DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Reviews Jens Klenner: Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction. New Directions in German Studies 42. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024. 195 pp. $ 110. The growth of interest in nonhuman objects continues unabated in literary criticism, as recent publications in German Studies show� Jens Klenner’s Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction stands out among these, and not just because of the imposing scale and scope of its subject� Spanning Haller’s In den Alpen of 1735 to Jelinek’s In den Alpen of 2002, with settings ranging from Sweden to Switzerland, this study does cover an immense amount of ground� But rather than attempting a historical account of alpinism, of which there are already good examples like Caroline Schaumann’s recent Peak Pursuits , Klenner offers something quite different: a form-oriented study of literary texts about alpine (and subalpine) environments� One of the underlying arguments is that mountains are literary-historical forms “insofar as each representation of a mountain recalls the many peaks that have occurred in the long history of German-language literature” (20)� The opening gerund of the unidiomatic title, Writing the Mountains , articulates this continuous aspect of the project of mountain writing� Counter to this dominant perspective in which mountains are shaped by literary writing, however, is a perspective in which writing is shaped by the encounter with mountains� What could be called the orogenesis of writing is attested to wherever mountains occupy the position of the grammatical subject, which they often do here� Mountains prompt questions, confound rhetorical strategies, and force authors to reconsider narrative templates. Just as narrative has special affordances for making the embodied experience of the mountains sensible, so do mountains have inherent affordances, albeit for destabilizing conventional figures, genres, and forms. From this perspective, Writing the Mountains also contributes to a German media history and even a media ecology along the lines of Jussi Parikka’s Geology of Media � Here, too, the earth is expressive and transformative� In the elevated form of the mountain, the earth is also resistant, and this study’s contribution to a vibrant materialism can be seen most prominently in its emphasis on the capacity of the mountains to impede and undermine attempts to narrativize human encounters with them� Each chapter articulates this tension of “mountain writing” in a different literary-historical situation� The opening chapter on alpine aesthetics, as informed by Georg Simmel’s 1911 article “Zur Ästhetik der Alpen,” troubles traditional 102 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 accounts of the historical reception of mountainous environments as a progression from the terrible to the sublime. Underlying all of these stages, and becoming more prominent starting in the nineteenth century, is a reception of the mountain as formally and generically disturbing� Each of the successive chapters - on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun ; Büchner’s Lenz ; Celan’s Gespräch im Gebirg ; and Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten and In den Alpen - explores an encounter with the recalcitrance of a mountain, an encounter that nevertheless proves to be generative� One of the achievements of this study is that, beyond its attunement to scenes of displacement, dissolution, vacillation and unruliness in these narratives, it observes a corresponding innovation of those narratives� Though it does not tackle Timothy Morton’s critique of ecomimesis, a paradoxical rhetorical strategy in nature writing that involves the evocation of an unmediated natural world, the dual attention of Writing the Mountains to the mediality of mountain writing and the materiality of mountains circumvents this common pitfall� Such a geopoetics complements works like Aaron Moe’s Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry , though the restricted scope of work outside of German Studies means that this connection goes unobserved� Despite the leap from 1837 to 1959 between Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, a leap that remains relatively unaccounted for, Klenner’s approach seems robust and informative for future readings of myriad texts on mountains, including those written in those intervening years� One thing that becomes evident after this jump, however, is the extent to which a post-Holocaust perspective structures the entire study� Though Celan is introduced only in the fourth chapter, his position, in which much of the German and Austrian literary culture of mountains has been impaired by historical transformations, is shared by his predecessors, if on very different grounds. The past remains present, even in these rarefied environments. Those looking for an account of the gendered experience of mountains in this study of mainly male figures will note its absence. But they will also find ample material for a queer ecocriticism� Over the course of Writing the Mountains , the mountain is denaturalized, and, along the same lines as Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work on gender, it becomes a site of sedimented literary historical practices rather than a timeless object� While the masculinities of its mountaineering subjects (let alone their gender trouble) largely go unexamined in this study, its selected readings tend to not reproduce the conventional masculine tropes of alpine conquest, domination, and heroism� If anything, the opposite is true: Klenner’s attention to the instability of the mountain form and mountaineering bodies tacitly offers a critical account of mountain masculinities� The mountain emerges in this study as a space of transformation as well as a site of disorientation and queer unruliness� The subjects of these Reviews 103 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 stories discover unexpected affiliations between their bodies and abject lithic matter, and their narratives unsettle normative accounts of the mountain and human alike� Jason Groves, University of Washington Michael R. Ott, Helge Perplies: Das romantische Mittelalter der Germanistik: Über Vergangenheit und Gegenwart eines populären Faches. Mit einem Nachwort von Racha Kirakosian. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2024. 