German Literature as World Literature 9781623563912, 9781628927009, 9781623561895

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German Literature as World Literature

German Literature as World Literature Edited by Thomas O. Beebee

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Thomas Oliver Beebee, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German literature as world literature / edited by Thomas Oliver Beebee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-391-2 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. German literature–Appreciation. 2. German literature–History and criticism. 3. Literature–History and criticism. I. Beebee, Thomas O. editor of compilation. PT115.G48 2014 830.9—dc23 2014006616 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6391-2 PB: 978-1-5013-1771-2 ePub: 978-1-6235-6053-9 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6189-5 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Contributors Acknowledgments A Note on the Text Introduction: Departures, Emanations, Intersections   Thomas O. Beebee

vii xi xii 1

Part 1   Goethe’s Weltliteratur/World Literature 1

2

Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) through Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience   Chunjie Zhang

25

Goethe, Rémusat, and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature   Daniel Purdy

43

Part 2  Ausstrahlungen/Emanations Between Political Engagement and Political Unconscious: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East   Simona Moti

63

4

Rainer Maria Rilke: German Speaker, World Author   Kathleen L. Komar

85

5

Bertolt Brecht—Homme du Monde: Exile, Verfremdung, and Weltliteratur  Martina Kolb

101

Militant Melancholia, or Remembering Historical Traumas: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn  David D. Kim

115

3

6

Part 3  Schnittmengen/Intersections 7

From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse   Thomas O. Beebee

137

vi Contents 8

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A Short Survey of the Creation and Development of Common German– Latin American Space: Humboldt, Emigration, Exile, and Contemporary Interactions  Paul Nissler

157

Contemporary German-Based Hybrid Texts as a New World Literature  Elke Sturm-Trigonakis

177

Bibliography Index

197 205

Contributors Thomas O. Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Pennsylvania State University, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. His publications include Clarissa on the Continent (Penn State Press 1991), The Ideology of Genre (Penn State Press 1994), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (Cambridge University Press 1999), Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492–2002 (Oxford University Press 2008); and Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (Purdue University Press 2008). Articles include “A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf ’s Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics” (with Beverly Weber); The Öffentlichkeit of Jürgen Habermas, “Ways of Seeing Italy: Goethe’s Italienische Reise and its Counter-Narratives,” and “Carl Schmitt and the Myth of Benito Cereno.” His most recent books are Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (Continuum 2011), and Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012). David D. Kim received his PhD in German Studies from Harvard University, and is currently Assistant Professor of German and Global Studies at Michigan State University and German at the University of California Los Angeles. He specializes in cosmopolitical, postcolonial, and translational issues and examines fin-de-siècle Vienna, contemporary German literature, critical theory, transnational adoption, human rights, and solidarity in his research. His articles have been published in German Studies Review, TRANSIT, Colloquia Germanica, Austrian Studies, Modern Austrian Literature, and Focus on German Studies. His first book project, titled Parables for World Citizenship, explores matters of communication and community in the works of Hans Christoph Buch, Michael Krüger, and W. G. Sebald. His second book project focuses on the conceptual history of solidarity. Martina Kolb received her Staatsexamen in Modern Philology from the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. She recieved two Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Universities of Konstanz and Bologna, and has taught in German and Comparative Literature and the Humanities Core Curriculum at the Universities of Konstanz, Bilkent, and Pennsylvania State. She taught in the Humanities Core Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, and held Postdoctoral Fellowships at the Universities of Konstanz and Bologna. Her fields of specialization are European modernism, comparative poetics, German and Romance philology, Mediterranean studies, geopoetics, travel literature, exile studies, theater studies, inter-arts, affect studies, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria (Toronto UP

viii Contributors 2013), and of various articles on Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, Pound, Brecht, Marinetti, Gottfried Benn, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wold, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In 2013, she was a Miller Fellow in Exile Studies at the University of London, is currently a Fellow at the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York, and the recipient of a 2014 Suhrkamp Fellowship at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. She is at work on her second book—an interdisciplinary study of verbal and visual representations of emotions, with a particular focus on the affective dimensions of pain. Kathleen L. Komar earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and has served as Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of California at Los Angeles for the past 35 years. She has published over 70 research articles on a variety of topics from Romanticism to the present in American and German literature, including on authors such as Hermann Broch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred Döblin, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Henry James, William Faulkner, and Wallace Stevens. Her books include Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation (2003), Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” (l987), Pattern and Chaos: Multilinear Novels by Dos Passos, Faulkner, Döblin, and Koeppen (1983), and the collection Lyrical Symbols and Narrative Transformations, co-edited with Ross Shideler (1998). Komar served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association 2005–7. She was elected to the executive board of the International Comparative Literature Association for 2010–13. She was a senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in 2012. She is currently working on a book on electronic literature. Simona Moti received her PhD in German from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, and is currently Assistant Professor of German at Kalamazoo College. Her primary research focuses on the representation of alterity as a figure of trauma and mediation in Central European literature. Her current book project deploys postcolonial and minority theories, along with recent theories of nationalism and transnationalism to explore the discursive practices in relation to ethnic minorities in the work of Hofmannsthal, Musil, and Kafka. Her publications include an article on the untranslatability of cultural difference in Musil’s prose. Another field of research constitutes the intersection between culinary studies and cultural studies, and her essay, “ ‘Do they feed you properly up here?’ Towards a Gastrosophic Interpretation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,” which appeared in the edited volume Cuisine and Symbolic Capital: Food in Film and Literature (2010). Paul Nissler has been teaching both German and Spanish at Stanford University since 2005. His dissertation (Penn State 2006) explored a common transnational German–Spanish aesthetic and ideological space, focusing on the early and mid-twentieth century. His recent work explores a historical German–Latin American space, with special emphasis on Alexander von Humboldt, Spanish Civil

Contributors

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War exiles in Latin America, Latin American presence in the Spanish Civil War, as well as broader linguistic and philosophical/cultural discussions in working and translating between German, Spanish, and Quechua. He has forthcoming publications on language acquisition and teaching, and is currently pursuing a number of comparative, interdisciplinary projects. Daniel Purdy is Professor of German at Penn State University. His research focuses on the connections between material culture and philosophical thought. Much of his writing concentrates on the Goethezeit. Having published extensively on consumer culture and on architectural theory, his current project focuses on the German reception of Chinese culture in the early modern period. In 1998 he published a study on fashion culture and male identity, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe, with Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2005, the University of Minnesota Press published his collection of historical writings about style, The Rise of Fashion. His latest book, On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, was published in July 2011 by Cornell University Press. Currently, Professor Purdy served for five years as editor for the North American Goethe Yearbook, and currently co-directs the Max Kade Research Institute at Penn State. Daniel Purdy has received grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch-Dienst (DAAD), the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, and the Humboldt Foundation. Elke Sturm-Trigonakis received her PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Philology and General Linguistics from the University of Heidelberg in 1993, and since 2001 has been Professor of Comparative Literature at the Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki. Her main research fields are multilingual and hybrid (new) world literature, the picaresque, crime fiction, urban literature, (post)colonial literatures, and the transfer of literary themes such as Don Quijote or Don Juan. In addition to numerous articles in German, English, Spanish and Greek, her books include: Barcelona in der Literatur (1994); Barcelona. La novel.la urbana (1996); and Global playing in der Literatur (2007), Sprachen und Kulturen in (Inter)Aktion (ed. with Simela Delianidou, 2013), and Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur (2013).

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek has held faculty positions in comparative literature, German, and English at the University of Alberta 1984–2000; media and communication studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg 2002–11, as well as (distinguished) visiting professorships in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Since 2000 he works at Purdue University. His single-authored books include Comparative Cultural Studies and the Future of the Humanities (forthcoming); Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application; and The Social Dimensions of Fiction and his recent edited volumes include Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies; Digital Humanities and the Study of Intermediality in Comparative Cultural Studies; and Comparative Central

x Contributors

European Holocaust Studies. He is series editor of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies and editor of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (both Purdue University Press). Chunjie Zhang received her PhD in German Studies from Duke University in 2010, and is currently an Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century studies, Asian-German studies, and postcolonial studies. She has published book chapters and journal articles in venues such as German Studies Review, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Lu Xun Research Monthly. The topics of her publications include the reception of China by Elias Canetti, August von Kotzebue and German transcultural consciousness, German Indophilia, Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy of history, Georg Forster’s journey to the South Pacific, and the reception of Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann in China . Her current book project, “German Transcultural: Travel, Literature, and Philosophy around 1800,” unearths the constructive impact of non-European cultures on the German discourse around 1800, which is commonly imbued with nationalist sentiment and movement. Related to her chapter in this book, her article “From Sinophilia to Sinophobia: China, History, and Recognition” appeared in the Colloquia Germanica.

Acknowledgments The editor wishes to thank first of all the Max Kade German–American Research Institute of The Pennsylvania State University for its generous support of a visit to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, which facilitated the writing of the Introduction and compiling portions of the bibliography. Zachary Shellenberger has earned our gratitude for his excellent research and editorial assistance in preparing the volume for publication. Katherine Anderson, Leah Klatt, and Juliana Schicker helped with proofreading. Finally, we are grateful to Haaris Naqvi of Bloomsbury Publishing for his unwavering support of our project, and for his patience in seeing it through to the finish.

A Note on the Text The abbreviation WL is used throughout this book for both “world literature” and Weltliteratur. These terms will be given in full in chapter titles and sub-headings, quotations, and other situations that call for the complete term. Quotations in languages other than English, when the authors have felt it important to give them in extenso, are given first in the original language, followed by the English translation in square brackets. An extensive selected bibliography of anthologies and criticism of world literature can be found at the end of this volume (pp. 197–204). Works that appear in the Bibliography are cited in abbreviated form, and frequently in-text, in the various chapters (in other words, the Bibliography also functions as a Works-Cited list where possible); works that don’t appear in the Bibliography are cited in modified Chicago style.

Introduction: Departures, Emanations, Intersections Thomas O. Beebee

The point of departure [Ansatzpunkt for world literature] must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily seen, set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” 13–141 World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? 281 Following the sentence I have chosen for the first epigraph, Erich Auerbach, a figure of immense importance in the fields of both comparative and world literature, goes on to propose the methodology of stylistics as one such circumscription of a set of phenomena. What if we, instead, were to take a national literature as such a set, as David Damrosch seems to be proposing in his geometrical metaphor? Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a philology of Weltliteratur (which is the title of Auerbach’s piece in German) could be managed without paying detailed attention to one or more individual language traditions. The difference that Weltliteratur makes to philology, in the words of Aamir R. Mufti, is that “the perspectivism of the Ansatzpunkt becomes the means to a new kind of synthesis, a self-consciously partial and ‘discontinuous history’ that seeks to establish contingently its own archive across borders and boundaries—of language, nation, continent, civilization, and tradition.”2 This volume of essays aims at providing one such partial and discontinuous literary history as one of several possible entry points to world literature. In other words, this collection of essays on German literature takes Auerbach’s suggestion as its basis, reading his admonition as an alternative way of “performing” world literature. Rather than “do” world literature either as a corpus of texts or canon, as occurs e.g. in the compilation Works that appear in the Bibliography, as both Auerbach and Damrosch do, are cited in abbreviated form, and frequently in text as here; works that don’t appear in the Bibliography are cited in modified Chicago style. 2 Aamir R. Mufti, “Erich Auerbach and the Death and Life of World Literature,” in D’haen and Kadir, eds, The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 78. 1

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of anthologies such as those published by Norton, Bedford, or Longman, or else as a series of isolated, exemplary comparative readings (as performed for example by David Damrosch in his What is World Literature?), we attempt here the re-visioning of a specific “national” linguistic canon as a particular nodal point of world literature’s international, intersystemic relations. At the same time, however, we may speculate as to whether we might reverse subject and predicate in Damrosch’s formulation—our second epigraph above—and still have a legitimate constative statement: “National literatures are elliptical refractions of world literature.” The ellipses referred to here— chosen by Damrosch for his metaphor due to their double foci, namely the culture of origin vs. the culture of reception of a literary work or corpus—closely resemble the Venn-diagram Schnittmengen (intersections) that are created when the circles of national literatures overlap with each other—for example when translation activity forms part of a national canon (see Figure 2 below). These are the “contact zones” of world literature. One sub-set of these intersections are what Jürgen Joachimsthaler has called Text-Ränder (text-margins), a concept that I explain below. As a first step in providing content for the ellipsis idea, and perhaps for moving beyond it to a multidimensional modeling of the interaction of literary systems, we present this collection of essays on German literature in its international dimensions. While not the first such effort in international Germanistik, the fact that there is not a single index entry for world literature (nor for Weltliteratur) in the otherwise very comprehensive “companion” to German Studies in the United States edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl indicates a need for a volume of essays dedicated to the topic.3 While no single volume can deal comprehensively with such a vast topic as the elliptical refraction of German literature in world literature (and vice versa), the present essays have been chosen so as to cover a historical range within the modern period, with a variety of approaches and authors represented. Together, the chapters address the systematic nature of the relations between German national literature and world literature as these have developed through institutions, cultural networks, and the careers of individual authors. The present collection thus joins analogous efforts focused on other traditions, for example Adam Barrows’s The Cosmic Time of Empire : Modern Britain and World Literature (2012), and Shades of the Planet, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, which solicit their respective national literatures, British and American, to reveal their world dimensions. The question with which the editors of the latter collection begin their introduction seems relevant to our own inquiry as well: What is “AMERICAN LITERATURE”? Is it a sovereign domain, self-sustained and self-governing, integral as a body of evidence? Or is it less autonomous than that, not altogether freestanding, but more like a municipality: a secondtier phenomenon, resting on a platform preceding it and encompassing it,

Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ed., German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook (New York: MLA, 2003).

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and dependent on the latter for its infrastructure, its support network, its very existence as a subsidiary unit?4

The name of any other national literature can be substituted for “American” here without altering the fundamental question being asked. The language of sovereignty and municipality suggest themselves in the case of “American” (by which the editors mean US) more than in that of German literature, since US literature can designate a variety of linguistic artifacts related to a single political unit, whereas German literature in this volume means verbal art in a single language (allowing for dialectal variants) produced by subjects or citizens of at least five different nation-states (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg), and beyond that by a constellation of emigrés and adoptees. Transferable, however, are questions of the degree of systemic autonomy and autopoiesis in national traditions. Given that this question of degree does not admit of a univocal or unambiguous answer, our purpose in this volume is to highlight the porousness of the boundaries of German literature and to adumbrate that larger platform of world literature that it rests on. From this point forward, both “world literature” and “Weltliteratur” will be referenced together under the acronym WL (except in titles, sub-headings, and quotations, where the full phrase will be preserved). Are not the German and the English WL equivalent, one might ask? In many senses, yes, the semantic overlap or Schnittmenge between the two terms is extensive. For example, both differentiate themselves against alternative formulations with “national”: “national literature” and “National-Literatur,” respectively. And since neither term possesses a clear or univocal meaning, attempts at definition of the two terms may coincide or cross each other. But as with most cognates, the fun begins with the subtle distinctions. As Martina Kolb points out in her essay on Brecht, the German version suggests a synonymous phrase where the two nouns, “Welt” and “Literatur,” are linked by a preposition—but by which one? “Literatur der Welt,” “Literatur in der Welt,” or “Literatur von der Welt” are all possibilities, as are conversions of the noun into an adjective: “weltbekannte Literatur,” “weltweite Literatur,” or even “weltliche Literatur.” But instead of any of these more precise limitations of the concept of WL, we are left with the enigmatic composite. In German, as in French, “world” can mean not the globe, but simply society, a valence that has been mostly lost in English usage. The German thus points towards a cosmopolitan element of WL that is certainly discernible in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s pronouncements. Oswald Spengler took up this aspect of WL in his highly influential cultural critique and attempt at world history, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22; The Decline of the West). Spengler makes the following reference to WL: “[WL] ist die führende weltstädtische Literatur” (WL is the dominant metropolitan literature).5 In English Spengler’s point is almost lost, because it lies in the progression from Stadt (city) to Weltstadt (metropolis). The opposite of world literature, in Spengler’s view, is not national literature, but provincial literature that is bodenständig Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, eds, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1. 5 Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich: Beck, 1963), 684. [My emphasis. My translation.] 4

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(telluric). The remark occurs in a segment of the book where Spengler is explaining the triumph of city life in the development of civilization. In the process, Spengler draws a binary distinction between culture-specific and “universal” artistic forms. His conclusion, that there is commonly more distinctiveness between the metropolis of a region and its telluric hinterland than between the various metropolises themselves, resonates with a number of contemporary critiques of globalization, and of WL as a technology of recognition that homogenizes all: wherever one goes today, one finds Berlin, London, and New York, just as the Romans encountered the familiar monuments of “their” culture in Palmyra, Trier, and Timgad. WL, for Spengler, is the literature appropriate to those metropolitan publics which are, whether they are aware of it or not, also cosmopolitan publics. Interestingly, here Spengler seems to go back before Goethe to C. M. Wieland’s marginal notation, “Weltlitteratur,” in the latter’s translation of the Roman poet Horace. Wieland seemed to be indicating just this: that the inhabitants of the capital of Rome were educated in a literature that was not distinctly Roman, but cosmopolitan. A WL perspective sees how national literatures define themselves over, against, and through their others. German literature has constructed itself with a view to those others, from French Classicism to Shakespeare to the Chinese novel that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe discussed with Johann Peter Eckermann on the last day of January in 1827, thereby creating a locus classicus for the discussion and definition of WL. At the same time, German literature has been translated, read, and absorbed in a majority of languages of the world, from Napoleon’s devouring of Goethe’s 1774 Leiden des Jungen Werthers (Sorrows of Young Werther) to the Nobel Prize for Literary Achievement awarded to Herta Müller in 2009. To give two examples from outside Europe, in 1923, Mohammad Iqbal, a renowned poet in both Urdu and Persian and one of the founders of Pakistan, published his Payam-i-Mashriq (Message from the East), which he conceived as a response to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819, revised edition 1827; Western–Eastern Divan). Goethe had written his last poetry collection under the influence of the Persian poet Hafiz, whose work Goethe had read in Joseph von Hammer’s 1814 German translation, and whose poetic persona he adopted for the Divan.6 In a harrowing, autobiographical fiction called “A Fool’s Life” (1927), the Japanese author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa wrote the following: The [West-östlicher] Divan was going to give him [Akutagawa] new life. Till now he had been unaware of the “Oriental Goethe.” With an envy almost approaching despair he saw Goethe standing on the far shore beyond good and evil, immense. In his eyes the poet Goethe was larger than the poet Christ. The poet’s soul holds not only the Acropolis or Golgotha. In it the Arabian rose also blooms. If only he had strength enough to grope in the poet’s footsteps.7 On the Iqbal–Goethe asynchronous exchange, see Anil Bhatti, “Iqbal and Goethe,” Yearbook of the Goethe Society of India (1999–2000), 184–201; and Anil Bhatti, “Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes Divan und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens”: 23–4. 7 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “A Fool’s Life,” in Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Hell Screen, Cogwheels, A Fool’s Life, trans. Will Petersen Grossman (Hygiene, CO: Eridonos, 1987), 129. 6



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In Akutagawa’s view, the creative pseudotranslation represented in the Divan had enabled Goethe to enter the realm of reconciled literary existence that the Japanese author, who wrote a number of works as responses to European authors such as Pierre Loti and Anatole France, longed for but could not attain. His citation of the Divan thus invokes a polylingual, multicultural force-field that is the system of WL in miniature. It is such processes of translation, dialogue, and rewriting that create the worldwide web of literary textuality. From the Germania of Tacitus to the Chinese studies of Leibniz, from the eastward gaze to India of Friedrich Schlegel and Hermann Hesse to the emergence of Turkish–German literature and the presence of Russian–German writers such as Wladimir Kaminer on the current scene, German literature has been imbricated in other cultural traditions. It has ventriloquized other cultures, taken them as mimetic objects, translated and transadapted their texts. Other cultures of the world have, as in the examples above, done the same with German literature. German literature has been written in non-German-speaking countries, and by people for whom German is a second language. German authors have been of vital importance to people who encounter them for the first time in English, Japanese, Spanish, Urdu, and other translations. This collection of essays on these and other transnational moments will together produce an image of, and further the conversation about, German literature as WL. If the foregoing sounds at best cosmopolitan and at worst triumphalist, our purpose is not to show German literature’s universalist appeal, nor to proclaim its important role in the creation of WL. Rather, we hope first of all to shift the terms in the discussion of German literature as a national literature through consideration of the WL component, and secondly, to begin the analysis of its place within a system of WL that includes tensions, rivalries, silences, and untranslatabilities. In what follows of this brief introduction to our topic, I will first say more about the slippery concept of WL, before addressing the creative tension between presenting German literature as WL and as German literature.

What does it mean to study world literature? As with most important topics in the humanities, there is more than one way of understanding the concept of WL. It is useful to have a palette of potential definitions. Five of the more common ideas of WL are: the comprehensive total of all the world’s literatures a hypercanon of the best that has been thought and said worldwide literature as an anthropological constant in human cultures the processes of diffusion and consecration by which locally produced authors, texts, and literatures become globalized 5. literature written with a global or transnational readership in mind. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Concept #1 stricto sensu must remain an ideal form, beyond the cognitive capacity of any single human to realize in its actual phenomenal variety. The urge for

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comprehensiveness does play a role, however, on the level of national and linguistic inclusiveness in the writing of world literary history, as well as in the compilation of anthologies or lexicons of WL. There have been attempts at conceptualizing the wholeness of WL on a more abstract level, and at writing histories of WL. G. F. W. Hegel and his followers did attempt to adumbrate a world-system of art, starting from the notion of the obedience of all forms of art to the workings of the Absolute. Moriz Carrière’s Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwickelung und die Ideale der Menschheit (Art in its Relation to the Cultural Development and Ideals of Humanity), composed in five volumes between 1863 and 1888, was an attempt at just such a universal history of art and literature, beginning in Asia and moving to Europe—though not considering Africa or the Americas. Unlike Carrière, compilers of most contemporary US anthologies concern themselves with the inclusion of as many different traditions as possible. For example, the Norton Anthology of World Literature was infamous for not being true to its title until a so-called “expanded edition” was published in 1995. Until then, the Norton Anthology of World Literature had been in fact an anthology of Western masterpieces. The Longman Anthology of World Literature includes, to be sure, literary artifacts composed originally in Native American and African languages, but beyond that in Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, and other languages. Approach #2 is meant to help solve the problem of unsurveyability by including only the finest works from many traditions, or, perhaps more crucially, those works that appear finest within the language system(s) into which they are translated in order to become WL. A concrete, three-dimensional example of this approach to WL has been given us by Martin Bodmer, who founded a Library of World Literature in Cologny (Geneva), Switzerland. Bodmer began in 1951 with 70,000 books and manuscripts; today the library counts over 160,000 unique items. In his introduction to the library, Bodmer notes that “Dichtung” (translating roughly “verbal art”) forms the imperishable core of WL. He then asks how one can tell “authentic verbal art” (echte Dichtung) among the dross of publication. Time is the great alchemical process from which emerges the gold of true verbal art: “Concerning authenticity there can be no deception. Time smelts it out [herausschmelzen] so purely and surely, as people smelt gold from ore” (Bodmer, Bibliothek der Weltliteratur 9). Naturally, Bodmer’s prosopopoetized “Time” needs to be populated with agents and institutions. Time does seem, in and of itself, to eliminate history and politics from literary works, and even from forms and genres—at some point, epic, which means “song,” lost its function of inspiring warriors to battle and took on a different, more prosified purpose, a change already discernable in literary epics such as the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). Thomas Beebee’s chapter on the Nobel Prize for Literary Achievement shows how the most famous single institution of WL fought against time in attempting to canonize the work of Paul Heyse that was too fully imbricated in his epoch to survive into the twentieth century. We owe to David Damrosch the coining of the term “hypercanon” to describe the select constellation of texts that make up WL.8 The poet Durs Grünbein, on the other David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Saussy, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, 43–53.

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hand, has supplied the most appropriate metaphor for this view of WL as consisting only of peaks: “Es gibt einen Himalya der Literatur, und seine Höhenzüge sind bestens bekannt. Dieses Weltgebirge wird unstreitig von einer Kammlinie aus Sieben- und Achttausendern dominiert, die dort schon seit Jahrhunderten aufragen” [Literature has its Himalaya range, and its peaks are quite well known. This world-range is unequivocally dominated by a backbone of 7000– and 8000–meter peaks that have towered above the rest for centuries] (“Weltliteratur – ein Panoramagemälde,” 23). Grünbein extends the metaphor into allegory as he lovingly describes snow-covered Dante Peak, crenellated Mount Shakespeare, and others, with Goethe among them in a milder light and showing some green meadows. While mountains may be perspectival, Grünbein argues metaphorically, everyone can agree that they have a place in the landscape: “Mag sein, dass die Reiserouten dorthin umstritten sind, die Landkarten widersprechende Angaben machen, einig ist man sich in der Himmelsrichtung. Das Gebirge der Weltliteratur liegt, nicht nur von Tibet aus gesehn, im Westen” [If the travel routes to get there are in dispute, if the maps give conflicting information, we at least agree on the orientation. The mountain range of world literature lies—and not only when seen from Tibet—in the West] (ibid., 24). Grünbein ends with a discussion of the paradox of contemporary WL, which in reality includes only works that have been straightjacketed into planetary conformity by the market pressures of world bestseller-literature, leaving us to imagine the “Inseln der seligen Unbekannten mit ihren seltenen Vogelarten, verloren für die nach fremdartiger Empfindsamkeit hungernde Intelligenz” [islands of the blessed Unknowns, with their rare species of birds, lost to an intelligentsia eager for foreign sentiments] (ibid., 32). The hypercanon of WL frequently involves conflicting mappings of the literary landscape; first and foremost, the hypercanon does not inevitably consist of the texts or authors considered most worthy from the perspective of national canons—which latter are themselves hardly stable objects, but more clusters of probabilities. The essays by Daniel Purdy and Chunjie Zhang confirm the truth of this statement: the famous novel that Goethe refers to in his seminal conversation in 1827 with Eckermann on the topic of WL is not one of the great classics, such as the Hong lou meng (Dream of Red Chamber), which had not yet been translated. No, a second- or even third-rate specimen, Abel Rémusat’s French translation of the Iu-Kiao-Li as Les Deux Cousines, became a European bestseller upon its publication in 1826. That Chinese novel (in French) became the immediate provocation for the discourse on WL. But decades earlier, another Chinese novel, the Hao Qiu Zhuan, translated from English into German in 1766 by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr under the title Haoh Kjöh Tschwen, d.i. die angenehme Geschichte des Haoh Kjöh, had also come to Goethe’s attention. If WL sometimes operates as a shadow-canon rather than a hypercanon, as mentioned above, there can also be interesting discrepancies between linguistic and political belongings. Franz Kafka’s prominence in WL obscures his position in the Czech or Austrian canon. In the case of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who is the subject of Kathleen Komar’s chapter in this volume, however, translatability and national canonization go hand in hand. Komar compares Rilke’s popularity in WL,

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shown in everything from intertextual references to repeated translations of his work, with the shadow status of the American poet Wallace Stevens. Certainly a “must-read” for anyone interested in anglophone poetry, Stevens has been translated much less often into other languages and remains a diminished presence in WL. (The anglophone poet most equivalent to Rilke, with many translations, would probably be T. S. Eliot.) There is a similar conjunction in the case of Bertolt Brecht, though as Martina Kolb proceeds to demonstrate in her piece, Brecht’s entry into WL has more material aspects, given his years of exile and forced wandering from country to country. Brecht himself became a literature-vector that spread his unique form of modernist theater—itself synthesized out of heterogeneous influences, from Russian formalism to Asian performance practices—to other parts of Europe and the Americas, resulting in an incalculable shift in the terms of playwrighting and filmmaking worldwide. Contrasting with these synchronizations of national and WL canonicity are the fates of Rudolf Eucken and Paul Heyse. As I show in my own piece on these forgotten Nobel Prize winners, the impact of the award in Germany was relatively muted compared to its international resonance, and it failed to halt the gradual disappearance of these authors from their respective canons. A limitation of the usefulness of the hypercanon idea is that it seems based on a questionable temporal and territorial sequence, in which national literature canons are created first, through their own internal processes, to then be culled by the mechanisms and processes of WL so as to form hypercanons. It can be demonstrated, however—indeed, the present volume is intended as one such demonstration—that there are international, cross-cultural factors at work in the creation of national canons. If nothing else, as Pascale Casanova points out, national literatures—which do not, despite the asseverations of J. G. Herder and others, emerge from the Volk (people) or bear a definable relationship to “national character”—can only define themselves vis à vis each other, resulting in a mutual conditioning of national literatures within a web of relationships. Beyond translatability, Mads Rosenthal Thomsen has formulated the idea of WL as a system, in which there is positive feedback (i.e., a “snowball” effect), inasmuch as constellations of works draw other texts with similar features into their orbit: The international canons consist of several constellations of works that share properties of formal and thematic character, where canonized works can bring attention to less canonized, but affiliated, works, and draw them into the scene of WL. By studying such constallations, a challenging and realistic mapping of WL is possible. There has been […] too little critical thought based on the mapping of social selection combined with a textual approach that seeks constellations across time and space. (Mapping World Literature 3)

David Kim’s essay in this volume on the writer W. G. Sebald seeks to define one such constellation, that of a militant melancholy forged by global events such as the Holocaust. In terms of genre, the novel (as in Sebald’s work) is perhaps the most highly visible of these constellations, and has been the tip of the spear for placing postcolonial literatures on the stage of WL. Works far from these constellations, on the other



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hand, experience the untranslatability that Emily Apter has identified as constitutive of WL in her book Against World Literature. Apter proposes a focus on untranslatabilities as “a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors” (3). Untranslatables are one element of what lies outside the Schnittmengen between cultures. In contrast, concept #3, that of anthropological constants, implying the translatability of forms, genres, images, and themes, is a useful approach for some of these, while #4, the idea of fusion, forms its complement for others. The idea of myth and folktales as forms of storytelling that arise in cultures independent of each other motivated works such as Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough compilation, while comparison of the lyric traditions of Europe and Asia has been a favorite topic of comparative scholarship, for example in James Liu’s Language, Paradox, Poetics: A Chinese Perspective and Earl Miner’s Comparative Poetics.9 These, and other comparisons of European with Chinese lyric, rest on the assumption that the same literary form exists on both continents, and that there is a translatability between the terms “lyric” and shi. In contrast, other forms such as the novel appear as examplars of the same processes of diffusion that create WL. Franco Moretti’s multivolume, polymathic approach to the question in the complex, multi-authored reference work The Novel is of interest here. While it is an edited set of volumes, The Novel’s organizational structure already makes an important point—or rather, two complementary points: “Toward World Literature” follows on “The Circle Widens” that follows on “The European Acceleration” that follows on “Polygenesis.”10 The implicit argument here is that while in one sense the novel is, like myth and lyric, a literary form that arises independently in several cultures, in another sense it is a European form that expands and is carried and imitated around the globe, creating what today is a world genre in which Günter Grass, Haruki Murakami and Paulo Coelho compete with each other for readership thanks to the work of translation. One of David Damrosch’s several definitions of WL, that it is composed of works that on balance gain rather than lose in translation, invokes this process of diffusion in a striking way (What is World Literature? 233). The contemporary novel brings us to category #5, WL as literature intended for a global audience. This applies to a certain type of author, and has a temporal vector, since increased rapidity of transportation and communication shrinks the globe and causes an ever-greater variety of cross-cultural entanglements. An example is W. G. Sebald, who wrote his novels about emigration and dislocation in German while holding a professorship at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, while another is the bilingual (German–Japanese) writing of Yoko Tawada, or the 2008 novel Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros by the Argentine writer Maria Cecilia Barbetta, which takes place entirely in Argentina, to mention only a few examples. In her piece that closes out our volume, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis has called category #5 the “neue Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd edn, 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906–15); James Liu, Language, Paradox, Poetics: A Chinese Perspective (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988); Earl Miner, Comparative Poetics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 10 Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 1: v–vii. 9

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Weltliteratur,” which she defines as “a concept which allows the establishment of a new literary system on the same rank with already defined literary systems such as national literature, postcolonial literature, or others” (177). The texts of new WL feature more than one language, at least implicitly, and they portray conditions of globalization, or the “oscillation between transnationalism and regionalism in terms of character, setting, and time.”11 In contrast to what Goethe appeared to think would happen, and also to the growth of the literary marketplace in general, interest in WL has not experienced a steady upward trend over the past two centuries. Or perhaps more accurately, one may speak of the “uneven development” of WL in horizontal terms. For example, the post-1945 Cold War saw a predominance of comparative literature and Western Masterpieces rather than WL, as literature became an important carrier for Western values in the face of a perceived threat from totalitarian, Communist states. Conversely, however, a search for WL terms during this period turns up countless publications from behind the Iron Curtain. The impulse towards WL in the DDR (East Germany) went hand in hand with the self-proclaimed internationalism of Communism, and of the official version of the Soviet Union as an anthology of different ethnicities. I. G. Neupokoeva’s contribution in a 1968 volume on comparative method published in East Berlin strikes the typical tone of solidarity, urging the study of WL as a way of isolating and valorizing revolutionary literature produced within capitalist frameworks: “By means of comparative analysis of the history of WL, a specific sampling of the revolutionary literature of the capitalist world just after the Great Socialist October Revolution [Grossen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution] can become part of a general exposition of literary developments in that period. Interesting patterns [Gesetzmässigkeiten] are thereby revealed” (“Probleme der vegleichenden Literaturbetrachtung in der ‘geschichte der Weltliteratur’ ” 65). Helmut Baldauf edited a collection, Schriftsteller über Weltliteratur (Writers on WL), based on a series of radio programs, “Literatur aus aller Welt” (Literature from Everywhere), that consisted of East German authors (Günter Kunert, Franz Fühmann, etc.), describing their encounters with the texts of WL. Oddly, the anthology also includes as part of WL texts originally written in German, such as for example Stephan Hermlin’s piece on Georg Trakl (Baldauf 63–7). In his brief epilogue, Baldauf avoids the stridently political, emphasizing instead the insights achieved through the technique of collecting personal relationships between practicing authors and the body of WL. These are just a select two out of nearly innumerable examples of the valorization of WL approaches in Communist East Germany during the period of that country’s existence. Only a few of these have been retained in the Bibliography for this volume. Conversely, it would be difficult to overlook the breaking down of the Wall and of the Iron Curtain in general, and the resulting processes of globalization as significant factors driving the revival of interest in WL in the West starting in the last decade of the twentieth century (though also beyond, as in the recently formed, globetrotting Institute for World Literature that has met not only in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, “Die Neue Weltliteratur,” IDE 1 (2010), 29.

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also in Beijing and Istanbul). One reason for the explosion of WL theory, pedagogy, and methodology (partly documented in the Bibliography to this volume), as opposed to actual “world lit crit,” is the difficulty of accomplishing either WL criticism, or world literary history. The capaciousness, as well as the polylingual and multicultural features of WL present formidable obstacles to its study, and call for collaborative approaches that conjoin a range of expertise. It is, to use Auerbach’s phrase, crucial to find the correct Ansatzpunkt or point of departure. The present collection of essays on German literature as WL contributes to the critical study of WL in its textual, institutional, and translational realities, while at the same time highlighting a question that has hitherto received insufficient scholarly attention: what is the relation between national and world literatures, or, more specifically, in what senses do national literatures systematically participate in (or resist) WL? While it is common to refer the origins of the concepts of both Weltliteratur and comparative literature to the German-speaking world, and especially to the scattered remarks of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, far less attention has been paid either to reading German literature as WL, or to documenting how Goethe’s injunction was carried out—or not—in Germany itself. Of course, comparative methodology has long been applied to German literature, with often revealing and sometimes surprising results. Comparative methodology is vital to making sense of WL. At the same time, however, consideration of German literature as part of an international network of literary discourse, complementing the autonomous aspects of its specific national, linguistic, and cultural polysystems, must inevitably alter the application of comparative method. In particular, the perspective of WL must expand comparatism beyond the confines of literary credit-and-debit accounting (e.g., as elaborated in so-called “influence studies”), to a more comprehensive and objective attempt at coming to grips with how meanings and traditions travel.12 Whereas the vast majority of comparative and transnational work on German literature has been confined to its derivations from the Classical heritage, with Germany and Austria’s surrounding geographical neighbors (more on this below), or with the multiculturalism of Switzerland, many of the essays in this volume consider more geographically removed cultures, e.g. China (in the chapters by Daniel Purdy and Chunjie Zhang) or Spanish America (in the piece by Paul Nissler), and also “minor” other cultures such as the Slavic hinterland of the Austrian empire (in the essay on Hugo von Hofmannsthal by Simona Moti) or the cultures of origin for immigrants to German-speaking countries, as enumerated by Sturm-Trigonakis. Whereas the comparative approach has historically been one of tracing inputs and outputs (seen frequently, unfortunately, as thematic, stylistic, or ideational credits and This language of “cultural bookkeeping” comes from René Wellek, who in 1959 published an important programmatic essay, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” reprinted in Damrosch, ed., The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, 161–71. See especially p. 167. Wellek called for overcoming such bookkeeping in favor of the shared values of literary imagination and human creativity. I do not mean to imply that comparatists work only or even primarily with a binary model, but Wellek’s characterization may indicate that the engagement with WL is one factor that has caused comparatists to abandon cultural bookkeeping.

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debits), a WL approach is more one of constructing a supralinguistic constellation of relationships between texts, languages, and cultures. Hence, a diagram such as Figure 1 below indicates a relative balance of inputs and outputs between German literary production and that of another language. I have chosen Chinese among dozens of possible languages in homage to its honored place in the single most-cited and anthologized discussion of WL by Goethe, which begins with Goethe’s remark to Eckermann that he has been reading a Chinese novel, to which the former reacts with surprise and some skepticism that such an exotic cultural product can exist. In the actual practice of criticism, one or the other of the terms of this one-dimensional interchange will be exemplified by a single author, so that we understand what Friedrich Schlegel and Hermann Hesse absorbed from Asian literatures, for example, or Goethe’s reception in China.13 Let me contrast the binary exchange model with the Schnittmengen of Figure 2: the diagram is limited by considerations of space to just five sets, and also to a deceptive two-dimensionality, when in fact literature possesses either multiple or zero dimensions. With a bit of imagination, perhaps the reader can see these rings as slices of spheres stacked next to each other, but in such a way that they intersect. The influential Germanist Julius Petersen, who was also long-time editor of the best-known German comparative journal, Euphorion (which he renamed Dichtung und Volkstum, see the discussion below), spoke of these intersections in an address to the Goethe-Gesellschaft, calling them not Schnittmengen but “Zwischenzonen” in a 1927 address with the dramatic title “National or Comparative Literary History?”: National literatures overlap in two areas, therefore: that of the use of foreign languages; and that of the linguistic appropriation of foreign creations, such that internationalized intersections [Zwischenzonen] arise, which represent a common possession: the Waltharius [a Latin composition ca. 1000 C. E. based on Germanic tradition] belongs to the tradition of the Latin Middle Ages no less than it does to German literary history. (Petersen, “Nationale oder vergleichende Literaturgeschichte?” 45)

A more literal translation of Zwischenzonen would be “between-zones,” but I have used “intersections” here in order to refer back to the concept of Schnittmengen that I find analogous to what Petersen presents here. Petersen’s concept of the systems model of Figure 2 was atomistic: the genius and quality of individual authors enter the space of WL and create effects, which he describes as happening when “the emanations [Ausstrahlung] of a genius in all directions through space and time—their transformation through the centuries and various peoples—are brought together in a summary overview, just as Michael Bernays planned to do with his Homer in On Schlegel, see for example Michael Dusche, “Friedrich Schlegel’s Writings on India,” in Deploying Orientalism, ed. James Hodkinson and John Walker (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 31–54; on Hesse, see for example the Symposium on Hesse’s Siddhartha at http://www.asian-studies.org/ eaa/siddhartha.htm. Accessed 24 March 2014. On the latter, see for example Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia, Goethe und China- China and Goethe (Bern: Lang, 1985). Further references can found in the essays by Purdy and Zhang, and in Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms.

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Figure 1   Comparative Model

Swedish

French

Spanish

German

Chinese

Figure 2   World-Literature Model World Literature, or as other considerations on the world influence of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe might bring forth.”14 “Ausstrahlung” is an interesting wordchoice, given that “Ausstrahlungskraft” is the Germanic equivalent of “charisma.” In this model, the idea of a national literature is no longer central. The solid location of “Gebiet” (field) is replaced by an “allseitige Ausstrahlung” (emanations in all directions). A single author or work appears in multiple languages and guises. In our own volume, Kathleen Komar has provided an excellent example of this approach using the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who joins Tu Fu, Rumi, and Walt Whitman as a premiere poet of WL, with his work translated into virtually all of the world’s literary languages. In either case, Petersen invokes Auerbach’s injunction avant la lettre, highlighting scholarship that proceeds from a single, well-defined Ansatzpunkt.15 But far more data is needed in order to construct the second model, the worldsystem of literature, and to outline German literature’s place within it. We should imagine the rings of the second diagram as the outlines of spheres, stacked together like the three-dimensional model of a molecule. Furthermore, those parts of the diagram that do not intersect with any other literature should carry a symbol to indicate something analogous to electrical repulsion of one literature by another, Ibid., 47. Petersen refers to Michael Bernays (1834–97), one of the last polyhistorians, who wrote on Goethe’s Homer reception. Remarkably, the following year (1928) saw a similar intervention, this time by the distinguished Romanist Karl Vossler. See his “Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur.”

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non-contact or untranslatability, which may occur due to material reasons, politicoreligious pressures, or the relative impermeability of the autonomous aspects of a literary system to outside influences. And the circles, of course, are too round and closed, creating the impression that “national” literatures are excessively definable and homogeneous, when in fact they are generally riddled with what Hamid Tafazoli and Richard Gray have termed (coining off of Michel Foucault) “heterotopias,” ranging from dialectal and bilingual writing within national spaces to authors’ hyphenated identities (Tafazoli and Gray, Heterotopien in Kultur und Gesellschaft). I have also drawn them to be excessively equal to each other, when in fact, “Weltliteratur is […] one and unequal,” in Franco Moretti’s words.16 A variety of forces impinge on literature at any time that it encounters a public, but especially when it enters the world stage (or attempts to). Manfred Koch formulates it thus: “Literary exchange between nations is never brought about merely according to the sublime criteria of artistic quality and cultural sympathies. Wherever there is a market, competition rules. Even in the market for world literature a contest of elimination [Verdrängungswettbewerb], in which it is not necessarily the wealth of intellect that triumphs, but the power of the respective culture industry [Kulturindustrie].”17 Few developed literary markets throw up greater barriers to translation than does the US, for example, while German has much greater tolerance for translated literature— there is no US equivalent to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for example. The specific choices made by different literary systems (and, yes, non-human systems do “decide” things) that result in their not interacting with each other is also an important aspect of WL, creating a dynamic tension between the “translatables” and “untranslatables” of intercultural communication, a dynamic that is of course not stable, but constantly ebbs and flows. Readers familiar with the history of Germanistik in Germany may be wondering why I have paid so much attention to an essay by Dr. Petersen, who just a few years later became a Mitläufer of National Socialism in publishing one of the more notorious works of völkisch literary scholarship, Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung (The Desire for a Third Reich in German Saga and Literature) in 1934. One reason is that I wish in this introduction to give a fuller account of thinking about WL in Germany, going beyond the perhaps 80 percent of articles that concern themselves only with Goethe, or at most with Auerbach as well. The second reason, however, is that Petersen’s retreat from comparative and WL between 1927 and 1934 corresponds at its beginning to the relatively open, cosmopolitan orientation of the years when the Weimar Republic seemed like it might actually succeed, with translations and WL making an important contribution to the literary corpus, and at its other end to the years of Nazi rule during which German authors were forbidden from accepting international literary prizes, among other mechanisms—including the exile and statelessness visited upon so many prominent authors—for reshaping Germans’ relation to WL as purely exogamous. Figure 2 suggests the point made by Abram de Swaan, who argues that the political centrality of a language should be determined less by the number of native speakers, Moretti, “Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur” 115. Manfred Koch, “Deutsche Welterleuchtung oder globaler Ideenhandel?’” 42.

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and more by the number of multilingual speakers it has—the overlaps between the circles. Swann uses a number of metaphors in order to map the relations between languages of the world, including Venn diagrams and the nested relations of heavenly bodies. Just as the moon revolves around the earth that revolves around the sun that traverses the galaxy, so too one proceeds from dialects to “national” languages to supranational languages as ever-widening constellations of cultural communication: There are roughly a dozen supranational languages. Sometimes, while central in their part of the system, they dominate by dint of the number of their native speakers, the sheer weight of their plurality: Chinese, German, and Japanese function mainly as native languages on a very large and contiguous territory, but at the same time as second languages they link a number of surrounding speech groups into a communication system.18

Migration patterns and technological development have complicated our originary understanding of what “primary” might mean. Austria, Germany, and the German language’s particular position vis à vis other languages contributes to German’s relative centrality in the development of conceptions of WL. To give one example, Jürgen Joachimsthaler has studied the “text-margins” (Text-Ränder) of Germany’s interactions with Slavic cultures in the east, and especially with Serbs, Lithuanians, Poles, and so forth. The question is one of how literature written in German can convey a multicultural reality. For example, Joachimsthaler describes the role of “the Polish” in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben: “Matters force their way into the text that should remain outside its German world according to the centrally German point-ofview—for which reason they are placed on the Polish side and there represent exactly what should not trespass onto the German side. The text thus imagines within itself its own exteriority [sein eigenes Ausserhalb].”19 Contributor Simona Moti carries out an analogous analysis on the work “Reitergeschichte” (Tale of the Cavalry) by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, prefacing her reading analysis with a review of Hofmannsthal’s ambiguous writings on Austrian multiculturalism and with his correspondence with leading members of its Slavic population that reveal how his dreamlike tale imagines the Slavic exteriority of empire. This reflective process that appropriates the eyes of the other begins with the earliest piece of writing about Germany, the Germania of the Roman writer Tacitus. Tacitus’ goal in composing this text was probably not ethnographic precision, but the admonishment of his own compatriots. The result was the literary composition of an anti-Roman located in the supposedly scrupulous, monogamous, democratic, and warlike Germans. The text began to be accepted as a foundational, transtemporal fixing of German qualities once it had served the French philosophe Montesquieu, who linked the woodland environment in which the Germans lived to their supposed republican virtues. Christopher Krebs has shown how the text’s deployment as a foundational Abram de Swaan, “The Emergent World Language System: An Introduction,” International Political Science Review, 14.3 (July 1993), 220. Jürgen Joachimsthaler, Text-Ränder: Die kulterelle Vielfalt in Mitteleuropa als Darstellungsproblem deutscher Literatur, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011), 1:187.

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document for German nationalism obscured the ongoing inquiries of a small minority into the troubling questions of what the text’s original purpose was, and how accurate it could have been—leaving aside the question of why modern Germans would prefer transtemporal identification with a vanished people to self-fashioning in the present.20 But this transtemporal aliveness is precisely what makes the Germania a work of literature. Bottom line: for 200 years the Germans have used a text written by a Roman and translated from Latin to help define who they are. WL has become German literature.

World literature as German literature Wenn diese Literatur ihrem Ursprung nach nicht bloss eine deutsch-nationale ist, so bezeichnet ihr Auftreten auch nicht bloss eine Epoche in der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, sie hat eine welthistorische Bedeutung: jene Weltliteratur selbst, auf welcher sie beruht, bekommt durch sie eine neue Richtung. [If this literature is not simply a German national one according to its origins, so too its appearance designates not simply another epoch in the history of German literature, but has a world-historical meaning: the world literature on which [modern German literature] rests receives a new direction through it.] Theodor Wilhelm Danzel, “Ueber die Behandlung der geschichte der neueren deutschen Literatur” 184721

These words of Theodor Wilhelm Danzel are remarkable, first of all for the nearmessianic tone with which they treat WL as an epiphenomenon of German exceptionalism. They bear comparison with Goethe’s career, in that like the latter’s own literary production they speak simultaneously to the emergence of the fields of both Germanistik and WL, in dialectical relationship with one another. Goethe first used the term WL in an oracular, prophetic manner that allowed for a continuous engagement with it as a topic and for its continued influence in German letters, at the end of a phenomenal career that had helped bring German literature out from under the shadows of its former models in France and England, an apprenticeship that Danzel refers to in his address. Of course, the simultaneity of the emergence of these two attitudes towards literature, along with the explicitly ideological calls for a German literary tradition as part of nation-building on the part of Jacob Grimm, J. G. Fichte, and Ernst Moritz Arndt, contributed to making them rivals with each other. Goethe was urged more than once to transadapt the Nibelungenlied in order to provide modern German literature with a foundational text, on the analogy of Athenian tragedy’s relationship to Homer.22 Goethe resisted such calls Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: Norton, 2011). 21 Theodor Wilhelm Danzel, “Über die Behandlung der geschichte der neueren deutschen Literatur,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Otto Jahn (Leipzig: Dyck, 1855), 201. 22 See Patrick Fortmann, “Romanticism’s Old German as Stepping-Stone to Goethe’s World Literature,” Goethe Yearbook 20 (2013), 247–63. 20



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in favor of the cosmopolitan approach, embodied most succinctly in his famous pronouncement to Eckermann, “Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen, die Epoche der Weltliteratur is an der Zeit, und jeder muss jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen” [National literature has not much meaning nowadays: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each of us must work to hasten its coming (Strich Goethe and World Literature 349)].23 Why not posit the origins of German literature as multiple, and as including Greek tragedy, Tacitus, Horace, the Bible, Italian novelle, and so forth—so Goethe seemed to argue implicitly? But the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings and flies at night. It fell to Danzel, as Hans Mayer so aptly points out, to bring the question of the relationship between German literature and world literature into greater focus and to insist that the two must be examined simultaneously in their essential interconnections. Danzel spoke two decades after Goethe’s pronouncement, and with G. G. Gervinus delivering in the intervening years the first comprehensive, “standard” history of German literature, a Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur (History of Poetic National Literature), published in five volumes between 1835 and 1842.24 Gervinus skipped over WL in order to express the uniqueness of German literature as its expression of a universal idea of humanity that the Germans shared uniquely with the Greeks. A bit later, at the University of Göttingen, Karl Goedeke worked on his “Umriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung” simultaneously with one of the first attempts at Stoffgeschichte in WL (the latter project unfortunately, but perhaps symptomatically, not coming to fruition).25 Furthermore, historical events drove both attempts: the same Napoleonic wars that had furthered Germans’ love of the fatherland as a reaction to occupation (and that had consolidated some of the hitherto scattered and independent German states) also brought about the increased commercial and political relations between nations that inspired Goethe’s idea of WL. (Indeed, Shaden Tageldin has argued that Napoleonic conquest within and beyond Europe bore a direct relation to the invention of littérature comparée [comparative literature], “a term that first appears in French in 1816 because France had a stake, in that (post)imperial historical moment,in styling itself a world-origin.”)26 A negative example of recognition of German literature’s relationship to WL is found in August Koberstein’s Grundriss der Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur, begun as an outline in 1827, and expanded into a full history in five volumes 1872–84. In his preface, Koberstein carefully distinguished between literature by Germans, and German national literature: “The literature of the Germans in general comprises the whole of creative products [Geistesprodukte] laid down by this people in speech and in writing, without regard to content or form of these products. German national literature is a part of that whole. It comprises, strictu senso, only those written works Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Munich: Beck, 1984), 198; Strich, Goethe and World Literature 349. 24 Hans Mayer, “Deutsche Literatur und Weltliteratur,” in Deutsche Literatur und Weltliteratur, 169–76. 25 Cf. Julius Petersen, 38–9. 26 Shaden M. Tageldin, “One Comparative Literature?” Comparative Literature Studies 47.4 (2010), 423. 23

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that have been produced in an artistic manner, exhibiting a German character [deutsches Gepräge] in their form as well as in their content.”27 Koberstein acknowledges that other literatures have influenced the German, “and in so doing perhaps have undermined its national character [Volksthümlichkeit] and threatened it with complete destruction.”28 It would seem that Josef Nadler’s infamous literary history, Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (1912–1928; Literary History of the German Tribes and Landscapes), created on the theory that each region of the German-speaking countries (or alternately, each German Stamm) had produced a literature that reflected its landscape or the character of its people, would represent the epitome of this kind of approach, but in fact the division of German literature into a myriad of tribal literatures created an unusual dynamic that caused Nadler to formulate his own approach on the analogy with that of WL: The geographical (or better, tribal-historical) factor [landschaftliche (besser stammesgeschichtliche) Moment] is to be compared in all its aspects to the national perspective, through which we observe world literature. […] But just as we prefer to consider a specific ethnographic unit, differentiated through political and geographical factors, as the true vector [Trägerin] of literature, and to use comparative literary history in order to do justice to the overall human connections, so too with our national literature. The tribes [Stämme] bear the same relation to German national literature as nations [Völker] bear to world literature.29

One might think that world literature succeeds national literature, just as globalization seems to be a stage that depends upon the infrastructures provided by national and local frameworks. Indeed, we will soon see Marx’s model in which WL emerges in just such a fashion. Yet the above examples have shown that the two concepts are created almost in tandem. Pascale Casanova points out two important things about national literature formations. One states that national literature is not synonymous with national character. The second identifies one source of literature’s autonomy: national literatures are formed not in isolation, but in relation to other literatures. Generally, there is a literature that is seen as more advanced and to be imitated, as in the case of Chinese for early Japanese literature, Renaissance Italian for French literature, or French for modern German literature. This tendency of national literatures to shape themselves within a network of WL comparisons, even if these are purely oppositional, can also be counted as an aspect of Goethe’s cosmopolitan model.

August Koberstein, Grundriss der Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur, 5 vols., 6th edn. (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1884), 1:1. 28 Koberstein, 1:2. 29 Letter to August Sauer, 17 December 1910; cited in Irene Ranzmeier, Stamm und Landschaft (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 103. 27



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The world literature connection Goethe’s development of the idea of Weltliteratur has been treated many times, by Fritz Strich, John Pizer, and others. Scholars tend to compress the long, detailed, and often contentious institutional history of WL in Germany and have Goethe speak to their age in particular. David Barry, for example, in a 2001 article on Goethe’s WL, cites the “somewhat melancholy judgment” of a 1999 German newspaper on the idea’s fate, which notes that the euro was born in the same city as the inventor of the term Weltliteratur.30 Fritz Strich and Hans Joachim Schrimpf are two scholars who see the restoration of the concept of WL as an overcoming of the pull of nationalism. One scholar who worked to carry out Goethe’s exhortations to WL was Karl Marx. Like Goethe, Marx, after all, was attuned to the close connections between economic and intellectual commerce. His early, unfinished novel, Scorpion und Felix, alludes to Sterne, Heine, Ovid, and the Bible (see Prawer 15–16). The idea of WL coordinated very well with the Hegelian philosophical idea of the connectedness of cultural events worldwide, as we have seen above, but also went hand in hand with the commercial unity of the world being brought about by capitalism. Yet neither Marx nor Engels produced an extended piece devoted to the topic of literature, let alone to WL. Like Goethe, they merely referred to it and located it within the world-system of bourgeois capital, as in this passage of The Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.31

Marx, then, is one example of what Peter Gossens has called the turning from an attempt at conceptualizing WL, to one of constituting it as an object of literary study in the writing of transnational literary histories and the creation of anthologies.32 Indeed, Johannes Scherr published the first edition of his Bildersaal der Weltliteratur in the revolutionary year of 1848. It would go through a number of re-editions, and be joined by other anthologies by Adolf Schwarz, Hermann Hettner, and Adolf Stern. In his preface, Scherr took up the Danzel’s theme of Germany’s WL exceptionalism, itself an inflation of the “ehrenvolle Rolle” (honorable part) that Goethe had parsed out for Germans: “Ein Buch wie das vorliegende ist nur in Deutschland möglich” [A David Barry, “Faustian Pursuits: The Political-Cultural Dimension of Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the Tragedy of Translation,” German Quarterly 74.2 (Spring 2001), 164. 31 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 476–77. 32 Peter Gossens, “Weltliteratur: ein schillernder Begriff,” IDE 1 (2010), 17. 30

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book such as you hold in your hands is only possible in Germany] (Bildersaal VI).33 Scherr’s following comment on the universality of the German Geist (spirit/intellect) that makes such an anthology possible will be echoed in the early-twentieth century by Rudolf Eucken in the context of the preservation of idealism in the face of materialistic theories of existence. A century later, in East Germany, Marx’s model of WL went hand in hand with the self-proclaimed internationalism of Communism, as noted above. In contrast, as the editors of a special issue of the Austrian journal IDE report, attempts at introducing WL into the Austrian school curriculum after 1945 were not lasting, despite the fact that the textbook for the Sekundarstufe II was called Lesebuch der Weltliteratur (World Literature Reader). In particular, the granting of full sovereignty to Austria in 1955 made these first efforts disappear, giving the impression that the focus on world literature had been a sign of lack of national sovereignty. In the current curricula for both Gymnasien and vocational schools, there is a requirement that students acquire “einen Überblick über die deutschsprachige Literatur im Kontext der Weltliteratur” [an overview of German-language literature in the context of WL]. A 1995 reader, appropriately called Brücken, was the only actual collection of texts of world literature intended for the Sekundarstufe, many of them given both in original languages and German translations, but it has since been removed from the list. A literary textbook called Zugänge remains for Sekundarstufe II. The nine essays that follow have been grouped into three categories, each with a bilingual title that hints at the (un)translatability of the concept involved: Goethe’s Weltliteratur/World Literature; Ausstrahlungen/Emanations; and Schnittmengen/ Intersections. The two essays of the first grouping, by Chunjie Zhang and Daniel Purdy, have been described above. The Goethean concept of WL has shown an ability to take on a life of its own, and to connect transtemporally with the concerns of whatever historical moment feels compelled to invoke it. These two essays perform an important function in reminding us, however, of the fact that Goethe’s pronouncements on WL were embedded in his acts of reading works of WL, from the Sanskrit drama Shakuntala to the two Chinese novels discussed by Purdy and Zhang, as well as in his adding to the corpus of WL through hybrid texts such as the West-östlicher Divan, the “Chinesisch-deutschen Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” and even, as Zhang argues, the earlier novel Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities). “Emanations” refers to the focus on individual writers and on the pathways by which their work enters the force-field of WL. In the vexed dealings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal with representatives of some of the Slavic cultures of Austria, Simona Moti gives us a prime example of the impurity of national literature, given its construction on the basis of difference from what the ethnic other is capable of producing. Moti’s essay shows how Hofmannsthal’s preoccupation with Austria’s ethnic others returns symbolically in the violence of his “Tale of the Cavalry.” Kathleen Goethe’s phrase occurs not in the conversation with Eckermann, but in an article on Alexandre Duval’s drama Le Tasse published in Über Kunst und Altertum, vol. 6, part 1 (1827). Cf. Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 349.

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Komar takes a different approach to WL—that of the hypercanon—in exploring the paradoxical phenomenon of poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work is deeply embedded in the specificities of German language, and yet who has been translated and appreciated in many different languages worldwide, entering the canon of “world poets” alongside Hafiz, Rumi, Ghalib, and Bashō. Conversely, however, as is well known, the triumph of fascism and of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism in the 1930s marks a particularly poignant historical moment when “unerwünschte” (unwelcome) authors became, in their physical persons, vectors for the diffusion of German literature into other languages and cultures. For Bertolt Brecht, as a playwright influenced by Asian and other non-European performance styles, exile represented yet another, culminating stage in his attempt at smashing Western drama’s Aristotelian mold. Even Brecht’s return to the (now East) German Fatherland ended up being more of a triangulated, transnational affair than a triumphant return home, as Martina Kolb details in her essay. The career Germanist and novelist W. G. Sebald (1944–2001) could be termed a “second-generation” exile; he was forced to leave Germany not by political decree, but by the cultural forces of amnesia, psychic foreclosure, and the inability to mourn in his homeland that returned to haunt his fiction as narratives of militant melancholy—a melancholy, as David Kim’s analysis shows, that reveals in ghostly fashion the globalized traumatic events that lie at its root. The last grouping of essays, Intersections, starts to fill in the ring model of Figure 2 with detailed information on the systematic programming of WL interactions. For more than a century, the Nobel Prize for Literary Achievement has been a highly regulated and thus highly visible mechanism for test-runs at WL status for national authors. (It has been somewhat less widely known as an intersection between Swedish and other national literatures.) My own chapter provides a case study of two failed runs at this status by German authors in the first decades of the twentieth century—failure in this case acting like an X-ray that reveals the inner workings of the mechanisms of fame and impact that remain hidden when the prize seems to have been inevitable given the literary value of the work. Paul Nissler’s essay takes a different approach to the intersections between German and Latin American literatures, attempting to populate them with bibliographic and in some cases biographic information. The cast of characters in Nissler’s history is immense. His essay begins and ends with Alexander von Humboldt as an emissary, a bridge, and finally an image between cultures and languages. He then complements Humboldt’s monumentality with a plethora of less well-known efforts that depended upon German travel to and residence in Latin America, and of Latin Americans finding refuge in Germany. WL is created out of this trading of place and the concomitant triangulation of viewpoints, as Latin American realities find expression in German. It is fitting that Elke Sturm-Trigonakis’s essay closes the volume, because her concept of “New WL” shows how unstable the elliptical model of WL becomes when the two foci of the ellipsis exist outside of any “national” literature. As she points out, in the Germany of the twenty-first century “the term ‘national literature’ is being questioned more than ever, especially because of the manifest presence of a transnational, linguistically and culturally hybrid literature which as ‘interkulturelle’ or ‘Migrationsliteratur’

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leads a precarious existence within German national philology” (180). Despite the apparent newness of the “New WL,” it reminds us of some old topoi, for example of the metropolis as a node within a “dehierachized, rhizomatic world-system, where one place can easily be substituted by another” (187). This should remind us of Spengler’s observation that WL is “weltstädtische Literatur” (cosmopolitan literature), as well as of Goethe’s discussion of WL as a form of intellectual commerce between peoples. Sturm-Trigonakis argues that New WL exists as an independent literary system rather than as an intersection—in other words, texts of New WL relate far more to each other than to any national canons to which they may be assigned. This is a strong argument, and an interesting metric by which to evaluate literary production over the next few decades. The aim of this introduction has been to hint at the necessity for a dynamic modeling of WL, both in the sense that interactions between literatures are systemic, historically conditioned, and hence subject to change, and that the valorizing of WL has been taken seriously in German intellectual discourse, while also fluctuating through the centuries in its relative claims on the attentions of Germanists. Recent predecessors in the same category of undertaking as here include Clark and Lubrich’s Transatlantic Echoes: Alexander von Humboldt and World Literature (2012), and Fuechtner and Rhiel’s Imagining Germany Imagining Asia (2013), volumes that join the previous work of Azade Seyhan and Leslie Adelson, among many others, in attempting to formulate critical paradigms for coming to grips with literary texts that find or have a life outside the nation.34 We hope there will be many successors to this volume of essays, this our point of departure into WL.

See e.g., Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001); Leslie Adelson, ed. The Cultural After-Life of East Germany: New Transnational Perspectives, Helen & Harry Gray Humanities Program Series 13 (Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2002), and Leslie Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). For yet another perspective, namely that of the increasingly transnational construction of Germanistik as a discipline, see Paul Michael Lützeler, Transatlantische Germanistik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013).

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Part One

Goethe’s Weltliteratur/ World Literature

1

Reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften)through Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Hong Lou Meng): Immanent Divinity, Vegetative Femininity, and the Mood of Transience Chunjie Zhang Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809) recounts a story in which a married couple, Eduard and Charlotte, fall in love respectively with another woman and another man while renovating and redesigning their garden and country estate. The garden’s flora and its transience not only offer a vegetative background for the entire novel but also serve as an exterior articulation of the characters’, in particular Charlotte’s niece Ottilie’s interior feelings and personalities. This latter function demonstrates Goethe’s perception of a close affinity and a mutual impact between nature and humanity. Published in 1791, about two decades earlier than Goethe’s work, Cao Xueqin’s (曹雪芹) classical Chinese novel The Story of the Stone (also translated as The Dream of the Red Chamber for Hong Lou Meng 红楼梦), also narrates love stories set in a garden—the Great Prospect Garden (da guan yuan大观园) of the aristocratic family Jia (贾). An examination of the female protagonist Dai-yu (黛玉) and of the mutuality between humanity and nature in The Story of the Stone discloses striking similarities with Ottilie in Goethe’s story, especially in the characters’ affinity with plants and their reflections on nature’s transience. This resemblance, however, is not a literary and cultural coincidence between Goethe and Cao, living apart in geographically and culturally remote places— Weimar and Beijing respectively, around the year 1800. Nor does the resemblance show direct intertextuality between these two literary works, canonical respectively in German and Chinese cultures. The Story of the Stone was first translated into a common European language—English—by Wang Xilian (王希廉) in 1832, the year of Goethe’s death, while the book’s first translation into German by Franz Kuhn, who drastically abridged the book, was not published until a century later, in 1932.1 Hence, Goethe could have known of neither the English nor the German Herbert A. Giles, A Catalogue of the Wade Collection of Chinese and Manchu Books in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 91. In this

1

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translation while composing his Elective Affinities. However, much other textual evidence indicates that Goethe was actively engaged with the artifacts of Chinese culture available to him at that time. More importantly, not only the reigning Confucianism, favorably endorsed and recommended to European intellectuals by the Jesuit missionaries in China, but also the Jesuits’ intellectual rivals in China— the Daoists and Buddhists—drew Goethe’s sympathy. Hence, even if the way in which the Jesuits conveyed knowledge about China influenced its reception among European intellectuals, their views by no means excluded other possible interpretations. The Story of the Stone is strongly influenced by Buddhist and Daoist ideas and highly critical of Confucian state ideology and social values. In the story, for example, a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest function as the chief emissaries between the human and the natural/divine world. Hence, although The Story of the Stone and Elective Affinities do not make direct intertextual references to each other, I shall show that the idea of the divinity inherent within nature and humanity, contained in Goethe’s pantheist Spinozism and Chinese Daoism and Buddhism, connects these two works. More importantly, the symbolic comparison of women to plants, which I call vegetative femininity, and the mood of transience in the two novels construct the points of comparison and render visible the idea of immanent divinity. These aspects in Elective Affinities, I believe, also deserve more scholarly attention.2 I will in the end stress that not only philosophical ideas or cultural history, but also, or even more importantly, the uniqueness of literature motivates this cross-cultural reading and enriches our debate about cross-cultural communication and transformation.

