Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 by Christina Morina

German Studies Review 37.3 (2014): 637–723 © 2014 by The German Studies Association.

Reviews

Emperor of the World: Charlemagne and the Construction of Imperial Authority, 800–1229. By Anne A. Latowsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 290. Cloth $49.95. ISBN 978-801451485.

The Frankish king Charlemagne (768–814) virtually doubled the size of the lands he ruled, uniting much of Western Europe into one polity, and then so radically reworked Frankish political practice that he changed the rules of the game of political life in the West. Unsurprisingly given this résumé, Charlemagne became a legendary figure shortly after his death, and remains a compelling symbol even for today’s European Union. Anne A. Latowsky’s book sheds new light on the Charlemagne legend that preoccupied medieval Europeans in the tenth through twelfth centuries.

The Charlemagne legend has been long known and often studied. Latowsky’s original contribution to the field is to reposition some of the earliest versions of the legend. Latowsky is interested in Latin literary texts that recount stories of Char-lemagne’s (entirely fictional) visit to the East. It is usually claimed that these texts were produced in a French milieu and that they placed an emphasis on Charlemagne as a proto-Crusader. While Latowsky agrees that the Crusades are the essential interpretative context for stories of Charlemagne in Spain, she contends that the early Latin works that imagine Charlemagne’s travels to the East have little to do with crusading and that they were produced primarily in the German empire, rather than in the kingdom of France. For Latowsky, the early works on Charlemagne in the East have far more to say about peaceful contact, foreign embassies, the meaning of empire, and occasionally eschatological concepts of a mythic Last Emperor than they do about crusading. Latowsky’s achievement in this book is to bring the empire firmly back into a story from which it is often omitted and to explore more fully the rich vein of meaning embedded in the legend of Charlemagne visiting the East. In so doing, she not only expands our vision of the Charlemagne legend itself, but also contributes to our understanding of political discourse and literary relationships in the medieval German empire.

The volume proceeds largely chronologically after the introduction, which lays out the scope of the book, justifies its focus on Latin rather than vernacular render-ings of the Charlemagne legend, and explains its primary method of historically contextualized close readings of literary texts. The first chapter tries to explain how Charlemagne’s two ninth-century biographers, particularly his friend and courtier Einhard, provided the foundation for later imaginings of voyages to the East by recounting details of the historical Charlemagne’s interactions with Eastern powers. According to Latowsky, Einhard’s account of foreign relations created a motif of

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peaceful contact with the East linked to visions of imperial power. Latowsky is cer-tainly correct to emphasize Einhard’s interest in embassies, as well as the nexus of imperial power and the East, associations later writers would take up. But her reading also privileges possible illusions to works we do not know that Einhard read, and it partially disassociates one chapter from a biography that is on the whole not very interested in empire but deeply interested in war. One would also have liked to see in this chapter some attention to the documentary sources about contact with the East, which provide a different prism for understanding what Einhard was trying to say. But once she begins addressing the first post-Carolingian permutations of the legend in the late tenth century, Latowsky hits her stride. The main chapters of the book analyze different groups of texts produced at particular moments when there was a special interest in the legend, such as during the fraught years of the Investi-ture Conflict pitting the empire against the papacy, or during the time of Frederick Barbarossa, who pushed through the canonization of Charlemagne by an antipope. The final chapter examines some French texts, arguing that these sources had little to say about Charlemagne as a crusading figure and that the more active discourse about Charlemagne in the East was taking place in the empire.

Latowsky’s efforts to enrich our understanding of what the motif of Charlemagne in the East meant to medieval writers, and to insist on the relevance of the empire to this story, are successful and constitute an important addition to the field. One of the particular virtues of her work is her ability to combine close readings of liter-ary texts with sensitive appreciation of the historical contexts that produced them, without reducing the literary texts to a simple reflection of political policies. Instead, Latowsky recreates for us a discourse among medieval writers in the empire who used the idea of Charlemagne in the East to think through their contemporary concerns about empire and Roman universalism. However, in her enthusiasm to restore the empire to its rightful place in the story and uncover new resonances in the texts, Latowsky sometimes unnecessarily dismisses previous scholarship. She is entirely convincing in demonstrating that the empire was profoundly interested in the Charlemagne legend and that the imperial texts reflected a sophisticated discourse about empire. Her arguments that the French were not interested in the legend, that at least one famous text thought to be French was not, and that the literary works in both a French and German context did not engage with ideas of crusade are less persuasive. Both the kingdom of France and the empire could embrace the legend, which could encompass different understandings of what a visit to the East meant. Latowsky’s book is thus best read not as a replacement for scholarship on French versions of the legend and the importance of crusading, but as a complement to it. She has nonetheless provided a nuanced new perspective on a very old legend, one that encourages her readers to appreciate the multivalent responses that the figure of Charlemagne evoked in the medieval German empire.

Jennifer R. Davis, The Catholic University of America

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The Witch in the Western Imagination (Richard Lectures). By Lyndal Roper. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 256. Cloth $39.50. ISBN 978-0813932972.

The Witch in the Western Imagination represents a continuation and elaboration of the argument of Lyndal Roper’s Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004), that “the European witch hunt was fired by an obsession with the power of old women to destroy fertility in the human and natural worlds” (1). The present work returns to the subject with an integrated examination of imagery and with analysis of the tension between the apparent messages of images and the history of witch hunting. Roper offers a thoughtful rumination on cultural history and conflict within communities, providing a richly layered cultural analysis of her chosen objects with mastery reminiscent of Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (2004). The result is a book of integrated essays that is a joy to read.

Much of the argument and method of this collection is laid out clearly in the intro-duction, although the sustained essays are a pleasure to read, beautifully crafted and harmoniously balanced by the elegant virtuosity of the physical edition. From font to binding, this is a book that celebrates the physicality of the text. Chapter one argues for the cultural power of entertainment as a creative force behind the elaboration of witch imagery, moving from demonology to the pornographic gaze and then to the picaresque baroque mind. Chapter two discusses the power of pagan survivals and the image of the heroic witch within the particular context of biconfessional Augsburg, discussing along the way the early modern sense of history and the openness of symbols to multiple, even contradictory interpretations. Chapter three offers a contextualized reading of the witch imagery in a relief of the last judgment, cleaving closely to icono-graphic and prosopographical interpretations. The fourth chapter, “Envy,” is an essay on the early modern iconography of envy and its psychological implications: this is the centerpiece of the collection, both physically and intellectually. Here Roper lays out her position on the emergent history of emotions, and proposes a historicization of the psychoanalysis that she herself has so fruitfully employed, seeking in the process to untangle the essential elements of human nature from the socially constructed.

Chapter five offers a microhistorical glimpse at the reality of the brutal eighteenth-century village trial of Magdalena Bollman in its social context, enhanced through the literary lens of local observer Sebastian Sailer. Roper highlights the marginalizing impact of the hardening gender divisions of the day, and she emphasizes the conflict-ridden context of the growing economic divisions within rural society, as village elites formed and separated from rural society, buoyed by growing wealth disparities. Chapter six examines the role of children in the late witch trials, and Roper explains how seventeenth-century Pietism and the process of confessionalization led the authorities who oversaw the late trials to be particularly interested in children and


their mental worlds. It is in her chapter on children that Roper is able to close the circle, to link the terrors and fantasies of a particular child to the literate iconography discussed in the earlier chapters through the person of a bizarre horse-headed devil (146). Chapter seven again pairs historical analysis with psychoanalysis, with Roper unpacking a seventeenth-century student’s diabolic pact in a kind of intellectual duet with Sigmund Freud’s 1923 diagnosis of “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.” Although Roper’s historical analysis dominates the essay, she also under-takes to defend Freud from nearly a century of criticism, offering a cogent reminder that we should read and evaluate such classics ourselves rather than simply accept the verdict of intervening generations.

Although there are few stylistic infelicities in the text, Roper’s use of the term “bisexual” to mean an entity manifesting both sexes is a jarring departure from the contemporary use of the term. When she later asserts the possible homosexuality of Viet “Sartorius” Karg, whose only explicit sexual liaisons were with women, rather than speaking of bisexual overtones of his relationship with the devil, Roper reflects the general blindness to bisexuality that continues to mar our intellectual culture. If there is a larger flaw in this generally excellent book, it is Roper’s repeated insistence on the psychological as universal. Roper’s analysis unpacks this proposition in a man-ner that reveals her awareness of how culture constitutes psychological parameters, yet in the end, the reader is left with the dichotomy of the socially constructed and the fundamental parameters of human experience that Roper finds expressed in psy-chology. She follows William Reddy’s argument in Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge, 2001) that societies establish emotional regimes, but continues to assume that the psychological substrate upon which social forces work is shared across cultural and historical boundaries. Recent research in the field of psychology has been grappling with the profundity of culture’s impact on individual psychology, but Roper is more attentive to the work of early twentieth-century theorists of the psyche, Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, whose nearness to the culture world of the early modern may make their theories more appropriate than they appear at first blush. In a power-ful parenthetical comment in her introduction, Roper remarks on the importance of the historian’s emotional response to the material of history, and on the question of emotions and human experience, her reflections throughout the book are fruitful even to a scholar who does not share her conclusions about psychology. Roper has honed her psychoanalytic inclination over the years into a fine blade, an effective tool to support her rich analysis, rather than a dominant model with the leading questions that such tend to offer.

This reviewer finds plenty to argue with in these essays, particularly in Roper’s approach to psychology, but I offer this fact as a point of praise. These are essays that excite the intellect and they are certain to inspire interesting discussions. I hope the

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publisher is quick to bring out a paperback edition so these essays can more easily find their way into our classrooms.

Laura Stokes, Stanford University

Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison & Evil Talk.” By Allyson F. Creasman. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xii + 282. Cloth $129.95. ISBN 978-1409410010.

Too few historians have concerned themselves with the efforts of Reformation-era authorities to govern printing, and those who have, have tended to measure the success or failure of censorship against the normative yardstick of imperial, territo-rial, or urban law. They predictably conclude that censorship was ineffectual. Such treatments, contends Allyson Creasman, fail to address what was truly at stake with censorship, or to analyze it in its proper context, i.e., in relation to evolving structures of communication. Drawing on judicial records from the imperial cities of Augsburg, Frankfurt, Nuremburg, and Ulm, as well as the Duchy of Bavaria, Creasman argues that censorship is best understood not simply as a top-down operation of the state against a passive, subject population, but as a communicative “process of accom-modation to communal expectations” (19). In Creasman’s analysis, censorship was the product of constant interaction between authorities and their constituent popula-tions, in which censorship both defined popular attitudes toward civic order and was constrained by beliefs held among the population at large.

This approach recognizes the proper object of censorship laws: not printed words and images per se, but all forms of expression, including rumor, gossip, graffiti, and song. Some of Creasman’s best detective work reconstructs the links between these genres of expression. Her first chapter reminds us that censorship was predicated on a universally held assumption that the regulation of expression was vital to the preservation of political order and unity of belief. As such, censorship antedated both printing and the Reformation and tended naturally toward the regulation of religious beliefs. Both forces stimulated new efforts to censor more effectively at all levels, from the imperial (through the 1521 Edict of Worms and controls on the Frankfurt book trade) to the territorial and municipal (through visitations of books shops, printing presses, and private libraries). On a superficial level, Creasman’s findings on the implementation of these laws seem to confirm their ineffectuality: Bavaria could not stem the interregional book trade, for example, and religious strife wrecked efforts to police the book market in Frankfurt. Examined as a communicative process, however, they reveal a subtler interaction in which the strength of enforcement varied according to the willingness of citizens and subjects to participate as informants and self-censors.


The contours of this reciprocity emerge more clearly in Creasman’s second and third chapters, which delve into the complexities of censorship in Nuremberg and Augsburg during the 1520s and 1530s. Both cities built censorship policies around a “middle path” that sought to accommodate popular demand for reform while, at the same time, suppressing texts that might have provoked political confrontations with the Emperor. Together, these tactics drove a wedge between the older aims of censorship. Henceforward, enforcing orthodoxy would yield to the aim of preserving civic order and concord, even in Nuremberg, where religious controversy eventually produced a monoconfessional, Lutheran regime. They also placed greater emphasis on honor, manifested in the suppression of libelous or defamatory texts. These effects emerge most clearly in Creasman’s third chapter, which treats the exigencies of peacekeeping in Augsburg after the Religious Peace of 1555. In addition to establishing a biconfessional regime in Augsburg, the Peace drove censorship even more strongly toward the preservation of civic concord. Any defamation of either lawful religion might have now potentially become the target of censorship; prosecution functioned increasingly as a “didactic tool” in the folkways of biconfessional coexistence. Thus censorship did not so much halt the circulation of texts as reposition them culturally.

Creasman rightly stresses the fragility of the Religious Peace, but her chapter on the controversy in Augsburg surrounding the Gregorian calendar reform of 1583 could just as easily be read to indicate their success as didactic tools. At one level, the controversy registered its collapse: rioting broke out in June 1584, and Lutheran clergy who preached against the reform were expelled. Yet both parties to the “Calendar Conflict” accused the other of disrupting confessional balance at the expense of civic concord; by the 1580s, in other words, civic concord had so far displaced unity of belief that both sides deployed the norm rhetorically for confessional advantage. As Creasman shows in her fifth and final chapter, the Thirty Years War revealed the resilience of biconfessional order. As the fortunes of war whiplashed the city between all-Catholic and all-Lutheran governments, every attempt at imposing religious conformity with the tools of censorship ultimately ended in failure. By the 1630s, Augsburgers had fully accepted the “practical necessity of both confessions’ traditional claims on the city” (221).

As these arguments suggest, Creasman’s book is as much about the cultural foun-dations of biconfessional coexistence as it is about censorship, and one could fault Creasman’s focus on Augsburg for skewing her results. It was, after all, one of only a few cities in which two confessions acquired equal standing. But the structures and dynamics she describes—the interdependence between printed text, manuscript, and oral communication; the dominant normative status of civic concord; the role of subjects and citizens in shaping censorship policies—could be found in virtually any city or territory in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. That the eventual

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outcome of these processes in Augsburg was biconfessional parity does not diminish their applicability to early modern censorship in the urban milieu.

David M. Luebke, University of Oregon

The Iron Princess: Amalia Elisabeth and the Thirty Years War. By Tryntje Helfferich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 344. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 978-0674073395.

“Amalia Elisabeth,” gentle reader, was landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, born 1602, died 1651. But of course you already knew that. You may not have known that she was the granddaughter of William of Orange, and that in 1619 she married Wilhelm, heir to the Calvinist landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, to whom she bore fourteen children. Wilhelm became landgrave in 1627 because the mostly Lutheran Estates of his pos-sessions combined forces with his neighbor and cousin, the Lutheran landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, and with the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, to force Wilhelm’s father to abdicate. Almost immediately, these allies also forced the new landgrave to sign an agreement (the Hauptakkord) that ceded both land and prestige to Hesse-Darmstadt. It was, notes Helfferich, “an utter humiliation, but it taught him and his wife, Amalia Elisabeth, some hard lessons about what they could expect from their Darmstadt cousins and what happened to those who played with a weak hand” (27). Henceforth, they would not only work to destroy the Hauptakkord but also to curtail permanently the power of those who had crafted it: Hesse-Darmstadt, the Estates, and the emperor.

At first the landgrave worked via diplomacy and negotiation, but got nowhere; in 1630 when Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed in Germany at the head of a powerful army, Wilhelm consequently became the first German prince to ally with him against the emperor. The new strategy worked well—mainly because Gustavus granted his ally enough confiscated lands in northwest Germany to fund an army of some 20,000 men, which Wilhelm led on campaign while Amalia Elisabeth acted as regent in Cassel—until a series of catastrophic military defeats in 1634, culminating in the rout of the Swedish field army at Nördlingen. The following year the emperor declared Wilhelm an outlaw and prepared to occupy his lands, leading the landgrave to renew his alliance with Sweden, to conclude a subsidy treaty with France, and to move with his large and battle-hardened army to East Friesland, from where he could more easily defy his enemies. But he died on October 1, 1637, leaving Amalia Elisabeth as regent for their eight-year-old son.

“The instability of regency governments was amply demonstrated,” Helferrich observes, “by the experiences of such notables as Anne of Austria, the widow of


Louis XIII of France, or any number of small-time German princess-widows left to fend for themselves after their husbands died in battle or expired from disease.” But unlike these other princess-widows, Amalia Elisabeth “had become the ruler of an army rather than the ruler of a state.” In order “to maintain control, she would have to become a unique creature—a female condottiere” (41–42). The Iron Princess chronicles in great detail the landgravine’s career as a female condottiere (and also as female regent and diplomat) over the next eleven years, as she carried her husband’s embalmed corpse with her from one place of refuge to another until she could at last bury him in the family vault. It also documents her amazing tenacity, buoyed up by a faith that her grandfather William of Orange would have admired. “I expect,” she told an adviser when her fortunes were at a low ebb in 1639, “that God will presently, through His grace, change things and bring us out of dishonor” (243). Her faith was amply rewarded: at the peace of Westphalia she secured constitutional protections for territorial rulers (both against emperors and against subjects), full toleration for Calvinists, the restoration of almost all confiscated lands, a full amnesty, and a cash settlement sufficient to repay most of her debts and also pay off her army. When it seemed that she might not secure everything she wanted, she arranged for the per-sonal appearance of both a Swedish and a French diplomat at 8 a.m. on October 24, 1648 to inform the assembled “plenipotentiaries for the peace” that they would not sign the treaties that had taken five years to craft unless Hesse-Cassel received two final concessions. The plenipotentiaries crumbled and signed the treaties—which now contained both concessions—that evening, bringing the Thirty Years War to an end.

Several studies of Amalia Elisabeth exist in German, culminating in a recent book that applied Ernst Kantorowicz’s “two bodies” concept (The King’s Two Bodies [1957]) to her career: Simone Buckreus, Die Körper einer Regentin. Amelia Elisabeth von Hessel-Kassel (2008). But none has provided such a thorough biographical account or drawn on such a wide range of archives. Helfferich deploys documents from Austrian, French, Swedish, and Venetian collections, as well as material from an impressive range of printed works (though the extent of her erudition is partly concealed by the absence of a bibliography). Unfortunately, she does not compare the Iron Princess with those other “small-time German princess-widows left to fend for themselves” (41)—or indeed with “big-time” players such as Elizabeth Stuart, widow of Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, and Queen Kristina of Sweden. Given the overwhelmingly masculine bias of previous studies of the Thirty Years War, and given Helfferich’s enviable familiarity with the sources, a consideration of how Amalia Elisabeth’s chal-lenges and achievements resembled or differed from those facing other women rulers would have been a welcome addition.

Geoffrey Parker, The Ohio State University

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Joachim Justus Breithaupt (1658–1732): Aspekte von Leben, Wirken und Werk im Kontext. Edited by Reimar Lindauer-Huber and Andreas Lindner. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2011. Pp. 222. Cloth €49.00. ISBN 978-351509335.

One of the most influential Pietists of his age, Joachim Justus Breithaupt labored alongside Philipp Jacob Spener and August Hermann Francke to inculcate Pietism within the Lutheran church of Germany. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, Breithaupt held a series of prominent ecclesiastical and academic positions that afforded him extraordinary influence. A prolific writer, poet, and controversialist, he was often at the center of Pietist-Orthodox controversies, whether in Erfurt in the early 1690s or later in Halle and Magdeburg. Despite an upsurge in Pietism studies in recent decades, Breithaupt—the first systematic theologian of Pietism—has seldom been the subject of focused investigation. The 350th anniversary of his birth in 2008 was the occasion for a scholarly symposium, and this volume marks an important step forward in work on Breithaupt.

Andreas Lindner opens the volume with an overview of the contributions, as well as a brief introductory essay on Breithaupt’s life and career that sets him in the context of the historiography. The main biographical contribution of the volume is Breithaupt’s own account of his life, which he began with Carl Hildebrand von Canstein’s urging in 1719. First published during his lifetime in 1725, the Lebenslauf was republished in 1736 by G.A. Francke. This reprinting of the autobiography is welcome, but it also raises questions. The reproduced text is simply a modern typographical resetting, devoid of any notes or commentary. No doubt the macaronic diction, the frequent cross-references, and the high scholarly standards for critical editions may have deterred the editors from producing a more useful annotated text, but this represents a lost opportunity. Individuals are not identified, allusions to key controversies remain obscure, and abbreviated works are left unresolved. Further, the editors chose to omit the appendix of works that accompanied the original autobiography, leaving some of Breithaupt’s own references even more inexplicable. In an age when digital reproduction is ever more common—and the 1725 edition of this text is available publically online—what is the added value of a bare bones, reprint text?

Some of the contributions function as a partial commentary on the autobiography. Lindner’s introduction fills in some of the elisions in Breithaupt’s own account and provides a concise overall narrative that the autobiography does not. Anne Lagny situates the Lebenslauf in the context of Pietist autobiography and notes the ways that Breithaupt’s autobiography lacks the inward, spiritual character of August Hermann Francke’s own famous account, conforming instead to the then prevailing models of the learned autobiography. Rather than striving to portray a model of individual repentance and conversion, Breithaupt’s autobiography, Lagny argues, sought to establish the legitimacy of the Pietist movement. Miriam Rieger focuses on one of the


autobiography’s pivotal childhood stories, which had a profound impact on him as a young boy: Breithaupt related how a thieving stable boy fell into the devil’s clutches, only to be rescued by the intervention of the local clergy, and Rieger explains how Breithaupt’s views conformed to the understanding of the devil and exorcism in late seventeenth-century Lutheranism.

Other essays explore episodes in Breithaupt’s life. Jean-Luc Le Cam investigates Breithaupt’s schooling and early studies, seeing him as a “typical product of the late humanism of the Helmstedt school” (111), a position Breithaupt came to reject in turning to Pietism. Volker Kapp examines the influence of the rhetorician Daniel Georg Morhof on Breithaupt and August Hermann Francke at the University of Kiel. Andrea Lehmann provides a careful examination of the circumstances that led to Breithaupt’s call to Halle as the university’s first professor of theology, illuminating the propitious timing and critical role of Spener in his appointment.

Whereas the emphasis of these essays is on his early life and career, others probe Breithaupt’s work more broadly. Ernst Koch takes up Breithaupt as systematic theo-logian and investigates his concept of theology, which built on the tradition of Martin Luther, Martin Chemnitz, and Johann Arndt—exemplifying oratio, meditatio, and tentatio, respectively—but also developed a distinctive, subjective character in which true theology was contingent on faith and marks. This marked a strong contrast to the Wittenberg theologians of his time. In a similar train, Andreas Lindner looks at Breithaupt’s theology of pastoral office and emphasizes how for Breithaupt, only the regenerate and illumined pastor can truly care for souls and illumine others. Rounding out the volume, Renate Schulze examines legal dissertations that dealt with questions of the right of patronage and the extent of civil authority in ecclesiastical matters during Breithaupt’s tenure in Halle; Stefan Michel illustrates how Breithaupt’s hymn lyrics reflected his Pietist convictions in the context of baroque poetics.

Without question, the essays in this volume illumine aspects of Breithaupt’s life and work, as the title suggests, but not the entirety of his career. The contributions pro-vide a better foundation for understanding his work and suggest new lines of inquiry. Yet at the conclusion of the volume one wonders whether Breithaupt’s significance is much clearer in the end. In most cases, the authors amplify and contextualize what is already known; they stop short of reassessing his importance within the Pietist movement or explaining why the historiography has so consistently neglected him. Lindner intriguingly suggests at one point that he “disappeared” (172) into the bureaucracy of the Brandenburg-Prussian church—in contrast to Francke’s building of the famous orphanage with all its schools and enterprises—but he explains little more. Was Breithaupt ineffectual then? Was he a powerful force behind the scenes? Did his views change substantially after his radical, activist days in Erfurt? These and other questions remained unanswered, and in end the essays remain somewhat

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disjointed. A more thorough editing of sources, a tighter focus, and more incisive judgments could have made this volume much stronger overall.

Jonathan Strom, Emory University

The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866. By Yair Mintzker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 285. Cloth $103.00. ISBN 978-1107024038.

This book, based on Yair Mintzker’s prizewinning Stanford dissertation, seeks to answer a question that is rarely asked: what happened to the walls around German cities? Mintzker asks this question to write a wide-ranging cultural/political history of German urban society from the perspective of city walls. As Mintzker points out, the blithe explanation is that the once ubiquitous walls around cities simply “disap-peared” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the apparent denial of any agency in the defortification of cities seems invalid, of course. Mintzker also identifies and deconstructs three seemingly obvious explanations why Germans tore down their city walls: demographic/economic, industrial, and military. The demographic/economic explanation is that, as cities expanded, the building of large suburbs outside the walls made the walls less useful and more problematically obtrusive. The industrial explanation similarly argues that transportation needs demanded the breaching and dismantling of city walls. The military explanation is that new artillery made city walls obsolete militarily.

Throughout his work, Mintzker shows that each of these simple explanations is inadequate and that the reality of defortification was much more complicated. The economic/demographic explanation does not hold water because many rapidly growing cities expanded their walls, whereas many smaller cities dismantled theirs. The industrial explanation fails entirely because most German cities were defortified by the end of the Napoleonic Wars—long before the transportation needs of indus-trialization. Counterintuitively, Mintzker shows that the military explanation is also incorrect: in reality, city dwellers wanted to dismantle their walls because they were all too effective militarily (a point discussed later).

Mintzker begins with an exploration of the importance walls had for a city’s identity. In an exemplary cultural study, he presents a plethora of evidence from across Germany to show how much urban dwellers identified themselves and their communities with the architecture of the walls, towers, and gates that surrounded them. The city was anthropomorphized, i.e., it was imagined to be a living body, a body whose appearance and orifices were its walls and gates. Of course many of the ceremonies, symbols, and traditions of the urban community were directly connected


to the walls and the gates of the city. In this cultural context, as Mintzker shows, the “disappearance” of cities’ walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is very intriguing. Given how much urban dwellers identified with their walls, it is rather unthinkable that they were unconcerned about their destruction.

After this initial contextualization, the book is organized roughly chronologically, a choice that works well. Mintzker’s narrative is easy to follow and is based on many case studies of different cities, based on archival sources from each. The basic argument is that in the long eighteenth century (1689–1789), it was the newly centralized Ger-man absolute monarchies that, following the model of French absolutism, drove the destruction of cities’ fortifications, which were the symbols of local political identity and the physical means of domestic political resistance. The monarchies replaced them with barriers designed only to facilitate tax collection and policing. This trend was supported by the fashions of monarchical representation, which found “open” cities with wide boulevards more impressive than the relics of obsolete military fortifications. At the same time, absolute monarchies, especially the Prussian one, intensely fortified and garrisoned those cities that were better situated to contribute to the defense of their territory. Given the pressure from absolute monarchies, urban communities were relatively powerless to resist the transformation of their walls. Indeed, as city walls became a symbol of state power, rather than a symbol of urban identity, city dwellers contributed to their “disappearance” by breaching them with illegal gates and stealing building materials from them.