188 pp. € 34.99. “Wir werden die Romantik nicht mehr los” (7)� Indeed� The legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism shaped and continues to shape the way medieval German texts (meaning those written in Middle High German) are understood as a university discipline in Germany. In the first four chapters of this readable, historically grounded work the authors explore how perspectives, beliefs, and categories grounded in this founding era have been carried forward into the present. In the final three chapters, they present ideas for reckoning with this ideological inheritance in order to remake it� The authors are German medievalists trained and working in the German system of higher education; the institutional premises are specific to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The authors’ insider perspective is nuanced by inspiration for curricular reform drawn from North American scholarship. Reading this book from a different institutional perspective (I am a scholar of medieval German studies in North American academia) highlighted some of the interesting ways in which teaching Germanistik and medieval studies in German-speaking lands and in North America diverge from one another� Chapter 1, “Ist die Romantik schuld? ” introduces the dual character of modern understandings of romanticism� The most common usage today refers to nature-loving and vaguely anti-rational beliefs widely held to be stereotypically German� Of critical importance for the work under review, romanticism also references intellectual and cultural developments in Europe after the French Revolution in which the search to create new forms of national identity through language and culture underwrote the rediscovery of vernacular (i�e�, not Latin) and secular (i�e�, not religious) art and literature from the medieval past� Chapter 2, “Steckt die Germanistik in der Romantik fest? ” provides an outstanding overview of and introduction to the history of the field. It reminds the reader that well into the twentieth century Germanistik was, largely, medieval studies (Mediävistik), characterized by a heavy emphasis on historical linguistics, philology, and a select few medieval German texts, considered classics, 104 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 from the first decades of the thirteenth century. The rise of modern Germanistik changed the place and value of medieval studies, but many of these discourses and beliefs nevertheless remained entrenched in university curricular structures� Chapter 3, “Wie geht man richtig mit dem Mittelalter um? ” delves deeper into the parting of ways between medieval and modern studies in Germanistik� As this chapter and the next one incisively demonstrate, medieval German studies in German-speaking lands are deeply wedded to historically and linguistically based expertise and have been slow to bring medievalism (the study of the uses and abuses of the medieval past in the present) into the scholarly fold� Advocating for such an opening, the authors present a good overview of medievalism studies in North America, whose rise predates the adoption of similar approaches in German-speaking lands by many decades� The outstanding afterword by Racha Kirakosian amplifies this theme. Chapter 4, “Darf man mittelalterliche Erzählungen übersetzen? ” traces the history of ideas about the role and scope of translation when teaching texts from the past that are embedded in the field of medieval German studies. This highly recommended chapter makes one aware of different cultural attitudes in North America and Germany about the value of translations for university-level courses� According to the authors, in Germany the ideal answer to the chapter’s title question is “no�” Since translations are often necessary, however, the position of the field is that they should, in my oversimplifying terms, privilege historically accurate, linguistic and cultural sense-making over linguistic beauty� The question of teaching medieval literature (or any literature, for that matter) using translations is much less fraught in North American academia� As the authors show, in the German university system the intellectual tension around this issue is a legacy of the nationalist projects that still anchor the field, coupled with the need to retain medieval German studies in university curricula� Chapter 5, “Muss ich Iwein sein wollen? ” foregrounds the authors’ arguments for renewal by advocating for reading medieval texts through the lens of feminist and postcolonial approaches, with a final nod to addressing with students changing political interpretations of the Nibelungenlied � The knight, Iwein, title figure in Hartmann von Aue’s Arthurian romance of the same name (ca� 1210), grounds the chapter’s fundamental idea that previous approaches have been based on an unreflected expectation of readerly identification with courtly ideals, which is imputed to the original medieval audiences as well (112)� The authors argue that contemporary readers can cast this aside in favor of disidentificatory approaches. Chapter 6, “Warum brauchen wir mehr unterschiedliche Stimmen? ” continues the authors’ advocacy for embracing new approaches that are North Amer- Reviews 105 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 ican in origin and that promote heterogeneity (to use the authors’ term): the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, as exemplified here by scholars such as Geraldine Heng and those of the BABEL working group� The authors stress the importance of including Muslim perspectives on the medieval world� The chapter then advocates for exploring more inclusive forms of scholarly production, including open access publication, the parameters for which differ in German-speaking lands from those in North America� Chapter 7, “Kommt das in der Klausur vor? ” concludes the volume with an impassioned and well-argued plea for experimenting with medieval German studies curricula at German universities that meet contemporary students where they are, a culturally determined standard that will, by default, differ from country to country� The ideas it presents for this kind of teaching are excellent, and they work, as North American colleagues who have been using similar ideas for the past two decades can attest� Given the book’s focus on cultural diversity, it is regrettable that medieval Jewish culture and literature, for example medieval and early modern Yiddish Arthurian literature, is not mentioned� The authors’ tight focus on romanticism appears to have dictated their choice to draw their medieval example texts exclusively from canonical, early thirteenth-century texts that originated in medieval German courtly culture� This creates valuable coherence across the volume for the reader, but at the cost of reproducing the fixations of the romantics themselves and of rendering invisible the extraordinary breadth, range, and sheer number of surviving medieval German works� Nevertheless, Ott and Perplies have written a thought-provoking, instructive, and accessible book that succeeds in shaking up academic paradigms while demonstrating a keen awareness of our field’s historical situatedness and its possibilities for change� Ann Marie Rasmussen, Duke University Heidi Schlipphacke: The Aesthetics of Kinship: Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century. New Studies in the Age of Goethe. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2023. 354 pp. $ 150.00 / $ 42.95. The Aesthetics of Kinship is a landmark book, among the very few texts that transform our vision of the Germanophone eighteenth century, offering a fundamental reconceptualization of its aesthetic debates. Schlipphacke offers new optics on the era, tying Weimar Classicism and Romanticism to a period-correct history of society and aesthetics that should supplant our inherited German-nationalist cultural histories� 106 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Schlipphacke reads canonical dramas and novels as embedded in the material culture and social practices of European literature, yet also as variants outside paradigms of empire and the capitalist nation-states� The nation-states of capitalist England or late-royalist and Napoleonic France had bourgeois public spheres that simply did not function like those in the pluricentric and multilingual Holy Roman Empire� Her premise is that normalizing such false analogies has led us to leaving unquestioned central assumptions: the “nuclear family” ( Kleinfamilie ), for example, was in Germanophone regions less important than were other, more