Immanent divinity Günther Debon demonstrates that Elective Affinities, especially in its approach to the problem of marriage, repeatedly invokes the popular Chinese novel Hao Qiu Zhuan (好逑传), the novel Goethe probably had in mind when he famously talked about world literature with Eckermann. Edited and published in its entirety for catalogue, the name of the translator is spelled as Wang Hsi-lien. Martha Davidson’s list shows that the earliest translation was published in 1842. Martha Davidson, ed. A List of Published Translations from Chinese into English, French, and German (Ann Arbor, Michigan: J. W. Edwards, 1952) (published for the American Council of Learned Societies), 10–12. In this list, reference a98 shows that S. N. Hsu’s French anthology of Chinese literature contains excerpts from Hong Lou Meng. This reference contains the parenthetical fragment “(1792 ed. Reprinted in 1927).” But it is difficult to decide whether the edition of 1792 is meant for Hong Lou Meng, because Hsu’s anthology mainly collects twentieth-century Chinese literature, and was first published in 1927. If this means that excerpts from Hong Lou Meng were translated into French or other European languages in 1792, this particular list of translations, at least, does not specify the place, the language, and the translator of this publication in a clearer and separate note. Hence, it is safer to go with the earliest date of 1832, documented in Herbert A. Giles’s catalogue. 2 See Tantillo’s work for a comprehensive summary of major scholarly trends in interpreting Elective Affinities. Astrida Orle Tantillo, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the Critics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001).



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the first time in London in 1761 by the writer and poet Thomas Percy, Hau Kiou Choaan, or the Pleasing History, was translated from English into German in 1766 by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr under the title Haoh Kjöh Tschwen, d.i. die angenehme Geschichte des Haoh Kjöh. A romantic story deemed second- or third-rate by its Chinese readership, Hao Qiu Zhuan delivers rigid Confucian moral messages about heterosexual relationships and celebrates sexual restraint and chastity before marriage.3 Debon meticulously proves that Goethe read and praised the restraint (Mäßigung) of the female and male protagonists in Hao Qiu Zhuan several times after 1796, as evidenced by his diaries, letters, and reports from contemporaries. Debon, however, also admits that the author of the Elective Affinities and the work itself do not unquestioningly defend the institution of marriage and female chastity, as Hao Qiu Zhuan does.4 Debon also quotes Goethe’s comments on the negative aspects of marriage to problematize the influence of Hao Qiu Zhuan on the Elective Affinities. Indeed, even though Ottilie’s resignation seems to “excuse” her behavior in “destroying” other peoples’ marriages, Goethe’s educated contemporaries, such as August Wilhelm Rehberg and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, accused the Elective Affinities of undermining public morality. Jacobi commented on Ottilie’s apotheosis toward the end of the novel as “Himmelfahrt der bösen Lust.”5 While Jacobi’s biting remark needs to be revised by more nuanced discussion, it also complicates a direct comparison between Hao Qiu Zhuan and the Elective Affinities from a moralistic perspective. Katharina Mommsen briefly points out that in addition to Confucianism, Goethe was familiar with the close relationship between humanity and nature in Chinese Buddhism and Daoism.6 In a letter to Schiller on January 3, 1798, Goethe mentioned a dispute between a Chinese and the famous Jesuit missionary Mateo Ricci, documented in Neupolirter Geschicht-Kunst- und Sitten-Spiegel ausländischer Völcker fürnemlich Der Sineser, Japaner, Indostaner, Javaner, Malabaren […] (News about History, Art, and Custom of Foreign Peoples, especially of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindus, the Javanese, the Malabar […]), edited by Erasmo Francisco and published in 1670. Goethe comments in his letter to Schiller that the dispute between the Chinese and Ricci resembles the quarrel between the idealist philosophers of nature, presumably including Friedrich Schelling, and Karl Leonhard Reinhold, an advocate of popular

For more detailed information about Hao Qiu Zhuan’s translations into European languages and its reception in Europe, see Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 128–30. 4 See Günther Debon, “Goethe erklärt in Heidelberg einen chinesischen Roman,” in Goethe und China—China und Goethe. Bericht des Heidelberger Symposions, ed. Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, and New York: Peter Lang, 1985). 5 See Rudolf Zoeppritz, ed. Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß. Ungedruckte Briefe von und an Jacobi und Andere. Nebst ungedruckten Gedichten von Goethe und Lenz (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1869), 44. Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities also quotes Jacobi’s moralistic comment, cf. “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1, Teil 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 142. 6 See Katharina Mommsen, “Orient und Okzident sind nicht mehr zu trennen”. Goethe und die Weltkulturen, 320. 3

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Enlightenment and of the universal validity of critical philosophical principles.7 Goethe borrowed this book from the library in Weimar between December 6, 1797, and November 10, 1798. Ricci is well known for his active role in introducing Chinese Confucianism to Europe and for translating Christian works into Chinese around 1600. In this dispute, the Chinese contests the Christian God’s omnipotence and God’s status as the sole creator of the universe. The Chinese does not deny that there might be such a regent of heaven and earth, but contends that every human, including himself, shares God’s creative power and is not inferior to him in any respect. When Ricci points to a frying pan and demands that the Chinese create the world, the Chinese protests and considers this request inappropriate. Thus the dispute enters a second round. The Chinese asks Ricci, when he talks about the sun and the moon, whether he ascends to heaven or these bodies descend to him. Ricci responds that neither happens—rather, when one sees something, “so entwerfen und reissen wir auf die Tafel unsers Verstandes, eine Gestalt deß angeschauten Dinges ab und wenn uns beliebt, von einer gesehenen Sache, zu reden oder daran zu gedenken. so schauen wir hinein, in unsere Sinnen und Verstand, fordern von denselben die empfangene Bildnissen und Gestalten wieder ab [we thus sketch out the tablet of our understanding, a form of the observed object, and when we wish to speak of something seen, we look inwards, into our senses and understanding, ask these to give us back the perceived images and forms].”8 At this moment the Chinese stands up and happily claims that Ricci has just created a new universe and, in the same way, he can create all other things. Ricci disagrees and contends that this act is merely a reflection of God’s creation. The narrator’s rhetoric clearly supports Ricci, and describes the Chinese as an arrogant and brazen pagan. Obviously, the Chinese denies the external existence of God, and recognizes creativity and divinity inside every human being. In other words, he contends that human beings have an innate divinity shared within nature and can also articulate this divinity in a creative manner. I believe that the Chinese person’s argument reflects the idea of tian jun (天均) in Zhuang Zi (庄子), one of the Daoist canons. Hu Shi (胡适) explains tian jun against the backdrop of the nineteenthcentury debate over Darwinian evolutionism, and argues that tian jun means that evolution and change come by themselves and govern themselves. This idea thus repudiates the existence of a metaphysical being, a God, as the creator.9 Ricci’s dispute is not just a random anecdote in the history of Jesuit missionaries Heiner Roetz points out the close resemblance of Schelling’s philosophy of nature to Chinese Daoism and Buddhism. See Heiner Roetz, Mensch und Natur im alten China: Zum SubjektObjekt-Gegensatz in der klassischen chinesischen Philosophie, zugleich eine Kritik des Klischees vom chinesischen Universismus (Frankfur am Main: Peter Lang, 1984). 8 Friedrich Schiller, Werke. Nationalausgabe, vol. 37, II (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1988), 278. 9 See Shi (胡适) Hu, Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (中国哲学史大纲) (Beijing: Dong Fang Chu Ban She, 1996), 223–33. Hu cites Guo Xiang’s argument on the existence of a creator: 请 问夫造物者，有耶？无耶？无也，则胡能造物哉？有也，则不足以物众形。[…] 故造物者 无主，而物各自造。230. 7



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in China. In fact, this story is a significant summary of the intellectual challenges and consequent political persecution the Jesuits encountered in China around 1600. The Chinese literati most sympathetic to Buddhist and Daoist thought, such as Huang Zhen (黄贞) and his influential An Anthology of Writings Exposing Heterodoxy (Po Xie Ji 破邪集), published in 1632, charged the Jesuits with destroying public morals and overthrowing the hierarchy of Chinese society. One of the major accusations against Christianity was that its monotheism placed God higher than family ancestors, which could potentially undermine Chinese ancestral rituals and the people’s consent to the imperial system. Facing these challenges, the Jesuits strategically allied with the school of Dong Lin (东林), a group of ambitious Confucian politicians, because the Jesuits saw in this school a trend toward monotheism and moral values compatible with their own Christianity.10 Owing to the Buddhist and Daoist attacks, and to the conflicts between Rome and the Jesuits, this Confucian alliance, in the end, could not save the Jesuits’ mission or prevent the Chinese state’s ban on Christianity around 1700. Although the narrator clearly supports Ricci, Goethe sympathizes with Ricci’s Chinese opponent. He comments in his letter to Schiller that the Chinese shows his “Scharfsinn.” Goethe’s sympathy with the Daoist and Buddhist position, as articulated by Ricci’s Chinese opponent, corresponds with his Spinozism—a pantheistic immanentism. Goethe’s Spinozism recognizes that human existence is confined within nature and does not need guidance from a supernatural or metaphysical God. Hence, one must constantly reconstruct and cultivate one’s inner world through art and literature in order to more closely approach the natural world—but not necessarily revolutionize the social order, as the French Revolution had done. Jonathan Israel argues that Goethe’s Spinozism is an inward path toward a revolution of the mind and sensibility instead of an outward engagement to change society. This route, Israel further comments, transforms “the individual outlook, an artistic, cultural, and moral emancipation separate from social and political concerns, yielding no changes in laws and institutions but instead creatively elevating and inspiring a thinly spread cultural elite composed of the most creative, independent, and sensitive.”11 Art, literature, and aesthetics became special media through which human beings can come closest to nature. Hence, the idea that I call immanent divinity connects Goethe’s Spinozism with the Chinese Buddhist–Daoist idea of creation. This shared immanentism in both German and Chinese culture provides a common ground for reading Elective Affinities through the themes of vegetative femininity and transience in The Story of the Stone. I shall begin my discussion with vegetative femininity in both novels in order to illustrate the close connection between femininity and plants embodied in Dai-yu and Ottilie. This vegetative femininity is also subject to nature’s seasonal change and transitory loss in both novels. This is the second theme I will discuss. Transience is central to both See the excellent article by Tiangang (李天纲) Li, “Early Catholicism and the Multitude of Social Culture in Ming- and Qing-China (早期天主教与明清多元社会文化),” Historical Review (史林) 56, no. 4 (1999). 11 Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 756. 10

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novels in different ways. While The Story of the Stone, in a more pessimistic manner, presents the Buddhist conception of life as suffering in an aimless cycle, Elective Affinities, in a rather positive and affirmative way, apotheosizes Ottilie’s death after she recognizes the transitory nature of life and decides to turn away from Eduard’s love and her love for him. Ottilie’s apotheosis, corresponding to Goethe’s Spinozism, is an embodiment of the immanent divinity of nature.

Vegetative femininity Ottilie has been one of the foci and, arguably, the most ambiguous aspect of the scholarship on Elective Affinities. Scholars see Ottilie as an adulterous woman, a moral and spiritual icon like the Madonna, a triumphant articulation of human will over passionate sexuality, a symbol for oppressive patriarchy because of her silence and obedience, a monastic figure, or the representative of the intellectual transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.12 I instead stress Ottilie’s vegetative femininity as seen through the prism of The Story of the Stone, in order to illustrate the entanglement between humanity and nature. Ottilie thus does not represent Virgin Mary, as many critics suggest, but rather proves a deist figure symbolizing immanent divinity. One of The Story of the Stone’s central themes is vegetative femininity. At the beginning of the novel, the Daoist priest Vanitas (空空道人), who is going to edit and circulate the story, addresses the stone on which are inscribed all the experiences it has had in the human world (红尘): Brother Stone, according to what you yourself seem to imply in these verses, this story of yours contains matter of sufficient interest to merit publication and has been carved here with that end in view. But as far as I can see (a) it has no discoverable dynastic period, and (b) it contains no examples of moral grandeur among its characters—no statesmanship, no social message of any kind. All I can find in it, in fact, are a number of females, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or insignificant virtue. Even if I were to copy all this out, I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book.13

The editor’s doubt about the value of the story highlights its uncommon focus on female characters and their emotional and psychological interiority and the lack of Confucian moral messages in this novel. This doubt precisely differentiates The Story of the Stone from the novels, more common in Chinese culture, about marriage, war, crime, and politics. Female interiority is intimately connected to the characters’ vegetative nature. See Tantillo, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the Critics, 180–4. Xueqin Cao, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes, 5 vols., vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1973), 49. [My emphasis.] Xueqin Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦) (Beijing: People’s Literature Press (人民文学出版社), 1996), 4–5. 石兄，你这一段故事，据你自己说有些趣味， 故编写在此，意欲问世传奇。据我看来，第一件，无朝代年纪可考；第二件，并无大贤大 忠理朝廷治风俗的善政，其中只不过几个异样女子，或情或痴，或小才微善，亦无班姑、 蔡女之德能。我纵抄去，恐世人不爱看呢。

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According to the Buddhist idea of incarnation and the life cycle of past, present, and future, the female protagonist Dai-yu is reborn from a crimson pearl flower (绛珠草) growing up in The Land of Illusion (太虚幻境), the place where the fairy Disenchantment (警幻仙子) lives. The fairy’s male servant Divine Luminescent (神瑛侍者) has been watering and nurturing the crimson pearl flower and is now going to be reborn into the human world as Bao-yu (宝玉), the male protagonist. Hence, the plant wants to repay his water with all the tears of her mortal life—that is to say, with a tragic love story. Femininity’s vegetative nature is articulated through the element of water and bodily fluid. This vegetative femininity is also deeply entangled with its male counterpart, who recognizes the feminine affinity with nature. Bao-yu claims that “girls are made of water and boys are made of mud. When I am with girls I feel fresh and clean, but when I am with boys I feel stupid and nasty.”14 Closeness to women thus indicates closeness to nature and human nature. Vegetativeness also performs the function of critiquing Confucian values of materialism and utilitarianism. The three-sided relationship among Bao-yu, Dai-yu, and Bao-chai skillfully constructs the contradiction between the emotional vision of love and the practical norm of family. The three characters’ names already disclose the paradoxical entanglement between love and family. Bao-yu and Bao-chai both share the first character bao 宝, meaning precious and rare. Since the character chai 钗, meaning hairpin, has a gold radical in ideogram, Bao-chai symbolizes gold in the novel. Yu 玉 in Bao-yu’s name means jade and, according to Confucian social values, forms a pair with gold and promises a fortunate and prosperous marriage, as is often suggested by many family members in the course of the story. The narrator tells us that “ever since Bao-chai’s first arrival, Grandmother Jia had been impressed by her placid and dependable disposition […].”15 In Chinese, the Confucian idiom “the fortunate marriage of gold and jade” (jin yu liang yuan 金玉良缘) finds its expression in the ideal marriage of Bao-yu and Bai-chai, a marriage of wealth and power. However, Bao-yu and Dai-yu share the character yu—jade, which is merely a stone if it is deprived of the preciousness society bestows on it. This linking through stone attaches these two characters to pure human emotion and to nature, in which the stone and the plant Dai-yu are both at home. The natural world of stone and plants has another function. It provides a medium for the expression of the Daoist and Buddhist ideal of the retreat from society and the pursuit of personal, spiritual, and intellectual freedom. Bao-yu exclaims in his dream: “I don’t believe in the marriage of gold and jade. I believe in the marriage of stone and flower.”16 Bao-yu and Dai-yu’s love story, however, ends tragically due to family pressure and Confucian materialist values of wealth and power. The narrator’s Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 76. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 28. 女儿是水作的骨肉，男人是 泥作的骨肉。我见了女儿，我便清爽；见了男子，便觉浊臭逼人。 15 Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 432. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 292. 贾母自见宝钗来了，喜他 稳重和平 …。 16 Xueqin Cao, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes, 5 vols., vol. 2 (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977), 203. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 479. 什么是金玉姻缘，我偏说是木 石姻缘。 14

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sympathy with the two lovers of stone and flower thus powerfully critiques the unnaturalness of the Confucian family ideal, which constrains human sentiments and estranges humans from their emotional nature. Since Bau-yu’s name ties him to the Confucian world and the Daoist and Buddhist world at the same time, he is not a purely natural figure. However, Dai-yu, representing vegetative femininity, is the quintessential figure of nature in The Story of the Stone. Later in the novel, when Dai-yu lives in the Great Prospect Garden (da guan yuan 大观园), her vegetativeness is symbolized even more strongly in her flower burial. We will come back to this point in the next section, on nature’s transience. Although there is no obvious incarnation and transformation in the German novel, Ottilie and Dai-yu still share numerous parallels: they are both in love with a person whom they do not end up marrying or remaining with; their love is not approved by society or the family; Ottilie is contrasted to Charlotte and Dai-yu is compared to Bao-chai, a person comparable to Charlotte in reason and tact; both Ottilie and Dai-yu die of hunger and weakness at the end of the story and make their lovers unhappy; both are teenagers; both are nieces, part of the family, but not of its core; and most importantly, both are integrated into the garden as a focus of their life and work. Their most conspicuous similarity is their vegetative femininity. In his famous conversation on world literature with Eckermann on January 31, 1827, Goethe commented on the Chinese novel (which, as noted above, must have been Hao Qiu Zhuan), observing that the Chinese think, act, and feel just like the Germans. The only difference in China is that nature always co-exists next to humanity: Es unterscheidet sich aber wieder dadurch daß bei ihnen die äußere Natur neben den menschlichen Figuren immer mitlebt. Die Goldfische in den Teichen hört man immer plätschern, die Vögel auf den Zweigen singen immerfort, der Tag ist immer heiter und sonnig, die Nacht immer klar; vom Mond ist viel die Rede, allein er verändert die Landschaft nicht, sein Schein ist so helle gedacht wie der Tag selber.” [They likewise differ from us in that with them external nature is always associated with the human figures. You always hear the goldfish splashing in the pond, the birds are always singing on the bough; the day is always serene and sunny, the night is always clear. There is much talk about the moon; but it does not alter the landscape, its light is conceived to be as bright as day itself].17

This observation fits the configuration of Dai-yu perfectly, but also Goethe’s conception of Ottilie. The narrative of Elective Affinities never completely leaves Eduard’s country estate, a place full of landscape architectural projects. Ottilie, who does not do well in the boarding school (Pension), prospers in the garden environment. In one of her diary entries, Ottilie expresses a deep connection to plants: [Mit den Bäumen die Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Johann Peter Eckermann Gespräche mit Goethe,” in Johann Wolfgang Goethe Sämtliche Werke, ed. Christoph Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), 223; Damrosch, Melas and Buthelezi, eds, Sourcebook of Comparative Literature, 22.

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um uns blühen, grünen, Frucht tragen, mit jeder Staude an der wir vorbeigehen, mit jedem Grashalm über den wir hinwandeln, haben wir ein wahres Verhältnis, sie sind unsre echten Kompatrioten] “With every tree around us which blossoms, bears leaves and brings forth fruit, with every shrub we pass by, with every blade of grass upon which we tread, we have a true relationship, they are our genuine compatriots”.18 Responding to Ottilie’s question about how long his plane trees and poplars live, Eduard says that they are as old as Ottilie. The parallel between Eduard’s trees and Ottilie sharpens when Eduard finds out later that not only the year but also the day coincide: Ottilie’s birthday is the same day Eduard started to plant his trees. On the one hand, the coincidence of dates may suggest that Eduard is a father figure who creates and patronizes Ottilie. On the other hand, it reinforces the intertwined development of Eduard’s engagement with nature and Ottilie’s vegetativeness. Eduard strongly identifies with these trees and declines to move or change them in the garden and park renovation projects. The narrator’s comment on Eduard’s childlike quality also undermines Eduard’s status as a patronizing father figure: “Eduard hatte bei zunehmenden Jahren immer etwas Kindliches behalten, das der Jugend Ottiliens besonders zusagte” [Despite his advanced years Eduard had retained something childlike to which Ottilie’s youth was particularly congenial].19 Like the rebirth in The Story of the Stone, when Eduard plants the trees, his identity is reborn with and in them. The trees join Eduard with Ottilie in a vegetative way. Eduard and Ottilie share an interest in, and a belonging to, vegetative nature. Ottilie also discovers her element in the cultivated nature of the park after Eduard’s departure. She leaves the house and learns to appreciate the countryside. She goes out to the park early in the morning, rows the boat to the middle of the pond, and, reading travel writings, lets her imagination fly to distant countries. Eduard’s departure obviously compels Ottilie to change her habitat and helps her find freedom, at least an imaginative freedom, in the garden environment. If the house represents social conventions and restrictions, Ottilie is now more closely integrated with the freer natural landscape. If we recall that women are compared to water in The Story of the Stone, we notice that Ottilie is also well served by this element that is otherwise associated with danger and instability and is responsible for the boat accident on her birthday and for the death of baby Otto. Ottilie is not only physically safe on water but also psychologically free. Accompanied by the movement of water, reading travelogues about other places allows her to imagine a different way of life in which her love for Eduard could become true. Ottilie thus finds the articulation of her inner feelings in nature. Before his departure, Ottilie is already skillful in taking care of Eduard’s garden. After his departure, Ottilie continues to care for the garden with the help of the old gardener, and she identifies herself strongly with the plants. When Luciane inconsiderately uses plant branches to decorate tables and rooms in winter, Ottilie suffers greatly, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), 215; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, vol. 3, Goethe Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1998), 558. 19 Goethe, Elective Affinities: 71; Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 448. 18

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dreading the future. When the architect and Ottilie paint and decorate the chapel in autumn, they not only use images and colors but also use plants: Aber wie in solchen Dingen immer eins zum andern führt, so wurden noch Blumen und Fruchtgehänge beschlossen, welche Himmel und Erde gleichsam zusammenknüpfen sollten. Hier war nun Ottilie ganz in ihrem Felde. Die Gärten lieferten die schönsten Muster, und obschon die Kränze sehr reich ausgestattet wurden; so kam man doch früher als man gedacht hatte, damit zu Stande. [But as in matters of this sort one thing always leads to another, it was decided to add hanging clusters of fruit and flowers, which were supposed, so to speak, to link heaven and earth. Here Ottilie was altogether in her element. The gardens provided the finest examples they could desire and, although the garlands were very liberally fitted out, the work was completed sooner than they had expected].20

The reference to heaven and earth (Himmel und Erde) in this passage reminds us of the Chinese person’s argument in the dispute with Ricci that everyone can create his or her own heaven and earth—the universe. “Heaven and earth” (天地) is a common expression for universe or world in classical Chinese. With Ottilie’s help, the architect creates his own heaven and earth through the chapel project. Between heaven and earth, the two poles of existence, flowers and plants function as mediator and emissary. The narrator’s comment that “Ottilie ist ganz in ihrem Felde” points out once again her vegetative nature. The chapel project then also creates space for the deist expression of nature’s immanent divinity.

Mood of transience This vegetative femininity in both the Chinese and German novels is subject to seasonal transience and a melancholic tragic mood. In The Story of the Stone, the scene of flower burial articulates this transient atmosphere. At the beginning of this scene, Bao-yu is reading the famous love story Western Chamber (Xi Xiang Ji, 西厢记) under a peach tree: He had just reached the line “The red flowers in their hosts are falling” when a little gust of wind blew over and a shower of petals suddenly rained down from the tree above, covering his clothes, his book and all the ground about him. He did not like to shake them off for fear that they got trodden underfoot, so collecting as many of them as he could in the lap of his gown, he carried them to the water’s edge and shook them in.21

When Bao-yu notices even more flowers raining down and hesitates, Dai-yu appears with a hoe, a muslin bag, and a garden broom. While Bao-yu asks Dai-yu to help Goethe, Elective Affinities: 168. Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 520–1. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 463. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 314. 正看到“落红成阵”，只见 一阵风过，把树头上桃花吹下一大半来，落的满身满书满地皆是。宝玉要抖将下来，恐怕 脚步践踏了，只得兜了那花瓣，来至池边，抖在池内。

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sweep all the petals together and tip them in the water, Dai-yu shows him another approach: “It isn’t a good idea to tip them in the water,” said Dai-yu. “The water you see here is clean, but farther on beyond the weir, where it flows past people’s houses, there are all sorts of muck and impurity, and in the end they get spoiled just the same. In that corner over there I’ve got a grave for the flowers, and what I’m doing now is sweeping up and putting them in this silk bag to bury them there, so that they can gradually turn back into earth. Isn’t that a cleaner way of disposing of them?”22

Bao-yu admires her cleaner way and helps bury the flowers. Although they choose the cycle through earth rather than water to decompose flowers, the narrative still lingers on water and the dreadful destiny of flowers until the end of this chapter. Left alone by Bao-yu, who is obliged to attend to a sick uncle, Dai-yu stays in the garden and hears a theater rehearsal singing: Because for you, my flowerlike fair / The swift years like the waters flow –“The words moved her to the depth of her being. ‘I have sought you everywhere, / And at last I find you here, / In a dark room full of woe -’ It was like intoxication, a sort of delirium. Her legs would no longer support her. She collapsed on to a near-by rockery and crouched there, the words turning over and over in her mind […].”23

Dai-yu then remembers other poems and lines about water and flowers and sinks into a melancholic mood: All these different lines and verses combined into a single overpowering impression, riving her soul with a pang of such keen anguish that the tears started from her eyes. She might have remained there indefinitely, weeping and comfortless, had not someone just at that moment come up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.24

Echoing with other literary examples, Dai-yu inadvertently reads herself into the transient disappearance of flowers with the flow of water in the two lines of the theater lyric on which she keeps ruminating. Flowers epitomize the beauty and the best years of a woman’s life, whereas the flow of water indicates the flying of time, and decay. Dai-yu’s tragic mood, however, contrasts with her method of burial. While Bao-yu spontaneously tips the fallen flower petals into water, Dai-yu consciously decides Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 463. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 314–15. 林黛玉道：“撂在水里 不好。你看这里的水干净，只一流出去，有人家的地方脏的臭的混倒，仍旧把花糟蹋了。 那畸角上我有一个花冢，如今把他扫了，装在这绢袋里，拿土埋上，日久不过随土化了， 岂不干净。” 23 Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 466. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 316–17. “则为你如花美眷，似 水流年 …”林黛玉听了这两句，不觉心动神摇。又听道：“你在幽闺自怜”等句，亦发如醉 如痴，站立不住，便一蹲身坐在一块山子石上，细嚼“如花美眷，似水流年”八个字的滋 味。 24 Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 467. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 317. […] 都一时想起来，凑聚 在一处。仔细忖度，不觉心痛神痴，眼中落泪。正没个开交，忽觉背上击了一下，及回头 看时，原来是 … 22

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to give the flowers a more solid place of transformation and perpetuation. Hence, Dai-yu’s flower burial acts against the impermanence of time and the ephemerality of the glory of flowers. Why does the melancholic mood still triumph over her action and dominate the scene? What should we do with this mood of experiencing the presence of death in life? The destiny of Dai-yu, to repay with her tears the debt she incurred as a plant, does not allow her to leave her predetermined path of mourning the transience of nature and her own life. Moreover, the idea of transience in The Story of the Stone is strongly associated with the Buddhist and Daoist idea that human material culture is nothing but superficial, illusory, and transitory. The word for flower花 or 华 also means “rich and prosperous” in Chinese. Hence, a flower and its decay symbolize life and death in general. If life is illusory, according to this logic, then it is necessary to abandon one’s connections to material and social life and seek salvation beyond the cycle of life and death. In the first chapter of The Story of the Stone, the character Zhen Shi-yin (甄士隐) comments: In such commotion does the world’s theatre rage: / As each one leaves, another takes the stage. / In vain we roam: / Each in the end must call a strange land home. / Each of us with that poor girl may compare / Who sews a wedding-gown for another bride to wear.25

After delivering this comment on society, with which Confucianism encourages everyone to actively engage, Shi-yin then leaves his family and goes away with the Buddhist monk and the Daoist priest. Obviously, Shi-yin perceives his society, infused by Confucian values of wealth and power, as a place of aimless suffering in an endless cycle. His departure demonstrates the path toward real salvation and escape from the cycle of suffering. Indeed, the entire plot in The Story of the Stone aims at illustrating this idea of life’s transience and the decadence of the powerful family Jia. The family name Jia (贾) shares the same pronunciation with the word 假 meaning “fake and unreal,” in contrast to Shi-yin’s family name Zhen, which shares the same pronunciation with the word 真 meaning “real and true.” These puns indicate that the Jia family’s power and money is fleeting, whereas the Daoist and Buddhist approach will lead the seeker toward the true meaning of life. Nature’s transience is used to symbolize human society’s illusory decadence. Most conspicuously, the male protagonist Bao-yu revolts against the Confucian ideals of social and family values—in fact everything that constructs masculinity. He does not like to study the Confucian classics. In his distaste, he violates his duty to his family, according to Confucian state philosophy, and veers from the official path he must follow to become a statesman. Instead, he avidly consumes vernacular romantic literature pregnant with Daoist and Buddhist ideas. He does not cultivate his personality by spending time with Confucian literati, to whom the status of his family provides him unlimited access; rather, he indulges himself in the circle of his female friends. Bao-yu is especially struck by an opera aria of a Buddhist monk “naked Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 65. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 18–19. 乱哄哄你方唱罢我登 场，反认他乡是故乡。甚荒唐，到头来都是为他人作嫁衣裳！

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and friendless through the world to roam.”26 After a quarrel with Dai-yu, Bao-yu declares that girls can have their mutual friendships, but his “destiny is a different one: naked and friendless through the world to roam.” The narrator then describes how “A tear stole down his cheek as he recalled the line from the aria.” 27 The fact that the Buddhist practice of detachment deeply affects Bao-yu demonstrates that he perceives the transience of human social and emotional attachment and recognizes this transience as the nature of all things. The Buddhist practice of detachment promises transcendence beyond both the circle of suffering and the circle of life and death. In Elective Affinities, a similar mood of natural and human transience is articulated through Ottilie’s observations of social events and seasonal changes and her rejection of Eduard’s love toward the end of the story. In fact, Ottilie’s diary entries in the second half of the novel repeatedly confront the topic of transience in great detail. As the narrator informs us, Ottilie’s diary creates a red thread of affection and inclination that connects all things together and describes the whole. Chapter 9 in Book 2 is the last chapter in the novel containing Ottilie’s diary as inner observations of and meta-comments on the events happening from chapter 1 to chapter 9 in book 2. Indeed, Ottilie gradually learns to welcome transcendence beyond life and death, a transcendence that her apotheosis symbolizes. In comparison with the more negative and cynical view of transience in The Story of the Stone, Ottilie first sees an endurance of life in death. This positive attitude, which enables her to engage with the world and care for the garden and baby Otto, disappears gradually after she learns that Eduard is at war. Her firm belief in transience, strengthened by baby Otto’s death, finally leads her to reject Eduard’s love and also transcend her life beyond life and death. Like Dai-yu’s flower burial, Ottilie’s reflection on the power of time and the reality of transience are connected to garden flora. After decorating the chapel with flower garlands, Ottilie is embarrassed that she does not have enough mature flowers to celebrate Eduard’s birthday. Immediately, this invocation of birth is linked to death and flowers when Ottilie reflects that the only other appropriate use for the flowerdecorated chapel would be as a communal tomb. This observation foreshadows the events toward the end of the novel, when Ottilie’s corpse will be kept in this chapel. Moreover, flowers and plants, as in The Story of the Stone, symbolize nature’s transience and evoke mortality and burial. Right after this thought on the communal tomb, reminiscent of Dai-yu’s flower burial and her self-pity, Ottilie also melancholically recalls how Eduard celebrates her birthday with fireworks, and feels lonely and hopeless. However, unlike Dai-yu’s entirely pessimistic view of vegetative decay and her own fate, Ottilie sees in death, symbolized by the cut-down ear of corn (Ähre), life and nourishment. Ottilie comments on nature’s transience in her diary: Das Jahr klingt ab. Der Wind geht über die Stoppeln und findet nichts mehr zu bewegen; nur die roten Beeren jener schlanken Bäume scheinen uns noch an etwas Munteres erinnern zu wollen, so wie uns der Taktschlag des Dreschers Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 435. Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 294.赤条条来去无牵挂。 Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 440; Cao, Hong Lou Meng (红楼梦), 297. Cao, The Story of the Stone, 1: 440. 他们有‘大家彼此’，我是‘赤条条来去无牵挂’。谈及此句，不觉泪下。

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German Literature as World Literature den Gedanken erweckt, daß in der abgesichelten Ähre soviel Nährendes und Lebendiges verborgen liegt. [The year is dying. The wind blows across the stubble and finds there is nothing left for it to shake. Only the red berries on their slender trees still seem to want to remind us of something merrier, and the beat of the thresher awakens in us the thought of how much life and nourishment lies hidden in the cut-down ear of corn].28

Unlike the Buddhists’ negative attitude toward the life–death cycle as one of endless suffering, Ottilie’s view contains a contemplative acceptance and a distanced affirmation of nature’s seasonal change, and the entanglement of life with death. When baby Otto is being baptized, the old parson passes away. Life and death are juxtaposed and connected to each other once again. Ottilie observes the deceased with envy because, after learning that Eduard is at war, she considers her soul dead and hence loses interest in the value of her body. At the same time, Ottilie gains trust and strength through her inner vision that Eduard is well and sound, and that they still share the most intimate possible relation. The dialectics of losing and gaining in Ottilie’s psyche is embodied in Ottilie’s relation to Eduard’s garden and its plants. The narrator tells us: Indem nun die Pflanzen immer mehr Wurzel schlugen und Zweige trieben, fühlte sich auch Ottilie immer mehr an diese Räume gefesselt. Gerade vor einem Jahr trat sie als Fremdling, als ein unbedeutendes Wesen hier ein; wie viel hatte sie sich seit jener Zeit nicht erworben! aber leider wie viel hatte sie nicht auch seit jener Zeit wieder verloren! Sie war nie so reich und nie so arm gewesen. Das Gefühl von beidem wechselte augenblicklich mit einander ab, ja durchkreuzte sich aufs innigste, so daß sie sich nicht anders zu helfen wußte, als daß sie immer wieder das Nächste mit Anteil, ja mit Leidenschaft ergriff. [As the plants now put down ever more roots and put out ever more branches, Ottilie too felt more rooted to this ground. Just a year ago she had come there as a stranger, as a creature of no importance; how much had she not acquired since that time! But how much, alas, had she not since that time lost again! She had never been so rich and never been so poor. Her feelings of wealth and poverty alternated one with the other with every passing minute, they met and crossed one another in the depths of her soul, and she knew no way out but to attack whatever task lay immediately to hand with sympathetic, with passionate involvement].29

In The Story of the Stone, Dai-yu also comes from another place to live with her rich grandmother and uncle. Both Dai-yu and Ottilie feel estranged and displaced at the beginning, but they soon are integrated through a love affair into the family’s emotional life. While Dai-yu inescapably mourns the transience of her own flower-like years, Ottilie’s feeling of being poor and rich at the same time reveals once again her Goethe, Elective Affinities: 171; Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 523. Goethe, Elective Affinities: 225; Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 565–6.

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struggle with loss and endurance. The endurance motivates her to passionately engage with the world and take care of baby Otto. She writes in the last diary entry of which we know: Warum nur das Jahr manchmal so kurz, manchmal so lang ist, warum es so kurz scheint und so lang in der Erinnerung! Mir ist es mit dem vergangenen so, und nirgends auffallender als im Garten, wie vergängliches und dauerndes in einander greift. Und doch ist nichts so flüchtig das nicht eine Spur, das nicht seines Gleichen zurücklasse. […] Alles Vollkommene in seiner Art muß über seine Art hinausgehen, es muß etwas anderes Unvergleichbares werden. [Why is the year sometimes so long, sometimes so short, why does it seem so short and yet in retrospect so long? That is how the past year appeared to me, and nowhere more strikingly than in the garden: what is transient and what endures are involved one with another. And yet nothing is so fleeting but it leaves some trace of itself behind. […] Everything perfect of its kind must transcend its kind: it must become something other, something incomparable].30

Ottilie’s statement about the perfect (Vollkommenes) and the incomparable (Unvergleichbares) points toward a transcendence beyond the cycle of life and death. Ottilie’s view resembles that of Shi-yin and Bao-yu. They all arrive at an abandonment of worldly existence, and a yearning for an escape from the cycle of suffering. The Englishman’s comment on his life as a traveler, and baby Otto’s death, help bring Ottilie’s reflections on transience, and her determination to transcend the cycles of human existence, to their final fruition. Both events shift Ottilie’s interior life away from her earlier insight on endurance. When Ottilie asks the Englishman about his favorite place, and where he feels most at home, the Englishman replies that he is now at home everywhere, and he is accustomed to change. He adds that his hope of bequeathing his estate to his son will not be fulfilled because his son has gone to India. He comments on the constant discrepancy between desire and reality and believes that he is now on the right path because he sees himself only as a traveler who gives up much so as to enjoy much. The Englishman’s comments on his traveling life help connect Ottilie’s observation of nature’s transience with the human world. The traveler’s way of life completely rejects the value system that informs Charlotte and Eduard’s landscape architectural projects, and throws Ottilie into the most terrible mental state (den schrecklichsten Zustand). She compares the Englishman to Eduard, who calls the estate his home because his dearest live there, but who cannot stay at home precisely because he is driven away by his most beloved to roam the world and face the danger of war. This paradox of belonging and roaming, echoed by the aria of the Buddhist monk in The Story of the Stone, becomes a trope for the life of a transitory passer-by. Ottilie’s observation of endurance in the garden is now repudiated by compulsory traveling. Hence, Ottilie decides to turn away from Eduard’s love because she cannot stand her inward vision of Eduard’s suffering from being forced to leave his home. Goethe, Elective Affinities: 227–8; Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 567–8.

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Ottilie’s resolution, aided by other events, in particular the demise of baby Otto, leads to her death toward the end of the novel. Her perception of transience plays an indispensable role in defining the development of her interiority and her resolute action. Ottilie’s apotheosis to a “divine” condition, a condition not external to Ottilie’s vegetative nature, but rather within it, defies the course of transience. The narrator recalls the sixth-century Byzantine general Belisarius, who defeated Rome’s enemies in North Africa without the support of the emperor, then develops a comparison with Ottilie’s sleep-like condition: wenn Eigenschaften, die der Nation, dem Fürsten, in entscheidenden Momenten unentbehrlich sind, nicht geschätzt, vielmehr verworfen und ausgestoßen worden: so waren hier so viel andere stille Tugenden, von der Natur erst kurz aus ihren gehaltreichen Tiefen hervorgerufen, durch ihre gleichgültige Hand schnell wieder ausgetilgt: seltene, schöne, liebenswürdige Tugenden, deren friedliche Einwirkung die bedürftige Welt zu jeder Zeit mit wonnevollem Genügen umfängt und mit sehnsüchtiger Trauer vermißt. [If] qualities indispensable to the nation and its prince in times of crisis had, instead of being valued, been thrown aside and banished, so in the case of Ottilie many other quiet virtues not long since called forth by nature out of its capacious depths had quickly been obliterated again by its own indifferent hand: rare, beautiful virtues, whose peaceful influence the needy world in every age embraces with joy and satisfaction and longingly mourns for when it is gone].31

In contrast to the statesman Belisarius’s masculinized virtues such as bravery, prudence, power, and rank, Ottilie apparently represents nature through her vegetative femininity. Her apotheosis is the articulation of nature’s immanent divinity, which is deeply entangled with the human world. If Dai-yu and Bao-yu’s tragic love story functions as a warning to the readers to learn their lesson and finally abandon the aimless and painful cycle of life and death, then Ottilie’s apotheosis escapes the cycle of transience through virtuous resignation. If the Chinese disputant’s insistence on everyone and everything’s innate creativity corresponds with Goethe’s Spinozism, then Ottilie’s apotheosis does not leave the realm of vegetative nature but confirms nature’s immanent divinity. The narrator’s comment frames Ottilie’s short and legendary life as an expressive embodiment of nature’s divinity within the human world.

Stimmung and jing jie (境界) As we have discussed, the immanent divinity shared between Goethe’s Spinozism and the Chinese Buddhist and Daoist idea of creation supports the comparison of vegetative femininity and nature’s transience in Elective Affinities and The Story of the Stone. This theoretical or ideological point of view, however, explains the idea but not Goethe, Elective Affinities: 296–7; Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: 620. [Emphasis added.]

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why and how this idea is articulated in the form of literature. In other words, how do literary works express the idea of immanent divinity? What should we identify as specifically literary that helps articulate the idea of transience? What exactly have we compared so far: plot, or character, or intertexutality? I consider the concept of Stimmung according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Wang Guowei (王国维)’s jing jie (境界) an apt method to describe my comparison. Expanding this German aesthetic concept, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht endeavors to use Stimmung, or mood, atmosphere, as a universal category to describe the ontological value of literariness that, Gumbrecht feels, deserves more attention in literary scholarship: “There is no culture and no epoch that will not admit the universal question about specific atmospheres and moods.”32 Gumbrecht explains that “concentrating on atmospheres and moods offers literary studies a possibility for reclaiming vitality and aesthetic immediacy that have, for the most part, gone missing.”33 Gumbrecht argues that scholars sometimes overlook those qualities of literature that defy the passage of time; in other words, even without any knowledge of historical, political, or cultural background one can still feel the power of a story and be moved by the beauty of its narration. In Gumbrecht’s terms, the mood or Stimmung is readily transported over historical and cultural boundaries and creates an “immediacy in the experience of past presents.”34 Hence, according to Gumbrecht, literature is not merely a sign of the past or its representation, and neither should it purely serve as articulations of philosophical ideas. Rather, the task of literary scholars lies in “discovering sources of energy in artifacts and giving oneself over to them affectively and bodily—yielding to them and gesturing toward them.”35 In other words, literary scholarship should also be committed to unearthing the “becoming-present” of Stimmungen. Gumbrecht’s revival of an old concept reminds me of the Chinese literary critic Wang Guowei (王国维)’s influential notion of jing jie (境界) in Chinese intellectual and cultural history. When separated, jing (境) means environment or situation; jie (界) means border or territory. Combining both characters, the word jing jie refers to an abstract and aesthetic realm of atmosphere, a mental state, or a cognitive level that elevates a person above the quotidian condition of material culture. In particular, Wang explicates this concept in relation to ci (词), a genre in classical Chinese poetry. For Wang, there are two types of jing jie: one with “I” (you wo 有我) and one without “I” (wu wo 无我). A “jing jie without I” describes an atmosphere or a scene without a subjective voice and human emotional transference. A “jing jie with I” is an atmosphere imbued with a subjective mood and articulated through the description of nature. Borrowing terms from German aesthetics, especially Kant, Wang calls the latter sublime and the former beautiful.36 In Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 10. 33 Ibid., 12. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid., 18. 36 See Guowei (王国维) Wang, “Collected Works of Wang Guowei (王国维文集),” ed. Ganming Yao (姚淦铭) and Yan Wang (王燕) (Beijing: China Literature and History Press (中国文史出版社）, 1997), 141–3. 有我之境，以我观物，故物皆著我之色彩。无我之境，以物观物，故不知何 者为我，何者为物。[…] 无我之境，人惟于静中得之。有我之境，于由动之静时得之。故 一优美，一宏壮也。142。 32

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other words, a jing jie without a subject needs an observer to admire it and describes a static condition. A jing jie with a subject, however, registers human agony and strong emotion and is thus an articulation of humanity through nature. This jing jie is marked by movement rather than inertness. For Wang, The Story of the Stone is a prime example of aesthetic sublimity in Chinese literature.37 Both Stimmung and jing jie explain how the two literary works stage and develop the mood of transience and articulate the immanent divinity of nature and humanity. Dai-yu’s flower burial evokes a melancholic Stimmung, which is an indispensable part of the overall narrative of The Story of the Stone, and also enables us to make connections to Ottilie’s observations and perceptions of transience. At the same time, jing jie, especially jing jie with I, illuminates how nature is imbued with human sentiment and how vegetative femininity is configured in both novels. There can be little doubt that the idea of immanent divinity connects Goethe’s and Cao’s works. But it is also literature’s unique quality—the literariness that invokes comparable Stimmung and jing jie in the two works, renders that immanent divinity visible, and makes this cross-cultural reading possible.

Ibid., 1–4.

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2

Goethe, Rémusat, and the Chinese Novel: Translation and the Circulation of World Literature Daniel Purdy On January 31, 1827, over dinner, Goethe mentions to Eckermann the books he has been reading, among which is a Chinese novel. In response to Eckermann’s astonished reaction that a Chinese novel must look very strange [sehr fremdartig aussehen], Goethe gives his famously cosmopolitan WL aesthetic: “Nicht so sehr als man glauben sollte. Die Menschen denken, handeln und empfinden fast ebenso wie wir, und man fühlt sich sehr bald als ihresgleichen….” [Not so much as you might think. The people think, act and feel almost just like us and it does not take long before one feels oneself to be their equal….]1 His one proviso, that among the Chinese everything is done more clearly, cleanly, and ethically, reveals the continuing influence of the early Enlightenment view that China was a utopian society guided by a philosophical emperor who set the moral example for all his subjects to follow. As I shall show in this paper, when the elderly Goethe turns to Chinese literature as a model for his own literary production, he returns to the stereotypes of an earlier age even as he sets these within the dialogic relation of WL. Goethe’s casual remarks to Eckermann about the new Chinese novel he has been reading combined the China-image of his youth with the latest, cutting edge literary opinion from Paris. His remarks rove from the single example he has just held in his hands to the genre as a whole. Attentive reading of the one book encourages him to generalize, with cautious self-consciousness, about Chinese literature in general. While Goethe’s late reflections on literature, the world’s and his own, affirm dialogic exchange with foreign culture, in his youth he would have denounced imitation as inauthentic and fake. At the end of his career, Goethe incorporates the chinoiserie forms that he had so vehemently rejected in his youth into his own new style.2 In describing the diegetic world of the Chinese novel, Goethe invokes images familiar Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Munich: Beck, 1984), 198; Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 349. References to Goethe’s writing will be cited as HA [Hamburger Ausgabe] with volume number and page following: Werke, Erich Trunz, ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 11th edn, and to the comprehensive Weimar Ausgabe with full citation. 2 Goethe had already amended his earlier position with his 1789 essay, “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,” which outlines three levels of imitation, HA 12: 30–4. This “Aufhebung” of his youthful position was then given greater nuance when he outlined three modes of translation in his comments on the West-östliche Divan, HA 2:255. 1

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from the eighteenth-century salon: “Die Goldfische in den Teichen hört man immer plätschern, die Vögel auf den Zweigen singen immerfort, der Tag ist immer heiter und sonnig, die Nacht immer klar; vom Mond ist viel die Rede …Und das Innere der Häuser so nett und zierlich wie ihre Bilder.” (January 31, 1827; “You always hear the goldfish splashing in the pond, the birds are always singing on the bough; the day is always serene and sunny, the night is always clear. There is much talk about the moon. [… A]nd the interior of the houses is as neat and elegant as their pictures”).3 Whereas the Sturm-und-Drang poet saw any effort to naturalize these forms in Europe as inevitably flawed, the late Goethe seeks to identify with them while also holding the detached view that they operate no differently than the tropes in European novels. Goethe’s ironic affection allows him to treat the adoption of foreign literary conventions as an all too human search for the new rather than to denounce them as false consciousness. In comparing the complex intrigues in Chinese and European romances, Goethe notes that Chinese novels are not as intensely focused on inner monologues. Rather than relying on epistolary discourse as in Die Leiden des Jungen Werther (1774) or Samuel Richardson’s earlier Pamela (1740), Chinese fiction externalizes interior states as natural landscape: “[b]ei ihnen [lebt] die äußere Natur neben den menschlichen Figuren immer mit” (31 January, 1827; “with them external nature is always associated with the human figures” [22]). Such parallels between a literary character’s emotional state and descriptions of nature were of course quite familiar in 1827 as Goethe spoke, as German Romantics were regularly conjuring up the moon and the mountains to mirror the protagonist’s emotions.4 Without referencing Joseph von Eichendorff or Ludwig Tieck, Goethe perceives a similar doubling of subjectivity in Chinese novels, thereby reinforcing his overall insistence that the two cultures’ long-form fictions have much in common. As we shall see later, Goethe performs the very same transference in the poem cycle he wrote later that year, “Chinesisch-deutschen Jahres- und Tageszeiten.”5 The conversation with Eckermann was no random event, because in 1827 Goethe was fully engaged with reading translations of Chinese literature. Literary criticism for its own sake, and the Enlightenment urge to map out the world’s cultures on an anthropological map, was not his concern; rather, Goethe was driven by a search for new literary impulses, a desire to exchange correspondences with a distant poetic form. In the journal Kunst und Altertum, he published four German adaptations of poems taken from a contemporary English collection, Chinese Courtship, translated by Peter Perring Thoms.6 His disregard for the prevailing judgments against Eckermann, Gespräche mit Eckermann, 197; “Conversations on World Literature,” in Damrosch, Melas, and Buthelezi, eds, The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, 22. Carsten Lange has pointed out that the transference of subjective processes onto the structures of the narrative space has long been recognized by critics in lyric accounts of Romanticism’s natural landscape and topography. See Architekturen der Psyche: Raumdarstellung in der Literatur der Romantik (Stuttgart: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 39. 5 Christine Wagner-Dittmar, “Goethe und die chinesische Literatur,” Studien zu Goethes Alterswerken, ed. Erich Trunz (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971), 182. 6 Chinese Courtship. [A Translation by Peter Perring Thoms of the Chinese tale entitled Hua Chien Chi.] In Verse. To which is Added an Appendix, Treating of the Revenue of China, &c. &c. By P.P. Thoms. Chin. & Eng (London: Parbury, Allen & Kingsbury; printed in Macao at the East India Company’s Press, 1824). 3

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China becomes apparent in his preface to the poems, wherein Goethe dismisses the nineteenth-century’s increasingly negative characterization of China as a despotic state: “[D]ie Gedichte geben uns die Überzeugung, daß es sich trotz aller Beschränkungen in diesem sonderbar-merkwürdigen Reiche noch immer leben, lieben und dichten lasse” (“The poems convince us that, in spite of all restrictions in this remarkable-unusual empire, one may still live, love, and write”). 7 The last poem, purposively, recounts the Emperor’s leniency towards a union between a soldier and member of his court. Goethe had read the few Chinese novels that had appeared in Europe over the course of his life, but in 1827 his diaries repeatedly mention Abel Rémusat’s French translation, Iu-Kiao-Li or Les Deux Cousines, and his contes chinoises, a collection of ten novellas translated from Chinese into French. Scholars have hitherto not recognized just how important Rémusat’s translations, and the theoretical preface he provided them, were in forming the immediate context for Goethe’s WL discourse.8 Hence, that discourse is not simply created on the basis of a single inspiration from an exotic text, but out of a complex and multiphasic web of textual and cultural transfers. Let us begin to trace the filaments of this web.

Goethe’s Chinese novel Goethe was reading Rémusat’s Les Deux Cousines in May 1827, when he retreated to his garden house to escape into the beautiful spring weather, so that he could work on his most important poetic engagement with Chinese literature, “Chinesisch-deutschen Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” a work very much in the synthetic, cross-cultural mode of West-östliche Divan.9 Organized into 14 short poems that do not reflect any particularly Chinese lyrical structure, the “Chinesisch-deutschen Jahres- und Tageszeiten” presents a two-sided temporal awareness of the beautiful day in the moment and the end of a long lifetime.10 The confusing title sounds as if it could have been yet another of the nineteenth-century’s many quickly printed journals and almanacs; however, it also concentrates the poem’s temporal sense on the present in order to contemplate the duration of a biological lifespan. The cycle performs precisely that projection of inner thoughts onto nature that he ascribes to Chinese poetry in his chat with Eckermann.11 Goethes Werke, ed. Bernhard Seuffert and Max Hecker (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1903), Section 2, vol. 41, 272. 8 Goethe’s diary for May 1827 mentions “the Chinese novel translated by Rémusat.” For the end of January of the same year, he had noted: “Dr. Eckermann. “Nachher mit demselben manches besprochen. Über den Charakter des chinesischen Gedichts. Abends für mich” [Dr. Eckermann. Afterwards conversation with same. On the quality of Chinese poems. Evening by myself]. Goethes Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan and C. A. H. Burkhardt; and Julius Wahle, Goethes Tagebücher (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1900) Section 3, vol. 11, 15, 55. 9 On the place of Chinese gardens in Goethe’s work, see Ingrid Schuster, Vorbilder und Zerrbilder: China und Japan im Spiegel der deutschen Literatur, 1773–1890 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1988), 143–61, as well as the preceding chapter by Chunjie Zhang. 10 Meredith Lee, “Goethes Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” Goethe und China—China und Goethe, ed. Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia (Bern: Peter Lang, 1985), 37–50. 11 Wagner-Dittmar, 222. 7

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In the eyes of most eighteenth-century Europeans, the single most impressive feature of Chinese civilization was its antiquity; thus in the opening line Goethe associates his own old age with that of a weary Mandarin: Sag’, was könnt’ uns Mandarinen, Satt zu herrschen, müd zu dienen, Sag’, was könnt uns übrigbleiben…. [Say, what could we Mandarins Weary of ruling, tired of serving Say, what remains for us to do….]

That which is left to old age, the remainder that even the elderly poet rediscovers, lies in the ornaments of nature. While escape into a landscape had always served Goethe’s poetry, this late style iteration of the trope brings irony with it, for the solace Goethe now finds in nature appears as a well-tended garden, precisely the setting that the sublimeobsessed, Sturm-und-Drang rebel once derided as inauthentic chinoiserie. The rococo version of Asia seemed superficial because its repetitive forms lacked the multiple references that a historical context provides. Rather than just disappearing into a simulated China, the late Goethe incorporates the few Chinese motifs familiar to Europeans into his own voice. Escaping the binary logic of authenticity that underlies the masquerade, the “Chinesisch-deutschen Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” imagines shared experiences between Goethe’s familiar voice and the foreign quality Europeans perceive in Chinese literature.

Defining the world in literature The term “World Literature” has to be understood as a product of the literary culture it describes, namely the heightened and ever expanding circulation of texts that portray places and events that had never before been subject to a printed record. Well before Goethe’s performative declaration, the phrase Weltliteratur had been making the rounds in German circles.12 Furthermore, much of WL’s immediate impetus came from the French journal Le Globe, and was elaborated in correspondence with the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle. His pronouncement is itself a moment in the emerging economy of literary exchange he describes. While mocked cruelly during Eckermann’s lifetime, by the turn of the twentieth century his Conversations with Goethe had become an international best-seller precisely because it had made a series of pre-dinner remarks available to a readership that would otherwise never have had access to such private moments of literary reflection.13 Scholars have always stressed the Research has ascribed earlier uses of the term to Christoph Wieland, August Schlegel, and Ludwig Schlözer. See Wolfgang Schamoni, “‘Weltliteratur’—zuerst 1773 bei August Ludwig Schlözer,” Arcadia 43.2 (2008), 288–98. 13 The famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica noted that Eckermann’s Conversations “have been translated into almost all the European languages, not excepting Turkish.” Encyclopædia Britannica (New York: Encyclopœdia Britannica Co., 1910) vol. 8, 886. 12



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unsystematic character of Goethe’s remarks, and Eckermann, of course, foregrounds the occasional quality of his compilation already in the book’s title, Conversations with Goethe. As Goethe’s Hausfreund, Eckermann operates as an interviewer who picks up thoughts in the moment of first articulation and then conducts them into a broader literary circuit, thereby translating the spoken word into a literary commodity and a reified concept. Goethe’s remarks are preserved in much the same manner as the clever witticisms made in London by the English dandy Beau Brummel. Both sets of remarks are considered brilliant because of their fleeting, momentary quality. Their subsequent publication reflects nineteenth-century readers’ desire to experience the Urszene of their own social order, to pass through the closed doors that allow only the privileged few to enter. Quite understandably, readers and scholars are drawn to the illusion that a popular idea had a moment of creation and a worthy creator. If Beau Brummel’s salon gestures were seen as the defining origin of dandyism, Goethe’s remarks signal the advent of a much wider cosmopolitanism. Despite the differences in their intellectual accomplishment, both men figure prominently in the nineteenth-century culture of celebrity. Yet both dandyism and WL come into existence not only because of their famous creators, but because they were quickly recorded in print and then circulated repeatedly and broadly. Both are highly self-conscious in the moment of articulation. Brummel both counts on and ignores that everyone is watching, as does Goethe in speaking with his secretary. Is this a private conversation, or are we addressing eternity? One key difference between the two scenes is that the concept of WL explains the conditions for its own existence, whereas dandyism veils the class structure by seeming to defy it. Finally, of course, Brummel is famous only because of his dandyism, whereas WL was Goethe’s second-order reflection on a literary economy within which he was a defining participant. Even before his famous conversations with Eckermann, the world was very much on Goethe’s mind. Hans Joachim Schrimpf lists the various different terms Goethe used in which he inserted the word “Welt” to create a complex, compound noun: Weltbildung, Weltkommunikation, Weltumlauf, Weltverkehr (Schrimpf 12). In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the Abbé refers to a changed moral order in which the piety of a household in all its relations with its members and its neighbors has or must be replaced with a broader concept of moral obligation: Weltfrömmigkeit. 14 The older notion of household morality cannot be replaced, for the Abbé argues that it is the basis for individual responsibility; however, personal morality is no longer sufficient to address the moral obligations to humanity: “wir müssen den Begriff einer Weltfrömmigkeit fassen, unsre redlich menschlichen Gesinnungen in einen praktischen Bezug ins Weite setzen und nicht nur unsre Nächsten fördern sondern zugleich die ganze Menschheit mitnehmen” [We need to compose a concept of world piety that places our honest humane attitude in a practical relation to the wider Angus Nicholls finds a path between Goethe’s Weltfrömmigkeit and Kantian ethics in his essay “The Philosophical Concept of the Daemonic in Goethe’s ‘Mächtiges Überraschen,’” Goethe Yearbook 14 (2007) 147–70, specifically here 166.

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world, so that we do not just support our neighbors, but rather carry all of mankind along as well].15 Goethe’s contrast between the household and humanity balances on much the same axis that Wilhelm Riehl later drew between “das ganze Haus” and the cosmopolitanism of the urban Bürgertum. Whereas Riehl lamented the decline of the agrarian household piety, Goethe’s Abbé acknowledges the need to supplement the one ethics with the other. This new addition, a moral obligation to the world, corresponds closely to the global public that Immanuel had Kant described in his (1795) essay “Towards a Perpetual Peace.” Indeed, Goethe’s literary term is by no means confined to aesthetics, but developed, as a concept, out of the larger late-eighteenthcentury philosophical response to the global colonial economy and the media-driven public sphere. While Weltfrömmigkeit cannot be transformed into a universal maxim, but rather implies both an attitude toward the world as well as a set of nuanced obligations, it expresses the same extension of moral concern as when Kant writes: “The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.”16 While Kant’s cosmopolitan order is grounded in the international cooperation of sovereign states, WL has far less respect for the “national” as a category: “Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen; die Epoch der Weltliteratur ist an der Zeit, und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen” (Eckermann, 198; “National literature has not much meaning nowadays: the epoch of WL is at hand, and each of us must work to hasten its coming” [Strich, Goethe and World Literature 349]). Goethe’s pronouncement has the double quality of diagnosing the Zeitgeist and proscribing it as an imperative. The combination of, on the one hand, advocating for WL, while at the same time announcing its arrival as a given fact operates on both the sociological and the personal level. As David Damrosch states, “Goethe assumed the futurity of Weltliteratur in his very first uses of his inaugural term.”17 As confirmation, Goethe cites the widening circulation of literature and news journalism along with the global trade in commodities as an economic trend that will only move forward faster, yet he addresses the individual in advancing WL as an aesthetic, and perhaps moral agenda. Kant, on the other hand, maintained that one could speak of enlightened individuals but that one had to be much more cautious in declaring a society or era to be enlightened. Goethe took a similarly cautious long-term approach when asked to extend the notion of Bildung to all Germans. This double-sided dynamic manifests itself clearly in post-1945 German scholarship on the WL, which advocates for the term while bitterly acknowledging the failure of Goethe’s prognostication: Wir Deutschen sind von gestern. Wir haben zwar seit einem Jahrhundert ganz und tüchtig kultiviert; allein es können noch ein paar Jahrhunderte hingehen, Goethe, Wilhem Meister’s Lehrjahre, HA 8:243. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 107–8. 17 David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39.3 (Summer 2008), 483. 15 16



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ehe bei unseren Landsleute so viel Geist und höhere Kultur eindringe und allgemeain werde…, daß man von ihnen wird sagen können, es sei lange her, daß sie Barbaren gewesen (Schrimpf 8) [We Germans are from yesterday. We have been cultivating ourselves thoroughly and energetically for the last hundred years; nevertheless it could take a few more centuries before so much spirit and high culture seeps into our people and becomes universal … so that one could say of us that it has been a long time since they were barbarians.]

Goethe’s reference to barbarians was intended as an allusion both to Mediterranean antiquity and to Oriental civilizations (Persia and China), yet post-Holocaust writers on WL, such as Fritz Strich in 1947 and Hans Joachim Schrimpf in 1968, fully understand that they are advocating for the concept as a recovery from Fascism when they elucidate its terms. They identified with Goethe’s avowed desire to escape European national strife, yet this was merely Goethe’s opening justification for his own fascination with Persia and China.

World literature and the circulation of commodities To have a complete picture of how WL came into existence as a social phenomenon, we have to consider, first, the translation, performance and distribution of popular as well as sophisticated literature across the borders of Europe and then, second, the acquisition, translation, and dispersal of non-European writing along similar global networks. Crucial to this entire process is an analysis of how non-European texts were evaluated: i.e., why were they collected in the first place. We need to ask what norms would lead a Jesuit missionary to acquire Mandarin courtly romances, and then why would a French philologist chose one such romance a century later for translation and publication. If we consider the full breadth of WL, we have to dramatically expand the traditional categories of autonomous art in order to include low forms of entertainment as well as works written with aesthetic intentions very different from Goethe’s own. Then, finally, we have to consider the close proximity between commercial trade and art. In the remainder of this paper I wish to explore two aspects of WL’s dependence on global trade networks: first, the importance of commercial trade in translations of German literature across the Atlantic world; and second, the late Goethe’s rather generous attitude toward mixing poetry with commodities. Fritz Strich, already in 1946, underscored the interdependence between global commodity exchange and Goethe’s concept, both in terms both of the historical preconditions for WL, and of the metaphors that shape its theoretical formualtions: “[WL] ist ein geistiger Güteraustausch, ein ideeller Handelsverkehr zwischen den Völkern, ein literarischer Weltmarkt, auf den die Nationen ihre geistigen Schätze zum Austauch bringen. Solcher Bilder aus der Welt des Handels und Verkehrs hat Goethe selbst sich zur Verdeutlichung seiner Idee besonders gern bedient” (Strich, Goethe und die

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Weltliteratur 16;). “World literature is an exchange of intellectual commodities, an idealized commerce between peoples, a literary world market upon which they bring out their intellectual treasures to be exchanged. Goethe himself especially liked to rely on such metaphors, borrowed from the world of trade and commerce, to elucidate his idea.” The circulation model of WL has profound implications for how we understand WL and its history. First, intellectual discovery by any one reader is not governed by an academic institution, but by the exigencies of personal curiosity and what is available on the market. A world literary encounter could therefore move backwards or askew in comparison to the chronology of actual events. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, Herder and Goethe, for example, held Chinese culture in disdain because they associated Chinese art with the chinoiserie of the aristocratic court. Only later, after their skepticism of Jesuit reports wore away and they had found their own critical interest in Chinese literature, did either of them find a means to identify with the figures in Chinese poetry and novels. Secondly, the circulation model of WL reverses the hierarchy of authoritative texts. The reception of a foreign culture is often determined by second- or third-hand representations, ill-informed popular compilations, and sensationalized narratives. As his enthusiastic reading of Erasmus Francisci’s 1670 Neu-polirter Geschicht- Kunst- und Sitten-Spiegel shows, Goethe’s interest in Chinese literature was inspired by his reading seventeenth-century digests that provided flashy summaries of the careful, scholarly treatises written by Jesuit missionaries.18 With its despotically cruel princess and commedia delle’arte courtiers, Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot (1761) has long been one of Europe’s most familiar representations of China, adapted by Friedrich Schiller and canonization by Giacomo Puccini. As many have noted, Goethe’s pronouncements about Chinese literature are based upon a handful of hardly definitive examples. As Goethe’s statements on China show, the circulation model of WL allows for unorthodox interpretations of recorded history motivated by foreigners unfamiliar with domestic institutions. These temporal reversals are heightened by the increased importance that spatial relations have in determining the movement of WL. Spatial relations between cultures often determine any knowledge of local or regional history. The European intellectual reception of Asian literature is very much determined by the exigencies of channels of exchange established by missionary groups, merchants, and colonial administrators. Chinese philosophical texts appeared in Europe only after they had been selected and translated by Jesuit missionaries. Sanskrit writing was first translated into European languages only after Britain had established its colonial administration on the subcontinent. Thus, the shift from temporal to spatial See Goethe’s January 3, 1798 letter to Friedrich Schiller about Francisci’s recounting of a 1599 encounter between the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and the Buddhist monk Xuelang Hong’en in Nanjing Erasmus Francisci, Neu-polirter Geschicht- Kunst- und Sitten-Spiegel ausländischer Völcker fürnemlich Der Sineser, Japaner, Indostaner, Javaner, Malabaren, Peguaner, Siammer, … und theils anderer Nationen mehr: welcher, in sechs Büchern, sechserley Gestalten weiset … (Nürnberg: Endter, 1670). For modern scholarly treatments of this dinner debate, see Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 194–8, and Iso Kern, “Matteo Riccis Verhältnis zum Buddhismus,” Monumenta Serica, 36 (1984–5), 88–94.

