrounded as this request follows a brief discussion of doubt and the use of aphorisms due to their “gewisse Etwas für fettarschige, behäbige Zuhörer” (“desired effect on fat-assed, corpulent listeners”; Brussig 17). By Klaus’s own admission, he is experienced in the use of aphorisms, and thus with convincing through generalization, to the extent that his “Kopf ist voll von diesem aforistischen SchubiDubi” ‘brain is awash with such aphoristic nonsense,’ without weight or substance (Brussig 17). As such, Klaus’s account and his role in events should be treated carefully as he derails his own reliability and the recollection of memory framing the narrative. And yet, there still exists the claim to truth in this recollection. Klaus asserts that his sole responsibility for the opening of the Berlin Wall is the true story. In this, Klaus’s imperfect memories and, thus, the nostalgia imparted through his recreation of the GDR and of 9 November 1989 fall

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into the tendency of nostalgia Boym describes as the restorative. Boym explains that nostalgia of this tendency is of the belief “that their project is about truth” and participates in the return to the lost home through “the antimodern myth-making of history” (41). This is to say that, in context of the novel and the authenticity of Klaus’s story, Klaus as a narrator is recreating the GDR and East German history according to his own imprecision of memory. In doing so, he discredits and delegitimizes those alternative recreations of that history, the Eastern and Western narratives of 1989. The way in which Klaus narrates a reconstructed image of the GDR for Kitzelstein draws attention to the processes of recall and the construction of his memories. This is similar in effect to Klaus’s suggestion that the pretense of a voice test allows him the ability to say anything that comes to mind. In doing so, Brussig’s portrayal of nostalgia is connected with the critical inquiry necessitated by Boym’s definition of the reflective. Through the use of humour and satire, which Cooke claims to be part of the hybrid position adopted by Brussig, but more precisely as Boym claims is an aspect of the reflective, Brussig’s novel dwells in the longing associated with nostalgia and in the disconnect between present and past in order to criticize both the accepted Western view of 1989 and Eastern nostalgia itself (Boym 49). The GDR Brussig creates initially bears the likeness of the dictatorship portrayed in Western reports as well as the findings of the Federal Republic’s Enquete-Kommission. In doing so, however, Brussig portrays the GDR as a Stasi or police state controlled by an incompetent, key-stone cop-like version of the organization. Cooke argues that while this portrayal confirms the oppressive nature of the GDR, it simultaneously confronts and questions the importance of the Stasi in any post-Wende reading of the German Democratic Republic (Cooke 75). Likewise, Brussig is critical of East German participation with and memory of the GDR and the events culminating in the fall of the Wall. As much as the GDR was itself incompetent, by Brussig’s account, so too was its population. In the story, Klaus observes that the crowd gathered at the border was “ein Bild des Jammers” ‘a pathetic sight,’ standing “so artig und gehemmt...wie sie von einem Bein aufs andere traten” (“in such a docile, diffident way, shuffling from foot to foot”), shoving at the gates only “symbolisch” ‘symbolically’ (Brussig 315-6). It is in this recreation of the GDR and its population as means of confronting Western-held perceptions and East German memories that Cooke locates his argument of the “positive hybrid position” (18) in Brussig’s writing. But it is the processes of memory and the claim of a singular, authentic memory which allow further doubt to be cast upon those memories. In drawing attention

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to the imperfections of Klaus’s memories, particularly when compared to the official history of 9 November 1989, Brussig questions the perceived authenticity of both narratives. By negotiating memory through restorative nostalgia and the claims to the truth of Klaus’s memories, Brussig demonstrates Klaus to be representative of the East German state. As much as Klaus is the son of an uncaring, Stasi agent father and an overly concerned, cleanliness-obsessed mother, he is Stalin’s unwanted child, to borrow the title of the monograph by the German historian and political scientist, Wilfried Loth. Toward the end of the novel, Klaus asks how East German society could survive forty years if the entire population was always unhappy. He answers that as much as the population was against the system, they equally integrated and collaborated (Brussig 313). Klaus freely admits that the system deformed people, not in that it disregarded human nature, but that it contravened that nature (Brussig 105). As Brussig’s reflection and recreation of the GDR perceives the East German citizenship as having integrated and collaborated with a system and state they claimed to hate, the population is at the same time responsible for having created the GDR and the Stasi as the deforming forces they are in the novel. The population metaphorically gave birth to these detrimental societal forces as Klaus, who evolves into a perverse Stasi agent himself, is the product of his parents and his upbringing in the GDR. Thus, the state is perverted by the collaboration with the population, expressed through Klaus’s self-confessed sexual perversion as a backlash against GDR repression. At the same time, the deformations of the state pervert the population that supported it, memories included. Running through the crowds on 4 November 1989 following Christa Wolf’s speech at the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, Klaus wants to be recognized as a Stasi agent and thus a representative of the state. The crowds, however, see him only as one of their own (Brussig 289-90). Were the crowds to acknowledge Klaus as an agent of the state, they would also be required to acknowledge their own participation with the GDR and SED systems, the deformations of their own lives because of those systems, and their own responsibility in the creation of those deforming systems. In effect, both Brussig and Klaus criticize the nostalgia for the GDR state as it ignores this collective responsibility for those systems. When Klaus reveals his injured and massively swollen penis to the border guards, revealing those perversions of the state and its own disassociation from society, the GDR system is paralyzed in such a way that, according to Soviet historian Stephen Kotkin, required only a

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nudge from the protesters to precipitate its collapse and open the Berlin Wall (65). This criticism operates counter to both East and West German memory of 1989 in a very significant way. Namely, it questions the perceived collective experience of those memories. In questioning the importance of the mass demonstrations during the Gentle Revolution, Brussig questions a foundational myth of East German and unified German identities. Both Brussig and Klaus, author and narrator, thus come to question the foundations upon which Ostalgie is built. By refusing to recognize the GDR and Klaus as the deforming forces they were, the GDR population, in-part responsible for collusion with that system, create further perversions through the inconsistencies and imprecision in memories of the event. Through the introduction of the possible plurality of memory and experience, Brussig deconstructs the notion of a singular shared and collective East German experience as the foundational myth of nostalgia.

Neue Leben’s Memory with an Eye toward the Audience Born in Dresden two years before Thomas Brussig, Ingo Schulze graduated from university in Jena with a degree in Classical Philosophy in 1988. Very much a child of the GDR, Schulze’s life closely paralleled that of his protagonist in Neue Leben. He worked as the dramaturge of a theatre in Altenburg until early 1990 when he founded the Altenburger Wochenblatt (Altenburg weekly newspaper) and the Anzeiger (gazette) (“Biografie”). Although not Schulze’s debut novel, Neue Leben is the spiritual sequel to his earlier novel, Simple Storys (1998), wherein he wrote interconnected stories of the former Eastern territories, providing a “melancholischen Innenansicht” ‘melancholic interior view’ of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Höbel 156). Like Brussig, much of Schulze’s early work focused on the GDR, the Wende, and the hopes, fears, anticipations, and disappointments that accompanied those subjects. Unlike Brussig, however, Schulze employs a less obvious form of satire in his work. He approaches his subjects with a degree of realism that is not devoid of humour, but attempts to characterize the GDR, its institutions, and society honestly and in a way that allows very little place for the ineptitudes of Brussig’s Stasi and the inadequacies of Klaus Uhltzscht. Similar to the literary form used in Helden wie wir, Schulze’s Neue Leben employs the “positive hybrid position” (Cooke 18) in its use of Western tropes to deconstruct Western-held perceptions and stereotypes. Neue Leben is a monologic epistolary novel. This means the novel is comprised of a series of letters written by a single author/narrator. This

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device is able to then convey a sense of authenticity through its perceived reflection of life. The style has similarly been employed by other writers in Germany and the Western world such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker to name but a few. Further, literary scholar Dagmar Jaegar notes that Schulze distances himself from authorship, discussed in detail below, in both Neue Leben and Simple Storys, thereby connecting his work to the Romantic tradition (Jaegar 144). However, Neue Leben is not immediately apparent as a Stasi-novel, as are the subjects of Cooke’s study, and thus does not begin from the premise of the GDR as a police state as necessitated by Cooke’s analysis of the hybrid position. Rather, Schulze’s novel is set during the months between the opening of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989 and German unification on 3 October 1990. As such, Schulze’s recreation of the GDR is significantly different from that of Brussig and those studied by Cooke. Noticeably absent, though not entirely forgotten, are the Stasi and the perversions and deformations of GDR social systems on which Brussig hung his narrative. Schulze’s GDR is a state in the transitional space between East German socialism and the Western social market economy, thus recreating the GDR as a hybrid of the two. Through the letters used to construct the novel, Enricho Türmer narrates his story set in the post-Wall “present” and his youth in the GDR. The “present” story is told through letters addressed to his family (his mother and his sister Vera) and friends. This story follows Türmer during the first six months of 1990 as he works at a local newspaper office and develops a friendship with Clemens von Barrista, a Westerner investing in the rebuilding and privatization of the former East Germany. In the “past” arc, similar to Klaus’s tale in Helden wie wir, Türmer recounts his upbringing in the GDR and his half-hearted attempts to write a novel radical enough to be banned by the regime. These letters are addressed to Nicoletta Hansen, another Western figure and Türmer’s muse. In addressing these letters to Nicoletta, Türmer seeks to make the same confession to and receive the same recognition from the West as does Klaus in his relationship with Kitzelstein in Brussig’s work. By the end of the novel, the two timelines intersect and Türmer’s life reaches rock bottom, personally and professionally, just as the border is opening elsewhere in the country.3 In a fashion not unlike Brussig’s recreation of the GDR in Helden wie wir, Schulze’s narrative draws attention to the operations of an imperfect memory. Through the use of the epistolary narrative, Schulze recreates the GDR through letters written by his protagonist, Enricho Türmer. As letters, there is a disconnection between the events themselves and the

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narration of those events. Türmer’s formative years in the GDR past and his own role in the fall of the Berlin Wall are thus negotiated through the memories of the individual through the production of those letters. He confesses to Western-held perceptions of the SED regime, reconstructing the GDR as a state built on compulsory military service, compliance, and cooperation with the Stasi despite a noted lack of evidence in a manner already made familiar in Brussig’s work (Schulze 271-2 and 373 footnote). This in turn removes GDR memory from the collective experience, focusing squarely on the dependency of those memories and the experience of the individual. In the novel’s foreword, Schulze establishes a framing device wherein he, as the imagined author, finds and edits together the letters of his protagonist. When read together and in chronological order, “entfaltete sich vor mich das Panorama jener Zeit, in der das Leben Türmers auf der Kippe gestanden hatte, und nicht nur seins” (“unfolded...a panorama of that period when everything in Türmer’s life—and not just his [referring to all East Germans]—stood in the balance”; Schulze 9). In doing this, Schulze, the actual author, assigns authorial voice, and thus authority, to the fictional Türmer, removing himself entirely from authorship of the novel. The authenticity of these letters, similar to Klaus’s claims to the truth of memory in Helden wie wir, is created through the imagined author’s claims that he personally knew Türmer and that his doubts concerning authorship of the letters were unfounded (Schulze 9). At the same time, the imagined author observes that Türmer . . . schielte selbst in seinen Briefen mit jedem Satz auf ein imaginäres Publikum . . . Dem aufmerksamen Leser wird nicht entgehen, dass der Briefschreiber Türmer ein und denselben Vorgang je nach Adressat in höchst unterschiedlichen Versionen schildert. (Schulze 8, 11) every sentence Türmer wrote . . . he kept one eye cast on an imaginary audience . . . the attentive reader will not fail to notice that in writing his letters Türmer describes the same incident in very different versions depending on his addressee

Just as obviously as in Brussig’s narrative, Schulze presents these letters as the authentic negotiation of memory, suggesting that these memories are intentionally imperfect and constructed in order to meet certain goals in the mind of their fictional author. Throughout the novel, then, Schulze as the fictitious author inserts himself into the narrative flow through the use of footnotes. Not only do these notes compile details and information not provided in the main body

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of the novel, but they serve to cast doubt on the authenticity, validity, and truth of Türmer’s memories. One of the more obvious examples of this comes as the imagined author claims that “Eher unwahrscheinlich, dass Roland, der laut V[era] T[ürmer] relative gut über die DDR informiert war, eine solche Frage gestellt hat. Vielleicht opferte [Enricho] T[ürmer] auch hier die Wahrheit der Pointe” (“It is rather unlikely that Roland, who according to V. T. was relatively well informed about conditions in the GDR, would have asked such a question. Perhaps here as well T. is sacrificing truth for the sake of a punch line”; Schulze 359 footnote) Not only does this demonstrate the imagined author’s apprehensiveness regarding the honesty of Türmer’s narrative, and thus his memories, but it also questions the notion that the GDR may be reconstructed from individual experience and memory through the use of the plurality of memory. Roland’s knowledge of the GDR differs from those recollections presented by Türmer. The society and the social interactions, and thus the GDR itself, are initially represented through the memory of experience and the assumed goals of Türmer himself. They are then renegotiated through the imagined author who possesses a wider knowledge of those events and the GDR state, gained through his exploration of the memories of the novel’s supporting cast. The imagined author is himself indicative of the East German collective memory, although it remains clear that this collective is still the compilation of individual experiences. Türmer assumes a collective experience and a collective memory in his writing that does not accurately reflect the reality around him. Rather, he writes for his imagined audience, projecting an image of himself and of the GDR that conflicts with the statements of other characters in the novel. The fictional author’s footnotes thus act to construct the perception of collective experience based on the plurality of East German voice. In doing so, Schulze deconstructs Türmer’s notion that he, as an individual, is able to adequately represent the perceived collective voice. Unlike Brussig’s narrator who, in the first few pages of Helden wie wir, imparts to Kitzelstein the claim of the authenticity of his memories, Türmer makes little direct claim to the truthfulness of his memories or his recreation of the GDR. Türmer’s memories are thus a contrivance. As the imagined author points out, Türmer made carbon copies of his letters (Schulze 8). This suggests that Türmer considered his narrative carefully; so carefully in fact that he wanted copies of these letters on hand for future reference. Had Türmer wished to portray events similarly in either tone or content to his various readers, he could have easily done so by referring back to these copies. Additionally, the imagined author observed that some paragraphs were constructed to the point where he thought them fabricated

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while other letters were nearly completely illegible due to cross-outs, deletions and insertions (Schulze 479 footnote and 372 footnote). As a writer, Türmer viewed himself as taking the omniscient position of a god. It did not matter what humanity did or thought, only “weil ich sie beobachtete” (“that I was observing them”; Schulze 205). The position of a writer allowed and demanded that Türmer imbue people’s thoughts, actions, even their words with meaning. Instead of insisting on the truth of memory, Schulze insists upon the construction of memory, both of the individual and of the collective. The cross-outs, deletions, and insertions of memory allow for those constructions to be given meaning in which the individual or the collective can anchor their respective senses of identity. The narration of Neue Leben thus presents a twice negotiated memory of Boym’s conception of reflective nostalgia. First through Türmer’s letters and then through the footnotes provided by the imagined author. The constructed nature of both the text and the footnotes challenge the notions of collective experience and memory at the same time as they impart meaning and justice to the recollections. In this way, the narrative dwells in the processes of memory, necessitated by Boym, recognizing the separation between the lost home, the memories associated with that home, and the impossibility of the home’s true recovery. Through this, Schulze points to the constructed nature of GDR memory and Ostalgie. As the GDR is not part of the history of the unified Federal Republic, East Germany is now accessible to its former citizens only through the act of remembering and is thus subject to the constructions of memory. This causes the disconnection between the lost home and the recreation, as Boym argues. The GDR reconstructed through Türmer’s narrative is a fabrication designed to suit Türmer’s need and portrayal of self. Türmer’s recreation is continually questioned throughout the novel through the voices of additional characters within the novel’s footnotes.4 Through this negotiation of memory, Schulze questions those nostalgic recreations of the GDR, exposing the fabricated nature of individual memory. At the same time, he challenges the notion of truth in the creation of a collective experience resultant of individual memories, the truth of which is subject to the goals and needs of the individual. Türmer thus portrays himself as an embodiment of the GDR in transition through these individual memories under the assumption that his memories represent those of the collective. Both Cooke and Jaegar point out that Schulze’s characters generally and Türmer in particular “attempt to gain a sense of being different” from the marginalizing effects of the colonizing West (Jaegar 145). That is, these characters attempt to construct an identity of East German-ness in defiance of the West’s erasure of GDR

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memory and experience. In moving beyond this identity of difference, the characters find themselves constructed by the events of 1989 instead of merely reacting to them (Jaegar 145). The GDR reconstructed in Schulze’s narrative thus calls itself into question through these processes of memory. Although making claims to represent an East German collective experience, Türmer’s memories, and subsequently all memories of GDR life, are those of the individual. The plurality of memory deconstructs this supposition of truth. In drawing attention to the process of memory through footnotes that discredit Türmer’s reconstruction of a collective GDR, Schulze reveals that the reconstruction itself dictates the memories, which negotiate the reconstruction. In other words, the nostalgic recreation of the GDR determines the use of memory that proves its own truth. Nostalgia is thus a fabrication of individual ends and not of a reality of collective experience.

Leibhaftig and the Nazi Infection of East German Memory Born in a German town that found itself part of Poland at the end of the Second World War, Christa Wolf’s family relocated to Mecklenburg in what would become the German Democratic Republic. A teenager by the time the war ended, Wolf found solace in socialism as the gravity of Nazi crimes surfaced. Her first book, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella), was published in 1961. She became internationally famous, though, following the publication of Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heavens) two years later, winning the GDR’s Heinrich Mann prize (Webb). Wolf was not only an East German writer with global impact, but an author of significance to those Germans who became adults in and identified with the GDR. In her commemorative piece on Wolf’s life from late 2011, New Yorker journalist Sally McGrane suggests that when “Wolf published a book in the GDR, everyone read it,” and when “she published one in the reunified Germany, everyone of a certain generation did.” However, Wolf grew disillusioned with the direction socialism took in the GDR following the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in 1965. 5 This alienation became apparent in her work as Wolf pursued the role of the loyal dissident. She characterized the GDR and state socialism as unravelling, injecting her writing with a “subjective authenticity” that garnered criticism from the regime even as she supported the idea of socialism itself (Webb). Wolf’s Leibhaftig at first appears the least critical of the novels under discussion here. Indeed, Wolf seems almost apologetic of the GDR past. Set in 1980s Berlin, Wolf narrates the story of a woman hospitalized due

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to an unknown illness. The novel traces the woman’s downward spiral to the verge of death, her dreams of the GDR and the Nazi states, and her eventual recovery with the help of medicines procured from the West. The protagonist remains unnamed and is, in part, a reflection of Wolf herself. And although the novel itself is short and the plot relatively straight forward, Wolf employs illness as a metaphor, here as stand-in for the problematic and deforming nature of the SED regime earlier observed in Brussig’s Helden wie wir. This is a device similarly employed throughout Wolf’s body of work including Der geteilte Himmel and Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968) and is reflective of Wolf’s own experience as she was rushed to the hospital following her speech at the Alexanderplatz on 4 November 1989 (Hage). Regarding Nachdenken über Christa T., critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki says that “Christa T. stirbt an der Leukämie, aber sie leidet an der DDR” (“Christa T. died of leukemia, but suffered from the GDR”; qtd. in Hage 199). Although the protagonist of Leibhaftig survives her experience, she is metaphorically hospitalized by the corruptions of the GDR that were caused by infections from the National Socialist state (1933-1945). This perception of the German East may be attributed to Wolf’s own experience with the corruptions of the SED regime, her forced involvement with the Stasi as an IM, and her later participation with the revolutionary movements in 1989 (Fulbrook 255). Wolf’s own biography thus shaped her representation of the GDR and the illness suffered by the protagonist in her novel. As the novel is one of metaphor wherein the protagonist is representative of the GDR state more broadly, as was the case in both Helden wie wir and Neue Leben, the reasons for the GDR’s illness in the 1980s are rooted in the GDR’s history and the shared German past. The soul of the GDR thus tortures the GDR body (politic) through this connection to the past. The result comes across almost as a display of wishful-thinking or alternate history on the part of Wolf, notably in the recovery of the protagonist and thus of the GDR body. That said, Wolf reconstructs the GDR as a sick and potentially dying state using memory as an explanation for those conditions. Wolf insists upon the continuities between the two German totalitarian regimes as cause of the GDR’s inherent weakness. The attention paid to the processes of memory demonstrates the problems of German history as explanation of the problems existing in the German Democratic Republic during the late 1980s. In doing so, Wolf’s narrative is less critical of post-unification memory of the GDR as it is of the conditions that led to the collapse of the GDR and the failure of a “Third Way” toward socialism with a human face.

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In the midst of her fever dreams, the protagonist pursues her aunt and uncle, a German woman married to a Jewish doctor, along the Spree River in a version of Berlin that belongs to both the GDR and the Nazi regime as “die Zeitebenen einander heillos durchdringen” (“the time periods hopelessly intertwine”; Wolf 59). The narrator’s confusion serves to create comparison between the two regimes that specifically teases out the continuities from one to the other. While this does not necessarily imply the persecution of Jews in the GDR state, the persecution of the larger population is evident as “ich sie mit ihrer Namensnennung in Gefahr bringen würden” (“I would put them in danger if I called them by their names”) even before the protagonist identifies the man as a Jew (Wolf 59).6 Wolf suggests here that the experiences of National Socialism permeated and infected the GDR and ravages the protagonist’s body. This connection is further explored through the protagonist’s perceived decent into Hades (Wolf 56). She descends into a shop basement infiltrated and monitored by the Stasi in the GDR, following subterranean passages reminiscent of air-raid shelters, into the German past, emerging in the bombed-out shell of Berlin at the end of the Second World War (Wolf 107-13). This direct physical connection between the foundations of the GDR and of the Third Reich makes real the continuation of Nazi practice in East German life. As the narrator passes through basements and passageways, moving from one state to the other and from the novel’s present into the past, the GDR state is quite literally built upon the ruins of the Nazi state and, by implication, of Nazi practice if not ideology. Wolf’s reconstruction of the dreamed GDR thus turns apologetic toward the problems and failings of the former state. As the protagonist follows the cries of an infant, stillborn as the protagonist discovers, through the underground of her dreams, her equally stillborn ideals speak to the socialist “Third Way” and the path not taken during German unification (Wolf 111-2). This represents a potential divergence of the historical continuities from one regime to the next. As a result, the protagonist observes that the “Traum der Vernunft gebiert Ungeheuer” (“dream of reason produces monsters”) and when the dream of socialism is usurped by “kleinen Geister... dann hat die Vernunft nichts zu lachen” (“petty demons... then reason is in big trouble”). The protagonist thus finds it necessary to ask, “führte der Weg ins Paradies unvermeidlich durch die Hölle” (“did the way to paradise lead unavoidably through hell”; Wolf 119-20)? The best intentions of German socialism itself led to this continuity between the Nazi and SED regimes. Blame for the persistence of this continuity is laid squarely at the feet of the German people in

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general and the East German people in particular as they were not grateful enough when the battles and massacres of the Second World War finally stopped (Wolf 83). Thus, it is the responsibility of East Germans themselves for not realizing the ideals of the stillborn infant and for allowing the socialist dream to produce these monsters of continuity. Like Brussig’s critique of nostalgia and East German participation in the collapse of communism and, coincidentally, of Wolf herself, Wolf’s protagonist wonders “ob seitdem die Sehnsucht nach Sicherheit und die Einsicht, daß es sie nicht gibt, in mir gleich stark miteinander straiten” (“whether the longing for security and the realization that there’s no such thing have been fighting violently within me”; Wolf 101). Wolf’s criticisms of nostalgia and of the GDR past extend to the actual present of the unified Federal Republic and the question of Ostalgie. As East German nostalgia is predicated upon the disjunction between memory and one’s (in)ability to function in the present causing insecurities related to the social and economic realities of the unified state, Wolf points to the inability of nostalgia to provide that desperately sought security (Dyke 161). In this manner, Wolf’s narrative of dreams drawn from a perceived collective memory operates in accordance with Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia. Moreover, as Boym suggests that the reflective acts within the space between the present and past, Wolf’s narrated dreamscape and the distinction made between that and the protagonist’s reality acts as the direct embodiment of that distance and distinction. Though the novel is set in East Germany, the GDR of the protagonist’s dreams disassociates itself from Wolf’s reconstruction of the real GDR through the waking/dreaming dichotomy. Like both Brussig and Schulze discussed above, Wolf gives the GDR voice through the character of the protagonist. Specifically, she represents the body politic whose soul is infected by the Nazi and totalitarian memory. As a result, Ich habe... immer guten Willen, häuftig den allerbesten Willen gehabt und auch gezeigt, schließlich nur noch gezeigt, denn, ich kann es nicht leugnen, allmählich ist mein guter Wille, zu häuftig benutzt, schadhaft geworden, aufgebraucht und abhanden gekommen. (Wolf 52) I’ve always had...good intentions, frequently the best of intentions, and showed it, eventually all I did was show it because, I can’t deny it, gradually my good intentions, put to use too often, got damaged, used up, got away from me.

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Wolf portrays the GDR state apparatus as “rettungslos beschädigten” ‘hopelessly corrupt’ and irrevocably damaged; the problems of the state destroying what good there was in the socialist project, manifesting that corruption as the illness suffered by the narrator (Hage 198). As noted above, Wolf’s dream of a humanistic socialism produced monsters. Thus in the novel, the GDR body politic lies in a hospital bed, prone and on the verge of death. The totalitarian memory and the resultant corruption of intentions in the protagonist’s soul are cause for the collapse of her immune system. In her weakened state, then, she becomes susceptible to the bacteria rebelling against her body (politic) (Wolf 160-1). Wolf’s GDR is one of a dream, but a dream that should not be given up on as with the narratives of Brussig and Schulze. Through the use of the dream-space as the negotiation of a collective German memory, Wolf approaches the problems and weaknesses of the East German state as the result of the infection of the shared German past. In doing this, Wolf does not argue against the existence of a collective memory in remembering the East German state, the East German experience, or life in the GDR. Rather, Wolf questions the collective memory in terms of the foundations and intentions of East German communism contrasted against the utopian ideals of a humanist socialism. Wolf’s reconstruction of the GDR, as a weak and dying state, informs the ways in which memories are used in that reconstruction. While she remains obviously nostalgic over what could have been, Wolf uses memory differently than either Brussig or Schulze. Each of the latter uses memory to criticize nostalgia itself. Wolf, on the other hand, uses memory to criticize the political problems of the GDR. In doing so, however, Wolf still perceives the GDR body politic along the lines of an Unrechtsstaat (constitutionally unjust state) similar to arguments found in the reports of the Enquete-Kommission as well as in the positive hybrid position of post-colonial literature posited by Cooke. It is not Wolf’s purpose to criticize the need for nostalgia, but to nostalgically celebrate the accomplishments of East German socialism without its totalitarian power structures. As such, Wolf’s approach to that nostalgia participates in Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia only insofar as it recognizes the dream-like and wishful-thinking qualities of that nostalgia. This significant difference between the three narratives may, in fact, be the result of the generational difference between the authors. Themselves members of the FDJ-generation and having no memory of the Nazi regime, Brussig and Schulze are unable and unwilling to address the influence of one totalitarian German regime on the one that followed.7 As such, they are not part of this perceived collective memory drawn upon in

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Wolf’s work and in the process, themselves, deconstruct the notion of its existence. Wolf’s narrative and her reconstruction of the GDR follow her support of socialism with a human face, her criticisms of rapid East German integration into the Western culture and society of the Federal Republic, and the possibility of reform from within following the opening of the German-German border (Love 60). On the other hand, Schulze never considered the GDR to be a legitimate state or state of being as the regime disallowed him the possibility of making many of his own life choices. It was not until well after German unification that Schulze finally considered himself to be an East German (Jaegar 152). Similar sentiments are raised by former Spiegel journalist Jana Hensel in her memoir Zonenkinder (After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next, 2002) and also find their way into Elizabeth Ten Dyke’s study, “Memory and Existence: Implications of the Wende.” The repetition and similarities here suggest commonalities among the experiences of the Zonenkinder of which Schulze, Brussig, and Hensel are all part.8 The differences in their representations of the GDR, however, in addition to more significant dissimilarities found in Wolf’s text which predicate themselves on the existence of collective memory, argue against this notion of a shared experience. Although some of these representations bear striking similarity from one author to another, these representations are based on individual experience and memory acquired under similar though not identical conditions.