extended kinship networks that grounded their social organization and identity politics� In rejecting this anachronism, Schlipphacke not only distances kinship units from more modern models of capitalism, but also redraws inherited scripts about gender identity and subject position� Schlipphacke’s focus is a body of material evidence in the forms of drama, novels, and paintings representing social relationships, taken as tableaux, or visual representations of social configurations - as seen rather than as interpreted through later lenses or as allegorical figurations of some kind of depth of characters. Like freeze-frames in films, tableaux map the visible surfaces and interactions of social relations; they represent what needs to be seen rather than insinuating underlying hierarchies, motivations, or value systems� The volume’s introduction contrasts Goethe’s great Wilhelm Meister with the bourgeois novels from England and France, not as a character study or Bildungsroman , but as working to connect for its readers different extended kinship networks, far beyond the “nuclear family,” yet based neither in class nor race� Schlipphacke circumvents older arguments like Habermas’ claim about the nuclear family as a source of fascism or Kittler’s realist reading of the novel and its Turmgesellschaft as an allegory (11—12)� Instead, she deploys queer theory (inspired by Eve Sedgwick) to suggest that the tableaux contradict our modern search for characters’ “depths” because their identities rest on “an aesthetics of kinship that is heterogeneous and nonnuclear” (18), on configurations of characters rather than plots� They thus work in a painterly mode of representation, rather than through socially stratified abstracts like “class.” Chapter 1 compares bourgeois drama in eighteenth-century France and Germany, exemplifying how notions like “bourgeois/ bürgerlich ” and “domesticity/ Häuslichkeit ” are not straightforwardly comparable� Chapter 2 sets up a theoretical frame for elucidating these differences, starting with how Lessing borrowed Diderot’s theory of dramatic tableaux as fourth walls framing the action to the audience while eliding subjective interiority� Schiller and a large range of other playwrights who use closing tableaux in their dramas are taken as examples of this practice in Chapter 3� Chapter 4 focuses on how props can work as metonyms signifying kinship relations, again amplified in Chapter 5’s Reviews 107 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 discussion of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise � Chapters 6 and 7 turn to a broad range of novels (from Classicism through Romanticism) that include tableaux, culminating in her discussion of the tableau vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) - a detailed analysis of how it points to constellations of kinship relations outside of “the nuclear family in eighteenth-century German literature” (231)� This important study shows the need to pay greater attention to actual European history and to critique our essentialized assumptions about family, nation, and ethnicity at sites that do not necessarily prioritize filiation (or its legacy, biological determinism) over affiliation. The work Schlipphacke does to recapture eighteenth-century Germanophone writing as representing individuals as part of social configurations rather than psychologizing them is critical to opening out differences in understanding what different ideas of individual choice and civil society were at play in different Germanophone regions - and different visions of aesthetic debates since Bodmer and Breitinger, at least� Seeing social relations as configurations (or Norbert Elias’s figurations) in a region not unified by much aside from language (rather than religion, hegemony, or trade/ capitalism) suggests how we must create canons outside the Weimar that has commandeered the reputation of “German” letters and occluded active regional and European conversations� Katherine Arens, The University of Texas at Austin Sophie Salvo: Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2024. 252 pp. $ 30.00. Sophie Salvo acknowledges that the intertwining between gender and language is well known and has been an ongoing preoccupation over time, for example in considering the histories of pronouns, the etymologies of words related to gender and sexuality, or the historical definitions of the words feminine and masculine� She adds that it is has often been explored and highlighted, to some extent at least, in the literary studies on women’s writing� Salvo refers in the notes of this book to such important scholarly benchmarks as Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres’s Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (1998), Katherine R� Goodman and Edith Waldstein’s edited volume In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers around 1800 (1992), and Nicole Seifer’s book Frauen Literatur: Abgewertet, vergessen, wiederentdeckt (2021)� The innovation of Salvo’s book Articulating Difference is to “uncover the conceptualization of language that licensed it” (1) and to take the histories of “fields of language” themselves to task. 108 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Salvo challenges “philosophy, the philosophy of language, and linguistics” and at its core the nineteenth-century “language science” ( Sprachwissenschaft ) that cemented language as a so-called “scientific” discipline and thereby became complicit with gender bias� She claims that in doing so, “ideas about the sexes often shaped how language was understood and analyzed” (2) and the notion, or more accurately, “the fantasy - of sexual complementarity served as grounds for the production of language and the humans who speak it” (2)� Masculinity has been associated with activity and femininity with passivity for centuries, yet Salvo argues that mainly linguistic scholars of the nineteenth century are to blame for this� They asserted the “patriarchal origins of language, as they posited the existence of ‘women’s languages’ and valorized grammatical gender, they established a fundamental distinction between the masculine and the feminine as a necessary premise, relying on the assumed priority of the masculine to support their claims and delimit their methodologies” (2)� Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language is charged in particular with structuring the binary active/ passive as gender attributes, and furthermore Salvo critiques especially the journal Historiographica Linguistica (founded in 1974) which she characterizes as dubious for asserting “a type of history writing that presents our linguistic past as an integral part of the discipline itself and, at the same time, as an activity founded on well-defined principles which can rival those of ‘normal science’” (3). Not only do these works make explicit emphasis on so-called “scientific” methods and rigor; at the same time, they seem to establish, as Salvo argues, a “narrative arc” (3) since they are valorizing and subtly supposing “an ontology of progress organized around eminent figures and their inheritors, almost exclusively male” (3) and hence “take the absence of women for granted” (3)� Salvo then refers to Sarah Pourciau who “questioned established accounts of the shift from diachrony to synchrony in linguistics” while offering “an important critique of such developmental narratives” yet who, in Salvo’s opinion, “rarely considers gender” (3)� And this is what Salvo sets