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models of literary history leads to the multiplication of timelines, because movements through different distributional networks are determined by the nodes where different channels intersect. In other words, European interest in China and Confucianism preceded the Romantic enthusiasm for Sanskrit, Buddhism, and India simply because the Jesuit missionary links between Beijing and Rome were older and much stronger than any colonial relationship between Britain and India. The fact that Europeans developed an affinity for Confucianism in the seventeenth century well before they learned about Buddhism in the nineteenth century had everything to do with the strength and commitments of the Jesuit mission in China. In his comments to Eckermann, Goethe recognizes from the start how geopolitics determines world literary relations. He discusses WL within two contexts: first, the translation of Asian texts into European literatures; and, second, the development of peaceful cultural relations between belligerent European nations. The first level reflects the long-standing European interest in global cultural relations that goes back to the sixteenth century, and the second determining factor for Goethe is the contemporary cessation of European-wide military conflict. Even if German intellectual interest in the Orient diverged from British and French colonial interests, Goethe well understood that the project of translating Chinese, Persian, and Indian texts was directly connected to these enterprises. We can isolate three distinct aproaches to translating Asian literatures over the course of Goethe’s literary career: the first, an Enlightenment concept of the encyclopedic synthesis of anthropological knowledge; the second, a Romantic notion of an original linguistic unity between cultures; and the third, the late Goethe’s rather isolated goal of reading foreign texts for the sake of poetic inspiration. WL is a mode of translation as much as it is type of writing.

Goethe’s Chinese education The scholarship on Goethe’s interest in China is extensive.19 Almost all studies on Goethe and China follow the narrative trajectory of Bildung, i.e. of a learning process that starts with disdain and apathy, leads to curiosity, followed by serious study and then intense appreciation. Goethe’s remarks on Chinese novels are thus seen as a culmination of a lifetime’s education. The key question for many scholars has been: When did Goethe begin to understand and to take Chinese culture seriously? The earliest references in the vast archive that Goethe has become are passing dismissals of chinoiserie fashion, yet already in Erich Trunz provides a concise overview in HA 1:774–6. The single best article on the subject remains Christine Wagner-Dittmar, “Goethe und die chinesischer Literatur,” in Studien zu Goethes Alterswerken, ed. Erich Trunz (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971), 122–228. See also, Ernst Beutler, “Goethe und die chinesische Literatur,” in Das Buch in China und Das Buch über China (Frankfurt: 1928), 54–8; Wolfgang Bauer, “Goethe und China: Verständnis und Missverständnis,” in Goethe und die Tradition, ed., Hans Reiss (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972) 177–97; and Katharina Mommsen, “Goethe und China in ihren Wechselbeziehungen,” Goethe und China—China und Goethe, ed. Günther Debon and Adrian Hsia (Bern: Peter Lang, 1985), 15–33.

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his Strasbourg period he makes mention of the Confucian texts translated by Jesuit missionaries. As with the European reception of China generally, Goethe’s remarks fluctuate between the material culture of Chinese fashionable commodities and theoretical response to the Jesuit literature on Confucianism. In either case, the evidence regarding Goethe’s first encounters with Chinese thought is limited. Even a thorough archival positivist such as Woldemar von Biedermann writes that we cannot draw any conclusions from Goethe’s first citation of the six classical books of China in 1770, where he simply notes their titles. “We can disregard the fact that Goethe already mentions the six Chinese classics in 1770” 20 We know nothing about the content of Goethe’s first attention to Chinese literature, his first notebook entry on the matter—but we can recognize that Chinese written culture is introduced to Goethe and to European readers generally as having a formal structure familiar from Scripture and from the canon of ancient Mediterranean literature, namely the existence of a coherent written lineage based upon Classical texts that serve as the standard by which later books are composed and interpreted. This concentration of literary history on Classical texts that are understood in terms of an architectural model that organizes cultural history begins with the Jesuit translation and commentary on Confucian thought. From the very start, missionaries sought the Classical texts of China in order to establish a parallel with Europe.21 This template continues to guide the current discussion of WL. Biedermann’s sentence thus confirms a simple equation between “the Chinese” expressed as a unified single entity and their correspondence with six specifically defined and well-recognized definitive texts. Real penetration into China, Biedermann writes, starts, for Goethe, a few years later. “Wirkliches Eindringen in chinesischen Schriften bekundet zuerst der Eintrag in sein Tagebuch vom 10. Januar 1781: ‘Kam [der Herzog] in den Briefen übers Studium der Theologie gelesen. O Ouen Ouang!’ ”22 [Real penetration into Chinese texts appears first in the diary entry for January 10, 1781, which reads “The Duke came by, read in Letters on the Study of Theology, Oh! Ouen Ouang!] (Biedermann, 385). Presumably, the sigh, “O Ouen Ouang!” signifies both insight and delight. Biedermann suggests, and many scholars since have accepted his view, that Goethe’s interest in Chinese literature was at this point connected with his pedagogical relationship to the Duke of Weimar; in other words, Confucian morals provided

Woldemar Freiherrn von Biedermann, “Goethe und das Schrifttum Chinas,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte N.F. 7 (1894), 384. The note is printed as ephemera in the Weimarer Ausgabe, vol. 37, 83 Books on China Goethe listed in 1770 as having read: Sinensis Imperii Libri Classici Sex. Adultorum Schola, Immutabile Medium, Liber Sententiarum, Memcius, Filialis Observantia, Parvulorum Schola. a Franc. Noel. Pragae 1711. 21 The contemporary debate on just how far the Jesuits went in editing and recomposing Chinese thought for a Christian audience in Europe has been driven by Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Responses include On-Cho Ng’s review in Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 21 (1999), 53–7; Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia’s review in History of Religions 41,1 (Aug 2001), 71–3; and, most recently, Nicolas Standaert, “The Jesuits Did NOT Manufacture ‘Confucianism,’” East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, 16 (1999), 115–32. 22 Goethe, Weimarer Ausgabe, section III, vol. 1, 128. 20



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an example of how to resist the corruptions of the court.23 This would suggest that Leibniz’s belief that Confucianism could educate Europeans how to have a more civilized political order lasted long into the eighteenth century. In a sense, Biedermann agrees with Friedrich Kittler when he argues that Goethe’s hermeneutic engagement with Chinese literature begins with a sigh. Kittler opens his Aufschreibensysteme with the claim that German literature commences with Faust’s cry of frustration in his study, and a similar exclamation, this time of enthusiasm, marks the Geheimrat’s interest in understanding Chinese literature, as we see above. After his return from Italy, at the height of his Classical endeavors with Friedrich Schiller, the first critical reflections on China appear in Goethe’s correspondence. In 1798, he sends Schiller a report found in an obscure Baroque compilation, recounting Matteo Ricci’s debate with a Buddhist monk in Nanjing, wherein Goethe’s sympathy clearly lies with the pantheism of the Buddhist. The Munich Sinologist Wolfgang Bauer writes that in this “mad philosophical dialogue” [tollen philosophischen Gespräch], Goethe encounters for the first time the “other” China that lies beyond the Confucian image propagated by the Jesuits.24 According to Goethe’s own biographical reflections, he finally undertook serious study of Chinese in 1813, immediately after the Battle of Leipzig, where Napoleon was decisively defeated. Goethe’s motive was much the same as he gives in the West-östliche Divan for learning Persian and thereby to better understand Hafiz: the desire to escape, mentally and perhaps even physically, from war-torn Europe. Hier muß ich noch einer Eigenthümlichkeit meiner Handlungsweise gedenken. Wie sich in der politischen Welt irgend ein ungeheures Bedrohliches hervorthat, so warf ich mich eigensinnig auf das Entfernteste. Dahin ist denn zu rechnen, daß ich von meiner Rückkehr aus Karlsbad an mich mit ernstlichstem Studium dem chinesischen Reich widmete. 25 [Here I have to recall one of the peculiarities of my work habits. Just as a monstrous threat was emerging in the world of politics, I threw myself into the most distant subject, which is why, having returned from Karlsbad, that I started to study the Chinese Empire seriously.]

The difficulty with tracking Goethe’s relation to China is that almost 200 years of European writing on China precede Goethe’s intellectual life. Thus, his initial comments are always framed within a well-established European tradition of China enthusiasm. If the eighteenth century developed a taste for China, this fascination Any divergence from Biedermann’s account focuses on the question of which text served as Goethe’s source for knowledge of Mandarin administrators’ political history. For a newer critical view, see Gunther Debon, “’O Ouen Ouang!’ Zur Tagebuch-Notiz Goethes,” in China zu Gast in Weimar (Heidelberg: Verlag Brigitte Guderjann, 1994), 135–40. 24 Wolfgang Bauer, “Goethe und China: Verständnis und Missverständnis,” 178. 25 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tag- und Jahres-Hefte als Ergänzung meiner sonstigen Bekenntnisse. [1807–22], in Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, eds Karl Redlich and Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1893) vol. 36, 85. 23

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also brought with it a profound aversion to the dreamy luxuries associated with tea, porcelain, ceremonies, and gardens from China.26 Goethe’s avowal of Chinese literature in the last decades of his life is noteworthy not only for the fact that he takes up Chinese poetry when it was no longer fashionable, but also because he had to overcome his own youthful disavowal of chinoiserie. The coupling of literary and commodity circulation that the late Goethe sees as the basis for WL is precisely what the young poet rejected: a mixture of poetry with luxury goods. The young, Sturmund-Drang Goethe scorned the fashionable overlap of foreign goods and literature. Yet his subtle and elegiac “Chinesischen Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” written in Goethe’s seventy-seventh year reiterate, undeniably, the clichés of eighteenth-century chinoiserie: a lovely garden; blooming flowers; a poet composing at leisure secluded from the machinations of the political world.27 These late poems in the Chinese manner would have found little enthusiasm from Goethe’s younger incarnation. The difference is not just a forgetful self-contradiction or the wisdom of a late style; rather, Goethe also finds an avenue into Asian literature through his philological study of Persian and Chinese texts, as well as his own efforts at writing and translating their scripts. As Fawzi Boubia has suggested, translation becomes Goethe’s means of mediating the strangeness of foreign languages.28 So long as China appears merely as a European fantasy, Goethe treats it as an inauthentic repetition of the already familiar. Language learning and translation become the means for him to establish his own standard of authentic engagement with difference, which in Goethe’s aesthetic requires, at least initially, translating Chinese culture out from the terms of the pleasingly beautiful into the sublime. In a 1773 review of a contemporary poetry anthology written for the Frankfurter gelehrten Anzeigen, Goethe mocked Ludwig August Unzer’s poems written “in the Chinese manner,” as ornaments belonging to a tea service and ladies toilette, in other words, as an expression of inauthentic feelings: “Die Arbeit des Herrn Unzer ist eingelegte Arbeit, mit ihrem chinesischen Schnickschnack auf Theebreten und Toilettkästchen wohl zu gebrauchen” [Mr. Unzer’s work is preserved in syrup; with all its Chinese Schnickschnack, it is well suited for tea tray and a ladies toilette].29 The successful poet must transfer (versetzen) his soul and not just his desiring For critical examination of the chinoiserie fashion in luxury consumption, see David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 27 Critics have often noted that Goethe deploys conventional Orientalist tropes in his identificatory readings. The question always remains how far further beyond the conventional his interpretations proceed. Andrea Polaschegg, Der andere Orientalismus: Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 301. On Zafer Senoçak’s criticisms, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms, 119. 28 Fawzi Boubia, “Goethes Theorie der Alterität und die Idee der Weltliteratur. Ein Beitrag zur neueren Kulturdebatte,” 284. 29 Weimarer Ausgabe, 1.37:237. For a recent critical analysis of Unzer’s poems, see Arne Klawitter, “Poetische Kuriosität oder dichterisches Experiment? Ludwig August Unzer und seine Nänie im chinesischen Geschmack,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 85 (2011), 489–507. 26



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eye to produce more than “bloße Decoration und Mythologie” [mere decoration and mythology]. Even before the publication of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Goethe reacts against sentimental appropriations of temporally or spatially distant styles, such as medieval Minnelieder or chinoiserie. In his earliest poetic statements, Goethe criticizes borrowings or even just imitations of the foreign styles as false and inauthentic, because he questions the poet’s ability to project his own interiority into the other culture. What the 24-year old Goethe finds so objectionable becomes the framework for his West-östlicher Divan, as well as for the “Chinesischen Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” namely an escape from the present horror of European politics into an idealized foreign utopia. In his notes to West-östlicher Divan, Goethe uses the trope of the soul’s wandering across space and time to describe his reading of Marco Polo’s travelogue. China appears as sublime and distant, as opposed to familiar and decorative, both as geographical space and as a written language. Marco Polo. Dieser vorzügliche Mann steht allerdings oben an. Seine Reise fällt in die zweite Hälfte des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts; er gelangt bis in den fernsten Osten, führt uns in die fremdartigsten Verhältnisse, worüber wir, da sie beinahe fabelhaft aussehen, in Verwunderung, in Erstaunen gerathen. Gelangen wir aber auch nicht sogleich über das Einzelne zur Deutlichkeit, so ist doch der gedrängte Vortrag dieses weitausgreifenden Wanderers höchst geschickt das Gefühl des Unendlichen, Ungeheuren in uns aufzuregen30 [Marco Polo This exceptional man stands at the top of the list. His travels fall into the second half of the thirteenth century. He made his way all the way to the Far East, thereby leading us into the strangest of circumstances, whereby we stand in wonder and amazement, given that the stories almost seem like fables. Even if we don’t ever attain the clarity that individual details can provide, the compact presentation of this far-ranging wanderer succeeds quite astutely in inspiring in us the feeling of vastness and endlessness.]

If the young Goethe questions the ability of poets to travel through reading, he later becomes a “participatory observer” of the Orient, a traveller wishing to see through his own eyes but rely on texts for mediation, so that the script becomes the first-hand visual evidence of the Orient’s difference.31 While Goethe recorded his efforts to write Chinese characters a number of times, the most significant effort have been during visits from the young Berlin Sinologist Julius Klaproth (1802–4, 1813).32 Goethe’s Weimar Ausgabe, 1.7:185. Andrea Polaschegg, “Diese geistig technischen Bemühungen … ‘Zum Verhältnis von Gestalt und Sinnversprechen der Schrift: Goethes arabischer Schreibübungen und E. T. A. Hoffmanns Der Goldene Topf, ” in Schrift: Kulturtechnik zwischen Auge, Hand und Machine, ed. Gernot Grube, Werner Kogge and Sybille Krämer (Munich: Fink, 2005), 283–5. 32 Martin Gimm, “Zu Klaproths erstem Katalog chinesischer Bücher, Weimar 1804. Oder: Julius Klaproth als ‘studentische Hilfskraft’ bei Goethe,” in Das andere China: Festschrift für Wolfgang 30 31

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efforts at learning Chinese were at best sporadic. Like European engagement with China during the early modern period in general, his interest came in fits and starts as the opportunity for learning Chinese presented itself, when texts or Orientalists offered themselves up. As Goethe’s model of WL circulation suggests, the movement of texts between cultures could be stymied, as well as escalated, by political events. Certainly the limited availability of Chinese manuscripts and books governed any Central European’s ability to learn the language. Only with the increased circulation of Chinese texts was it possible for a Central European writer to engage with China. This was just the situation in 1827 when Goethe told Eckermann he was reading a Chinese novel.

Rémusat’s preface as a resource for Goethe Abel Rémusat’s French translation Les Deux Cousines was an international sensation. Goethe was by no means the only writer curious to read the novel, and the theory Rémusat’s preface expounded to lure the reader into the text shares much with Goethe’s thoughts on WL. Across Europe and then with English translations of the French, across the Atlantic, the work became an example of WL circulating as a bestseller. German and English translations of Rémusat’s translation quickly appeared: in Vienna as Die beyden Basen, in London as The Two Fair Cousins.33 Thomas Carlyle, who himself contributed greatly to Goethe’s concept, extolled The Two Fair Cousins. In a letter to John Sterling, after complaining about possessing too many books, he recommends Rémusat’s translation as “very well worth reading.” One Book let me recommend to you as very well worth reading: Rémusats Translation of “The Two Fair Cousins” from the Chinese. Would you like to see a man of real genius struggling to express himself, and actually becoming discernible, under the figure of “dragon-letter verses,” Chinese formalities and formulas, buy this Book. A man who really sees into objects; and under his silk gown and mandarin ways, has a certain impetuosity in him.34 Bauer zun 65. Geburtstag, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), 559–600. “Julius Klaproth (1783–1835) war einer der bedeutendsen Vertreter der europäischen Orientalistik in der 1. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und ‘l’un des premiers sinologues des temps modernes,’ der sich durch immense Begabung und Vielseitigkeit auszeichnete” [Julius Klaproth (1783–1835) was one of the most significant representatives of European Orientalism of the first half of the nineteenth century, and ‘one of the first Sinologists of modern times, who distinguished himself through his immense talent and versatility’] (561). 33 Ju-Kiao-Li, oder die beyden Basen, Ein Chinesischer Roman übersetzt von Abel Rémusat (Vienna: Schade, 1827); Iu-Kiao-Li: or, the Two Fair Cousins, from the French version of M. Abel-Remusat (London: Hunt and Clark, 1827). 34 Thomas Carlyle to John Sterling, September 11, 1836; DOI: 10.1215/lt–18360911–TC-JOST–01; CL 9: 50–3 letter. Online Source The Carlyle Letters http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/ full/9/1/lt–18360911–TC-JOST–01?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Remusa t&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT



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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Orientalist Notebooks are filled with many of the same sources as Goethe’s: Hafiz, Hammer-Purgstall, and Abel Rémusat’s translations.35 The work was so well known, and perhaps so over-hyped as a representative of Chinese culture generally, that in 1838 Edgar Allan Poe satirized how dropping a dexterous allusion to the novel’s title would allow writers to pretend that they enjoyed an “intimate acquaintance with the language and literature of the Chinese.”36 Abel Rémusat’s theoretical preface to the French translation was central to the novel’s success. Both English and German versions included it, a clear indication of how very important his analysis of the similarities between Chinese and European literature was to the reading public. Rémusat built a theory of comparative literature into his translation, which the German and English translations then reiterated, allowing thereby a theory of WL to be circulated along with its contents. Any analysis of Goethe’s Weltliteraturbegriff must include with an account of the circuitry that brings distant novels to the attention of typically French translators who then enable Europeans and Americans to access a version of the work. We must consider how translations move within and across intellectual circles. What genre transformations do the texts undergo in the process? For example, Chinese narratives such as The Dream of Red Chamber are sometimes referred to as novels, at other times as romances. Which are they? How do they become poetic within the terms of European aesthetics? As Fritz Strich suggested in the quote provided above, the circuitry of a text’s identification, translation, recommendation, and distribution in the West may well move along the same lines as the trade in Asian commodities, such as tea, porcelain, cinnamon, or cloves. China enthusiasts shared many of the same traits. Like Goethe, Rémusat argued against the nineteenth-century European tendency to denigrate Chinese culture as ossified and moribund. As with Goethe, Rémusat’s wonder at Chinese culture reminds one of Leibniz’s enthusiasm at the end of the seventeenth century. Over 120 years after Novissima Sinica was published, Rémusat deploys literature, whereas Leibniz concentrated on ethical philosophy, to argue the same point, namely, that Europe and China were equally great civilizations with much to learn from each other. If the Jesuit interpretation of Confucianism allowed the early Enlightenment ethicists such as Leibniz and Christian Wolff to argue that the civilizations were evenly matched, with each having its distinct features from which the other might benefit, Rémusat deploys the novel to argue that both civilizations display an intense self-consciousness that verges on modernity. Likewise, Goethe’s affinity for the Chinese novel reiterates the position that Abel Rémusat presented in his preface, and specifically his claim that the Chinese story creates aesthetic illusions and fictional characters with which the modern, rational European reader can identify. Rémusat, like Goethe, posits empathetic understanding, an identificatory ability to recognize oneself in the literary other, as the novel’s Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald Bosco & Ralph Orth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993) vol. 2, 40, 120. Richard P. Benton, “Poe’s Acquaintance with Chinese Literature,” Poe Newsletter, 2.2 (April 1969), 34.

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cosmopolitan bond.37 He thereby makes a special case for literature as the medium for cosmopolitan understanding. Rémusat stresses the particular similarities between literary genres in Europe and China. He still follows the familiar Enlightenment model of civilizations’ advance when he argues that younger civilizations are fascinated with the marvelous stories and epic fables, whereas more advanced societies prefer the sober realities of life over the wild and wonderful. If Rémusat favors the Chinese Romance over Islamic narratives, Goethe shows no such preference, as his admiration for Islamic literature in the Notes to West-östlicher Divan makes clear. Rémusat invokes the growth progressive model of Universal History when he states that civilizations must reach a certain stage before pondering domestic life, the play of passions and the fictions of manners. Goethe also makes the somewhat hyperbolic statement that the Chinese were writing Romances while Germans were still barbarians in the woods, in order to underscore the autonomy of Chinese literature. In the end, Goethe like Rémusat insists that Chinese courtly romances share many features with European. Both Rémusat and Goethe acknowledge the temporal disalignment between Chinese and European literary histories, while at the same time insisting on the possibility of European readerly identification with Chinese literature. Thus, a Chinese novel from the sixteenth century can ring true to nineteenth-century European readers. Rémusat is concerned to show that the Chinese novel developed on its own, independently of any European influence; therefore, he points out that Chinese works are often 700–800 years older than equivalent European works. Nevertheless, he stresses that both traditions focus on individual self-consciousness, and the calculated concern with understanding one’s own emotions. He characterizes Chinese literature in humanist terms: “Man in relation to man, his vices, his aptitudes, and his moral habits, including the tone and language of society, forms the subject of the more prevalent Chinese compositions of all kinds.”38 The seventeenth-century accusations of atheism levied against the Jesuit presentation of Confucianism are taken in the nineteenth-century literary context as a sign of epistemological restraint, which in the English translation of Rémusat’s preface sounds almost Humean, but to German readers would have a Kantian tone: “Confined to the sphere of reality, the imaginations of their authors seem especially bounded by the limits of the sensible world.”39 Language then is the one barrier to unmediated identification. Chinese passions could be our own but for their names, just as their cities, Nanking and Canton, could be London or Paris.40 Rational self-reflection, a restrained investigation of society’s own regulations, makes Chinese novels superior to travelogues written by outsiders unfamiliar with the nuances of language and manners.41 Novels, then, are the new basis for parity between the two civilizations. According to Rémusat: “the Chinese, with a few of the nations of modern Europe, have alone On identificatory reading and consumer culture, see Daniel Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 22–50. 38 Abel Rémusat in the “French Translator’s Preface,” Two Fair Cousins, x. 39 French Translator’s Preface, x. 40 French Translator’s Preface, xi. 41 French Translator’s Preface, xi. 37



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admitted fiction into parlours and drawing rooms, and allowed her to take part in familiar discourse, in amicable reciprocation, in domestic discussion, in the diplomacy of the household, and in all the petty details which, in the aggregate, compose by far the greater part of the lives of civilized men.”42 Here, Rémusat draws the analogy that Goethe will reiterate to Eckermann: the modernity of the Chinese novel lies in its attention to social detail, much like Richardson’s Clarissa. Through the representation of intimate social relations, which escape the notice of most merchants and ambassadors to the Emperor, Chinese novels form characters with which readers, including Europeans, readily identify. The characters in these novels have social standings similar to those of European novel readers: they belong to the classes between the ruling elite class and the laboring lower-class; they insist on their own moral virtue, take marriage seriously; they rely on academic achievement to advance, and are prone to retire from politics when confronted with corrupt plots. The strongest difference lies in the language, which Rémusat admits was difficult for him to translate. The nuances of metaphor and the poems embedded in the prose, the details for which Rémusat praises the novel, present a European transator with the greatest difficulties. “Their style becomes so ornamented with metaphors and poetical figures, as to be sometimes nearly unintelligible” (Rémusat p. xv). Rémusat seeks to offer a smooth translation, one that integrates the Chinese novel into the European readership, without the stumbling blocks of scholarly footnotes laden with learned discourses on languages. A translation ought convey the defining features of the foreign language; in this case Rémusat mentions the compact simplicity of style coupled with the dense allusions. The translator is faced with many tropes that have no correspondence in Europe. In the end, differences in literary language block the all too easy incorporation of world culture into a single abstract concept of humanity. 43 The assertion that literature more effectively reveals the qualities of Chinese society than reports written by European travellers marks a shift in the epistemological approach to understanding foreign cultures. WL eschews the metaphysical comparisons of philosophical treatises and it does not rely on anthropological evaluations of culture. In Goethe’s formulation it asserts the possibility of cross-cultural readerly identification. We could trace the history of European engagement with China through the succession of genres that were at any time given precedence over all others. In each case, these categories were constructed to organize Chinese writing within a framework that allowed mediation with an imaginary European reader. The Jesuits isolated an ancient core teaching of Confucianism in order to integrate Chinese thought into Christian theology much in the same manner as pagan Greek philosophy had been incorporated. Enlightenment anthropology replaced natural theology with a

French Translator’s Preface, ix–x. Steven Sondrup overstates the case when he claims that Goethe emphasizes “the homogeneity of the world-wide community of letters” and “the resolution of national differences,” for Goethe in fact stresses the complex negotiations inherent in any transaction or translation.“Literature and Language,” The Comparatist 34 (May 2010), 41.

42 43

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taxonomy for isolating China’s defining features. Then, WL isolated lyrical poetry and the romance novel as writing forms shared most commonly. In each case, these cross-cultural discourses construct an ideal European reader along with a definitive Chinese representative. Not only did the Jesuits form Confucius as an historical figure comparable to Plato or Aristotle, they also addressed their own construct of a European reader able to appreciate their construct. The seventeenthcentury “Rites Controversy” reflects the discrepancy between the ideal Jesuit reader of Chinese literature and actual Christian theologians in Paris and Rome. Somewhat more cautiously, Goethe and Rémusat posit the existence of a few hundred readers who are prepared to understand WL through the Chinese novel.

Part Two

Ausstrahlungen/Emanations

3

Between Political Engagement and Political Unconscious: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Slavic East Simona Moti Around the turn of the twentieth century, apocalyptic fantasies of a future Slavic rule became a cultural cliché in Central Europe. The popular Vienna-born dramatist Elsa Bernstein, who wrote under the pseudonym Ernst Rosmer, presents a typical example in the naturalist drama “Dämmerung” [Twilight] (1893). One of the characters complains in a racist tone about her Bohemian servants: “Sind doch nur halbe Menschen—diese Slawen” [They’re only half human—these Slavs], which prompts the ironic response: “Die Rasse der Zukunft” [The race of the future].1 Along with stereotypes of Slavic presentday inferiority and future superiority, there circulated the cliché of Slavs as “Naturvölker,” who still possessed the vitality that “Kulturvölker” lacked. Hofmannsthal evokes “das glänzende, dämonisch kraftvolle, aber unsichere slawische Seelengebilde”2 [the brilliant, demonically energetic but uncertain Slavic soul],3 but at the same time is haunted by the apocalyptic vision of “eine slawisch-jüdische, sinnliche Welt”4 [a Slavic-Jewish sensual world] arising on the ruins of Vienna. According to Hofmannsthal, although endowed with vitality, the Slavs, nevertheless, lack the competency of their German predecessors. Their world dominance appears to be an “Endzeiterscheinung,” an epoch of decadence. The Slavs became a topic of major interest for Hofmannsthal during the First World War and eventually turned into the key element of the “Austrian idea” and the Europe-concept, which he developed in his war essays. During the war, Hofmannsthal exhibited a strongly expressed belief in the Austrian idea, and he developed an intense activity and engagement in furthering it, all the while harboring a deep fear of the complete destruction of Austria. During the First World War, Hofmannsthal was employed in the Pressegruppe des Kriegsfürsorgeamtes [Press Group of the War Relief Authority]. In this Ernst Rosmer, “Dämmerung,” in Dramen des deutschen Naturalismus, ed. Roy C. Cowen (München: Winkler, 1981), 1: 570. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze II (1914–1924), in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. Bernd Schoeller and Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979), 410. 3 David S. Luft, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea. Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2011), 76. 4 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze III (1925–1929), in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. Bernd Schoeller and Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980), 383. 1

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administrative position, he was active as a propagandist for the Austrian war effort and the Austro–German cause, which he expressed in a series of essays, such as “Die Bejahung Österreichs” [The Affirmation of Austria] (1914) and “Die österreichische Idee” [The Austrian Idea] (1917). These writings emphatically promote Austrianism as a supranational, pan-European vision and a superior alternative to nationalism—the official Habsburg ideological line. In contrast with the harmonizing, supranational vision promoted in his war essays, the representation of ethnicity in his early prose fiction is symptomatic of a radically different political reality. A close textual analysis reveals the Slavic figures of Hofmannsthal’s fictions as the Oriental other, while the fear of contamination with disruptive alterity in the imperial encounter runs like a thread through these early stories and marks them as narratives of colonial panic. The tension between the harmonizing, supranational vision promoted in the essays, and the representation of ethnic alterity with its violent and threatening connotations that emerges from his fiction, constitutes the immanent tension in Hofmannthals’s thinking, but it also embodies one of the peculiarities of the Habsburg Central European context. My essay explores this tension in Hofmannsthal’s wartime essays and early fictional work, especially “Reitergeschichte” [A Tale of the Cavalry] in the context of interdisciplinary studies of ethnicity, minority, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism, especially the powerful representations of the cultural dynamics of ethnicity, power, and empire within the late Habsburg Empire.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) Hofmannsthal writes from a discursive position that is representative of the dominant, German-speaking elite of Imperial Austria, i.e. he represents the imperial mentality of “a culturally broad German group that socially belonged to the upper and middle classes of a geographically small area centered on Vienna.”5 Hugo Edler von Hofmannsthal was raised in an upper middle-class family of industrialists and financiers in Vienna. He was the only son of a lawyer in one of Vienna’s leading banks. His paternal grandfather, who had inherited the silk and manufacturing industry from his father, married a woman from an aristocratic Italian family. The family owed the patent of nobility represented by the name “von Hofmannsthal” to his greatgrandfather, the Jewish merchant Isaak Löw, and his services on behalf of the House of Habsburg. Hugo thus belonged to the third generation of Catholic Hofmannsthals. He attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna and then started the traditional law studies of his family and class at the University of Vienna. He subsequently changed to studies of philology, and in 1899 received his doctorate. His convictions were marked by cultural and political conservatism, and he clearly identified with the aristocratic and imperial paradigm. He has been labeled an arch-conservative, a Fredrik Lindström, Empire and Identity. Biographies of the Austrian State Problem in the Late Habsburg Empire (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2008), 14.

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“guardian of Austrian culture,”6 with “Austria” being the object of his conservatism. Whatever label we use, Hofmannsthal was centrally concerned with rescuing what he considered to be of value in the Austrian tradition.7 Hofmannsthal’s involvement in politics was forcefully triggered by the outbreak of the First World War. His first comments about the war reflected the widespread enthusiasm of the time for war as a means of potentially reinvigorating the Austrian idea, by creating a temporary subjective experience in the Austrian peoples of belonging together, which then could be utilized for a far-reaching internal reform that would ensure the continued existence of the Habsburg Monarchy.8 Hofmannsthal’s attitude, however, stands in contrast with the “Rettungsaktionen, die eigene Person betreffend”9 [the rescue operation concerning his own person]. After being conscripted, he made desperate attempts to get transferred back to Vienna. He was with his unit for no more than 48 hours, and then used his connections in high places in Vienna to obtain a transfer to the War Relief Authority. There he worked as a “cultural officer” on behalf of the Foreign Office of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on cultural–political missions abroad. This is the route that got him involved in propagandistic projects like “Ehrenstätten Österreich” [Memorial Sites of Austria] (1914), and that led to the output of his “patriotic” war essays. It has been remarked that the political statements, both implicit and explicit, made during this period, more than any other aspect of his career, have problematized our view of Hofmannsthal today.10 David Luft notes in the introduction to his recent volume of translations of selected essays and addresses by Hofmannsthal on the Austrian Idea that many scholars have been critical of Hofmannsthal’s political views, and especially of his support for the Austrian war effort, while his high social status, deep commitment to European high culture (as well as German high culture in particular), and broad sense of conservative values have distanced him from many commentators.11

Postcolonial Austria Recent years have witnessed increasing attempts to rethink the former multinational Habsburg Empire in terms of (post)colonial theory, and this topic has generated controversy. Most critics agree that the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary cannot qualify as a colonial power in the strict sense of the word. Several factors distinguish it from the empires of Britain and France: first, it lacked overseas colonies; second, it lacked “significant” cultural differences to its subject peoples (it did not confront 9

Lindström, 120. Luft, xi. Lindtröm, 4. Heinz Lunzer, Hofmannsthals politische Tätigkeit in den Jahren 1914 bis 1917 (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1981), 29. 10 Thomas A. Kovach, “Introduction: Hofmannshtal Today,” in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Thomas A. Kovacs (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 10. 11 Luft, 7. 6 7 8

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different races); third, it lacked significant economic asymmetry between center and periphery (before the First World War, Bohemia and Moravia were economically stronger than the Austrian core lands themselves); last, but not least, Austria–Hungary was a dynastic structure, like its eastern and southern neighbors, the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and unlike the other modern empires at the forefront of European and world power. The arguments for the use of postcolonial theory made, among others, by Ruthner12 and Feichtinger,13 are grounded in “cultural imperialism” that comprises identity politics, discursive strategies, the production and circulation of ethnically and culturally coded images of self and other, and their political import. In this sense, the opposition identified between Europe and the Orient translates in the Central European space as the relationship between the Germanophone population and its various non-German, mostly Slavic subject peoples, which frequently implies assumptions of ethnic and cultural superiority as part of a colonial power imbalance. In this continental space the racial differences become more subtle ethnically and culturally coded differences. It is thus in the realm of cultural constructions of images of self and other and in the subsequent establishment of ethnic hierarchies that postcolonial theories have most relevance. Among the Empire’s internal others, the Slavs carried powerful connotations in the political discourse and in the Austrian imaginary. As the most populous ethnic group, they posed the main challenge for the continued survival of the Empire as a power structure dominated by Germans. This biopolitical fact made the Slavic question into a crucial historical question of the time, especially during the last decades before the First World War, which were dominated by the nationalities conflict. From the AustroGerman perspective, the geopolitical positioning of the Slavs was highly ambiguous: they represented, on the one hand, an integral and vital part of the Empire—through their continued adherence, they embodied the guarantee of its continuation. On the other hand, they were the Empire’s internal and external enemy, as they were caught up in a variety of actions aimed at balancing national and imperial interests. If the Slavs of the Empire in general were perceived as a destabilizing force, the Czechs and the South Slavs featured most prominently in the Austrian popular imaginary, as well as in the political and literary discourse, because they were the focal points of discussions within the growing nationalistic conflicts. This ambivalent position led to the conceptualization of the Slavic other in Habsburg literature as a phantasm of inner exoticism. The construction of cultural images of self and other shows similarities to that of transcontinental colonial structures. These reflect the ethnically and culturally coded asymmetry of power between the Austro-German self and the Slavic other. The latter is constructed as the Oriental other, objectified as inferior, primitive, non-rational, deviant, passive, silent, and at the Clemens Ruthner, “K.u.k. Kolonialismus als Befund, Befindlichkeit und Metapher: Versuch einer weiteren Klärung,” in Habsburg postcolonial. Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis, ed. Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, Moritz Csaky (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 111–28. 13 Johannes Feichtinger, “Habsburg (post)-kolonial. Anmerkungen zur Inneren Kolonisierung in Zentraleuropa,” in Habsburg postcolonial. Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis, ed. Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch, Moritz Csaky (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 13–31. 12



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same time subjectified as a threat, in a series of images that ranges from the political subversion of the Czechs, to the parlous wilderness of the Balkans, and the excessive sensuality of the Slavic women. Exploring Hofmannsthal’s essayistic output and early prose in conjunction with the interdisciplinary space afforded by postcolonial theory and minority discourse thus reveals the intricate dynamics between an imperial, Austro-German self and the colonized Slavic other, who, on the one hand, is culturally reified and appropriated as part of the consolidation of the self, but who, on the other hand, poses a permanent threat to the survival of the self. Within this framework, Hofmannsthal’s wartime essays and cultural projects emerge as exemplary instances of imperial rhetoric. The earliest such project, “Ehrenstätten Österreich,” was planned as a pan-Austrian manifestation of unity of the multinational Monarchy in the form of an illustrated book with short comments that was supposed to include pictures of Austrian sites worthy of remembrance, such as battlefields, castles, churches, cemeteries, memorial houses of prominent personalities, etc. Its title indicates propagandistic intent as a patriotic booster of the Austrian feeling. As would become a pattern in Hofmannsthal’s wartime propaganda, among the peoples of Austria–Hungary, Hofmannsthal’s strongest interest is directed toward the Czechs and Slovaks. His efforts are concentrated to maintain and strengthen the spiritual unity of Bohemia, the oldest crown land, with the Hereditary Lands, based on their common history. The real aim of the project was to counter Bohemian claims of autonomy with images that emphasized the alleged harmonious entity of the Monarchy. Hofmannsthal refused to accept an autonomous Czech culture and regarded Bohemia as an inalienable part of Austria. In search of collaborators, he focused on personalities whose Austrophile orientation was uncontested. People like Thomas Masaryk, whom he initially thought of including, become problematic because of his nationalistic orientation. Among the Czech intellectuals whose collaboration on this project Hofmannsthal sought out were the translator Pavel Eisner, and the Germanist couple Otokar and Blažena Fischer. Although they all were welldisposed toward Hofmannsthal, they declined collaboration, explaining that for them Austrian supremacy had been suppressing Czech national identity since the seventeenth century, and they no longer saw the empire as a political partner. Another personality he did manage to enlist as a contributor to the project “Ehrenstätten Österreichs” was Jaroslav Kvapil, Czech dramatist and director of the Bohemian National Theater in Prague at the time, and widely regarded as the founder of modern Czech theatrical culture. They engaged in a brief correspondence, which was most likely Hofmannsthal’s first serious and direct confrontation with nationalistic tendencies of Bohemia.14 Kvapil’s letters were among the most important influences that relativized Hofmannsthal’s views on the Slavic interest in the Austrian idea. Kvapil counters Hofmannsthal’s ideas about Bohemia and attempts to clarify for him the fundamentally problematic relationship of the Czech people to the Austrian See Lunzer, 102.

14

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state. In conceiving his book, Hofmannsthal had intended to include elements of previous Czech history, but from the dominant Habsburg perspective, which elicited Kvapil’s differentiating opposition. In his first letter to Hofmannsthal on November 16, 1914, Kvapil emphasized that Bohemia and Austria had little mutual respect for each other’s values: Das Schönste und Ruhmvollste, was wir in unserer Vergangenheit haben, war sehr selten von Österreich als solches angesehen—und umgekehrt betrachtet schaut die Sache noch schlechter aus. Das Meiste, was mein Volk verloren hat, in seine[r] politischen, nationalen und religiösen Selbständigkeit, verlor es durch Österreich und an Österreich.15 [The most beautiful and glorious aspects of our past were seldom regarded by Austria as such—and in the other direction, the situation is even worse. The greatest loss of my people in terms of its political, national, and religious autonomy was through Austria and to Austria.]

Hofmannsthal fails to grasp Kvapil’s point and attempts to bridge their opposition with an appeal to reconciliation and a new sense of commonality. In his response on December 2, 1914, Kvapil insists on irreconcilable differences in the face of centuries of Habsburg dominance. I quote from his reply at length because it is representative for the Slavic counter-narrative to the Austro-dominant perspective which has seldom found its way into discussions of Austrian literature: Aus Ihrem werten Schreiben ersehe ich, dass Sie meinen Standpunkt doch nicht richtig erfasst haben. Es handelt sich ja keineswegs um das Verhältnis zweier Völker, welche unser Land seit Jahrhunderten bewohnen und sicher für immer bewohnen werden, mit allen souveränen Rechten und Ansprüchen freier, gebildeter, lebensfähiger Völker, sondern um das gegenseitige Verhältnis meiner Nation und dessen, was wir kurz Österreich nennen wollen. Und dieses Verhältnis war in den verflossenen drei Jahrhunderten so oft unnatürlich und für uns schmerzvoll, ja lebensgefährlich, dass sich die nächste Zukunft (und das gebe Gott!) viel und viel ändern muss, um endlich die Vergangenheit eben nur als Vergangenheit ansehen zu können.16 [From your esteemed letter, I see that you have not understood my point of view. This is by no means the relationship of two peoples who have inhabited our country for centuries and will surely continue to inhabit it with all the sovereign rights and demands of free, civilized, and viable peoples; this is rather the mutual relationship of my nation and that which we shall call in short “Austria.” And this relationship was so often unnatural and painful, even life-threatening, for us during the past three centuries, that in the near future a lot will have to change (and God grant that it does!), in order to regard the past as just the past.] Martin Stern, “Hofmannsthal und Böhmen. Der Briefwechsel mit Jaroslav Kvapil und das Projekt der Ehrenstätten Österreichs,” Hofmannsthal Blätter 1 (1968), 13. 16 Ibid,, 14. 15



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After reading Hofmannsthal’s essay “Die Bejahung Österreichs” [The Affirmation of Austria], which the author had sent him, Kvapil replied that he refused to believe in a future of the Monarchy in its current political shape and in an Austrian revival. In a letter from January 11, 1915, Kvapil commented that the Bohemians had been oppressed for too long by absolutism, forced Germanization and Catholicization to find sympathy for their oppressor: “Die Bejahung Österreichs” beruht auf einem festen Glauben an Österreich— und diesen Glauben habe ich nicht und kann ihn leider auch durch die letzten Ereignisse nicht gewinnen. Auch historisch genommen […] sind für mich die Begriffe “Österreich” und “das böhmische Volk” etwas ganz Verschiedenes. […D] iese hundert Jahre bedeuten für meine Nation in Österreich die größte kulturelle, nationale und wirtschaftliche Erniedrigung […] Dadurch, was ich da schreibe, will ich nur von Neuem beweisen, dass sich Österreich und unser Glück sehr oft gegenseitig ausschlossen, und dass wir auch heute von einem eventuellen Renascimento Österreichs (an das ich übrigens nicht glaube) implicite nichts Gutes und Vorteilhaftes für uns zu erhoffen brauchen […] Und was wir in den letzten 100 Jahren wurden, wurden wir ohne Österreich, trotz Österreich—und manchmal sogar gegen Österreich.17 [“The Affirmation of Austria” relies on the firm belief in Austria—and I do not share this belief, nor can I acquire it in the aftermath of the latest events. Even from a historical perspective, the concepts of “Austria” and “the Bohemian people” are for me very different things … these hundreds of years mean for my nation within Austria the utmost cultural, national, and economic humiliation … Through what I write, I want to argue again that Austria and our own fortune were often mutually exclusive, and that, even today, we need not implicitly expect anything good or beneficial for us from a potential Renascimiento of Austria (in which I do not believe, by the way) … That which we Czechs have become in the last hundred years, we have become without the help of Austria—sometimes even against Austria.]

Confronted with such an oppositional understanding of history, Hofmannsthal discontinued the correspondence but expressed his hope to meet Kvapil in person and to continue their exchange of opinions. In the face of these difficulties in engaging Czech intellectuals for his project, “Ehrenstätten” was never realized. Lunzer speculates that Hofmannsthal’s confrontation with Kvapil’s letters left a deep impression on Hofmannsthal but that, owing to his lack of knowledge about the nationalities of the Monarchy and to his political bias for a Germanophone cultural theory of the state, he underestimated the explosive force Kvapil’s statements.18 Throughout the war, Hofmannsthal promoted the Austro-German cause through the glorification of Austrianism in a series of essays. The lower the chances of survival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the more intensely he was preoccupied with the Ibid., 20. Lunzer,103.

17 18

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peaceful coexistence of its peoples and their common humanistic development. Of the wartime essays, I focus on “Die österreichische Idee” (The Austrian Idea) (1917) because it summarizes Hofmannsthal’s attempt at legitimating the continued existence of the Habsburg Monarchy and its cultural, historical, and spiritual mission in Europe, though in a way that flagrantly contradicts the nationalist developments within the Monarchy and Hofmannsthal’s own knowledge of this political situation in the fall of 1917. This essay also emphasizes the centrality of the Slavs within his discussion of the “Austrian idea” as a model for Europe. He infuses Austria with transcendent and spiritual values, regards it as crucial for the future of Europe, and conceives of Austrian history as the deeds of expansion and of colonization that combine “zu einer sehr hohen Synthese”19 [to a very lofty synthesis]: “[Eine österreichische Geschichte] die, obgleich sie ungeschrieben ist, eine darum nicht minder große geistige Macht ausübt, welche im Laufe der Jahrhunderte stark und beständig wie ein immer und immer wehender Wind in die Poren der südöstlichen Völker eingedrungen ist.” [This history, although unwritten, exercises nonetheless a great spiritual power, which in the course of the centuries has penetrated strongly and constantly like a continually blowing wind, into the pores and marrow of the southeastern people].20 In an earlier essay from 1915, “Wir Österreicher und Deutschland” [We Austrians and Germany], he had employed a similar imperial rhetoric of the manifest destiny to refer to Austria as the revelation of a spiritual power and an historic necessity: “Österreich ist die besondere Aufgabe, die dem deutschen Geist in Europa gestellt wurde. Es ist das vom Geschick zugewiesene Feld eines rein geistigen Imperialismus.” [Austria is the special task that is posed to the German spirit in Europe. It is the field, directed by destiny, of a purely spiritual imperialism].21 For Hofmannsthal, the mission of Austria–Hungary lies in the reconciliation of the Germanic with the Slavic peoples. According to his views, while the whole world followed a nationalistic path between 1848 and 1914, Austria had to liquidate the remains of its old supranational politics (e.g., through the war with Italy in 1859 and with Prussia in 1866), after which it allegedly started laying the ground for a new supranational, European politics focused on the integration and transcendence of nationality. Therefore, Austria was best prepared for the future by reconciling “das nicht mehr scharf-nationale Deutsche mit slawischem Wesen” [bringing this no longer sharply national Germanness into balance with Slavic identity].22 The idea of reconciliation and synthesis is based not on historical arguments, but on the manifestation of the “historic, holy German inheritance.”23 While he evokes the idea of a multicultural Austria or Europe, Hofmannsthal clearly insists on German cultural leadership within these entities. According to Nina Berman, in the essays “Grillparzers politisches Vermächtnis” [Grillparzer’s Political Legacy] (1915), “Geist der Karpathen” [The Spirit of the Carpathians] (1915) and Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze II, 457. Ibid., 457; Luft, 101. 21 Ibid., 393; Luft, 69. 22 Ibid., 457; Luft, 101. 23 Luft, 86. 19 20



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“Österreichische Bilbliothek” [Austrian Library] (1916), Hofmannsthal voices his appreciation for Slavic and other peoples of the Habsburg Empire, but the stance he takes remains “paternalistic.”24 For example, in “Grillparzer’s Political Legacy,” after postulating that Bohemia belongs to Austria as “die hohe, unzerstörbare Einheit” [the sublime, indestructible unity] and as “gottgewollte Gegebenheit” [a divinely ordained given], he elaborates on the contrast between “slawischem und deutschem Wesen” as “das glänzende, dämonisch kraftvolle, aber unsichere slawische Seelengebilde” versus “das schlichte tüchtige des Deutschen, der auf Organisation und Dauerhaftigkeit ausgeht”25 [“Slavic and German character” as “the brilliant, demonically energetic but uncertain Slavic soul” versus “the simple, competent soul of the German, which expresses itself in organization and forbearance].26 He evokes the much used cliché that contrasts the Dionysian quality of the Slavs as “Naturvölker,” who are, however, unstable and lack the competency and efficiency that Germans demonstrate. The Dionysian potential of the Slavs is instrumentalized for the cultural regeneration of Germandom and at the same time tamed by German rigor. As my discussion of his early fiction shows, Slavic figures are associated with negative characteristics and represented as destabilizing elements pertaining to an “enormous only half-civilized hinterland,”27 as Hofmannsthal refers to the Slavic lands of the Monarchy in a letter to Harry Graf Kessler from 1911. Hofmannsthal’s political vision is consistently elitist with a strong preference for aristocratic orders, and paternalistic, based on privileging an idea of Europe under German cultural leadership. His main concern is preserving German identity as a moral category for the foundation of Europe, an identity that he sees threatened by the Slavic East. Simultaneously, the Slavic East constitutes the possibility of preserving Germandom by acting as its receptacle. According to Nino Nodia, the function of the Austrian model is essentially that of converting Slav people to the German spirit.28 In “Aufzeichnungen zu Reden in Skandinavien” [Notes for Talks in Scandinavia] (1916), Hofmannsthal elucidates: Welcher deutsche Gedanke ist im Phänomen Österreich realisiert? junge Völker,— was brauchen sie?—Schule. Wird Deutschland diese Schule sein?—Sendboten, Kolonisten,—welchen Geistes?—Es ist auferlegt, dass sie höchsten Geistes seien, je reiner deutsches Wesen in der Welt, desto hoffnungsvoller das Durchdringen der slawischen Völker, um deren Seele es geht.29 [What German idea is realized in the phenomenon of Austria? young peoples,— what do they need?—schools. Will Germany be this school?—emissaries, Nina Berman, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Political Vision,” in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Thomas A. Kovacs (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 221. 25 Hofmannshtal, Reden und Aufsätze II, 410. 26 Luft, 76–7. 27 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Harry Graf Kessler, Briefwechsel 1898–1929, ed. Hilde Burger (Frankfurt/M: Insel Verlag, 1968), 326. 28 Nino Nodia, Das Fremde und das Eigene. Hugo von Hofmannsthal und die russische Kultur (Frankfurt/M: Peter D. Lang, 1999), 85. 29 Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze II, 36. [My translation.] 24

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We see here that his Austrian patriotism is grounded in the political and cultural hegemony of the Germanophone population within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In subscribing to a very deliberate colonial project, he juxtaposes Germany and its colonial expansion with Austria–Hungary’s expansion into South-Eastern Europe. What both have in common is German power politics that had been ideologically prepared since the turn of the century and that were aimed at a pan-German economic union under German leadership.30 In ideological terms, Austria’s highest meaning lies in its European mission. During the last years of the war, Hofmannsthal develops the notion of Austria as a model for the future Europe, and this is the culminating point of “The Austrian Idea.” The Habsburg Empire, by comprising a multitude of peoples and cultures, represents the spiritual model and blueprint for his notion of a multicultural Europe, not least through its alleged flexibility that allows it to integrate the “polymorphen Osten” [the polymorphous East.].31 His vision of a multicultural, supranational Europe is placed necessarily under German leadership. Even when he propagates the European idea most ardently, he never tires of idealizing Germandom. The tension between his supranational vision of Europe and the idealization of German culture has led Michael Steinberg to describe this ambivalence as “nationalist cosmopolitanism.”32 Steinberg argues that Thomas Mann and Hofmannsthal in particular regard the German nation as one distinguishing itself by a cosmopolitanism that grounds its superiority to other nations. For Hofmannsthal, the Habsburg Monarchy thus becomes a model for future European harmony, even though Germanophone dominance remains uncontested. The main reason why Austria rather than Germany preserves German humanity as the tenor for a European commonality is the former’s ability to coexist with the “non-European Slav world.” Consequently, the foreign Slav element is located at the center of Hofmannsthal’s notion of Europe, and Austria’s main raison d’etre is to harmonize the “alteuropäischen latein-germanischen mit der neu-europäischen Slawenwelt” [compromise between the old European, Latin-German and the new European, Slavic world].”33 Its geographical location turns Austria into a connecting link between Europe and the Orient. It is both a bastion against the Balkans, as well as bridgehead for its colonization, a metaphor that becomes the focal point of the argument in “The Austrian Idea”: […] zugleich Grenzmark, Grenzwall, Abschluss zu sein zwischen dem europäischen Imperium und einem dessen Toren vorlagernden, stets chaotisch See Lunzer, 84. Hofmannsthal, Reden und Aufsätze II, 457; Luft, 102. 32 Michael Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival. Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). 33 Luft, 101. 30 31



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bewegten Völkergemenge Halb-Europa, Halb-Asien und zugleich fließende Grenze zu sein, Ausgangspunkt der Kolonisation, der Penetration, der sich nach Osten fortpflanzenden Kulturwellen, ja empfangend auch wieder und bereit zu empfangen die westwärts strebende Gegenwelle. [to be at once border march, border wall, and settlement between the European empire and an always chaotically moving mixture of peoples camped before its gates, half Europe half Asia, and at the same time a flowing border, a point of departure for colonization, for penetration, with cultural waves propagating toward the East, but also receiving and ready to receive the counter-wave striving westward.]34

Hofmannsthal’s definition of Austria as a model for Europe reveals a certain Eurocentrism in the sense discussed by Samir Amin, as an ideology that in this case legitimates intra-European imperialism.35 This instance of colonial discourse emphasizes the chaotic quality of Eastern/Oriental people that are being contained and tamed by the taxonomic order of the West. In her book Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne, Nina Berman applied to Hofmannsthal Edward Said’s remark about Joseph Conrad: “He writes as a man whose Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations.”36 Berman further comments that Hofmannsthal is such an untouchable cultural symbol that the critique of his political views often meets with implacable resistance.37 From the standpoint of postcolonial critique, however, not only did he never question colonization and Austrian cultural-political domination in Central-Eastern Europe, always instead advocating the expansion of Habsburg power at least in the Balkans, but for him the Slavic other has value only insofar as it is neutralized as an autonomous culture and then dominated, influenced, and molded (in and of itself the East is ‘polymorphous’ and ‘chaotic’) by the superior German culture—the colonial argument grounded in belief in the German civilizing mission in Central Europe. As late as 1917 he made assertions, e.g. that Bohemia was the “nächstverbundene Volk” [the closest related people to Austria],38 along with hints about the independence of Slavs, but at the same time insisted on Austro-German supremacy, without ever addressing the contradiction inherent in these statements. Hofmannsthal’s apotheosis of Austrianism is grounded on very little rational argumentation, but is rather an abstract decree in reaction to oppositional tendencies and in accordance with the self-imposed obligation to defend the values of his culture.39 His references to “Austria” rarely invoke a constitutional political structure, but rather evoke a spiritual entity whose tenor is the state, operating in the field of politics with Luft, 100. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989). 36 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), xviii. 37 Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne. Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschsprachigen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997), 258–9. 38 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Widmung an Brezina,” Hofmannsthal Blätter 2 (1968), 106. 39 See Lunzer, 258. 34 35

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ethical–humanist–abstract arguments. The supranational dimension of Austria as a Central European paradigm remains vague, utopian, pseudo-political, much like the dilettante culture behind the so-called Parallel Campaign in Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities]. Hofmannsthal never gained a clear insight into the political status quo, but thought that he could respond to the various antagonistic political tendencies with abstract humanistic arguments based on imperialist premises. The political vision that he elaborates in his war essays is characterized by the tendency to counter the complex, muddled imperial reality of Austria–Hungary with a radically conservative and reductionist cultural theory so as to construct a more orderly conception of the world.40 Taming the “chaos” and producing taxonomic order is an integral part of the epistemology of colonialism. In contrast, his open and ambivalent early prose texts seem to be more complex and insightful in portraying the crises of the time.

Reitergeschichte Hofmannsthal’s early prose texts have frequently been read as apolitical, especially within the larger debates on the divorce of modernism and aestheticism from politics and history. This latter interpretive line has been promoted most influentially by Carl Schorske, the father-figure of Viennese cultural studies and the historian of de-historicization in his groundbreaking Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (1980).41 More recent criticism, however, has taken on the interpretive task of historicizing the ahistorical. A significant contribution towards a historicizing approach to Hofmannsthal’s prose fiction is that of Nina Berman, in her essay “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Political Vision.” She argues that Hofmannsthal’s conservative and paternalistic political vision is expressed not only in his essays and letters, but in his literary work as well, and concludes that in his early narratives Hofmannsthal articulates concerns about the stability of the social and political order. Members of the lower classes are experienced by the protagonists as threatening, violent, and primitive, and they contribute to bringing about the death of the protagonist (“A Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) or alternatively need to be killed by an upper-class member in order to protect the existing order and social hierarchy (“A Tale of the Cavalry”).42 However, a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s early prose shows that it is not only members of the lower classes that emerge as carriers of disorder, but that danger emanates primarily from the ethnic other. I argue that the ethnic component of the narratives can be foregrounded as the essential factor that causes the downfall of the central character. The contact with the perceived “disorder” of ethnic and cultural alterity

See Lunzer, 260. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980). 42 Berman, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Political Vision,” 218–19. 40 41



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has a disintegrating effect on the metrocentric protagonist, and the Slavic element in particular is crucial to the reading of “A Tale of the Cavalry.” By relocating this text within the discursive networks of the time in Habsburg Central Europe, which I hope to have made clear through my reading of Hofmannsthal’s political writing discussed above, I show that undergirding the alleged apoliticism are imperial attitudes of dominance that are accompanied by feelings of anxiety and ambivalence vis-à-vis ethnic otherness that have been largely neglected so far by literary critics. The inscription of (post)colonial relationships in Austrian and Central European literature has only recently started to receive critical attention. What has remained elusive is a specific account of the intersection of Austro-German and Slavic identities in conjunction with the precise cultural, political, and ideological context that has facilitated the development of these images of self and other, and how they crystallized in an unconscious inventory of images that acquired density across a number of texts. The novella “Reitergeschichte” (A Tale of the Cavalry, 1899) depicts one day of an Austro-Hungarian cavalry squadron in Austrian Lombardy, in the immediate vicinity of Milan, during the nationalist-revolutionary movement of 1848, and details the story of one of its members, Sergeant Anton Lerch. After the military victory over the city of Milan, the squadron led by Baron Rofrano enters the defeated city. Here Sergeant Lerch has a chance encounter with a woman whom he recognizes from earlier days. A ride through an impoverished village follows; and immediately afterward, a small battle; then follows the enigmatic insubordination of Lerch—he is reluctant to obey the command of his superior, Baron Rofrano, and surrender his booty—and his consequent execution. The inevitable hermeneutic question that Richard Alewyn has raised and many in his wake have tackled is: Why does he have to die such an inglorious death?43 Most interpretations of this novella are along psychoanalytic/symbolic lines and downplay the importance of the historical setting of the 1848 Austrian campaign in Italy, focusing instead on the complex plot structure and accumulation of significant symbolic detail that constructs a psychogenic space. When read as a “narrative of the psyche” or dream-narrative, the exterior landscape translates into the interior landscape of the protagonist. 44 For instance, Lerch’s ride through the desolate village, dubbed by critics as the “death-village” episode, has been interpreted as a figment of his imagination. It is notable, however, that this dream-like sequence appears in the proximity of the ethnic other. The ride through this desolate village culminates with the story’s most striking scene, Lerch’s encounter with his Doppelgänger—another much-analyzed passage through symbolic-hermeneutic frameworks. Depressed and disoriented, he escapes from the village, and on a bridge is faced with a vision of himself riding on his horse, an apocalyptic rider and omen of his own death. It is significant that this premonition Richard Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967). For the former, see Richard Gray, “The Hermeneut(r)ic(k) of the Psychic Narrative: Freud’s Das Unheimliche and Hofmannshtal’s Reitergeschichte,” German Quarterly 62:4 (1989), 473; for the latter, see Dorrit Cohn, “Kafka and Hofmannsthal,” Modern Austrian Literature 30 (1997), 1–19.

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of his death appears immediately after the encounter with the other in its ethnic/ national avatar. At first sight, the Doppelgänger appears to be an odd, disconnected detail that is difficult to integrate within Hofmannsthal’s narrative of the nationalistrevolutionary movement of 1848. I want to suggest, however, that precisely within this socio-historical framework it introduces an element of disruption connected to the problem of otherness. Whereas the very sign of imperial power is the imposition of order over “recalcitrant phenomena,”45 this aesthetics of disruption indicates the loss of control over the other as a destabilizing force. The Doppelgänger denotes a specific way to negotiate the shock of alterity because it prompts one to question how to deal with bodily and psychic doubles that are both concrete and ephemeral, both inside and outside, both self and other. By juxtaposing the spectral with the material/ bodily, it suggests that these concepts are not irreconcilable, but that each incorporates something of the other, they are no longer seen as binary opposites. Homi Bhabha uses the concept of “the uncanny,” the disruptive return of the repressed, to characterize colonial experience, namely the splitting, doubling, and hybridization of colonial authority. Lerch’s encounter with his daemonic double is analogous to Bhabha’s uncanny doubling in which colonial authority is confronted with its own hybridity, generating the anxiety at the core of colonial discourse: “The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘replication’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery.”46 The figure of the Doppelgänger summons up the complex, multivalent, hybrid character of the encounter with alterity in the imperial setting of Austria–Hungary, i.e. with the very aspect that Hofmannsthal failed to grasp and to render in his war essays wherein he attempted to “tame” the misapprehended “chaos” of the other within a German-fronted cultural taxonomy. Hybridity, contamination with the “disorder” of ethnic and cultural alterity, is the problem that lies at the core of “A Tale of the Cavalry.” My analysis evidences how the disruptive encounter with alterity, and in particular with Slavic alterity, is instrumental to the demise of the protagonist. At the same time, the text reveals a more diffuse type of hybridity that is manifested in a multiplicity of codes such as culture, ethnicity, and class that translate into an overlay of self and otherness and/or frequent transgressions. Sergeant Anton Lerch represents a complex overlay of dominant/dominated positions. In relation to his superior, Captain Baron Rofrano, Lerch occupies a dominated, disempowered socio-economically determined position: he is of middleclass origin, of inferior military rank, and therefore subordinate to Rofrano twice over. Yet in relation to Vuic, a Croat acquaintance he briefly encounters during his ride through Milan, he occupies a dominant position determined by his belonging to the dominant Austrian culture, and by his gender. The power dynamics between Lerch and Vuic is typical of the way in which gender informs imperial discourse, or the conjunction between minority discourse, colonial politics, and sexual politics, featuring hegemonic masculinity and the oppressed gendered and ethnic other. Significant in this respect is, for example, her cunning-submissive smile of colonial Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 145. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 165.

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mockery: “[sie] lächelte ihn in einer halb geschmeichelten slawischen Weise an, die ihm das Blut in den starken Hals und unter die Augen trieb”47 [she gave him a fawning Slav smile which sent the blood pulsing into his thick neck and under his eyes]. (Henceforth, all page numbers in parentheses, placed after quotations in English and without further bibliographical information, refer to this text.) He answers with a gesture towards her, “so dass er ihren Kopf mit schwerer Hand nach vorwärts drückte” (42) [he pressed her head forward with a heavy hand (59)], which symbolically asserts his gendered and imperialist domination. The gesture of pressing down her neck and the excitement he feels constitute an act of symbolic rape, a frequent motif in the arsenal of colonial literature that is connected to conquering territory. And indeed, before taking off to catch up with his squadron, in the only spoken address during their brief encounter, Lerch stakes out her bedroom: “in acht Tagen rücken wir ein, und dann wird das da mein Quartier” (42) [a week from now we shall occupy the town and these shall be my quarters (59)]. All the details that make up the portrayal of Vuic through Lerch’s eyes (he is the focalizer of the passage), emphasize her physicality and imply licentiousness: her sensual, voluptuous figure; her white skin; her wide white bed that he glimpses through an open door; her disheveled attire; her sly, submissive smile; her lack of language; the fact that he had known her nine or ten years ago and had spent an evening or half the night in Vienna with her in the company of her lover at that time, making the encounter a rather incredible coincidence. The Westernized construction of the Slavic and gendered other in this context of voyeurism becomes the imagined locus for excess and sexual license. Moreover, she is generic and barely individualized—he admits being unable to recall her Christian name, addressing her only by her surname, which clearly identifies her as a South-Slav. The encounter with Vuic marks the beginning of Lerch’s undoing: as the Slavic other, she exudes an excessive, dangerous licentiousness that poses a threat to his rationality. The erotic and violent fantasies that her presence conjures up in his imagination act as catalysts that awaken the sense of his culturally determined hegemony, which in turn prompts him to transgress his socially determined dominated position by defying the authority embodied by his superior. For his refusal to part with the mount of an enemy officer killed in combat, Lerch is executed. Rofrano’s gesture ultimately represents an urge, conscious or unconscious, to defend the prerogatives of hegemonic positions, or Baron Rofrano is allowed to “carry the day for the semifeudal world of Habsburg order,”48 which is consistent with Hofmannsthal’s conservatism, his admiration for Habsburg traditionalism and aristocracy. Granted, the social conflict between Lerch and Rofrano takes the center stage of the narrative and is the apparent cause of Lerch’s execution. My aim is to shift the interpretive dynamic from the center stage of the Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke XXVIII. Erzählungen 1, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1975), 41. Henceforth, all page numbers in parentheses, placed after quotations in German and without further bibliographical information, refer to this text; trans. Mary Hottinger, “A Tale of the Cavalry,” in The Whole Difference. Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), 58. 48 Colin J. Fewster, “A Question of Loyalty: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stendhal, D’Annunzio, and Italian Nationalism,” seminar 42:1 (2006), 21. 47

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narrative to its margin, where the ethnic and gendered conflict between Lerch and Vuic plays out, which is easy to overlook because it is so understated. However, it is not a marginal but a central encounter that co-determines the denouement, because this first contact with alterity sows the seeds of hybridity within Lerch, seeds that get augmented during his ride through the village. Hofmannsthal did not opt for an Italian but a South-Slav female character whom he implanted in the insurgent Italian setting. Why not choose an Italian woman, who is stereotypically associated with sensuality as well? I think that Vuic’s ethnicity is neither coincidental nor insignificant, but rather that this detail provides, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s terminology, the “political unconscious” of ethnic, cultural, and political tensions and related anxieties of Hofmannsthal’s time.49 In the Habsburg context, the Slavic element in general, and the South-Slavic in particular, was perceived to be the destabilizing, uncontrollable element par excellence. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova shows that Balkanism is the intra-European version of Orientalism.50 She followed the historic discursive construction of the Balkans as the opposite of civilized Western Europe, a terrifying world marked by instability, raging nationalism, and the inability of the people to control and solve their conflicts in a civilized way. From the Western perspective that regarded nationally homogeneous political formations as a progressive ideal and taxed all deviations from this model, the Balkans were chaotic and inscrutable. Maria Todorova describes this state of affairs with the concept of “Balkanism” in analogy to Said’s “Orientalism.” The figure of Vuic channels the anxieties that circulated in the Habsburg Empire vis-à-vis its own Oriental others and the South-Slav question. The encounter with Vuic triggers sexual fantasies that cannot be immediately satisfied, but which in turn mutate into cupidity that requires immediate gratification and corrupts the military discipline of his mind. Out of his fantasy of entering Vuic’s bedroom with its lure of sexual promise and civilian comfort arises the impulse to ride through a small village near Milan that he encounters on the way, in the hope of “surprising in the village some ill-defended general, or of winning some other great prize” (60). The village traversed by him is Italian, but the representation of the imperial periphery is informed by generic stereotypes pertaining to the colonial discourse of othering, so that it could be any other peripheral space of the Habsburg Empire. As in “classical” colonial discourse, the representation of cultural alterity is linked to the construction of space, and the domination of people is linked to conquering space and expansion in space. Lerch is the literary type of the “Herrenreiter” in the Near East. The Habsburg Monarchy produced this specific type of colonial traveler who, when he scouts out the Habsburg Near East in search of exotic adventures, is in a way the successor of Conrad’s protagonist Marlowe.51 In Heart of Darkness Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1981). 50 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997). 51 Clemens Ruthner, “K.(u.)k. postcolonial? Für eine neue Leseart der österreichischen (und benachbarten) Literatur/en,” in Kakanien Revisited. Das Eigene und das Fremde (in) der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie (Tübingen: Francke, 2002), 101. 49



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(1902), Africa appears to the Europeans as a dark, alienating, peripheral space. In the context of the Habsburg Monarchy, from the Austro-German perspective, this space is allocated to regions that are characterized by linguistic/cultural difference and by economic asymmetry with the center. This equation of an Italian village with a “dark” continent might at first seem counterintuitive from the German perspective that associated Italy with culture, turned it into an object of artistic fascination (a fascination which Hofmannsthal shared), and made it into a traditional destination of European Bildungsreisen. This, however, is worlds away from the peripheral space of the small impoverished Italian village, marked by cultural as well as economic difference, and inhabited by an indeterminate other. The perception of the village through Lerch’s eyes thus reflects the way in which peripheral rural societies “enter the imaginative metropolitan economy,”52 i.e. reflects patterns of representation of the world beyond the metropolitan center. The description of these peripheral settings submitted to imperialist scrutiny for questioning and interpretation—a frequent topos in the literature at the beginning of the twentieth century—is markedly ideological. The owner of the imperial gaze who surveys landscapes and people is the hegemonic subject, and what he perceives is a pre-industrial, agrarian, hopelessly rural, deeply impoverished, and uncultivated landscape. The colonial landscape in relation to a particular surveying gaze of a colonial official can be seen as both the place of observation and discipline. In classical colonial literature, the colonial traveler who produces a description of colonial landscape, usually from a position of elevation, often provides an account of an empty landscape stretching off to the horizon as if ripe for colonial exploitation. Lerch is high on a horse wherefrom he surveys the space he penetrates. The trope of the horse and relatedly of the mounted traveler, are symbols of colonial authority. In this sense, the triumphant cavalcade led by Baron Rofrano winding its way through Milan’s streets is a display of colonial rule and military violence, reminding the population of their subordination to the Austrian Empire. It is not coincidental that in the end, Lerch’s demise is triggered by his refusal to give up the booty of a horse, i.e. to surrender his authority. At first sight, the village appears deathlike and silent, dirty and ugly, almost completely void of people, apart from a few repulsive and filthy characters, its vacancy and availability seemingly awaiting imperial conquest. Such blank spaces invite other cultural superscriptions, such as subhuman savages that allegedly populate this space. Inevitably, foreign territory implies the production of images of self and other, identity and difference. The locals are made visible in this imperial/colonial process of identity construction in which the colonizer produces the colonized. As he rides through the village, Lerch notices “hie und da eine faule, halbnackte Gestalt auf einer Bettstatt lungern oder schleppend, wie mit ausgerenkten Hüften, durchs Zimmer gehen” (43) [the sergeant caught sight from time to time of a dirty, half-naked figure lounging on a bed or hobbling through the room as if on broken hips (60)]. People and their houses are perceived merely quantitatively, and the dissolution of any distinguishing features indicates the erasure of any marks of individuality, such as the dirty, tattered woman Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 82.

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that crosses Lerch’s path: “eine Frauensperson, deren Gesicht er nicht sehen konnte. Sie war nur halb angekleidet; ihr schmutziger, abgerissener Rock von geblümter Seide schleppte im Rinnsal, ihre nackten Füße staken in schmutzigen Pantoffeln” (43) [a woman whose face he could not see passed close in front of his mount. She was only half-dressed, her ragged, filthy gown of flowered silk, half-torn off her shoulders trailed in the gutter, there were dirty slippers on her feet (60–1)]. She walks disturbingly close to his horse, “sie ging so dicht vor dem Pferde, dass der Hauch aus den Nüstern den fettig glänzenden Lockenbund bewegte” (43) [she passed so close in font of his horse that the breath from its nostrils stirred the bunch of greasy curls that hung down her bare neck under an old straw hat (61)]. This uncanny closeness reflects his uneasy perception of an exacerbated physicality of the other, an indication of the incipient transgression of binary oppositions between self and other, perceived by Lerch as an early threat. She disappears, “ohne dass der Wachtmeister hatte ihr Gesicht sehen können” (44) [before the sergeant could see her face (61)]. Her unseen face, like that of the other local peasants, is paradigmatic for the deficit of representation of the dominated population: a depersonalized, marginalized other, whose very presence is “overlooked—in the double sense of social surveillance and psychic disavowal.”53 The repugnant state of the village and its inhabitants is also reflected in the baseness of the animals that Lerch notices. First, two bleeding rats—“zwei ineinander verbissene blutende Ratten” (43–4) [two rats, bleeding in their death-agony, rolled into the middle of the street (61)]. The image of the rat evokes the parasitic and pestilent dimension that was attributed to the other. In the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, the discourse of alterity was linked to other discursive formations such as medicine, and especially to social hygiene and eugenics (which in Germanophone spaces became institutionalized as Rassenhygiene). Hygienic arguments against the other were invoked in which notions of pestilence, contamination, and vermin played a symbolic and important part.54 Next, a couple of ugly, dirty, decrepit dogs fight over scraps of food, and when they begin to attack Lerch’s horse he attempts but fails to shoot one of the animals and then leaves hastily. Soon thereafter, he is confronted with the next repulsive scene: a cow on its way to the slaughterhouse, “von dem Dunst des Blutes und der an den Türpfosten genagelten frischen Haut eines schwarzen Kalbes zurückschaudernd, stemmte sich auf ihren Füßen” (44) [the cow, shrinking from the smell of blood and the fresh hide of a calf nailed to the door-post, planted its hooves firm on the ground (62)]. These scenes of vicious, animal violence “perpetuate images of degraded animal life on the streets, of hunger and repulsively exaggerated physicality.”55 In the case of the animals the surveying look zooms in on the “facial” details: the narrator remarks about one Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 339. Ute Gerhard, “Entstellte Grenzen. Kafkas Textverfahren und der zeitgenössischen Diskurs über Wanderungsbewegungen,” in Odradeks Lachen. Fremdheit bei Kafka, eds Hansjörg Bay and Christof Hamann (Freiburg, Berlin: Rombach, 2006), 69–87. 55 Lawrence Frye, “Masking, Doubling, and Comedic Strategy in Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” in Wir sind aus solchem Zeug wie das zu träumen … Kritische Beiträge zu Hofmannsthals Werk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 144. 53 54



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of the dogs, “in den kleinen ruhelosen Augen war ein entsetzlicher Ausdruck von Schmerz und Beklemmung” (44) [there was a dreadful look of pain and fear in its restless little eyes (61)]; about another, that he was “von äußerst gieriger Häßlichkeit” (44) [hideous in its avidity (61)] and “seine Augen waren unendlich müde und traurig” (44) [his eyes were fathomlessly weary and sad (61)]. The animals also show traces of human pain: one of the two fighting rats “von denen die unterliegende so jämmerlich aufschrie” (44) [the under one screaming so desperately (61)]; and the cow, before being forced into the slaughterhouse, “riss sich […] mit kläglichen Augen noch ein Maulvoll von dem Heu ab” (44) [tore away with piteous eyes a mouthful of hay (62)]. The haunting images of violence in relation to animals in the context of the rural landscape—Martens compares the whole death-village episode to a painting by Bosch56—metaphors of a horrific struggle for survival, of pain and impotence, obviously connect them to the representation of the local peasants. While the colonized humans appear to be lamentably underhumanized, backward, and barbaric, the animals gain anthropomorphic features, reflecting the colonizer’s panic but also ambivalence towards what he perceives to be the threatening other. In colonial literature, the ethnic/national other is habitually equated with animals and violence which originates in “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.”57 This results on the one hand in a deficit, even vacancy of representation, and on the other hand in automatic images of violence pertaining to otherness in its negative capability as threat to the surveying subject. The rural periphery is thus constructed as the site of violent confrontation and conflict, of hostile engagement with another culture, of dissolving boundaries, and of destabilization, far from the harmonious picture of Habsburg ideology. As a consequence of this eruption of radical alterity, the imperial move of conquering and dominating space seems to be reversed: as he moves through this threatening space, Lerch, the metropolitan subject, experiences alterity as a violent attack that in the end overpowers him. This corresponds to the political situation and the anxieties that were haunting the Austro-German community around the time of Hofmannsthal’s writing “A Tale of the Cavalry.” As the historian Pieter Judson argues in his article “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880–1914,” around 1900 the rise of violent incidents in the rural areas of the crown lands increased significantly, and could be traced directly to nationalist causes, especially in areas of multilanguage use such as the Bohemian Woods, South Styria, and the South Tirol.58 Moreover, nationalist conflict appeared to permeate every aspect of public life in these areas and threatened to erupt at any moment when one side might find it necessary to defend itself against the apparent incursions of the nationalist other. Contemporary observers and later historians Lorna Martens, “Ich-Verdopplung und Allmachtphantasien in Texten des frühen Hofmannsthal,” Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur LiteraturWissenschaft 33:2 (2002), 235. 57 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 108. 58 Pieter Judson, “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880–1914,” in Creating the Other. Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy Wingfield (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 128–9. 56

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concluded from such incidents that the nationalities’ conflict dominating political life in Austria’s cities and legislative institutions had swallowed up the countryside as well. The representation of the Italian countryside and that of the ethnic other is informed by stereotypes pertaining to the colonial discourse of othering, so that this could stand for any other peripheral space of the Habsburg Empire. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s impressions of the Galician countryside where he did his military service in May 1896. In a letter to Leopold von Andrian, dated August 7, 1895, he describes a dog scene with the same focus on detail as in “The Tale of the Cavalry”: Und auf dem Rasen sind […] fünfzehn Hunde, alle hässlich. Mischungen von Terriers und Bauernkötern, übermäßig dicke Hunde, läufige Hündinnen, ganz junge schon groß mit weichen ungeschickten Gliedern, falsche Hunde, verprügelte und demoralisierte, auch stumpfsinnige, alle schmutzig, mit hässlichen Augen, und wundervollen weißen Zähnen.59 [And on the grass, there are fifteen dogs, all of them ugly. Mongrels of terrriers and peasant mutts, excessively fat dogs, bitches in heat, very young but already big dogs with soft, clumsy limbs, conniving dogs, battered and demoralized, even dull-witted dogs, all dirty, with ugly eyes and wonderfully white teeth.]

Hofmannsthal’s depression and disgust at the contact with the rural Slavonic periphery is reflected once more in the baseness and ugliness of the dogs. “A Tale of the Cavalry” has a strong autobiographical character, reflecting some of the desolation of Hofmannsthal’s period of military service. In 1894 he began his one year of military service, most of which was spent in the small Moravian town of Göding, only about 65 miles northeast of Vienna, but worlds away from the cultivated upper middleclass environment in which he had lived up to that time. The contrast with the decrepit environment in which he now found himself could not have been greater. This encounter with the reality of the provinces induced depression and illness in the young writer. The ultimate characteristics of the peripheral rural setting are its lamentable fixity, its connotations of sluggish stagnation, a fact that is metaphorically rendered in Lerch’s perceived long duration of the whole village episode, and the difficulty of his horse to advance. As Lerch’s horse reaches the outskirts of the village, „[er] fühlte […] in der Gangart seines Pferdes eine so unbeschreibliche Schwere, ein solches Nichtforwärtskommen […] und ihm war, als hätte er eine unermessliche Zeit mit dem Durchreiten des widerwärtigen Dorfes verbracht (45)” [He felt in his horse’s step such an unutterable heaviness […] and it seemed to him that he had spent an eternity riding through the hideous village (62)]. The impediment of the horse and the increasing unease of the mounted rider as figures of colonial authority indicate a gradual paralysis of power in the proximity of the imperial periphery.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopold von Andrian, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1968), 164.

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Conclusion What is instrumental in the demise of the central character, Sergeant Anton Lerch, is the disintegrating effect of the contact with ethnic alterity. First, the perceived excessive Slavic sexuality exuded by Vuic undermines his rationality and conjures up his fantasies of power, followed by the ride through the village with its perceived poverty, baseness, and violence. The exposure to the “disorder” of exacerbated cultural alterity is transferred upon him and impairs his judgment and self-control which ultimately prompts him to disobey the command of his superior. Confronted with ethnic alterity, Lerch’s rationality and sense of military discipline disintegrate. The dangers of proximity are synthesized in colonial literature by the trope of “going native,” i.e. the fear of the (European) colonizer who lives in the colonies of being absorbed into the life and habits of the colonized, an absorption that has been associated with ethnic contamination and moral degeneration. This trope is paradigmatically represented in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a journey to a geographical and moral edge: it equates “the dark continent” with barbarity, violence, inhumanity; a journey that generates insight into the corrupting effect of power. But ultimately, it tells the story of the colonial subject, Marlow, prevailing over the dangerous peripheral culture out there. In the typical colonial narrative, the European colonial subject roams a remote and dangerous periphery in order to reassure himself (the sojourner is usually male) of the superiority of his own culture, a fact that legitimates domination. Hofmannsthal’s text aligns itself with the tradition of colonial literature and employs a variation of the trope of “going native,” by presenting the identity crisis of Lerch, the intra-European colonial traveler on the border of Western, i.e. German, civilization. Except that in this case, the principle of domination is challenged. Lerch is no Marlow capable of insulating himself from the shattering effect of the contact with alterity: it has an overwhelming power over him, the fundaments of his reason and order are challenged, he is driven to unreasonable courses of action, and loses the battle against moral degeneration. In addition to the uncanny encounter with his double which announces his downfall, the hybridization of Lerch is made visible in the very end of the story when he acquires animal traits, similar to those he had observed in the village: when refusing to obey the order of Rofrano, in his eyes flashes up “etwas Gedrückters, Hündisches” [an oppressed, doglike look (64)], and he feels “ein bestialischer Zorn” (47) [a bestial anger (64)] rising inside of him. The act of becoming animal as a consequence of the colonial encounter represents a metaphorical infusion of metropolitan civilization with the savagery of the periphery. Hofmannsthal’s text ultimately tells the story of the Austro-German imperial subject who fails to assert himself, of the threat posed by the colonial periphery defined as a space of disorder and insurgence to the metropolitan center whose claim to power fails. The first sentence of “Reitergeschichte” indicates a precise date, July 22, 1848, for the fictional advance of the Austrian cavalry squadron on rebellious Milan. It is close to the important date of Radetzky’s offensive at Custozza on July 25, 1848, which resulted in the resounding defeat of Italian nationalism and the shattering of the

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Italian hope of independence. In “A Tale of the Cavalry,” Radetzky’s Italian campaign is reduced to the subjective perception of a non-heroic Lerch, a participant in minor rearguard battles around Milan. While Le Rider reads in this reduction of great history to small stories Hofmannsthal’s ironic intent to deconstruct the Austrian history and his disguised support for Italian independence,60 I read it as an anxious reflection of the historical situation in the 1890s when rising nationalistic forces threatened the multicultural image of Austria that Hofmannsthal defended and promoted emphatically in his wartime essays.

Jacques Le Rider, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Historismus und Moderne in der Literatur der Jahrhunderwende (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), 70.

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Rainer Maria Rilke: German Speaker, World Author Kathleen L. Komar

Few German-speaking writers have a greater claim to world authorship than does the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). An exquisite explorer of the possibilities of German as a literary language, Rilke was born in the dominantly Czech-speaking city of Prague when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From his very beginnings, then, the idea of “nation” or “national identity” would have been very complex for him. Not only did he live in multiple venues and travel broadly (including to Russia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Egypt), but he also wrote some of his late poetry in French. He was inspired by the Norwegian Sigbjørn Obstfelder and the Dane Jens Peter Jacobsen, and he corresponded with Swedish feminist Ellen Key.1 On his travels to Russia, Rilke met Tolstoy and the painter Leonid Pasternak (father of the novelist Boris Pasternak). He lived in the artists’ colony of Worpswede, about which he wrote a monograph and where he worked alongside artists Paula Modersohn-Becker and Fritz Overbeck, as well as Rilke’s future wife Clara Westhoff. Rilke worked as secretary to August Rodin in Paris, and he had an affair with the French painter Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke lived in the Castle of Duino near Trieste, itself a crossroads for Italian, Slavic, and Germanic cultures, and in the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. One would be hard put to find a more well-travelled, cosmopolitan author than Rainer Maria Rilke. His very biography places him in the context of world culture.

Rilke as globally influential In many ways, Rilke envisioned himself as a citizen of the world, and it turns out that his vision has been proven correct over the entire span of time since his death. His work has been translated into most of the world’s languages,2 and it has inspired not For an extended analysis of the multi-national influences on Rilke’s work, see Robert Vilain’s “Rilke the reader” in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 131–44. 2 I tried to find a language into which Rilke was not translated by randomly searching the library catalog Melvyl for “Rilke in X” (where X was the language in question). After doing Urdu, Chinese, Armenian, and Arabic, and finding translations into each of these languages, I gave up. 1

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only major English-speaking writers such as American novelists Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) and J. D. Salinger (1919–2010), British poet W. H. Auden (1907–73), and American poet James Merrill (1926–95) and playwright Tennessee Williams (1911– 83), but also writers from Iran (Sadegh Hedayat [1903–51]), Sweden (Gunnar Ekelöf [1907–68]), the former Czechoslovakia (Milan Kundera [b. 1929]), Japan (Yukio Mishima [Kimitake Hiraoka] [1925–70])3 and India (Amitav Ghosh [b. 1956])— among many others. Composers such as Britain’s Oliver Knussen (b. 1952), Russia’s Dimitri Shostakovich (1906–75), Denmark’s Per Nørgård (b. 1932), Norway’s Arne Nordheim (b. 1931), and America’s Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) have set Rilke’s poetry to music.4 The Wisconsin “indie rock” band “Rainer Maria,” which recorded between 1995 and 2006, took its name directly from Rilke. And the “Rilke Projekt,” which has been active since 2001, is a musical endeavor of the composer and producer Richard Schönherz and Angelica Fleer, who create CDs of Rilke’s work as interpreted by German-speaking actors and musicians (such as Nina Hagen).5 The first three of these four (to date) CDs reached gold status. Visual artists such as American Cy Twombly (1928–2011) produced sculptures and visual images using several of Rilke’s works, including his poems on Roses.6 And Rilke’s writing has been highlighted in American films ranging from Sister Act 2 and Little Man Tate to Awakenings and City of Angels (itself a remake of Wim Wenders 1987 Wings of Desire, which also draws heavily on Rilke).7 Woody Allen uses Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in his 1998 film Another Woman, and Norman Jewison’s 1994 film Only You uses Rilke’s “You Who Never Arrived.”8 “For the sake of a single For an extended and fascinating discussion of Rilke’s interaction with Japanese culture, see Mizue Motoyoshi’s “Rilke in Japan und Japan in Rilke” in Rilke und die Weltliteratur, ed. Manfred Engel und Dieter Lamping (Düsseldorf, Zürich: Artemis und Winkler, 1999), 299–320. This valuable volume includes several essays germane to the topics of Rilke’s interactions with world culture. 4 When I searched for “Rilke + music scores” in the library holdings cited in Melvyl, I received over 600 entries. Even admitting a good deal of redundancy, this is an impressive presence of Rilke in the musical world. When I conducted a similar search for Rilke + visual art, I got over 90 entries. 5 The “Rilke Projekt” (2001–present). See (accessed June 28, 2013). 6 For a discussion of Rilke’s own deep involvement with the visual arts (particularly Rodin, Cézanne, and the artist colony of Worpswede), see Helen Bridge’s “Rilke and the Visual Arts” in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, 145–58. See also William Waters’s “The Reciprocation of the Image in Two Poems by Rilke,” in Text and Image in Modern European Culture, ed. Natashia Grigorian, Thomas Baldwin, and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue UP, 2012), 63–75. 7 Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, 1993, Director Bill Duke, Script by James Orr, Jim Cruickshank, and Judi Ann Mason, Starring Whoopi Goldberg, Touchstone Pictures. Little Man Tate, 1991, Director Jodie Foster, Script by Scott Frank, Starring Jodie Foster, Orion Pictures. Awakenings, 1990, Director Penny Marshall, Script by Steven Zallian, Starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro, Columbia Pictures. City of Angels, 1998, Director Brad Silberling, Script by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Wings of Desire, 1987, Director Wim Wenders, Script by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke, starring Bruno Ganz. For an analysis of the use of Rilke’s work in Awakenings, Little Man Tate, and Sister Act 2, see my article “Rilke in America: A Poet Re-Created,” in Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth, ed. Hartmut Heep (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 149–70. 8 Another Woman, 1988, Directed and written by Woody Allen, Starring Gena Rowlands, Mia Farrow, and Ian Holm. Only You, 1994, Director Norman Jewison, Script by Diane Drake, Starring Marisa Tomei and Robert Downey Jr. 3



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verse” is an animated short by Shamik Majumdar (India 1999, National Institute of Design) based on an excerpt from Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This film tradition continues into the twenty-first century as Rilke is quoted in the 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein in a personal ad posted by a lesbian looking for love, and in the film based on Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife from 2009.9 The world-wide distribution of these films has helped to expand Rilke’s visibility both across time and on the world stage. In American popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s, Rilke became almost a cult figure for “New Age” thinkers.10 His writings were used as inspirational sound bites by spiritual self-help gurus providing advice on relationships and how to live a happy life.11 Even today, quotations from Rilke’s work dominate wedding-planning manuals from which couples select inspirational words to launch their married lives. It would be difficult to think of a more peculiar use of Rilke’s work. While these appearances may be surprising, it is even more startling to see Rilke quoted extensively on television programs about angels or in the corporate boardroom. 12 As the list above indicates, popular culture continues to absorb Rilke’s writing and reproduces it in surprising venues ranging from self-help manuals to films to contemporary Indie rock groups. Rilke’s famous works, written in German, have become the property of the world at large. His connections to this broader literary and cultural world give his work resonance in every corner of the globe. Rilke’s impact on the Anglophone world has been particularly profound. In a review of Rilke’s Duino Elegies In The New Republic (Sept. 6, 1939), W. H. Auden, who deeply admired Rilke’s Dinggedichte and his ability to express abstract ideas in concrete terms, famously described Rilke’s growing influence on English poetry, suggesting that Kissing Jessica Stein, 2001, Director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, Written by Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt, Starring Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. The Time Traveler’s Wife, 2009, Director Robert Schwentke, Written by Bruce Joel Rubin and Audrey Niffenegger, Starring Michelle Nolden, Eric Bana, and Rachael McAdams. 10 See, for example, Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels, Noetic Sciences Collection: 1980–1990, 10 Years of Consciousness Research (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990). For a fuller discussion of Burnham’s use of Rilke, see my paper “Rilke: Metaphysics in a New Age” in Rilke-Rezeptionen: Rilke Reconsidered, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan Cocalis (Tübingen/Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995), 155–169. Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation and Guide to His Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), and Meditations: on the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). For an analysis of this material, see my article, “Rilke in America: A Poet Re-Created,” in Unreading Rilke: Unorthodox Approaches to a Cultural Myth, ed. Hartmut Heep (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 149–70. 11 For a more extended discussion of this phenomenon, see my essays “Rilke: Metaphysics in a New Age,” “Rilke in the Boardroom: Receptions of Rainer Maria Rilke in America of the 1990s,” in Memory, History and Critique: European Identity at the Millennium, ed. Frank Brinkhuis and Sachsa Talmor (Proceedings of the 6th International Society for the Study of European Ideas Conference at the University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, August 1996, on CD-ROM, MIT Press, 1998); and “Rilke in America: A Poet Re-Created.” 12 “Angels: The Mysterious Messengers,” May 24, 1994 on NBC from 8 to 10 p.m. See David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1994). And see Danah Zohar’s Rewiring the Corporate Brain (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1997). 9

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“Rilke is probably more read and more highly esteemed by English and Americans than by Germans, just as Byron and Poe had a greater influence upon their German and French contemporaries than upon their compatriots.” In the United States, Rilke remains one of the most popular, best-selling poets—along with thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi (1207–73) and twentieth-century Lebanese-American Khalil Gibran (1883–1931, an almost exact contemporary of Rilke whose work has also been read for its inspirational and metaphysical qualities). Although Rilke was clearly uncomplimentary about Americans and American culture, he himself has been enthusiastically received for several decades by what he described as those “sham-loving” Americans. Rilke feared that Americans were particularly complicit in the ongoing demise of the importance of the individually crafted objects that he so valued. In his famous letter or November 13, 1925, to his Polish translator Witold von Hulewicz, precisely when Rilke is waxing most poetic about transforming the visible and fleeting into the invisible and preserving the intimate nature of things, he laments: Nun drängen, von Amerika her, leere, gleichgültige Dinge herüber, Schein-Dinge, Leben-Attrappen … Ein Haus, im amerikanischen Verstande, ein amerikanischer Apfel oder eine dortige Rebe, hat nichts gemeinsam mit dem Haus, der Frucht, der Traube, in die Hoffnung und Nachdenklichkeit unserer Vorväter eingegangen war. [Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life … A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers.]13

Sigrid Bauschinger outlines the early translations of Rilke into English and points out that his poetry began to appear in America in the poetry journal Poet Lore as early as 1915;14 the translations of his work continue at a rapid pace.15 Mary Dows (M. D.) Herter Norton was enthusiastically translating Rilke in the 1930s and produced an English edition of his letters (in two volumes in 1945 and 1947) even before the German edition appeared. The stream of American translators is impressive and to name just a few we have Galway Kinnell (1927–), Robert Bly (1926–), William H. Gass (1924–), Robert Lowell (1917–77), and Stephen Yenser (1941–) among many, many others. Briefe, Bd.II: 1914–1926, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950), 483; trans. Jane Banard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910–1926 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1947), 374. Or to cite perhaps an even worse view of Americans, we can look at Rilke’s letter to Countess M. dated June 25, 1920, in which he bemoans having been taken to the Guidecca Gardens first by an American (probably Nathan Sulzberger). “…when I first saw it, in 1897, it was as the guest of an American! So it wasn’t there at all …!” (Letters, 218). 14 Sigrid Bauschinger cites a translation of the Stundenbuch’s first poem in Poet Lore, 1915, no. 1. in “Ein Orpheus für Amerika: Die Rezeption Rilkes in den Vereinigten Staaten.” In Rilke-Rezeptionen: Rilke Reconsidered. Eds. Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan Cocalis, (Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995, 95–109). 15 See Heather Hahn Matthusen’s “Rainer Maria Rilke und Robert Lowell. Die Differenz des Übersetzens,” in Rilke und die Weltliteratur, ed. Manfred Engel and Dieter Lamping, (Düsseldorf:Artemis und Winkler, 1999), 281–98; and Hartmut Heep’s A Different Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke’s American Translators Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, (New York: Lang, 1996). 13



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In addition to the many translations of his work from the 1930s onward, Rilke begins to figure prominently in American literary texts as early as the 1960s—in Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 The Crying of Lot 49,16 for example. Although Pynchon (1937–) does not invoke Rilke by name, he has frequent references to the Thurn and Taxis family. By having his version of this family run a messenger service, Pynchon plays throughout The Crying of Lot 49 on Rilke’s claim to have received the beginnings of Elegies in a communication from the unknown at Duino as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. Rilke appears again in Maxine Hong Kingston’s (1940–) 1987 novel, Tripmaster Monkey, which takes place in the San Francisco and Berkeley area of the 1960s.17 The novel’s main character, Whittman Ah Sing, is a reincarnation of Malte Laurids Brigge with a Berkeley degree. In this multi-cultural American novel, Rilke’s language becomes the medium for a young Chinese American, named after Walt Whitman, to express his feelings of alienation and isolation. Only on the copyright page is the reader tipped off that the unattributed italicized passages of the novel are quoted from Malte Laurids Brigge. By the late 1980s in America, Rilke’s work is so familiar that his name does not need to be invoked. Rilke also surfaces in Barbara Riddle’s (1944–) novel The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke from 2000.18 Another west-coast character from the 1960s, the heroine of this book is a chemistry major at Harvard who gains intellectual status simply by owning Rilke’s work. Rilke emerges in the American poetry of Raphael Rubinstein’s (1955–) 1996 volume The Basement of the Café Rilke19, in which Rubinstein recalls Maxine Hong Kingston’s Rilke-riddled novel Tripmaster Monkey—thus revealing a characteristic gesture of the American reception—the tendency to use both Rilke’s own texts, but also filtered through other American writers. And more recently, Canadian Ted Bishop composed Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books from 2005, while American M. Allen Cunningham created a fictional life of Rilke in Lost Son from 2007.20 Even more extraordinarily, we find Rilke quoted extensively on popular television series21 and featured repeatedly in The New Yorker.22 In this venue, Rilke makes a positive Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York and San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1965). For a more extended analysis of Rilke’s appearances in American novels, see my essay “Rilke in America: A Poet Re-Created.” 17 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Random House, 1987). 18 Barbara Riddle, The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke (San Francisco: Renaissance Sound and Publications, 2000). 19 Raphael Rubinstein, The Basement of the Café Rilke (West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press Editions, 1996). 20 Edward L. Bishop, Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (New York: Norton & Norton, 2005). M. Allen Cunningham, Lost Son (Columbia, Missouri: Unbridled Books, 2007). 21 While watching a new television series, I was surprised to hear a young female photographer console the Chief of Police, with whom she was about to embark on an affair, with the words, “Rilke says we are all beginners.” The television series was “Under Suspicion,” on CBS on Friday, January 13, 1995. Rilke was also quoted several times in the CBS series “Beauty and the Beast”, which ran from 1987 to 1989 (a new version of the series began in 2012). Rilke is also quoted in season three, episode “Legacy” of the WB television network series “Smallville,” which ran from 2001 to 08. 22 The magazine places him in a 1996 drawing, titled “Literary Carols,” depicting Christmas carolers singing from texts by Joyce, Zola, Thurber (a New Yorker bias), Nabokov, Kafka, Mann and (prominently) Rilke. See The New Yorker, December 25, 1995 and January 1, 1996, sketch by Benoit Van 16

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appearance in poems “The Foundation” by C. K. Williams (The New Yorker, March 23, 2009, 58–59) (“Watch me again now, because I’m not alone in my dancing, / my being air, I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats …,”) and “Learning to Read” by Franz Wright (The New Yorker, January 19, 2009, 70) (“I get down on my knees and thank God for them. DuFu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke. / Life has taught me to understand books”). Rilke also appears somewhat less favorably in Michael Robbins’s Alien vs. Predator (The New Yorker, January 12, 2009, 57) (“Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk”). And lest we fear that Rilke has somehow lost his allure, we need only consult the internet, where numerous blogs feature quotations from his work and letters. See, for example, the “Dispatches from M. Allen Cunningham,” author of the novelization of Rilke’s life, Lost Son. In the blog for Tuesday, March 6, 2007, entitled “Rilke, Woody, Whoopi, DeNiro, and Bob,” Cunningham points out that Bob Dylan has been reading Rilke since 1966, and actors Colin Firth, Jodie Foster, Ethan Hawke, and Dennis Hopper all mention Rilke as among their favorite reading. He further states that Bono, the lead singer of the rock band U2 launched a clothing line in which every pair of jeans comes with a poem by Rilke embroidered in the pockets! Cunningham reveals that Country Musician Ray Wylie Hubbard names Rilke an inspiration, and Meryl Streep reads Rilke’s poetry to music on the CD “Ancient Tower” by musical group New York Voices.23 Or we might pick up the 2009 volume A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, which offers quotations from his work and sees Rilke as “a trusted guide amid the bustle of our daily experience.”24 Finally, we cannot overlook Rilke’s lasting impression in the form of a tattoo sported by Lady Gaga since 2009, which quotes Rilke’s “Letter to a Young Poet” (in German): Prüfen Sie, ob er in der tiefsten Stelle Ihres Herzens seine Wurzeln ausstreckt, gestehen Sie sich ein, ob Sie sterben müßten, wenn es Ihnen versagt würde zu schreiben. Muss ich schreiben? [Test whether it spreads its roots in the deepest place in your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Must I write?]

To return from the skin of the arm of a famous pop star to the realm of literature, we find several contemporary American poets who respond to Rilke’s work.25 Stephen Yenser’s poem a “Valediction for Lorna Roberts (1942–2001)” was subtitled “After Rilke, Die Sonette an Orpheus, II.12” (Yenser, 46).26 The poem begins “So choose to Innis. See also David Ives, “Hunger Artist,” The New Yorker, October 30, 1995, 118, as well as the cartoon on page 98 of The New Yorker, June 23 and 30, 1997. 23 http://mallencunningham.blogspot.com/search?q=rilke%2C+whoopi (accessed June 28, 2013). 24 A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). The quotation is from the front flyleaf of the cover. 25 For an extended analysis of Rilke’s resonance among American poets, see my essay, “Nach Duino, nach Rilke: Rilke und die Amerikanishe Dichtung,” in Nach Duino: Studien zu Reiner Maria Rilkes Späten Gedichte, ed. Karen Leeder und Robert Vilain (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 93–108. 26 Stephen Yenser, Blue Guide. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 46.



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change. Be inspired by fire.” Yenser’s volume entitled The Fire in All Things27 (winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) also echoes Rilke’s sonnet, which begins, “Wolle die Wandlung. O sei für die Flamme begeistert.” Another of Yenser’s poems entitled “Salle Archaïque: An Afterbeat” frames a translation of Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” with additional introductory and concluding lines. (Blue Guide, 29). Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” is, in fact, a favorite among many later poets. The poem’s concluding lines “You must change your life” becomes a kind of manifesto. This remarkable demand made by a work of sculpture that we should change our lives becomes a compelling power that suggests that art has the capacity to rejuvenate our vision of the world and of things. As Randall Jarrell (1914–65) puts it: “The work of art says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we see things as ends not as means—that we too know them and love them for their own sake.”28 Theodore Roethke (1908–63) agrees and focuses on Rilke’s ability to move beyond the self-conscious state to a unity with something beyond the self. Roethke describes it this way “To look at a thing so long that you are a part of it and it is a part of you—Rilke gazing at his tiger [sic] for eight hours, for instance. If you can effect this, then you are by way of getting somewhere: Knowing you will break from selfinvolvement, from I to Otherwise, or maybe even to Thee.”29 American poet James Merrill (1926–95) also appreciates Rilke’s insistence in his poetry that we experience objects in an intense way. As a 20-year-old, he composed “The Transformation of Rilke” (originally published in the Yale Poetry Review, Spring 1946), which focuses on Rilke’s ability to transform objects, and Merrill perceptively suggests that the “The paradox in [Rilke’s] poetry is that he has made things infinitely real to us at the same moment that he proclaims them insubstantial” (455).30 In addition to these poets, many other American poets also respond to Rilke’s work.31 In fact the American poetic Stephen Yenser, The Fire in All Things (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). Randall Jarrell, Sad Heart at the Supermarket (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1965), 113. 29 Theodore Roethke, “On Identity,” In On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), 25. See Steven Kaplan’s essay “Will the Real Rilke Please Stand Up? Contemporary Translations of Rilke’s Poetry” in RilkeRezeptionen (125–35) for more on this point. 30 Quoted from James Merrill, Collected Prose, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 449–55. James Merrill uses Rilke’s and Valéry’s work in his often anthologized poem “Lost in Translation” (in Divine Comedies [New York: Atheneum, 1977], 4–10) when he recalls a Rilke version of Valéry’s “Palme.” Merrill’s poem translates the works of his French and German colleagues into a new American context in which Rilke plays a major part. 31 I mention only a few here. Galway Kinnell both translates Rilke’s work in The Essential Rilke and quotes the Duineser Elegien at the beginning of his sequence The Book of Nightmares (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), which is much indebted to Rilke. Galway Kinnell, The Essential Rilke. Selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1999. Sherod Santos’s The Pilot Star Elegies (New York: Norton, 2000) probably has the Duineser Elegien in view. Robert Lowell translates or adapts a number of Rilke’s poems in Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), and Randall Jarrell, too, has translated him interestingly in The Woman at the Washington Zoo (New York: Atheneum, 1960). The poet Edward Hirsch has a chapter on Rilke in his book The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (New York: Harcourt, 2002). Alan Williamson has a poem called “Rilke’s Argument with Don Giovanni” in his book Love and the Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). James Wright 27 28

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community at the University of North Texas has even established a “Rilke Prize,” “an annual award of $10,000 recognizing a book that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision written by a mid-career poet.”32

What makes Rilke so globally appealing? But having rehearsed all of these instances of Rilke appearing in contemporary poetry, in music, in visual culture, and in popular venues, the question remains as to what in Rilke’s work gives it such resonance through many generations and in the world at large. We might posit that it is his extraordinary ability to explore the possibilities of language that makes him a world author. And, indeed, he creates linguistic alchemy throughout his work. It might seem counterintuitive that an author so focused on language and its potential would prove so amenable to translation. How can someone so concerned with the minute specifics of his language transcend the language in which he works? One answer lies in Rilke’s ability to use language to expand our vision of existence, to induce us to conceptualize a realm beyond the rational and physical precisely through the limited, humanly constructed medium of language itself. By expanding the limits of language, Rilke leads us to imagine what we cannot comprehend. When, for example, in the second of his Duino Elegies, Rilke is faced with describing angels, metaphysical beings by definition beyond our physical world and beyond the normal capacities of language which resides in that limited, human world, he must find a way to make language speak beyond its own limits. He does this by violating our normal semantic expectations and categories to produce the following description: Frühe Geglückte, ihr Verwöhnten der Schöpfung, Höhenzüge, morgenrötliche Grate aller Erschaffung,— Pollen der blühenden Gottheit, Gelenke des Lichtes, Gänge, Treppen, Throne, Räume aus Wesen, Schilde aus Wonne, Tumulte stürmisch entzückten Gefühls und plötzlich, einzeln, Spiegel: die die entströmte eigene Schönheit wiederschöpfen zurück in das eigene Antlitz. [Early successes, Creation’s pampered darlings, Ridges, summits, dawn-red ridges Of all beginning,— pollen of blossoming Godhead, (1927–80) mentions a fondness for Rilke in his letters (James Wright, A Wild Perfection: the Selected Letters of James Wright, ed. Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley, with Jonathan Blunk [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005]). I even came upon a poem entitled “Very Rilke” by Lynn Emanuel (1949–) posted on the internet http://lumpy-pudding.tumblr.com/post/45347693323/ lynn-emanuel-very-rilke-like-that-time-in-paris (accessed June 28, 2013). 32 The prize is offered by the University of North Texas and was meant to make its Humanities departments more visible; it is financed by the Texas Legislature. For more details see http://english.unt. edu/creative-writing/poetryprize (accessed June 28, 2013.).



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Hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones, Spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate, Mirrors, drawing up their own Outstreamed beauty into their faces again. [J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender translation]

By combining physical and non- (or meta-) physical concepts in a single phrase (“pollen of Godhead” or “shields of felicity” or “spaces of being,” for example), Rilke forces us to conceptualize beyond our rational categories, to breach our normal linguistic rules, and thus to imagine what we cannot rationally understand—to imagine the transcendent realm of the angels. This violation of limited, categorical thinking is couched in German, but it challenges the boundaries of language as such. This challenge can be carried over into other language settings without losing its power. And as a final tour de force in this passage, Rilke introduces mirrors into our envisioning of angels. In this case, he takes a physical object, the mirror, which itself contains an unreal, humanly constructed space—one that is the reverse of what it reflects and doubles its distance to the eye—and uses it to define beings beyond our experience, the angels. In his Sonnets to Orpheus (II, 3), Rilke defines the mirrors as “Zwischenräume der Zeit” [in-between-spaces of time]; this gesture of stopping linear time by transforming it into space—and in this case irreal space—gives Rilke a linguistic phrase that forces us to conceptualize beyond the limits of language, to imagine another sphere. He then uses this image of the mirror to define the transcendent angelic realm that we cannot understand within our normal, rational linguistic categories. Rilke thus employs a specific language, German, to move beyond all linguistic limits. This gesture of exploring the possibilities of language by violating the limits of our normal linguistic usage transcends the specific language in which Rilke composes to push the boundaries of language as such. And indeed, Rilke creates linguistic alchemy of this kind throughout his work. To provide just a few examples, we can examine Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”) and the first Duino Elegy. The “Archaic Torso” will exemplify Rilke’s capacity to create images that encapsulate an entire philosophical argument within an object. And the first Elegy will provide an instance of Rilke’s ability to violate semantic boundaries in order to avoid the repercussions of time and death. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the reader and the poet view the headless statue that represents an archaic torso of Apollo. Despite missing its head, the frequent symbol of human consciousness and rationality, this statue radiates a powerful light from the creative center of its being. While we begin as spectators looking at the art object, we end as the viewed, upon whom the command is laid in the sonnet’s last line that “you must change your life” (“Du musst dein Leben ändern”). The very direction of consciousness and of contemplation is reversed in the poem so that the human subject ends by being the object of the compelling power of art. The inanimate object shares

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a moment of consciousness with the poet/viewer. The sculpture and the poem accomplish a radical shift in our understanding. Rilke accomplishes this renovation in our perception by intensely contemplating an object that embodies several stages of consciousness in one aesthetic piece. The torso of Apollo is, first of all, stone, an object literally at one with and a part of nature. But it is also statue, a kind of doll that figures the human being but lacks any differentiating consciousness. Like the unformed stone that makes up the statue, the statue as a pre-conscious human image is still physically part of nature. Additionally, however, the statue figures a human being, who moves into the next, and more alienated range of consciousness, the self-consciousness. Although the statue is headless (and thus lacking the symbol of self-consciousness), the poem extends that symbol by embedding it in the very loins of the human being. Consciousness is suffused throughout the human body. The headlessness might also figure Rilke’s attack on the purely rational or traditionally philosophical in favor of the poetic metaphor. The image that Rilke creates in the poem carries his philosophical assertions directly and compellingly without any need for discursive language. And to complete its embodiment of the possible states of consciousness, the archaic torso represents Apollo’s, and therefore figures the transcendent, divine realm of perfected consciousness. And for a final touch, by using Apollo, Rilke adds the realm of poetry, the special province of Apollo, to the mix. In a single, powerful image, then, Rilke incorporates the whole progression of consciousness from the preconscious level of the object (stone and statue) to the humanly self-conscious level of the human figure, to the divinely complete level of transcendent consciousness. This torso, which also figures the patron of poetic work, embodies for the reader the whole progression of consciousness that makes us aware of our limited position in that progression and our need to see the world in a more unified way—to change our lives. This progression is spelled out in more detail in the remainder of the poem (as when, for example, the stone of the statue attains animal characteristics, “Raubtierfelle,” and finally the transcendent attributes of the stars). But this brief example makes clear one of Rilke’s talents, that is, observing objects with such intensity that consciousness and object merge to overcome the Kantian split between self and world. The poem reunifies our disjointed world and demands that the reader revise his life to accommodate that restructuring. This kind of alchemy makes more evident why other artists and poets admire Rilke’s work so intensely. A second example of Rilke’s ability to violate the normal prescriptions of language rules in order to create a new order comes in the first of his Duino Elegies. As the Elegies open, Rilke famously contemplates hailing the transcendent realm directly, “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” [Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?]. But he quickly realizes that human beings, with our limited self-consciousness, could not survive such a direct experience. He spends the remainder of the first elegy looking for models that might serve to get him closer to the transcendent realm and further from his isolated self-conscious state. He explores the idea of man’s personal identity and of humanity’s relentless consciousness of time, and of the inevitable result of linear time, death. He laments the fact that



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we are not very comfortable in our interpreted world, the human world which must always project meaning onto the world of objects. And he contemplates those who might facilitate his search for a transcendent realm—heroes, lovers, those who die young. One of the problems the poet confronts in attempting to move toward the unified, transcendent realm of the angels is his consciousness of time. We are always distracted by future desire for the beloved or by memory of the past; thus we are always caught in time and distressed by its ineluctable movement toward death. Later, in the Duino Elegies the poet will realize that he can make use of time and of this limited human world, but in Elegy I he is seeking to escape time. And he does so (briefly at least) by turning time into space—linguistically. In line 53 of the first elegy, while discussing the need to celebrate unrequited love, to free ourselves from the beloved like an arrow leaving the bow, Rilke creates the phrase “Denn Bleiben ist nirgends” [For staying is nowhere]. This phrase, equally odd in German and English, is one of those linguistic transformations of time into space. The concept of “Bleiben” [staying or remaining] implies persistence through time and is thus a temporal category. “Nirgends” [nowhere], on the other hand, is spatial. By linking these two concepts with “ist” [is], Rilke equates time and space; he succeeds in stopping the forward march of linear time by defining it as a spatial category. And further, Rilke employs a spatial category that denies division or specific location—“nirgends” [no-where]. By a feat of linguistic alchemy, Rilke turns time into space and universalizes space. He forces us to reconceptualize our normal semantic categories, to change our lives—or at least our perceptions. He thus creates in his poetry the boundless realm of transcendence not available in the world as we normally conceptualize it. Definitely a rigorous experimenter in the medium of language and a poet who passionately believes in the power of art to reshape our thinking and our lives, Rilke would certainly appeal to poets, writers, and artists of all kinds. But does this account for his enormous general popularity? Rilke’s ability to turn language into a tool to stop time and to reunify realms is compelling and provides us with a new way to exist in the world. But if this were his main accomplishment, he might be matched by other poets, such as American Wallace Stevens, for example, who would have the advantage of writing in a more globally dominant language than Rilke’s German. In his “Sunday Morning” or “Anecdote of the Jar,” Stevens too accomplishes a good deal of linguistic alchemy. If we examine the first few lines of a very early poem by Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning” (1915), we can see already poetic talents comparable to Rilke’s. The first lines of the poem read: Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark

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There is in the very language of the first four lines a continual merging of human consciousness and physical objects. The complacent consciousness of the woman is inseparably linked to and in fact defined by the physical objects that make up the scene. It is she, of course, and not her negligee, that is complacent, but Stevens purposely merges the two, incorporating the object and human consciousness into one another—much as Rilke does with the viewer and the torso of Apollo. The phrase “green freedom of a cockatoo” reinforces this mingling of consciousness and physical objects. Green is a physical attribute, and in this phrase it might indeed apply to the cockatoo and also calls to mind the environment, the lush verdure of the cockatoo’s habitat. But green serves also as a modifier of freedom, which is an attitude or state of consciousness. The phrase links the favorable state of consciousness (freedom) to nature in its physical essence. The first four lines of the poem, then, present a state of unity of consciousness and objects, a state of predifferentiation of the two. It is not until the “holy hush of ancient sacrifice” impinges upon this unity that the consciousness of the woman becomes identified as a separate entity by the use of the pronoun “she.” Religion changes one’s relationship to his/her world; it separates this woman from objects by making her conscious of a mythic order external to herself and to nature. When this change occurs, the direct physical reality of the first four lines gives way to the intangible reflections of the mind. She “dreams,” and the green wings “seem,” and the day is “like.” Only at this point does the consciousness of disparity necessitate the use of vocabulary designed to create artificial associations (for example: like, seem, as …). The pungent oranges and bright green wings are now subjugated to the non-physical, religious myth of Christianity. The woman’s consciousness has been shaken from its primary unity of sensibility with natural objects by the disruptive violence (blood and sepulcher) of Christian myth by the end of stanza I. Like Rilke, Stevens can generate an entire philosophical debate (here between the allegiance of human consciousness to religion or to the physical world) by employing language in new configurations and by violating semantic categories and expectations in order to make us rethink our lives. Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919) might serve as another example of his ability to make the reader rethink his world as Rilke does in “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The first-person (singular) narrator of “Anecdote of the Jar” famously places a jar that is “gray and bare” in the “slovenly wilderness” of Tennessee. This simple gesture of placing an unadorned, utilitarian, man-made object (quite pointedly not, for example, a Grecian urn—or even an Archaic torso) into a natural landscape changes the world. “The wilderness rose up to it,/ And sprawled around, no longer wild.” Like Rilke, Stevens passionately believes in the power of the humanly constructed object to realign the world. He even takes Rilke’s argument about art’s power to demand that



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we change our lives one step farther. For Stevens, even the lowly jar has this capacity— when embodied in a poem that reveals its power. Both poets make strong claims for poetry. They both assert that poetry matters, that it has the power to induce change at an essential level. And both embed this assertion not in discursive language, but in images of things and their interaction with human consciousness. Both poets view this material world as crucial to ontological vision and to our survival as human beings. Given their similarities, it is curious that Stevens does not elicit the same global following that Rilke does. While I did find translations of Stevens into the major European languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hungarian) and in Turkish, I did not find the scores of different and ongoing translations one finds for Rilke (particularly in English). Stevens was not translated into French until the 1960s despite the fact that he was an avid reader (and occasional translator) of French poetry.33 Even in England, Stevens was slow to achieve a serious reputation. Frank Kermode’s charming reminiscence regarding Stevens’s reception in Europe (in which he points out that he introduced the Swiss to Stevens’s work around 1958) makes clear that the British were not early fans.34 Kermode points out that Faber published the Selected Poems of Stevens (which Kermode suggests was not a good representation of the poet) only in 1953 and that it is the only Stevens work still in print with Faber. Whether this was due to T. S. Eliot’s purported “lukewarmness” about Stevens is a matter of speculation. Kermode laments that Holly Stevens’s “much richer selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, has never been published in England, and most readers, unless they can afford the Collected Poems and the updated Opus Posthumous, are presumably still stuck with the 50-odd-year-old and inadequate Selected” (xvi). Even in his own language, Stevens has not had the enthusiastic reception that Rilke enjoys. I believe the difference in their popularity lies in their dissimilar attitudes towards the transcendent realm. Rilke evinces a tremendous nostalgia for the transcendent realm. His passionate desire to call to the angels ties him still to a desire of the romantic era to reach a transcendent realm. He struggles in the Duino Elegies to a position of realizing that this world and transforming the things in it through his intense consciousness are his proper domain as a poet, but he never denies the realm of the angels. Stevens on the other hand is single-mindedly for the anthropocentric and geocentric. He celebrates this world and is unabashed by the fact that we humans must construct fictions of meaning and coherence. For Stevens the transcendent realm is long dead, eternity is boring, and “Death is the mother of beauty”—because it gives precious value to our fleeting, constantly changing physical world, not because it is a threshold to the transcendent realm. As early as 1915, in “Sunday Morning,” Stevens definitively opts for the material world of fleeting but recurring objects over the lure of religion and the metaphysical. And by “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), Stevens quite happily acknowledges the necessarily humanly constructed nature of all For a recent discussion of Stevens’s reception in France and Italy, see Massimo Bacigalupo’s “Reading Stevens in Italian” in Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic, ed. Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 216–30. 34 Frank Kermode, “Preface” to Wallace Stevens Across the Atlantic, ed. Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xv–xvii. 33

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of our supreme fictions—including that of transcendence—even as he also recognizes the human need for them. Like Rilke, Stevens, too, exquisitely employs language to make his point by disrupting semantic categories in order to force us to conceive of a new order, a new unity. So it cannot be exclusively the linguistic dexterity or profundity that makes Rilke an indisputable World Author while Stevens remains lesser known. Nor can it be only the belief in the importance of poetry, in its power to induce change at an essential level, in the ability of art to make us change our lives. Rilke and Stevens share these beliefs. There must be more to Rilke’s status as a world author. I would argue that the incredible range of Rilke’s impact rests on two almost opposite features of his work. The odd range of twentieth-century venues in which Rilke appears is indicative of this dual nature of Rilke’s poetry. Recall his emergence in self-help manuals and New Age metaphysics on the one hand, and in the cerebral and skeptical arena of the academy and the avant garde of the aesthetic world on the other. The first characteristic of Rilke’s oeuvre is a genuine interest in the metaphysical realm that emerges in many of Rilke’s most famous poems, including perhaps most prominently, in the Duino Elegies, which open with a call to the angelic realm. And the second is an intense involvement with the objects of this physical world, a precise attention to Things as crucial to our survival as human beings. It is this dual vision of the metaphysical and the physical that allows Rilke to appeal to mystics and New Age metaphysicians on the one hand, and to skeptical, cerebral scholars, and artists on the other. Rilke reveals a nostalgia for the possibility of a transcendent realm that tethers him loosely to the hopes of the Romantic era while at the same time evidencing an immersion in the objects of this material world so compelling that objects and consciousness merge into a new state of mutual interaction. These two characteristics give Rilke a range of appeal almost unmatched among writers of the past century. Having explored Rilke’s attention to objects and his ability to turn things of the everyday world into compelling consciousnesses, let us turn our attention to his relationship to the metaphysical and to the other-worldly realm. In a recent volume entitled Dichtung als Erfahrungsmetaphysik: Esoterische und okkultistische Modernität bei R.M. Rilke, Gísli Magnússon investigates Rilke’s relationship to the occult and the esoteric.35 He begins with the young Rilke and the spiritualist impulses of his mother Phia, who enjoyed telling the child Rilke otherworldly stories. Rilke would eventually distance himself from what he felt was his mother’s inauthentic Christianity, but he remained fascinated by the spiritual and the metaphysical. As a boy he was reputed, after a long illness, to have developed almost magical powers, which allowed him to cure pain in others.36 Magnússon goes on to trace occult influences and interests through the rest of Rilke’s career. The most intensely involved period for Rilke was during a stay at the Castle of Duino as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. His correspondence with her contains important information Gísli Magnússon, Dichtung als Erfahrungsmetaphysik: Esoterische und okkultistische Modernität bei R.M. Rilke (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009). Franz Werfel mentions this in his commemorative remarks on Rilke; see his “Begegnungen mit Rilke” in Das Tage-Buch 8.4 (1927), 140–4.

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regarding Rilke’s relationship to the occult and to spiritualistic matters. The Princess’s son, Alexander (“Pascha”) served as an apparently talented medium in the séances they and Rilke conducted at Duino in 1912 at Rilke’s instigation. In her Memoirs of a Princess, Marie Taxis describes Rilke’s “magical personality” and his “occult qualities” that allowed him as an adult to recapture some of those childhood magical powers that gave him access to a world beyond this one.37 She also describes the intensity of his subconscious mind and his conscious powers of projecting thoughts to others as part of his receptiveness to the metaphysical and the occult. Rilke believed so strongly in the possibility of the subconscious mind to contact other realms that he responds to commands he received through Pascha from one such contact with “the Unknown Lady.” He encountered this figure in séances at Duino, and he follows her suggestion to travel to Spain, convinced that her direction would be crucial for his poetic career. What characterizes Rilke’s relationship to the occult is his association of it with the aesthetic and his skepticism toward fake spiritualists who specialized in table-turning deception. He was not simply an easy mark for those who pretended to have contact to the occult, but he felt that it would be short-sighted to deny that a realm beyond this physical world could exist and could be experienced. It is this sensitivity to the spiritual that many of Rilke’s current devotees sense in his work. It is this quality that led the International Association of Sufism to sponsor Terri Glass’s seminar, “Rumi and Rilke: Feasting on Soul and Spirit” in California in 201338. It is Rilke’s openness to the otherworldly that induces Paratheatrical Research and Vertical Pool to present Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” as a “staged intermedia performance ritual” in Berkeley, California, in 2005.39 The term “paratheater” was coined by late Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski to describe a process that erases the boundary between actors and audience—somewhat like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” As Alli describes his Rilke project: This will be my second paratheatrical staging of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of “Requiem” (the first was in Seattle in 1990). Since that initial immersion, a rich subtext has been revealed to me in Rilke’s confessions and convictions around death and loss and their transformation of love into art … a kind of alchemy Rilke sometimes called “the greater circulation”. … The paratheatrical processes we underwent to arrive at this performance insists on metamorphosis. Each night all of the performers are serving sources discovered over an eight week period. Each night culminates in a different performance.

Rilke’s struggles with the angels. His acknowledgment that they exist but that he cannot reach them, inspires many writers but also many spiritual seekers who share See Memoirs of a Princess: The reminiscences of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, trans. and ed. Marie von Thurn und Taxis and Nora Wydenbruck (London: Hogarth Press, 1959). See the website for this event at http://ias.org/arts/rumi-rilke/ (accessed June 30, 2013). I also discovered a site that creates new “found” poems by combining the works of two poets—in this case Rumi and Rilke. See http://simplyblessed.heartsdeesire.com/2010/02/07/rumi-and-rilke-a-foundpoem/ (accessed June 30, 2013). 39 See website http://www.paratheatrical.com/requiem.html (accessed June 30, 2013) for the advertisement for this event conceived and directed by Antero Alli. 37

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his struggle. Rilke’s refusal to deny the otherworldly, occult side of existence gives him an appeal that few other twentieth-century poets exhibit. At the same time, professional literary scholars (like myself) are attracted to the other side of Rilke, the cerebral poet, the thinker who acknowledges (particularly in the Duino Elegies ) that although the transcendent realm may exist, his proper focus as a poet is on this physical world of things. As a devoted reader of the French symbolist poets and a student of Rodin, Rilke understood that an intense contemplation of things, physical objects, can provide a vision of much more. He convinces us that the very ephemeral quality of physical things makes them even more beautiful and precious, fit even to display to the angelic realm (as he suggests in the ninth of the Duino Elegies). Many who contemplate death and its meaning are attracted to Rilke, as, for example, is the International Necronautical Society, which often refers to him.40 By paying such close and aesthetic attention to our limited human world of fleeting objects in his poetry, Rilke transforms them into a more enduring invisible order. That is a great deal to offer to a world in which competing systems of subjective demands tend toward chaos and destruction. These two qualities—the refusal to give up on the possibility of a transcendent realm while at the same time intensely interacting with the limited physical world of things—provide the unique combination that assures Rainer Maria Rilke’s place among authors with a truly worldwide readership.

See the society’s website at http://www.necronauts.org. Accessed 24 March 2014. The interview section features several interviews that refer to Rilke (e.g., those with Tom McCarthy or Simon Critchley). “Founded in 1999 by Tom McCarthy, the International Necronautical Society (INS) spreads itself as both fiction and actuality, often blurring the two.” “Famously described as ‘replaying the avant-garde along the faultline of death’ (Art Monthly, London), the INS inhabits and appropriates a variety of art forms and cultural ‘moments’ from the defunct avant-gardes of the last century to the political, corporate and conspiratorial organizations they mimicked. The INS’s manifestos, proclamations, reports, broadcasts, hearings, inspectorates, departments, committees and sub-committees are the vehicles for interventions in the space of art, fiction, philosophy and media. A collection of key INS texts was published by Sternberg Press (Berlin, 2012) under the title The Mattering of Matter.” Quoted from http://vargas.org.uk/publications/ins/ (accessed June 30, 2013).

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Bertolt Brecht—Homme du Monde: Exile, Verfremdung, and Weltliteratur Martina Kolb

… the literary past as a work yard …

(Kenneth White)1

… world literature is … a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time … (David Damrosch)2 In 2010, the International Brecht Society organized a conference in Hawaii, titled Brecht in/and Asia. One may envision a future endeavor in this regard, titled Brecht in/and the World, since Brecht’s overwhelming presentations of international literary intertexts taken from the cumulative corpus of WL prove to be not only his truly modernist endeavor, but also an exile’s continued attempt to create a place for the theater in an increasingly international world. If Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was not a Communist, as he tried to convince the House Committee on Un-American Activities just before leaving the US for Europe in 1947, his final appeal may nevertheless well have echoed the one found in the Communist Manifesto: Literatures of all countries unite! This chapter will show how Brecht’s career and (mostly forced) travels in fact united literatures from diverse parts of the globe. German by birth and a German citizen into midlife, Bertolt Brecht became an exile from Nazi and postwar Germany from 1933 to 1947, and was stateless from 1935 (when the Nazis deprived him of his citizenship) to 1950 (when he was granted Austrian citizenship). Brecht was born, raised, and schooled in the Swabian-Bavarian provincial town of Augsburg (and in touch with its vernacular), and studied in Kenneth White, in his talk A Chart of World Literature at the University of Aberdeen on May 10, 2013, placed a strong emphasis on a writer’s work with literary predecessors, and referred to this literary past as “a work yard,” conjuring the sort of place where the crew that Brecht welcomed went about its common efforts and collective projects. 2 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2003), 281. This is Damrosch’s third point (and the one on which he elaborates only minimally) of a threefold definition that he presents in the conclusion of his book. As a result of the “detached engagement” it is this third part that is particularly pertinent to a discussion of temporal and spatial distance, exile and Verfremdung in Brecht. 1

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Munich; he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s, where he entered the capital’s vibrant cultural scene, and in a collaborative effort with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann, composer Kurt Weill, and set designer Caspar Neher, presented the greatest success in the theater of the Weimar Republic: Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] (1928)—a tradaptation of John Gay’s 1728 English play, The Beggar’s Opera. Formally registered as a student of medicine and philosophy, Brecht’s actual commitment during the Munich university years was to contemporary German literature, specifically in Professor Artur Kutscher’s seminar, where (proto)-Expressionist poets and dramatists such as Frank Wedekind, Andreas Thom, and Hanns Johst were at the core of the syllabus. Brecht’s interest in literature was grounded in his early enthusiasm for the theater, and quickly evolved in two significant directions: He widened both his historical and geographic scope, thus moving on from German to WL, and from the turn-of-the-century to the ancient, medieval, and modern literary worlds. Although Brecht worked virtually in all genres and penned a few stories and novels (such as the Dreigroschenroman [Threepenny Novel] and Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner [Stories of Mr. Keuner]), his consistent concentration was on poems, songs, and plays, with a special focus on performance, including radio plays, operas, ballets, and films. If Brecht had already demonstrated his literary worldliness and sophistication in the 1920s, it was his exile from Nazi Germany that really forced him willy-nilly to become, quite literally, an homme du monde [man of the world]—a wanderer through various cities, landscapes, and countries, mainly in Scandinavia and California. When interrogated in Hollywood the last day of his Californian exile (October 30, 1947) by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), Brecht asked, with a German accent that could not have been any stronger: “May I read my statement?” The question was whether Brecht had ever been a member of the Communist Party. This brief initial exchange was followed by an awkward silence; incidentally, out of the eleven so-called unfriendly witnesses to which Brecht belonged, the remaining Hollywood Ten refused to testify and were consequently blacklisted, the most wellknown case was the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Brecht, however, decided to reply, and expressed that while he did not consider the Committee’s “question as proper,” he was going to answer it nonetheless, since he was “a guest in this country” and wanted to steer clear of legal trouble. He stated: “I was, or am, not a member of the Communist Party.” The HCUA further wondered whether he had ever attended any Communist Party meetings, and Brecht replied: “I do not [s]ink so.” When they asked whether he was “certain,” he said: “I [s]ink I’m certain.”3 The day after, he left Santa Monica for Zurich (via Paris), completing the last leg of his Quotations from this interrogation are taken from the reproduction of a portion of it in the documentary Theater of War (DVD 2008), directed by John Walter, featuring Tony Kushner and his recent translation of Mutter Courage, and Meryl Streep (Anna Fierling/Mutter Courage). Set in New York City and subdivided into five acts like a classical tragedy, Theater of War is a documentary on Brecht’s committed art, includes shots of anti-Iraq-war demonstrations in the City in 2006, of rehearsal spaces and a variety of behind-the-scenes-work in the Newman Theater and in Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where Mother Courage was eventually performed (with Streep in the lead), as well as valuable commentary by Barbara Brecht-Schall and Carl Weber, among others.

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long exilic circumnavigation of the globe that had commenced over 14 years earlier, in late February 1933, right after the Reichstagsbrand [Reichstag fire], the second, drastic inauguration of Nazi dictatorship following Hitler’s Machtergreifung [seizure of power]. Brecht lived in exile for a period of almost 15 years, and arguably longer, if one closely considers the years following his return from California in 1947. In 1933, he left Berlin for Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Lugano, and Paris, where he established the Deutscher Autorendienst [German Authors Service] to provide publication venues for German writers in exile. Sieben Todsünden [Seven Deadly Sins], a ballet by Brecht and Weill, premiered in the French capital, while Brecht’s wife actress Helene Weigel and their two children were traveling ahead to the Danish Thurö, close to Svendborg. Brecht’s books were burnt and his works censored by the Nazis the same year.4 The family remained in Svendborg for five years, and Brecht memorably inscribed the place in his cycle Svendborger Gedichte [Svendborg Poems]. From Denmark, Brecht frequently contributed to journals in Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam. In 1939, he completed the first of what were eventually to become three versions of Leben des Galilei [Life of Galileo], alternatively titled Galileo or Galileo Galilei, moved into a farm house in the Swedish Lidingö close to Stockholm, and in 1940 on to Helsinki and Marlebäck, in Finland, where he was invited by the Estonian-Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki. Brecht based his play Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti [Master Puntila and His Slave Matti] on a text of Wuolijoki’s, and also began, in collaboration with her, his work on the unfinished play Die Judith von Shimoda [Judith of Shimoda], after a text by Japanese novelist and playwright Yuzo Yamamoto. In 1941, the US visas for Brecht and his family were ready, and they left Finland— via Moscow and Vladivostok—for Santa Monica. Six years later, Brecht departed from California and was headed to Switzerland, where he remained for one year, in Zurich, and was not allowed to enter West Germany. In 1948, he traveled from Zurich, via Prague, to East Berlin. The legendary postwar performance of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder [Mother Courage and Her Children], with Weigel playing the lead, took place in Berlin in 1949, the same year that the German Democratic Republic was founded. East Berlin, however, was not Brecht’s first choice of residence, and his return from exile clearly not a return home. In fact, he traveled back to Zurich and applied for a permanent residence permit, but saw his application rejected. As a retreat from East Berlin and to a degree from the reproaches of his purported Western decadence and the trouble of the related Formalismusstreit [Formalism Debate], Brecht, his family, and other collaborators chose to live and work in the summers in a house in rural Buckow, and, as had already been the case with the Svendborger Gedichte, Brecht’s poetic sensitivity to place surfaced once again in In 1930 the Nazis began to interrupt performances of Brecht’s plays, and in the beginning of 1933 they stopped the staging of one of his most controversial plays, Die Maßnahme [The Measure Taken], a Lehrstück designed after a Japanese Nō play translated by Elisabeth Hauptmann, which involves Communist agitators crossing the Russian Chinese border, masked as Chinese. The idea of this and other Lehrstücke was that it did not primarily address an audience, but instead addressed the actors themselves, who by assuming various roles were being educated politically. Brecht also installed various references in Die Maßnahme to the dramaturgy of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passionen [Passions].

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the Buckower Elegien [Buckow Elegies].5 In 1950, while working for the Salzburger Festspiele [Salzburg Festival], Brecht and Weigel received Austrian citizenship, even if, ironically, they had no intention of residing in Austria. Brecht’s six remaining years as an Austrian citizen living in East Berlin revealed practically schizophrenic symptoms: he actively participated in discussions in West Berlin, while receiving the Stalin Peace Prize in the Kremlin, and being performed in Paris. Brecht’s postwar comeback was deeply marked by exilic conflicts and contradictions. Indeed, his most prolific years were exilic in nature, spent in a variety of places (including East Germany) where his identification with either the social conditions or the languages on location turned out to be notoriously impossible. From 1933 to his death, Brecht’s poetic and theatrical creations were characterized by an outsider’s detachment. In the course of these years, his official status changed from a German citizen to a stateless exile, to an Enemy Alien, to an applicant seeking a Swiss residence permit, to an Austrian citizen and resident of the German Democratic Republic. If Brecht had a home it was clearly not a country, but the literatures of the world. This holds true also for his exile in Los Angeles, where unlike various other German exiles, for instance Thomas Mann, Brecht lived rather withdrawn, hiding in Hollywood, as it were, and hardly at ease in his new world. In 1939, Brecht’s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” [To Those Born After], which soon after the Second World War counted among the most important texts of German exile literature, was published in Paris. It is part of the Svendborg cycle and includes the following decisive, autobiographically infused lines: “Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe die Länder wechselnd / Durch die Kriege der Klassen, verzweifelt / Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine Empörung.” [We walked after all through the wars of classes / changing our countries more often than our shoes, desperate / whenever we met injustice without indignation]. Brecht’s stress falls on exile and war, on class struggle, injustice, and the absence of outcry. His departure from Hitler’s Germany was an unambiguous political statement: He was a life-long anti-Nazi. In 1942, when the US entered the war and Brecht was registered as an Enemy Alien, the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on him in Los Angeles. Eventually the HCUA, whose central function it had been at the time to investigate Nazi subversive propaganda in American society, interrogated, in an era that now discerned allegedly Communist propaganda emanating from Hollywood, a counter-culture Marxist about his potential transliterary political activism—a Marxist, who had submitted himself to a social cause, who through the theatrical medium demanded collective action rather than the wars of nations against nations, and who had never been a party member. Brecht’s replies to the officers of the HCUA were not only his way of saving his exilic skin without spoiling his imminent return to Europe. Rather, his Hollywood Jan Schütte’s Abschied aus Buckow—Brechts letzter Sommer [The Farewell] (DVD 2000) depicts the Buckow landscape well, even though it only presents Brecht’s last day of vacation on the lake in 1956, ending with their return to Berlin. Schütte’s is a free, controversial portrait which focuses almost exclusively on Brecht’s life-long collaborations and promiscuities. Cf. Martina Kolb, “Clouds of Knowing, Songs of Experience, Seasons of Love: Bertolt Brecht´s Intimations of Dante and Haiku,” Oxford German Studies 41:1 (April 2012), 103–26, especially 126.

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testimony was likewise part of what Shakespeareans would have called Brecht’s goodly show. Brecht referred to himself as a foreigner, as a “guest,” and took the liberty to perform his answers as if in a homage to his own theatrical convictions: bitter comedy and the distancing detachment related to it. In John Walter’s documentary Theater of War, Brecht’s daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall is thoroughly amused about her father’s staging of himself (after all, Brecht was not only a playwright and a director, but also an actor), and points out that her father´s English had hardly been as bad as he pretended for it to be during his HCUA testimony. In a similar vein, director and theater scholar Carl Weber, who also appears in Theater of War, calls Brecht’s performance in front of the HCUA “a play […] a Brechtian comedy.”

Brecht as world littérateur Brecht’s ideas about literature and art were of the engaged and committed kind, and his poetic and dramatic inspirations, ideas and devices were drawn from a vast pool of the world’s arts and literatures, ranging from Sophocles and the Bible to Dante Alighieri and Martin Luther; from Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare to François Villon and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen; from Johann Sebastian Bach to Pieter Bruegel the Elder; from Chinese legends and Japanese Nō plays to John Gay and Molière, to Goethe and Maxim Gorki, to Gerhart Hauptmann and Mei Lan Fang, Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin—to name the most obvious ones. Moreover, Brecht was well-known for his enthusiastic explorations into the world’s poetic and dramatic traditions, his favoring of team work and his controversial ideas of authorship, as well as for his writing and rewriting of drafts and fragments, revisions, and (tr)adaptations—in sum, for a form of composition that is dynamic, collective, and dedicated to an ongoing process of distribution rather than a finished product or polished masterpiece: to a WL in constant motion.6 As has been pervasively stated, the term WL is as conceptually problematic as it is culturally enticing, for its precise scope seems impossible to pin down—even Goethe refrained from defining it. If one compares the discipline (or method) of investigation that is comparative literature with its object of study that is WL, one quickly spots a common denominator that is anything but low: a commitment to languages, literatures and cultures that is not constricted by national boundaries (or any other sort of spatial or temporal limitations), but dedicated instead to translation and distribution, to intermedial adaptation and crossgeneric variation, to prenational and international, transnational, and postnational dimensions of literary production, as well as to an inclusion of exilic and nomadic, vernacular, and minority literatures into a protean pool that is diametrically opposed to the hierarchical Western canon. For discussions of Brecht and his collaborators, cf. John Fuegi, Brecht and Co.: Sex, Politics and the Making of the Modern Drama (New York: Grove Press, 2002) and “Introduction” to Bloom’s Major Dramatists: Bertolt Brecht, ed. Harold Bloom and Martina Kolb (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2002), 9–11.

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As a result of the resemblance between the object (literature) and the method (literary studies or the literary discipline that German calls Literaturwissenschaft [science of literature]), the difference between comparative literature and WL may turn into a moot point. Although it took until 1900—the year that Nietzsche died and Freud published Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (both Nietzsche and Freud being well versed in the literatures of the world)—for the first congress of comparative literature to take place in Paris, the birth of comparative literature as a discipline historically followed Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engel’s 1848 public deployment of the term Weltliteratur in their coauthored Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei [Manifesto of the Communist Party] (just prior to Marx’s London exile) more closely than Goethe’s 1827 reminting of Christoph Martin Wieland’s weighty term Weltliteratur in a private conversation with his student Johann Peter Eckermann, who published these Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens [Conversations With Goethe During the Last Years of His Life] in 1835.7 As a result of the global vogue that beats upon the shores of any national canon, the horizontal extension and ubiquity of WL seems to be taken more seriously than its vertical dimension and historicity. However, in a broad sense, WL is not only all literatures of and for all places, but also all literatures of and for all times. The term was coined by Wieland prior to Germany’s nation formation, and has not only acquired increased cosmopolitan and international semantics through Goethe, on the one hand, and Marx and Engels, on the other, but also includes in its vision prenational dimensions (what Marx and Engels called not only national but also local literatures), such as the crucial contribution of the very vernaculars that Brecht so powerfully deployed. Even though the word literature derives from the word letter and as such pertains to the written word, all literatures of all places and all times likely encompass those that do not literally practice letters or literature in written words, but instead sing and and recite, memorize, perform, and hand down a rich pool of oral tradition and theatrical heritage. Among these places and times count those whose vernaculars and idioms have been less frequently acquired, understood, or translated by precisely the type of world that launched the idea of WL in the first place. “And so, what is world literature?” asks David Damrosch in a humorous reprise, an almost Brechtian open ending, on the concluding pages of What is World Literature? That the page facing this unanswerable question should show the noseless, often parodied sphinx of Giza may be telling beyond the “historical” and “emblematic” possibilities for reading this image—a sphinx whose precise function remains as much of a challenge as that of WL itself, and who as a consequence of being protected by the Egyptian desert sand was naturally equipped to fight the tolls of time in a sort of absurd Pompeiian burial. Damrosch writes: In contrast to what is often stated as a matter of course (see also Damrosch’s introduction to What is World Literature?, “Goethe Coins a Phrase,” 1–36), Goethe did not coin the term Weltliteratur. Christoph Martin Wieland was the one who minted the phrase earlier, and Goethe (and Marx and Engels) reprised it. It is not entirely clear whether Goethe knew of Wieland’s Weltliteratur. Cf. Hans-J. Weitz, “Weltliteratur zuerst bei Wieland”, Arcadia 22 (1987), 206–8: “Goethe, in whose writings the word appears for the first time in July 1827, is generally assumed to be the coiner of the word ‘world literature’ and as such also the creator of the concept. From here on in, however, we will need to give credit to Christoph Martin Wieland (who died in 1813), at least for the coining of the word” (206).

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Like a work of world literature, this image can be seen emblematically or with attention to its historical context […]. As an emblem, it serves here to suggest the opening up of the world of world literature […]. The Great Sphinx at Gisa […] buried to the shoulders in sand, puzzles her European interlocutors much as her literary counterpart, brought to life two and a half millennia ago by Sophocles, challenged Oedipus to solve the riddle of human identity […] we can historicize our image as well. […] Napoleon’s chief purpose in invading Egypt was to strike a blow against England’s growing imperial reach, his hope was to begin dismantling the Ottoman Empire before the British could accomplish the task […]. (Damrosch 300–301).

If Damrosch does not address Brecht in his discussion of WL, he surely approaches the pool of all literatures of all places and all times with a subjective spirit similar to Brecht’s: “as Eckermann gives us his Goethe, I have given you my world literature.” (Damrosch 281)—just as Brecht has given us his WL, albeit without showing much of an interest in terminologies such as these. Rather, Brecht put to his practical theatrical use the literary and artistic past of the world and looked at it as “a work yard,” to recall Kenneth White’s propitious phrase, chosen as an epigraph for this chapter.

World literature as Verfremdung While Brecht’s work, both as a poet and as a dramatist, can and should not remedy the issue of defining WL, which after all remains much more productive and inspiring when open and unsolved, Brecht’s understanding of Verfremdung [defamiliarizaton] and his deployment of the vernacular may offer a fresh perspective on some of the issues repeatedly raised in recent discussions about the world and its literatures. Brecht’s most revolutionary idea for the stage was that of distantiation or defamiliarization, and, as his theatrical practice has repeatedly demonstrated, this Verfremdung is grounded in a complex understanding of distance in spatial, temporal, and affective terms. Damrosch’s idea of WL as “a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (281) certainly resonates with Brecht’s take on defamiliarization in space and time, which promotes precisely what Brecht intends: an avoidance of affective identification by way of a thorough thwarting of expectations, culminating in a rupture of automatized sentimental reflexes and instead furthering critical thinking and, when needed: “Empörung” [indignation]. Furthermore, spatial and temporal distancing embodied in settings such as Sezuan or Soho, the Inquisition or the 30-Years-War, provokes a fresh look at the dynamics of the literatures and histories of this world. Verfremdungseffekt has traditionally been rendered as alienation effect, and is a notion that Brecht developed as a term of the arts and not of philosophy or sociology.8 A selection of these comments on defamiliarization will also appear as an encyclopedia entry. Martina Kolb, “Verfremdungseffekt,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross (forthcoming online 2015).

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Brecht’s concept distinguishes itself from Hegelian or Marxist notions of alienation (Entfremdung) by being relentlessly focused on the stage’s impact on a living audience. That said, Brecht coined his Verfremdungseffekte in the plural, intending not a single result, but a variety of artistic devices meant to assure what he demanded of his “moderne […] nicht-aristotelische Dramatik” and his “episches Theater […] des wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters” [modern non-Aristotelian drama and epic theater of the scientific age]: distance between actor and role and between stage and spectator; the actor’s “Gestus des Zeigens” [gesture of demonstration]; and the overall absence of the very illusion that the bourgeois stage had so insistently pursued.9 Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekte were influenced by Russian Formalism’s concept of ostranenie [estrangement, or making strange] and Viktor Shklovsky’s conviction that art must destroy comfortable habits of seeing and hearing. Among Brecht’s strategies toward this end were shock and taboo, interrupted plots, shifts in chronology, open endings, songs and commentaries, preludes and interludes, exotic settings, remote times, a variety of linguistic registers and a visible stage technique—all of which encourage the spectator to question the conditions of word and world. Rather than emphasizing the drama of fate the way tragedies do, Brecht’s theater presents the world as changeable, and shows such changeability in the theater itself, imagining it as a perfect site for people’s critical intervention into the issues of the day. Though Brecht’s early theater had included substantial Verfremdungseffekte, his explicit theorization of the device came after seeing Japanese Kabuki actors in Berlin and the Chinese opera star Mei Lan Fang in Moscow in 1935. Further, Verfremdung is neither exclusively modern nor exclusively theatrical. As a matter of fact, Brecht observed it across times, genres, and places: not only in traditional Chinese acting and the Japanese Nō theater, but also in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, hence emphasizing crossgeneric representation and crosscultural contradiction in the Renaissance man’s œuvre. The German terms Verfremdung and Entfremdung, both translatable as alienation in English, have caused some confusion in understanding the precise meaning and impact of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekte. It is therefore helpful to distinguish Entfremdung [alienation] from Verfremdung [defamiliarization], and to avoid the ambiguous estrangement altogether. Brecht after all announced in no uncertain terms a deliberate defamiliarizing of what is comfortable and familiar, rather than voicing a concern with Kafkaesque or existentialist crises, or a Lukácsean transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit [transcendental homelessness]. This does not imply that Brecht was not preoccupied with the dark side of society—on the contrary. Extremely aware of war, poverty, and injustice, he foreshadowed Theodor W. Adorno’s insight that without art alienation is total—that without defamiliarization alienation goes unnoticed. The instrumentalized distance inherent in the techniques of Brechtian defamiliarization is an antipode to existential and social alienation, precisely because such detachment fosters an understanding of a performance as a didactic practice, resulting in a Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater: Über eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 3, 19–21, 61, 169, and 173.

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motivation to action through that recognition. Brecht’s answers to the members of HCUA in October 1947 included his performative defense (or, perhaps, a world literate’s “distanced engagement,” to repeat Damrosch’s words) against alienation and alienating authority by way of a self-empowering, theatrically informed defamiliarization, of which Brecht’s perplexingly slow speech and comically strengthened German accent in the face of his interrogators bore witness. He did not rely on interpreters or translators. Tony Kushner embraced the additional challenge of a contemporary translation, and transposition, into the New York cultural context, and in the preface to his twentyfirst-century translation of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder [Mother Courage and Her Children] addresses canonical but outdated English translations of Brecht (such as Eric Bentley’s, John Willett’s and Ralph Mannheim’s), while placing heavy emphasis on the diachronic and synchronic concerns with the prenational vernacular, the contemporaneous horror of all wars, the exilic status of Brecht the dramatist, and any translator’s ensuing challenge in “finding an English-language equivalent to the Bavarian-scented hybrid of modernist-medieval German that Brecht invented to give the half-modern, half-feudal men and women in Courage a simultaneous contemporaneity and antiquity, befitting the characters in an old chronicle written by a mid-twentiethcentury refugee.”10 Kushner’s felicitous description of Brecht’s intricate interweaving of vernaculars, times, places, and social conditions (“Bavarian-scented hybrid of modernist-medieval German” and “half-modern, half-feudal men and women”) are reminiscent of Marx and Engels’s elaborations in the first chapter of Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. It is titled “Bourgeois und Proletarier” [Bourgeois and Proletarian], outlines history as an uninterrupted sequence of continuous class struggle, and states that the end of feudal and beginning of modern society did not by any chance overcome the difference between social classes, but instead only created new forms of oppression, culminating in the modern two-class system of bourgeoisie and proletariat. The authors of the Manifest draw the unavoidable parallel of WL and the world market as follows, and would likely have seen their concept of WL as it develops alongside an international Weltmarkt already illustrated with Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper: Und wie in der materiellen, so auch in der geistigen Produktion. Die geistigen Erzeugnisse der einzelnen Nationen werden Gemeingut. Die nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit wird mehr und mehr unmöglich, und aus den vielen nationalen und lokalen Literaturen bildet sich eine Weltliteratur.11 [And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children/Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, trans. Tony Kushner, ed. Charlotte Ryland (London: Methuen Drama, 2010), vi. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), 23–4.

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narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.]12

With and beyond Marx, Brecht’s energetic adaptation and appropriation, satire and parody, translation and circulation of John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera as well as of other models (among them the fifteenth-century vagabond-poet François Villon) culminates in a version of the story that illustrates the intertextual and transnational, multilingual, and translational dynamics of WL. Die Dreigroschenoper shows how in a world in which corruption reigns supreme the bourgeois and the criminal become synonymous. Although set in an anachronistic Victorian London at a certain distance from Brecht’s Weimar Republic Berlin of the late 1920s, the musical criticizes social realities that demand a change. And while doing so, it wittily juxtaposes Lutheran German with Anglicisms and slang, all woven into the world’s literary fabric. In the words of Willy Haas, “Brecht was a Literat who rarely wrote without literary models.”13 Die Dreigroschenoper presents, with legendary figure “Mackie Messer” [Mac the Knife], a modern antihero, along with Brecht’s Marxist critique of the capitalist world. When Brecht left Germany in 1933, the musical had already been translated into 18 languages and performed about 10,000 times all over Europe, while during his beginning months in Scandinavian exile, The Threepenny Opera opened at the Empire Theatre on Broadway. Apart from Die Dreigroschenoper, with which Brecht’s success as a playwright and dramatist set in, his most well-known plays were written during his long exile—a time in which he penned Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, Galileo Galilei, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [The Good Person of Sezuan] and Der kaukasische Kreidekreis [The Caucasian Chalk Circle]. Written in 1939 in the Swedish Lidingö, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder is subtitled generically and historically: Eine Chronik aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg [A Chronicle of the Thirty-Years-War]. While repeating some concerns of the earlier Trommeln in der Nacht [Drums in the Night], Brecht borrows the protagonist Anna Fierling’s nickname “Courage” from the seventeenth-century writer Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Although Brecht’s character has little in common with her Baroque precursor, he found in Grimmelshausen’s representation of the 30-Years-War in Der abenteuerliche Simplizissimus [The Adventurous Simplicissimus] the historical detail needed for good parody. Brecht’s Mutter Courage is set during the 30-Years-War, in Poland, Sweden, and Germany, was written during the Second World War, and has been classified repeatedly as the greatest anti-war play of all time. It was Brecht’s theatrical way of criticizing the Nazi regime and to address, in absentia, the atrocities of the Second World War from an exilic position outside of Stockholm. While Brecht’s absence could not help but imply also a spatial detachment, his commitment was strong and his engagement serious. Mutter Courage was first performed in Zurich in 1941, and is a play Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, Marx, vol. 50 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1952), 415–34. Willy Haas, “The Threepenny Opera and Its Consequences,” Bert Brecht, trans. Max Knight and Joseph Fabry (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 52.

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pervaded by a strongly idiomatic and dated vernacular (both in the sense of local and of vulgar speech), which adds to its difficulty and local color, as well as to its specific charm. The most prominent features of Brecht´s language are inverted syntax (hard to render since English is a less inflected language than German and its syntax, as a result, relies on stricter word order), and dialect, sociolect and dated expressions embedded in culturally intensely coded idioms. Mutter Courage in particular is permeated with such difficulties, ranging from “Bagage“ (normally meaning luggage, but there referring to people or unlikely folks) and “Pfaff “ (or “Pfaffe“ as a derogatory term for a pastor) in scenes one and nine, to the “Hungertuch“ and “Schindanger“ in scenes two and three (Kushner 8, 30, 96, 166). “Hungertuch“ literally means hunger cloth, and is the cloth with which the altar is shielded during Lent (so that the expression “am Hungertuch nagen,” literally “gnawing at the hunger cloth,” implies starvation and is rendered as such). The “Schindanger“ used to be the place in villages where dead animals were skinned, and it is neither a bier nor a pit where Courage´s son at the end of scene three is taken after she denied him, but to that place: the “Schindanger.“ Together with Margarete Steffin, Brecht composed the first of three versions of Galileo Galilei between 1938 and 1940, in Scandinavian exile—the last version was written in Santa Monica after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The play premiered in Zurich in 1943, and was collaboratively translated into English by Charles Laughton and Brecht in California. Removed in space and time, Galileo Galilei is historically set in Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century, temporally overlapping with the setting of Mutter Courage in the 30-Years-War. And Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, likewise penned betwenn 1938 and 1940, in collaboration with Ruth Berlau and Margarete Steffin, also premiered in Zurich. It is set in prewar China (Sezuan), where Brecht presents the oppressive world of a charitable waterseller and a good-hearted prostitute as one that capitalistically orchestrates their demise as well as that of their goodness—a world in which the good die young. Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, finally, was written in Santa Monica between 1944 and 1945, in collaboration with Ruth Berlau, translated into English by Eric Bentley and Maja Apelmann, and first performed, in translation, in Minnesota in 1947. It features a prologue set in postwar Russia, while the play itself is a double flashback, set in the past and delivered as initially two separate stories that eventually merge. Brecht’s thorough rearrangement of Li Hsing Tao’s thirteenth-century Chinese parable of the chalk circle, which Klabund (Alfred Henschke) had adapted to German in the 1920s, provides the play’s unexpected solution. If WL comprises works written in a national language, which have managed to transcend political and linguistic boundaries and as a result have become known to and appreciated by the world, Brecht’s output clearly falls into this rubric. Wieland meant Weltliteratur as literature for the the Weltmann or homme du monde, which Brecht clearly was, whereas others intended WL as a characteristic of the cosmopolitan dimension of the mind (first and foremost Goethe),14 and the literary merchandise and bodies of Goethe’s idea of world literature as something like a cosmopolitan literary mindscape is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s metaphor (borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge) of the “androgynous mind“ that great writers of both sexes share, regardless of their biological gender. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, 1989), 98–103.

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thought that are disseminated internationally according to the laws of the world market (Marx and Engels).15 Brecht’s mind was clearly cosmopolitan, and the works he produced have certainly experienced a strong international circulation. Further, WL is the sort of open concept that Brecht always favored. Without using the term WL explicitly, he reworked a great variety of literary texts originally written in an almost equally great variety of languages. Brecht celebrated open endings, as prototypically stated at the conclusion of the Der gute Mensch von Sezuam: “Der Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen” [the curtain drawn and all questions unanswered], and also entertained ongoing questions, including the kind that Goethe in his Weimar isolation chose not to define or confine either, but instead to use as a propeller rather than aiming for a static final result. Various German compounds have paved their way into Anglo-American discourse. Among these are Schadenfreude and Ersatzbefriedigung, Bildungsroman (Karl Morgenstern’s coinage, but brought to fame by Wilhelm Dilthey), Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Freud’s Traumdeutung, and who-knows-whose Weltliteratur. There are two ways in which these German nouns are generally printed in English texts: Bildungsroman and Verfremdungseffekt tend to appear italicized and untranslated, whereas Traumdeutung and Weltliteratur are normally rendered as interpretation of dreams and world literature (but not, for some reason, as dream interpretation and literature of the world).16 English necessarily reverts to a dilution (into a prepositional phrase or two nouns, occasionally hyphenated) of the succinct original compound that has at its disposal one of the more intriguing morphological characteristics in the German language: the simulatenous presence of two types of genitive, that is: the coexistence of genetivus objectivus and genetivus subjectivus in one word, which entertains an ambivalence of agency and hence an ambiguity of meaning in Traumdeutung as well as in WL. Such grammatical simultaneity intrinsically begs the question of the precise relationship between the two nouns within the compound.17 Freud’s understanding of Traumdeutung is, indeed, the interpreation of dreams, that is to say an interpretation that is based on an interpreter’s (analyst’s) reading of a dreamer’s (patient’s) dreams as if they were texts. What German presents, however, is that which gets lost in the English rendering: that the dream is not only the object of interpretation, but is itself an interpreter of a given dreamer’s psyche. Traumdeutung, then, likewise implies the interpretation by the dream. Dream interpretation would be a better translation to foreground this aspect, and in the case of WL it is indeed the prepositionless translation that has dominated the critical discourse of WL. Goethe does not leave world literature on the level of hope (“hoffnungsreiches Wort”) when he discerns an era in motion (“bewegte Epoche” and “erleichterte Communication”) (Frankfurter Ausgabe I 22: Über Kunst und Altertum, Band VI Heft 2, 427), but becomes more concrete about transportation and publishing in his letter to Thomas Carlyle on August 8, 1828, in which he mentions “Schnellposten und Dampfschiffe” [express mail and steamers], “Tages-, Wochen- und Monatsschriften” [daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals] (Weimarer Ausgabe IV 44, 257). 16 That said, attempts have been made, such as novel of formation, novel of education or coming-of-age novel for Bildungsroman, and alienation effect or defamiliarization effect for Verfremdungseffekt. 17 Unlike Weltliteratur and Traumdeutung, Bildungsroman and Verfremdungseffekt spell out the genitive marker “–s” and offer a slightly altered situation regarding objective and subjective dimensions. 15



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In analogy to Traumdeutung, does not Weltliteratur also inlude both genitives, thus simultaneously addressing the literature by and of the world? For a discussion of Brecht’s borrowings from and contributions to the world and to literature, this issue does not remain a grammatical insight alone; rather, it foregrounds a feature that enables a less streamlined approach to a notion that has gained such currency in international English. After all, the world in WL has as much agency as the literature in that world. And how did stateless exile and Enemy Alien Brecht approach this world? While Damrosch plays with Andrew Marvell’s “had we but world enough, and time” in his assessment of WL today, White deploys William Wordsworth. “The constant is world,” writes White, “what we commonly call ‘the world’ is […] a world in the sense that Wordsworth had in mind when he said ‘the world is too much with us’. […] If we use ‘world’ for the ordinary context, World, with a capital, for all the otherworlds, the world I’m implicated in might be written with italics, world, to indicate that it is in process, and also that […] is not fixed and coded.”18 For better or worse, Brecht was very much a man of such an ever-changing world (in both the creatively inspiring and the existentially threatening sense), and he appropriated a literary world that has in turn appropriated him. His immense output and reception would not be thinkable without the WL that had preceded and has followed him, and without the translations made available to him—nor is the international modern stage fathomable without considering Brecht’s trailblazing and thoroughly disseminated ideas about authoring and acting. Brecht’s international venues of publication and performance (various of his plays premiered abroad, notably in Switzerland during the Nazi years, some even premiered in translation, such as The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Minnesota), the dynamic of alienation and defamiliarization in his work and his life, his Marxist internationalism, his change of countries and shoes (as Brecht stated in his poem “An die Nachgeborenen”), genres, and citizenships, certainly convey a strong picture of one of the most international German literati. One way of visualizing his internationalism is to minutely follow the routes that Brecht took around the globe: in 1941 he arrived in California from Vladivostok, and in 1947 he crossed the Atlantic to return to Europe. What Damrosch writes about Kafka’s case but perhaps with the intention of possible extrapolations to other writers, is confirmed in Kushner’s work as a director and retranslator of Mutter Courage: “works that attain a lasting status as classics of world literature are ones that can weather a variety of tectonic shifts in the literary landscape. As they do so, their translations change along with their interpretations. Ours is an age of translation and also an era of retranslation” (Damrosch 186). Of Damrosch’s threefold definition of WL, it is his third point (quoted earlier as an epigraph to this chapter) about a “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time” (281) that is particular pertinent to a discussion of temporal and spatial distance, exile and Verfremdung in Brecht. Damrosch’s other two portions of the definition of WL are about WL as an “elliptical refraction of national literatures” Kenneth White, “Grounding a World,” in Grounding a World: Essays on the Work of Kenneth White, ed. Gavin Bowd, Charles Forsdick, and Norman Bissell (Glasgow: Alba Editions, 2005), 200.

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and WL as “writing that gains in translation” (281). While “elliptical refraction” and “translation” are of course also strong components in a discussion of Brecht’s place in WL (suffice it to mention the passing of works from one medium to another—such as Dreigroschenroman and Dreigroschenoper—as well as the success of his plays in translation), the focus of the present discussion has been on what Damrosch felicitously calls “detached engagement,” a thoroughly Brechtian concept, I contend, in which defamiliarization, commitment, and exile converge, albeit without paying heed, as far as Brecht is concerned, to categorizing labels such as WL. Wieland coined Weltliteratur in reference to the Weltmann or homme du monde. When Goethe reminted Wieland´s term, he had already produced other world neologisms echoing universal ideas of botanic and intellectual formation (such as Weltgarten [world garden] and Weltseele [world soul], or Urpflanze [primal plant] and Urwort [primal word]). And Marx and Engels parallelized their Weltliteratur with Weltmarkt [world market]. The general attribution to Goethe may be a consequence of at least three factors. There seems to be criticism’s steady desire to revert to a classic poet who harbored great hopes for international communication, commerce and transportation, in order to (canonically, after all?) justify a literary discussion of an increasingly productivist and purportedly non-elitist issue. The attribution to Goethe may also have to do with Christoph Martin Wieland’s notorious marginalization in German and comparative literary history. While Goethe observes WL in the process of arising, Wieland used the term in a discussion of his translation of Horace’s letters (there is also Brecht´s post-Corneille Lehrstück, The Horatians and the Curatians), and refers to the Roman poet´s time as an era of WL. Writers and scholars were men of the world, well read and hence sophisticated. Were Welttheater [world theater] not already a firmly established notion that refers to Pedro Calderón de la Barca´s seventeenth-century El gran teatro del mundo [The Great Theater of the World] — a play that conjures visions of the Mariä Einsiedeln pilgrimage rather than of Brecht´s Berlin or exile in Hollywood — Welttheater may have been the most appropriate name to classify Brecht´s theatrical contributions to Weltliteratur. That said, Brecht´s poetry, if less famous, was just as much of the international literary world as his dramatic contributions, and it is for a good reason that The Brecht Yearbook 37 (2012), titled The B-Effect: Influences of/on Brecht, took up these thoroughly international and intensely cross-generic aspects of Brecht´s oeuvre. It is for a good reason that Friedemann Weidauer, in the volume´s editorial, points to the “amazing range of influences that Bertolt Brecht absorbed in his work and the surprising ways in which aspects of his thinking and writing resurface in a variety of media and cultural products today. […] quite in contrast to many rumors, Brecht is becoming more relevant by the day. […] The ingenious ability of Brecht to stage complex situations is what keeps drawing practitioners and theorists of art to his work” (ix). In any case, exiled poet-dramatist Bert Brecht has contributed his fair share to a union of the literatures of all countries.

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Militant Melancholia, or Remembering Historical Traumas: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn David D. Kim Even a writer as steeped in nineteenth-century and early modern literary solemnities as W. G. Sebald was moved to seed his lamentation-narratives of lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapes with photographs. Sebald was not just an elegist, he was a militant elegist. Remembering, he wanted the reader to remember, too. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others It is a militancy in the open in the sense that it claims to attack not just this or that vice or fault or opinion that this or that individual may have, but also the conventions, laws, and institutions which rest on the vices, faults, weaknesses, and opinions shared by humankind in general. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth

Memories and world citizenship Since the collapse of communist states in 1989 and 1990, German society has undergone a rapid multicultural diversification. Some of the well-known reasons for this societal change are global migration, transnational capitalism, and information technology, but the less obvious one is the entanglement of individual and collective memories. Since German speakers are no longer of German descent or of capitalist upbringing only, the familiar notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—or critically mastering the Nazi past—has begun to criss-cross with postcolonial and postcommunist narratives, thereby changing the dynamics of contemporary German culture in “a memory boom of unprecedented proportions.”1 This is not to say that recollections of historical trauma or political utopia circulate randomly in public spaces, but present political crises and uncertain futures coincide in unforeseen ways, giving rise to newly convoluted, transgressive acts of remembrance. That is, German national identity after Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 5.

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the fall of the Berlin Wall continues to orient itself around the haunting legacies of Auschwitz, but it harkens back to colonial and communist pasts as well.2 One way to assess this memorial-mnemonic development is to pit it, as Andreas Huyssen has done in his groundbreaking study of cultural amnesia, against neoliberal claims of waning historical consciousness in late capitalism. As he deftly points out, the liberation of East Central European states from Soviet rule and the emergence of new European multicultural communities have mobilized memories to the point that previous claims of posthistoire are no longer applicable to the postcommunist period. Indeed, the 2009 European Parliament resolution on conscience and totalitarianism confirms Huyssen’s suggestion that memory is integral to building community at the supranational level. It declares that a collective view of history is essential for integrating the various European nation-states in peace, justice, and solidarity, and that Nazism and Stalinism, along with other fascist and communist regimes, constitute common historical legacies for all member states.3 Yet, strikingly absent from this bold vision is postcolonial remembrance, although memories of slavery, Orientalist fantasy, and imperial discovery have assumed transnational proportions in the latest phase of economic globalization, mass migration, and new media. The aim of this essay is to illustrate how contemporary German literature has responded to this oversight within the new cosmopolitical context after 1989. Let us connect this issue for a moment to current debates on world citizenship. In 1994, Martha Nussbaum edited a provocative collection of essays on cosmopolitanism, thereby laying a foundation for contemporary inquiries into global democracy. The premise of her work was that only a liberal education could account for the cultural, ethical, and political challenges of the twenty-first century because it cultivated “the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally.”4 Imagining the construction of human relationships in “a series of concentric circles,” she argued that individual citizens need to learn to move outward from the familiar to the foreign, while their mind is growing more and more accustomed to looking at life from expansive perspectives.5 World citizens are “philosophical exiles,” so to speak.6 Their awareness of local limitations would gradually break down prejudicial barriers between self and other until the rest of the world looked like a sensible German colonial fantasy and Ostalgie—the yearning for a simpler communist past in the German Democratic Republic—are just two examples of the role that memory plays in exposing contemporary German crises with national identity, modern history, and the uncertain future. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore this theme any further, but two films—Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Africa [Nowhere in Africa] (2001) and Good Bye Lenin! (2003)—are iconic illustrations of this problematic. 3 This is the European Parliament resolution of April 2, 2009 on European conscience and totalitarianism. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6– TA–2009–0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (accessed on November 8, 2013). 4 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9. The essays were originally published in the October/November 1994 issue of Boston Review. 5 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 56, 60. See also Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism or Cosmopolitanism?” Boston Review 19.5 (Oct.–Nov. 1994), 3–6. 6 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 58. 2



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extension of their homeland. Inspired by Diogenes the Cynic, who had first coined the term kosmou polites, Nussbaum defined world citizenship as the product of such liberal “cosmopolitan education,” systematically moving from ancient Europe to Kant’s morality and, ultimately, to Tagore’s postcolonial novel The Home and the World.7 Of course, a number of alternative visions of world citizenship have undermined this Eurocentric framework since then, including Homi Bhabha’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Walter Mignolo’s “critical cosmopolitanism,” Jeffrey Alexander’s “local cosmopolitanism,” and James Clifford’s “discrepant cosmopolitanism.”8 Instead of elaborating on these theoretical interventions at this point, I want to echo Bruce Robbins, who has aptly described this subversive movement as “a pluralizing of cosmopolitanism” or as “‘cosmopolitanism from below.’”9 As Robbins explains, this proliferation, though crucial it may be for criticizing universal constraints on worldly aspirations, has failed to offer effective firewalls to prevent war and suffering because the “shift from normative to descriptive cosmopolitanism” sets up transnationally inapplicable guidelines for peace and justice.10 It prevents detachment from local cultures, urban centers, and national identities, sources that often feed dangerous, destructive types of patriotism. Therefore, Robbins concludes, global modernity continues to be an epoch where “happy familiarities” rule at the detriment of political communities where perpetual wars, biopolitical supervisions, and innumerable sufferings outweigh international human rights despite increasingly interconnected, overlapping networks of communication, trade, environment, and government.11 If the concept of world citizenship is far from being settled, it is because the end of communism has exacerbated the problem of common senses in modern society. Robbins formulates this issue in the following, perhaps intentionally vague terms: “The worldliness into which we are now hesitantly venturing mixes the ethical, the political, and the cultural in proportions that are too obscure, too unstable, and too novel to allow any easy escape.”12 In other words, the age of globalization does not presuppose a sense of community that is sustainable or straightforward. Jean-Luc Nancy is a bit more concrete on this difficult point when he returns to the lost translational origins of the world in his observation of contemporary crises in community. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 6. I refer my readers to the following publications to examine these concepts more closely: Jeffrey Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Homi K. Bhabha, “Unpacking My Library Again”, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 28.1 (Spring, 1995), 5–18; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997); Walter Mignolo, The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 9 Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 11. 10 Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War, 12. 11 Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 21. 12 Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global, 17. 7 8

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“There is no longer any world,” he writes, “no longer a mundus, a cosmos, a composed and complete order (from) within which one might find a place, a dwelling, and the elements of an orientation.”13 Originally, Nancy claims, these words mean “being-to or being-toward,” signaling an unbreakable relationship between earthly beings.14 They stand for “rapport, relation, address, sending, donation, presentation to,” but in the course of modern history the “earth” has come to represent “anything but a sharing of humanity.”15 Since 1989, he says, the world community has utterly collapsed under the weight of inhuman cruelty. Only a brief look at Rwanda and Bosnia, along with the rising number of nationalist and xenophobic movements around the globe, substantiates this depressing state of affairs. In this essay, I wish to examine how this crisis in world citizenship figures in contemporary German literature. More specifically, I want to focus on W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn [The Rings of Saturn, 1995] as a literary exemplar of this confrontation whereby critical questions of citizenship are raised in response to cross-cultural, transnational, and intergenerational memories of historical trauma after 1989. What interests me here is less the equivalence of totalitarian regimes as the most extreme dialectical expressions of modernity than the impact that these periods of man-made destruction have on imagining the limits of global democracy. If the imagination of world citizenship involves an open-ended, topsy-turvy rethinking of self and other in relation, what I want to explore is Sebald’s novel as a literary analogue to this philosophical life where the colonial past, the Nazi violence, and the communist utopia haunt the living. This reading builds upon Rebecca Walkowitz’s assessment of Die Ringe des Saturn as a novel that does not so much transcend national boundaries as it destabilizes local norms. She argues that Sebald’s disorienting assemblage of text and image engenders a global network of linkages, one that subverts magisterial, top-down views of the world. Although memories are grounded in particular time-spaces, Sebald plays with vertiginous linkages between memory, speculation, and research, giving shape to what she calls “critical cosmopolitanism.” Instead of perpetuating the notion of “planetary humanism,” which sings in “heroic tones of appropriation and progress,” his aesthetic vision of cosmopolitanism constitutes a comparative, self-conscious, and open-ended revision of the past.16 For Walkowitz, this fictional historiography invites readers to exercise their individual citizenship not in border patrol, but in negotiation between “different versions of thinking beyond the nation.”17 It involves working through trivial facts, different names of places, suspended descriptions, and competing perspectives—all in pursuit of “critical cosmopolitanism.” What follows is informed by this reading, but it shifts the focus from such ambiguous moments in the narrative onto Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, 8. 15 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xiii. 16 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2. 17 Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 169. 13

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retrospections of historical trauma across national boundaries. Illustrative of world citizenship and made possible by an army of militant melancholics whom the narrator conjures up in imagination to respond to his suffering and that of others, these aesthetic practices transcend both the individual and the nation as principal frameworks for identity, memory, and politics in the age of globalization. I argue that Sebald’s novel is an example of WL insofar as this melancholy narrative reconfigures international visions of colonialism, Nazism, and communism. It imagines a world community of melancholics whose work engenders locally particular, globally attuned perspectives of historical trauma in contemporary German literature. In other words, this example of literary imagination is illustrative of global authorship whereby the colonial, Nazi, and communist pasts inform the limits of world citizenship. German literature is WL in this regard. To unravel this line of reasoning, the following section guides readers through a pivotal passage in Die Ringe des Saturn where melancholia and militantism come together to open up memories of the Nazi Holocaust to transnational perspectives. This textual moment, as I elucidate, creates a multiperspectival context within which readers are able to turn their attention to other instances of mass violence. Here, the emphasis rests on identifying a community of militant melancholics whose work is dedicated to engendering a more equitable world. I contend that these individual subjects do not withdraw from political life altogether, but draw upon their affective state of mind to fix the broken world in individually courageous and collectively disjunctive ways.

A militant elegist? A quarter of the way through Die Ringe des Saturn, readers come across a black-andwhite photograph, which I suppose catches them by surprise. By this point in the novel they have watched the narrator trace the industrial extinction of herring along the North Sea coast of England—more specifically, near the desolate port town called Lowestoft. Yet, the narrator does not recount this “pilgrimage” in a straightforward manner; instead, it takes shape in a complex criss-crossing of time-spaces as distant as seventeenth-century Norfolk and Rembrandt’s Amsterdam and as close as the neighboring towns of Norwich and Somerleyton. The narrator draws upon his painstaking memory, the recollection of others, archival documents, and a set of photographs to create a local story, which is at the same time global in scope.18 It is this dizzying fabric of the narrative, which the blurry black-and-white picture, printed across two full pages, interrupts suddenly. At first glance, the picture appears to show a pile of dirty clothing strewn across a remote wooded landscape. Only upon closer look does it reveal itself as a snapshot of According to Barbara Hui, the novel presents “a local history that is global in scope.” In other words, the emphasis lies on the local without which the global makes little sense. Barbara Hui, “Mapping Historical Networks in Die Ringe des Saturn,” in The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselsberger (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 283.

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cultural barbarity, as a visual remnant of decomposing human bodies. Yet, the narrator displays this horrific photograph without saying a word. It comes as part of an episode about Major George Wyndham Le Strange, the British veteran whose regiment arrived first at the Nazi concentration camp in Bergen Belsen. There is nothing in the novel that refers directly to the image. What readers have before them is an autobiographical recollection of the narrator’s “englische Wallfahrt” [English pilgrimage] in 1992 and it originates, as he explains, from the following three distinct, yet interrelated stages of personal crisis.19 First, his foot journey began as an attempt to escape from the growing sense of emptiness he felt after having completed a substantive amount of work.20 On those hot, sultry days, he felt the need to follow “bis weit in die Vergangenheit zurückgehenden Spuren der Zerstörung” [the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past] since such an archaeological endeavor seemed to promise him physical mobility and historical reflection.21 Exactly a year later, he was again struck by a similarly inexplicable “Unbeweglichkeit” [immobility] and, this time, he decided to take notes of the foot journey to get back into motion.22 Finally, another year or so later, he returned to those notes to write the novel from multilayered and multitemporal perspectives. This last stage was triggered by the sudden death of two of his dear colleagues: Michael Parkinson and Janine Rosalind Dakyns. It was in the late summer of 1992, then, that the narrator remembered Le Strange’s curious story during his foot journey in the county of Suffolk where the former soldier also had his expansive property. The novel includes a facsimile of his obituary published in The Eastern Daily Press, but the narrator summarizes its content as follows: Le Strange habe, so hieß es in dem Artikel, während des letzten Krieges in dem Panzerabwehrregiment gedient, das am 14. April 1945 das Lager von Bergen Belsen befreite, sei aber, unmittelbar nach dem Waffenstillstand, aus Deutschland zurückgekehrt, um die Verwaltung der Güter seines Großonkels in der Grafschaft Suffolk zu übernehmen, die er, wie ich von anderer Seite weiß, zumindest bis Mitte der fünfziger Jahre in vorbildlicher Weise bewirtschaftete.23 During the last war, the article read, Le Strange served in the anti-tank regiment that liberated the camp at Bergen Belsen on the 14th of April 1945, but immediately after V-E Day, he returned home from Germany to manage his great uncle’s

This is the subtitle of the novel. The quotes in this essay are from W. G. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995). All translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. 20 In the beginning of the novel, the narrator observes that “bestimmte Krankheiten des Gemüts und des Körpers” [certain illnesses of the mind and body] are possibly linked to Dog Days and that he remembers a certain tension between the sense of freedom and the rising sense of dawn in the summer of 1992. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 11. 21 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 11. 22 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 12. 23 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 77, 80. 19



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estates in Suffolk, a task he had fulfilled in an exemplary manner, at least until the mid-50s, as I knew from other sources.

The narrator was unable to verify the many rumors that were circulating about Le Strange, but the former was able to confirm that the latter had indeed been a “virtual recluse.”24 Moreover, Le Strange had required his longtime housekeeper Florence Barnes to dine with him in complete silence every day before bequeathing her his entire estate. Now, if readers accept this narrative frame at face value, it can be surmised that Le Strange’s odd interaction with Barnes may have had something to do with posttraumatic stress disorder and that the unidentified photograph might be of Bergen Belsen.25 However, I wish to raise a question at this crucial juncture in the novel: why is it that the narrator does not dwell even for a moment on the picture itself? It comes without any description and with little context. In fact, this verbal void is a clear departure from the rest of the novel, where the narrator uses his inquisitive or speculative imagination to link up personal accounts with material objects. No other image stands alone as such. A quick survey of Sebald’s other works reveals the same conclusion. In Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants, 1992], he confronts the traumas of National Socialism via the emigrant story of the protagonist Paul Bereyter. In Austerlitz [Austerlitz, 2001], he assembles similarly empathetic stories and images to shed light on the extraordinary suffering of children during the Second World War. In Die Ringe des Saturn, though, Le Strange’s wartime experience, along with the photograph of Bergen Belsen, is shrouded in a conspicuous silence. Deane Blackler has argued that Sebald employs photography “as the mimetic counterpart of what the verbal text tells” readers, but this reading does not follow from the singular episode to which I have called attention.26 Does the lack of commentary on the photograph somehow mirror Le Strange’s impenetrable privacy or is it that the Holocaust lies beyond the narrator’s sensibility of historical trauma across time and space? Does the picture in its sheer otherness re-enact the moment of the soldier’s psychological trauma in the face of a genocidal event by shattering the narrator’s cognitive or perceptual ability to speak; if not, what else prevents him, as melancholy as he is, from talking about the dead? Mark McCulloh is right to suggest that the stakes are high in visual representations of the Holocaust, but the silence around the photographed ghosts of Bergen Belsen does not go so far as to repudiate “language itself.”27 On the contrary, I believe that the entire novel is an imaginative illustration of the narrator’s deep aesthetic engagement with some of the most horrific, unspoken, or vanishing memories of inhumanity; so it is not that language is incapable of formulating an appropriate response to the ghastly sight of what the late soldier might have Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 81. Jonathan Long suggests that the photograph is not of Bergen Belsen after all, but of Buchenwald. J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 143. 26 Deane Blackler, Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience (Rochester: Camden House, 2007), 169. 27 Mark Richard McCulloh, Understanding W. G. Sebald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 65. 24 25

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witnessed upon arriving at the concentration camp or that memories of historical trauma escape linguistic expression. It also seems to me that McCulloh’s reading lifts the Holocaust to a measure of genocidal traumas whereby colonial violence, which is later discussed in the novel, falls short of being equally injurious or terrifying. I suggest that something else is at work here. Silence is not necessarily a form of meaningless inactivity; it can also be registered as a highly communicative void, which the political subject actively produces in response to an objectionable sensory input. Instead of being a symbol of utter incomprehension, the narrator’s silence about the Holocaust possibly constitutes a deliberate refusal to participate in modern society where consumer-oriented, untrustworthy, and voyeuristic images often prompt or exploit superficial engagements in the public sphere. By maintaining an interpretative distance from what the photograph shows, he eludes the danger of confusing visibility with authenticity. As J. J. Long explains, “the mythic transparency of the photographic image” neither confirms nor represents the past as such and Sebald’s novel continuously challenges readers to be attuned to this visual trap.28 More specifically, a visual representation without verbal elaboration takes issue with spectacular “publicity images” whose production and consumption reduce the transmission of history more or less to a political end.29 It frustrates reductive readings in a “layering of multiple after-stories,” which Walter Benjamin understands as a multimodal fabric of the text.30 Archival documents, photographs, and paintings come together in the narrator’s “materialistic presentation of history,” creating a dialectical tension between the verbal and the visual.31 For this reason, I concur with Blackler that Sebald’s multilayered story poses critical questions about the transmission of memory. The one she highlights above all is the following: “What does it mean if the eyewitness is more an eyewitness to his memories of what happened, images gleaned from seeing pictures in the newspapers or the newsreels at the cinema?”32 Having characterized Sebald’s narrator as more than an eyewitness to history, someone who draws upon individual memory, historical research, and public information to (re)collect the far-flung debris of ruins of war, mass violence, and individual suffering, Blackler claims that the novel engenders “vigilant” readers who work through the text with an acute sense of the mediated relationship between past, present, and future.33 From my perspective, this interpretation is immensely helpful in mapping out the broader trajectory of Sebald’s writing, including the tricky relation between word and image, the transformative role of technology in remembrance and reproducibility, the transformative nature of transmission and forgetting, and the topographic sedimentation of history in the natural environment or the urban space. J. J. Long, W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 48. John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (London: Penguin, 1990), 139. Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 419. 31 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 5, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 578. 32 Deane Blackler, Reading W. G. Sebald, 132. 33 Blackler, Reading W. G. Sebald, 132. 28 29 30



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However, what Blackler does not take account is the narrator’s attempt to arrest the seemingly inexorable flow of history in remembrance of the victims of colonialism and Nazism from transnational perspectives. That is, focusing on readership does not suffice to explain why being silent about the Holocaust opens up an uncanny, “multidirectional” space for objecting to the underlying conditions of colonial exploitation and imperial fantasy. I borrow the concept of “multidirectional memory” from Michael Rothberg, who argues that memories of colonial violence and Nazi terror are capable of operating in a “productive, intercultural dynamic.” Although his study is restricted to the 1950s and 60s, he asserts that memories of disparate historical events are not in competition with one another, do not need to vie for the same--and thus limited--public sphere. They travel across time and space, from one polity to another, to lay the foundation for “new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.” Since neither the argument of singularity nor the logic of analogy suffices to explain why memories of mass violence traverse political boundaries, Rothberg writes that “multidirectional memory” helps grasp a certain homology between colonial fantasies and anti-Semitic irrationalities, between colonial terror and Auschwitz.34 Susan Sontag makes an important point about war photojournalism before drawing another questionable conclusion about Sebald. In reference to nineteenthcentury imperial projects and twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, she criticizes pictures of war and suffering for their dubious political function. She observes that they are emotionally charged and politically motivated. “What is the point of exhibiting these pictures?” she asks before following up with more poignant questions. To awaken indignation? To make us feel “bad”; that is, to appall and sadden? To help us mourn? Is looking at such pictures really necessary, given that these horrors lie in a past remote enough to be beyond punishment? Are we the better for seeing these images? Do they actually teach us anything? Don’t they rather just confirm what we already know (or want to know)?35

As Sontag asserts, photographs of war have immense shock effect, but they do not transform viewers to the extent that their relationship with the world undergoes positive change. She attests to this experience in her own life as a result of seeing shocking photographs of Bergen Belsen and Dachau. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.36

As Sontag explains, the psychological trauma of seeing photographs of the Holocaust has divided her life into two ontological phases. It has also changed her understanding of self and others, all the while leaving a deep wound in her psyche. She asserts that Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3, 5. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 91–2. 36 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 20. 34

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a context would have helped her wrestle with those gruesome images at a young age, but they came without any point of orientation. Thus, she became a victim of this posttraumatic fixation and mythmaking, unwillingly partaking in perverse voyeurism as opposed to political action or critical thinking. Of course, Sontag is aware of the irresistible power that images have in contemporary visual culture and she singles out Sebald as an example of this modern phenomenon. She observes that a storyteller even as masterful as he is relies on photography to resurrect lost lives and to recover forgotten worlds. Even a writer as steeped in nineteenth-century and early modern literary solemnities as W. G. Sebald was moved to seed his lamentation-narratives of lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapes with photographs. Sebald was not just an elegist, he was a militant elegist. Remembering, he wanted the reader to remember, too.37

For Sontag, Sebald uses photographs not only to arrest the continuous loss of persons and things in modern history, but also to enforce a certain work of remembrance among his readers. To ensure that memories are transmitted across time and space, he supports “his lamentation-narratives” with haunting images. By “militant,” then, Sontag means assertive, forceful, and demanding. I want to think with Sontag to clarify the reason why the alleged photograph of Bergen Belsen stands alone with so little context, but I suggest that we redefine the meaning of militantism or militancy for this study. True, Sebald displays photographs like other modernists—Émile Zola, Kurt Tucholsky, and André Breton, to name just a few—to facilitate a certain transfer of afterlives, destructions, and ruins between narrator and reader, but Sontag’s observation does not capture Sebald’s differentiated negotiation between colonialism and the Holocaust in Die Ringe des Saturn. Having read Sontag’s work on photography, Sebald seems to want readers to remember the Holocaust, but what aspects of it?38 To paraphrase Sontag’s question about war photography, what are readers supposed to gain from seeing this gruesome image: to feel shame for having arrived too late or to mourn the loss of innumerable lives under Hitler’s regime? And what are readers to do with the silence, either Le Strange’s or the narrator’s: fill it, leave it, and in either case, how? I propose that we shift the meaning of militantism from a forceful transaction of memories to something far more fluid, as the narrator goes on to melancholize the story of Roger Casement in the colonies. This shift is not only informative of Sebald’s poetics of historical reconstruction after colonialism and Nazism, but it also highlights an uncanny interconnectedness between colonial imperialism, the Holocaust, and the dynamics of modern society.

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 89. Richard Sheppard points out Sebald’s reference to Sontag’s On Photography, in his “Dexter-sinister: Some Observations on Decrypting the Mors Code in the Work of W.G. Sebald,” Journal of European Studies 35.4 (December 2005), 456–7.

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Militant melancholia To open up a more fluid definition of militancy, let us take a quick detour through Foucault’s final lectures at the Collège de France in 1983 and 1984. One of the two epigraphs at the onset of this essay has already referred to them, so I want to specify how Foucault helps us think about memory, identity, and suffering in international, transhistorical, and collective terms. Though separated by a year, both lecture series explored ethical transformations of the individual subject in terms of parrhesia, or truth-telling, because Foucault was no longer interested in formal conditions or constraints under which discourses of truth were validated. He wanted to examine non-formal modes of veridiction in ethical subjects whose “alethurgic” practices avoided epistemological inquiries into truth, as well as particular visions of the distribution of power in democracy.39 Yet, he sensed a certain distance between his ancient topic and the weekly seminar audience, so he began his lectures by pointing out that matters of truth-telling were absolutely relevant for “contemporary problems.”40 Although he could not tease out this passing observation before his death in June 1984, he noted that Cynicism was not merely a philosophical phenomenon in antiquity, but “a trans-historical category,” one that involved revolutionary and scandalous practices of veridiction.41 Cynicism, he said, was a militant “style of existence,” which broke with “the conventions, habits, and values of society” in its embodiment of “the concrete possibility and the evident value of an other life” or “the true life.”42 For Foucault, such militant practices exposed underlying structures of corruption, exploitation, and injustice anywhere around the globe, while employing the individual’s courage to tell the truth even at the risk of dying. They required a certain ability to take care of oneself and others in a community and this was the main reason why the act of telling the truth entailed “a sort of lesson of universal significance” for every individual around the globe.43 If we connect this philosophical deliberation to the concept of melancholia, the humor that is most often associated with the planet Saturn, it seems possible to find a new point of entry into Die Ringe des Saturn as a cross-referential, multilayered act of remembrance vis-à-vis the Nazi horror, the colonial violence, and the present ruin.44 Now what is it about melancholy subjects that makes such an act even possible? As Jonathan Flatley explains, not all melancholias are depressing or disengaging; some forms result in great insight and political action as they enable individual subjects to care for themselves and others in grief. Although melancholics are widely known Foucault defined as early as 1980 what he meant by “alethurgic.” See his lectures under the title “On the Government of the Living” (January 23 and 30, 1980). 40 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 41 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 179. 42 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 184. 43 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 272. 44 Holger Steinmann explores the connection between citation and the planet Saturn in Die Ringe des Saturn. Holger Steinmann, “Zitatruinen unterm Hunddsstern: W.G. Sebalds Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Philologie,” in W.G. Sebald: Politische Archäologie und melancholische Bastelei, eds by Michael Niehaus and Claudia Öhlschläger (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006), 145–56. 39

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for feelings of guilt and shame, suicidal thoughts, hopelessness, sleeplessness, and self-loathing, their psycho-affective experiences are far more complicated than this short list of depressions. For instance, Benjamin does not conceive of melancholia as dwelling on loss, inaction, fatalism, and complacency. For him, it connotes a certain “clinging to things from the past,” which heightens “interest and action in the present world,” and the outcome of this multitemporal being-in-the-world is “a historical-allegorical insight” into modernity.45 Born under the sign of Saturn, modern melancholics associate their own suffering with the lives of others in a critical response to war, revolution, exile, trauma, discrimination, xenophobia and their “aesthetic technology,” which relates individual suffering to political crises elsewhere, and gives rise to a community of melancholy subjects.46 It is true that nearly a century separates the authors in Flatley’s study—Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Andrei Platonov—from Sebald, but what they have in common, I argue, is the militant-melancholy critique of “specific experiences of modernization,” including “urbanization, industrialization, colonization and imperialism, modern warfare, the invention of ‘race,’ the advent of the modern commodity and mass culture, the emergence of modern discourses of gender and sexuality, and the pathologization of homosexuality.”47 Their work commonly explores the meaning of caring for oneself and others in a shared, broken world where traumatic events resonate across time and space as painful memories or vanishing stories to highlight locally particular variations of a globalizing modernity. The narrator obviously forms the center of this imagined militant-melancholy community, but each figure contributes to exposing these relations in distinct ways. As melancholia is historicized in various episodes of the novel, the narrator forms an army of truth-telling subjects whose political struggle with different sorts of loss, violence, and suffering is informative of the tragically unfolding present. This approach to the world community becomes apparent in the narrator’s critical inquiry into the former colonial town of Lowestoft and the much forgotten story of Casement’s anticolonial resistance at the turn of the last century. A hundred years ago, the narrator writes, the town of Lowestoft along the North Sea coast of England was famous for its busy trade and continuous traffic. It was the place where exciting, hugely anticipated adventures began for thousands of European colonizers and seamen. Symbolic of imperial power and civilizational grandeur, the town radiated with “alles durchwaltenden Vernunft” [all-pervasive reason].48 In 1992, though, the narrator saw only sad traces of past colonial ambitions. Only pitiful, ghostly remnants remained of that colonial fantasy, as Lowestoft looked like a “dead” town inhabited by “mute” citizens.49 Ich war vor fünfzehn Jahren vielleicht zum letztenmal in Lowestoft gewesen, an einem Junitag mit zwei Kindern am Strand, und ich bildete mir ein, mich zu Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 65. 46 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 4. 47 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 3–4. 48 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 62. 49 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 43, 41. 45



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erinnern an einen zwar etwas zurückgebliebenen, aber ansonsten sehr freundlichen Ort. Unbegreiflich schien es mir darum jetzt, als ich nach Lowestoft hineinging, wie es in einer verhältnismäßig so kurzen Zeit so weit hatte herunterkommen können.50 The last time I had been in Lowestoft was perhaps 15 years ago, on a June day with two children on the beach, and I thought I remembered a town that had somewhat become something of a backwater but was otherwise a very pleasant place. So now, as I walked into Lowestoft, it seemed incomprehensible to me that in such a relatively short period of time it could have run down thus far.

According to the narrator, the town was suffering from a postcolonial guilt, which was to say, from the greed and the great wealth at the cost of distant, impoverished communities. This historical legacy gave the narrator a certain melancholy pleasure at the same time as he was perplexed.51 Illustrative of Benjamin’s dictum that “a document of civilization” was at the same time “a document of barbarism,” the town’s modern history made sense to him as an absurdity of its own colonial making.52 A real “Tragikomödie” [tragicomedy], as Joseph Conrad had noticed in a letter to his aunt at the turn of the last century. 53 The narrator refers to this comment in conjunction with his personal recollection. If colonialism as a self-damning crime against humanity is directly responsible for the uncanny silence and the historical decline in postcolonial Lowestoft, the narrator recognizes the same effects in Brussels, the capital of King Leopold’s colonial empire. Echoing once again Conrad’s critical account of the imperial center, he points out how desires for colonial power have manifested themselves in widespread psychosomatic maladies after so many years. He observes with astonishment that there are “mehr Bucklige und Irre” [more hunchbacks and madmen] than anywhere else in the world, and that the reason for this social phenomenon is the “dunkle kongolesische Geheimnis” [dark Congolese secret] that has stricken Belgians since the beginning of their colonial endeavor.54 Lowestoft and Brussels are both palimpsest spaces, then, where the past and the present overlap with each other in ghostly ways, but the narrator notes that those lessons have been lost because people act “als sei in ihren Köpfen alles ausradiert worden” [as if everything had been erased from their minds].55 Ignorant of colonial Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 56. Against the backdrop of Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal reading,” Todd Presner has argued in slightly different terms that Sebald’s work presents a dialectical relationship between progress and ruin. Despite initial signs of cultural advancement, Sebald figures buildings and monuments as material objects with seeds of their own decline. Todd Presner, “Hegel’s Philosophy of World History via Sebald’s Imaginary of Ruins: A Contrapuntal Critique of the ‘New Space’ of Modernity,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 193–211. 52 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1986), 682. 53 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 142. 54 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 149. 55 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 54. 50 51

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aftermaths in their own lives, they do not see why they continuously face disorientation, degeneracy, and malady. The narrator infers from this critical observation that history is really a “dreidimensionale” [three-dimensional] construct.56 It lies beneath the “kalten Staub der verflossenen Zeit” [cold dust of elapsed time] as much as archival documents illuminate the past, so the problem of Geschichte needs to be addressed in the double sense of narrative and history.57 That is, cross-temporal, international, and uncanny connections in modern history only make sense in narration. The narrator goes on to revisit this issue with Casement’s tragic story. The son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, Casement exercised a great influence on Conrad with his famous reports on exploitation, execution, and maiming in the Belgian Congo. As the British consul in Boma, he witnessed these abuses on-site and protested against European colonial practices more generally. Consequently, the narrator writes, King Leopold used his personal influence on the British government to promote Casement to a higher official status, all the while relegating him to another part of the world where he would not be heard: South America. Yet, here too, Casement discovered similar horrific crimes against the indigenous peoples of Peru, Columbia, and Brazil, and his second report on behalf of the “Rechtlosen und Verfolgten” [the disenfranchised and the persecuted] generated new international conflicts for the Belgian king.58 Despite further promotion in rank, Casement refused to join his fellow government officials in authorizing exploitative colonial policies. In fact, driven by a strong commitment to interrogating “die Natur und [den] Ursprung dieser Macht” [the nature and the origin of this power], he claimed his Irish roots and fought for national independence from British rule until his public execution for treason.59 According to the narrator, such an ethical transformation was possible because of Casement’s melancholy “Homosexualität” [queerness].60 The humble servant of the British Empire dared to speak out against the “imperialistischen Mentalität” [imperialist mentality] because his own suffering as a gay Irishman resonated with that of colonial subjects in Africa and Latin America.61 As common experiences of racial discrimination, cultural effacement, and sexual violence lay the foundation for his transformation into a truth-telling revolutionary subject, he exposed what others considered to be civilizational progress as exactly the opposite, namely a modern malaise on a global scale. As I have mentioned before, the narrator takes a central place in this network of truth-telling, militant-melancholy subjects. He is depressed by the many traces Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 151. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 151. Scholars have described this inherently limited accessibility to history as something that Sebald’s narrators try to overcome with obsessive research, but to no avail. See Anne Fuchs, “‘Phantomspuren’: Zu W.G. Sebalds Poetik der Erinnerung in Austerlitz,” German Life and Letters 56.3 (Jul. 2003), 282; Thomas Kastura, “Geheimnisvolle Fähigkeit zur Transmigration: W.G. Sebalds interkulturelle Wallfahrten in die Leere,” Arcadia 31.1–2 (Nov. 2009), 203. 58 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 156. 59 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 156. 60 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 162. 61 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 156. 56 57



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of desolation, death, and suffering in Suffolk, but he does not stop there. In variously related, imaginative steps, he constructs a world republic of subjects whose individual resistance against oppressive structures of politics and society illuminates the “Schatten der Zerstörung” [shadow of destruction].62 Unable to let go of what the modern world has lost and still committed to envisioning his local environment within a global context, he forms a republic of militant melancholics whose international and non-sequential perspectives recover cultural, historical, and psychosomatic entanglements between past crimes and present crises. At this point, I want to highlight Barbara Hui’s digital mapping of historical networks in The Rings of Saturn. Drawing upon Doreen Massey’s reconception of space as a dynamic social, historical, and political framework, Hui teases out how Sebald’s narrator combines the recollection of a foot journey in the summer of 1992 along the east coast of England with a complex set of narratives that eventually covers many parts of the world.63 The past is past, but the narrator makes sense of the broken world by remembering those who have cared for themselves and others in a variety of knowledge-producing, truth-telling ways. Flatley explains in his study of melancholia that this remedial process does not rebuild the world in the image of an ideal past; instead, it prepares the existing order of persons and things for a revitalizing transformation in sensibility. It connects local particulars in mutually corresponding, worldly concerns for peace and justice. Here is how Flatley puts it: In the melancholic state, the world becomes a set of objects with no necessary function or meaning, the object world has been emptied of significance, and in this sense it has also been prepared for allegorical transformation.64

Since history and truth are not fully accessible in any epistemological paradigm, literary imagination works to reconsider a distant local particular in relation to what is happening here and now. The mechanism by which this “allegorical transformation” occurs creates a multilayered constellation of past, present, and future and it does so by relating local histories to distant time-spaces and by revaluing historically contingent experiences of death and suffering as universally abominable conditions of modernity. The same sort of politically activating melancholia held for Parkinson and Dakyns, two friends who, the narrator remembers, were deeply compassionate and in their own ways suffering. The former was known for his frugality in a world where material consumerism determined a person’s value, while the latter was trying to take care of herself and others with her academic work. In einer Zeit, wo die meisten Leute zu ihrer Selbsterhaltung in einem fort einkaufen müssen, ist Michael praktisch überhaupt nie zum Einkaufen gegangen. Jahraus, jahrein trug er, seit ich ihn kannte, abwechslungsweise eine dunkelblaue Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 35. For more information about her work, see Hui, “Mapping Historical Networks in Die Ringe des Saturn.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, edited by Markus Zisselsberger (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 277–98. 64 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 37. 62 63

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und eine rostfarbene Jacke, und wenn die Ärmel abgestoßen oder die Ellbogen durchgewetzt waren, hat er selber zu Nadel und Faden gegriffen und einen Lederbesatz aufgenäht. Ja, sogar die Kragen an seinen Hemden soll er gewendet haben.65 In an era where most people must continuously buy things for self-preservation, Michael practically never ever went shopping. Year in, year out, he wore, ever since I had known him, his attire alternately between one dark blue and one rustcolored jacket, and when the sleeves were frayed or the elbows worn out, he took up needle and thread himself and sewed on a leather trimming. In fact, people say that he even reversed his shirt collars.