Conclusions Through the turn to everyday life and culture, those homesick for the GDR make the claim that life was not as bad as portrayed in the dictatorship versus democracy binary favoured by institutions of the unified Federal Republic.9 Post-Wende authors do not approach the use of nostalgia or East German memory from this position, however. Through the demonstration of the imperfections of the memories upon which these not-that-bad- representations of the GDR themselves are founded, these authors criticize the ways in which nostalgia recreates the past and the effects it has upon the unified German state. Whether by using the narrative genres of the interview or epistolary novel with contradictory footnotes, these texts draw attention to the ways in which memories are negotiated and attack the notion of a shared experience in which Ostalgie is rooted. In questioning the foundations of nostalgia, these authors seek to demonstrate that the lost home is not one that ever existed as a collective experience. Rather, its existence as collective experience is a composite of

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individual memories and dreams given the aura of authenticity. The representations of nostalgia thus create a cyclic relationship with memory. Individual memory dictates the reconstruction and representation of the GDR. That reconstruction, in turn, dictates which memories become parts of the reconstruction and which are suppressed through claims to the truth of a collective memory, experience, and East German identity. Through the representation of an obviously contradictory GDR, post-Wende writers negotiate the reality of that reconstruction and East German identity itself as a personal and individual experience. The narratives themselves, as with the memories of the protagonists and the reconstructions of the GDR state, are constructed not only to tell compelling tales about life in the former East Germany, but to make a point about the construction of memory itself. In this way, the public remembrance of the GDR crafted in post-Wende literature bears striking similarities to the restorative nostalgia associated with memories of the Gentle Revolution and unification as they are incorporated into the official narratives of the Federal Republic since 1990. What post-Wende literature does differently is that it draws attention precisely to the fabricated nature of collective experience and its perceived authenticity which is normally unable to find expression in restorative accounts of the (re)unification of Germany. This articulation and instrumentalization of memory suggests that, while the reconstructed GDR is the GDR that is remembered for good or ill, the reconstructed GDR is not the GDR as it actually was. This is not to say that post-Wende novels are meant to be nostalgic in and of themselves, nor are they meant to open a window of truth on the East German past. What post-Wende literature does, however, through this negotiation of memory is to criticize a memory left unquestioned regarding both the GDR past and the post-communist present. As much as the reconstructed GDR is critical of nostalgia for a past that may or may not have existed and the perceived need for that nostalgia, the representation finds itself able to question a restorative narrative that neglects the human factor in its simplification of a multifaceted experience. In this, post-Wende literature does justice to the multitude of experiences, and not the singularity of experience, that it rebuilds.

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Notes 1

Referred to in English as “turning point,” the Wende typically refers to the period of transition from state socialism to democratic capitalism experienced by the German Democratic Republic. This includes the Gentle Revolution, marked by the Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday Night Rallies) held in Leipzig, East Berlin, and elsewhere in the GDR and the opening of the Berlin Wall in the summer and autumn of 1989. As part of the Western narrative of the period, the term has since come to include the period of German unification in the summer and fall of 1990 when the territories of the former GDR acceded to the Federal Republic. 2 For the three novels under discussion, the quoted German text and cited page numbers refer back to the original German language editions of each novel. The provided English translations are taken directly from the English language editions of those same novels and are not my own. 3 It should be noted here that in the German, the verb “türmen” means to flee or escape. It is with no small degree of irony that Enricho Türmer portrays himself as representative of a decidedly East German identity and collective memory/experience, despite the origins of his name. However, in the novel’s foreword, the imagined author claims that Türmer disappeared and was unavailable to confirm the authenticity of the letters found by the imagined author (Schulze 8). In addition, following unification, Türmer adopted the Western version of his given name, Heinrich, effectively fleeing the East German identity and experience so carefully constructed through the novel’s narrative (Schulze 7). 4 Unlike the voice of the imagined author inserted directly into the footnotes of Schulze’s novel, the voices of these supporting characters, including Türmer’s sister, Vera, and her politically outspoken partner, Roland, are negotiated through the voice of the imagined author. As the imagined author constructs his own presence in the novel as representation of the “shared” East German experience, these supporting characters are incorporated into that experience through the imagined author. At once, this serves to establish the collective shared experience as a plurality of experience over a singular truth of experience. Schulze argues against individual experience as equivalent to an East German collective experience and collective identity. Through the negotiation of Türmer’s friends and family through his own voice, Schulze represents those voices as part of a collective based on plurality of experience rather than a singular experience shared by all East Germans. 5 The Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party was held 16-18 December 1965. Following a series of political defeats that weakened the position of SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht and reversed some of the reformist cultural and youth policies implemented earlier in the decade, the SED leadership zeroed in on cultural policy as its most pressing concern, devoting much of the Plenum to it. Although the film industry suffered the greatest impact from the Plenum, several other artists and their works were brutally criticized (Feinstein 2). Film historian Joshua Feinstein suggests that “East German artists were hopelessly utopian” and the criticized art provided “an alternative vision of East

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German society...where the Party did not always represent the best interests of the new society” (169). The SED leadership was uncomfortable with what this internal criticism of East German socialism represented to their rule as many of the perceived dissidents understood themselves to be committed socialists. 6 This is a reference to the denunciations made to both the Gestapo during the Third Reich and to the Stasi in the GDR and serves as a thematic continuity between the two regimes and the two time periods in Wolf’s narrative. 7 The FDJ-generation refers to the Frei Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, the East German socialist youth group and mass party organization). This was the generation born after the foundation of the GDR in 1949 and socialized largely by the FDJ and under the auspices of the SED regime. Conversely, Christa Wolf, born shortly before the Nazi seizure of power in 1939, is of the HJ (Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth)-generation. 8 Zonenkinder (children of the Soviet zone of occupation) refers to those children born following the division of Germany. The term comes from the derogatory slang employed by numerous Westerners, mostly West Germans, to refer to the German Democratic Republic (Hensel 174). The government of the Federal Republic refused to recognize the legitimacy of the GDR as an independent state until, arguably, the Ostpolitik ‘policies pertaining to the East’ of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even after the GDR’s admission to the United Nations in 1973, tantamount to recognition of state independence by the global community, the GDR was known as the Zone in the West. Alternately, this may be understood as both a reflection of Western superiority and of the perceived temporary nature of both German states during the Cold War division. Since unification, Zonenkinder was a term reclaimed by those former East Germans as a source of nostalgic pride (Hensel 174). It also provided the German title of Hensel’s memoirs in 2002. 9 This turn originally appeared among those former citizens of the GDR, disillusioned with life in the unified state and the slow reality of economic recovery versus the promises of a second Wirtschaftswunder ‘Economic Miracle’. However, it was quickly adopted by the artistic community, the tourist industry, and the press to represent the perceived orientalism of former East Germans. Since the beginning of this turn in the mid-1990s and in German society more broadly following the release of Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and television content such as ZDF’s Ostalgie Show (2003) fetishizing East German consumer goods, this turn was accompanied by the commoditization of GDR memory and nostalgia. Berlin’s various Trabi tour groups and numerous Ampelmann shops construct an image of the GDR as a quirky, yet non-threatening point in German history. While attempting to educate and provide a balance between this orientalism and the perceived tyranny of the SED regime enforced by the ever-present Stasi, GDR museums in Berlin and Leipzig are often accused of playing to this nostalgia by the press. While recognizing the existence of this nostalgia, the press typically downplays its effects on the psyches of Germans in the East. Instead, the press represents the persistence of nostalgia and the continued commoditization and fetishization of aspects of GDR culture as a threat to long-term national unity. In

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some instances, this also perpetuates the complaining Ossis ‘Easterners’ stereotype rampant in the years following unification.

Works Referenced “Biografie.” IngoSchulze. Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, n.d. Web. 17 April 2015. “Biographie.” ThomasBrussig. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 April 2015. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print. Brussig, Thomas. Helden wie wir. Berlin: Verlag Volk & Welt, 1996. Print. —. Heroes Like Us. Trans. and Ed. John Brownjohn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Print. Cooke, Paul. Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia. New York: Berg, 2005. Print. Dyke, Elizabeth A. Ten. “Memory and Existence: Implications of the Wende.” The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture. Ed. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 154-169. Print. Feinstein, Joshua. The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Print. Fulbrook, Mary. The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Print. Hage, Volker Von. “Auf Leben und Tod.” Der Spiegel 18 February 2002: 198-200. Print. Hensel, Jana. After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next. Trans. and Ed. Jefferson Chase. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Print. Höbel, Wolfgang. “Der ganz normale Wahnsinn.” Der Spiegel 10 October 2005: 156-8. Print. Jaegar, Dagmar. “‘Only in the 1990s Did I Become an East German:’ a Conversation with Ingo Schulze about Remembering the GDR, Simple Storys, and 33 Moments of Happiness; With an Introduction to His Work.” New German Critique 101 (2007): 143-55. Print. Jarausch, Konrad H. “Memory Wars: German Debates About the Legacy of Dictatorship.” Berlin Since the Wall’s End: Shaping Society and Memory in the German Metropolis since 1989. Ed. John Alexander Williams. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 90-109. Print.

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Kotkin, Stephen with Jan T. Gross. Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. New York: Modern Library, 2009. Print. Kürten, Jochen. “Thomas Brussig lässt die DDR weiterleben.” DW. Deutsche Welle, 25 February 2015. Web. 16 April 2015. Love, Myra N. “The Crisis of East German Socialism: Christa Wolf and the Critique of Economic Rationality.” Monatshefte 84 (1992): 59-73. Print. McGrane, Sally. “Remembering Christa Wolf.” The New Yorker Online. Advance Publications, 13 December 2011. Web. 20 April 2015. Prager, Brad. “The Erection of the Berlin Wall: Thomas Brussig’s ‘Helden wie wir’ and the End of East Germany.” The Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 983-998. Print. Rubin, Eli. “Understanding a Car in the Context of Socialism: Trabants, Marzahn, and East German Socialism.” The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ed. Lewis H. Siegelbaum. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. 124-40. Print. Schulze, Ingo. Neue Leben: Die Jugend Enricho Türmers in Briefen und Prosa Herausgegeben, kommentiert und mit einem Vorwort versehen von Ingo Schulze. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2005. Print. —. New Lives: The Youth of Enricho Türmer in Letters and Prose Edited and with Commentary and Foreword by Ingo Schulze. Trans. and Ed. John E. Woods. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Print. Schwarz, Robert. “Review: Helden wie wir.” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 681-2. Print. Webb, Kate. “Christa Wolf Obituary.” Guardian Online. The Guardian UK, 1 December 2011. Web. 20 April 2015. Wolf, Christa. Leibhaftig. München: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2002. Print. —. In the Flesh. Trans. and Ed. John S. Barrett. New Hampshire: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2005. Print.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE RECEPTION OF GERMAN MEDIEVAL MYSTICS IN POPULAR FICTION DEBRA L. STOUDT

Since the mid-nineteenth century attention to the Western mystical tradition of the Middle Ages has grown as works by spiritually blessed men and women were rediscovered and knowledge of their lives, accomplishments, and experiences spread through editions, translations, and scholarly study. These renowned religious individuals were active at different moments during the High and Late Middle Ages in various parts of Europe, e.g., the twelfth-century Victorines in Paris and the late fourteenth-century mystics in England. However, beginning in the twelfth century there was a sustained mystical tradition in the German-speaking territories that includes the Benedictine saint Hildegard von Bingen as well as the Dominicans Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Seuse (in English Henry Suso), Johannes Tauler (in English John Tauler), and Margareta Ebner (in English Margaret Ebner). Knowledge of the mystics’ lives has been derived from autobiographical and contemporaneous biographical references. Evidence gathered by scholars in the past century has sufficed to inspire more than two dozen historical novels and novellas about the five individuals noted above, works that present a mixture of popular fiction, historical chronicle, and hagiography. This chapter examines reception of the German medieval mystics and the popular identity created for them in European and American fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do modern authors reflect historical documentation, popular perceptions, and present-day literary and social trends in their fictional accounts, and how do they interpret and adapt the historical background for their own purposes and for popular taste?

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Introduction and Overview The recent popularity of Hildegard, especially since the 1970s, recommends her today as an obvious subject of fictional treatments. More unexpected is historical interest in the fourteenth-century religious figures, and in fact this attention appears to have peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. The five religious figures above were well-known during their lifetime in their respective milieus because of their spiritual gifts; manuscripts containing their writings were preserved and printed editions appeared in the sixteenth century. Three of them have received official recognition by the Church in modern times. Seuse was beatified in 1831 and Ebner in 1979. A formal papal declaration of Hildegard’s sanctity was put forth in 1227, but the process was not completed at that time;1 nonetheless, she was venerated locally as a saint and included in the Roman martyrology in 1584. It was not until 2012 that she was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church. A woman of myriad talents, Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) has been celebrated as a prophet and visionary as well as for her musical compositions and medical knowledge. Founder of two religious communities for women, she engaged in preaching tours that took her far beyond the confines of her convents at Rupertsberg and Eibingen near Bingen, and among her epistolary correspondents were the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa and several popes. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) was an acclaimed teacher in Paris and Cologne. However, the ineffable nature of his philosophical ideas led to controversy, and he was accused of heresy in the final years of his life. The master died before the trial ended, but Pope John XXII officially condemned some of his statements in 1329. The Dominican preachers Heinrich Seuse (c.12951366) and Johannes Tauler (c.1300-61) studied with Eckhart in Cologne; all three ministered to men and women of their own order as well as Beguines and other lay religious in the Lower and Upper Rhineland, particularly around Cologne, Constance, and Strasbourg. Seuse’s reputation was due especially to Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, 1328-30), the most popular German devotional tract in the century following its distribution. Tauler’s notoriety derived from his sermons, the preacher’s only extant works; his distinctive style blended the homiletic and thematic sermon forms common at the time and employed rhetorical strategies designed to resonate with listeners. The Dominican nun Margareta Ebner (1291-1351) was celebrated as a holy woman favored by God. Through her spiritual adviser Heinrich von Nördlingen her fame spread far beyond the monastery of Maria Medingen

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in northern Bavaria, especially among other Dominicans as well as the Gottesfreunde ‘Friends of God’ in southwestern Germany and northern Switzerland. Active around Cologne as well as in Upper Germany, these men and women of diverse socio-economic backgrounds were inspired by and supportive of the mystical tradition espoused by both Dominicans and Franciscans. The first critical editions of the works of these religious figures appeared in the nineteenth century. Modern German editions have continued to appear, and translations into English and other languages have become more numerous, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century. Scholarship about the mystics and their works followed. Gaps in information about their lives, e.g., the final years of Eckhart’s life, have been accorded particular attention in the historical fiction discussed here, allowing modern authors to advance their own realities based upon the established historical framework. Mysticism is a religious experience in which union with the Divine or apprehension of Divine knowledge is achieved. Bernard McGinn’s definition of the term as “a special consciousness of the presence of God” is useful here,2 since it draws attention to the recognition of and response to the experience by the individual. Divine knowledge and union are pursued through separation from the world, accomplished by adoption of a coenobitical or eremitical lifestyle, contemplation, prayer, and sometimes ascetic practices.3 Revelation of the Divine takes various forms, most commonly visionary or auditory experiences, and culminates in a rapture or ecstasy, usually a trance-like state. As a consequence of the remarkable accounts of their experiences and their astounding, sometimes miraculous activities, the mystics are acknowledged as holy; they are chosen by God to fulfill the roles of prophet, preacher, and healer to those afflicted in body and in spirit. The mystical experience is profoundly personal. Because of its extraordinary nature and unusual manifestation, it is often kept secret until God compels it to be revealed, as in the case of Hildegard, who maintains her silence until she is commanded to write. The intimate experience with the Divine necessitates neither intercession from a priest nor reliance on the sacraments. The mystic frequently is called by God to service that may conflict with traditional beliefs or the expectations of sacred and secular powers, including one’s own family. The revelations often are viewed with suspicion and it is questioned whether their origins are divine or demonic. Mystics frequently find themselves on the margins of orthodoxy, conflicted within themselves and challenged by others as to the authority and validity of what they have seen and heard. As a result, the distinction

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between prophet and heretic, between saintly healer and blasphemous witch can be blurred. The twelfth-century Western mystical tradition is an outgrowth of the religious reform and renewal of the time (McGinn, Growth of Mysticism 149-57). Its development in the German-speaking territories is informed by Cistercian thought, especially that of Bernard of Clairvaux, and the theological teachings of the Victorines. Although she makes no claim to union with the Divine, Hildegard commonly is included in discussions of the German mystical tradition because of her visions and prophetic abilities. The thirteenth century witnesses a series of remarkable German mystics as well, including Mechthild of Magdeburg and the holy women of Helfta.4 German-speaking areas produce the most mystical literature in the later Middle Ages, thanks to the mendicant orders (McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism 83). The Dominicans Eckhart of Hochheim, Johannes Tauler, and Heinrich Seuse preached and served as spiritual advisers and confessors to religious women as well as devoted laypersons. Whereas the men commonly penned works of a didactic nature, such as treatises and sermons, the women described their personal experiences of mystical union; one example is Margareta Ebner, who writes in her Offenbarungen (Revelations, c. 1344-48) of the “presence of God” (100). The centuries discussed here are periods of tremendous secular and religious change. The twelfth century is characterized by a rediscovery of classical knowledge, the foundation of universities, renewed interest in philosophical and theological questions, as well as innovations in technology and in the arts. In the mid-fourteenth century the Black Death reaches the German-speaking lands, Jews are massacred in cities such as Basel and Strasbourg, and a significant earthquake strikes Basel. During this period the mendicant orders emerge and cities grow, bringing about a shift from cloistered life to engagement with an urban environment and increased interaction with the secular world. The courtly tradition waxes and wanes. Both the twelfth and fourteenth centuries witness controversy between the Holy Roman Empire and the Church, as kings and emperors struggle with each other and with the popes – in Rome and later in Avignon – to establish authority. The Church experiences challenges from the Cathars, particularly active in Cologne in the mid-twelfth century, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who were declared heretics at the Council of Vienne in 1311-12. In the twelfth century inquisitions are introduced to combat heretical sects; the prosecution of magicians becomes their purview in the subsequent century, and by the fifteenth century the witchcraft trials by inquisitors begin.

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The aspects of mysticism and socio-historical events noted above as well as the German mystics’ writings themselves have proven to be fertile ground for modern fiction authors.5 Referenced here are 28 works in which one of the five individuals above is a protagonist or plays a pivotal role: 16 about Hildegard, seven concerning Eckhart, two each about Seuse and Tauler, and one featuring Ebner.6 The table below provides an overview of publication years, authors, and titles. Publication Year 1923 1923

1941 1993 1997 1997 1998

1998

1999

2003 2005

Author

Title

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Adam Josef Die Heilige. Rheinischer Roman (The Cüppers Saint. A Novel of the Rhine) Hedwig von Eine deutsche Frau. Lebensbild Redern Hildegards von Bingen. Äbtissin des Klosters Rupertsberg 1098-1179 (A German Woman. A Portrait of the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, Abbess of the Rupertsberg Monastery 10981179) Wilhelm Das lebendige Licht. Roman (The Hünermann Living Light. A Novel) Barbara The Journal of Hildegard von Bingen Lachman Barbara Hildegard, the Last Year Lachman Joan Ohanneson Scarlet Music: Hildegard von Bingen Gabriele Göbel Die Mystikerin Hildegard von Bingen: Roman (The Mystic Hildegard von Bingen: A Novel) Sabine Trooger Hildegard von Bingen: Roman eines brennenden Lebens (Hildegard von Bingen: Novel of a Life Aflame) Edgar Noske Der Fall Hildegard von Bingen. Ein Krimi aus dem Mittelalter (The Case of Hildegard von Bingen. A Medieval Murder Mystery) Mary O’Connell The King’s Daughter : Hildegard von Bingen, A Medieval Romance Petra Welzel Hildegards Lied: Hildegard von Bingen : der Roman ihres Lebens

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2009/2012

Anne Lise MarstrandJørgensen

2009

Ursula Koch

2010

Brigitte Riebe

2011

G[race] M[cIntosh] Dyrek Mary Sharratt

2012

1925 1927

1933 1969; 1982 1998 2002

2011

1922

(Hildegard’s Song: Hildegard von Bingen: The Novel of Her Life) Hildegard (original Danish)/Tochter des Lichts. Ein Hildegard von Bingen Roman (Daughter of Light. A Hildegard von Bingen Novel) (German translation) Die Meisterin von Rupertsberg: Hildegard von Bingen, eine Botin der Liebe. Historischer Roman (The Magistra of Rupertsberg: Hildegard von Bingen, Love’s Messenger. A Historical Novel) Die Prophetin vom Rhein (The Prophetess from the Rhine) The Seer and the Scribe. Spear of Destiny: A Medieval Murder Mystery

Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) Paul Gurk Meister Eckehart Hans Much Meister Ekkehart: Ein Roman der deutschen Seele (Meister Eckhart: A Novel of the German Soul) Karl Röttger “Das Gestirn Eccehart” (“Eccehart the Luminary”) Simon Vestdijk Het proces van Meester Eckhart (The Trial of Meister Eckhart) Jean Bédard MaРtre Eckhart 1260-1328 Bernd Kemter Meister Eckharts Prozess: Roman um den mittelalterlichen Prediger und Mystiker (Meister Eckhart’s Trial: A Novel about the Medieval Preacher and Mystic) Michael The Death of Magister Aycardus Demkovich Heinrich Seuse (c. 1295-1366) Ludwig Diehl Suso. Der Roman eines deutschen Seelenmenschen (Suso. The Novel of a Soulful Man of Germany)

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1984

1920

1927

1938

191

Bruder Heinrich des Seusen mühsame und selige Wanderwege zwischen Konstanz und Köln (Brother Henry Suso’s Arduous and Blessed Travels between Constance and Cologne) Der Mystiker vom Bodensee: Heinrich Seuses Reise von Konstanz nach Köln (The Mystic from Lake Constance: Henry Suso’s Journey from Constance to Cologne) Johannes Tauler (c. 1300-61) Robert Will Tauler. Eine Geschichte aus Straßburgs Vergangenheit (Tauler. A Story from Strasbourg’s Past) Maria Brie Johannes Tauler und der Gottesfreund: Roman (John Tauler and the Friend of God: A Novel) Margareta Ebner (1291-1351) Erwin Guido Das gottgelobte Herz (The Heart Kolbenheyer Pledged to God) Otto Gillen

The earliest works date from the 1920s, with seven from the period of the Weimar Republic.7 During the National Socialist era three works were published. Kolbenheyer’s novel about Ebner was among the recommended historical novels of this time (Vallery 35-43). With the exception of the works by Gillen and Vestdijk - both republished in the 1980s - there was a gap of almost fifty years before the series of fictional accounts about Hildegard that began in the 1990s - six novels in that decade and seven more since 2000 – as well as the three relatively recent Eckhart novels. These publication trends reflect the contours for historical novels in Germany in the twentieth century. Scholarly attention to the genre develops after World War I and throughout the 1920s; the early years of World War II mark the heyday of historical novel production in Germany.8 Post-war interest quickly diminishes. A resurgence of the genre occurs in the 1970s, which coincides with a flurry of non-fiction publications about Hildegard in celebration of the 800th anniversary of her death in 1979. Scholarly interest in the magistra reaches a second high point in the 1990s, with the anniversary of the 900th anniversary of her birth in 1998, and a third in 2012, with her canonization and recognition as a Doctor of the Church.

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Most of the 18 fictional accounts published after World War II acknowledge primary and secondary sources in the form of a preface, foreword, chronology, genealogy, afterword, or bibliography. Several authors include glossaries or a description of the hours of the Divine Office, the series of daily prayers observed at particular times throughout the day in the monastic tradition, and chronologies of the lives of the protagonists as well as of contemporaneous emperors and popes serve as reference. O’Connell provides a list of fictional and nonfictional characters, delineating at the onset the distinction between fact and fiction. Göbel’s final chapter, “Dinkellady or Athlete of God – The Risk Involved in Writing a Novel about Hildegard,” details the challenges in portraying such a renowned and multifaceted individual. Sharratt’s epilogue discusses the differing versions of Hildegard’s early life chronicled in Guibert of Gembloux’s Vita Sanctae Hildegardis and the Vita Domnae Jutta Inclusae, noting the latitude these varying accounts afford today’s fiction writers.9 Many of the authors specialize in historical novels, especially about the Middle Ages. Several, e.g., Bédard, Göbel, Koch, and Riebe, have an academic background; Bédard, a philosopher, has also written a fictional work about the thirteenth-century Beguine Marguerete Porete. Among the authors are two religious: the priest Wilhelm Hünermann, well-known as a biographer of Catholic saints, and the Dominican Michael Demkovich, author of non-fiction works on Meister Eckhart and on spirituality in addition to the murder mystery discussed here. The shift from mostly male authors to almost exclusively female ones beginning in the 1990s reflects the focus on fiction about Hildegard. 18 of the 28 works were published originally in German; however, a striking number of the novels dealing with Hildegard – six of 16 – are in English. The significance of Meister Eckhart in medieval philosophy may account for fictional treatments not only in English and German but also in Dutch and French.10 The mystics identified here are especially appealing as subjects of fictional treatments for several reasons. There is adequate information about them, either from their own writings or those of others - letters, chronicles, (auto)biographies - to allow modern authors to devise credible portrayals. All five religious men and women are caught up in the ecclesiastical and secular politics of their day and their partisanship has a profound impact on their personal lives and their vocations. The interdict imposed on Rupertsberg tarnishes Hildegard’s reputation during her final years and the prohibition enacted in much of the Dominican province of Teutonia in 1324 creates hardships for Seuse, Tauler, and Ebner. The noble origins of the protagonists afford medieval courtly life a significant

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role in the novels. Modern authors weave rich historical tapestries in their descriptions of power struggles among the great houses within the Holy Roman Empire, attacks on the movements of the Cathars and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the impact of the Avignon papacy alongside the mundane events in the daily lives of these religious figures. The boisterous secular milieu provides a striking contrast to the tranquil, self-reflective world of monastic life. The ineffable nature of the mystical experiences is addressed in various ways, as will be described below. Each section begins with a brief biographical sketch, followed by a summary of key aspects of the individual historical novels. The synopses are presented chronologically according to the date of publication and highlight the diverse approaches to the subject matter. In the first four sections, which deal with multiple works, the analysis concludes with a discussion of common elements or themes as well as unique or unusual features of specific novels.