The focus of Mintzker’s book is on the “great defortification surge” that took place during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mintzker’s survey of German cities convincingly demonstrates that in the century before the fall of the Bastille, only one-fifth or so of German cities were defortified. From that point until the Battle of Waterloo an additional one-third of German cities were defortified. Mintzker shows that urban fortifications were still very effective in the period 1792–1815—so much so, in fact, that cities now became military targets, to the obvious discomfort of their residents. Rather than seeing their fortifications as protection, city dwellers increas-ingly viewed them as a hazard, because they made their city more likely to suffer a siege or occupation. Though far from militarily obsolete, urban fortifications had apparently outlived their usefulness, if their purpose was to spare the urban population from the ravages of war. In addition, in the early nineteenth century, burghers saw benefits in dismantling their fortifications in order to open up new arable or buildable land, or to create public parks or promenades.

The chapters on 1815–1866 serve as a kind of epilogue: “by 1815 the idea of a ‘city in arms’ was dead” (189) and civilians now saw city walls as archaic. In the relatively few cities that remained fortified, the visibility of modern, militarily effective fortifications were downplayed and often placed some distance from the city itself. As the political climate changed, so too did the function of city walls around growing

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metropolises: they were intended less and less to fend off foreign enemies but instead designed to facilitate tax collection and municipal policing on an everyday basis, as well as to enable crowd control in times of social and political turmoil. Indeed, the revolutions of 1848 saw urban dwellers attack gates and walls, and in the aftermath, many successfully demanded the destruction of city walls, which had become sym-bols of taxation and oppression. The “modern” city was an open community and its residents identified themselves (and were legally distinguished) based less on their membership in their urban community and more as subjects of the state. It seems fitting that the materials from demolishing some of the last city walls in Germany were used to build railway stations, which became the new representative ports of entry into the urban space.

This book is not without flaws. It is generally easy to read and engaging, though sometimes repetitive, and it sometimes seems colloquial or glib (“a bishop trashing his insignia”). Some of the maps are poorly done, which is especially unfortunate given the geographic dimension of Mintzker’s analysis. Finally, it is not always clear whether Mintzker is talking about city walls as military fortifications or as customs walls: “defortified” did not necessarily mean “open,” and demolishing military forti-fications was presumably a much different phenomenon than dismantling customs barriers. These minor faults aside, this is a very important book not only for the urban history of Germany, but also for the social, political, and cultural history of Europe.

Benjamin Marschke, Humboldt State University

Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel. By Peter Gilgen. Munich: W. Fink, 2012. Pp. 231. Paper €29.90. ISBN 978-3770542338.

In an series of highly subtle readings of paradigmatic philosophical texts from the Western canon, the monograph examines how Erinnerung functions as a central concept in the emergence of historical consciousness and the development of the philosophy of history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taking cues from Hegel’s hyphenated concept of “Er-Innerung,” the book distinguishes recollection (reminiscentia) as an internalization process, which incorporates and adapts what it recalls, from memoria, the mere storing of content. Erinnerung is not approached as a mental ability but as a particular hermeneutic practice, a reading technique, which recollects, rewrites, and rethinks earlier instances of interpretation. The book’s three main chapters are organized accordingly around three sets of double readings, juxtaposing Lessing with Augustine (and Augustine’s Confessiones with his Soliloquia), the late Kant with the critical Kant, and finally Hegel with Hölderlin. With this approach, Gilgen hopes “to lay open a space for the simultaneous reconstruction of different understandings of history” (225).


While presenting us with a highly differentiated view that accommodates a great degree of simultaneity, the study nevertheless charts a historical narrative with a rather clear trajectory. The narrative is framed by two authors who surprisingly (considering that they receive as much attention as Lessing, Kant, and Hegel) are missing from the book’s title, namely Augustine and Hölderlin, and centers around historical changes in semiotics as first conceived by Koselleck, Foucault, and Derrida. In a nutshell, the development of the philosophy of history is tied to the transition from medieval scholastic forms of exegesis to a hermeneutic practice guided by the idea of a tran-scendental signified for which the written word becomes a dangerous supplement (in the Derridean sense). Recollection serves as a chiffre for the emancipation from the letter and the unearthing of the spirit of the text qua its internalization. If Augustine emerges as the “godfather” (277) of the philosophy of history, it is because he first applies, Gilgen argues, this new method to the reading of the Bible, of himself, and of history. In Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the transcendent position that God held in Augustine is secularized. The transcendental signified is seen as immanent to the progress of history (103). Overcoming the limited human perspec-tive requires time, but also the liquidation of the letter, a “vollständige Er-Innerung” (103) equated with a reading practice where “paratext, text, and resonating context can no longer be separated from each other, but mutually implicate each other” (104).

Concerns with the limited human perspective and the fragmentary nature of his-torical truth, which Lessing still frames in a theological language, Kant transfers into the autonomous domain of reason. For Kant, the central question is what evidence in history makes accessible its purposiveness. How can meaning and purpose be derived from what empirically in history appears as its opposite, as chaos, random-ness, fragmentation, and so on? Kant, Gilgen argues, fails to answer this question sufficiently in his “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte” from 1784 and in the Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1786. But he solves the problem in Der Streit der Fakultäten, in essence by rereading the history of the problem in his own writings. That is, in this late text Kant approaches the earlier concern about individual “unwillingness” by applying the logic of the sublime, which, as Lyotard noted, derives finality from openness, pleasure from un-pleasure. Historical progress thus hinges on an act of reading, on the compassionate observer of history (the audience of the French revolution) understanding historical events as a sign, which will lead the observer to put rational constraints on corresponding events in the future. With Kant, history enters into a recursive process: it starts reading itself, recollecting and incorporating its past in anticipation of its moral telos.

The tension between the particular (events of history) and the general (its teleol-ogy) receives a more speculative treatment in Hegel. Gilgen’s discussion of Hegel centers around two hyphens, the hyphen Hegel drops from a Schiller verse he quotes at the end of the Phenomenology, and the hyphen he inserts into the word “Er-Innerung” to highlight his understanding of recollection as the internalization of an

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external object. The appeal of the hyphen, or Bindestrich, is structural: it simultane-ously connects and separates. This makes the hyphen (in good Derridean fashion) the “sign of a wound, of an abyss or fissure into which the refuse of Hegel’s totalization machinery disappears” (212). While Hölderlin retains the tension it symbolizes and resists ideals of sublation and totalization in history, Hegel tries to overcome the fis-sure through “Er-Innerung,” through a process of internalization and incorporation, which removes any disruptive qualities to reach a standpoint of absolute knowledge where all stages in the development of spirit are retained and interfused.

Presenting us with readings of readings of recollection, the book promulgates the recursive process it locates at the center of the production of historical consciousness and thus inscribes itself into the very history it analyzes. Of course, Gilgen sides not with Hegel but with Hölderlin whose aversion toward totalizing gestures make him a precursor of contemporary philosophy. The strength of this hermeneutic practice is the subtle, detailed, and perceptive readings it can offer and its ability to relate such seemingly minute details as a missing works-cited reference (Lessing), a misplaced comma (Kant), or a hyphen to the grand transcendental questions raised around 1800. The proximity to the discourse it analyzes, however, is also its weakness. There are occasional hints toward alternative discourses that could have offered an outside perspective on the emergence of modernity’s historical consciousness; but technology’s role in defining the metaphorics of memory since Aristotle (imprint) are not expanded any further, media considerations downplayed, and developments in the social sciences (statistics) affecting Kant’s thinking subordinated to the internal dynamics of the examined texts. In my view, these are missed opportunities—as is the absence of any discussion of contemporary narratological theory, no stranger to the relationship between reading, recollection, and history—with which the study could have spoken to a broader array of interests in the topic of recollection and which could have offered fresh vistas onto the classical texts it revisits.

Edgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State University

Friedrich der Große in Europa—gefeiert und umstritten. Edited by Bernd Sösemann. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012. Pp. 155. Paper €24.00. ISBN 978-3515100892.

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich II of Prussia occasioned in Germany what one popular news magazine termed the “Friedrich-Hype” among broad segments of the educated public. The publication by Die Zeit of a newly discovered erotic poem dubbed the “orgasm poem” unleashed a public reception of the jubilee that revealed more about contemporary twenty-first century middlebrow popular culture than about scholarly engagement with the life and times of Friedrich.

This slim volume edited by Bernd Sösemann seeks to balance the treatment of


Friedrich II by making accessible to that same general reading public some of the fruits of a Europe-wide research project, three years in preparation, which bore fruit in events and exhibits throughout 2011 in Hamburg, London, Como, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Wroclaw, Turin, and Moscow. The project produced a massive, 1128-page two-volume work of fifty essays for the use of scholars (Bernd Sösemann and Gregor Vogt-Spira, eds., Friedrich der Große in Europa. Geschichte einer wechselvollen Beziehung [2012]), and Sösemann selected the essays in the volume under review to reach a broader public. In fourteen contributions that range from overviews to scholarly analysis, from a translation of the erotic poem to a transcription of a field letter from Friedrich to a commander during the Second Silesian War with a post-script in French in Friedrich’s own hand, the contributions in this volume provide a useful and accessible overview to any scholar who wishes to find a quick update on the latest scholarship on Friedrick II.

An opening essay by Peter Paret provides both a survey of Friedrich’s life and of the history of his depiction in biographies. Working from the assessment by the British ambassador to Berlin, James Harris, of the “great contradictions in the character of this monarch” (14), Paret explores how Friedrich compartmentalized his life, which permitted great personal grace and tenderness to be combined with ruthless and brutal instrumentalism as he shifted roles between enlightened individual and monarch charged with the pursuit of raison d’état. Characterizing Friedrich as rooted firmly in the ancien régime despite all of his enlightened attitudes, Johannes Kunisch’s essay analyzes Friedrich’s first work of political theory, which brought him Europe-wide notice, the Antimachiavell, which appeared in 1740, the year of his succession, as well as his disputation with Baron d’Holbach over the latter’s Essay on Prejudice of 1770. Michel Kerautret contributes from a French perspective an analysis of Friedrich as author and as the “king-philosopher,” drawing upon Friedrich’s published works and his correspondence with Voltaire.

Other essays in the opening section, notably one by Swiss scholar Ursula Pia Jauch, treat the erotic poem by Friedrich to and about Francesco Algarotti, explaining the story of how that Venetian scholar crossed Friedrich’s path—a very eighteenth-century story of cosmopolitanism—and of how Friedrich came to write his poem in a competitive correspondence with Algarotti. Hans-Ulrich Seifert’s essay shows how the poem’s 2011 “discovery” ignored its earlier publications as long ago as 1933. Jauch also provides a German translation from the original French. The material ultimately demonstrates both the playfulness of Friedrich II, as well as the triviality of contemporary popular fascination with sex.

The third section of the volume consists of essays by non-German scholars who consider Friedrich II’s relations with and attitudes toward France (Jean-Paul Bled) and Austria (Carsten Kretschmann). Two fascinating additional essays warrant mention. Peer Vries of the University of Vienna provides a fascinating comparison between

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Friedrich II and his almost exact contemporary, the Qianlong Emperor of China (1711–1799) of the Qing dynasty. Like Friedrich, the Qianlong Emperor expanded his kingdom, annexed and had to administer new territories, and presided over a bloom-ing and prosperous era in China’s history. A reformer of law and administration like Friedrich, the Qianlong Emperor strengthened his state so that it withstood blow after blow between 1799 and the fall of the Empire in 1911, much as Friedrich’s reforms helped Prussia survive even after the disasters of 1806. Art historian Hubertus Kohle of Bonn provides a delightful essay of how the artwork of Adolph Menzel in the 1840s and 1850s fixed the popular visual imagery of Friedrich as soldier and military hero. Finally, Sösemann himself contributes an important essay on how National Socialist propaganda appropriated and mobilized the image of Friedrich II in print, in poster, and most vitally in film, with multiple depictions culminating in the Veit Harlan 1942 spectacular Der große König.

No single volume aimed at the public could fulfill all the needs of scholars who seek to understand a figure as complex as Friedrich II and the age in which he lived. A useful addition, for example, would have been an essay on Friedrich’s legal practice and legal reforms, such as those by Monika Wienfort in the larger work that resulted from this project. This small volume, however, piques the interest of the reader, provides immediately useful knowledge of the state of the most recent scholarship on Friedrich, and points the more determined scholar toward the more complete product of this useful and successful research project. That is a large accomplishment for a small volume.

Kenneth F. Ledford, Case Western Reserve University

Heinrich von Kleist: Style and Concept: Explorations of Literary Dissonance. Edited by Dieter Sevin and Christoph Zeller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Pp. 422. Cloth €99.95. ISBN 978-3110270471.

Christoph Zellers Einleitung und die abschließenden Reflexionen von Christine Kohlross bilden den Rahmen des Ganzen: Viele von Kleists dichterischen Arbeiten, hält Zeller fest, stellen für weltanschauliche Dogmen eine Herausforderung dar und nehmen ideologiekritische Positionen vorweg, wie sie dann seit Marx und Nietzsche auf unterschiedliche Weise verstärkt das kulturelle Bewusstsein der Moderne prägen. Kohlross meint, dass die Erdbeben im eigentlichen wie übertragenen Sinne, an denen sich der Autor abgearbeitet habe, zu Chiffren unserer von Katastrophen geplagten Gegenwart geworden seien. Der Band ist in sechs thematischen Gruppierungen ange-ordnet: Leben und Fiktion, Sprache und Medien, Text und Intertext, Philosophisches und Juristisches, Affekt und Gefühl, Musik und Rezeption.

Unter “Leben und Fiktion” kommt als erster Günter Blamberger zu Wort, einer


der besten Kenner von Kleists Biografie. Er schildert den Autor als Projektemacher, als jemanden, der sich in ständig wechselnde Unternehmungen stürzt. Sein Vorbild dafür sei Ernst Wünsch gewesen. Von Wünschs Studie Kosmologische Unterhaltungen mit dem Gesetz der polaren Kontaktelektrizität sei Kleist fasziniert gewesen. Dieses Polaritätsgesetz mit seiner Dualität von Anziehung und Abstoßung habe Kleists Bil-dungsidealismus unterminiert und Einfluss auf die Gestaltung seiner Protagonisten gehabt, die nicht selten als “Kipp-Figuren” erscheinen. Auch bei Hinrich Seeba geht es um biografische Aspekte, um die entweder nie geschriebene oder verschollene Schrift “Geschichte einer Seele” des Autors. Seeba liegt, mit Kant zu sprechen, am Herausfinden der “Bedingung der Möglichkeit” von Biografie im Falle Kleists. Dessen im frühen Lebensplan gesteckte Ziele seien im Zug der sogenannten Kant-Krise kon-terkariert worden. Sören Steding meint, dass man Kleist vor allem als traumatisierten Soldaten sehen sollte, der als junger Mann bereits die Angst und den Horror auf dem Schlachtfeld erlebt habe. Der Krieg sei im Werk des Autors omnipräsent.

Das Kapitel “Sprache und Medien” eröffnet Helena Elshout mit einem narratolo-gischen Aufsatz über die Materialität in Kleists Erdbeben in Chili. Wie sie selbst sagt, ist ihre Studie ein Beleg für die gegenwärtige Abwendung vom Poststrukturalismus hin zu Aspekten der Performanz, wo es um die Realität des Artifiziellen geht. Elshout hält fest, dass es in Kleists Erzählungen immer wieder Schlüsselmomente gibt, in denen nicht feststehe, aus welchem Mund gesprochen werde. Wolf Kittler erinnert an die Techniken der Übermittlung von Botschaften, deren revolutionäre Umgestaltung Kleist bereits wahrgenommen habe. In einer Notiz der Berliner Abendblätter hat der Autor den gerade von Thomas von Sömmering erfundenen “elektrischen Telefgrafen” beschrieben, der es möglich mache, in Sekundengeschwindigkeit Botschaften um die Erde zu schicken. Er selbst hat sich, Projektemacher der er war, an der Idee einer “Bombenpost” zur Beschleunigung von Korrespondenzen berauscht: mit Kanonen sollten Postsendungen von Artilleriestation zu Artilleriestation geschossen werden. Scott Abbott interessiert sich fürs Stehen und Fallen, für Erektion und Erschlaffung in der Erzählung Die Marquise von O.... Er bringt die Vergewaltigung mit dem patriar-chalen Prinzip in Verbindung. Dieses Prinzip werde widerlegt durch die Entscheidung der Marquise, ihr eigenes Leben aufzubauen. Mit der fundamentalen Irritation einer Frau, der Alkmene im Amphitryon, hat auch John B. Lyons Studie zu tun. Für ihn artikuliert sich im “Ach” der Alkmene die Hinterfragung der Weisheit des Jupiter, womit sie sich gegen die Wiederherstellung der alten göttlichen Ordnung wende. Lyon stellt zu Recht fest, dass die Schlüsse bei Kleist durchweg offen seien.

Der Abschnitt “Text und Intertext” setzt mit einem Aufsatz von Jeffrey High über Freude und Rache bei Schiller und Kleist ein. Der frühe Kleist stehe dem Klassiker noch relativ nahe. Aber in der Entwicklung des Kleistschen Schaffens profilierten sich immer deutlicher die Differenzen: Der philosophische Schwerpunkt verlagere sich vom Schillerschen Zusammenhang von Tugend und Glück zum Kleistschen

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von Rache und Hass. Bernhard Greiner sieht, was die Ästhetik der Tragödie betrifft, Kleist auf einer Bahn, auf der man sich von der übermächtigen aristotelischen Poetik fortbewegt. Das führt er durch eine detaillierte Interpretation der Familie Schroffen-stein vor Augen. Nicht die erneute Etablierung, sondern das Auflösen von Sinn und Ordnung sei hier das Ziel. Sieht Greiner eine Bewegung zurück hinter Aristoteles, erkennt Mike Hiegemann in seiner Analyse des Robert Guiskard-Fragments, dass Kleist (wie er es selbst sagt) mit dem Stück “auf die Zukunft hinaussehen” wolle.

Das mit “Philosophisches und Juristisches” überschriebene Segment setzt mit einer Studie von Bernd Fischer über Gerechtigkeit bei Kleist ein. Kleists Poetologie wird als “Ästhetik des Widerspruchs” bezeichnet. Auch die Relationstechnik, auf deren Bedeutung für Kleist Hans Kiefner hingewiesen hat, werde durch Doppeldeutigkeiten, Paradoxien, Wortspiele und Zynismen unterlaufen. Verweigerte Anerkennung, so sieht es Fischer, ist im Werk Kleists der Auslöser von Krisen. Edgar Landgraf schreibt über die Bedeutung der Improvisation im Kleistschen Werk. Improvisationen waren seinerzeit auf dem Theater durch die Zensur verboten. Für Kleist mit seiner Passion fürs Widersprechen wird das Improvisieren zu einem Lebensprinzip der Helden seiner Erzählungen und Dramen. Carl Niekerk diskutiert die Ambivalenzen im Hinblick auf den Rasse-Diskurs, wie er in der Verlobung in St. Domingo zum Tragen kommt. Er konturiert die anhaltende Debatte im Rückgriff auf die Anthropologie der Aufklärung mit ihren Vorstellungen über Zivilisationen und Rassen, deren Ursprung und Unterschiede. Dabei betont er, dass in Kleists Novelle neben Rassen- auch Klas-sen-Ideologien eine Rolle spielen und Zündstoff für die geschilderten Konflikte liefern.

Das Kapitel “Affekt und Gefühl” setzt mit einem Aufsatz von Rolf Peter Janz über “affektive Exzesse” ein. Kleists literarisches Personal befinde sich durchweg in einem emotionalen Ausnahmezustand. Das wird an Figuren wie Kohlhaas und Penthesilea überzeugend erhellt. Christine Kanz schneidet—ähnlich wie Bernd Fischer—das Thema der fehlenden Anerkennung bei den Protagonisten an und geht im Einzelnen auf den Findling ein. Kategorien wie Verwandtschaft, Familie oder Generation bilden, so ihre These, eine Grauzone, die nicht geklärt, sondern innerhalb einer konfliktuö-sen Affektenkette aufrecht erhalten werde. Von dem “Gefühl des Rechts” handelt Pascale LaFountain, die eine weitere Analyse der Familie Schroffenstein beisteuert. Sie zeigt ebenfalls, wie Aufklärungsvorstellungen untergraben werden: in diesem Fall des Rechts durch barbarische Racheschwüre.

Schön, dass ein eigener Abschnitt dem Kapitel “Musik” gewidmet ist. Peter Höyng vergleicht in seinem vorzüglich geschriebenen Beitrag Kleist mit Beethoven. Er kommt wie Jeffrey High auf die Nähe und Distanz zwischen Kleists “Germania an ihre Kinder” und Schillers von Beethoven vertonter Ode “An die Freude” zu sprechen. Beide hätten der “Generation Napoleon” angehört, beiden sei eine vergleichbare ästhetische Formung von Gewalt zu attestieren. Wie Höyng geht auch Leslie Bees-ley auf die Legende von der Heiligen Cäcilie ein. Die dort zu konstatierenden vier


unterschiedlichen Erzählversionen über das Schicksal der Bilderstürmer vergleicht er mit den vier Evangelien, die ebenfalls Abweichungen voneinander aufweisen. Kleist radikalisiere hier Lessings Religionskritik, denn die Analogie nähre den Zweifel an der Zuverlässigkeit der Berichte über das Leben Jesu im Neuen Testament. Amy Emm verdanken wir eine eingehende Darstellung der Unterschiede zwischen Kleists Penthesilea-Drama und der gleichnamigen Oper von Othmar Schoeck aus dem Jahr 1927. Schoeck, der bei Arnold Schönberg studiert hatte, übernahm zwar den Text von Kleist als Libretto, doch kürzte er ihn auf ein Viertel der ursprünglichen Länge und berücksichtigte unverständlicherweise nicht Kleists Hinweise auf Musik im Dramentext. Wie Schoeck war auch Viktor Ullmann bei Schönberg in die Schule gegangen. Ullmann komponierte in Prag, kurz bevor die Nationalsozialisten ihn nach Theresienstadt verschleppten, die Oper Der zerbrochene Krug nach Kleists Komödie. Laurie Johnson interpretiert dieses Dokument des Widerstands überzeugend von der Theorie der “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch) her. 1944 wurde Ullmann von den Nationalsozialisten ermordet.

Was die literarische und filmische Rezeption von Kleists Werken betrifft: John Pizer weist nach, dass in Thomas Bernhards Stück Die Jagdgesellschaft von 1974 das Fragment Robert Guiskard als Intertext zu entdecken ist. Krankheit und Seuche kündigen in beiden Fällen Tod und Untergang von Gewaltmenschen an. Johann Holzner erkennt in dem österreichischen Gegenwartsautor Erich Hackl einen Kleist-Adepten. Dessen durch Lakonie, Unsicherheit und Vielstimmigkeit geprägter Erzählstil erinnere an den von Kleist. Waltraud Maierhofer und Ambika Athreya untersuchen Differenzen zwischen dem Film Julietta—Es ist nicht, wie du denkst aus dem Jahr 2001 und Kleists Novelle Die Marquise von O.... Es sind besonders die beschönigenden Vergewaltigungsmythen vom Zusammenfall von Liebe und Notzucht, die die beiden Germanistinnen kritisch vergegenwärtigen.

Der Band ist ein willkommener wissenschaftlicher Diskussionsbeitrag in der Kleistforschung, auf den sicher noch oft zustimmend und fragend zurückgegriffen werden wird. Er zeigt auch, wie gut germanistischer Philologie interdisziplinäre Weiterungen tun. Zu verdanken ist er der Initiative des leider kürzlich verstorbenen Kollegen Dieter Sevin.

Paul Michael Lützeler, Washington University in St. Louis

Grillparzers Welttheater: Modernität und Tradition. By Brigitte Prutti. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2013. Pp. 477. Paper €34.80. ISBN 978-3895289552.

Prutti’s study of Grillparzer’s dramatic work is an ambitious project that plays down its ambition. The introduction denies any intention to provide a new global assessment of Grillparzer or his body of work; instead, Prutti claims simply to conduct new readings

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of the works using up-to-date approaches and concepts. Yet, she has a certain Grillpar-zer in mind. She announces “die programmatische Intention, den aufregenden und vielseitigen Weltdramatiker an die Stelle des langweiligen und ideologie-konformen Nationaldramatikers zu setzen” (31). This project yields multifaceted readings of his work. In addition to discussing the body of secondary literature exceptionally thoroughly, Prutti analyzes the poetic and theatrical components of Grillparzer’s work; contextualizes it within the literary and dramatic traditions; attends to recep-tion history; and considers its position with respect to the politics of the restoration Habsburg Empire. The result is a compendium that provides an extensive overview of Grillparzer’s work and does, in fact, present a very different picture of Grillparzer than that familiar from many other studies.

Not only does the study seek to establish Grillparzer as a world dramatist, rather than a Habsburg apologist, but its theoretical commitments and interpretive concerns are more unified than the introduction suggests. The first five chapters each examine a major dramatic work (Die Ahnfrau, Sappho, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn, Weh dem, der lügt!), the sixth two (König Ottokars Glück und Ende, Die Jüdin von Toledo), and the epilogue a collection of letters and poems in which Grillparzer stages his own romantic relationships. While Prutti does apply other approaches at times (e.g., celebrity studies in the chapter on Sappho and post-colonial studies in that on Weh dem, der lügt!), most of her readings are grounded in a gender studies approach with strong commitments to psychoanalysis and semiotics. She does not forward a central claim, but a clear pattern emerges from the body of individual analyses.

Nearly all of the chapters contain variations on a theme: Grillparzer’s female figures serve the construction and stabilization of male identity and status. While many of Grillparzer’s dramatic women initially appear as strong and dynamic figures, in the end, their roles and staging shore up male subjectivity, authorship, political power, and dynasty. Prutti makes this argument explicitly about König Ottokars Glück und Ende and Die Jüdin von Toledo, but the same could be said for her readings of Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn, in which the rebellious Queen Gertrude and the imperious lady Erny become bodies in the restorative tableau of the conclusion, and Weh dem, der lügt!, in which the spirited and resourceful Edrita becomes a fetish of a benevo-lent, paternalistic, enlightened universalism meant to be associated with Habsburg Austria. As these examples have already suggested, stabilizing the male position often requires sacrificing the female figure. Sappho’s subjectivity and hysterical body must be sacrificed, Prutti contends, to affirm the purity of a divine (but secular) art separated from the dirty business of life. Erny must die because she represents a sign that cannot be fixed; closure can be achieved only after her death, when “Man(n) ist endlich ganz unter sich” (236).

To be sure, not all of the chapters deal with this theme. The discussion of Des


Meeres und der Liebe Wellen presents the play as exploring the psychology of modern romantic love and as deconstructing the myth of the romantic Liebestod. Prutti’s discussion of the death scene is illustrative of the scope of her analyses. True to her interest in establishing Grillparzer as a skilled dramatist, she devotes significant atten-tion to his prowess in stagecraft: in the careful choice of props and costume, in the staging of spectacle, and in the creation of highly symbolic and affecting tableaus. In discussing this play, she contends that Grillparzer’s choice to narrate the kiss, rather than to stage it, aims to foreclose the audience’s recuperation of a transfiguring mean-ing. In addition, she discusses Heinrich Laube’s 1851 production and explains how his staging managed to inject the possibility of transcendence into the death scene. Such attention to generations of reception and production is representative of her treatment of Grillparzer’s work and importance.

Chapter 1 and the epilogue on Grillparzer’s letters and love poetry take a slightly different tack toward the dynamic of the male/female relationship as well. Here, Prutti reads Grillparzer’s work within a biographical context and contends that poetic pro-duction asserts the subjectivity, aesthetic agency, and artistic status of the male artist. In her discussion of the Ahnfrau, the young Grillparzer appears as a man who has not yet secured a place within the “männlich bestimmte Traditionslinie für die erfolg-reiche Reproduktion von Autorschaft” (61). Indeed, in extensive exchanges about its composition, both he and his contemporaries often attributed to him a female-coded role. In retrospective statements, however, Grillparzer arrogates to himself a role as an independent, masculine creator, a self-representation that resonates with the rhetorical use to which he was later put by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and others interested in establishing a strong (male) Austrian identity. Similarly, the epilogue reads Grillparzer’s “love letters” as documents meant to stage him in a certain light. In them, he appears as an artist who is determined to preserve his independence from the semiotic and hermeneutic uncertainty of romantic relationships.

Prutti does not present a unified picture of Grillparzer or his work. But she does pursue fairly constant concerns, and in incorporating a biographical component into her study, she suggests a relationship between the historical figure Grillparzer and the figures that he created and staged. Somewhat simplified, her suggestion seems to me to be this: in life as in fiction, Grillparzer employs female figures to buttress the positions of often ambivalent, weak, or threatened males. My own stylistic prefer-ence would be to have this claim and its theoretical framework clearly articulated from the outset, but the book will be useful for at least two audiences. Those who are unacquainted with Grillparzer but interested in him will find a wealth of information about his plays, his world, and the reception of his work over the last two centuries. Those interested in her analytical perspective will profit greatly from Prutti’s extensive investigations of the individual works.

Katra A. Byram, Ohio State University

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Mendelssohn Perspectives. Edited by Nicole Grimes and Angela R. Mace. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Pp. xxii + 368. Cloth £65.00. ISBN 978-1409428251.

2005 and 2009 were important Mendelssohn years, as they marked the 200th birth-days of the siblings Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn. Many events took place in those years, creating a flurry of new scholarship. This collection of essays falls into the category of conference proceedings, as it is the end result of the international conference “Mendelssohn in the Long Nineteenth Century” at Trinity College, Dublin, in July 2005. In the introduction, editors Nicole Grimes and Angela R. Mace list the impressive achievements of Mendelssohn scholarship over the last half century that have rehabilitated the composer’s distorted image caused by rising antisemitism soon after Mendelssohn’s death. This volume, therefore, is free “to celebrate multifaceted and engaging perspectives on Mendelssohn studies” (1). The wide range of topics “is informed by critical engagement with a wide range of source materials,” including “not only traditional musical analysis-based studies, but also . . . lines of inquiry that are crucial to other areas of the humanities, bringing these approaches to bear on historical and interpretative studies of the Mendelssohns” (3).

The resulting sixteen essays by scholars from North America, Germany, the UK, Italy, and France cover a wide range of topics organized in five parts: Mendelssohn’s Jewishness, Between Tradition and Innovation, Mendelssohn and the Stage, Style and Compositional Process, and Contemporary Views and Posthumous Perspectives. This sensible categorization works well to give the reader a sense of continuity and homogeneity despite the diverse contributions. The level of scholarship of this volume is high, as the majority of contributors are seasoned Mendelssohn scholars. The non-Mendelssohnians, nevertheless, offer fresh insights by exploring new contexts. The extensive use of a variety of source materials is impressive, and they underline the originality of most contributions. Editors Grimes and Mace were able to strike the right balance of creating a uniform style without squelching the scholar’s individual voice.

The first part on Mendelssohn’s Jewishness might seem at odds with the editors’ claim that Mendelssohn scholarship has gotten past image repair, as the four chap-ters trace elements of public perception of the composer’s Jewish identity. A closer reading, however, reveals new and different perspectives that are unconcerned about rehabilitation. Sinéad Dempsey-Garrat’s reevaluation of Wagner’s smear campaign against Mendelssohn, for example, argues surprisingly against its success, offering more potent reasons for the composer’s quickly faltering image around 1850. And just as Nicole Grimes seems to wade dangerously into recent controversies of Jewish perspectives in the interpretation of Mendelssohn’s works, she effectively broadens the discussion through her careful reading of Eduard Hanslick’s review of Mendels-sohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Marian Wilson Kimber’s “Never Perfectly Beautiful: Physiognomy, Jewishness, and Mendelssohn Portraiture” is the most esoteric of the


group. Yet Kimber is able to not only ask broader cultural questions, but her fascinating research takes the reader beneath the surface of public perception through her explo-ration of portrayal of Jewishness in drawings, paintings, and caricatures throughout the nineteenth century. In doing so, Kimber strips away at our still simplistic image of the composer. While Colin Eatock’s “Mendelssohn’s Conversion to Judaism: An English Perspective” would seem to offer the least novel ideas, his contribution to Mendelssohn’s reception history is outstanding. Eatock shows convincingly how Mendelssohn’s Jewishness hinges on the question of race or religion—a question whose answers shift dramatically during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The pairing of the second part of the book, Between Tradition and Innovation, seems at bit forced, as its three essays are quite different in scope and approach. That does not lessen the excellent content of these chapters, however. “Norm and Deformation in Mendelssohn’s Sonata Forms” by Paul Wingfeld and Julian Horton might be the most groundbreaking chapter of the book. Their excellent survey and discussion of Mendelssohn’s approach to sonata form offers not only fascinating insights into his compositional strategies, but they provide a new framework for analy-sis and interpretation of the composer’s instrumental music. John Michael Cooper’s article on Mendelssohn and Berlioz is a fine exposé on their personal and professional relationship throughout their careers, rectifying misconceptions and generalization that have skewed our perspective for many years. Cooper is also able to demonstrate convincingly some of the musical affinities between these very different compos-ers. Anselm Hartinger’s essay “Between Tradition and Innovation: Mendelssohn as Music Director and His Performances of Bach in Leipzig” does an excellent job of exploring broader historical and cultural contexts around Mendelssohn’s approach to the programming of his historic concerts and his performances of Bach’s music in Leipzig. By looking beyond the typical source materials, Hartinger helps us understand Mendelssohn’s rationale for his programming and performance choices.

Mendelssohn’s failed attempts at composing an opera during his career as a musi-cian have caused much consternation and speculation. Part III: Mendelssohn and the Stage explores two very different aspects of the composer’s complex relationship to staged works. Jason Geary’s essay “Converting the Pagans: Mendelssohn, Greek Tragedy, and the Christina Ethos” traces the cultural and aesthetic relevance of the composer’s incidental music for Antigone and Oedipus in Kolonos within the political, religious, and cultural contexts of the time. Geary gives reasons for the music’s suc-cess at the time of composition as well as its seeming irrelevance in today’s culture. Monika Hennemann comes at the topic from a completely different angle, as she explores how the nineteenth-century public coped with Mendelssohn’s delay and eventual failure to produce an opera. Her discussion of rumors of imminent opera performances and of fictionalized biographies gives fascinating insights into Mendels-sohn’s image during his lifetime and after his death.

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Two of the three articles on Style and Compositional Process deal with the Mendelssohn siblings’ piano playing and how it relates to their compositional styles. R. Larry Todd’s essay on the origins and meaning of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words presents fascinating details that offer insights into their improvisational skills, compositional process, and aesthetic framework. Angela Mace’s archival research is equally remarkable, as she uncovers performance details about improvisational strategies of Felix and Fanny. Benedict Taylor presents new inter-pretative clues in his analysis of Mendelssohn’s sonata form strategies of his String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 12. His article is thought provoking, as it opens up new hermeneutic windows for finding meaning in Mendelssohn’s music.

The last part of the book, Contemporary Views and Posthumous Perspectives, looks at less developed topics about Mendelssohn’s image and personality. Regina Back’s “A Friendship in Letters: The Correspondence of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Klingemann” and Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s “Mendelssohn as Portrayed in the Goethe-Zelter Correspondence” highlight the high regard for his extraordinary talents. Pieto Zappalà and Cécile Reynaud deal with perceptions and successes of Mendelssohn’s music in Italy and France. All four articles fill in gaps in our understanding of the composer’s talents, perception, and personality.

This book continues the trend of exceptional Mendelssohn scholarship in form of collections of essays. While many chapters deal with biographical and cultural topics that are easily accessible to the general public (parts I, III, and V), the target audience is nevertheless primarily music historians; part II, Between Tradition and Innovation, and part IV, Style and Compositional Process, are rather technical in their discussions of specific musical procedures. This book will be on the bookshelf of most nineteenth-century scholars, but its partially interdisciplinary content also offers important ideas for scholars outside the discipline.

Siegwart Reichwald, Converse College

Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression. Edited by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2013. Pp. 360. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-1580464321.

As the title Rethinking Hanslick promises, this volume offers fourteen studies that mark what Nicole Grimes terms “a paradigm shift” in the reception of the work of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) by seeking to “redress the manifold misreadings” that have grown up around it (5). A number of the contributors do focus attention on musi-cal formalism and expression, as the subtitle would suggest; yet surprisingly, much of the most interesting material explores topics not hinted at on the book’s cover, notably cultural politics, gender, ethnicity, and social identity. Taken as a whole, this


proves to be a compendium of substantial, well-informed, and rewarding articles that reconsider the significance and value of Hanslick’s writings from a variety of angles.

Influential as both a music critic and an important aesthetician, Hanslick left some-thing of a bifurcated legacy, and this is reflected in Rethinking Hanslick. His major contribution to the field of musical aesthetics is Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, a treatise published in 1854, accepted as his Habilitationsschrift in 1856, and republished in nine updated editions during his lifetime. It has remained a canonical text, widely read up to the present. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen is traditionally deemed a rather conservative declaration of musical ideals opposed to the avant-garde tendencies of the time. Hanslick was thus positioned firmly on one side of an ongoing debate over musical style that continued for the last half of the nineteenth century, a position cemented by Hanslick’s vigorous championing of Brahms in the 1870s and 1880s. On these terms Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was contested from the start, as is well charted in James Deaville’s survey of “Hanslick’s path through musical history.” While some traces of partisanship remain, these disputes have now largely cooled, of course. Following Hanslick’s revilement in the Third Reich, the academic tide swung largely in his favor in the postwar decades, perhaps not surprisingly, as he was himself a most successful academic who shared the historicist, rather conservative liberalism that characterized much of the musical establishment during the Cold War and, in slightly different forms, in the current age of neoliberalism, too.

Articles in the book by Fred Everett Maus, Anthony Pryor, and Felix Wörner dis-cuss Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, demonstrating that critical discussions of Hanslick’s ideas about the aesthetics of musical beauty still have vitality, particularly as they contest one-sided interpretations of his aesthetics as essentially conservative, if not reactionary. Most of the contributors concentrate, however, on Hanslick’s work in Vienna as a music critic, memoirist, and on-the-spot historian, from the 1860s onwards. The rethinking of this side of Hanslick’s work is both more complicated and more unsettled than that of his aesthetics. Readings of late nineteenth-century Viennese art and culture organized around now familiar narratives of the decline of a culture of liberalism and the intertwining ascents of nationalism, collectivism, antisemitism, and various modernisms have prevailed for some two decades. Several articles explore perspectives on Hanslick that have been facilitated by this approach. David Brodbeck’s discussion of Hanslick’s reception of the music of Carl Goldmark and Nicole Grimes’s “German Humanism, Liberalism, and Elegy in Hanslick’s Writ-ings on Brahms,” to take the two best examples, reveal the complexities Hanslick navigated as a standard-setting critic working to align his musical taste, his bourgeois identity, and his aesthetic premises. These essays both effectively regard Hanslick primarily in terms of virtues and conflicts inherent in the culture of the liberal Ger-man Bürgertum he inhabited. The related issue of Hanslick’s Jewish identity—an identification he did not embrace, despite his mother’s Jewish birth—is important

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here as well. Faced with the discomfort that Hanslick felt with what he heard as the “Jewish-Oriental character” in Goldmark’s music, as opposed to an ostensibly more universal “European-Occidental” style, Brodbeck does not ascribe it to antisemitic bias but rather to a liberal, assimilationist desire to identify with German cultural values (see 139–142). Issues of Jewish identity are also raised in David Kasunic’s “On ‘Jewishness’ and Genre: Hanslick’s Reception of Gustav Mahler,” which turns rather opaque in its effort to coordinate the author’s wish to read Hanslick as Jewish and to reevaluate his judgment of Mahler, even against the critic’s fairly blunt appraisal of the First Symphony as “the kind of music which for me is not music” (327), to say nothing of Kasunic’s quixotic claim that as a critic Hanslick is some ways “Nietzsche’s kindred spirit” (314).

Alongside these contributions, which are consolidations of recently established critical approaches basically sympathetic to Hanslick, the volume includes a set of articles that take a more critical stance in resisting him in one way or another. These are among the most rewarding and freshest essays in the book. Lauren Freede’s exploration of the mix of accurate reportage and image creation in Hanslick memoir Aus meinem Leben (1894) is particularly useful as she shows it to be an often inadver-tently “revealing document of the social religious and political fabric of fin-de-siècle Vienna” (189). Marion Gerards’s consideration of Hanslick’s criticism in light of contemporaneous gender discourse brings into focus biases that appear painfully obvious once they are glimpsed, while the article by Nina Noeske on Hanslick’s use of “the organism metaphor” does something similar by revealing how his rhetoric evoked loaded metaphors of “healthiness” and “unhealthiness.” Some of the ways in which personal commitments colored Hanslick’s opinions are suggested in both Timothy R. McKinney’s essay on Hanslick and Hugo Wolf, a critic whose opinions were far to the opposite side, and David Larkin’s discussion of Hanslick’s reviews of the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss and Dvor=ák. In principle, Hanslick was unsympathetic to the symphonic poem, the leading genre of modernist concert music at the time, but was markedly more favorable in his comments on Dvor=ák’s effort in the form than on Strauss’s. Part of the reason, as Larkin proposes, may well have been that Dvor=ák’s musical syntax is somewhat more traditional that Strauss’s, yet it is hard not to feel that Brahms’s allegiance to the Czech composer played a significant role as well. Related themes come together in some insightful ways in Dana Gooley’s “Hanslick on Johann Strauss Jr.: Genre, Social Class, and Liberalism in Vienna” and an essay on “Listening and Dancing in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception” by Chantal Frankenbach. Both of these authors treat Hanslick’s ambivalent if not conflicted feelings about dance music as a window onto the deeper issues of identity, class and the body that beset liberalism and the Bildungsbürgertum. In these essays the rethinking promised by the title appears at its sharpest and brightest.

Benjamin M. Korstvedt, Clark University


The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century. Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 286. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-1571134875.

The display of contempt for commercially successful literature and its readers has enjoyed a long tradition among writers and literary critics. Jonathan Franzen’s dismay at seeing Oprah’s book club logo on his novel’s cover is not dissimilar to Theodor Fontane’s denigration of his immensely popular colleague E. Marlitt as writing for the “Strickstrumpf-Madame in Sachsen und Thüringen.” At about the same time Fontane made his condescending comments about Marlitt, a young Emma Goldman enjoyed reading Marlitt’s novels for her German class in Königsberg, as one of the articles in The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century tells us (198). The somewhat jarring image of the multilingual future anarchist leader as a reader of mass-produced romantic fiction wonderfully illustrates one of The German Bestseller’s main goals: to complicate our notion of bestsellers by taking a closer look at them as literary products and cultural commodities.

As Charlotte Woodford, one of the volume’s editors along with Benedict Scho-field, states in the introduction, an emphasis on works that were widely read and enjoyed, affords the opportunity “to explore the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market” (1). The texts the authors of this volume analyze did not simply sell well but they were widely read and enjoyed, and all had what Michael Minden calls “the aura of popular success” (Michael Min-den, “Bestseller Lists and Literary Value in the Twentieth Century,” Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung [2007], 169). As a result, the volume gathers articles on canonized and noncanonized texts and we thus find a look into the melodramatic elements of Buddenbrooks alongside a careful analysis of Josefine Mutzenbacher. Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, a faux autobiographical text that has become a pornographic classic. A special focus of the overall project is to examine the “literariness of works sometimes dismissed as merely popular” (14).

Woodford’s introduction gives a compact overview of the development of the literary marketplace in the nineteenth century and reminds us of the importance of periodicals and lending libraries as sources of reading material even in an age when mass production made book ownership more widespread. Many of the articles in the book use Alberto Martino’s research on lending libraries as a way to gage which books were actually read in addition to using sales numbers as an indicator of a book’s popularity.

A workshop on “The Tradition of the Bestseller” inspired the essays in this book and the contributions are organized into three categories: “The Aesthetics of Suc-cess and Failure,” “Short Fiction,” and “Imagination and Identification.” While the decision behind this particular categorization of the different articles remains a bit

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unclear to this reader, all contributions complement each other nicely and present a broad spectrum of authors and popular works in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. With its emphasis on both aesthetic categories and material conditions, the volume intersects with and contributes to a growing body of work in nineteenth century book history in German Studies as represented by such scholars as Kit Belgum and Lynne Tatlock whose work on the Gartenlaube and transatlantic cultural transfer of popular fiction has advanced our understanding of the literary marketplace in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Through exploring “bestseller” as a literary genre, the volume can go beyond traditional hierarchies and integrate “high” and “low” culture equally into its analysis and look at commonalities. Perhaps not surprisingly, one category that serves as an important interpretative tool for analyzing bestsellers is “melodrama.” Ernest Schonfield takes a look at how Buddenbrooks, one of “the few novels around 1900 to have achieved both critical acclaim and widespread popularity” (95), employs melodramatic registers and identifies them as one of the reasons the novel appealed to different audiences. In his article on Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Benedict Schofield also sees the melodramatic love triangle along with adventure narratives as important components for the success of Freytag’s 1855 novel. And Todd Kontje uses melodrama as a lens for his analysis of Felix Dahn’s hugely popular historical novel Der Kampf um Rom in addition to placing the novel in the context of other narratives of ethnic nationalism. The book was published in 1876 and by 1938 more than 600 editions had appeared. Kontje ascribes the novel’s broad appeal to the mixture of melodrama and nationalism and it would have been fascinating to hear even more about why Dahn’s book in particular rose above the many other historical novels in the readers’ favor.

Christiane Arndt’s article on Storm’s Schimmelreiter usefully introduces the liter-ary category of “Schauerrealismus” (gothic realism) to describe Storm’s unique use of complex framing and other literary devices to produce an effect of the uncanny that no doubt contributed to the novel’s popular and literary success. Nicholas Saul also turns to aesthetic structures for his analysis of a text by Wilhelm Jensen, one of the most widely read writers of the late nineteenth century who is now almost completely forgotten. By looking at some of Jensen’s texts that did not become successful, Saul wants to examine the perplexing relationship between literary and market value. This focus is an interesting twist in a volume on bestsellers and might have been even more illuminating through a comparison with a close reading of Jensen’s more popular works.

Several articles take a fresh look at the genre Heimatliteratur and succeed at complicating our notion of this genre and of the literary and cultural work it carried out. The essay on Clara Viebig by Caroline Brand convincingly establishes the inter-dependency of regionality and urbanity and sentimentality and naturalism in Viebig’s novels. Martin Swales and Anita Bunyan open up fascinating aspects of Stifter’s


Bergkristall stories and Berthold Auerbach’s Dorfgeschichten, respectively, and show how both writers layer regional aspects into their works along with other aesthetic features and create effects that expand our understanding of Heimatliteratur.

The four articles in the volume’s last section, “Imagination and Identification,” all successfully combine analyses of aesthetic and ideological facets of popular texts with a discussion of the material conditions they were created in. Katrin Kohl’s article on Eugenie Marlitt was particularly insightful in its concise yet multifaceted examination of Marlitt’s work, her poetics, and her life as a professional writer. Peter Pfeiffer pres-ents Balduin Möllhausen as a well-loved author of adventure narratives who, unlike Karl May, has disappeared into obscurity. Pfeiffer’s article focuses on a travelogue by Möllhausen, perhaps saving the analysis of Möllhausen’s popular novels for another project. Charlotte Woodford and Elizabeth Boa frame the novels they discuss within larger social and ideological discussions of their time, especially in regard to questions around women’s role in society. Novels by Bertha von Suttner and Gabriele Reuter receive a careful reading in Woodford’s essay and she shows how both authors’ use of sentimental narrative style can function as a protest against gender inequality. The volume closes with Boa’s comparison of two texts that center around urban prostitutes and that each sold millions of copies. Boa notes that both texts were marketed as “authentic” diaries but were in fact penned by writers (Margarete Böhme and Felix Salten) who subsequently denied the authorship. Despite similarities between these two texts and their authors (who both wrote prolifically out of financial need), Boa is also interested in what makes these texts different in their transgression and why one of them continues to be successful while the other faded in popularity.

The exploration of questions like these, combined with careful literary analyses and considerations of material conditions, render The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century a wonderful addition to research on popular literature in the nineteenth century. In keeping with true popular culture fashion, let’s hope for a sequel coming soon to a library and bookstore nearby.

Katrin Völkner, Northwestern University

Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature. By Jörg Kreienbrock. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. 313. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0823245284.

Feet are no longer just feet when they rest threateningly, encased in boots and noisome filth, on the train cushion beside a quietly fuming traveler’s knees, their soles imper-tinently encroaching upon his personal space and, Jörg Kreienbrock argues, upon his very subjectivity. This particular image, taken from Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s novel Another One (Auch einer, 1879), is one of many that illustrate Vischer’s own notion

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of the “Tücke des Objekts” (and in particular here, the “impudence of the foot”), and that pepper Kreienbrock’s new cultural study of irascible subjects reacting to allegedly malicious objects. Moving between a panoply of theorists and four modern novelists (modernity here is understood quite broadly), Kreienbrock chronicles the history of a seemingly quotidian phenomenon—the object that, by failing to perform its intended function, resists the will of the subject, and that the subject thus imbues with mali-cious intent—that speaks to the development of the modern subject through fiction, science, literature, philosophy, and ethics. In this ambitious second book Kreienbrock draws on Joseph Vogl’s influential edited volume Poetologien des Wissens (1999) and its approach to both cultural studies in general and the production of knowledge in particular, to propound a poetics of the malicious object. What, Kreienbrock asks, allows us to attribute ill intent to an object that seemingly acts out and provokes? How are we to understand the phenomenon—the ascription of agency to objects and the ensuing explosive reaction to them—as a process embedded in a history of its own?

Objects, as understood here, are equipment, Zeug, and thus purely functional means to an end. When they break down, however, they short-circuit this process of mediation and become ends in themselves. In failing to execute their function—and here Kreienbrock takes his lead from Martin Heidegger, who forms the backbone of the study—they paradoxically reveal their hitherto concealed essence as tools, as objects. This irruptive enunciation proves problematic, however, for it can occur only when the object has subverted or thwarted the subject’s effort to attain some end of his own. To know an object as a tool is to experience its malfunction. This is apparently quite irritating for Kreienbrock’s subjects.

Initially, these malfunctioning objects, or “technologies of the self,” to borrow Foucault’s term, serve as a means of steeling the subject against the contumacies of a reality composed of both people and things. The squeaky parlor door in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, and Phutatorius’s open breeches, make pos-sible a sensuous interaction between object and subject (in these cases an irritating squeak or a piping hot chestnut in one’s pants) that the Stoic subject must resist in order to cultivate his philosophy of life. Yet Phutatorius’s response to the chestnut, an unprintable curse, illustrates the tenuous hold Sterne’s subjects have on the stoicism they espouse.

In Jean Paul, we find a similar dynamic at work, with an added corrective so as to enliven what the poet deems a certain dullness in Stoic ataraxia (the preference for reason over affect). For Jean Paul, strategies of projecting human intentions upon the recalcitrant object—and the reader’s subsequent recognition of this fallacy—succeed in adding humor to, and defusing, the irritating situations his protagonists Siebenkäs and Frohauf Süptitz encounter; the projection of anthropomorphism, Kreienbrock argues, serves as “a coping strategy of the cornered subject himself” (121). This solution, however, marks a shift from maintaining a subjective distance


against the encroachment of objects (Sterne) to attributing agency (and thereby subjectivity) to objects, if playfully (Jean Paul). Having given life to the Hydra of the anthropomorphized object with malicious intent, Jean Paul establishes a trope that his literary heirs, at the latest with Vischer, will invert and transform into something much more invidious.

Indeed, as Vischer’s image of the impudent feet illustrates, the attribution of agency to pernicious objects has, by the late nineteenth century, lost its component of humorous release for the subject; it is the source now of anxiety, explosive anger, and a pathological relationship of subject to object (one thinks of Alfred Döblin’s Michael Fischer a few decades later). The most interesting part of Kreienbrock’s study involves Vischer’s theoretical reflections on the “malice of objects,” which illuminate—as much as the highly entertaining episodes from his lamentably understudied novel Another One—the development of a modern subject in an increasingly urban world cluttered with recalcitrant Zeug on the verge of failure.

In a final chapter, Heimito von Doderer’s connection with thermodynamic elabo-rations of ignition (Julius Mayer) serves as a counterbalance to the universal reality of malicious objects in Vischer. In historicizing the concept as a specifically modern phenomenon, Doderer adapts Vischer’s understanding of Tücke to a scientific age in which the power of such objects to ignite anger might be used productively (as it is in Sterne), but as a means of catharsis. By the same token, for Doderer, “projecting agency in the form of malicious intentions is an ‘executive process’ . . . to reduce or efface the even greater threat of contingency, that is radical groundlessness” (208). What once threatened subjectivity has become a technology of the self for coping with the distressing realities of modern existence and its search for meaning.

The story Kreienbrock tells here is an interesting and thorough one, and it makes a contribution to the history of the modern subject amid the menagerie of objects from which he differentiates himself. But to contextualize his narrative, Kreienbrock turns to a considerable number of theorists and thinkers, ranging from Freud to Michel de Certeau, whose place in the study is less certain (because less overtly prominent) than that of the literary figures he foregrounds in his title, though the former punctu-ate the text frequently. One wonders whether, to highlight their importance to the epistemological underpinnings of the project as a whole, these theorists might not have deserved a dedicated chapter or an interlude of their own. A final thought: one consequence of Kreienbrock’s selection of texts and theories is an implicit gendering of the modern subject as male. On the one occasion when the female subject enters the picture, with Freud, she suffers not from anger at malicious objects, but from hysteria. The text thus seems unwittingly to raise the question of the modern subject’s gender without addressing it further. To what extent is the female subject shaped by malicious objects? Or is the anger in this narrative exclusively the province of men?

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In prompting these and other questions, Kreienbrock’s book has laid the groundwork for much interesting work to come.

Daniel Bowles, Boston College

Maritime Wirtschaft in Deutschland: Schifffahrt—Werften—Handel—Seemacht im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Edited by Jürgen Elvert, Sigurd Hess, and Heinrich Walle. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012. Pp. 228. Paper €36.00. ISBN 978-3515101370.

This useful collection of essays brings together maritime scholars and experts from Germany, Britain, and Norway to study the history of maritime economics in nine-teenth- and twentieth century Germany. Though informative throughout, the essays, organized thematically in four parts, are of mixed quality and ambition. Some offer synthetic overviews; some are based on substantive primary research and/or offer original analysis; some offer little that is analytically or empirically new; and some work well as thought pieces.

The first group of essays covers the history of shipping. In his introductory piece, Heinrich Walle presents a summary overview of German shipping in the nineteenth century. Melanie Leonhard explores the shipping enterprise(s) of the Rickmer fam-ily in Bremen between shipbuilding and East-Asia trade, combining business history with family history. Birgit Braasch analyzes personal experiences and memories of post–World War II transatlantic travel with the Cunard Line. Introduced by Sönke Neitzel, the second part of the book features articles on the history of the shipyard industry. Dirk Peters surveys the history of that industry between 1850 and 1914, with special emphasis on its relationship to its British counterpart. Cord Eberspächer presents a succinct analysis of Anglo-German competition over construction orders from China from 1870 to the mid-1890s, a rivalry that took place in the context of competing pursuits of empire and profit, as well as Chinese efforts at self-strength-ening. Johanna Meyer-Lenz charts the business history of Blohm-Voss before 1914 as a fast-developing shipyard enterprise that made itself into a leading, internationally competitive company. Sketching the short-lived history of Germany’s only freight ship with nuclear propulsion, the Otto Hahn, Hajo Neumann explores the interplay between business, science, and government in West Germany.

A third round of essays is grouped under the rubric of trade and framed by an introductory essay by Sigurd Hess, a coeditor of the volume. Jürgen Nagel briefly writes on European East India Companies. Robert Riemer sketches the development of European trade and industry in the age of empire before 1914. Franz Böni offers a sweeping discussion of the vulnerability of maritime trade to piracy, ranging from


classical antiquity to modern-day Somalia, with the bulk of the discussion devoted to the present situation. The fourth, and final, part of the volume deals with sea power. After a brief introduction by Ulrich Otto, Rolf Hobson reflects on the making of an ideology of sea power in Germany and elsewhere at the turn of the twentieth century. Michael Epkenhans gives a concise overview of the history of naval warfare and armaments in the twentieth century. Andrew Lambert offers a wide-ranging discussion of ideas and arguments about “sea power,” tracing this history from Greek and Roman thinkers of classical antiquity to the American Alfred Thayer Mahan and his British and German contemporaries in the late nineteenth century. In a final essay, Thomas Kossendey, a parliamentary state secretary in the German Ministry of Defense, analyzes Germany’s global maritime interests in the twenty-first century.

Kossendey’s essay points to an important feature of this collection: as several of the contributors note, it serves a clear political-pedagogical agenda, i.e., to draw attention to modern Germany’s dependency on the promulgation and protection of seaborne trade and the interrelationship among prosperity, security, and maritime economics in what is referred to as our current “maritime century.” To make their case about the centrality of maritime interests to Germany’s wellbeing in the present and future, Hess and others openly draw on seemingly authoritative analyses offered by the German Fleet Command and the German Maritime Institute. Strikingly, some of the language used in this context could have been lifted out of pro-navy writings from an earlier time. Hess himself echoes Wilhelm II when he ends his brief introduc-tion to the volume by invoking the “weiterhin gültigen Grundsatz: ‘Navigare necesse est—Seefahrt tut not’” (10).

In short, this edited collection works in different registers. It offers a series of valuable though disparate academic analyses of various aspects of the maritime his-tory of Germany (and elsewhere), which all advance our understanding of the past. Yet it also takes part in the current public debate in Germany about the country’s worldwide maritime interests and its pursuit of naval power in the global twenty-first century. With its peculiar combination of historical analysis and presentist argument, Maritime Wirtschaft in Deutschland may leave its reader with a sense of historical déjà vu. It may also leave readers curious about the genealogy of the current debate over maritime economics and naval power in general—and, in particular, over the legacies of pre-1945 talk about sea power, the world economy, and global politics in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Precisely because of the high quality of most of the contributions, the volume ultimately invites the reader to think about how to study, in the same analytical field and beyond the languages of the historical actors themselves, Germany’s maritime pursuits across the ruptures of the twentieth century. Maritime Wirtschaft in Deutschland may not provide a clear answer to this question, but it does suggest how intellectually productive its exploration would be.

Dirk Bönker, Duke University

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Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany. By Christian S. Davis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 281. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0472117970.

Since Hannah Arendt or even Albert Memmi, scholars have long theorized how racial obsessions first developed in the colonies ultimately rebounded back to the metropole and culminated in the brutalities of German National Socialism. In recent years, historians have pointed out continuities of both ideology and practice between the Ger-man colonial project of the late nineteenth century and the Nazi racial state. Yet few scholars have delved very deeply into the contemporary linkages between colonialism and the politics of antisemitism during the time of Kaiserreich itself. This is the focus of Christian Davis’s thorough, detailed, and multifaceted account. Davis’s book charts how colonial ideology (including its racial and economic dimensions) fits into the political thought of antisemites. He also maps out the role that notorious antisemites, on the one hand, and Germans with Jewish ancestors, on the other, each played in the German colonial project. The exact relationship between colonialism and antisemitism that emerges here is more complex and variegated than is often presumed, and a number of important arguments ensue. One of the more striking—though perhaps not entirely a surprise—is that “colonialism gave weight to a key component of racial antisemitism by reifying for the public the reality and importance of race” (24). Davis thus lends credence to those who have mapped continuity between German colonial projects and the Third Reich by showing the interconnections and mutual influence of ideologies and political organizations. Yet Davis’s book also highlights the ambiguity and contingency that continued to permeate this relationship before World War I. Colonialism, Davis argues, benefitted the contemporaneous antisemitic cause, but at the same time also partially undermined it.

The first of Davis’s four substantive chapters tackles the antisemitic movement and the ways in which the German colonial project worked its way into this still marginal group. While antisemitic politics reached a high-water mark (in the Kaiserreich) in 1896, Davis skillfully shows the fractures among its different strands, as well as the ways in which the politics of German colonialism fit within each. Christian antisemites supported the missionary element of colonialism, while racially obsessed antisemites extolled the expansion of “Germandom” in settler colonies—despite the terrifying potential for race-mixing in colonies. At the same time, there were colonial skeptics among the antisemites: committed anticapitalists decried the monopolistic tendencies of colonial concession companies, while the most radical scorned the government’s overly “lenient” colonial policies, attributing them to “Jewish intrigue” (53).

Skillful in his treatment of the antisemites, Davis perhaps oversimplifies the corresponding complexity of organized colonial politics, which had its own diverg-ing strands and internal contradictions. But for historians interested in German


colonialism, Davis’s attention to antisemites lays bare some of the colonial project’s less visible threads. Social Darwinism, for instance, rarely appears unvarnished in the more genteel writings of the German Colonial Society—but the antisemitic publisher Friedrich Lange stridently promoted it, extolling the colonial field as a “bloody test” for the “Aryan people.” In the process, he disparaged peace-loving Jews as working “to estrange the Germans from their own innate ‘bellicosity’” (40). Lange would briefly serve as a director of the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft. Meanwhile, committed antisemites like Carl Peters or Fritz Bley brought their antisemitic beliefs and politics with them in their notorious activities in German East Africa, while other committed antisemites leveraged their experience in Africa into colonialist careers in the metropole. Thus, when Vorwärts bitterly claimed that Carl Peters shot “Negroes” as a substitute for his desired target—Jews—the socialist paper’s correlation of anti-semitism with colonial racism was not so wide off the mark.

Davis then moves on to the larger issue of the “striking compatibility” (77) between colonialist racial thinking and the so-called Jewish Question. Davis intrigu-ingly argues that representations of blacks and Jews were increasingly conflated in the decade before World War I. Jews, an enemy within, had previously been associated with the negative forces of materialism and modernity, whereas blacks were dismissed as a savage menace at the outskirts. Yet the dehumanizing rhetoric and the “extreme positioning” (82) at the core of each representation fed into ever-greater slippage between them. Jews and blacks were each portrayed as lazy and/or nonlaboring; as noncreative and even destructive; as nomadic or unrooted; as overly present-minded; as stateless, as hateful, and as lacking any fundamental morality. Ultimately, each representation took on the supposed capacity to “pollute” German blood. The convergence of representations could also serve tactical needs: given the visible success colonialists had incorporating racial “difference” into colonial law and colonial jurisprudence, it was unsurprising that antisemitic publicists cannily began to include passing references to “blacks” as they penned their screeds against Jews. However, the representations Davis grapples with are drawn largely from the realm of political ideology; he does not foray into larger arenas such as the mass media. In advertising, for instance, representations of blacks became omnipresent (serving as a useful racial foil), whereas representations of Jews qua Jews did not. We are left then with the larger question of how deeply the conflation of Jews with blacks penetrated into broader reaches of German culture.

The last two chapters veer off on a different path, tracing the involvement of Ger-mans of Jewish descent in the German colonial project, including Paul Kayser, Eduard Schnitzer (Emin Pasha), and Bernhard Dernburg. Davis offers political biographies of these men, showing how they—despite initial opposition from antisemites—could make careers in colonial administration or gain fame. Indeed, Eduard Schnitzer, in his role as Emin Pasha, gained more public acclaim in Imperial Germany than

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any other individual of Jewish descent. By “participating in the nationalistic project of empire-building,” Davis argues, these men “could affect, but not eradicate, the antisemitism that Jews and Germans of Jewish descent faced” (194). Davis’s final chapter, devoted entirely to the career of Bernhard Dernburg (the Colonial Director after 1906) shows this process in action—and how colonialism could even offer “the possibility of cooperation between antisemites and those they persecuted” (200) by furnishing a common identity as colonizers. By weathering political attacks in the Reichstag, and even winning grudging respect from procolonial antisemites, men like Dernburg could prove their nationalist credentials and therefore undermine the growing distinction of “Jewishness” from “Germanness” during the Kaiserreich.

A great strength of this book is the way that it uses biographical vignettes to avoid simplistic assertions or categorizations, and instead reveals the complexity of both antisemitic politics and of German-Jewish participation in the colonial project. Overall, Davis stresses that German colonialism “propagated to the wider public a vocabulary of racial domination and notions of the morality of racial violence”—and thereby altered the terms of “what was possible to think” (250). While the colonial empire did not predestine the Third Reich, “for antisemites it was colonial Africa that showed most clearly what the future could look like” (254). That German Jews and Germans of Jewish descent could pursue personal career paths that undermined antisemitism while, at the same time, help to generate forces of racial difference that contributed to the horrors of future decades, is indeed sobering food for thought.

David Ciarlo, University of Colorado

Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space. By Kristin Kopp. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 255. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0472118441.

In Germany’s Wild East, Kristin Kopp adds a compelling case to the growing body of scholarship arguing for the inclusion of Poland within studies of German colonialism. Focusing on the discursive colonization that she sees as the necessary complement of material colonization, Kopp argues that from the middle of the nineteenth century on Germans understood Polish space with a diffusionist worldview much like the Eurocentric diffusionism that J.M. Blaut found to underwrite English and French overseas colonial projects in the same era (The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History [1993]). Accordingly, Germans saw themselves as cultural agents capable of expansion and improvement, while understanding Poles as the passive beneficiaries of German culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kopp argues that this diffusionist worldview provided an “inner connection between all German settlements” (2), whether overseas or in the Slavic


East. Reinventing the long history of settlement in the East going back to the Middle Ages as a story of persistent German colonization legitimized new overseas colonial ambitions by grounding them in centuries of history and German identity. At the same time, the proximity and instability of the German-Polish border produced anxieties about Germans’ effectiveness as colonizers and their supposedly unique vulnerability to the threat of “reverse diffusion,” whether in the form of territorial loss or cultural regression on the borders of settlement.

Kopp writes with clarity and great appeal about a wide range of sources, including literature both high and low, maps, and film. While she is at times revisiting well-treaded ground, particularly in the first three chapters on representations of Poland in literary sources, she brings something new to her analyses of Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855), Clara Viebig’s Das schlafende Heer (1904), and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895). Using the lens of colonial discourse and providing rich historical contextualization for each of her studies, Kopp gives a nuanced interpretation of how representations of German-Polish relations evoked global colonial geographies, while also challenging the stable boundary between colonizer and colonized. This is well demonstrated by her examination of the image of the “black Pole” in inner colonial literature from the period around 1900. These novels valorized German settlement campaigns in the eastern reaches of Prussia that were intended to displace Poles and tip the population balance in ethnically mixed areas to create a German majority. Kopp argues that the repeated identification of blonde Germans and dark-haired Poles in expansionist novels evoked the racial categories of overseas colonial literature, but also “reveal[ed] an anxiety of racial containment” (78) that was all the more pronounced because the actual borders between German and Pole were uncertain.

The final two chapters treat postcolonial discourse about the German East after World War I. In the first of these, Kopp shows how mapmakers deployed cartographic tools to legitimize German irredentist and expansionist claims, with reference to the chapter’s ample and useful illustrations. One way in which cartographers justified German eastward expansion was by mapping not just the bounds of German settle-ment, but also the more elusive territory of German Kulturboden, that expansive area deemed to have been shaped by German culture at some point in the past, even if containing negligible German population in the present. In the face of postwar losses, the emphasis on Kulturboden allowed a retreat to a happier past while justifying more aggressive German territorial claims. The fifth and final chapter, then, looks at the idea of Kulturboden in the interwar period through a captivating close reading of Fritz Lang’s two-part Nibelungen (1924). Kopp persuasively argues that the film is about not only the trauma of border violations, but also the status of eastern lands as German Kulturboden degraded by its primitive Asiatic inhabitants. To represent the threat from the East, Lang assembled the visual world of the Huns out of a mishmash of references to Native American, Asian, and African cultures, positioning Germany’s

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border conflicts within the context of global colonialism. Yet, as Kopp cleverly points out, Lang also depicted the Huns living within the remnants of a Western spatial order. The palace of King Etzel, the king of the Huns, is the architectural double of the Burgundian palace in Worms, brought to a state of decay and disorder by ill use.

It is not the primary goal of this tightly argued book to consider the relationship between the “Wild West” and the “Wild East,” but rather to establish the discursive links between the Polish frontier and overseas colonialism within the framework of Eurocentric diffusionism. Kopp argues that Gustav Freytag positioned settlement in the East as an alternative to overseas migration to the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century by “map[ing] iconographic elements of the Wild West onto the eastern ter-ritories, thereby constructing a ‘Wild East’ on the Prussian-Polish plains” (21). This representation continued to influence the German perception of Poland decades on. Yet links between the American West and the German East neither began with Freytag nor ended with the nineteenth century. Since the Wild West appears so persistently in Kopp’s sources, up through the influence of American Westerns on Fritz Lang, it is hard not to crave a more sustained treatment of the German understanding of the American West and the status of the American frontier myth as a particular manifesta-tion of the colonizer’s diffusionist worldview. This is particularly true since the case Kopp makes for the uniqueness of the German example within colonial studies rests heavily on the proximity of the Polish “Outside” and on German colonial belatedness. One wonders whether the insistent evocation of North American parallels in her sources might further complicate the story Kopp tells about that “inner connection” between German settlement in the East and overseas colonialism.

Kopp’s real achievement is the way in which she bridges two active areas of recent scholarship, one on colonial discourse in German culture and the other on the place of the East in the German spatial imagination, adding rich cultural analysis to the argument that German designs on Polish space are best understood as part of a colonial project. Kopp’s lively and engaging study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the place of Poland within the history of colonialism, both in Germany and beyond.

Kristin Poling, University of Michigan Dearborn

Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 271. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1107025882.

The reputation of a thinker and writer is often difficult to fathom. There are those like Goethe whose eminence grew in his own time and increased long after his death. There are others like the theologian Adolf von Harnack, prominent in his own day


but largely forgotten in ours. And then there are figures like Max Weber, known if at all only in small circles during his lifetime, but growing dramatically in stature and recognition well after his death in 1920. Weber offers a striking case of posthumous fame, a lengthy journey from relative obscurity to international prominence and the invention of a distinctive “Weberian” approach to knowledge about society and history. How and why this development occurred is an engaging intellectual and historical question. The answer tells us something important not only about Weber’s ideas, but also about the cultural and political crises and the intellectual history of the last hundred years.

There are many reasons, an unusual “combination of circumstances” to speak with Weber, that account for the growth of engagement with Weberian ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Drawing upon the tradition of scholarship in Rezeptionsgeschichte and Begriffsgeschichte, Joshua Derman has written an important study that explores many of these reasons. Presented in its first version as a history dissertation at Princeton, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought investigates the transatlantic reception of Weber’s ideas primarily in Germany and the United States. The author emphasizes that the narrative of Weber’s ascendancy is filled with surprises. The study is concerned not with something as opaque as “influence,” but rather with the uses of Weber’s thought in the twentieth century. To use a major thinker’s ideas is to engage with them in dialogue, or as the author points out, to think with Weber and to extend, elaborate, and apply his questions and concepts in novel ways or in unanticipated contexts. To be sure, authors have intentions and try to control the way in which their ideas are borrowed, interpreted, and applied. But control has limits. Most complex ideas have elasticity, depth, and reach, as Weber’s writings illustrate. Weberian analysis has gained currency, shown resilience, and become an identifiable approach in the human sciences in important measure because of its conceptual richness and capacity for extension into uncharted terrain.

Derman explores the theme of reception and conceptual history in six well-considered chapters, beginning with a sketch of the circles of scholars and intellectuals associated with Max Weber and knowledgeable about his ideas, and ending with a chapter on the concept of “charisma” and its introduction into the language of social science and public discourse. Along the way he discusses some of the major features of Weber’s contribution: the well-known dispute over “values” and “value freedom”; the famous debate about modern capitalism and its origins and significance; the problem of belief and conviction in a “disenchanted” world; and the nature of “soci-ology” itself as Weber came to understand the subject. These are not new topics, of course. But there are two significant advantages to the author’s approach: first, it is resolutely historicist in the most constructive sense. That is, unlike discussions that decontextualize and abstract Weber’s positions, ignoring his actual targets and the rhetorical and polemical aims of those who used his arguments, Derman’s account

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pays close attention to the intellectual and political contexts in which the ideas were appropriated and the arguments advanced. The result is both a fresh perspective on familiar topics and an expansion of the field of Weberian Rezeptionsgeschichte. The chapter on charisma is a case in point, as the discussion shows clearly how interwar social scientists began to borrow and rework Weber’s ideas in response to the emer-gence of fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In the era of postwar decolonization, the same concept was transposed to address the politics of leadership in new states. Detached from its origins in theology, an entirely new word and concept then entered the scientific lexicon and captured the popular imagination.

The second advantage is that Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is com-mitted, more than is usually the case, to investigating the reception of Weber’s ideas in German-speaking Europe during the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, and the immediate aftermath of World War II. Thus, we learn about tendentious readings of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) as an indictment of the Reformation and of capitalism, a breathtaking distortion of Weber’s intended meaning. For someone like Carl Schmitt, the book served as a demonstration of Catholicism’s superior “harmonious reconciliation of conflicting values” (102), or for members of the George-Kreis, as an indictment of Protestantism’s alliance with soulless modern industrial capitalism. Guenther Roth has written about creative misinterpretations of Weber in Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (1971). Such a reception seems to reach beyond creative misinterpretation to a much more hostile, willful distortion. But there were serious alternative visions of the subject too, as with the constructive yet critical approaches of Hans Freyer and especially Siegfried Landshut, the postwar teacher of the late Wilhelm Hennis. This older generation of scholars is rarely encountered today. Der-man has performed an important service by alerting us to the ways in which, even while criticizing Weber, these forgotten figures kept alive an interest in Weber’s categories, problems, and questions.

Weber’s international reputation depended in essential ways on developments in the United States from the 1920s onward: the early teachings and translations of Frank Knight, Talcott Parsons, and Edward Shils; the contributions of German émigrés such as Hans Gerth and Albert Solomon; as well as the promotional activities of scholars like C. Wright Mills and Robert Merton. In the social sciences Weber’s work had become enshrined in the theoretical canon by the 1960s. Canonization served important purposes: it helped to institutionalize sociology as a discipline; to achieve prominence for social theory; to give coherence to areas of inquiry such as historical sociology, the sociology of law, and the sociology of religion; to consolidate the prestige of the social sciences; and to prepare the way for Weberian thought to return to Germany. Since then interest has surely grown exponentially, extending even to major recent biographies by Joachim Radkau (Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft


des Denkens [2005]), Jürgen Kaube (Max Weber. Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen [2014]), and Dirk Käsler (Max Weber. Preuße, Denker, Muttersohn. Eine Biographie [2014]).

One challenge for the approach Joshua Derman has so successfully employed is to identify criteria according to which the uses of a work can be assessed. Some appropriations are centrally important to inquiry, others are peripheral; some are significant, others are trivial; some remain true to the author’s intentions, while others march in a contrary direction. Are there any limits to interpretative invention? Is every usage “unmittelbar zu Gott,” to borrow Ranke’s phrase? Similar to Marxism, the increasingly complicated and diversified Weberian field is rife with such questions. Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought is a thoughtful and engaging contribution to establishing the contours of the field and to thinking through this problem.

Lawrence A. Scaff, Wayne State University

Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The Hidden Openness of Tradition. By David Suchoff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 267. Cloth $62.80. ISBN: 978-0812243710.

David Suchoff offers new readings of Franz Kafka’s oeuvre with an eye to his linguistic philosophy that developed while learning Yiddish and Hebrew between 1911 and his death in 1924. Suchoff tells the reader that he seeks to “revise the critical tradition that has presented [Kafka’s] relation to Judaism as conflicted at best.” His focus on Kafka’s Jewish linguistic interests helps him argue that “Jewish languages helped Kafka envision . . . the formative ‘family resemblances’ between supposedly separate national and linguistic realms” (2). This manuscript brings to light many passages in Kafka’s works that point to his engagement with things Jewish.

The structure yields an introduction followed by five distinct chapters. Chapter one is an overview of Kafka scholarship and the changing critical reception of Kafka from the Cold War on. Chapter two provides a look at Kafka’s first interest in Yid-dish and its impact on Kafka’s linguistic philosophy as brought out in “Das Urteil.” Demonstrating Suchoff’s perspective as Professor of English, Beckett and Joyce make a cameo appearance in a brief, but fruitful comparison (67–71). Chapters three through five shift focus to Kafka’s acquisition of Hebrew and its various markers in the texts Der Verschollene, Der Process, Das Schloss, “In der Strafkolonie,” and the animal stories. Suchoff narrows his focus to these few stories to demonstrate how even the most well-known works exhibit Kafka’s Jewish interests. Die Verwandlung is notably absent from analysis.

His approach to answering the perennial question on what is Jewish about these texts is much preferable to simple nods to Kafka’s “in-between” status as evidenced

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in his odd Prager Deutsch, for example. The book is well researched and is at its best in its keen awareness of exactly which Yiddish plays Kafka attended and which books would have been available to him. Based on this knowledge, the Yiddish influence of Yaakov Gordin’s play Elishe ben Avuya is brought to bear on an interpretation of Der Process (156). The Hebrew influence of Yosef Haim Brenner and Kafka’s Hebrew letter to his friend and instructor Puah Ben-Tovim inform Suchoff’s reading of Das Schloss (chapter 5). These specific examples of intertextuality are more convincing in Kafka’s Jewish Languages than some passages from the encyclopedic work of the Talmud, with which Suchoff suggests Kafka would have been familiar. The author positions Kafka within the Hebrew-Yiddish language war raging at the time in Eastern Europe, as each vied to be the supreme Jewish language. He also brings in Kafka’s contemporaries with contrasting views on Hebrew, like Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin. This pan-European perspective proves lucrative for his interrogation.

Ultimately, this book should be seen in line with those readings that attempt to uni-versalize Franz Kafka, even when examining the man during the most particularlist, Zionist period of his life. Suchoff makes the case that despite Kafka’s Zionist interests and publication of his short stories in the cultural/political Zionist organs Selbstwehr and Der Jude, including the story “Vor dem Gesetz,” Kafka was uncomfortable with the movement he observed when he attended the Zionist Congress in Vienna. Kafka felt unable to subscribe to the project of building the modern Hebrew lexicon when it sought to put up blinders to “foreign” influence. Throughout this manuscript, the protagonist is a transnational Kafka, one whose German was inflected by Yiddish and Hebrew and who idealized the transnational, free-flowing nature of the Jewish languages he was learning.

Of Suchoff’s two main objectives noted at the beginning of this review, the latter point is persuasively argued. He demonstrates that Kafka envisioned German and Hebrew open to their historical contact with foreign nations. Thus Yiddish (Jargon) becomes the language here that most meets Kafka’s ideals. As for Suchoff’s initial claim, seemingly he means to place more emphasis on the Jewish sources underlying Kafka’s writing, rather than suggest that Kafka had a comfortable relationship with Judentum (Judaism/Jewry). The “Brief an den Vater” certainly lays out Kafka’s issues with Judaism, or at least the Judaism of his father, and Kafka’s humorous statement is also not undone by Suchoff’s book: “What do I have in common with Jews, I have hardly anything in common with myself.”

The analysis of Jewish texts in the original German, Hebrew, and Yiddish is admi-rable. Kafka’s Jewish Languages is weighted more toward Hebrew sources than Yiddish ones. After finishing the book, it is clear that Kafka’s writings should be historicized within the time period when he was significantly invested in his Jewish identity, and the sources should be analyzed as Kafka would have read them—in the original.


Suchoff aims high with his audience. Those familiar with Jewish sources and lan-guages will have an easier time understanding some of his readings. The dense prose makes it foreseeable that a selection of the text could be used in a graduate course within German Studies, Jewish Studies, or Translation Studies. Students would do well to read a chapter from this work in conjunction with one of the corresponding stories from Kafka.

Nick Block, Emory University

Franz Kafkas Handschrift zum “Schloss.” By Matthias Schuster. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012. Pp. 552. Cloth €74.00. ISBN 978-3825360719.

Die in der Bodleian Library in Oxford aufbewahrte Schloss-Handschrift dient Matthias Schuster als Primärtext für die bis dato wohl umfassendste Deutung von Kafkas drit-tem Roman, zumindest in erzähltheoretischer und sozialpsychologischer Hinsicht. Da die Untersuchung vom Umfang her etwas Herkulisches hat—der Bogen reicht von Schleiermachers Hermeneutik bis hin zu Canettis Massentheorie—seien hier nur ein paar Hauptpunkte kritisch beleuchtet.

Schusters Anliegen ist zunächst ein editorisches. Er argumentiert für den Gebrauch der Handschrift, weil es vom Schloss keine Ausgabe letzter Hand gibt und weil bisherige Ausgaben, namentlich die von Max Brod, aber auch die Kritische Kafka-Ausgabe des Fischer-Verlages, durch Emendationen das Original verfälschen. Ein Beispiel dafür ist das so genannte “Fürstenzimmer-Fragment,” mit dem die Handschrift beginnt. Brod lässt es ganz weg, die Fischer-Ausgabe “versteckt” es im Apparatband, Schuster liest es als eine dramatische Exposition, die “wesentliche Themen” vorwegnimmt (125–126). Insgesamt plädiert Schuster für das editorische Prinzip der Historisch-Kritischen Ausgabe des Stroemfeld-Verlages, bei dem die Handschriften ohne jeglichen Eingriff faksimiliert und transkribiert erscheinen. So lobenswert diese unverfälschte Wiedergabe des Originals ist—es ist, als schaute man Kafka beim Schreiben zu—so prekär erweist sie sich in Schusters analytischer Praxis. Seine Kategorisierung von Kafkas Streichungen ist nachvollziehbar und seine Folge-rung, dass es dabei vor allem um die Vermeidung von Eindeutigkeit (z.B. durch die Schaffung von “Leerstellen”) geht, ist überzeugend. Konsterniert ist man jedoch, wenn Schuster wie selbstverständlich den Spieß umdreht und genau diese Streichungen be- bzw. ausnützt, um eine von Kafka absichtlich “verdunkelte” Stelle zu erhellen. Unermüdlich entwirrt Schuster auf diese Weise das psychosoziale Beziehungsgeflecht zwischen den Figuren. Solch flagrante Instrumentalisierung von Kafkas Korrekturen wirft ästhetische und ethische Fragen auf. Zum einen vermisst man bei Schuster eine dezidiert stilistische Analyse des Gestrichenen (man denke an Kafkas pedantisches Ringen um Prägnanz, Ton, Rhythmus und le mot juste), zum andern macht Schusters

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unlauterer Umgang mit der Handschrift klar, dass Kafkas paradoxes Korrigieren die vorbehaltlose Transparenz der Stroemfeld-Ausgabe ad absurdum führt: statt zum Tilgen verführt das durchsichtige Durchstreichen zum Lesen.

Erzähltheoretisch verficht Schuster im Anschluss an Bachtin eine dialogische Mehrstimmigkeit. Zu diesem Chor gehören der Protagonist als hauptsächlicher Erzäh-ler, ein “neutraler” bzw. “außenstehender” Erzähler, sowie Figuren mit autonomen Stimmen. Diese kakofone Stimmenvielfalt setzt ein kritisches Abwägen von figürlichen Aussagen, Wahrnehmungen und Deutungen in Gang, das, folgt man Schuster, in der Entlarvung von K. als ruchlosem Karrieristen endet (165–237). Die blinde Über-nahme von Bachtins erzähltheoretischen Überlegungen zu Dostojewski überrascht. Nirgendwo gibt es im Schloss eigenständige Stimmen à la Iwan oder Aljoscha in den Brüdern Karamasow, zu sehr saugt das zentrale Erzählerbewusstsein andere Stimmen in sich auf und beraubt sie so, wie Schuster sich selbst widersprechend zugeben muss, ihrer Unabhängigkeit (82, 103, 191). Spätestens seit Martin Walser den subtilen Perspektivenbruch zwischen Protagonist und Erzähler konstatierte, lässt sich Kafka gegen den Strich lesen, das vermeintliche Opfer als Täter sehen.

Schuster betont, dass die durch die besondere Erzählhaltung bewirkte Mehr-deutigkeit, inhaltlich und interpretatorisch gesehen, nicht postmoderne Beliebigkeit impliziert (409). Er sieht im Schloss den Prototyp eines totalitären Behörden- und Machtapparates und in K. den Aufsteiger, der alle und jede(n) als Mittel zum Zweck benutzt. Bei dieser Dechiffrierung der textuellen Ambiguität steht der Zeitgeist Pate, sei es Freud, Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Alfred Weber oder Carl Schmitt. Wie einleuchtend auch immer dieses Auffüllen der Leerstellen im einzelnen sein mag, sein Bezug zu Kafkas schriftstellerischem Selbstverständnis—Schreiben als “Annäherung an die Wahrheit,” wie es sinngemäß im Brief an den Vater heißt—wird von Schuster nicht ausgelotet. Vielleicht hätte sich von hier aus eine Möglichkeit eröff-net, dem Argument eine gewisse Teleologie oder zumindest einen Bogen zu geben, statt Dutzende von Kapiteln und Unterkapiteln (ohne Personen- und Sachregister) aneinanderzureihen. Auch verstellen die ausufernde Kontextualisierung und die Aufarbeitung von zum Teil überholter, bis auf drei Ausnahmen nur deutschsprachiger Sekundärliteratur den Blick auf das Neue. Besonders fruchtbar dürfte sich Schusters feinsinniges Herausarbeiten des “Theatralischen” erweisen, und zwar nicht nur der “Schauspielerei” und ihres psychologisch-rhetorischen Rollenspiels, sondern auch des prononciert Mimischen, Gestischen und Komödiantischen (369–414). Eignet damit der Erzählerinstanz nicht auch etwas Performativ-Ludisches, ein spielerisches, wenn nicht gar verspieltes Sich-Inszenieren? Ein szenisch-fragmentarisches Improvisieren?

Franz R. Kempf, Bard College


Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy. Edited by Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. 464. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0691135106.

The dazzling diversity and complexity of intellectual activity that emerged in German speaking central Europe in the wake of the cataclysm of the First World War eludes the grasp of a single individual and raises the question of whether it is possible to talk of “Weimar Thought” as a unified concept, even if the term is useful as a necessary shorthand. The sheer variety of voices and the bewildering simultaneity of competing, often inherently contradictory, world views cannot easily be accommodated under a unified conceptual heading. Using a lens of “continuity and crisis” (1), editors Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick deftly acknowledge and discuss the theoretical quandaries to which their project is subject.

The present volume explicitly seeks to address expert and general reader alike. Any given reader—including this reviewer—is inevitably reduced to the status of a novice in areas beyond his or her own particular expertise. Many of the essays, in a sense, provide summaries of major intellectual trends in the Weimar period. The introduction does a brilliant job of summarizing the nineteen essays assembled here. Since the introduction is easily available online on the publisher’s website, a review that provides a kind of “summary” of such “summaries” runs the risk of redundancy. Instead, I wish to highlight which specific contributions I personally find particularly enlightening, and which ones less so, based on my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, inter-ests, and offer some general comments on the particular merits and limitations of this essay collection.

Most likely, my own reading experience as a reviewer—reading in a linear fashion, from cover to cover—will differ from that of “regular” readers, who will presumably pick this or that chapter selectively in accordance with their own interests and concerns. Some overlaps and repetitions are inevitable in a volume of this kind—Max Weber looms large, for instance, in the essays of John P. McCormick (legal theory), David Kettler & Colin Loader (sociology), Dana Villa (political theory), and Peter E. Gordon (theology). Not all articles adhere to the format of aiming to provide a survey of a given field of knowledge. Frederick Beiser’s chapter on “the fate of Neo-Kantianism” in the Weimar Republic launches a lengthy, albeit informative, discussion of the origins and main tenets of neo-Kantian thought and then embarks on a somewhat speculative narrative on the objections other contemporary philosophical schools (historicism, nihilism, and pessimism) would have had, had they taken Neo-Kantianism seriously as a worthy opponent. Michael P. Steinberg outlines art historian Aby Warburg’s fascinating Mnemosyne “picture atlas” project in an essay that culminates in a plea to preserve the independence of the Warburg Library in London. Another chapter, that of Martin A. Ruehl on poet Stefan George and his circle, also is perhaps too narrow in

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focus to fit into the collection comfortably. By way of contrast, contributions such as Cathryn Carson’s insightful discussion of fundamental debates within the sciences, or John V. Maciuika’s engaging account of the history of the Bauhaus, more clearly fulfill the book’s promise. Suzanne Marchand offers a refreshingly nuanced assessment of the many variants and meanings of “orientalism” in Weimar German culture. She does so in breezy, crystal clear prose that is a pleasure to read.

On the whole, the volume is well edited, with mercifully few misprints, although there are a few mistakes—“principle/principal” (32); “ to effect/to affect” (103)—that are the bane of a teacher’s existence and that should perhaps not occur in a publi-cation by a leading academic press. A major glitch occurs with a misspelling of the subordinating conjunction “whether” as “weather”—charmingly, when mention is made of a storm (326). More disturbing is the appearance of a mysterious “Friedrich Herder” in the main text (117) and in the index (432)—he turns out, of course, to be identical with the separately listed eighteenth-century philosopher of history, Johann Gottfried Herder.

The general impression one gets from the volume is that women were largely absent from public debate in the Weimar Republic, or that their contributions were restricted to “women’s issues.” These are relegated here to one essay, by Tracie Matysik, on “Weimar Femininity,” which is lumped together, perhaps not insignificantly, with other issues in the book’s final section under the catch-all heading “Themes of an Epoch” (339). There are fleeting references here and there to Marianne Weber’s work alongside that of her husband Max, as well as to Hannah Arendt, whose most signifi-cant work of course originated well after the Second World War. Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas are mentioned in Martin Jay’s discussion of the Weimar Left; and there are brief passages on Hannah Höch’s innovative photomontages (Maciuika; Steinberg). Perplexingly, Sabine Hake, in her dense distillation of points made in her 1993 book on Weimar German film theory and criticism, briefly mentions Lu Märten as “the first critic to develop a materialist aesthetic based on the characteristics of the cinematic apparatus” (279), yet leaves it at this tantalizing remark.

To my mind, the volume’s subtitle, “A Contested Legacy,” is potentially mislead-ing: the essays assembled here primarily focus on aspects of Weimar thought that are justly recognized as salient, productive, and important to this day. While individual essays are often highly self-reflective, conceptually sophisticated, and critical of their respective subject matters, the overall tone of the volume is largely celebratory. Much of what deserves to be “contested” is left out, touched upon here only in Anson Rabinbach’s brief “Reflections on the Culture and Ideology of National Socialism” that concludes the volume. Without relapsing into a naive teleology that puts early twentieth-century Germany on a predetermined path careening into the Third Reich, it is important to acknowledge that Weimar Germany produced not only innovative and forward-looking or measuredly conservative reflections, but also the turgid prose and


occluded “logic” of innumerable völkisch, imperialist, racist, bigoted, megalomaniacal agitators: surely, the vile venom spewed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925/1926) or the rabid concoctions of Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) are every bit as relevant to an understanding of “Weimar Thought” as is the political insight of Heinrich Mann, the chiseled rhetoric of his brother Thomas, or the sparkling irony of Kurt Tucholsky (the subjects of Karin Gunnemann’s contribution). The ideas of Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger—representa-tives of a political Right that has, it seems, become salonfähig—are addressed. Yet a discussion of more extremist right-wing political effusions is missing. Such a discus-sion might have provided much needed insight into what went on in the minds of many citizens of the Weimar Republic in response to the prevailing sense of crisis. The shocking revelations emerging out of the trials currently held in Munich against the NSU terrorists should remind us that in more ways than one, Weimar thought “has not yet come to an end” (3)—we need to take account of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Given that the task of doing justice to the diversity of “Weimar Thought” is well-nigh impossible, the editors have, to a remarkable extent, succeeded with this useful and thought-provoking volume.

Christian Rogowski, Amherst College

The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities: Possibility as Reality. By Genese Grill. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. x + 204. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571135384.

Genese Grill’s study inserts itself into the debate about the relative success or failure of Robert Musil’s final, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities. While the novel constitutes Grill’s principal object of inquiry, her study encompasses Musil’s broader philosophies about life, and in particular the role of art in life, for which his novel served as a vehicle for experimentation. She writes against the trends in literary criticism that pronounce Musil’s project a failure for reasons such as the novel’s unfinished state or Musil’s inability to reconcile the idiosyncratic experiential realm of “the Other Condition” with ordered reality. With optimistic gusto and hints of admiration, she argues for Musil’s success and strategically reshapes those very critiques into constructive aspects of his aesthetic and philosophical goals. While Grill only mentions recent studies, such as works by Patrizia McBride (2006) and Stefan Jonsson (2000), in truth, her work disagrees with a trend that reaches as far back as Ulrich Karthaus (1965). In short, we are to understand a lack of finality or the unsolvable tension between “the Other Condition” and reality not as a “failure,” but as a fruitful ground for endless artistic and ultimately conceptual renewal.

For Grill’s maneuver to work, she must provide a definition of success that accounts

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for inconclusiveness and inadequacy. As the title of her work suggests, she stakes her argument on Musil’s conception of metaphor and its role in meaning-making both for the artist and the world at large. She introduces the idea of “metaphoric transparency” to describe a point of view that considers our understanding of reality to be fundamentally assembled through metaphorical structures. She ascribes this attitude of “metaphoric transparency” to him by using evidence from his published works, personal notes, and letters. Like Musil, Grill uses the term metaphor not in its strictly rhetorical sense, but as a broad category for an entire range of symbols and comparisons. The perspective of “metaphoric transparency” considers typical reality to be the realm of shopworn metaphors, and the “possibility” intimated by the study’s subtitle is the artist’s constant imperative to provide different metaphorical structures for interpreting the world. Success is thus based on proliferation rather than solutions and conclusions. The “Other Condition’s” resistance to reality and its ineluctable ephemerality create productive problems that propel Musil’s aesthetic project. A quote from Grill’s conclusion provides a helpful summary: “While the internal telos of Musil’s unfinished and unfinishable novel, as moving, living expanding map of his life in art, does not come to a final conclusion on the question of how to reconcile metaphor and reality, this very ‘failure’ constitutes its enduring faithfulness to its own ethical and aesthetic laws, whether or not they conform to external commands, expectations, or requirements” (181).

Within its discussion on the success of The Man Without Qualities, Grill’s study makes other notable contributions to the field. She frequently attempts to place Musil amongst his modernist contemporaries, particularly Marcel Proust. This attempt is not pursued as carefully as it is in Mark Freed’s study (2011), which places Musil at the margins of the “nonmodern,” and which this book curiously attributes twice to “Michael” Freed. Likely to the satisfaction of Musil fans, Grill defends Musil’s brand of modernism from accusations that it is aloof (see Lukács). In accordance with the book’s strategy, she reverses the heretofore criticized apolitical nature of Musil’s poetics, and valorizes its dynamic ability to keep its distance from the ideologies of his day. The continually renewing nature of his aesthetic goals thereby forms the basis of his ethics with which it intertwines. Grill’s study is one of the first to lever-age the new resources found in the 2009 electronic Klagenfurter Ausgabe of Musil’s collected works, which contains newly transcribed archive material. Her focus on the unpublished chapters of The Man Without Qualities is refreshing; however, it relies on a modestly sized sample of evidence. That being said, her decision to explore the “still life” motif at length is instructive, as this motif represents the type of productive contradiction of which Musil was so fond. Grill explains how the idea network of “still life” metaphorically displays a discourse on metaphoric proliferation and the effects of temporality on art, and in particular “the problem of externalization” vis-à-vis the intent to avoid finality (126).


The study’s title is arguably misleading. The work is as much a defense and expli-cation of Musil’s poetics as it is a study of the novel itself. For this reason, it treads similar ground as Roger Willemsen’s Das Existenzrecht der Dichtung (1984), which to be fair, Grill indeed mentions in order to note her optimistic departure from it, although both studies share many similarities about the importance of art for Musil. Since her argument already reaches beyond The Man Without Qualities, there are some missed opportunities. For example, the introductory discussion on the oscilla-tion between the realms of subjective experience and rationality does not avail itself of Musil’s own attempts to present this difficult topic through the terms, ratioïd and nicht-ratioïd, even though the avoidance of the absolute contained within those terms is also at the very heart of Grill’s argument. Moreover, despite her repeated analyses of dead and living thoughts, Grill surprisingly never mentions The Confusions of Young Toerless in which this theme figures prominently. While no particular theory guides her approach, she forges allegiances with Adorno and Nietzsche. Her incorporation of metaphor theory mostly begins and ends with latter, but there is room for much more. Thus, if I may pivot in Grill’s manner, I would call these aforementioned omissions promising. Her study, like its argument, is about possibilities. In addition to providing a nuanced reading of the novel’s unpublished chapters, and the “still life” motif in particular, Grill’s study makes a convincing call for a broader examination of the role of metaphor or “metaphoric transparency” in Musil’s work.

Brett Martz, Longwood University

Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall. By Moritz Föllmer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 312. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1107030985.

This engrossing book reads as a collective biography of Berliners during the turbulent middle decades of the twentieth century. It is an ambitious undertaking that attempts to capture the quest for and conceptions of individuality of millions of Berliners over thirty years. The author examines how the forces of modernity in this urban setting affected these individuals under five different political regimes, and through this prism comes to some new and interesting insights, especially with respect to the Nazi era. He argues that a focus on individuality remained of central importance for Berliners, even in an era of collective movements. A rich if ultimately largely familiar picture of Berlin and its inhabitants unfolds in these pages.

In the first of three sections, Föllmer paints the well-known landscape of late Weimar Berlin as a kaleidoscope of individual desires and existential uncertainties intersecting with both the promises and perils of modernity. He argues against a nar-row interpretation of individuality undergoing a crisis due to the rise of mass culture

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as well as political movements that focused on collective notions of nation or class. Instead, the author focuses on the many voices throughout the Weimar public sphere that emphasized the importance of the individual, especially understandings that encouraged flexibility, authenticity, and an attractive consumer culture. He posits, in fact, that individuality was such an influential concept that Nazis and Communists developed their own versions of it.

The real strength of the book is its middle section, an examination of Berlin in the Third Reich. Instead of the commonly held idea that Nazi activists and propagandists sought to dissolve Berliners into the Volksgemeinschaft, Föllmer shows how appeals to individuality were emphasized by Goebbels—not only because of a need to com-promise with society. Rather, “the Nazi regime . . . promised and actually stimulated personal agency and self-realisation within a transformed ideological and institutional context” (269). In this telling, the racial community enabled Berliners to express their individual aims: both “ordinary” desires for consumption and domesticity, as well as “extraordinary” wishes to realize ambitions unfettered by traditional constraints. A major integrating factor was the defining of a racialized “illegitimate” individuality—of the Jews to whom a chapter is devoted that analyzes their attempts to maintain their individuality under impossible conditions.

The Nazis were much more successful than the Communists, both in the latter’s pre-1933 appeals, as well as while in power in the German Democratic Republic. Though the author details communist attempts to create an appealing vision where individual desires could be realized through collective action, this faltered in the face of larger trends toward bureaucracy and dictatorial control, as well as mass frustra-tion over privileges given to professionals and party members. On the other side of the Cold War divide, liberals and Social Democrats successfully appealed to West Berliners on the basis of consumer goods as well as public housing. Individuality was a highly contested concept in the early Cold War, but the author finds by the later 1950s in both East and West Berlin a reduced definition of individuality that focused on consumption and domestic concerns, and that was significantly decoupled from larger political questions.

The source base is, in the author’s words, “eclectic and necessarily uneven” (18), but covers an extensive sampling of the popular press, documentation from corporate, state, and party archives, as well as an assortment of personal documents like diaries and letters. Chapters begin with a detailed and representative case from a work of fiction, diary, or state archive, which sets the stage for the subsequent themes discussed. Though the author makes successful efforts to capture the voices of individual workers and women, there is nonetheless a (perhaps unsurprising) bias toward the experiences of members of the middle and upper classes. The intersection of class, gender, and race with the idea of the individual is thus effectively explored, but sexuality is a surprising lacuna.


Föllmer displays an impressive understanding of the historiographies across the caesura of 1933 and 1945, as well as in east and west. But a more clearly articulated theoretical framework would have strengthened this study. The author makes refer-ence to other work that examines the idea of individuality, both for the twentieth century and earlier, but he could have situated his own work more clearly in this broader literature. Furthermore, an extended theoretical examination of key terms would have been useful. The core of the study looks at the different understandings and interpretations of “individuality” from the late 1920s through the early 1960s, but a coherent statement of how the author understands and uses this core concept would have helped to ground the book more carefully. Oft-used words like “individual-ism,” “agency,” “subject,” and “subjectivity” are deployed as near synonyms without adequate unpacking. Föllmer touches on some of these issues in the introduction and conclusion, but could have devoted more time to them throughout his study. Overall, however, the book is a welcome contribution to the history of Berlin, as well as to broader debates about modernity and the individual.

David G. Tompkins, Carleton College

Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer. By Alexandra Kleinlercher. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. Pp. 472. Paper €39.00. ISBN 978-3205786054.

Kleinlercher, a faculty member at University College, London, has in this impec-cable volume taken up the perpetually thorny problem of Austrian author Heimito von Doderer and his implication in both antisemitism and National Socialism. To supplement her thorough survey of the published material on the author, Kleinlercher conducted interviews with Doderer’s secretary and biographer Wolfgang Fleischmann and exchanged emails with Hasterlik’s niece, as well as accessing collections of let-ters that have heretofore not been made available to scholars (“The Hine Collection” 367–368). The result is a readable, superbly documented book that has done the incredible service of collecting all the evidence available on those charges, address-ing them openly and even-handedly, without preconception. The author should be commended for pointing toward the situation’s almost inevitable but unappetizing conclusions, without claiming definitive answers that would push further into a complicated era than the evidence warrants.

The book is divided into two sections, the first dedicated to Doderer’s biography and the second to his work. Kleinlercher first addresses letters from his first wife August (Gusti) Hasterlik and correspondence from family and friends that reflect on Doderer and his antisemitism on a day-to-day level. Those insights, however, are pulled into a broader exposition of his life that carefully verifies dates, names, and

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issues. Thus her first chapter, “Herkunft und Jugend,” addresses his German heritage and how he identified with it, his possible bisexuality or at least bisexual curiosity, and his experiences as a POW in World War I. The second chapter adduces evidence for his antisemitism and his approach to the National Socialist cause, starting with his 1933 entry into the party. Chapter 3 takes on his “career” as a Wehrmacht officer (1940–1945); chapter 4 traces his road from POW to successful author after a nominal denazification. Chapters 5 and 6 illuminate his postwar negotiations with fame and establishment as a public figure, especially with respect to friends shared with Gusti Hasterlik and particularly with Albert Paris Gütersloh. This history confirms a general conspiracy to cover up the author’s National Socialist past and establish him as the voice to renew an Austrian national literature after the war.

The second part of Kleinlercher’s project turns toward the evidence from text criticism. The centerpiece is a comparison of Die Dämonen (1956) with its early version, Die Dämonen der Ostmark, and other documentation back as far as a 1929 personal ad that Doderer inserted into the Neue Freie Presse, seeking “Anschluß an ca. 40-jährige distinguierte israelitische Dame (Wienerin) von nur sehr starker kor-pulenter größerer Figur und schwarzem Haar,” guaranteeing discretion—an author looking for material on a projected novel, Dicke Damen, which presaged both versions of the Demons. In this category also fall the essay “Sexualität und totaler Staat” and the mid 1930s “Aide mémoire” for the project. All the levels of the book retain clear evidence of his concern with antisemitic and racist stereotypes, and with his desire to split the races.

Kleinlercher is careful in tracing the links between Aryan and Jewish characters in the novel, and how the novel was gradually edited to reduce the prominence of various characters’ Jewish heritage and to stress instead a more philosophical thesis differentiating two realities, the gaps between inner and outer worlds. She leaves little question that the novel retains significant racial prejudices, even as it withdraws from overt National Socialist viewpoints.

The final section of Kleinlercher’s book publishes some of the most important recovered documentation, including most notably a thorough exposition about the question of Doderer’s Aryanizing an apartment (401–422), which shows that there is not enough evidence to support an answer. Nonetheless, it is clear that Doderer edited his own history with the Nazi party—he renewed his membership as late as 1939. Yet he also joined the Catholic Church in 1940 and claimed that date as a transformation, which led him to see what he had interpreted as issues with Jew-ish society as problems with bourgeois society (265–275). Kleinlercher’s exposition stresses that Doderer’s motives are not determinable in retrospect, no matter what critics like Wolfgang Fleischer would assert (341–366).

Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung is an exceptional book about an era with a rapidly shifting moral and political landscape, neither blaming nor exculpating, but revealing


the dimensions of this author’s possible moral lapses in an era where the black and white implications of behavior and utterance shifted inexorably. As such, this is an extraordinary contribution to studies of authorship and ethics for the generation who lived through two world wars.

Katherine Arens, The University of Texas at Austin

Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945. By Doron Rabinovici. Translated by Nick Somers. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Pp. x + 260. ISBN 978-0745646824.

Doron Rabinovici’s study of the role of the Vienna Israelite Community (IKG), first published in German in 2000 and now available in English translation, is fueled by a desire to understand and explain the “cooperation” (199) of Jewish administra-tive leaders with Nazi authorities in post-Anschluss Vienna. As Rabinovici himself acknowledges, the book is largely “a description of what happened to the Vienna Jewish community between 1938 and 1945 and how it reacted” (147). Here it succeeds in sketching out the story of one of the more neglected Jewish administrative bodies under Nazi occupation. Describing the intricacies of the complex web of varied forms of cooperation, Rabinovici makes a valuable contribution to the field, particularly given that the IKG was “the prototype for a Jewish administration under Nazi control and a precursor of the later Jewish councils” (40).

The IKG played a critical role in post-Anschluss Vienna in a wide range of spheres. On the one hand, it was active in organizing large-scale legal emigration, as well as in providing welfare for Jews living under an ever-growing set of measures that had serious economic impact. On the other hand, and more controversially, it was a criti-cal tool in “the administration of extermination” (109). When Jews in the city were required to wear the yellow star, the IKG was made responsible for their manufacture and distribution. Over two days, IKG employees worked “day and night” (111) to make 176,000 stars from the yellow fabric supplied to them, and then sold them to the city’s Jews from morning to night at a cost of 10 pfennig each. As deportations commenced, the IKG played a critical role notifying those scheduled for deportation, as well as in clearing the collection points and providing food to Jews waiting there. Rabinovici’s conclusion—that “although the Central Office could no doubt have killed all of the Viennese Jews without the Jewish administration, the deportations and extermination would not have run smoothly without its collaboration” (119)—is one that echoes studies of other Jewish councils across occupied Europe.

Rabinovici does point to differences of opinion within the IKG, as was the case elsewhere. Whereas one employee refused to issue the Jewish stars, another was unhappy—at least initially—about having to draw up lists of individuals exempted

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from deportation on the grounds that they were essential employees. This practice signaled one of the more problematic aspects of the “cooperation” offered by the IKG. While the lists of deportees were drawn up by the Nazi authorities, IKG personnel could and did request exemptions for individual employees and others for various reasons, e.g., “imminent emigration, health reasons or the splitting up of the family” (117). In these cases, the IKG had “to find someone to replace these deferred persons” (118) from lists provided by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Such measures invited charges of corruption, and it does seem that some employees sought to save themselves by making donations. More generally it opened up IKG leaders—and especially Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, a controversial figure who played a key role here—to criticism of favoring some at the expense of others.

Because of this lobbying for exemptions, Rabinovici places the IKG historiographi-cally somewhere between Hannah Arendt’s damning critique of a collaborationist “Jewish leadership” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and Dan Michman’s defense of Jewish Council “headship” as Nazi imposed (“‘Judenräte’ und ‘Judenvereini-gungen’ unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Aufbau und Anwendung eines verwaltungsmäßigen Konzepts,” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft [1998]: 293–304). As Rabinovici unpicks what the IKG did and did not do during the war, he is careful to note that they were no longer the elected representatives of Vienna’s Jews, or simply taking orders from the Nazi occupiers. Rather, he positions them as “an authority without power” (162), squeezed between fellow victims and the Nazi authorities with limited room for maneuver. His analysis does not go much further than previous accounts of Jewish councils in explaining compliance. In the penultimate chapter he promises to move beyond description to a suggestive coun-terfactual historiography that explores “what could have happened; what alternatives were available” (147), but largely fails to deliver on these aims beyond a discussion of contemporary Jewish knowledge about the death camps and the postwar fate of leading IKG members. Ultimately Rabinovici offers a rather ahistorical conclusion: the nature of the relationship between the Nazi authorities and the IKG meant, he claims, that “retrospectively, there appears to have been no alternative way out of the dilemma” and “no group of victims could have reacted differently under similar circumstances; nor could they do so today either” (203).

This conclusion fails to engage sufficiently with suggestive passages in the mono-graph. When sketching out the backstory of conflicts among Viennese Jews over their relationship with the state, for example, Rabinovici points to the long-standing dominance of voices that called for efforts to mitigate antisemitism through appeals to the state and a preference for the term “Jewish Austrians” rather than “Austrian Jews” (19). Rabinovici recognizes that “when the Nazis came to power, they discovered a Jewish institution that was already well practiced in submitting to state authority” (25), but he does not examine this critical local context in sufficient detail. Likewise,


although Rabinovici does note that criticisms were leveled by Viennese Jews against the IKG in general and Murmelstein in particular, he fails to interrogate these dis-senting voices. Thus in explaining (away) Murmelstein’s role, Rabinovici concludes that the rabbi’s “work demanded that he take an authoritarian stance” because “mass emigration in the shadow of Nazi terror called for military logic and organizational talent” (76)—but fails to substantiate such a claim. In short, the book successfully describes the varied role of the IKG during the Nazi occupation, but fails to analyze and explain specific acts of cooperation and resistance in persuasive and, more crucially, time- and place-specific ways.

Tim Cole, University of Bristol

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. By Mary Fulbrook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 421. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 978-0199603305.

This magnificent book masterfully weaves together several strands of inquiry: the career of one “ordinary Nazi,” Udo Klausa, the main civilian administrator (Landrat) of the Polish county of Bedzin, which was annexed to the Reich in 1939 and located some twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; the effects of his administrative work on the county and its population, most notably tens of thousands of Jews; the Landrat’s postwar self-representations as a decent man who “knew very little and did nothing wrong” (v), and who, by absenting himself repeatedly from his position in Bedzin to perform military service, did his best not to become “innocently guilty” (332); and, finally, the lingering and contested legacies of the past. Based on an abundance of sources, from oral testimonies of Jewish survivors to the many letters the Landrat’s young wife wrote to her mother, the book describes the development of the Shoah in a small town and delineates the role civilian administrators played in the creation of the ghettos, their administration and policing, as well as the expropriation and later forced labor of the ghetto inhabitants. It also addresses how these men made sense of their roles.

It is Fulbrook’s personal ties to the Landrat and his family that allows her to tap into the rich Klausa family archive—while providing the book with an unexpected twist. Fulbrook unravels the sleights of hand and inaccuracies in family lore, as well as in his unpublished memoirs and his defense statements during legal investigations in the Federal Republic. In so doing, she shows the extent of his involvement in and knowledge of genocidal policies in this deeply researched and richly contextualized account. Fulbrook nevertheless gives Klausa and his wife Alexandra—her émigré mother’s school friend and the author’s own godmother, i.e., people she has known all her life “as family friends and upright citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany”

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(23)—a hearing devoid of cynicism. Rather, the author attempts to understand Klausa’s “psychological truths” (266) and mindset at the time: as an ordinary Nazi with ample professional and personal ambitions, who, while “living” the colonial racism of the wild East, seems to have grown increasingly troubled about his role but nevertheless remained a loyal servant of the state. In this sense, then, his is also a story paradigmatic of the many who, while not the most fanatic Nazis were certainly Hitler’s facilitators and “witting beneficiaries.” (7) Their ongoing support made pos-sible the step from brutal colonial racism to outright genocide.

Administrators are usually boring subjects of historical inquiry, and Klausa is no exception. But the strength of Fulbrook’s book is her focus on the deadly effect of the routine work of civilian administrators. In many ways this book is the story of the Jewish community in the county of Bedzin, until the latter was made judenrein in 1943. Making use of survivor accounts, Fulbrook traces in great detail the com-munity’s last years, its ultimate destruction, and the fate of individuals. Her terse and emphatic descriptions shake the reader, and her book is the epitome of a multifaceted, deeply researched, expertly contextualized case study of the Shoah in a small town in Upper Silesia.

Klausa is clearly the book’s key character and Fulbrook effectively deconstructs his justifications, but does so with a willingness to hear him out and contemplate the possibility that there was more to the man and his postwar narratives than what survived in the archival record. Most notably she shows that Klausa played fast and loose to create a narrative of inner decency and crucial absences from Bedzin that came to define his postwar self. She shows that he likely attended public hangings in April 1942 and was present during the sports ground selections of August 1942—and that the connection between the latter event and Klausa’s return to military service in December 1942, which Klausa likened to a silent protest, had much less of a causal or temporal connection than he later claimed. But there is also some indica-tion that over the course of 1942, Klausa became more and more troubled by the clearly genocidal policies that were now taking shape, and about which he must have known. Klausa, for his part, always maintained a personal “past without violence” (211) and described the August 1942 selections, in an inspired rejigging of dates and events, as a “turning point” (226). Perhaps, as Fulbrook suggests, the transition to genocide was the point at which “ordinary” and “fanatic” Nazis parted way. This point is difficult to generalize, but it seems to hold some truth in the case of Klausa, whose role she sees as a “tragic combination of careerism, courage, cowardice, and callousness” (341). Klausa’s alleged parting from National Socialism happened largely in his mind: there was clearly no need to be a fanatic Nazi to remain a loyal servant of the state, even if one found some of its policies distasteful and a reason to escape to the military frontlines.

This terrific book provides even experts with much detail and food for thought.


Yet it would also work well for an advanced Holocaust class; its approach makes it a master class in the historian’s craft and its complex, multilayered story should engender much discussion.

Katrin Paehler, Illinois State University

Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944–1945. By Gareth Pritchard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 250. Cloth $103.00. ISBN 978-1107013506.

For two months in the late spring of 1945, a small triangle of territory in the western Erzgebirge between Saxony and the Czechoslovakian border remained unoccupied by American or Soviet troops. In their absence, the administration of the roughly 500,000 residents fell to a shifting network of local antifascist committees. In this slim and admirably readable monograph, Gareth Pritchard tells the story of this extraordinary and accidental experiment in German self-rule among the ruins of Hitler’s Reich.

While Pritchard focuses on a relatively small region, he is making a more ambi-tious and ultimately counterfactual argument. Who were the antifascists and what might have happened if they had been able to occupy broader political space at the end of the war? The titular Niemandsland, he argues, offers a “control study” (28) of antifascist rule in postwar Germany. Historians have provided a variety of assessments of the antifascists, ranging from marginalizing their role to offering the committees as a road not travelled, a “third way” between a market-oriented West and a communist East. By examining the one substantial area in which antifascist committees took and retained power without the backing of Allied troops, Pritchard attempts to understand broader trends in Germany’s postwar political and social history.

His focus on regional dynamics in the western Erzgebirge is fascinating. The antifascist committees emerged from the local labor movement, which was heavily influenced, though not dominated by, the Communist Party (KPD). Many of the leaders of the committees had suffered terribly during the Nazi period and thus had substantial grievances against the local political and economic elites who had benefit-ted from the regime. As Allied armies moved deeper into Germany, local antifascists pushed out existing authorities, sometimes using violent methods, and took effective control of the region.

Once in power, the antifascists faced an array of practical challenges. Defeated German soldiers, refugees of various types, and former forced laborers moved through the area unhindered. Food was in desperately short supply, transportation was badly damaged, and local industries sat idle. Locals feared Werwolf units, but attempts to create armed self-defense militias risked conflict with the American and Soviet patrols who ventured into the area.

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The story that Pritchard tells here is not a happy one. The committees could not agree on a number of critical issues, including the most effective way to get the economy moving again, the speed and severity of local denazification, and relations with the Americans and Soviets. They systematically excluded women, who made up the majority of the population as a result of the war. In the end, the committees found little popular support for their reform programs.

The root of this failure to articulate a popular vision of the future lay in the members of the committees, who were themselves often deeply embittered about their past experiences and blamed the broader population for their support for the Nazi regime. The committees “genuinely wanted to win the hearts and minds of the people and to mobilize them in the service of antifascist reconstruction . . . but they themselves did not trust the people whose interests they claimed to champion, and for the most part they did not like them very much either” (178). The antifascists had little faith in the population and almost no interest in meaningful democratization.

The Soviets arrived in June 1945 and either absorbed or suppressed the antifascists of the western Erzgebirge. Still, Pritchard argues that the Soviet occupation actu-ally displayed a number of continuities with the rule of the committees, including some personnel, the increasing domination of communists, and the use of judicial and extrajudicial means against opponents on the left and right. Pritchard, who has previously written on the creation of communist rule in East German and central Europe, clearly intended this study to help us better understand the roots of the SED dictatorship. In his formulation, the antifascist committees earnestly and bravely attempted to transform German society following the collapse of Nazism and the loss of the war, but their own deeply held prejudices and profound sense of victimization led them to pursue reforms in ways that were often undemocratic and rarely achieved widespread legitimacy.

There is a great deal to like about this book, from its lucid prose to its admirable focus on understanding the local dynamics that fueled the events Pritchard describes. The broader applicability of this case study depends on the reader’s willingness to accept microhistorical approaches, even if this particular microhistory examines a large and well-populated area. The archival base is generally very solid, although it might have been useful for Pritchard to incorporate better the perspectives of the American and Soviet actors who play critical roles in the story of Niemandsland—a book (and place) that argues for a broader comparative approach to the history of occupied Germany. Both across and within the four Allied zones, the relationship between local power and the authority of the occupiers moved along a continuum. Niemandsland was unoccupied for several months, but there were also many places only notionally under occupation authority, where occupiers lacked the interest, will, or capacity to engage effectively in the complex task of political and economic reconstruction. In such cases, local power and local elites emerged to fill the void.


The story of occupied Germany, in all of its complexity and contingency, needs to be understood as a nexus of local, regional, and international interests. This study provides both a compelling case study and a useful framework with which other scholars might approach similar questions.

Adam R. Seipp, Texas A&M University

Adenauer’s Foreign Office: West German Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Third Reich. By Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 389. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 978-0875804637.

“Wir sollten jetzt mit der Naziriecherei einmal Schluß machen, denn, verlassen Sie sich darauf, wenn wir damit anfangen, weiß man nicht, wo es aufhört.” So äußerte sich Konrad Adenauer im Oktober 1952 in der Bundestagsdebatte über den Bericht des Untersuchungsausschusses zu Personalkontinuitäten zwischen dem neuen Bon-ner Außenministerium und dem ehemaligen Auswärtigen Amt der Wilhelmstraße. Der Ausschuss war aufgrund einer Artikelserie in der Frankfurter Rundschau ins Leben gerufen worden, in der aufgedeckt worden war, dass die Bundesrepublik im Auswärtigen Dienst eine Reihe ehemaliger NSDAP Mitglieder angestellt hatte, auch solche, die in die Deportationen involviert waren.

Die Affäre, die im vorliegenden Buch ausführlich beschrieben wird und die das Auswärtige Amt Thomas W. Maulucci zufolge über mehrere Monate hinweg in einen “Zustand der Unruhe” (145) versetzte, erinnert daran, dass die von einigen als sensati-onell eingestuften Enthüllungen des Buches Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (2010) in manchen Fällen nicht so sehr Neuentdeckungen als vielmehr brisante Wiederentdeckungen waren. Der erste Kanzler der Bundesrepublik war sich der problematischen Vergangenheit vieler seiner Diplomaten jedenfalls schmerzhaft bewusst—einer der Gründe, warum er ihnen zeitlebens nie vertraute. Aber Adenauer war auch der Meinung, dass zum gegebenen Zeitpunkt niemand da war, der die kompromittierten Experten hätte ersetzen können. Der Kanzler erscheint damit in Mauluccis Buch zurecht als ein Paradebeispiel für die von Hermann Lübbe beschriebene Strategie des “kommuni-kativen Beschweigens” (7) der Nazivergangenheit in der frühen Bundesrepublik, die Lübbes Meinung nach notwendig war, um die große Mehrheit der Deutschen in den neuen demokratischen Staat integrieren zu können.

Wie lang aber war der Schatten, den das Dritte Reich auf die westdeutsche Diplomatie warf? Die Tatsache, dass der Bundesaußenminister Joschka Fischer es noch im Jahre 2005 für notwendig erachtete eine Kommission ins Leben zu rufen, um die Geschichte des Auswärtigen Amtes im Hinblick auf dessen Verstrickung mit dem Nationalsozialismus aufzuarbeiten, scheint Antwort genug. Maulucci war

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übrigens selbst einer der von der Unabhängigen Historischen Kommission beauf-tragten Mitarbeiter an Das Amt, weist allerdings gleich zu anfangs darauf hin, dass seine Interpretationen sich auch unterscheiden würden, wobei er dem Leser leider verschweigt, worin diese Unterschiede denn bestehen. Statt dessen weist er lapidar darauf hin, dass die Unterschiede für diejenigen, die mit der Studie Das Amt vertraut sind, “offensichtlich” seien (xi).

Es sind drei für die Frühgeschichte der Bundesrepublik zentrale und ineinander verwobene Themenfelder, die Maulucci mit seiner Studie erhellen will: Erstens die Integration des neuen Staates in die internationale Gemeinschaft, zweitens die Kooptation der alten Eliten und Traditionen durch das neue politische System und drittens die erfolgreiche Erschaffung des neuen Systems selbst (4). In der Tat gelingt es ihm durch seinen Fokus auf die Entwicklung der Außenpolitik und ihrer Instituti-onen während der Jahre 1949 bis 1955, die seiner Meinung nach von der bisherigen Forschung bisher eher kursorisch behandelt worden seien, überzeugend zu zeigen, wie es der Bundesrepublik gelingen konnte, sich so schnell nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auf der internationalen Bühne zu behaupten. Zurecht stellt Maulucci dabei die Rolle Adenauers und die veränderte internationale Lage als entscheidende Faktoren dar. Die Bedeutung der personellen “Restoration” im Amt wurde dadurch automatisch im Schach gehalten, zumal wie gesagt nicht nur Adenauer selbst, sondern auch die Westalliierten gegenüber den alten Diplomaten erhebliches Misstrauen hegten und kontinuierlich auf der Hut waren, ob diese nach den neuen demokratischen Regeln spielen würden.

Doch es stellte sich ohnehin heraus, dass die Wilhelmstraße-Veteranen durchaus willig waren, die Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik ebenso gefügig zu vollstrecken wie vorher die des Dritten Reiches. Maulucci zeigt zwar einmal mehr, dass viele dieser Diplomaten angesichts ihrer nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit aus moralischen Gründen keine Funktion im Auswärtigen Amt hätten erhalten dürfen. Gleichzeitig weist er aber gekonnt nach, dass diese personelle “Restoration” im Großen und Ganzen eben nicht mehr und nicht weniger war als das: eine “Restoration” der Personen, die für den Nationalsozialismus gearbeitet hatten, nicht aber eine aktive Wiederauflage diskreditierter nationalsozialistischer Ideen.

Geholfen hat in diesem Zusammenhang allerdings, dass einige der auch zwischen 1933 und 1945 propagierten Prämissen auch im Westen noch gepflegt werden durften, insbesondere Nationalismus, Glaube in die eigene kulturelle Überlegenheit und Antikommunismus. Faszinierend ist, wie der Autor im achten Kapitel zeigt, dass ausgerechnet einige dieser Veteranen sich aber von diesen Prämissen teilweise lösten und schon in den frühen fünfziger Jahren die Ideen von Détente und der Ostpolitik Willy Brandts vorwegnahmen, freilich ohne dass ihnen Gehör geschenkt wurde.

Maulucci beginnt seine Studie mit einem ausführlichen Überblick der Instituti-onengeschichte des Auswärtigen Amtes seit der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches


im Jahre 1871 und einem Folgekapitel, das die Frage nach einer eigenständigen deutschen Außenpolitik zwischen Kriegsende und der Gründung der Bundesrepu-blik im Jahr 1949 behandelt, wobei er sein Augenmerk vor allem auf die Initiativen innerhalb der Westzonen richtet. Die darauf folgenden sechs Kapitel behandeln dann seinen eigentlichen Schwerpunkt, nämlich die institutionelle, personelle und ideelle Entwicklung der deutschen Außenpolitik im international vorgegebenen Rahmen der Jahre 1949 bis 1955, dem Jahr, als die Bundesrepublik ihre Souveränität erhielt. Was die politische Geschichte dieses Zeitraums angeht, findet der Leser keine neuen Fakten oder Einsichten, die man nicht in Standardwerken zur frühen Geschichte der Bundesrepublik und der Adenauerjahre finden würde. Wohl aber erwartet ihn eine Fülle von informativen Details der Diskussionen und Bemühungen hinter den Kulissen und ein Lehrstück darüber, wie die außenpolitischen Eliten in der Bundes-republik sich damit abfanden, dass Deutschland seinen “Platz an der Sonne” verloren hatte und statt dessen aktiv daran mitarbeiteten “auf Machtpolitik zu verzichten und sich um internationale Kooperation zu bemühen” (10).

Ob all das—wie Maulucci hofft—wirklich Relevanz für einen demokratischen Neu-beginn in Ländern wie Irak oder Afghanistan haben kann, ist eine interessante Frage. Bedenken muss man dabei jedenfalls, dass die meisten Wilhelmstraße-Veteranen nicht nur die Erfahrung der NS-Diktatur hatten, sondern auch die von Weimar—und letztere sollte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Gelingen der bundesdeutschen Demokratie nicht unterschätzt werden.

Sylvia Taschka, Wayne State University

The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right. By Paul B. Jaskot. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Pp. 288. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0816678259.

With recent revelations about Nazi-appointed art historian Hildebrand Gurlitt’s ill-gotten collection of “degenerate” art, and the February 2014 release of The Monu-ments Men, a film based loosely on the Allied platoons of art historians who saved Europe’s treasures from Hitler, the enduring presence of the Nazi criminal and the changing status of the art historian (whose use-value President Obama seemed to question in a January quip) have momentarily collided. Paul B. Jaskot’s study The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right likewise draws together National Socialism’s continuing reverberations with a demonstration of the powerful potential of art’s histories. His book focuses on a series of four deeply investigated situations from the 1950s to the present in which complex political debates and evolving notions of the Nazi perpetrator, the embodiment of guilt and responsibility, become tethered to cases of German art and architecture. Together,

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Jaskot’s detailed, materialist histories around the early work of Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, and the Nuremburg Party Rally Grounds form a sustained corrective to art historical simplifications and omissions regarding German art’s engagement with the fascist past, including overlooked conservative debates. His painstaking research intertwines a range of political perspectives with the objects, individuals, and institutions of postwar culture. Jaskot’s book deserves to be counted among the richest recent scholarship on German art, but should also be considered a model for the valuable analysis the most precise histories of art can offer.

Historians in other disciplines may recognize the inclusive evidence Jaskot employs. But studies of postwar German art tend, with notable exceptions, to focus on themes of memorialization, experimental artists like Joseph Beuys, or complex artworks explored through disciplinary narratives and philosophical abstractions rather than sources like German newspapers or city council proceedings. These subjects, Jaskot notes, while important, are really part of a broader web that must be untangled from art history’s habit of generalizing about German politics or ignoring what seems to have no “value.” Investigations of right-wing politics and culture are limited to stud-ies of the Nazi era. Jaskot’s work rights these imbalances by looking at the responses of cultural practitioners to evolving discussions about historical guilt, especially complicated West German conservative debates (as distinct from continuing fascist ideologies) about the Nazi perpetrator. Thus Adenauer and the CDU’s indictment, not of individuals, but of secularism and materialism as they carefully negotiated any positions they shared with the former state, sets the stage for understanding Richter, just as Kohl’s agendas in the 1980s resonate with Kiefer’s work. Jaskot demonstrates that by engaging postwar art through nuanced political and social histories, we can form accurate considerations of overlooked and ubiquitous subjects.

Some of these oversights trace their origins to the immediate postwar period and considerations of historical perpetration in the cultural realm. After outlining the NSDAP’s instrumentalization of art, architecture, and their histories, Jaskot shows that although the Party carefully and broadly employed aesthetics for deadly ends, in the subsequent rebuilding period Nazi criminality was delinked from the world of Kultur both by Germans and their occupiers; art and fascism became oppositional categories. As Jaskot notes, in the cultural sphere people “acted as though the NSDAP had had no impact on their world whatsoever” (40). Not until the early 70s did Ger-man art historians, for example, begin to consider the blind spots of the discipline.

Against assumptions of complete postwar silence in the art world, however, Jaskot demonstrates that German artists, unlike art historians, engaged debates about the character of the Nazi perpetrator before 1968. Works like Richter’s Christa und Wolfi (1964), for example, embody more than problems of aesthetics. Some of Richter’s photo-based paintings from the mid-1960s explore the very nature of the perpetrator, not the easy-to-spot extremist prosecuted during denazification, but an “everyday


Nazi” whose rehabilitated presence might remain unnoticed in government—or in one’s family. Jaskot’s analysis of Kiefer likewise detects an unrecognized element in his military-themed works from the early 70s. References to Kiefer’s father, both a former soldier and later art teacher, engage questions about the powerful generational conflicts at a time when “all older West Germans were tainted with fascism [as was] the military as a conservative state institution,” but also about the artist’s agency in society. Kiefer’s case also illuminates on-going recategorizations of the perpetrator; in the 1980s, Kiefer’s romantic style sublimated real tensions between fathers and sons and links between past and present, abstracting them into rhetoric about an “epic past,” a conservative, cultural turn Jaskot sees mirrored in Chancellor Kohl’s symbolic and ritualized negotiations of World War II anniversary events.

Jaskot’s history of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum brings the evolving defini-tions of the Nazi perpetrator into the post-reunification period. Although the plan for an integrated Jewish section within the Berlin Municipal Museum originated in the late Cold War context of the 1970s, the project, and its state and local political and financial parameters, changed in the wake of post-reunification politics and Berlin’s building boom. By the time it opened in 2001, Libeskind’s structure had become “the Jewish Museum,” no longer focused on Jewish history in the city, but instead a self-contained “racial” project, a potent symbol in the face of debates about the reappearance of the (neo-)Nazi perpetrator.

Jaskot’s examination of the Nuremburg Party Rally Grounds is a diachronic history of the space that formerly communicated the NSDAP’s total power and command of aesthetic spectacle. Today, with political debates about guilt fading, the area now accommodates diverse functions (from sports venues to commemorative centers) shaped by a range of national, regional, and local interests, and a variety of narra-tives, designs, and aesthetics that simultaneously occlude and reveal the grounds as a former site of perpetration. Jaskot’s final unraveling of this plurality demonstrates his larger point that accurate art historical analysis requires exhaustive knowledge, including a full spectrum of political perspectives, to grasp its subjects. Perhaps more important is his argument that a thorough understanding of visual culture and its histories is necessary for truly understanding the way ideologies, past and present, work. In the end, what role could be more valuable?

Kathryn M. Floyd, Auburn University

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Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer. Edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 324. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0472051670.

As the first collected volume in English on the noted Weimar-era theorist Siegfried Kracauer, Culture in the Anteroom convincingly argues for both the historical impor-tance and contemporary relevance of his work. Examining Kracauer from his first book (Die Entwicklung der Schmiedekunst in Berlin, 1915) to his last (History: The Last Things Before the Last, posthumously published in 1969), the sixteen essays cover some topics familiar to the secondary literature on Kracauer, such as his contribu-tions to film and media theory, his paths of exile, and his relationships with friends and contemporaries. They also break new ground in documenting Kracauer’s early writings in American exile and pointing to the proximity of his thinking to feminist perspectives, the field of sound studies, and the work of the New York Intellectuals, in particular the editor of the magazine Commentary, Robert Warshow.

The main contribution that Culture in the Anteroom makes, however, lies in its mobilization of Kracauer’s own unique interdisciplinary methodology as a productive hermeneutic and critical principle. Editors Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke cite Kracauer in their outstanding introduction, presenting the volume as an attempt to examine “many small factors” to reveal a cohesive and comprehensive image of Kracauer amidst “history’s moving forces in full action,” such as the institutionaliza-tion of film studies (2). In taking this perspective on Kracauer’s legacy, many of his texts gain new life as the authors explicate often-overlooked features of his far-ranging work while contextualizing them within contemporary debates in numerous fields and the crisis in the humanities as a whole.

Two essays in particular demonstrate how the collection seeks to renegotiate Kracauer’s standing and relevance. Noah Isenberg’s “This Pen for Hire” exemplifies the way in which a number of the essays—by von Moltke, Eric Rentschler, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andreas Huyssen—revisit and redirect “some of the paths along which Kracauer has habitually been read” by situating select texts in the broader historical and intellectual context in which they were produced (5). In doing so, the authors collectively attempt to expose the prejudices inherent in Kracauer’s fragmentary reception as either a minor or marginal figure, in comparison to Walter Benjamin or Theodor W. Adorno, or as a “quaint and dated” relic of realist and “classical” film theory (42).

Isenberg, for example, focuses on Kracauer’s little known articles and reviews written in English after his arrival in New York, recently published as Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings (2012). Reading essays and reviews published in the New Republic, Commentary, and Harper’s, Isenberg argues that the piecemeal reception of Kracauer’s intellectual career as either a “film man,” or a “philosopher


of culture” or a “poet” obscures the deep and abiding continuities in his thinking and writing before and during his American exile (30). The tropes of exile and homeless-ness, intermediacy and non-belonging, and Kracauer’s structural paradigm of thinking (finding “social images and ideologies hidden in mainstream films”) indicate less his nonsystematic weaknesses and more his perennial strengths as a multidisciplinary “polymath” (33, 30). Reading Kracauer “from the margins,” as the editors suggest, often results in the paradoxical yet productive image of a thinker who is simultane-ously the quintessential fragmented modern subject, a surprisingly subversive film theoretician, and an essential node in the intellectual networks of Frankfurt, Berlin, Marseille, and New York (12).

The collection’s second main concern is to explore the relevance of Kracauer’s thinking to contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship, recent developments in visual studies, and debates in digital media. Putting Kracauer’s own “radical interdisciplin-arity” into practice, the collection hinges on diverse and intriguing contributions by Elizabeth Otto, Claire Zimmerman, and Kerstin Barndt, each of which provide new insight into Kracauer’s intersections with art history, architecture, and exhibition culture during the Weimar Republic (14). But what both ties such diverse articles together, and makes them particularly persuasive in combination, are the contribu-tions by Lutz Koepnick, Sabine Biebl, Inka Mülder-Bach, and, especially, Miriam Hansen, which trace and explore the rigorous detail and theoretical meticulousness of Kracauer’s disciplinary border-crossings. For instance, Hansen’s careful reading of Kracauer’s well-known text “Die Photographie” (1927) shows ostensibly how the essay addresses the “issues of technological image production and usage,” “indexi-cality” in the postphotographic age, and “cinematic realism” (94). By interpreting photography as “nature alienated from meaning,” Kracauer unlocks “photography’s potential” in its unique ability to collect and expose “the disintegration of traditional and reinvented unities, the arbitrariness of social and cultural arrangements,” such as bourgeois culture (103–104).

At the same time, however, by unraveling Kracauer’s broad web of medial, liter-ary, historical, and philosophical concerns, Hansen’s essay puts its finger on how Kracauer’s interdisciplinary methodology—examining society through the careful reading of disparate and seemingly insignificant details—turns out to be more than just the sum of its parts. Kracauer, in other words, proposes a way of thinking that radically transgresses disciplinary boundaries while maintaining an ongoing intel-lectual and epistemological commitment to a rigorous and critical investigation of culture. On the whole, the volume makes a compelling case for the uniqueness (in its time) and applicability (to issues of our time) of Kracauer’s critical reflections on the essence and effects of media, literature, and mass culture. More significantly, however, Culture in the Anteroom argues for the conviction, shared by this reviewer, that Kracauer’s methodology and his fondness for the provisional, “anteroom” type

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of thinking that inform the collection’s title provides a viable, productive, and timely guide for critical inquiry today.

If the message of the collection is ultimately to think through Kracauer himself, then the overall cohesive, interdisciplinary discussion leaves specific points to be clarified. Many of the essays, for instance, tend to amalgamate Kracauer’s biography, objects of study, and method of analysis, often obscuring disparate and opposing terms such as “stranger,” “marginal,” “intermediary,” and “surface-level.” If reading Kracauer from the margins reveals his centrality to groups and movements at the heart of film and intellectual history, then do we not also find ourselves forced to reevaluate the critical value of margin and center, indeed of canonicity, as a whole? Furthermore, associating Kracauer with an “‘un-masculine’ way of thinking,” even one that “subverts the male-dominated discourse of the sciences and humanities,” still needs to account for discourses on the German-Jewish body of which Kracauer must have been all too conscious (12). Yet I see such questions not as a shortcoming of the collection, but rather as the productive grounds for conversation that will propel and sustain interest in Kracauer’s biography and textual copra in the years to come.

In the acknowledgements, the editors dedicate the collection to the memory of Miriam Hansen. As is clear from her contribution, which also appears in her final monograph Cinema and Experience (2011), a magisterial book on film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno, perhaps the greatest value of studying Kracauer today lies in the conceptual and methodological link he forges between the crisis of modernity and the various cultural products and media produced by, and themselves sustain-ing, such a crisis. Ultimately, by building on the type of Kracauer scholarship that Hansen worked so hard to establish, Culture in the Anteroom shows us how such critical tools and perspectives can continue to identify and negotiate the crises and challenges of our own times.

Matthew Handelman, Michigan State University

Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert. By Jan Eike Dunkhase. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Pp. 378. Cloth €39.90. ISBN 978-3525370124.

During the last decade and a half, an impressive number of studies on twentieth-century German historiography has appeared. Apart from monographs such as Sebas-tian Conrad’s Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan 1945–1960 (1999), Thomas Etzemüller’s Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte. Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (2000), and Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung (2003), several significant


German historians, including Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, Hermann Aubin, Percy Ernst Schramm, and Arthur Rosenberg, have all found their biographers. Jan Eike Dunkhase’s study of the social historian Werner Conze, who lived from 1910 to 1986, is one of the most recent additions.

Conze undoubtedly deserves an academic biography. One of the West German historical profession’s key figures between the late 1950s and late 1970s, when he taught at the University of Heidelberg, Conze was a proponent of Strukturge-schichte and, together with Reinhart Koselleck, launched the multivolume project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. In addition, he organized the important Arbeitskreis für Sozialgeschichte and advised a number of talented younger historians, though not as many as his contemporary Theodor Schieder.

The book’s emphasis lies on Conze’s career after 1945, with six of the nine chapters focusing on these decades. The first three chapters offer a brief account of the historian’s family background, his student years, as well as his career during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including his relationship with the Nazi regime and his military service. The analysis shifts from chronological to topical for the postwar decades. These six chapters focus on Conze’s rise within the West German historical profession, the development of his particular version of Sozialgeschichte, Conze’s relationship to the German nation, the Cold War, contemporary history, and finally Conze’s scholarly (non-)relationship to the Holocaust. Each chapter begins with a brief section on the general historical context before moving to an analysis of Conze’s role and activities. These introductory paragraphs are sometimes odd (e.g., the chapter on Conze’s relationship to the German nation begins with the statement “‘Nation’ ist ein großes Wort, das man nach all dem Unheil, für das es gestanden hat, kaum mehr gelassen aussprechen kann” [167]), but in general they usefully set the stage.

As a student at the University of Leipzig, the young Conze encountered the sociologists Hans Freyer and Gunther Ipsen, both of whom came to exert a lasting methodological influence on him. The charismatic Hans Rothfels also appealed to Conze because of his understanding of the historian’s political role, which was of par-ticular importance at the “Grenzlanduniversität” Königsberg. Dunkhase convincingly documents the extent to which Conze’s ideological predispositions led him not only to participate in the project of Volksgeschichte (an interdisciplinary approach that shifted the emphasis from the state to the people and often served Nazi expansionism and even genocide) but also to adopt an “attitude of endorsement” (45) toward the Nazi regime more generally. While some of Conze’s writings supported the Nazi persecu-tion of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during 1938 and 1939, Dunkhase contends, as opposed to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim (Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung [1991]), that the historian was “not a Vordenker der Vernichtung” (54).

After World War II, Conze seems to have undergone a gradual intellectual trans-

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formation. Dunkhase’s treatment of this crucial aspect is convincing but too cursory. In his conclusion, he argues that Conze’s adherence to “Kontinuitätssicherung als Grundprinzip” (259) after 1945 resulted from his previous personal connection to Nazi ideology, as well as from his focus on the German nation, which was especially important in light of the postwar partition of Germany. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate further on this plausible claim. Ultimately, like Schieder, Conze seems to have contributed more to the “modernization” and pluralization of the West German historical profession by training a number of younger historians who pursued the very topics the older generation did not want to touch.

Dunkhase has evidently tried very hard to write elegantly, yet his search for original metaphors and other stylistic devices does not always succeed. In addition, a more economical usage of words such as “diskursiv” and “epistemisch” would certainly not have weakened his analysis. More important, of course, are the book’s analytical qualities. This is a very concise study, and it is impressive how Dunkhase manages to shed light on many different aspects of Conze’s life. The author also succeeds in keeping the balance between criticism and empathy. He does not mince words with regard to Conze’s approval of and his scientific collaboration with the Nazi regime. Yet Dunkhase’s portrayal of Conze’s reform efforts at Heidelberg in the late 1960s, when he was caught in the middle between reactionary Ordinarien on the one side and dogmatic left-wing student groups on the other, can hardly fail to evoke the reader’s sympathies. Conze had initially been the candidate for position of the Rektor favored by his liberal colleagues and criticized by the conservative ones, but was nevertheless targeted by the student mob as the situation at Heidelberg escalated.

Some aspects of Conze’s work deserved a more thorough treatment. Anyone interested in a deeper analysis of the historian’s methodological development and his institutional establishment within the West German historical profession will still have to consult Thomas Etzemüller’s seminal study. But despite these minor criti-cisms, Dunkhase provides a concise, nuanced, and ultimately convincing analysis of Conze’s life and work.

Philipp Stelzel, Duquesne University

Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945. By Christina Morina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 297. Cloth $94.00. ISBN 978-1107013049.

In his influential study Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997), Jeffrey Herf discussed the profoundly different ways in which political actors in postwar West and East Germany addressed the Nazi-era mass murder of Jews and its legacies. Now Christina Morina, who was Herf’s doctoral student at the University


of Maryland, has published a book of similar structure and import. Her theme is the divided memory in postwar German history of the Eastern front. As Morina convinc-ingly shows, the experience of this war and its aftermath profoundly shaped postwar German political culture. Her account offers a corrective to the many studies on memory in postwar Germany that reduce “coming to terms with the past” (Vergan-genheitsbewältigung) to the Holocaust alone.

Morina’s particular focus is on what she calls the “political memory” of the East-ern Front: the ways in which the history of the war was turned into public use and as such shaped political culture. Germany’s division and the rapidly unfolding Cold War gave the memory of the war against the Soviet Union an extraordinary political charge from the very beginning, as leaders in both parts of Germany grappled with how to position themselves toward the postwar Soviet Union. At the same time, Morina cautions against studying political invocations of history through an exclusively utilitarian lens. Political speech, she writes, should not necessarily be dismissed as propaganda, for it is also rooted in personal experience and often carries personal beliefs and convictions. For this reason, and with a nod to Catherine Epstein’s The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Era (2003), Morina’s analysis focuses on the biographies of a range of politicians and veterans. These are the principal actors of her study.

The book is organized chronologically, and, in a succession of comparative chap-ters, covers the occupation period, the height of the Cold War, Ostpolitik, as well as German unification and its aftermath. The rigorously comparative perspective brings to light precious insights. In the immediate wake of the war, Germans in both East and West were equally inured to the sufferings of others. Morina pairs the shocked testimonies of Anna Seghers, who returned to East Germany from Mexican exile in 1947, and Hannah Arendt, who visited West Germany in 1949. Nowhere, Arendt remarked, was “the nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself” (65). These eyewitness accounts make clear how much political work was required to sensitivize the populations of both parts of Germany to different aspects of their country’s problematic past.

In the East, the speeches of Communist leaders left no doubt that the war against the Soviet Union had been a criminal undertaking. The prominent public discussion of the destruction German soldiers had wrought on Soviet soil ensured that no myth of a clean Wehrmacht could emerge, as it would in West Germany. Well into the 1960s (and especially during the June 1953 uprising and again in 1961), East German leaders invoked “June 22, 1941” to sound the alarm of a fascist attack and display their antifascist credentials. A former exile, SED leader Walter Ulbricht presented himself as the leader of “another,” free Germany. That vanguard position gave him license to absolve all German workers from any individual culpability in a mistaken war that had been forced upon them. Former Wehrmacht officers who had fallen

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into Soviet captivity at Stalingrad similarly embraced a Hegelian mode of history to emphasize how the Soviet system had opened their eyes to a new life and political future for Germany.

In the West, Stalingrad would, for many decades, exclusively connote the suffer-ing of German soldiers who had been sacrificed by callous Nazi leaders. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledged early on Germany’s responsibility for the mass mur-der of the Jews of Europe, but signaled no contrition whatsoever toward the Soviet Union. While East German leaders invoked the lessons of history, Adenauer explicitly called for historical closure during his 1955 visit to Moscow to avoid revisiting the violent past. As Morina implies, West Germans eventually came to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at the expense of the suffering of Soviet citizens—including many Soviet Jews whose works have still not entered the canonical Holocaust literature. This problematizes Rainer Lepsius’s dictum that East German citizens “external-ized” their guilt (“Das Erbe des Nationalsozialismus und die politische Kultur der Nachfolgestaaten des ‘Großdeutschen Reiches,’” in Kultur und Gesellschaft, eds. Max Haller et al. [1989], 247–264), whereas West Germans proceeded to internalize it: in both Germanys, the internalization of one mass crime came at the expense of externalizing, or silencing, another.

While the exploration of biography for an understanding of political culture is a sound method, the sources Morina uses to lay out the worldviews of select political actors are quite slim. It is problematic to deduce the personal experience of the German-Soviet war, or attitudes toward the Soviet Union, from little more than a single memoir, as she does in the cases of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl. The sole consideration of political discourse is problematic as well, as it does not show how East or West Germans dealt with the war and its legacy in other important venues: literature, film, memorials, or the school curriculum. With her exclusive focus on the Eastern Front, Morina also seems at times to lose sight of the larger context. She credits Kohl for being the first German chancellor to acknowledge Soviet suffering (in conversations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev), but she does not mention Kohl’s notorious comparison of Gorbachev with Joseph Goebbels, or his visit to the graves of SS soldiers at Bitburg—actions that should be discussed in this book, because they surely had an effect on how Soviet and East German leaders viewed him, or themselves, within the context of the legacy of the Eastern Front.

In a thought-provoking epilogue, Morina takes the memory of the Eastern Front into the postunification years, dwelling on the traveling exhibit about the “Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944” (Wehrmachtausstellung) as a turning point in German popular memory of the Eastern Front. But as she notes, many of the visitors who came to the show in Dresden in 1998 did not experience it as revelatory. The reason was simple: East Germans had more knowledge of what had happened at the Eastern Front, and they were remarkably sympathetic toward the plight of Soviet victims. But


among West Germans, the Wehrmachtausstellung created a stir when detractors of the initiative found out that a handful of the many hundreds of photographs that served as documentation for the crimes committed by German soldiers had been misattributed. Critics of the exhibit achieved their aim of casting doubt on its overall veracity, and their actions showed how strong the urge remains among Germans to deny the extent of Nazi-era crimes committed against Soviet citizens. But as far as East Germany was concerned, Morina notes, there was another scandal: the exhibit “subtly dismantled the GDR’s antifascist legacy” (259). It presented the “coming to terms” with the Eastern Front as a West German affair, claiming that East Germans had “failed” to master the difficult German past. The outrage expressed by former East Germans in the visitor books has done little if anything to tarnish the exhibit in this respect.

Morina is correct in claiming that the Eastern Front was and remains a “politicum” (262) of the first order. Her groundbreaking book does an excellent job tracing its public memory in both German states, and her monograph will continue to open up avenues for further research. One much needed book would center on the Soviet experience of the Great Patriotic War and how that experience shaped policies toward postwar Germany; another might focus more closely on East Germany and explore its antifascist policies with an eye to the popular dimensions of antifascist politics and education.

Jochen Hellbeck, Rutgers University

The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent. By Susanne Rinner. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. vi + 174. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-0857457547.

The student revolts in West Germany that reached their zenith in the year 1968 were so seminal for the constitution of the identity of the protestors that the broad cohort of this age group is named after this year: the 1968 Generation. The debates about the events that took place in the late 1960s were, and continue to be, so intense, that as the author of this volume, Susanne Rinner, claims, the signifier itself has gained the status of a “dritte Vergangenheitsbewältigung” alongside the GDR and the Third Reich (6, 9). The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination focuses on how fictional treatments, in the form of novels, make a seminal contribution to the cultural memory of the “1968” era. While there were novels written soon after the student revolts, such as Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Uwe Timm’s Heißer Sommer (1974), Rinner only treats such earlier works tangentially and by way of con-trast to significantly later fiction, usually published in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For example, she contrasts the early efforts by Schneider and Timm with later prose

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fiction by these same authors, Edwards Heimkehr (1999) and Rot (2001) respectively. For it is Rinner’s central thesis that while the earlier works give voice to the disillusion of the young authors and a concomitant withdrawal from public life, the later texts not only “emphasize the need to actively engage with one’s personal environment in order to shape the public discourse” (46), but take on a broadly transnational and transethnic scope, frequently crossing spatial and temporal borders and coming to terms with an event generally elided in the 1970s fiction, the Holocaust. Rinner’s book draws on theories broadly connected to the discourse of public memory, such as Walter Benjamin’s notions of spatiotemporal constellations, Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” concept, and Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” paradigm. Engaging such critical discourse, Rinner successfully demonstrates how relatively contemporary fiction on “1968” reenergizes the ideals of the generation named for this year and makes them relevant and productive for the geopolitics of contemporary Germany.

After an introduction in which Rinner outlines her approaches and provides an overview of the genre the book will explore, “1968 memory novels,” the first chapter engages in the previously mentioned contrast of novels published in the 1970s with those which appeared in the 1990s. While the 1960s revolts constituted a refutation of the students’ parents’ Nazi generation, both their inhumanity in the 1930s and 1940s as well as their consumerist quietude in the 1950s Adenauer era, Rinner shows that historical guilt concerning, especially, the Holocaust is first given expression, albeit obliquely, in postunification 1968 memory novels through a dialectic of remembering and forgetting, and through fictive dialogue with Holocaust survivors. The second chapter goes back in time to GDR literature to show that East German authors were well aware of late 1960s protest in Western Europe as well as in Prague, and thema-tized these events, despite the fact that many scholars virtually deny the existence of “East German ‘68ers” (57). Rinner focuses here on Irmtraud Morgner’s Salman trilogy, which creates the figure of a revenant female troubadour whose experiences reflect Morgner’s disillusion with how the revolution played out in, particularly, Paris, East Berlin, and Prague. The following section highlights 1968 memory novels that feature the United States as a spatial locus where Germans who suffered from the 1970s Berufsverbot against leftist agitators found fulfilling lives, and where encoun-ters between German narrators and Holocaust survivors can be productively staged. Once again, Edwards Heimkehr is drawn upon in order to illustrate this staging as well as Bernhard Schlink’s widely read novel Der Vorleser (1995). Ulrike Kolb’s novel Frühstück mit Max (2000) is also discussed, albeit in order to show how the central protagonists grapple with their earlier Berlin communal life rather than the Holocaust. The final chapter treats Emine Özdamar’s trilogy as an example of how contemporary nonethnic German authors draw the events of the late 1960s into a transnational context (in the trilogy, the far more brutal treatment of protestors in the author’s home country of Turkey is thematized and juxtaposed with German events)


and fictively demonstrates how the author negotiates the spaces, politics, and milieus of the GDR and FRG as she constantly shuttles between East and West Berlin, and between Turkey and the Germanys. The conclusion nicely summarizes the book’s overall purport and individual chapters.

Rinner’s study is theoretically sophisticated but also quite lucid, and her unique approach to 1968 cultural memory novels is usually convincing. Occasionally she repeats herself, and some passages are confusing. For example, Rinner does not make clear how Irmtraud Morgner’s female Troubadour figure allows one to envision “ways of transcending the ideological stalemate” among discrepant representations and views concerning the gender divide (69–70). Nevertheless, The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination makes a striking, original contribution to current discourse on 1968 novels, and how they, and the period they represent, can be productively engaged in the contemporary German transnational sphere.

John Pizer, Louisiana State University

After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault. Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Pp. 310. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-0857453730.

This book is required reading for any student entering the terrain of Foucauldian sexuality studies and for any scholar already engaged with the intricacies of Michel Foucault’s work. For the first type of reader in particular, it provides an accessible introduction; two opening chapters by Helmut Puff and Merry Wiesner-Hanks detailing concise and provocative literature reviews of the responses to Foucault’s History of Sexuality (the first volume of which was published in English translation in 1978); various models for applying Foucault’s methods within different disciplinary contexts; and an invaluable bibliography. For the latter, the volume presents a series of intriguingly detailed case studies that respond to some of the key criticisms leveled at Foucault’s work. For all readers, the volume lays down the challenge of defining “the future of our history of sexuality” (12).

The volume comprises sixteen short but concise chapters, in addition to an introduction, postscript, and select bibliography. As coeditor Scott Spector writes, the contributors’ aim was to assess “where the histories of sexuality are after the History of Sexuality, and particularly after its decades-long reception by historians” (1). The historical scope of the contributions—from the Middle Ages to the present—is impressive. What the chapters have in common, Spector argues, is “to write histories of sexuality that attend to the demands of Foucault’s radical disruption of how we view sexuality, without projecting onto it a dogmatic program” (6). The book is structured

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in such a way as to challenge any such dogmatism, while at the same time addressing key criticisms of Foucault’s text, some of which, the authors argue, are founded in misreadings of his work. For example, the first section takes issue with Foucault’s own claims about periodization: his assertions about sexuality as a modern phenom-enon are persuasively refuted by examples from Ulinka Rublack, Andreas Krass, and Robert Deam Tobin. Yet, at the same time, the authors insist on the importance of the antiteleology and antiessentialism of Foucault’s method. The volume as a whole, and particularly the second section (with chapters by Kirsten Leng, Robert Beachy, Jeffrey Schneider, Julia Roos, Marti M. Lybeck, and Philipp Sarasin), takes issue with criticisms of Foucault’s concept of power, criticisms which the authors argue are based on an incorrect assumption about a purported lack of agency. Thematizing issues of resistance, tactical polyvalence, and reverse discourse, the case studies look at a range of formations, including the police, the military, prostitution, the media, and the women’s movement, as well as at forms of subjectivity and agency that were, or were not, available.

The third section, which includes contributions by Tracie Matysik, Andreas Pretzel, Florian G. Mildenberger, Erik Huneke, and Massimo Perinelli, begins—as do the two other sections in the book—with a helpful summary by Dagmar Herzog. These chapters focus on the politics of sexual ethics and the work of historical “experts or activists” (184). The chapters thus take a fresh look at some of Foucault’s ideas and terms that have either been taken for granted, condemned as ubiquitous, or misunderstood. They point to what they find useful in his theoretical approach and problematic in terms of his own application of it. Several of the chapters draw on the work of other theorists from within psychoanalytical and cultural studies in their productive and impressively detailed rereadings of Foucault.

The volume makes a powerful case for its focus on Germany through the original research it contains. It is written in a way that is accessible to those who have not yet engaged in detail with the primary texts, and the historiography that it covers is invaluable for anyone wanting to embark on new case studies using Foucault’s methods. Moreover, the breadth of case studies will appeal to scholars interested in many different historical periods. The chapters do indeed sustain Spector’s claim that “thinking about alternate temporalities after the History of Sexuality is a history of sexuality with Foucault” (16).

The volume highlights the benefits, but also the challenges, of interdisciplinary work. It points to the research still to be done on the intersections of, and tensions between, sexuality studies and gender studies, feminism, as well as subjectivity and identity studies more broadly—and, for example, with studies of taboo, shame, and witchcraft, more specifically. It reminds us of the usefulness of in-depth literary stud-ies for exploring all types of text, including the autobiographical. Overall, this volume


makes an important contribution to the academic debates and provides a timely reminder of context-specific, institutional definitions of sexuality and an individual’s or community’s power to support or challenge them.

Joanne Sayner, University of Birmingham

The Self in Transition: East German Autobiographical Writing Before and After Unification. Essays in Honour of Dennis Tate. Edited by David Clarke and Axel Goodbody. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Pp. 304. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-9042035935.

This volume, edited by David Clark and Axel Goodbody, presents a collection of essays assembled in honor of Dennis Tate and his work on GDR literature, particularly his research on autobiographical writings by East German authors. The introduction by Clarke and Goodbody, after briefly discussing Tate’s contributions to German Studies in the UK and beyond, highlights the various modes of autobiographical reinterpretation and realignment that can be found in works produced after the two historical caesuras in recent German history, 1945 and 1989, and that are the shared focus of all collected essays. Of chief interest is the interconnectedness between the predominant social and political values at the time of writing and publication on the one hand and the act of autobiographical writing on the other hand.

As can be expected from a volume of this kind, Tate’s scholarship features promi-nently in all essays, and here it is mainly his research on “subjective authenticity” as discussed by Christa Wolf in her essay “Lesen und Schreiben” (1968) that provides a core reference point for the majority of essays. It is also not surprising that none of the essays set out to challenge Tate’s argument, but rather reaffirm the value of his approach by supplying additional support and examples. But beyond that, the essays bring Tate’s research in dialogue with relevant theoretical approaches for their particular subject, hence situating Tate’s work within a broader theoretical framework that extends beyond German Studies and often even beyond studies of autobiographical writing.

The volume is divided into three historically defined sections. Part One focuses on “The Third Reich in Socialist Autobiographies” and the essays analyze various genres of autobiographical writing by Hans Marchwitza, Greta Kuckhoff, Rudi Goguel, and Elfriede Brüning. The essays in Part Two deal with “Writing the Self in the German Democratic Republic.” Given the centrality of Christa Wolf in Tate’s research as well as her significance in the GDR, it is not surprising that three of the five essays in this part of the book are concerned with her work. The other two essays address the writ-ings of Wulf Kirsten and Volker Braun. While Part One and Two address the works of writers from the same generation, the essays in Part Three, with the versatile heading

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“Shifting Perspectives after 1989,” span multiple generations of writers by discussing the works of Günter de Bruyn, Jurij Bre=zan, Reinhard Jirgl, and Ingo Schulze. Ute Hirsekorn’s analysis of Günter Schabowski’s autobiographical self-reflections after 1989 even extends the scope of analysis beyond the literary scene and emphasizes the narrative strategies Schabowski employs to negate individual responsibility in an attempt to distance himself from the GDR government and its actions.

Despite the variety of works, genres, and authors discussed in the individual sec-tions and essays, their general reference to Tate’s research creates a cohesive and simultaneously comprehensive volume. In addition to the broad theme of autobio-graphical reinterpretations after historical caesuras that creates a common thread throughout the book, a number of essays across sections are connected through reappearing subtopics. Two essays, for example, address the issue of autobiographical projection onto historical figures as crucial narrative strategy, for example in the works of Christa Wolf and Günter de Bruyn. Ricarda Schmidt’s intriguing reading of Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort. Nirgends with a precise analysis of the original Kleist quotes and their recontextualization in Wolf’s novel is one of the strongest pieces in the volume. Related to the strategy of autobiographical projection is the complicated subject of self-censorship of writers in the GDR that is addressed in essays in Part One and Two of the book. As Martin Kane shows for Hans Marchwitza or Renate Rechtien for Christa Wolf: authors consciously adjusted autobiographical details in their writings if the actual events or the author’s opinion on a subject collided with the official party line or the historical interpretations of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). This intriguing issue is less illuminated for writings after 1989. While the example of Schabowski demonstrates the desire to quickly provide a reading of one’s life that fits into the values and historical parameter of West Germany, autobiographi-cal reconstitutions or even the possibility of self-censorship of East German authors after 1989 are, if at all mentioned, more insinuated than analyzed. This could have proved a valuable angle, connecting Tate’s research to a contemporary issue that does not only highlight similar narrative strategies, but also provides a telling insight into the state of German society nearly 25 years after the opening of the Berlin Wall. Nonetheless, the volume presents a valuable addition to the scholarship on GDR literature and authors from the GDR, while at the same time singing well-deserved praise to Dennis Tate’s crucial research. It is hence likely that Ian Wallace’s claim “that this publication will remain an essential reference point for researchers in the field for many years to come” (7) will stand the test of time.

Regine Criser, University of North Carolina Asheville


Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany. By Andrew Bickford. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. 288. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0804773959.

In seiner Studie Fallen Elites beschreibt der amerikanische Anthropologe Andrew Bickford die deutsche Wiedervereinigung und ihre Auswirkungen aus der Sicht ehe-maliger Angehöriger der Nationalen Volksarmee (NVA) der DDR. Die ethnografische Schrift basiert insbesondere auf seinen persönlichen Gesprächen mit zahlreichen Offizieren und Wehrpflichtigen der NVA, geführt hauptsächlich zwischen 1997 und 2000, sowie seinen Erlebnissen bei Treffen des Landesverbands Ost des Deutschen Bundeswehrverbandes (DBwV) und der Arbeitsgruppe Geschichte der NVA im DBwV in diesem Zeitraum. Weitere Interviews führte er 2003 und 2006. Viele Auszüge aus seinen Gesprächen sind im Buch enthalten und sie sind der bei weitem interessanteste Aspekt des Werkes.

Im ersten Teil des Buches beschreibt Bickford allgemein die Rolle des Soldaten in Staat und Gesellschaft, um dann über die Militarisierung in der DDR zu sprechen. Obwohl er hier wenig Neues berichten kann, erhält man doch interessante Einblicke in die Art und Weise wie die Offiziere der NVA im Gespräch mit dem Autor nach der deutschen Vereinigung ihren Dienst und ihr Leben in der NVA rückblickend bewerteten. Für viele geht es dabei offensichtlich um eine Rechtfertigung ihrer Zeit in der Armee eines repressiven Regimes, die Rettung ihrer Soldatenehre angesichts einer öffentlichen Negativbewertung der NVA und die Darstellung ihrer Rolle in der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte. Der zweite Teil beschäftigt sich hauptsächlich mit der Lebenssituation der NVA Soldaten nach 1990 und ihrem vielfach angespannten Verhältnis zur neuen Bundesrepublik und Bundeswehr, hervorgerufen meist durch den Verlust der sozialen Sicherheit und beruflichen Perspektiven. Die Unzufrieden-heit einiger Gesprächspartner kulminiert in der Aussage, die NVA-Offiziere wären die “new Jews of Germany” (196).

Obwohl Bickford diese extreme Behauptung verurteilt, vertritt er die berechtigte Ansicht, dass viele NVA-Angehörige, insbesondere die Offiziere, zu den Verlierern der deutschen Vereinigung zählen. Darüber hinaus sieht er sie aber auch als Opfer, da sie der westdeutsche Staat und die Bundeswehr angeblich bewusst und geplant für ihren Dienst in der deutschen Armee jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs bestraft hätten: “The new German state and Bundeswehr went to great lengths to delegitimate the NVA and deny it any possible ‘positive’ role in German military identity or tradition” (197). Überzeugende Beweise dafür bleibt er leider schuldig.

Bickford lässt die meisten Aussagen seiner Gesprächspartner unkommentiert, was nach einer Weile den Eindruck erweckt, als würde er ihre Ansichten in jeder Hinsicht teilen. Dieser Eindruck wird auch durch die Verwendung von Begriffen aus der DDR-Propagandasprache verstärkt. Wiederholt spricht er beispielsweise von

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den “West German elites” und ihren Anstrengungen, die NVA-Soldaten nach der deutschen Vereinigung zu bestrafen um die Deutungshoheit über das, was es heißt, deutsch und deutscher Soldat zu sein, zu bewahren. Ein Problem dabei ist, dass er an keiner Stelle definiert, wer diese “West German elites” sind, weder in Theorie noch in Praxis. Dies ist umso bedenklicher, als dieser Begriff Teil der politischen Sprache der DDR war und überall in den Lehr- und Propagandamaterialien der NVA zu finden ist.

Die vielleicht schwersten Mängel von Fallen Elites sind die Einseitigkeit und die fehlende Rücksicht auf die politisch-historischen Umstände. Die Blickrichtung ist dezidiert von Ost nach West und hat einen stark antagonistischen Charakter: Wir gegen sie. Der Autor lässt weder westdeutsche Entscheidungsträger und Soldaten nennenswert zu Worte kommen, noch beschreibt er hinreichend die politischen Umstände der Wiedervereinigung soweit sie die Eingliederung der NVA in die Bun-deswehr betrafen. Weder erwähnt Fallen Elites beispielsweise den Zwei-plus-Vier-Vertrag, noch den KSE-Vertrag von 1990; weder den letzten Verteidigungsminister der DDR, Rainer Eppelmann, noch Gerhard Stoltenberg, Verteidigungsminister der Bundesrepublik vor und nach der deutschen Vereinigung. So gibt es in Tendenz eine seltsame De-Personalisierung und Verallgemeinerung der politischen Prozesse und eine Über-Personalisierung und Individualisierung wenn es um die NVA-Offiziere geht. Dadurch entsteht ein narratives Ungleichgewicht: Die NVA-Offiziere, die meist nur mit ihrem Vornamen identifiziert werden, stehen als die Opfer der deutschen Vereinigung auf der einen Seite, und ein gesichtsloser westdeutscher Staat, der mit seinen Eliten darauf aus ist, Rache für den Kalten Krieg zu üben, auf der anderen. Zwar geht es dem Buch darum, die bisher weitestgehend übersehene Geschichte der NVA-Offiziere zu erzählen, doch dies wäre wesentlich glaubwürdiger geschehen, wenn der Kontext ausgewogener gewesen wäre.

Die Interviews selbst sind weder in voll Länge noch im Original zugänglich. Außer-dem ist nicht immer klar, in welchem Jahr ein Gespräch geführt wurde. Gelegentlich gibt es mehrere Sprecher, die nicht einzeln identifiziert werden. Von den wenigsten Gesprächspartnern sind zudem der volle Name, das Alter oder die genaue Dienst-stellung bekannt. Dies alles lässt sich wahrscheinlich damit erklären, dass der Autor seinen Quellen Anonymität zugesagt hatte. So legitim dies auch sein mag, es ändert nichts an der Tatsache, dass diese Textpassagen für eine weitere wissenschaftliche Verwertung nur eingeschränkt geeignet sind. Dies ist durchaus zu bedauern, selbst wenn man nie vergessen darf, dass die vertretenen Meinungen in den Interviews keineswegs repräsentativ für alle NVA-Offiziere sein können. Einerseits ist dafür die Anzahl der Gesprächspartner viel zu klein. Andererseits rekrutierten sich diese anscheinend hauptsächlich aus einem eng vernetzten Personenkreis, einer sehr homogene Gruppe, mit ähnliche Erfahrungen, Ansichten und Interessen. DDR- und NVA-kritische Stimmen fehlen größtenteils.

An einigen Stellen erhält man daher auch den Eindruck, als würde Fallen Elites


die Beschreibung der DDR als Unrechtsregime oder repressive Gesellschaft als west-deutsche Propaganda abtun wollen (108). Andere Passagen lesen sich als Vorwurf an die Bundesrepublik und die Bundeswehr, nicht genügend NVA Offiziere übernommen zu haben, während Bickford auch sehr deutlich erklärt, wie diese Soldaten—teilweise über Jahrzehnte—politisch geschult und indoktrinierten worden waren; wie sie der SED-Staat für ihre Loyalität mit Privilegien belohnte und sie dementsprechend Nutznießer der Militarisierung gewesen sind; und wie man sie zum Hass auf den Klassenfeind und die Bundeswehr geschult hatte. Dieser Widerspruch zwischen Analyse und Beschreibung findet sich häufiger.

Um den Wert von Fallen Elites einschätzen zu können, darf man das Buch nicht an seinen eigenen Ansprüchen messen, denn seine ambitionierten Ziele kann es nicht erreichen. So fällt es abschließend schwer zu sagen, für wen dieses Buch geeignet ist, denn für Historiker, die mit dem Prozess der deutschen Vereinigung vertraut sind, bietet Fallen Elites nichts Neues, und für andere Leser ist es zu einseitig, zu generalisierend und lässt zu viele Aspekte aus, um mit ruhigem Gewissen empfohlen werden zu können. Liest man es jedoch, um einen Eindruck von der Gefühlswelt der ehemaligen NVA-Offiziere nach 1990 zu erhalten, ergeben sich durchaus interessante und sehr anschauliche Einsichten darüber, wie diese Gruppe versuchte, nach diesem für sie in beruflicher und sozialer Hinsicht meist katastrophalen Ereignis in einer neuen Welt zurechtzukommen, wie sie sprachlich und ideologisch der Vergangenheit verhaftet blieben und wie sie sich ein neues Selbstbild schufen, indem sie einen großen Teil der vergangenen vierzig Jahre ausblendeten. Was Bickford aber auch deutlich macht ist, dass dies in vielen Fällen eine Reaktion darauf war, wie wenige Aufmerksamkeit die westdeutsch-dominierte politische und militärische Führung nach der Wende den ehemaligen NVA-Soldaten schenkte, die einst vom Staat umsorgt und hofiert worden waren und sich plötzlich in völliger Bedeutungslosigkeit wiederfanden.

Sören Steding, Luther College

Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia. By Mattias Frey. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. x + 206. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-0857459473.

Something—one can no longer deny it—is happening in German film studies. A discipline that for the longest time studied German national cinema primarily as an historical phenomenon, looking to it as a way to make sense of the country’s past, appears in the process of recalibrating its critical lens. Without wanting to suggest that Germany’s history is no longer relevant to German film studies—landmark books such as Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Prince-

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ton, 2011), the ongoing work by scholars such as Sabine Hake and Eric Rentschler, as well as the steady outpouring of scholarship focusing on East German cinema history would clearly belie such a claim—I am nevertheless struck by how, in recent years, an increasing number of scholars have investigated contemporary German cinema and its relation not merely to the country’s past but also to its present. One might speculate that German film studies’ turn toward the present symptomatically expresses larger sociocultural transformations affecting postwall Germany, not least the phenomenon of Normalisierung—the apparently growing desire among Germans to have their country be considered, at long last, a “normal” nation state. Without endorsing this Normalisierungswunsch, German films studies seems to acknowledge and respond to the possibility that the country’s terrible twentieth century history no longer has the same purchase on its present as it arguably still did just a decade ago.

Whatever the reasons, this adjustment in focus among scholars of German cinema is powerfully evidenced by various books published since 2010, including Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager’s The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010), Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s New Directions in German Cinema (2011), Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht’s Kino in Bewegung. Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms (2011), Pierre Gras’ Good Bye Fassbinder!: Le cinéma allemand depuis la réunification (2011), Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel’s Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (2012), Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore’s Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria (2012), Paul Cooke’s Contemporary German Cinema (2012), and Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Brad Prager’s Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema (2013). Mattias Frey’s monograph is an important addition to this steadily growing library.

In some respects one can understand Frey’s book, which focuses on “the promi-nence of the historical genre” (1) in contemporary German cinema, as offering a sustained reflection on this very change in German film scholarship. Frey reads recent German film productions’ encounters with significant historical events—the German soccer team’s 1954 World Cup victory in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003); the RAF crisis of the 1970s in Christopher Roth’s Baader (2002) and Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex, 2008); the paranoia affecting West Germany’s alternative Milieu during the Cold War’s waning days in Hans-Christian Schmid’s 23 (1999); the Stasi’s machinations in Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006); as well as the fall of the wall and its aftermath in, respectively, Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go, 2000)—as having as much if not more to say about the extradiegetic sociocultural circumstances surrounding their moment of production as they do about their diegetic content’s historical context. As Frey writes in his concluding chapter,


“The Future of the German Past,” the “postwall historical films are products of a new attitude toward national history in general and a confident domestic industry in specific” (169). Enabled by a national and increasingly transnational funding system that approaches film as “more of a commercial enterprise than primarily . . . as an expressive art” (171), these films mark the very changes that Germans’ attitude towards their country’s history have undergone since unification. This is why it is more productive to read some of these films’ “obsession for historical authenticity”—which Frey foregrounds in, for instance, his excellent discussion of Becker’s and von Donnersmarck’s films—as a symptom of the present than as more or less accurate representations of the past. As Frey puts it in his discussion of Good Bye, Lenin!, “the paradox of Ostalgie’s obsession for historical authenticity . . . is that the closer the film attends to the authenticity of Eastern material objects, the more perfectly the film promotes a Western perspective” (132). A film such as Becker’s, but also Edel’s and Wortmann’s, is of interest, then, less for how accurately it represents its historical subject than for how it marks the present’s political desires.

Frey’s discussions throughout are governed by a crucial methodological premise. Arguing against interpreting these films through the lens of the “‘heritage film’ model” (5) in which “the postwall German historical film [is subjected] to an ideological critique on the basis of the films’ naive historicism” (4), he instead shows “how recent German historical film deploys constellations of film history to recreate the past” and, in so doing, elucidates “the postwall German film historical imaginary” (7). Frey draws on work by scholars such as Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, who observe that “contemporary cinephilia” is characterized by “its radically different way of employing the historical signifier” and which “‘engages in popular reworkings’ of the film-historical imaginary” in response to the unhinging of “‘media time’” from “‘traditional historical time’” (8), as well as Elena Gorfinkel, from whom he takes the concept of the “film historical imaginary” (10). Frey concurs with Gorfinkel that today’s audiences are increasingly “cine-literate [due to] the spread and popularity of festivals, multiplexes, discussion forums on the internet, and DVDs” (11). Indeed, Frey suggests that the filmmakers under discussion embrace this phenomenon of widespread cine-literacy as their films’ condition of possibility: today’s popular Ger-man cinema, Frey argues, “indulges in this [intertextual film historical] referencing extensively and often consciously,” so much so that the film historical imaginary “has become a constituent element of the postwall historical cinema” (11). Frey’s methodological gambit, then, is to view these postunification German historical films as not merely being about German history but also serving a crucial historiographi-cal function: they do not so much constitute “naive historicism” as what he calls a “cinema of retro-flection”—“a highly ambivalent negotiation of German history and film history which looks back to the recent past through, over, and/or against film

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history and prior interpretations of national history, and above all those of the New German Cinema” (12–13).

Desiring to move us beyond debates about these films’ representational accuracy (and whether or not they do “justice” to the past), Frey successfully illuminates how these films are “in search of a useable past” (13); how their search is crucially medi-ated by their complex engagement with film history; and how, implicitly and explicitly, these films offer what they find as something that is useful for and in the present. How these films are being used, or perhaps abused, by their audience for living life in the present is a question, however, that Frey leaves unanswered. Put differently, whether or not the results of these films’ search are in fact useful for and in the pres-ent—and, importantly, who gets to decide what counts as useful—remains to be seen. That Frey’s study provokes us to ask this question even though he does not actually pose it indicates, to me, how successfully he executes his argument. Indeed, I think this question emerging from Frey’s work is a political question to which German film studies would do well to respond.

Marco Abel, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Contemporary German Cinema. By Paul Cooke. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. 312. Paper $23.70. ISBN 978-0719076190.

We were due for an updated study of contemporary German cinema that examines the directions taken by films in the 2000s, and Paul Cooke delivers an eminently read-able and engaging analysis. The film corpus for this book consists of predominantly feature films from the decade 2000–2010, touching on over 300 titles, with individual readings of some two dozen films to illustrate his arguments.

To situate the work, Cooke takes seriously Sabine Hake’s question from her 2008 book: how should we define a national cinema? He sets out to consider the weight given to politics over aesthetics, filmmakers over film audiences, and shows how the role of the medium is currently contested. Cooke positions himself as a fan of New German Cinema, with an interest in how contemporary films engage with this period, and references the New German Cinema in each chapter as a comparative marker for recent developments. The study combines a text-based approach to readings of significant films with a focus on industry.

A particular strength of this book is the first chapter (of seven) on the effects of film finance structures in Germany. Beginning with statistical information on the recent success of German cinema on all fronts (financial returns, popularity with audiences, and critical acclaim), the chapter goes on to offer a detailed view of the impact that the film economy, including the increase in transnational funding, has on


the types of films being produced. New German Cinema pitted art against commerce, while contemporary filmmakers are more divided: Henckel von Donnersmarck, for example, considers it possible to have success in both spheres, while Haneke perceives the ambition for both as undermining the industry.

Cooke rightly points out that authenticity is a signifier that has gained importance in the 2000s, in part, as a reaction to what Rentschler termed the “cinema of consensus” of the 1990’s. Two chapters of the book are occupied with questions of authenticity: chapter 2 explores how questions of authenticity and realism are answered differently by reality TV or mockumentary, then by Andreas Dresen, who draws on his DEFA background to offer constructed forms of everyday life, and finally, by filmmakers of the Berlin School, Angela Schanelec and Christian Petzold, who present new images of individuals in a globalized society. The examination of authenticity is drawn into chapter 3, which enters the fraught territory of heritage cinema; that is, the popular, but much maligned movies drawn from Germany’s National Socialist past and from the oppression in the GDR. Cooke leads us cogently through the scholarly debates around authenticity in heritage films: as a selling point, critiqued as fetishization, or an access to new ways of relating to the past. He reflects on the more active role that spectators have taken in film responses, through mashups of Der Untergang, through fan fiction, or blogger responses to learning about history through film.

Like the question of authenticity, transnationalism in cinema is a thread that is drawn through several chapters. The work deals with the funding structures that encourage the development of a European Cinema, and the pressures to present transnational stories that risk becoming homogeneous “Europudding,” references the focus on the national in relation to the international in New German Cinema, and articulates ways in which some films, such as Fatih Akin’s, can uncover the creative potential of transnational identity formation. There are several detailed accounts of how transnationalism features in specific films, and Cooke concludes the discussion of transnationalism by saying that German national identity continues to be a major force in German cinematic production, perhaps now with an increased global awareness.

Chapter 5 covers the legacy of women’s filmmaking in New German Cinema as it relates to current production, particularly the market share and role of women directors. The numbers of women in the film industry have increased significantly, and this chapter shows women directors’ particular contributions both to heritage cinema and to the transnational themes. Other topics covered are projections of America in New German Cinema and now (chapter 6) and Heimatfilm (chapter 7). With the spate of studies on manifestations of the transnational in literature and film, there has been at the same time a resurgence in the term Heimat as a descriptor for the search for belonging and identity in German film. To the notion of Heimatfilm, Cooke devotes his anchor chapter, asserting that a large proportion of contemporary

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films could be assigned to a Heimat corpus, in which German identity, community and history are explored.

Reading the success of recent German cinema against a backdrop of New German Cinema offers insights into both the legacy of previous filmmakers and the innova-tion of the current generation. This excellent study will serve as a go-to resource for undergraduates and specialists alike, and is likely to find its way onto many course syllabi. The readings of films and thematic discussions are accessible even for those who have limited knowledge of the film corpus; the filmography, bibliography and index are useful, and important voices in recent German film criticism are well synthesized. Cooke’s knowledgeable perspective on trends and developments in German cinema contributes to larger academic debates, particularly in the areas of transnationalism, realism/authenticity, and heritage cinema, while the focus on the industry forces brings the work of German media scholars and Anglophone scholar-ship on German cinema closer together.

Cheryl Dueck, University of Calgary

Germans Going Global: Contemporary Literature and Cultural Globalization. By Anke S. Biendarra. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Pp. 244. Cloth €94.95. ISBN 978-3110282818.

Germans Going Global offers a unique and insightful look at the impact of globalization on the German literary market, including its traces in text content and aesthetics, its consequences for authorship, and the use of old and new media in global reception and circulation. In this, Anke Biendarra’s study tackles some of today’s most urgent issues related to the global reach of capitalism, including precarity, economic insecurity, and neoliberal working practices, showing how such experiences define subjectivities that literature is well suited to illuminate. She thus provides an important and hitherto missing dimension to a topic that has urgency and currency well beyond the literary.

Biendarra’s study marks a clear departure from past research on such related areas as transnationalism and makes a convincing case for German Studies’ place in discussions of globalization, a topic the field has been slow to address, due in part, she claims, to its persistent interest in nation, national identity, and nationhood (9). She grounds the relationship of the global and the local in numerous analyses outside of and in German Studies (such as those by Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck or Stuart Taberner), and is particularly indebted to Roland Robertson, from whom she borrows the term glocalization. A consideration of the glocal also guides her choice of contemporary German texts that deal explicitly with “conditions of global existence and contemporary realities” (6). Such literature provides commentary on


the ongoing effects of globalization locally as well as abroad. In her corpus, Biendarra, perhaps surprisingly, does not include those texts whose authors have an explicit transnational background (due in part to what she sees as a need for a comparative or more contextually expansive approach to such authors). Instead, she uses a glocal approach to analyze the material, thematic, and aesthetics dimensions of literary work and authorship of writers such as Judith Herrmann, Ingo Schulze, Elke Naters, John von Düffel, Christian Kracht, and Kathrin Röggla. Throughout, she deploys a set of interdisciplinary-based theoretical considerations based in media studies, sociology, political science, economics, and anthropology.

In charting a trajectory of global impasses related to neoliberal subjectivity, she begins already in the literary debates of the 1990s (chapters one and two), and offers an overview of the issues and debates foundational to the contemporary German literary market, including some of the primary features of the categories of literature in the 1990s (Fräuleinwunder, pop) and the debates around their reach in the public sphere of the emerging Berlin Republic (realism, authenticity, media). Her analysis of authorship with relation to globalization is one of the many aspects that make Biendarra’s study particularly strong. Her understanding that authors are both “(self-performing) subjects and (managed) objects” (19) illustrates the increasing importance globalization and the public sphere, including media, has had on the local construction of the author in the German literary marketplace. She notes, for example, how the literary and authorial development of Judith Herrmann “connects to the very globalization of both the city of Berlin and, by symbolic extension, to the Berlin Republic” (32). Biendarra anchors texts and authors in the local immediacy of space and shows, in turn, how the forces of globalization interact within that space. This connection, firmly established in the first chapters, resonates explicitly and implicitly across all of the chapters.

The remaining three chapters deepen their look at specific aspects of globalization and literature, beginning with literature of work during the first decade of the 2000s (chapter three), unemployment (chapter four), and finally turning to global travel as both mobility and immobility (chapter five). In this last chapter, she shows how travel narratives illuminate the manner in which globalization has changed the way in which we reside at home: “National borders and local places have ceased to be the clear supports of our identity; after all, globalization transforms the localities we inhabit” (150). The study ends not with a conclusion but with a coda, which analyses narratives of 9/11 and their documentary style. The coda forms an excellent bridge from the local to the global in a very different way than the chapters; it builds on the conclusions of the fifth chapter by showing how the local (German identity in the Berlin Republic) is still retained when shifted through travel to a new local context (New York), though it is transformed by the global (the effects of terrorism).

Thus Biendarra focuses not only on the positive, performative, and self-actualizing

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reach of globalization in German literature, but also on the negative representation of global forces: “Much of post-millennial aesthetic production demonstrates how painfully aware German-speaking artists are of the negative side of global capital-ism . . .” (91). Here, for example, she discusses Kathrin Röggla, who “undertakes a form of aesthetic appropriation that demonstrates the forms subjectivity takes, the coercive mechanisms that arise through the self-regulation of the neoliberally administered subject, and the price paid by the individual as a result of transferring social organizational structures into the subject itself” (121). Biendarra shows how these authors open literature to the everyday inequities and violence of capitalism, including the effect such aspects as precarity, the broad reach of economic forces into the private sphere, or neoliberal business practices have on the subject, subjectivity, and the body (99, 119).

Germans Going Global not only skillfully shows the importance of the global within contemporary literature, but also how literature impacts the broader range of discourses essential to globalization, for, as she argues, “intellectuals and authors continue to play a crucial role in the public sphere” (12). From the outset of the study, which begins in the understanding (following Ulrich Beck) that Germans have been particularly affected by the ambivalence produced in the wake of both Europeanization and globalization (2), to its end, Biendarra convincingly argues for the necessary importance of German Studies more broadly, and German literature specifically, in shaping the experience of and discourse on global social, economic, and political conditions and their local resonances. This argument for relevancy also suggests that Germans Going Global takes a central position in shaping the direction of German literary and cultural studies today.

Carrie Smith-Prei, University of Alberta

Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 by Christina Morina

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Transcript of Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 by Christina Morina