Similar to Foucault’s Cynics, Parkinson criticized the dominant consumer society by refusing to abide by predominant cultural norms. Dakyns was a scrupulous academic who had a similar attitude toward the world, but her act of resistance took shape in a radically different “Ordnung” [order] via Flaubert’s writing.66 Constitutive of a parallel “Papieruniversum” [paper universe], her scholarship placed disorderly things in distinct locations so that they related to each other in accordance with different principles of being.67 Consequently, both Parkinson and Dakyns imagined the world as a potentially different place. To search for more profound, invisible connections between persons and events, they emptied the visible world of its superficial meaning before pursuing an “allegorical awakening” whereby in their lives and the lives of others they exercised new possibilities for knowledge production and well-being.68 The novel makes clear that the narrator’s retrospective concern about Parkinson, Dakyns, and others goes hand in hand with a deeply personal effort to recover from various illnesses and this double concern crosses cultural, national, and historical boundaries to construct a community of militant melancholics who do not necessarily know each other in person, but line up in the narrator’s multiperspectival rings of Saturn. For example, he follows the few traces of Thomas Brown’s displaced skull to arrive at the dissection of a strangled thief named Aris Kindt on January 16, 1632. As the narrator discovers across time and space, Brown was a melancholy doctor and scientist who more likely than not gave witness to Nicolaes Tulp’s much publicized dissection of Kindt in Amsterdam, a gruesome spectacle that Rembrandt would later depict in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The narrator places a photographic reproduction of this painting in the novel and concludes that the painter probably wanted to criticize the scientific procedure as a kind of postmortem humiliation of the delinquent’s flesh. By directing the spectators’ gaze not in favor of the Gild of Surgeons, but with empathy for the victim of state power, Rembrandt offered a visual critique of biopower “in full view of everyone.”69 Again, a member of the narrator’s community of melancholy-militant parrhesiasts. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 14. Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 19. 67 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 17, 18. 68 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 38. 69 Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 272. 65 66



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Reading the novel as a literary reflection on such saturnine subjects clarifies what Peter Fritzsche summarizes as the “tension in Sebald’s work between nature and history, between the generic and the particular, between catastrophe and the Holocaust, between the dispersed evidence of history and the specific disasters of the twentieth century.”70 With this lengthy enumeration, Fritzsche claims that the Holocaust provides Sebald’s narrator with a poignant image by which other man-made disasters come into view and that this dialectical approach to modern history upsets “the appropriation of any single method of representation.”71 Another way of phrasing this issue would be as follows: Die Ringe des Saturn probes the various possibilities and tensions of recovering, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words, “the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject.”72 Her postcolonial concern with the ambivalent and disjunctive positionality of Western writers refers to the paradox of speaking for silenced subject-objects in the colony as a reinscription or as a rehearsal of colonialist imperatives of cultural erasure, economic exploitation, and political domination. I believe that Sebald’s narrator goes to great pains—literally and metaphorically—not to document calamities in modern history from such injurious perspectives. His is a cross-referential resonance between colonial oppression, the Holocaust, and modern society, conjoined with a keen examination of the underlying reasons for telling the truth about past crimes and present calamities.

The potential for telling the truth After the detour through melancholia as a potentially productive illness and through militancy as a personal commitment to a public critique of the world, let us return to the purported photograph of Bergen Belsen. I argue that this textual moment is not symptomatic of an inadequate narrative strategy for articulating the horror of Nazi concentration camps; instead, it is a point of departure for translating—when one is at risk of being too general about each individual case—between the colonial past, the Holocaust, and modern society. It leads us to a unique position to trace multilayered, transhistorical perspectives of trauma, loss, and suffering. To put it differently, there are two obvious reasons why the narrator might have decided not to discuss the Nazi horrors explicitly. First, the Holocaust is a topic that has been subject to overdetermination in Western popular cultures. It is often viewed—not without controversy—as a measure of genocidal events, while its universalism has transmogrified into a problematically free-floating metaphor of evil.73 In Peter Fritzsche, “W. G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories,” in W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 292. Fritzsche, “W. G. Sebald’s Twentieth-Century Histories,” 292. 72 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 274. 73 There are several scholarly works that explore this controversy, but the one that has had the greatest impact due to its rigorous critique of the U.S. and the U.N. is Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 70

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light of these moral, historical, and political challenges, the narrator’s singular silence presents itself less as a sign of individual weakness than as an attempt to complicate what is known about the Holocaust in the age of globalization. Second, the narrator might want to withhold information about the picture in response to Le Strange’s irreducible silence; for to speculate and construct a story to fill in this gap would violate his privacy. In sum, these are plausible explanations, which focus on the narrator’s more or less intimate relationship with Le Strange. However, Sebald’s aesthetic practice solicits a broader collective perspective of history at the cusp of being remembered and forever lost. Again, at stake here is not the possibility of appropriating the Holocaust as a measure of mass violence, but the linkage of subaltern histories as a meaningful ethic for the living in the age of globalization. Cognizant of the need to redefine the nature of remembrance in late capitalism, Sebald imagines a fellowship of political subjects whose individual struggle against war, exploitation, and suffering resonates across time and space in terms of truth-telling. To do so in the German language after a foot journey in the county of Suffolk raises critical questions not only about Nussbaum’s neatly concentric conception of world citizenship, but also about any strict demarcation of German literature itself. It sheds light on the worldhistorical context of German literature, just as it locates the narrator in locally attuned, globally expansive exercises of national citizenship. By remembering a community of international, transhistorical, and truth-telling subjects who wrestle with pain, the narrator also hints at the possibility of engendering a different, more caring world. This means that readers cannot seek refuge in moral outrage by which only the local or the immediate is deemed relevant; instead, they need to work through the narrator’s community of militant melancholics whose stories amount to disjunctive conceptions of world citizenship. When Sontag describes Sebald as “a militant elegist,” she operates on the shaky assumption that what is to be remembered in his writing is a relatively straightforward matter of concern, but nothing could be further from the truth. Since readers are constantly faced with the challenging task of figuring out what it is that they need to remember and how, there has to be a different approach to the intersection between militantism and melancholia in Die Ringe des Saturn. Sontag also presumes that totalitarianisms are neatly compartmentalized as separate cultural archives, but the novel presents a rigorously hermeneutic space where distinct approaches to historical trauma are subverted by the narrator’s uncanny community of militant melancholics. Under such circumstances, the narrative has less to do with an insistence on remembering colonialism and Nazism from a particular perspective than it does with a translational point of entry into modern calamities. This means that Die Ringe des Saturn is a militant book in the sense that the melancholy narrative requires readers to translate between multiple retrospections of totalitarianism. The result is a fugue of international voices, a mosaic of mutually resonating claims to truth across cultural, historical, and national boundaries. The novel constitutes an allegory of global authorship whereby individual signatures come together in Sebald’s fictional histori-ography. Remember the narrator’s inclusion in the novel of a photocopy of Roger Casement’s signature on April 14,



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1916, exactly 29 years before Le Strange’s arrival in Bergen Belsen. The narrator also states later in the narrative that it is coming to an end on April 13, 1995. Writing WL from the German base is grounded in such a constellation of truth-telling practices. German literature is world literature in this case.74

I would like to thank Thomas Beebee and Patrick McConeghy for their insightful comments on a previous draft of this essay.

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Schnittmengen/Intersections

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From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse Thomas O. Beebee Among the variety of criteria that distinguish the methodologies for approaching comparative vs. world literature, the necessity of materialist approaches suggests itself as being far more crucial to the latter. By “materialist” I mean simply the investigation of how literature is produced, distributed, and institutionalized as a material force in the world. In other words, those seeking to understand WL should take Pascale Casanova’s image of the “world republic of letters” seriously; we should investigate the functioning of the institutions that comprise this diffuse, distributed, and operationally secretive republic.1 Indeed, a major part of the scholarly study of WL involves the understanding of WL’s processes and institutions. These institutions (French, “instances”), include publishing regimes, university syllabi and anthologies, national promotions of translation, and the machinations of prize committees, among other things. All of these, since Casanova’s modeling of WL relies strongly on the schemata of Pierre Bourdieu, we could refer to as the various “instances de consécration” (consecrating institutions) of WL. The study of WL is faced with a fundamental paradox: material institutions are used to consecrate literary works and their authors, but the effect of such consecration is to make literature appear timeless, ethereal, and inevitable, thus obscuring the effect of those material institutions on the process. Denis Benoît explains: “When applied to literature […] consecration refers to the action of assigning a text or author to the sacrality of literariness [la chose littéraire], and it thus connects to the process of attributing aesthetic value to these. The idea of transsubstantiation […] designates the passage from print into literature, from the book to the work, from a material good, manufactured and commodified, into a symbolic good. This process of transformation (from the material to the spiritual, from the economic to the symbolic, from the profane to the sacred) always seems somewhat mysterious.”2 To put it another way, scholars should systematically attempt to “map” WL, and attempt the kind of polysystems analysis undertaken most notably by Itamar Even-Zohar. See: Mads Rosenthal Thomsen, Mapping World Literature; and Itamar Even-Zohar, ed., Polysystem Studies, special issue of Poetics Today 11.1 (1990). 2 Benoît Denis, “La consécration,” COnTEXTES 7 (2010), June 3, 2010, availbale at http://contextes. revues.org/4639 (accessed 4 June 2013). All translations from French and German in this article are by the author, unless otherwise noted. 1

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The Nobel Prize for Literary Achievement (hereinafter NPL) has become perhaps the best-known of such consecrating institutions in WL, one that is constantly monitored for its ability to elevate a national literature to world status by awarding the prize to an author of a hitherto neglected or disadvantage nation or language. Literary prizes in general are ripe for both comparative and system-theory analysis, while the contingency and scalar disproportion behind the prominence of the NPL have been too infrequently remarked on. That is, the ability of a regional perspective on WL—in this case that of the Swedish Academy—to attract global interest is analogous to the elevation of regionalist literature onto the stage of WL in the work of William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, and other authors. Andrea Geier expresses this well: Although the honoree has in fact only been admitted to the specific author-canon of the [Swedish] Academy group, a claim to “world-literature” status is implicit in the awarding of the highest and financially most advantageous distinction for international literature. The critical reaction [to a particular recipient of the Nobel] therefore allows itself to be understood as a test of the author’s claim to canonicity [Kanonfähigkeit].3

The term “Kanonfähigkeit,” which is not completely adequately translated by “canonicity,” is a new formation on the well-known “Salonfähigkeit,” a term indicating an individual’s capacity for taking part in the sophisticated social and literary communications typical of a salon. While the adjective “fähig” would seem to indicate personal capacity, the creation and determination of this capacity is in fact social, not individual. This social determination of value would be all the more true of Kanonfähigkeit. Geier’s view, with which I agree, is that the NPL is not canonization per se, but rather a test of canonizability for an author’s work. The announcement of the award, which at present creates an immediate media echo worldwide, thus constitutes a kind of test-run for consecration, which will then be weighed in both the short and the long term by other institutional actors in WL, e.g. by public intellectuals, professional critics, publishers, and teachers of literature. In essence and over time, the judgment of the correctness of the award becomes either a “hit” or a “miss,” conforming to Niklas Luhmann’s idea of the binary coding of modern societal sub-systems.4 Obvious reasons for the overweening prestige of the Nobel include its relatively early start, its basis in Europe, the size of the award, and the fact that the prize for literature is coordinated with a series of other subject areas (Peace, Economic Sciences, Medicine or Physiology, Chemistry, and Physics) which the public regards as significant. To review some basic facts, these prizes were established by the testament of Alfred Nobel (1833–96), a Swedish chemist and armaments manufacturer, who endowed the prizes with the greater part of his vast fortune. This endowment Andrea Geier, “Das ist doch keinen Nobelpreis wert! Über literarische Wertung und Kanonisierung am Beispiel der Nobelpresiverleihung an Elfriede Jelinek im Jahr 2004,” Der Deutschunterricht 58.1 (2006), 92. 4 For an overview of binary distinction in Luhmann’s sociology, see Christian Borch, Niklas Luhmann (New York: Routledge, 2011). 3



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has managed to grow through the years, allowing the prize a continuity that has contributed to its prestige. Nobel also named the institutions that would be responsible for determining the various prizes, with the Svenska Akademien handling the one for literature. Part of the contingency of the prize derives precisely from the small number of categories into which Nobel divided the universe of rational and ideal human efforts: for example, why shouldn’t there be a prize for History or Philosophy? This may help explain why some of the awards in Literature have in fact gone to historians and philosophers. We might also imagine a situation in which Alfred Nobel had been a Frenchman rather than a Swede, or a citizen of the Americas. No doubt the list of prizewinners would look rather different, and the interaction of the NPL with other institutions of the world republic of letters would have been different as well. Perhaps the most significant “possible world” of the NPL would involve Nobel’s testament mandating the convening of a prize committee consisting of world-renowned scholars and practitioners of literature—thus making membership on the prize committee itself a kind of prize or reward for truly significant literary work, as opposed to what it is now, an ex-officio task derived from membership in an academy. If the diversity of national membership of the award committee were to mirror the ambitions of the prize itself to recognize literary achievement on a global scale, then the list of NPL laureates might more closely conform to the list of authors found in anthologies of WL. There seem to be two polar reactions to the Nobel Prize: 1) that of loyal acceptance and instrumentalization of the Swedes’ choices, as in for example the creation of Nobel prizewinner book series or college courses (my own university, Penn State, has just such a course); or 2) the “demystifying” approach that denies any relation between the Academy’s choices and reality. Eckhard Henscheid has delivered a particularly caustic and amusing version of the latter, where he reduces the “Treffer” (correct guesses) of the Academy to a “few mostly accidental hits” (ein paar halbe Zufallstreffer).5 As of 2013, 13 German-language authors had won a NPL, tied with French and just ahead of Spanish, with English the big winner in linguistic terms. German’s placement becomes more remarkable when we consider that unlike the other three languages just mentioned, it is not a world language that has left behind hosts of writers in a string of former colonies. The long list of verifiably great German authors who have gone prizeless (e.g., Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Broch, Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Christa Wolf) certainly takes on more weight when compared with the flimsiness of some academy choices. Henscheid characterizes the two forgotten Nobel authors whom I consider in this essay as follows: Eucken is a “rightfully completely forgotten pseudo-philosopher and world-warmonger, and a rather cynical exploiter of national antagonisms” [zu Recht restlos vergessene Philosophiesimulant und Weltkriegshetzer und ziemlich schnöde Bellizismusnutzniesser]; while Paul Heyse’s greatest poetic achievement was Eckhard Henscheid, “Der Literaturnobelpreis und seine Leute. Oder: 100 Jahre Narrentreiben,” Neue Rundschau 112.2 (2001), 143–6 at 144; cf. also George Steiner, “The Scandal of the Nobel Prize,” New York Times, September 30, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 7: 1+.

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his furthering of the career of Italo Svevo.6 Beyond the somewhat exaggerated account of the quirks in some Academy choices in Henscheid’s piece, one regrets his failure to take a broader viewpoint by considering the absurdities produced by the NPL from the standpoint that all of our judgments about literary value are a result of contingent processes. Both synchronic (e.g., across cultures) and diachronic (e.g., the rise and fall of literary reputations within a national literature) furnish empirical demonstrations of this fact. I feel that it is more in line with the spirit of literary study to consider the NPL a material “fact” of WL, to analyze, to study that fact from a variety of angles, and then to use that fact to say something of interest about WL as a process of institutional consecration. This contingency that I have presented synchronically can in fact be studied in its diachronic aspects: in different epochs from 1901 to the present, the Swedish Academy has approached the judging of the prize in different ways, with different models of the ideal writer, and hence with different results according to the metric of identifying lasting achievement. Nobel’s will states specifically that the NPL is to go to a writer who has produced “det utmärktaste i idealisk rigtning” (the most excellent [works] in the direction of idealism), which in the early years of the prize was interepreted very literally, as demarcating writers of literary idealism. In its early years, then, the prize was dominated by German and French authors, some of whom are still being read today (e.g., Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann). How should one evaluate, however, those German authors who won the prize but who are not remembered? What does the forgetting of such authors say about the processes of WL, and about the role of German literature within those processes? Rudolf C. Eucken (1846– 1926), who won in 1908, and Paul Heyse (1830–1914), who won in 1910, furnish two case studies of NPL recipients who have failed to maintain a readership, or even a prominent place in philosophical or literary history. Like Tolstoy’s famous unhappy family, forgotten writers are more revealing of literary and social history than are the immortals, and these cases of an apparently undeserved NPL may be more revealing than are the cases of lasting fame. (Logically, this essay should also have included the historian Theodor Mommsen, who was awarded the prize in 1902, and possibly also the Swiss-German writer Carl Spitteler, who received the NPL in 1919. These awards, too, would appear to represent further “Fehlleistungen” of the Swedish Academy. Considerations of space caused me to focus on just two German recipients rather than three or four; more importantly, however, Mommsen arguably has enjoyed more of an afterlife than either Eucken or Heyse. His Römische Geschichte, which was the masterpiece for which he won the prize, has stood the test of time and is still cited.) It is easy to see why this would be so: in the case where the NPL matches up correctly with the lasting monumentality of a writer, as in the case of Mann, the perceived justness of the laureation, as it has solidified itself over time, obscures the contingency of the award at the time it was made. Thus, we may feel that Mann deserved a NPL, but not necessarily for Buddenbrooks, though this in fact is the work that most influenced the Academy. From this perspective, the choice of Mann does not look terribly different from the Loc. cit.

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choice of Heyse, since in each case the Academy members were indulging in nostalgia for prose fiction that had influenced them during their formative years. Another diachronic aspect of contingency concerns the comings and goings of Academy members, and the relative influence that a strong personality can exert. As Kjell Espmark implies in his “tell-all” story of the criteria behind NPL selection, the first decade of awards under the leadership of Carl David af Wirsén contains few truly deserving names, owing to Wirsén’s overly literal reading of the “ideal direction” indicated in the will of Alfred Nobel. In Wirsén’s reading of Nobel’s intentions, the prize could not merely be awarded for literary talent: the author’s works were also to display, in the words of the 1905 report of the prize committee, “a true nobility not simply of presentation but of conception and of philosophy of life.” Those who knew enough of Nobel’s life to guess at the ideal author he had in mind may have imagined a twentieth-century Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose drama The Cenci was the model for Nobel’s own attempt at tragedy, Nemesis, as the paradigm to be followed. In essence, Wirsén was using the NPL to counter prominent trends in literature of the fin de siècle, such as Naturalism and Decadence—thus no prize for Henrik Ibsen, Georg Brandes, Herbert Spencer, or (God forbid!) August Strindberg, for whose work Alfred Nobel had a personal loathing. Hence, while the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne now seems superior to anything produced by laureates in the NPL’s first decade, the questionable morality of Swinburne’s early phase of writing shut him out from the NPL forever. In 1908, the committee split between Swinburne and Selma Lagerlöf, allowing the compromise candidate Rudolf Eucken to win. And in the case of Heyse, “idealistic realism […] favored the plastic rendition of a nature that in the final analysis was conceived as spirit; on the one hand it abhorred abstraction and symbolizing, and on the other hand it was remote from ‘every naturalistic, photographic depiction of low, ugly reality,’ as we find the matter expressed in the highly appreciative evaluation of Paul Heyse in 1910.”7 Eucken won as the least-worst choice, then, while Heyse was truly admired by the committee, once its interest had been piqued by the celebration of Heyse’s eightieth birthday. Let us now learn more about these authors and their pathways to the prize and to subsequent reputational oblivion, resulting in what I am calling negative monumentality. To understand negative monumentality, think of a monument or statue whose purpose is to induce forgetfulness of an individual or event. In fact, of course, every type of remembering involves a forgetting to create a background against which the memorable stands forth. Beyond that, however, the receipt of the NPL can lead to negative reactions in a kind of compensatory dynamic, frequently most virulent within the national culture of the writer; on the other hand, authors consecrated by other institutions of WL but not awarded the NPL enter the negative list of those overlooked or disadvantaged by the process.8

Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria Behind the Choices, trans. Robin Fulton and Kjell Espmark (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 14. My thinking on monumentality is inspired in part by a dissertation by Renae Mitchell, “Monuments of Culture and the Cult of the Monument,” completed at The Pennsylvania State University in 2013.

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Rudolf Eucken Despite being one of the very few philosophers to have won a NPL, Eucken today enjoys no entry in, for example, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Instead, we find an entry for his arch-rival and colleague at Jena University, the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. The reason for Haeckel’s ultimate triumph over his rival seems clear: scientific impacts on our notions of what it means to be human have continued, whereas idealism has not. Furthermore, if one were to construct a genealogy of German philosophy during the years that Eucken wrote, we would find Gottlob Frege, Paul Natorp, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and perhaps Hermann Cohen, but not Eucken. Few falls from philosophical prominence have been more dramatic, then, than Eucken’s—though as we shall see, to speak of Eucken as philosophically prominent is to misstate the case somewhat, since nearly all of his work was aimed at a general readership rather than a professional one. One way of characterizing Eucken’s project is as the combating of monism, by which term Uwe Dathe takes him to mean in general “the striving after a single philosophical principle but which in Eucken’s historical moment meant principally Charles Darwin, his disciple Haeckel, and the linguist August Schleicher.”9 By 1976, the halfcentenary of Eucken’s death, Johann Mauthner could write that “Antimaterialism, which still raises its timid voice from time to time, has no chance at all today” [Der Antimaterialismus, da und dort noch schüchtern aufklingend, hat heute keine Chance mehr.]10 The breadth of appeal sought by Eucken implied the translation of his work into a number of languages. The existence of an author’s work in languages beyond that of its composition is of course an important factor in its world “Kanonfähigkeit,” as is of course also the quality of translation. The first of Eucken’s books to be translated into English was The Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought Critically and Historically Considered, published by Appleton in New York in 1880. This tome was a history of philosophical thought, with little or no polemical agenda; it preceded Eucken’s more central works, for example Die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und That der Menschheit of 1888 [The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Action of Humanity], and the Lebensaunschauungen der grossen Denker [Views of Life by the Great Thinkers] of 1890. In contrast, the first French translation of a book by Eucken was De l’idée de loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contemporaines, which appeared only in 1901. This is the same date as the first book translation into Swedish, but it is perhaps of interest for the NPL that one of Eucken’s most popular books, Grundlinien einer neuen Lebensanschauung [Outline of a New Life-World], appeared in Swedish as Grundlinjer till en ny lifsåskådning in 1907, the same year as its

Uwe Dathe, “Rudolf Eucken—ein Gegner des Monismus und Freund des Monisten,” in Monismus um 1900. Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung, ed. Paul Ziche (Berlin: VWB, 2000), 43. Johann Mauthner, “Kosmischer und menschlicher Geist. Vor 50 Jahren starb der Philosoph Rudolf Eucken,” Badische Neueste Nachrichten 213, September 14, 1976: 10.

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original publication in German. His work was by this time being read and celebrated in Finland, Holland, France, Sweden, Bulgaria, England, the USA, China, and Japan. Since Eucken did aim at world popularity, let us start with a couple of n-grams to get a rough idea of the reception history of Eucken’s work, at least insofar as this can be tracked in book publication. An n-gram is simply a graph of the percentage of books in which (in this case) a name occurs. (The books, obviously, must have been scanned in order to enter the database.)11 Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of citations/ mentions of Eucken in English-language books published from 1900 to 2000. We see a spike around the time of the awarding of the NPL, followed by a sharp decline following the outbreak of the First World War, the reason for which will be made clear below. The German graph (Figure 2) does not look radically different in shape, though the percentage of books citing Eucken is approximately four times that of those in English at any one time. In other words, Eucken had a much larger share of the citations in German books than he did in English ones. There was also a sharp decline in Eucken’s German readership during the First World War (perhaps due to fewer German books reaching US libraries), but then a plateau through the era of the Weimar Republic, and an interesting though minor resurgence in the last decade of the twentieth century—as documented by Jens Aden in a 1989 article for the Tageszeitung.12 Some of his German books kept selling significant numbers of copies into the 1950s, for example Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker.13 The title is typical for Eucken in its erasure of his own philosophical viewpoint, whose originality was always hard to determine. His work consisted mostly in summarizing and contrasting previously established philosophical viewpoints, manipulating these so as to emphasize the history of philosophical idealism and to demonstrate that a purely naturalistic approach to life was untenable. He thus managed to win the NPL without displaying either a true literary style or an original idea. This rough tracking of Eucken’s popularity is relevant to his philosophical project, which was designed to reach as many lay people in as many parts of the world as possible. In other words, Eucken’s was a pragmatic or “self-help” philosophy that attempted to counter the modern encroachments of science (e.g., of Darwinism) into spiritual and ideal notions of what it means to be human. Like Nietzsche, whom he knew and worked with in Basel, Eucken did not aim his mature writings at his fellow philosophers, but at a broader reading public. Significantly, Edwin E. Slosson included him as one of the “six major prophets” of modernity in his book of that title, published in 1917 when Eucken’s popularity in Britain and the US had declined precipitously owing to his propagandistic writings and speeches that attempted to counter the There are, obviously, a number of caveats regarding the accuracy of n-grams in determining, in this case, literary reputation: periodical literature is not included, and the database of books is only a small percentage of all books ever printed. Nevertheless, n-grams visualize statistical information in a new way, and provide a useful supplement to qualitative analysis, as I hope to use them here. 12 Jens Aden, “Capra der Jahrhundertwende,” Die Tageszeitung, January 21, 1989: 20. 13 Translated as The Problem of Human Life, trans. Williston S. Hough and W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Scribner’s, 1910). 11

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Figure 2   Appearance of the name “Rudolf Eucken” in German-language books, 1900–2000

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Figure 1   Appearance of the name “Rudolf Eucken” in English-language books, 1900–2000



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Allies’ condemnation of Germany as the cause of the war. Slosson’s title-page sports a picture of George Bernard Shaw, who would thus be the senior major prophet. (The other four were G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, John Dewey, and Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller.) In his chapter on Eucken, Slosson gives an eyewitness account of an Eucken lecture on morality at Jena that, in aim and performative aspect, went far beyond the delivery of technical material for a profession. Slosson remarks on the Nobel Prize in general, but especially on its usefulness for Eucken: The Nobel prizes have failed to carry out the intention of their founder, which was to place $100,000 or so immediately into the hands of a man who had made a signal contribution to science, literature, or peace. […] If they have not discovered original genius, they have at least pointed it out to the world at large. […] The award of the prize did not, of course, add to [Eucken’s] reputation in philosophical circles, but Eucken does not believe that the influence of a philosopher should be confined to philosophical circles. […] He has a message which he believes of vital importance to his contemporaries, so it cannot be a matter of indifference to him that he is, in his later years, gaining a wider audience, that his works are the most widely current philosophical writings of the present day in Germany, and are being extensively translated into other languages.14

The original intention of Nobel was that the NPL function as the MacArthur Awards do today—more or less—to recognize and further relatively unestablished talent. The task of rewarding hitherto underrecognized literary talent proved to be impossible to carry out from year to year, and the NPL became instead mostly a tribute to those of eminent WL status. The message referred to by Slosson was summarized neatly in Eucken’s Nobel acceptance speech, “Naturalism or Idealism?” In this relatively brief address—certainly shorter than one of his Jena lectures— Eucken seeks to demonstrate the dialectical dependence of the two concepts on each other. The old, Christian idealism that saw nature as a thought of God has given way principally during the nineteenth century to a scientific understanding of nature that threatens to engulf the human within mere factuality and appearance, and to make humans simply another type of natural body governed in the end by natural laws. But, paradoxically, “we may say that naturalism with its emphasis on nature is refuted nowhere with more cogency than in modern science as it transformed nature into an intellectual conception. The more we recognize the intellectual achievement and inner structure of modern science, the clearer becomes the distance from naturalism. […] Naturalism makes the mistake of ascribing to nature itself the changes the [human] mind effected in it.”15 Eucken calls explicitly for a renewed effort to make idealism a lasting value in the struggle against reduction of the human to oneness with nature. Given the constraints of the NPL, he does not emphasize the role of philosophy in that effort. Instead, he gestures towards Edwin E. Slosson, Six Major Prophets (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1917; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries), 278–9. Rudolf Eucken, “Naturalism or Idealism?” (1908), available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/literature/laureates/1908/eucken-lecture.html (accessed May 30, 2013).

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the role of literature: “Literature can clarify and confirm by drawing certain simple outlines in the bewildering chaos of the time and by confronting us with the chief problems of our intellectual existence and persuading us of their importance. It can raise our life to greatness above the hubbub of everyday life by the representation of eternal truths, and in the midst of our dark situation it can strengthen our belief in the reason of life. It can act in the way envisaged by Alfred Nobel when he gave to literature a place of honour in his foundation.” He closes his speech with a quatrain from “Sehnsucht” [Longing] by that most idealist of German poets, Friedrich Schiller: Du mußt glauben, du mußt wagen, Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand, Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen In das schöne Wunderland. [You must believe, you must dare, For the gods give no guarantee, Only a miracle can transport you Into the beautiful land of miracles.]

Striking is the invocation of “Wunder” [miracle] in the discourse of a philosopher. The citation of this 1801 poem was something more than Eucken’s way of lending a “literary” quality to his address, so as to justify his inclusion in the category of literature. Eucken had attempted in his own writings to create a position for the modern subject that privileged neither brute facticity nor the general idea, but that represented instead a third term between these two poles. He called this third space “Personalwelt,” an idea that we might compare to the “life-world” (Lebenswelt) that would become a crucial term in the work of Alfred Schütz and Jürgen Habermas. The personalworld of a modern European is exemplified in the vision of this poem, in which an individual trapped by circumstance—metaphorized as natural forces—is nevertheless encouraged to envision a wonderland. This is the last stanza of Schiller’s poem, and we note that the eventual outcome remains unstated—there is an imperative and an invocation of miracle, but no demonstration of the miracle’s accomplishment. This potentially delusional aspect of the poem corresponds to the prevalent judgment of Eucken’s work decades after his death: that Eucken was pleading for a miracle that would make time move backwards, thus reinstating the conditions for a certain type of idealism and reinvesting religion with a definite truth value that could be agreed upon. This latter point was of interest, naturally, to those multitudes who still believed in God and in scripture, and it may account, among other things, for the US love affair with Eucken’s work until the First World War got in the way. The German review of an anthology of his previously published work, titled Geistesprobleme und Lebensfragen [Spiritual Issues and Life Questions], which appeared in 1919 with Reclam, furnishes another clue in this regard. The reviewer complains about the inclusion of too much “Feuilletonismus” [journalistic pieces] which he finds “already dated” [schon veraltet] (82), and which does not leave enough room for what makes Eucken “immortal”



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[unsterblich], namely the book Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion [The Truth Value of Religion].16 Eucken’s path to the Nobel had begun when he left the University of Basel—where he knew and worked with Friedrich Nietzsche—to the University of Jena. Eucken won out over a Berlin candidate whose approach was much closer to developments in science, above all to Darwinism. Neo-Kantianism had begun in Jena with Kuno Fischer’s famous call for a return to Kant (cited in the presentation of Eucken’s prize by Harald Hjärne), and Eucken would become neo-Idealism’s big prizewinner. Hjärne notes that Eucken’s professional life has been spent observing the attempts by philosophy to gain firm ground after the collapse of its grandiose systems (e.g., Hegel): “Sometimes the motto was ‘Back to Kant,’ and the great metaphysical iconoclast served as a model for thorough studies of the limits of human knowledge.”17 Similarly, as noted above, Eucken’s NPL in 1908 was widely recognized as a compromise—he was the second or third choice of competing factions who preferred either the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne or the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf. Eucken was not as well known to the Swedes, of course, as the latter, but much better known than the former, many of his books having been translated into Swedish. One member of the Swedish Academy at that time, Vitalis Norström, was also a philosopher and a friend of Eucken and sympathized with his philosophical approach. It is no accident, then, that the presentation of the award by historian Harald Hjärne (1848–1922) constantly makes the comparison with Swedish philosophy. Hjärne begins with an entire page about Alfred Nobel’s intentions for the award, including how Nobel had been influenced by the poetry and philosophy of Viktor Rydberg (1828–95), called Sweden’s “last Romantic,” who enjoyed some success on the world stage through his retellings of Norse mythology and pre-Christian history. Hjärne then moves on to compare Eucken’s work with that of the Swedish philosopher Kristofer Boström (1797–1866), whom he claims as an early critic of “dialectic absolutism,” another term for German Idealism. As opposed to the latter’s pantheistic replacement of God by Idea, Boström maintained the need for a creator being. In Hjärne’s words, “There is an indisputable resemblance between [Boström’s] views and those developed by Professor Eucken in his writings. This is not surprising, for they both represent a basic type that […] has preserved its vitality in the face of pantheistic abstractions as well as materialistic fear of thought.”18 At the banquet, Hjärne volunteered one further remark concerning the German–Swedish connection, perhaps the most revealing of all: “[Hjärne] recalled Thuringia and, in particular, the University of Jena, the heart of German humanism, and the relations of that university with the history of the Swedish Reformation.”19 It is true that the Universität Jena was founded in 1548 precisely as a Protestant counterpart to the University of Wittenberg, which Paul Feldkeller, “Weltanschauung und Persönlichkeit,” Das literarische Echo 22.2 (October 15, 1919), 82. 17 Harald Hjärne, “Presentation of Rudolf Eucken,” in Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901–1967 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1969), 67–73 at 69. 18 Hjärne, 69. 19 Hjärne, 73. 16

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remained Catholic, and that it got a leg up on Martin Luther’s alma mater by being the first to publish Luther’s collected works. The mid-sixteenth century was also the time when religious reform began in Sweden that would eventually make it a predominantly Protestant country. We may detect in Hjärne’s remark an underlying motive for the general preference on the part of the Svenska Akademien for German authors that display this common religious and ideological heritage. In contrast to the devoted attention of the Swedes to German philosophy and theology, including to Eucken, the “press echo” of the Nobel Prize for Eucken in Germany appears to have been rather minimal, which could be read as a silent rebuke to the test-run at his consecration, or as indifference to the NPL in general. Theodor Kappstein published an appreciative summary in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1909, in which he addressed the question of whether a philosopher should have received the prize. Kappstein acknowledges that Eucken’s style was hardly literary: “Frisians don’t sing,” he writes, referring to Eucken’s birth in Aurich.20 But he concludes that Eucken’s artificial style creates clarity and allows the force of his thought and personality to come through, hence making him deserving of the prize. Eucken’s reputation, both at home and abroad, was indeed raised by the awarding of the Nobel. In 1911 he gave religio-philosophical lectures in England; in 1912 he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and lectured in several cities. Syracuse, Columbia, and New York University all granted him honoray doctorates. An Eucken Association was founded in New York, and an Eucken Club at the Lutheran College of Gettysburg (now simply Gettysburg College). Invitations from China, Japan, India, and Australia could not be taken up due to the difficulties caused by the First World War. Eucken’s patriotic efforts during WWI on behalf of German idealism raised his reputation in Germany, but of course at the same time lowered it in other parts of the world. Uwe Justus Wenzel faults Eucken with two post-NPL errors that led to the decline of his international reputation: one was his defense of Germany’s role in the First World War, which although not chauvinist, was—and perhaps this is worse—filled with a sense of Germany’s missionary role in the world; the other, more important one, is that of instrumentalizing philosophy.21 In 1914, jointly with his colleague Haeckel, Eucken published a letter to American universities, asking them to make an effort at understanding the German position in the war. His writings were distributed in “Feldpostausgaben” (special cheap editions of literary materials for troops), he gave lectures all over Germany, and his book Die Träger des deutschen Idealismus [The Bearers of German Idealism] sold 30,000 copies.22 As the title of this book signals, almost worse than chauvinistic patriotism was Eucken’s voicing of a belief in German exceptionalism in world history and in the “German mission” [Deutsche Sendung] to resolve the contradiction between naturalism

Theodor Kappstein, “Rudolf Eucken: Zur Verleihung des Nobelpreises,” Deutsche Rundschau 35.8 (May 1909), 222–37 at 222. 21 Uwe Justus Wenzel, “Idealistische Gesinnung. Vor 150 Jahren wurde der Philosoph Rudolf Eucken geboren.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 5 January 1996, international ed., Feuilleton: 31. 22 Statistics and date from Rainer A. Bast, Einleitung to the Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2005), iii–xxxvii at xiv. 20



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and idealism, since in no other culture was it so pronounced.23 As Dathe notes, “Eucken is one of the forerunners of the those who draw the distinction between Western civilization and German culture.”24 Though it damaged his reputation abroad, Eucken’s patriotism had a lasting national appeal after WWI, leading to the creation of an Euckenbund in Jena in 1919.

Paul Heyse [Paul Heyse] is the narrator of a cultivated, pseudo-Goethean bourgeoisie, which has long ceased to exist. [Er ist der Erzähler einer kultivierten pseudogoetheschen Bürgerlichkeit, die es längst nicht mehr gibt.]25 Anonymous reviewer in 1930

Heyse’s adult years were punctuated by significant events in German history: the 1848 uprisings; the war of 1866 in which Bavaria lost its sovereignty; the FrancoPrussian war of 1870–1 and subsequent founding of the Reich. Not a single one of these, nor any other contemporary event, found its way into his narrations. Heyse did insert a socialist character, Franzelius Gracchus, into his first novel, Kinder der Welt (Children of the World), but his single political act in that novel is to hold an anti-clerical speech that lands him in jail. The Italy that Heyse depicted in his work was especially impervious to change and devoid of political conflict—the struggle for unification that racked the peninsula during Heyse’s career also found no place in his work. This historical vacuity created a static, stereotyped cultural tapestry that served as background for the simple love stories that formed the core of his most popular narrations. Heyse’s intolerance for naturalism, a movement that did seek to incorporate social issues into literature, is well documented. After sitting (barely) through a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, he wrote to his friend Georg Brandes, “I have long known that this remarkable man lacks a mature intellect [gereifte Geisteskraft] that could control, guide, and relieve the “phantasms” that oppress him [seine herandrängenden Phantasmen].”26 The phantasms that most affected Ibsen in this period were: reality and politics. The reification of social relations in Heyse’s work—idealistic in one sense of the adjective—already made his writing highly questionable to the anonymous reviewer of 1930 quoted above, turning the “Würdigung” (honoring) expected of the centenary of the author’s birth—and not just of any German author, but of the most celebrated of the latter half of the 19th century—into something bordering on satire or anathema. From the time of his NPL in 1910 forward, Heyse Cf. Rudolf Eucken, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes (Stuttgart/Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1914). 24 Dathe, “Rudolf Eucken,” 50. 25 “Zu Paul Heyses 100. Geburtstag,” Die literarische Welt 6 (March 14, 1930), 1. 26 Heyse to Brandes, December 24, 1881, cited in Paul Heyse: Münchner dichterfürst im bürgerlichen Zeitalter (Munich: Beck, 1981), 215. 23

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has achieved the status of negative monumentality: remembered only as the most completely forgotten author of German literary history. The n-grams for Heyse tell a more equivocal story, however. A look at Englishlanguage books confirms the view of Heyse as a once-important but now forgotten author in WL (see Figure 3 ). We see an extraordinarily steep rise in reputation during the decade 1865–75, followed by an almost equally steep decline. Another spike occurs in the years leading up to 1910, the year of the NPL, but is followed by another rapid decline. On the face of it, however, the fact that the upward movement precedes the award would indicate critical interest as having contributed to the prize. The German graph (Figure 4 ) looks rather different. Overall the curve, while still full of ups and downs, looks much smoother than the English one. It shows much less of a peak in the NPL year, which is certainly confirmed by the minimal attention paid in the German press to the prize. Finally, there is a rise during the war years, followed by a steep decline after 1945. On December 10, 2010, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Radio) broadcast a brief (nine double-spaced pages in typescript) program celebrating Paul Heyse’s receipt of the NPL a century earlier. About a third of the way through, after weighing Heyse’s mummified presence as an idealist in the atmosphere of Naturalism and Expressionism then reigning in Germany against the fact that remembered authors such as Theodor Fontane and Gottfried Keller had declared Heyse to have been an important influence on their styles, the question is raised: “Have Germanists and literary critics perhaps taken the last German ‘poet-prince’ too lightly” [Haben es sich die Germanisten und Literaturkritiker mit dem letzten deutschen ‘Dichterfürsten’ etwa zu leicht gemacht?].27 The answer, of course, is a resounding “No!” As with Eucken two years earlier, Heyse was honored for his entire literary output, and like Goethe, whose epigone he willingly declared himself, Heyse wrote in every major genre: eight novels; 68 stage plays; over 150 poems; and many translations from the Italian. Called as a court littérateur to Munich by Maximilian II at the age of 25, before he had produced anything of notice, Heyse spent the rest of his life attempting to fulfill the promise that others had seen in him and to make the best use possible of the free time he had been given to produce literature. He wrote dramas that rarely enjoyed long runs or much box-office—and most certainly did not serve as his entry point into WL.28 His lyric translations from the Italian are still known, chiefly through their being set to music by Hugo Wolf and other composers—indeed, the first results in an online search for Heyse as author generally will bring up the Italienisches Liederbuch in one or the other of its recent recordings. But the Nobel committee cited first and foremost Heyse’s Novellen. If anything by this author could remain living, it is these works, which exhibit three features: 1) they continue the tradition of German portrayals of Italy; 2) they are well-crafted; and 3) they sometimes take on themes out of the ordinary and exhibit a relative tolerance toward individual and cultural differences. Christoph Vormweg, “1910: Paul Heyse erhält den Literaturnobelpreis,” broadcast December 10, 2010, in Cologne WDR, typescript, 3. An exception was the 1865 patriotic Colberg, which had the distinction of later furnishing the script for the last film of the Nazi period in Germany.

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Figure 3   Citations of the name “Paul Heyse” in English-language books, 1860–1945

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Figure 4   Citations of the name “Paul Heyse” in German-language books, 1860–1945

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Going up against previously nominated authors such as Anatole France, Georg Brandes, and Maurice Maeterlinck, as well as against some other German candidates just as forgotten today, Heyse received in 1910 a nomination that caught the committee’s attention, with a petition containing 82 signatures, a well-crafted recommendation by Franz Muncker, and the backing of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Heyse had celebrated his eightieth birthday on March 15, and it was this occasion that appears to have brought to the mind of German supporters an author who, with his most important work behind him, could just as well have been nominated in any other year since the NPL’s founding. Indeed, the first paragraph of Wirsén’s laudatio deliberately locates Heyse’s achievement in the youthful years of the Academy members: “[Heyse’s] name revives the memory of our youth and manhood; we still remember the literary pleasure that his novellas, in particular, gave to us.”29 As with Eucken two years earlier, the reaction to Heyse’s NPL seems to have been especially muted in Germany. In her dissertation on the reception of Heyse, Kristina Koebe confirms that the most frequent response of periodicals in Germany to Heyse’s NPL was silence, or nearly so. This had to do not only with Heyse’s specific position vis à vis the literary currents of 1910, but also with the fact that the NPL in general did not enjoy much standing with the German public or intelligentsia at this time.30 Writing many years after the fact, Ascan Klée Gobert confesses that neither he nor his fellow students noticed the event at all. He goes on to note the complete disappearance of any of Heyse’s words from the German vocabulary: not a single citation from his works became proverbial, nor was a single title preserved in the collective intellectual memory: “Even the Nazis did not find it necessary to eliminate or burn Heyse’s works, despite the fact that his mother was a Salomon.”31 (Gobert’s claim is accurate only in terms of the creative side of Heyse, since his so-called “Falkentheorie” of novella construction does remain a critical commonplace.) Responses outside the German-speaking world were far more numerous, led by the Italians with appreciations in the Corriere Toscano, La Stampa, Il Giornale della Domenica, L’Illustrazione Italiana, La Nazione, and the Rivista di Letteratura Tedesca. French notices appeared in Le Correspondent and Figaro.32 Finally, a curious mixed source is the periodical Etsch und Adria, a bilingual journal of Trento. That the Adige (German, Etsch) watershed still was under Austrian control in 1910 undoubtedly lent interest to the Italo-German cultural synthesis of Heyse’s translations and novellas. What little press coverage was given to Heyse’s Nobel used the occasion with some frequency to discredit the winner. Especially sarcastic was the double notice in Der Carl David af Wirsén, “Presentation,” in Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901–1967 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1969), 100–3 at 100. A German version can be found in Italienische Novellen. Nobelpreis 1910, by Paul Heyse (Zürich: Coron Verlag, 1974). The volume belongs to a NPL series of this press; in their words, editions are restricted to the “Kreis der Nobelpreisfreunden” (circle of friends of the Nobel Prize). It is not clear what it takes to be a friend, or if the term is meant to imply that the NPL has enemies. It is interesting to note how the title of this volume confirms the central status of Heyse’s novellas set in Italy as his lasting contribution to WL. 30 Kristina Koebe, “Die Paul-Heyse-Rezeption zwischen 1850 und 1914: kritische Würdigung und dichterisches Selbstbewusstsein im Wechselspiel,” Ph.D. diss., University of Rostock, 2002, 241, 244. 31 Ascan Klée Gobert, “Vergänglichkeit des Ruhmes. Der Nobelpreisträger Paul Heyse,” Neue literarische Welt 3.22 (November 25, 1952), 8. 32 List from Werner Martin, Paul Heyse. Eine Bibliographie (Hildesheim: Olms, 1978), 137. 29



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Sturm—quite naturally, given that the journal represented the strivings of the literary avant-garde of the time, and also considered itself to be extremely cosmopolitan.33 On page 303 of the 1910/11 volume, Heyse is called “Der Meisterepigone,” and a straw-man reader of “der Lokalanzeiger” (roughly, a small-town newpaper, alluding to Heyse’s supposed appeal to the provincial middle-class) is ventriloquized as being glad of his hero’s earning the Nobel: “May God preserve for them [the middle-classes] their optimism, cluelessness, and the epigone of the classical authors” [Gott erhalte ihnen den Frohsinn, die Ahnungslosigkeit und den Epigonen der Klassiker].34 Only a few pages later (a week later in terms of time), a notice is given of Heyse and Tolstoy. The immediate event to be reported is Tolstoy’s infamous abandoning of his family in favor of an ascetic life, which the writer manages to bring into harmony with the “rivalry” between Tolstoy and Heyse for the NPL in a contest of negative monumentalities—Tolstoy being one of he most famous non-recipients of the NPL. The article summarizes various reactions to Tolstoy’s antics, ending with the “Nobelgreis” (Old Man Nobel) Paul Heyse. Supposedly, Heyse made disparaging remarks about Tolstoy’s renegade behavior to a Trieste newspaper. K. M. summarizes: The Grand Old Man needs it! Of course he doesn’t like Tolstoy, of course. But the damned honorable Heyse has also staked his loftiest criterion in the debate: The comfort zone! There it is, the comfort zone. For his whole life, Heyse has only written from out of the family and about the family. And now an aging genius from Russia abandons his family? Oops, the whole comfy-chair culture of Heyse must totter at that! Good old Heyse certainly won’t be crawling out of his creature comfort any time soon. [Dieser Jubelonkel hat’s nötig! Natürlich ist ihm Tolstoj unangenehm, natürlich. Der olle ehrliche Heyse hat aber auch gleich sein höchstes Kriterium in die Debatte geworfen: Die Behaglichkeit! Da haben wir’s, die Behaglichkeit. Heyse hat ja seine Lebtage immer nur aus der Failie und fur die Familie gedichtet. Und nun geht da so ein genialer Kerl aus Russland im hohen Alter von seiner Familie weg? I, da muss ja die ganze Heysesche Plüschmöbelkultur knacken! Der gute Heyse wird freilich nicht so bald aus seiner Behaglichkeit hervorkriechen.]35

The keyword in this negative assessment is “Behaglichkeit,” which here is synonymous with “Gemütlichkeit.” Both words refer to a kind of quiet pleasure one finds in conventional and materially adequate domestic arrangements. Naturally, writing about people secure in their comfort zones hardly seems to make for compelling literature. (Nor is it true that Heyse only wrote about the family.) In a 1907 monograph, Viktor Klemperer had used this very term to characterize Heyse’s literary output, highlighting: “the innumerable novellas, which mostly report on beautiful things and On the latter, see Hubert F. van den Berg, “‘Berlin ist die Hauptstadt der Vereinigten Staaten von Europa’: Zur Internationalität der Zeitschrift und Galerie Der Sturm,” in Germanistik im Konflikt der Kulturen, Band 8: Universal-, Global- und Nationalkulturen/Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin and Stéphane Pesnel (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007), 59–63. 34 Trust, “Der Meisterepigone,” Der Sturm 38 (November 17, 1910), 303. 35 K. M., “Tolstoj und Heyse,” Der Sturm 39 (November 24, 1910), 312. 33

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people in a comforting urge to mimesis [behagliche Gestaltungslust], and even tell of tragic matters so gracefully, that the reader’s heart is only moved with pleasure, not with force” [die zahllosen Novellen, die meist von schönen Dingen und Menschen in behaglicher Gestaltungslust berichten und auch das Traurige so anmutig erzählen, dass es in seiner Herzbeweglichkeit nur angenehm rührt, nicht gewaltsam ergreift].36 Rather unusually, Tilman Krause posited in 1994 that Heyse-Amnesia stems above all from literary polarization: This forgetting [of Heyse] teaches us that the polarization of German society since the Wilhelmine period, the separation into those who strive for major-power status vs. those who aim at a radically utopian societal transformation on the other is an inherited deficit [Erblast] that is still present today. The chance that a middleof-the-road individual like Heyse still has a chance at recognition is minuscule.37

Appraisals such as this, that lay the blame for Heyse’s disappearance not on his work, but on his (non)readers and on a society that destroyed the value of Behaglichkeit, are relatively rare. More usual are those that echo the language of Klaus Jeziorkowski: Heyse did not rise above being a “Salonautor” who “achieved the miracle of mediocrity on a level that one calls tasteful” [realisierte das Wunder des Durchschnitts auf dem Niveau, das man geschmackvoll nennt].38 In terms of Heyse’s Novelle production—which, be it reminded, was the aspect of his work cited by the Academy—Gabriele Kroes-Tillmann has perhaps put her finger on the formula that insured contemporary success for the author, while it worked towards his future oblivion: of the seventeen so-called “italienische Novellen,” nine “refer in their titles to a female protagonist. Girls and women, temperamental, primal [ursprüngliche], unusually beautiful characters, almost always dark-haired and with glowing eyes, natural [unverbildet], upright creations of nature, seductive but never seduced, these are Heyse’s favorite heroines.”39 With the creation of such figures, Heyse appears to have fulfilled a need in European literature that would fall later to the Brazilian author Jorge Amado in Latin America: the desire for “strong” female characters. Like Amado’s Gabriela of the 1958 novel with that title (Gabriela, Cravo e Canela), the widow of Pisa in the novella of that name demonstrates an aggressive sexuality that would threaten the patriarchal order were it not banished south of the border. In both authors, however, the supposed “strength” must be placed in scare quotes, because the overall shape of their narratives does nothing to challenge or shift the terms of patriarchy. In Heyse’s case, for example, we can see from the above quote that his heroines reinforce the common analogy between masculine/feminine and culture/nature binaries, which in a number of his novellas are joined by a third: Germany/Italy. That is, a sizeable subset of Viktor Klemperer, Paul Heyse (Berlin: Pan, 1907), 5. Tilman Krause, “Ein netter Kerl auf der Flucht in den Suden,” Der Tagesspiegel, August 14, 1994, Feuilleton, 15. 38 Klaus Jeziorkowski, “Der Virtuose des Durchschnitts: Der Salonautor in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, dargestellt am Beispiel Paul Heyse,” in Die Rolle des Autors: Analysen und Gespräche, ed. Irmela Schneider (Stuttgart: Klett, 1981), 44. 39 Gabriele Kroes-Tillmann, Paul Heyse, Italianissimo (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993), 58. 36 37



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the Italian novellas involves a German hero falling in love with an Italian heroine.40 Not only is the reverse never true, thus avoiding the threatening figure of Latin masculinity, but in fact the German–Italian love affairs only end in marriage in one instance: but even in the story “Erkenne dich selbst,” the beloved is in fact Italo-German, with her father representing the German side. This would seem to break Heyse’s unwritten rule of North/South alliances, and perhaps for that reason the parents never appear in the story itself, having been “killed off ” by the author, as it were, before the events of the story take place. The first-person narrator of “Die Witwe von Pisa” makes fun of the title figure, who is portrayed as desperately enamored of him to the point that he must flee the city, discovering by coincidence on his flight that her husband is in fact still alive, which solves his problem. Heyse’s knowledge of Italian culture went far deeper that the stereotypes portrayed in these novellas, and included, as previously mentioned, translations of lyrics whose musical settings are still part of the classical repertoire. But the association of Italy with a special type of female protagonist and a recognizable romantic resolution was what emerges from his narratives, and I would argue that these are the novellas that the Swedish Academy had in mind when they indulged their own reminiscences of youth in awarding the NPL.

Conclusion At present there are in Europe […] no poets and hardly any writers of the first rank. […] Something unprecedented has arisen in our time, precisely because writers see before them the possibility of being known and read throughout the whole world. Georg Brandes41

Writing just a few years prior to the first NPL award, Georg Brandes already identified the paradox of WL mentioned briefly in my introduction to this volume: the interplay and tension between regional content and translated readerships. More recently, and along similar lines, Pascale Casanova has intriguingly posited this paradox as a “natural law” of world literary status: namely, that a writer’s entry into WL presupposes a conflicted relation with his or her national literary background: “understanding the way in which writers invent their own freedom—which is to say perpetuate, or alter, or reject, or add to, or deny, or forget, or betray their national literary (and linguistic) heritage—makes it possible to chart the course of their work and discover its very purpose.”42 We may compare how Eucken and Heyse “invented their freedom” from a national literary context. We have seen that the actual mechanisms of their receiving the NPL To wit: “Am Tiberufer” (1855), “Erkenne dich selbst” (1858), “Die Witwe von Pisa” (1866), “Annina” (1862), “Beatrice” (1867), “Barbarossa” (1871), and “Die Hexe von Korso” (1881). A useful summary is given in Julia Boehme, Bürger zweier Welten (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1995), 25–8. 41 Georg Brandes, “World Literature,” in Damrosch, The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, 65. 42 Pacale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 41. 40

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differed a great deal: Eucken was a “dark horse,” compromise candidate, while Heyse represented a nostalgic return to the idealist reading habits of Academy members. Both authors also deliberately “wrote for translation,” as Brandes would put it. Eucken’s rationalist philosophical project demanded clear writing without ambiguity or obscurantism. Heyse’s choice of Germans in Italy as a central motif of his fiction created an implicit comparative project that brought the invisible space of European cultural (in)compatabilities to light through fiction, perhaps preparing the way for writers like Hugo von Hofmannsthal (see the chapter by Simona Moti in this volume) and Robert Musil, who would treat them in much less anodyne fashion. The all-important idealistic orientation had a somewhat different meaning in the case of each author. Predictably, Eucken made his philosophical project the rescuing of idealism as a basic human orientation toward reality and living. Heyse, as we have seen, provided a pseudo-Goethean escape from the messiness of political and historical reality—in Heyse’s work, the Western–Eastern gardens of Elective Affinities (see the chapter by Chunjie Zhang in this volume) are substituted by Northern– Southern Italian landscapes.

8

A Short Survey of the Creation and Development of Common German–Latin American Space: Humboldt, Emigration, Exile, and Contemporary Interactions Paul Nissler German-language literature’s intersections with Latin America form an important subtopic of world literature. There are many examples of literature in German that reference and/or take place in Latin America. Literature in German has been both read and produced in Latin America. Within this long development and dynamic of a German–Latin American literary space, there are three pivotal moments. First, Alexander von Humboldt’s late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth century travel and related writings began the formation of a unique German–Latin American space. Humboldt’s experience stimulated further contributions by his peers as well as later development of this space from various fields. By the early to mid-twentieth century one can see a second pivotal moment, one of enhanced definition and growth of this space in the movement of authors and their production, often via Spain into Mexico and further spaces of Latin America, as well as in the reverse direction, from Latin America into Spain and Germany. As artistic means of expression and sharing evolve in postwar Germany in the mid/late twentieth century, this space rapidly develops amidst expansion of cultural collaboration and traffic between Germany and Latin America, creating a third stage. Before focusing on these three stages, the entirety of this experience should be considered. German Literature as WL with respect to Latin America begins when speakers and writers of German are conscious of the existence of what we popularly term Latin America—the geographical space encompassing contemporary South America through Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico.1 Here early references to European expeditions are first expressed in German in the literary satire Das Narrenschiff (1494). During the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, Germans were involved in the first printings of chronicles as well as maps and other cartographical works (e.g. by Jakob Cromberger in 1500/1539). The Fuggers and Welsers An accepted indigenous term is Abya Yala, which is a Kuna (Panama) expression for “la tierra fertile en la que vivimos” [the fertile land where we live], referring to the continent from a non-Western perspective (Josef Estermann, Si el Sur fuera el Norte. Chakanas interculturales entre Andes y Occidente [Quito: Abya Yala, 2008], 34).

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helped finance the conquest and therefore secured German participation in it. Here many Germans took part in Latin America during the conquest—exploring and exploiting, and writing of this from a very narrow perspective, which one can find e.g. in Micer Ambrosio, Ambrosio Ehinger, Georg Hohermuth, Nikolaus Federmann, and Philipp von Hutten.2 Of these early adventurers and colonizers who wrote of their experiences (or were written about) in German, notable is Philipp von Hutten, whose letters about his 1535–8 and 1541–6 travels in today’s Venezuela were published in Zeitung aus India. Further into the sixteenth century, various historiographies were written in German, such as by Hans Staden about Brazil, and Ulrich Schmidl about La Plata. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works surfaced in German from missionaries; for example, Jesuit Adam Schirmbeck’s Messis Paraguayensis in 1649, Pater Antonius Sepp and Anton Böhm’s 1696 Reisebeschreibung, then Pater Xavier Feigls in 1785, and in 1791 Jesuit F. X. Eders. Amidst the growing narratives in German from Latin America were also works from scientists, writing of nature and medicine, notably: Georg Markgraf and Wilhelm Piso’s Naturgeschichte of Brazil in 1648; the Austrian botanist Nikolaus Joseph Franz von Jacquin’s studies in the Caribbean in 1755; and Silesian Juan de Esteyneffer’s “Florilegio medicinal” (Heilkräuterbuch) in 1729. Further writings of “travel” continued to appear, such as A. Z. Helms’s diary Tagebuch einer Reise durch Peru (1798). Many missionaries worked between Spanish and Indigenous languages, for example Sepp in Guaraní. Later in the eighteenth century and in a different context, Gotthold Ephraim von Lessing makes reference to the lyric and poetry—outside a religious context—in the Quechua language. This broad group of works laid the basis upon which a German–Latin American literary space developed. To include these “earliest” of early writings in the category of WL is justified by their geographic scope, yet problematic in their “one-way,” non-inclusive surface presentations.

The first moment: Humboldt and his extensions However, this changed when from 1799 to 1804 Alexander von Humboldt visited the Americas, from North America to the Caribbean, Mexico and into coastal, mountainous, and forested South America. He was motivated by the earlier European explorers’ trips, such as those of the Italian-born Spaniard Alejandro Malaspina (who was himself accompanied by the Bohemian German Thaddäus Haenke on his 1789–94 trip). Humboldt found himself amidst the contemporary comparative discussions, for example J. G. Herder’s ideas of national cultures. During his trip, Humboldt took extensive notes, and upon his return he wrote in French and German, elaborating a new and more culturally dense overlapped common space between Germany and Latin America that is a central defining moment for German literature within the WL Germán Arciniegas, Los Alemanes En La Conquista De América, [Panoramas] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1941).

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discussion. His experience, attitude and interpretation of Latin America in his writings often break dramatically from those of the canonical European writers—predominantly as colonists and culturally-detached adventure-seekers. This difference is at its most dramatic in Humboldt’s opposition to and juxtaposition with, for example, the writings of the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600). Humboldt represents a break from that which was and a creation of that which is new; here a new interrelatedness and interconnectedness, and an understanding of the dynamic involved in this, were quite ahead of his time in considering modern ecology, sociology, and cultural anthropology and linguistics. For example, he writes: “Was mir den Hauptantrieb gewährte, war das Bestreben die Erscheinungen der körperlichen Dinge in ihrem allgemeinen Zusammenhange, die Natur als ein durch innere Kräfte bewegtes und belebtes Ganze aufzufassen” [my greatest drive was the search to understand all appearances of physical things in their overall interconnections, nature as a whole moving and living through its inner powers].3 Humboldt observed nature, the geology and geography, the fauna, the mountains, the jungle and the skies, the sounds, animals, and people—much more as a scientist than as a conquistador or a missionary. He took notes on all of this, worked upon others’ previous work in developing new analysis and connections, and even drew cartographic and topographic maps and sketches of impressionable natural geographies and indigenous architecture and monuments. He connected and overlapped his visuals with his writings with detail, and often in poetic language. Upon returning, he published and lectured widely on his experiences (later continuing to travel in and write of Russia and other parts of Asia). Humboldt’s Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent: fait en 1799, 1800, 1801, 1803 et 1804 (written with Aimé Bonpland), his Ansichten der Natur (1808) and his Ansichten der Kordilleren und Monumente der eingeborenen Völker Amerikas (1810), Versuch über den politischen Zustand des Königreichs Neuspanien (1809–15), then his attempt at a world description in Kosmos (1845–62) resonated beyond France and Germany, including in Latin America. Humboldt, much ahead of his time, understood the concepts of “Kommunikation, Zusammenarbeit, Internationalität, Transdisziplinarität and Offenheit.” 4 His writings invigorated academic and scientific studies and inquiry and inspired many ensuing intellectual discussions and artistic and literary creations in Germany and beyond—from the natural sciences (geology, astronomy, geography, biology, ecology) to the social sciences (anthropology, languages, philosophy, sociology). In Ansichten, Humboldt “brought … two apparently different aspects of the American world together: vestiges of monuments and of works (sculptures, hiarglyphic manuscripts, objects, etc.) of the pre-Colombian cultures, and landscapes presented as typical pictures of the American nature” (Minguet and Duviols XI). Here laminates of Aztec architecture and writings are still studied and cherished in Mexico and beyond, while his notes and maps of indigenous languages in Mexico, Central and South America spurred further inquiry and communication. Peculiarly, the voice Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf Einer Physischen Weltbeschreibung / Alexander Von Humboldt ; Ediert Und Mit Einem Nachwort Versehen Von Ottmar Ette Und Oliver Lubrich (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 2004), 3. [Further citations in text.] 4 Ottmar Ette and Oliver Lubrich, Nachwort to Kosmos, 906–7. 3

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of those he was writing of was not present. On this, Mary Pratt writes of the absence of direct voices of people who lived and shaped this often romanticized, supposedly uninhabited “nature” in Humboldt’s account.5 Absent then, they would take some time to be heard. In Germany, broader Europe and beyond, Humboldt stimulated further discussions. (They can be sampled in Clark and Lubrich, eds., Transatlantic Echoes). In Latin America, Humboldt is historically identified with Simon Bolívar during this period of Latin American independence. He is often mentioned in works across disciplines. His statue even stands in Mexico City, among other cities, and many schools in Latin America still bear his name. Through the nineteenth, twentieth, and now into the twenty-first century, Humboldt was and continues to be referenced by and to influence German and Latin American (among others) writers of many fields—both his achievements and the people and circumstances that surrounded these, as well as perhaps some of his premature conclusions and things missed. Humboldt’s experience and the work upon this define much of the further German–Latin American space. With direct reference to Humboldt’s notes, the Swiss naturalist, field researcher, linguist and diplomat Johann Jakob von Tschudi traveled in 1838–42 and 1857–9 to Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, and later wrote many works in German, including: Untersuchungen über die Fauna peruana (1844–7), Die Kechuasprache (1853), Ollanta, ein altperuanisches Drama, aus der Kechuasprache übersetzt und kommentiert (1875), Organismus der Khetsuasprache (1884), Peru, Reiseskizzen (1846), and Reisen durch Südamerika (1866–69). Within the same current of Tschudi was the doctor, archaeologist, and ethnologist Ernst Middendorf, who worked and traveled from 1855 to 1880, mostly in Peru and surrounding areas. Middendorf mentioned Tschudi directly (and by association this connects to Humboldt) in his works. Here, he wrote many works in German: Das Runa Simi oder die Keshua-Sprache (1890), Wörterbuch des Runa Simi oder der Keshua-Sprache (1890), Ollanta, ein Drama der Keshua-Sprache (1890), Dramatische und lyrische Dichtungen der Keshua-Sprache (1891), Die Aimara-Sprache (1891), Das Muchik oder die Chimu-Sprache (1892), and then Peru – Beobachtungen und Studien über das Land und seine Bewohner während eines 25jährigen Aufenthalts. Both Tschudi and Middendorf are a critical extension of Humboldt in creating a new nuance in German–Latin American literary space. They began a process of bringing Quechua, Ayamara, and Muchik/Chimu, and hence direct voices and experiences and culture, less “interpreted” and “filtered” (exemplified in Alexander’s brother Wilhelm’s misguided conclusion on Quechua’s lack of intellectual capacity),6 into German via extensive traveling and very laborious dictionaries and collecting and translating of local stories and even of theater. Looking more closely, Tschudi published the first known written version of Ollantay in Quechua and German in 1857, with Middendorf ’s to follow in 1890. This piece is considered originally to have been passed along orally in Quechua within the Inca period, and later to have been Mary Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London: Routledge, 1992), 141. See Wilhelm von Humboldt und die amerikanischen Sprachen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1994).

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somewhat influenced by Spanish colonialism in its known theatrical form. The legend has it that the warrior Ollanta(y) secretly marries the Inca’s daughter, then later asks for her hand, and challenges and adventures ensue. Although their respective versions are very similar, there are variances as well. Tschudi’s version begins with Ollanta stating: Chaypas cuchun! munacusak Chay llullluçusca urpeyta! Ñam aparcan sonçollayta! Pallallayta mascaçusak.

Mag sie es auch sein! Ich werde Diese meine vielgeliebte Taube; Sie hat schon mein Herz davongetragen! Ich werde meine vielgeliebte Fürstin suchen.

[May it also be! I will / these my beloved dove / she has taken my heart / I will search for my loved princess]

Then Piki Chaki begins: Supaycha raycuscamunki! Icha çamça muspankipas …

Der Dämon hat dich wohl verwirrrt Vielleicht träumst du auch

[the demon has made a mistake / perhaps you are also dreaming /…]

In Middendorf, Ollanta begins slightly differently: Piqui Chaqui ricunquichu Cusi Koillurta huasinpi?

Piqui Chaqui, sahest du Cusi Koillur in ihrem Hause?

[piqui chaqui, did you see / cusi koillur in your house?]

And Piqui Chaqui responds: Ami Inti munachunchu Chaiman churacunaytaka; Manachu kanka manchanqui Incaj ususin caskantaka?

Möge der Sonnengott nicht wollen, Daß ich dorthin mich begebe; Schreckt denn ich nicht (der Gedanke), Daß sie des Königs Tochter ist?

[perhaps the sun god may not like it / that I give myself / the thought does not scare me / that she is the kings daughter? ]

We notice, first, that there are notable differences in words as well as in spellings. This exhibits the unique regional understanding and linguistic variance in the areas. Secondly, Middendorf includes “Cusi Koillur,” while Tschudi writes this part using poetic analogy. Here Quechua shares space with German in Middendorf. In Tschudi, some of the lyricism of Quechua (both language and culture) is translated into German. Third, instead of “Supay” Middendorf uses “Ami Inti,” a reference to the sun god versus a demon in Tschudi. Supay is a complicated term, understood and used by the Spanish in a Christian sense of “devil” (with both sin/soul), but in Quechua and Andean culture it carried a much more nuanced meaning. To continue, a comparative look into Tschudi and then Middendorf ’s German versions of Ollanta give rise to many linguistic and cultural peculiarities, and thus to insights that greatly enrich the emerging German–Latin American literary space.

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Humboldt, Tschudi and Middendorf are but a few of the many Germans (or German-speakers/writers) to travel and write during this time. To mention but a few others: in 1852 the German speaking/writing Livonian author Jegor von Sivers wrote of his travels in the Caribbean and Central America; the naturalist Theodor Wolf traveled to the Galapagos islands in 1879; from 1884 to 1887 the doctor Karl von den Steinen studied the Xingu area in Brasil; Karl Sapper traveled numerous times to Guatemala for research from 1888 to 1928, as did Hans Steffen in Chile and Argentina (1891–9), Otto Buerger in Venezuela (1896) and Chile (1900–1908), and Hermann Meyer and Theodor Koch-Gruenberg in the Xingu area in Brazil (1898–1900). However, the Dresdner Max Uhle’s archaeological study of the ruins of Tiahuanaco in 1882 and then his contribution to the later 1968 Quechua–German bilingual publication Vom Kondor und vom Fuchs: Hirtenmärchen aus den Bergen—with accompanying songs, edited by Antje Kelm and Hermann Trimborn—very significantly continued a literary development initiated by Humboldt, and propelled and expanded by Tschudi and Middendorf. Americanist and ethnologist Hermann Trimborn further contributed to developing understanding between German and South American works from the 1930s through the late 1960s. Among his many translations is that of the Bolivian Quechua-language poet and author Jesus Lara’s Volksdichtung der Ketschua (1959). This publication enhanced the Quechua–German literary space, while it stimulated and influenced German-language literary production and nuance overall. Here, for example, Peruvian author José M. Arguedas’ Spanish–Quechua works gained greater nuance, especially the canonical novel Los Rios Profundos (1959), translated as Die tiefen Flüsse (2011). The Quechua-language theatrical work Ollanta, discussed earlier, originally translated by Tschudi (1857) and Middendorf (1890) into German, was later shown to share in a larger critical theatrical development between Germany and Latin America, and was even connected to Brecht’s theater by Ricardo Blanco in Von Apu Ollantay bis Brecht (1983).7 More recently, the Swiss-German author and academic Martin Lienhard has continued to give critical intellectual breadth to the German– Latin American space (and beyond) in his theoretical work La Voz y su Huella (1989/90), where he brilliantly argues for the inclusion of Latin American Indigenous voices and cultural production (especially in Peru, Paraguay, and Mexico) in literary discussion that has been historically dominated by a Eurocentricism and stark racism. Lienhard’s work continues a trajectory, initiated by the likes of Humboldt and the contributions from Tschudi and Middendorf and later from Uhle and Trimborn. Along this thread, Lienhard also translated many pieces, notably here is his translation of Titu Kusi Yupanki’s Relación de la conquista del Perú, originally in Quechua (1570), into German as Die Erschüterrung der Welt/Der Kampf gegen den Spanier (1985/2003). These “translations” are not simply “Ersatz” literature in yet another imperial language

Here Blanco sees many of Brecht’s theatrical techniques, of epic theater, Verfremdung, use of choirs, masks, music, colors used in a common way in Ollantay. He traces certain societal conditions and possibilities of the art of theater from this early play through Latin American theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ricardo Blanco, Von Apu Ollantay bis Brecht (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1983), 168.

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(Fitz and Lowe xii).8 But from Quechua into Spanish and then into German, Lienhard gives critical depth and nuance to a German–Latin American literature within a discussion of WL. A further example here can be seen in the translation of Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s work, originally in Spanish, translated into German by Curt Meyer-Clason and into Quechua by Porfirio Meneses. Considering Vallejo in all three languages expands geography and audience. For example, Spanish tiempo, German Zeit and the culturally-loaded Quechua pacha (time-space) overlap, share and partake in a literary dialogue of meaning and poetry. On a further impulse in this direction, in the 1970s, Tübingen professor Thomas Barthel decoded the Easter Island writings, extending the possibilities of further writing and interaction between languages in Germany and Latin America. The German work, in critically translating language and pondering and delving into cultural difference, sharing and learning, and the complexities and even the limitations of translation, is unique and important in any discussion of WL, especially within the historical German–Latin American space.

Authorial emigration Through the nineteenth century (mostly after Humboldt’s travels and writings), numerous German communities established themselves in Latin America, often (but not always) in a different sense than earlier conquistadores or wealth- and adventure-seekers. In these communities, even countries at large, German schools and newspapers were started. From here developed the next major impulse(s) in the German–Latin American literary space. Notable (although not exclusive) here are Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. For example, in the late-nineteenth century German philosopher Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, followed her husband to “Nueva Germania,” a small village founded by Germans in rural Paraguay. In 1920, African-Germans founded “Independencia,” a settlement in central Paraguay.9 Austrian playwright Fritz Hochwälder wrote the theater piece “Das heilige Experiment” (1942), motivated by the historical Paraguayan experience in independence and sustainability. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Argentina’s first German-language newspapers, Argentina and La Plata-Zeitung (1863), then Argentinische Zeitung (1889), established themselves. Presentation of local issues as well as reference to broader regional and world themes were published. German-language literary works were reviewed. But German-born authors in Argentina first began to publish to greater attention in the early to mid-twentieth century; for example, Hans Tolten, Max Tepp, F. R. Franke, and Hahn and Kretzschmar, amongst others (Fröschle 121). Brazil had experienced Elizabeth Lowe and Earl E. Fitz, Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). 9 Hartmut Fröschle, Die Deutschen in Lateinamerika: Schicksal U. Leistung, Buchreihe Deutsch Ausländische Beziehungen des Instituts Für Auslandsbeziehungen Stuttgart (Tübingen and Basel: Erdmann, 1979), 864. Further reference can be made to his Americana Germanica: Bibliographie Zur Deutschen Sprache und Deutschsprachigen Literatur in Nord- Und Lateinamerika, Auslandsdeutsche Literatur Der Gegenwart (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1991). 8

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an earlier wave of German immigration already in the 1820s. The “Deutsche Presse” began here in the 1850s.10 Towards the end of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, some of the first German departments at Latin American universities were being established, and here German literature and philosophy was not only discussed and read in German, but also written of (especially in Argentina). Here the philosophy of Kant, the German Romantics, and Nietzsche was read. German literature from Germany also resonated, most notably Goethe’s Faust, but then Rilke, Brecht’s theater, Hesse (Siddharta), Thomas Mann (Der Zauberberg), and later Stefan Zweig, Heinrich Böll, and Patrick Süßkind (Das Parfüm).11 Through the establishment of a Germanlanguage press and study and promotion of German through certain schools and universities, a stage was set for German-language works written in Latin America to be read in Latin America and resonate into Germany. Here, many German-language authors, having emigrated to Brazil and Argentina12 (or other areas of Latin America), or having been born in Latin America to German parents, began finding some audiences in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Reinterpretations of or recasting of indigenous tales, stories of explorers and exploration, and early “German” colonist experiences, now more subtly contextual and ever “integrating” and “nuanced,” are a part of this literary production. Many of these authors writing German in Latin American countries can be categorized in three groups, as Christl Brink does for those in Brazil: 1) those who praised Germany and rejected the Latin American country in which they reside; 2) those who accepted their Latin American country; and 3) those who attempted a symbiosis of the two.13 In Brazil, Brink discusses numerous authors in each group. For the first group, Wolfgang Ammon, Ernst Niemeyer, and Therese Stutzer (Am Rande des brasilianischen Urwaldes, 1889), Germany remained the Vaterland and was idealized, often at the expense of Latin America. Niemeyer’s poem “Walafried: Sachsengesang” (1910) begins: “Das fremde Volk blickt fremd dich an …” [the foreign people look strangely at you]—he is mistrusting, disconnected and continually uses the adjective “fremd” (i.e. the German seeing him/herself in Brazil) in his poem. In contrast, Carlos Hunsche, Joseph Kissner, Erwin Bock, or Dora Hamann (e.g., in the beauty and tenderness of her 1964 poem “Kolibri”) accepted Brazil, and Juanita Schmalenberg Bezner, Carl Fried or Edith Freyse (e.g., in her novel Brasilianische Sinfonie: Eine Familiensage, 1982) attempted a sort of symbiosis of the two countries (Brazil and Germany).

Hans Gehse, Die deutsche Presse in Brasilien (Münster: Aschendorf, 1931). Klaus D. Hebenstreit, “La Recepción De La Literatura Alemana En Colombia,” Poligramas (2005), 169–76. 12 Nicholás Jorge Dornheim, “Literatura En Alemán Escrita En La Argentina: Una Tierra De Nadie Literaria?” Boletin de literatura comparada (1982–3), 105–14. 13 Christl M. K. Brink, “Deutsche Literatur in Brasilien: Eine Anpassungskontroverse Zwischen Ablehnung und Annahme,” In Kontroversen, alte und neue, X ed. Albrecht Schöne et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 113–19. 10 11



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The second moment—immigration and integration The second major development in the German–Latin American literary space occurs via the Spanish Civil War, Nazi repression in Germany, and during or shortly after the Second World War. To contextualize this one needs to consider the Romantics’ engagement with Latin America, then Marx and Engels’ critical political–economic considerations of Latin America from the mid-1840s through 1870s, and then Rosa Luxemburg’s mentioning of Peru in the early 1900s (e.g., “Einführung in die Nationalökonomie”—unfinished manuscript written in 1908/10 in her Gesammelte Werke), where she reaffirmed a concern with Latin America in German political literature, amidst historical world political debate. Further, works of Max Weber and Otto Bauer gained great influence in Latin America during the early twentieth century. Another theme and genre, in theater, Franz Werfl’s historical drama Juarez und Maximilian (1925) took place in Mexico. Alfred Döblin’s trilogy Amazonas (1935–37) is the classic literary reference and critique of Western Civilization in/to Latin America from Germany. In its third book, a wise old indigenous man states: “Wir wissen, wer die Weißen sind. Sie kommen aus ihren Ländern, wo Unordnung herrscht, und bringen Zerstörung. Wo sie gehen, ist Zerstörung” [we know who the whites are. They come from their countries, where chaos reigns, and bring destruction. Where they go, there is destruction] (170).14 Döblin´s novel is in many respects fantastical, at the surface perhaps seeming to parallel the developing magic realism in Latin America at that time (e.g., by Miguel Asturias and José María Arguedas), with living nature and animal protagonists. However, his text lacked authenticity and cultural nuance, at times appearing a bit naïve and even ill-informed. Whereas Döblin’s work was heavily researched (as most of his works), neither his, nor the writings of Marx or Luxemburg or Werfel, were based on lived-experience in the culture and geography of their writings (unlike Humboldt´s). They were armchair ethnographers. This was to change, however. In the 1930s and early 1940s a significant moment in the development of a German–Latin American literary space took place. During this time, a wave of authors from Germany and Latin America found themselves in Spain (many via Paris), and then in Latin America. The influence of German philosophy on the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset (and his influence in turn on many intellectuals who later found themselves in exile in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War) also can be seen playing a role in the influence of this German cultural nuance into Latin America. The reason for their leaving of Central or Western Europe for the Americas involved the political transformations and eventual persecutions that are well-known enough not to need elaboration. Numerous German writers found refuge and a space for literary production in Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, and to some extent Brazil. There developed an almost continent-wide network of German-language production. Post-Spanish Civil War, German, Antifascist works of theater, novel excerpts, short stories, poems, and accounts taking place in Paraguay, Venezuela, and Mexico, were published alongside Mexican, Argentine, Chilean, and Cuban authors’ presentations Alfred.Döblin, Amazonas: Romantrilogie (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1991).

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and discussions that were translated into German. This stimulated a sense of common geography, ideology, and language. A central medium that enabled this was Freies Deutschland, published monthly from November 1941 to June 1946. FD became a sort of loosely connected geography of writers, intellectuals, and politicians—in German and Spanish—through the numerous clubs (e.g., der Heinrich-Heine-Klub), congresses, associations, and other organizations (El Libro Libre) that were consistently presented and elevated in the publications (often in a section of FD entitled “Das Echo”)—from the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico), through Mexico and Central America (Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala) and into South America (Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina). This created common space is enhanced and given depth through the many local and foreign exiled authors in Mexico and other Latin American countries, and the fact that FD was printed and distributed in Mexico and to affiliates and audiences beyond that country’s borders.15 Egon Erwin Kisch, contributor to Freies Deutschland in Mexico, wrote that the “Haupträger der Kultur ist in Mexiko— und nicht nur in Mexiko—die Monateschrift Freies Deutschland, sie ist das Organ der Bewegung gleichen Namens, die bereits heute die aktiven antifaschistischen Verbände aller lateinamerikanischen Staaten umfaßt” [the main bearer of culture is in Mexico—and not only in Mexico—the monthly journal Free Germany, is the organ of movement of the same name that consists already today of active Anti-fascist groups of all Latin American states].16 A special FD edition (Sonderausgabe) published in June 1943 was devoted to Mexico, and a number of the publications and proclamations were translated from Spanish into German, often with short explanations or further commentary in Spanish.17 Latin America was a common space produced in German in FD through theater pieces, short stories, novel excerpts, reports, and editorials that spanned the geography of Latin America. For example, Alfons Goldschmidt writes a poem with Mexican geography, entitled “Auf dem Ixtaccihuatl” (n.1, November/ Other Center/Left anti-Nazi publications in Latin America included: El Alemán Antinazi/Freie Deutsche Zeitung (Santiago de Chile, 1941–5), Deutsche Einheit gegen den Faschismus (Uruguay, 1939), Europa Libre/Freies Europa (Bogotá, 1942), Das freie Wort (Montevideo, 1943–6), Freies Deutschland (Chile, 1943–6), Jüdische Wochenschau (Buenos Aires, 1940), Informationsblatt des Deutschen Antifaschistischen Komitees (Montevideo, 1943–6). Some Right/Center publications ideologically countering Freies Deutschland were: Deutsche Zeitung von Mexiko, der N.S.- Herold, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Volksgemeinschaft, das Bulletin der Deutschen Handelskammer in Mexiko, das Gemeindeblatt der deutschen evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Mexiko, Die Pflugschar (Zeitschrift der Vereinigung christlicher junger Deutscher), and in Spanish: Diario de la Guerra, La Voz del Pueblo and La Noticia (Wolfgang Kiessling, Alemania libre en Mexico (Akademie Verlag: Berlin 1974) V.1 31–2). Here, Patrick von zur Mühlen writes of Das andere Deutschland and Jüdische Wochenschau, the “Fünfte Kolonne” in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia, the extreme conservative, monarchic and clerical “Strasser-Bewegung” and Das schwarze Front, Die Zeit and La verdadera Alemania (110–15). Reiner Pommerin can be further referenced in Das Dritte Reich und Lateinamerika (1977). 16 Marcus G. Patka, Der rasende Reporter: Egon Erwin Kisch. Eine Bibliographie in Bildern (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1998), 218. 17 For example, in the June, 1943 issue, Antonio Castro Leal’s “Moderne mexikanische Dichtung,” Jose Mancisidor’s “Der mexikanische Roman” and Xavier Guerrero’s “Mexikanische Fresken” were translated into German, as was Enrique González Martínez’s poem “Der Abschied” (from Paul Mayer). 15



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December 1942: 21). German and Latin American poetry from Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, and Nicolás Guillén came together on the same pages in German. Neruda (i.e., in reference to a people and language in Guaraní), Anna Seghers, Bodo Uhse, Kisch, Zech, and others write of indigenous places and peoples with a new sensibility and “nearness.” Gustav Regler and Ludwig Renn were in Cuba and the Americas during the Spanish Civil War; then both wrote while exiled in Mexico.18 There is a direct connection of “lived” experience which is then also a relational connection between later works published in Latin America and earlier works published in Spain and Germany. Published and referenced in FD, Stefan Zweig wrote of and from Brazil (Brasilien); Anna Seghers wrote various stories (e.g., Crisanta [1950], Karibische Geschichten [1977]) in Mexico; and Erich Arendt translated a good number of works from Spanish and Latin American authors into German, and further published his own poems from Colombia, in Tolú (1951/56). Here, for example, Seghers’ Crisanta follows the protagonist Crisanta (not Hidalgo, Morelos or Juárez as a heroic protagonist, though the Mexican Catholic/indigenous role of Guadalupe does surface) from her small Mexican village of Puchaca into the larger city, and through the ensuing ebbs and flows of finding and loosing herself, her family, and her community. Seghers is uniquely able to paint a very nuanced local setting: work in the tortilleria, the factory and the fields; the interplay between the US and Mexican borders; figures looking for work; and the issues of detached families and strong but abused women, which still resonate over 60 years later.19 In the same manner as Seghers’ writing is informed from her own experience in Mexico and the Caribbean, the poems of Erich Arendt create an authentic poetic nuance of nature and time: in poems such as “Karribische Nacht,” “Deine Wildnis,” “Verlorene Bucht,” or “Dämmerung”; music in the titles “Cumbia,” “Trinklied,” “Das Lied von der Machete,” “Gesang vom Kanu”; and people—historical and present-day—in “Staub und Hunger,” “Die fremden Herden,” and “Kolumbianische Ballade.” For example, in his poem “Cumbia” Arendt weaves the darkness of night with the backdrop of the sea, mountains, and fields with poetic reference to a natural, rhythmic, historical, and erotic crescendo of maracas, drums, and dancing. Like the sea, music is a “nie sich erschöpfende nachtschwarze Figur” [never exhausting night darkness]—an overlapping of nature, culture, and language.20 FD also connected German and Spanish-language narrative, poetry, and theater in Latin America. In 1940, Paul Walter Jakob opened the “die Freie Deutsche Bühne” in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and was mentioned in FD. Excerpts from the Ferdinand Brückner theater piece “Die Republic in Gefahr” (n.12, 10/42, eighth scene from “Der Kampf mit dem Engel”) take place in Venezuela and deal with “die erste Revolution in Venezuela und Simón Bolivars Ringen um klare revolutionäre Erkenntnisse” (30),

Gerold Gino Baumann, Los voluntaries latinoamericanos en la Guerra Civil Española (San José (CR): Editorial Guayacán, 1997), 33. 19 Anna Seghers and Sonja Hilzinger, Crisanta: Erzählungen 1950–1952. 1 Aufl. ed. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1994. 20 Erich Arendt, Tolú: Gedichte Aus Kolumbien, (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1997), 72. 18

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later published as “Simon Bolivar” (FD Sep. 45, p. 35). While in Argentina, Paul Zech wrote both poetry and theater invoking and/or taking place in Latin America.21

Third moment—increased mobility and expanded media In all this production—connected through the established network of German newspapers and their new addition (i.e., The FD), and later serving as a basis for further production after the war—a new, geographically and linguistically perspectival dynamic was created in the German–Latin American literary space. This then sets the tone for a third stage of German–Latin American literary (and multi-genre) space as world literary space in the second-part of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century. This historic back-and-forth movement and residing of authors between Germany and Latin America has created a highly traveled space, which has accelerated greatly in recent years and has greatly expanded literary production. This moment can be seen as beginning with Latin Americans contemporary with Humboldt who wrote of their travels to Germany and beyond, such as the Peruvian Juan Bustamente and the Bolivian Emeterio Villamil de Rada in the nineteenth century. Just as Humboldt (among other European visitors to Latin America) was written about in fictional works (e.g., Germán Arciniegas, Eduardo Galeano, G. G. Márquez, William Ospina), so too there is a movement of explorers in fictional works from Latin America to Europe and beyond, as in Argentine Federico Andahazi’s El Conquistador (2006), where an Aztec noble “discovers” Europe. This creates both an historical and now fictional “two-way” street, and hence an emerging dynamic spatial construct between Germany and Latin America. This two-way historic and fictional traffic continued and developed. In the early/mid-twentieth century many German language authors were exiled in Latin America during the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, but in the second part of the twentieth century there was a movement of Latin American authors to Germany. From the early 1970s, the DAAD and numerous “Stiftungen” and institutes in Germany (e.g., IAI, VDA-Gesellschaft, IA-K in Hamburg, among others) and those established in Latin America (i.e. Goethe Institutes), have actively supported interaction and exchange. During this time, the wave of dictatorships and state violence also forced many intellectuals to seek asylum, notably from Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador. Furthermore, there was a great spike in Latin American students studying in Germany, both East and West. Literarily, another element to be considered was the so-called “Boom” and Magic Realism in Latin American literature, with early representations from Further examples include: E. E. Kisch’s “Karl May, Mexico und die Nazis” (n.2, November 1941: 11), “Deutsche Meister über Mexico: Goethe, Engels, Bismark, Nietzsche, Dürer, Heine” (December 1941: 16–17), “Freies Europa im freien Mexico, das andere Spanien” (n.8, June 1942: 19–20), “Aufgabe der Deutschen in Amerika” by Alfons Goldschmidt (n.1, November/Dec. 1942: 21), “Mexikos Volk an der Seite der FD” (n.4, March 1943), J. Becher’s “Drama in Mexiko” (n.9, August 1943), Kisch’s articles “Oaxaca” (n.1, December 1943), “Schatz des Montezuma” (n.7, June 1944) and “Entdeckungen in Mexiko” (n.2, January 1945).

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indigenous traditions carried into writing by the likes of José María Arguedas (Peru, Quechua/Aymara), Agusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, Gaurani), Miguel Asturias (Guatemala, Maya), and Juan Rulfo (Mexico, Aztec/Maya), and further developed by Gabriel García Márquez (Cien Años de Soledad) and Isabel Allende (La Casa de los Espiritus). Amidst this dynamic, a new impulse was injected into the German– Latin American literary space. Stylistically, this can be pronouncedly seen in newer German-language literature as WL. Furthermore, Latin American perspectives and experiences are now being realized first-hand in German literature, deriving no longer from the traditional observers, nor through translation. Notable here are Zé do Rock and Elza Wagner-Carozza, both from Brazil, who now reside in Germany and who write in both Brazilian-Portuguese and in German. Rock, for example, challenges and plays with the grammatical rules of the German language in his travel-themed work Fom Winde verfeelt (1995). Carozza addresses issues of foreignness in her poem “Fremde,” and ecology in “Feuerrot” (1998). Perhaps most celebrated is Nora Becker Álvarez, originally from Chile, who resides in Germany and is a bilingual author. Her bestseller Die Geister leben um die Ecke (1994) is starkly influenced by Magic Realism, and has been compared to Asturias’ Leyendas de Guatemala. Having grown up in the Southern Chilean Chiloés culture, she interweaves love and death, happiness and sadness, hope, and future in four long stories. People and nature communicate with one another. Álvarez states: “Die Figuren der Mythologie überwinden hier ihren angestammten Platz und erreichen andere Sphären, in denen sie mit der Realität der Gegenwart in Berührung kommen” [the figures of mythology overcome here their rooted place and reach other spheres, in which they come into contact with present reality].22 Álvarez also uniquely continues Grimm’s tale in her Bremer Stadtmusikanten (1995). Her literature written in German overlaps with Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda’s 2004 Los peores cuentos de hermanos Grim, which gives further nuance and expansion to the literary space of Grimm’s tales within a Southern-cone cultural context. Also, Arguedas’ well-known folkloric story, “El sueño del pongo,” has antecedents in earlier German stories. Ultimately, there are many traditionally ‘German’ nuances that are taken-up and re-sculpted in Latin American literature, which can and should be considered a part of a WL, and a German–Latin American space. Humboldt obviously has been subjected to mimetic presentation many a time, notably in Uruguayan Eduardo Galeanos’ Las Veinas Abiertas de América (1971) as a man in pursuit of scientific truth, in Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’ El General en su laberinto (1989) as being in contact with Simon Bolivar, and in William Ospinas’ América Mestiza (2004) as a precursor to modern ecology. On another note, reminiscences of German Fascism in Latin America are taken up by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in El tercer Reich (1989), and again in Literatura Nazi en América (1996), which overlaps with German Fascist writings from Germany and Latin America in both German and Tomás Stefanovics, “Literatur der Spanischsprachigen Autor/Innen Aus Lateinamerika,” in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland Ein Handbuch, ed. Carmine Chiellino (Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2007), 221.

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Spanish. The German writer Ernst Jünger also appears as a character in Bolaño´s novella, Nocturno de Chile (2000). Recently, Argentine author Maria Cecilia Barbetta, by writing Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros (2008) in German, further contributes to this third moment of a German–Latin American literary space as WL. Barbetta’s work takes place in a predominantly urban setting, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and follows a young protagonist (Mariana), who works with her mother and grandmother in a Schneiderei (dressmaker’s shop), and their relationship and experiences—a father’s death, a client’s wedding preparations, gossip of boyfriends, and local happenings. Barbetta very literally unites German and Spanish in her title: Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros. The narrative is written entirely in German, but in a very Latin American style and tone. For example, her predominantly female figures’ interactions display a uniquely Latin America gossip—or chismosear—dynamic that is both entertaining and very culturally embedded, from the conversations in the Schneiderei to Mariana’s rendezvous with Gerardo. The wisdom and familiar structural dynamic in traditional Latin American culture is clearly present, exemplified, and cherished in scenes with Mariana’s grandmother, for instance when together they butcher a chicken. Religion, as a uniquely Latin American, long-standing, and often somewhat contentious synthesis of indigenous religion with Catholicism, is also shown: “Das konnte die Oma, weil sie wenngleich ein frommer, so doch nicht für religiöse Spitzfindigkeiten zu habender Geist ist. Obwohl streng katholisch erzogen, hat die Großmutter gelernt, ihre Aufmerksamkeit überwiegend den Dingen dieser Welt zu widmen” [grandma could do that, because, although pious, she was not for religious pedantry. Although she was brought up strict Catholic, she learned to devote her attention overwhelmingly to things of this world].23 Like Rock, Barbetta stretches the German language, using many more than usual Spanish cognates: insistieren (insistir), negieren (negar), lamentieren (lamentar), konsultieren (consultar), parzellieren (parcelar); as well as English cognates (zoomen, desodorieren), which give the literature an ever more, not only Latin American, but “worldy” nuance. From earlier appreciation of the lyricism in Quechua, to translations of poetry into German and now contemporary multilingual poems, poetry has long played an important role in German–Latin American space. Furthermore, poetry in and into music has given and continues to give rise to numerous examples. In the 1960s and 1970s many cantautores (Liedermacher, or singer-songwriters) found themselves exiled in Germany, among other places. The music of Victor Jara, Mercedes Soza, and Illi Intimani became popular in Germany. Musicians, poets, and their work traveled from Latin America to Germany as well as from Germany to Latin America. Here, Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez makes reference to Bertolt Brecht, his artistic and philosophic contributions, in his song “Sueño con Serpientes” (1974). Later, Bertolt Brecht’s “Mackie Messer” (1927) was re-interpreted in a Latin American context by Panamanian singer-songwriter Rubén Blades in “Pedro Navaja” (1978). The Mexican-German Singer Oliva Molina, born in Europe to a German mother, moved Barbetta, María Cecilia. Änderungsschneiderei Los Milagros: Roman (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2008), 79.

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to Mexico and sang Schlager. Music and poetry is a broad creative space that, with the advent of the internet and upsurge of multilingualism, breaks national space identity as never before—this is, as such, present in production within the German–Latin American context where the Hip-hop band Fettes Brott invokes love with the SpanishLatin American lovesong “Emanuela,” and Freundeskreis salutes and references progress in Bolivia due to President Evo Morales through a phrase of the chef d’oeuvre of German philosopher Ernst Bloch in their song “Das Prinzip Hoffnung” (2007). With the upsurge in popularity of Salsa music (now even a Bavarian group sings salsa/ son in German) and Salsa dancing in Germany (as well as worldwide) and the growth of “world” music festivals, German–Latin American poetic and musical space is very much alive. As German and Latin American literary space began expanding from poetry to music in the 1960s and 1970s, so too was literature expanding into film. During this time H. M. Enzensberger critiques Latin America and the growing tourism industry in general in Eine Theorie des Tourismus (1958/9), and the greater Latin American dynamic in Das Verhör von Habana (1970). He also translated various works from Latin America. The figure of Tania, an undercover Leftist informant of German heritage, connected to Che Guevara in Argentina and Bolivia, found its way into song, literature and film (i.e., Venezuelan singer-songwriter Ali Primera). There were a series of films (mostly East German) that dealt with or in a contemporary Latin America; for example El Cantor (1977), which was based on the brutal murder of Chilean singersongwriter Victor Jara. The GDR mini-series “Das Geheimnis der Anden” (1972) followed the adventures of an undercover agent from Germany in Latin America. Der deutsche Freund (2011), directed by Jeanin Meerapfel, is an Argentine–German coproduction, in both Spanish and German. It takes place in both Argentina and Germany, and follows a love story between a young Jewish girl and the son of an SS officer, covering the early Peron years, the student movements in Frankfurt in the late 1960s and 70s, and back to Argentina through the end of the Videla dictatorship. This German–Latin American overlap into cinematic space has continued to evolve in contemporary independent German film in Latin America production. For example, Herz der Erde (2011) in Spanish and Mayan and Pachakutic (2011) in Spanish and Quechua, both with German subtitles, address in a very artistic and thoughtprovoking presentation current issues of environmental and cultural degradation and survival (i.e., international mining companies, climate-change, and pollution). Within this German–Latin American cinematic production is an ever-growing number of films that have—often intertwining—socio-political, cultural, and literary backdrops, often an intertwining of all three. For example, in 1923 German-speaking Mennonites from Canada founded a colony near Chihuahua, Mexico. This was the background for a 2007 film from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas Stellet Licht, filmed in Plautdietsch [Plattdeutsch], with some intermingling with Spanish. Here a German dialect was created by a Mexican director, giving his instructions to the amateur actors in Spanish, who then proceeded to translate their lines into Plattdeutsch which is spoken in a new geography – Chihuahua Mexico, versus Northern Germany – and in a new medium (film).

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At this juncture, I would like to focus on two particular artists, West German Werner Herzog and East German Rainer Simon, whose work from the 1970s until the early twenty-first century help highlight where literature and film uniquely intertwined – from literature to film, as well as from film into literature. Werner Herzog’s films Aguirre (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), and his book Eroberung des Nutzlosen (2004), and Rainer Simon’s films Die Besteigung des Chimborazo (1988) and Die Farben von Tigua (1994), as well as his books Fernes Land (2005) and Regenbogenboa (2005), are exemplary of this stage within the German–Latin American nuanced literary space. Both connect historical figures in their contemporary art. Simon draws on Humboldt in one of his films, while Herzog’s historical figures were much less in equilibrium with their natural space-time surroundings, i.e. Latin America’s environment. Rainer Simon’s experiences of and perceptions of a Latin American environment come forth in his autobiographical work, Fernes Land (2005). Simon respects his natural environment and understands people as being a part of this, showing himself open to the ability to learn from it as well as from those who know and converse with it (i.e., Indigenous groups). In Simon’s film Die Farben von Tigua (1994), people, nature, and culture all interact. Tension arises between the city and the mountains. Simon’s Mit Fischen und Vögeln Reden (1998/9) is a beautiful documentary of the Zapara people, their culture and way of life, which is in balance with their natural surroundings in the Ecuadorian jungle. Upon returning from Quito, one of the young men, when asked what it was like, responded that it was ‘hell”—trying to explain how people there live in small caves stacked on top of one another. Simon’s later 2002 film Der Ruf des Fayu Ujmu is in the Chapalachi language, and shows the Chachi in their natural setting, according to their myth of the call of the “fayu ujmu” (an evil spirit in Chachi legend). Here, Simon, a German male, breaks historical, colonizing etiquette and films indigenous protagonists in their language through his artistic medium (with German subtitles). This is reminiscent and overlaps with the artistic space of Peruvian film director Luis Figueroa’s first all-Quechua-language-dialogue film, Kukuli (1961). Simon’s novel Regenbogenboa (2005) is a fresh addition to earlier German–Latin American works, combining the magic and fantasy of an Alfred Döblin with the lived experience of an Anna Seghers. In the novel, the character Ana goes to Ecuador to bury her father Gregorio, who has been living there for many years. Once there, she leafs through his diary, reminiscing his experiences (some of which she shared), mostly lived in Ecuador; some childhood experiences during the latter war years and early post-war Germany are also mixed in. A great portion of the novel takes place in the Ecuadorian jungle, amongst indigenous groups Shaur and Huarani.24 From Tayta Chimborazo, he takes a long expedition on the Napo and Shiripuno rivers in the Urwald. In the novel, local figures, Riqui, Adan, Fidel, and Pachacutic are developed and interact with each other. The jungle is not a godforsaken place, but a part of the Quechua time-space concept pacha. The interaction and interrelation between one’s tangible reality and a sort of “other” dimension, somehow, mysteriously accessed through sacred plants/herbs and rituals, mixes life and death: the uray pacha/below, Rainer Simon, Regenbogenboa (Berlin: Schwartzkopff Buchwerke, 2005), 69–79, 182–3.

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kunan pacha/here and hanaq pacha/above. Lived experiences make this presentation so unique and real; and modern with inclusion of the negative role of petroleros, fights between Catholic, and Evangelical missionaries, and the suppression of curanderos/ shamans, amongst TVs and T-shirts in the jungle. Simon’s work seems starkly influenced by Latin American Magic Realism, with an informed cultural nuance. Whereas Simon’s Humboldt, although not completely understanding, is interested in learning more from the local people and keenly eager to observe and document them and the natural environment, Herzog’s protagonist in Aguirre (1972), played by Klaus Kinski, with a group of adventurers and conquistadores in search of El Dorado, is possessed to conquer, not to observe and learn from nature. He is brutal to the local people. Herzog keeps intact, in many ways, the colonizer’s narrative. Nature is fierce, to be survived and conquered. However, in his comments on the making of the film, which was written in a frenzied period of two-and-a-half days and shot in a few weeks, Herzog does display a wide variety of experiences in the filming process: a constant adaptability and spontaneity necessary for survival. This creates a sort of juxtaposition between Latin American experiences of Aguirre the figure and Herzog the author. Herzog states that the jungle is not a backdrop, as in a commercial, but almost has a human quality, as it is always a part of the soul of men in the jungle.25 In a sense, the jungle reciprocates to Aguirre what he gave and took from it. In Herzog’s later film Fitzcarraldo, the protagonist, a rubber baron of Irish descent, is again possessed, this time by the idea of an opera in the jungle. Herzog states that the film “encourages the audience to fulfill dreams.”26 Herzog’s own dream was “das Bild von einem großen Dampfschiff über einen Berg” [the image of a huge steamship over a mountain].27 In his book Eroberung des Nutzlosen (2004), Herzog talks of how they reminisced about experiences of Aguirre while working on Fitzcarraldo. Eroberung does not flow quite as seamlessly and smoothly as does Simon’s Fernes Land, but Herzog takes the reader through: experiences and issues of his surroundings; strikes; daily life at the local level; news from abroad; and difficulties, or simply observations, of place and people surrounding him and his camp. In contrast to the German Herzog’s portrayal, Chilean journalist and author Luis Sepúlveda introduces the historical Carlos Fitzcarraldo as “brutal and unscrupulous […] one of the worst adventurers of all time.”28 He continues to write of all the beautiful nature, the dynamic relationship between land and people that Fitzcarraldo missed, ending thus “Nada de esto vio Fitzcarraldo. La codicia será siempre como una aguja de hielo en las pupilas” [Fitzcarraldo did not see any of this. Greed will always be as a needle in the eyes].29 Sepúlveda and Herzog overlap, but are distinct. Perhaps, in the end, through his own “lived” experience, Herzog, to Stated in DVD audio commentary with Director Werner Herzog and Producer Norman Hill (Anchor Bay Entertainment, Troy MI, 1972/2002). Also in Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin (London: Faber, 2002), 81. 26 Stated in DVD audio commentary with Director Werner Herzog and Producers Lucki Stipetic and Norman Hill (Anchor Bay Entertainment, Troy MI, 1982/2002). Also can be referenced in Herzog on Herzog, 186. 27 Werner Herzog, Eroberung des Nutzlosen (Berlin: Hanser, 2004), 7. [Further citations in text.] 28 Luis Sepúlveda, Historias Marginales (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2001), 27. 29 Ibid., 33. 25

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an extent, sees, experiences, and even respects and has a relationship with what his figure, Fitzcarraldo, was blind to. However, is the story of Fitzcarraldo one of dreams, as Herzog makes us believe, or of greed, as Sepúlveda suggests? In the epilogue to his Eroberung, revisting Iquitos 20 years later, Herzog recognizes the dynamic of nature—with the place of the classic boat scene already grown over once again with vegetation. “Ich sah mich um, weil alles so reglos war. Ich erkannte den Urwald als etwas, was mir vertraut war und was in mir war, und ich wusste, ich liebte ihn: indes wider mein besseres Wissen” [I looked around, because everything was so still. I recognized the jungle as something familiar and that was in me though against my better judgement].30 Nature is a sort of protagonist in his films and in his life; it is in dialogue in the films and here even with Herzog. But, Herzog obviously struggles with his concept of nature; more so than Simon and in a more European or German perspective, versus Simon’s more culturally – and interculturally – nuanced sense. Perhaps Simon has learned from Humboldt (and his mistakes) and progressed, while Herzog remained fixated. German–Latin American literary space comes full circle in 2005 with Daniel Kehlmann’s Vermessung der Welt. His dual-biographic novel (i.e., also following mathematician and astronomer Carl F. Gauss) revisited Humboldt in Latin America, mostly South America, only to be filmed in 2012. Kehlmann’s Humboldt, as in Simon’s film, becomes humane, with desires and doubts, vision and blindness. “Alle große Ströme seien verbunden. Die Natur sei ein Ganzes.” [All great streams are connected. Nature is a whole.] writes Kehlmann ́s Humboldt.31 Within the discussion of the intersections of WL, however, one thinks, as Moraña writes, of a “déjà-vu of world literature.”32 Here I ask myself, perhaps, whether “people and their interconnection with one another and their environment” might have been the logical insight to follow. In Kehlmann’s novel, with Humboldt now returned from his travels in Germany, he writes: Der Kosmos werde ein begriffener sein, alle Schwierigkeiten menschlichen Anfangs, wie Angst, Krieg und Ausbeutung, würden in die Vergangenheit sinken, wozu gerade Deutschland und nicht zuletzt die Forscher dieser Versammlung den vordinglichsten Beitrag leisten müßten. Die Wissenschaft werde ein Zeitalter der Wohlfahrt herbeiführen, und wer könne wissen, ob sie nicht eines Tages sogar das Problem des Todes lösen werde.” 33 [The cosmos would be understood, and all difficulties of human beginnings, such as fear, war and exploitation, would sink into the past, to which now Germany and not withstanding the researcher of this collection would certainly achieve an important contribution. Science could introduce a period of welfare, and who would know, whether or not it will even solve the problem of death some day.] Herzog, Eroberung, 329–30. Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung Der Welt: Roman (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2005), 117. 32 Mabel Moraña, “A río revuelto, ganancia de pescadores. América Latina y el déjà vu de la literatura mundial,” in America Latina En La Literatura Mundial (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2006), 319. 33 Kehlmann, Die Vermessung, 238. 30 31



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It is perhaps this absence of the human sense and simple focus on his role within this “science” that we now see playing out in great present-day tensions (e.g., nuclear energy versus nuclear weapons, extractive versus renewable resources). Kehlmann’s recasting of Humboldt’s travels gained world attention, a world audience, perhaps even reinvigorated an at times flailing German-language literature in the world market. A German–Latin American literature has a lot to do with the broader discussion of WL as defined and developed in German from Kant’s Weltbürger and Goethe’s Weltliteratur, through Marx ́s world history, capital and markets, to the world philology of Leo Spitzer and linguistics in Erich Auerbach. Within talk of Latin American literature as WL, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova draw critical attention to issues surrounding literary studies, the geopolitics of knowledge, and a sociology of WL. And here, differences in language and culture create an asymmetrical and mostly disadvantageous position within a European mode of expression and distribution of such since colonization. We have heard here some of the Latin Americn voices that position “German–Latin American” literature in a complex nexus of viewpoints and concerns. This worldly discussion overlaps with and takes part in a broader historical discussion of identity and nation within a “world” market (where, for example, certain Latin American authors were actively “translated” and supported by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, inasmuch as they were found to be compatible with “US” interests). Amidst these concerns, in conclusion, this unique German–Latin America literary (or better, artistic) space and experience is both unique and broad. It is, amidst the online Internet space and the development and creation of new and hybrid genres and forms of presentation, part of an ever-expanding world literature.

9

Contemporary German-Based Hybrid Texts as a New World Literature Elke Sturm-Trigonakis

This article introduces the concept of “New World Literature” as a taxonomical and analytical tool for approaching culturally and linguistically hybrid contemporary texts that are usually considered to be minor parts of their respective national literatures. But what is national literature in our postnational era under conditions of globalization? And what does this term mean in the rather complex case of German literatures? And, what is these texts’ relationship to WL, on the one hand, and to German-based multilingual texts, on the other hand? My intention is to put these disparate items in order, focusing, first, on notions of national literature in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Secondly, I introduce “New WL” as a concept that allows the establishment of a new literary system on the same rank with already defined literary systems such as national literature, postcolonial literature, or others. As a third step, finally, I demonstrate the functionality of New WL through its application to contemporary German colonial literature.

Defining German literature today Following Elias Torres Feijó (and Itamar Even-Zohar’s systemic approach to literary activity), I understand literature “as social space,” i.e., as a system capable of supporting and even generating the identity of a certain group.1 This social space is not automatically tantamount to a national literary system, although precisely such a system is (mis)used in such a way that a dominant group imposes previously configured values and identity markers on a collective in order to create socio-national community cohesion. “This process encourages a sense of common belonging and provides certain instruments of mutual recognition, comprising privileged ways of intra- and extracommunitary, referential, and symbolic communication” (Torres Feijó, 4). In reality, however, in many cases, the common comprehension of nations as “gatherings Elias J. Torres Feijó, “About Literary Systems and National Literature,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011), 3, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481–4374.1901 (accessed February 26, 2013).

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of people linked to a certain territory with a dominant language” is inappropriate to describe an “identitary-literary-linguistic patrimony” (Torres Feijó, 5), as Torres Feijó convincingly demonstrates by the example of Galician literature in relationship to Castilian and Portuguese literature (Torres Feijó, 5–8). The case of German literature is no less complicated, since the term can refer to the literature of Germany (during the existence of the German Democratic Republic [GDR] from 1945 to 1989, to two Germanies!), of Austria, to the German-speaking part of Switzerland (about 60 percent of the population), and of Liechtenstein—the “DACHL” countries. Hence, we are confronted with a variety of configurations and functionalizations of the notion according to the necessities of the historical period and the political circumstances in question, so that it makes sense to take a closer look at every case, one by one, before relating it to other literary systems such as world literature or New WL. At the outset, it is important to recall the fact that notions such as “the national,” “national culture,” or “national literature” are terms which came into being not earlier than at the end of the eighteenth century. First developed in Germany and England, the idea of Culture as the way “social components adhere,” and further of how “language, the arts, religion, and the sciences” interact and place themselves institutionally into society, was perceived as the expression of the national character of a certain society defined as a homogenous entity distinguished from its neighbors.2 As such, the concept of a national culture is a modern aspiration; the claim for a collective identity shared by all members of the dominion did not exist in preindustrial societies, with their strict stratification between the ruling elite and the dominated lower classes, nor in Empires such as the Ottoman or the Habsburg (Jusdanis, 31–2). In Europe, the United Kingdom and France, for example, evolved rather early into nation-states with a well-defined territory, imposing one language and a set of national culture patterns on the subdued peoples of Ireland and Wales, Bretagne and Provence, respectively; thus, in these societies a classical center–periphery-hegemony with assimilating forces was created, a governance model that these nation-states later transferred and applied to their colonies. The majority of the German-speaking parts of Middle Europe, however, belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, and after its collapse in 1806 following the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, Germany longed for national unity until the foundation of its first nation-state in 1871. Hence Germany, as well as Greece for instance, represents an example of a “Kulturnation,” which means that “national unity was conceived first by elites in terms of language, history, folk tradition, literature, and common descent decades (and in Germany’s case, a century) before the establishment of a state” (Jusdanis, 32). Lacking a national territory and military conquests, Germany had to offer only one of E. J. Hobsbawm’s three criteria of nationhood, a written tradition of national literature that provided the only foundation to rely upon in order to form a national identity.3 Herein lies the reason for the hypertrophic national literature Gregory Jusdanis, “Beyond National Culture?” boundary 2 (Duke UP), 22.1. (Spring, 1995), 30. Cited in Hinrich C. Seeba, “Germany: A Literary Concept: The Myth of a National Literature,” German Studies Review 17.2 (May 1994), 354.

2 3



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discourse in Germany, from Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1807) as the last (!) hope for the German reunification (“Wiedervereinigung”) up until 1980, when German Nobel prize-winner Günter Grass published his book Kopfgeburten (sic), where he underlines the existence of one German cultural identity unifying the German Democratic Republic and the Federal German Republic beyond the ideological and political differences, going back to imaginations of German unity in the nineteenth century (cf. Seeba, 356–7). Generally, the entire, “long” nineteenth century can be characterized by the search for a cultural and lingual homeland (“Heimat”), since the historical reality consisted of two unequal powers—Austria and Prussia—fighting for dominance over a rather loose association of 39 German sovereign countries and towns (the so-called “Deutscher Bund”).4 “Whoever wanted to localize Germany, which had all but disappeared from the political map of the nineteenth century, had to reinvent it as a Germany of the mind, as a literary and intellectual concept to be taught in the institutions of higher learning” (Seeba, 357). But whereas the early literature of the Romanic countries by Petrarca, Boccacio, Rabelais, Racine, Camões, Calderón, or Cervantes became classics of their respective national literary histories, with a continuous presence in academia and the public, Ancient and Middle Ancient German texts had to be regained through systematic research by the early German scholarship at the beginning of the nineteenth century (e.g. by the brothers Grimm), and until today, German literature before 1750 is a field restricted to a few university departments.5 Recovering ancient German literature was extremely difficult, because Medieval or Early High German works had not been continuously edited and because the intense language evolution throughout the centuries reduced the comprehension of older texts to a circle of specialists. Hence, literature of the German Middle Ages, such as epic or courtly love songs, became part of a quasi-mythological discourse of an imagined German origin in freedom and unity, containing even religious overtones. This discourse about the German mythological spirit manifested by “sacred” German texts led both to the first re-edition of the Nibelungenlied in 1807 and to Richard Wagner’s operas, but was also abused later by Third Reich rhetoric concerning the imagined heroic German past.6 After the Second World War, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) presented itself as the guardian of anti-fascist “Germanness” and promoted a German national identity which embraced all democratic and revolutionary forces, in contrast to the Federal Republic which was claimed by the GDR to be the shelter of former Nazis and other reactionary elements.7 Authors such as Anna Seghers or Bertolt Brecht accompanied and supported—although critically—the process of establishing East German literature as the exclusive representative of the entire literary production in German. But, after the Wall had been erected in 1961, the repressive tendencies See e.g., Hagen Schulze, Kleine deutsche Geschichte (München: C.H.Beck, 2007), 91–4. About the tenet of a relatively short history of German literature, see Heinz Schlaffer, Die kurze Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (München: Hanser, 2002). 6 Seeba, 359–60, and Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992). 7 Cf. Peter Davies, “Hanns Eisler’s ‘Faustus’ Libretto and the Problem of East German National Identity,” Music and Letters 81.4 (November 2000), 587. 4 5

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by the regime towards younger authors such as Peter Hacks, Günter Kunert, Heiner Müller, or Wolf Biermann greatly increased; as a result, GDR writers often published their works in the Federal Republic—though at great risk—because in the GDR they could not pass censorship. With respect to older German literature, there reigned an obvious preference for humanistic and rationalist literature: selected texts by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, or Heinrich Mann corresponded to the socialist ideology and found benevolent reception into the GDR literary canon. Thus, there really existed, at least as part of a whole, a common corpus of a unified German literature, though divided into two politically controversial German states, which kept vivid a German national identity, once again to be localized in imaginative and spiritual territories. Since the reunification of both Germanies in 1989, literary criticism has not only stated a “Wiederkehr des Erzählens” (“return of narrative”; Nikolaus Förster), but has also witnessed the genesis of literary texts that focus on the Fall of the Wall, and on different mentalities of East and West Germany: Durs Grünbein, Thomas Brussig, or Ingo Schulze have thematized these subjects from the Eastern perspective, Günter Grass in Ein weites Feld [A Broad Field], or Yadé Kara in Selam Berlin from the Western one.8 With regard to the diversity of contemporary German literature, the term “national literature” is being questioned more than ever, especially because of the manifest presence of a transnational, linguistically and culturally hybrid literature which as “interkulturelle” or “Migrationsliteratur” leads a precarious existence within German national philology. Considering the Austrian case, at first sight it seems to be even more difficult to decipher an explicit discourse of an Austrian national literature that would contribute to the genesis of a well-defined Austrian identity. Following Wolfgang Müller-Funk, there are several Austrias—it is a territory, a culture, or an imperial past, depending on one’s point of view.9 During the Habsburg Empire, whose vast territory included various ethnic groups with different languages and religions, the question of “Germanization” or German nationalism seldom arose, for, like other empires such as the Hohenzollern or the Romanov, Vienna made “little effort at cultural or ethnic homogenization,” states Krishan Kumar. “Nationalism of the nineteenth-century variety is … inimical to empire.”10 After the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in 1917, Austria found itself reduced to a financially weak and internationally rather unimportant country where large groups soon sought to regain the lost splendor by courting German National Socialism in order to profit from the German aspirations for European hegemony from the decade of the 1930s on. Even though a great part of the Austrian population in 1938 had applauded the “Anschluss” to Hitler’s Third Reich, after 1945 the mechanisms of forgetting and of suppressing the Nazi-past in the collective memory worked just as effectively—perhaps more so—than they did in See the very good introduction by Stuart Taberner, The Novel in German since 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 9 Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Komplex Österreich. Fragmente zu einer Geschichte der modernen österreichischen Literatur (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2009), 21. 10 Krishan Kumar, “Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective,” Theory and Society 29.5 (October 2000), 578. 8



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the Federal Republic. Hence, the Second Austrian Republic was intent on restarting the construction of a new “imagined community” with a special emphasis on its neutrality, but “Austriacity” remained a rather amorphous artifact. As a consequence, Austrian scholar Ruth Wodak et al. conclude: that there is not one Austrian identity, but that constructs of identity are formed depending on context, and are influenced by factors such as social status, party political affiliation, regional and/or ethnic origin, and so on. … The concept of an Austrian nation encompasses elements of both Kulturnation and Staatsnation and … a number of other dimensions might prove influential in the construction of Austrian identities, for example differentiation from non-Austrians resident in Austria or from other nations, in particular from “the Germans.”11

Thus, Austrian identity after the Second World War was defined ex negativo, as “non-German,” though including the German language with its Austrian dialectal specificities. From the 1950s onward, the generation of Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, or Peter Handke initiated the deconstruction of the presumed idyllic Austrian Heimat of happy farmers and skiers in a bucolic landscape. Their texts are considered the first examples of a genuine Austrian national literature, and they have found successors in Robert Menasse, Gerhard Roth, Wolf Haas, or the Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek. These authors, who are searching for Das Land ohne Eigenschaften [The country without characteristics]—thus the title of a collection of essays about Austria by Robert Menasse from 1992, playing off the title of Robert Musil’s famous novel-recur to “Lust am Text, Hybridisierung, Spiel mit den literarischen Konventionen, deutlich markierte Distanz, Intertextualität, Bloßlegen der Konstruktionsverfahren, Einbezug des Lesers als Mitspieler, Ironie und Parodie“ [Joy in textuality, hybridization, playing with literary conventions, distantiation, intertextuality, revealing of mechanisms of construction, inclusion of the recipient in the game, irony, and parody]. As Joanna Drynda states in her study that carries the allusive title Poetik der Österreichkritik [Poetics of Austria-Criticism], moral and economic corruption, individual, and collective disillusionment, and sarcastic subversion are the most relevant issues in Austrian literature from 1945 until today, which is, of course, closely linked to the anti-German discourse in this period.12 In the last decades, however, the strong criticism toward the socio-political situation in Austria has been accentuated by foreign voices. Authors such as Vladimir Vertlib, Doran Rabinovic, or Dimitré Dinev have offered new literary symbolic representations of another, unfamiliar Austria, negotiating heterogeneous identities and displacements in space and time beyond the Habsburg myth and the contemporary anti-Austrian counter-discourse.13 Obviously, with their strong presence on the Ruth Wodak et al., The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 188. 12 Joanna Drynda, Schöner Schein, unklares Sein. Poetik der Österreichkritik im Werk von Gerhard Roth, Robert Menasse und Josef Haslinger (Poznań: Rys-Studio, 2003). 13 See Ernst Grabovszki, “Österreich als literarischer Erfahrungsraum zugewanderter Autorinnen und Autoren,“ in Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige 11

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Austrian literary scene, Austrian literature is becoming less national, but, at the same time, is gaining more pluralism in styles and subjects; in this way, these transnational newcomers lead back to former globalized conditions under the Habsburgs with their omnipresent multiculturalism and multilingualism. In any case, they do question and challenge constructions of a national literature as the expression of a presumed unity discourse in Austria. The common denominator of the Swiss and Austrian perception of national literature is their directedness against hegemonic cultural ambitions on the part of Germany from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. Whereas in Germany the national narrative was an instrument for claiming an own nation-state before its political realization in 1871, in Switzerland national literature gained importance only after the birth of the Swiss Republic in 1848, and supported the formation of a national identity in the newly created state, grounded in a common political system. As such, it represents the reverse of the Kulturnation Germany and an equivalent to the Austrian situation after 1945 when, in a comparable way, nation-building preceded identity formation.14 From about 1860 on, Swiss–German scholarship aspired, on the one hand, to integrate Swiss–German literature into the greater context of German literature, while on the other hand, it promoted the establishment of a Swiss–German literary tradition of its own based on authors like Johann Caspar Lavater, Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller, or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. These eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors rather cautiously criticized the Swiss society of their era, but were nevertheless perceived as supporters of the construction of the national project. Under the threat of the Third Reich, the ambivalence between integration and demarcation with regard to Germany led to the concept of literature as “geistige Landesverteidigung” [intellectual defense of the country]. After 1945, however, Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt experienced worldwide successes with rather “non-Swiss” universal human themes and stereotyped characters.15 Although in the following decades the concrete reality of Switzerland and its self-image as an ideal welfare state were thematized and challenged in the narratives of Peter Bichsel or Adolf Muschg, for instance, the literary production was also dominated by a strong tendency toward cosmopolitanism (in the tradition of Frisch and Dürrenmatt), treating a wide range of various issues capable of worldwide consumption. The bestsellers by Martin Suter (e.g., his short stories in the collection Business Class from 2000) represent this trend. Probably because of this indifference toward national affairs, contrary to Austrian literature by authors such as Handke, Christoph Ransmayr, or Jelinek, Swiss-German literature after Frisch and Dürrenmatt was not able to give innovative impulses to German literature, nor did it stand out by the undertaking of an explicit national Swiss discourse (see Caduff and Sorg, 13–16). Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 290–2. 14 Corina Caduff and Reto Sorg,“Zur Einführung,” in Nationale Literaturen heute—ein Fantom? Die Imagination und Tradition des Schweizerischen als Problem, ed. Corina Caduff and Reto Sorg (München: Fink, 2004), 10. 15 See also Markus Jud, “Literaturgeschichte der Schweiz,” available at http://literatur.geschichteschweiz.ch (accessed November 5, 2011).



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Differently from Austria or Germany, however, literary production in German does not monopolize literary discourse in the country. Among the four literary languages of Switzerland, it is maybe only the Romansh that can claim to represent exclusively Swiss matters, uninfluenced as it is by the literatures of France, Germany, or Italy as is the case for the other languages; Swiss-German, French, and Italian are always exposed to the risk of being limited to a minor literature of the neighbor countries in question, since drawing clear boundaries is quite a difficult enterprise. This idea of a minor literature is reinforced by the fact that the spoken German of Switzerland is almost never written, while the literary production is without exception composed in a standard German “imported” from Germany, as it were. On the other hand, however, the label “CH-Literatur” protects literature from commercialization and from “Verschwinden der Literatur aus dem öffentlichen Raum” [disappearing of literature from the public space], as Sabine Haupt argues.16 With regard to the general acceptance of the lingual and cultural heterogeneity of contemporary Swiss literature and its functionalization by the homogeneous political nation-state, it is not surprising that, from the late 1990s on, there is a debate about a “fifth literature” by immigrants to Switzerland, represented by authors such as Periklis Monioudis or, recently, Melinda Nadj Abonji, who was awarded the German and the Swiss “Buchpreis” in 2010. In conclusion, at the moment there are three national literatures in the German language: an Austrian with quite a specific identity of its own; a Swiss-German struggling for a unique profile; and a German that plays a hegemonic role among all of them with regard to publishing, promotion, and scholarship. The presence of a so-called migration or intercultural literature has entangled this already complex situation even more, because lacking the French or British experiences of quite a long-lived past as nation-states as well as a colonial empire, German scholarship shows a high degree of resistance against the integration of a culturally and lingually foreign literary discourse into the traditional monocultural German one, which used to neglect “non-German” books so as not to confuse the ostensible unified Germanness.17 In this situation the question arises how, under such circumstances marked by explicit nationalisms, the term WL could be created and disseminated. With his famous observation on January 31, 1827, that national literature had lost importance and had to be substituted by WL, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe inaugurated the “age of WL,” leaving us an ambiguous legacy which since then has provoked a plethora of interpretations.18 Two aspects of Goethe’s premise, however, are especially Sabine Haupt, “Vom Topos kultureller Selbstbehauptung zur Höflichkeitsformel,” in Schweizer Literatur‘ und ihre Diskursgeschichte, ed. Corina Caduff and Reto Sorg (Munich: Fink, 2004), 214–15. See the very interesting historical survey on foreign voices in older German literature and German works in East European territories by Jürgen Joachimsthaler, “‘Undeutsche Bücher’: Zur Geschichte interkultureller Literatur in Deutschland,” in Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur. Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration, ed. Helmut Schmitz (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 19–39. 18 In Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1975), 174; Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 394. About WL in general see especially in the bibliography to this volume Amman, Mein, and Parr, Boubia, Casanova, Damrosch, Ette, Gossens. Gupta, Koch, Lamping, Mayer, Moretti, Prendergast, Saussy, Schmeling, Simonsen and Stougaard-Nielsen, and Thomsen. 16

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noteworthy today. First, his idea of WL as communication and exchange between various national literatures, whose existence for him was beyond any doubt; and secondly, the anchorage of WL in the financially and technically innovative context of his time, in which the coming imperialistic globalization of the nineteenth century was already discernible. With these arguments, Goethe stood in opposition to the nationalist spirit of his contemporaries. Like Schiller and other intellectuals of the cosmopolitan eighteenth century, he acted and thought in European or even global dimensions, and was “old-fashioned” in the eyes of the young Romantics with their nationalist ambitions concerning the unification of Germany after 1815.19 At the same time, however, it is precisely in Goethe’s cosmopolitanism that the common denominator with our time lies, allowing us to connect his perceptions and concepts with culturally and linguistically hybrid texts by authors of our globalization such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar in Germany, Assia Djebar in France, or Hanif Kureishi in the United Kingdom, to which, I argue, monocultural analytical tools and national canon-based aesthetic criteria would not offer an adequate approach. Therefore, with Goethe as a starting point, I introduce a new taxonomical category for cross-cultural texts: “New” WL is based on an empirical and systemic approach and on two parameters: 1) on the expression plane, the texts must use code-switching in the widest sense, including dialects, creoles, or idiolects; 2) on the content plane, they must negotiate issues of our contemporary or former globalizations, performing the tensions between the global and the local/regional regarding persons, setting, and time. Based on an extensive text corpus with exactly defined main characteristics, I designate the closed operational system New WL (henceforth NWL) as a subsystem of the literary system in general, one that shows overlapping zones with other literary subsystems such as postcolonial or migration literature, but which is not a minor system with regard to national literature.20

Negotiating the global: The new WL as an approach to contemporary hybrid texts Die Putzfrau. Ist üblich in Deutschland, bilet wiyzitowy, Visitenkarte, hat jeder. Sie zeigt auf die Visitenkarte und liest vor. Janina Wiśniewska. … Werden sein müssen viele Übungen in Deutsch mit Ihnen, werden wir anfangen müssen bei Anfang. Nikt się mistrzem nie rodzi. 21 [The cleaning lady: Is common in Germany, bilet wiyzitowy, everyone has business card. She points to the business card and reads out loud. Janina Wiśniewska. … Many German lessons with you necessary will be, at the beginning we will have to begin. Nikt się mistrzem nie rodzi.] Peter Turrini, Ich liebe dieses Land See Peter Gossens, Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. For details, see Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur, Chapter 3. 21 Peter Turrini, Ich liebe dieses Land (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 17. 19 20



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For about three decades, many German texts have been published that look like the example above, taken from a drama by the Austrian author Peter Turrini. Traditional categories such as “German intercultural literature” (Gino Chiellino) or migrants’/ migration literature do not offer the tools for describing and analyzing these texts adequately; instead, they often focus on biographical data of the author (Turrini, for instance, is not a migrant) and perceive the texts as testimony for a particular cultural and linguistic group thought to be homogenous (a concept that is per se unrealistic and lacks any logic), the latest of such groups being the second generation of immigrants. Aesthetically, national literature normally serves as a fixed point that treats hybrid forms as a minority relative to the monocultural and monolingual majority, although textual code and culture-switching have become such a common phenomenon, particularly in globalization contexts, that these texts deserve a taxonomical and analytical category of their own: the NWL, whose foundations lie within the theoretical framework of Comparative Cultural Studies with special emphasis on an interdisciplinary, empirically based approach.22 Within this logic, the first step is the linguistic analysis of the textual languages as the raw material for the symbolic representation of multiple identities, remaining strictly on the level of performance; potential language competences of the author are deliberately excluded from this procedure. Based on the hierarchical system introduced for describing the language-mixing in Chicano texts by Ernst Rudin, I register the entire gamut of code-switching, starting from one-word-entries (the most usual form) through one-sentence-entries to whole passages in the second language, as in Feridun Zaimoglu’s Abschaum. Die Geschichte des Ertan Ongun, for instance.23 By analyzing the entries’ semiotic fields, it becomes obvious that the majority of the vocabulary in the second language indicates family or other affective relationships, food and clothes, religions, and the collective memory; these entries always have a synecdochical function, transporting the world of the second language into that of the first, thus marking differences in a heterocultural ambiance. In a similar way, grammatical interferences and neologisms, as they are used in poems by José F. A. Oliver or texts by Yoko Tawada, signify the interruption of the textual cohesion in order to notify the invasion of alterity into the reader’s own, through which something new is generated: a Third Space, as Homi Bhabha gave us this term. In case of lengthier entries, as in Zaimoglu’s above-mentioned text with its jigsaw puzzle of northern German argot and non-translated Turkish passages, the German reader is exposed to a rather radical poetic strategy that at first sight denies communication; but this is precisely the message, as the recipient is thrown into the status of alterity. As a consequence, what seems to be a mimesis of the colloquial language, which usually is attributed to non-Western oral narrative art in Arabic or African contexts, turns out to be a deliberately chosen aesthetic construction in order to undermine the presumed superiority of canonized, Western poetic registers. See Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári, “Comparative Literature, World Literature, and Comparative Cultural Studies,” in Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies, ed. Steven de Zepetnek and Tutun Mułherjee (New Delhi: Cambridge UP India, 2013). 23 Ernst Rudin, Tender Accents of Sound. Spanish in the Chicano Novel in English (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1996). 22

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Further literary mechanisms with a synecdochical function are metamultilingualism and transtextuality. The first term denotes the fact that the reader learns in almost every scene the language(s) that is/are spoken at that particular moment without explicit codeswitching into a second language; metamultilingualism can indicate positions in the intra-textual world as, for instance, in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, or circumstances of the extra-textual world, as in novels by Assia Djebar concerning the relations between Berbers, Arabs, and the French. Transtextuality appears in the NWL texts to usually quite an extensive degree owing to the often transnational background of the authors: Salman Rushdie satirizes “holy books,” such as Shakespeare’s plays, the Qur’an, or the Bible in his short stories East, West and in his novel The Satanic Verses; the poet José F. A. Oliver juxtaposes famous authors such as “Mayröcker Kunze Nelly Sachs” and “Sepúlveda Cortázar Octavio Paz,” Paul Celan, and Federico García Lorca.24 This signifies the decanonization of established notions of the highbrow works through a poetic strategy that demonstrates the contingency of any nationally or monoculturally defined literary system. In general, one observes a qualitative and quantitative rise of different forms of multilingualism in literature, going hand in hand with remarkable marketing efforts on the part of the publishing industry. Polyglossia in literature has lost its overtones of avantgarde literature for an exquisite elite audience; the sales figures of books by successful authors such as Rafik Schami, Assia Djebar, or Salman Rushdie speak for themselves.25 As far as the content plane is concerned, the texts of the NWL explore globalized living conditions through the dynamic between globalism/transnationalism and regionalism/localism by sketching fictional persons, settings, and times. The worldwide mobility of individuals or larger groups, be they tourists, refugees, poor or skilled migrants offers the main sujet of the NWL and gives occasion to set stories going, e.g. about marriage (as in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane), exile (as in David Albahari’s Bait), education (see, e.g., some short stories in Carlos Fuentes’s Frontera de cristal or Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s novel Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde), or work (as in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Carlota Fainberg, or Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje). In cases where there is a focus on conflicts, these usually do not appear as a “clash of civilizations,” that is, as a gap between established behavioral patterns of the majority culture and those of others; instead, the characters become misfits with themselves because of their existence, alienated from both cultures involved, as it is narrated in Aysel Özakin’s Die blaue Maske [The Blue Mask], whose protagonist feels as uncomfortable in the society of Turkish immigrants as any average middle European would. This radical feeling of foreignness ultimately leads to a de-hierarchized transculturality, set beyond countries and places: “Wohin zurück? Nach Istanbul oder nach Berlin? Das kann ich im Moment einfach nicht entscheiden.“ [Back where? To Istanbul or Berlin? At the moment I simply cannot decide], states the narrator at the end of the novel].26 In general, in all these transnational biographies, identity constructions turn out to be individual, flexible, and provisory matters, whose composition is subject In Gastling (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1993), 18–19. For the whole extent of literary multingualism, see Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies, chapters 4 and 5. 26 Aysel Özakin, Die blaue Maske (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1989), 184. 24 25



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to negotiations depending on place and time and which are adjusted anew on a case by case basis. Although there is always a certain potential of conflicts inherent in the described migration processes, the narrative discourse elaborates them in a playful, ironic, or satirical way, which marks a decisive difference from the writing back of many postcolonial texts.27 Azade Seyhan, in her comparative study about US–American Chicano and German–Turkish literature, differentiates three phases: in the first stage, within a situation of diaspora, the authors usually express themselves in their first language, describing particular or collective themes in relation to their migration; in the second phase, they often change to the language of their “host country,” focusing on “an aesthetically inscribed field of social observation, critique, and innovations and use of the target language”; in the third stage, we find phenomena of language code-switching and/or creolization, and the texts produce a “borderland of different languages, rites of passage, and negotiations of myth and reality, memory and presence, madness and reason, and factual account and revolutionary experimentations in language and style.” The texts of the NWL usually belong to the third stage, as they have overcome the “writing back” of postcolonial literature as well as the longing for a lost mother country, substituting clearly shaped inscriptions in one or two spaces with a sovereign and often playful negotiation of a nomadic existence.28 As identities are relational to their respective social environment, so too spaces— e.g., national territories—cannot be perceived as a given within fixed boundaries, but as mental constructions where fictional persons can be transitorily inscribed, be it in only one particular space or place, be it consecutively in various spaces worldwide, or be it simultaneously in ubiquitous conditions. Ulrich Beck describes this as a “polygamy of place” and emphasizes that through cosmopolitanization, the frames of reference have been modified from “national-national,” that is international, to “trans-local, local-global, trans-national, national-global, and global-global” (76–77).29 Thus, in-between spaces are generated that the NWL narratively fathoms and playfully expands, for example in the great urban agglomerations one of the preferred settings of the NWL: Berlin and Istanbul in Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde by Özdamar; Paris in French Dream by Mohamed Hmoudane; or London in Café Cyprus by Yadé Kara, Brick Lane by Monica Ali, or Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi; London and Mumbai in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. All metropolises have in common a lack of asymmetrical center–periphery-hegemony; instead, they are inscribed in a dehierarchized, rhizomatic world-system, where one place can easily be substituted by another.30 Besides the metropolis, one of the most relevant theoretical configurations since the nineties has been the borderlands, a term which, while originally only applied to the Mexican–USA-frontier, nevertheless as a schema of cognition draws our attention to On nomadic biographies in general, see Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies, chapter 6. Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 107. 29 Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity P, 2006), 43. Another approach is through Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia,” see, e.g., the collection edited by Tafazoli and Gray, Aussenraum--Mitraum—Innenraum. 30 On this idea of metropolis, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 3 vols., especially vol. I. 27 28

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many other comparable space constellations. Assia Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg, for example, thematizes the triangle Southwest Germany–Alsace–Northwest Switzerland, and confronts the reader with a plethora of persons from France, Germany, Algeria, Morocco, etc., who have all transferred their histories, languages, and cultures into the city of Strasbourg and who there create transitory, individual Third Spaces of their own. Melinda Nadj Abonji’s novel, Tauben fliegen auf (2010) refers to borderlands between the Near East and Europe, focusing on a family that belongs to the Hungarian minority in Croatia near the frontier with Serbia and whose members negotiate their Balkan borderland identities during and after the Yugoslavian civil war while starting a new life in Zurich. Generally, all the texts of the New WL perform polycentric spaces that simultaneously contain, in reality or virtually, other (urban or other) places, to the extent that the exclusivity of determined places is suspended and any kind of positioning is characterized by contingency. Every symbolic appropriation of space creates dehierarchized, transnational, and atopic arrangements, which correspond with the derangement of established Western perceptions of time. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck introduced the metaphor “Zeitschichten” [time layers] as a term for processes of mixture, compression, and acceleration of time under globalized living conditions, adequately describing time perception beyond the dichotomy between linear and cyclic.31 As most texts in the NWL introduce real or mythic strata of past times into their story as a form of alterity, suspending the linearity of the narrative, the idea of time strata reveals the overlapping and gearing together of different times, the “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen” [simultaneity of the non-contemporaneous].32 In Chicano texts, for example, the past is sometimes a mythical primeval construction, implanted in the present in order to explain contemporary stages or to get orders to act now, as in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La frontera where the Aztec gods and Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Mexica, function as a foundation for a new configuration of the mestiza by revaluating the established historical discourse.33 In German-language literature, there are examples of different time layers working into each other, mainly to be found in texts about former globalizations, as I will demonstrate below. The jigsaw puzzle of diverse time levels with regard to the traditional holistic national history has the consequence that it “displaces the historical present—opens it up to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects,”34 thus allowing for complexity and working against trivialization that occurs when time structures are simplified. Altogether I would summarize that the texts of the NWL are characterized by transnational, nomadic biographies, polycentric spaces and borderlands, and transtemporality.35 Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 19. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 126. 33 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987), cf. e.g. 34. 34 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 167. 35 On space and time constellations in hybrid texts of globalization, see Sturm-Trigonakis, Comparative Cultural Studies, chapter 7. 31 32



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Finally, evaluating the NWL as an operationally closed literary system, acting “as a micro-system within a macro-system” after Siegfried J. Schmidt (8) in comparison to other taxonomical systems of literary texts,36 it becomes evident that its space overlaps with that of postcolonial literature only to a certain extent, since texts such as Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia or Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost could perfectly figure in both systems; but this is not the case for Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, for example, because it thematically moves exclusively in a local dimension and is characterized by the writing-back strategy that characterizes a plethora of postcolonial texts. With respect to the literary subsystem “postcolonial literature,” the NWL develops an alternative category, in particular for contemporary texts with specific aesthetic criteria beyond any monocultural or multicultural national literature. This also applies to the highly problematic German terms “Migrationsliteratur” and “Interkulturelle Literatur.”37 Based on extra-literary criteria, the first one causes the blurring between the author-based language competence and the performance of the text, and furthermore, does not correspond to novels such as Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Carlota Fainberg or Martin Walser’s Der Augenblick der Liebe, written by established national authors without any migration background. For its part, “Interkulturelle Literatur” starts from a binarism of two clearly shaped cultural container paradigms which lacks every reason for existence. Both of the terms create hegemonic relations by classifying hybrid texts as the minority inside a monolingual and monocultural national literature majority. A further approach is the “Literatur der Globalisierung” (Schmeling, Schmitz-Emans, and Walstra), which introduces a system of texts with a thematic focus on globalization.38 Since the thematic approach here is distributed in linguistically hybrid texts as well as in monolingual ones, clearly the common space with the NWL excludes monolingual fiction. Both systems, nevertheless, complement and inspire each other, because of their genuinely comparative and cultural methodology and their value as a cognitive model that allows the identification of symbolic representations of globalization matters. National literature, however, shares no common space with the NWL since the former is generated by excluding any form of cultural or lingual alterity, and is based on a homogenizing discourse which nowadays is losing ground, not only in the production of literature but also in academic institutions “in such a way that the normativeness of linguistic and national traditions is undermined and the horizons of the extensive field of literature in the world are within view,” as Suman Gupta underlines.39 Consequently, national literature and the NWL are juxtaposed without crossing each other, as equally ranked literary systems whose components are clearly contoured by specific differences. Siegfried J. Schmidt, “Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies,” CLCWeb 12 Issue 1 (March 2010) Article 1, (accessed 29 March 2014). 37 See Carmine Chiellino, ed., Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland. Ein Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), and Mary Howard, ed., Interkulturelle Konfigurationen. Zur deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur von Autoren nichtdeutscher Herkunft (München: Iudicium, 1997). 38 Manfred Schmeling, Monika Schmitz-Emans, and Kerst Walstra, eds, Literatur der Globalisierung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000). 39 Suman Gupta, Globalization and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 144.

36

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Finally, comparative cultural studies result in being the only system with a horizon wide enough to function as an umbrella for the dialogue between different cultural practices under hierarchically symmetrical circumstances, because it offers a theoretical and a methodological framework consisting of a non-Eurocentric, holistic approach beyond “rigidly-defined disciplinary boundaries,” and thus provides an “alternative, as well as a parallel field of study. This inclusion extends to all Others, all marginal, minority, and peripheral entities, and encompasses both form and substance.”40 NWL as a cognitive model and an analytical toolbox signifies an application of the principles of comparative cultural studies because of its focus on culture, which includes non-canonical literature. The comprehensiveness of this approach, however, means that the study of different literary systems “cannot continue to be seen as isolated monads but need to become part of more complex research networks that work both in scholarship, education, as well as in cultural practices in general.”41 Tantamount to comparative cultural studies, the NWL has proven its utility with regard to contemporary hybrid texts focusing on globalization processes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; as a further step, I will now delve into the application of this configuration to texts about historically precedent globalizations such as explorations or colonization in recently published German-speaking novels.

Exploring and colonizing in contemporary literature in German In historiography, the acceptance of the fact that our age of globalization has been preceded by former phases of accelerated globalizations has evolved into a commonplace. Since Fernand Braudel’s perception of a “longue durée” (1958) as a set of repetitive structures in history and Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of the “Modern World System” (1974), there have been various attempts at describing worldwide financial, political, and societal entanglements from the beginning of human history until today.42 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, ed., Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2003), 259. 41 Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Asunción López-Varela Azcárate, “Education, Interculturalism, and Mapping a New Europe,” in Mapping the World, Culture, and Border-crossing, ed., Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and I-Chun Wang (National Sun Yat-sen University, 2011), 39. 42 Schüttpelz and Geider sketched a system of five globalizations starting with the first dissemination of mankind “out of Africa“ in Erhard Schüttpelz, “Weltliteratur in der Perspektive einer Longue Durée I: Die fünf Zeitschichten der Globalisierung,“in Wider den Kulturenzwang, eds Özkan Ezli, Dorothee Kimmich, and Annette Werberger (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 339–60, and Thomas Geider, “Weltliteratur in der Perspektive einer Longue Durée II: Die Ökumene des swahili-sprachigen Ostafrika,”in Wider den Kulturenzwang, eds Özkan Ezli, Dorothee Kimmich, and Annette Werberger (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 361–401. Contrarily, Sloterdijk prefers to take the first contact between Europeans and Americans as a starting point, as well as Amir and Ette: cf. Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals. Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2005); Samir Amin, “Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?” in The Modern World System in the Longue Durée,’ ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 5–30; Ottmar Ette, TransArea. Eine literarische Globalisierungsgeschichte, (Göttingen: De Gruyter, 2012). Further: Jürgen Osterhammel, Weltgeschichte. Basistexte, (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens. Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2010); Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, and Ulrike Freitag, eds, Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Ansätze, Themen (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2007). 40



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The importance of these approaches lies in their transnational, transtemporal, and transcultural foci which allow for a more complex contextualization of contemporary phenomena of globalization in the light of former ones. Transferred to fictional texts, the acceptance of the fact that our globalization is grounded on precedent phases of worldwide circulations of goods, human beings, and information opens up new dimensions of analysis and interpretation of older texts as much as of present literature, since we are confronted with a “literature on the move” which urgently requires “poetics of movement” beyond monocultural national philology tools (Ette, 25–6). Returning to German matters, it is noteworthy that the discourse shift of historiography to world history, along with the influence of postcolonial studies, has contributed to an unprecedented interest in the German colonial past, be it in history or in literary and cultural studies.43 Although the German colonial empire, in comparison with the Iberian, the French, or the British one, was much more shortlived (1884–1917) and did not result in massive postcolonial immigration flows as was the case with the U.K. and France, postcolonialism as a theoretical configuration has stimulated scholarly attention to a literary genre that seems to gain in popularity year by year in the German-speaking book market. The boom of literary subjects thematizing German colonial history or the history of explorations in novels by Sten Nadolny, Christoph Ransmayr, Hubert Fichte, Daniel Kehlmann, Thomas Stangl, or Iliya Troyanov, to name just the most famous representatives, has introduced a new “worldliness” into German texts,44 negotiating representations of the own and the foreign together with NWL-authors such as Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, or José F. A. Oliver. Similar to texts of the latter, theirs, too, often are founded on lingual and cultural hybridity, so that these texts about past colonizing processes can be classified and analyzed within the framework of NWL. Applying its principles to contemporary German literature about explorations and colonizing, at least two different categories of texts can be conceived: one group would consist of novels such as Morenga by Uwe Timm, Die Vermessung der Welt by Daniel Kehlmann, or Imperium by Christian Kracht, whereas another group would contain texts belonging to NWL, such as Herero by Gerhard Seyfried, Der Weltensammler by Iliya Troyanov, or Der einzige Ort by Thomas Stangl. The first group focuses on (German or other) protagonists and their survival strategies or conquest ambitions; they are presented as invaders or explorers of spaces of wilderness (e.g. Alexander von Humboldt in Die Vermessung der Welt, or the German soldiers in Namibia, former German Cf. Gabriele Dürbeck and Axel Dunker, “Postkoloniale Studien in der Germanistik. Vorwort zur Reihe,” in Ost-westliche Kulturtransfers. Orient—Amerika, ed. Alexander Honold (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011), 12. Further Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus, 6th edn. (Munich: Beck, 2009); Gisela Graichen and Horst Gründer, Deutsche Kolonien. Traum und Trauma, 4th edn. (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005); Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 2008). 44 Cf. Christof Hamann and Alexander Honold, “Ins Fremde schreiben. Zur Literarisierung von Entdeckungsreisen in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten der Gegenwart,” in Ins Fremde schreiben. Gegenwartsliteratur auf den Spuren historischer und fantastischer Entdeckungsreisen, ed. Christof Hamann and Alexander Honold (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), 9. Further Axel Dunker, Kontrapunktische Lektüren. Koloniale Strukturen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 2008); Daniel Schneider, Identität und Ordnung. Entwürfe des ‘Eigenen’ und ‘Fremden’ in deutschen Kolonial- und Afrikaromanen (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011). 43

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Southwest Africa, in Morenga), and/or exotic environments (August Engelhardt in Imperium), thus preserving a monolingual and European-centered narrative strategy. Contrarily, the NWL-texts always unfold their stories from a polyphonic perspective with the concrete insertion of two or more languages, always intent on mapping the diversity of the involved geographical, social, cultural, and ideological spaces, while demonstrating the consequences for all individuals or groups under the influence of the contact under conditions of globalization. Examining the expression plane, it is obvious that the three above-mentioned novels build their fictional worlds to a great extent by means of multilingualism, through explicitly introducing various languages as well as through metamultilingualism, i.e., the discussion of multilingual conditions. In Seyfried’s Herero, for instance, a Herero-song is quoted,45 or trees are named by their German, Latin, and Nama names (134–5); the reader learns about the variety of naming the whites, or losses in translations from Herero and Nama to Dutch and German (359–60), on the one hand, and about the disdainful names for the local people on the part of the Germans (93–4). In the ears of the protagonist Ettmann, the Nama language with its clicking sounds is melodious and pleasant (433), and in spite of its complexity, there are Germans who speak this language well, as, e.g., the priest Lutter (619–20). Troyanov’s Weltensammler [Collector of Worlds] not only describes the efforts of its protagonist, the British officer Francis Burton, to learn various Indian languages and Arabic, but it is also accompanied by a glossary explaining and translating words from Hindi, Persian, Swahili, Arabic, and others.46 Stangl’s Der einzige Ort narrates the first journeys to Timbuktu: The British officer Alexander Gordon Laing reaches this famous trade center in 1826 coming from Tripoli, and the French René Caillié in 1828 traveling from Senegal northwards. Whereas Gordon disappears on his way back, Caillié arrives in Morocco and finally reaches France after years of indescribable exertions. Again, West African languages such as Fula, Malinke, and Songhai are inserted in the text.47 Caillié, disguised as an Arab, is shown during his efforts to learn Malinke (129–31) and his writing lists vocabulary in French, Malinke, Kissour, and Arabic (440), exactly the way the navigator Rooke in Kate Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant does with the aborigines’ vocabulary during the first attempt of colonizing New South Wales in Australia. Untranslated words in unnamed African languages are interspersed in Stangl’s text, (e.g. 120–2), which destroy textual cohesion and stop the communication procedure for the German monolingual reader. All these foreign interferences—from one word to entire sentences—as well as the chapter titles in African or in other languages, function as synecdoches, transferring alterity into the German text, often without securing the comprehension by the recipient, who is abruptly forced into the role of the Other, the outsider, the foreigner. Thus, a language rhizome of equally ranking elements is generated, which subverts the presumed Gerhard Seyfried, Herero, 5th edn. (Berlin: Aufbau, 2009), 199. Ilija Trojanow, Der Weltensammler, 6th ed. (München: dtv, 2009); Iliya Troyanov, The Collector of Worlds: A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton, trans. William Hobson (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2010). All the quotations are from this English translation and are cited in the text. 47 Thomas Stangl, Der einzige Ort (München: btb, 2006), see e.g. 41, 98, 113–15, 422. 45 46



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superiority of monolingual and monocultural Western linguistic discourses based on national languages. All of the protagonists are cartographers: Caillié in Der einzige Ort himself and/ or his body has become the machine for mapping the land, “das Land schreiben” as a method to make it his own. The boundaries between his body and the landscape around him have dissolved so that his disguise as an Arab is not revealed by the handling of European navigation instruments; thus he is forced to create a mental map of all the spaces he crosses (42). Seyfried’s protagonist Ettmann is a more than an enthusiastic topographer: “Ettmann will nicht nur die Karte mit Inhalten füllen, sondern das gezeichnete Gebiet auch kennenlernen und so weit wie möglich verstehen, so dass es sein Land wird. … Was man nicht versteht, schrieb Goethe, besitzt man nicht” [Ettman not only wants to fill the map with contents, but also to get to know the area and to understand it as much as he can, so that it becomes his country. … What one does not understand, wrote Goethe, one does not possess] (39). Learning regional languages and drawing exact maps of the land in order to facilitate military operations if necessary are supposed to be efficient strategies to take possession of new lands; these are well-established methods that have been inherited from the Spanish and Portuguese cartographers and priests of the first accelerated phase of globalization (following Ette, 8) and have guaranteed European hegemony—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under French and then British rule—until the second and the third phase of globalization (cf. Ette, 14–20). Although representing European imperialistic institutions or mentalities, however, some protagonists and other persons are shown “going native.” For instance, Caillié travels as the “Arab” Abdallah to Timbuktu “und kommt weiter, indem er sich auslöscht” [and goes further as he extinguishes himself] (Ort, 119–20), always fearing being detected as a European (45–48). His predecessor Gordon Laing, on the contrary, is proud of being a European and exhibits the presumed superiority of his world with his uniform (248), but his arrogance leads to his death as an infidel under mysterious circumstances (504–6). Troyanov’s Francis Burton not only speaks Indian languages, but even goes so far as to suffer circumcision, prison, and torture, so as not to reveal himself as British, a behavior that leads his superiors to doubt his loyalty to the Crown (cf. 91, 188). Notwithstanding, his Indian teacher denies him the right to change sides and to interfere in the Indian struggle against the colonizers for “you can disguise yourself as much as you want but you’ll never learn what it’s like to be one of us. You can take off your disguise at any time: that’s always there for you as a last resort. But we are imprisoned in our skin. Fasting is not the same as starving.” (Collector, 177). Hence, Burton claims a place in-between: “You only ever think in crude patterns: friend and enemy, ours and theirs, black and white. Can’t you imagine that there’s an in-between? If I assume somebody else’s identity, then I can feel what it’s like to be him” (176). Thus, the texts demonstrate that mechanisms of societal inclusion and exclusion on the foundation of religion, knowledge, ethnicity, skin color, or just behavior are identical in every society; persons with fluent identities are under suspicion for not belonging to particular groups, but at the end they reach their goals because their open-mindedness always gives them a choice. Nevertheless, the texts demonstrate through their narrative strategy that all the

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efforts the protagonists make do not lead to durable success in the end, and this is the point of interaction with our phase of globalization, since the contemporary reader is aware of the fact that the plethora of colonial projects ended in failure. Furthermore, however, the description of former methods of conquering and repressing African or other peoples might provoke thinking about contemporary, similar phenomena under the sign of neoliberalism that might usually be less bloody and brutal, but nevertheless are even more efficient and leave deeper traces on people and land. Finally, I would like briefly to focus on the rewriting of history in the three novels. A remarkable part of every text is dedicated to narrating local or regional history up to the history of empires such as the Mandingo one, whose conquests are tantamount to Alexander the Great’s (Ort, 99–106), the Songhay-empire, its conquest of Timbuktu and the flourishing of this town until it fell into the hands of Morocco (Ort, 279–98). In Herero, the conflicts between the Germans and the Herero are systematically explained from both sides, the Herero part usually in chapters titled with a Herero word such as “Ovita” (72) or “Otjimbingwe” (190). In Troyanov’s Collector of Worlds the local history is represented by Burton’s servant Naukaram in India, the governor of the Ottomans, the local Sharif and the Qadi in the Arabian episode, and Sidi Mubarak Bombay in the East African expedition. All these narrative instances reveal the “other side” of the European history of explorations and colonizations, regaining the dimension of the explored and colonized societies. Through the intermingling of different and contrary approaches to historical facts as, e.g., Assia Djebar also does in her novel about Algeria, L’amour, la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade], the contingency of any history is emphasized, and established discourses of history, which are functionalized by Western nation-states in order to underline their superiority, are subverted; polyphonic history also undermines the European idea of a tabula rasa in those countries before the arrival of the Europeans; instead, local history is demonstrated in its continuity and put on the same rank as the Western (cf. Ette 124).

Conclusion As the above deliberations have demonstrated, contemporary literature in German has at least two literary subsystems that challenge the discourse of a unifying Austrian, German, or Swiss national literature: One of them is—inadequately—characterized as migration or intercultural literature, but in its majority it can be better categorized and analyzed as New WL. This concept also applies to the second group, colonial literature in German insofar as the texts are multilingual and encompass the perspective of the Other, the hybrid, and non-European, written in the esprit of the NWL and therefore favoring the transareal, translingual, and transtemporal. In both cases, the NWL emphasizes the contingency of traditional national affiliations and reveals them as imagined communities, seriously questioning the justification of a discourse named national literature. In the particular case of literature in the German language, this category might make even less sense due to the fact that German literature is written



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in at least four states, the DACHL-countries. Without any doubt, it is not helpful to use either language or nationality as the exclusively defining criterion of the authors. Consequently, the displacement of national literature as the predominant literary system for criticism and literary history might be overdue. Referring to WL, as a matter of fact in the German language there are a plethora of works that count as WL in David Damrosch’s sense, that is, they are frequently translated and thus circulate worldwide.48 But this traditional highbrow literature has little or nothing in common with the innovative, translingual, and transcultural texts now emerging under conditions of globalization(s); for them, an approach within the interdisciplinary methodological framework of NWL is more appropriate, because it corresponds with their specific aesthetics on the formal and the thematic level.

See David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 4–5.

48

Bibliography Compiled by Thomas O. Beebee and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek This bibliography of world literature consists of studies that either are written in German, or that consider German literature within their purview. Thus, it does not include studies in the discipline of comparative literature, except where these invoke the idea of world literature. For bibliographies of comparative literature, see, e.g., the Bibliographie der vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte (Berlin: A. Duncker, 1903); and the Internationale Bibliographie zu Geschichte und Theorie der Komparatistik, ed. Hugo Dyserinck and Manfred S. Fischer (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1985). Note: UP = University Press

Anthologies of world literature Damrosch, David, et al. eds. The Longman Anthology of World Literature. New York: Pearson Longman, 6 vols, 2nd edn, 2009. Davis, Paul, et al. eds. The Bedford Anthology of World Literature. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 6 vols, 2004. D’haen, Theo, César Domínguez, and Mads Rosenthal Thomsen, eds. World Literature: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2013. Forst De Battaglia, Otto. Die Neue Weltliteratur—Dichtung Unserer Zeit. Stuttgart: Universitas Stuttgart, n.d. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. 2nd edn, 1807. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986. Hesse, Hermann. Eine Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. [1929]. Stuttgart, Reclam: 1986. Puchner, Martin, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 6 vols, 3rd edn, 2012. Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: A Global Anthology. 2 vols. Berkeley: U. of California P., 1998. Scherr, Johannes, ed. Bildersaal der Weltliteratur. 1848. 2nd edn. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1869. Stern, Adolf. Geschichte der Weltlitteratur in übersichtlicher Darstellung. Stuttgart: Rieger, 1888.

198 Bibliography

Selected Writings on world literature Aldridge, A. Owen, ed. The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986. Amman, Wilhelm, Georg Mein, and Rolf Parr, eds. Globalisierung und Gegenwartsliteratur. Konstellationen, Konzepte, Perspektiven. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2010. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. —Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso, 2013. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Centennial Review 13 (1969): 13–14. Bachmann-Medick, Doris. “Multikultur oder Kulturelle Differenzen? Neue Konzepte von Weltliteratur und Übersetzung in Postkolonialer Perspektive.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 68.4 (1994): 585–612. Bal, Christina. “Grenzbereiche des Verstehens: Eine Begegnung Mit Japanischer Literatur.” Informationen zur Deutschdidaktik: Zeitschrift für den Deutschunterricht in Wissenschaft und Schule 1 (2010): 69–73. Baldauf, Helmut, ed. Schriftsteller über Weltliteratur. Ansichten und Erfahrungen. Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1979. Bartels, Adolf. Einführung in die Weltliteratur (von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart) im Anschluss an das Leben und Schaffen Goethes. München: G.D.W. Callwey, 1913. Bauschinger, Sigrid. “Ein Orpheus für Amerika: Die Rezeption Rilkes in den Vereinigten Staaten.” In Rilke-Rezeptionen: Rilke Reconsidered, eds. Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan Cocalis. Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995, 95–109. Beebee, Thomas. “What in the World does Friedrich Nietzsche have Against World Literature?” Neohelicon. 38.2 (2011): 367–79. Bender, Helmut and Ulrich Melzer. “Zur Geschichte des Begriffes ‘Weltliteratur.’ ” Saeculum 9 (1958): 113–23. Berczik, Árpád. “Goethe, die Weltliteratur und die Anfänge der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald 16 (1967): 159–65. Bhatti, Anil. “Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes Divan und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens.” In From Popular Goethe to Global Pop. The Idea of the West between Memory and (Dis)Empowerment, eds Ines Detmers and Birte Heidemann. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013. Blair, Walter. The History of World Literature. Chicago: University of Knowledge, 1940. Blankenagel, John C. “Goethe, Madame De Staël and Weltliteratur.” Modern Language Notes 40.3 (1925): 143–8. Bleicher, Thomas. “Novalis und die Idee der Weltliteratur.” Arcadia: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 14 (1979): 254–70. Block, Haskell M., ed. The Teaching of World Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1960. Block de Behar, Lisa, ed. Comparative Literature Worldwide: Issues and Methods / La Littérature Comparée dans le Monde: Questions et Méthodes. Montevideo: Fundación Fontaina Minelli, 2000. Bodmer, Martin. Variationen zum Thema Weltliteratur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1956.

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Bohnenkamp, Anne and Matías Martínez, eds. Geistiger Handelsverkehr: Komparatistische Aspekte der Goethezeit. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. Boubia, Fawzi. “Goethes Theorie der Alterität und die Idee der Weltliteratur. Ein Beitrag zur neueren Kulturdebatte.” In Gegenwart als kulturelles Erbe. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturwissenschaft deutschsprachiger Länder, ed. Bernd Thum. Munich: Iudicium, 1985. 269–301. Brown, Hilda. “Der Blick Hinaus: Deutsche Literatur und ‘Weltliteratur’ im Zeitalter der Romantik.” Akten des XI. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Paris 2005: Universal-, Global- und Nationalkulturen. Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur, Vol. 8. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 205–10. Cammarota, Antonio. “Zukünftige Vergangenheit: Zur Vorgeschichte des Modernen Begriffszusammenhangs ‘Europäische Literatur’-’Weltliteratur.’” In Komparatistik und Europaforschung: Perspektiven Vergleichender Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Hugo Dyserinck and Karl Ulrich Syndram. Bonn: Bouvier, 1992. 265–79. Carroll, Michael Thomas, ed. No Small World: Visions and Revisions of World Literature. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996. Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004. —Les Littératures combatives. L’Internationale de nationalismes des littératures. Paris: Hermann, 2011. Clark, Rex and Oliver Lubrich, eds. Transatlantic Echoes: Alexander von Humboldt and World Literature. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Conter, Claude D. “Weltliteratur und Litterärgeschichte: Über die Verdrängung Europäischer Literaturgeschichtsschreibung im 19. Jahrhundert der Nationalen Identitätsbildung.” Euphorion: Zeitschrift Für Literaturgeschichte 101.1 (2007): 87–102. Coulmas, Danae. “Ein Marxistisches Plaidoyer für die Idee der Weltliteratur: Kostas Varnalis’ Essay.” Oetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 2 (1968): 92–9. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. —How to Read World Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. —ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2009. D’haen, Theo. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. London: Routledge, 2012. D’haen, Theo, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature. London: Routledge, 2012. Dima, Alexandru. “Der Begriff der Weltliteratur.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin. Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche 14 (1965): 421–26. Doderer, Klaus. “Das Konzept einer Weltliteratur der Jugend.” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, n. F. 48. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1998. 109–14. Eggebrecht, Axel. Epochen der Weltliteratur. Gutersloh: Bertelsmann, 1964. Ehrlich, Lothar. “Goethes Weltliteratur-Konzept und die ‘fremdkulturelle’ Interpretation.” In Eigen- und Fremdkulturelle Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Dirk Kemper, Elksez Zerebin, and Iris Bäcker. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011. 79–102. Eppelsheimer, Hanns W. Handbuch der Weltliteratur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1960. —“Zur ‘Geschichte Einer Europäischen Weltliteratur’” Ideen und Formen. Festschrift für Hugo Friedrich zum 24. XII. 1964. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1965. 79–91.

200 Bibliography —Geschichte der Europäischen Weltliteratur. Bd. 1. Von Homer Bis Montaigne. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1970. Ernst, Jutta. “The Hart Brothers as Anthologists.” In Weltliteratur in Deutschen Versanthologien des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Birgit Bödeker and Helga Essmann. Göttinger Beiträge Zur Internationalen Übersetzungsforschung 19. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1996. 433–49. Espmark, Kjell. The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria Behind the Choices, trans. Robin Fulton and Kjell Espmark. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Essmann, Helga. “Weltliteratur between Two Covers: Forms and Functions of German Translation Anthologies.” In Translating Literatures, Translating Cultures: New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer and Michael Irmscher. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 149–63. Ette, Ottmar. “Europäische Literatur(en) im Globalen Kontext: Literaturen für Europa.” In Wider Den Kulturenzwang: Migration, Kulturalisierung, und Weltliteratur. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 257–96. Exner, Richard. “Weltliteratur und Provinzliteratur: Eine Wirkungsgeschichtliche Problematik.” Neue Deutsche Hefte 152 (1976): 675–94. Ezli, Özkan, Dorothea Kimmich, and Annette Werberger, eds. Wider den Kulturenzwang. Migration, Kulturalisierung und Weltliteratur. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Farinelli, Arturo. Aufsätze, Reden und Charakteristiken zur Weltliteratur. Bonn: K. Schröder, 1925. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 65. Flemming, Willi. “Weltliteratur; Encyclopädische Literaturvergleichung; Vergleichende Literaturbetrachtung; Weltliteratur.” In Bausteine zur systematischen Literaturwissenschaft. Meiseheim: Hain, 1965. 18–26. Flugel, Heinz. Konturen des Tragischen: Exemplarische Gestalten der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1965. Frenzel, Elisabeth. Motive der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon Dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte. 7th edn. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008. Fuechtner, Barbara and Mary Rhiel, eds. Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Geier, Andrea. “Das ist doch keinen Nobelpreis wert! Über literarische Wertung und Kanonisierung am Beispiel der Nobelpresiverleihung an Elfriede Jelinek im Jahr 2004.” Der Deutschunterricht 58.1 (2006): 91–6. Gilzmer, Mechthild. “Transkontinentale Fluchtbewegungen in der Französischen ‘Weltliteratur.” Romanistische Zeitschrift Für Literaturgeschichte/Cahiers D’Histoire des Littératures Romanes 35.1–2 (2011): 83–97. Glaser, Herman. Kleine Geschichte der Modernen Weltliteratur. Frankfurt: Ullstein Verlag, 1956. Görner, Rüdiger. “ ‘Nirgends Wird Welt Sein als …’? Zur Antinomie von Weltliteratur und Globalismus.” Akten des XI. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Paris 2005 “Germanistik im Konflikt der Kulturen” Vol. 8. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 199–204. Gossens, Peter. “Weltliteratur: Eine Historiche Perspektive.” Informationen Zur Deutschdidaktik: Zeitschrift für den Deutschunterricht in Wissenschaft und Schule 1 (2010): 9–28. —Weltliteratur. Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011.

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202 Bibliography —“Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur.” In Studying Transcultural Literary History, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. 113–21. —“World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur.” In Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. 67–77. Mühlmann, Wilhelm E. Pfade in die Weltliteratur. Königstein: Athenäum, 1984. Nepozitek, Sabrina. “Weltliteratur: Bibliographische Notizen für den Deutschunterricht.” Informationen zur Deutschdidaktik: Zeitschrift für den Deutschunterricht in Wissenschaft und Schule 1 (2010): 106–14. Neupokoeva, I. G. “Probleme der vegleichenden Literaturbetrachtung in der ‘geschichte der Weltliteratur.’ ” In Aktuelle Probleme der vergleichenden Literaturforschung, ed. Gerhard Ziegengeist. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968. 59–66. New Work about World Literatures, ed. Graciela Boruszko and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. Special Issue CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.6 (2013): Available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss6/. (Accessed November 27, 2013) Petersen, Julius. “Nationale oder vergleichende Literaturgeschichte?” DVJS 6.1 (1928): 36–61. Pizer, John David. “Cosmopolitanism and Weltliteratur.” Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America 13 (2005): 165–79. —The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. Pongs, Hermann. Das Kleine Lexikon der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart: Union Verlag, 1954. Prawer, Siegbert S. Karl Marx und die Weltliteratur. Munich: Beck, 1983. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. London: Verso, 2004. Richter, Sandra. “’Arkadien für alle’: jenseits von Celan: der ‘mittlere’ Durs Grünbein und die ‘Weltliteratur.’” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 43.2 (2011): 49–62. Rösch, Heidi. “Migrationsliteratur als Neue Weltliteratur?” Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 35.1 (2004): 89–109. Rüdiger, Horst. “Comparative Literature in Germany.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 20 (1971): 15–20 —“Die Begriffe ‘Literatur’ und ‘Weltliteratur’ in der Modernen Komparatistik.” Schweizer Monatshefte: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur 51 (1971): 32–47. Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Liberature in an Age of Globalisation. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 2006. Schaefer, Albert. Weltliteratur und Volksliteratur: Probleme und Gestalten. München: Beck, 1972. Schmeling, Manfred, ed. Weltliteratur heute. Konzepte und Prespektiven. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995. Schmeling, Manfred, Monika Schmitz-Emans, and Kerst Walstra, eds. Literatur im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2000. Schmidt, Siegfried J. “Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies”, CLCWeb 12.1 (2010): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol12/issl. (Accessed 31 March 2014.) Schneider, Jost. “Psychische Globalisierung? Vom Projekt einer Weltliteratur zur Realität der Weltunterhaltungskultur.” TRANS: Internet-Zeitschrift Für Kulturwissenschaften 15 (2003). Available at http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/04_08/schneider15.htm. (Accessed November 27, 2013.)

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Index Abonji, Melinda Nadj 183, 188 Achebe, Chinua 189 Acosta, José de 159 Adelson, Leslie 22 Aden, Jens 143 Adorno, Theodor W. 108 Akutagawa, Ryunosuke 4, 5 Albahari, David 186 Alewyn, Richard 75 Alexander, Jeffrey 117 Ali, Monica 186, 187 alterity 64, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 185, 188, 189, 192 ethnic 83 Álvarez, Nora Becker 169 Ambrosio, Micer 158 Amin, Samir 73 Ammon, Wolfgang 164 Andahazi, Federico 168 Andrian, Leopold 82 Anzaldúa, Gloria 188 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 117 Apter, Emily 9 Arabic 85, 185, 192 Arciniegas, Germán 158, 168 Arendt, Erich 167 Argentina 9, 162–71 Arguedas, José María 162, 165, 169 Aristotle 60 Asia 6, 9, 22, 46, 73, 101, 159 literature 50, 54 Asturias, Miguel 165, 169 Auerbach, Erich 1, 10, 13, 14, 175 Auschwitz 116, 123 Ausstrahlung see Emanations Austria 3, 11, 15, 63, 64–73, 76, 82, 84, 104, 177–82 as bastion against the Balkans 72, 78 Habsburg Empire 64, 65, 71, 72, 78, 82, 180

literature of 180 as postcolonial nation 65 Second Austrian Republic 181 and world literature 20 Bachmann, Ingeborg 181 Baldauf, Helmut 10 Barbetta, Maria Cecilia 9, 170 Barrows, Adam 2, 90 Barry, David 19 Barthel, Thomas 163 Basel, University of 87, 143, 147, 163 Bashō 21 Bauer, Otto 165 Bauer, Wolfgang 53 Beck, Ulrich 187 Beijing 10, 25, 51 Belisarius 40 Benjamin, Walter 122, 126, 127 Benn, Gottfried 139 Benoît, Denis 137 Bergen Belsen 120–1, 123–4, 131, 133 Berlin 80, 102, 104, 110, 114, 186, 187, 191, 192 Berlin Wall 116 Berman, Nina 70, 71, 73, 74 Bernays, Michael 12 Bernhard, Thomas 181 Bernstein, Elsa 63 Bhabha, Homi 76, 80, 117, 185, 188 Bhatti, Anil 4 Bichsel, Peter 182 Biedermann, Woldemar von 52–3 Biermann, Wolf 180 Bildungsreisen 79 Bishop, Edward L. (Ted) 89 Blackler, Deane 121–3 Blades, Rubén 170 Blanco, Ricardo 162 Bloch, Ernst 171

206 Index Bock, Erwin 164 Bodmer, Martin 6 Bohemia 66, 67, 71, 73 Böhm, Anton 158 Böhmen 68, 69 Bolaño, Roberto 169 Bolívar, Simon 160, 168, 169 Böll, Heinrich 164 Boström, Kristofer 147 Boubia, Fawzi 54 Bourdieu, Pierre 137 Brandes, Georg 141, 149, 152, 155 Braudel, Fernand 190 Brazil 128, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167–9 Brecht, Bertolt 3, 8, 21, 101–14, 139, 162, 164, 166, 170, 179 “An die Nachgeborenen” 104 Buckow Elegies 103 defamiliarization 107 early years 101 exile of 101, 103, 113 Galileo Galilei 111 HCUA hearing 102, 104, 109 Horatians and the Curatians, The 114 Judith of Shimoda 103 Life of Galileo 103 Master Puntila and His Slave Matti 103 Measure Taken, The 103 Mother Courage and her Children 103, 109–10 Seven Deadly Sins 103 Stalin Peace Prize 104 Stories of Mr. Keuner 102 style 111 Svendborg Poems 103 Threepenny Novel 102 Threepenny Opera, The 102, 109, 110 university years 102 as world littérateur 105 Brecht-Schall, Barbara 105 Breton, André 124 Brink, Christl 164 Britain 2, 9, 50, 51, 65, 143 Broch, Hermann 139 Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder) 105, 108 Brummel, Beau 47 Brussels 127

Brussig, Thomas 180 Buddhism 26–9, 51, 5 see also Hong lou meng Buell, Lawrence 2, 3 Buerger, Otto 162 Bustamente, Juan 168 Caillié, René 192, 193 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 114 Campe, Joachim Heinrich 179 Cao Xueqin 25, 42 Carlyle, Thomas 46, 56, 112 Carrière, Moriz 6 Casanova, Pascale 8, 18, 137, 155, 175, 183 Casement, Roger 124, 126, 128, 132 Celan, Paul 139, 186 Chesterton, G. K. 145 Chicano literature 185, 187, 188 Chiellino, Gino 185 China 11–12, 26–9, 32, 41, 43–6, 49–59, 111, 143, 148 culture 26, 29, 30, 50, 51, 54, 57 language 12, 15 literature 18, 25, 42–6, 50, 52–4, 58, 60 chinoiserie 43, 46, 50, 51, 54, 55 Christianity, Chinese response to 29 circulation, of literature 43, 49 Classicism, Weimar 11, 52, 53, 116 Clifford, James 117 Coelho, Paulo 9 Cohen, Hermann 142 colonialism 51, 64, 74, 116, 119, German 123–4, 127, 132 Spanish 161 comparative cultural studies 185, 190 comparative literature 10, 11, 17, 57, 105, 106 compared with national literature 12 methodology 6, 9, 12–13, 17, 32, 44, 155, 177, 180, 184–8, 190 Confucianism 51, 52, 53, 57–60 Conrad, Joseph 73, 78, 83, 127 cosmopolitanism 14, 47–8, 72, 116–18, 112, 153, 182, 184, 187 post-1989 116 theories of 117–18

Index and world literature 3–5, 17–19, 22, 43, 58, 106, 111 Cromberger, Jakob 157 Cunningham, M. Allen 89, 90 Dachau 123 Damrosch, David 1, 2, 6, 9, 11, 32, 44, 48, 101, 106–9, 113–14, 155, 183, 195 Dante 7, 13 Danzel, Theodor Wilhelm 16, 17, 19 Daoism 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 40 darwinism 28, 142–3, 147 Das Narrenschiff 157 Dathe, Uwe 142, 149 DDR see German Democratic Republic decadence 141 defamiliarization 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114 Der Sturm 152, 153 Dewey, John 145 Dichtung und Volkstum 12 Dimock, Wai Chee 2–3 Dinev, Dimitré 181 Djebar, Assia 184, 186, 188, 194 Döblin, Alfred 165, 172 Dong Lin 29 see also Hong lou meng Doppelgänger 75 Dream of Red Chamber see Hong Lou Meng Drynda, Joanna 181 Du Bois, W. E. B. 126 Duino, Castle of 85, 89–90, 93, 98–9 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 182 Dusche, Michael 12 Duval, Alexandre 20 East Berlin 10, 103–4 East Germany see German Democratic Republic Eckermann, Johann Peter 4, 7, 12, 17, 20, 26, 32, 43–8, 51, 56, 59, 106–7, 183 Eders, F. X. 158 Ehinger, Ambrosio 158 Eichendorff, Freiherr von 44 Eisner, Pavel 67 Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) 25–42 Charlotte 25, 32, 39, 109

207

Eduard 25, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39 Ottilie 25, 27, 30, 32–4, 37–40, 42 Stimmung 40, 41, 42 transience in 34–40 Eliot, T. S. 8, 97 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 57 emigration 157, 163 Enlightenment 28–30, 43–4, 51, 57–9 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 171 Espmark, Kjell 141 Esteyneffer, Silesian Jaun de 158 Ette, Ottmar 159, 183, 190–1, 193–4 Eucken, Rudolf 8, 20, 137, 139–41, 142–8, 149, 150, 152, 155, 156 in history of philosophy 142 Nobel Prize acceptance speech 145 reception 143, 145–6 reputation abroad 148 translations of work 142 Euphorion see Dichtung und Volkstum Europe, Central 63, 66, 74 Even-Zohar, Itamar 137, 177 Expressionism 102, 150 Faulkner, William 138 Federal Republic of Germany 179 Federmann, Nikolaus 158 Feijó, Elias Torres 177 Fichte, Hubert 191 Figueroa, Luis 172 Fischer, Kuno 147 Fischer, Otokar and Blažena 67 Flatley, Johnathan 125, 126, 129, 130 Flaubert, Gustave 130 Fontane, Theodor 150 formalism 103, 108 Fortmann, Patrick 16 Foucault, Michel 14, 115, 125, 130, 187 on Cynicism 125 France 17, 97, 143, 159, 178, 184, 188, 192 empire 65, 191 literature 16, 183 France, Anatole 5, 152 Francisci, Erasmus 50 Franke, F. R. 163 Frankfurt Book Fair 14 Frankfurter gelehrten Anzeigen 54 Frazer, Sir James George 9

208 Index Frege, Gottlob 142 Freies Deutschland 166 French literature 18 Freud, Sigmund 75, 106, 112 Freyse, Edith 164 Freytag, Gustav 15 Fried, Carl 164 Frisch, Max 182 Fritzsche, Peter 131 Fuentes, Carlos 186 Fuggers 15 Fühmann, Franz 10 Galeano, Eduardo 168–9 Galicia 82 Galician 178 García Lorca, Federico 186 García Márquez, Gabriel 138, 168–9 Gauss, Carl F. 174 Gay, John 102 105, 110 GDR see German Democratic Republic Geier, Andrea 138 German Democratic Republic 10, 20, 22, 103, 104, 110, 116, 178, 179 German language 3, 15, 183 Germania 5, 15, 16, 163 Germanistik 2, 14, 16, 153, 191 German-Turkish literature 187 Germany 14, 20, 21, 85, 101–4, 106, 110, 120, 150, 154, 182, 184, 188 colonial empire 191 compared with Austria 70–2 as Kulturnation 178, 181–2 and Latin America 157–74 literature 11, 14, 19, 177–80 WWI 145, 148 Gervinus G. G. 17 Ghalib 21 globalization 4, 10, 18, 116, 117, 119, 132, 177, 184–90, 192, 193, 195 Gobert, Ascan Klée 152 Goedeke, Karl 17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 10–14, 22, 43–60, 105, 106, 107, 114, 150, 164, 168, 175, 180, 193 and Bildung 48–9 and bourgeois norms 149, 156 and Chinese culture 26–9, 50–6

“Chinesisch–deutschen Jahres– und Tageszeiten” 44–6 conception of world literature 3–5, 16–20, 32, 43, 46–8, 111–12, 183–4 Die Leiden des Jungen Werther 44 Die Wahlverwandtschaften see Elective Affinities and Rémusat 45, 56–60 Spinozism of 26, 30 Über Kunst und Altertum 20 West-östlicher Divan 55 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 47 Goldschmidt, Alfons 166–8 Gossens, Peter 19 Gotthelf, Jeremias 182 Gozzi, Carlo 50 Grass, Günter 9, 179–80 Gray, Richard 14 Grenville, Kate 192 Grimm, Jacob 16, 169, 179 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von 105, 110 Grünbein, Durs 6, 180 Guevara, Che 171 Guillén, Nicolás 167 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 41 Gupta, Suman 189 Haas, Willy 110 Haas, Wolf 181 Habsburgs 64–8, 70–3, 75, 77–9, 81–2, 178, 180–1 Hacks, Peter 180 Haeckel, Ernst 142, 148 Haenke, Thaddäus 158 Hafiz 4, 21, 53, 57 Hamann, Dora 164 Hammer, Josef von 4, 57 Handke, Peter 86, 181, 182 Hau Kiou Choaan 26–7 Haupt, Sabine 183 Hauptmann, Elisabeth 102, 103 Hauptmann, Gerhart 105, 140 Hegel, G. F. W. 6, 127, 147 Heidegger, Martin 142 Heine, Heinrich 19, 166, 168, 180 Helms, A. Z. 158

Index Henscheid, Eckhard 139, 140 Herder, J. G. 8, 50, 158 Herero (people) 191, 192, 194 Hermlin, Stephan 10 Herzog, Werner 172, 173 Hesse, Hermann 5, 12, 140, 164 Hettner, Hermann 19 Heyse, Paul 6, 8, 137, 139–41, 149–50, 152–6 compared with Jorge Amado 154 compared with Tolstoy 153 dramas 150 and history 149 intolerance for naturalism 149 Italienisches Liederbuch 150 negative monumentality 150, 154 nomination for nobel prize 152 Novellen 150 reaction to his nobel prize 152 reception 150 reputation in Italy 152 women figures in 154 Hinduism 27 Hjärne, Harald 147 Hmoudane, Mohamed 187 Hobsbawm, E. J. 178 Hochwälder, Fritz 163 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 11, 15, 20, 63–84, 156 attitude towards Slavs 63, 67–74 military service 82 political vision 74 “Reitergeschchte” 74–84 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe 2 Hohenzollerns 180 Hohermuth, Georg 158 Holocaust 8, 49, 119, 121–4, 131 Holy Roman Empire 178 Homer 12, 13, 16 Hong lou meng (Dream of Red Chamber) 7, 25–42, 57 Bao-yu 31, 34–7, 39, 40 Buddhism in 26–32, 36–40, 50–1, 53 Confucianism in 26–32, 36 Dai-yu 25, 29, 31–2, 34–8, 40, 42 Daoism in 26 jing jie 40–2 translations of 25–6

Horace 17 House Committee on Un-American Activities 101–2, 104–5, 109 Hsia, Ronnie Po’Chia 50 Hu Shi 28 Huang Zhen 29 Hui, Barbara 119, 129 Humboldt, Alexander von 21, 22, 157–60, 162–3, 165, 168–9, 172–5, 191 writings of 159 Hunsche, Carlos 164 Husserl, Edmund 142 Hutten, Philip von 158 Huyssen, Andreas 115, 116 hybridity 76, 78, 83, 184, 191 textual 177 Ibsen, Henrik 141, 149 idealism 145, 147, 148 Immanent Divinity 25, 26 India 51 Intimani, Illi 170 Israel, Jonathan 29 Italy/Italian 53, 70, 75, 79, 85, 97, 111, 149, 150, 152, 154, 156, 183 literature 17, 18, 85, 97, 150, 155–6, 158, 183 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 27 Jacquin, Nikolaus von 158 Jakob, Paul Walter 167 James, Henry 126 Jameson, Fredric 78 Japanese (language) 15 Japanese (people) 27 Japanese literature 18 Jara, Victor 170, 171 Jarrell, Randall 91, 92 Jelinek, Elfriede 138, 181, 182 Jena, University of 142, 145, 147, 149 Jensen, Lionel 52 Jesuits 26–8, 49–53, 57–8, 60, 158–9 Jeziorkowski, Klaus 154 Joachimsthaler, Jürgen 2, 15, 183 Johst, Hanns 102 Judson, Pieter 81 Jünger, Ernst 170

209

210 Index Kabuki 108 Kafka, Franz 7, 75, 80, 89, 113, 139 Kaminer, Wladimir 5 Kant, Immanuel 41, 47–8, 117, 147, 164, 175 Kara, Yadé 180, 187 Kehlmann, Daniel 174, 175, 191 Keller, Gottfried 150, 182 Kermode, Frank 97 Kessler, Harry Graf 71 Kim, David 8, 21, 115 Kingston, Maxine Hong 89 Kinnell, Galway 88, 91 Kisch, Egon Erwin 166, 167, 168 Kissner, Joseph 164 Kittler, Friedrich 53 Klabund (Alfred Henschke) 111 Klaproth, Julius 55, 56 Klemperer, Viktor 153, 154 Koberstein, August 17 Koch, Manfred 14 Koch-Gruenberg, Theodor 162 Koebe, Kristina 152 Kolb, Martina 104, 105, 107 Komar, Kathleen 85 Koselleck, Reinhart 188 Kracht, Christian 191 Krause, Tilman 154 Krebs, Christopher 15, 16 Kroes-Tillmann, Gabriele 154 Kumar, Krishan 180 Kunert, Günter 10, 180 Kunst und Altertum see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Kureishi, Hanif 184, 187, 189 Kushner, Tony 102, 109 Kutscher, Artur 102 Kvapil, Jaroslav 67, 68, 69 Lady Gaga 90 Lagerlöf, Selma 141, 147 Laing, Alexander Gordon 192, 193 Lange, Carsten 44 Lara, Jesus 162 Latin America 21, 128, 154, 157–75 Lavater, Johann Caspar 182 Le Globe 46 Le Rider, Jacques 84 Lee, Meredith 45

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 5, 53 Novissima Sinica 57 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim von 158, 180 Liechtenstein 3, 178 Lienhard, Martin 162 Liu, James 9 Long, J. J. 121–2 Loti, Pierre 5 Lowestoft 119, 126–7 Luhmann, Niklas 138 Luther, Martin 105, 148 Luxemburg, Rosa 165 Maeterlinck, Maurice 152 Magnússon, Gísli 98 Malaspina, Alejandro 158 Malinke language 192 Mann, Heinrich 180 Mann, Thomas 72, 104, 164 Nobel Prize 140 Marco Polo 55 Markgraf, Georg 158 Martens, Lorna 81 Marvell, Andrew 113 Marx, Karl 18–20, 106, 109–10, 112, 114, 165, 175 Communist Manifesto 19, 101, 109 Scorpion und Felix 19 Masaryk, Thomas 67 Mauthner, Johann 142 Mayer, Hans 17 Meerapfel, Jeanin 171 Mei Lan Fang 105, 108 melancholy 115, 119, 125–6, 129–32 Menasse, Robert 181 Meneses, Porfirio 163 Merrill, James 86, 91 Mexico 157–8, 162, 165, 167–9, 171 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 182 Meyer, Hermann 162 Meyer-Clason, Curt 163 Middendorf, Ernst 160 Mignolo, Walter 117 “Migrationsliteratur” 21, 180, 189 Miner, Earl 9 Minnelieder 55 Mitchell, Renae 141 Molina, Oliva 170

Index Mommsen, Katerina 27, 51, 140 Mommsen, Theodor 140 Monioudis, Periklis 183 Montesquieu, Charles Secondat Baron de 15 monumentality, negative 137 Morales, Evo 171 Moretti, Franco 9, 14, 175 Moti, Simona 11, 15, 20, 156 Mufti, Aamir 1 Müller, Heiner 180 Müller-Funk, Wolfgang 180 Muncker, Franz 152 Muñoz Molina, Antonio 186, 189 Murakami, Haruki 9 Murr, Christoph Gottlieb von 7, 27 Muschg, Adolf 182 Musil, Robert 74, 139, 156, 181 Muzot, Château de 85 Nadler, Josef 18 Nadolny, Sten 191 Naipaul, V. S. 186 Nama (language) 192 Nancy, Jean-Luc 117, 118 Napoleon 4, 53, 107 National Socialism (Nazism) 14, 101–4, 110, 113, 115–16, 118–20, 123–5, 131–2, 150, 152, 165–9, 179–80 Natorp, Paul 142 Naturalism 141, 145, 150 Nazism see National Socialism Necronautical Society 100 Neher, Caspar 102 Neo-Kantianism 147 Neruda, Pablo 166 Neupokoeva, I. G. 10 New World Literature 177 Nibelungenlied 6, 16, 179 Nicholls, Angus 47 Niemeyer, Ernst 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich 106, 142–3, 147, 163–4, 168 Nissler, Paul 11, 21 Nō theater 108 Nobel, Alfred 138, 139, 141, 146, 147 Nobel Prize for Literary Achievement 138–56, 179, 181 critiques of 139–40

211

founding principles of 140–1 impact in Germany 8, 148, 152 and world literature 138 Nodia, Nino 71 Norström, Vitalis 147 Nussbaum, Martha 116, 117, 132 Oliver, José F. A. 185, 186, 191 Ollantay 160, 162 Ondaatje, Michael 186, 189 Ortega y Gasset, José 165 Ospina, William 168 Özakin, Aysel 186 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 184 Özdamar, Sevgi Emine 184, 186, 187, 191 Percy, Thomas 27 Persia 49 Petersen, Julius 4, 12, 13, 14, 17 Piso, Wilhelm 158 Pizer, John 19 Plato 60 Platonov, Andrei 126 Poe, Edgar Allan 57, 88 Poles 15 postcolonial literature 10, 177, 187, 189, 191 Power, Samantha 132 Prague 67, 85, 103 Pratt, Mary 160 Presner, Todd 127 Primera, Ali 171 Prussia 70, 179 Puccini, Giacomo 50 Purdy, Daniel 7, 11, 12, 20, 58 Pynchon, Thomas 86, 89 Quechua (language) 158, 160–63, 169–72 Rabinovic, Doran 181 Rada, Emeterio Villamil de 168 Radetzky, Johann Josef Wenzel Graf 83 Ransmayr, Christoph 182, 191 Reformation 147 Regler, Gustav 167 Rehberg, August Wilhelm 27 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 27 Rémusat, Abel 7, 43, 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60

212 Index Renn, Ludwig 167 Reygadas, Carlos 171 Ricci, Mateo 27, 28, 29, 34, 50, 53 Richardson, Samuel 44, 59, 118 Riddle, Barbara 89 Riehl, Wilhelm 48 Rilke, Rainer Maria 7, 13, 21, 85–105, 139, 164 and the angelic realm 87, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99 Dinggedichte 87 Duino Elegies 87, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100 and French symbolists 100 and New Age metaphysics 87, 98 Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The 87, 89 and the occult 98, 99, 100 and paratheater 99 and Rodin 85, 86, 100 Sonnets to Orpheus 90, 93 and spiritualism 98, 99 in The New Yorker 89 translations of 88, 91, 92, 97 Roa Bastos, Agusto 169 Robbins, Bruce 117 Rodríguez, Silvio 170 Roethke, Theodore 91 Romansh (language) 183 Rome 51 Rosmer, Ernst see Elsa Bernstein Roth, Gerhard 181 Rothberg, Michael 123 Rubinstein, Raphael 89 Rudin, Ernst 185 Rulfo, Juan 169 Rumi 21 Rushdie, Salman 186–7 Rydberg, Viktor 147 Said, Edward 73, 78, 79, 127 Sanskrit 50 Sapper, Karl 162 Schami, Rafik 186 Schelling, Friedrich 27–8 Scherr, Johannes 19 Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott 145 Schiller, Friedrich 27, 28, 29, 50, 53, 146, 180, 184

Schirmbeck, Adam 158 Schlegel, August 46 Schlegel, Friedrich 5, 12 Schleicher, August 142 Schlözer, Ludwig 46 Schmalenberg Bezner, Juanita 164 Schmidl, Ulrich 158 Schmidt, Siegfried J. 189 Schorske, Carl 74 Schrimpf, Hans Joachim 19, 47, 49 Schulze, Ingo 180 Schuster, Ingrid 45 Schütte, Jan 104 Schwarz, Adolf 19 Sebald, W. G. 8, 9, 21, 115–32 Austerlitz 121 Emigrants, The 121 images in 122, 124 Rings of Saturn 118–21, 124–32 Seghers, Anna 167, 172, 179 Selpúveda, Luis 169 Sepp, Antonius 158 Sepúlveda, Luis 173 Sevgi, Emine 191 Seyfried, Gerhard 191, 192 Seyhan, Azade 22, 187 Shakespeare, William 7, 13 Shakuntala 20 Shaw, George Bernard 145 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 141 Shklovsky, Viktor 108 Simon, Rainer 172 Sivers, Jegor von 162 Slavs 63, 66, 70–3, 77–8, 82 compared with Germans 71, 83 stereotypes of 67 Slosson, Edwin E. 143, 145 Sontag, Susan 115, 123–4, 132 on Sebald 124 Soza, Mercedes 170 Spanish America 11 Spencer, Herbert 141 Spengler, Oswald 3, 4, 22 Spinozism 26, 29, 40 Spitteler, Carl 140 Spitzer, Leo 175 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 131 Staden, Hans 158

Index Stangl, Thomas 191, 192 Steffen, Hans 162 Steinberg, Michael 72 Steinen, Karl von den 162 Steinmann, Holger 125 Stern, Adolf 19 Stevens, Wallace 8, 96–8 Stoffgeschichte 17 Story of the Stone see Hong Lou Meng Strich, Fritz 17, 19, 20, 43, 48, 49, 57, 183 Strindberg, August 141 Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke 9, 10, 11, 21, 22, 184, 186, 187, 188 Stutzer, Therese 164 Süßkind, Patrick 164 Suter, Martin 182 Svenska Akademien see Swedish Academy Swaan, Abram de 14 Swedish Academy 138, 140, 147, 148, 155 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 141, 147 Switzerland 3, 6, 11, 85, 103, 113, 153, 177, 178, 182–3, 188 Tacitus 5, 15, 16, 17 Tafazoli, Hamid 14 Tageldin, Shaden 17 Tagore, Rabindranath 117 Tantillo, Astrida 26 Tawada, Yoko 9, 185, 191 Tepp, Max 163 theology, Christian 59 Thom, Andreas 102 Thoms, Peter Perring 44 Thomsen, Mads Rosenthal 8, 137, 183 Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Alexander “Pascha” von 99 Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Princess Marie von 89, 98 Tieck, Ludwig 44 Timm, Uwe 191 Tirol 81 Todorova, Maria 78 Tolten, Hans 163 tragedy 16, 102, 141 Trakl, Georg 10 translation 19, 43–4, 56, 87, 91, 117, 163 intranslatability 14

213

trauma 131, 191 Trimborn, Hermann 162 Troyanov, Iliya 191, 192, 193, 194 Tschudi, Johann Jakob von 160 Tucholsky, Kurt 124 Turrini, Peter 184, 185 Uhle, Max 162 Uhse, Bodo 167 United Kingdom 178, 184 Vallejo, César 163 vegetative femininity 30–4 Verfremdung see defamiliarization Vergangenheitsbewältigung 115 Vertlib, Vladimir 181 Vienna 56, 63–5, 74, 77, 82, 84, 103, 180 Villon, François 105, 110 Virgil 13 Wagner, Richard 179 Wagner-Carozza, Elza 169 Wagner-Dittmar, Christine 44 Wahlverwandschaften see Elective Affinities Walkowitz, Rebecca 118 Wallerstein, Immanuel 190 Walser, Martin 189 Walter, John 102, 105 Waltharius 12 Wang Guowei 41 Weber, Carl 102, 105 Weber, Max 165 Wedekind, Frank 102 Weigel, Helene 103, 104 Weill, Kurt 102 Weimar 14, 25, 28, 43, 45, 53, 55, 102, 110, 112, 169 Duke of 52 Weimar Republic 14, 143 Wellek, René 11 Wells, H. G. 145 Welsers 158 Welttheater 114 Wenzel, Uwe Justus 148 Werfl, Franz 165 White, Kenneth 101, 107, 113 Wieland, C. M. 4, 46, 106, 111, 114 Wirsén, Carl David af 141, 152

214 Index Wittenberg, University of 147 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 142 Wodak, Ruth 181 Wolf, Hugo 150 Wolf, Theodor 162 Woolf, Virginia 111 Wordsworth, William 113 Worpswede 85, 86 Xavier Feigls, Pater 158

Yamamoto, Yuzo 103 Yenser, Stephen 88, 90, 91 Yupanki, Titu Kusi 162 Zaimoglu, Feridun 185 Zé do Rock 80, 169, 170 Zech, Paul 167, 168 Zhang, Chunjie 7, 11, 12, 20, 45, 156 Zola, Émile 124 Zweig, Stefan 164, 167