out to do� Her book challenges the so-called “narrative arc” that the journal Historiography Linguistica established as a historical inquiry into Sprachwissenschaft itself, claiming that articulating sexual difference is not only a matter of description or mimetic representation, but already deeply rooted in the histories of “the science of language” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and linguistics from the core� She adds that to understand something like the historical disparagement of women’s writing or the success of the generic masculine pronouns, we must uncover the conceptualization of language that licensed it” (1)� Salvo states that “it is the aim [of this monograph] to investigate the histories of fields that take language itself as their focus, specifically philology, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, and examine how they theorized their subject in connection to Reviews 109 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 gender” (1)� However, how can this book unravel such intricacies in such a wide spectrum? It seems to me like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Clearly, Salvo boldly approaches language philosophy and science as a construct to be examined for its own patriarchal implications. She finds what has been regarded as the science which motivates her intricate study, although it has been based on the myriad uses of the German word “Geschlecht,” which initially does not make any distinction between sex and gender. Salvo effectively argues that there are always gendered implications in such history and offers new ideas and speculative reflections on terminologies. She points out that although gender is now common in English parlance, it was not employed outside of the grammatical context until the second half of the eighteenth century. The book consists of five parts: 1. “Gendered Origins”; 2� “’Women’s Language’ and the Language of Science”; 3� “The Sex of Language: Grammatical Gender”; 4� “Women Writing on Language”; and 5� “Modernism’s Masculine Language Crisis�” References include such authors as Herder, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Butler, and Irigaray� It incorporates a wealth of research, makes unexpected links between literature and literary theorists, and does not restrict itself to linguistic studies� Salvo’s basic message is: What appeared to camouflage itself as “natural” language turns out to be a matter of construction and artistic creation� Salvo connects her work with that of Jocelyn Holland and Helmut Müller-Sievers, who each show connections between scientific and literary discourses, but also how these reinforce norms of masculinity and femininity� She digs into various historical sources for the studies on the origin of grammatical gender in the eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries and shows how they often reflect conceptualizations of language that are premised upon problematic assertions� In the footsteps of Foucault, she emphasizes that language is not only mimetic or representing facts and events but is always riddled by wants, wishes, ideas, and projections� In that sense Salvo’s book is a wake-up call for everyone using language and applying linguistic assumptions that embed gender implications they may not be aware of� I am not a linguist but a literature scholar, and some of the arguments of this book escape me� However, there is no doubt that Salvo’s claim is correct: Whatever language philosophy or type of linguistic scholarship we may pursue, we tend to partake in applying certain inscribed and silently implicit norms which may well deserve scrutiny, if not merely careful questioning, for their implicit undercurrents� Sophie Salvo’s book brings new observations to light and does well in bringing fresh awareness to hidden aspects of the rise and fall of notions and implicit beliefs that surround debates concerning “Gechlecht” which have never lost their relevance� Beate Allert, Purdue University 110 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Edgar Landgraf: Nietzsche’s Posthumanism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2023. 260 pp. $ 28.00 Focusing on physiology, entomology, and technology to partake in critical discussions on agency, language, and epistemology, Nietzsche’s Posthumanism offers two principal outlooks� While appropriating Nietzsche as a posthumanist avant la lettre , Landgraf diagnoses tensions within posthumanism which, defined by the common theme of decentering the human rather than by shared methods or philosophies, is not a cohesive movement� Additionally, he launches an interdisciplinary Nietzsche reception that “offer[s] new vistas” (xxiii) based on the proto-posthumanist’s destabilization of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanisms, in particular Judeo-Christian impacts on anthropocentric morality and Western idea(l)s of dignity and community� The book’s two foci merge in portrayals of bidirectional legacies ranging from evidenced influence, such as Nietzsche’s “heavily marked” copy of Alfred Espinas (xvii), to “common ancestry” (36), personal contact such as Nietzsche’s with Wilhelm Wundt (88), or elective affinity. The author considers post not “as marking a strict temporal border” but as “indicat[ing] discontinuities and continuities” (13)� Post , however, is temporal and, beyond denoting succession, lacks a semantic scope to grant precision to either itself or the -ism it attaches to, which may partially explain the book’s defensive style. In numerous attempts at identification, posthumanism tests the credo of human exceptionality, relying on developments ranging from the vanishing health of our planet to the rise of AI� Post has been with us sufficiently long (since 1960s poststructuralism at least) to expose the repercussions of its inflationary usage (with ongoing postmodernism as prime example), especially when combined with a longstanding history of ideas and cultural practices impossible to fathom under one -ism (such as centuries of humanism or decades of international modernism, as opposed to 1920s structuralism)� Rather than complicating posthumanism’s too encompassing name and not “escap[ing]” its “self-contradiction” as only “apparent” and “performative” (xi), Landgraf finds refuge in and reconciliation through Nietzsche in an era characterized by (post)humanist crises� He dissects posthumanism while remaining keen on reassembling its strands as if to save a movement whose denominations lack what Nietzsche may provide, mainly the “confluence of science and philosophy” (xii). It seems strange that Landgraf lists posthumanist variants of all stripes, including “assemblage,” “critical,” “dystopic,” “mediated,” “methodological,” “philosophical,” “radical,” and “panhumanism,” “antihumanism,” and “transhumanism or humanity+” (7) - a rather non-Nietzschean flight into abstractions - but nevertheless supports a collective “posthumanism” as one that “confronts the so-called humanities” (10)� One wonders whether “so-called” is placed in the right syntactic position here� Reviews 111 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Nietzsche’s Posthumanism furnishes a survey of international trans-/ post-humanist thought, including Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Roberto Esposito, Francesca Ferrando, Elaine Graham, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Stefan Herbrechter, Bruno Latour, Vanessa Lemm, Timothy Morton, Pramod Nayar, Robert Pepperell, Tamar