Reception of Hildegard von Bingen Hildegard, the tenth child of a noble family, was given at the age of eight as a tithe to the Church. Too young to be a novice, she served instead as the companion of Jutta of Sponheim, her first teacher. The two – perhaps along with a third girl or young woman – lived in an anchorhold attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg near Bingen. Despite her ascetic lifestyle, the charismatic Jutta attracted many female followers, and upon her death Hildegard assumed leadership of the group. Directed by God to establish her own community, Hildegard ultimately persuaded Kuno, abbot of Disibodenberg, to allow her to move with her followers to Rupertsberg, where a new convent was built. Already as a child Hildegard had experienced visions, and at the age of 42 she began to dictate them to the monk Volmar, her secretary and confidant, as well as Richardis of Stade, a young nun who became her favorite in the community. Although she won the approval of Pope Eugene III, Hildegard met with substantial resistance from Abbot Kuno as she exercised leadership at Rupertsberg and her new community in Eibingen. Through her letters as well as her sermons she provided advice and guidance to fellow Benedictines as well as to political figures and Church leaders. In recent times she has garnered attention not only for her religious writings but also for her music and her medical remedies deriving from plants and other natural materials. Despite its promising title, Adam Cüpper’s Die Heilige. Rheinischer Roman (The Saint. A Novel of the Rhine, 1923) features Hildegard in

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several minor, albeit pivotal functions, as healer, visionary, and comforter. The work recounts political battling among Rhenish petty nobility in the twelfth century and the murder of Count Otto II of Rheineck (1115-49). Two familiar names appear in unanticipated roles: Jutta and Kuno are children of the Palatine Count Hermann of Stahleck. Hildegard’s visionary work Scivias is mentioned (45), and her exhortations against the heretics (210) complement the contours of the plot. Hildegard is not the only saint to which the book’s title refers (29); a second is Gertrud, Kuno’s mother, who retires to a monastery in Bamberg (231). Although Hildegard as seer and healer appears at key points throughout the novel, the focus of the plot is the secular world with its romance and intrigue. In Eine deutsche Frau. Lebensbild Hildegards von Bingen. Äbtissin des Klosters Rupertsberg 1098-1179 (A German Woman. A Portrait of the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, Abbess of the Rupertsberg Monastery 1098-1179, 1923) Hedwig von Redern chronicles the abbess’s encounter with important personages and the production of her literary and musical works, interspersing the narrative with imagined dialogues between the protagonist and her contemporaries. She describes Hildegard as “Allgemeingut der Christenheit” ‘common to all of Christendom’ (10), comparing her preaching with that of John the Baptist (7) and her visions with those of John of Patmos (30); however, Hildegard herself rejects the epithet “heiliggemäßig” ‘saintly’ (116). A poem by von Redern describing the mystical experience prefaces the work (5), and the image of light presented there recurs throughout the portrait as the guiding force in Hildegard’s life. As the title indicates, Wilhelm Hünermann’s Das lebendige Licht. Roman (The Living Light. A Novel, 1941) also makes use of the light motif. Hildegard’s experience of the Living Light often is accompanied by music, and through the text of her songs, recited as part of the magistra’s visions or sung by her nuns, Hünermann characterizes her spirituality. The author devotes the first half of the novel to the years before Hildegard assumed leadership of her community. His depiction of Jutta’s and Hildegard’s anchoritic enclosure at Disibodenberg as an expansive area complete with garden rather than a simple cell is probably more historically accurate given the number of women who joined the two in subsequent years. The novels published since the 1990s take advantage of the abundant scholarship published in the interim, which results in fuller, more nuanced characterizations of the protagonist, her life, her works, and her milieu. The Journal of Hildegard von Bingen (1993) and Hildegard, the Last Year (1997), both by Barbara Lachman, feature a first-person narrator and

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are devoted to a single year in the magistra’s life; each is supplemented by footnotes, a bibliography, and a glossary of relevant terms. The journal presents an intimate psychological portrayal in Hildegard’s voice on the left side of each page, which is complemented by the author’s extensive commentary on the right. The resulting construct is a hybrid, half fiction and half historical documentation; in terms of content it is the mirror opposite of von Redern’s work. The journal chronicles 1151, the year in which Hildegard struggles to establish her own community at Rupertsberg and to extricate herself from the care and supervision of the monks at Disibodenberg, where she has lived since the age of eight; it also examines the religious women’s attempts to define their role in the Church. Hildegard, the Last Year records the spiritual and physical challenges the Benedictine faced in 1178-79, especially the spiritual melancholy that permeated the Rupertsberg community on account of the interdict.11 The use of a first-person narrator allows the author to explore Hildegard’s feelings, from initial self-doubt through gradual understanding of her experience to the musings of her final days, when she declares: “I look forward to being more of the substance of the stars” (115). Joan Ohanneson’s Scarlet Music. Hildegard von Bingen (1997) represents a marked turn toward the popular, as Hildegard struggles against the machinations of Abbot Kuno, Archbishop Heinrich of Mainz, and the Margravine of Stade, mother of Richardis, whose actions are motivated by pride and greed. The magistra herself exhibits disrespectful behavior and appears at times self-absorbed. Ohanneson’s Hildegard is a seer: her visions of souls as “a mirror of God” cannot be understood by the people of Würzburg, to whom she is preaching (185) and her prophecies against the Church and in defiance of the interdict in her final days enrage Bishop Egbert and the canons (253-54). Hers is a strident voice that seeks to warn a wayward Church. The author’s style and lexical choices seem incongruous with Hildegard’s life and time, and the use of the epithet “Lady Abbess” demonstrates the extent to which courtliness takes precedence in this novel. The two 1998 German novels, Gabriele Göbel’s Die Mystikerin Hildegard von Bingen: Roman (The Mystic Hildegard von Bingen: A Novel) and Sabina Trooger’s Hildegard von Bingen. Roman eines brennenden Lebens (Hildegard von Bingen: Novel of a Life Aflame), offer complementary treatments of the subject matter. Göbel begins with the death of Jutta but includes flashbacks of Hildegard’s early years. Trooger provides a firstperson account that offers the recollections of the 80-year-old magistra. Both document in detail the daily life in the monastic community as well as secular events of the time and explore the nature of Hildegard’s

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visionary experiences along with sources of her medical knowledge. They also propose a purpose for the lingua ignota, the unknown language Hildegard created that has survived in the form of a glossary and whose function remains unclear. The authors are particularly adept at relating the physical and the spiritual, as for example in Trooger’s work, when Richardis’s hazel eyes remind Hildegard of the concept of viriditas, the greening power that invigorates all creation. In each storyline Hildegard’s relationship with the Divine and her spiritual experiences are balanced with a love affair with tragic consequences. Göbel’s novice Jacoba engages in a relationship with the monk Anselm, reminiscent of that between Heloise and Peter Abelard, whose works the two young religious have been reading surreptitiously; Jacoba eventually leaves the convent and becomes an adherent of the Cathars. In Trooger’s work the novice Ludowiga becomes pregnant, flees the monastery, and commits suicide. A popular style similar to that of Ohanneson’s novel is employed in the two mysteries, Edgar Noske’s Der Fall Hildegard von Bingen. Ein Krimi aus dem Mittelalter (The Case of Hildegard von Bingen. A Medieval Murder Mystery, 1999) and G. M. Dyrek’s The Seer and the Scribe: Spear of Destiny (2011). The former begins with the discovery of a skeleton, identified as that of a nobleman who visited Rupertsberg years before, became involved romantically with Richardis, and fell to his death. The first half of Noske’s book solves the mystery of his demise, and the second half introduces a second intrigue, the poisoning of Abbot Kuno. The mystery behind The Seer and the Scribe is identified in the subtitle: a knight returning from the First Crusade gives young Volmar the spear of Longinus, a relic with holy powers, for safe keeping. When the knight and two other visitors to Disibodenberg, ostensibly Knights Hospitaller, are murdered at the community, the teenaged Volmar and Hildegard begin their search for the cause and the perpetrators. Although Volmar initiates a romance, both young people remain true to their religious callings. In both mystery novels, the authors concentrate their efforts on the elaboration of the plot; Hildegard’s experiences and accomplishments are rarely referenced. Noske does, however, divulge the magistra’s infatuation with Richardis, which fades when her protégée becomes abbess at Bassum and leaves Rupertsberg. Dyrek allows supernatural powers to intervene, as when the Voice of the Living Light directs Hildegard’s actions and words to deal with an intruder in the anchorhold (230) and the intruder’s sword becomes too hot for him to clasp (231). Mary O’Connell’s The King’s Daughter (2003) also explores the relationship between Hildegard and Richardis in the years 1148 to 1153, as Richardis’s mother Rikkarda sets out to realize the same ambitions for

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her younger daughter that her older daughter, the queen of Denmark, has achieved: a realm of her own, albeit a spiritual one. Hildegard’s love and obedience, as the metaphorical King’s daughters, contrast with Richardis’s pride and the scheming of Rikkarda and her collaborator Archbishop Heinrich of Mainz, who was once her lover. Whereas Hildegard appears as the mouthpiece of the Living Light (336), Richardis “has no light of her own” (293). Piety is eclipsed by politics in O’Connell’s work, but the death or disgrace of all of her adversaries proves Hildegard’s moral superiority in the end. Yet further removed from the spiritual realm is Petra Welzel’s Hildegards Lied: Hildegard von Bingen: der Roman ihres Lebens (Hildegard’s Song: Hildegard von Bingen: The Novel of Her Life, 2005), which brings together the religious and secular worlds in very different ways than the previous novel. Hildegard is mentored first by the kind and compassionate herb woman and midwife Rike and subsequently by the austere anchoress Jutta. Welzel’s Hildegard embraces the religious life as an escape from marriage to Anno, the dishonorable son of a nobleman; however, later in life she rekindles an affair with Erik, the son of a crusader, whom she met before she took her vows. Hildegard’s visions, prophecies, and acts of healing identify her as an active protagonist and an emancipated religious woman. At the end of the novel the magistra is prepared to leave the monastery with Erik and abandon her cloistered life, when Anno appears, brandishing a knife; in the ensuing struggle Erik kills Anno but is mortally wounded. Hildegard takes these shocking events in stride, resolving to look toward the future: “Mochte kommen, was wollte, sie würde sich dem Leben stellen. Vielleicht noch ein Kloster gründen, vielleicht in die Welt ziehen um zu predigen. Es gab noch so viel zu tun” (“Come what may, she would face her destiny. Maybe she would establish another convent, maybe travel out into the world to preach. There was still so much to do”; 442). Hildegard’s humility and obedience to her calling are replaced by Welzel with self-confidence and a willingness to create her own destiny. Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen’s Hildegard was published in Danish in 2009; the German translation, Tochter des Lichts. Ein Hildegard von Bingen-Roman (Daughter of Light. A Hildegard von Bingen Novel), appeared in 2012. The novel of almost 500 pages tells only of the Benedictine’s early years, concluding with Pope Eugene III’s endorsement of Hildegard’s Scivias around 1147. The toddler Hildegard’s first word is ‘light’ (44), and she is described as having visions already as a very small child. Because of these experiences she is able to prophesy, and over the years she develops an understanding of the cosmos (278). Through her

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visions she is directed to have her nuns dress in fine clothes and wear crowns on feast days (410), an incident documented in Hildegard’s letters. When the magistra travels to a goldsmith in Trier to have proper crowns made, she is taken aback when she hears references to herself as a “living saint” (441), and during her travels she is accosted by people who seek her blessing or a cure from disease. Upon her return to Disibodenberg, she receives the command from God to write down and share her experiences. The novel ends with the Pope’s endorsement of her first visionary work; however, this is only half of Hildegard’s story, and ending the narrative at this point diminishes the impact of her accomplishments. The frame of Ursula Koch’s Die Meisterin von Rupertsberg (The Magistra of Rupertsberg, 2009) is the biography of the nun Lutgard, who on her deathbed in 1227 recounts her life at Rupertsberg while Hildegard was magistra. Interspersed with the chronological presentation of Hildegard’s life is the narrative of Lutgard’s last days, during which the first attempts at Hildegard’s canonization were made. Although both story lines tout the accomplishments of the “mistress of Rupertsberg,” there are undercurrents of skepticism in each toward certain religious practices. As Hildegard’s healing acts are described, the narrator reveals that holy water was simple well water with dubious curative powers (14), and the archbishop participating in the canonization case notes the challenges and dangers of the holy life, saying: “Es ist sehr anstrengend, ein Heiliger zu sein. Und die Gefahr ist groß – dass du auf dem Scheiterhaufen landest!“ (“It is very strenuous to be a saint. And there is great danger of being burned at the stake”; 23) His cynical attitude is also apparent in his comments about Hildegard’s youthful visionary experiences in the anchorhold: “sie hatte ja auch sonst nichts zu tun” (“she had nothing better to do”; 45). Although the magistra’s detractors view her behavior as prideful and her ability to heal as the result of magic, they grudgingly recognize the gift her visions have to comfort in troubled times (131). Despite its title, Brigitte Riebe’s Die Prophetin vom Rhein (The Prophetess from the Rhine, 2010) relegates Hildegard to a supporting part in this account of the lives of two young people left as children at the monastery after their mother dies. The girl learns the healing arts and finds work as a midwife after she leaves the religious community; the boy is apprenticed to a cruel armor maker, whom he eventually murders. Although the Rupertsberg monastery serves as the backdrop for the initial chapters, it is quickly abandoned for a worldly milieu in which the spiritual plays no part. The magistra’s involvement in the politics of her day and her preaching against heretical sects allow these topics to become the sensationalized focus of the plot, in which lay as well as religious

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figures are involved in rape, abortion, and murder. Like Lachman’s works, Mary Sharratt’s Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen (2012) features a first-person narrative with Hildegard relating her life story. The focus is two key relationships with other women: Jutta and Richardis. Hildegard describes the trauma she endured with the anchoress in the enclosure and reveals the ominous origins of Jutta’s piety: her mentor’s desire for the eremitical life is the result of having been raped by her brother. With Jutta’s death Hildegard’s life begins anew. Richardis is given into her spiritual care and eventually becomes the illuminator of the magistra’s manuscripts. The intimate relationship that develops between the two women is described by Hildegard in otherworldly terms: “What united Richardis and me was not Eros, but Caritas, that blinding glimpse of divine love” (174). The theme of gender informs much of the narrative: the anchorhold is characterized as a refuge for noble women (96); the issue of the women’s dowries and who controls the monies becomes a point of contention between Hildegard and the abbot (231); and the nuns’ virginity is described as “the secret jewel of sworn maidenhood, freed from the burden of constant pregnancies” (234). Sharratt’s Hildegard is less pensive and poetic than Lachman’s, and her spiritual experience seems less genuine as a consequence. Despite the variety of plot twists presented in the works above, the portrayals of Hildegard and her world are remarkably similar and, with the notable exception of the love affairs, faithful to historical biographical facts and circumstances regarding the magistra (and Jutta) as well as consistent with recent scholarship. Physical descriptions of Hildegard in the fictional accounts are sparse, although a number of authors, e.g., Hünermann, Göbel, O’Connell, endow the young Hildegard with the Germanic traits of blond hair and blue eyes. Ohanneson, on the other hand, portrays the religious woman with violet eyes, a clear designation of Hildegard as Other. Koch offers an impression of Hildegard in her final years through the eyes of the novice Lutgard: Eine kleine alte Frau saß [auf dem Pferd]. Ihr Gesicht war zerfurcht, aber ihre Augen blitzten . . . Sie sah so zerbrechlich aus . . . [d]och nichts schien sie zu erschüttern. Sie hob die Hand, und es wurde still . . . Ihre Stimme war fest und ruhig, sie kreischte nicht, wie Frauen das oft tun. Sie murmelte auch nicht unverständliches lateinisches Zeug, wie wir es von den Klerikern hörten. (11) A small, old woman was sitting [on the horse]. Her face was wrinkled, but her eyes sparkled . . . She looked fragile . . . [b]ut nothing seemed to upset her. She raised her hand and silence fell … Her voice was firm and calm,

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Hildegard commonly is portrayed as a strong woman, justified through her visions although with moments of self-doubt. Except in Welzel’s novel and that of Marstrand-Jørgensen, she is a willing companion to Jutta in the anchorhold and embraces the role of magistra (usually abbess in these texts) without hesitation. Other major themes of her life’s work find resonance to varying degrees. In Trooger’s novel Hildegard’s parents nickname her “Flämmchen” ‘little flame’ (58), a reference to the child’s divinely inspired experiences, and Volmar characterizes the recording of the visions as a kind of “seelischen Aderlaß” ‘bleeding of the soul’ for her (97). Trooger presents a dramatic scenario when the visions occur: Hildegard speaks, Richardis supports her physically, and Volmar records the words (28). Hildegard’s Scivias is referenced repeatedly and the letters are excerpted by a number of authors; the other works garner substantially less attention. Göbel mentions the man in Scivias II.2 who is the color of sapphire (28) and the manuscript miniatures in general (265), but few others discuss the remarkable artistic renderings. Theological ideas include the Feminine Divine in Sharratt’s novel, which begins with the vision of Ecclesia (xi) and God as Mother (xii), as well as in O’Connell’s work, which describes the “maternal charity of God” (200). Göbel’s novel describes how Hildegard and Elisabeth von Schönau, another twelfth-century visionary, meet and engage in a “Symposium um die weibliche Zärtlichkeit Gottes” (“symposium on the feminine tenderness of God”; 291), which manifests itself in female figures such as Ecclesia, Maria, and Sophia that are featured so prominently in the writings of both Benedictine women. Descriptions of herbal gardens, diseases, pregnancies, and abortions introduce allusions to Hildegard’s knowledge of medicine, gained from various sources such as Kräuterweiber ‘herbal healers’ and midwives. Trooger presents Hildegard as a keen observer of plants (73), who in her later years makes the acquaintance of a sorcerer from whom she learns more about herbs and precious stones (176-80). Göbel provides an extensive discussion of Hildegard’s medical cures (41-47) and describes the curative powers of various stones (132); she also notes that Hildegard uses her secret language, the lingua ignota, to share her medical recipes following the Vatican’s ban on healing (35-36). Marstrand-Jørgensen’s Hildegard, in contrast, is unsure of the meaning of the unknown alphabet and the words the letters form, convinced only that “alles dient dem gleichen Zweck: uns zu lehren, Gott innig zu lieben und zu fürchten und alles, was wir tun, ihm zu Ehren zu tun” (“everything serves the same

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purpose: to teach us to love and fear God with all our heart and to do everything that we do to His honor”; 423). Hildegard’s musical accomplishments are referenced in every work. In Lachman’s Journal of Hildegard, veneration of St. Ursula serves as the impetus for the composition of seven liturgical works by the magistra. The performance of Hildegard’s play Ordo virtutum is described in detail in several cases. e.g, Göbel (233) and Lachman (Journal 142-49). In Trooger’s novel, Richardis is an alto, but in Göbel’s she must be a soprano, since it is the girl’s ability to sing the stratospheric high notes characteristic of the magistra’s compositions that makes her indispensable to the religious community. Whereas the motivation of actions is left unexplored in many cases, several authors comment on religious and political practices of the time. Abbot Kuno’s refusal to relinquish to Hildegard the women’s dowry gifts in order to build the Rupertsberg community is repeatedly explained by his greed and his desire to maintain the high profile of his own monastery at Disibodenberg (Welzel 81). The convent sometimes serves as a haven for women from abuse as well as unwelcome marriage (Sharratt 96). In Göbel’s work Hildegard’s biological sister does not want to marry and contemplates cutting herself with clay shards so as to be undesirable to her potential mate; instead she is permitted to enter religious life (15). The fictional works provide extensive description of Hildegard’s life as a young girl in the anchorhold, as an adult in the Disibodenberg community, and later at Rupertsberg. Despite their length, few – with the notable exception of Lachman’s Journal - delve into the daily routine of life in the monastery, with its focus on the Hours of the Divine Office, contemplation, prayer, and a vow of silence. Instead they explore Hildegard’s personal relationships and the accomplishment of her great goals: establishment of her own community, healing, and preaching.

Reception of Fourteenth-Century Mystics Meister Eckhart Meister Eckhart, born in the Thuringian village of Hochheim, joined the Dominicans in Erfurt, then continued his education in Cologne and possibly in Paris as well. In 1294 he was appointed prior in Erfurt and provincial of Thuringia. He spent about a year in Paris as the Dominican chair of theology, returning to Erfurt in 1303 to assume the position of provincial of Saxony. Invited to return to Paris again as magister (1313), he eventually moved to Strasbourg. In 1323 or 1324 he returned to

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Cologne; it was during this time that Seuse and Tauler probably studied with him. Toward the end of Eckhart’s life the orthodoxy of some of his teachings was called into question, and Nicholas of Strasbourg, as inquisitor, conducted an investigation; although evidence of Eckhart’s innocence was provided, Archbishop Heinrich von Virneburg nonetheless ordered further examination of the Dominican’s writings. Despite Eckhart’s public claim of his innocence on February 13, 1327, he was declared guilty. He appealed to the Pope and traveled to Avignon in the spring of the same year, but he died in early 1328, before the verdict of the trial was given. Paul Gurk’s Meister Eckehart (1925), published originally in 1920 and reissued in 1943, chronicles the Dominican’s years in Cologne and ends with Eckhart’s death. Hagiographic in tone, the novel presents the master as a reluctant miracle worker. He is called upon to turn water to wine at a wedding (94) and to awaken the dead son of a widow (96), acts designed to suggest an analogy with John the Baptist and Christ (143). There are frequent references to the complicated nature of Eckhart’s teachings, and the Dominican is declared not only a “Ketzer des Denkens” ‘heretic of thought’ (131) but also a “gefährlicher Träumer” ‘dangerous dreamer’ (141). This depiction of a learned man in service to God is tempered by the Dominican’s interaction with three women: the young daughter of the gardener of the house where Eckhart lives, the widow of the merchant whose confession Eckhart hears, and a fallen woman – appropriately named Magdalene - whom the master encounters while walking through the streets of the city. In the final scenes Eckhart returns home following the announcement of his condemnation. Magdalene appears and dries the “Schweiß der Einsamkeit” ‘sweat of solitude’ (174) from him with a silk cloth filled with the odor of nard. As Eckhart lies dying, the archangel Michael and Lucifer battle for his soul and body, a supernatural element not found in any other fictional treatment of these mystics; however, at his death the master is transported neither to heaven nor to hell. Despite the equivocal outcome, the subsequent scene makes clear Eckhart’s destiny: the three women surround his body, and the gardener’s daughter weaves tendrils together as a crown and places them on his head (181) – like the crucified Christ on the cross. Much’s 1927 novel is steeped in philosophical allusions to Christian as well as other religious traditions, and the fiction occasionally is interrupted abruptly by the author’s expositions. Among Eckhart’s teachers on his life journey are the architects and masons of the great churches and cathedrals that the Dominican visits; the Bauhütte (the hut that served as office for the medieval architect) is a focal point of esoteric discussion (167),

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forging connections between religion, philosophy, and magic. In Strasbourg the cathedral serves as a refuge for the Beghards (237), groups of men joined together in spiritual communities outside the Church’s monastic system, and the son of the Baumeister, Eckhart’s companion throughout the novel, fulfills the role of the master’s secular Doppelgänger (37). Much’s Eckhart is a seeker of truth and neither his interaction with the external world nor his daily life among his fellow Dominicans is described in detail. Characteristic of a 1920s novel is the emphasis on Eckhart’s lineage – noble and “ritterlich” ‘knightly’, an “Aristokrat des Geistes” ‘aristocrat of the spirit’ (287) – and heritage: “ein deutscher Ritter” ‘a German knight’ (246) who asserts: “ein Deutscher bin [ich] mit Leib und Seele” (“I am a German with body and soul”; 392). Although clearly a German hero, he is also referred to as a saint by a former student (318), a juror (361), and the narrator (378). Karl Röttger’s 80-page novella “Das Gestirn Eccehart” (Eccehart the Luminary, 1933) is the first of five fictional accounts of European luminaries – Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Bach, and Hölderlin are the others – that comprise Das Buch der Gestirne (The Book of Luminaries). The title plays not only upon the renown of each protagonist but in the case of Eckhart the metaphor of Divine Light. Eckhart’s mother observes a falling star that augurs his birth, and already as a child, Eckhart experiences visions of stars (25). As God’s chosen one, the boy saves a hermit from Satan’s wiles (37), and when it is revealed to him that he is to proclaim the Light (41), his destiny as a Dominican is clear. Misguided by a voice that is not God’s, Eckhart struggles in the world until another voice reveals the Divine truth that God is in each person. Thus begins Eckhart’s final journey that leads to the accusations of heresy. In the master‘s last moments on earth Christ encourages him in a dream, and at his death Eckhart stands “in seiner ganzen Kraft, leuchtend und groß, sieghaft, ernst lächelnd, sein selber sicher und gewiss: Sein Gottesbewusstsein, gegen die Welt und gegen die Kirche gestellt (wenn die Kirche – nicht er – es so wollte), werden siegen” (“in his power, luminous and great, victorious, solemnly smiling, sure of himself: his faith, against the world and against the Church (if the Church – not he - wants it to be that way) will prevail”; 67). The inquisitor Nicholas of Strasbourg is the narrator in Simon Vestdijk’s Het proces van Meester Eckhart (The Trial of Meister Eckhart, 1969, 1982), which describes the 1326 investigation. Nicholas cautions the master as renewed accusations of heresy are presented, but Eckhart’s unwillingness to keep silent and his interactions with the Beghards seal his fate. The novel is of particular interest for its portrayal of how the trial

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unfolds. Although Nicholas avers that he is not a follower of Eckhart (137), his sympathetic stance toward the master is apparent. Jean Bédard’s Maître Eckhart 1260-1328 (1998) presents an eyewitness account as well, this time narrated from the perspective of Meister Eckhart’s secretary. Bédard’s protagonist is a man of courage (318): he befriends the Beguine Katrei, who has been accused of heresy.12 He is also a man of conviction at odds with a corrupt Church that fails to support an individual of great intellect (134, 180). The reason for the charges brought against him are not only his teachings but also his progressive attitude toward women (246). Despite the author’s sympathetic portrayal, his stance toward the master, revealed in the introduction, is ambivalent: “En tout cas, s’il n’est pas hérétique, il est certainement saint” (“In any case, if he is not a heretic, he is certainly a saint”; 18). In Bernd Kemter’s Meister Eckharts Prozess: Roman um den mittelalterlichen Prediger und Mystiker (Meister Eckhart’s Trial: A Novel about the Medieval Preacher and Mystic, 2002) a narrator accompanies the Dominican on his travels and regales the reader with tales of their adventures: an encounter with the cathedral builders in Chartres and Reims, the horrors of the Black Death, and the loyalty of the Jew Maimonides, who comes to Eckhart’s aid in Avignon. In this account Meister Eckhart’s role as agitator and his preaching to the people in the vernacular are just as significant to the accusations of heresy as his theological beliefs. Despite references to the Dominican’s visionary experiences – which the historical Eckhart did not claim to have had – Kemter’s work strikes a decidedly secular chord. The Death of Magister Aycardus (2011) by Michael Demkovich features as narrator a character named Gottfried Reisner, employed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), whose task it is to uncover the truth about the Dominican’s death and the authenticity of a saint’s relic in Nicholas’s possession. Demkovich reconstructs Eckhart’s final days after leaving Avignon, describing how the master’s writings are preserved and how after his death his body is divided up by his friends “for safe transport” (208) and for protection from thieves – thus explaining the survival of manuscripts Nicholas has acquired and relics he has discovered. The lack of historical documentation concerning much of Eckhart’s life permits the historical novelists great latitude in their portrayals; the Dominican is at times a man rich in spiritual gifts (Gurk and Röttger), a philosopher (Much), a compassionate pastor (Bédard), and an individual at once detached from the world but nonetheless desirous to experience it

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(Kemter). In all seven accounts the accusations of heresy and the intrigues that surrounded them play a prominent role. Evidence of Eckhart’s humanity is found in his relationships with those in his pastoral care, religious and laity alike, but his religious experiences have isolated him from love of things and of people, as he explains: “Jetzt aber lebt in mir nur noch die Liebe zu den Ideen, die schöpferisch sind und das Geschaffene eine Stufe tiefer setzen, weil sie ausströmen, abfallen von ihnen!” (“But now only love for creative concepts and ideas lives in me, which put the existing Creation at a lower rank because they emanate, fall away from them”; Gurk 127-28). The master is portrayed as resolute in his beliefs and resigned to his fate.

Heinrich Seuse Heinrich Seuse was born into a patrician family in or near Constance. His fragile health destined him for the religious life, and he began his novitiate in the local friary at the age of 13. After studying in Cologne around 1324-25, he returned to Constance, where he served as lector and then as prior. Seuse subsequently became an itinerant preacher and spiritual adviser, especially to religious women in convents in the Alsace, Switzerland, and along the Upper Rhine. Loyal to the Pope in the conflict with Emperor Louis of Bavaria, Seuse was exiled from Constance around 1338. In 1348 he was transferred to the Dominican monastery in Ulm, where he spent his final days. Before his death Seuse prepared his writings for distribution: the Exemplar consists of four works, with the autobiographical Life of the Servant as the first among them. It is probable that the Dominican Elsbeth Stagel, to whom Seuse was confessor and friend, assisted in the editing, if not the writing of the vita. Despite the wealth of anecdotes it contains that might provide the foundation for fictional accounts, there are only two historical novels about Seuse to date, both from the mid-twentieth century and both of which focus on only a portion of his life. Ludwig Diehl’s Suso. Der Roman eines deutschen Seelenmenschen (Suso. The Novel of a Soulful Man of Germany, 1922) introduces the protagonist as a worldly innocent setting foot outside the Dominican house in Constance for the first time in ten years and quickly retreating within its walls. In his role as confessor, Seuse ministers to a woman who accuses him of fathering her child. The accusation, which greatly damaged his reputation, was mentioned by the historical Seuse in his Life of the Servant. In Diehl’s novel, the fictional Seuse leaves the monastery with the baby in tow and travels toward Ulm, settling in an abandoned hermit’s

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cell along the way and preaching to the local people. Diehl takes additional liberties with the story of the Dominican’s life by introducing Elsbeth Stagel as a young girl whose mother had sent Seuse beautiful illuminations years earlier. Their spiritual relationship develops into a physical one as well, but ends when Elsbeth returning to her family. The baby is returned to its mother, and Seuse enters the Dominican monastery in Ulm as prior. The modest novella Bruder Heinrich des Seusen mühsame und selige Wanderwege zwischen Konstanz und Köln (Brother Henry Suso’s Arduous and Blessed Travels between Constance and Cologne) by Otto Gillen, reprinted with a brief introduction as Der Mystiker vom Bodensee. Heinrich Seuses Reise von Konstanz nach Köln (The Mystic from Lake Constance: Henry Suso’s Journey from Constance to Cologne, 1984), depicts the Dominican’s travels from the island monastery at Constance to the bustling city of Cologne.13 As Seuse wanders the streets, he encounters groups of Flagellants, Lollards, and Brothers of the Free Spirit. Here, as in Diehl’s novel, he makes the acquaintance of a young woman who has an illegitimate child and who threatens to accuse Seuse of being the father. Part of their conversation is overheard and Seuse is recalled to Constance. Although the good-hearted Dominican desires to help the people he meets on his journey, he is too unworldly to succeed. Neither Diehl nor Gillen makes extensive use of the autobiographical details provided in the Life of the Servant or additional information found in Seuse’s letters and other works. Their protagonist is a devout man who is compassionate and sympathetic, but naïve and ultimately ineffectual as a Seelsorger ‘spiritual guide’. In both works Seuse leaves the safe, familiar environment of the monastery to engage in preaching tours in urban areas; either the authors did not know or chose not to discuss the fact that Seuse’s most effective pastoral care was not with the laity but rather with the Dominican nuns of southern Germany and northern Switzerland, none of whom is mentioned here. Since Elsbeth Stagel’s role in Seuse’s life and literary productivity has been examined in detail by scholars only beginning in the 1960s,14 it is not surprising that these earlier fictional accounts do not afford her a significant role. In Diehl’s novel, Elsbeth is a young noblewoman who spends her final days in the religious community at Töß but is never identified as a nun; she does not appear at all in Gillen’s novella. Diehl references Seuse’s visionary experiences, but the nature of the Dominican’s spirituality is unclear. Except for mortifications of the flesh (56, 76), the religious experiences of Gillen’s mystic also remain unspecified. In both cases the protagonist is longsuffering, accepting attacks and insults with humility. Whereas

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Hildegard’s and Eckhart’s challenges come primarily from within the religious sphere, Seuse’s are the result of encounters with the world. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that both Diehl and Gillen position their protagonist outside the monastery walls for much of their works and that Seuse’s interactions with secular individuals play the pivotal role.

