eJournals

COLLOQUIA GERMANICA BAND 45 in Verbindung mit Jane K. Brown (Seattle), Katharina Gerstenberger (Salt Lake City), Todd C. Kontje (San Diego), John Pizer (Baton Rouge), Maria Tatar (Cambridge), Anthony Tatlow (Dublin), Robert von Dassanowsky (Colorado Springs) und den Mitgliedern der Division of German Studies (University of Kentucky) Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik Herausgegeben von Harald Höbusch und Linda K.Worley Band 45 · 2012 Published for the UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY by A. FRANCKE VERLAG TÜBINGEN © 2015 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All Rights Strictly Reserved Satz: Informationsdesign D. Fratzke, Kirchentellinsfurt Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren ISSN 0010-1338 INHALT Heft 1 Christoph Seifener: Lebensgeschichte und politische Großerzählung: Die Brüder Grimm im Spiegel ihrer Biographen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Martin Rosenstock: The Fatherland and Its Double: Hermann Detzner Maps an Overseas Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Jan Uelzmann: Symbolic Homecoming of the «Hero-Father»: Realignment of National Memory in the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau Special Feature on Konrad Adenauer’s 1955 State Visit to Moscow . . . . . . . . . 41 Samuel Frederick: Transcendent Trivialities: Utopian Space and Fallen Things in Gerhard Meier’s Toteninsel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Thyra E Knapp: Gerhard Richter and the Ambiguous Aesthetics of Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Heft 2 Themenheft: Heinrich von Kleist John B Lyon: Kleist’s «Bombenpost»: The Subject, Place, and Power 113 Nora Martin Peterson: Innocence, Interrupted: Bewusstsein and the Body in Heinrich von Kleist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers: Of Mothers and Lovers: Social and Maternal Conflict in Kleist’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Holly A Yanacek: Investigating the Unexplained: Paranormal Belief and Perception in Kleist’s «Die heilige Cäcilie» and «Das Bettelweib von Locarno» . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Joseph D O’Neil: The Fate of the Martial Sublime: Studies of War in the German Lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Besprechungen/ Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 VI Inhalt Heft 3/ 4 Themenheft: Triangular Readings Martin Kagel: Introduction - Configurations of the Third . . . . . . . . . 209 W Daniel Wilson: Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy: The Imagination and Non-Reproductive Sexuality in Goethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Elizabeth Goodstein: Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Matt Erlin: Schiller’s Island: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen as Robinsonade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 J P Short: Global Consciousness, Commodity Form, and the Natural History Objectv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Matthias Meyer: In Search of the Arthurian Third . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Alexander Sager: The Moderate Watchman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 William Collins Donahue: The Third Man in Annette von Droste- Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche: A Real Nobody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Ann Schmiesing: A Bicentennial Trio: Reading the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Context of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen and Edition of Der arme Heinrich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 Ela Gezen: Convergent Realisms: Aras Ören, Nazım Hikmet, and Bertolt Brecht . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 Antje Krueger: Presenting a Moment of the Past: Third Positions in Uwe Timm’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386 Introduction Configurations of the Third MA RTIN K AGEL Univ ersity of Georgia I. «Nothing is more momentous in any situation than the appearance of a third person,» Charlotte maintains in the opening chapter of Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities. «I have known friends - brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives - whose circumstances were completely reversed, whose mutual relationship changed completely through the accidental or intentional intrusion of a new person» (9-10). Charlotte’s concern - expressed here as a moral axiom - relates to her husband Eduard’s suggestion that the couple invite an old friend into their house to live with them. Seeking to alleviate her fears, Eduard replies that «[n]othing would be changed by the presence of the Captain; on the contrary, everything would be quickened and stimulated» (9). Any unwelcome intrusion, he later adds, would be preempted by self-awareness. Yet Charlotte is not to be dissuaded. Consciousness alone would be an insufficient guard in this case, she retorts, insisting on the profound transformation effected by the intervention of a third (10). This brief conversation, which foreshadows developments in Goethe’s narrative, offers at least two important insights. First, it identifies the transformative power unleashed by the introduction of a third figure or factor into so-called dyadic relationships (those based on two figures/ factors); secondly, it points to the structural nature of this change. If Charlotte is to be believed - and current scholarship in the humanities and social sciences seems to agree - then the addition of a third interrupts and fundamentally redefines dyadic relationships, regardless of how (or whether) this change is perceived from the inside. And while Charlotte’s comments refer to interpersonal relations, they are not limited in their scope to friends, relatives, spouses, or lovers. Already in the novel we see how the disruption caused by the entrance of a third extends beyond the intimate sphere of two individuals to societal institutions and conceptual understandings. Goethe’s exploration of the change effected by the introduction of a third is mirrored by a recent surge in interest in the subject among scholars in fields such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural and gender studies 210 Martin Kagel seeking to shift the theoretical focus from the relationship between «ego» and «alter» to constellations involving figures and functions of the Third. 1 Figures of mediation, such as the judge, the observer, the bystander, the translator, the messenger, the servant, the scapegoat and the rival, are plentiful in literary and cultural texts. Whereas traditional forms of interpretation commonly relegate them to secondary status, an inquiry attuned to the dynamics of triangulation finds in such figures a key to a more nuanced and frequently novel understanding of dyadic relationships. Creating or arbitrating tension or conflict, or shedding new light on individual characters and their relationship to others, they invite the contemplation of their role in personal interactions or social settings. Similarly, triangular constellations in these texts reflect the qualitative difference created by the introduction of a third to conceptual pairs such as mind and matter, nature and culture, inclusion and exclusion, identity and alterity, precursor and follower, victim and perpetrator. Here, as in other triangular constellations, the presence of a third changes the frequently static juxtaposition of two entities into a more dynamic relational triangle demanding different forms of inquiry and new interpretive approaches. 2 Of course, triangular configurations are so fundamental to Western culture that it seems impossible to historicize their significance. As Albrecht Koschorke has pointed out, the classical European semantic with its dualisms has always been accompanied «by a highly elaborate metaphysics of the third number: from Christian dogma of trinity to neo-platonic triads […]» (13). 3 Koschorke, who along with Claudia Breger, Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, Gesa Lindemann and Bernhard Malkmus has spearheaded the new scholarship on the Third in German cultural studies and sociology, notes in this context that in the religious and philosophical tradition, the Third functioned mainly as a form of synthesis or - in chronological progression - to reestablish a former unity. The current interest in the notion of the Third, however, which draws on early twentieth-century models, is distinct from any general consideration of cultural triads and triangles with their accompanying transcendence in that it aims to recognize the discrete and irreducible status of an immanent Third (cf. Fischer, «Tertiarität» 136). In the triangular configurations considered here, the Third is not the result of reconciled opposition; rather, it functions as an independent agent requiring the use of a «new grammar of cultural and epistemological negotiations» (Koschorke 13). As a category, it comprises a spectrum of different figures and functions, which in social theory is otherwise only associated with the notion of the Other. «The fourth or the fifth does not produce a plenitude like the Other or Third» («Tertiarität» 147), Joachim Fischer observes, add- Introduction 211 ing that in plural constellations dyadic and triadic configurations normally are duplicated and repeat themselves while intersecting with each other. Insofar as dyadic relationships reference the Third by anticipation, in retrospect, by inclusion or exclusion, it appears that the Third is always already present, prestructuring intersubjectivity of different kinds. «There is,» as Fischer puts it, not only the Other as partner in dialogue, but also the absent Third as our subject; not only the Other as co-agent, but also the Third as observer, eavesdropper, witness; not only the Other as absentee, but also the Third as messenger; not only the Other cooperating, but also the Third scheming, not only the Other as trusted confidante, but also the Third as stranger; […] not only the Other as partner in trade, but the Third as dealer; […] not only the courted Other, but the rival and competitor; […] not only the Other as superior, but the Third as backer, as savior; not only the Other as antagonist, but the Third as mediator; not only the Other as opponent, but the Third as beneficiary; […] not only you and I as friends or even lovers, but the Third who does not belong, who has been excluded as «tertius miserabilis.» («Der Dritte» 126) II. There is as yet no established history of scholarship on the notion or theory of the Third. Next to its critical function in Freudian psychoanalysis, which itself provides a foundational template for our understanding of triangular relations, scholars have pointed to German sociologist Georg Simmel as one of the first to consider the significance of the Third in social theory. Writing a century after the publication of Goethe’s novel, Simmel maintains that modern society is constituted at the core via the introduction of the relational triangle. «Where three elements, A, B, C, constitute a group,» Simmel writes in his Sociology, «there is, in addition to the direct relationship between A and B, for instance, their indirect one, which is derived from their common relation to C» (135). The latter relationship separates and connects A and B in different ways and hence objectifies (or institutionalizes) their relationship, while also calling it into question (cf. Lüdemann 85). As Simmel points out, «the indirect relation does not only strengthen the direct one. It may also disturb it. No matter how close a triad may be, there is always the occasion on which two of the three members regard the third as an intruder» (135). 4 Simmel’s basic model of society stands at the beginning of a systematic theory that accounts for qualitative change via the introduction of a third cause, recognizing both its destabilizing and stabilizing effects. In the current discussion, his reflections serve as a framework for the rethinking of personal, institutional and conceptual relationships in a social context. 212 Martin Kagel Within this framework, the position of the Third offers not only a different perspective, but its «dynamic of indirectness» (Koschorke 18) also allows for new forms of codification of existing relationships. Hence, the systematic reflection on the status of the Third - as Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindeman point out in the introduction to their Theorien des Dritten - «changes our understanding of subject, social existence and knowledge, and opens up new possibilities of observation and evaluation» (8). Besides Freud and Simmel, an important reference point for the genealogy of scholarship on the Third has been the work of literary scholar and cultural philosopher René Girard. Girard’s study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965; originally published in 1961 as Mesonge romantique et verité romanesque), in which he analyzed constellations of triangular desire in classic nineteenth-century novels, initiated the exploration of triangulation in literary texts, which he himself expanded to ritual and religion in his investigation of the scapegoat in Violence and the Sacred (1972), his second major monograph. All desire, Girard argued in his first study, is mimetic and mediated through third figures rather than direct, spontaneous and rooted in the desired object. «The great novelists,» Girard states, «reveal the imitative nature of desire» (14) and its dynamic of ambivalence fueled by three triangular emotions, «envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred» (40). In the highest state of mediation, such as in Dostoevsky’s novels, he notes, «there is no longer any love without jealousy, any friendship without envy, any attraction without repulsion» (41). A further point of reference for current scholarship on the Third is the challenge to binary thinking presented by post-structural and post-colonial theory. While post-structuralism aimed at deconstructing or otherwise breaking down binarisms and exposing the ideological foundations in the construction of knowledge, notions like hybridity and liminality, such as they are commonly employed in post-colonial theory, denote an in-between territory that binary logic suppresses in discursive space. Homi Bhabha’s widely adopted concept of a third space identifies a cultural space that is not simply the mixture of minority and majority culture, but rather a new «location» from which both can be redefined. Pointing to the role of working-class women in the British miner’s strike of 1984-85, who in the course of their protest against the British government also began to question their role in the family and the community, Bhabha notes that the transformative power of the hybrid moment lies «in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both» (28). Jonathan Rutherford, who contemplated questions of politi- Introduction 213 cal identity in relation to that same event, noted that the different positions represented in the strike highlighted difference rather than a fixed identity «reducible to the single logic of class» («A Place Called Home» 19). The convergence of issues of class and gender challenged not only left chauvinism, he maintained, but in doing so also «the leftist assertion that the strike was an homogeneous working class engaged in a singular struggle» (18). The continuous negotiation of identity as a positioning through difference, both authors suggest, ultimately eschews the «simplistic polarity between the ruler and the ruled» in favor of a «‹third space,› which enables other positions to emerge» (Rutherford, «Interview with Homi Bhabha» 220). Recent scholarly work on the Third does not reflect an attempt to critique or transcend the approaches of Homi Bhabha or others such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Serres, Judith Butler, or post-colonial and post-structural theory more generally. Indeed, it recognizes the importance of such theory for conceiving the passage from the Other to the Third. Therefore, current scholarship on triangulation focuses less on deconstructing, overcoming or negotiating traditional binary oppositions than on highlighting the significance of figures and factors operating in relation to them in ways often not sufficiently understood or appreciated. In this sense, research on the Third is probably best described as a form of cultural inquiry operating alongside and, at least partially, on the basis of current theories, incorporating approaches from different fields of study and drawing on their insights. From ethics to epistemology to aesthetics, the eccentric position of the Third underscores the asymmetry of dyadic relationships and provides a critically important perspective on the formation of the subject and its socialization. Moreover, against the background of transcultural negotiations, it offers a more accurate form of reflection on cultural heterogeneity. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous outcomes in this context is that the basic notion of (cultural) difference has been elevated from the comparison of differences to the discussion of forms and methods of differentiation. In cultural triangulation, in other words - similar to though not identical to post-colonial theory - the emphasis is on staging encounters or observing the migration of texts and meanings rather than on a search for origins, stable contrasts or principle juxtapositions. In this sense, the primacy of a relational understanding in triangular relationships - in contrast to a comparative one in a dyadic constellation - is also relevant to the study of the movement of people, objects, concepts and texts across borders and different regions. To reflect on the mediation that transfer and translation entail and to consider national relations in a con- 214 Martin Kagel text beyond the fruitless iteration of static and often preconceived opposites can doubtless deepen our appreciation of transnational connections. The humanities and social sciences, as Joachim Fischer has maintained, are uniquely positioned to inquire into the role of the Third, since they form a specific group of academic disciplines focused on theorizing intersubjectivity. Historically based on inquiring into the Other, the reflection on the Third here becomes a logical supplement to the discussion of identity and alterity, while also representing «one step ahead […] a step between alterity and plurality» («Turn to the Third» 96). Because of their shared focus, triangular readings also lend themselves to combining humanities research with that in the social sciences, where adding a third perspective has routinely been employed to validate results or as a way to gain additional knowledge (Flick 309). Moreover, in fields like geography or geometry, methods of triangulation have been used for centuries to determine location and measure distance. While such methods may not be transferred directly into literary and cultural study, mapping, navigation, and surveying can be more than mere metaphors here, when they are employed as figures of theoretical thought. Beyond the immediate connection, in other words, the room opened by triangulation provides opportunities for potential associations, adding complexity and enlarging understanding. III. Among the different contexts in which the Third has become relevant to my own thinking, such as in the research on friendship in eighteenth-century Germany, where it appears that a Third is always needed to balance principally asymmetrical relationships, or the question of literary influence, where precursor and follower frequently speak to each other by way of a Third, I want to highlight one example that initially informed the conceptual thinking out of which this collection of essays has grown. 5 This is in the figure of the bystander, or observer, in the context of the Holocaust. A few years ago, I was invited by the organizers of the Athens Jewish Film Festival to introduce Yael Hersonski’s 2010 documentary A Film Unfinished, a film whose disquieting revelations I have continued to ponder ever since. The starting point for Hersonski’s inquiry was the discovery in 1998 of about thirty minutes of outtakes from a partially edited film German Nazis shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942, just before the deportations to the extermination camps of Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz began. An hour of footage from that same film had originally been discovered in 1954 in an East German film archive, and the images it presented had gener- Introduction 215 ally been considered «historical» in the sense that they recorded the Ghetto reality. With this understanding, the footage was used in museums around the world and also found its way into feature films on the Holocaust, for example Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). What was significant about the discovery of the outtakes was that the additional material showed that Nazi filmmakers had actually staged several of the scenes, a fact that rendered the pictures taken even more chilling than they had already seemed. In light of this discovery, Hersonski, a young Israeli filmmaker, began her own inquiry «into the truth as well as the deception of documentary representation» (Insdorf), calling into question the veracity of the entire footage, and, equally important, drawing attention to those who shot the film in Warsaw. Only one of the cameramen has ever been known by name, Willy Wist. When, during post-war German investigations, he was interviewed about his role in Nazi crimes in the Ghetto, Wist readily admitted that he had been part of the film crew in Warsaw, but claimed not to remember the names of superiors and, predictably, denied any knowledge of the Holocaust. Overall, he exhibited a conspicuous emotional distance to the scenes he had recorded on camera. Watching and listening to a reenactment of Wist’s interview, I wondered about the culpability of this man who observed the crimes the Nazis committed and chose not to interfere. Although he may have been ignorant of the regime’s designs for the so-called final solution, the conditions in the Ghetto were such that it is absolutely inconceivable that Wist did not understand that murder was being committed there. Yet he elected to do nothing, and in so doing, became complicit in the crimes that were committed in Warsaw. 6 In his defense, Wist made himself appear as the proverbial bystander caught in the criminal web that the regime had spun, and legally, there seemed to be no grounds to convict someone who simply observed and recorded the events in the Ghetto. In the context of a theory of the Third, however, Wist’s status as an observer would not equal that of an outsider; rather, it would place him among those who helped execute and justify the inhumanity he witnessed. The feeling of empathy, as Fritz Breithaupt argued in his book Kulturen der Empathie - also a study on the Third - is always connected to a choosing of sides in triangular constellations (152). Wist chose a side. Seeing Wist as the Third invalidates his claim to neutrality, given that he does not stand outside the dyadic relationship between perpetrator and victim; rather, objectifying Jewish suffering through his camera’s lens, he is an integral part of this relationship. He does not have to be the Other vis-à-vis the victims, nor does he have to hate or physically abuse them. As the Third, 216 Martin Kagel he becomes an ally of those who murder, simply by rendering human relations abstract. Showing the suffering of the Ghetto inmates in a manner devoid of empathy, rehearsal and all - that is his crime. In a rather profound sense, then, Wist’s case exhibits the ethical dimension in triangulation, including the way in which the theory of the Third can help elucidate this dimension. IV. The essays presented in this special double issue of Colloquia Germanica stake out new ground insofar as they complement the conceptual focus of the current discussion of the Third with an exemplary corpus of Triangular Readings. Some of the readings focus on the figure and function of a third in specific texts, while others bring together three different texts for new and creative readings. Both approaches recognize the considerable «poetic productivity» (Koschorke 28) in triadic constellations and seek to illuminate previously hidden connections and meanings. The collection begins with two foundational essays. Daniel Wilson’s inquiry into Goethe’s erotic imaginary highlights the structural role of the Third for the aesthetic and erotic encounters of the Weimar poet and its significance for their literary representation in his writing. «So mystifizierte ich mich selbst […],» Goethe maintains in Dichtung und Wahrheit when he recalls his first amorous relationship as a youth in Frankfurt and the outof-self persona in which he combined erotic sensibility and literary production (Werke 9: 168). Considering Goethe’s Winckelmann essay and his Venetian Epigrams, Wilson skillfully lays out the evidence for how the Third in the form of an imaginary person - an experiential and poetic device - aids Goethe’s exploration of, and reflection on, human sexuality. Although there is no direct relationship, a subterranean link seems to exist between Goethe’s imaginary Third and Georg Simmel’s Third «as imaginative form,» as both understand this positionality as a critical form of selfreflection. Elizabeth Goodstein’s comprehensive discussion of Simmel’s excursus on «The Stranger» explores the notions of Third and Thirdness as central figures in Simmel’s thinking and theoretical enterprise. Simmel, Goodstein argues, is «both a theorist and an exemplar of Thirdness,» positioned in the liminal space between sociology and philosophy. More than simply a reflection of Simmel’s own status, however, his figure of the stranger delineates a particularly modernist form of human experience, one that both defines and defies social totality. The two essays that follow represent unique theoretical approaches to triangulation that emphasize the significance of triangular readings at the Introduction 217 intersection of aesthetics and politics. Matt Erlin’s seismological location of Schiller’s letters on the aesthetic education of man «at the intersection of three conceptual frames» - eighteenth-century republicanism, European literary history, and Adorno’s reflections on the sedimentation of social phenomena in art - aims to pinpoint their particular «discursive moment.» Aesthetics here is politics in a quite literal sense, as Schiller envisions in the encounter with art not only a form of rebirth. Aesthetic education, Erlin argues, also fulfills a function structurally analogous to that of landed property in republican theory. In its emphasis on constellation, Erlin’s contribution is linked to John P. Short’s investigation of the natural history object, «starfish, corals, iguanas - sought in the remotest places for assembly into exotic collections for edification and exchange,» as a third element in the «powerful duality of economic subject and object.» Short’s essay is evocative not just in the images that accompany his inquiry, but also because of the many ambiguities the natural history object carries with it as it collapses distances of time and space. In the growing global consciousness of late nineteenth-century Europe, it emerges as a cultural form in which new relations of exchange become manifest and, in this way, functions as both subject and expression of global capitalism. Three pairs of essays on texts from different literary periods constitute the remaining body of triangular readings. Matthias Meyer and Alexander Sager, both scholars of medieval German literature, discuss the Third in the context of the Arthurian Romance and medieval poetry. Meyer focuses on internal and external figures mediating and structuring the encounter between the aristocratic court and the world of adventure, while Sager traces the development of the figure of the watchman in the German Tagelied from outside observer to internalized voice of reason and conscience. Sager’s discussion of the medieval watchman shares with William Donahue’s essay on Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche an interest in the explanatory presence of a third, seemingly marginal, yet actually central character who is key to understanding a text’s moral and social narrative. In Donahue’s reading of the Judenbuche, Johannes Niemand’s role is significant especially with regard to the story’s oft-debated anti-Semitism, a discussion to which Donahue adds a new perspective, that of the Third. Triangulating different editorial projects by the Brothers Grimm (Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, the fairy tales, and the collection of Deutsche Sagen, all projects happening at about the same time), Ann Schmiesing inquires into the relationship between the Grimms’ appropriation of medieval literature and their purported recovery of Volkspoesie. Looking at individual stories as well as introductions and other commen- 218 Martin Kagel tary, Schmiesing carefully reconstructs how Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm imbued the different texts «with their own notions of gender roles or of cultural nationalism,» rendering their edited work a mixture of the stories they collected, their own class-based values, and their political agenda rather than a presentation of the unmediated voice of the people. Ela Gezen and Antje Krueger complete the collection of triangular readings with their discussion of twentieth-century authors and texts. Gezen provides a transnational perspective in her analysis of the relationship between German, Turkish and Turkish-German authors Bertolt Brecht, Nazım Hikmet, and Aras Ören. In Ören’s narrative poem, Was will Nyazi in der Naunynstraße? , German and Turkish labor history are intertwined and so are Brecht’s, Hikmet’s and Ören’s conceptions for an emancipatory form of literary realism that has a role in social, revolutionary practice. Finally, in her analysis of Uwe Timm’s «sprechende Situationen,» Antje Krueger returns to the question of positionality. «Sprechende Situationen» are remembered or narrated events whose authenticity is underscored by the fact that they are retold in the text. In addition, they also speak for themselves. In Krueger’s view these sections assume a third position in Timm’s narratives, as they, situated between fact and fiction, allow historical and imagined realities to converge, thereby creating something more telling, and, in a way, more truthful than either could alone. V. Following the initial discussion between Charlotte and Albert about the impact a third person might have on their relationship, the notion of the Third no longer appears in the text of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Throughout the novel, however, every single relationship is mediated and reconfigured either directly or conceptually by a Third, be it a person, such as the architect, the teacher, Charlotte’s daughter Luciane, Ottilie’s late father or the fittingly named Mittler, or a conceptual reference point, such as the military, the building projects and landscape design. Moreover, the Third is also present in the self-conscious role-playing of the main characters, all of whom operate in what could be called the mode of the Third, a state of mind negotiating the belief in fate with the equally strong conviction of self-determination, in which factual and imagined reality run parallel. 7 The Third, in other words, does not have to be introduced into Goethe’s novel. It is - and this seems to apply in different ways to all the texts discussed in this collection - always already there. Introduction 219 Notes 1 Cf. Breger and Döring 1998; Bedorf, Fischer, and Lindemann 2010; Eßlinger et al. 2010; Cooper and Malkmus 2013. 2 Cf. Erlin and Kagel, «Unter Geschäftsmännern» 283-84. 3 Unless noted otherwise, all translations from the German are my own. 4 Simmel notes: «The sociological structure of the dyad is characterized by two phenomena that are absent from it. One is the intensification of relation by a third element or by a social framework that transcends both members of the dyad. The other is any disturbance and distraction of pure and immediate reciprocity. […] This intimacy, which is the tendency of relations between two persons, is the reason why the dyad constitutes the chief seat of jealousy (136). 5 On friendship, see Kagel, «Authoring Amity»; on the question of influence, see Kagel, «Tod eines Genossen.» 6 Cf. Koschorke 27. 7 Cf. in this context Fritz Breithaupt’s discussion of Goethe’s notion of «selbstbewußte Illusion» (Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder 57-58). Works Cited Bedorf, Thomas, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindeman, eds. Theorien des Dritten. Innovation in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2010. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Breger, Claudia, and Tobias Döring, eds. Figuren der/ des Dritten. Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Breithaupt, Fritz. Jenseits der Bilder: Goethes Politik der Wahrnehmung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2000. -. Kulturen der Empathie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. Cooper, Ian, and Bernhard F. Malkmus, eds. Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Erlin, Matt, and Martin Kagel. «Unter Geschäftsmännern: Figuren des Dritten in Lessings Dramaturgie.» Lessing Yearbook 41 (2014): 283-84. Eßlinger, Eva, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer, and Alexander Zons, eds. Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Fischer, Joachim. «Tertiärität/ Der Dritte. Soziologie als Schlüsseldisziplin.» Theorien des Dritten. Innovation in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie. Ed. Thomas Bedorf, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindemann. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2010. 131-160. -. «Der Dritte. Zur Anthropologie der Intersubjektivität.» wir/ ihr/ sie. Identität und Alterität in Theorie und Methode. Ed. Wolfgang Eßbach. Würzburg: Ergon, 2000. 103-36. -. «Turn to the Third: A Systematic Consideration of an Innovation in Social Theory.» Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity. Ed. Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus. 81-102. Flick, Uwe. «Triangulation in der qualitativen Forschung.» Qualitative Forschung. Ed. Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardorff, and Ines Steinke. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007. 220 Martin Kagel Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Transl. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Elective Affinities. Transl. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963. -. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. Erich Trunz. 14 vols. München: Beck, 1982. Insdorf, Annette. «Interrogating Images» [liner notes]. A Film Unfinished. Dir. Yael Hersonski. Oscilloscope Pictures, 2011. Kagel, Martin. «Authoring Amity: Sophie von La Roche’s Fanny und Julia and the Question of Female Friendship in Eighteenth-Century Germany.» Publications of the English Goethe Society 82.2 (2013): 85-103. -. «Tod eines Genossen. Erinnerung und Intervention in George Taboris Nathans Tod.» Brecht Yearbook 39 (2014): 129-51. Koschorke Albrecht. «Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.» Die Figur des Dritten. Ed. Eva Eßlinger et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 9-31. Lüdemann, Susanne. «Ödipus oder ménage à trois. Die Figur des Dritten in der Psychoanalyse.» Die Figur des Dritten. Ed. Eva Eßlinger et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 80-93. Rutherford, Jonathan. «A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference.» Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 9-27. -. «The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.» Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207-21. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950. Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy: The Imagination and Non-Reproductive Sexuality in Goethe W. DANIEL W IL SON Royal Holloway, Univ ersity of London Two Goethe passages use the term «the third» in entirely opaque ways. The complete lack of commentary on these passages in Goethe editions indicates that others have been equally puzzled by them, and both highlights and masks their importance. For the most interesting passages in a work of literature are often the most apparently incomprehensible, those where we stumble, then perhaps hurry on to more agreeable passages that suit our need to reduce everything to simplicity. The passages occur in Goethe’s most important pronouncement on same-sex love, the «Skizzen zu einer Schilderung Winkelmanns,» Goethe’s own contribution to a hybrid book he edited, entitled Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (1805). Goethe’s Skizzen are one of the densest, most delightful, and most readable prose pieces he ever wrote. For the first time, Winckelmann’s «homosexuality» - an open secret among intellectuals of the time - was confronted directly in public. And what a confrontation it is! Far from condemning same-sex love like most of his contemporaries, indeed far from merely tolerating it, Goethe positively celebrates it. Goethe explains that the ancients possessed a totality of character - very much in Schiller’s sense in his Ästhetische Briefe 1 - that we moderns lack, with our enslavement to specialization and fragmentation. And this totality required the ancients to experience «die Verbindungen menschlicher Wesen in ihrem ganzen Umfange,» which means that they had to cultivate that «Entzücken […] das aus der Verbindung ähnlicher Naturen hervorspringt» (MA 6.2: 353). And in case we’re unclear what he means, he specifies «die Freundschaft unter Personen männlichen Geschlechts» - though with a nod at lesbians, too. In the section I have been quoting from, called «Freundschaft,» Goethe then makes an astonishing assertion: Die leidenschaftliche Erfüllung liebevoller Pflichten, die Wonne der Unzertrennlichkeit, die Hingebung eines für den andern, die ausgesprochene Bestimmung für das ganze Leben, die notwendige Begleitung in den Tod setzen uns bei Verbindung zweier Jünglinge in Erstaunen, ja man fühlt sich beschämt, wenn uns Dichter, Geschichtschreiber, Philosophen, Redner, mit Fabeln, Ereignissen, Gefühlen, Gesinnungen solchen Inhaltes und Gehaltes überhäufen. (MA 6.2: 354) 222 W. Daniel Wilson Here Goethe uses descriptors of Christian marriage in his day to define the ideal relationship between two young male lovers in antiquity, and thus turns conventional morality of his day on its head. But then comes the passage with the usage of «dritten» that can cause us to stumble: Zu einer Freundschaft dieser Art fühlte W. sich geboren, derselben nicht allein sich fähig, sondern auch im höchsten Grade bedürftig; er empfand sein eigenes Selbst nur unter der Form der Freundschaft, er erkannte sich nur unter dem Bilde des durch einen dritten zu vollendenden Ganzen. Frühe schon legte er dieser Idee einen vielleicht unwürdigen Gegenstand unter, er widmete sich ihm, für ihn zu leben und zu leiden, für denselben fand er selbst in seiner Armut Mittel reich zu sein, zu geben, aufzuopfern, ja er zweifelt nicht, sein Dasein, sein Leben zu verpfänden. Hier ist es, wo sich W. selbst mitten in Druck und Not, groß, reich, freigebig und glücklich fühlt, weil er dem etwas leisten kann, den er über alles liebt, ja dem er sogar, als höchste Aufopferung, Undankbarkeit zu verzeihen hat. (MA 6.2: 354) Of course, we often talk of «third parties,» of a «third person,» usually meaning someone objective or impartial in a relationship between two other parties or persons. In this passage, though, one would expect instead «einen zweiten» or «einen anderen,» since there are only two people involved. The likelihood that Goethe is quite simply confused here is perhaps supported by the second usage of «dritt-» that can make us stumble even more seriously. In this passage, in the section «Katholizismus,» Goethe seeks to defend Winckelmann against vicious attacks because of his - clearly opportunistic - conversion to Catholicism in Dresden, a step that earned him a splendid papal appointment and the freedom to pursue his studies of ancient art in Rome. And Goethe describes the human instinct to demand consistency and loyalty. Denn es bleibt freilich ein Jeder, der die Religion verändert, mit einer Art von Makel bespritzt, von der es unmöglich scheint, ihn zu reinigen. […] Ausdauern soll man, da, wo uns mehr das Geschick als die Wahl hingestellt. Bei einem Volke, einer Stadt, einem Fürsten, einem Freunde, einem Weibe festhalten, darauf alles beziehen, deshalb alles wirken, alles entbehren und dulden, das wird geschätzt; Abfall dagegen bleibt verhaßt, Wankelmut wird lächerlich. (MA 6.2: 357) Note that Goethe manages to smuggle sexuality into the equation, indeed with the word «Freund» he refers back to the section «Freundschaft,» on same-sex love, and equates same-sex and opposite-sex love. And he also echoes the earlier description of male-male «marriage» and its valorization of «die Wonne der Unzertrennlichkeit […] die ausgesprochene Bestimmung für das ganze Leben.» And yet here, Goethe treats such fidelity with obvious distance, even irony - and it is worth mentioning that his ridicule targets im- Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 223 plicitly the very concept that later in life he championed, Entsagung, which of course has a clear sexual component. This passage leads into Goethe’s almost self-consciously frivolous defense of Winckelmann’s religious inconstancy, and here we find the other odd use of «dritt-»: War dieser nun die eine schroffe, sehr ernste Seite, so läßt sich die Sache auch von einer andern ansehn, von der man sie heiterer und leichter nehmen kann. Gewisse Zustände des Menschen, die wir keinesweges billigen, gewisse sittliche Flecken an dritten Personen haben für unsre Phantasie einen besondern Reiz. Will man uns ein Gleichnis erlauben, so möchten wir sagen, es ist damit, wie mit dem Wildbret, das dem feinen Gaumen mit einer kleinen Andeutung von Fäulnis weit besser als frisch gebraten schmeckt. Eine geschiedene Frau, ein Renegat machen auf uns einen besonders reizenden Eindruck. Personen, die uns sonst vielleicht nur merkwürdig und liebenswürdig vorkämen, erscheinen uns nun als wundersam, und es ist nicht zu leugnen, daß die Religionsveränderung Winkelmanns das Romantische seines Lebens und Wesens vor unserer Einbildungskraft merklich erhöht. (MA 6.2: 358) This may have been one of those passages that provoked the fury of the Jena Romantics against the «heathen» Goethe’s Winckelmann book: Goethe not only calls conversion to Catholicism, which Friedrich Schlegel was already considering during this period, «sittliche Flecken,» but justifies it on grounds that could hardly satisfy a committed Catholic and indeed brazenly compares a convert with a divorced woman and her with over-ripe meat, thus poking fun also at the two divorced women in the brother Schlegels’ lives. But what are the «dritte Personen» here? Should it not again be simply «andere Personen»? This passage seems to support the assumption that in both places, Goethe is using «dritt-» rather loosely, or, to speak plainly, he is using it incorrectly. But we can imagine another reading, an imaginative one, a triangular one. In both passages, the imagination plays a central role. In this latter passage, our imagination - it ends with «Einbildungskraft» - causes us to see an apostate in an entirely different light, through rose-colored lenses, as «wundersam,» «romantisch.» Of course, «dritt[e] Personen» does not seem to signify the imagination itself. But consider another passage - yes, a third one - that hovers between the two uses of «dritt-» and elucidates them. It is one of the most astounding claims in the essay, and indeed undermines both Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s classical aesthetics. In the section «Schönheit,» immediately following the one «Freundschaft,» Goethe explains the origins of same-sex love from the sense for beauty. The beauty of the human body is fleeting - Goethe, along with other contemporaries, located it in the older adolescent male body. 2 According to Winckelmann, there are two ways to 224 W. Daniel Wilson «fix» this beauty, to make it less transient: castration and the work of art. In this section of his essay, Goethe focuses on the work of art, which stands «in seiner idealen Wirklichkeit vor der Welt.» He continues: Für diese Schönheit war Winkelmann, seiner Natur nach, fähig, er ward sie in den Schriften der Alten zuerst gewahr; aber sie kam ihm aus den Werken der bildenden Kunst persönlich [! ] entgegen, aus denen wir sie erst kennen lernen, um sie an den Gebilden der lebendigen Natur gewahr zu werden und zu schätzen. Finden nun beide Bedürfnisse der Freundschaft und der Schönheit zugleich an einem Gegenstande Nahrung, so scheint das Glück und die Dankbarkeit des Menschen über alle Grenzen hinauszusteigen, und alles, was er besitzt, mag er so gern als schwache Zeugnisse seiner Anhänglichkeit und seiner Verehrung hingeben. So finden wir W. oft in Verhältnis mit schönen Jünglingen, und niemals erscheint er belebter und liebenswürdiger, als in solchen, oft nur flüchtigen Augenblicken. (MA 6.2: 355f.) The word «persönlich» is astonishing here, and is made even more baffling by the accompanying verb «entgegen kommen»: the statue is somehow a person, and of course Goethe means the statue of a «Jüngling,» something like the Apollo Belvedere. In the most famous description in all of art history, Winckelmann had figured the statue as a living being. Goethe, in a letter to Frau von Stein from Italy, described his encounter with ancient art in terms similar to the passage quoted: «Ich lasse mir nur alles entgegen kommen und zwinge mich nicht dies oder jenes in dem Gegenstande zu finden» - and then he mentions the Apollo Belvedere. 3 The statue comes to life, entirely violating Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s precept of what Kant called «ein uninteressiertes und freies Wohlgefallen,» which also excluded «das [Interesse] der Sinne« (Kritik der Urteilskraft 287) as a prerequisite for aesthetic pleasure: for in Goethe’s formulation, the statue is alive and becomes a model for the spectator’s desire for other young men, «[die] Gebild[e] der lebendigen Natur.» This explains why Goethe uses the term «einen dritten,» referring to a person: «[das Bild] des durch einen dritten zu vollendenden Ganzen,» what he calls right after that an «Idee,» adopting Winckelmann’s platonic language, which is even more pronounced in Goethe’s term «Form.» The «Dritter» as person is the work of art that comes toward us «persönlich,» or, more accurately, it is our imagination that brings the work of art to life, gives it platonic form and seeks a real lover to correspond to it: Winckelmann «legte […] dieser Idee einen […] Gegenstand unter.» Our act of imagination creates the lover, and Goethe associates this process with same-sex love. In the eighteenth century, the operative concept for same-sex love, a subset of non-procreative sexuality, was «sodomy,» which signified any sexuality that did not serve reproduction: not only same-sex love, but any kind Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 225 of non-genital sex between man and woman (e.g., anal or oral sex), as well as masturbation, using a dildo, bestiality, and even sex with the devil (see Zedler 328-35). The «geschiedene Frau» may have held the same association for Goethe, for the two women whom he knew most prominently in this category, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel, did not produce children in their second marriages, though they had in their first (to be sure, only Caroline could have figured as a clear example of this pattern at the time Goethe wrote the Winckelmann essay). For Goethe, same-sex love is engendered by imagination, which in turn is aroused by beauty; moreover, I would argue, imagination and its products - literature, art, semiotics - play a role in other manifestations of non-reproductive sexuality. To me, the existing theories of triangulation do not seem to account very well for this phenomenon and treat literature as a rather simplistic field of endeavor. For example, Albrecht Koschorke cites Girard’s notion of mediated desire, a concept that has been justifiably influential in theories of the third. However, in the case of literature, Koschorke focuses mainly on character constellations: triangular relationships, family triangles, patricide, etc. (18). Concretely, he hints that Goethe’s novels cannot be understood without reference to «triadisch[e] Beziehungsprozesse» (29), trailing off, at the end of his essay, onto the well-worn track of triangular personal relationships. Examining triadic relationships may have served us well, as Eve Sedgwick’s theories of male-male bonding through a woman have shown; her analysis has given rise to a flourishing branch of scholarship. But is that all there is? Surely literature is richer than just love triangles and patricide, and I would suggest that overcoming the age-old emphasis on character analysis will lead us more to the core of what interesting writers are really after. Imagination as the third, in particular in the history of sexuality, seems to me a fecund area for literary study. The eighteenth century seemed obsessed with the dire sexual consequences of an overactive imagination. Or at least it did for a while: the Enlightenment debate on masturbation has often been exaggerated, since it was really a controversy of only a few years in the late 1780s and focused on the circle around one obsessed writer, Johann Heinrich Campe, as Isabel Hull has shown (258-80). But certainly, reading in general was tinged with suspicion in the eighteenth century. As new social groups, primarily the middle class, began to read more - much more - than just the Bible and devotional writings they had previously read, fears arose of Lesewut creating social disorder. In the excess of imagination, the anxiety around sexual transgression was never far off the page. It is here, rather than in elucidation of love triangles and such, where I think the figure of the Third can be most productive. 