Sharon, Yunus Tuncel, Natasha Vita-More, and Cary Wolfe� It comprises an introduction (xi—xxiii), seven chapters (1—183), extensive endnotes (185—221), a bibliography that does not include all works cited (223—39), and an index (241—60). While the introduction and the first and last chapters present overviews of posthumanist criticism and sporadically refer to Nietzsche, chapters two to six include convincing close readings of thematically selected published and unpublished Nietzsche texts� To contextualize his terrain, Landgraf provides helpful reminders of nineteenth-century inventions and discoveries, including the railway, neurophysiology, industry, and electricity. He also introduces a figural embodiment of an abstract intersection between biology and technology - the cyborg as “unofficial symbol of posthumanism” (xii) - and summarizes his seven chapters. Chapter 1: “Posthumanism and Its Nietzsches” (1—24) mobilizes Herbrechter and Heidegger and presents a wealth of information about posthumanism� Nietzsche is introduced as an intellectual nomad, a challenger of dualism (if without engaging his fundamentally antithetical style not known for synthesis), and as one who early on recognized the “hominization effects of technology” (6). Unfortunately, the book now begins to show symptoms of disorganization from which it suffers throughout. There is no obvious reason for the author’s often free translations of Nietzsche’s German� Phrases and quotations are repeated verbatim more than once in a span of a few pages� Combined with text following chapter headings and subheadings frequently not appearing where one would expect, multitudes of names, patchworks of quotations, and a wealth of metadiscourse in the form of disclaimers and cross-references interrupting the flow, they can make one’s reading experience cumbersome. Chapter 2: “Posthumanist Epistemology” (25—58) qualifies Nietzsche as “decidedly neo-Kantian” (27), underscoring his “recognition of the constitutive role of language in creating sociopolitically consequential realities” (25)� The chapter concentrates on Nietzsche’s understanding of language as organ, presents a fine reading of On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense where, using “neurophysiological vocabulary” (31) that seems to clearly rely on Johannes Peter Müller’s work on nerve energies (28), Nietzsche discusses language’s unalienable metaphoricity and exposes human illusions about its representational qualities� Saussure’s take on the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified could have enhanced this discussion� Further, in the context of dream logic (45), where Nietzsche anticipated Freud, the latter’s day’s residue and après-coup would have offered themselves as influential references. 112 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Chapter 3: “Insect Sociality” (59—77) demonstrates “convergences between entomology and posthumanism” (61) and, focusing on “herd mentality” (64) and Nietzsche’s residency in Switzerland, a “hotbed of entomology” (62), shows how the swarm’s systemic self-organization (despite or perhaps because of its lacking consciousness and rationality) grants insights into human sociality� Nietzsche’s eliminating the border between animal and human is a step posthumanism welcomes; one also thinks of Kafka in this context, as well of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents which silently relies on Nietzsche’s pre-texts but, albeit placed as the chapter’s highly suitable epigraph, receives no further attention� Chapter 4: “Instinct, Will, and Will to Power” (79—99) which includes readings of intriguing unpublished Nietzsche notes (85) and portions of book four of Zarathustra , follows instinct as a “liminal concept […] between inner and outer” (83) , returns to entomology’s insights to portray facets of the will (as well as of effect and affect), while deconstructing received interpretations of Nietzsche’s controversial will to power (but without sufficiently acknowledging that Nietzsche himself never completed this work and considered it as a writing experiment in flux). Relying on Wundt’s extension of herd mentality into the self, rather than opposing it to the self, Landgraf submits his thought-provoking interpretation of individuality as itself gregarious and interactional� Chapter 5: “Media Technologies of Hominization” (101—24) confirms the cyborg as “the preeminent symbol of posthumanism” (101) and offers, based on Nietzsche’s century’s understanding of technology not “as supplemental or prosthetic vis-à-vis nature,” but rather “in dialectical terms” (104), an insightful revision of technology, defining it broadly as including “sticks,” “stones,” “simple tools” (102), and language itself� Technology here implies an extension and development of the human (also physiologically) rather than opposing or reducing it� The chapter includes references to Marx and to Ernst Kapp’s ideas on hominization� Chapter 6: “Cultivating the Sovereign Individual” (125—50) has Nietzsche accord with posthumanist embeddedness, placing the primacy of language as “technology of hominization and cultivation” (131) that “makes appear agency” (132), and refers to critical posthumanism’s agreement “that we cannot simply abandon notions of self, human subjectivity, or agency, but have to reimagine such notions in ways that avoid normative forces of the humanist tradition” (125—26)� Humans coevolve with their technologies that recursively show repercussions on the minds, bodies, and sociality of their creators� In other words, the sovereign individual is materially and technically formed� Landgraf productively underscores the shortcomings of reductionist posthumanist directions that define technology narrowly as digital gadgets. Chapter 7: “The Ethics and Politics of Nietzschean Posthumanism” (151—83) situates Nietzsche and his reception beyond fascist appropriation� While ap- Reviews 113 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 proaching complex political themes, the chapter at the same time foregrounds Nietzsche’s poetic technique, exegetic force, and “agon” (155—56)� It concludes with summaries of previous chapters, once more placing emphasis on the concept of the swarm, and ending by having “human, all too human modes of thinking [intersect] with posthuman, all too posthuman predicaments” (183)� Nietzsche’s Posthumanism is ambitious and erudite and turns toward important themes of interest for several disciplines, but lacks organizational rigor and contains conspicuous absences, ranging from Freud to Adorno and including sci-fi and AI (mentioned only in passing). That said, Landgraf ’s book offers a wealth of information and is certainly of value to international scholars of (post)humanism, comparative and influence studies, Nietzsche studies, and nineteenthto twenty-first-century histories of ideas. Martina Kolb, Susquehanna University Helen Finch: German-Jewish Life Writing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Beyond Testimony. Series Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature, Culture, and Thought 11. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2023. 218 pp. $ 110.00 In this erudite study, Germanist, Comparatist, and Queer Studies scholar Helen Finch examines the writing careers of four survivors of the Holocaust who chose to write in their native German language: H�G� Adler (1910-1988), Fred Wander (1917-2006), Edgar Hilsenrath (1926-2018), and Ruth Klüger (1931-2020)� These names will be familiar to any reader of postwar German literature, but not necessarily the portrait Finch creates for each of them in a separate chapter� Having spent time and effort in the archives, Finch brings together information gleaned from not only these authors’ published novels, stories, and memoirs, but also from other genres of life writing and archival material of various sorts: letters, diaries, essays, journalism, internal publishing documents� I suspect that even other specialists on Holocaust testimony and German Jewish writing will bump into at least some material they have never seen before� Though quite different in temperament and style, what justifies looking at these four authors together, Finch proposes, is what she calls “Holocaust metatestimony,” that is to say, testimony that references the process of trying to give testimony, creating a “poetics of the aftermath of the camps” (11)� If there is a single point to be taken from Finch’s study it appears to be that this poetics, this metatestimony damns postwar German society: not only because these authors had trouble getting published at least at certain times over their careers, but also because their interactions with publishers and mainstream culture reveal ongo- 114 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 ing German antisemitism. In other words, these authors offer a counterweight if not outright refutation of the “mainstream German discourse of Vergangensheitsbewältigung ” (2), a word I will come back to below� Finch’s chapters travel over so much material and time that they do not lend themselves to being summarized� Interestingly, that was Böll’s explanation in the mid-1960s for why Adler was not better known in Germany (quoted on p� 26)� This neglect has continued to be bemoaned, Finch points out� Given the number of studies of Adler she quotes, it’s hard not to wonder if this assessment should be changed� Finch herself zeroes in on the question of ressentiment , contrasting Adler in this regard with Jean Améry� Adler’s vocabulary in his early work is not one of personal ressentiment , Finch maintains, but rather of sin and grace (52)� Where Finch does locate ressentiment is in Adler’s posthumously published last work, Die unsichtbare Wand (1989); to be found, more precisely, in the “angry, satirical and unforgiving portraits” of the friends and scholars who turned against him (59)� As for Fred Wander, Finch offers readers the proposition that all his works constitute one lifelong autobiographical project, a project that differed fundamentally from Adler, Hilsenrath, and Klüger in its absence of critique of publishing industries and culture, focusing rather more on the personal trauma suffered that testifies most directly to the “radical homelessness felt by survivors in the GDR” (106)� Finch brings to bear Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory and points out the many ways - even if not all satisfactory in giving agency and voice - in which Wander seems capable of registering the pain of others, whether it be those under French domination in North Africa or the targets of antisemitic slurs in postwar Vienna� The transnational commitment of multidirectional memory is also a lens in Finch’s chapter on Edgar Hilsenrath� She focuses on what she calls his three main semi-autobiographical novels: Die Abenteuer des Ruben Jablonski (1997), Fuck America (2012), and Berlin … Endstation (2006)� Here, however, Finch must and, mercifully, does point out that Hilsenrath’s metatestimonial poetics “compulsively reenact the violence that they seek to analyze” (111), particularly against women and racialized others� In my own calculus, this violence is not only misogynistic and racist, but ultimately so gratuitous that it prevents me from wanting to grant any space in my own intellectual life to Hilsenrath� I see how Finch thought she needed to include Hilsenrath in her study of metatestimony, but I wish her own condemnations of him had come sooner, more frequently and more unequivocally� The fourth analysis concerns Ruth Klüger, someone whose work has received quite a lot of attention ever since the publication of weiter leben. Eine Jugend (originally published by Wallstein in 1992 and picked up by dtv in 1994)� Finch Reviews 115 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 pursues her research question by considering Klüger’s Holocaust testimony as well as essentially all of her output, including her (seemingly) more purely academic work and focusing on her less well-known “second” memoir unterwegs verloren (2008)� Finch’s reading of Klüger’s reading of Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht and “Verlobung in St� Domingo” is on target and constitutes a very welcome reminder that Klüger was quoting Frantz Fanon before most North American scholars had a clue who that was� While I agree with Finch that Klüger’s project involved much more than weiter leben , as someone who knew Klüger, I’m not sure I (or she) would agree with “feminist rage” as the best designation for what she was up to� She was a feminist to be sure� Politically engaged for human rights, yes, to the point of attending marches and demonstrations and of taking her young sons with her� I am glad Finch includes that� Still, Klüger hated being pinned down or labeled, and she certainly deployed skepticism, irony, and downright humor as much as she used rage to critique German, Austrian, and American societies and subcultures like Holocaust and German studies� This is a study for specialists, not general readers� Finch assumes that one knows the course of German and international publication of testimony to the Holocaust and even that her readers already know quite a lot about these four writers and have a context into which they can integrate the many details and insights she provides about their work� Sometimes, though, it would have been helpful for her to spell out more of the basics� I wonder, for instance, why she insists on the word Vergangenheitsbewältigung to describe postwar German reckonings with the Nazi Judeocide. Using the teleological implications of the idea of “mastering” the National Socialist past creates an easy strawman to knock down� My observation is that as intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens did engage over the decades more deeply and honestly with the NS past, the terminology of what one could strive for as an individual or as a whole society changed� Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung , trying to work through, to engage with the past, is nowhere mentioned in Finch’s study, though that’s the term I see deployed most frequently by public intellectuals on this issue� On second thought, perhaps some recent political pronouncements and acts of violence, including murder, support Finch’s use of that misguided term Vergangenheitsbewältigung after all� There are plenty of voices right now telling Germans and Austrians - and many of the rest of us -that we can master the past by denying that it ever happened or that we don’t have to engage with it or that it has anything to do with the future we wish for ourselves� Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College 116 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Fischer, André: The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2024. 298 pp. $ 65.00. This book, based on a 2017 Stanford University dissertation entitled The Aesthetic Justification of the World: New Mythologies in German Postwar Culture , is primarily a study of four key postwar West German artists� The two writers under consideration are Hans Henny Jahnn and Hubert Fichte� The latter had not been considered in the original dissertation� The visual and performance artist is Joseph Beuys; and the filmmaker is Werner Herzog. What ties these four different artists together, André Fischer argues, is their programmatic rejection of a purely rational approach to art and their insistence on myth� Fischer’s primary argument is that myth does not have to be fascist or right-wing, and that it can have utopian or even progressive potential� He therefore wants to defend all four artists against critics who argue that their recourse to mythmaking is necessarily regressive and even fascistic� The conception of mythmaking and its intertwinement with or opposition to modernity that lies at the heart of the book stands under the influence of a number of key thinkers� The most important are Max Horkheimer and Theodor W� Adorno, whose magnum opus Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) first articulated the intertwinement between mythmaking and modernity� Fischer is also heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, especially Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872), which had established the categories of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and which had argued in Schopenhauerian terms that human existence is fundamentally painful and problematic� It was also Nietzsche who proclaimed that art provides an aesthetic justification for the world and its inevitable pain. Fischer also acknowledges his debt to the late German literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, a visitor to Stanford, who himself was fascinated by the Dionysian, the tragic, and the painful, and who was a powerful and articulate right-wing critic of postwar West German culture and what he saw as its stubborn and boring avoidance of tragedy and violence� In addition to these four thinkers, whom one might view as the patron saints of the book, a good many other thinkers come in for consideration: Mircea Eliade, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Jürgen Habermas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Botho Strauss, etc� In many ways the book is a juggling act, with the four artists representing the balls that Fischer throws into the air and the various theorists and thinkers he considers the many arms with which he propels the balls on their various courses� This makes for challenging and intriguing reading, and indeed the book is a rich and useful source of information on each of the artists under consideration� However, given the sheer variety of theorists as well as the inherent differences among the four artists, the book also Reviews 117 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 risks a lack of unity and coherence in its overall structure and argument� To put it more colloquially, it is entirely possible here to miss the forest for the trees� However, the trees - the four artists under consideration - are fascinating indeed� Two of these artists, Beuys and Herzog, are very well known in the English-speaking world� The two writers, Jahnn and Fichte, are, to put it mildly, considerably less well known. I find myself wishing that Fischer had addressed this discrepancy and the reasons why it is the more visual German artists who have provoked such worldwide attention in their attempts to reconstruct mythmaking after World War Two, whereas the two writers have remained, for the most part, untranslated and without an obvious impact on the world literary scene� Is there something about the visual that makes the power of myth and pain more acceptable and translatable, whereas in literary or purely linguistic form it becomes more hermetic and unapproachable from the viewpoint of other cultures and languages? Nietzsche himself believed that pure tragedy arose from the spirit of music, but that tragic music alone was unbearable and needed the Apollonian power of the visual in order to make it endurable� However, in spite of Nietzsche’s theorization of the visual and the aural, Fischer remains strangely uninterested in generic questions� Given that not much has been written in English about either Jahnn or Fichte, the two chapters on these writers are particularly important - if also occasionally creepy and uncomfortable� In particular, Jahnn appears to have been a pedophile, and to have victimized Hubert Fichte when Fichte was a teenager� In much of his literary work, Fichte then wrote about, built upon, and also took his revenge on Jahnn (for instance imagining him being cut open and dissected on an autopsy table in a morgue in Brazil)� Fischer writes about all of this openly and frankly, if somewhat obliquely and without much moral condemnation� The exploration of Jahnn’s fascination with death and pain and Fichte’s obsession with Jahnn, and later on with the erotic and cultural possibilities of South America and Africa, makes for interesting, if occasionally disquieting, reading. Here Fischer has clearly identified and explored a current of postwar West German cultural and aesthetic thought that is undoubtedly important but relatively understudied, particularly in the English-speaking world� It would have been helpful if Fischer had clearly identified who did the translations from German into English of excerpts from works by the two writers that have not previously been translated into English� I assume that Fischer himself was the translator, but the book does not make this clear� It would also have been useful, for the sake of comparison, to have the original German text in the endnotes to the book� I am not always convinced by the translations - for instance when Fischer has Fichte capitalize the adjective “Black” (114)� This strikes me more as a contemporary “correction” of Fichte than as something Fichte would have 118 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 been likely to do when he originally wrote Explosion: Roman der Ethnologie shortly before his death from AIDS in 1986� With Beuys and Herzog many readers will find themselves on more familiar ground� Here Fischer displays his considerable skills not just as a literary scholar but also as an interpreter of the visual arts and of films. One of the key strengths of the book is its eclecticism and its seemingly effortless movement from the literary to the visual and performative to the cinematic� It is only with Beuys and Fichte, however, that Fischer’s key claim about mythic thinking - that it has potential for progressive and even leftist projects - strikes me as convincing. Beuys specifically addresses the concept of utopia, and Fichte’s multiculturalism and anthropological explorations suggest the possibility of a world in which the sins of colonialism and racism are at least partially expiated� With Jahnn and Herzog, however, it is hard to see much utopian potential� But perhaps the point is that a recognition of the tragic and of the force of myth is vital in order to be able to move beyond them to something more positive� This would have been the viewpoint of Horkheimer and Adorno, or of Bertolt Brecht - who is also mentioned in the book - but it was not that of Bohrer or Nietzsche� The book seems to hover, undecided, between these two seemingly irreconcilable poles, leaving readers to judge for themselves� Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University Sunka Simon: German Crime Dramas. From Network Television to Netflix. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 316 pp. $ 117.00 / $ 35.95. The crime drama, in its various iterations ( Krimis , podcasts, films, TV series), which cultural critics previously dismissed as simple-minded entertainment, has experienced a resurgence of popularity accompanied by significant scholarly attention. According to Sunka Simon’s German Crime Dramas. From Network Television to Netflix, the rise of the crime drama runs parallel to the rise of the Golden Age of TV (including streaming services such as Netflix). In the convergence era, when global content is readily available across various platforms, concepts of local, regional, and global are in flux. Long-running network shows, such as Tatort , which have learned to adapt to changes in industry, technology, and policies, “bear crucial information and inspiration for producers, executives and for creative teams and program directors” (3), Simon argues� To paraphrase an old GDR slogan, von Tatort lernen, heisst siegen lernen. To be sure, the post-World War II TV crime drama offered the possibility to “delve into questions of guilt without seeming overly invested in Holocaust remembrance” (14) by stimulating critique Reviews 119 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 of systemic violence, while upholding the validity of democratic laws represented by the detective� As such, it served as a stabilizing factor in postwar society� Yet, Simon asks, at what cost and at whose expense did this stabilization occur? The book is divided into two main sections “Network Television” and “Netflix.” The introduction connects both media studies and German studies in laying out the goal of the book. Using the genre of crime drama (in all its variations and sub-genres), Simon proposes to examine both network TV ( Tatort ) and Netflix for their continuities and differences, especially their sub-texts on memory culture and the (self-)representation of Germany and its citizens� Tatort , Simon suggests, with its reliable cast of characters (some teams have been on TV for over 20 years), and its somewhat predictable 90-minute plots, has provided its various writers, producers, and directors with a creative sandbox allowing “for a wider variety in directing styles, casting and acting, integrating local politics and milieu, pacing, and aesthetics”(5)� In her analysis of no fewer than nine Tatort episodes (three set in in each of the cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Leipzig/ Dresden) between 1970 and 2008, read in relation to the news of the time, she highlights how the crime dramas (even if produced long before the corresponding news stories were reported) reflect social anxieties, speak to collective trauma and changing demographics, while connecting regional, national and global discourses. Ultimately, she argues, the crime drama and its malleability, and the seriality of Tatort in particular, has primed and prepared German viewers for the age of Netflix. The second part, “Netflix,” traces the streaming service’s break into the European, specifically the German, market. It analyzes Netflix’s strategies to win viewers, both younger viewers who grew up in the visual age and older viewers who did not. Simon highlights Netflix’s practice of importing US content while also trying to localize material which is nationally and even regionally relevant� The EU-mandated quota of 30% national or local content, paired with a tendency to engage in local productions - though this began as a requirement - became a distinct advantage for Netflix as they hired local directors, creators, and writers who have had international experience and acclaim (such as Tom Tykwer for Babylon Berlin ). Netflix’s German shows have managed to captivate a global audience. Simon provides an in-depth reading of the Netflix (co-)produced shows Dark (2017-20), Perfume (2018), and Dogs of Berlin (2018), combining a media studies perspective that analyzes both their embeddedness in an international, capitalistic streaming system as well as the culturally specific idiosyncrasies of each show� Dark, while not a classic police procedural, still provides poignant reflections on personal and collective memory, guilt, and what recent research would call “implication” in crime(s)� More than that, the show’s self-awareness hints at similarities between the (rather complicated) family structures of the show and the post-network structures it exists in� 120 Reviews DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0007 Perfume , a (fairly) loose adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s 1986 best-selling novel, is self-referential in terms of content (the book actually plays a role in the solving of the case), as well as form: the episodic narration, with each episode named after an old-time perfume ingredient, switching between flashbacks and present day, provides various visual and narrative layers, mimicking perfume production, resulting in a troubling, miasmic finale. The show’s self-presentation as a contemporary reimagination of the past, however, fades like a cheap scent, revealing the continuous reproduction of violent gender relations that no “postfeminist female nominal agency” (read: a female lead detective) can cover up (280)� Dogs of Berlin shows the most continuity between network crime drama and post-network crime drama, both in its choice of director (Christian Alvart previously directed several Hamburg Tatort episodes), its attempt at socio-political relevance, and the story of a crime that seems politically motivated but ends up being what German law would call “niedere Beweggründe” (base motives). While ostensibly portraying a diverse city and fleshed-out characters with various motivations, Simon writes, the subtexts reveal a more one-dimensional perception and rather reactionary commentary if read against contemporary German discourses on race, migration, gender identity, and class. Ultimately, both network shows and post-network Netflix shows reflect the broader structures within which they operate� From the predominantly white male leadership in network television to Netflix’s preference for producing shows by established, successful directors rather than supporting emerging, diverse voices, crime dramas often reinforce existing power structures rather than challenging or critiquing them� This then takes us back to one of Simon’s initial questions: in a global broadcast landscape, which image of Germany and Germans is presented, by and for whom, and at whose expense is it presented? As other streaming platforms are trying to break into the European market, whether this translates into more diverse and multi-faceted images of Germans and Germany remains to be seen� Simon’s book is a tour de force and a dense read, combining methods from social sciences, film studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. Even if one may not agree with each reading, observation, or statement, the sheer amount of primary and secondary sources and the connections Simon highlights between content, form, historical context, production, and audience reception are impressive� Written in an engaging and witty style, German Crime Dramas ’ numerous pop-cultural references often elucidate the more complex arguments and interpretations� Overall, it achieves its stated goal of inspiring English-language media studies to engage in more cross-cultural studies� This book will hopefully not be the last of its kind� Verena Hutter, University of Portland