Johannes Tauler Born in Strasbourg, Johannes Tauler spent much of his life in an urban environment. Like Seuse, he was a protégé of Eckhart in Cologne, but he may also have studied in Paris. As a result of the interdicts in 1324 and in 1338 he moved to Basel, eventually returning to his native city each time. A preacher to Beguines as well as nuns, he was active among the Gottesfreunde in Basel. In his later years he traveled to Cologne on preaching tours. For Tauler there is no extant contemporaneous biography, and his sermons, the sole works that remain today, offer only glimpses of his personal life. Robert Will’s Tauler. Eine Geschichte aus Straßburgs Vergangenheit (Tauler. A Story from Strasbourg’s Past, 1920) begins as a religious treatment of the preacher’s life. The young Dominican is identified by God and by the leadership of the religious house as Eckhart’s heir. Will offers extensive details regarding daily religious life within various religious communities – those of the mendicant orders as well as the houses of the Beguines – the role of the Church in the daily life of the laity, and the political and social events of importance during Tauler’s lifetime. Although Tauler’s role as confessor to the Beguines leads to temptation with a Meisterin, one of the leaders of such a community, he holds fast to his vocation: “Mein Herze muss alleine Gottes sein” (“My heart must belong only to God”; 123). Subsequent chapters describe his ministry in the countryside, where his listeners are not always receptive to his message, the Dominican brothers’ exile and move to Basel, and his years as an itinerant preacher. When Tauler returns to Basel in 1347, the plague and the pogroms against the Jews overshadow the role of the Church in the life of the city. Will presents the movement of the Gottesfreunde in a negative light, and Tauler’s friend and spiritual guide Rulman Merswin uses his naïve confessor to promote his own religious agenda. Ailing during his final years, Tauler dies in the care of the sisters of St. Nikolaus in Undis rather than in his own monastery, a fitting end since “[e]r sei auch immer mehr in den Frauenklöstern daheim gewesen, als bei den eigenen Brüdern” (“he was more at home in convents than with his own brothers”; 242).

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Maria Brie’s Johannes Tauler und der Gottesfreund. Roman (John Tauler and the Friend of God: A Novel, 1927) highlights the holiness of Tauler’s life. In the night after his mother prays to the statue of Mary in the Strasbourg cathedral, she feels the power of God in her body and shortly thereafter becomes pregnant with John. The quiet and dreamy child is influenced by the Dominican preachers he hears as well as the chief architect of the cathedral. Having decided to pursue a religious vocation, Tauler travels to Cologne to study with Eckhart; here he meets Seuse, whose asceticism stands in stark contrast to his own less austere religiosity. Tauler returns to Strasbourg after Eckhart’s death and undertakes a preaching tour. Like Seuse, his reputation is tarnished by his experiences in the world; in despair, the Dominican seeks to begin his religious life anew: with the help and support of his friend Merswin and their mentor, the Friend of God from the Oberland, Tauler becomes “der seelenmächtigste Prediger in Straßburg” (“the most spiritually powerful preacher in Strasbourg”; 285) and ends his days in peace. Both fictional accounts intertwine Tauler’s life with the lives of other important Dominican and lay religious figures of the time – those with whom he studied and those to whom he preached. The relationship with Merswin is particularly significant, with Brie’s positive assessment of the relationship contrasting to the disapproving tone of Will, who states: “Keiner hat [Tauler] so knechtisch ausgeplündert, wie sein Beichtkind Rulman Merswin” (“No one has preyed upon Tauler in such a servile way as Rulman Merswin, for whom he was the confessor”; 211). Both accounts present Tauler’s life’s work against the backdrop of events of the time, especially those in Strasbourg.

Margareta Ebner Born into an aristocratic family, Margareta Ebner entered the Dominican convent at Maria Medingen at the age of 15. Except for the period between 1324 and 1325, when she was forced to return to her home in Donauwörth because of war, she remained in this community her entire life. Like many holy women of the time, she endured years of sickness. In 1332 Heinrich von Nördlingen, a secular priest, visited the monastery and became her confessor and spiritual advisor. The two exchanged letters over the years, and Heinrich encouraged Margareta to write her Revelations, her visionary autobiography, along with her prayer, the “Pater Noster”; these are her only extant works. The former includes abundant references to her life as a nun but little information regarding her early years.

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Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, author of Das gottgelobte Herz. Roman aus der Zeit der deutschen Mystik (The Heart Pledged to God: A Novel from the Time of German Mysticism, 1938) was a well-known figure in the preWorld War II years. The Austrian novelist’s works resonated with the National Socialists and resulted in his being included among six authors on the “gottbegnadete Liste” (“list of artists talented by the grace of God”) drawn up by Goebbels and Hitler in 1941. The work begins in the midst of a spiritual encounter experienced by the 10-year-old Margareta.15 She is called to be an “Angelobte des himmlischen Herrn” ‘betrothed of the heavenly Lord’ (41), and, when her older sister Alheid marries, the child expectantly awaits her own marriage to Christ. Her betrothal to the Church occurs about halfway through the 500-plus page novel, with her religious profession described in detail. When the young nun has her first ecstatic experience and receives the kiss of the Beloved (314), it is feared that this is the work of the devil (315), but the prioress vouches for its genuineness. Political turmoil and famine in the land cause Margareta to return to her family in Donauwörth, and upon her return, the secular priest Heinrich von Nördlingen arrives at Maria Medingen. His role is that of teacher but after his encounter with Margareta, he becomes a prophet, sharing her experiences with the Gottesfreunde and the congregations he preaches to during his travels. The final pages return to the theme of spiritual devotion and its value to religious communities at the time, as Emperor Ludwig der Bayer (Louis the Bavarian) visits to view the imperial regalia on display at the convent. The novel concludes with Margareta speaking with the Christ Child statue that has been sent to her as a gift. As Margareta suckles the Child, “[s]ie war in ihrem Leben nie noch seliger gewesen” (“she had never been more blessed in her life”; 537). Kolbenheyer’s narrative of Margareta’s life as a child in the secular world and later as a cloistered nun is closely tied to descriptions of the socio-historical milieu that overshadow the theme of religion throughout much of the novel. The politics of the region and its impact on the lives of the Ebner family are focal points, and, although the author takes liberties with chronology, events are presented with historical accuracy, e.g., the destruction of Margareta’s presumed birthplace by King Albrecht I in 1301; the relationship between the king and his nephew Duke John, which culminates in John’s murder of his uncle; and the struggle between Frederick of Habsburg and Louis of Wittelsbach. Characteristic of Kolbenheyer’s historical novels is the use of dialect, which is employed by all of the figures. Surprising is the late introduction of the key figure of Heinrich von Nördlingen (479). Citations by the author from Heinrich’s letters, his only extant works, are fictional but

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imitate his ornate rhetorical style. Margareta’s own Revelations describe in detail the sensual nature of her religious experiences – what she saw, heard, tasted, and smelled – and their physical impact upon her: the binding silence, uncontrollable speaking, loud outcries, and the sharp arrows of love. However, Kolbenheyer does not explore these aspects of her life as much as might be expected, although he references her physical suffering, the long silences, and her relationship with the Christ Child. The idea of Margareta as Christ’s bride appears repeatedly, but lacking are the visionary conversations with her Beloved found in her Revelations. The religiosity of the work is tempered, undoubtedly due to the decade during which it was written. There are also occasional skeptical comments about the ecstatic experiences of religious women during Margareta’s time (356) and the suspect motivation of male religious who foster such behavior, exemplified here by Brother Lambert, who is directed to encourage piety among the Ebner women through his charismatic ways in order to fill the Church’s coffers (221). Margareta realizes her calling by becoming a nun; however, she also fulfills the traditional role of a woman, in her way, as a mother to the Christ Child. It is noteworthy that the novel ends rather abruptly at this point.

Conclusion The analyses above present a myriad of fictional accounts of the lives of the German medieval mystics. Despite occasional irony and skepticism about the Church and the mystical experience, most of the authors are respectful of their individual protagonists’ callings and the nature of their spirituality. A number of writers are especially adept at creating an authentic medieval milieu that integrates the religious and secular worlds. Others make a clearer appeal to the tastes of modern audiences by introducing popular notions of the Middle Ages, love affairs, political machinations, magic, and murder. Although solitude is the hallmark of the mystical experience, the protagonists here are remarkably social and socialized. Most accounts are in the third person, allowing the reader to encounter these religious men and women as others did – and indeed it is the perspective of the world that determines whether a mystic is ultimately deemed a heretic or a saint. These fictional accounts confirm the timelessness as well as the timeliness of the story of these medieval German mystics.

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Notes 1

George Ferzoco chronicles the early failed attempt and recent successful attempt at recognition of Hildegard’s cult and ultimately her sanctity. 2 McGinn’s series on the history of mysticism, especially Volume 2, The Growth of Mysticism (1994), and Volume 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (2005), are most useful resources for this topic. 3 Additional general information may be found in Hollywood’s and Beckman’s work, which discusses contexts, key terms, and contemporary questions. 4 Despite the popularity of Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead in the later Middle Ages and today as well as the significant spiritual activity in the community of Helfta in the thirteenth century, neither has proven to be a topic of interest to writers of historical fiction to date. 5 There are comparatively few fictional works dealing with other Western European mystical figures. One notable exception is the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich. Susannah Mary Chewning discusses five novels about Julian of Norwich in her article. 6 The German Historical Novel project of the Institut für Germanistik at the Universität Innsbruck (1991-2002) provides a database of German historical novels between 1780 and 1945. The database includes 13 titles for the figures under discussion: five for Hildegard, three each for Eckhart and Tauler, and one each for Seuse and Ebner. Four of the works are not analyzed here, since the mystic does not play a central role. Two reference Hildegard: Adolf Glaser, Wulfhilde. Roman aus dem dreizehnten Jahrhundert (1880), and Coloman Schlesinger, Arnold vom Seelenhofe. Eine Mainzer Tragödie aus dem 12. Jahrhundert. Historischer Roman (1926); one Eckhart: Dorothea von Fabeck, Der Sänger der Rothenburg. Ein Kyffhäuserbuch (1938); and one Tauler: Sophie Evenius, Meister Erwins Tochter. Aus Straßburgs vergangenen Tagen (1929). Four recent works ostensibly related to this topic have been excluded as well. Bodo Heimann’s Geschichte von Meister Eckhart (1985) consists of a series of vignettes describing the Master’s response to various contemporaneous and modern situations. Bettina Darré’s Die Wächterin. Das Geheimnis der Hildegard von Bingen (2009), despite its title, features the saint in a minor role. On her deathbed - Hildegard’s death occurs on p. 35 of the 349-page novel - Hildegard utters a secret concerning the Stein der Weisen to the protagonist, Sister Margarete, which serves as the focus of the plot. Anette Huesmann’s Die Glut des Bösen. Kriminalroman (2012), a murder mystery, deals with the twentieth-century discovery of a Hildegardian medical manuscript that leads to intrigue. Lorette Nobécourt’s La clôture des merveilles. Une vie d’Hildegard de Bingen (2013) offers a poetic retelling of the magistra’s life rather than a fictional historical narrative. The Young Adult historical fiction novel Feathers and Trumpets: A Story of Hildegard von Bingen by Joyce Ray (2014) has been excluded here as well. 7 Gurk’s Meister Eckehart appeared in a new edition in 1943. The original edition was not available for this study.

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8

See Mühlberger and Habitzel for statistics regarding the production of German historical novels. Historical novels of this era are the subject of Vallery’s Führer, Volk und Charisma. 9 An English translation of both texts is provided by Silvas. According to Jutta’s vita, Hildegard’s teenage years were spent at the Sponheim estate of Jutta’s family, but only Marstrand-Jørgensen among the authors discussed here opts for this version of Hildegard’s youth. 10 The Croatian novel Sluga Vjeþne Mudrosti about Seuse by Sida Košutiü (Zagreb: Duhovnog života, 1930) was not available for this study; the title “Servant of Eternal Wisdom” is the epithet Seuse uses for himself in his autobiography, the first work of his Exemplar. Ohanneson’s novel has been translated into Spanish: Una luz tan intensa: Hildegard von Bingen, trans. Dolors Gallart (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 1998). 11 Kimberley M. Benedict briefly discusses Lachman’s work among the “emotional perspectives” in the chapter “Revisionary Histories” of her work (88). 12 The “Schwester Katrei” tract, whose ideas often have been viewed as exemplary of the Heresy of the Free Spirit, was incorrectly attributed to Eckhart in early editions of the work. 13 Hardtwig notes the popularity of the Reisebericht ‘travel report’ – real or imagined – as a topos in historical novels in the second half of the twentieth century (21). 14 See, for example, Tobin. 15 Kolbenheyer’s Das gottgelobte Herz has been analyzed extensively by Hanimann (159-77).

Works Referenced Primary Sources Bédard, Jean. Mâitre Eckhart 1260-1328. Paris: Stock, 1998. Print. Brie, Maria. Johannes Tauler und der Gottesfreund. Roman. Basel: Rudolf Geering, 1927. Print. Cüpper, Adam. Die Heilige. Rheinischer Roman. Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1923. Print. Demkovich, Michael. The Death of Magister Aycardus. Charleston, SC: Lumen, 2011. Print. Diehl, Ludwig. Suso. Roman eines deutschen Seelenmenschen. Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1922. Print. Dyrek, G. M. The Seer and the Scribe. Spear of Destiny: A Medieval Murder Mystery. Carmel, IN: Luminis, 2011. Print. Gillen, Otto. Bruder Heinrich des Seusen mühsame und selige Wanderwege zwischen Konstanz und Köln. Karlsruhe: Badenia, 1946. Print.

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Gillen, Otto. Der Mystiker vom Bodensee: Heinrich Seuses Reise von Konstanz nach Köln. Stein am Rhein: Christiana, 1984. Print. Göbel, Gabriele. Die Mystikerin Hildegard von Bingen: Roman. Munich: Econ und List, 1998. Print. Gurk, Paul. Meister Eckehart. 1925. Dessau: Karl Rauch, 1943. Print. Hünermann, Wilhelm. Das lebendige Licht. Roman. Bonn: Verlag der Buchgemeinde, 1941. Print. Kemter, Bernd. Meister Eckharts Prozess: Roman um den mittelalterlichen Prediger und Mystiker. Berlin: Frieling, 2002. Print. Koch, Ursula. Die Meisterin von Rupertsberg: Hildegard von Bingen, eine Botin der Liebe. Historischer Roman. Gießen: Brunnen, 2009. Print. Kolbenheyer, Erwin Guido. Das gottgelobte Herz. Munich: Albert LangenGeorg Müller, 1938. Print. Lachman, Barbara. Hildegard, the Last Year. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1997. Print. Lachman, Barbara. The Journal of Hildegard von Bingen. New York: Bell Tower, 1993. Print. Marstrand-Jørgensen, Anne Lise. Tochter des Lichts. Ein Hildegard von Bingen-Roman. Trans. Patrick Zöller. Berlin: Insel, 2012. Print. Much, Hans. Meister Ekkehart: Ein Roman der deutschen Seele. Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1927. Print. Noske, Edgar. Der Fall Hildegard von Bingen: Ein Krimi aus dem Mittelalter. 1999. Munich: Goldmann, 2004. Print. O’Connell, Mary. The King’s Daughter. Hildegard von Bingen, A Medieval Romance. Sidney, NSW: Handmaid Press, 2003. Print. Ohanneson, Joan. Scarlet Music: Hildegard von Bingen. New York: Crossroad, 1997. Print. Riebe, Brigitte. Prophetin vom Rhein. Munich: Diana, 2010. Print. Röttger, Karl. “Das Gestirn Eccehart.” In Das Buch der Gestirne. Leipzig: Paul List, 1933. Print. Sharratt, Mary. Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print. Trooger, Sabina. Hildegard von Bingen: Roman eines brennenden Lebens. Munich: Schneekluth, 1998. Print. Vestdijk, Simon. Het proces van Meester Eckhart. 1969. The Hague: N.V. Uitgeverij Nijgh and Van Ditmar, 1982. Print. von Redern, Hedwig. Eine deutsche Frau. Lebensbild Hildegards von Bingen. Äbtissin des Klosters Rupertsberg 1098-1179. Schwerin: Friedrich Bahn, 1923. Print.

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Welzel, Petra. Hildegards Lied: Hildegard von Bingen: Der Roman ihres Lebens. Frankfurt am Main: Krüger, 2005. Print. Will, Robert. Tauler. Eine Geschichte aus Straßburgs Vergangenheit. Basel: Ernst Finckh, 1920. Print.

Secondary Sources Benedict, Kimberley M. Empowering Collaborations. Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Chewning, Susannah Mary. “Julian of Norwich in Popular Fiction.” Julian of Norwich's Legacy. Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception. Ed. Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 101-12. Print. Coakley, John W. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Print. Ebner, Margaret. Major Works. Trans. and ed. Leonard P. Hindsley. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993. Print. Ferzoco, George. “The Canonization and Doctorization of Hildegard von Bingen.” A Companion to Hildegard von Bingen. Ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and George Ferzoco. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. 305-16. Print. Habitzel, Kurt, and Günter Mühlberger. Projekt Historischer Roman. Institut für Germanistik, Universität Innsbruck, 1997. Web. 16 September 2016. Hanimann, Willy A. Studien zum historischen Roman (1939-1945). Bern: Peter Lang, 1981. Print. Hardtwig, Wolfgang. “Geschichte für Leser: Populäre Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte für Leser: Populäre Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Erhard Schütz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005. 2111-32. Print. Hildegard of Bingen. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. Trans. Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. —. Scivias. Trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1990. Print. Hollywood, Amy, and Patricia Z. Beckman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism. Cambridge and New York:

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Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print. McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism. Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200-1350). New York: Crossroad, 1998. Print. —. The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Print. —. The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500). New York: Crossroad, 2005. Print. Mühlberger, Günter, and Kurt Habitzel. “The German Historical Novel (1780-1945): The German Historical Novel from 1780 to 1945. Utilising the Innsbruck Database.” Travellers in Time and Space. Reisende durch Zeit und Raum: The German Historical Novel. Ed. Osman Durrani and Julian Preece. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 5-23. Print. Silvas, Anna. Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical Sources. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Print. Tobin, Frank. “Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?” Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Ed. Catherine M. Mooney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 118-35. Print. Vallery, Helmut. Führer, Volk und Charisma. Der nationalsozialistische historische Roman. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1980. Print.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE OTHER WITCH-CRAZE: THE EARLY MODERN PERSECUTIONS IN RECENT HISTORICAL FICTION WALTRAUD MAIERHOFER

In 1998, I attended a crowded museum-tour-plus-performance in the historical residence of the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler and the torture chamber of the historical city hall in Regensburg, titled “Wissenschaft und Aberglauben: Der Hexenprozess gegen die Mutter des Astronomen Johannes Kepler” (“Science and Superstition: The Witchcraft Trial against the Mother of Astronomer Johannes Kepler”). Despite the dreary late-fall weather, it was crowded. I heard an audience member say in surprise what translates to “And I thought, only school students are dragged to things like these.” But no, the subject of the museum tour which included performed scenes (“Szenische Führung mit Schauspiel”) was the trial against Katharina Kepler, accused of witchcraft, based on historical documents such as letters, trial documents, and excerpts from the astronomer’s works.1 Kepler defended his mother in letters to the court in Leonberg, Württemberg, and to the Duke. The result was that Katharina Kepler was not burnt at the stake, the usually certain outcome of such a trial; she was set free but died shortly afterwards from the consequences of torture and malnutrition. When the verdict with the accusations was read, a woman behind me shared with her friend a suspicion if this were all it took, she very likely would have died as a witch in those times. Is such identification part of what makes the witch-hunts so fascinating for today’s audience? While this may still be true to a certain extent, though difficult to measure, this chapter argues that there are other factors to consider. Several other cities and towns such as Freiburg and even Zurich, remember their own witch trials in the form of guided tours, museum exhibits, and plays,2 feeding into the interest in corresponding fiction

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bestsellers but also in turn benefitting from them. In the case of Katharina Kepler it is the novel by Katja Doubek which bears the explanatory subtitle “Die Hexenjagd auf die Mutter des großen Astronomen” (Katharina Kepler: The Witch-Hunt for the Great Astronomer’s Mother, 2004). Popular novels about more or less documented cases of persecution and execution are nothing new but have appeared in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in a surprising number and variety since 1990. Such an important factor in the publishing market deserves our scholarly attention. It can serve as a kind of focus group, revealing a formula for highly successful historical fiction today that exploits a topic already more or less familiar to everybody. The belief in witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and America and the persecution of men and women as witch-masters and witches has produced a vast and ever-growing body of historical research, making the witch-hunts one of the most-researched phenomena of Western history.3 The German lands of the Holy Roman Empire were the center of the European witch-hunts, and in the wake of research and the growing interest in women’s history since the 1970s, a large number of novels for a general reading audience, have been published and several have become bestsellers. On the other hand, Wiccan beliefs and new paganism enjoy new popularity, and romantic ideas and images about magic, supernatural powers, and even torture continue to abound in Western popular culture, while similar hunts are still going on in parts of the world. The more trivial fictional writing with its half-truths and conjectures still had a powerful hold on the popular imagination, while historical scholarship did not attain a similar broad acceptance, noted historian Rita Voltmer in her introduction to the catalogue of the 2002 Berlin exhibition, Hexenwahn (Witch Mania). This chapter argues that such discontent and this gap between scholarship and entertainment culture may have contributed to the recent wave of historical novels authored by historians and fiction writers academically trained in the discipline. Writers such as Sabine Weigand, Harald Parigger, and Brigitte Riebe have a doctorate in history; Katja Doubek, Eveline Hasler, Tanja Kinkel, and Christa-Maria Zimmermann also have degrees in history. Several authors of such novels also write historiographical non-fiction, for example Doubek, Jürgen Hoops von Scheessel, Parigger, and the Swiss author Franz Rueb. Several works include a list of sources, related readings or a chronology (for example Hasler, Parigger, Ulrike Schweikert) and/or clearly mark quotes and excerpts from historical documents (Manfred Böckl, Hasler, Weigand, Josefine Wittenbecher). The persecutions are certainly not the only topic popular in German-

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language historical fiction. Since about 1990, the genre in general witnessed a “Wiederkehr,” a return, a sheer explosion of publications and popularity, as pointed out for example by Hans-Edwin Friedrich. The witchcraft persecutions are important to study because they provide a paradigm of one of the major trends in historical fiction to no longer seek national success stories but instead explore the “other,” the dissenters, and victims of change. While there is a large number of sub-literary and trivial genre fiction marketed as historical which exploits the theme for suspense, romance, and clichés, there is also a considerable number that do in fact convey recent historical research and scholarly findings. The following overview will show that important approaches represented besides women’s history in general include biography as historical microstudy, men and children as victims of persecutions, and original historical documents, especially the book Malleus Maleficarum, and its role in the persecutions and in the opposition to the witch trials. In several cases the novels have made legal and other documents available to the reader, often especially of local or regional interest and even before they became available on the webpages of archives and in scholarly studies.4 The less trivial novels present the topic in a way that alludes to contemporary issues, criticizing modern “witch-hunts.” Because of this educational component, the topic is also very fruitful for historical fiction aimed at young adult readers, and such works are often assigned as school reading. The first part of this chapter shows the wide variety of historical fiction addressing the topic of witchcraft and the persecution of witches: authors and their background and gender, concepts of history, patterns of historical cases, gender of protagonists, subgenres, and patterns of fictionalization or trivialization.5 The second part analyses major trends in representative works, namely the relation of fact and fiction and the modus operandi of those academic authors, who tend to incorporate various historical documents into one complex portrayal of the historical circumstances usually focused on a specific city, such as Sabine Weigand’s Die Seelen im Feuer (Burning Souls, 2008), Eveline Hasler’s docu-fiction Die Vogelmacherin (Child Witches, 1997) focusing on a documented trial and also on children as victims, and Elmar Bereuter’s Die Lichtfänger (Catchers of Light, 2005) which focuses on the opponents to the trials as main characters. The young adult literature about this topic has recently been examined in several studies, namely Margit-Ute Burkhardt’s dissertation Hexengeschichte / Hexengeschichten (Witch History / Witch Stories, 2004) and Heinke Kilian’s Von Hexen, Zauberern und magischen Gestalten (On Witches, Sorcerers, and Magic Figures, 2010); it is included in the survey, but no example is included in the analytical part.