226 W. Daniel Wilson We already have studies that read Werther’s obsession with Lotte as a product of his life of the imagination, and his obsession has been read as masturbatory (by Stephan Schindler and more recently Edward Potter). And earlier readings (for example, Bruce Duncan and Erdmann Waniek) stressed that Werther falls in love with Lotte through literature: Homer, Klopstock, Goldsmith, Ossian. Wilhelm Meister, too - to follow Koschorke’s focus on Goethe’s novels - places models such as the gender-transgressive figure of the Amazon between himself and a desired woman. And of course the adultery in the Elective Affinities is initially an act of imagination, when Eduard and Charlotte fantasize their respective lovers while having sex with each other. So the character triangles possibly have a much wider valence when we see the imagination as the Third. I would stress here that the imagination has to be understood widely, as the root of literature and art, which are often also figurations of the Third. Goethe’s most unique work from this perspective are the Venetian Epigrams, written mainly in 1790 during his second sojourn in Italy. Like Goethe’s portrayal of the origin of same-sex love in the Winckelmann book over a decade later, the Venetian Epigrams depart entirely from our usual notions of Classical Weimar aesthetics. For this reason (among others), the cycle of epigrams in the style of the Roman erotic poet Martial was long ignored or treated with palpable embarrassment. 4 Here Goethe engaged in an experiment that he had begun with the Roman Elegies: Could the German public and indeed censors manage explicitly erotic works in the mold of Propertius or Martial? The experiment failed; Schiller «censored» both works before publishing them in his journals without the most explicit texts. 5 Because these were essentially «external» reasons for truncating the cycles, much recent scholarship has taken the pre-censorship manuscript versions as the basis for analysis. The role of imagination, of art and literature is abundantly obvious in the Roman Elegies, too, and has been recited in various interpretations. We only need to think of the famous passages in the «Roman Elegy V» where the poet runs his hand over the breast of his beloved and understands marble statues, and then taps out the meter of hexameters on her back as she sleeps (MA 3.2: 47). It is difficult to say whether literature and art are ancillary to the beloved woman, or the woman is ancillary to literature and art. In either case, imagination and its products are essential ingredients of a fully satisfying sexual bond between two people - that is, their Third. But the Venetian Epigrams radicalize the connection between a couple and the third that is imagination, just as they radicalize both sexual dissidence and religious heterodoxy in a combination that is paradigmatic for the posture of the liber- Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 227 tine. This was Goethe’s most shocking work for contemporaries, and would have been much more outrageous had it been published in its original form, which we cannot fully restore because a few passages were scratched or cut out or erased from the manuscripts in the late nineteenth century, probably, at the beginning, by Goethe’s last heir and grandson Walther von Goethe before he died in 1885. 6 The epigrams from these and other manuscripts that were not published during Goethe’s lifetime were the most scandalous of the works called the Secretanda, kept back from full publication even in the standard Weimar Edition until 1915, in the very last volume of addenda and corrections, where few readers noticed them. Goethe is here at his cheekiest, both sexually and religiously. For a taste of the brazenness in many of the epigrams that Goethe did not publish, consider what is probably the most offensive poem Goethe ever wrote, at least for a Christian sensibility: Sauber hast du dein Volk erlöst durch Wunder und Leiden Nazarener! Wohin soll es dein Häufchen, wohin? Leben sollen sie doch und Kinder zeugen doch christlich, Leider dem früheren Reiz dienet die schädliche Hand Will der Jüngling dem Übel entgehn sich selbst nicht verderben, Bringet Lais ihm nur brennende Qualen für Lust. Komm noch einmal herab du Gott der Schöpfung und leide Komm erlöse dein Volk von dem gedoppelten Weh! Tu ein Wunder und reinige die Quellen der Freud und des Lebens Paulus will ich dir sein Stephanus wie du’s gebeutst. (MA 3.2: 94) 7 Translation: Jesus, you didn’t do a good job of redeeming your little band of followers. According to the Bible, they are supposed to be fruitful and multiply, but until marriageable age (in Goethe’s day relatively late by modern standards) a young man has to resist early stimulation and console himself with masturbation. If he tries to escape this evil, prostitutes (Lais was a famed prostitute in antiquity) only give him venereal diseases. Next time you should redeem us by coming down to Earth again and doing new miracles: free us from masturbation and syphilis, purify our genitals and fluids. If you do that, I’ll convert from being your denier to being your apostle (St. Paul) or martyr (St. Stephen), whichever you like. A poem full of scorn for Christianity and a plea for free love - and a classic libertine poem, like one of the elegies that was held back at Schiller’s wish from publication in the Roman Elegies. 8 Given the scholarly neglect of the Venetian Epigrams, it is no surprise that some of their elemental poetic patterns have remained unexamined. One of these is the patently dialogic nature of the work. Again and again, much more so than in other poetry of Goethe’s, poems are addressed to 228 W. Daniel Wilson some sort of «du» or «ihr» - sometimes the muses, even the epigrams themselves, but mostly to an anonymous «Freund» or «Freunde,» who stand in for imagined readers. There are two levels here, as in many eighteenth-century works. The first is what I have elsewhere called «characterized» readers, those who are fairly well developed as characters much like those on the level of a work’s «content,» often readers who themselves speak up in the text (Wilson, «Readers»). This sort of «characterized» reader or «narratee» was introduced into eighteenth-century German literature by way of Laurence Sterne’s pioneering novel or meta-novel Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in the 1760s, where the narrator constantly banters with fictional readers. The most brilliant practitioner of this device in Germany was Christoph Martin Wieland, who had a marked impact on Goethe and, I would argue, on the romantics, who lent this technique philosophical significance as a feature of what we call romantic irony. (Wieland, whom the romantics viciously attacked, possibly had at least as much impact on them as their purported models, Cervantes, Sterne and Shakespeare.) Much like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, speech by and to the characterized reader reminds us relentlessly that we are reading a work of fiction, not experiencing the world represented there in an unmediated way. During his first and longer Italian sojourn, Goethe experienced a phenomenon that in his mind firmly tied the figure of the third to this foregrounding of a work’s fictionality. He describes it in a short essay published in 1788,«Frauenrollen auf dem Römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt.» He turns the Vatican prohibition of women on the stage into a fascinatingly modern meditation on gender and representation that very much looks forward to Judith Butler’s insights on performativity. For Goethe, the men who play women in the Roman theatre are more convincing than women would be in at least some of the same roles. That is because they give rise to a unique aesthetic pleasure, one that he says was previously unknown to him. The reason behind it is, «daß bei einer solchen Vorstellung, der Begriff der Nachahmung, der Gedanke an Kunst, immer lebhaft blieb, und durch das geschickte Spiel nur eine Art von selbstbewußter Illusion hervorgebracht wurde.» He says that this gives rise to «ein doppelter Reiz, […] daß diese Personen keine Frauenzimmer sind, sondern Frauenzimmer vorstellen. Der Jüngling hat die Eigenheiten des weiblichen Geschlechts in ihrem Wesen und Betragen studiert; er kennt sie und bringt sie als Künstler wieder hervor; er spielt nicht sich selbst, sondern eine dritte und eigentlich fremde Natur» (MA 3.2: 173-f.). Here, as later in the Winckelmann essay, the term «dritte» is apparently used consciously; we might have expected «zweite» or «andere,» since the male actor is imitating the other sex, but it seems to me to refer to Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 229 the imaginary gender that he is playing. It is the foregrounding of this representation, what Goethe calls «selbstbewußte Illusion,» that gives rise to this pleasure. And two years later, in Venice, Goethe sought to recreate this aesthetic pleasure in erotic poetry. Of the 136 epigrams in the most important original manuscript of the Venetian Epigrams (MS. H55), ten feature readers who speak up and address the poet directly; seven of these were included in the published version, along with some new ones of the same type. 9 Quite a few other epigrams draw attention to the work and its genesis specifically, so that Stefan Oswald sees poetological self-reflection as the dominant theme in the work (379), though he does not examine specifically the fictional readers. As in Sterne and Wieland, most of the readers who speak up satirize themselves; they represent narrow, conventional responses to the sexual and religious heterodoxy of the poems. For example, one epigram begins with the reader objecting to the salacious writing, to which the poet responds: «Wagst du Deutsch zu schreiben unziemliche Sachen! » - Mein Guter Deutsch dem kleinen Bezirk leider ist griechisch der Welt. (MA 3.2: 104) This response reverberates with double entendre: the poet may simply mean that the wider world does not understand German, so it is not worth worrying about writing obscenities in that language; but he may also be referring obliquely to «Greek love,» the term Goethe used for sodomy. 10 In several cases, the reader’s banter draws explicit attention to the book he or she is reading, the libellus epigrammatum that made up the classical divisions of Martial’s epigrams (consisting of about 100 epigrams each), a term that Goethe also uses for his own cycle in letters from Venice and afterward (see MA 3.2: 498). When the poet writes excessively about the street acrobat Bettina, the reader interjects: «Welch ein Wahnsinn ergriff dich im Müßiggang, hältst du nicht inne? Wird dies Mädchen ein Buch? Stimme was klügeres an.» Wartet bald will ich die Könige singen die Großen der Erde Wenn ich ihr Handwerk und sie besser begreife wie jetzt. Unterdessen sing ich Bettinen denn Gaukler und Dichter Sind gar nahe verwandt und die Verwandtschaft zieht an. (MA 3.2: 99) Despite his stated intention, the poet does go on to «sing» of kings, though still without really comprehending their actions - material for satiric treatment. But first he writes yet another epigram in which he refers to the «Büchlein» that he is writing, reminding us again and again of the text’s fictionality. This sort of metatextual reflexivity goes so far that in one case, the reader addresses the epigrams themselves, and they respond: 230 W. Daniel Wilson «Epigramme seid nicht so frech! » Warum nicht? Wir sind nur Überschriften, die Welt hat die Kapitel des Buchs. (MA 3.2: 113) - a typically Goethean defense of erotica as part of life. But it is also clearly the kind of «selbstbewußte Illusion» that he referred to in the essay on cross-dressing in the theatre. The mention of the «Buch» or, more often, «Büchlein» of epigrams, constantly reminds us that we are reading a book, not experiencing real people and events. Alongside this explicitly «characterized» reader is another, more abstract one, more or less equivalent to what Wolfgang Iser called the «implied» reader, and others have called the «ideal» or «intended» reader of a text. But it is via the characterized, satirized reader that we can define the implied reader. As we saw, in the Venetian Epigrams the characterized reader is inadequate to the text, scandalized by it and sometimes impatient with what s/ he sees as irrelevant or unimportant matter: «Hast du nicht gute Gesellschaft gesehn,» this reader asks, «es zeigt uns dein Büchlein | Fast nur Gaukler und Volk und was noch niedriger ist? » (MA 3.2: 104). And of course the poet defends his choice of low-life subject. This inadequate characterized reader is a foil for the implied or ideal reader, who appreciates sexuality as part of human nature and enjoys even what seem to be forays into triviality and low life, for example the street contortionist whom the poet calls Bettina, and the prostitutes. The implied reader is attuned to the partly hidden codes and strategies for making the erotic visible. However, the poet has to take account of conventional tastes, as part of his experiment of publishing explicit erotic poetry, on the model of ancient Greek and Roman writers, in the modern, Christian age. But he turns this necessity into a virtue, playfully probing the aura of the forbidden. In a series of epigrams he searches for vocabulary that a pious German reader will accept as a substitute for openly obscene words. As we saw, the theme is launched by one of these prudish readers, who asks the poet: «Wagst du Deutsch zu schreiben unziemliche Sachen! » (MA 3.2: 104). The poet’s strategy is to introduce foreign words and German words formed from them, thus poking fun at the contemporary requirement that dangerous material was only to be discussed in Latin publications, not in German ones. In sketches for the epigrams, Goethe playfully returns to this theme again and again, asking, for example, whether his readers will accept such vocabulary: Ungern brauch ich [in] meinen Gedichten die anderen Sprachen. Wäre es sicher! so arm sieht sie anmaßlich [? ] Aber bald wird mirs unmöglich, ich habe der Distichen viele, Manches sagt ich noch nicht weil es die Sylbe verbot. Wenn du es Leser erlaubst, so brauch ich manchmal ein Wörtchen Deutscher Leser erlaube mir nun bey fremden zu Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 231 Du verstehst ja [? ] doch alle Sprachen geschickt Fremde Sprachen verstehst du, o deutscher Leser, in einem Kleinen Gedichte verstehst du wohl auch ein fremdes Wort. 11 What these sketches with feigned anguish over spicy language resulted in, was a finished epigram that Goethe did not publish, addressed to the phallic god Priapus: Gib mir statt der Schwanz ein ander Wort o Priapus Denn ich Deutscher ich bin übel als Dichter geplagt. Griechisch nennt ich dich φαλλος , das klänge doch prächtig den Ohren, Und lateinisch ist auch Mentula leidlich ein Wort Mentula käme von Mens der Schwanz ist etwas von hinten Und nach hinten war mir niemals ein froher Genuß. (MA 3.2: 101) This poem gives «phallogocentrism» new meaning - naming becomes an etymological joke. But the human mind (mens) and penis (mentula) are not as disparate as one might think. The poet is in any case playing with the expectations of negatively characterized prudish readers who cause him terminological headaches, and provokes them with the surprising and (to Goethe’s contemporaries) shocking allusion to anal sex. This poem is the prelude to a series of epigrams that allow him to write about prostitutes - but only with the (characterized) reader’s permission to hide them behind a code. Lange hätt’ ich euch gerne von jenen Tierchen gesprochen, Die so zierlich und schnell fahren dahin und daher. Schlängelchen scheinen sie gleich, doch viergefüßet, sie laufen, Kriechen und schleichen, und leicht schleppen das Schwänzchen sie nach. Seht hier sind sie! und hier! sie sind verschwunden! Wo sind sie? Welche Ritze, welch Kraut nahm die Entfliehenden auf? Wollt ihr mir’s künftig erlauben, so nenn’ ich die Tierchen Lacerten; Denn ich brauche sie noch oft als gefälliges Bild. 12 The joke here is that the characterized reader, who presumably gives his or her permission to use this image, doesn’t know yet what it stands for. Goethe published this epigram in the cycle, but without its context in the original manuscript, so that it is not entirely clear that these «lizards» are prostitutes. In the next epigram, the poet says that one of these «Lacerten» lures him into a «Spelunke,» so the reader now suspects that a woman of ill repute is meant, but there the poet does not explain «Spelunke.» That epigram gives rise to a supremely metatextual one, again poking fun at prurient readers who finally demand to know what the poet is up to: Was Spelunke nun sei? verlangt ihr zu wissen, da wird ja Fast zum Lexikon dies epigrammatische Buch. 232 W. Daniel Wilson Dunkele Häuser sind es in engen Gäßchen, zum Kaffee Führt dich die Schöne, und sie zeigt sich geschäftig, nicht du. (FA 1: 458) A reader who knows the manuscript version will be astonished that Goethe dared to include this poem in the final printed version (as no. 69), or that Schiller allowed it, because the obscene meaning of «drinking coffee» is explained in an epigram that appears only in the manuscript: Caffé wollen wir trinken mein Fremder! - da meint sie b[ranlieren] Hab ich doch, Freunde, mit Recht immer den Caffé gehaßt. (MA 3.2: 104) With the code word for «branlieren» (masturbate) we are back to the lexicon, the epigram that defines itself, the «epigrammatische Buch» that refers constantly to itself and introduces a blur of code words for sexual parts and especially acts that fall firmly into the realm of the forbidden and obscene. This sex is heterodox not only because it is not procreative and indeed occurs outside marriage, but precisely because the woman is active and turns the gendered relationship of normally active male and passive female on its head - a common attraction of the prostitute for men, of course. And the reader is again drawn in, this time a «Freund» who presumably isn’t bothered by this transgression, an idealized or implied reader who is on the same wavelength as the poet. Indeed, the reversal of gender roles reflects the reversal of roles of traditionally active author and passive reader - now the reader, like the prostitute, is active. The transgression climaxes in a longish epigram that describes the prostitutes’ activities in realistic detail, as well as the supposed effects of her manipulation of the «Schwanz» that has no name; but this one was not included in the published cycle: Seid ihr ein Fremder, mein Herr? bewohnt ihr Venedig? so fragten Zwei Lacerten die mich in die Spelunke gelockt. Ratet - Ihr seid ein Franzos! ein Napolitaner! Sie schwatzten Hin und wieder und schnell schlürften sie Kaffe hinein. Tun wir etwas! sagte die Schönste, sie setzte die Tasse Nieder, ich fühlte sogleich ihre geschäftige Hand. Sacht ergriff ich und hielte sie fest; da streckte die zweite Zierliche Fingerchen aus und ich verwehrt es auch ihr. Ach! es ist ein Fremder! so riefen sie beide sie scherzten, Baten Geschenke sich aus die ich doch sparsam verlieh. Drauf bezeichneten sie mir die entferntere Wohnung Und zu dem wärmeren Spiel spätere Stunden der Nacht. Kannten diese Geschöpfe sogleich den Fremden am Weigern O so wißt ihr warum blaß der Venetier schleicht. (MA 3.2: 103) In passing: in this and other passages, Goethe turns out to be fairly conventional when it comes to masturbation. The suggestion in the previously Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 233 quoted epigram that he «hates» masturbation as much as coffee is bolstered here by typical eighteenth-century physiological arguments against the solitary sin: it is «schädlich» and an «Übel» that makes its devotees pale and sickly. Goethe’s only innovation is that what he is describing here is not solitary sex; though the usual theories attributed the ill effects to the absence of a woman, 13 Goethe extends the malaise even to the «hand job.» Nevertheless, masturbation is clearly part of life, and Goethe is intent to portray sexuality in all its forms: he mentioned to Herder his «Buch Epigrammen […], die, hoff ich, nach dem Leben schmecken sollen» - again reflecting Martial, whose dictum «jede Seite von mir schmeckt nach dem Menschen allein» Goethe used as a motto for the first publication of the work, and who also did not shy away from the theme of masturbation. 14 After we read these poems, we begin to see masturbation in other places; the «geschäftige Hand» of this poem had appeared in the rather more reserved «Roman Elegy V»: «Ich befolge den Rat, durchblättre die Werke der Alten | Mit geschäftiger Hand täglich mit neuem Genuß» (MA 3.2: 47). (The suggestion of sexual touching is in the original manuscript of this poem, where the line «Aber ich habe des Nachts die Hände gerne wo anders» is replaced by the rather more respectable «Aber die Nächte hindurch hält Amor mich anders beschäftigt»; MA 3.2: 46-f.). Is Goethe deploying even in the lofty Elegies the well-known eighteenth-century topos of ‹one-handed reading›? Here, too, it is a reader - the poet as reader - who has the «geschäftige Hand» that is used both in sex and in reading. In the Venetian Epigrams, which are much more explicit than the Elegies, a published epigram may have the same connotation, referring to the book of erotic poems itself and thus bringing together the metatextual self-reflection with the theme of self-satisfaction: Wenn auf beschwerlichen Reisen ein Jüngling zur Liebsten sich windet, Hab er dies Büchlein, es ist reizend und tröstlich zugleich; Und erwartet dereinst ein Mädchen den Liebsten, sie halte Dieses Büchlein, und nur, kommt er, so werfe sies weg. (no. 80; FA 1: 459) The book is stimulating (reizend), but also soothing (tröstlich) - in other words, it is good for one-handed reading, replaced by the real lover when he or she is finally present. 15 But the epigram also points out the limits of (erotic) literature, which is no stand-in for real relationships, just as masturbation is a poor substitute for sex with a partner. The work of erotic literature describes itself as functional, dispensable, occasional, indeed pornographic. Yet this description is doubtless tongue-in-cheek, again creating an unreliable characterized reader as opposed to the implied reader who realizes that 234 W. Daniel Wilson this poetry is anything but merely functional. Indeed, it is a literature that trains the reader to become active, creative, and ultimately imaginative. To conclude, the imagination takes the form of persons, but imaginary ones. In the Winckelmann essay, it is statues that seem to come to life and approach the male viewer, who then compares the statues’ ideal beauty to real young men and conceives desire for such men. This is strikingly like the male lover in the Roman Elegies who feels the surface of a female statue and compares it to the body of his beloved, in this case in a «heterosexual» situation. But the very similarity of these processes unsettles the easy distinction between heterosexual and homosexual love, just as Goethe was later to trouble this difference in the figures of the androgynous, indeed sexless angels who are the object of Mephisto’s imaginative desire in the penultimate scene of Faust II, «Grablegung» (Burial) (see Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben 315-47). In the Roman Elegies and the Winckelmann essay, the Third is a work of art, the product of the imagination, which in turn fires the imagination of the subject’s desire for the other. In the Venetian Epigrams, the imagination takes the form of the imagined or implied reader, likewise a creation of the writer, figured also in interaction with the book itself (Büchlein). As I said, the explicit version of this reader, who speaks up in the text, is a characterized reader, a negative foil for the ideal or implied reader whom Goethe imagines. Goethe may even be referring back to another of his characterized readers, in Werther, who is addressed in the short prefatory note, with its suggestion that this Büchlein should be his friend if he has no other - «laß das Büchlein deinen Freund sein» - a grossly inappropriate use of the novel that many critics have, I think mistakenly, taken to be addressed to an ideal rather than a caricatured reader. In the Venetian Epigrams, it may seem initially that the implied reader, like the lover in the Winckelmann book and the Roman Elegies, is male, since the poet says «da wird sie geschäftig, nicht du,» addressing the male reader as a sort of supplement or double of the poet. Such addresses to the «Freund» or «Freunde» seem to suggest a kind of macho camaraderie. But in the last epigram that I quoted, the female lover is also portrayed as reading the very Büchlein that we are reading, thus undoing the identification of the reader as male, or at least the implied reader - it thus seems to me that this male reader is a characterized one, indeed one whom the poet playfully catches imagining himself in the compromising position with the prostitute and thus drawing attention to the desires that this reader might hope to repress (hypocrisy is a favored theme of both the Roman Elegies and the Venetian Epigrams). But this «gender trouble,» the apparent contradiction in Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 235 the gender of the reader, is perhaps intended to remain as the deeper secret of this Third: the imagination questions and unsettles any easy distinction between the lovers, both in terms of gender and of a comfortable separation of fictional character and reader. We are vicariously drawn into the fiction, in a playful suggestion of our prurient, indeed voyeuristic reading habits. The author seems to depend on this participation of the reader, as the profoundly dialogic structure and conversational tone of the Epigrams suggests. The writer needs our work of imagination in order to realize his project, to describe a fully sexual human relationship, one that can involve a great deal more than just making babies. Notes 1 See Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 4th and 9th letters (Schiller 8: 706- 810). 2 See Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben 173-78. 3 20-23 Dec. 1786, Goethe, Briefe 2: 32. 4 Most recently, Stefan Oswald’s monograph has filled this gap; on the nonor anti- Classical aesthetics and poetological discourse in the Epigrams, see 379-400. Most insightful on the Epigrams is Horst Lange’s article. On the gender, sexual, and homoerotic aspects, see Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben 102-34. 5 For an analysis of this censorship and the concern over Goethe’s potential image as a libertine, especially in the Epigrams, see Wilson, Goethes Erotica. 6 See Wilson, Goethes Erotica, 9-17, 112-67. These acts of censorship are usually attributed to Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar - unfairly. 7 I shall quote the manuscript H55 from MA 3.2 (for abbreviations see «Works Cited»), where it is published for the first time as a whole; however, I quote the published Epigrams from FA I, 1, which uses the first edition published in Schiller’s Musen-Almanach, rather than from MA, which uses the later version from the Neue Schriften. All of the manuscript poems from H55 do appear in FA, but not together as in the manuscript. 8 The poem «Zwei gefährliche Schlangen,» MA 3.2: 79-80, originally no. 16 in the Elegies. 9 See the following passages (referring to book, epigram, and line number from the manuscript H55, as reproduced in MA 3.2: 83-116): 1.2.5, 1.2.13, 1.59.1-2, 1.64.1-2, 1.81.1, 1.82.1-2, 2.3.1, 2.13.1, 2.22.1-2, 2.26.1, 2.38.1-2. The ones that were omitted from the final version were 1.81, 2.13, and 2.38; 1.64 was substantially altered for publication as no. 55. New in the final version are especially no. 59, which is introduced with the reader’s plea: «Epigramme seid nicht so frech! » (FA I, 1, 456). 10 For the two instances of Goethe’s use of the term, see Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben 158, 169-70. 11 WA I, 5.2, 377; Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv 27/ 60, Bl. 51r, 52v; cf. Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben 132. 12 No. 67 (FA I, 1, 457); cf. in manuscript H55: MA 3.2: 102. 13 See Laqueur, esp. ch. 4, «The Problem with Masturbation.» For the German context, see Braun. 236 W. Daniel Wilson 14 Letter to Herder, 3. Apr. 1790, FA I, 1, 1089; Martial: FA I, 1, 443, 1133 («Hominem pagina nostra sapit»). Goethe’s other references to masturbation are primarily in Hanswursts Hochzeit, where the word «branlieren» was misunderstood in the original editorial commentary in the new Frankfurter Ausgabe (FA I, 4, 586; corrected in FA I, 1, 1151 in the commentary to «Caffé wollen wir trinken»), and the late invective poems «Herr Werner ein abstruser Dichter» and «Über […] Junius an die Nachkommen» (FA I, 2, 760, 771). 15 Oswald’s reading (130 f.) moves in this direction, saying that Goethe - following Martial rather than the earlier proposed Propertius - portrays the book in the woman’s hand as «ein erotischer Stimulans,» but he does not suggest that the ultimate theme is masturbation. Works Cited Braun, Karl. Die Krankheit Onania: Körperangst und die Anfänge moderner Sexualität im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1995. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Duncan, Bruce. «‹Emilia Galotti lag auf dem Pult aufgeschlagen›: Werther as (Mis-) Reader.» Goethe Yearbook 1 (1982): 42-50. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Briefe. Ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow and Bodo Morawe. 4 vols. Hamburg: Wegner, 1962-1967. -. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed. Friedmar Apel et al. 40 in 45 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985-1999. [«Frankfurter Ausgabe,» abbreviated «FA».] -. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens: Münchner Ausgabe. Ed. Karl Richter et al. 21 in 33 vols. München: Hanser, 1985-2013. [Abbreviated «MA».] -. Werke. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. 133 vols. in 4 pts. Weimar 1887-1919. [Abbreviated «WA».] Hull, Isabel V. Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700 -1815. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kant, Werke in zehn Bänden. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Vol. 8. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Koschorke, Albrecht. «Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.» Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Ed. Eva Eßlinger et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 9-31. Lange, Horst. «Goethe’s Strategy of Self-Censorship: The Case of the Venezianische Epigramme.» Monatshefte 91 (1999): 224-40. Laqueur, Thomas W. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone, 2003. Oswald, Stefan. Früchte einer großen Stadt - Goethes Venezianische Epigramme. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. Potter, Edward T. «Hypochondria, Onanism, and Reading in Goethe’s Werther.» Goethe Yearbook 19 (2012): 117-41. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Masturbation, Prostitution, Sodomy 237 Schiller, Friedrich. Werke und Briefe. Ed. Otto Dann et al. 12 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988-2004. Schindler, Stephan K. Eingebildete Körper: Phantasierte Sexualität in der Goethezeit. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. Waniek, Erdmann. «Werther lesen und Werther als Leser.» Goethe Yearbook 1 (1982): 51-92. Wilson, W. Daniel. Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur ‹Homosexualität›. Berlin: Insel, 2012. -. Goethes Erotica und die Weimarer ‹Zensoren›. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2015. -. «Readers in Texts.» PMLA 96 (1981): 848-63. [Zedler, Johann Heinrich.] «Sodomie, Sodomiterey.» Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, welche bißhero durch menschlichen Verstand und Witz erfunden und verbessert worden […]. 64 vols. Halle und Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1732-1750, 38: 328-35. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form ELIZA BETH S . GOODST EIN Emory Univ ersity Although recognized as a canonical «founding father» of sociology, Georg Simmel has an unusual status. In contrast to Durkheim or Weber or even Marx, he is remembered not as the source of fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks but rather as an «unsystematic thinker» - albeit a scintillating speaker and writer who produced work that continues to «stimulate the sociological imagination.» 1 The case of theoretical reflection on the third and thirdness is symptomatic for the resulting selective mode of reception, in which the practice of appropriating Simmel’s work by inspiring bits and pieces further perpetuates the prevailing underestimation of the philosophical sophistication and enduring theoretical significance of his oeuvre. Thus, to be sure, Simmel’s 1908 Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung has become a locus classicus in the literature on the third and thirdness. 2 But usually, in line with dominant sociological practice, only selected passages (in this case, from the penultimate chapter concerning the diverse roles third parties play in the dynamics of human social life) are actually cited. While a few readers have attempted to build more encompassing theories of the third and thirdness on the basis of Simmel’s distinctive understanding of the social itself as constituted in and through Wechselwirkung (reciprocal interaction or causation), they too have failed to read the Soziologie in ways that meet the challenge his thinking poses. 3 In fact, this topos affords a valuable opportunity to deepen reflection on Simmel’s writing and its place in relation to the contemporary disciplinary imaginary as a whole. For the problem of the third and thirdness is not simply a theme within his Soziologie; it is central to what Simmel identified as his relativist metaphysics. His friend Margarete Susman drew attention to the significance of the category in her 1959 book Die geistige Gestalt Georg Simmels: «With his disinclination for the system, which was grounded for him in the essence of thinking itself, Simmel never represented the three and the third in systematic form. Nonetheless it permeates his philosophy» (4). 4 Thirdness is, then, a figure 5 for that purportedly unsystematic form that is essential to Simmel’s thought as such - to be more precise, for an occupation with form that is not Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 239 formalist but in the broadest sense aesthetic, in which the legacy of dialectical philosophy is carried into a new sort of theoretical enterprise, one centered on life and existence rather than reason and understanding. Simmel’s approach to thinking the social is remarkably consonant with a still-contemporary wish to overcome the dichotomies of the tradition and in particular (as he put it later in a remark to which we shall return) «the spell of the subject» through a new approach to thinking itself - a modernization, as it were, of philosophy. Taking Susman’s claim as its point of departure, this essay returns to the much-read excursus from the Soziologie known in English as «The Stranger» to resituate Simmel’s sociological efforts in the horizon of this broader striving for a properly modern mode of philosophizing - a search, again in Susman’s words, for a «third, not yet discovered but discoverable spiritual and life-form [Geistes- und Lebensform]» (5). In such a new form of (social) life, one might speculate, reconciliation need not entail sublation since a thoroughgoing metaphysical relativism would have supplanted the absolutes of the inherited metaphysics of the subject, enabling multiplicity and difference, immanence and transcendence, to coexist. Like what we have come to call cultural or more generally critical theory, then, Simmel’s thinking occupies a (third) space between sociology and philosophy and is oriented both practically and theoretically toward an (uncertain) future. As Susman’s remarks underline, thirdness is not simply a sociological topos but a problem internal to Simmel’s approach to philosophizing. Like his avowal of relativism, the anomalous, interor transdisciplinary position he occupies is indicative or symptomatic of his prescience as a thinker. Simmel recognized that the problem of figuration becomes a very concrete, lived issue in a world where appeal to ultimate foundations is foreclosed, as it were, from within. The thirdness proper to Simmel’s own historical and theoretical situation between the modern knowledge formations taking shape during his lifetime finds expression in the interactive relation between the dimensions of conceptual and disciplinary innovativeness in his thinking. Thus in his account, «strangeness» cannot be understood in sociological terms alone, for it registers the insurmountable disunity and internal difference that shapes the (individual and social) being of the (modern) subject. That Simmel himself came to be remembered as a stranger is thus well worth pondering; as I will show, this image leads to the heart of the question of his place in the contemporary disciplinary imaginary. The case of Simmel foregrounds how fundamental questions about what used to be called the history of ideas remain for understanding the disciplin- 240 Elizabeth S. Goodstein ary organization of our own intellectual world. A lavishly published author during his lifetime, he wrote not only sociological treatises and philosophical monographs, but also meditations on canonical and contemporary artists and writers, scores of essays on cultural phenomena from fashion to cities to femininity - and criticism, poetry, and fiction to boot. The sheer complexity of Simmel’s writing makes demands on the reader that call for more thorough conceptualization, while the diversity and range of his oeuvre (or to put it less generously, his lack of clearly defined disciplinary identity) pose challenges of another order. Despite his prolific scholarly output, overflowing lecture halls, and international reputation, 6 the thinker George Santayana dubbed «the brightest man in Europe» (qtd. in Simmel, The View of Life x) did not receive a regular professorship until 1914, only a few years before his untimely death in 1918. Simmel remained a rather marginal figure institutionally during his lifetime, and his marginalization as a thinker endures today despite his nominal canonization in sociology. The vast majority of his writings continue to go unread, particularly in the Anglophone world. All of Simmel’s future readers will remain indebted to those who have labored for over twenty years on the edition of his complete works, the Gesamtausgabe, the twenty-fourth and final volume of which is due out this year. By making the breadth and depth of Simmel’s accomplishments visible, this edition has secured Simmel’s place in the canon of what the late Klaus-Christian Köhnke, the author of the irreplaceable Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen and the editor of a number of volumes in the Gesamtausgabe, called «the classical period of the human and social sciences» (Köhnke 23; emphases in original). But emphasizing canonicity has its perils. To give Simmel his due, we must also grasp the significance of the institutional marginality and disciplinary liminality that shaped both his career and his posthumous reception. 7 In doing so, we must take very seriously Simmel’s own insistence that despite his reputation abroad, he was not, in fact, a sociologist - that, as he wrote to Celéstin Bouglé in 1899, «I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.» 8 To be sure, Simmel never ceased to reflect on social life or to attempt to promulgate his vision of what the discipline of sociology ought to be. Still, for all his professional tribulations, he was not a heroic voice in the wilderness fighting for a fledgling discipline against its traditionalist enemies but an internationally regarded philosopher and bestselling author who enjoyed very considerable public and professional success. Despite his lack of a chair, Simmel regularly drew hundreds to lecture courses held in the largest halls Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 241 of the Berlin University. He was called to Strasbourg in 1914 with the understanding that his prominence would help build up the university by raising the profile of German philosophy there. Forgetting (or dismissing) the fact that this canonical «sociologist» understood himself and was understood by his contemporaries first and foremost as a philosopher has helped anchor a narrative about the emergence of the sociological discipline that remains important for its continued cohesion. Simmel saw philosophical questions as imbricated with sociological and anthropological issues because he regarded knowledge as constituted in and through categories and modes of perception and valuation that were themselves generated in a sociocultural process. Severing his sociological from his philosophical contributions makes it possible to claim him as founding father while simultaneously distancing the newer discipline from the very questions that Simmel saw as central. This inaccurate or at best misleadingly narrow representation of Simmel’s life and work is part and parcel of an account of sociology’s origins that functions to establish and reinforce disciplinary boundaries. Even today, despite the growing chorus of voices drawing attention to his wide-ranging contributions to cultural and social theory broadly conceived, the institutional hold of this canonizing narrative is barely diminished. In part because the same anachronistic assumptions about intellectual boundaries also inflect the self-understanding and disciplinary memory (as it were) of philosophy, Simmel has been largely disregarded and forgotten in his own discipline, as well. I contend we should negotiate the challenge of thinking Simmel’s distinctive historical and theoretical position - his thirdness - by reading him as modernist philosopher, foregrounding his innovative (and influential) style of thought and drawing attention to the affinity between his methods of interpretation and broader modernist cultural developments. Approaching his texts as modernist in this writerly sense decenters received accounts of Simmel’s significance as a thinker in fin-de-siècle Europe. By emphasizing his marginal, or better, liminal, disciplinary and institutional position, my approach reframes the question of how to situate Simmel in relation to the disciplinary traditions that have shaped his reception. Reading Simmel as a modernist also casts new light on the standard accounts of the history of social and cultural theory, thereby helping us to ask anew what constitutes rigorous inquiry into the constitutive structures of collective existence in the modern world. Simmel is, then, both a theorist and an exemplar of thirdness: a figure between disciplines, or, more precisely, knowledge regimes. In a gesture that at once honors and disowns him, his erstwhile acolyte Georg Lukács famously 242 Elizabeth S. Goodstein declared Simmel to have been «without a doubt the most important and interesting transitional phenomenon in all of modern philosophy.» As such, Lukács (writing in the German-language Hungarian paper Pester Lloyd the week after Simmel’s death) continued, «he was so exceedingly attractive for all those genuinely philosophically talented in the younger generation of thinkers (those who are more than merely clever or industrious specialists in philosophical sub-disciplines) that there is practically no one among them who did not succumb to the enchantment of his thinking for a briefer or longer time» (qtd. in Gassen and Landmann 71). Yet unlike his philosophical contemporaries «Cohen, Rickert, or Husserl,» Lukács underlined, Simmel «had no disciples [Schüler].» In fact, Simmel did not aspire to establish a school at all. As he put it himself: «I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and it is a good thing). My legacy is like one in cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature: whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.» 9 In no small part as a consequence of that anonymization, the breadth and depth of Simmel’s impact on twentieth-century thought has been obscured (notably in the case of Lukács himself! ). During Simmel’s lifetime, modern sociology was still in the process of taking form and was, institutionally speaking (particularly, but not exclusively, in Germany), not yet entirely differentiated from philosophy. As time went on and he came to be remembered as a founding father of sociology, the specifically philosophical nature of Simmel’s theoretical contributions tended to be, quite literally, written out of the story. 10 As we shall see, when, as a consequence, his concept of form is conflated with social structure or his crucial figure for thirdness, the stranger, is construed as a social «role,» Simmel is seriously misunderstood. In an underappreciated essay from 1959 titled «Formal Sociology,» Friedrich Tenbruck argued that Simmel should be credited with initiating a new way of thinking, or more precisely, of disclosing a new way of seeing defined by attention to «forms of association,» Formen der Vergesellschaftung. 11 According to Tenbruck, «Simmel was the first, or among the first, to uncover for sociology a specific ‹layer› of reality, its ‹social dimension›» and therewith a «world of new phenomena» (qtd. in Wolff 65). 12 For him, Simmel’s basic, groundbreaking insight was that «objects and phenomena reveal their full significance only when questioned in respect to their social dimension, a dimension which possesses an order of its own.» «The originality and novelty of this idea,» Tenbruck continues, «have been obscured for us by subsequent advances in sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Today, Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 243 we take Simmel’s basic perspective for granted, no matter how much his particular insights may still impress us. We are used to exploring the social presuppositions and implications of phenomena» (qtd. in Wolff 66). In other words, understood as a way of getting at a freshly disclosed aspect of reality, Simmel’s conception of social form helps clarify what was at stake in the paradigm shift that gave rise to modern social science - and, more generally, to a knowledge regime in which the existence of «society» is taken for granted and «culture» has taken on meanings quite different from the traditional understanding still regnant when he was formulating these ideas. The liminal quality of Simmel’s conception of social form and formation, which he understood as part of a larger «cultural process» in which human subjectivity was also evolving, 13 became obscured when his ideas were assimilated to the discipline of sociology. In fact, by the time he published his Soziologie in 1908, the understanding of both objectivity and subjectivity disclosed by his concept of reciprocal interaction had already led Simmel beyond a sociological point of view. The philosophical implications of Wechselwirkung - that is to say, of regarding the interpretation of phenomena, both external and internal, as requiring attention to a third, transindividual perspective, the «dimension» of their sociohistorical, cultural constitution or formation - had brought about a change in Simmel’s self-understanding. On his own account, the internal dynamics of his distinctive concept of the social gave rise to the major shift in his thinking that culminated in the Philosophy of Money (1900; second, revised edition 1907), where the idea of «living reciprocal interaction» was extended into «an entirely comprehensive metaphysical principle» that then became the basis for his relativist revisioning of the «central concepts» of philosophy: «truth, value, objectivity etc.» as such (GSG 20: 304-05). Moreover, Simmel’s approach to theorizing what he sometimes called the «superindividual,» das Überindividuelle, 14 suggests that the assumption (pervasive, if mostly tacit today) that social-scientific objects and methods can be clearly distinguished from philosophical or more broadly humanistic concepts and approaches is eminently questionable. As Simmel stated explicitly in the introductory chapter to the Soziologie, the «constitution of a special science of sociology» could not resolve or eliminate the questions proper to social philosophy. 15 From a Simmelian perspective, neither discipline could lay claim to absolute authority in reflection on human social and cultural life. As we shall see in the case of the figure of «the stranger,» he regarded social forms as philosophically significant in themselves. In our terms, understanding them calls, disciplinarily speaking, for a double perspective, a way of seeing at once sociological and philosophical. 244 Elizabeth S. Goodstein Simmel’s conception of social form as inhering in philosophically significant performative interactions between human beings thus makes visible the theoretical and historical significance of his own liminality or thirdness as a thinker. The figure of Simmel - his work, but also his person - provides a crucial missing link between the preoccupations of «theory» (in the broader sense in which that term is used in the contemporary, increasingly «interdisciplinary» humanities and qualitative social sciences) and the regnant questions and problems of a hundred years ago; that is, of the philosophical and historical moment in which the modern disciplinary order was coming into being. In my reading, what is generally framed in anachronistic terms as Simmel’s disciplinary marginality is better understood as theoretical and methodological liminality. The problem of how to situate Simmel is by no means extrinsic to his thought. Throughout his life, he himself strove to locate the shifts involved in his work in larger historical and theoretical context. This liminality is intraas well as interdisciplinary. Simmel has often been labeled a Neo- Kantian, and there is no disputing the importance of Kant for his thinking. For good reason, though, he was hardly an unambivalent Kantian, as the existence of a radically different competing characterization of Simmel as a Lebensphilosoph underlines. 16 In a letter from 1908, the year he finally completed his long labors on his Soziologie, Simmel confided to one of his philosophical interlocutors that he had become embroiled again in the sort of «epistemological-metaphysical questions» that had occupied him earlier in his career, «once again with the feeling that we are just going round like squirrels on a wheel in this whole epistemology that rests on Kantian presuppositions. What a thing this man did to the world by declaring it to be a representation! When will the genius come along who frees us from the spell of the subject as Kant freed us from that of the object? And what will ‹the third› be? » (GSG 22: 666). 17 This is a lived, not an academic dilemma: the lament of a thinker pursuing philosophy not as an «expert» or «specialist» but as a human being. To pigeonhole Simmel as a Neo-Kantian is to discount the depth and significance of his epistemological crisis, to ignore his recurrent attention to materiality, embodiment, and the emotions, to historical specificity and cultural difference, to the challenges of thinking a world gripped in flux. For Simmel is by no means an epigone of Kant’s; he is, rather, one of Nietzsche’s finest and most subtly influential readers. In his modernist approach to culture, as Simmel struggles to overcome «the spell of the subject» without sacrificing epistemological self-reflexivity, the inherited resources of the philosophical tradition are transformed before our eyes. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 245 The philosophical sophistication of Simmel’s approach has been consistently misread or ignored by his sociological heirs. Thus Lewis A. Coser appeals quite directly to one of Simmel’s most often-read texts to anchor his reading of Simmel as «unsystematic» thinker. Treating the excerpt from the Soziologie concerning «der Fremde» (the foreigner or stranger) as both theoretical and biographical authority, he writes: «As in the case of ‹The Stranger,› of whom he wrote so perceptively and so movingly, his relations to the academy were a compound of nearness and remoteness» (Masters 213-14). Coser relates Simmel’s intellectual accomplishments to his marginal institutional status, linking his «nonconformist behavior» to Simmel’s originality and inventiveness as a thinker via a typological characterization of him as at once «Academic Outsider» and «Virtuoso on the Platform.» 18 Coser thereby synthesizes the basic lines of what became the dominant sociological interpretation of Simmel as a sort of free-floating intellectual avant la lettre, going so far as to assert that he developed his remarkably «acute analytic skills» (215) as a consequence of his status as internal outsider in the academy. In a single stroke, text and author become classics of a peculiarly alien type. For, according to Coser, «Simmel, the marginal man, the stranger, presented his academic peers not with a methodical, painstakingly elaborate system but with a series of often disorderly insights, testifying to amazing powers of perception» (214). It is worth noting that Coser’s divisio is dubious: a mode of writing that does not aspire to the status of a «system» might nonetheless well be something more than the trace of unrelated flashes of insight. As the remarks by Margarete Susman cited at the outset attest, further reflection on this matter leads directly to the question of the existentialtheoretical significance of Simmel’s modernist conception of form. But the point for now is simply that depicting Simmel himself as «stranger» in this way authorizes considerable hermeneutic license. As Coser, with remarkable candor, went on to describe his practices as a reader: «Despite the unsystematic and often willfully paradoxical character of Simmel’s work, it is possible to sift and order it in such a way that a consistent approach to the field of sociology emerges» (215). Coser was one of Simmel’s most influential readers and advocates in twentieth-century sociology, and it is hard to overestimate the influence of his strategy for transmuting theoretical writing into a form of testimony. With striking frequency, such sifting and ordering of his oeuvre into a coherent contribution to the (contemporary) discipline of sociology is, even today, framed by identifying Simmel as «the marginal man, the stranger.» 19 In identifying Simmel with the figure of the stranger, Coser simultaneously ushered Simmel into the sociological canon and set aside the question 246 Elizabeth S. Goodstein of how his mode of analysis and conceptual vocabulary relate to and engage with the philosophical tradition to which he belonged and out of which he had developed his distinctive vision of sociology. But these are matters that from an historical as well as conceptual point of view are in fact decisive for the constitution of social science as such. How much is at stake here for the institutional and conceptual organization of social theory in general and for efforts to theorize the third and thirdness in particular will become clear when we look more closely at the text itself. Like all of his most famous and influential writings, «The Stranger» is almost always read out of context. What has come to be known as an «essay» is a text of barely seven pages that was originally published as an excursus at the end of Chapter IX of the Soziologie, «Der Raum und die räumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft.» Labelled simply the «Exkurs über den Fremden» by its author, it entered the Anglophone sociological canon as «The Stranger» via its inclusion in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology in 1921. The text quickly took on a life of its own, in which the question of the methodological as well as metaphysical (and metasociological) significance of the «Exkurs» and its relation to Simmel’s larger arguments in the Soziologie (not translated into English in its entirety until 2009) were rendered moot. The «essay,» which quickly came to be regarded as a classic contribution to sociology, has been repeatedly anthologized, taught, and cited for nearly a century. The reception of «The Stranger» illustrates how these questionable textual practices established an image of Simmel that has become a sociological commonplace. It also underscores the theoretical significance of the fact that he tends to be remembered, if at all, as an outsider to, rather than a famous and cosmopolitan participant in, a vibrant and in many ways very modern cultural and intellectual world. The figure of Simmel as sociological stranger reveals and conceals at once. It erases the historical and philosophical complexity of his position while rereading him in a way that reframes and appropriates his methods. It thereby metaphorically enables the assimilation of Simmel to a discipline that assumes precisely what he did not: that there is such a thing as the social or society outside of its performance by human beings. For that performance is the phenomenon of form as Simmel understood it. The «Excursus on the Foreigner,» or «The Stranger» follows directly on an extended and fascinating treatment of questions of mobility and social order in which Simmel discusses the impact of spatiality on the evolution of the labor market since the Middle Ages 20 and the resulting modalities of wan- Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 247 dering and their implications for social order. Afterward, Simmel steps back to reflect on «the sociological form of the ‹stranger›,» which he situates in relation to the two extremes of the human relation to space: the Gelöstheit (detachment) of those who wander as opposed to the Fixiertheit (fixity) of those who remain in the same social space all their lives (GSG 11: 764). Simmel is sensitive to the ways mobility and class are connected, to the social function of very concrete relations to space that condition and enable class-differentiated forms of mobility. However, his analysis of strangeness emphasizes the importance of dimensions of existence that cannot be understood in these terms, which indicate the constitutive impact of (transindividual) sociality on the spatial organization of human life. Unlike the wanderer who «comes today and goes tomorrow,» he writes, the stranger «comes today and stays tomorrow»; he is «so to speak, the potential wanderer who […] has not entirely overcome the dissolution of coming and going» (GSG 11: 764). As this description signals, Simmel’s excursus concerns not the social «role» of the stranger but rather the figure in a very general sense. Thus he invokes explicitly philosophical language to introduce what he underlines is an analytic construct, «the sociological form of the ‹stranger›,» and anchors his interpretation via a phenomenological observation about human cultural life as such. That sociological «form,» Simmel writes, «represents in a certain sense the unity of the two determinations» - that is, the poles of detachment and fixity that constitute human spatiality as a social phenomenon - thereby offenbarend (revealing) an even more general hermeneutic principle. As a sociological form, the stranger embodies one of the basic and quite general lessons of Simmel’s Soziologie: «that the relation to space is on one hand the condition, on the other hand the symbol of relations to human beings» (GSG 11: 764). This doubling constitutes the thirdness of Simmel’s conception of social form itself. The sociological form of the stranger - though by no means of this form alone - is at once symbolic and concrete, ideal and material. The stranger, qua stranger, is a figure of symbolic significance: one not simply other or different, but a being in and for whom a particular Konstellation (constellation) of transpersonal interaction, the «unity of intimacy and distance» (GSG 11: 768-69) that is a feature of every human relation, takes on the symbolic form of otherness. The sociocultural position of the stranger, the potential wanderer, cannot be understood in privative terms, as a lack of identity, nor is strangeness the otherness of one who fails to belong to the community. On the contrary, as Simmel elaborates, 248 Elizabeth S. Goodstein Being-strange [das Fremdsein] is of course an entirely positive relation, a specific form of reciprocal interaction [Wechselwirkungsform]; the inhabitants of Sirius are not actually strange to us […] rather they entirely do not exist for us, they stand beyond near and far. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and the manifold «inner enemies» - an element whose immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed. (GSG 11: 765) It is well worth reflecting on the distinctive topology of this subject position. «Being-strange» is not a role but a relationship of reciprocal interaction, a form of social life that implicates both subject and other. What this form reveals, as already noted, is even more general: Simmel’s «stranger» or «foreigner» figures «the unity» of the apparently opposed poles of «detachment» and «fixity» that constitute human spatiality as a social phenomenon and thereby reveal the human being’s «relation to space» to be «on one hand the condition, on the other hand the symbol of relations to human beings.» (GSG 11: 764) In Simmel’s account, spatiality is at once social and material, simultaneously product and condition of human existence. Space is social: not, pace Kant, a «form of intuition,» but both the material and ideal effect of movement in and out of human collectivities. For Simmel, human spatiality reflects the complex interplay of historical, social, psychological, and cultural context that defines all human interaction as such. It is, in a word, a culturally constituted category, and thus both a material and ideal condition of possibility for social life as such. The conception of social form in play here accords with Simmel’s mature understanding of the significance of Kantian insights, in which the a priori has received a Hegelian twist. On that view, spatiality is constituted and shaped historically - that is to say, culturally, socially, psychologically. As usual, Simmel’s sociological reflections are shot through with a philosophical effort to understand how subjects and objects come into being, interact, change, and evolve. Thus spatiality is both Bedingung - condition of possibility - and Symbol - symbolic framework for understanding human (that is to say, interbut also transsubjective, social, cultural, psychological) relations. Simmel eschews any claim to completeness for his discussion (GSG 11: 765). But the sociopolitical issue that often motivates contemporary theorists to return to this text - the question of how those who are construed as strangers are perceived by the majority community - clearly interests him far less than the philosophical problems he saw the figure of the stranger as representing and exemplifying: the ways sameness and difference in general constitute identities for both groups and individuals. Simmel’s «Stranger» Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 249 resonates with Plato’s Eliatic Zeno, with the alienated subject depicted by fellow modernists such as Nietzsche and Strindberg, and with politically significant discourses on foreigners and foreignness in contemporary Germany. In its mixture of philosophical universality and sociological and historical particularity as well as its preoccupation with the ways that «beingstrange» (Fremdsein) constitutes both self and other, Simmel’s discussion of the figure anticipates the discourse on «alienation» (Entfremdung), with its central trope of «spiritual homelessness» (geistige Obdachlosigkeit), in the next generation. 21 To return to the passage already cited, for Simmel, the stranger is «an element of the group itself.» As noted, what is in play sociologically has a very distinctive topology: «being-strange» is a «specific form of reciprocal interaction» in which the stranger’s «immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed» (GSG 11: 765). In the next sentence, Simmel describes the entire social formation as a dialectical whole in which «the repelling and distancing moments […] constitute a form of being together [Miteinander] and of reciprocally interacting unity [wechselwirkende Einheit]» (GSG 11: 765). Stranger and other, that is, are co-constitutive. Social formations, in Simmel’s understanding, resemble Aristotelian or indeed Hegelian dialectical wholes. But this is merely a resemblance. In Simmel’s vision, conflict is not eliminated within the social totality; difference is not subordinated to identity, which remains external to itself. Thus the sociological form of the stranger, whose «immanent position as member» of the group «simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed,» makes visible - is a figure for - something quite fundamental about human existence. Strangeness turns out, as it were, not to be strange but to be internal to subjectivity itself. Here, Simmel extends and as it were inverts a basic dialectical point that the relation to the other reflects and is partly constituted by a relation to self. As he puts it in a passage from earlier in the Soziologie to which we shall return, it is only apparently paradoxical that human beings must «understand themselves and view one another» under such categories in order to become subjects who «so formed, can produce [ergeben] empirical society» (GSG 11: 51-52): «The fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society forms the positive condition for his being so with other sides of his being: the human «mode of being-social [or being-in-society: Vergesellschaftet-Seins] is determined or codetermined by his mode of not-being-social [Nicht-Vergesellschaftet-Seins]» (GSG 11: 51). For Simmel, then, «the stranger» is both a constitutive element of the group and a figure in whom the interpenetration 250 Elizabeth S. Goodstein of symbolic and material dimensions in human sociality becomes uniquely visible. As Simmel shows, reflection on the (interand transsubjectively constituted) social form of «strangeness» sheds light on an important «constellation,» a key mode of differentiation not only within social groups but also within intimate relations: what we might call the thirdness of human (social) being. The analysis of strangeness can thus help us parse a variety of social and cultural phenomena, some of which we have come to think of as features of subjective identity, others as aspects of group dynamics. For Simmel, these are consequences or effects of the a priori feature of human existence just noted: human identity is in itself external to itself; being-social is internally fractured, wrought with difference, and constituted in and by relations that reveal the subject’s own otherness to itself. In one of Simmel’s recurrent metaphors, being-fragmentary is the human way of being: «we are all fragments» (as he puts it a few pages earlier) «not only of human being in general, but also of ourselves» (GSG 11: 49). The particular mode of being-between that defines the stranger is linked to what Simmel calls «the special attitude of the ‹objective one› [des ‹Objektiven›],» who is in but not entirely of the group. This attitude, he continues, «does not signify a mere distance and impartiality [Abstand und Unbeteiligtheit], but rather a specific configuration [besonderes Gebilde] out of distance and intimacy [Nähe], indifference and engagement» (GSG 11: 766- 67). Although he is often misread on this point, Simmel does not conflate the special «attitude» of objectivity with a «social status» or role at all. He is, rather, providing a phenomenological description of the sociocultural and intersubjective specificity of the stranger’s subject position. The stranger’s «objectivity» reflects the complex interpersonal and psychic situation of one whose belonging to society is characterized both by the (quasi)spatial qualities of distance and closeness and by the (more clearly) psychic or symbolic aspects of indifference and engagement. What is being described is not a psychic or social structure, nor is it an institution that orders society into rigid camps. Rather, the stranger’s attitude of objectivity is the (embodied, subjective) «expression» of what Simmel calls a Gebilde, a configuration in which spatial relations take on symbolic social significance and shape modes of interpersonal interaction. It is this emblematic formation or configuration of interand transsubjective relations, not the other or otherness but social organization itself, that is at stake. For Simmel, objectivity is not something separate from subjectivity; it is, rather, a mode in which that interand transpersonal, sociocultural dimension (das Überindividuelle) constitutes, even in a sense inheres in, the subjectivity of Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 251 the subject. The tendency to objectivity directly «expresses» the stranger’s conditions of existence: a complex, internally conflicted mode of belonging to the community or society that comprises both «distance and intimacy, indifference and engagement» (GSG 11: 766-67). Simmel’s stranger is not a role or an identity but a social form that arises in and through a transand interpersonal configuration: the name for a position in an interactive field of human (sociohistorical, cultural, symbolic) practice. Again, for Simmel «being-strange» is «an entirely positive relation, a specific form of reciprocal interaction […] the stranger is an element of the group itself» (GSG 11: 765). The stranger’s objectivity is a function of that particular constellation, an attitude that expresses a reciprocal relationship that is neither a being-inside or a form of exclusion or difference, but rather a way of being the boundaries, a mélange of distance and intimacy, indifference and engagement. For Simmel, there is no absolute outside or utter exclusion involved; strangeness is, rather, a distinctive mode of being-related to the dominant perspective. It is embedded in a social relation or configuration that includes both perspectives. Thus it is that the objectivity proper to the social form or constellation of strangeness makes possible the institutionalization of the dominant position of the Gruppenfremden, of people foreign to the group, under certain circumstances, as (in Simmel’s example) in the Italian city-states where outsiders were brought in as judges for intragroup conflicts. In the larger context of the Soziologie, the figure of the stranger serves to catalyze the reader’s recognition that internal difference constitutes both human identity and sociality. For not only does «[t]he fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society form the positive condition for his being so with other sides of his being» (GSG 11: 51). The same holds of the inter-and transsubjectively constituted world as well: «the a priori of empirical social life is that life is not entirely social» (GSG 11: 53). We are all strangers in the strange land of social life. In considering the significance of Simmel’s «Stranger,» we have thus far followed the sociological reception in focusing on the text that originally appeared as the third excursus to the penultimate chapter of the Soziologie. Let us now take a step back to situate this figure and the «Excursus on the Stranger» itself both thematically and formally within the book as a whole. Doing so will make clearer how consequential the theoretical and methodological effects of the strategies of reading I call «appropriation by fragments» have been for the understanding of Simmel’s thought. For while this fact does not play a role in the literature on the stranger, the figure actually 252 Elizabeth S. Goodstein makes its initial appearance in the very first chapter of the Soziologie. Or rather, to be more precise, in an «Excursus on the Problem: How is Society Possible» that supplements the book’s introductory chapter on «The Problem of Sociology.» 22 As I will show, this is a very significant context indeed. Simmel initially introduces the category of «the stranger» in a fashion that is doubly noteworthy in light of the reception of what has been construed as an independent essay on the topic. The figure of the stranger (or foreigner) appears alongside «the enemy,» «the criminal,» and «the pauper» as an example of one of those «types» whose «sociological significance is fixed in its very core and essence by their being somehow excluded from the society for which their existence is significant» (GSG 11: 51). That is, the meaning of «the stranger» in particular in and for Simmel’s understanding of the social is, as it were, already quite general. It is paradigmatic for a way of meaning that, as the text makes clear, does not inhere in such figures themselves but rather exists in and through the interactive social configuration as a whole in each case. These forms exemplify a mode of mutual relations between subjects and society tout court. In Simmel’s Soziologie, the stranger functions, then, as a figure in the technical, rhetorical sense. It is, in particular, the exemplification or embodiment of a feature of human subjectivity that constitutes it as social (and by the same stroke makes «society» possible). Simmel’s way of thinking about the role of otherness in human sociality conjoins phenomena that are now theorized in quite different ways. The figure of strangeness encompasses both psychological and cultural dimensions, both the preand the nonor extrasocial. Simmel is not failing to distinguish between (to simplify for the sake of clarity) the internal and the externalized other. To be sure, he can be criticized from an anachronistic point of view that lays claim to certainty concerning theoretical priority, whether of unconscious or of sociohistorical processes. But given that so much contemporary cultural theory is absorbed with attempts, having begun from one or the other, to make the connection to the opposed sort of otherness - and given that the underlying reductive agenda at work in the vast majority of these efforts seems doomed to fail - it is worth considering suspending, at least hypothetically, the certainty that it is possible to distinguish between the preand the postsocial, das Unterand das Überindividuelle. For Simmel does not simply happen not to draw the lines as we would. His theoretical and methodological framework precedes our bifurcations - between reflection on subjectivity and intersubjectivity and theories of the social, between philosophy and sociology, between humanistic and social scientific thought practices more generally, because they had not yet solidified. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 253 Thus what is figured as strangeness is not just doubled or ambiguous, but a third in the sense that in Simmel’s thinking, the boundary between subjects’ unconscious and the (linguistic, cultural, historical) context cannot really be demarcated - nor for that matter can the line between description and interpretation, phenomenology and theory. The doubling and ambiguity so clearly inscribed in the «stranger» as a particularly exemplary constellation of sociability reflect the circumstance that, in Simmel’s understanding, subjects are constituted as social in a way that involves both the preand the superindividual. On the one hand, the presocial (precultural, prelinguistic) outside, das Unterindividuelle: what used to be called nature but is today more usually conceived in the language of the unconscious (a vocabulary Simmel sometimes uses, albeit not in a Freudian sense). On the other, the properly supersubjective, transindividual realm, das Überindividuelle. Otherness, difference, involves both sorts of «outside,» and both constitute the extrasocial existence of the individual, albeit not necessarily in a clearly distinguishable way. On Simmel’s account, what brings the social into being simultaneously subtends the process of subjectivation - human beings and their world are co-conditioned. As we have already noted, in the «Excursus on the Stranger» itself, Simmel calls «being-strange» «an entirely positive relation, a specific form of interaction. […] The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and the manifold ‹inner enemies› - an element whose immanent position as member simultaneously encloses something external and juxtaposed» (GSG 11: 765). The constellation exemplified by figures such as the stranger manifests a positive characteristic of the social as such, its being constituted by beings who are in but not entirely of it. But this constellation is a sociological form also in the sense that it makes visible a fundamental feature of subjectivity as such. It is, in fact, a synecdoche of becoming-social, for the socialization process as a whole in both objective and subjective senses. This brings us back to the passage cited earlier, which it is now possible to place in a larger context. At the point in «How is Society Possible? » where Simmel first introduces the figure of the stranger, he writes: «[E]very element of a group is not only part of society [Gesellschaftsteil] but also in addition something else» (GSG 11: 51). But this something else, the nonor incompletely social aspect of individuality, is «not merely a [being] outside of society» (GSG 11: 51). In the dialectical tradition to which Simmel belongs, subjectivity depends on intersubjectivity; the notion of a simply nonsocial form of identity is incoherent. He articulates this principle, which has crucial consequences for his understanding of social life, in an admirably straightforward fashion, continuing 254 Elizabeth S. Goodstein (in the passage already cited): «The fact that with certain sides of his being the individual is not an element of society forms the positive condition for his being so with other sides: his mode of being-social is determined or codetermined by his mode of not-being-social» (GSG 11: 51). These modes or kinds of «being-social» are practices or forms of life or experience. Simmel is among other things warning against hypostasizing «parts» of the self. Just as, after Kant, we must recognize that we cannot understand nature independently of critical reflection on our own practices of thought, we can only assure our knowledge of the human world if we remain reflective about the difficulties of thinking our own role in its symbolic constitution. In Simmel’s view, the challenges of scientific reflection on the human are inherently greater and deeper than in the case of the science of nature. The unity of the social is not imposed by the «observing subject» on «sensory elements that are in themselves unconnected [an sich unverbundenen Sinneselementen]» (GSG 11: 43). Rather, «since they are conscious and synthetically active, the social unity is realized directly by its elements and requires no observer. […] Here the consciousness of forming a unity with the others is in fact the whole unity in question» (GSG 11: 43). Crucially, what constitutes the unity of the social is not, Simmel continues, «abstract awareness of the concept of unity,» but rather «countless singular relations, the feeling and knowledge with respect to the other of this determining and being determined» (GSG 11: 43-44). Such lived awareness of being-social is categorically distinct from scientific or synthetic knowledge that arises from the perspective of «an observing third party» (GSG 11: 44). Knowledge of the social is differently, more intimately structured than knowledge of nature; it is constitutive for the subject itself. Simmel is no idealist. Both society and subjectivity are external to their own concepts; their being is constituted in part by their non-being. Still, as Simmel was trying to indicate, the differentiation of these differences is probably not entirely graspable in concepts. The distinction between society and the subjects that constitute it is not an ideal or psychological distinction even though it is a function of the fact that the elements of society are thinking beings. As spiritual, historical, and cultural existences, their very identity is constituted by the social and cultural world that, although it comes into being through human activity, is experienced as an opposed and even alien force over and against subjective individuality and the will to freedom and autonomy. The intersubjectively configured, performative and experiential knowledge of being-social is enacted in «social forms,» the lived configurations and constellations of (interand transsubjective) «superindividual» exis- Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 255 tence. There is no human subjectivity for Simmel without a relation to the dimension or function of sociohistorical objectification that constitutes human culture. A noteworthy invocation of the objective genitive underlines that Simmel’s apparently Kantian conception of the subject has taken an idiosyncratic «Hegelian» turn: «Die Gesellschaft aber ist die objektive, des in ihr nicht mitbegriffenen Beschauers unbedürftige Einheit» (GSG 11: 44). Human subjectivity is constituted through intersubjectivity, but this intersubjectivity is not the same thing as the social. One of Simmel’s great and largely unrecognized theoretical contributions - once again the consequence or expression of the liminal place of his thought between the post- Kantian philosophical tradition and what would come to be the social or cultural sciences - is to have articulated so clearly the tensions between the two. That is, to have identified the theoretical importance of the «third» as figure for or dimension of understanding, conceptualizing human existence both in its individual and in its sociocultural dimensions. A passage elaborating what is at stake in this nonidentity of intersubjectivity and the social and that also suggests Simmel’s significance for what would come to be known as existentialism is worth citing in full. «The feeling of being I has an unconditionality and imperturbability» unlike any «representation of a material externality,» he writes, but this very certainty also includes for us, whether justifiably or not, the fact of a you [des Dus]; and as cause or as effect of this certainty, we feel the you as something independent of our representation of it, something that is just as much for itself as our own existence. That this for-itself [Für-Sich] of the other does not stop us from making it into our representation, that something which is in no way resolvable into our representing nonetheless becomes the content, thus the product, of this representing - that is the most profound psychological-epistemological schema and problem of becoming-social [Vergesellschaftung]. (GSG 11: 44-45) To ask «how is society possible? » is, then, to ask about the implications of representation and of our existence as beings who represent ourselves to ourselves, who are others for ourselves. This includes the objectifications of that process: the various modes in which human (historical, cultural) existence endures in the diverse realms and spheres, defined ultimately by value (legal, cultural, religious, etc.), that form the «third» dimension of sociality, the superindividual dimension that exists in and through but also beyond, before, and above the interactions of individual human beings. The existence of social figures or types such as the stranger thus exemplifies one of the quasi-transcendental features of human sociality that Simmel calls «sociological a prioris» - the principle, as he puts it a few pages later, that «the a priori of empirical social life is that life is not entirely social» 256 Elizabeth S. Goodstein (GSG 11: 53). This formulation makes clear that what is at stake philosophically in the translation discussed above is by no means limited to its implications for social and cultural thought. As Simmel’s invocation of the category of life illustrates, and as he underlines in his reflections, these implications are (in his sense of the term) quite directly metaphysical. Human beings are not simply (socially formed) subjects; this fact and the (lived, if not necessarily conscious) awareness of the limits to one’s belonging to society are crucial both for the experience and the reality of society. «Societies are configurations [Gebilde] out of beings [Wesen] that stand simultaneously inside and outside of them» (GSG 11: 53). Thirdness is a sociocultural phenomenon with existential-ontological implications. Reflection on the social thereby opens up new dimensions for philosophical reflection in and on those aspects of existence that Heidegger, who rejected the category of social science, would later place under the category of Mitsein, «being-with.» In contrast, too, to Hannah Arendt, who regarded the emergence of the category of the social as obscuring the problems of reflection on human existence, for Simmel, society, social being, generates perhaps the most conscious, at least the most universal expression [Ausgestaltung] of a fundamental form of life as such: that the individual soul can never stand inside a relation that it does not simultaneously stand outside of, that it is not placed in any order without finding itself juxtaposed to it. This holds from the transcendent and most universal contexts all the way to the most singular and accidental. (GSG 11: 53) Simmel developed these ideas in the first chapter of the book he thought of as his philosophical testament, the Lebensanschauung of 1918. There he extends his account of human being as Grenzwesen, as a being constituted equally by boundaries and transgressions of boundaries. This text, which takes up and elaborates his thinking about the relations between life and form, makes explicit both the epistemological and ethical implications of the relativist ontology Simmel is espousing. In this context, let us simply attempt to note what is distinctive about Simmel’s claim that what is at stake is of the order of a «sociological a priori» that can cast new light on our understanding of human subjectivity. «The standpoint out of which the existence of the individual can be ordered [angeordnet] and conceived of can just as well be taken from inside as from outside itself» (GSG 11: 55). «The totality of life» encompasses both perspectives: «The fact of association brings the individual into a doubled position […]; it is comprised by it and at the same time juxtaposed to it, is a member of its organism and at the same time itself a closed organic whole, a being for [society] and for himor herself» (GSG 11: 56). Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 257 Yet however great it may seem, the apparent opposition between our individual and social being is an illusion: [B]etween individual and society the inside and the outside are not two determinations that persist alongside one another […]; they refer to the entire unified position of the human being living socially. His existence is not only, in a dividing up of its contents, partially social and partially individual; it stands under the fundamental, formative [gestaltenden], category of a unity that we cannot express in any other way than through the synthesis or simultaneity [Gleichzeitigkeit] of the two logically opposed determinations of membership and being-for-oneself. (GSG 11: 56) Here, in the midst of an argument that seems to wear its Hegelian heart on its sleeve, Simmel takes a rather surprising turn, one that, again, anticipates developments in twentieth-century thought well beyond sociology - developments that, although in many cases galvanized by his students and readers, have generally been seen as entirely unrelated to Simmel’s thinking. The passage continues: [S]ociety consists not only of beings that are partially not socialized but of those that feel themselves to be on the one hand fully social existences, on the other, while preserving the same contents, fully personal. And these are not two standpoints that lie without any relation alongside one another, as when one regards the same body now with respect to its mass and again with respect to its color, but rather the two form a unity that we call the social being […]. (GSG 11: 56) This inherently conflicted and ambiguous «social being» is, he adds, the «synthetic category» that unifies the elements of individual and society into an «a priori unity» just as the category of causality unifies cause and effect. Thus an argument that begins, as it were, from Kant and Hegel ends with Nietzsche: Strangeness, which, it should be recalled, might be better translated by foreignness, figures the way individual subjectivity tout court is inseparably intertwined with social being. Human beings live a life that is at once fully social, «produced and encompassed by society,» and entirely individual, a life «for itself» lived «out of one’s own center and for the sake of that center» (GSG 11: 54). Simmel’s stranger is a synecdochic expression of the decentered quality of human identity and a microcosm of the form or configuration that defines the (modern, internally differentiated and fragmented) social totality. As such, it is a figure of philosophical as well as sociological significance. Not only are the combinations of movement and fixity, nearness and remoteness, inclusion and exclusion that define strangeness constitutive for the social or society as such. The figure of the stranger, like the other «types» whose «sociological significance» is defined precisely «by their being somehow 258 Elizabeth S. Goodstein excluded from the society for which their existence is significant,» exposes what Heidegger would describe as an Existentiale of human «being-in-theworld,» Mitsein: being and existing with others. 23 Just as sociology cannot evade the philosophical questions that frame all reflection on human being, philosophy cannot begin from the individual alone. Questions concerning subjectivity are simultaneously sociological, political, psychological; questions concerning social, political, psychological reality are simultaneously philosophical. The fact that the individual human being is at once «a being for [society] and a being for himor herself» (GSG 11: 56) is constitutive for society as well as the individual. If Simmel’s importance for cultural and social theory is to be appreciated, the liminal position of his thinking between sociology and philosophy must be taken into account. As the case of «Stranger» illustrates, he was grappling with fundamental and still unresolved questions about the nature and limits of reflection on human being and sociocultural and historical life. Simmel’s reception reflects the way the systematic - historical as well as theoretical - importance of these questions is imbricated with his liminality - thirdness - from the perspective of the contemporary disciplinary order, with its seemingly self-evident distinction between humanities and social sciences. We cannot reestablish the long-lost scholarly imaginary proper to the moment the cultural and social sciences took their leave of philosophy any more than we can recover the (relative) political innocence still possible before the cataclysms of the twentieth century. Nor, in advocating that we (re-) read Simmel, am I suggesting that we may find in his work a point of origin for an alternative postor interdisciplinary theoretical canon. What are in Nietzschean terms antiquarian or monumentalizing efforts must equally fail to disclose what is most urgently needed today: ways of thinking differently, approaches that help us move beyond the ultimately misleading tacit assumption that the world itself is divided up along the lines of our disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. I am suggesting that contemporary theory return to Simmel once again, anew, as a stranger, as an exemplary figure of both historical and theoretical thirdness. Reading him as at once philosopher and sociologist, canonical and foreign, can help establish a more adequate critical perspective on our own practical-intellectual situation. In particular, by exposing the historical and theoretical contingency of our (disciplinary) habits of thought, such a return to Simmel may help enable us to reframe the categories and inherited bifurcations - between society and culture, mind and body, ideal and material - that shape contemporary understandings of self and world and, Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 259 perhaps, to develop new conceptual and methodological strategies and approaches that are more adequate to the complexity and multiplicity of the problems we face. As I have tried to illustrate in the case of «The Stranger,» in asking what has not been read and what remains illegible in Simmel’s protean oeuvre, we may discover the unthought resources of our own past. An imaginative return to this other modernity, to a theoretical landscape strange in its familiarity, at once very different from and intimately related to our own, opens new perspectives on the received certainties that make up the contemporary intellectual world. And perhaps it is not too much to hope that such work may help, to evoke once again Susman’s description of her friend’s lifelong striving as a thinker, to disclose a «third, not yet discovered but discoverable spiritual and life-form» that points the way beyond the deadly bifurcations of the present. Notes 1 In Lewis A. Coser’s classic formulation (Masters 215). 2 Otthein Rammstedt’s critical edition of the Soziologie appeared in 1992 as volume 11 of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe. 3 Thomas Bedorf describes Wechselwirkung as the «varying intertwining [Verflechtung] of individuals through which society first comes into being»; Joachim Fischer sees Simmel’s «third as the source of originary forms of Wechselwirkung» (Bedorf et al. 15, 139). See, however, Bröckling’s critique of Fischer’s foundationalist reframing of Simmel’s conception in the same volume (194-95 and particularly 205-06). See also Marotta’s reflections on the «third element,» which he identifies with «cosmopolitan aesthetic sensibility» (Marotta 675). 4 Translations here and throughout are my own. 5 Regarding the figure of the third, see Eßlinger et al., especially Koschorke’s introductory essay, «Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.» 6 For example, as early as 1894, when Simmel was still a Privatdozent, Célestin Bouglé singled him out as one of Germany’s prime intellectual attractions in the pseudonomously published «Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne.» See Breton, «Notes.» 7 These meditations draw on my forthcoming book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford UP), which approaches Simmel as a thinker with the aspiration of disclosing the unrealized - the unand perhaps anticlassical - potential of the same modernist moment that gave birth to the modern social sciences. As Köhnke shows, the very failure to fit in with a modernizing and professionalizing discipline that was the source of Simmel’s professional woes became the condition of possibility of his originality - what enabled him «in contrast to many other successful, tenured [ordinierten] colleagues - to become a classic» (Köhnke 21). 8 Letter to Célestin Bouglé, 13 Dec. 1899 (GSG 22: 342-43). Simmel had stronger things to say on this point on other occasions; consider his remark in a letter (20 Mar. 1908) to Georg Jellinek that it was an «idiocy» to regard him as a sociologist (GSG 22: 617). 260 Elizabeth S. Goodstein 9 This passage (which serves as the motto for the collection of aphorisms Gertrud Kantorowicz presented as selections from Georg Simmel’s «diary,» which appeared posthumously in Logos in December 1919) is worth citing in the original: «Ich weiss, daß ich ohne geistigen Erben sterben werde (und es ist gut so). Meine Hinterlassenschaft ist wie eine in barem Gelde, das an viele Erben verteilt wird, und jeder setzt sein Teil in irgend einen Erwerb um, der seiner Natur entspricht: dem die Provenienz aus jener Hinterlassenschaft nicht anzusehen ist» (GSG 20: 261-96; here 261). 10 Thus, crucially, his magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, was redefined as a work of sociology. In the words of Coser, «[a]lthough this large book does contain certain important philosophical ideas, it is mainly a contribution to cultural sociology and to the analysis of the wider social implications of economic affairs» (Masters 193). 11 Simmel’s 1894 «The Problem of Sociology» is the locus classicus of Simmel’s argument that these forms should provide the proper, specific object of the discipline of sociology. 12 Tenbruck’s essay was first published in Wolff (61-99) and later partially reprinted in Coser, Makers. In attempting to remedy the injustice of Simmel’s marginalization within sociology, Tenbruck emphasizes the closeness of his conception of form to Weber’s ideal types. Whatever Simmel’s influence, largely unacknowledged, on Weber’s thinking, from our point of view, what is more essential is the complex relation between his breakthrough conception of or perspective on form and the philosophical tradition proper. 13 Resonating with both philosophical and evolutionary perspectives on history, Simmel’s conception of the Kulturprozess plays a key role in the Philosophy of Money. 14 In a letter to his teacher Moritz Lazarus from 5 Nov. 1894, Simmel credited him with having «directed me to the problem of the superindividual and its depths [des Überindividuellen u. seine Tiefen], whose investigation will probably fill out the productive time that remains to me» (GSG 22: 132). 15 «The philosophy of society has no justification [Rechtsgrund] for evading the advantages or disadvantages of its belonging to philosophy as such by constituting itself as a particular science of sociology» (GSG 11: 41). 16 See Weingartner for a reading of Simmel as a philosopher of life. 17 Letter to Count Hermann Keyserling (13 Oct. 1908). 18 This line of argument, in which Coser deploys Robert K. Merton’s schema for interpreting social innovation - Simmel was engaged in a «quest for originality» in which he «conformed to the goals of the academy, but he rejected the norms governing the ways and means for their attainment» (Masters 214) - may itself be regarded as a demonstration of the value of the cold cash of Simmel’s thinking for the discipline of sociology. 19 See Donald N. Levine’s by now classical - that is to say, too little read - discussion of the issues in this reception in «Useful Confusions: Simmel’s Stranger and His Followers.» For a recent example of an appropriation of the «Stranger,» see Alexander. 20 First elaborated in an excerpt from his work in progress Simmel published in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch in 1903 («The Sociology of Space,» now in GSG 7: 132-83), this discussion remains of considerable interest in an era of mass migrations accelerated by the ongoing transportation revolutions of the intervening century. 21 Regarding the genealogy of the «homeless» modern subject, see Webb. 22 This text itself, a radically revised version of Simmel’s 1894 essay, was, like «The Stranger,» first published in 1908 as part of the Soziologie. Simmel’s Stranger and the Third as Imaginative Form 261 23 See Sein und Zeit, Part I, Chapter 4, where Heidegger discusses his probing of phenomena that disclose «Strukturen des Daseins, die mit dem In-der-Welt-sein gleich ursprünglich sind: das Mitsein und Mitdasein,» the mode of being [Seinsart] in which, in Heidegger’s (decisively un-Simmelian! ) view the everyday mode of subjectivity he calls «das Man,» «the they,» is «grounded» (114). Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C. «Despising Others: Simmel’s Strangers.» The Dark Side of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Breton, Jean (Célestin Bouglé). Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne. Heidelberg-Berlin-Leipzig-Munich. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1895. -. «Notes d’un étudiant français en Allemagne.» La Revue de Paris 1 June 1894: n. pag. Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. -. ed. Georg Simmel: Makers of Modern Social Science. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965. Eßlinger, Eva, Tobias Schlechtrieman, Doris Schweizer, and Alexander Zons, eds. Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Bedorf, Thomas, Joachim Fischer, and Gesa Lindemann, eds. Theorien des Dritten. Innovation in Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie. Munich: Fink, 2010. Gassen, K.L.M., and Michael Landmann, eds. Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel: Briefe, Erinnerungen, Bibliographie: Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 1. März 1958. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979. Köhnke, Klaus-Christian. Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996. Levine, Donald N. The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985. -. «Useful Confusions: Simmel’s Stranger and His Followers.» The Flight from Ambiguity. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985. 73-88. Marotta, Vince. «Georg Simmel, the Stranger and the Sociology of Knowledge.» Journal of Intercultural Studies 33.6 (2012): 675-89. Simmel, Georg. Gesamtausgabe Band 7: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908. Band I. Ed. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt and Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1995. -. Gesamtausgabe Band 11: Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Ed. Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1992. -. Gesamtausgabe Band 22: Briefe 1880 -1911. Ed. Klaus Christian Köhnke. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. -. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Trans. John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, with an Introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010. 262 Elizabeth S. Goodstein Susman, Margarete. Die geistige Gestalt Georg Simmels. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959. Webb, Philip. «Homeless Bodies, Homeless Minds: Myth and the American Metropolis.» Diss. Emory University, 2008. Weingartner, Rudolph. Experience and Culture: The Philosophy of Georg Simmel. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1962. Wolff, K.H., ed. Georg Simmel: 1858-1918. A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography. Columbus: Ohio UP, 1959. Schiller’s Island: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen as Robinsonade MAT T ER LIN Wa shington Univ ersity in St. Louis Scholars have long debated the political implications of Friedrich Schiller’s tract Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (hereafter: Briefe). Whereas earlier Marxist critics took the author to task for what they saw as a flight from politics into the aesthetic realm, recent research has tended to opt instead for a more sympathetic elucidation of the complex ways in which his text responds to the concrete political challenges posed by the French Revolution. 1 There has in fact been something of a renaissance in Schiller scholarship among political theorists in the past several years, one driven by the belief that Schiller is a moral and political philosopher of the first order whose ideas have relevance for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. Inspiration for these new readings of Schiller has come from the work of Frederick Beiser, whose book, Schiller as Philosopher, appeared in 2005. According to Beiser’s insightful interpretation of the Briefe, Schiller’s political views must be situated within the long tradition of what among historians of political thought has come to be known as civic republicanism. Beiser’s assertion is based on Schiller’s claim that a reformation of moral character must precede any substantial political reform, as self-government is only possible among citizens who have learned to place the public good above private interest. As Beiser puts it, «no less than Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Ferguson, Schiller held that moral virtue is the essential support of a fundamental political goal: a stable and enduring republic» (125). Since the publication of Beiser’s book, a number of other scholars have sought to identify the potential contribution of Schiller’s uniquely aesthetic republicanism to contemporary reflection on the subject (Church, Moggach, Schmidt). 2 In the analysis that follows, I would like to take these readings as a starting point for an interpretation of the Briefe that seeks both to enrich our understanding of Schiller’s relationship to republican political thought and to refocus attention on the aesthetic, rather than the political interests that undergird the text. I would agree with Beiser that Schiller’s most original contribution to a republican tradition that had always emphasized education has something to do with his «insistence on the preeminent im- 264 Matt Erlin portance of aesthetic education» (126). But Schiller is by no means the first to claim that aesthetic experience can infuse the principles of reason with affect and thereby help to create virtuous citizens. What makes the Briefe innovative in their historical context is less their general acknowledgment of the importance of aesthetic education for politics than the degree to which they expand the range of materials that can contribute to that education. In order to make this claim plausible, I will situate the Briefe at the intersection of three conceptual frames as a way to pinpoint their discursive moment. Section one will read the Briefe against the backdrop of the history of ideas, more specifically, of the tradition of republican thought (and practice) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Section two will consider their position within the context of eighteenth-century German and European literary history. Finally, section three will attempt to clarify the results of the other two readings by way of a transhistorical theoretical framework adapted from the work of Adorno. My approach to Schiller’s text is conceived as a creative reworking of a method of triangulation used in seismology. In order to identify the exact location of an earthquake, one takes distance measurements from three seismographs. The epicenter can be found by locating the intersection of circles drawn around each of the seismographs with a radius equal to the respective distance from that seismograph to the earthquake. In this particular variant of a triangular reading, it should be noted, the object of investigation (Schiller’s Briefe) is not one of the vertices of a triangle but rather the location that is to be triangulated. Both the Briefe and the texts discussed in sections one and two are in close historical proximity to and can be said to reflect on each other. The Adorno text, in contrast, provides a transhistorical theoretical model that illuminates the intellectual-historical landscape from above, so to speak. One can thus think of the procedure as a triangulation in three dimensions, whereby the axes of analysis in sections one and two define a horizontal, historically synchronous plane. The Adorno model provides a diachronic vertical axis that intersects with the historical plane to provide an additional location coordinate. These three axes of analysis also correspond to the three primary ways in which the Briefe have been read since their appearance: as a contribution to the history of political thought, as a crucial moment in the conceptualization of autonomous literature, and as a theoretical statement on aesthetics with transhistorical validity. Without wanting to push the metaphor too far, my hope is that the approach as outlined (and as depicted, albeit in only two dimensions, in figure 1), will enable us to describe the discursive rupture instantiated by the Briefe with greater precision and in greater detail. Schiller’s Island 265 Fig. 1 Definitions of republican thought - not be confused with the ideology of the republican party in the United States - are a bit of a moving target in the history of political philosophy. When Beiser and others link Schiller’s Briefe to this tradition, they tend to focus on a few key passages in the text and appear to be drawing their insights from what has come to be termed the «civic humanist» paradigm, most closely associated with the Cambridge scholar J.G.A. Pocock. The most obvious feature of republicanism is of course an opposition to monarchy and the endorsement of a republican form of government. More significant for our purposes, however, is a preoccupation with moral questions of virtue and corruption and especially the insistence on a particular notion of individual virtue as the prerequisite for civic participation. As Pocock explains, virtue in the republican tradition was not simply a matter of behaving morally, but entailed a «moral disposition of the self towards the maintenance of a public […] good, identifiable with the political association, polis or respublica itself» (235). The republican ideal, in other words, first articulated in antiquity and revived by Machiavelli and others, demanded the complete subordination of private interest to the public good. The greatest threat to the republic was corruption, understood precisely in 266 Matt Erlin terms of an inversion of this hierarchy; in the words of John Robertson, if citizens «are led by necessity or choice to put private, material interests before public virtue, then, in the view of the civic tradition, the political community will be threatened with corruption» (138). This association of corruption with private interest makes it clear that this republican tradition, at least in its ideal-typical form, is diametrically opposed to the modern selfinterested individualism favored by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and Kant (Beiser 125). The case for Schiller’s connection to this republican tradition can best be made on the basis of the first ten of his letters. Here the author explains the aims of his work and offers a justification for focusing on aesthetic questions at a moment that seems to demand attention to political matters. In the wake of the French Revolution, Schiller writes, one has the impression that «das große Schicksal der Menschheit» (Briefe 8) is being decided in the political arena, but he goes on to insist nonetheless on the need to attend to beauty rather than freedom. As he asserts in one of the more famous lines from the Briefe, «es [ist] die Schönheit, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert» (8). He then continues on, in letters five and six, to explain why, offering his interpretation of the modern era as one in which the division of labor has fractured and fragmented the human personality: Sobald auf der einen Seite die erweiterte Erfahrung und das bestimmtere Denken eine schärfere Scheidung der Wissenschaften, auf der andern das verwickeltere Uhrwerk der Staaten eine strengere Absonderung der Stände und Geschäfte notwendig machte, so zerriß auch der innere Bund der menschlichen Natur, und ein verderblicher Streit entzweite ihre harmonischen Kräfte. (32) Rather than a holistic development of all human capacities toward the realization of what eighteenth-century commentators referred to as die Bestimmung des Menschen, the process of civilization has resulted in a monstrous imbalance. Each individual is little more than an «Abdruck seines Geschäfts, seiner Wissenschaft» (34). The antithesis to the fragmentary quality of modern human character is to be found in the harmonious unity of personality characteristic of the ancient Greeks, who combined «die Jugend der Phantasie mit der Männlichkeit der Vernunft in einer herrlichen Menschheit» (30), and for whom each individual could serve as representative of the species or Gattung. Schiller concludes this first section of the letters by making the case that only aesthetic experience can enable us to regain this unity of personality. It cannot be recovered through action on the part of the state, since the modern state has itself given rise to the divisions. Nor can philosophy provide the solution. Modern philosophers have already identified the principles of reason according to which Schiller’s Island 267 a virtuous polity can be established; these theoretical principles, however, have proven inadequate to the task of realizing this goal. Only the fine arts are capable of libidinizing these principles in such a way as to make them matters of feeling and the will rather than mere ideas. As he puts it in another famous line, «der Weg zu dem Kopf [muß] durch das Herz geöffnet werden» (52). Here we see the outlines of the conceptual framework that Beiser identifies with the republican tradition: virtue must precede political freedom, but that virtue is sorely lacking among both the lawless, instinctual lower classes and the corrupt elites, for whom «mitten im Schoße der raffiniertesten Geselligkeit der Egoism sein System gegründet [hat]» (Briefe 26). The solution to this problematic state of affairs is a variant of the civic education - aesthetic in this case - that the republican tradition had always viewed as crucial to stable government. To this point one can hardly quarrel with Beiser’s reading. What he (and others) fail to consider in any detail, however, is just how central Schiller’s historical-philosophical framework is to this conception of aesthetic qua civic education. More specifically, I would argue that one can actually identify two different models of aesthetic education in this first part of the work. The first is the one previously mentioned, which conceives of the arts as a means to imbue the ethical principles established by reason with affect and thereby render them efficacious in the political or social sphere. It may be the case that Schiller was the first to present this model as an explicit response to the political crisis of the French Revolution, but the idea that the arts can enhance morality is a commonplace in the late eighteenth century, as Schiller himself remarks in the tenth letter. Thus one can hardly view this aspect of the letters as their most significant contribution to thinking about the cultivation of political virtue. More interesting, and more unique, is the second model, which Schiller adumbrates in the first ten letters against the backdrop of a conjectural history of humanity and elaborates in psychological terms at a later point in his deliberations. In this model, the desired transformation of the state does not simply require education in the service of virtue, but a form of education that can undo the corruption that has already occurred, corruption that constitutes the unfortunate side effect of an otherwise necessary process of historical evolution. A key to Schiller’s pedagogical program can be found in his various invocations of one of the root metaphors of the Enlightenment - namely, the equation of the history of humanity with the life span of the individual. Schiller has recourse to this metaphor on a number of occasions. In the third letter, for example, he describes the transition from the state of nature (Naturstaat) to one based on moral laws as a process whereby man 268 Matt Erlin retrieves, «auf eine künstliche Weise, in seiner Volljährigkeit seine Kindheit nach» (10). Later, as previously mentioned, he describes the Greeks as combining «die Jugend der Phantasie mit der Männlichkeit der Vernunft» (30). And in a somewhat different but closely related vein he writes of the modern artist: «Eine wohltätige Gottheit reiße den Säugling beizeiten von seiner Mutter Brust, nähre ihn mit der Milch eines bessern Alters und lasse ihn unter fernem griechischen Himmel zur Mündigkeit reifen» (56). His famous play-drive or Spieltrieb, which he associates with the aesthetic and which is said to mediate between the form-drive and the sense-drive, can also be understood within the same metaphorical framework. This metaphorical field allows us to recognize that the problem of aesthetic education for Schiller is not primarily a matter of rendering reason sensuous; it is a problem of uneven development. As Schiller explains, the species, taken as a whole, has evolved to a level of cultivation far higher than that of the Greeks, but this evolution has only been possible at the cost of abandoning the harmonious totality of human capacities that characterized each Greek individual. The task of aesthetic education is to recover this totality without renouncing the achievements of modernity. The aim, in other words, is not a straightforward return to an earlier state of development. It is a recovery of the unity of personality that characterized that earlier state, but in such a way that the individual, upon achieving that unity, is in a position to reappropriate the collective achievements of contemporary civilization in a more balanced fashion. Schiller elucidates the psychological mechanism through which beauty makes this possible in letters nineteen through twenty-one. The main idea here is summed up in a rather provocative claim: «in dem ästhetischen Zustande ist der Mensch also Null» (144). Although one finds passages in the text that present a linear progression from a sensual to an aesthetic to a moral state, in these three letters we are confronted with a different model of how aesthetic experience works. Here Schiller argues that the aesthetic returns us to the zero point of human development, a state in which we are «von aller Bestimmung frei» but in which we are also simultaneously blessed with «eine gleich unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit» (140). The former state - «von aller Bestimmung frei» - resembles that of childhood, or even the moment of birth, since, as he puts it, the individual must «auf gewisse Weise zu jenem negativen Zustand der bloßen Bestimmungslosigkeit zurückkehren, in welchem er sich befand, ehe noch irgend etwas auf seinen Sinn einen Eindruck machte» (140). This absolute indeterminacy, however, must exist simultaneously with a state of «unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit,» a state that suggests maturity on the level of both the individual and the species as a whole, inas- Schiller’s Island 269 much as it is characterized by «eine Gemütsstimmung, welche das Ganze der Menschheit in sich begreift» (150). Schiller also describes the aesthetic state as one in which «es ihm nunmehr von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will» (146), a description that suggests both the potential of youth prior to determinations imposed by society and also the knowledge and capacity for self-determination characteristic of adulthood. Where have we seen this before? Not, I would argue, in the aesthetic treatises of any of Schiller’s European predecessors or contemporaries. Cast in the broadest possible terms, the characterization of aesthetic experience just described can no doubt be situated within the context of widespread male fantasies of self-generation or Selbstgeburt in the eighteenth century, what Helmut J. Schneider has described as the «aufklärerische Utopie der vernünftigen Selbsthervorbringung» (177). Rather than pursuing this more general line of inquiry, however, I would like to suggest two specific literary examples that evoke a more limited set of intertexts shaping Schiller’s intervention. The first is Christoph Martin Wieland’s novel Der goldne Spiegel. Published in 1772, this treatise on government in narrative form relates the fictional history of the Oriental empire of Scheschian as told, in the style of The Arabian Nights, to the Persian sultan Schach-Gebal. The high point of the story is the establishment of the rule of Tifan, who ascends to the throne at a point when the empire is nearing collapse and ushers in a golden age of peace and prosperity. Klaus Berghahn has already identified a connection between the Briefe and Wieland’s Staatsroman on a general level, pointing to the fact that Schiller is both writing for a prince and addressing Bloch’s paradigmatic utopian question: «Wie könnte die Welt vollendet werden? » The parallel I want to identify, however, is a different one. The relevance of this particular section of this particular Staatsroman for a consideration of Schiller stems from its representation of a different question, precisely the one Schiller poses in his first ten letters: how to create virtuous subjects in a corrupt state. Wieland’s novel suggests that the task is in fact impossible. In order to become the ideal ruler, the infant Tifan cannot stay in Scheschian. He must be spirited away from the depraved court at a moment of crisis and raised in a distant valley. Far from the corrupting influence of courtly life, his mentor, Dschengis, creates a small colony with a group of freed slaves, and together they transform the wilderness into fertile farmland. Against this backdrop, Tifan experiences an upbringing that could be taken straight from the pages of Rousseau’s Émile; he is, in the narrator Danischmend’s words, «von der Natur selbst auf ihrem Schoße erzogen» (205). 270 Matt Erlin Fig. 2: University of Virginia library The pedagogical relationship here proves crucial for understanding the link between this passage and Schiller’s Briefe. As an infant, Tifan finds himself «von aller Bestimmung frei.» But he is also paired with the virtuous Dschengis, who by some stroke of luck has escaped the corrupting influence of his environment and who, because of his virtue and his profound knowledge of humanity, is the source of «eine gleich unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit,» Schiller’s Island 271 providing Tifan with an upbringing that essentially recapitulates the natural course of human development in ideal terms. Knowledge must be obtained on the basis of immediate experience and in the proper order. Only after Tifan has tilled the land, herded sheep, and recognized the basic equality of all men does he begin to learn the principles of good government through both education and travel, and only upon reaching adulthood is he made aware of his noble origins and prepared to reclaim his throne. Aside from the structural analogy between Schiller’s recuperative model of aesthetic education and the pedagogical experiment related by Wieland, one finds a number of remarks in the Briefe that suggest Schiller is operating within the same general conceptual framework as Wieland in thinking about virtue and the state. Most striking is the previously cited description of the education of the artist, who must be snatched from his mother’s breast and raised under a Grecian sky before returning to his century, as a stranger, to purify it. And it is not only the artist whom Schiller depicts in these terms. Towards the end of the treatise, in letter twenty-three, Schiller explains that while the aesthetic individual needs no more than a sublime occasion «um ihn zum Helden oder zum Weisen zu machen» (164), the sensuous individual must first be transported «unter einen anderen Himmel» (164). Reading this statement with Schiller’s philhellenism in mind, one might think again of the ancient Greeks, but when considered together with his insistence on the aesthetic state as a zero point and the example from Der goldne Spiegel, a different context comes to mind. My hypothesis is that both Schiller and Wieland are channeling a more elementary, albeit fairly new literary archetype, one whose prevalence in eighteenth-century German literature has been well documented. The paradigmatic tale of an individual transported «unter einen anderen Himmel» in order to recapitulate the course of human development is of course Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Even as early as 1957, Ian Watt associated the protagonist’s experience on the island, where he eventually becomes «Master of every mechanick art» (Defoe 51), with efforts to overcome the dehumanizing division of labor in the emergent commercial society referenced by Schiller in his remarks on fragmentation (Watt 71-74). As more recent scholarship has pointed out, Crusoe’s evolution roughly parallels the sequence proposed by the fourstages theory of human development espoused by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (see Meek). He progresses from wanderer to primitive scavenger and hunter, to farmer, mechanic, and domesticator of animals. By the middle of the novel, prior to the appearance of the footprint that leads him to Friday, his island economy is generating a significant surplus that places it on the brink of commercialization (Cruise 112). Finally, as Michael 272 Matt Erlin McKeon has persuasively argued, what Crusoe achieves on the basis of his island reeducation is a kind of psychic recalibration. The «suspended time» there enables him to acquire «the psychological equipment needed for possessive individualism» (334). While McKeon and others tend to emphasize how a «naturalization» of desire prepares Crusoe for a return to commercial society rather than political life, it is worth noting that his final role on the island prior to his return is in fact that of political sovereign. His island has gradually become populated, and he describes himself as «absolute Lord and Law-giver» (Defoe 174). One could debate whether Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is really the key intertext for Schiller or whether Johann Karl Wezel’s adaptation or Campe’s wildly popular Robinson der Jüngere is a more plausible candidate. In the case of Campe’s novel, one finds, in addition to the shipwreck story that unfolds on the island, a frame narrative in which a pedagogy of play figures crucially in the education of moral subjects. Considering the explosion of Robinsonaden in the period, from the Insel Felsenburg to Der Churpfälzische Robinson, it probably makes the most sense to speak with Ian Watt of a widely circulating Robinson myth that includes the key elements of the structural parallel I have delineated: «primitivist» isolation, reeducation, and return, but with the additional specification that the isolation involves no less than a recovery of the full potential of human development, and the reeducation is in fact a recapitulation of that entire development in ideal terms. While Defoe’s original includes far more than just the island episode, especially if one considers the second and third volumes that he published in 1719 and 1720, eighteenth-century contemporaries, from Rousseau to Campe to Wezel, certainly viewed the essence of the Robinsonade along these lines. In the preface to his own version of the story, for example, Wezel explains that Robinson is «eine Geschichte des Menschen im Kleinen, ein Miniaturgemälde von den verschiedenen Ständen, die die Menschheit nach und nach durchwandert ist» (9-10). 3 In case it has not yet become clear, my claim is that the artwork functions in the Briefe as «Schiller’s island,» not merely a refuge from a corrupt modern world but one that enables the recovery of an original human potential through a form of rebirth. In order to grasp the full extent of the parallel, however, we need to consider an additional aspect. Just as Schiller’s aesthetic education requires the individual to combine simultaneously a state of indeterminacy and infinite determinability, infancy and adulthood, primitive humanity and modern civilization, such that «es ihm nunmehr von Natur wegen möglich gemacht ist, aus sich selbst zu machen, was er will,» so it is equally the case that although Crusoe returns to the zero point of human Schiller’s Island 273 development, he carries with him both the knowledge and also the technology of eighteenth-century Europe. On the island, in other words, he is both «primitive» and modern European simultaneously. And it is only as a result of his possessions and his knowledge that he is able to domesticate himself and his island. Again it was Ian Watt who first established that Robinson Crusoe offers anything but a straightforward back to nature story. Crusoe is a capitalist, who owns, as Watt puts it, «the freehold of a rich though unimproved estate» and who, thanks to the materials he has rescued from the ship, is «lucky heir to the labours of countless other individuals» (87-88). This final aspect of the parallel is significant because it helps to foreground a crucial feature of the republican tradition that has been neglected in recent scholarship on Schiller. Simply put, to endorse republicanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is by no means to endorse democracy. 4 We do well to remember that none of the independent republics in existence at the time Schiller was writing (e.g., Geneva, Venice, Genoa, the Dutch republic) were democratic in the sense of having universal suffrage. In Montesquieu’s discussion of republics in The Spirit of the Laws, he divides the category into democracies and aristocracies, depending on how many wield sovereign power. D’Alembert, in his article on Geneva for the Encyclopédie, claims that the republic «has all of the advantages and none of the difficulties of democracy» (243). Even the French constitution of 1791, to give an example more temporally proximate to Schiller’s Briefe, distinguished between active and passive citizens based on property, and the property requirements for electors were even more restrictive. This distinction brings us to the crucial point. In both classical republican theory and its reappropriations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, virtuous citizenship was seen to be contingent upon certain material prerequisites, the most important of which is property. As Pocock and others have explained, property, particularly in the English tradition, is the precondition of civic virtue and thus of political participation. This is because property - more specifically, agrarian property - provides the independence that allows the individual to participate in politics without falling prey to the seductions of material self-interest. Significantly, in the debates between the landed interests and the moneyed interests that take center stage in eighteenth-century England, the value of property is presented in terms of its opposition to the fragmented personality typical of the man of commerce. To quote Pocock, «the ideal of the patriot entailed an image of a personality free and virtuous because unspecialized» (109). What makes Schiller’s aesthetic republicanism most innovative, then, is not simply that art is incorporated into a project of civic education. It is, 274 Matt Erlin rather, that art fulfills a function that is structurally analogous to the function of the landed property in republican theory. Art, or aesthetic experience, is identified with a unity of personality and a universal perspective opposed to the fragmentation brought about by the modern division of labor. In fact, under the right circumstances, it enables one to recover that unity in the midst of commercial society, thus potentially resolving what historians of political thought have identified as tension between agrarian and commercial paradigms of individualism. Accessing the aesthetic island becomes a matter of temporal compartmentalization rather than spatial displacement, and it can thus coexist with a commercial society. From this perspective, Douglas Moggach is right to argue that Schiller’s «aesthetic program is predicated on a new understanding of the demands of modernity,» demands that he confronts with «a redefined sense of virtue» (526). According to Moggach, Schiller’s Briefe seek to provide a new universal (i.e. aesthetic) basis for political unity in a society where individuals are increasingly differentiated by function rather than rank. I would agree in principle. However, the manner in which Schiller appropriates and resignifies the elements of the republican program suggests a somewhat different conception of its practical implications. Schiller’s aesthetic ideal does indeed have universal applicability in theory - anyone can access the aesthetic island. In a number of passages, however, he seems to suggest that only a select few are actually capable of doing so under the current circumstances. He does, after all, refer in his final letter to the aesthetic state as existing «in einigen wenigen auserlesenen Zirkeln» (Briefe 218) - one thinks here of classical Weimar. A similarly exclusive group is suggested by his comments in the essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, where he explains that the capacity for a proper appreciation of poetry can only develop among «einer Klasse von Menschen,» which «ohne zu arbeiten, tätig ist, und idealisieren kann, ohne zu schwärmen» and which combines «alle Realitäten des Lebens mit den wenigstmöglichen Schranken desselben» (Dichtung 356). Although Schiller in both cases presents these groups as ideal rather than actually existing communities, the language used, especially in the second example, is certainly evocative of an aristocratic class. While both texts remain vague on this issue, such comments raise the question whether participation in the aesthetic state does not have as its precondition access to some kind of aesthetic estate, however that might be conceived. While it seems anachronistic to criticize Schiller on this count, we can certainly regret his failure to endorse the more radical variants of republican theory in circulation at the time. We should also recognize, however, that his ambivalence was typical of broader European debates about republicanism in the Schiller’s Island 275 Fig. 3: Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des Deutschen Instituts für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung 276 Matt Erlin period. More problematic is Schiller’s failure to elucidate any mechanism of mediation by which aesthetic experience, understood as a return to a state of determinability, is transformed into a capacity for real political action. Schiller’s reflections, in other words, seem to end at the moment of arrival on the island. We never really discover what skills are to be acquired there or exactly how and when we know that it is time to return to society (see fig.-3). More could be said regarding the precise character of Schiller’s appropriation of the republican tradition, especially as regards the complex constellation of republicanism, commerce, and landed property evoked by his concluding remark on «auserlesenen Zirkeln.» In my own concluding remarks, however, I want to shift gears and try to link matters of political content to those of aesthetic form, returning to the assertion I made at the outset regarding Schiller’s originality. As mentioned above, Beiser notes that «Schiller’s distinctive contribution to [the republican] tradition is his insistence on the preeminent importance of aesthetic education» (126). Even if we ignore previous philosophical articulations of the idea of aesthetic education, after considering the literary examples of Wieland’s Der goldne Spiegel and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we can hardly find anything innovative in Schiller’s insistence on aesthetic education as a training ground for political virtue. After all, what is the reader of Robinson Crusoe or Der goldne Spiegel experiencing if not moral-political instruction by way of aesthetic experience? The protagonist learns to become a virtuous citizen or citizen-ruler through his isolation, and the reader participates virtually in the process. What is pathbreaking in the Briefe, however, is that Schiller takes the moral-political instruction coupled with a specific thematic and narrative trajectory and transfers it to aesthetic experience as such. To be more specific, what I am arguing here is that in Schiller the primitive isolation - reeducation - return structure that defines the plot of the Crusoe narrative and its derivatives undergoes a process of universalization, whereby it becomes associated with all encounters with genuine works of art. To my mind, the most intriguing way to approach this phenomenon is to take a detour through Adorno, namely through his assertions regarding the form/ content relationship in the artwork as a site where broader historical shifts become visible. Adorno’s key idea in this context is that of new aesthetic forms as «niedergeschlagene Inhalte,» precipitated or sedimented contents, something he first articulated in his Philosophie der neuen Musik in 1948 and that reappears in his Ästhetische Theorie and the fragments on Beethoven. Admittedly, the precise meaning of the phrase is somewhat elusive. In the Philosophie der neuen Musik he writes that there is «keine Verhärtung der Form, die nicht als Negation des harten Lebens sich lesen ließe» (46), and in Schiller’s Island 277 the Beethoven fragments he describes syntactic relationships in the Second Symphony as a sedimentation of parodic elements that previously figured as part of the content. Nonetheless, as the second example makes clear, Adorno’s basic assertion is that the content elements of artworks (e.g., parody) can over time become diffused into the formal structures of new works (e.g., syntax). The most helpful elaboration and extension of Adorno’s idea can be found in Peter Szondi’s Theorie des modernen Dramas, where the author expands Adorno’s brief remarks into a full-blown theory of generic transformation. For Szondi, the formal innovations of twentieth-century drama appear as so many sedimentations of a late nineteenth-century crisis in interpersonal communication that appeared as a theme in the works of that period. To give a concrete example, dramatists in the nineteenth century found it increasingly necessary to take up the theme of the isolated individual confronting an alien world, but this content threatened to burst the formal frame of a classical drama, which relied on a particular view of character and the role of dialogue as well as an organic relationship among various dramatic elements. After a period of crisis, however, the new theme eventually finds formal accommodation in the Stationendrama of Expressionism. Such sweeping interpretations can of course be challenged on a variety of levels. Nonetheless, whatever its flaws, I think Adorno’s and Szondi’s idea of a historical sedimentation of content provides a helpful framework for making sense of Schiller’s model of the aesthetic. In the Briefe, an outcome that had been associated with a specific storyline - namely, the salutary impact of an idealized recapitulation of the development of the species - has been transformed into a structural element in all aesthetic experience. There is a twist, however. Szondi’s model is heavily indebted to a Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, according to which an original harmony of form and content gives way to a state of tension in which new content puts pressure on the form, until finally «die formal fungierenden Inhalte sich vollends zur Form niederschlagen und damit die alte Form sprengen» (76). Both he and Adorno proceed from a conception of art as a space in which social antagonisms return as immanent problems of form. I am sympathetic to this reading, and it may in fact be possible to situate Schiller’s Briefe within such a framework. My current interpretation of the work, however, understands the phenomenon of sedimented content in less doctrinaire terms, focusing not so much on social antagonisms as on artistic opportunities. Keeping in mind the predominantly didactic orientation of Enlightenment literature, whether in the form of Staatsromane intended to cultivate republican-minded rulers, or of more broadly pedagogical Robinsonaden like Campe’s, one can view Schiller’s generalization of the recovery 278 Matt Erlin of totality through art as an emancipation of the artist. While the extent of Schiller’s republican commitments may always remain an open question, there can be little doubt that he was committed to his own aesthetic production. I want to suggest, and I choose this word deliberately, that the Briefe signal a moment in the history of German literature when literature’s didactic aims, understood here specifically in terms of the cultivation of virtue in a situation of uneven historical development, migrates from theme to form, thereby freeing the author to address topics as he sees fit without renouncing his claim to contribute to these aims. From this perspective, the emergence of aesthetic autonomy appears not as the renunciation of literature understood in terms of political or moral utility, but rather as its sublation. Notes 1 For a discussion of the Marxist line of criticism see Sharpe 86-94. Recent examples of more sympathetic, historically informed analyses include the essays discussed in this contribution as well as the essays on the Briefe included in High, Martin, and Oellers. The latter, however, tend to emphasize philosophical and scientific intertexts and focus primarily on German debates. 2 An important earlier inquiry is Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment. 3 For a relevant discussion of how the island functions more generally as «Keimzelle und elementare Einheit in verschiedenen Reflexionszusammenhängen und Diskursen des 18. Jahrhunderts» and marks «den Nullmeridian einer genetischen Entwicklung» compare Vogl 186-90. 4 For a general discussion of Enlightenment republicanism with an eye toward actually existing republics see Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophie der neuen Musik. Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969. Beiser, Frederick. Schiller as Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Berghahn, Klaus L. «Ästhetische Reflexion als Utopie des Ästhetischen.» Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie. Ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982. Church, Jeffrey. «Friedrich Schiller on Republican Virtue and the Tragic Exemplar.» European Journal of Political Theory 13.1 (2014): 95-118. Cruise, James. Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the «Origins» of Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. D’Alembert, Jean le Rond. «Geneva.» Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Letter to d'Alembert and Writings on the Theater. Ed. and trans. Allen Bloom, Charles Butterworth and Christopher Kelley. Lebanon, NH: New England UP, 2004. 239-49. Schiller’s Island 279 Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Michael Shinagel. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. High, Jeffrey L., Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers, eds. Who is this Schiller Now? Essays on his Reception and Significance. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600 -1740. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Meek, Ronald. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Moggach, Douglas. «Schiller, Scots and Germans: Freedom and Diversity in the Aesthetic Education of Man.» Inquiry 51.1 (2008): 16-36. -. «Schiller’s Aesthetic Republicanism.» History of Political Thought 28.3 (2007): 520-41. Oz-Salzberger, Fania. Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Robertson, John. «The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition.» Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatierff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Schiller, Friedrich. «Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.» Schillers Werke. Vol. 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1966. -. «Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.» Schillers Werke. Vol. 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1966. Sharpe, Lesley. Schiller’s Aesthetic Essays: Two Centuries of Criticism. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995. Schmidt, Alexander. «The Liberty of the Ancients? Friedrich Schiller and Aesthetic Republicanism.» History of Political Thought 30. 2 (2009): 286-314. Schneider, Helmut J. Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2011. Szondi, Peter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1956. Venturi, Franco. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. Vogl, Joseph. Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen. Zurich: diaphanes, 2004. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957. Wezel, Johann Karl. Robinson Krusoe. Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1990. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Der goldne Spiegel und andere politische Dichtungen. Ed. Herbert Jaumann. Munich: Winkler, 1990. Global Consciousness, Commodity Form, and the Natural History Object J.P. SHORT Univ ersity of Georgia To antedate globalization to the nineteenth century is the work of the new global history, which establishes ample grounds for such a move - in flows of trade, capital and labor first of all. This empirical and material history bears along with it, trailing in a kind of phosphorescent wake, the idea of global consciousness, an altered awareness of the individual’s relationship to the globe, the world, the planetary. At its most compressed, this is formulated as the «annihilation of time and space» through technologies of transportation and communication: railroads, steamships, the telegraph, time zones. The history, or pre-history, of global consciousness in nineteenth-century Germany, or Europe, represents here the classic problem of drawing a relationship between material life and mentality, of reading technological and social forms for evidence of an evolving consciousness of the global. The scholarship on global history over the last decade looks for transnational relationships, exchanges, appropriations and conflicts. It finds connections between the most distant places, tracing out how global or transnational forces shaped the local or the national, and how these were, in turn, implicated in the global. It asserts the distinctiveness of globalization as a major historical force, but, again, antedates it, looking back to the nineteenth century or even before. Most fundamentally, globalization signifies the emergence of a world economy through international trade, the convergence of prices leading to a world market, and global flows of capital and labor. The decades after 1870, up to the First World War, saw the rapid and unprecedented acceleration of these trends in the vast migrations, colonial empires, capital flows and commercial connections that were emblematic of the period. This economic history conventionally implies, in turn, a cultural dimension, a reflection of growing economic networks in the domain of consciousness. The new globalizing reality is supposed to have transformed experience by altering material culture, multiplying contacts and communications, redistributing populations, bringing the world closer. My particular interest revolves around this question of how the «global» was produced for consciousness - or, perhaps, how it was not - during this period. Concerning the question of origins, it seems to me that global consciousness - the convergent play of scales, proximities, distances and vantage points Global Consciousness 281 - was not some automatic effect of globalizing technologies, epiphenomenal and given. Rather, the global took hold on consciousness as the complex and problematic outcome of certain techniques of seeing, elements of commodification, cultural technologies and modes of modern experience. To get at this elusive development involves a certain reshuffling of technologies and cultural forms, a somewhat idiosyncratic attempt to move beyond the marked domains of transport and communication. My focus is not on flows of capital or commodities or labor nor on the role of the state nor on the place of violence, although the well-established history of these things is crucial to my framework. Instead, in order to get at the protracted, submerged process that developed an image of the global, or a global self-image, I propose to assemble and interpret a series of historical technologies, objects and cultural forms that both exemplified and produced the ramifying engagement of Europeans with the world: for example, natural history and the commercial traffic in its objects; the bourgeois domestic interior; the interiorized vantage point and visual logic of the panorama; the fractured, estranged global of the cinematograph; the condition of boredom; and the development of a kind of critical «kitsch globalism» by the early modernist avant-gardes. Here I would like to touch on the first of those themes, natural history. In particular I mean the natural history object - starfish, corals, iguanas - sought in the remotest places for assembly into exotic collections for edification and exchange. I would like to interpolate the natural history object, ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Europe, into the relation between economic subject - humans producing and consuming - and object - the commodities they make, buy and sell - in a globalizing world. As a third element, the natural history object disrupts the powerful duality of economic subject and object and accentuates it at the same time. This is because it admits to no stability, standing at once for living nature and death, for scholarly disinterest and commercial interest. Fusing the organic and the inorganic discloses a kind of inherent tension that reveals all the more vividly the dialectical production of consciousness, or in this case global consciousness. For natural history produced dense, composite forms: at once petrifactions of «the world» or «nature»; global exotica; scientific specimens; wonders; merchandise. Brought into the subject-object relation of capitalism, these forms suggest ways to think about its global dimension. As display, natural history exemplified the play of scales and vantage points, miniaturizing «the world» in the diorama, the terrarium, the aquarium. And natural history also opened up the question of time and the global by juxtaposing temporalities: its own expanded time (geologic and natural historical) with the compressed, empty time of modern travel and communications. Or we might think here of the 282 J.P. Short natural history expedition as temporalized travel, as traveling back in time in the sense that Johannes Fabian meant by the «denial of co-evalness,» making colonial discourse productive of evolutionary time frames (Fabian 31). (And, parenthetically, the theme of natural history also resurfaces toward the end of my period as an element of modernist kitsch globalism, highlighting limitations of «global consciousness.») Of particular interest to me is the transnational traffic in natural history objects, as well as the fabrication and trade in their ingenious artificial imitations - by the latter I mean, for example, the delicate flowers and jellyfish made in Dresden by the Blaschkes and sold internationally to museums. For, above all, natural history was extremely significant in the nineteenth century as a cultural form mediating global diversity but also objectifying it, paralleling and ultimately instantiating the commodity form and exchange. If the commodity form and the exchange relation, which formed the basis of globalization in the nineteenth century, are central here, this of course in a way only restates the problem of relating subject and object, consciousness and world, rather than resolving it to develop some sense of globalizing consciousness and its production. Certainly, the paired relationship of product and producer, of commodity and consumer, indicates - in a period of extended transnational commodity chains - a changing experience of material culture. Theodor W. Adorno, looking back to the nineteenth century, suggested «that the commodity category could be greatly concretized by the specifically modern categories of world trade and imperialism,» and he evoked, writing to Walter Benjamin, the «arcade as bazaar.» For him, the significance of «compressed distance» lies in manipulation and legitimation, the work of ideology (Scholem and Adorno 501). This seems, though, insufficient for understanding the particular experience of the «global.» Introducing natural history opens up the matter for refinement, offering clues to a particular experience of the world bound up with a certain moment in the history of capitalism. My interest in the natural history object lies in the fact that it is neither one thing nor another, neither simply nature nor culture, at once found object, object lesson, souvenir and commodity. The natural history collection was a metonymic system standing for a global ensemble of remote zones. Expeditions traced the paths of colonial exploration and trade; objects circulated in transactional networks of merchant-naturalists. Natural history figured and mediated global diversity, fixed and materialized it, and, moreover, embodied in striking form the dialectical unity of organic and inorganic that was constitutive of global consciousness. Interposed into the pairing of economic subject and object that was at the center of global relations it concretizes and illuminates its most elusive, ten- Global Consciousness 283 sional aspect and registers the globalization of consciousness at the same time. Already in the 1840s, in Paris, Marx was, of course, elaborating his transposition of philosophical categories into political economy. At the center of this was the dyadic relationship of worker and commodity, which was also a relationship of man and nature. For Marx, human labor in its most natural sense resulted in the gradual elaboration of «anthropological nature,» the fashioning of the material world in ways useful to human life. «In creating a world of objects [gegenständliche Welt] by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being» (Marx, Manuscripts 113). He produces even when free of physical need. Man «contemplates himself in a world that he has created» (Marx, Manuscripts 114). In a state of estranged labor this relation is not broken but transformed. «The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. […] objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it» (Marx, Manuscripts 108). This deeply contradictory relationship is reproduced by what Marx called the commodity fetish, metaphorical language expressing the displacement of social labor - the source of value - by abstract exchange value; the attribution of exchange value as inherent (objectification); and the effacement of that twofold operation (or mystification) (Marx, Capital 76-87). The commodity appears as «a power independent of the producer,» part of an «alien world of objects» which the worker «creates over and against himself» (Marx, Manuscripts 108). The metaphor of the fetish expresses, in displacement and mystification, the power that commodities hold - perversely, paradoxically - over their producers, and in this sense the transposition of subject and object, of organic and inorganic, so that commodities appear metaphorically animated, vivified, endowed with agency. We recall the simple table in Marx, made of «that common, everyday thing, wood,» which «as soon as it steps forth as a commodity […] not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities […] stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas» (Marx, Capital 76). Already very early in the nineteenth century, in 1808, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier traced in the language of trade this inverted relationship between people and goods. Commodities are on the move. «The finest minds of the nineteenth century are those who can explain the mysteries of the Stock Exchange,» he laments, adding that «the temple of memory is only open to those who understand why sugar has weakened or why soap has eased. […] The old language of merchants has been replaced with the suavest expressions, so that people talk elegantly about sugar easing or weakening 284 J.P. Short […] and soap doing very well.» We hear in «glowing Pindaric terms» that «‹Soaps have experienced rapid and unexpected movement.› We seem to see the boxes of soap leap up towards the clouds» (Fourier 270). The artist and illustrator Grandville, a contemporary of Marx and Fourier who worked in Paris, registered a similar sense of a quickening object world. His work breathes droll, dreamlike life into vegetables, ink pens, oil paintings, musical instruments, champagne bottles. Fig. 1: J.-J. Grandville, A quoi bon du reste la personne? On ne va là que pour voir les habits, Un autre monde (Paris, 1844). «The enthronement of the commodity,» observed Walter Benjamin, «is the secret theme of Grandville’s art. […] The subtle artifices with which it represents inanimate objects correspond to what Marx calls the ‘theological niceties’ of the commodity» (Benjamin, «Paris» 18). Grandville literalizes visually what Marx later sought to capture in his own metaphorical language. His drawings «depicted the adventures of the strolling commodity,» inverting the sense of the flâneur taking in the arcades (Benjamin, Arcades 367). This announces the graphic language of capitalism that will flourish in advertising. «Under Grandville’s pencil,» Benjamin suggests, «the whole of nature is transformed into spécialités [luxury goods]. He presents them in the same spirit in which the advertisement […] begins to present its articles» (Benjamin, «Paris» 7). Indeed, «Grandville’s works are the sibylline books of publicité. Everything that, with him, has its preliminary form as joke, or satire, attains its true unfolding as advertisement» (Benjamin, Arcades 853). Global Consciousness 285 Of course, to interpret Grandville’s work as an expression of what Marx would call the commodity fetish is to reproduce and reinforce the inverted dyadic relationship of subject and object later articulated by Marx, which by itself only takes us so far - into, say, the nineteenth-century world of the arcade or the department store or the world exhibition. But Grandville, if his vivid work gestures subtly in that direction, opens up a whole further dimension of critical interpretation in his rendering of an engineered, commodified nature. Just as world exhibitions «propagate the universe of commodities,» Benjamin says, so do «Grandville’s fantasies confer a commodity character on the universe» (Benjamin, «Paris» 8). And so we get the rings of Saturn as a wrought-iron balcony for strollers, or a fashionable, cosseted moon. If commodities come alive, then, by the same token, the natural world becomes commodity. Let us observe, as an example, a particular image from his work Un autre monde, published in 1844. Fig. 2: Plantes marines, une reproduction exacte des dentelles, brosses, pompons, toupets et gazons, Un autre monde (Paris, 1844). 286 J.P. Short We are at once combing the seashore and gazing at a shop window. Grandville’s caption: «The marine life collection, showing that underwater plants and animals are based on forms invented by man - fans, wigs, combs, brushes, etc.» A dialectical image capturing the tensional object of natural history. The same might be said of the images of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, although here we move in the reverse direction, not from the strange vitalism of the inorganic, where Grandville begins, but from organic nature to inorganic, crystalline form - and finally to artifice, art and commodity. Haeckel’s immensely popular and influential work Kunstformen der Natur appeared in installments beginning in 1899. The focus here is substantially microscopic, but the microscope is equally kaleidoscope. Fig. 3: Ernst Haeckel, Pediastrum. Melethallia. Gesellige Algetten. Plate 34, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig and Vienna, 1899-1904). Global Consciousness 287 Fig. 4: Ernst Haeckel, Calocyclas. Cyrtoidea. Flaschenstrahlinge. Plate 31, Kunstformen der Natur (Leipzig and Vienna, 1899-1904). Much of Haeckel’s early work was on single-celled radiolarians, whose symmetric patterns appeared to him reminiscent of crystals - thus laying the foundations of what he would call in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866) an «organic crystallography.» The individual organisms in a given plate might come from wholly different parts of the earth - Europe, Australia, Africa - bringing global diversity into tight constellation, or effacing it altogether. Haeckel traveled the globe: in 1882 he was, as Max Müller put it in his Cambridge lecture, «rushing through Indian forests and dredging in Indian seas,» and at the turn of the century, in Java, Ceylon, Singapore (Müller 7). Haeckel’s ordered, symmetrical, crystalline nature surfaced as Art Nouveau or Jugendstil décor and decorative objects for the bourgeois interior. 288 J.P. Short Fig. 5: Ceiling ornament, Villa Medusa (Jena). He seems to anticipate this; a note to one of the plates in Kunstformen der Natur describes how «the fine cell network of the delicate leaves [of the moss produce] beautiful motifs for embroidery patterns, while the capsule with the delicate cover and the opening’s serrated edge provide patterns for urns and bottles» (Haeckel 15). With the entrance gate to the Paris World Exposition of 1900, a sort of gigantic radiolarian designed by René Binet, we seem to come full circle. In 1899 Binet wrote to Haeckel: «About six years ago I began to study the numerous volumes written on the Challenger Expedition in the library of the Paris museum and, thanks to your work, I was able to amass a considerable amount of microscopic documentation: radiolarians, bryozoans, hydroids, etc. […], which I examined with the utmost care from an artistic standpoint: in the interest of architecture and of ornamentation. At present, I am busy realizing the monumental entrance gate for the exhibition in the year 1900 and everything about it, from the general composition to the smallest details, has been inspired by your studies» (Haeckel 15). Inorganic nature - the symmetrical organism magnified, rendered in iron - becomes the portal to the world of objects, the world-in-miniature that was the world exhibition. Global Consciousness 289 Fig. 6: René Binet, entrance gate, Paris World Exhibition (Paris, 1900). But more so than in the world exhibition, the composite nature of the natural history object as global commodity emerges most vividly, it seems, in a now obsolete, forgotten form, the Handelsmuseum. The commercial museum marked the intersection of global, especially tropical, commodities with the idea of the museum as site of scientific accumulation, institutionalization and display, the marriage of commerce and science. Naturalia fit rather well in series of goods like sisal, ivory tusks, jute, copra, ostrich feathers, ebony. Hamburg, entrepôt of world trade, was the center of the natural history business in Germany. Indeed, the business preceded the development of institutional and pedagogical natural history there. In 1843 the Hamburg Senate and the Natural History Association agreed to establish a museum, but it would take nearly five decades before a building was constructed and the museum finally housed in 1891. The commercial traffic, on the other hand, flourished already in the 1850s and 1860s. Numerous merchants sold naturalia from foreign lands in the Spielbudenplatz and surrounding streets: exotic animals - monkeys, parrots - and shells and other specimens. Umlauff’s Welt-Museum und Naturalienhandlung offered «reichhaltige Sammlungen naturhistorischer und ethnographischer Gegenstände aus allen Weltteilen» (Benrath 41). Umlauff himself had originally worked on ships, where he became familiar with the world of exotic artifacts. And Carl Hagenbeck, of course, operated his «Handlungs-Menagerie,» trafficking in live exotic animals. 290 J.P. Short Fig. 7: Catalogue of naturalia, J. F. G. Umlauff. The Natural History Museum rather carefully divided its holdings between a Schausammlung and specimens stored for scientific work (Benrath 71); the Handelsmuseum rather less so. But it would be a mistake to read the Handelsmuseum as a Barnumesque wink at science. The Umlauff establishment was involved in developing museum collections, even displays (Penny 104-05). The Godeffroy Museum also fused commercial interest and scholarly disinterest. It was famous among naturalists for both its own extraordinary holdings and for supplying other natural history collections (Kranz 17). Godeffroy, a merchant and ship owner in Hamburg (and friend of Ernst Haeckel), opened the museum in 1861. He was deeply invested in the Südseegeschäft, with outposts and agents across Polynesia, Australia, and the Bismarck Archipelago. His trade in pearls, mother-of-pearl, coconut oil, tortoise shell and trepang - that is, sea cucumbers, taken in the South Seas, boiled, dried, smoked and shipped to China for soup or aphrodisiac - seems barely distinguishable from the traffic in naturalia (Kranz 14). For years he instructed his captains to bring zoological, botanical and ethnological spec- Global Consciousness 291 imens back to Hamburg, and as his collection grew he hired the zoologist Eduard Graeffe to organize it into a scientific museum, a Handelsmuseum. Its fate - it was offered as security for a loan during difficult times after the crash of 1873 and was finally sold off in bankruptcy proceedings in the 1880s - completes the conflation of market and museum (Kranz 15, 27). Natural history was, though, science first of all. At one level it - and the Handelsmuseum as one of its institutions - signifies exploration, observation, description, collection, modes of empirical and taxonomizing science in the nineteenth century. Voyages of exploration and collection generated its primal scene. Eduard Graeffe furnishes us with one of countless examples of natural history collecting, this one suitably from the Antipodes. He is on an island off of New South Wales, in Australia, searching the reefs and tidal pools and finding mostly sea urchins. With respect to the fauna animating this lagoon, I found myself quite disappointed in my expectations since it contained neither a great diversity of animal forms nor a great number of individual specimens. Although I was on the reef for hours when the tide was at its lowest, turned over hundreds of stones, searched in the deeper waters of the lagoon, still I found only very seldom an interesting sea creature or a good shell. The corals themselves are on the outer side of the reef, to be found probably at a depth of several fathoms, while just a few species live in the lagoon. By contrast, one finds on the reef that rings the coast of Samoa a great abundance of the most varied types of coral. Among echinodermata, I found here on the outer side of the reef, just where the surf breaks, a black, oval-shaped sea urchin of a type never until now observed by me with short but very thick spines. […] I found likewise a new kind of Acrocladia with beautiful violet spines whose shape is most similar to the Acrocladia mamillaria. In the sand of the lagoon in the shallow areas one often sees holes and regularly finds, digging at the depth of a few inches, a beautiful type of Spatangus, the sea urchin with small bristle-shaped spines. […] It is a strange spectacle to observe the wave-like motion of spines across the shell of this animal, very like the legs of a moving millipede, though these bristly spines move not all at once and in the same direction but rather rise and fall at different places in different rhythms and directions. (Graeffe 1, 161-62) This is a scene of dogged searching, discovery, close observation, physical description, and maybe some small admixture of wonder. It takes place at an immense distance from the main office in Hamburg and from Graeffe’s readers, subscribers to a popular-science journal called Das Ausland; the full travelogue foregrounds the isolation of discovery, a tiny island on the immense globe, indeed on its «other side.» The lure of geography is a spatial expansiveness, distance, the journey, the exotic and strange. Commerce makes no appearance here. Scholarly disinterest occludes commercial interest. 292 J.P. Short And yet Graeffe is also the far-flung agent of a robust trade in natural history. Contemporary letters from the Godeffroy Museum to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, for example, detail a lively trade in organisms from Asia and the South Seas, from Bangkok, Samoa, Penang, Canton and elsewhere right through the 1860s. 1 And at the Umlauff firm, a decade and more later, the same business flourished. Skeletons of African flamingoes (Phoenicopterus roseus), for example, ranged in price from fifteen to twenty-five marks, depending on their dimensions. The skeleton of an East Indian marabou (Leptoptilus argala) was forty marks. 2 Among Hydrophidae (sea snakes) the Hydrophis Hardwicki from the Java Sea could be had for twelve to fifteen marks. A sand snake (Psammophis sibilans) from the Psammophidae, or desert snakes, could be had from Cameroon for five to twelve marks. 3 A rich correspondence from the turn of the twentieth century between Umlauff and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin illuminates the relationship of commerce and science: Umlauff supplies naturalia, proposes exchanges of objects, solicits expertise, plans dioramas, and trades information about collectors and expeditions. «By post I sent you today the head of an orangutan, as well as the hands and feet of the same,» reads a letter from Hamburg. «Since the orangutan belongs to a wealthy private collector who wishes not to be named I ask that you publish nothing on it. The thumb has a distinctive nail, the cheeks are large and the color is reddish.» 4 They wheel and deal over a bewildering array of body parts and skins from all corners of the globe. «I want to reduce the price for the baboon to 20 Reichsmarks and hope the pelt is worth the sum to you,» offers Umlauff. «Have you any interest in Siberian mammal pelts? Have a big shipment […].» 5 Or, in the compressed form of a telegram from Umlauff to the museum in Berlin: «american wants gorilla and skeleton in hand within six weeks asked 3,500-dollars agreed.» 6 It seems unaccountable, now, that natural history was once thought to be especially accessible to the uneducated, that its objects were transparent, in a way (Penny 145-46). To the contrary, it appears to connote paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity. When Christian Buddenbrook returns from eight years in Chile «dressed in a yellow plaid suit that certainly hinted at the tropics and [carrying] a swordfish sword and a long stalk of sugarcane,» these improbable emblems of an overseas, exotic world of commerce portend instability, change - not at all unlike the exotic objects in Effi Briest, the taxidermied shark and crocodile suspended from the ceiling, which have a kind of talismanic power and foreshadow disaster (Mann 214, Fontane 52-53). If there was a dreamworld of capitalism in the nineteenth century then surely natural history produces a kind of collective or composite ob- Global Consciousness 293 ject, multiply determined, representing what Freud called the «work of condensation» in the dream (Freud 224-27). Freud’s own dream links natural history and death: «I have written a monograph; it is lying in front of me; it has colored plates; there are dried plants attached to each specimen. It is like the stillness of a field strewn with corpses, with no trace remaining of the battle that once raged» (Freud 305). Natural history couples the organic - organisms, wildlife, biology - with death in striking form (which will eventually resurface, in a kind of second death, as obsolescence and the uncanny). It signifies a concretized exotic - and obscures it by displacement into collection, taxonomy, a metonymic standing-for-the-world. This gives a rather different sense to the «annihilation of time and space,» the bringing of the world «closer.» Certainly there is no deconstruction, no transcendence of our original dyadic relation, but rather, perhaps its apotheosis in a way - if through tension and paradox. That is precisely the utility of introducing the natural history object as a third form into the dual relationship of economic subject and object; it throws light on the dialectical nature of consciousness, just as it poses the global as both object of consciousness and constitutive of it. The natural history object reflects back onto the commodity form, illuminates the exchange relation, the configurations of organic and inorganic, nature and artifice, world and collection. Notes 1 J.D.E. Schmeltz, Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg to Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. 1863-69. Museum für Naturkunde der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Historische Bild- und Schriftgutsammlungen [MfN d. HUB, HBSB]. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S I Godeffroy Museum. 2 Preis-Courant über Skelette von Vögeln, J.F.G. Umlauff. MfN d. HUB, HBSB. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S III Umlauff J.F.G. Unnumbered. 3 Preis-Courant über Reptilien, J.F.G. Umlauff. MfN d. HUB, HBSB. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S III Umlauff J.F.G. Unnumbered. 4 J.F.G. Umlauff to Paul Matschie, MfN. 13 August 1906. MfN d. HUB, HBSB. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S III Umlauff J. F.G. Blatt 49. 5 J.F.G. Umlauff to MfN. 14 October 1899. MfN d. HUB, HBSB. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S III Umlauff J.F.G. Blatt 22. 6 J.F.G. Umlauff to MfN. 3 July 1903. MfN d. HUB, HBSB. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S III Umlauff J.F.G. Blatt 24. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. «Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century» (Exposé of 1939). The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. 14-26. 294 J.P. Short -. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Benrath, H., ed., Hamburg und Umgebungen. Berlin: Albert Goldschmidt, 1895. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Fontane, Theodor. Effi Briest. New York: Penguin, 1967. Fourier, Charles. The Theory of the Four Movements. Ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Graeffe, Eduard. «Reisen nach verschiedenen Inseln der Südsee.» Das Ausland. Ueberschau der neuesten Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Natur-, Erd- und Völkerkunde 40.48 (26 November 1867): 1, 159-64. Haeckel, Ernst. Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel. Munich: Prestel, 1998. Kranz, Helene. Das Museum Godeffroy, 1861-1881: Naturkunde und Ethnographie der Südsee. Hamburg: Altonaer Museum, 2005. Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. New York: Vintage, 1992. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967. -. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers, 1964. Müller, F. Max. India, What Can It Teach Us? New Delhi: Penguin, 2000. Museum für Naturkunde der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Historische Bild- und Schriftgutsammlungen. Bestand: Zool. Mus. Signatur: S I Godeffroy Museum. Penny, H. Glenn. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Scholem, Gershom, and Theodor W. Adorno, eds. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. In Search of the Arthurian Third MAT THIA S MEY ER Univ ersity of Vien na In this essay, I will start with some preliminary remarks, followed by an interpretation of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Diu Crône; by way of transition between these two main parts I will add some general remarks on grail romances. But let me begin with some truths (or truisms) more or less universally acknowledged: for medieval Arthurian verse romances, especially German ones, scholars have agreed that their basic construction, their world-view, is grounded in a dichotomy between the Arthurian (courtly) world and the non-Arthurian world. Basically, the trajectory of an Arthurian romance normally follows the protagonist, an Arthurian knight, through different stations in the non-Arthurian world; his task is either to vanquish what he finds or integrate it into the Arthurian world. Which route is taken depends on a further, dichotomist construction of the non-Arthurian world, which is either courtly, or connected to some kind of otherworld. 1 In Hartmann’s Erec, for example, the eponymous hero befriends the dwarf Guivreiz; in Diu Crône by Heinrich von dem Türlin, Gawein ultimately turns Gasozein into a knight of the Arthurian court; Hartmann’s Iwein and Stricker’s Daniel become rulers of countries with otherworldly characteristics and dispose of their predecessors; dwarves and giants are regularly chastened and/ or killed. There hardly seems to be room for a different possibility, and if one is presented, as with the father of the giants in Stricker’s Daniel, it is marginalized. The father of the giants becomes the ruler of a country that cannot be entered from the outside and hence plays no further role. There is, at first glance, no room for a Third figure (or a figure of the Third) in this construction, especially since the one character that is able to move between the two worlds, the protagonist, is deeply rooted in Arthurian society. A locus classicus of a figure of the Third is, of course, the love triangle. But again, in the German Arthurian verse romances (and most of the verse romances in other vernaculars) this figure of a Third is mostly absent, since their narrative trajectory leads their protagonists from love to a marriage that stands at the end of the text and is in itself not narrated. The two archetypal romances of adultery, the Tristan story and the Lancelot-Ginevra romances, are either not really Arthurian and follow, even if Arthur makes an 296 Matthias Meyer appearance, a different narrative scheme, or they are related to the Arthurian prose tradition which, again, follows a completely different set of rules. The one exception is the Charrette by Chretien de Troyes, which, left unfinished by its original author, was furnished with a rather pedestrian ending by a continuator who negated all of the possibilities opened up by the love triangle. Tellingly, this text was not translated into German. Applying to Arthurian romances the instruments of interpretation offered by theories of the Third is nonetheless intriguing. I am particularly interested in cases where a Third is part of the Arthurian society or evolves from it and thus calls into question the basic tenets of this society, or at least opens possibilities for thinking about its exclusions. I will now look at some aspects of triangulation that are relevant for my questions and then follow my general remarks with a discussion of two examples. My main focus is on the German tradition, but I will also keep other vernaculars in mind. Central to my analysis is one of the stock figures of Arthurian romances, Gawein (Meyer, «Walewein/ Gawan as Hero» 70-74; Schmitz 138-43, 323-25; Zudrell), who is usually considered an archetypal embodiment of everything Arthurian (and also, in the grail romances, of Arthurian limitations). However, in my readings I will argue that Gawein, while fulfilling all these roles, is also, at least in pivotal moments, a figure that transgresses these limitations. The limitations arise either from the social code of the Arthurian courtly society which prohibits certain actions or through the strictures of the genre, e.g., the negation of death for the core figures of each romance. It has been noted - and I agree - that a figure of the Third does not have to be a literary character (Koschorke 18). 2 Although in literary texts it is very tempting to restrict the Third to such a personalized figure, I will also bear in mind the concept of a Third space (cf. Roth), a spatial metaphor for hybridity, but which must have a meaning different from its established use in postcolonial theory when applied to medieval literature, though it retains its characteristic of openness. In general, the figure of the Third is, for the purpose of this paper, something that is not solely related to the Arthurian or anti-Arthurian world, but also something that transgresses either side of this utterly stable boundary - stable, because the genre is fixed on this boundary. The mere act of transgressing this boundary is not enough to characterize something as a figure of the Third, since these transgressions actually often only enforce the boundary. One of the requirements for a figure of the Third should be that s/ he (if it is a literary character) actually transfers (or thematizes) elements of another world within the boundaries of the world s/ he comes from. In Search of the Arthurian Third 297 Finally, there is one precaution to add. By starting from the consensus of a dichotomous conception of the Arthurian world, I am nevertheless imposing a modern interpretation on the medieval text - an interpretation governed by a structuralist, dualistic perspective. Theories of the Third are poststructuralist and/ or postmodern because they try to break down structuralist binaries. However, I am not so sure that these binaries adequately reflect medieval positions, as the communis opinio will have it. The medieval world was, to be sure, governed by Christian binaries like Heaven and Hell, civitas dei and civitas diaboli. On the other hand, such binary thinking could be seen as Manichean and thus as heretical. Furthermore, the Trinity and other triads always lurk beyond medieval binaries. 3 Therefore, a search for figures of the Third in medieval texts will certainly lead to results, even if these are not identical to modern realizations. One easily recognizable Figure of the Third within the Arthurian world is the seneschal Keie. He is the opposite of what Arthurian knights should be, yet nevertheless an integral part of the Arthurian court (Haupt; Baisch 159-65, 172-73). Keie can best be (and has been) described as a rudimentary trickster figure. Tricksters are part of nearly all mythologies; they are either messengers of gods or semi-divine figures that are able to transgress boundaries between gods and the world, between gods and the underworld, etc. They are also prone to committing mischievous acts both as petty revenge and on a large scale. As a trickster, Keie is the embodiment of the Other (albeit on a small scale) within Arthur’s court. He is therefore especially suited to identify and negotiate with the Other. This is the reason behind a strange narrative convention: it is always Keie who first tries an adventure that comes to Arthur’s court, although he usually is not able to succeed and the hero has to step in. (This is logical, since Keie as a trickster is part of the Other as well and therefore cannot vanquish it, whereas the protagonist, who is no trickster, can). 4 Keie seems to adhere to an archetype of a figure of the Third. Another archetype of modern literature is the rival lover in a love triangle. But I have already ruled out the romances of adultery as a topic for my essay, as Arthurian verse romances (at least the German ones) tend to end in marriage. It is one of the staple claims in the scholarship that on his way through the adventures, the Arthurian protagonist negotiates between the claims of an absolute, personal love and the claims of society. In an earlier article I argued that Arthurian romances lack the vocabulary to represent love and hence ultimately ignore it in favor of marriage (Meyer, «Versuch über die Schwierigkeiten des Artusromans, über Liebe zu erzählen» 168-69). 5 While I still subscribe to the view that Arthurian romances have a certain difficulty with 298 Matthias Meyer love, I would now concede that they do start with something resembling romantic love before ending up in - unnarrated, or only briefly summarized - marriage (even if love is jettisoned on the way). Arthurian verse romances leave no room for the classic love triangle, but they still use triangular constellations in their discussion of personal relations, as I will discuss using Iwein as an example. At the same time, I wish to make explicit that I read Arthurian romances as romances of adolescence (cf. Erdheim 191-94; Wyss). These narratives use the Arthurian court as an institution of society (thus, related to marriage) where the knight passes from his youth, during which he is defined by membership in a family structure, through a final liminal stage into adulthood and marriage. This transition is made abundantly clear in the texts: In Hartmann’s Erec, the hero is described as an inexperienced knight still very close to his father’s court at the beginning of the story; he is only able to act as his father’s successor for a very brief period before he has to leave the court again; he returns to the Arthurian world only after he has learned to forego love for society and marriage. In Hartmann’s Iwein, the main protagonist is portrayed as his father’s son and has to gain his own identity as «Knight of the Lion» before being able to function as territorial lord and husband. In these processes, as I will discuss, triangular relations play a pivotal role. My last preliminary remark concerns the question: Why Gawein? Gawein’s classic role is that of the best knight at Arthur’s court and the standard against which every other knight is measured, including the protagonist, whom he usually befriends. When fighting, Gawein always wins, with the exception of fights against the protagonist, where there is usually a draw or the fight is ended before a conclusion is reached. Gawein is the extension of Arthur and a symbol of everything the Arthurian world stands for. It is this symbolic function that makes rifts in the surface of this literary character the more interesting to watch out for. The first of such rifts occurs in Hartmann’s Erec and also (if a little less pronounced) in its French source. In both romances, it is Gawein who tricks the hero back to Arthur’s court against Erec’s professed intention to avoid courtly society until further notice. But since this deception is practiced with Arthurian good intentions, it is just the method, not the aim that is unusual for Gawein. This begins to change in Hartmann’s Iwein. This romance tells the story of its eponymous hero who in a fight at a magical fountain kills the ruler of a land and, after being imprisoned in this land, is finally able to marry the beautiful widow Laudine with the help of her confidante Lunete. King Arthur’s court arrives, and Gawein gives Iwein the fateful advice to come with him on a tour of tournaments. Laudine grudgingly allows Iwein to be away for a year, but Iwein In Search of the Arthurian Third 299 overstays his leave of absence and his marriage is terminated in front of King Arthur’s court. This leads to a period of madness and, following that, a chain of adventures as «Knight of the Lion,» which leads to a re-entry into Arthurian society and, finally, to a resumption of his marriage to Laudine before the romance’s very open, highly qualified happy ending. 6 There is a famous passage - after the first meetings between Laudine and Iwein, after the actual marriage, after Iwein’s victory over Keie, and after the Arthurian court has entered Laudine’s realm as her guests - in which Laudine addresses Iwein for the first time with a term of endearment, calling him geselle (2665), and the narrator tells us here that alrêst liebet ir der man (2674, «only now she was happy about her husband»). Even this late in the supposed love story, the semantics of the MHG term lieben are very broad and do not necessarily refer to a kind of personal love. The narrator is still arguing about the public and political value of Iwein when Laudine’s conclusion (as a quote of her thoughts) is again related to reason: «ich hân wol gewelt» (2682, «I made a good choice»). Shortly after this scene, Gawein gives Iwein what will prove to be catastrophic (and blatantly bad) advice to go on a knightly tour. The breaking of his condition of leave temporarily ends the marriage to Laudine. There are two characters that immediately come to mind while thinking about triangles in Hartmann’s Iwein: Lunete, lady in waiting to Laudine, the hero’s love interest, and Gawein, introduced as Iwein’s friend. They both seem to embody typical figures of the Third: the scheming confidante and the best friend who might also be a rival. This has been argued especially in the case of Lunete: Lunete has a much wider range of possibilities of action than either Iwein or Laudine (Zutt). She is the one who brings about the seemingly impossible marriage between the mourning widow and the knight who murdered her husband. Behind this brutal but inescapable logic lies the incontestable superiority of the victor over the vanquished (Mertens 34-40). This logic is twofold: Laudine is the ruler of an imperiled land, but one she cannot herself defend; this can only be done by a male champion. But this motif - politically exploited in the text - has an older layer to it: Laudine’s situation, a female ruler who has lost her husband, is related to an older story type: at an earlier stage she was a fairy, and her champion, who also was her lover, is always replaced by the next champion/ lover. This motif is extant in its original form in other medieval texts (where it is usually used to test the faithfulness of the protagonist who has to find a way out of an unsought-for love prison). 7 In the German Iwein - again, more pronounced than in the French source - Laudine is not at all depicted as a Lady in (or of) 300 Matthias Meyer love (Ruh 418-20). Or, to be more precise, the love Laudine shows is clearly not a modern kind of absolute personal love (which is usually connected to the fairy motif), but a rational, matter-of-fact kind of love, connected to the grudgingly conceded fact of Iwein’s victory over her husband, as well as to Iwein’s lineage (he is known to Laudine as King Urien’s son) and his connection to the Arthurian court. Of course, Iwein is blissfully unaware of the political dimension of his marriage. As the central female character, Laudine is accompanied throughout by her lady in waiting, Lunete. She is clearly an extension of Laudine; even her name, related to the moon, makes her a satellite. Lunete does what Laudine, due to the limitations of the genre, cannot do (but could do as a fairy, like changing lovers at will). 8 And she must also bear the blame. If the figure of Laudine were to preserve more reminiscences of her fairy prototype, she could lose some magic power through Iwein’s breaking of the taboo (as Meliur does in the Partonopeus romances). But since she is a courtly lady in Chretien’s and Hartmann’s versions, her lady in waiting, as her extension, has to bear the blame and punishment. At the end - at least in some manuscripts - Lunete is married off to complete the lieto fine. However, although she is a messenger, Lunete is no real figure of the Third, but more an extension, a mobile arm, of the main female character. On the male side of the quadrangle of main and supporting roles, Gawein is assigned to the hero as his friend. However, as a permanent member of Arthur’s court, he is also Arthur’s extension. He seems to fulfil this role especially in his unfortunate advice to Iwein, since he lures Iwein away from Laudine and back to the world of Arthur’s court - away from the adult responsibilities of life as lord of a territory, and back into the transitory world of knight errantry. If Gawein is a figure of the Third during this episode at all, he is a figure of an external Third, namely the author, because he generates narration. If you start from the logic of medieval rulership, neither of the internal major courts can have an actual interest in Iwein leaving Laudine, since Laudine needs him as her champion, and since Iwein’s lordship extends by proxy the reach of Arthur’s rule. Therefore, Iwein’s highly unusual request for leave of absence is not really motivated - Gawein acts for the good of the story, not for the good of any party within the narrative. But a closer look at the exact wording of the MHG text reveals another figure of the Third, again connected to Gawein, lurking in these scenes. As I have pointed out, the first term of endearment between Laudine and Iwein appears rather late in the story. Before this moment, their relationship is described along the lines of (existing) hierarchies and in politi- In Search of the Arthurian Third 301 cal terms. The only instance in which Hartmann makes clear that we are to think about their relationship in terms of love is when they separate and Hartmann - rather laboriously, even clumsily - uses the metaphor of the exchange of hearts, which he introduces into the text independently of his source. Chretien mentions only that Yvain leaves his heart behind; he says nothing about an exchange. But what I find interesting is that the only intimate term in this passage, geselle, is used quite frequently in other textual surroundings, including in the emotionally intensive compound trûtgeselle. This word is used to describe the relationship of Laudine and Lunete, Iwein and Lunete, Iwein and Gawein, and in the last case not only as direct speech, but also through the narrator’s voice. The etymology of the term geselle refers to someone living and sleeping in the same sal, the same quarters (Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 5, col. 4025- 40). In a homosocial medieval society, the sleeping area is, of course, a samesex environment. Thus, on one level, the text’s use of the term geselle is correct - and only unexpected in the pairing of Iwein and Lunete, where it can best be explained by the extra-textual prehistory between the two hinted at in their first dialogue. But on another level it is significant that the usage of the term geselle between Iwein and Laudine is preceded by a scene where it is used regarding Iwein and Gawein. The male-male intimacy precedes the heterosexual one. And it is not random, I would argue, that after Laudine’s use of the term geselle, Gawein’s advice leads Iwein away from her. Gawein then goes on a tournament spree with Iwein, and he treats him especially well, as Hartmann notes. Depending on how you translate the passage, you could also interpret this treatment as a kind of wooing. (Chretien is far more direct, telling us only that Yvain will break his promise to return within a year since Gauvain will not let him go). Gawein is depicted as someone ensnaring Iwein with guoter handelunge (3053, «good deeds»). I don’t want to suggest an explicitly sexual context to these scenes of male bonding, but I want to emphasize that Gawein is an agent of a Third, if you set the heterosexual dyad in the center. Thus Iwein is not only a romance about love and society or love and politics, but also about the uneasy relations between, on the one hand, heterosexual exclusive marriage and, on the other, the basic homosocial structure of medieval society and forms of heterosexuality that lie beneath the official surface. Further examples could be discussed here. The pre-existing relationship between Iwein and Lunete, for one, both enables and destabilizes the relation between Iwein and Laudine. A relation between Gawein and Lunete is also hinted at as a possibility, but since Gawein has to remain unmarried, Lunete is, at least in some manuscripts, married off to an anonymous count. 302 Matthias Meyer Within the genre of Arthurian romance, the grail romances occupy a special branch (if one does not want to argue that they represent a different genre altogether). This is made clear by the fact that in the historical development of the grail romances, Arthur is reduced to second place. Although the king always plays a minor role in a genre whose narrative centers around the individual protagonists, his value is never really questioned. 9 Nonetheless, the development of the grail romances does lead away from the Arthurian court. This is made clear by the final removal of the grail hero from the Arthurian world. Perceval/ Parzival, the first grail heroes, have strong connections to the Arthurian genealogy, but unlike the typical Arthurian hero, they do not come from courtly society; they arrive as outsiders, reduced by the calamities of their parental generation to an upbringing in the woods, in non-courtly surroundings. In fact, they arrive not merely as outsiders, but as uneducated fools. The reduced circumstances of Perceval in Chretien’s romance are explained as a result of societal upheaval. Wolfram reframes this: it is the death of Parzival’s father (and, thus, the Arthurian part of his genealogy) that drives his mother into the woods, away from a society that caused her inconsolable grief. Although Parzival finds himself in an outsider position, this does not give him - in my opinion - the status of a figure of a Third, since he bears a genealogical duality that he cannot transcend (and which is again split into two lines at the end of Wolfram’s romance through his twin sons). This inherent duality is made explicit in the construction of the romance, in the fact that it is the first MHG tale with two parallel (not successive) protagonists, Gawan and Parzival. The more Parzival becomes a figure of the grail, the more Gawan becomes a figure of the Arthurian court. In the beginning he is fighting his own battles, but by the end, both characters perform deeds of redemption. I won’t go into detail, but I cannot really see that the Arthurian court is superseded by the grail kingdom at the end of Wolfram’s Parzival. Both realms co-exist in a newly achieved glory. In fact, it is Gawan’s redemption of Chastel merveille that generates the narrative momentum that brings about the happy end for Parzival. In the later grail prose texts, the removal of the grail hero from the Arthurian society is far more radical. Gawan, who in Wolfram and Chretien plays an integral part in the grail adventure (even if a widely differing one in the two versions), is reduced to insignificance, and, in the final Mort Artu, becomes the prime cause of the downfall of Arthur’s realm. All this happens by accident and because the «historical» Arthur of the prose texts has to die (in contrast to the seemingly eternal fictional Arthur of the verse romances). While one could argue that Gawan in the prose tradition acts as a character that moves the story along to its predestined end (and, thus, becomes a fig- In Search of the Arthurian Third 303 ure of the author), he does not transcend the basic binary construction of the grail romances. In fact, I would argue that the binary «Arthur’s realm - grail realm» seems to reduce the textual possibilities of a figure of the Third. While there are messengers between the worlds, like the interesting character Cundrîe, the potential of these figures is hardly ever exploited. The appearance of the grail thus greatly reduces the potential for disturbance. There is, however, one exception to this observation, Heinrich von dem Türlin’s romance Diu Crône. Diu Crône is either one of the most fascinating German Arthurian romances or a really bad one, depending on your view. One of the text’s recent editors, Fritz Peter Knapp, does not think very highly of the author, of whom we know next to nothing; others are of a different opinion. 10 Diu Crône is the only large-scale Gawein romance in German literature and for this reason I want to take a closer look at it. Furthermore, it is the one (and only) grail romance that represents the grail completely differently than the mainstream version. In this text, I will argue, something like a space beyond the Arthurgrail dichotomy appears for the first time. What is remarkable is that this space is also not the usual anti-Arthurian space, since it cannot be integrated or vanquished. Rather, it is a semantically open space that opens up in the course of the romance; it gives room for a figure of the Third, as will be described in the following reading of Diu Crône. One could call it a third space if one keeps in mind that it is not the Third Space of post-colonial theory. Diu Crône is separated into two parts. In the first part, Gawein and Arthur undergo separate adventures: Gawein follows a chain of adventures that leads him into a campaign against a giant, while Arthur has to deal with a knight who apparently has older claims on Ginover. Gawein is married during his adventures to a landed lady, and he has to lose this position as lord of an independent realm to function again as an Arthurian knight in the second part of the romance. This second part is purely a Gawein-romance; it incorporates all the Gawan-adventures in Wolfram’s Parzival - albeit with different names and in a slightly changed setting - as well as other adventures, some of them strange journeys through even stranger lands for which Alfred Ebenbauer coined the term «Wunderketten,» «chains of adventures.» These «Wunderketten» resemble surrealist movies more than medieval romances and show elements of journeys to purgatory without being such journeys (Ebenbauer, «Fortuna und Artushof»; Keller, Diu Crône 33-158; Keller, «Wunderketten» 235-44). During the second part, it becomes clear that Gawein has to master the test of the grail adventure. While in other romances it is made clear what the 304 Matthias Meyer grail is (at least in most of them; Chretien keeps it astonishingly unclear), in Diu Crône the narrator only states that the grail is gottes taugen (29418, «God’s secret»). 11 But since in an earlier passage the narrator already likened himself to God (28147, So dùht ich mich ein weltgot), the precise meaning of the phrase gotes tougen remains ambivalent (Meyer, «Sô dunke ich mich ein werltgot» 195-97). Since Diu Crône is a uniquely secular grail romance, the reference to God’s secret can be seen as merely an empty reference, thus taking Chretien’s open concept of the grail to the extreme. In fact, in no other text does the grail come so close to being a MacGuffin in the Hitchcockian sense. If the grail loses its connection to God, there is no reason to see it as superior to the Arthurian court. In fact, it is Gawein who is the redeemer of the grail world - a world of the undead. It is interesting that while the secularization of the grail reduces what is seen in the other grail romances as a fundamental dichotomy, the grail world is still set apart from the Arthurian world. It is, as Ulrich Wyss has pointed out, somewhat like an Arthurian world that has fallen under the shadow of death (287). 12 But there is also a third world, one that is connected with Gawein and his later wife, her sister, and the strange character of the magician Gansguoter. 13 This world maintains connections to the grail world through Gansguoter, but also, through Gawein, to the Arthurian world. And yet it is a world separate from both. The first time this world is introduced in the romance is when Gawein enters the realm of Amurfina (some kind of fairy character connected to courtly love). 14 This realm is protected by a virtual stream of boulders that cannot be crossed without magic (7964-8023). Magic also plays an important role in holding Gawein in marriage, by means of a magic bed and a love potion. 15 But all this magic leads to nothing in the end, since Gawein, who had lost all memories of his former life after drinking the potion, regains them (including even «memories» of events that will take place later in the romance) after seeing his adventures engraved on a ceremonial serving dish, whereupon he returns to his former campaign against the giant. But the marriage (and his function as lord of a land) still exists. This state of affairs leads to the appearance of his wife’s sister, who traps Gawein into being her champion in a dispute over inherited land. Gawein wins the signs of rulership over these lands (and proves to be an ideal ruler), but he wins them for his sister-in-law. Thereupon he freely chooses to leave his own country and joins the Arthurian court. The means of this transfer of possession is the bridle of a mule, and the sequence of adventures leading up to this episode is an often very close translation of an extant French Arthurian lay (Boll 117-21). Poetologically speaking, Heinrich von dem Türlin shows that In Search of the Arthurian Third 305 his construction of the Arthurian realm (and his construction of an Arthurian romance) can incorporate all existing Arthurian material, thus becoming «the crown» of the medieval title (Meyer, Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion 112-20). But what are the semantics of this world? Upon first encounter, it seems to be connected to love. The sisters’ names (Amurfina and Sgoidamur), the love potion, the magic bed that only lets Gawein close to Amurfina after he has truthfully sworn eternal love - all these elements seem to lead to this conclusion. But in this world, love is also connected to death. When Gawein first sees Amurfina, he immediately falls in love with her, and here there is much rhetoric regarding the work of Vrou Minne, «Lady Love,» how she wounds both of them and how both will die if they are not healed. They will heal each other, of course, but before this happens, there are two obstacles to be overcome. The first is the aforementioned bed, made, as the narrator states, by a cleric and necromancer for the mother of King Arthur (8303-13; this is the first appearance of Gansguoter, though incognito). There is a sword installed over the bed that pins a man down and takes his breath away, thus preventing all sexual acts between a couple until the man has truly sworn eternal faithfulness to the lady. Gawein very nearly dies on this bed, both of love and suffocation (8573-92). Secondly, he is served the potion, which forces him to love Amurfina, die, or lose his senses (8648-57). Since he is already in love, and since genre convention dictates that he cannot die, the latter happens, and from here forward he believes that he has already been married to Amurfina for thirty years. To go into the strange logic of this love potion would lead too far afield. I only want to emphasize the threat of death, avoided by insanity, which is depicted as the death of the self. Gawein is introduced properly to Gansguoter during the bridle quest to which I already alluded. Again, Gansguoter is introduced as a cleric (pfaff, 13025) who has acquired arts (listen, 13027) allowing him to change shape into something monstrous, and he has killed many men. However - and in a way that both enlarges and reduces the threat he represents to Gawain - he is also introduced by the narrator as the pfaff who secretly lead Arthur’s mother from her country and who is the uncle of Amurfina and Sgoidamur (13030-39). 16 Gansguoter is a mediator of death, and he could also be connected in some ways to the grail world, since it is his sister who gives Gawein the final information that enables him to end the grail episode successfully; furthermore, she is the grail-bearer. So, as the grail is also connected to death in Diu Crône, it becomes feasible to link Gansguoter directly to the grail. But I would draw a line here. In scenes connected to the grail, as in the first and last «Wunderketten,» death is always linked to some brutal kind of suffering or torture. 306 Matthias Meyer It is also connected to an unidentified dolorous stroke (29494-539), which could relate to some element of the Parzival story, but here the text is deliberately opaque and possibly also distorted in manuscript transmission. In the world of Gansguoter and his artefacts, the connection to death is different, revealing elements of playfulness and even humor: a lustful and breathless lover impaled by a sword in a magical bed seems to be a very Freudian answer to ubiquitous male sexual aggression. A love potion that either kills you or else makes you believe you have been married for thirty years is a love potion with a definite twist. The beheading game takes place in a magic castle made of glass, with a revolving wall that encircles it like a merry-goround. Gawein enters it by valiantly jumping with his mule as the entrance rushes past, and everything is well, except that the mule loses parts of its tail from a nail on the spinning door. All this can be read as a playful take on the duel between the lion and the dragon in Chretien’s Yvain and on the protagonist’s predicament at the entrance to Askalon’s castle, supplemented with a rather whimsical allusion to castration. In short, Gansguoter’s realm is a world where death is omnipresent but not taken too seriously. This pfaff has not only learned to live with death, but to laugh about it. Gawein is the Arthurian knight who gains the most experience with death (and being dead by proxy) during the course of this romance. In the end, he more than once acknowledges the possibility of his own death, something the Arthurian court never learns to cope with. Gawein is introduced to and prepared for this world of death by a character who is neither here nor there, neither a member of the grail nor of the Arthurian world, but who has relations to both worlds (Gansguoter’s sister is even called a göttin (28439). He thus is the classic figure of an intermediary. Related to Gawein by marriage, he also turns Gawein into a figure that can traverse the boundary between death and life. Lastly, I want to point out that the character of Gansguoter is also very close to the poetological core of the romance. Roughly twenty years ago, I argued that, although Heinrich basically follows a poetic of dichotomy, 17 Gansguoter enters as a third element, for he is not only a character within the story but also a figure with poetological dimensions. While good and bad fortune act in the text by either guaranteeing a perfect outcome or by sending messengers with the intent to kill the hero, Gansguoter does something different: he wants to help Gawein, but he introduces him to the beheading game, which is a very oblique kind of help, though it is also playful and fanciful. As the introductory scene makes clear, Gansguoter is so chimerical in his different shapes that he hardly can be narrated (13011-16), but of course the narrator does so anyway. In short, Gansguoter is a poetological chiffre In Search of the Arthurian Third 307 for the adventures of invention, of magic (in a poetic sense), of listen, of the arts learned out of books, which is, in the case of Heinrich, fiction and literature. It is this fascination with literature, with fiction, and the ability to laugh at the central problems of human existence, that makes the text, if at times crude, some of the most enjoyable reading in all of German Arthurian literature. This is made possible through a narrative figure of the Third comprising a character, Gansguoter, a space (the locations associated with him), and a main character, Gawein, all acting together to enable a different kind of narration governed neither by death (such as the realm of the grail in Diu Crône), nor by a victorious hero (as is the Arthurian convention). This Third has two effects: narration becomes more varied and more interesting, and the thematic focus on death becomes more bearable, lighter, and even comic. There is another Gawain who has to endure a beheading game in another medieval romance. For this Gawain, the story has a very different conclusion because his existence ends within the Arthurian framework. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero fails the beheading test, at least in his opinion. When, in the brief last sequence of the text, the Arthurian court tries to comfort him and even takes up the sign of his shame, Gawain seems to remain inconsolable and to have lost faith in himself. This text leaves the end comparatively open. We do not know what will happen to Gawain. We only know two points of view: Gawain with his personal shame and the Arthurian society that wishes to re-integrate him. In his journey to the Green Chapel, Gawain turns away from Arthurian society and cannot re-enter it because he has discovered that its virtues cannot be adhered to in a situation of crisis. The Gawein of the German romances always returns to society and is sometimes able to change it, for the Arthurian court at the end of Diu Crône is completely different from the one at the beginning. It has been argued that figures of the Third are a figment of modernity, since the constraints of medieval society do not allow such a traversing, boundary-shattering concept (Koschorke 9). Although scholars like Walter Haug interpret Arthurian romances as pivotal, considering them to be the first deliberately fictional texts in medieval Europe, they are, by and large, nonetheless a conservative body of literature. They usually center on a brief period of the protagonist’s life, beginning with his coming of age and ending with marriage; they end with the more-or-less successful integration of the knight errant into feudal society. As such, they do not seem to allow for a Third. But the Third nevertheless exists, if one cares to look for it. In general, I see the search for triangular constellations and triangular readings as a form of interpretation that might lead us to a textual poten- 308 Matthias Meyer tial that lies beyond the manifest surface structure, be it binary or otherwise formed by rigid boundaries - boundaries that govern Arthurian literature as well as other kinds of medieval fiction. Thus, triangular readings could also lead to the texts’ subversive potential, if it exists at all. This is why in this essay I looked at Gawein, the classic embodiment of Arthurian courtly values, in a triangular mode. Even Gawein can become a figure of a Third, a mediator of disturbance, although he seems so deeply rooted in the system. It is through Gawein (and to a lesser degree through Lunete) that in Hartmann’s Iwein the specter of non-normative sexuality and the tension between heterosexual marriage and homosocial society becomes visible. It is through Gawan that the final sequence of redemption is triggered in Wolfram’s Parzival, calling into question the religious utopia of the ending. It is through Gawein in Diu Crône that death loses its sting and can become a laughing matter, and it is through Gansguoter that an apology for fantasy can be created. When Gawain leaves the Arthurian realm, a threat that looms at the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we truly come to the end of Arthurian fiction and its narrative possibilities. Notes 1 This perspective informs the classic study by Walter Haug (91-133, 155-78, 259-87). 2 «Wenn von der Figur des Dritten gesprochen wird, dann ist - dies sollte deutlich geworden sein - ‹Figur› nicht vorrangig in einem personalen Sinn zu verstehen. Zwar mögen sich Figuren des Dritten in literarischen Helden inkorporieren, aber noch grundsätzlicher geht es dabei um ein liminales ‹Spiel auf der Schwelle›, eine Dynamik der Indirektheit innerhalb kognitiver, affektiver und sozialer Strukturen.» 3 Koschorke notes the role of the number three, although some examples could be questioned: Is the trinity a symbol for Three or, rather, for One? (13). 4 For Keie as trickster see Ebenbauer, «Der Truchseß Keie» 122-25, 128-31; for the trickster figure in general see Schüttpelz. In Diu Crône, Keie is brought to the fore as he, together with a prophetic damsel, is the only one who is able to warn the Arthurian court against the machinations of its adversary Giramphiel in the glove test episode. 5 Marriage is achieved even if the characters have to be forced into it, like Laudine in Hartmann’s Iwein. 6 The endings of the text are discussed by Hausmann. 7 For example the Pluris-Episode in Ulrich’s von Zatzikhoven Lanzelet, as well as Demantin of Berthold von Holle. 8 This Lunete must bring about as a matchmaking servant. 9 I subscribe to this view despite contrary lines of reasoning in research focusing on criticism on Arthur (e.g. Horst P. Pütz); basically, criticism does not mean a reduction in fundamental value, as Norris Lacy has rightly pointed out. 10 During the last decades, Diu Crône has become a staple of research. Instead of listing the major contributions I point to the excellent commentary by Felder. In Search of the Arthurian Third 309 11 This often quoted phrase actually refers to the wonder of the bleeding lance, but it is repeated several times that the grail is God’s secret and that only what one sees is revealed, nothing of the bezeichenunge, the signification that might (or might not) be attached to it (29600; the passage 29578-604 contains the gottes taugen / götlich taugen two more times). 12 In fact he goes further, because he has argued that since the grail king and Arthur are both Gawein’s uncles, it is possible to read the grail king in the Crône as «Arthur under the shadow of death.» 13 For an overview of interpretations regarding Gansguoter see Felder (335-37); it is telling that most interpretations compare Gansguoter to well-known trickster figures. Yet tricksters are usually connected to the hierarchy they also subvert - as, for instance, the God Loki whom Ebenbauer compares to Keie. Gansguoter’s affiliations to the Arthurian world are much more distanced and, furthermore, they are played down in the text. 14 Amurfina is, of course, fin’amors, the medieval French term for courtly love; the name of her sister is also related to love: Sgoidamor is the joie d’amor, the joy of love. 15 The bed is first introduced in 8302-04; its mechanism is described in 8505-616. The potion is described in detail in 8638-69. 16 This introduction leads to the well-known beheading game, which Gawein wins, though without the consequences that attend his victory in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Meyer, «Feuer- und Wasserwelten» 112-13). But before the happy ending of this episode is reached, Gawein is again threatened by death. In a reading using the figure of the Third, the major difference between Diu Crône and Sir Gawein and the Green Knight is that in the former, Gansguoter is attached to a figure of the Third and Gawein gains entry to this third space and brings it back into the Arthurian realm. In the latter text, Bertilac/ the Green Knight/ Morgane are antagonists and Gawain succumbs to them. 17 Heinrich does this by reflecting in the character of Lady Fortune the problem of narration with a perfect hero (as Gawein has to be); thus, he supplies Lady Fortune with an evil sister who persistently counteracts the guarantees Fortune has given Gawein (Meyer, Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion 65-176, esp. 124-32). Works Cited Baisch, Martin. «Welt ir: er vervellet; / Wellent ir: er ist genesen! Zur Figur Keies in Heinrichs von dem Türlin Diu Crône.» Aventiuren des Geschlechts. Modelle von Männlichkeit in der Literatur des 13. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Martin Baisch, et al. Göttingen: V&R UP, 2003. 149-73. Boll, Lawrence L. The Relation of Diu Krône of Heinrich von dem Türlin to La Mule sanz Frain: A Study in Sources. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1929. Ebenbauer, Alfred. «Fortuna und Artushof. Bemerkungen zum ‹Sinn› der Krone Heinrichs von dem Türlin.» Österreichische Literatur zur Zeit der Babenberger. Ed. Fritz Peter Knapp, Alfred Ebenbauer, and Ingrid Strasser. Vienna: Halosar, 1977. 25-49. -. «Der Truchseß Keie und der Gott Loki. Zur mythischen Struktur des arthurischen Erzählens.» Literarische Leben. Rollenentwürfe in der Literatur des Hoch- 310 Matthias Meyer und Spätmittelalters. Festschrift für Volker Mertens zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Matthias Meyer and Hans-Jochen Schiewer. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. 105-31. Erdheim, Mario. «Adoleszenz zwischen Familie und Kultur.» Psychoanalyse und Unbewußtheit in der Kultur. Aufsätze 1980 -1987. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. 191-214. Felder, Gudrun. Kommentar zur Crône Heinrichs von dem Türlin. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006. Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, Deutsches Wörterbuch. Vol 5. Hirzel: Leipzig, 1854- 1961, col. 4025-40. Web. Hartmann von Aue: Gregorius. Der Arme Heinrich. Iwein. Ed. and trans. Volker Mertens. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2004. Haug, Walter. Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985. Haupt, Jürgen. Der Truchseß Keie im Artusroman. Untersuchungen zur Gesellschaftsstruktur im höfischen Roman. Berlin: Schmidt, 1971. Hausmann, Albrecht. «Mittelalterliche Überlieferung als Interpretationsaufgabe. ‹Laudines Kniefall› und das Problem des ‹ganzen Textes.›» Text und Kultur. Mittelalterliche Literatur 1150 -1450. DFG-Symposion 2000. Ed. Ursula Peters. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. 72-95. Heinrich von dem Türlin. Die Krone (1-12281). Ed. Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. -. Die Krone (12282-30042). Ed. Alfred Ebenbauer and Florian Kragl. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Keller, Johannes. Diu Crône Heinrichs von dem Türlin: Wunderketten, Gral und Tod. Bern: Lang, 1997. -. «Fantastische Wunderketten.» Das Wunderbare in der arthurischen Literatur. Probleme und Perspektiven. Ed. Friedrich Wolfzettel. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003. 225-48. Knapp, Fritz Peter, Alfred Ebenbauer, and Ingrid Strasser, eds. Österreichische Literatur zur Zeit der Babenberger. Vienna: Halosar, 1977. Koschorke, Albrecht. «Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.» Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Ed. Eva Eßlinger, et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 9-31. Lacy, Norris J. «King Arthur.» Le heros dans la réalité, dans la légende et dans la littérature mediévale. Der Held in historischer Realität, in der Sage und in der mittelalterlichen Literatur. Ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok. Greifswald: Reineke, 1996. 67-80. McCracken, Peggy. The Romance of Adultery. Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1998. Mertens, Volker. Laudine. Soziale Problematik im Iwein Hartmanns von Aue. Berlin: Schmidt, 1978. Meyer, Matthias. «Feuer- und Wasserwelten.» Fiktionalität im Artusroman des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts. Romanistische und germanistische Perspektiven. Ed. Martin Przybilski and Nikolaus Ruge. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2013. 107-17. -. «It’s Hard to Be Me, or Walewein/ Gawan as Hero.» Originality and Tradition in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein. Ed. Keith Busby. Cambridge: Brewer, 1999. 63-78. In Search of the Arthurian Third 311 -. «Sô dunke ich mich ein werltgot. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis Autor-Erzähler- Fiktion im späten Artusroman.» Fiktionalität im Artusroman. Dritte Tagung der Deutschen Sektion der Internationalen Artusgesellschaft in Berlin vom 13.-15. Februar 1992. Ed. Volker Mertens and Friedrich Wolfzettel. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. 185-202. -. Die Verfügbarkeit der Fiktion. Interpretationen und poetologische Untersuchungen zum Artusroman und zur aventiurehaften Dietrichepik des 13. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter, 1994. -. «Versuch über die Schwierigkeiten des Artusromans, über die Liebe zu erzählen.» Der Tod der Nachtigall. Liebe als Selbstreflexivität von Kunst. Ed. Martin Baisch and Beatrice Trincâ. Göttingen: V&R UP, 2009. 151-69. Pütz, Horst Peter. «Artus-Kritik in Hartmanns Iwein.» Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift Ser. N.F. 22 (1972), 193-97. Roth, Gudrun. «‹Hybridität› und ‹Dritter Raum›. Displacements postkolonialer Modelle.» Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Ed. Eva Eßlinger, et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 137-49. Ruh, Kurt. «Zur Interpretation von Hartmanns Iwein.» Philologia Deutsch. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Walter Henzen. Ed. Werner Kohlschmidt, et al. Bern: Francke, 1965. 39-51. Rpt. in Hartmann von Aue. Ed. Hugo Kuhn and Christoph Cormeau. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973. 408- 25. Schmitz, Bernhard Anton. Gauvain, Gawein, Walewein. Die Emanzipation des ewig Verspäteten. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008. Schüttpelz, Erhard. «Der Trickster.» Die Figur des Dritten. Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Ed. Eva Eßlinger, et al. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. 208-24. Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival. Ed. Bernd Schirok. Trans. Peter Knecht. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998. Wyss, Ulrich. «Fiktionalität - heldenepisch und arthurisch.» Fiktionalität im Artusroman. Dritte Tagung der Deutschen Sektion der Internationalen Artusgesellschaft in Berlin vom 13.-15. Februar 1992. Ed. Volker Mertens and Friedrich Wolfzettel. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. 242-56. -. «Die Wunderketten in der ‹Crône›.» Die mittelalterliche Literatur in Kärnten. Vorträge des Symposions in St. Georgen/ Längsee vom 8. bis 13.9.1980. Ed. Peter Krämer. Vienna: Halosar, 1981. 269-91. Zudrell, Lena. «Gawein und die historische Narratologie. Zur Rede von Figuren am Beispiel von Hartmanns von Aue Erec und Iwein.» Aktuelle Tendenzen der Artusforschung. Ed. Brigitte Burrichter, et al. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. 101-12. Zutt, Herta. «Die unhöfische Lunete.» Chevaliers errants, demoiselles et l’Autre: höfische und nachhöfische Literatur im europäischen Mittelalter. Festschrift für Xenja von Ertzdorff zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Trude Ehlert. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1998. 103-20. The Moderate Watchman ALEX ANDER SAGER Univ ersity of Georgia «How will I separate this knight and this beautiful woman, who have often spent the night together before? With true loyalty and in fear of my life I advise them both to part and that he go from here. Moderation is important in all things. Life and honor will not be well guarded if they continue to lie together any longer. I sing only one thing now: It is time, rise, sir knight! » «My friend, do you hear the watchman on the battlement and what his song proclaimed? We must part, my dear man, just like you did recently when day broke and the night fled away from us. The night gives pleasure, the day brings pain. Alas, dearest love, I cannot conceal you now. The grey light is stealing so many joys from us. Rise, sir knight! » «Your mouth, made for kissing, your lovely body, the way you cuddle up to me, your embrace - this makes me want to stay here! Ah, that I might one day spend the day with you without it costing us our happiness. If that were to happen, we would have no cause to lament. Your love is like a vise to me; it holds me fast, I must come to you whatever the cost.» «The dawn won’t let you! This I lament, I unhappy woman. Rise, sir knight! » 1 The tearful parting of lovers at dawn, familiar to the general reader from Romeo’s and Juliet’s bedroom debate over the kind of bird that has awakened them, is the subject of a genre of medieval courtly love poetry known as the dawn song or aubade, German Tagelied. The above poem, «Wie sol ich den ritter nû gescheiden» by German Minnesänger Otto von Botenlauben (c. 1175-c.1245), is a conventional example of the genre (hereafter referred to as Otto XIII). 2 In European literature the dawn song reached its classical form in the high Middle Ages, though its roots reach back much further and are not restricted to Europe; poems and songs of this type are found in such different cultures as the ancient Chinese and medieval Slavic 3 What seems specific to the Western European tradition, however, is the speaker in the first stanza of Otto’s poem, the watchman. This figure is found only in three literary traditions: Old Provençal, Old French, and Middle High German. 4 That is, only in these traditions is the relationship between the parting lovers represented as a triangular constellation which includes a watchman, who, as in the above poem, often plays a substantial role. Furthermore, this constellation forms the basis of the great majority of the dawnsongs in all three literatures. This is especially the case in Germany, where many more such poems survive than in the literatures of the Romance neighbors to the west, especially in the later The Moderate Watchman 313 Middle Ages. Of the eighty or so secular dawnsongs preserved from Germany between c. 1200-1500, the watchman, or some reference to him or to a watchman-like figure, fails to appear in only about half a dozen. 5 This remained the case even after the love relationship depicted in the poem was no longer one of forbidden love and the watchman lost his traditional function of warning the lovers. So while it is not absolutely constitutive of the genre, we can say that in France and Germany the triadic relationship between the two lovers and the watchman was felt to be very close to its literary center. 6 How did he get there and what exactly is he doing? Why, as Marianne Shapiro asked in her study of this figure in Old Provençal poetry, must a third figure monitor the proceedings between lovers? (Shapiro 616). 7 To answer these questions, I will first give a brief overview of the origins of the watchman in medieval European courtly love poetry, then outline his various roles in the German tradition, focusing in on one role in particular that tends to get neglected in the scholarship: the watchman as agent of moralizing exhortation. Finally, I will look at some of the less familiar poems in the German dawnsong tradition from the position of this moralizing watchman. 1. The question of the origins of the watchman as a substantial poetic figure is complicated and can never be settled with certainty, since the texts that perhaps could settle the puzzle were either lost or never written down in the first place. There are two main lines of descent. On the most basic level, the figure reflects the material and social reality of a military elite living or aspiring to live in castles and courts. Castles were guarded by watchmen. In the poetry, the role is part of a cultural poetics of space. 8 In most dawnsongs in world literature, the lovers, usually represented as literally embedded in or very close to the order of nature, are awakened by some natural sign like the light of dawn or the morning star, or by a natural agent, usually a bird, such as a the swallow, lark, or rooster. Lovers awakened by a watchman are, even when the text contains no other architectural references, to be thought of as inside a private chamber within a larger building at some remove from nature, its signs and messengers. It is the watchman’s job to bridge this remove and to communicate the signs of nature to the lovers. The dawnsong poetics of space are not to be thought of realistically, but as ideologically informed in various ways. For example, while morning birdsong still often features in watchman poems, the call of the rooster virtually never resounds. This absence surely does not reflect an absence of roosters from real-historical medieval castles and courts. Rather, it is beholden to a representation of the court as far from contact with the rustic and bestial peasantry, 9 and it is also probably governed by the desire to avoid explicit 314 Alexander Sager religious associations. In fact, as scholars have pointed out, the watchman’s typical role in the poetry - singing or shouting about a clandestine love affair from the castle battlements - is patently unreal. 10 Many other world dawnsong traditions arose in courtly and urban settings where watchmen stood guard and yet did not make it into the literature as figures of interest. 11 As Maria Dobozy has pointed out, the job of watchman is socially low on the totem pole in medieval Europe. 12 Thus socio-cultural factors are a necessary but by no means sufficient condition to help explain the prestige of this figure. Rather, an explanation for the watchman’s status is to be found in the sphere of religion. Although every particular is contested, scholars generally agree that the Christian discourse of spiritual awakening in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages played an important role in the genesis of the secular genre. 13 On this theory, the origins of the dawnsong watchman are linked to the admonitory guardians and wakers in Latin hymns of the morning that survive from late antiquity onward (Hatto 78-79). In the fourth-century «Hymn for the Cock-Crow» by Prudentius (Hatto 277-78), for example, the rooster that heralds the day is simultaneously the mouthpiece of Christ’s wake-up call to our minds to arise from our beds of sloth and sin. The spiritual significance of the rooster, as explained in the poem, goes back to the Gospel scene in which Peter denies Christ. The watcher on the walls can also be a human character. In a tenth-century song from the monastery at Fleury (Hatto 280-81), the herald who calls for the slothful to arise is a spiculator, a sentry or bodyguard. This poem takes up the language of the Biblical prophets, who often refer to themselves as speculatores appointed by God to watch over, awaken by song, or warn the city of Jerusalem. 14 The religious tradition supplies the watchmen with the necessary prestige, but we are still not close to a sufficient explanation for the origins of his role in the secular dawnsong. This remains a conundrum in the field. The main question is how we get from a poetry that glorifies the light of day and exhorts sleepers to awaken from the night of sin, to a poetry that spiritualizes the night of erotic sensuality and curses the dawning of day. This is wrapped up in the greater question concerning the origins of courtly love and its valorization of adulterous passion. For the watchman specifically, the question is how an exhorter leading away from sin becomes its enabler. 2. It appears that the literary importance of the watchman increases to the extent by which he transcends his «realistic» function, that of warning the lovers of the approach of dawn so that they can separate, thus avoiding detection and social censure (Cormeau 700). Otto von Botenlauben’s XIII ex- The Moderate Watchman 315 emplifies this liminal position in a number of ways typical of a large number of poems in the tradition. First and most notably, there is the intermediate quality of his speech act, that is, the disjunction noted above between the private contents of his words and the public manner of their delivery. Secondly, the actual wake-up call is only a part of what he says; most of the first stanza - and the watchman typically has at least a whole stanza, often more - is a reflection on the relationship he is guarding. Thirdly, he is both an insider and an outsider, bound to the lovers in friendship and personal loyalty, but also an agent of something external to that relationship. In Otto’s poem the watchman does not simply worry about saving his friends and himself, he also worries about values: «mâze ist zallen dingen guot.» Because of these characteristics, the watchman has often been described as a «third figure» in the scholarly literature. 15 However, what is generally meant by this is something like a «third party.» That is, there is a tendency to interpret the watchman’s mediatory function as essentially that of a personal agent, messenger, and enabler of the lovers, i.e., as a supplementary figure to an essentially dyadic relationship. 16 At its core, this understanding rests on the primacy of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is generally thought to have introduced the figure of the watchman into German poetry and therewith to have established a theme upon which all subsequent poets have performed variations (cf. Greenfield 43). 17 Wolfram’s watchman is marked above all by his intense commitment to the lovers; he is triuwe, loyal, and staete, constant. In Wolfram’s most famous dawnsong, «sîne klâwen durch die wolken sind geslagen» (Hatto 451-52), the watchman describes the arrival of dawn as the claws of a great monster striking through the clouds. In the most recent study of the figure, John Greenfield observes that the watchman here plays the role of an accomplice: «[E]r sieht das Licht des Tages aus der Perspektive der Liebenden als einen gewaltsamen Eindringling, und er scheint das Bedürfnis des Paares nach der Aufrechterhaltung der Intimsphäre zu verstehen» (52). 18 To be sure, this complicity is not absolute and unmitigated. Greenfield argues that Wolfram’s watchman, in urging the lovers to arise and separate, does give voice to a principle of «reason» («Vernunft») and «non-emotionality» («Ent-Emotionalisierung») that contrasts with the highly erotic atmosphere of the dawnsong bedchamber and attempts to intervene in the latter. Nonetheless the effect of the intervention is highly counterproductive: Für die Liebenden […] hat das Eingreifen bzw. der Kommentar des Wächters oft nicht die von ihm gewünschte Wirkung, nämlich das die Liebesspiele aufhören. Im Gegenteil: Weil das Liebespaar durch den Wächter vom Tageslicht erfährt, intensiviert es häufig sogar noch seine erotischen Anstrengungen. (Greenfield 48) 316 Alexander Sager Thus, Wolfram’s watchmen operate as enablers, catalysts and intensifiers of dyadically-configured relationships - as a kind of glorified messenger, as Peter Göhler maintains: Worin ähneln sich Bote und Wächter? Da ist zunächst ihre Vetrautheit mit den Liebenden. Sie vermitteln zwischen beiden Partnern, indem sie Nachricht überbringen, indem sie Neigung offenbaren, indem sie Wünsche übermitteln und das Verhalten des anderen zu steuern suchen, indem sie Forderungen stellen, Hoffnungen laut werden lassen. Und sie schirmen die Partner vor einer Öffentlichkeit ab. […] Bote und Wächter öffnen einen fiktiven Raum für die Weiterführung, Ausgestaltung, für das Ausleben der Partnerbeziehung - jenseits der Normen der höfischen Welt. (84) It may or may not be the case that Wolfram stands at the beginning of the watchman tradition in Germany. As Alois Wolf emphasizes, it is impossible to establish the matter chronologically, and other scenarios are possible (Wolf 1979, 75, 80, 84, 125). While Wolfram’s particular conception - or conceptions - of the watchman figure were perhaps the most influential, they were not the only influential ones. I would argue with regard to the nature of the «thirdness» represented by the exhortatory watchman in Otto’s XIII, that he is a different kind of figure, one located in a genuinely triadic relationship, as opposed to a «third party» in a dyadic one. While Otto’s watchman, too, is bound to the lovers in personal loyalty and wants the relationship to be able to continue, it is not for these reasons alone that this watchman counsels moderation, but also because he sees it as the morally right thing to do in an abstract sense, as indicated by the proverbial statement: «Moderation is important in all things.» Wolf has pointed out that the watchman, when speaking of mâze, is acting as the spokesman for an essential value of courtly society (1979, 87). One can go further and make a case that by around 1200, mâze had come to be considered the quintessential virtue in the secular courtly-chivalric culture in Germany (cf. Bumke 303-04, Rücker 410). However, the most important difference between Otto XIII and Wolfram’s dawnsongs lies in the way in which the lovers respond to the third figure involved in their relationship. In Otto, they do not argue with the watchman or take his warning as a cue to turn up the erotic intensity. Rather, they are mindful of his exhortation and put into practice the value in question. Their willingness to obey the watchman’s call is manifest first and foremost in the woman: «Hœrstu, friunt, den wahter an der zinnen, wes sîn sanc verjach? wir müezen unsich scheiden, lieber man … . » Her final words in the second stanza move from the intimate level of terms of endearment (vriunt, lieber man) to the formal, quasi-professional address of the watchman: «stant ûf, ritter! » The knight himself can be seen to resist, to want to tarry The Moderate Watchman 317 in the moment of intimacy and return to lovemaking: «dîn minne ist gar ein zange mir, si klemmet mich, ich muoz ze dir, gult ez mir al den lîp.» But the woman doesn’t allow it, repeating the exhortation and thus, at third voicing, definitively turning it into refrain - a feature common in the alba but very rare in German dawnsongs. 19 By the time the voice of the watchman and that of the woman overlap, the latter has essentially internalized the voice of the former. In fact, we can interpret the refrain as the direct poetic expression of that internalization, and, conversely, consider this the very reason for the refrain’s highly conspicuous deployment in the poem in the first place. 20 Otto’s watchman in XIII does not enable the lovers to step outside courtly society and its norms, as Göhler argues for Wolfram’s watchman-as-messenger. Rather, he provides a way for them to be together within it on its own terms. In other words, Otto’s poem presents the watchman not merely as a figure who watches out for the lovers, but also as one through whom the intradiagetic society observes and monitors their behavior, subjecting them to a certain practical moral discipline. This kind of bi-directional gaze is not a pronounced feature of the watchman in Wolfram’s dawnsongs. 21 It is, however, a feature of Romance poetry, albeit with a somewhat different inflection. According to Shapiro, an important role for the watchman in Provençal poetry is to supervise the enactment of an amorous code of etiquette (622). In Cadenet’s poem «S’anc fui belha ni prezada,» for example, the watchman, who does not know the couple at the beginning, agrees to aid them because they conform to his notion of true, well-founded love: «If I were watching a castle where false love reigned, may I be accursed if I would not hide the coming of day as much as I could, for I should wish to separate false lovers. For true lovers I watch loyally» (Hatto 360-61). This watchman forms his loyalties in reference to an external code of conduct, of which he is literally the supervisor. As Shapiro writes: «The watchman’s right to act as functionary is interwoven with his defense of love. His qualifications of constancy, loyalty, and discernment parallel those of true lover, therefore validating his chosen role of moralist» (623). Otto’s watchman is an analogous kind of functionary - an excellent term for the figure of the third as opposed to the third party - albeit not in as pronounced a manner and in terms of a different, less avant-garde kind of ethos than courtly fin’amors. As Wolf has suggested, it is possible that this is a case of direct influence. 22 If Otto von Botenlauben was who scholars think he was, then he was a personage who can be identified at the court of Emperor Henry VI in 1197, was married to a French noblewoman and spent time on crusade in the kingdom of Jerusalem, at that time dominated by families of 318 Alexander Sager Provençal and French origin. This makes it highly likely he knew Romance courtly love poetry firsthand. 23 Furthermore, it is possible that Otto was the first to introduce the watchman into German poetry, or that he introduced him independently. As Wolf repeatedly emphasizes, we simply do not know about the relative chronology of most early German dawnsongs, including Otto’s and Wolfram’s lyric output (70-71, 80, 85). It is as plausible to argue that Otto influenced Wolfram as vice-versa (85). Consequently the didactic, morally exhortatory, «functionary» watchman of Otto XIII should perhaps be seen as closer to the center of the German dawnsong tradition and exercising a greater influence from the beginning as is typically seen to be the case when one considers Wolfram’s amatorily more radical dawnsongs to be the point of origin. Notably, Otto’s XIII is the first poem to deploy the discourse of mâze in the mouth of the watchman (Kraus 2: 379). This figure, which I would call the «moderate watchman,» would go on after Otto XIII to become a major topos in the genre, appearing explicitly in no fewer than eight German dawnsongs between 1200 and 1450. 24 3. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the dawnsong watchman has been interpreted not only as an epic figure, but also as a poetological one. As Marianne Shapiro put it concerning the Provençal albas, in the watchman’s discourse and reflections he «parallels and duplicates [the figure] of the poet vis-à-vis his creation, thereby demonstrating the irruption of poetic self-consciousness into the demesne of narrative» (606). Though not to be simply identified with the author, he can be thought of as a «metonymy for the poet» (620) and furthermore as occupying a position analogous to that of a specifically medieval kind of commentator-author: «The watchman stands in the very position from which literature is produced: the marginal post of the glossator» (627). Christoph Kiening has recently emphasized the poetological dimension of the figure in Wolfram’s dawnsongs in similar terms: 25 the watchman himself is connected «mit der Produktion des Sanges, eines Sanges, der zwar nicht explizit als Minnesang oder überhaupt als ‹Literatur› hingestellt wird, aber doch in deren Nähe rückt» (169). As a «Figur des Dritten» he is simultanously a figure «in der sich die Genese eines literarischen Sprechens über Liebe selbst reflektieren kann» (170). The watchman in Otto’s XIII also illustrates this poetological dimension, but, again, in a way quite different from Wolfram’s poetry. The main difference lies in the degree of the watchman’s abstraction, by which I mean two things: the abstract nature of his reflective discourse, i.e., its philosophicalproverbial character and his literal abstraction as figure within the narrative scenario, i.e., his withdrawn and isolated position. With the exception The Moderate Watchman 319 of the formalized refrain «stant ûf, ritter! ,» the watchman does not speak to either of the lovers personally or directly. He only speaks about them, and they in turn only about him. This contrasts not only with both of Wolfram’s poems in which the watchman engages in reflections (in «von der zinnen» he addresses both lovers personally, and in «sîne klâwen» he holds a conversation with the lady), but also with the three other poems in this genre by Botenlauben himself, all of which contain substantial cross-communication between the watchman and his two charges. 26 In XIII, the watchman is physically-logistically displaced (though not completely removed) from the narrative scenario of the lovers’ bedchamber. Highlighting the reduction in temporal signaling vis-à-vis other dawnsongs of Otto’s, Wolf argues that the main thrust of this watchman stanza is to represent the love relationship in terms of a condition rather than an event. The atemporality of the scenario that Wolf’s reading implies is underscored by the complete lack of any reference to the dawning of day on the part of the watchman. The twofold tendency to abstraction is taken up in subsequent poems featuring the moderate watchman. In an early-mid-13th century poem by Ulrich von Singenberg, the watchman stanza, in its standard first position in the poem, is essentially one extended proverb on moderation: Whoever has sweet love with sweet delight, he ought not to hesitate, when the day dawns, to force his mind away from his heartfelt delight so that he might keep enjoying it in the future. In this way, friendship may be preserved. For certainly: Whatever is done to excess, will very easily turn into something painful in the end. 27 In terms of philosophical abstraction, this stanza goes a step further than Otto’s XIII, as here there is no mention of particular lovers at all. Rather, the discourse on moderation is completely generalized, introduced with the proverbial markers swer («whoever») and so («whenever»). The narrative abstraction is also significantly greater. Although this watchman does refer to the dawning of day, there are no concrete temporal signals and - crucially - he utters no actual wake-up call. There is a further major shift in the reaction of the lovers. In Otto’s poem the woman, though she does not speak with the watchman, nonetheless refers to him as a human agent in his physical location and in his concrete speech act («Hœrstu, friunt, den wahter an der zinnen, wes sîn sanc verjach? »). In the Singenberg poem, the connection between the first and the second stanzas - between the voice of the watchman and the woman’s reaction to it - is logistically as indeterminate as it is concrete in terms of philosophical content: «Now listen, sweet companion! » said the lovely woman, 320 Alexander Sager how this being awakened cuts me to the heart! Whether I wish it or not, I fear that your love, in its immoderation, will completely ruin my joys. It seems that my moderation is becoming most immoderate! If you are going to leave me in such longing, I don’t know how long I am going to be able to survive. 28 Here the watchman virtually disappears from the scene as a human agent. All we are left with is the effect of his presence, das wecken. I accept the awkwardness of the English translation «this being awakened» because it is important to note that we’re dealing with the unambiguously transitive verbal act «to awaken somebody,» as opposed to the potentially intransitive semantics of all English cognates («to wake,» «to awaken,» «to wake up»). In other words, albeit indirectly, the woman is still referring to an external agent waking her up, an agent her lover can also hear («nû hoerent, trûtgeselle! »). She is not referring to awakening of her own accord, which would be wachen. Still, that external agent has vanished as a concrete human individual. At the same time, the lovers’ engagement with the philosophical content of the watchman stanza is ratcheted up a notch. The woman not only wakes up at the watchman’s - textually unrepresented - call, she also manifestly listens to his warning against excess and interprets her and her lover’s relationship according to it: «sô vürchte ich, daz dîn minne mich an vröiden gar verderbe, diu niht mâze hât. ich waene an mir diu mâze welle unmâzen.» The standard dawnsong idiom of longing and erotic lamentation is now admixed with a language of moralizing reproach, including self-reproach. This poem turns the watchman into a figure of explicit moral instruction. Indeed, the conspicuous eliding of the standard wake-up call comes very close to insinuating that the awareness of problematic excess is the thing that wakes, not the fact that it is dawn. 29 Another poem from the mid-thirteenth century, «Swer tougenlîcher minne pflege» by Bruno von Hornburg, takes yet a further step along the trajectory of abstraction. «Whoever is pursuing secret love should now awaken, for surely day is dawning. Let him shake off repose in good time! He ought not to act such that he give cause for lamentation. A separation will please me well. Very often a man begins to suffer great sorrow on account of sweet affairs.» At these words a lovely woman started up. Then she embraced her companion. She said: «Alas, I believe the day is approaching us soon. I am very unhappy about it, poor longing me.» The pure sweet lady woke him up. They both looked at the grey light. They feared Rumor, and also Danger. Their shared joy turned to sorrow when they had to part and the day dawned. The pure woman of good breeding gave herself to him with solemn oaths. The knight promised her then: «Nobody can make me want to give you up. May the blessing of heaven be your roof.» 30 The Moderate Watchman 321 Here the watchman stanza is very similar to the Ulrich poem: moralizing discourse in a proverbial register without any reference to particular lovers, nor any wake-up call. There is, to be sure, no explicit reference to mâze in this text, and I have not counted it among the eight poems to employ that topos (cf. note 24). Nonetheless it seems clear that the problematic behavior circumscribed in the phrase er sol niht machen, daz man von im beginnet klagen has to do with immoderation. The general thrust of the stanza, however, is even more moralizing. Whereas in Otto and Singenberg the watchman’s exhortation is still tied to his traditional concern for the health and future of the clandestine love affair he supervises, this concern is not present here. In fact, the last two sentences seem to suggest that the scheiden the watchman has in mind is of the permanent kind. The greater level of abstraction in Hornburg results from the incomplete representation of the logistical relationship between the watchman’s voice and the act of waking. The connection is even less clear than in the Singenberg poem. The phrase I have translated as «these words» in the second stanza, diu rede, is a very neutral term for a speech act in MHG and seems incommensurate with both the traditional medium of the watchman (that is, song) as well as the expected volume of the delivery (i.e., loud). 31 Indeed, very often in MHG diu rede simply means «the matter» or «the issue» at hand, in a way only vaguely related or even unconnected to an antecedent speech act. 32 Consequently, an alternative translation of the woman’s reaction to the first stanza could be simply: «The woman started up on account of this.» Moreover, what the woman tells her companion is not only completely without reference to an external agent of waking (notice that there is no call for him to listen, as there is in the previous two examples), it also makes one redundant in a way that comes close to falsifying the physical presence of a watchman. For the woman to say that she believes the day is approaching - «ich waene, der tac uns aber wil nâhen» - is to claim for herself the watchman’s role as interpreter and announcer of the signs of dawn. In other words, one of the ways of interpreting this poem is that there is no longer any human watchman on the battlements at all. If, to paraphrase Kiening’s reading of Wolfram’s dawnsongs (168), the watchman fails as a narrative figure only to become more powerful as a poetological one, the Hornburg poem, following a trajectory first established in Otto XIII and continued in - or paralleled by - Singenberg, strips the watchman stanza of all narrative functions and presents the figure as solely signifying a poetological space. The warning to specified lovers in the context of a particular affair has now turned into moralizing gloss on courtly love relationships in general. And if the sanc of Wolfram’s watchman approaches that of Minne- 322 Alexander Sager sang (Kiening 169), it seems to me that diu rede of Hornburg’s watchman signals another kind of literary discourse gaining popularity and salience from the early thirteenth century: the gnomic poetry known in German as Spruchdichtung. Beginning with Otto, the moderate watchman in dawnsong poetry begins to sound a lot like courtly didacts such as Thomasin von Zirclaria and the anonymous author of the treatise Die Maße, both of whom attempt to accommodate socially problematic courtly love relationships by prescribing practical moral rules for their participants. In the latter text, in fact, the main benefit of practicing moderation (repeated at four points in the short text) seems to be that it enables «knights and ladies» to successfully practice clandestine love affairs! 33 At the same time, even though the watchman stanza is divested of its narrative content, it is obviously still operating within a narrative poem. In Otto we saw how, through the formal logic of the refrain, the voice of the woman can be seen to internalize the voice of the watchman and carry out the content of the exhortation. In Singenberg, too, the woman’s interpretation of her relationship takes up the watchman’s warning against excess in a way that also looks like a kind of internalization. By the Hornburg poem, it seems to me that the connection between the first and the second stanza has become so tenuous and abstract as to suggest that the voice the woman wakes to is actually some kind of internal voice. How might we theorize this kind of internalization in early 13th century Germany? One way, trodden by Hartmut Kokott, is to psychologize the whole dawnsong constellation according to the Freudian triad of the ego (knight), id (lady), and superego (watchman). 34 However, this kind of approach has not held up very well in critical scholarship. 35 One very glaring problem for straight-up Freudian analysis is that, at least in the poems discussed here, the lady cannot be seen in the position of the id, since she is the one who is actually listening to the watchman and seeking to carry out his exhortation in the face of a male desire coded as immoderate. So if anything, the woman would represent the ego and the knight the id. In my view, the love relationship between the knight and the lady in mid-13th century dawnsongs cannot be understood in any kind of generalized psycho-metaphorical terms. I do think there is some scope for pondering Kokott’s identification of the watchman with the Freudian superego, however, and for two reasons. First, models of the human psyche featuring a metaphorical watchman who supervises an inner moral economy and exhorts self-discipline are widespread in the west long before Freud - and the historical patrimony of his models and complexes was of course of greatest importance to Freud himself. The Moderate Watchman 323 Selective examples would include the «inner judge» in Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten who «observes» the subject and «speaks with a fearsome voice» at the moment of waking (438). 36 This inner judge represents the conscience and the voice of reason. A century before Kant, Grimmelshausen described a character’s moral crisis in Simplicissimus in the following terms: «jedoch unterliesse der jnnerliche Waechter, das Liecht der Vernunfft, der Zeug, der nimmer gar stillschweigt, nemblich das Gewissen, indessen nicht, einem jeden seine Fehler zeitlich genug vorzuhalten und ihm eines andern zuerinnern» (590). 37 A century and a half before Grimmelshausen, Hans Sachs wrote a religious dawnsong identifying the watcher on the battlements with the voice of reason: «Der wachter an der zinnen / ist die vernunfft mit sinnen: / -‹wach auf! › so rufft er drat / ‹wach auf von sunden, es ist spat! › (Hatto 470). 38 And fifteen centuries before Sachs, the stoic philosopher Seneca talks about the benefits of holding self-scrutinizing converse with what he calls one’s inner speculator and censor concerning one’s moral state (340-41). 39 The importance for courtly literature of stoic moral philosophy in general and Seneca in particular has been well documented in recent years, 40 so it is by no means a stretch to regard the moderate watchman as a mouthpiece for such a philosophy. The second reason I think the Freudian superego is important here has to do with the ultimate metaphysical or ontological status ascribed to the watchman and his voice on the part of the author. In Seneca and in all the post-medieval examples cited above, including Hans Sachs, the internal watchman represents the voice of reason, and reason is ultimately Reason, i.e., it is grounded either in nature itself or in some sort of transcendental order. The Freudian superego, in contrast, is non-transcendental, denoting the internalization of socio-cultural rules. It is in this non-transcendental sense that I would interpret all of the poems in the «moderate watchman» group, beginning with Otto’s XIII. The difference can best be illustrated with Sachs’s «es ruft ein wachter faste.» Here Sachs is appealing to his audience as an author and asking them to listen to the voice of their internal watchmen as the voice of reason speaking within themselves. He really means it. The poem ends with a personal prayer on the part of Sachs himself. 41 Otto’s XIII, in contrast, has a very different objective: it artistically registers the state of courtly-cultural affairs in early 13th century Germany, in which a new generation of literary moral didacts is setting itself up as the conscience - or the superego - of society in matters of love. In this way, the poems of the «moderate watchman» group can be seen to encapsulate little scenarios of literary performance-cumreception in which the characters of the ladies are listening, responding to, 324 Alexander Sager and internalizing in a way that seems quasi-psychological, the watchman as Spruchdichter. Unlike Sachs, the poet himself is not necessarily identifying with or identifying himself as the watchman. Whether Otto von Botenlauben himself preached or practiced moderation, or even thought it was ze allen dingen guot, is irrelevant. 42 I do think, however, it possible that the forms of internalization we have seen in the poems discussed above might represent some lived socio-psychological experience, including on the part of the authors of dawnsongs. Hitherto we have been dealing with watchmen who increasingly disappear as a concretely-situated speaker behind an ever more generalized discourse. At the end of the 14th century, Hugo von Montfort composed a dawnsong entitled «weka wekch de zarten lieben» that presents the opposite case: here the watchman is present as a character, but he no longer actually does or says anything at all! The narrator merely addresses him out of the blue on two occasions. 43 The common scholarly wisdom on this poem is that the watchman has lost his «function» because the scenario being invoked is not one of clandestine love, but marriage. John Greenfield writes: «[D]er Wächter hört offenbar nur zu. Es handelt sich bei diesem Wächter also um ein funktionslos gewordenes Element einer um 1400 grundlegend veränderten Tradition» (59). As to the question of why the watchman is even mentioned in such a poem, Greenfield’s answer is that he «scheint ein so zentraler Bestandteil dieser Tradition zu sein, daß seine Präsenz in einem Tagelied fast unabdingbar erscheint […] selbst wo er funktionslos zum Schweigen verurteilt ist.» (60) This is a circular argument: in effect, that the watchman appears in this poem because the watchman always appears in these kinds of poems. But this is neither strictly true of the tradition in general, as I noted at the beginning, nor even of Hugo’s oeuvre in particular, which is characterized by a great deal of autonomy vis-à-vis literary conventions (cf. Schnyder 453). He leaves the watchman out of one of his other dawnsongs, 44 and he imports the figure into no less than four further poems, 45 two of which, in terms of their content, bear virtually no relationship to the dawnsong at all. 46 This strongly suggests that the watchman - usually a morally exhortatory figure 47 - is an important figure for Hugo outside of generic conventions, which means that we need to find a more positive account for his presence and his function, or at least explain the function for his functionlessness. I, for one, would venture the possibility that Hugo himself, as author, having heard and/ or read a lot of German dawnsongs, has internalized the watchman and, Seneca-like, really does hold converse with him, among other places, in the bedroom while his wife sleeps. The Moderate Watchman 325 Much of the cultural backstory to this internalization doubtless lies in developments within the sphere of religious discourse, specifically in the reemergence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the spiritual dawnsong, which in Germany features the watchman and his wake-up call in a prominent position (Schnyder 635). However, it has recently been proposed that this second wave of spiritual dawnsongs first developed under the influence of the secular Spruchdichtung tradition (Schyder 631). If so, it seems very likely that the exhortatory watchman of secular Minnesang, who incorporates Spruchdichtung as a «third position» from which courtly love relationships are monitored and subjected to forms of internalization, also played a significant part in this development. Notes 1 Otto von Botenlauben, ‹Wie sol ich den ritter nû gescheiden.› 1. ‹Wie sol ich den ritter nû gescheiden / und daz schœne wîp / die dicke bî ein ander lâgen ê? / dâ rât ich in rehten triuwen beiden / und ûf mîn selbes lîp / daz sie sich scheiden und er dannen gê. / mâze ist zallen dingen guot. / lîp und êre ist unbehuot, / ob man iht langer lît. / ichn singe eht anders niht wan: ez ist zît. / stant ûf, ritter! › 2. «Hœrstu, friunt, den wahter an der zinnen / wes sîn sanc verjach? / wir müezen unsich scheiden, lieber man. / alsô schiet dîn lîp ze jungest hinnen, / dô der tac ûf brach / und uns diu naht sô vlühteclîche entran. / naht gît senfte, wê tuot tac. / owê, herzeliep, in mac dîn nû verbergen nieht: / uns nimt der fröiden vil daz grâwe lieht. / stant ûf, ritter! » 3. ‹Dîn kuslîch munt, dîn lîp klâr unde süeze, / dîn drucken an die brust, / dîn umbevâhen lât mich hie betagen. / daz ich noch bî dir betagen müeze / ân aller fröiden vlust! / sô daz geschiht, son dürfen wir niht klagen. / dîn minne ist gar ein zange mir, / si klemmet mich, ich muoz ze dir, / gult ez mir al den lîp.› / «dichn lât der tac, daz klage ich, sende wîp. / stant ûf, ritter! » Quoted from Kraus 1: 314-15. All translations from MHG are my own. 2 Following the standard critical edition in Kraus (cited above). 3 See the collection by Hatto, Eos. 4 Hatto (37-40, 81) discusses several examples of the watchman figure in Slavic poetry, but regards these as highly derivative from the German tradition; he speaks in this context of the «German watchman» (40). Furthermore, he notes two passing references to watchman figures in Chinese poetry (109, 112). 5 The most complete and thematically best structured of the several collections available is that of Hausner. I arrive at the figure of eighty by combining her first three categories of traditional lyric (Tagelieder, 71 poems; Serena + Tagelied, eight poems; Serena + Tagelied + Kreuzlied, one poem). Other authors arrive at different total counts according to different criteria (Bumke 2004, 37: about 70 from the 12th-14th centuries; Cormeau 695: about 50 from the early 14th century Minnesang manuscripts). 6 Cf. Greenfield 62: «Die Tradition wird zwar modifiziert, aber der Wächter scheint ein so zentraler Bestandteil dieser Tradition zu sein, daß seine Präsenz in einem Taglied fast unabdingbar ist»; also Kiening 159. 326 Alexander Sager 7 «It would seem […] that the unrequited or nostalgic lover of the canso has simply become, for a time, someone else - a requited lover. Must a third voice monitor the proceedings? » (Shapiro 61). 8 One of Hatto’s contributors notes that the study of dawnsongs from all over the world would be incomplete without a comparative analysis of domestic space (64). 9 Hatto 431; also 31, 75, 80. 10 Cf. Cormeau 702 and the sources cited there. 11 Note the Chinese examples cited in note 4 above. Hatto also discusses (31) the figure of the caller on the mosque in the Arabic and other Islamic traditions, but as in the Chinese examples, these figures are not developed as in Romance and German poetry. 12 See Dobozy 29, 175-76, 228. 13 See Wolf 1992, 19-25. 14 See Isaiah 52: 8-10 and the discussion at Hatto 91. 15 Cf. Hatto 31 («third character»), Cormeau 700 («dritte Personalrolle»), Schweikle 137 («dritte Person»). 16 Some of the more recent literature has come to emphasize the «thirdness» of the figure more (cf. Holznagel 93). This is especially the case in Christian Kiening’s discussion of Wolfram’s watchmen in terms of a sophisticated «Poetik des Dritten» (157-175). This stimulating analysis overlaps with my argumentation to no small degree. But in two ways Kiening’s interpretation accords with the traditional view of the watchman: first, that Wolfram first introduced the figure (159, 165, 174), and secondly, that Wolfram’s watchman catalyzes the (dyadic) relationship and is thereby taken out of the equation (depotenziert). Thus far this is similar to Greenfield’s view. But Kiening then goes a key step further: the watchman is only seemingly reduced: «Der Wächter, dieser Katalysator der Liebesvereinigung, wird scheinbar depotenziert, genau dadurch aber auch profiliert. Als personale Figur steht er nun neben der personifizierten des Tages, und das macht sichtbar, worum es im ganzen geht: eine ‹gläserne Differenz,› die trent und zugleich verbindet, ein Drittes, das zwischen innen und außen vermittelt und doch weder dem einen noch dem anderen ganz angehört» (168). 17 For the most recent literature on the debate over the question of Wolfam’s influence, see Holznagel 95. 18 See also Wolf 74. 19 Kraus (2: 379) notes that refrains occur only in Heinrich von Morungen, Ulrich von Singenberg, and Günter von dem Vorste. 20 In contrast to Kraus (1: 314), Helmut Brackert (182) interprets the refrain as always in the voice of the watchman, in my view a far less interesting possibility. 21 Though see Kiening 168 and Holznagel 93. 22 While Wolf does not actually claim Otto’s poem (XIII) was directly inspired by that of Cadenet, he strongly implies as much (85-86). 23 See Wolf 80 and Huschenbett 205. 24 The poems in which the watchman uses the word mâze are Ulrich von Singenberg, «Swer minnecliche minne» (Hausner 13); Der Marner, «Guot wahter wis» (Hausner 19); Heinrich Teschler, «Ein wahter sanc ‹diu naht wil hin›» (Hausner 20); Konrad von Würzburg, «Ich sihe den morgensternen glesten» (Hausner 22); Hadlaub, «Ich wil ein warnen singen» (Hausner 40); Hadlaub, «Nu merkt mich, swer noch tougen lige» (Hausner 41); Peter von Arberg (? ), «ich singe, ich sage» (Hausner 46); Anonymous (Liederbuch der Clara Hätzerlin), «Woluff, woluff, es ist an der zeitt» (Hausner 13). This last text, which is in a popular vein, qualifies the scholarly claim cited The Moderate Watchman 327 by Kraus that the watchman’s counsel to moderation was unknown in the Volkslied (379). 25 In light of Shapiro’s essay, Kiening’s claim that the poetological aspect of the watchman has thus far been omitted (168) seems somewhat too sweeping. 26 In III, the watchman addresses the woman (Kraus 307-08), the woman the watchman in XIV (Kraus 316), and in IX/ IV the watchman and the knight converse (Kraus 309-10). 27 Ulrich von Singenberg, «Swer minneclîche minne» (1. ‹Swer minneclîche minne / mit minneclîchem liebe habe, / der sol sich des niht sûmen, / sô der tac ûf gê, / ern twinge sîne sinne / sîns herzeclîches liebes abe, / dur daz sîn künfteclîchiu vreude werde als ê: / sô mac diu vriuntschaft wernde wol belîben. / ouch sint gewis, swaz man wil übertrîben, / daz dâ daz wol vil lîhte am ende wirt ein wê»). Quoted from Hausner 13. 28 Ulrich von Singenberg, «Swer minneclîche minne.» 2. «nû hoerent, trûtgeselle! » / sô sprach daz wünneclîche wîp: / «wie nâhe mir daz wecken an mîn herze gât! » / ich welle sône welle, / sô vürchte ich, daz dîn minne mich / an vröiden gar verderbe, diu niht mâze hât. / ich waene an mir diu mâze welle unmâzen: / wiltû mich alsô dicke senede lâzen, / daz ist ein dinc, daz mir den lîp niht lange lât.» Quoted from Hausner 13. 29 It is possible that this particular poem concludes more in a Wolframian than in an Ottonian way. The poet tells us that they exchange a kiss, «and thereafter I don’t know what happened; it’s the kind of thing we should think about but not see» (da sol man nach gedenken und nicht gesehen). Consequently, the jury is out on whether this couple obeys or resists the watchman’s exhortation to moderation. 30 Bruno von Hornburg, «Swer tougenlîcher minne pflege.» 1. ‹Swer tougenlîcher minne pflege, / der sol nu wachen, / wan ez wil ân zwîvel tagen. / der ruowe er sich enzît bewege. / er sol niht machen, / daz man von im beginnet klagen; / ein scheiden wil mir wol behagen: / vil dicke ein man von lieben sachen / vil grôziu leit beginnet tragen.› 2. Der rede ein schœne wîp erschrac./ ein umbevâhen tet sî ir gesellen dô. / si sprach: «Owê, ich wæn der tac / uns aber wil nâhen; / des bin ich sendez wîp unfrô.» / diu reine süeze wahte in sô. / daz grâwe lieht si beide an sâhen: / so forchten melde und ouch den drô. 3. Ir beider fröide ein trûren wart, / dô sî sich scheiden muosten, und der tac ûf brach. / ein reine wîp in rehter art / mit hôhen eiden ir lîbes im für eigen jach. / der ritter dô mit triuwen sprach: / «nieman kan dich mir geleiden. / der himel segen sî dîn dach.» Quoted from Kraus 1: 24. 31 The watchman’s speech is referred to as diu rede in other mid-thirteenth century dawnsongs, e.g., Marner’s «ich künde in dem dône» (Hausner 17-18, stanza 2) and Ulrich von Winterstetten’s «verholniu minne sanfte tuot» » (Hausner 27, stanza 3; here it is the speech of the handmaiden). However, it does not seem to occur any earlier, and so possibly its use is a figment of the increasing abstraction in the tradition. 32 Cf. for example Hartmann von Aue, Erec, lines 971 (diu rede [sich] verkêret hât) and 452. 33 Cf. Thomasin von Zirclaria, lines 275-96 (This section is about how a married woman can maintain a relationship with a suitor without alienating her husband). The passages in Die Maße (cf. Rosenhagen 103-07) linking moderation to secret love are lines 40-45: swer die mazze rechte hat, / des wirt vil dicke gedaht / von rittern und von vrouwen; / der mag auch taugen / haben der vrowen minne / mit aller slahte dinge; lines 120-27: Ez zimet wol den vrowen, / des en ist dehein lougen, daz si die mazze chunnen han: / so mag ir ere wol gestan. / ir minne sint vil gut / die si danne getut / mit taugenlichen dingen; / so sint gut die minne; lines 169-75: so sint die minne vil guot / 328 Alexander Sager umbe die tauglichen site; unde ist die mazze da mite, / so ist ez allez vil guot, swaz si danne getut / taugenlicher dinge; lines 196-99: wil si aber minnen / mit taugenlichen dingen / ob si der mazze wil pflegen, / so mac si vrolichen leben. 34 Cf. Hartmut Kokott 34. 35 On Kokott cf. Kiening 166. See also Wolf 1979, 154-55 and Cormeau 701 for critiques of other Freudian approaches to the watchman-lady-knight constellation. 36 «Jeder Mensch hat Gewissen, und findet sich durch einen inneren Richter beobachtet, bedroht und überhaupt im Respekt (mit Furcht verbundener Achtung) gehalten, und diese über die Gesetze in ihm wachende Gewalt ist nicht etwas, was er sich selbst (willkürlich) macht, sondern es ist seinem Wesen einverleibt. Es folgt ihm wie sein Schatten, wenn er zu entfliehen gedenkt. Er kann sich zwar durch Lüste und Zerstreuungen betäuben, oder in Schlaf bringen, aber nicht vermeiden, dann und wann zu sich selbst zu kommen, oder zu erwachen, wo er alsbald die furchtbare Stimme desselben vernimmt.» 37 I have modified the punctuation in the edition in order make the passage easier to read. 38 Orthography modified for the reason noted above. 39 «This [i.e., the spirit] should be summoned to give an account of itself every day. Sextius had this habit, and when the day was over, and he had retired to his nightly rest, he would put these questions to his soul: ‹What bad habit have you cured to-day? What fault have you resisted? In what respect are you better? › Anger will cease and become more controllable if it finds that it must appear before a judge every day. Can anything be more be more excellent than this practice of thoroughly sifting the whole day? And how delightful the sleep that follows this self-examination - how tranquil it is, how deep and untroubled, when the soul has either praised or admonished itself, and when this secret examiner and critic of the self [speculator […] censorque] has given report of its own character! I avail myself of this privilege, and every day I plead my cause before the bar of self. When the light has been removed from sight, and my wife, long aware of my habit, has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words: I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing» (De Ira III, ch. 36). 40 Cf. Stephen Jaeger esp. 79-81, 168-69; Scaglione 108-09. The main source for the medieval learned discourse on moderation is Cicero’s De officiis, I.40. 41 Maria, junkfrau milde, / du senftmütiges bilde, / so ich in sünd entschlif, / mit der genaden stim mir rif, / das ich wir aufgewecket. 42 In any case he wrote several other dawnsongs in which the watchman has various quite different roles. 43 Hugo von Montfort 173-75, lines 17 and 35; also Hausner 207-09. 44 Hugo von Montfort 37 («Ich fröw mich gen des abentz kunft»). 45 Hugo von Montfort 40 («Ich fragt ain wachter ob es were tag»), 42-43 («Mich straft ain wachter des morgens fru»), 44 («Sag an wachter, wie was es tag»), 82-86 («Wachter, mir hat getromt ain troum»). 46 I mean here the latter two examples in the note above. Schnyder (652) lists «Sag an wachter» in his appendix of religious songs featuring «isolated elements» of the dawnsong tradition, but this is not the case with «Wachter, mir hat getromt ain troum,» which is secular in character. 47 Schyder speaks of the «Moralisierung der Gattung» (453). The Moderate Watchman 329 Works Cited Brackert, Helmut, ed. Minnesang. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1989. Cormeau, Christoph. «Zur Stellung des Tagelieds im Minnesang» Festschrift für Walter Haug und Burghart Wachinger. Ed. Johannes Janota et. al.. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. 695-709. Dobozy, Maria. Re-membering the Present: The Medieval German Poet-Minstrel in Cultural Context. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Göhler, Peter. «Zum Boten in der Liebeslyrik um 1200» Gespräche - Boten - Briefe. Körpergedächtnis und Schriftgedächtnis im Mittelalter. Ed. Horst Wenzel. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1997. 77-85. John Greenfield. wahtaere, swîc: Überlegungen zur Figur des Wächters im tageliet.» Die Burg im Minnesang und als Allegorie im deutschen Mittelalter. Ed. Ricard Bauschke. Frankfurt a.M.: Erich Schmidt, 2006. 41-61. Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob Christoffel von. Werke. Ed. Dieter Breuer. Vol. 1.1. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. Hatto, A.T. Eos. An Enquiry into the Theme of Lovers’ Meetings and Partings at Dawn in Poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1965. Hausner, Renate, ed. Owe do tagte ez. Tagelieder und motivverwandte Texte des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1983. Holznagel, Franz-Josef. «Die Lieder.» Wolfram von Eschenbach. Ein Handbuch. Vol.1. Ed. Joachim Heinzle. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 83-143. Huschenbett, Dietrich. «Die Dichtung Ottos von Botenlauben» Otto von Botenlauben. Minnesänger, Kreuzfahrer, Klostergründer. Würzburg: Schöningh, 1994. 203-37. Jaeger, C. Stephen. The Origins of Courtliness. Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 923-1210. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1985. Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Werke. Prussian Academy of Sciences. Vol. 6. Berlin: Reimer, 1914. 203-495. Kiening, Christian. Zwischen Körper und Schrift. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003. Kokott, Hartmut. «Zu den Wächter-Tageliedern Wolframs von Eschenbach. Acta Germanica 16 (1983): 25-41. Kraus, Carl von, ed. Deutsche Liederdichter des 13. Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1952/ 1958. Rosenhagen, Gustav, ed. Die Maße. Kleine mittelhochdeutsche Erzählungen, Fabeln und Lehrgedichte. Vol. 3. Die Heidelberger Handschrift cod. Pal. germ 341. 103-07. Scaglione, Aldo. Knights at Court. Courtliness, Chivalry and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: California UP, 1991. Schnyder, André. Das geistliche Taglied des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Textsammlung, Kommentar und Umrisse einer Gattungsgeschichte. Tübingen: A. Francke, 2004. Schweikle, Günter. Minnesang. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Moral Essays. Ed. T.E. Page et al. Transl. John Basore. Vol 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. 106-355. Shapiro, Marianne. «The Figure of the Watchman in the Provençal Erotic Alba» Modern Language Notes 91.4 (1976): 607-39. Thomasin von Zirclaria. Der Welsche Gast (The Italian Guest). Transl. Marion Gibbs and Winder McConnell. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009. 330 Alexander Sager Wolf, Alois. «Literarhistorische Aspekte der mittelalterlichen Tagelieddichtung.» Tagelieder des deutschen Mittelalters. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992. 11-81. -. Variation und Integration. Beobachtungen zu hochmittelalterlichen Tageliedern. Darmstadt; Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979. The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche: A Real Nobody W ILLIAM COLLINS DONAHUE Duk e Univ ersity Die Judenbuche concludes with what is possibly the most infamous corpse in all of German, if not world, literature. In a recent study intended to lay to rest - once and for all - decades of scholarly speculation regarding the identity of the decomposing cadaver found hanging in the eponymous tree of Droste’s novella, Norbert Mecklenburg would have us concede that it is really and truly Friedrich Mergel after all. 1 Despite the passion of Mecklenburg’s polemic (which if persuasive would take down a generation of prominent critics no less effectively than the story’s immensely successful timber poachers), 2 it fails to convince. And it fails, mainly, because of a certain «nobody.» Or, to put it more precisely, the most recent critical attempt incontrovertibly to identify the principal murder suspect in Droste’s «crime story» (she called it «eine Kriminalgeschichte» before her editor gave it its current title) founders on the figure of Johannes Niemand, whose name literally means «John Nobody.» He becomes the story’s crucial «third man» who, more than any other literary stratagem (in a work equipped with an impressive arsenal of narrative obfuscation), defies the reader’s thirst for closure. In this sense, we could say that he stabilizes the story’s instability. 3 Nobody ensures the mystery of this novella like Johannes Niemand. But that is just the precondition for the manner in which this uncanny figure of the «Third» insistently draws our attention to social arrangements in which natural resources and human relationships are captive to the ends of economic profit, while the execution of «justice» is undermined by self-interest and greed. To employ vocabulary from Droste’s own Catholic idiolect: Johannes Niemand represents an unfulfilled occasion of transcendence and grace. By viewing Niemand in this way, challenging though this may be to a secular age, we can move beyond a number of interpretive dyadic dead-ends. An unsettling figure, he demonstrates the insufficiency of positions represented by either pole of the respective bimodal relationship into which he is interposed. As a hermeneutic irritant, he steps between mother and son (Margaret and Friedrich); uncle and nephew (Simon and Friedrich); village dandy and his nemesis (Friedrich and young Hülsmeyer); between detective and 332 William Collins Donahue chief suspect (the Gutsherr and Friedrich); and ultimately between Christian majority and Jewish minority groups. In each case, this figure opens up a realm of social and religious critique that could not have emanated as clearly or as powerfully from the dichotomous pairings alone. Niemand is useful at a meta-analytic level as well. Once we have carefully examined his function within the narrative, I will switch registers and briefly address the critical literature on the topic of anti-Semitism. 4 For this debate, which I treat at the end of this essay, also tends to polarize readers in a manner that frequently only recapitulates on another level the need for fixed meaning, i.e., if we can never know for sure whether Friedrich Mergel has been masquerading as Niemand in the novella’s crucial final section, then we can at least achieve the hermeneutic satisfaction of «knowing» that the story - and its author - are steeped in anti-Semitism of various kinds. 5 I will argue that by drawing on what we have learned from Niemand - namely that «Christian» and «Jewish» are in this narrative rather unsteady categories and by no means simple opposites - we can come to a clearer understanding of the novella’s hotly debated anti-Semitism. It too, as I will show, is ambivalently «third» in nature: neither merely a blemish nor exclusively an instrument of critique. German literature’s most baffling detective story is really the story of two (and possibly more) murders and for the most part follows the trajectory of one young man, Friedrich Mergel, from his birth to his sudden disappearance from his Westphalian village at the age of eighteen. Friedrich is linked to both murders circumstantially. The victim of the first homicide, the forester Brandis, was leading a patrol one night against a famous band of timber poachers called the «Blue Smocks» (Blaukittel), locals who illegally «harvest» lumber from the forests of the aristocracy. They wear similarly looking apparel to avoid detection, and their indistinguishable attire can stand as just one of the story’s many images of obfuscation - which is often quite consciously intended by those wishing to avoid responsibility, but just as often the result of inherent ignorance, lack of evidence, pervasive prejudice, or superstition. Forester Brandis believes he is hot on the trail of the timber poachers when he encounters a sleepy Friedrich grazing his cattle; Brandis questions Friedrich aggressively - even derisively - and Friedrich responds by claiming to know nothing (which may or may not be true) and then by sending Brandis in the wrong direction, so that he will not meet up with his fellow foresters, who have gone off in the opposite direction. The forester is found dead the next morning, with an axe planted squarely in his skull. Because he was the The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 333 last person to see Brandis alive, Friedrich is a suspect, and even his mother, Margret, seems to suspect him (if only briefly); but Friedrich is not guilty of the actual murder, though he is certainly guilty of having lied to Brandis about the path taken by the other foresters. Did he knowingly send Brandis into an ambush? Or did he merely seek to discomfit a man who had just verbally abused him? We never know for sure - and our uncertainty even at this point has in part to do with Johannes Niemand, who, simply by resembling him and being distant from the crime scene, may unwittingly have provided Friedrich with an alibi during the inquest. The second murder, that of the Jew Aaron, occurs some years later, at a time when Friedrich has established himself as a popular and handsome young village dandy. Along with the entire village of B., he is attending a wedding, having a wonderful time showing off to the young women, dancing energetically, singing, and playing music. In a moment of braggadocio, he makes the mistake of showing off his as yet unpaid-for silver pocket watch, drawing the fire of a rival young man by the name of Hülsmeyer, who publicly taunts Friedrich about his debt to the Jew Aaron. As luck would have it, Aaron appears on the scene as if conjured by Hülsmeyer’s gibe, and, in the presence of the assembled wedding guests and to Friedrich’s deep shame, demands immediate payment. Both Friedrich and Johannes Niemand flee the scene. Aaron is found dead shortly thereafter, but this murder too remains unsolved. Friedrich - the chief suspect because of the altercation at the wedding - has fled the village, escaping the Baron’s attempt to surprise him at home. Friedrich is never heard from again - unless, of course, we believe the Baron, who in a cryptic final statement declares that the man who had returned to the village B. after twenty-eight years of «Turkish slavery,» and who had been identified by all (including the Baron himself) as Johannes Niemand, is in fact Friedrich Mergel. «Identifying» the dead man as Friedrich is meant to close the murder case on the tacit assumption that his suicide constitutes a confession of guilt. For, if the Baron is right, then order is restored, crime is punished, justice is done, and the mysterious «Jews’ beech tree» has somehow fulfilled the prophecy that it would lure the murderer back to the place of Aaron’s slaying so that he (the perpetrator) would suffer the same fate as his victim. 6 The Baron’s proclamation is doubly seductive in that it fulfills both an «enlightenment» agenda of identifying and prosecuting culprits, as well as a «supernatural» claim to mete out justice by the mysterious power of the «Hebrew charm» inscribed on the famous tree. 7 Droste no doubt meant her readers to sense the irresistible call of both aesthetic and ethical closure, but to be «haunted» as well by nagging suspicion 334 William Collins Donahue that none of this really adds up. Scholars have documented exhaustively the long list of narrative strategies which, upon closer examination, raise more than a reasonable doubt about the Baron’s final declaration. Of all of these, none is more efficacious (at a plot level) - and none less studied - than the «construct» of Johannes Niemand, a character who by his very name stands out in a story that famously lays claim to «realism» at multiple levels. 8 His name would seem rather to belong to the genre of fable or fairy tale, yet there it is: smack dab in the middle of a «true» story - one, as we shall see, that is allegedly truer than fiction - we encounter a figure whose very name cries out for interpretation, refusing to be marginalized from the narrative, despite his obviously marginal social status. Peter Foulkes rightly points out that Niemand appears to possess some of the traits of the «dreamy» (träumerisch) young Friedrich. But he goes a bit too far, I think, when he suggests «that Johannes and Friedrich are, for part of the story, separate manifestations of the same self» (Foulkes xxvii). 9 This relegates Niemand to a secondary status, to the functional equivalent of Friedrich’s «other self, that of a ragged shepherd boy lost in dream and thought» (xxix). In this reading, Niemand, demoted to the protagonist’s alter ego, is used to explain why people mistook Friedrich for Niemand upon his return as an old man after twenty-eight years of forced labor, which is just another way of flattening the story, rounding its corners, solving its puzzles. The mystery dissolves, in other words, if the man going by the name Niemand in the final scenes, as Foulkes suggests, is really Friedrich (xxix). 10 Yet, in fact, Niemand is a «real» nobody; that is, he has ontological status on par with all other characters of the novella. And this matters, because without it, the story simply loses its punch: we need that fundamental ingredient of any good detective story - the very real possibility of mistaken identity, and with it the challenge to solving the murder(s). Niemand carries the novella, so to speak, at this basic narratological level. Without him we have no «crime story» as envisioned by the author. But what of his deeper meaning for the story? Here we need to attend closely to the scene in which he is introduced to the novella and to those scenes where he makes what is usually an abrupt but prominent appearance. Unlike the other more rounded characters, Niemand is defined by, and continually associated with, privation, humiliation, poverty, and emargination. Unlike Margret, for example, whose character unites the disparate features of loving mother and simple anti-Semite, Niemand is consistently characterized as the underprivileged outsider par excellence in this society. He is, Margret surmises, the bastard son of her brother Simon; accordingly, he bears the «surname» of «nobody» precisely because he has no demonstrable The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 335 paternity, and thus cannot inherit Simon’s (then) considerable wealth. Little is known or narrated about him. In fact Niemand is introduced to us just as Simon «adopts» Friedrich in what ultimately amounts to a kind of purchase. Relatedly, though in starker terms, Niemand emerges as the novella’s mobile icon of human commodification: exploited by Simon for all manner of work, yet improperly cared for like the unwanted orphan he essentially is. Margret perceives his real status only gradually: «‹Hebt man dir nichts auf? ›» she asks, as she considers giving him some food; «‹Sprich, wer sorgt für dich? › - ‹Niemand,› stotterte das Kind. - ‹Niemand? › wiederholte sie; ‹da nimm, nimm! › fügte sie heftig hinzu; ‹du heisst Niemand und niemand sorgt für dich! Das sei Gott geklagt! ›» (14-15). In her dawning recognition of someone even worse off than herself (and she is already sinking into desperate poverty), Margret resemanticizes the boy’s name (who, notably, becomes a «child» in her eyes) to direct us not simply to his legal status, but to the material destitution that results from it. It is a crime against the divine order, she exclaims. As a figure of privation and human exploitation, Niemand serves to accentuate similar themes in each of the scenes in which he appears. When we first meet him - one of the novella’s most remarkable scenes - Margret mistakes him for her own son, Friedrich. It is by no means a fleeting misprision; on the contrary, the misidentification continues for some time as she goes back and forth in her own mind (13). The scene draws attention to the way in which Margret is in a sense correct in her very mistake. For the «adoption» of her son Friedrich is at bottom a kind of human trafficking, in which Simon bribes his sister to acquire him. Simon draws attention to her advancing age, and points ominously to her poverty and lack of options, as well as to Friedrich’s much better financial prospects under his tutelage. There can be no missing the fact that this is at heart a financial deal in which Friedrich is reduced to a commodity (very much like Niemand) and Margret, his older sister, to a mere business partner: «So kam es denn dahin, dass nach einer halbstündigen Unterredung Simon eine Art Adoption des Knaben in Vorschlag brachte […] Margret liess sich geduldig auseinandersetzen, wie gross der Vorteil, gering die Entbehrung ihrerseits bei dem Handel sei» (10; my emphasis). The point is driven home later when Friedrich drops in to offer her some of his earnings, which she initially rejects as dirty money, having come from Simon. Though she quickly loses her resolve, her first response is repulsion: «‹Geld vom Simon? Wirf’s fort, fort! ›» (15). The net result of this commercialized «adoption» is her inconsolable misery and loneliness. The most intimate of human relations - between mother and son, between sister 336 William Collins Donahue and brother - have been commodified, and this to her constitutes by far the worst of all her sufferings (15). This is the foundational moment - the «establishing shot» to speak in the parlance of film studies - in which Droste uses the «third man» to highlight themes that will dominate the novella until its climactic end. Niemand breaks open the dyadic relationship between mother and child as well as sister and brother; he is the alien, yet familiar «third» in each relationship, shining a clarifying light upon them all. In a novella known for its obscurity - Foulkes rightly refers to it as «this twilight world» of uncertainties even at the factual level (xxvi) - Johannes becomes a beacon of sustained social critique, alerting us to the fact that even in this preindustrial agrarian idyll of Westphalia, «Handel» frequently means «Menschenhandel,» and that the desire for financial gain can distort and utterly debase human relationships. The wedding scene, which marks the second principal appearance of Niemand, has been much discussed in the secondary literature and can perhaps for this reason be dealt with fairly quickly. 11 The marriage itself, between an elderly rich man and a beautiful young woman, is clearly all about wealth and social status: «‹Du hast nun genug geweint,› sagte er verdriesslich; ‹bedenk, du bist es nicht, die mich glücklich macht, ich mache dich glücklich! ›» (28). With tears in her eyes, the bride assents to the status quo in which marriage is expressed as a financial transaction: «Das Geschäft war beendigt; die junge Frau hatte ihrem Manne zugetrunken» (29) - but not before the narrator contrasts this unhappy union with the ideal of true (and erotic) love from the biblical Song of Songs: «Er stand neben ihr, durchaus nicht wie der Bräutigam des Hohenliedes, der ‹in die Kammer tritt wie die Morgensonne›» (28). Framing this cameo event is the larger narrative involving Friedrich and his adversaries. First it is the young Hülsmeyer, who, as we noted, intentionally provokes Friedrich (competing for the alpha male’s dominance of the younger crowd) by publicly revealing that the very item with which Friedrich intends to impress, the silver pocket watch, is essentially stolen goods. While he does not actually deprive Friedrich of the elegant watch that he has ostentatiously withdrawn from his pocket and dangled for all (especially the young women) to see and marvel at, Hülsmeyer’s challenge does amount to an act of at least metaphorical emasculation: Friedrich is not the man he claims to be because he cannot pay his bills; his value as a man has been slashed, so to speak. The second antagonist is of course Aaron himself, who, it must be said (and this point has not been emphasized sufficiently in the critical literature focusing on the novella’s traffic in anti-Semitism), first attempts to take Friedrich aside and handle things quietly. But Friedrich must show he is a man, and thus refuses with overwrought machismo to The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 337 yield the spotlight. As a result he is publicly humiliated (now for the second time) when Aaron demands «laut und vor allen Leuten» (29) the ten Thaler that are already over six months past due. Prefacing, and to some extant overlapping, both of these «masculinity duels» is the incident with poor Niemand, who is again inserted into a context of multiple dyadic interactions that tell their own story - or try to do so, but are pertinaciously interrupted by this third figure. Droste employs him here - as elsewhere - to cast the event in terms of human (d)evaluation based on wealth status, thus adding to these scenes of gender shaming a specific hue that links the events to her larger concern. 12 The reader will recall that just prior to Friedrich’s humiliation, Niemand has been caught in the improbable act of stealing butter from the opulent buffet. On first reading, this act can strike us as a somewhat comic scene - the foolish thief, the shlemiel, who doesn’t understand that he will very likely expose himself (as of course he does when he stands too close to the fireplace and grease is seen dripping from his coat pocket). And his plight certainly does provide some entertainment for the guests. But the narrator - who is so uncertain about many other key events and motivations - steps in to defend this «butter thief»: «Johannes, der arme Teufel, dem zu Hause das Schlechteste gut genug sein musste, hatte versucht, sich ein halbes Pfündchen Butter für die kommende Dürre zu sichern […]» (28). For others, the wedding was just one more big feast, but for him it was a rare occasion of plenty - and one he is only allowed to partake in due to the custom calling for all the village’s inhabitants to be included. His theft was simply an attempt to stave off the coming hunger, when, once again, no one would care for him, an arrangement in which, one could say, the entire village tacitly conspires. 13 For this «stupidity,» he harvests a public beating from his only friend (Friedrich), the very same person who repeatedly claims him as his «Schützling» (protégé). Niemand truly has nobody. Friedrich clearly enjoys his leading role - until, that is, he is upstaged by his clownish, unmannered look-alike. This is why Niemand gets the beating, then, not for the petty thievery. He is punished for stopping the action, as it were - for stealing the show. For he does not in this scene merely introduce the theme of personal shame, which will then be echoed more forcefully in Friedrich’s double humiliation. Rather, his plight suggests more broadly that this is a pervasive, societal form of degradation that judges human beings by their possessions and in the process literally «dis-graces» their humanity. He is particularly well-poised to do this precisely because he is a narrative nobody, a social third, as it were, lacking in rich characterization and dissociated from desires and plotlines that might otherwise distract the reader from this central issue. 338 William Collins Donahue Furthermore, Niemand’s humiliation reminds us, retrospectively, that one of the key reasons for the failure of the first murder investigation lies in the fact that the court, places trust in dubious testimony in large part because it is given by «propertied» (and thus respectable) residents. 14 In this way, Niemand functions as the hermeneutic «clue» to the whole inquest, uniting otherwise disparate events in the narrative and in the process solving the «mystery» of what might seem digressive or even random narration. With the figure of Niemand, Droste elevates conventional detective fiction to social and religious commentary. Indeed, once interjected into the narrative, and reintroduced at key points, Niemand functions as a kind of «black light,» making visible plot elements that might otherwise be overlooked or remain dormant. Returning for a moment to the first half of the novella, for example, we notice now, more clearly perhaps than before, that the key motivation for Friedrich’s famous lie (which sent Brandis in the wrong direction and ultimately to his untimely death) was an imprecation that reduces Friedrich - precisely because of his poverty - to the status of a nobody: «Ihr Lumpenpack, dem kein Ziegel auf dem Dach gehört! Bis zum Betteln habt ihr es, gottlob, bald gebracht, und an meiner Tür soll deine Mutter, die alte Hexe, keine verschimmelte Brotrinde bekommen. Aber vorher sollt ihr mir noch beide ins Hundeloch» (19). Brandis’s extensive verbal abuse of young Friedrich and his mother hardly seems calculated to get the boy’s cooperation, and it certainly keeps us from viewing him (Brandis) as an untarnished hero - amounting to just one of Droste’s many nuanced qualifications in characterization. But the larger point for this discussion links back to questions of wealth, social status, and human value itself, for the narrator has already made it clear that the ownership of the trees in the forest is both contested and legitimately contestable. Those who are charged with meting out local justice, namely the landed aristocracy (and in this case the «Gutsherr» or Baron), are so authorized based solely on their property ownership. The very title in German emphasizes that the status of «lord» (Herr) follows from his possessions (Gut, Güter). Yet these barons are themselves parties to the dispute regarding the proper ownership (and stewardship) of the very natural resources in question, and thus hardly dispassionate observers. Lurking within this narrative is the very conflict Kleist exploits to great comic and sociocritical effect in Der zerbrochene Krug. To understand the administration of «justice» as a privilege of wealth, which may otherwise seem digressive from our focus on Niemand, allows us now to view Brandis not as the unquestioned representative of some kind of disinterested, evenhanded, enlightenment-based legal code (as some in- The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 339 terpreters have seen him), but rather as a partisan enforcer of the interests of the propertied class. Brecht will make this point less subtly in Die Mutter (in which the protagonist’s central realization is that the police are really the factory owners’ hired thugs, rather than the impartial protector of all); and Dürrenmatt, too, in his best play, Der Besuch der alten Dame, will make a related point with unforgettable pithiness: «anständig ist nur der, der Geld hat.» Die Judenbuche is perhaps less polemical, but no less powerful in showing how those without wealth and property - those like Friedrich, Margret, and ultimately Simon - become ipso facto social «nobodies.» For Droste, however - and this sets her apart from her more contemporary secular colleagues - this matter possesses a significant theological dimension, posing the question of how God’s green earth should be shared, cared for, and managed. Human value, in this novella at least, is linked closely with questions of divine (dis)order. The story’s climax occurs in those scenes in which Niemand is perhaps most obviously the interjected «third» character. The dyad that structures this part of the story consists of the Baron and Friedrich. When the latter becomes the prime suspect in the murder of Aaron, the Baron leads the police brigade to Friedrich’s house in order to supervise the arrest. This time around, the Baron does not leave the execution of justice to his hapless court recorder Kapp, but rather takes personal charge of the entire murder investigation. Friedrich barely manages to avoid arrest - his bed is still warm when the police arrive - and successfully flees the country. Yet even in his absence, he remains very much the concern of the Baron. For a quarter century the Baron and the missing Friedrich remain firmly associated - even, or especially, when the Baron receives «evidence» that might exonerate his prime suspect. Into this binary configuration steps Niemand, abruptly as always: «Friedrich war hin, verschwunden und - Johannes Niemand, der arme, unbeachtete Johannes, am gleichen Tage mit ihm -» (34). The ostentatious graphic use of the final dash (leading, significantly, to nothing) and the subsequent textual empty space separating this from the next and final passage constitute, as narratologist Dorrit Cohn has shown with reference to other canonical texts, a prominent marker of «pregnant meaning.» 15 We are meant to notice the role of Niemand here - both as an alternate suspect (who thus builds suspense and curiosity), but also in his own right, namely as «the poor, disregarded (or unvalued) Johannes.» 16 At least until the Baron’s final, enigmatic declaration, everyone thinks the old man hanging in the Jews’ beech tree is none other than Niemand, just as there had been an absolutely uncontested consensus on his identity heretofore as the old man who returns after twen- 340 William Collins Donahue ty-eight years from «Turkish slavery» on that fateful cold and snowy Christmas Eve of 1788. To my argument it matters not at all whether this person is «actually» Niemand or Mergel, for he is of course neither «actually»; Droste has very carefully created the obscurity that she productively exploits. Important, however, is that all the intradiegetic figures accept this returnee as Niemand after not a little inspection of his physical attributes (including his neck, by the way), careful reflection, and consultation with the village elders (who would have remembered the two escapees as young men). Why is this so? And why are we so willing (if indeed we are) to flip over to the Baron’s side at the end? Droste has ingeniously lured us into the very prejudicial mindset that is her target of critique. For it somehow «makes sense» within the symbolic economy of the novella that a lonely, poverty-stricken old man be seen as a «nobody» rather than as the former village dandy with so much promise. Accordingly, this «Niemand» (and let us assume for now that he is who he says he is) is treated as someone both easily sidelined and yet quite «usable,» as distinctly fungible. Just as in his youth, Niemand presents himself as a mere messenger for others (a classic third figure) - a task that does not appear particularly well suited to his decrepitude, yet one to which the Baron immediately acquiesces. As a «nobody,» he can make himself useful - that is, of value - only by carrying out the wishes and errands of others. He is the quintessentially heteronomous individual in the Kantian sense, a status indicated, sometimes condescendingly, sometimes compassionately, by the designation «Kind» (child), applied long after this makes any sense from a chronological point of view. 17 Recall that he was first introduced as a figure lacking in «Würde» and in «Selbstständigkeit» (13); these privations appear to match those of the broken and impoverished old man returning on that cold Christmas night. Indeed, he is subordinate, dependent, and fully answerable to the desires of others - especially those of the Baron, who uses Niemand also as a source of cheap entertainment. He meets with him on numerous occasions to hear rousing tales of exotic adventures in the Muslim world far beyond the confines of this rural German principality. But he clearly doesn’t trust Niemand: the latter is good enough for telling a thrilling tale, but far too «simple» actually to be believed. (This echoes the famous passage, discussed below, where the narrator explains that only fanciful fictions - not true stories - satisfy our thirst for divine justice and narrative closure.) In fact, Niemand is held in such low esteem that he is judged not even capable of the degree of agency that mental illness or suicidal tendencies would require: «er war sein Leben lang ein Simpel; simple Leute werden nie verrückt» (39), opines the Baron. The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 341 We will never know how Niemand ends up in the Jews’ beech, but we can now understand better why he is brought into such close narrative association with it. Recall that it stands as a memorial to the unsolved murder of the Jew Aaron, but it only stands at all because the Jewish community has bought it from the Baron. This is an aspect of the story that is often overlooked. The Baron, who after all is unable to solve the Jew’s murder, and thus leaves Aaron’s wife’s emotionally charged request for justice unfulfilled, nevertheless has no compunction about accepting 200 Thaler - ten times the price of Friedrich’s silver pocket watch - as payment for the tree. Clearly it is an inflated price: «‹Wollen wir sie doch nicht um gewöhnlichen Preis›» - says an unidentified Jewish community leader, using a kind of «Judendeutsch» or «muscheln» - «Sie boten zweihundert Taler. Der Handel ward geschlossen […]» (33; my emphasis). This illicit gain from Jewish wealth - profiting from the misfortune of Jews - anachronistically evokes what we would, a century later, call «Aryanization.» 18 The Baron, the highest ranking member of the Christian community, has, in passing, essentially put a price on Aaron, and taken money for a memorial he might have granted simply out of a sense of human dignity and compassion. But the death of a Jew - like numerous other intimate acts - is reduced to a business transaction that ensures only that one tree stands prominently on his property; ostensibly this functions as a «Mahnmal» to Aaron’s murderer, but it is no less a beacon of the Baron’s failure to deliver justice. In this way, the novella suggests the quiet but pervasive sense in which Jews in this society amount to «nobodies.» If there is any doubt on this count, one need only consider the deindividualized nomenclature employed for Jews throughout: «the Jew Aaron» (but then so many of «them» are called Aaron, as one of the Baron’s Christian aristocratic cronies reminds us); «the Usury- Joel» (Wucherjoel); «Aaron’s wife» (never given a name like Margret, her Christian counterpart); «their rabbi»; «the Israelites» (Israeliten), etc. All are basically anonymous and virtually interchangeable - as «nobodies» generally are. On this reading, Johannes Niemand’s own body becomes the true cipher of the Jews’ beech tree, rather than the ominous Hebrew inscription that appears to promise retributive justice: «Wenn du dich diesem Orte nahest, so wird es dir ergehen, wie du mir getan hast» (42). The Christian Nobody ironically comes to serve as a surprisingly legible epitaph for both the tree proper and the story itself. But it does so as counterpoint to the Hebrew inscription, rather than as proof of its fulfillment. 19 Indeed this famously disputed corpse emerges as a monument to unrequited justice, a mockery of the oppressed minority’s plea for righteousness, and a painful reminder of the 342 William Collins Donahue extortionist «deal» that, like conscience itself, was to remind the community of its obligation to all, including the «least» among them. To understand the tree’s uncanny «power» in this way - the mysterious sway it possesses over both the figures within the diegesis and the decades of critics who have been drawn to this story - thus does not require us to seek recourse to magic or the supernatural. Equally important in this discussion is the profound «presence of absence» marked by the Hebrew-inscribed tree: for the Jews’ beech now stands alone in a meadow that was once thick with forest. 20 As the camera pulls back, so to speak, we see the great emptiness and understand that the Baron has systematically sold off all the other trees that once surrounded it. This too demonstrates how the Jews’ beech tree unites the disparate internal tales: what for the «Blaukittel» constituted the grave crime (and alleged moral infraction) of timber poaching remains for the Baron a privilege based on class and birth. Dangling from the Jews’ beech like the silver pocket watch from Friedrich’s hands, Niemand’s corpse calls out for another kind of justice. To make my point about the power of the «Third» in this alluring, maddeningly oblique, and still widely read story, I have not given Droste her full due. In attending to the novella’s critique of human commodification as it is poignantly highlighted by the figure of Niemand, one could easily forget that the narrator treats her figures (or most of them) with notable gentleness, kindness, and compassion. Excepting those «Jewish nobodies» and Niemand himself, the narrator is frequently found vacillating, qualifying, providing mitigating circumstances, withholding explicit judgment (or placing it quickly in doubt), contradicting herself, and not infrequently simply falling silent on matters that would be of great importance (at least to a «criminal story») out of apparent humility or simple ignorance. One is in fact reminded of Fontane’s loving depictions of Prussians that intermingle a warm tolerance for human weakness («menschlich allzu menschlich») with incisive social critique - but never one at the expense of the other. This approach is evident particularly in the final portion of the novella that begins with the observance of Christmas Eve and the return of Niemand after the twenty-eight-year hiatus. To be clear: Niemand is no simple «Christ figure.» Droste does not traffic in such easy allegories. But his return as well as his ultimate demise are clearly framed in striking Christian imagery that will require us to view him within that religious context. Thus, on the night commemorating Christ’s birth - literally the «Holy Night» of Christian hymnody - we encounter a homeless man seeking shelter; he is told to go to the local inn, and while it is not quite the case that «there is no room at the inn,» it is true that his poverty, like that of the Holy Fam- The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 343 ily’s in the biblical Christmas story, limits his options, and lands him on a bed of straw. The locals are leery of this disfigured stranger and certainly do not welcome this alien intrusion on one of their biggest holidays - despite the fact, of course, that this very holiday should remind them precisely of their religious obligations to the poor, the homeless, and the outcast. The well-known hymn that Droste has them sing (as well as the verses explicitly referred to but not included verbatim in the text) at the stroke of midnight surely casts their fearful, isolationist, and acquisitive behavior in ironic and critical light. 21 But Droste does not let her Christian community fail utterly. Under duress, with notable hesitation, and perhaps with something less than full compassion and generosity, they nevertheless do admit the old man, give him a humble bed, and gradually readmit him to their society, albeit in a partial and fully subaltern status. The Baron, for all his evident shortcomings and willing instrumentalization of this poverty-stricken old man, does at least arrange for modest food and shelter, as he had also done for Margret. Droste’s - like Fontane’s - are humanely mixed figures, neither demons nor angels, neither villains nor heroes. If they fall short, it is not by the externally imposed standard of a judgmental omniscient narrator, but by their own community - and in this case, religious - standards. The Christmas Eve scene is thus both a bit of an idyll - reminiscent of Stifter’s Bergkristall (1845) - and an unmistakable form of communal selfindictment. As we have seen throughout, the villagers’ tendency is to judge human value by wealth and property; in other words, to put a price on something which, in their own religious worldview, is fundamentally God-given. The story of the forest thieves - in which the narrator allows us to consider the aristocratic landholders as equally rapacious as the «Blaukittel» - simply echoes and gives depth to this same theme. Indeed these diverse strands come poignantly together in the Jews’ purchase of the beech tree, as we have observed above. On all of this, Johannes Niemand trains a consistent semiotic beam, revealing the underlying unity of this otherwise rather loosely told story. The novella’s conclusion is particularly infused with religious signification. There is no getting around that. It is not a crucifixion scene per se; the reference to Christ’s passion, while unmistakable, is rendered in what Emily Dickinson might have called a deliberately «slant» manner. Further, there is no reason to believe that the Baron is even thinking along these lines. Nevertheless, he becomes the vehicle (or narrative occasion) for the biblical allusion when he speaks his famous final line: «Es ist nicht recht, dass der Unschuldige für den Schuldigen leide; sagt es nur allen Leuten; der da 344 William Collins Donahue […] war Friedrich Mergel» (roughly: «It is not right that the innocent one should die for the guilty; just tell everyone that this man was Friedrich Mergel»). 22 What we hear in these lines - even if the Baron may be deaf to this meaning - is a reprise of the Christmas Eve technique discussed above. The community, this time in the person of the Baron, is once again engaging in a moment of unconscious self-indictment by distancing itself from its Christian calling at the very moment of its articulation. The refusal to see «Niemand» in the tree constitutes in this sense a renunciation of divine grace, or on the purely human level, a rejection of the possibility that this suicide represents Niemand’s perhaps ill-conceived attempt to atone for the guilt of his lifelong friend, Friedrich. At any rate, the phrase «just tell everyone» suggests damage control or political spin rather than dispassionate empirical deduction. Rather than consider why or how Niemand would come to hang in this tree, the Baron opts for a kind of closure that confirms a worldview in which innocence and guilt can be neatly sorted out and human reason can penetrate the darkest of mysteries. Intentionally or not, it is a decision that reinforces the status quo, with him at the helm. On the one hand, we could say that Niemand’s substitution is a kind of narrative necessity: for only by acquiescing, however ephemerally, in the Baron’s «identification» can we come to see our own authoritarian hermeneutic proclivities. In the face of implacable doubt, we may feel the irresistible pull to accede to the dicta of the powers that be in closing the Iserian «Leerstelle.» 23 There is an additional reason, however, why Droste made the disappearance plausible - if only provisionally. For to leave Niemand there unequivocally - as a sacrificial fellow traveler, trying in some crazy way to atone to the Jews (or to God) for the murder he thinks his friend may actually have committed - would have suggested a moment of efficacious grace that Droste did not wish simply to fiat into narrative existence. That would indeed have constituted what one might call a brand of «Christian socialist realism» by positing the precise (religious) solution to the story’s insistent query. Unlike the Baron, however, Droste opts for indecision rather than definitive removal of Johannes Niemand from the narrative, and while Niemand is surely the figure that makes this indecision possible, he is not to be equated with the author’s strategy of creating a third hermeneutic position that neither nullifies nor synthesizes, but rather depends upon the viability of the other two. 24 Of course, the story itself warns against its own ending. In a moment of striking authorial intrusion («auktorial» in Stanzel’s terms), the narrator cautions that neat endings are apposite of fiction, in which a reader’s carefully cultivated «curiosity» requires unambiguous answers, whereas The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 345 true stories (such as hers) tend not to deliver that kind of gratification: «Es würde in einer erdichteten Geschichte unrecht sein, die Neugier des Lesers so zu täuschen. Aber dies alles hat sich wirklich zugetragen; ich kann nichts davon oder dazu tun» (24). 25 While this in itself does not decide the matter, it remains one of the better known strategies (among many others) that keeps the «Niemand option» open to readers. Understanding that Niemand does not simply «exit» the novella by baronial proclamation is crucial on a number of levels. In this final section, I wish to show its relevance for one of the most controversial topics in the prolific secondary literature, namely the manner in which Die Judenbuche exhibits and addresses anti-Semitism. How Die Judenbuche participates in and/ or deploys anti-Judaic and anti- Semitic sentiments has indeed dominated discussions of the text over the last fifteen years. The work of Jefferson Chase, Martha Helfer, and myself in particular illuminates the diverse and variegated ways in which anti-Jewish prejudice is undeniably present here. While I cannot do justice to the long and nuanced discussions here, I would like to highlight two classic - or «ideal» - positions that have emerged as untenable. 26 On the one hand, it has not been possible to fully «exonerate» either the author or the narrative by arguing that each and every specimen of «anti-Semitism» (a word I will use as shorthand for an array of prejudicial positions) is attributable to a critical agenda that systematically targets rather than affirms anti-Semitism. On the other hand, one can not make a convincing case that anti-Semitism is simply a regrettable ideological stain that has no redeemable function in this otherwise extremely sophisticated work. Disagreements turn on such fundamental and key matters as whose anti-Semitism is at issue - i.e., to whom are we to attribute the respective anti-Semitic sentiments - and on the equally crucial question of what constitutes such a moment. In other words, beyond the obvious culprits, what other kinds of behavior, perpetrated by non-Jews, is negatively coded as «Jewish»? What does Johannes Niemand have to say about all this? To put it succinctly, I would say that by attending to him we can move beyond what has become - sometimes against the critics’ own intentions - an interpretive bypass. Niemand does not by any means remove anti-Semitism as a serious interpretive irritant that arises necessarily from a realistic depiction of Jews in early nineteenth-century Germany. Anyone seeking to depict their «true» status, as our narrator assures us is her overall goal in painting this «Sittengemälde,» will of necessity reinscribe the very emargination and discrimination that characterizes Jewish life at this time. And this inevitably runs the risk of appearing «naturalizing» or affirmative. If Jews are to ap- 346 William Collins Donahue pear as the social «nobodies» they actually were, their very depiction as such can appear to be a benediction on the status quo. But if we view this in light of Niemand, then we see that Droste has consistently portrayed Christians as perpetrators of a social and economic hierarchy that systematically distorts human value, relegating those without property, standing or position to an outsider status. The examination of Niemand’s role throughout the novella has shown us nothing if not the manner in which Christian society tries - but repeatedly fails - to naturalize this behavior, and indeed to «bless» it as consonant with the same religious principles it professes. Droste - precisely through the figure of Niemand - shows how these efforts founder, resulting in self-indictment. In this sense, then, it is not Friedrich who is the novella’s «hidden Jew» (pace Helfer), but Niemand who becomes the «Jew» writ large - visible in his vulnerability perhaps precisely because he is not a Jew for whom this would otherwise be «natural.» To some this will constitute an «instrumentalization» of Jews or seem a suspect appropriation of Jewish experience, and perhaps it is both. In any case, it helps us grasp more accurately the predominant modes that govern the novella’s «use» of anti-Semitism. But there is more. By hanging in the tree in apparent expiation for the murder of the Jew Aaron, Niemand reminds us by virtue of his very stylized appellation that the entire process of detection is in a sense misdirected. In a society that views Jews as deserving of whatever random violence they may experience (and here we recall the lesson that Margret teaches young Friedrich: if Hülsmeyer senior really did beat Aaron, then the Jew surely got what was coming to him) - in such a society, one need not really look very far for a plausible perpetrator. Just as Jews prove to be virtually interchangeable in the Christian mindset of this story, so too do Christians become generic as potential perpetrators of anti-Jewish crime. «Niemand» did it: this is as much to say as «anybody» committed the crime. Long before the Baron arrives on the scene to enact the judicial peripeteia, we have actually received a valid verdict - at least in the sense of larger-scale culpability. For this story is not reducible to Friedrich or Aaron no matter how much we wish to think it is. Yet it is not simply in broadening out the circle of suspects to include virtually any member of a Christian society that condones anti-Jewish violence that Niemand fulfills his function as «corrective» to the debate on the novel’s anti-Semitism. He takes us one step further still. For throughout he has been a cipher of underprivilege due in large part to his penury. This has been a constant, the key to his illumination of other scenes and relationships that essentially operate on the same, often tacit, principle. But now it is Niemand The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 347 himself who initiates an interpretive peripeteia: by hanging in the Jews’ beech as potential perpetrator, he is powerfully juxtaposed with Aaron in a manner that had hitherto not been the case. And in that intimate configuration we recognize in a flash that it is of course not alone material possessions that determine social standing. Not for all, and certainly not for the Jews. Aaron’s relative wealth failed to purchase him either security or social standing. And the collective wealth of the Jewish community did not buy it justice. Niemand bears witness, so to speak, to the fact that Jews could not buy their way even into this world of commodified human relationships. In this sense, he returns to the Jews what they had given him: In the end - and at the end - he serves to illuminate their particular vulnerability, rather than vice versa. This reading of Niemand thus weighs in heavily upon the «critical» side of the anti-Semitism debate. For example, the limited portrayal of Aaron as a venal moneylender, as well as Margret’s crass assumptions about «Jewish» extortionist lending practices, can now be seen, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, 27 as part of a larger, critical deployment of anti-Jewish stereotypes. But this is no easy, nor blanket benediction upon the wide array of (what we now see as) anti-Semitic imagery and characterization. Precisely by linking our analysis to this nebulous, vulnerable figure of the «Third,» we can see how easily the critique - like Niemand himself - can be emarginated, or «disappeared» by readers. It remains risky business: not self-evident, but an argument that needs to be made and remade. If this reading fails fully to confirm the «critical» reading of anti-Semitism, neither does it fully support the all-too-easy condemnatory impulse that views the novella’s anti-Semitism as an ideological contaminant - emanating from the author’s own prejudice as well as from the shared values of her time - that has been «secreted» into the narrative. To say this is to modify my own prior work, which, I fear, provides some of the best-known fodder for the view that the author’s own anti-Semitism raises fundamental doubts about her famous tale. 28 This, too, proves to be an untenably reductive view. For if we read from the perspective of Niemand (and the hermeneutic role he plays in the story), it becomes improbable to believe that minor characters, such as the Jews, are meant simply to be normalized and affirmed in their abject status. The unfortunate effect of some scholarship on this matter has been, I would argue, to supply readers (even when they have misconstrued the scholars in question) a faux certainty about the text’s suspect ideology, a kind of certainty that substitutes for that of which they have been deprived regarding the identity of Aaron’s murderer. Some of the eagerness to view Die Judenbuche in this light surely stems from a larger negative view of «tradition» in general (a critical position widely underwritten by Habermas), 29 348 William Collins Donahue and of German realism in particular as a fundamentally deceptive enterprise (sponsored by Robert Holub’s influential Reflections of Realism, and more generally by the Frankfurt School). Reading with Niemand, however, we can see that anti-Semitic depictions are neither spirited into the narrative under the cover of night, nor are they incidental blemishes that can be separated out from an otherwise respectable narrative. Like Niemand, the Jews remain largely on the margins, but nevertheless are on occasion thrust - perhaps distastefully at times - to the center of the narrative. Indeed, they have a great deal in common: For to see Niemand in the tree is inevitably vividly to recall Aaron - for whom the tree was after all «rescued.» Yet while my reading of Niemand is meant to reassess this potent debate in the critical literature by urging us to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of both «ideal» positions that characterize the anti-Semitism discussion, the real value may lie elsewhere. For the trajectory of Niemand in Die Judenbuche in the end undermines the very distinction between Christian and Jew upon which the narrative otherwise depends. This remarkable figure of the «Third» does not reconcile, dissolve, or resolve the two antagonistic religious traditions. Yet, paradoxically, as the «crucified» Christian outsider, he reflects in his own being the plight of the Jews, even while he illuminates what is distinctive to their exclusion. As a literary construct, and a figure of aesthetic analysis, Niemand is given the uncanny ability to move back and forth between the two opposed camps, to «represent» each (scandalous as this may seem to some), and to capture what is common to both. In short, he does what nobody else can. Notes 1 Mecklenburg suggests that it is a modernist or postmodernist theoretical game we play when we insist that the novella ends with conspicuous indeterminacy; we are reading the novella out of context, he argues, and failing to attend to the author’s carefully planted cues that should lead the properly schooled reader to resolution rather than bewilderment. 2 And this, as the following makes clear, is precisely his intent: «Annette von Droste- Hülshoffs Erzählung Die Judenbuche, seit über einem Jahrhundert ein kanonisches Werk der deutschen Literatur, in über sechs Millionen Exemplaren verbreitet, in viele Sprachen der Welt übersetzt, ist von den professionellen Interpreten permanent und fast ausnahmslos falsch gelesen worden und wird es weiterhin» (11). 3 But this is not simply to hand the victory to Mecklenburg’s opponents. For the function of this third man does not merely serve to confirm a postmodern worldview in which indeterminacy has the final word. Indeed, this «nobody» functions not only to frustrate our deep-seated detection desires (and thereby metaphorically to gesture to broader conditions of epistemological unknowability), but rather to point to a third The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 349 way, as I argue below. For a selection of critics who have argued for indeterminacy, see Brown, «The Real Mystery»; Mellen, «Ambiguity and Intent»; Kraus, «Das offene Geheimnis»; Bernd, «Clarity & Obscurity.» Critics who argue (in various ways) for closure and successful detection of Aaron’s murderer are: Raleigh Whitinger, «From Confusion to Clarity»; Larry D. Wells, «Indeterminacy as Provocation»; and Wolfgang Wittkowski, «Das Rätsel.» For an overview of the critical literature on this point see Donahue, «‹Ist er kein Jude›» 44 and 65-66. 4 Despite the polemical nature of much of his study, Mecklenburg helpfully - and for the most part, quite reasonably - summarizes the fairly recent spate of articles examining its association with anti-Semitism (Mecklenburg 109-21). For an assessment of his book, see my review in German Studies Review 33.2-(2010): 449-51. 5 See especially Jefferson Chase, «Part of the Story»; Karin Doerr, «The Specter of Anti-Semitism,» Martha Helfer, «‹Wer wagt es›»; William Donahue «‹Ist er kein Jude›»; Richard Gray, «Red Herrings.» 6 Contrary to normal critical practice, I refer to the title in English as the «Jews’» beech tree (emphasizing the plural possessive) in order to stress the communal meaning (and ownership) of this tree. It is not Aaron’s tree, but the Jewish community’s, paid for at a considerable price. 7 This is a phrase taken from Jane Brown’s pathbreaking article «The Real Mystery,» in which she supports the Baron’s identification of Friedrich by pointing to the Ulysses intertext early in the novella; this, she argues, supports identification of a long-lost loved one via the story of Ulysses and his childhood scar. The only problem with this supposition, however, is that there is no mention of Friedrich ever having had a scar, nor does the Baron make the connection as is overtly the case in Homer when the old nanny recognizes the scar. 8 For a recent example, see Geoff Baker’s «Realism and the Problem of Empiricism in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche,» which convincingly places the novella in the realist tradition by documenting its pervasive (but not exclusive) use of empiricism, both at the level of plot and of narration/ form. More traditional approaches to the novella as literary realism can be found in Heitmann, McClain, and Silz. 9 Foulkes’s sterling introduction is as valuable as many a freestanding research article, and is one of the few essays to offer an interpretation of Johannes Niemand, though one that I will wish to qualify. All quotations from Die Judenbuche in this essay are from this edition. 10 Foulkes makes rational sense of the «doubling» of Friedrich and Niemand by reducing the latter to part of the former, noting that «the years of hardship and struggle for survival have restored the equilibrium within Friedrich’s personality.» 11 See for example Immerwahr. 12 Friedrich’s full value - including especially his masculinity - is challenged in a manner that consistently measures him in relation to possessions and the accumulation of wealth (cf. 25). 13 As we know from the opening passages of the novella, this is a community with few secrets. The egalitarian bounty of the wedding feast is of course an exception to the general rule of economic stratification and hardship for many of the guests. So, while the marriage functions on the one hand as a kind of x-ray into the priority of economic over romantic relations (see below), the wedding feast itself serves as a temporary reprieve from these very realities - realities that drive a significant part of the population to steal, as we know. The larger social target of the author’s social critique is thus evi- 350 William Collins Donahue dent in this scene as well, of course as in Johannes’s very name: for «Niemand» evokes the etymologically related generic terms «somebody» and «everybody.» 14 It is by no means Friederich’s «partial» testimony alone that leads to an inconclusive investigation into the murder of the forester Brandis. On the contrary, one can speak of a «code of silence» among the farmers (cf. 23). The fact that their propertied status renders them «unsuspicious» is itself a target of the novella’s critique, one that is brought into sharper focus by way of the «third» figure, Johannes Niemand. 15 Cohn would have had a field day with these textual strategies or «graphic markers»; see her article on Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… (1975), in which she analyzes the meaning of the dash, as well as her section from Transparent Minds on Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl in which she explicates the use of empty space (though in this case for other reasons, namely the text’s dependence on the protagonist’s «narrated monologue»). 16 «der arme, ungeachtete Johannes» (34). «Ungeachtet» in German possesses a rich valence of meaning, including «unappreciated,» «unvalued,» «ignored,» and «disregarded.» It is a narratological challenge both to replicate this social disregard (by rendering him a relatively minor character) and at the same time to employ him in the manner I am describing here. Droste will face the same challenge in depicting the Westphalian Jews, who are both socially emarginated (as a social fact), yet need to play - however briefly and obliquely - a key role in this narrative. 17 Admittedly, this appellation comes from an earlier phase of Niemand’s life. First spoken by a compassionate Friedrich, and then reiterated by the narrator (14), it is meant to apply to a young man who looks «zum Verwechseln ähnlich» to Friedrich, who precisely at this point in the narrative is described as coming into his manhood. Of course Niemand’s return as a helpless old man can also be seen as a kind of second childhood - as in the famous Sophoclean riddle. 18 For some such «anachronistic» reading is ipso facto illegitimate. On the contrary, I maintain that precisely in dealing with canonical texts that are presented to students (and readers more generally) as supratemporal cultural artifacts, it is crucial to notice how they signify in their «belated» settings. To speak with Agamben, this kind of reading is necessitated precisely because of the text’s claim to «the contemporary.» 19 Here I depart from a longstanding view in the critical literature, perhaps best exemplified by Walter Silz’s still valuable Realism and Reality (1954, chapter 4), that views the Hebrew inscription as a fulfilled prophecy. Silz, however, takes this not as a simple endorsement of «Old Testament justice» but rather as evidence of an existentialist view of a valueless, amoral world. 20 I borrow the term «presence of absence» from discussions of Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum, a building that in innovative ways conjures Jewish absence in Germany after the Holocaust. The phrase is indebted to Derrida’s notion of the «trace» first discussed in Of Grammatology (1976). 21 Donahue, «‹Ist er kein Jude›» 60. 22 The use of «nur» in this carefully worded formulation deserves fuller explication. Suffice it to say that it functions as the Baron’s attempt to link semantically these two otherwise potentially unrelated statements. The «nur» (literally «only,» but which I am translating as «just» to convey the sense of his attempt to make the second sentence follow from the first) betrays the Baron’s need to play to the crowd, so to speak; that is, to explain the mystery to the villagers. It communicates both a sense of uncertainty/ wonder and pragmatic politics, e.g. something along the lines of: «just give them The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 351 something they will find plausible.» There is an echo here, for those attuned to New Testament scripture, of Pontius Pilate’s famous decision to crucify Jesus and release Barabas. He suspects the former’s innocence and knows the latter’s guilt, but acts in accordance with what his subjects will most easily accept, only later to ask famously «What is truth? » 23 Mecklenburg (12) invokes Wolfgang Iser by using the term «Leerstelle» to refer to this passage in the story, though ultimately he endorses only his own manner of bridging this hermeneutic gap rather than recognizing it as a durative problem. 24 Readers attentive to Droste’s religious investments will notice that she is borrowing a triadic structure from Paul, who regularly triangulates «Jews» and «Christians» with the third term «grace.» Paul’s third term does not expunge either pole of the apparent binary, but serves as a third force that both is and is not yet the solution to the opposition. Whereas Paul, particularly in the Second Letter to the Romans, will directly invoke grace, Droste must adapt the narrative/ epistemic structure to poetic ends, which do not allow her the same liberties. Grace for her (and in this novella) is an alwayspresent possibility, but no less a maddeningly elusive third element. 25 This passage, which has played an important role in the secondary literature, refers specifically to the lack of a successful conclusion to the trial for murder of the forester Brandis. Here the official «detective» (Kapp, acting for the Baron) fails to identify the perpetrator(s). The narrator intervenes to insist that the failure of the detectives is not tantamount to a failure of her story; quite the contrary. Critics have understandably taken it, however, as a kind of motto for the entire work. Of course Droste is conscious of the fact that she has fictionalized actual historical events; and surely she was aware of the way in which she (as scholars of a rather pedantic bent have shown at some length) altered her source material. 26 I extrapolate these two «ideal» positions from the secondary literature as an heuristic device to elucidate the core debate; I do not attribute them in this pared-down form to any particular critic. Cf. the array of secondary literature cited in Mecklenburg, 109-21. Nevertheless, the former («critical») position receives memorable articulation in Richard T. Gray (see especially 537), while the latter («ideologically tainted») view has undeniably been fueled by the work of Martha Helfer and myself (see below). 27 See Donahue, «‹Ist er kein Jude.›» 28 Ibid. While this article ultimately advocates a richer, more multivalent approach to the topic, it has too often been reduced to its title, in which I quote an anti-Semitic remark from one of Droste’s letters. I have often regretted the title for this very reason. 29 In the Gadamer-Habermas debate, as Thomas Pfau has argued, Habermas offers a widely influential view of «tradition» as a fundamentally negative phenomenon linked (in his argument) to the rise of Nazism and to the persistence in the postwar period of fascist mindsets. In contrast, Gadamer posits tradition as significantly more capacious, ranging over millennia, and in itself neither good nor bad, but something that needs to be contended with. The individual’s necessary grappling with this more variegated view of tradition may be thought of as a mode of «third» critique, that is, as a corrective to the bimodal assumptions of Habermas. See Thomas Pfau, «The Gadamer-Habermas Debate Fifty Years On» (North Carolina German Studies Seminar Series, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 2014). 352 William Collins Donahue Works Cited Bernd, Clifford Albrecht. «Clarity and Obscurity in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Judenbuche.» Studies in German Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Festschrift for Frederic E. Coenen. Ed. