DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 Reviews German #Me too. Rape Cultures and Resistance. 1770-2020. Ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. 413pp. $99.00/ $29.95. #MeToo - durch diese internationale Bewegung im Internet erhielten von sexueller Gewalt, von sexueller Ausbeutung, Nötigung und Vergewaltigung betroffene Frauen die Möglichkeit zu sagen „me too“ - „ich auch“. So einfach diese zwei Worte auch erscheinen - so grundstürzend neu ist der Vorgang aus dem Jahr 2017 gewesen. Frauen in vielen (westlichen) Ländern erhoben in großer Zahl ihre Stimmen, sagten, was ihnen zugefügt worden war. Plötzlich konnten sie davon ausgehen, Gehör zu finden, ohne dass ihre Glaubwürdigkeit in Zweifel gezogen wurde oder ihnen gar eine Mitschuld gegeben wurde. Ein jahrhundertelanges Schweigen über Vorgänge wurde gebrochen, für die es nur wenige und zumeist höchst deutungsbedürftige Dokumente - etwa Gerichtsakten - gibt. Spuren finden sich allerdings in der Literatur, auch in den bildenden Künsten, die dafür ihre eigene Sprache und indirekte Darstellungsweise entwickelt haben, ohne dass das Verbrechen verharmlost worden wäre. Allerdings ist es bezeichnend, dass in der Literatur bis weit ins 20. Jahrhundert hinein keine Frau in einem literarischen Text sagte, sie sei vergewaltigt worden. #MeToo eröffnete die Möglichkeit, dass die Täter für das Begangene Folgen zu gewärtigen haben. #MeToo: die Frau rückt ins Zentrum. Wie wenig dies historisch selbstverständlich ist, zeigt ein Blick auf die Etymologie von ‚rape‘, aus dem lateinischen raptus abzuleiten - Raub, Frauenraub. Frauenraub war über Jahrhunderte im deutschen Recht ein Synonym für Vergewaltigung (früher: Notzucht). Dies zeigt, wie die Frau als Teil des männlichen Eigentums gedeutet wurde: durch den Frauenraub erfolgte der Entzug seines Eigentums. Unabhängig davon, ob es einen Sexualakt gegeben hat oder nicht: ihre Ehre und damit die ihrer männlichen Angehörigen, ihrer gesamten Familie war verletzt. Mit gravierenden Folgen im sozialen Leben. Aufs Engste damit war der Umstand verbunden, dass Frauen nicht über das sprachen - sprechen konnten, was ihnen angetan worden war. Welche mentalitätshistorischen Transformationen der #MeToo-Bewegung vorausgingen, lässt sich so ausmachen. Dies ist die Folie, vor deren Hintergrund die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes ihre Eindringlichkeit erhalten. Sie haben das Verdienst, die durch #MeToo angestoßenen Fragestellungen für den deutschsprachigen Bereich aufzunehmen, sie anhand einer Fülle von Materialien zu analysieren und in ihren historischen Kontext zu stellen. Dabei geht es sowohl um Ausblicke auf die Ge- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 342 Reviews schichte von sexueller Gewalt um 1800 und im Zweiten Weltkrieg als auch um ihre Darstellung in Literatur, Bildender Kunst, Film und Theater. Die einzelnen Analysen knüpfen produktiv an Forschungen der germanistischen Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft aus den letzten Jahrzehnten an. Neben Untersuchungen von bekannten und bereits mehrfach analysierten Texten wie denen von Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Heinrich von Kleist, Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann und Elfriede Jelinek, stehen Bildwerke von Otto Dix und Charlotte Salomon sowie Filme der Vergangenheit (wie Jud Süß ), der Gegenwart ( Gegen die Wand ) und Fernsehserien wie Tatort . Der Zeitraum zwischen 1770 bis 2020 wird in fünf großen Abschnitten durchmessen: „Histories“ - „Dialogues across Times“ - „Sexual Violence, Warfare, and Genocide“ - „Institutions of #MeToo“ - „#MeToo across Cultural and National Borders“. Nach einer höchst informativen Einleitung der beiden Herausgeberinnen werden sechzehn Einzelstudien präsentiert. Diese Einleitung gibt einen gelungenen wissenschaftshistorischen Problemaufriss. Zu Recht wird dabei an rechtshistorisch informierte kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungen erinnert (vgl. S. 3ff.), zumal an die Studie von Susan Brownmiller Against our Will (1975). Darüber hinaus werden Hinweise auf Ursachenforschungen für Vergewaltigungen gegeben, bis hin zu den soziobiologisch-evolutionsgeschichtlichen Thesen von Randy Thornhill und Craig T. Palmer, wonach Männer durch Vergewaltigungen eine Verbesserung der Gensubstanz ihrer jeweiligen ethnischen Gruppe zu erreichen suchten (vgl. 5 f). Wie ein roter Faden zieht sich durch diesen einleitenden Überblick das Motiv der Machtdynamiken sexualisierter Gewalt und deren Deutung. Das gilt zum einen für die direkt Beteiligten, zum anderen aber auch retrospektiv, wenn es darum geht, Fehlverhalten und Verbrechen beim Namen zu nennen. Die „lens of #MeToo“ (vgl. 22) erweist sich als überaus produktives methodisches Verfahren, um viele Traditionen gegen den Strich zu lesen und Spuren einer Misogynie freizulegen, die sich auch in Deutungstraditionen von Texten und Kunstwerken eingeschrieben hat. Exemplarisch dafür etwa der Beitrag „#Me Too: Prostitution and the Syntax of Sexuality around 1800“ von Patricia Ann Simpson zur Figur des Gretchens in Goethes Faust I , in dem diese zu Recht als Begehrende vorgestellt wird (vgl. 63). Sie ausschließlich im Kontext der frömmigkeitsgeschichtlich interessanten Gretchenfrage zu assoziieren, greift, wie Simpson klarstellt, zu kurz. Alle Beiträge lassen sich mit Gewinn lesen, auch wo sie zu Widerspruch herausfordern. Aufschlussreich ist in dieser Hinsicht der Aufsatz von Lisa Wille, „Eighteenth-Century #MeToo: Rape culture and Victim-Blaming in Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin “. In diesem Bürgerlichen Trauerspiel wird die spätere Kindermörderin Evchen Humbrecht vergewaltigt - in einem DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 Reviews 343 nicht einsehbaren Kämmerchen auf der Bühne. Zu Recht unterstreicht Wille, dass es sich nach heute geltendem Recht um eine Vergewaltigung handelt (vgl. 57). Hinzuzufügen wäre aber, dass dies nach zeitgenössisch-damaligem Recht keineswegs so der Fall war, denn Evchen Humbrecht war ohne Wissen des Vaters gemeinsam mit ihrer Mutter in ein Wirtshaus zweifelhaften Rufs gegangen. Weil sie damit schon ihre Ehre verletzt hatte, konnte die Tat im damaligen Verständnis kein Ehrenraub sein. Was uns heute als „victim blaming“ erscheint, steht in der Gefahr, ohne historische Kontextualisierung ein anachronistisches Deutungsmuster zu werden. Zugleich kann Literatur aber, indem sie die Leiden der Opfer, hier Evchen Humbrecht, in den Blick nimmt, Sachverhalte anders deuten als das zeitgenössische Recht, das ausschließlich am Täter orientiert argumentieren musste. Wille zeigt zu Recht, dass sich die Deutung eines erzwungenen Beischlafs auf der Bühne in den letzten Jahrzehnten durchgesetzt hat. Zu Recht weist sie aber auch auf neuere Versuche in der deutschen Germanistik hin, über diesen Tatbestand einfach hinwegzugehen und Evchen Humbrecht in eine Reihe mit den Frauenfiguren in Lessings Trauerspielen zu stellen, womit man, wie Wille betont, am Konfliktpotential von Wagners Trauerspiel vorbeigeht und nur ein neuerliches Beispiel dafür gibt, wie tief „male entitlement is anchored in cultural memory“ (57). Leider blendet Wille die sich verändernden Einstellungen von Vater Humbrecht einerseits und des Vergewaltigers andererseits aus, womit das eigentliche zeitgenössische Skandalon, die Kritik an den sozialen Verhältnissen, etwas zu kurz kommt. Jessica Davis untersucht Otto Dix‘ Serie Lustmord , der Titel der Abhandlung „The Women of Otto Dix’s ‚Lustmord‘ Series“. Dabei verfährt sie ausschließlich psychologisierend im Kontext von Dix‘ Biografie und verfolgt die These, „that Dix created the Lustmord series as an outlet for his hostility towards women because he believed that they were ultimately responsible for all war […] and because he resented that, unlike traumatized veterans, the New Women were thriving in the postwar period. The Lustmord series can thus be seen as Dix ‚righting‘ the wrongs he experienced during and after the war“ (147). Dagegen kann eingewendet werden, dass Dix‘ Serie verstörend wirkt, das soll sie vielleicht sogar: sollten Opfer von Lustmord, also Frauen, die getötet wurden während der Mann Lust empfand, ästhetisierend dargestellt werden, also als ein schöner weiblicher Körper? Oder gilt hier vielleicht ein Darstellungsverbot? Lenkt Dix nicht die Aufmerksamkeit auf das Verheerende des Lustmordes? Im Zentrum der Darstellungen ist jeweils die versehrte weibliche Leiche, weder die Tat selbst noch der Täter. Auch Dix‘ Mädchen am Spiegel muss nicht ausschließlich unter der Maßgabe gedeutet werden, dass Dix der Frau ihre Humanität genommen hat (vgl. 169). Dix‘ Gemälde kann auch in der ikonographischen Tradition der Frau Welt gedeutet werden: Das Sinnbild für die Falschheit und DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 344 Reviews Vergänglichkeit der Welt ist seit dem Mittelalter die schöne Frau, die auf der Rückseite allerdings von Würmern zerfressen ist - ein in Theologie und Kirche tradiertes Bild. In Dix‘ Gemälde wird diese Tradition gebrochen und verfremdet - und damit kritisiert. Wenn der Anspruch erhoben wird, den Frauen auf den Gemälden eine Stimme zu geben, weil diese „countless real women who were murdered in a similar manner“ (170) repräsentierten, so entsteht die Gefahr eines historischen Anachronismus. Sofern man Gemälde einzig als Dokumente realhistorischer Vorgänge sieht und dabei die ikonographischen Traditionen und Wirkungsintentionen bei Seite lässt, riskiert man, die Komplexität des Dargestellten zu unterbieten. Die in diesem Band versammelten Analysen machen deutlich, welche aufklärende Funktion historisch argumentierende Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaften haben können. Zumal in Zeiten eines Krieges in Europa, inden der Angreifer einerseits mit Atomwaffen droht, zugleich Potenzmittel für die Soldaten zur Verfügung gestellt werden, um die Feinde durch Anwendung von sexueller Gewalt zu erniedrigen. Dem Band ist eine breite Rezeption zu wünschen. Gesa Dane, Freie Universität Berlin Dirk Niefanger: Lessing divers: Soziale Milieus, Genderformationen, Ethnien, und Religionen. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2023. 394 pp. €34. Dirk Niefanger provides his readers with a lively tour through much of Lessing's literary oeuvre , considering both familiar and unfamiliar texts in an effort to explore new perspectives on the canonical and the micro-canonical Lessing. He laments with some justification that Lessing is generally only known “durch eine Handvoll Texte” (dust jacket) while his production extends far beyond that. Not only has the canon been limited in Niefanger's opinion, but also the entry points (Zugänge) to the work rarely expand past the usual rubrics of “Toleranz und Mitleid” (20). He proposes moving beyond these characteristics, as well as beyond the basic categories of diversity analysis, namely race, gender, and class. To this end, he has divided his study into segments on “ soziale Milieus, Gender-Formationen, Ethnien und Religionen ” (20). From this broad platform, the author launches a series of close readings, often straightforward and with interesting, if sometimes predictable, departures from standard scholarly treatments. For example, he mounts a defense of Miss Sara Sampson 's villainous Marwood (single mother, abandoned) and also of Ettore Gonzaga, Emilia Galotti's princely tormenter. In the case of the latter, Niefanger cites Gonzaga's “Ist es, zum Unglücke so mancher, nicht genug, dass Reviews 345 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 Fürsten Menschen sind […]” (114). He explains in detail how princes are indeed people too, dwelling on Gonzaga's lovesick state and the difficulties of thinking clearly and acting morally under its influence. Niefanger even suggests some unconvincing ways out of this dilemma-though Lessing has, in my opinion, effectively blocked these avenues. Gonzaga could marry Emilia zur linken Hand or let her marry Appiani and have an affair with her. This kind of speculation does open up the texts and diversify them-Niefanger's purpose-but it is here and elsewhere closer to a more speculative fan fiction than conventional literary inquiry. Overall, Niefanger emphasizes the variety of viewpoints that can be adopted when reading Lessing and the ways in which this variety is reflected, as he sees it, in Lessing's sensitivity to social, racial, and gender hierarchies. I believe that Lessing often leaves room for these impressions and opinions, but I don't think that the book's true value emerges from the literary readings-though the texts are well-selected and numerous. The real value of this volume lies in its impressive philological contextualization of the texts it addresses. Niefanger has vast knowledge of the provenance of these texts, their historical conditioning, their reception and their receivers, and even their commercial roots. There is a stunning amount of contextual information in this volume, and it will be a useful compendium for future scholars who seek background on Lessing's literary writings. Of course, the volume of information and the depth of philology can sometimes slow or even obscure the process of argument with peripheral concerns, occasionally producing a kitchen-sink effect. There are frequent digressive or retardative passages as in Niefanger's discussion of Die Juden : Bevor ich näher auf das Stück eingehe, bitte ich, einen Blick auf zwei Nürnberger Theaterzettel aus der zweiten Hälfte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts zu werfen: Zunächst ist eine Ankündigung der Theatertruppe von Johann Josef Felix Kurz von 1766 (vermutlich in einer Neuauflage von 1778) abgedruckt, dann eine der Grünbergischen Gesellschaft wohl aus dem Jahre 1770. (255) This goes on for several pages, but the point of the Theaterzettel is that one of them lists the dramatis personae in order of appearance and the other according to social class. The latter representation relates to social diversity, but we go a long way-including reproductions of both programs-to make this minor point and in general we spend too much time on the periphery. It is an ornate and richly detailed periphery, but I wished for more direct and cogent analysis. We learn so much about context and I had expected also to learn more about the texts themselves or to find new ideas that were grounded in the literature. However, I do acknowledge that dwelling on this imbalance between rigorous DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 346 Reviews philology and highly speculative textual analysis may be the wrong approach to Niefanger's project. He seems to be aiming for a diverse or divergent study of Lessing's literary work, but I would object that he tries too hard and needs to signal his intentions more clearly. In fairness, he does explain his project: Mir geht es nicht um eine Bewertung von Lessings Ansichten und eineRekonstruktion seiner Denkweise, nicht um biographisch fokussierte Ideengeschichte oder um eine ethisch fixierte Literaturgeschichtsschreibung, sondern um eine Erweiterung, eine Relativierung unseres Lessing-Bildes. Ich möchte zeigen, wie divers man diesen Autor lesen kann oder muss und mit welch unterschiedlichen Texten, Schreibweisen und Ansichten wir ihn verbinden können. (244) “Diversity,” is a prodigiously overused term that in its simplest form denotes variety. Lessing offers dazzling variety to his readers and audiences and Niefanger takes us through much of this variety but, while pointing it out, he does not really address its essence. Gail K. Hart, University of California, Irvine Walker, John. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Transcultural Communication in a Multicultural World. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. 248 pp. $99.00. This thought-provoking study uses the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt to suggest a solution to one of the most intractable problems of our contemporary world: how to reconcile the coexistence of multiple cultures and religions with enlightenment universalism. John Walker uses Humboldt’s ideas to engage with today’s problems, particularly concerning the difficulties of interfaith dialogue between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. For this reason, he alternates between the explication of key concepts in Humboldt’s work and discussions of more recent writers. Sometimes, in fact, Humboldt drops out of the picture for extended periods, but Walker always returns to his central thesis that “Humboldt’s work is directly relevant to reconceiving the task of transcultural communication in a multicultural world and especially to the dialogue between faiths that such communication requires” (6). Walker begins by stressing the vital importance of language in Humboldt’s thought. Unlike Herder, Humboldt does not think of culture as a preexisting community into which one is born, but rather as the product of individual development ( Bildung ) through dialogue with others. Walker stresses this point in his third chapter on Humboldt’s essay on the Kawi language of Java. “For Reviews 347 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 Humboldt, languages […] belong to peoples (often in the plural), not the other way around” (86). There can never be an abstract, universal form of truth, or a monolithic culture that predetermines individual or collective consciousness, because individuals and cultures develop in dialogue with others. “Humanity as such” always consists “of actual persons acting in specific circumstances” (41). We live in language, which is always more process than product, a living, open-ended medium for communication between diverse individuals and peoples. Translation, broadly conceived, becomes a key concept for Humboldt’s understanding of the world, for interpersonal communication always engages us with those different from ourselves, even if they speak the same language. As Walker stresses in his second chapter, dialogue and translation are closely connected for Humboldt, which makes his thought “most relevant to our contemporary cultural situation, in which the recognition of identities in a plural and yet interconnected world is the most insistent cultural and political demand” (75). Throughout these opening chapters, Walker illuminates Humboldt’s ideas by contrasting them with those of others, including Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. Humboldt’s openness to other cultures distinguishes him from his contemporaries, as Walker argues in his fourth chapter, which contrasts his work with the Orientalist ideas of Hegel and Friedrich Schlegel. In the fifth chapter, Walker turns away from Humboldt to explore the possibilities for interfaith dialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Hauerwas, and Shahab Ahmed. Without claiming any direct influence of Humboldt on these thinkers, Walker suggests that they carry his spirit into our age by viewing dialogue between cultures and faiths as open-ended acts of translation and ongoing conversations. Walker ends this chapter with a brief look at the failure of intercultural understanding as depicted in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India . Chapter 6 introduces the concept of Scriptural Reasoning (SR), a form of religious thought that advocates interfaith understanding, opposes proselytism, and resists the temptation to claim that one religion is superior to another. Chapter 7 shifts the focus from the sacred to the secular; it consists of an extended critique of Habermas’s “concept of discourse without domination (‘herrschaftsfreier Diskurs’) as a paradigm for communication between cultures and faiths” (173). Chapter 8, finally, considers the relevance of Humboldt’s thought for the modern university. What is the line between free speech and hate speech, between the right to express controversial opinions and the need to protect others from verbal violence? The problem, as Walker sees it, lies in the need to retain respect for individuals even though they may express what some consider offensive ideas. The university should be a place that allows open debate of controversial topics, “a shared space in which multiple languages, DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 348 Reviews both literal and metaphorical, are now spoken” (213), and which can therefore serve as a paradigm for multicultural understanding in the modern world, as Humboldt’s work on university reform suggests. This is not to say that we must follow his specific plans for the organization of what is now known as the Humboldt University, but rather that the spirit of his reforms, based on open dialogue toward cross-cultural understanding, should inform our approach to higher education today. The book’s double title, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Transcultural Communication in a Multicultural World , gives a good indication of what it is and what it is not. It is not, or at least not primarily, a book about Wilhelm von Humboldt in biographical or historical context. It rather uses certain Humboldtian ideas as a way of intervening in current debates about religious differences and cross-cultural encounters. In keeping with the value that Humboldt ascribes to open communication, Walker’s argument is dialogic throughout, consisting of careful summaries of works by critics, philosophers, and theologians, followed by judicious critique. Humboldt is always the trump card in these analyses, the standard against which the validity or weakness of a given argument is measured, which paradoxically gives him an absolute authority that his stress on the need for critical exchange would seem to subvert. Walker’s individual summaries of various thinkers are nevertheless insightful and judicious, his larger purpose laudable. The daily barrage of depressing news about sectarian violence and ideological blindness reveals the urgent need for more dialogue between opposing forces in entrenched positions. In response to this situation, John Walker offers an erudite and eloquent defense of Humboldt’s plea for open debate and a willingness to listen. Todd Kontje, University of California, San Diego Patricia Anne Simpson: The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2020. 312 pp. $35.95. The central thesis of the book is simple: that ideologically, aesthetically, and materially (that is, through the manufacturing of toys and the separation of play spaces), German eighteenthand nineteenth-century cultures created a model of childhood that became dominant not just in Germany but across the Atlantic and much of the world. This model childhood, “with its taut dialectic of innocence and guilt, reward and punishment” (3), “insists on the child as an essential subject, integral to the construction of public identities” (2). To make the case, Simpson’s The Play World does not merely revisit familiar literary and Reviews 349 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 pedagogical discourses from the long eighteenth century (Rousseau, Campe, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Pestalozzi, Fröbel, Ariès, and the like, though they, too, are being addressed), but focuses primarily on lesser known writers, on children’s literature, on examples from the visual arts, and on material artefacts, toys, games, and their marketing, to reveal meticulously the religious, national, gender, ethnic, and racist biases that inform this model childhood as it evolves from the late seventeenth into the early twentieth century. Simpson’s study thus lays bare how this model childhood and the instrumentalization of play it invites, fails to live up to the ideals of the humanist-Enlightenment tradition that conceived and promoted it in the first place. The book’s focus on the design and advertisement of toys, games, and play spaces as well as on lesser-known authors and children’s literature allows Simpson to write a material history that extends and adds substance to the more familiar histories of childhood that focus primarily on philosophical and pedagogical discourses. Thus, The Play World traces the very idea of malleability back to a protestant play ethics that predates the emergence of the modern concept of childhood as a separate stage of human development (Ariès). Simpson shows how pietists like Henriette Catharina von Gersdorff already “sought religious reform through modeling the child, situating childhood in a redemptive play world” (37) and how a religious hymnal canon from the early 1800s “foregrounds the innocence of childhood and the emphasis on joy in play” (43). While Nicolaus Zinzendorf ’s espousing of free play as an asset to the natural development of children still runs counter to accepted religious norms, his hymns are the means by which this heterodoxy is taught and exported across the Atlantic. The protestant play ethic remains virulent in the Enlightenment for its professionalization of parenting. The focus of chapter 2 is on the little-known (and over 900 pages long) manual Ökonomisches Handbuch für Frauenzimmer that instructs mothers how to teach play. While the eighteenth century, as Simpson notes, also leaves room for paternal love (e.g. in Campe’s Kleine Kinderbibliothek ), its professionalization means that parenting becomes the domain of mothers. Despite much of the supervision of play around 1800 being restricted to the domestic sphere, the history of toy manufacturing reveals the increased politicization of play in the early nineteenth century. In chapter 3, “Revolutions of Play,” Simpson focuses on war toys and on discussions of toy guillotines and the yoyo to reflect on “transnational fantasies of German interventions in the spirit of resistance to tyranny” (92). Moreover, while texts and toys embed a “political consciousness and historical events into the practices and accessories of play” (113), they also come to cultivate masculine traits that are thought to “prepare the boy reader/ player for the seamless transition from imagined to adult DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 350 Reviews citizenship” (113). The discussion of Ellen Key (who casts Goethe as a pedagogical model for raising generations of greatness) and her “cringeworthy views about hygiene, heredity, and race that leave subsequent generations of readers in a state of profound moral ambivalence vis-à-vis her ostensibly progressive politics on gender equality” (108—9), announces first what in the subsequent chapters of the book emerges as a main theme: namely, how the Enlightenment educational ideals that, following Rousseau, “elevate the innate innocence of childhood, fostered under the ministry of Nature” (116), in the nineteenth century become the foil to instill a cultural, nationalist, ethnic, and racial sense of superiority that is as much an expression of German colonial ambitions as it is a means of helping to constitute a racialized identity and form of subjectivity. Subsequent chapters of the book discuss play worlds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that show colonial fantasies where the “model German child consumes and controls the world” (150). Colonial games, illustrations, and children’s literature like W.A. von Horn’s Ein Kongo-Neger: Eine Geschichte aus Sankt Domingo , or the 1890 calendar pamphlet “Knecht Ruprecht in Kamerun,” reveal a paradigm shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century where the “European child, thus educated subliminally and bold-facedly through entertainment and play, learns to eschew the ‘wild’ streak within and instead identify with white settler mentalities, shepherded by representations of satirized ‘savages’” (162). While Simpson’s book documents differences in how the German imagination treats Africa and the Americas-noting the “sometimes perplexing fascination Germans have historically exhibited for all things Native American” (175)-what unites both is the sense of moral superiority that is attached to the supposedly more civilized attitude toward play, a sense of superiority that ultimately is designed to help promote and justify nationalist, sexist, and racist attitudes. In this regard, the play worlds Simpson analyzes in the latter half of the book reveal the problematic consequences of the ethics that informed their creation as analyzed in the first part of the book. Simpson’s approach to the history of play is not univocal but rather puts into dialogue a number of different methodologies and concerns from cultural, gender, and postcolonial studies to anthropology, from new historicism to new materialisms. Even trauma studies make an appearance in Simpson’s discussion of Goethe’s mother’s refusal to buy her son a toy guillotine. Simpson is thus able to offer a multi-faceted view of the historical construction and functionalization of play worlds that will be of interest to a wide variety of readers. The rather eclectic use of theories, however, comes at the price of a more targeted narrative, a desideratum in particular with regard to the far-reaching political implications of the book. Simpson’s research shows in much detail how the play worlds of humanist and enlightenment traditions help fashion the ideal of Reviews 351 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 a human in the West that exerts an “astonishing and appalling dominance over culturally, racially, and ethnically constructed others and corroborating images of ‘otherness’” (188). In this regard, the plethora of historical material Simpson’s study offers do more than open “apertures into [a] greater understanding of the human condition in the modern, transatlantic world” (188); rather the book shows how the model childhood and fashioning of play has been instrumental in creating a racialized, gendered, and ethically restrictive ideal of “the human” that has failed so many humans (and other species). The substantiation of this point is highly relevant again in light of current political agendas that want to censor children’s literature in ways that preserve the problematic humanist conceits of this tradition-and another reason why Simpson’s The Play World deserves broad recognition today. Edgar Landgraf, Bowling Green State University Hanna Hamel, Eva Stubenrauch (Eds.): Wie Postdigital Schreiben? Neue Verfahren der Gegenwartsliteratur. Literatur in der digitalen Gesellschaft. transcript Verlag, 2023. 256 pp. € 39. With a focus on the influence of technology on contemporary literature, editors Hanna Hamel and Eva Stubenrauch situate this stimulating collection of essays firmly in the era of the postdigital-that is, a time when the digital has become so normalized that it is no longer seen as a revolution, but rather as an integral part of our everyday lives. As Hamel and Stubenrauch note in their introduction, while the question “wie schreiben? ” has been a part of literary text production since its beginnings, the “wie postdigital schreiben? ” is a fundamental question for the present and one that can be approached from many angles and disciplines. With digitalization, there have been far-reaching changes in the literary world such as the design, production, distribution, description, and review of texts. The titular question asks readers to consider what innovations have developed with the ever-increasing applications of technology--though several essays also examine those apparent innovations that are part of longstanding literary tradition. Across thirteen chapters come different answers and explanations of how, in a world which is decidedly postdigital, texts and authors work with the transformative potential of new media and technology, and how these same practices have retained a firm grounding in literary tradition. Contributions by Mattias Schaffrick, Eva Geulen, and Wolfgang Hottner explore the role of technology itself in the writing process. These chapters investigate the creation of technological tools like search engines, algorithms, DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 352 Reviews AI-generative technologies, and the innovation of the PDF. The authors show that while these new technologies certainly offer new opportunities to access, organize, and redistribute massive amounts of information quickly, they can also lead to reductive, misleading, and exclusionary work. Schaffrick investigates writers who interact with algorithms in a postdigital way in their texts. The authors in question do not simply reproduce the information gleaned from algorithms such as search engines, but rather use information produced by algorithms as a way to reflect on our usage of digital media and provide literary commentary. Geulen postulates that the use of AI technologies in the writing process works to both open the “black box” of the mysterious author-subject by highlighting and demystifying the writing process, and yet further cloaks the author-subject. With technology-and the use of AI technology specifically-the reader may no longer be able to identify which elements of a text came from a human author and which from the computer itself; the author-subject becomes further blurred when humans co-write with computers. Finally, Hottner details how significantly the PDF has changed the distribution and reception of literature. He investigates, for example, how analog and digital textual elements coexist and can represent an ambivalence between the print and digital versions. Exploring online metafiction, Martina Stemberger offers a very convincing study of the online, interactive writing practices of fan fiction writers and their meta-discussions of literary practices and the writing process. The metafictions of these fan writers create a hybridity of “old” and “new” media. As Stemberger argues, the flourishing of fan fiction and fan metafiction, which interrogates literary practices, newly defines both the “status” of literary activity and its borders. Johanna-Charlotte Horst and Philipp Ohnesorge both address the "glitch turn" in German-language literature. These chapters investigate the literary potential of a poetics of disruption or interruption that makes use of or simulates a digital “glitch.” Horst discusses the postdigital glitch-alike which reproduces the effect of a digital error-an aesthetic simulation of a glitch-and harnesses its critical potential in works like those of Georges Perec. Ohnesorge investigates the literary glitch turn as something that is not disruptive, but on the contrary something which, when used productively, allows for new elements of narrative transformation. Finally, in three separate chapters, Vera Bachmann, Elena Beregow, and Immanuel Nover investigate the postdigital writings of Christian Kracht and Leif Randt-specifically investigating their different aesthetics of Oberflächlichkeit . Both Kracht and Randt utilize the concept of Oberfläche to highlight depth and nuance in their works. Beregow contrasts what she terms as Kracht’s predigital use with Randt’s postdigtial one-highlighting the different uses of Oberfläch- Reviews 353 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 lichkeit between generations (Kracht as representative of Gen X and Randt as a Millenial). Nover likewise discusses Randt’s engagement with these themes, though with respect to his Tegel Media project-one in which Randt explores the uses of both the analog and digital in an online format with Tegel Media as his “Anti-Internet-Internet-Projekt.” Hamel and Stubenrauch's collection demonstrates both that the postdigital world shares a striking continuity with established literary traditions such as concrete poetry of the 1960s, and that it produces new developments and variations in writing, reading, and the concept of authorship. This volume celebrates a multiplicity of perspectives and methods in approaching the topic of the postdigital. This multiplicity of perspectives and approaches taken by the contributors effectively shows that an understanding of the postdigital cannot be reduced and combined into a simple definition. It adds to and continues an important conversation on the ways in which the postdigital can be discussed and defined, as well as exploring what the boundaries are in discussions of a “digital age.” Wie Postdigital Schreiben? highlights a multitude of voices that will inspire further investigation and discussion on the topic of how our writing, reading, distribution, and reception of texts in a postdigital world are impacted. Jaime W. Roots, Washington and Lee University Stanley Corngold. Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 315 pp. $120/ $29.95 For many scholars, retirement means just that. Not so for Stanley Corngold, Princeton Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature-and a household name in Kafka studies since his aptly titled 1973 critical debut The Commentator’s Despair and 1972 Bantam Critical Edition of Die Verwandlung , which has sold more than two million copies. As both a scholar and translator, Corngold’s work remains in rarified company in both breadth and acclaim. Expeditions to Kafka , an eclectic compendium of original and adapted work, is at once a career retrospective and primer for scholars of all levels who, like Corngold, have found themselves inside the grasp of the twentieth century’s foremost “athlete of anguish,” much the same way the man himself could not escape the claws of Prague (1). The Expeditions are essays in the purest sense. As Corngold warns in his preface-in which he admits to “no better justification [for the book] than the pleasure of approaching Kafka once again”-they are meant to be episodic rather than chronological or exhaustive, and they contain intentional repetitions (ix—x). They also sound an entire symphony of Corn- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 354 Reviews gold’s half-century of critical bona fides while remaining conversational, and somehow digressive and succinct at once. In the book’s first sections (centering on single works, but rife with digression borne of Kafka’s own relentless intertextuality), readers are treated to the origin story of that bestselling Verwandlung translation. Particularly winning is Corngold’s admission that he attempted to woo a skeptical editorial board by explaining that “as a speaker of Brooklynese, I had the lowdown on Kafka’s Prague German” (27); more so is the distinctly Corngoldian assertion that every sentence of Kafka’s most famous work “marches in a straight line through Gregor’s steady diminishment to his starving away to death,” lending itself to the now-infamous “infinite [critical] interpretability that is less an ‘invitation’ than a demand” (30, 37). This section is also where Corngold dives deep enough perhaps to stymie the casual reader; an exploration that compares Die Verwandlung to the Bible via Werther may give all but the most established expert some pause. Compelling evidence for this connection includes the co-occurrence in both texts of "uneasy dreams" and images of incest, "real" in Gregor's relationship with Grete and imagined by of Charlotte's fraternal rejection of Werther; Werther fantasizing about turning into a "maybug," the protagonists' lackluster fathers and "verminous exclusion" from polite society; discoveries of their bodies (not quite dead in Werther's case) "in early morning by a servant" (60—62). The reader, should persevere through the turns, however, to behold Corngold’s take (with a warmly centered assist from Adorno) on the hermeneutic literalization of “In der Strafkolonie,” namely that fateful sixth hour of punishment where the prisoner finally begins to decipher ( entziffern ) what his sentence actually “means”: “He cannot understand the substance of his sentence until he is emptied out of his substance, until he has been excreted” (53). This sentence is an exemplar of how Corngold’s own poetics both exemplify and overshadow his own hermeneutics-which was, of course, probably the point all along. Expeditions’ section on Kafka more generally conceived includes an expansive exploration of Kafka’s fixation, in both fiction and aphorism with “abundant bars and cages” (including a propensity for putting himself in one) that is simultaneously bureaucratic and erotic (138, 144, 155); highlights also include a striking exegesis of Kafka’s language skepticism through the lens of his Brotberuf as an attorney, particularly the concept of Besitz (where “property” is but one meaning). Finally, the collection concludes with several examples of Kafka in dialogue with both contemporaries and a century of perplexed critics, highlights of which include a dalliance with Kafka’s relationship with Nietzsche played out non-aphoristically through aphorism (though the metaphor of “inside baseball” does figure in). Reviews 355 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 If Expeditions were to be the only book a person read about Kafka, it would of course leave gaps in the canon (critical voices sampled appear limited, primarily, to individuals who share Corngold’s chromosomal makeup and dearth of melanin, for example). A brief excoriation of this reviewer's mass-media criticism presents an exception; I am honored to be punished in such an august tome. And yet, were this tome the lone surviving Kafka remnant of a strangely specific apocalypse, it is a testament to Corngold’s eminence and influence that Expeditions to Kafka would, indeed, provide enough of a foundation that one could affect a convincing simulacrum of Kafka expertise from its pages alone. Rebecca Schuman, University of Oregon Helmut Puff: The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2023, 244 pp. $30. This slim volume-a mere 150 pages of text followed by prodigious notes and bibliography-is in its way enormously ambitious. Helmut Puff takes as his subject a room and unfolds from it an entire spatio-temporal world distinct from our own. In his telling, the late medieval and early modern European antechamber created an infrastructure for waiting, an experience that, it turns out, was anything but empty and inconsequential. In an introduction that surveys anthropological, sociological, and philosophical literature on waiting, Puff quickly dispenses with a common notion that early or pre-modern temporalities were simply the inverse of our own contemporary frenetic, highly individualistic experiences of time, the fallacy that time must have been by contrast “slow, steady, predictable” (2). Rather, time spent in the antechamber, in Puff’s highly textured account, was multilayered and conflicted. Waiting-“a bounded condition in which time becomes actual” (4)-is such an illuminating subject of study for Puff because it encapsulates the complex interplay of individual and collective pressures and opportunities. It is a dead time that is nevertheless pregnant with possibility; a species of inactivity that simultaneously involves its own kind of agency. The exigencies of waiting reflect and reinforce power relations but can also generate their own distinct forms of sociability and can open avenues to advancement. In addition to its introduction and conclusion, the book divides nicely into three chapters devoted to the intersecting concepts: “Times,” “Spaces,” and “Encounters.” Each chapter ranges across a massive historical and geographical expanse, albeit with a preponderance of examples and evidence drawn from the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire in the 17 th and early 18 th centuries. The Antechamber’ s overall thrust is indeed towards surveying commonalities across DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 356 Reviews contexts rather than teasing out local differences. The latter is perhaps a task for the further scholarship on the topic that will surely come in this book’s wake. The defining term in the chapter on “Times” is occasionalism , which Puff employs to mean a relationship to time where one can “recognize what could pass as due moments to act” (16). This action-oriented stance emerges as more prudential than bold in the array of artifacts and sources he marshals. For example, in the Latin motto “tempora tempore tempera,” he points to the pun linking the Latin words for time (here: tempora, tempore) and the verb to temper/ moderate (tempera), glossing the maxim as “soften the impact of the times [you] live in by acting in time with moderation” (17). Waiting is thus part and parcel of acting. A subtheme of this chapter is the way that-in contrast to historiographical narratives of this period emphasizing collective mindsets-a lonely burden falls here on the individual, who must understand the workings of time, strategize, be vigilant, and, at the right opportunity, engage. In the subsequent chapter on “Spaces,” we survey the antechamber itself, which originates in late-medieval palatial architecture. The antechamber figures above all as a relational or transitory space, sometimes one room in a series, that positions the waiter within hierarchies of power, entertains or occupies his mind (it was almost invariably a man), and/ or prepares him psychologically for the audience to come. Puff analyzes particularly the wall décor of these “interstitial zones” (94), including emblems that challenge the viewer to decode a message that is often occasionalist in tenor; historical or mythological scenes of peripatea, momentous “reversal[s] through an individual’s courageous act” (79); or images of happy sociability or intimacy. By the eighteenth-century anterooms were no longer confined to royal residences but had become a widespread feature of prosperous homes. Thus, the chapter ends with a glimpse of Goethe’s carefully staged sequence of spaces through which a visitor would advance in his Haus am Frauenplan. As readers approach the culminating chapter, “Encounters,” they might well expect an account of long-awaited audiences with the elite and powerful; yet the more interesting story remains the “curated sociability” (139) in the outer chambers, where waiters encountered each other and the servants and representatives who controlled their access. Because rulers were expected to make themselves available, at least on occasion, to their subjects, antechambers could be populated, not only by aristocrats and diplomats, but also by commoners, artisans, and poor people striving for some opportunity or remedy. These rooms served then as both “a space where hopes, dreams, and schemes abounded” but also, given the uncertainty of the timeframe and outcome, “a space of precarity” (115). Puff devotes over ten pages to the maneuvers of one unemployed yet ambitious young musician to gain a hearing-and a job-from Maximilian III Joseph, Reviews 357 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 Elector of Bavaria. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart spent six days in September 1777 networking, gathering advice, and strategizing about how best to approach the elector before venturing the approach, only to blow the moment, Puff suggests, through his overeagerness and lack of restraint. The book’s conclusion reflects on the transformations and afterlives of the antechamber and its culture of waiting. But any reader of this book is guaranteed to have their own reflections as well. In this respect, the book reaches far beyond its historical subject and surprises us by discovering a surfeit of meaning and possibility in this seemingly most mundane experience. Karin Schutjer, University of Oklahoma Todd Kontje, Georg Forster: German Cosmopolitan. Max Kade German Institute Research Series: Germans Beyond Europe, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022, 200 pp., $99.95 The silhouette facing the first page of the book’s introduction is apt: profiling Forster with a gigantic sailboat in his hands, it contours the man and signals what contemporaries (and literary historians ever since) considered a great accomplishment. He had taken part in Cook’s second Voyage Around the World and written about it. A few short years later, he was chastised when he became a leader of the Republic of Mainz and swore allegiance to France. Forster’s conflicted legacy is Todd Kontje’s point of departure; the scholar seeks to reclaim and resituate the eighteenth-century naturalist, translator, want-to-be politician and, writer as both German and cosmopolitan. As is to be expected, Kontje does so with swift elegance, ease, and erudition-an achievement that has been honored with the 2023 DAAD/ GSA Prize for the Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies. In rehashing and resolving the conundrum of accurately representing Georg Forster and his accomplishments, Kontje effectively marshals contemporaneous views of Forster’s local, national, and global entanglements as well as fairly recent critical approaches that wrestle with the legacies of the European and, I would contend, transatlantic Enlightenment. These studies introduce alternate viewpoints marking Enlightenment’s complicity in colonial and imperial projects, while dislodging intellectual movement and period from any logic that has Western dominance inevitably manifest as monolithic colonial aspiration and territorial practice. Kontje offers what I would call a capstone reading that invites ongoing dialogue with very recent thought pieces-published, for example, in the 2023 and forthcoming volumes of the Goethe Yearbook and put forth in eagerly awaited monographs in progress. What seems peculiar in part of the in- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 358 Reviews troduction, though not unexpected and perhaps unavoidable, is Forster being recast in an ensemble of the canonical (“great”) figures of late eighteenth-century Germanophone literature and culture. He is briefly but poignantly compared with Goethe in particular, but also with Herder, Schlegel, and Humboldt. Kontje completes his introductory chapter by sending us onto a path of thinking about “the Age of Goethe differently: as multilingual, malleable, and mobile, both local and cosmopolitan, dynamic and decentered” (23). Here, the author joins a group of scholars including but not limited to Matt Erlin, John Noyes, Daniel Purdy, Birgit Tautz, Chunjie Zhang, who have pursued just that in books, articles, and chapters, albeit not with Forster as a central protagonist and not necessarily with holding on to Goethe as the century-defining man. The five subsequent chapters of the book unfold Kontje’s approach further, by bringing nuance to a sweeping argument. The chapters are: “What is an Author? ” (ch. 1); “A Voyage around the World” (ch. 2); “Race, History, and German Classicism” (ch. 3); “Views of the Lower Rhine” (ch. 4); Revolution in Mainz: Liberation or Conquest? (ch. 5). Throughout, Kontje walks a tightrope between two poles that define Forster’s biography but are rarely thought together in one study: there is the cosmopolitan traveler and scientist Forster, who establishes himself as a (German) author while translating and positioning himself, on Kontje’s account, between “hackwork and genius” (ch. 1, 32—42). However, this activity appears deeply localized, carried out while working as the university librarian in Mainz (1788—1793). From there, Forster’s name became synonymous with the Mainz Republic, at least in literary circles, and led him straight to becoming “a German exiled in France” (18). Kontje underscores this complexity in Forster’s life and legacy by linking it to the concept of authorship (against translation? ); here, he anchors his argument once more: not solely in scholarly approaches to European Enlightenment’s conflicted legacies but also in a bio-bibliographical approach to Forster’s oeuvre. Kontje cleverly exposes blind spots in studies that privilege either cosmopolitan impetus or German identity when reading not only Forster but also the German and European Enlightenment more broadly. For example, Kontje approaches “Forster on Race” through essays written in the period between the publication of Voyage and Forster’s involvement in the Mainz Republic and introduces the intellectual exchange in two locations, Göttingen and Weimar, respectively, when discussing Forster’s being torn between ethnography/ racial distinction and humanity/ classical antiquity (cf. 87). In directing us to these “smaller,” aka less well-known texts - and putting them in conversation with writings by Forster’s contemporaries-Kontje’s study enriches the interdisciplinary discourse on late Germanophone eighteenth century from the distinct perspective of the literary historian. At the same time, the book provides a Reviews 359 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0016 succinct introduction to all German Studies scholars who are somewhat new to this important subfield of literary studies and its correlate wealth of approaches and are ready to infuse it with deep bio-bibliographical knowledge of important authors. Kontje attends to the aspiring politician Forster by reorienting travel, the mode of movement and perception that had structured Voyage . Forster’s observations of the Rhine region appear at scale, focusing no longer on integrating a global width determined by an at times overwhelming natural environment and isolation of oceans, but on “articulat(ing) an early understanding of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene” (127). With microscopic attention to detail, Forster sought to comprehend the uneven economic, social, and political developments of cities (e.g., Aachen, Liege, Brussels) that embraced past and/ or future, often all at once. From here, Kontje pivots to outlining the political Forster whose take on revolution appears deeply informed by the naturalist: “From his (i.e., Forster’s) perspective, revolutions accomplish nothing in the long run; they are just one more eruption of an eternally active volcano” (135). While I’ll leave it to colleagues to parse Kontje’s argument from an environmental studies perspective, I certainly reaffirm the insights that embrace the nexus of local and global yield. The last chapter unites Goethe and Forster, literally and metaphorically. They met in Mainz in 1792 at Sömmering’s badly damaged house; while both men took opposite stances to the French Revolution (149), their presence in Mainz certainly co-shaped their legacies. But here Kontje shows once more that Forster’s position was more complex and conflicted, laying it out in a few more than 20 pages and beginning with the succinct statement: “Although Forster initially welcomed the French as liberators, he soon developed the nagging suspicion that they were in fact foreign conquerors” (148). Consequently, Forster emerges as in the book’s short Conclusion as “A different kind of Classic” who holds his own next to Goethe and, through a “deeper consistency of thought” characterized by “antidogmatic and dialectical tendencies” (172) decenters the dominance of Classical Weimar in German literary historiography around 1800. While the latter became associated with “wholeness,” Forster’s thinking and writing “moves between languages and across borders” (172). Therefore, in working through the example of one author, Kontje extends the important project of centering seemingly marginal figures, literary and philosophical works, and disciplines adjacent to literary studies. As this project has developed over the past three decades, it has invigorated German Studies in robust ways-and Todd Kontje’s contributions have been profound. Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College