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Trends: Gender, documentation, time frame, meta-fiction There is some overlap with Katya Skow’s chapter in this book, which examines popular historical fiction “by, about, and for women.” Her major findings apply to the theme of witchcraft persecutions because the majority of such narratives is about women, is told by female authors, and read by a mostly female audience. However, since the beginning of historical fiction, the witch-hunts have also been narrated by male authors and included male protagonists, and they continue to do so today. Among the ones included here are Elmar Bereuter, Manfred Böckl, Stefan Fandrey, Uwe Gardein, Frank Goyke, Alexander Hartung, Jürgen Hoops von Scheessel, Jürgen Kehrer, Thomas Meßenzahl, Harald Parigger, Roman Rausch, Franz Rueb, Michael Seitz, Sebastian Thiel, Michael Wilcke, and Walter Züst. First, a few remarks about the history of the topic as such are in order. Witchcraft persecutions and trials have been narrated in historical fiction since the beginnings of the genre, for example in Ludwig Tieck’s Hexensabbat (Witches’ Sabbath, 1832).6 The persecutions are remarkably present in the extensive historical fiction of the nineteenth century in its search for a nation and its exploration of the nation’s past (for example in Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen (The Forefathers, 1872-80) and Wilhelm Jensen’s Minatka (1871). Major canonical authors tended to fictionalize historical cases in shorter narratives rather than in full-fledged novels, such as Ludwig Bechstein’s Hexengeschichten (Witches’ Stories, 1854), Wilhelm Raabe’s “Else von der Tanne,” (1865) and Theodor Storm’s “Renate” (1878) and the fragment “Sidonie von Borcke” (1879-82). Major authors of historical fiction dealt with witchcraft persecutions within complex fictional and non-fictional works such as Ricarda Huch—the first such author with a doctorate in history—in her narrative Der große Krieg (The Great War, 1912-1914) and Alfred Döblin in his novel Wallenstein (1920). During the Nazi regime, authors of the “inner exile” drew parallels between the historical persecutions and the terror of the Nazi regime; for example, Erika Mitterer in Der Fürst der Welt (The Prince of Darkness, 1940). In his novel Hexenkampf: Ein Friedrich-Spee-Roman (Fighting for Witches: A Novel about Friedrich Spee, 1939), Hans Eschelbach, an author who supported the Nazis, aligned the trial-opponent and Jesuit theologian von Spee with the party’s fight against “Volksfremde” (“those considered foreign to the German people”). In respective chapters in my book about historical women and images of femininity in historical fiction about the Thirty Years’ War, Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber, I have argued that the “witch novels” of the nineteenth century established a

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circulus vitiosus that is still prevalent and being perpetuated in popular fiction, that of the female protagonist being presented as victim of individual hatred or mass hysteria instead of a model of a persevering character apt for reader identification as was the case for most male heroes of realist historical fiction. Historians such as Heide Wunder have shown that the inquisition prevented the rise of women to political power and successfully eliminated women from the writing of history as the history of great individuals. It also prevented the writing of historical fiction about average but representative female individuals from the middle class. What was left was the subject of the persecutions themselves. However, when staying true to historical facts, it does not provide female heroes and prototypes for emancipation, but reinforces the patriarchal order where women appear powerless and suppressed. Authors of historical novels were faced with the absence of well-documented female individuals in history, while on the other hand—before the academic discipline of women’s history rose to prominence—a large audience and readership interested in female protagonists in historical settings arose and has continued to grow. This legacy was abandoned and countered in the twentieth century. As part of the 1970s women’s movement and in its wake, female figures persecuted as witches (fictional and well as historical characters) have repeatedly been represented as independent, strong women, as forerunners and models of emancipation. Post-1990, such identification is rare and occurs mostly in the more trivial works of fiction. Another important fact that has changed is the periodization. Advertising and marketing used to locate fiction on witchcraft persecutions in the Middle Ages. Historical novels have contributed to correcting this error as seen for example in the German online magazine for historical fiction, Histo-Couch.de which in its timeline now places the theme of “Hexenverfolgung” ‘witchcraft persecution’ correctly in the Early Modern Period. The majority of more recent historical novels thus takes place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Altenstein, Bereuter’s Lichtfänger, Böckl’s Die Hexe soll brennen (The Witch Shall Burn), Doubek, Fritz, Goyke, Hartung, Hasler, Hass, Hoops von Scheessel, Hübner, Kehrer, Köster-Lösche, Meßenzehl, Parigger, Rausch, Scheikert, Steyer, Thiel, Weigand, Wilcke, Wittenbecher, Zimmermann, Zück. This emphasizes—in accordance with historical research—that witch trials and witchcraft persecutions were an Early Modern phenomenon. It is remarkable how many historical novels are based on documented protagonists or cases. Bereuter’s Lichtfänger features the theologian Cornelius Loos, the priest and poet Friedrich von Spee, and the small-

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town mayor Hermann Löher; Böckl’s Die Hexe soll brennen narrates the case of Katharina Grueber in Straubing; Doubek focuses on Katharina Kepler; Fritz’s Die Hexe von Freiburg (The Witch of Freiburg) narrates the life and trial of Catharina Stadellmenin, the widow of a Freiburg guildmaster and city councilor; Hasler’s Vogelmacherin (The Bird Maker) features trials against children in Lucerne and Buchau; Hass’s Teufelstanz (The Devil’s Dance) focuses on cases in Nördlingen; the four novels by Hoops von Scheessel follows trial documents of cases in Rotenburg near Lüneburg; Parigger’s Hexe von Zeil (The Witch from Zeil) has a fictional protagonist modeled on documented historical persons of the Bamberg trials 1625 to 1630; Schweikert’s Die Hexe und die Heilige (The Witch and the Saint) on the victims of the Ellwangen trials in 1588 and 1611 to 1618; Wilcke’s Hexentage (Witches’ Days) follows Anna Ameldung, wife of an apothecary in Osnabrück; Wittenbecher’s Tödliche Feuer (Deadly Fire) the city official Dietrich Flade of Trier and her Feuer am Fluss (Fire at the River) the child murderess Eva Zeihen; Zück finally narrates the life of the Swiss farm woman Agatha Rohner. All the novels stress that the persecutions were an Early Modern phenomenon, took place in a tumultuous time of change and crises, and were often the result of threats to the existing power structures. A few have a slightly earlier time-frame in the fifteenth century: Bereuter’s novel Hexenhammer (The Witches’ Hammer) subtitled “about the beginnings of the witchcraft persecutions,” Tanja Kinkel’s Puppenspieler (Puppeteers) as well as Brigitte Riebe’s Die Hexe und der Herzog (The Witch and the Duke) all of which place a fictional plot against the background of Heinrich Kramer and his Malleus Maleficarum of 1487. Other novels situated in the fifteenth century (Manfred Böckl’s Agnes Bernauer, Cornelia Haller’s Seelenfeuer [Fire of the Soul, Isolde Heyne’s Hexenfeuer [Witches’ Fire]) as well as Böckl’s young adult novel Svenja (taking place in the thirteenth century) include no trials. The trial and execution of Joan of Arc for heresy in fourteenth-century Rouen is only the backdrop for Stefan Fandrey’s plot in Hexengericht (Witch’s Trial). In Elsa Schöner’s Hexensohn (The Son of the Witch) and Michael Seitz’s Die Hexe von Burg Weißenstein (The Witch of Castle Weiȕenstein), both set in the late fifteenth century, the persecutions provide merely a general background for the novels’ characters and plotlines. Following Eveline Hasler’s very successful 1982 novel Anna Göldin about the Swiss maid and the 1782 trial against her which had all the marks of a witchcraft trial, several authors have also researched and narrated documented late trials of the eighteenth century including their anachronism in the Enlightenment period. Thus Böckl narrates in Der Hexenstein (The Witch’s Stone) a trial

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in Bavaria in 1703, Uwe Gardein’s Die letzte Hexe: Maria Anna Schwegelin (The Last Witch: Maria Anna Schwegelin) tells the life of the maid who was tried but not executed and who died in prison in Kempten in 1781, Franz Rueb’s Ausmisten (Cleaning out) the last trial in Zurich in 1701 which condemned eight persons, Margrit Schriber’s Das Lachen der Hexe (The Laughter of the Witch) the scapegoating of the widowed Anna Maria Schmidig in the canton of Schwyz who died during the trial in 1753. Several novels take place during the Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648) which indeed saw an upsurge in the persecutions: Doubek’s Katharina Kepler, Kehrer’s Das Geheimnis der Tulpenzwiebel (The Secret of the Tulip Bulb), Parigger’s Die Hexe von Zeil, Rausch’s Die Kinderhexe (The Child Witch) and Die Kinder des Teufels (The Children of the Devil), Sebastian Thiel’s Die Hexe vom Niederrhein (The Witch from the Lower Rhine), Sabine Weigand’s Die Seelen im Feuer, Michael Wilcke’s Hexentage, and Christa-Maria Zimmermann’s Hexentanz (The Witches’ Dance). A remark about subgenres and publishers’ classifications is in order here because they are not always a reliable guide to how important and complex descriptions of the historical era and connections are in any given work. They often do not indicate whether the protagonist is a documented person or not. More literary and discerning works such as Hasler’s tend not to be labeled as historical fiction. Hasler prefers the simple term “Roman” ‘novel’. Other writers express their emphasis on historical facts over fiction in circumlocutions and subtitles such as “Roman über die Anfänge der Hexenverfolgungen” (“novel about the beginnings of the witch-hunts”) for Bereuter’s Hexenhammer or “Der Fall Eva Zeihen” (The Case Eva Zeihen) for Wittenbecher’s Feuer am Fluss (Fire on the River). Thus some authors distinguish their writings from others that simply bear catch words such as “Hexe” ‘witch’ or “Teufel” ‘devil’ in the title and are marked as historical novel, while lacking documented persons, as well as complex historical analysis and characters thinking and acting within the given historical parameters. Examples are Rosemarie Altenstein’s Hexenfeuer: Elisabeth, lauf um dein Leben (Witch’s Fire: Elisabeth, Run for Your Life!) Ivonne Hübner’s Teufelsfarbe (Devil’s Color), and Haller’s Seelenfeuer. In his seminal study on the historical novel, Georg Lukacs termed such fiction costume novels.7 Amateur historian Hoops von Scheessel even added the redundant phrase, “über eine wahre Begebenheit” (“about a true event”), to the already extensive titles of his novels focusing on the victims of the local Rotenburg/Lüneburg trials, a response to much of trivial fiction vaguely set in the distant past and

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marketed as “historical.” Authors of historical crime fiction have also imagined crimes and mysteries against the backdrop of witch-hunts, including more or less extensive historical background, such as Hartung in Die Rache des Inquisitors (The Inquisitor’s Revenge) where a young woman searches for the secret behind the documented seventeenth-century Idstein trials.

What and how much history and to what end? Even today, any study of historical fiction cannot ignore Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937), one of the best-known works of Marxist literary theory, written in Russian exile in the 1930s when the historical novel had fallen out of the ranks of serious fiction and modernism. According to Lukács, the classical or social nineteenthcentury historical novel interconnects public events and private lives, society and the average individual. In the words of literary scholar Perry Anderson, it is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. (n.p.)

Lukacs’s claims still apply to the more ambitious and complex historical novels in the entertaining or mass audience sector. The witchcraft persecutions of the Early Modern period per se provide middle characters, opposing social forces if not a prolonged battle between good and evil, many possibilities for colorful descriptions of landmark events, famous persons and sights in the background as well as the trajectory of progress. In the tradition of the realist epic, novels such as Bereuter’s Hexenhammer and Kinkel’s Puppenspieler tell a long—often 400-600 pages long—and engaging story, full of believable characters and vivid detail. They also include intricate discussions of the reasons for the persecutions, relevant conflicts of the era, and the worldview of the people at that time. Besides good entertainment and complex historical information, they provoke critical reflection about the topic and related issues today. More literary or postmodern novels (for example by Hasler, Bereuter as discussed in more detail below) tend to experiment with surprising perspectives, a non-chronological timeline, multiple plot

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structures, or thematize the fictional aspects in historical documents. However, the large majority of entertainment fiction that is labeled “historical,” belongs to a diffused form no longer aspiring to a Hegelian epic totality but instead relying on a set of scenes or stories of that historical period, often narrowly focused on intrigues, conspiracies, seductions, infamies, heroic deeds, sufferings, and sacrifices. Stories of witchcraft persecutions and trials have a peculiar affinity to such narratives because even documented historical cases show the same type of stories in abundance and even early scholarship repeated some of the clichés such as midwives, redheads, and plant experts being portrayed as especially vulnerable targets. The novels by Haller, Heyne, Hübner, Schöner, Schweikert, and Thiel as well as Köster-Lösche’s Mutter Griebsch contain such clichés. It does not come as a surprise that several novels about witchcraft persecutions were the first published work of the respective author, such as Hexengericht (Witches’ Court) by Stefan Fandrey; Die Hexe von Freiburg (The Witch of Freiburg) by Astrid Fritz; Seelenfeuer (Souls’ Fire) by Cornelia Haller; Die Rache des Inquisitors by Alexander Hartung; Hexenfeuer by Thomas Meßenzahl; Der Hexensohn by Elsa Schöner; Die Hexe von Burg Weißenstein by Michael Seitz; and Die Hexe vom Niederrhein by Sebastian Thiel. Among the writers are amateur historians researching local history, with several also publishing works of nonfiction of local and regional interest: Jürgen Hoops von Scheessel for Rotenburg near Lüneburg, Jürgen Kehrer for Münster, Kari Köster-Lösche for North Frisia, Thomas Meßenzehl for Aschaffenburg, Nicole Steyer for Idstein in the Taunus region, Züst for the Appenzell region in Switzerland.8 Several novels—by both female and male authors—have male main characters either as persecuted victims, as witch hunters, or opponents of the persecution: the Dominican monk Heinrich Kramer in Elmar Bereuter’s Hexenhammer; the theologian Cornelius Loos, the Jesuit priest and poet Friedrich von Spee, the Rheinbach mayor Hermann Löher in Die Lichtfänger; a monk and inquisitor, both fictional, in Fandrey’s Hexengericht; two fictional inquisitors in Hartung’s Die Rache des Inquisitors; a young fictional nephew of the banker Jakob Fugger in addition to the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in Tanja Kinkel’s Die Puppenspieler; in Franz Rueb’s Ausmisten, one man is among the group of eight villagers condemned, and the leader of the accusers is also a man; a historical mayor of Trier is the protagonist in Josefine Wittenbecher’s Tödliche Feuer. Young adult fiction tends to prefer protagonists of the same age group as the readers. Thus, Böckl’s Svenja features the daughter of a knight,

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Hass’s Teufelstanz two young women, Isolde Heyne’s Hexenfeuer a young woman and her stepsister, Kehrer’s young adult detective story a young woman, as does Parigger’s Die Hexe von Zeil; Zimmermann’s Hexentanz focuses on an orphaned brother and sister. Several recent novels have made children and young adults also the protagonists of adult historical fiction, such as the girls accused of witchcraft in the novels by Altenstein, Hasler, Köster-Lösche, Rausch, and Thiel, also Hoops von Schessel’s Gretge and the siblings in Rausch’s Die Kinder des Teufels and Hasler’s Vogelmacherin. The latter is discussed in the next section, the first of three detailed analyses of individual works.

Children in Witchcraft Trials: Die Vogelmacherin by Eveline Hasler The Salem witch trials of 1692 are some of the best known and best documented in the history of the witch-hunts.9 Key historical facts are the following: The Salem cases in New England began with common forms of foretelling the future, such as future husbands. In January of 1692, nineyear-old Betty Parris, daughter of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village church, and his 11-year-old niece Abigail Williams showed fits, convulsions and other odd behavior that were explained as being caused by demons or witches. The fits proved infectious and spread among the girls and a few young women in the community, and they denounced three local women as witches. In the course of the ensuing witch-hunt, twentyeight persons were brought to trial, nineteen of which were executed and one of them died during torture. The majority of the accused were married women over the age of forty, the ones who accused them were young women around age sixteen. Beliefs in witchcraft and demons were among the baggage that the New England settlers had brought with them from Europe. The Salem trials represent a type of persecution where adolescents and young adults (from twelve to eighteen years old) were more active than younger children in spreading rumors of witchcraft. The stories Eveline Hasler, born 1935 in Glarus, Switzerland, tells are different. The two parts of the novel, Die Vogelmacherin: Die Geschichte von Hexenkindern (The Birdmaker Girl: The Story of Child Witches, 1997)10 by the history-teacher-turned-writer are based on actual trial documents. These trials in Lucerne and Buchau followed events in rural communities and villages in today’s Switzerland and Southwest of Germany and took place a few decades earlier than the Salem trials. Hasler’s novel shows children and adolescents as the victims of abuse and neglect and political power struggles. The children and adolescents are not

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the accusers but the accused, having supposedly made a pact with the devil and performed black magic. Hasler does not construct an epic picture of the time, and her writing does not try to fit Lukacs’s criteria of the social historical novel. She stresses the psychological dynamics and the issue of child abuse, reminding us of the fact that legal rights for children are a fairly recent accomplishment in history. They should not be taken for granted but fought for throughout the world today. In his 2008 book on Africa, British journalist Richard Dowden pointed out that children in Angola and Congo are still today being accused of witchcraft or of being possessed by devils (317). A CNN International headline in 2009 reported that in Nigeria there was “Abuse of child ‘witches’ on rise” (Karimi). A growing body of historical scholarship has shown that throughout the history of witchcraft trials children have been involved (La Fontaine, Roper, Sebald, Walinski-Kiehl, Weber). Children, pregnant women, and women in childbirth were believed to be more vulnerable to black magic than others. It was not unusual that children who testified as the victims of a magical attack, were charged with the crime themselves. Several historians have reasoned that this happened because their accusations challenged adult authority and threatened basic hierarchical structures in the community. Anyone with stories about witches' sabbaths and other dark fantasies was not seen as seeking attention or possibly suffering from neglect or abuse but as guilty of witchcraft, and witchcraft was an exceptional crime punishable by the death penalty regardless of age. As Hasler states in her preface to Die Vogelmacherin, she encountered accusations of child witchcraft while doing research for her earlier novel, Anna Göldin—Letzte Hexe (1982)11 and she felt drawn to the topic especially by historical documents, namely the verdict of the Schmidlin case and the records of the Lehner case, which served as starting point for her writing (5-6).12 It is remarkable that a wave of German-language scholarship on witchcraft trials against children was published only after Hasler addressed the topic in fiction (Weber, Beck, Dillinger, Bettlé), and her novel was followed by several trivial novels for adults about children as victims of witch-hunts.13 The protagonists of Hasler’s novel are based on documented cases.14 Eleven-year old Catharina Schmidlin from the village of Romoos near Lucerne was burnt at the stake for witchcraft and blasphemy in 1652. The fact that the executioner was to strangle her beforehand, was considered a mitigation of the sentence. Four pages of the original records of her interrogation, “Verhör mit der ‘Kinderhexe’ Kathrin Schmidlin von Romoos, 1652” (Interrogation of the Child Witch Kathrin Schmidlin from Romoos, 1652), before the court in Lucerne are extant in the State Archive

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of Lucerne and can be viewed on its webpage in both the original handwriting and transcription. In Buchau on the German side of Lake Constance, a nine-year-old boy and his eleven-year-old sister, the Lehner siblings, were condemned for relations with the devil in 1662. They were kept in a monastery for four years until old enough to be executed. The trial records are in the Main State Archive in Stuttgart, and the novel Die Vogelmacherin contains extensive excerpts in the original hard-to-read language of the time (255-61). In her novels, Eveline Hasler often includes quotes from documents and books retaining the original language of the respective time period, visually distinguished by print in italics. She also acknowledges several archives and historians in the appendix. Like any fiction about historical characters and events, Hasler skillfully mixes fact and fiction and applies several literary devices that draw us into the story. In contrast to Lukacs’s socio-historical novel, her characters do not think and act within the historical circumstances. Instead, she also explores psychological motivations for the behavior of the children and their accusers. The orphaned eleven-year old Catharina Schmidlin leads a life of hard work and lacks any sense of belonging. She copes by escaping into fantasies. It is by sheer coincidence that the governor hears of her blasphemous claim that she can create living birds out of clay, which leads to her arrest and incarceration. Catharina becomes the victim of Governor Amrhyn’s goal to give a terrifying example to the rebellious peasants. The larger context of Catharina Schmidlin’s case is provided by the Swiss Peasants’ War of 1653. The rural subjects demanded more rights and economic freedoms. The authorities in Lucerne feared a major transformation of existing power relations. Unlike much historical genre fiction, Hasler does not provide elaborate history lessons on these connections but only hints at them, mostly in the dialogues. The Lehner siblings of the second part of Hasler’s novel are also easy targets for persecution because they are outsiders and considered a burden to society. They are left to themselves after their mother died and their father married another woman with children. Their fate is intertwined with the economic power of the ecclesiastical territory of Buchau Abbey, or by its official title the “das weltliche gefürstete Damenstift Buchau” (“the worldly princely ladies’ convent Buchau”). The historical Franziska von Montfort immediately began the reconstruction of the Abbey after her election as abbess and made efforts to retrieve its treasure and to revive its economy, enforcing feudal rights after the losses incurred during the Thirty Years’ War (Theil 61). But only the abbesses after her were able to stabilize the economic situation and construct additional buildings (Theil 63), a fact that the novel ascribes to Franziska von Montfort alone,

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emphasizing her hunger for power and expansion. This use of poetic license clearly marks the siblings’ role as victims of external power struggles and stresses that the persecutors were not exclusively male misogynists, but included a woman in a powerful position, a constellation still neglected in historical research. The two stories are loosely connected by the character of the priest Wolfgang Hackenburger. He skeptically witnesses both cases but cannot halt the dynamics of the persecution. He is mostly fictional although there was a Jesuit monk of this name (1610 – 1666) from Freiburg/Breisgau by whom sermons are extant in Lucerne (Strobel 248). In the novel, he is a Jesuit priest and trial recorder who is influenced by writings of Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld (1591 – 1635), the Jesuit and poet whose anonymously published Latin treatise Cautio Criminalis, Or a book on Witch Trials (1631) argued against the application of torture and is referenced in the novel. Hackenburger opposes witchcraft trials and has pity on the children but the apparatus of persecution is too powerful for him to affect any change in the children’s fate.15 His interest in botany represents a hint of emerging Enlightenment thought with its focus on the study of nature and its disbelief in witchcraft and demons. Hasler narrates the events predominantly from the perspective of the children, giving insight into their perceptions and motivations. The main characters form two groups: the accused children and those sympathetic to them, namely Hackenburger and the nun Ursula Colonna. These characters are portrayed as being close to nature, not focused on power, appearances, and strict social class division of commoners and nobility. The other group believes in the opposite values and principles. In contrast, Governor Amrhyn, Abbess von Montfort, and Judge Moehren want to control nature and enforce the social and political status quo.16 As figures who hold high offices and honors, they are ultimately responsible for the innocent deaths of falsely accused victims. It is also remarkable that with the exception of Ursula Colonna, female characters do not behave in a nurturing manner towards the children but become accomplices of the authorities; for example the priest's cook Jacoba, the baker's wife, and Mrs. Huepp, the prison guard’s wife. This is just one of the features in which Eveline Hasler resists a sentimental, trivialized depiction of this important historical topic. As she states in her preface, the novel breathes new life into neglected documents, proof that reminds us of cases of injustice and the short history of Human Rights for children (Hasler 6).

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Historical Meta-Nonfiction: Elmar Bereuter’s Lichtfänger Elmar Bereuter (born 1948 in Lingenau, Austria) lives in Southern Germany and runs an advertising company. He began writing fiction about notorious historical issues of Swabia, his home region. His first novel, Schwabenkinder (Swabian Children, 2002), about children from poor peasant families who during the nineteenth century were sold or rented out to wealthy Austrian and Swiss farmers, was an immediate bestseller. In reader reviews, he is often praised for his vivid dialogues and colorful and suspenseful narration. On his homepage, he uses the term “Tatsachenroman” ‘factual novel’ to describe his fiction and conveys that he is especially interested in preserving the memory of the almost forgotten history of child laborers of that era. All his novels incorporate authentic documents. He attributes his interest in the witchcraft persecutions to an ambition to correct widespread prejudices and errors about the time period, the accused, and the motives at play.17 His 2003 novel Hexenhammer (Witches’ Hammer) followed the Dominican monk and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, in Latin named Institoris (c. 1430 – c. 1505), the witch-craft trials he was involved in, and the writing of his book Malleus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer, 1487) which has been counted among the most portentous books in history.18 The Process of writing and the resulting books are also the subject of Bereuter’s 2005 novel Die Lichtfänger (Catchers of Light), this time narrated from the perspective of exceptional individuals opposing the witch craze. In the earlier novel, Bereuter employed a fictional love story which draws the reader in and motivates a critique of the trial methods. Die Lichtfänger is less linear and conventional. The title refers to those few who undertook to bring light into the darkness of superstition and replace mania with reason and truth. The protagonists of the three parts of the novel are documented historical figures who opposed witch-hunts, namely the Dutch theologian Cornelius Loos (1556 – 1595), the Jesuit priest and poet Friedrich von Spee von Langenfeld, and Hermann Löher (1595 – 1578), merchant and lay judge in the city of Rheinbach near Cologne. The parts of the novel are named after the most significant writing by each character: Part I “De vera et ficta magia” (“About true and false magic”), Part II “Cautio criminalis” (“Judicial Precautions”), and Part III “Wehmütige Klage” (“Sorrowful Lament”). Each chapter fictionalizes the men’s experiences and insights while they witnessed the persecutions and trials that motivated them to put pen to paper. An overarching second plot line is interspersed in these chapters. It narrates the search of the American historian and librarian George Lincoln Burr

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(1857 – 1938) for documents and books about the witchcraft persecutions, which laid the foundations for the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection. Today it “contains over 3,000 titles documenting the history of the Inquisition and the persecution of witchcraft, primarily in Europe” (The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection). This narrative begins with Burr’s first journey to Europe in 1884 and includes his findings, often accidental, of copies of the three Early Modern texts. The most spectacular one is the Loos manuscript, one of the first books written in Germany against the witch trials. It was long believed to have been destroyed by the Inquisition but Burr discovered it and identified it in the Jesuit library in Trier even though its title page and author information were missing. Like Hasler in the previous section, Bereuter consulted recent scholarship and experts.19 A decade earlier, Löher’s Wehmütige Klage had been published in a new modern translation. Friedrich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis was also available in a new edition, and his life had regularly been the subject of biographies and novels (Feldmann, Weber). Cornelius Loos and his “De vera et ficta magia” are discussed in several important studies on witchcraft trials.20 The book itself remains unpublished and not translated. The Burr plot line and the novel as a whole end with his death in 1938 while he burnt most of his intellectual estate, a vast amount of office papers, excerpts, scripts, magazines, dissertations, letters, etc. Bereuter lets his protagonist sum up his life, stressing that it resulted in a lot more than a few scholarly publications: George Lincoln war darüber nicht verbittert, sondern sah es mit heiterer Gelassenheit. Seit dem Ende des Weltkriegs hatte er den größten Teil seiner Energie im Kampf gegen die amerikanische Hysterie verbraucht. Für die Freiheit der Geschichtsschreibung, die Freiheit der Religionen, die Freiheit der Wissenschaft, die Freiheit des Denkens, die Freiheit der Rassen, die Freiheit der Meinungen. Nicht für die Freiheit seiner eigenen Meinung, sondern die der Andersdenkenden. (Bereuter, Die Lichtfänger 412) George Lincoln was not bitter about it but he felt serene tranquility. Since the end of the World War, he had spent most of his energy fighting American hysteria. For freedom of historiography, freedom of religion, freedom of scholarship, freedom of thoughts, freedom for all races, freedom of opinion. Not for the freedom of his own opinion but of those whose opinions stood outside the mainstream.

This attitude contrasts sharply with what Burr witnessed in 1938 Germany, described just a few pages earlier. Bereuter does not need to

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spell out the fact that we do not need to go as far back as the witchcraft persecutions to find that fearless individuals tend to be a very small minority, those who risk their lives fighting widespread mania and delusion and its destructive dynamics, and they are often found in unexpected places. As mentioned in the novel, only one short biographical account of Burr was written a few years after his death (415) by Herbert Bainton, remembering the historian, librarian, and professor who never obtained an academic title. Die Lichtfänger is also a memorial to the enthusiastic historian Burr. Bereuter tells his efforts as strongly reflecting those he terms “catchers of light,” fighters for enlightened, humane ideas and values and equal rights for all. In addition, Bereuter acknowledges Burr’s significance for the study of witchcraft persecutions in a short epilogue, stating: “Vieles wäre ohne seine aufopferungsvolle und selbstlose Arbeit für uns und die Nachwelt wohl für immer verloren.” (“Without his self-sacrificing and selfless labor, much [of the documents and books about the witchcraft persecutions] might have been lost to posterity forever”; Die Lichtfänger 415) The final analysis examines the way in which persecutions in the distant past are connected with recent issues in a way that goes beyond paralleling persecutions then and now.

Witchcraft Persecutions as a Response to Climate Change: Die Seelen im Feuer by Sabine Weigand Among the authors of novels surveyed in the first section, Sabine Weigand (born 1961 in Nürnberg) is the one who holds a doctorate in history.21 Working as a historian for the city museum of Schwabach, she published her first historical novel in 2002 and has since landed several bestsellers. Many critics have praised the quality of her writing. The fact that she is also politically active and a member of the city council in Schwabach, conveys her conviction of the importance to connect past and present. The following sentence stands as a motto on her homepage: “Alles in allem ist die Vergangenheit ... immer ein ferner Spiegel unserer Zeit.” (“All in all, the past is … always a distant mirror of our own time”; “Sabine Weigand”). In a 2011 interview, she named the witchcraft persecutions as one of several historical phenomena that fascinate her because of their multifaceted origins in religious, political, social and psychological circumstances (Weigand 2011). Related issues such as justice, power, and its abuse are timeless. Her novel about the Bamberg witch craze, Die Seelen im Feuer (Burning Souls, 2008), has drawn particular interest and has been turned into a television film of the same

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title, directed by Urs Egger, script by Annette Hess and Stefan Kolditz.22 The novel takes place in Bamberg around 1630 during particularly widespread and cruel persecutions of witches and its eventual turning point. Between 1612 and 1632 around one thousand men, women, and children were tortured and executed, among them several mayors. The city’s ruler, a greedy Bishop Prince, used the trials to purge his political enemies and enrich himself with their wealth and possessions. The Bamberg trials are therefore an important chapter in standard studies of witch persecutions. The latest detailed monograph on the topic by Britta Gehm (2000) drew enough interest for several editions. In recent years, exhibitions including a digital museum, the “Virtual Witch Burner Museum,” lectures, and publications including extensive documents quoted in Weigand’s novel (Stadt Bamberg, Hasselbeck/Zink, Kloos/ Göltl, Grießhammer), have added to scholarly and public interest in the topic. In nearby Zeil, a documentation center has been established (Dokumentationszentrum Zeiler Hexenturm). In 2011, a citizens group was formed that called for rehabilitation of the victims and a monument in the city, something neglected in the buzz about Bamberg’s designation as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1993. The decision about the monument was reached in Fall 2014, the monument was revealed in August of 2015, a lighted sculpture titled “Brandmal” ‘burnmark’. Besides marking the remembrance of the city’s darkest chapter, the monument’s purpose is to raise awareness of and resistance to all forms of fanaticism and discrimination in the present, as stated on the accompanying plaque.23 According to statements in the above-mentioned interview, Weigand, as a historian, approaches her protagonist and theme for a new novel always via extensive study of scholarly publications and historical documents including archival material (Sabine Weigand). Similarly to Hasler, she likes to incorporate original documents into the narrative and does not modernize the language of historical documents. In an interview, she described the process as weaving these sources into her text, explaining that this way the characters could talk directly and without detours to the reader, offering access on an emotional basis to life in earlier centuries (Borchardt). To quote the author one more time, she made the most of the abundance of sources for the Bamberg persecutions: Im Fall des Bamberger Hexenwahns war die Quellenlage sensationell gut. Die kompletten Hexenakten aus dem 17. Jahrhundert sind uns erhalten geblieben. Folterprotokolle, Testamente, Geständnisse, Urteile, Gnadenzettel, Brennholzrechnungen, Speisezettel, Briefe und Anklageschriften. So viel historische Grundlage ist ein Glücksfall. (Borchardt n.p.)

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Chapter Eight In the case of the Bamberg witch craze, the supply of source material was exceedingly good. The complete seventeenth-century records of the witch trial are extant. Torture records, last wills, confessions, verdicts, pardons, bills for the wood, menus, letters, and bills of indictment. It is a stroke of luck to have such a solid historical basis [for a novel].]

In the epilogue to Die Seelen im Feuer, Weigand recounts the fate of the court papers, which only by a series of coincidences escaped destruction in the early nineteenth century (515). Unlike the examples above—and unlike Weigand’s other protagonists so far who are drawn from documented historical persons such as Elisabeth of Thuringia—, the foreground plot of Seelen im Feuer is a fictional and admittedly a rather trivial love story. The reader learns of the events through the characters of Johanna Wolff, a pharmacist’s daughter, and a young physician, Cornelius Weinmann. Weinmann who studied in Vienna and experienced the new Renaissance art movement and ideas in Italy, is aghast with the superstitions, faith dominated by fear, and general backwardness in Bamberg, when he visits to care for his dying father. Johanna, his love interest, a strong, unusually educated and active young woman, carries on her father’s business although it is forbidden. In the interview, Weigand states her preference for strong female characters from the past: “Mich fasziniert, wenn Frauen sich aus der ihnen damals vorgegebenen Rolle befreien, wenn sie sich quasi über ihre Zeit hinausheben. Es ist gar nicht so einfach, solche historischen Frauengestalten zu finden.” (“It fascinates me when women liberate themselves from the role imposed on them by their time period, when they lift themselves out of their time. It is not easy at all to find such historical women”). It is telling that Weigand did not turn one of the documented witchhunt victims into a quasi-modern, emancipated woman, but created fictional characters for the reader to relate to the historical events. Weigand does not superimpose modern thoughts and analyses unto her characters, but lets the character of Weinmann encounter humanist thinking and new medical treatments in Vienna. Johanna is very religious and thinks and acts in the manner believable of the time, but she is also curious and critical and questions her social and political conditions. The Bishop Prince Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim is ambitious and rejects the ideas of the Reformation. Although the Thirty Year’s War had been raging for many years, it had spared Bamberg so far. Travelers and tradesmen bring new ideas that criticize the authorities and knowledge of nature to the city. The weather has been unusually cold and wet for years, the harvests are meager or fail completely, and the people go hungry. Who

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is to blame? The priests preach of Satan and his temptations, and fear spreads. The first accusations of witchcraft are being uttered. Weinmann cannot leave but has to serve the Prince Bishop and examine the imprisoned for witches’ marks. The power-hungry Archbishop named Förner uses the witch-hunt to persecute his political opponents, and the Bishop Prince collects the wealth of the victims for his own projects. The dynamics of denunciation and mass hysteria takes on a life of its own. Johanna becomes suspect because she makes herbal medicines and illegally manages a business, usually the sole prerogative of a man. Cornelius is shocked by the cruelty exercised in the name of God. Together with a few other men, he takes on fighting for reason and justice. Together they urge the city council to demand an end to the trials, torture, and executions. Cornelius succeeds in getting Johanna pardoned and undertakes to even go and plead with the Emperor in Vienna to end the terror. Meanwhile, Johanna is imprisoned again, and there is ample opportunity for the reader to fear for her life and her plan to escape to Amsterdam and begin a new life. Historically, the Emperor and the Imperial Court did in fact ban the trials and thus end the witch-hunt. In accordance with historical studies, Weigand stresses that the witchcraft persecutions were also a way to deal with inexplicable climate change, with what is known as the “Little Ice Age” in Europe.24 The English historian Norman Cohn was the first to stress that in the fifteenth century, witches assumed the role of scapegoat previously assigned to the Jews (qtd. in Behringer 128). In Weigand’s novel between all the insistence on pacts, sex with the devil and demons, and rides through the air, the real threats and fears of the people become quite apparent: death, disease, hunger, a frozen or flooded harvest, destructive storms, hail, and fires, for which there was no explanation and apparent source. All of these brought famine and hardship, especially for mothers, infants, and children. The author seems to point to parallels today: Aren’t we deceiving ourselves in the same manner when a cool summer or snowy winter nourishes the illusion that there is no climate change? Thus in February 2014, CNBC host Joe Kernen stunned his audience when he compared the theory of global warming to witchcraft (Taibi). We believe ourselves to be so much more rational than people in the Early Modern Period, and yet we often act in the same irrational way.

Conclusion Despite the overwhelming appeal of the witchcraft persecutions to women authors and to their female readers, the theme continues to be

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attractive to male authors as well. Writers of both genders have also chosen male main characters either as persecuted victims or as witch hunters; the latter reflects the academic interest in the persecutors and their writings more than a division along gender lines. Through the survey and examples analyzed, the wide range of fiction narrating witchcraft trials has become apparent and so has the strong presence of historians and writers with an academic training in history. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues and the stories of yet more documented but forgotten witch hunters and their victims and opponents keep entertaining and also informing a broad reading audience thanks to the efforts and skills of historians and writers of historical fiction. Touristic marketing of sites, memorials of persecutions, and historical fiction appear to benefit each other. The new witch craze in fiction does not seek to return the reader to the past. The more discerning readers of historical fiction are no longer looking to the figure of the witch as the paragon of the strong woman and forerunner to emancipation, not to mention the witch as the perfect heroine in trivialized adventure and romance, but readers now expect solid historical research and insights together with a memorable story. There are quite a few works that provide these in addition to being well-written and/or exploring techniques beyond chronological narrative. Hasler’s Die Vogelmacherin, Bereuter’s Die Lichtfänger, and Weigand’s Die Seelen im Feuer are just a few of them. These novels provide good entertainment and contribute to a broader awareness of historical cases of persecutions, their place in our memory culture, the dynamics of change and relation to issues today.

Notes 1

Originally part of a special event, it has in the meantime been offered year-round (cf. the link on Regensburg.de). The performers were members of a local theater group and the scenes were compiled by Matthias Freitag who has a degree in history, has been curator of the Kepler-Gedächtnishaus ‘Kepler Memorial House’ since 1994, and is the author of a short history of the city, Kleine Regensburger Stadtgeschichte. 2 Several companies offer tours of the footprints of Catharina Stadellmenin, socalled witch of Freiburg, for example “Hexen, Folter, Scheiterhaufen: Historische Tour über die Hexenverfolgung in Freiburg,” organized by the Cologne’s women’s history club, which claims to make women’s history visible. A theatrical city tour of Zurich borrowed Anna Göldin from the canton of Glarus for its focus on witchcraft, superstition, and murder (“Hexenwahn, Aberglaube und Justizmord”). On the Baltic Sea, the theater festival “Klassik am Meer” every summer stages an

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adaptation of the nineteenth-century bestselling novel Die Bernsteinhexe (The Amber Witch) by Wilhelm Meinhold, which, however, was not based on a historical trial but purely fictional and became a local saga (“Spielplan 2014”). Vienna tourism addresses witchcraft persecutions as part of a tour surveying the city’s criminal history: “Mörder, Hexen, Henker: Strafrechtsgeschichte von Wien” (Ehrlich). Another example is the 2012/13 special exhibit in the Römermuseum in Güglingen about Katharina Kepler and witchcraft persecution in Southwest Germany: “Hexen, Tod & Teufel: Der Fall Katharina Kepler und weitere Stationen der Hexenverfolgung” with accompanying program. 3 Suffice it to name only a few of the leading scholars and recent publications, namely Behringer (2004), Thurston (2001), and Purkiss (1996). 4 Given the subject of this book, I am not discussing fantasy fiction which celebrates past or modern “witches” as powerful individuals with supernatural abilities although they may be marketed as historical and contain detailed historical background (for example novels by Zinßmeister, Gössling, and Meyer). See for example Johnston and Aloi for analysis. 5 Within the scope of this article it is not possible to provide a detailed survey of all novels mentioned and listed in the bibliography. It will be provided in the form of an extensive table on my webpage. The list is not comprehensive. In particular, novels which feature the witchcraft persecutions only in the background and do not relate any particular trial have only been sampled. 6 See the monograph by Kippel who studies the reception in fiction from the nineteenth century to about 1990. 7 Cf. Lukacs 15. 8 See the authors’ web sites, for example Hoops-archive.de or “Kari KösterLösche.” 9 To name just one study, see Malevolent Nurture by Deborah Willis (1995). 10 An English translation under the title The Child Witches of Lucerne and Buchau (translated by Jennifer Vanderbeek) has been undertaken at the University of Iowa and submitted for publication. 11 This was published in English in 2013 under the title Anna Goeldin: The Last Witch. 12 The case of the Lehner siblings is discussed in both of Hartwig Weber’s monographs on witchcraft trials against children in Württemberg. 13 Select titles excluding young adult fiction are Die Kinderhexe (2011) and Die Kinder des Teufels (2012) by Roman Rausch as well as Der Hexensohn (2005) by Elsa Schöner. 14 See the dissertation by Volke-Mandescheid who focuses her analysis on the historical background, the characters, and their motivations. 15 Kilian agrees with this reading (124). 16 See for more details Volke-Manderscheid (68). 17 Cf. ibid. “Kaum ein Thema ist so belastet von Vorurteilen und Irrtümern wie dieses.” (“Hardly any other topic is as burdened with prejudices and errors”). 18 See the extensive introduction in the new translation and edition by Günter Jerouschek. 19 In the preface, Bereuter acknowledges the historian Rita Voltmer for pointing

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out George Lincoln Burr to him (7). 20 Loos is also featured in the exhibition Hexenwahn (Beier-de Haan) and in Franz/ Irsigler. 21 Weigand’s dissertation (University of Bayreuth, 1992) focused on a castle of the early modern period, its function, and court life (Weigand-Karg, Die Plassenburg: Residenzfunktion und Hofleben bis 1604). 22 Die Seelen im Feuer premiered at the Filmfest in Munich on July 3, 2014 and aired on German public television in March 2015. The English title, Burning Souls, is the translation given in the ZDF press release for the premiere, July 3, 2014 (“Das ZDF auf dem Filmfest München 2014”). 23 Cf. the 2013 newspaper articles in Die Welt, “Gemartert und verbrannt, bis nur Pulver blieb” and “Ein Denkmal dort, wo früher Hexen brannten”; more information on the monument as well as images in “Gedenken in Bamberg.” 24 Cf. the study by Brian M. Fagan. The following paragraph draws on ideas in the review article by Claudius Seidl, “Hexenverfolgung und Klimawandel: Der Winter der Welt.”

Works Referenced Primary Sources Altenstein, Rosemarie. Hexenfeuer: Elisabeth, lauf um dein Leben: Historischer Roman. Radeberg: DeBehr, 2010. Print. Bereuter, Elmar. Hexenhammer: Roman über die Anfänge der Hexenverfolgung. Munich: Herbig, 2003. Print. —. Die Lichtfänger: Roman aus der Zeit der Hexenverfolgung. Munich: Langen Müller, 2005. Print. Böckl, Manfred. Agnes Bernauer: Hexe, Hure, Herzogin: Roman. Berlin: Aufbau, 1993. Print. —. Der Hexenstein: Ein Roman aus dunkler Zeit. 2nd ed. Waldkirchen: Südost-Verlag, 1997. Print. —. Die Hexe soll brennen: Ein Tatsachenroman aus dem 17. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: FACTA, 1989. Print. —. Svenja und der Hexenjäger: Historischer Roman. Recklinghausen: Georg Bitter, 1995. Print. Damm, Dörte. Die Els und ich: Zwei Mädchen in den Wirren des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Wien: Ueberreuter, 2002. Print. Doubek, Katja. Katharina Kepler: Die Hexenjagd auf die Mutter des großen Astronomen. München: Piper, 2004. Print. Fandrey, Stefan Hexengericht: Historischer Roman. Bergisch-Gladbach: Lübbe, 2006. Print. Feldmann, Christian. Friedrich Spee: Hexenanwalt und Prophet. Freiburg: Herder, 1993. Print.

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Flacke, Uschi. Die Hexenkinder von Seulberg. Hamburg: Carlson, 2003. Print. Fritz, Astrid. Die Hexe von Freiburg. Roman. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003. Print. —. Die Hexe von Freiburg: Historischer Jugendroman. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009. Print. —. Die Tochter der Hexe: Roman. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2005. Print. Gardein, Uwe. Die letzte Hexe: Maria Anna Schwegelin: Historischer Roman. Messkirch: Gmeiner, 2008. Print. Gössling, Andreas. Faust, der Magier. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 2007. Print. Goyke, Frank. Hexenfeuer: Ein Hansekrimi. Hamburg: Hanse, 2006. Print. Haller, Cornelia. Seelenfeuer: Historischer Roman. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 2012. Print. Hartung, Alexander. Die Rache des Inquisitors: Historischer Roman. Moers: Brendow, 2010. Print. Hasler, Eveline. Die Vogelmacherin: Die Geschichte von Hexenkindern: Roman. Zurich: Nagel & Kimche, 1997. Print. —. Anna Goeldin: The Last Witch. Trans. Mary Bryant. Savage, MN: Lighthouse Christian Publishing, 2013. Print. —. The Child Witches of Lucerne and Buchau: A Novel. Trans. Jennifer Vanderbeek. Ed. Waltraud Maierhofer. Ms. Hass, Ulrike: Teufelstanz. Eine Geschichte aus der Zeit der Hexenverfolgungen. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995. Print. Heyne, Isolde. Hexenfeuer. Bindlach: Loewe, 1990. Print. Hoops von Scheessel, Jürgen. Anna, die alte Zauberin: Der letzte Scheiterhaufen von Rotenburg: Ein historischer Roman über eine wahre Begebenheit. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2011. Print. —. Gretge: “mit Hexen verwandt, als Hexe verbrannt”: Ein historischer Roman über eine wahre Begebenheit. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2009. Print. —. Mettes Flucht in den Tod: Das verdächtige Gesicht: Ein historischer Roman über eine wahre Begebenheit. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2012. Print. Hübner, Ivonne. Teufelsfarbe: Ein historischer Roman. Mannheim: Dryas, 2007. Print. Kehrer, Jürgen. Das Geheimnis der Tulpenzwiebel: Freigraf Kettelers zweiter Fall. Münster: Waxmann, 1998. Print. Kinkel, Tanja. Die Puppenspieler. Munich: Goldmann, 1993. Print. Kloos, Ralph, Thomas Göltl, Die Hexenbrenner von Franken: Die Geschichte eines vertuschten Massenmordes. Erfurt: Sutton, 2012. Print. Köster-Lösche, Kari. Die Hexe von Tondern: Roman. München: Econ &

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List, 1999. Print. —. Die Pesthexe: Oder Wie eine Jungfrau Anno 1650 den Schwarzen Tod nach Tondern lockte: Roman. Husum: Cobra, 1987. Print. —. Mutter Griebsch: Roman. Mainz: Lermann, 1991. Print. Meßenzehl, Thomas. Hexenfeuer: Historischer Roman aus Aschaffenburg und Kahlgrund. Aschaffenburg: RegioKom, 2007. Print. Meyer, Kai. Faustus: Historischer Roman. Doktor-Faustus-Trilogie. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe, 2007. Print. Parigger, Harald. Die Hexe von Zeil. Munich: DTV, 2002. Print. Rausch, Roman. Die Kinderhexe. Historischer Roman. Reinbek: Rororo, 2011. Print. —. Die Kinder des Teufels. Historischer Roman. Reinbek: Rororo, 2012. Print. Riebe, Brigitte. Die Hexe und der Herzog: Roman. Munich: Diana, 2008. Print. Rueb, Franz. Ausmisten. Ein Roman zur Hexenverfolgung. Zurich: Edition 8, 2005. Print. Schöner, Elsa. Der Hexensohn: Historischer Roman. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 2005. Print. Schriber, Margrit. Das Lachen der Hexe: Roman. Zurich: Nagel & Kimche, 2006. Print. Schweikert, Ulrike. Die Hexe und die Heilige. München: Droemer Knaur, 2001. Print. Thiel, Sebastian. Die Hexe vom Niederrhein: Historischer Roman. Messkirch: Gmeiner, 2010. Print. Volker, Mara. Die Tochter der Apothekerin: Historischer Roman. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe, 2009. Print. Weigand, Sabine. Die Seelen im Feuer: Historischer Roman. Frankfurt a. M.: Krüger, 2008. Print. Wilcke, Michael. Hexentage: Historischer Roman. Berlin: Aufbau-Taschenbuch, 2003. Print. Wittenbecher, Josefine. Tödliche Feuer. Trier: Paulinus, 2003. Print. Zimmermann, Christa-Maria. Hexentanz. Würzburg: Arena, 2005. Print. Zinßmeister, Deana. Das Hexenmal: Roman. Munich: Goldmann, 2008. Print. —. Der Hexenturm: Roman. Munich: Goldmann, 2010. Print. —. Der Hexenschwur: Roman. Munich: Goldmann, 2013. Print. Züst, Walter. Die Dornesslerin: Roman. Herisau, Switzerland: Appenzeller Verlag, 1998. Print.

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Secondary Sources All webpages were last accessed 2 Oct. 2014 except where noted. Anderson, Perry. “From Progress to Catastrophe.” London Review of Books 33.15 (2011): 24-28. Web. Bainton, Herbert. George Lincoln Burr. His Life: Selections from His Writings. Ed. Lois Oliphant Gibbons. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1943. Print. Beck, Rainer. Mäuselmacher oder die Imagination des Bösen: Ein Hexenprozess 1715 – 1723. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011. Print. Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. Print. —. Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Print. Beier-de Haan, Rosmarie, Rita Voltmer, Franz Irsigler, eds. Hexenwahn. Ängste der Neuzeit. Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2002. Print. Bettlé, Nicole J. Wenn Saturn seine Kinder frisst: Kinderhexenprozesse und ihre Bedeutung als Krisenindikator. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Print. Borchardt, Cordelia. “Weigand, Sabine.” fischerverlage.de, 12 April 2011. Web. Burkhardt, Margit-Ute. Hexengeschichte / Hexengeschichten. Strategien des Erzählens von Hexenverfolgung in der deutschen Jugendliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Diss. University of Konstanz, Germany, 2004. Web. Cohn, Noman. Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. “Ein Denkmal dort, wo früher Hexen brannten.” Die Welt, 10 Feb. 2013. Web. Dillinger, Johannes. Kinder im Hexenprozess: Magie und Kindheit in der Frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013. Print. Egger, Urs, dir. Burning Souls (Die Seelen im Feuer). Perf. Mark Waschke, Silke Bodenbender. Eclypse, Film-Line, and ZDF, 2014. Film. Ehrlich, Anna. “Mörder, Hexen, Henker: Strafrechtsgeschichte von Wien.” Wienführung Dr. Anna Ehrlich, n.d. Web. “Elmar Bereuter: Autor.” Schwabenkinder.de, n.d. Web. Fagan, Brian M. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300– 1850. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print. Freitag, Matthias. Kleine Regensburger Stadtgeschichte. Regensburg: Pustet, 1999. Print.

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Friedrich, Hans-Edwin. Der historische Roman: Erkundung einer populären Gattung. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. 1-13. Print. Freitag, Matthias. Kleine Regensburger Stadtgeschichte. Regensburg: Pustet, 1999. Print. “Gedenken in Bamberg: Hexenmahnmal erinnert an dunkle Episode.” BR.de. BR24 3 Aug. 2015. Web. 14 June 2016. Gehm, Britta. Die Hexenverfolgung im Hochstift Bamberg und das Eingreifen des Reichshofrates zu ihrer Beendigung. Hildesheim: Olms, 2000. Print. “Gemartert und verbrannt, bis nur Pulver blieb.” Die Welt, 8 Nov. 2013. Web. Grießhammer, Birke. Verfolgt – gefoltert – verbrannt. Die Opfer des Hexenwahns in Franken. Erfurt: Sutton, 2013. Print. Hasselbeck, Johannes, Robert Zink. “So wird die gantze Burgerschafft verbrendt...” Der Brief des Bamberger Bürgermeisters Johannes Junius aus dem Hexengefängnis 1628. Bamberg: Stadtarchiv Bamberg, 2013. “Hexen, Folter, Scheiterhaufen: Historische Tour über die Hexenverfolgung in Freiburg.” Historix-tours.de, n.d. Web. “Hexen, Tod & Teufel: Der Fall Katharina Kepler und weitere Stationen der Hexenverfolgung.” Myheimat.de., n.d. Web. “Hexenwahn, Aberglaube und Justizmord.” Theatertours.eu. n.d. Web. “Historische Romane ueber die Hexenverfolgung.” Histo-couch.de. 2014. Web. Hoops-Archive: Jürgen Hoops von Scheessel. Web. Irsigler, Franz. Hexenglaube und Hexenprozesse im Raum Rhein-MoselSaar. Trier: Spee, 1995. Print. Jerselius, Kristina Tegler. “Child Witch.” Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society. Ed. Paula S. Fass. Vol. 1. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. 204-205. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. Johnston, Hannah E., and Peg Aloi, ed. The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Kari Köster-Lösche, January 2015. Web. Karimi, Faith. “Abuse of Child ‘Witches’ On Rise, Aid Group Says.” CNN International, 18 May 2009. Web. Kilian, Heinke. Von Hexen, Zauberern und magischen Gestalten: Hexenverfolgung in der Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart – ein Thema mit aktuellen Bezügen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. Print. Kippel, Markus. Die Stimme der Vernunft über einer Welt des Wahns.

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Studien zur literarischen Rezeption der Hexenprozesse (19. – 20. Jahrhundert). Münster: Lit, 2001. Print. Kloos, Ralph, Thomas Göltl. “Virtual Witch Burner Museum.” Hexenbrenner Museum. 2015. Web. Lajares. 2012. Web. Kramer (Institoris), Heinrich. Der Hexenhammer: Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. and ed. Günter Jerouschek. Munich: DTV, 2000. Print. La Fontaine, Jean, ed. The Devil's Children: From Spirit Possession to Witchcraft: New Allegations That Affect Children. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Print. Löher, Hermann. Wehmütige Klage der frommen Unschuldigen. Ein Schöffe kritisiert die Hexenjagd. Trans., ed. Dietmar K. Nix. Cologne: Nix, 1995. Print. Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Peregrine, 1969. Print. Maierhofer, Waltraud. Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber: Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. Print. Nicol, Bran. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Purkiss, Diana. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Roper, Lyndal. “Evil Imaginings and Fantasies: Child-Witches and the End of the Witch Craze.” Past and Present 167 (2000): 107–39. Print. Sabine Weigand, 2014. Web. Sebald, Hans. Witch-children: From Salem Witch-hunts to Modern Courtrooms. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995. Print. Seidl, Claudius. “Hexenverfolgung und Klimawandel: Der Winter der Welt.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 Nov. 2013. Web. Spee, Friedrich von. Cautio Criminalis oder rechtliches Bedenken wegen der Hexenprozesse. Munich: DTV, 2000. Print. “Spielplan 2014.” Klassik am Meer. n.d. Web. Stadt Bamberg, ed. Hexenprozesse und Hexenverfolgung im Hochstift Bamberg: Eine vorläufige Bilanz. Bamberg: Perpetuum Publishing, 2013. Print. “Stadtspaziergang.” Kölner Frauengeschichtsverein. n.d. Web. Strobel, Ferdinand. Schweizer Jesuitenlexikon. Zurich: Schweizer Provinz SJ, 1986. Print. Taibi, Catherine. “CNBC's Joe Kernen: Climate Change Is ‘Like Witchcraft’.” Huffington Post, 27 Feb. 2014. Web.

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The Cornell University Witchcraft Collection. The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library, 2012–2016. Web. Theil, Bernhard. Das (freiweltliche) Damenstift Buchau am Federsee. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994. Print. Thurston, Robert. The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. “Verhör mit der ‘Kinderhexe’ Kathrin Schmidlin von Romoos, 1652.” State Archive Lucerne, 2010. Web. Volke-Manderscheid, Susanne. Eveline Haslers Hexenroman ‘Die Vogelmacherin’. Master‘s thesis. Oldenburg, Carl von Ossietzky U, 2000. Ms. Walinski-Kiehl, Robert. “The Devil's Children: Child Witch-Trials in Early Modern Germany.” Continuity and Change: A Journal of Social Structure, Law, and Demography in Past Societies 11 (1996): 171-90. Print. Weber, Hartwig. Die besessenen Kinder. Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 1999. Print. —. “Von der verführten Kinder Zauberei”: Hexenprozesse gegen Kinder im alten Württemberg. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 1996. Print. Weber, Helmut, Gunther Franz, Friedrich Spee (1591 – 1635). Leben und Werk und sein Andenken in Trier. Trier: Friedrich-Spee-Gesellschaft, 1996. Print. Weigand-Karg, Sabine. Die Plassenburg: Residenzfunktion und Hofleben bis 1604. Weißenstadt: Späthling, 1998. Print. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Print. “Wissenschaft und Aberglauben: Der Hexenprozess gegen die Mutter des Astronomen Johannes Kepler.” Regensburg.de. n.d. Web. Wunder, Heide. He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women In Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Print. “Das ZDF auf dem Filmfest München.” ZDF Presseportal. July 2014. Web. Zeiler Hexenturm: Dokumentationszentrum. Web.

CHAPTER NINE THE “WOMEN-IN-TRADE NOVEL”— POPULAR HISTORICAL FICTION IN GERMANY: BY, ABOUT, AND FOR WOMEN KATYA SKOW

Recently, a proliferation of German historical novels featuring strong, pro-active professional women has begun to influence our understanding and interpretation of history. These novels are set at various historic time periods, although many showcase the Middle Ages. The female protagonists of these novels all have one thing in common—through some combination of circumstances they become successful practitioners of trades or occupations normally reserved for men. The popularity of these historical novels, which I refer to as “Women-in-Trade” novels for lack of a better term, is attested by their proliferation, high sales numbers on amazon.de, and visibility in brick-and-mortar book stores in Germanspeaking countries. Scholarship now reflects that women played a larger role in history than that with which they were previously credited.1 The interpretation of women’s history reflected by these historical novels, however, is at times such that after reading a few of them one might question the necessity of the women’s movement. The women doctors, bankers, traders, artisans, and athletes who people these books often give the impression that women were more powerful and treated more equally than they actually were. There were certainly women in earlier centuries who worked in occupations generally reserved for men, however, they were very few and far between. The proliferation of this particular type of historical novel seems to belie that fact, leading to a potential and faulty reinterpretation of history on the part of the readership, which I will argue is predominately women. In this paper I shall examine a number of these historical novels, for I suspect they reflect an alternate view of history that is being driven by the

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most recent incarnation of feminism, the third-wave or postfeminism. It is not surprising that they are all written by2 and, I suggest, for women. These are self-described “historische Romane” ‘historical novels,’ and for the purpose of this study, I will define them loosely as popular historical fiction. I have chosen a group of novels defined by a distinct pattern in their titles, that is immediately obvious. Although there are dozens of similarlytitled novels, I chose works based on publication date, title profession, and historic time period. My examination includes recent novels published between 1997 and 2012, the fifteen years leading up to the beginning of the project. The novels reflect a variety of professions historically associated with male practitioners, and lastly, the historic time periods chosen reflect European history from the 13th through the 19th centuries. The novels in question, listed in reverse order of publication are: Martha Sophie Marcus, Die Bogenschützin (The Female Archer, 2012),3 Caren Benedikt, Die Duftnäherin (The Scent Seamstress, 2012), Caren Benedikt, Die Kerzenzieherin (The Female Candle Maker, 2012), Sabine Martin, Die Henkerin (The Female Executioner, 2012), Petra Schier, Die Gewürzhändlerin (The Female Spice Merchant, 2011), Melanie Metzenthin, Die Sündenheilerin (The Female Healer of Sins, 2011), Heidi Rehn, Die Wundärztin (The Female Surgeon, 2010), Ricarda Jordan, Die Pestärztin (The Female Plague Doctor, 2008), Ursula Niehaus, Die Seidenweberin (The Female Silk Weaver, 2007), Petra Durst-Benning, Die Samenhändlerin (The Female Seed Merchant, 2005), Ines Thorn, Die Pelzhändlerin (The Female Fur Merchant, 2004), Iny Lorentz, Die Goldhändlerin (The Female Gold Merchant, 2004), Kari Köster-Lösche, Die Wagenlenkerin (The Female Charioteer, 2000) and Die Raubritterin (The Female Robber Knight), Helga Hegewisch, Die Totenwäscherin (The Female Corpse Washer, 2000), Helga Glaesener, Die Rechenkünstlerin (The Female Mathematician, 1998), Petra Durst-Benning, Die Zuckerbäckerin (The Female Confectioner, 1997) and Die Glasbläserin (The Female Glasblower, 1997), and Helga Glaesener, Die Safranhändlerin (The Female Saffron Merchant, 1997).4 These works of historical fiction represent a larger group of similarlytitled novels too numerous to examine in their entirety, and their spin-offs and sequels, which often focus on daughters, legacies, and/or revenge—for example Melanie Metzenthin’s Die Reise der Sündenheilerin (The Journey of the Female Healer of Sins, 2011) and Die Tochter der Sündenheilerin (The Daughter of the Female Healer of Sins, 2014], Ines Thorn’s 2006 Die Silberschmiedin (The Female Silver Smith), who happens to be the daughter of the protagonist of her 2004 Die Pelzhändlerin, and Kari

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Köster-Lösche’s sequels to her 2000 Die Raubritterin, Tod allen Reichen! (Death to all Rich People, 2000) and of course Die Tochter der Raubritterin (The Daughter of the Female Robber Knight, 2001). Some have been made into television movies, such as Petra Durst-Benning’s Die Samenhändlerin (ZDF, 2011) and Iny Lorentz’s Die Wanderhure (The Wandering Whore; Sat.1, 2010), and its two sequels Die Rache der Wanderhure (The Revenge of the Wandering Whore; Sat.1, 2012) and Das Vermächtnis der Wanderhure (The Legacy of the Wandering Whore; Sat.1, 2012). The proliferation of these novels is so noticeable that it has engendered media commentary and even mockery.5 The texts were published between 1997 and 2012 thus spanning the turn of the twenty-first century. They were all published for the paperback market by publishing houses including Ullstein, Knauer, Bastei Lübbe, and Goldmann, all of which either specialize in or have a line of genre fiction. The book covers all feature the image of a woman, dressed according to period. The cover images are designed to look historical and interesting, avoiding the violent sexuality of the “bodice-ripper” and the pastel colors of the romance. Often the image is either taken from a famous painting such as Die Safranhändlerin which uses Titian’s Salome with the head of John the Baptist (1515), or made to look as such. As I point out in my 2007 article, this artistic touch lends the novels an aura of respectability and a certain historical legitimacy and thus separates them from their more formulaic cousins. As I have already alluded to by merely listing them, one of the most striking features of these books is their titles. They consist of the feminine definite article “die” ‘the’ and an agent noun describing a profession or occupation that has been made feminine with the suffix “-in” reflecting the linguistic phenomenon of feminization. In German feminization usually consists of the addition of the suffix “-in” to a masculine noun to describe its feminine counter-part. Nouns that function this way range from animals to religions. Thus “der Hund” ‘dog, male dog’ becomes “die Hündin” ‘female dog’ and “der Protestant” ‘male protestant’ becomes “die Protestantin” ‘female protestant’. However, as Victoria Martin points out in her 1997 article, “the overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is most obvious in the domain of job titles, where in the majority of cases both a masculine and a feminine form exist” (197). Since there are relatively few professions limited to women, or originally associated only with women, feminization of erstwhile masculine occupations is the most common way to describe women practitioners of most trades and professions in German. Examples of female occupations that do not use feminization of a masculine agent noun

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are rare and include “die Amme” ‘wet nurse’, “die Hure” ‘whore’, “die Magd” ‘maid’, “die Krankenschwester” ‘nurse’, and “die Nonne” ‘nun’. With the exception of professions where women have long played a role— “die Köchin” ‘female cook’, “die Erzieherin” ‘female educator’, die Bäuerin ‘female farmer’6—the use of feminized job titles is a direct result of “second-wave” feminism. In her article on language and gender, Christiane Pankow (1998) traces the beginning of frequent use of feminized job titles to the late 1970s and early 1980s, noting “bis in die 60er Jahre ist der Unterschied zwischen dem grammatischen Genus im Deutschen (maskulin, feminin, neutrum) und den semantischen Merkmalen [weiblich und männlich] von den Sprachträgern kaum in Frage gestellt worden” (171). Until the 60s the difference between the grammatical gender in German (masculine, feminine, neuter) and the semantic features [feminine and masculine] by speakers (speech providers) had barely been questioned.

She explains that in the late 1970s and early 1980s the idea was already in play “daȕ es zwischen dem herrschenden Sprachgebrauch und der Gleichberechtigung von Frauen und Männern ein [sic] Zusammenhang gibt” (“That there was a connection between the dominant language usage and equal rights between men and women”; 171-172). Martin concurs, noting the prevalent argument “that if the ways in which women are referred to are changed, this will encourage a change in social attitudes towards them” (202). Although all of the novels examined for this article were published after Germany’s 1990 reunification, it is worth considering briefly that the feminization of job titles did not catch on in the GDR, despite warnings not to underestimate “die Macht der Sprache, ihren Einfluȕ auf unser Denken und Handeln” (“The power of language, its influence on our thoughts and deeds”; Schmidt 77). This is documented in several linguistic studies7 and usually credited to the fact that women in the GDR did not consider themselves at a disadvantage to men. Pankow sums up: “Eine Frauenbewegung wie in der Bundesrepublik hatte es nicht gegeben. Es gab also andere soziale und politische Voraussetzungen, die nicht diesen Sprachwandel einleiten konnten, und viele Frauen in der DDR fühlten sich durch die maskulinen Sprachformen nicht diskriminiert” (173). There had not been a women’s movement such as in the Federal Republic. There were therefore other social and political prerequisites that were

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unable to introduce this linguistic transformation, and many women in the GRD did not feel discriminated against by the masculine linguistic forms.

According to linguist Kristin Sobotta in her 2002 article, as late as the year 2000 “Frauen und Männer mit DDR-Sozialisation [bevorzugen] zu einem groȕen Teil das so genannte generische Maskulinum weiterhin” (“For the most part women and men who have been socialized in the GDR continue to prefer the so called generic masculine”; 149), and already in 1998 Victoria Martin notes an “enormous increase in the use of masculine forms amongst younger speakers” (209) and wonders if this signals change, for “given the higher prestige that the masculine form enjoys, female speakers derive individual advantage from employing it, and it in no way violates the constraints of the language” (209). The choice of titles is certainly interesting in this context. Since many women who grew up in the former GDR prefer the generic masculine to indicate even women practitioners of professions, and more and more young people do as well, the use of the feminized form might either assume or seek to appeal to a specific readership demographic—older, former West German women, for example, or be a deliberate attempt to influence usage. Women drive the book market in Germany. In our 2008 article, Julia Karolle-Berg and I examine how the “Frauenliteraturbetrieb” (“the business of women’s literature”), a group of magazines, television talk shows, and other media, manipulates the reading habits of women. At least since the first centuries of printing, books have been made for and marketed to women (Skow 1998, Karolle-Berg and Skow 2008). I suspect that this statement holds true as well in other countries. In the North American and European English-speaking market, in Germany, in France, and probably in other markets as well, women have long been recognized as the main buyers of books and the most prolific readers. As early as 1978 the American publishing industry discovered that three-fifths of the American book-reading public was composed of women under fifty (Radway 41). Women read more than men, especially fiction. In Western Europe and the United States, at least, study after study reflects this.8 In a 2005 interview Gunnar Cynybulk, a German book editor, explained that the average book buyer “is female, in her mid-forties, university-educated, and purchasing fifteen books a year” (Karolle-Berg and Skow 220).9 In a 2010 interview for Zeit Online the Swiss media scholar Heinz Bonfadelli stated that reading for entertainment is certainly “eine Domäne der Frauen” (“a woman’s domain”). Women read more—especially fiction—, and consequently buy more books than men, thus influencing the book

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market as a whole. Because women are an important consumer group, publishing companies consistently tailor their offerings towards them. The novels listed above are without a doubt tailored to women. As mentioned before they are written by women and are about women—a fact that is reflected by their very titles. The novels run the historical gamut from Ancient Greece (Die Wagenlenkerin) to the turn of the twentieth century (Die Glasbläserin) with a preponderance of novels set in the Middle Ages (see appendix). The professions and occupations represented are varied as well, and many are traditionally associated with men. There is a female executioner (Die Henkerin), a female therapist of sorts— literally “sin healer” or “healer of sins” (Die Sündenheilerin), a couple of female doctors (Die Wundärztin, Die Pestärztin), and the aforementioned “Wagenlenkerin” ‘charioteer’, who turns out to be the first female Olympic athlete ever to compete in the chariot race. According to these titles, women in history, starting with Ancient Greece and continuing on up through the ages, led rich, rewarding professional lives, and have not lacked opportunity. An innocent reader might even come to an entirely erroneous conclusion about women’s role throughout the ages. History, on the other hand, does not say much at all about women, and it certainly does not reflect that women have had a “carte blanche” with regard to professions and careers during the past millennium. To some extent, women authors are projecting an imagined history in these works of historical fiction. In a 1996 study on contemporary German feminism, Silke Beinssen-Hesse and Kate Rigby stress “the importance of studying the imagined woman historically . . . , for she still haunts our lives in her different manifestations. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that both men and women in search of historical sources often turn to imaginative writing because there is so little real history available” (31).

The trend of empowering women by giving them a profession in German historical fiction takes the place of the earlier and equally misleading trend of writing about kings and princesses. This “nostalgie de la cour,” ‘yearning for the court’ is according to historian Cleo McNelly Kearns “a form in which royal blood, aristocratic manners, and the shenanigans of kings and queens take precedence over the cultivation of sheep and cabbages or even, for the most part, the solid laudable accumulations of investment capital” (37). In his article on postmodern historical novels as a medium of revisionist presentations of history, Ansgar Nünning also discusses this

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tendency to shift the emphasis from the public to the private sphere, calling it a “revisionist conception of history.” “Diese [revisionistischen Geschichtsauffassungen] verlagern den Akzent vom Öffentlichen auf das Private, messen der Wahrnehmung des historischen Geschehens im Bewußtsein durchschnittlicher Figuren Bedeutung bei und dezentrieren das große historische Geschehen” (21). These [revisionist conceptions of history] shift the accent from the public to the private, attach meaning to the perception of the historic events in the consciousness of average figures, and decentralize the large historic happening.

The eponymous protagonists in my novels have managed to acquire power by becoming respected in their professions and economically solvent. In this way, readers can indulge their interest in the every-day, reading about heroines who presumably reflect their own demographics more closely. These novels are right in keeping with recent trends in German feminism. None of the novels questions woman’s ability to succeed in a profession or trade, reflecting an intended readership of women raised in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s, who have not experienced blatant gender discrimination in their pursuit of education and career. The more recent novels, those published since 2008, may even reflect elements of the “Demographiedebatte” ‘debate about demographics’ of 2006, which placed the blame for Germany’s aging population and falling birthrate on “the integration of women into the (paid) labor force . . . , arguing that it had led to a decrease in stay-at-home mothers and a low birth rate” (Scharff 266). In examining these novels in the context of Germany’s more recent feminism, I would like to point out a couple of interesting and disturbing trends. The first is that in most of the novels, economic necessity—and not a calling—forces the protagonist to take up her trade or profession. The second is that when the protagonist has a child the novels question the wisdom of raising the child alone and most definitely prefer the unity of a traditional male-led family. The third is that again, in most of the novels, once economic necessity is removed from the equation— usually because the woman marries and is now supported financially by her husband—the female protagonist generally abandons her trade. Lastly, the transformative process of the already beautiful protagonist into a professional, with all the ingenuity and industriousness necessary to power the transformation, merely validates the protagonist and proves her

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worthiness—to be a wife and mother. At this point it is useful to examine a few of the plots. In Sabine Martin’s 2012 Die Henkerin, a novel set in the midfourteenth century, the protagonist is left destitute when her parents are killed in a regional feud. The girl is rescued by the local executioner and disguised as his male apprentice. The executioner is a kind and wise man, and he trains the girl as his apprentice. She serves her apprenticeship and becomes a skilled executioner, and a practiced torturer. She also learns healing, since if a prisoner dies before confessing the executioner must justify him- or in this case herself to the council (188). The girl does not question her new profession and becomes an excellent student of her craft. When her benefactor becomes ill and eventually dies after many years, she naturally takes over the job of the town’s executioner. After overhearing evidence of a plot to execute an innocent man, Melchior (the male name she uses) helps the accused man to escape, and then she too must flee. To pull off the escape, Melchior (the girl disguised as a male apprentice) dons women’s clothing. The women’s clothing prevents people from identifying her as the male apprentice, Melchior, which is an interesting twist. In the end she falls in love with the man she freed. The final pages find the protagonist once again clothed as a woman, and no longer working in her profession. She is, however, together with the man she has rescued, and wedding bells are imminent. Although “Melchior” learns the trade of the executioner by serving an apprenticeship—usually five or six years, and then works in the trade for an unspecified number of years, as soon as circumstance allows the girl disguised as a male apprentice abandons her hard-learned trade and existence as a man. The plot of Die Henkerin is really about how the protagonist goes about losing this identity. The female protagonist is forced into the trade and the male identity to survive, finally proving herself worthy of her future husband by using her trade to save him from execution. At this point she abandons her trade, because as the wife of a wealthy burgher, it will presumably no longer be necessary for her to practice it. Petra Schier’s 2011 Die Gewürzhändlerin is set in the mid-fourteenth century, and takes place in the city of Koblenz. There are a few subplots in the novel. The woman protagonist falls in love with a man of a higher social class. This man is then falsely accused and imprisoned and the protagonist plays an important role in proving his innocence and then freeing him. There is also a short prolog to the novel that explains the existence of a mystical amulet that can predict unfortunate events. However, a great deal of the novel describes how Luzia, the protagonist,

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learns the profession of a spice merchant from the master spice merchant Martin Wied, eventually starting her own company. Luzia’s training starts when she agrees to help Martin mind the spice stand at the yearly fair. When he asks her to help him, her initial response is “Wie kommt Ihr auf die Idee, ich könnte mich um Euren Verkaufsstand kümmern?” (“Where did you get the idea that I could take care of your market stand?”; 7. Kapitel). She continues, claiming ignorance of the different wares that he sells. Martin insists that all she needs to know is how to read and add a little. Thus begins the process for Luzia of learning how to run a business. She first learns how to identify the different spices and dyes. Then she learns how to sell them using weights. When Martin realizes that she is a talented mathematician, he convinces her to work for him on a more regular basis. One of his acquaintances is at first skeptical, but then comes around. “Erstaunlich. Eine Frau als Gewürzhändlerin. Aber warum nicht?” (“Amazing. A woman as a spice merchant. But why not?”; 8. Kapitel). Luzia soon proves her worth. She discovers that giving customers a small discount for one item often tempts them to purchase more. Despite doubt on the part of Martin’s brother and mother, who question Luzia’s experience and the seemliness of her working for Martin, Luzia is soon an integral part of Martin’s business. He shows her his storerooms, and teaches her how to take inventory. When circumstances dictate, Luzia takes charge of the entire business. Eventually, Martin lends her money so that she can invest in a shipment of pigment to sell to the monastery for illuminations. It is not surprising that at the end of the novel, Luzia marries Martin. Although Luzia does not follow the traditional apprenticeship, she deliberately teaches herself, or is taught by others the trade of merchant. During the novel various figures doubt her qualifications because she is a woman, but in every instance of doubt, she is able to prove her worthiness. Die Wundärztin (2010) takes place during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The protagonist is a sort of battlefield surgeon. Her father is also a Wundarzt, or battlefield surgeon, and Magdalena learns her trade from him. She practices the family trade to support herself. After her lover disappears, she finds herself pregnant and has a child out of wedlock. Because she must work to support herself and the child, her cousin takes care of the baby. Magdalena, the protagonist, is frustrated by her inability to work and care for her child at the same time. At some point Magdalena’s lover returns, wounded, and she is able to save him using her skills as a surgeon, thus reflecting the usefulness of her trade and proving herself worthy of her man. Eventually, while Magdalena is busy working,

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the cousin steals away with the child, justifying her action: “Ich habe mich nur um das Kind gekümmert, als kein anderer für sie sorgen wollte“ (“I only cared for the child when no one else wanted to take care of her”; 476). It is not until Magdalena leaves her profession that she finds her lover and child again. Once reunited with her loved ones, Magdalena marries her man, and the family settles in a large house in Frankfurt that belongs to her husband. “Seinetwegen hatte sie sogar den Traum, weiter als Wundärztin zu arbeiten und ein unabhängiges Leben zu führen aufgegeben“ (“For him she had even given up the dream of continuing to work as a surgeon and living an independent life”; 681). Magdalena works because she must. Her work portrays her positively as a strong, skilled, and compassionate woman—a worthy partner for her future husband. She loses her child for several years because of her job. Not until she gives up her profession, does fate reunite her with her lover and daughter in the context of a male-led family unit. The late-fifteenth-century protagonist in Ines Thorn’s Die Pelzhändlerin (2005) is a poor washerwoman at the local “Feldsiechenhaus” ‘hospital for infectious diseases’. Her life is summed up—“schwere Arbeit, wenig Freude, alt vor der Zeit mit kaputten Knochen und ewig schmerzendem Rücken” (“hard work, little joy, old before her time with broken bones and a perpetually aching back”; 10). By means of a circuitous turn of fate, she manages to become a wealthy designer and manufacturer of fur garments. The transformation is difficult; she must act like a wealthy burgher, maneuver within the guild system, and of course learn how to be a furrier and savvy business woman. Her efforts are certainly motivated by her wish to better herself economically. She succeeds beyond her wildest dreams, but not without sacrificing true love. When her lover asks her to leave with him, she explains that she cannot leave her business in the lurch. “Jahre habe ich gebraucht, um es hochzubringen. Jetzt gehöre ich zu den angesehensten Handwerkerinnen Frankfurts” (“It took years for me to get it to this level. Now I am one of the most respected woman artisans in Frankfurt”; 441). Throughout the novel, the protagonist proves herself to be intelligent, resourceful, and of course beautiful—qualities that can also be parlayed into a successful marriage. Years later she is finally ready to abandon her business and reputation to follow her lover to Italy for a new beginning. Again set in the late-fifteenth century, the protagonist in Iny Lorentz’s 2004 Die Goldhändlerin is also motivated by loss of family and livelihood. Lea, a young Jewish girl, loses most of her family in a pogrom. Despite the fact that she is only a “Mädchen, das nichts von Geschäften verstand und keinerlei Erfahrung besaȕ” (“Girl who didn’t know anything

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about business and had no experience”; 129), she disguises herself as her brother (who was killed in the pogrom) and successfully takes over her father’s banking and investment business. Dressed as a man, she travels the country, conducts business with leading princes and bankers, even dealing with the future Emperor Maximilian I (265) and managing to convince Queen Isabella of Spain to fund Columbus’s expedition to India (614). Lea proves she can do the same job as a man, and then the economic stability of marriage enables her to lay aside her disguise and resume a more traditional womanly role. At the end of the novel she gives birth to a son. Her business is put aside—“Das hat bis morgen Zeit. Jetzt muss Lea sich um unseren kleinen Samuel kümmern, und danach sollte sie ein wenig ruhen” (“That can wait until tomorrow. Now Lea must take care of our little Samuel and then she should rest for a while”; 614). In Petra Durst-Benning’s Die Zuckerbäckerin (1997), which takes place in poverty-stricken Württemberg during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Eleonore is also destitute. An orphan, she picks pockets because she is starving. “Auch sie hatte Hunger. Beihnahe unerträglichen Hunger” (“She was also hungry. Almost unbearably so”; 15). A twist of fate brings her to the attention of Queen Katharina of Württemberg who installs her in the kitchens of her country estate outside of Stuttgart. Once there Eleonore quickly becomes indispensable. Because she is innovative and creative, she soon becomes the head confectioner at Queen Katharina’s court. Unfortunately, her wish—“ein Mann, der sich um sie kümmert, eine Familie, eigener Grund und Boden, den ihr niemand wegnehmen konnte” (“a husband who cares for her, a family, her own place that no one can take away from her”; 97)—is only granted her when she gives up her career in the court kitchen to follow her man. Durst-Benning’s Die Glasbläserin (1997)10 has similar themes and elements. Set in the late-nineteenth century, Marie, the protagonist, and her sisters are left with no means to support themselves—“drei junge Frauen ohne männlichen Schutz” (“three young women with no male protection”; 18). In desperation, the middle daughter takes up her father’s tools and begins to blow the glass ornaments for which her town in Thuringia is known. Despite resistance on the part of the male glassblowers, Marie is successful, and over the years, very successful. She is credited with introducing glass Christmas tree ornaments to the US, when she contracts with Mr. Woolworth to supply his New York store (372). Glassblowing becomes her life, long after the element of necessity is gone. Whereas her two sisters lay aside their professions and eventually marry and have children, Marie does not, implying that career and family do not mix well.

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In all of the novels I examined, the women protagonists succeed in living and working in male-dominated professions or trades. The process of setting up or becoming skilled in the profession or trade provides opportunity to extoll the talent, cleverness, and beauty of the protagonist. These women practitioners face prejudice from their male counter-parts, but never doubt their own abilities for long. Economic necessity is the main reason for the women to adopt a profession in all but four of the nineteen novels I examined. In Die Henkerin, Die Bogenschützin, Die Seidenweberin, Die Sündenheilerin, Die Wundärztin, Die Pestärztin, Die Pelzhändlerin, Die Goldhändlerin, Die Zuckerbäckerin, Die Raubritterin, Die Kerzenzieherin, Die Duftnäherin, Die Samenhändlerin, Die Totenwäscherin, and Die Glasbläserin the protagonist is forced into her trade by circumstance. She is either destitute or economically disadvantaged, and the only way for her to survive is to pursue a profession. This seems to imply that although unquestionably able, there is no reason for a woman to work outside the home unless circumstances dictate. In three of the novels—Die Henkerin, Die Wagenlenkerin, and Die Goldhändlerin—the fact that the protagonist must disguise herself as a man reflects that the profession or occupation is indeed closed to women, and not equal-opportunity as the novel’s title might suggest. Finally, the protagonist’s return to a non-professional status (and in the above novels to woman’s clothing as well) when presented with a potential husband who will presumably support her financially, further subverts the power of the titles of these novels. Few of these novels depict a woman engaged in a traditionally male career because she feels a calling—Jordan’s Pestärztin, Durst-Benning’s Die Glasbläserin, Glaesener’s Die Safranhändlerin, and perhaps Schier’s Die Gewürzhändlerin are exceptions. In an article on commercial “New Woman” fiction, Chris Willis writes, “a heroine who is ‘political or highly educated’ is almost sure to come to a bad end unless she abandons her socio-political and intellectual activities in favor of a conventional wifely role” (53).

Although Willis is writing about popular fiction published at the turn of the twentieth century, she could just as easily be referring to the texts examined in this paper. The protagonists I have described might not be “political or highly educated” per se, but they all practice a trade or occupation normally reserved for men, and their presence in these trades or occupations, no matter how good they are at their jobs, transgresses the social order. As I have pointed out, in many of the novels the woman protagonist is portrayed as unhappy or unfulfilled, because her trade or occupation stands in the way of a successful relationship or family life.

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Marie, in Die Glasbläserin never marries because presumably she devotes all of her energy and creative powers to her profession. Sibylla in Die Pelzhändlerin must give up her successful business in order to be happy in love. In Die Goldhändlerin the novel ends with the birth of Lea’s son and at least a hiatus in her business career. Finally, Magdalena, the protagonist in Die Wundärztin, is separated from both her daughter and her lover until she is willing to give up her profession. The novels all reflect woman’s ability to achieve what men have achieved, but also suggest that the process of achieving this equality is merely a stepping-stone along the way to the greater good of the stability of the male-led family unit. Despite their titles, the novels and novel trend I have presented in this paper do not reflect the feminist ideals of the 1970s and 1980s, generally referred to as second-wave feminism. In fact, they do just the opposite. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie (2004) cautions that “elements of contemporary popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism” (255). Like pioneers for women’s equality, the protagonists in these fictions are as capable as men and prove it, mastering traditional male trades if in somewhat anachronistic fashion. They are not unlike the “A1 girls” McRobbie sees reflected in current popular media— “glamorous high-achievers destined for Oxford or Cambridge . . . usually pictured clutching A-level certificates” (257). However, as feminist scholars Yvonne Trasker and Diane Negra (2007) caution, “postfeminist culture also (even insistently) enacts the possibility that women might choose to retreat from the public world of work” (2). The protagonists in many of my novels do just that. Once they have proven their worth by managing to succeed in the male world and acquire a partner, they often give up their designations as “A1 girls” as soon as they can, relying instead on their husbands to support them. This reflects more closely the third-wave, new, or post- feminism of the turn of the twenty-first century, than any previous form of feminism. This is not surprising, since the proponents of this new feminism share many of the same demographics as the primary readers of these novels— as noted by sociologist Christina Scharff they are overwhelmingly white, economically-advantaged, educated, and middle-aged (266). Thus the actions of the protagonists in these novels reflect the preferences of the readership. McRobbie points out today’s tendency towards “neoconservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life” (256), and in her 2012 study, sociologist and feminist scholar Myra Ferree establishes a link to German social policy, explaining that “German politics has drawn on both conservative views of patriarchal authority and social democratic ideals of justice to forge a social welfare

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state that prioritizes family support and the social reproduction of the nation” (5).

She later points out: “West German women’s life course was set by family politics that held them out of the labor force but offered them support as mothers and as dependents of men” (51).

In a 2010 study sociologist Katja M. Guenther agrees arguing that the “western German expectation of a male breadwinner family model in which good women stay home to raise their children is reflected in social policies that make it difficult for women to combine mothering with paid employment” (12).

She further notes that Germany is more interested in women’s “maternal contributions than workforce contributions” (13). Claudia Pinl points out in an earlier study (1993) that Germany considers this paid child-rearing period to be a ‘promotion’ of women: “Sie verkaufen die Möglichkeit, die sie Frauen mit kleinen Kindern bieten, für einige Zeit oder auch für Jahre aus der Beschäftigung auszusteigen, als ‘Frauenförderung’” (“They sell the opportunity that they offer women with small children to drop out of employment for a while or even for years as ‘promotion of women’”; 114). Legitimized by their historical framework, many of the “women-in trade” novels reflect a trend towards a conservative male-led family model, which ironically seems in keeping with more recent incarnations of feminism. Although the protagonists are without question the equal of men, the novels promote the superiority of the traditional family and question the compatibility of that family unit with a wife and mother who works outside the home. Most of the protagonists gladly sacrifice their careers for their husbands and children. Those who persist in their professional pursuits, like Marie in Durst-Benning’s Die Glasbläserin, often find it difficult or impossible to combine career and family, ending up alone. In conclusion, I will try to link my observations to the initial premise of the paper—that the proliferation of “women-in-trade” novels is gradually coloring our interpretation of history. At first glance the novels, and especially their titles, reflect the ideals of second-wave feminism. The feminized agent nouns used as titles of the novels proclaim stories of traditional feminist heroines—women who presumably succeed in a

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masculine occupation or profession. It is not until deep into the novel that the proactive and forward-thinking protagonists of the novels are exposed for what they are: historical versions of McRobbie’s “A1 girls” (257). The feminized title draws in an armchair audience of women interested perhaps in learning about successful professional women in earlier times. Along the way, however, their own choices may be mirrored and approved by the protagonists. For like the protagonists, many women readers gave up a promising career for house and family. In retrospect and upon closer analysis, the titles actually anticipate their contradiction, for in addition to being feminine, they are all singular. And, while they do highlight the strength of the individual—they also emphasize the single nature of the protagonist. Since there is no community of say “Goldhändlerinnen” ‘female gold merchants’, the protagonist will eventually have to find solidarity within the family unit, or live her life alone. It will be interesting to see what the next trend will be in German historical fiction. As mentioned earlier, many of the novels I have discussed have already spawned sequels, usually generational and marketed as Die Tochter der ... –in (“Daughter of the Woman …”).11 Perhaps these protagonists like their armchair audience, will migrate through new waves of feminism to reflect a new trend in gender politics.

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Appendix I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Die Bogenschützin

2012

n

y

Die Duftnäherin

2012

n

Die Kerzenzieherin

2012

Die Henkerin

2012

Die Sündenheilerin

2011

Die Gewürzhändlerin

2011

Die Wundärztin

2010

Die Pestärztin

2008

Die Seidenweberin

2007

Die Samenhändlerin

2005

Die Pelzhändlerin

2005

Die Goldhändlerin

2004

Die Totenwäscherin

2000

mid15th mid14th mid13th mid14th mid13th mid14th mid17th mid14th mid15th mid19th mid15th late15th 19th th

y

V II y

VIII archer/hunter

y

unclear

n

entrepreneur

n

y

n

n

candle maker

y

y

y

n

executioner

n

y

y

n

therapist/psychologist

n

n

n

n

spice merchant

n

y

y

y

battlefield surgeon

n

y

n

n

doctor

n

y

n

n

silk weaver

n

y

n

y

seed merchant

n

y

y

y

furrier/ fur merchant

y

y

y

y

banker/merchant

n

y

n

y

undertaker

Die Raubritterin

2000

14

y

y

y

y

robber knight

Die Wagenlenkerin

2000

y

n

unclear

n

charioteer/athlete

Die Glasbläserin

2000

y

y

n

n

glassblower

Die Rechenkünstlerin

1998

n

n

unclear

n

math teacher

Die Safranhändlerin

1997

Anci ent Gree ce late19th mid14th 14th

n

n

n

n

importer/merchant

Die Zuckerbäckerin

1997

early -19th

n

y

y

n

confectioner

I. Title of the novel. II. Publication date of the novel. III. Time period covered in the novel. IV. Does the protagonist need to disguise herself as a man to work in her profession? y/n V. Does the protagonist pursue a career out of economic necessity? y/n

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261

VI. Does the protagonist give up the profession once married? y/n VII. Does the protagonist have a child during the main part of the plot? y/n VIII. What is a possible modern equivalent of the profession?

Notes 1

A list of scholarship discussing women’s role in history follows in reverse chronological order, most recent first. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993; Christiane KlapischZuber, ed., A History of Women in the West. II. Silences of the Middle Ages; Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1992; Joel T. Rosenthal, ed., Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990; Sherrin Marshall, ed., Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe. Public and Private Worlds, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989; Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, Sarah Westphal-Wihl, eds., Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989; Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Woman and Work in Preindustrial Europe, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986; Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate. A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai, London and New York: Routledge, 1983, 1990. 2 A number of the novels are published under pseudonyms—and behind at least one of the pseudonyms is a male-female team (Sabine Martin), however the pseudonym chosen is feminine. 3 Unless otherwise noted all translations from German into English are my own. 4 I have put the novels in chart form in my appendix. 5 In a short piece author and literary critic Rainer Moritz (2005) pokes fun at this trend in titles, suggesting two columns’ worth of further possibilities using the feminizing suffix –in. 6 Petra Ewald documents many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instances of the –in suffix in her 2005 article “Das Suffix –in im Spannungsfeld von phonischen und morphemischen Schreibungsdeterminanten.” 7 Bartz (1985), Böhlke (1991), Pankow (1998), Sobotta (2002), Geyer (2007). 8 Many English-language, German, and French sources cite that women read more than men. I have included several of these in my bibliography and refer to them here as well. English-language (US and Britain): Zickuhr 2014, Waldman 2013, Weiner 2007, Thorpe 2009. French: Vantroys 1995. German: Bonfadelli 2010. 9 This statement sums up the description given to us by Gunnar Cynybulk, then editor and program director of the Kiepenhauer publishing house, in a 2005 interview made possible by the 2005 Fulbright summer seminar. Cited from Karolle-Berg and Skow 2008. 10 The recent publication of the English translation of Die Glasbläserin (The Glassblower, trans. Samuel Willcocks, AmazonCrossing 2014) has proven very popular in the US. It was ranked number one on Amazon.com’s bestseller list in the Kindle Store under “historical romance” (Web. 4. April 2-16), and as number

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two as a printed book under the rubric “books,” subheading “romance” and then historical” (Web. 4. April 2016). 11 Examples of this generational trend are: Kari Köster-Lösche, Die Tochter der Raubritterin (List 2001), Melanie Metzenthin, Die Tocher der Sündenheilerin (Piper 2014).

Works Referenced Primary Sources Benedikt, Caren. Die Duftnäherin. München: Knaur, 2012. Print. —. Die Kerzenzieherin. München: Knauer, 2012. Print. Durst-Benning, Petra. Die Zuckerbäckerin. 1997. München: Ullstein, 2003. Print. —. Die Glasbläserin. 2000. München: Ullstein, 2002. Print. —. Die Samenhändlerin. 2005. München: Ullstein. Print. Glaesener, Helga. Die Rechenkünstlerin. 1998. München: List, 2000. Print. —. Die Safranhändlerin. 1997. München: Heyne, 2002. Print. Hegewisch, Helga. Die Totenwäscherin. München: List, 2000. Print. Jordan, Ricarda. Die Pestärztin. Köln: Bastei Lübbe, 2008. Print. Köster-Lösche, Kari. Die Raubritterin. 2000. München: Ullstein, 2003. Print. —. Die Wagenlenkerin. München: List, 2000. Print. Lorentz, Iny. Die Goldhändlerin. München: Knaur, 2004. Print. Marcus, Martha Sophie. Die Bogenschützin. München: Goldmann, 2012. Print. Martin, Sabine. Die Henkerin. Historischer Roman. Köln: Bastei Lübbe, 2012. Print. Metzenthin, Melanie. Die Sündenheilerin. München: Piper, 2011. Print. Niehaus, Ursula. Die Seidenweberin. München: Knauer, 2007. Print. Rehn, Heidi. Die Wundärztin. München: Knaur, 2010. Print. Schier, Petra. Die Gewürzhändlerin. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rohwolt, 2011. Kindle file. Thorn, Ines. Die Pelzhändlerin. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005. Print.

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Secondary Sources Bartz, Irmhild. “Zum Verhältnis von movierten und unmovierten Berufsbenennungen im Sprachgebrauch der DDR.” Beiträge zur Erforschung der deutschen Sprache 5.1 (1985):190-198. Print. Bauman, Zygmunt. The Individualized Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001. Print. Beinssen-Hesse, Silke and Kate Rigby. Out of the Shadows. Contemporary German Feminism. Victoria: Melbourne UP, 1996. Print. Böhlke, Doris. “War die Frau in der Sprache der ehemaligen DDR ‘gleichberechtigt’?” Germanische Mitteilungen 33(1991): 35-41. Print. Bonfadelli, Heinz. Interview by Ijoma Mangold. “Geist und Papier.” Zeit Online. Literatur. 26. July 2010. Web. 7 May 2014. Ewald, Petra. “Das Suffix –in im Spannungsfeld von phonischen und morphemischen Schreibungsdeterminanten.” Sprachwissenschaft 30.1 (2005): 83-110. Print. Ferree, Myra Marx. Varieties of Feminism. German Gender Politics in Global Perspective. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. “Frauen kaufen und lesen mehr Bücher als Männer.“ Berliner Zeitung. Kultur. 13. Aug. 2013. Web. 7 May 2014. Geyer, Klaus. “Warum Studentinnen keine Studenten und auch keine weiblichen Studenten sind—Linguistische und didaktische Perspektiven auf ein immer noch kontroverses Thema.” Triangulum. Germanisches Jahrbuch 2007 für Estland, Lettland und Litauen. Ed. Sigita Barniškiené, Dzintra Lele-Rozentale, and Mari Tarvas. Kaunas: Koolibri, 2007. 11-37. Print. Guenther, Katja M. Making Their Place. Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Heywood, Leslie and Jennifer Drake. “‘It’s All About the Benjamins.’ Economic Determinants of Third Wave Feminism in the United States.” Third Wave Feminism. A Critical Exploration. Expanded ed. Ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 114-124. Print. Karolle-Berg, Julia and Katya Skow. “From Frauenliteratur to Frauenliteraturbetrieb: Marketing Literature to German Women in the 21st Century.” German Literature in a New Century: Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations. Ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Katharina Gerstenberger. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2008. 220-36. Print.

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Kearns, Cleo McNelly. “Dubious pleasures: Dorothy Dunnet and the historical novel.” Critical Quarterly 32.1(1990): 36-48. Print. Martin, Victoria. “ ‘Der Lehrer schimpfte mit ihren Schülern’: Perspectives on the Changing use of the –in Suffix.” Gendering German Studies. New Perspectives on German Literature and Culture. Ed. Margaret Littler. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. 196-210. Print. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255-264. Print. Moritz, Reiner. “Wanderhure und Almwiesenfrau. Buchtitel. Unendlich viele Kreationen. ” Börsenblatt Online, 21 July. Web. 18 April 2016. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘Beyond the Great Story’: Der postmoderne historische Roman als Medium revisionistischer Geschichtsdarstellung, kultureller Erinnerung und metahistoriographischer Reflexion.” Anglia 117.1 (1999): 15-48. Print. Pankow, Christiane. “Sprache und Geschlecht. Zum Sprachwandel und Sprachgebrauch unter dem Einfluȕ der Frauenbewegung in Deutschland.” Moderna språk 92.2 (1998): 171-173. Print. Pinl, Claudia. Vom kleinen zum groȕen Unterschied. “Geschlechterdifferenz” und konservative Wende im Feminismus. Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1993. Print. Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Print. Scharff, Christina. “The New German Feminisms: Of Wetlands and Alpha-Girls.” New Femininities. Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Ed. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 265-278. Print. Schmidt, Antje. “Frau vermiȕt—die unmerkliche Diskriminierung.” Sprachpflege und Sprachkultur. Zeitschrift für gutes Deutsch 39 (1990): 75-77. Print. Skow, Katya. “Die Zuckerbäckerin, Die Glasbläserin, Die Totenwäscherin: Nineteenth-Century Women in Contemporary German Historical Fiction.” South Carolina Modern Languages Review 6.1 (2007): n. pag. Web 11 May 2014. —. “Women in the Book of Love: A Study in Context of Feyerabendt’s Das Buch der Liebe (1587).” Colloquia Germanica, 2 (1998): 105-16. Print. Sobotta, Kristin. “Sprachpraxis und feministische Sprachkritik. Zu einer sprachlichen Sonderentwicklung in Ostdeutschland.” Zeitschrift für germanische Linguistik 30, no.2 (2002): 147-168. Print.

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Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra. “Introduction. Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” Interrogating Postfeminism. Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 1-25. Print. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Why women read more than men.” The Guardian. The Observer. 21. March 2009. Web. 11 May 2014. Vantroys, Carole. “Les femmes et la lecture. Pourquoi les FEMMES lisent plus que les hommes.” Dossier. lexpress.fr. 1. May 1995. Web. 11 May 2014. Waldman, Katy. “Most American Adults Read Books but Not Literature.” slate.com. 1. Oct. 2013. Web. 7 May 2014. Weiner, Eric. “Why Women Read More Than Men.” NPR. arts & life. books. 5. Sept. 2007. Web. 7 May 2014. Willis, Chris. “‘Heaven defend me from political or highly-educated women!’: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption.” The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact. “Fin-de-Siècle” Feminisms. Ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001. 53-65. Print. Zickuhr, Kathryn. “A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013.” Pew Research Internet Project. 16. Jan. 2014. Web. 7 May 2014.

CONTRIBUTORS

JULIE KOSER is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. Her research interests include literature and culture in the Age of Goethe with a focus on German women writers, gender and representation, women and warfare, and German Orientalisms circa 1800. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her monograph Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe appeared in 2016. DANIELA RICHTER is an Associate Professor of German at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Her research interests include German nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly women’s literature, travel literature and the representation of history, in particular archaeology in popular culture. She has published articles on Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Gemeindekind and Fürst PücklerMuskau’s travel writings. In 2011 her monograph entitled Domesticating the Public: Women’s Discourse on Gender Roles in Nineteenth-Century Germany appeared with Peter Lang. JASON DOERRE is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Trinity College. He earned his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2016. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and film. CARL GELDERLOOS is an Assistant Professor of German Studies in the Department of German and Russian Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). His publications on Alfred Döblin, East German science fiction, and Albert Renger-Patzsch have appeared in German Quarterly, Monatshefte, and the German Studies Review, among other venues. He is currently working on a book manuscript which explores the ways in which figures such as Döblin, Ernst Jünger, and Helmuth Plessner articulated the relationships among technology, biology, and the human being.

268

Contributors

VASSILAKI PAPANICOLAOU, a Doctor of Philosophy in General and Comparative Literature, is member of TELEM Research Team at Bordeaux-Montaigne University, Pessac, France. His work primarily deals with theoretical, epistemological and cultural topics in the area of the historical novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on fictions set in antiquity. He has published journal articles, conference proceedings and book chapters on historical novelists such as Gore Vidal, Gary Jennings, Amin Maalouf and Odile Weulersse. SEAN EEDY is a recent PhD in Modern Europe from the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research interests include East German comic books and culture, childhood representation, and narrative constructions of socialism and state power. He has published articles on these topics in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and on the theoretical meanings of Gorbachev’s role in German unity in the Review of European and Russian Affairs. DEBRA L. STOUDT is Professor of German and Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA. She has published on the lives and works of the medieval German male and female mystics, medieval women healers and the power of healing, and the relationship between magic and medicine in the Middle Ages. She is co-editor with Beverly Mayne Kienzle and George Ferzoco of A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 45 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). WALTRAUD MAIERHOFER is Professor of German and an Affiliated Faculty member of International Programs and the Honors Program at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, USA). She has published widely on German literature and culture since the 18th century, with a major focus on narrative prose. Her interdisciplinary interests resulted in an introductory monograph on the painter Angelika Kauffmann (1997) and editions of her letters (1999 and 2001). Her research on the representation of historical women and femininity in historical narratives about the Thirty Years’ War (Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber, 2005) as well as several project since have been supported by the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation. Related to historical fiction, she has also edited English translations of novels by Eveline Hasler and the play The Devil in Boston by Lion Feuchtwanger.

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KATYA SKOW is Professor of German at The Citadel, in Charleston, SC. Originally trained as a medievalist, her interests center on popular fiction from its beginnings to the present day, particularly its intersection with women as authors and readers. She has published on Heinrich von Morungen, Feyerabendt’s Das Buch der Liebe, Die sieben weisen Meister, recent popular women’s fiction, and popular historical fiction.



INDEX

Alberti, Konrad, 80, 81, 82 Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 164, 167, 174 Alger, Horatio, 82 allegory, 128 Alltag (everyday life), 161, 163 anchoress, anchorhold, anchoritic, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 Anderson, Benedict, 73 archaeology (Egyptology), 46ff., 50 Aristotle, 19; Poetics, 19 Austria, 218, 230 autobiography, autobiographical, 185, 192, 205, 208, 212 autonomy, 130, 138, 153 Benjamin, Walter, 74, 99, 128 Berliner Tageblatt, 77 Berlin Wall, 160, 164ff., 168ff., 180 Bereuter, Elmar, 219, 223, 225, 230; Die Lichtfänger, 219, 221, 224, 225, 230ff. Bildungsroman, 136, 149 biography, 128, 135, 152, 185, 192, 193, 198, 199, 207 Bismarck, 72 Bismarckianism, 93 Blankenburg, Friedrich, 103 book covers, design of, 247 Bourdieu, Pierre, 139 Brecht, Bertolt, 98 Broch, Hermann 127-137, 139-142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150ff.; “Das Böse im Wertsystem der Kunst” 132, 133 ; Der Tod des Vergil 127-131, 133-148, 150-157; Die Heimkehr des Vergil 141; “Die mythische Erbschaft der



Dichtung” 133; Die Schlafwandler 131, 132; “Mythos und Altersstil” 133 Brussig, Thomas, 160-171, 174, 176ff. Burckhardt, Jacob, 139 Burr, Lincoln, 230ff., 238 capitalism, 132, 140, 144 Catholic Church, 186, 188, 191, 193, 195, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210 Chateaubriand, François-René, 136 children as fictional characters, 219, 226-29, 230, 233, 235 chinoiserie, 25 Christianity, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 48, 53, 65, 128, 130, 144, 146; European Christians, 15, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39f. climate change, 232-35 colonialism, 24 consciousness, 137, 140, 141, 144, 147, 149, 150 convention, 127, 129, 134, 148 Craig, Gordon, 87 crime fiction, historical, 224 cross-cultural encounters, 15, 24, 25, 35 Crusades, 15, 17, 24, 25, 26, 35, 37, 38; critique of, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 39; Second Crusade, 18; Third Crusade, 18, 27 culture, 139, 140, 141, 144 Dahn, Felix, 74 Das deutsche Reichsblatt, 75 demography debate in Germany, 251

272 destruction, 129, 142, 143 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 102 division, 128, 144 Döblin, Alfred, 93, 127, 136; “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker. Berliner Programm”: 104, 107, 113; “Bemerkungen zum Roman”: 119; Berge Meere und Giganten: 100, 115,117; Berlin Alexanderplatz: 100, 121; Das Ich über der Natur: 104, 112, 116, 119; “Das Wasser”: 112, 119; “Der Bau des epischen Werks”: 117,118; “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters”: 106, 113; Die drei Sprünge des Wang,Lun: 100; “Die Natur und ihre Seelen”: 112,113, 119; “Epilog”: 117; “Von Gesichtern, Bildern und ihrer Wahrheit”: 98; Wallenstein: 97,123; Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine: 100 docu-fiction, 219 Early Modern Period, 220, 222, 235 East, 129, 139, 143 East Prussia, 75, 82, 85 Ebers, Georg, biography, 47-50; oeuvre 45f., 49; Eine ägyptische Königstochter (An Egyptian Princess), 49; reception of, 5155; Uarda 55-66, Ebner, Margareta, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 208ff. egocentrism, 129, 148, 152 Egyptomania, 50f. elasticity, 128 Elftes Plenum des ZK der SED (11th Plenary of the SED), 173, 180 Eliade, Mircea, 149 Eliot, T.S. 139 “enlightened sultan” (concept), 15, 18, 25, 26, 27, 35, 39 Enlightenment, 15, 19, 37; discourses of, 23, 24, 39; ideals



Index of, 18, 24, 26, 34, 35, 36 See also Orientalism: Enlightenment Orientalism Enquette-Kommission, 163, 166, 177 epic, 98, 100, 120, 121, 131, 133136 epistemology, 127, 131, 152 Erman, Adolf, 51f. Erziehungsroman, 136 escape, 128, 129, 134, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146 exile, 128, 129, 137 experiment, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137 fatalism, 128 feminine agent nouns, 247, 258 feminism, second-wave, 248, 257f.; third-wave, 246, 257, 259 feminization, of nouns, 247; of job titles, 247, 248; of job titles in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), 248, 249 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 127, 141 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation), 84 fiction, fictional, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192, 195, 199, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211; meta-fiction, 220 footnoting in historical novels, 46, 49, 54 form, 127, 129-132, 134-138 Fowler, Alastair, 138 fragmentation, 130, 132, 139, 145, 148 Frauenliteratur, 35 freedom, 127, 129, 134, 138ff., 148, 153 free-form, 129, 134, 138 Free German Youth (FDJ), 177, 181 Freytag, Gustav, 74 Galland, Antoine: One Thousand and One Nights, 38 Genette, Gérard, 140 gender, concept of, 219, 220, 236

The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century genre, 127-130, 132-135, 137, 138 genre fiction, 247 Gentle Revolution (1989), 160, 164, 165, 167, 169, 173, 174, 179, 180 German family politics, 258 German feminism, 250, 251 German Orientalisms. See Orientalism German Wars of Liberation, 84, 85, 86 Gesamtkunstwerk, 136 Geschichtskultur (historical culture), 4 God, 128, 139, 140, 145-150 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71, 131; Götz von Berlichingen, 3637; Iphigenie auf Tauris, 34 Göldin, Anna, 222, 227 Günderrode, Karoline von, 37 Hanns Heinz Ewers, 71 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 71, 81, 83; “Vor Sonnenaufgang” (Before Sunrise), 78; “Die Ratten” (Rats), 82 Harden, Maximilian, 81, 82, 83 Hasler, Eveline, 218, 219, 226; Die Vogelmacherin, 219, 226-29 healing, medical knowledge, 186, 187, 188, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201 Heinrich Seuse, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190f., 192, 202, 205ff., 208 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 142 Heinrich von Nördlingen, 186, 208f. Herder, Johann Gottfried, 25, 39; Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 39; Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 26, 29, 37f., 39 Hildegard von Bingen, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189f., 191, 192, 193201, 207 Hensel, Jana, 178



273

heretic(s), heresy, 186, 188, 194, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 210 Hermannsdenkmal, 88 Hesse, Hermann, 127-137, 139ff., 143-152; Berthold 131-132; Glasperlenspiel 136; Siddhartha 127-131, 133-154, 156, 157 Heyse, Paul, 78, 79 historical fiction, 246 historical figures, 49, 56ff., 58f., 63 historical novel, genre, 5-14, 15, 1721, 35, 36, 37, 127-138, 141ff., 152, 153, 246, 250 history, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137ff., 141, 142, 144, 152, 153, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 204, 205, 209; representation of, 1f.; film productions of 2; as discipline, 15, 18, 19, 21, 37, 227,228, 231 Hoher Orden vom Schwarzen Adler, 89 Hohenzollern, 93 holism, 130, 131, 148 Holy Land, 27, 28 Holz, Arno, 81; “Die Familie Selicke” (The Family Selicke), 82 Honecker, Erich, 164 humanism, 128, 130, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 148, 152 Human Rights, 229 hybridization, 130, 131, 136 idealism, 128, 139 idiosyncrasy, 131 individual, 128, 132, 137-142, 144, 150 innovation, 127, 129, 131, 138 internalization, 137, 141, 142 Iron Cross, 89 Islam, 25, 26, 37; see also Muslim Jerusalem, Kingdom of, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39; fall of, 25, 28, 29 Joyce, James, 136 Kaiser Wilhelm II, 92

274 Kamban, Guðmundur, 134 Kepler, Johannes, 217 Kepler, Katharina, 217, 223 Kinkel, Tanja, 218, 224, 225 Kitsch, 133 Knowledge, 131, 134, 135, 140, 142, 147ff., 151 Kracauer, Siegfried, 98, 103, 130 Kramer, Heinrich, 222, 225; Malleus Maleficarum, 219, 230 Kulturkampf (culture struggle) 60f. Laengsdorff, Julia Virginia, 77 laity, layperson, lay religious, 186, 188, 205, 206, 207, 208 League of Nations, 140, 141, 153 Lesewut, 20, 37 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 27; Nathan der Weise, 26, 27, 34, 38, 39 Levant, 23, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37 Lex Heinze, 76 liberal Secession, 75 liberalism, 71–93 lieux de mèmoire, Erinnerungsorte, places of memory, 2, 87, 88, 89 Literary Congress, 75 Logos, 147, 148 Loos, Cornelius, 225, 230 Lukács, Georg, 18, 22, 36ff., 92, 93; 137, 224; Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel), 56f., 73, 98, 103, 109, 115; Die Theorie des Romans: 98,99, 102,103; Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: 103 lyricism, 131, 135, 137, 147, 148, 152 Mann, Heinrich, 127 Mann, Thomas, 127 materialism, 129, 139 Mauthner, Fritz, 79, 80, 82, 83 Meister Eckhart, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 201-05, 207, 208 messianism, 128, 140



Index micro-macrocosmic analogy, 148, 149, 150 Middle Ages, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30, 220 middle-class, 19 Middle East, 23, 24, 27, 28, 36, 37, 39 “Modedichter,” 79, 81 modernism, 127ff., 132-135, 138, 141, 153 Mommsen, Theodor, 87 monotheism, 63ff. monument, 233, 236, 238 morality, 131, 132, 139ff., 143ff., 147 Müller, Friedrich Max, 150 museum exhibits, 47, 50 Muslim, 15, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37; See also Islam mutability, 137, 138, 152 mystic, mysticism, 185, 187f., 192, 193, 194, 202, 206, 210 myth, 133, 136 Napoleon, 86, 90; Napoleonic Wars, 72, 73, 74, 84, 85, 87 nationalism 4, 46f., 59, 73f., 83-93 naturalism, 71–93 Naubert, Benedikte, Alme, oder Egyptische Mährchen, 36; Eudocia, 16; Fontanges, 16; Friedrich der Siegreiche, 30; Geschichte Emma’s Tochter Kaiser Karls des Grossen und seines Geheimschreibers Eginhard, 21; Heerfort und Klärchen, 16; Heinrich von Plauen und seine Neffen, 17; Konradin von Schwaben, 17; Konrad und Siegfried, 17; “Zweischichtenroman,” 22, 28, 35 Near East, 23, 24, 25, 27, 36, 37 negentropy, 148 newness, 135, 137, 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 90ff., 140

The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century Nora, Pierre, 87, 88 nostalgia, 159-163, 165-168, 172, 173, 176-179, 181 Orient, 17, 28, 37, 38, 50f. and music, 51; as construct, 23, 24, 36; exoticization of the, 23, 25; as Other, 18, 23, 26, 35, 36 Orientalism: as discipline, 15, 24; as discourse, 15, 24, 26, 34, 37; Enlightenment Orientalism, 25, 27, 37; German Orientalisms, 24. See also Orient Ostalgie, 161, 163, 168, 172, 176, 178, 181 Ottoman Empire, 24, 25, 26, 27 pantheism, 63f. parable, 130, 137, 149 Pharaonenroman (pharaonic novel), also Professorenroman 45f., 52f., 55 philanthropy, 129 philosophy, 128, 131, 139, 142, 143 poetry, 133ff., 152 politics, 129, 132, 133, 137 polyhistorism, 131, 132 polymorphism, 134, 136ff. polyphony, 134 popular culture, 2, 3ff. popular fiction, 3, 4f., 8-11, 54f. Postfeminism, 246, 257, 259 post-traumatic stress disorder, 87 prophecy, 128, 140 Ranke, Leopold von, 19 readership demographics, 249, 251 revisionist history, 245, 250, 251, 258 realism, 72, 80, 81, 87 Realpolitik, 72 religion, 60-65, 128, 139, 143ff., 147-150 Rickert, Heinrich, 75 Ricoeur, Paul, 37; Time and Narrative, 19 romance, 46, 49, 56 Romanticism, 15, 17, 130, 145, 149 Ronzeaud, Pierre, 138



275

Rudolf Mosse Press, 77 Sander, August, 98 saint, sainthood, sanctity, 185, 186, 188, 192, 194, 198, 203, 204, 210 Said, Edward, 24; Orientalism, 24 Saladin (Ayyubid Sultan), 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39 Salem witchcraft trials, 226 Saracen, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39 Schlaf, Johannes; “Die Familie Selicke” (The Family Selicke), 82 Schlegel, Friedrich, 136 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 152 Schulze, Ingo, 160, 163, 168-173, 176ff., 180 Scott, Sir Walter, 18, 22, 37, 62f., 103, 134; Waverley, 18 Sheeans, Vincent, 134 Simmel, Georg, 103 society, 129ff., 133, 137, 139, 140, 144, 148, 151 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 161, 163, 164, 167, 170, 173ff., 180, 181 Spee, Friedrich von, 220, 229, 230 Spengler, Oswald, 128, 140 spirituality, 128, 134, 136, 139, 145, 149, 150 Stasi, 161, 163, 164, 166-170, 174, 175, 181 Stifter, Adalbert, 133, 134 Sudermann: Bilderbuch meiner Jugend (Picture Book of my Youth), 74, 82; “Die Ehre” (Honor), 71, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83; Litauische Geschichten (Lithuanian Stories), 77; “Literarische Wandlungen in Deutschland” (Literary Transformations in Germany), 75; Frau Sorge (Dame Care), 77, 79, 82 Switzerland, 218, 225, 226

276 symbolism, 129, 130, 143 Tauler, Johannes, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 202, 207f. teleology, 128, 130, 142ff. therapy, 130, 146 thermodynamics, 139 Third Reich (also Nazi), 163, 173177, 181 time, 142f. Tolstoy, Leo, 133, 134 total man, 149 transcendence, 128, 148 transformation, 131, 141, 142, 149152 travel, journey, 197, 198, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 travel writing, 46, 49 trivialization, 219, 236 Ulbricht, Walter, 180 Undset, Sigrid, 133, 134 universalism, 18, 24, 33, 34, 128, 130, 133, 134, 139, 143, 149152 University of Königsberg, 75 value, 129ff., 140, 141, 148, 152 visionary, vision, 186, 187, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210 Vivos Voco, 141 Völkerschlachtdenkmal, 88



Index Von Ranke, Leopold, 90 Von Treitschke, Heinrich, 90ff. Wagner, Richard, 136 Walhalla, 88 war, 127, 130, 132, 133, 138-144, 146 Weigand, Sabine, 218, 232; Die Seelen im Feuer, 219, 223, 23235 Wende, 160, 161, 164, 166, 168, 178ff. West, 128, 139, 140, 143ff. West German colonialism, 162, 172 White, Hayden, 2f., 19, 87 Wilhelmine Germany, 75, 92, 93 witch hunt, persecution of witchcraft, 217-36 Wolf, Christa, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 173-178, 181 Woltereck, Richard, 141 women and the book market, 249, 250, 257 women’s history, 245, 250, 251, 255 “women-in Trade” novels, 245, 258 women writers, 16, 21, 24, 37 World War I, 85, 87 World War II, 92 work in progress, 136 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 152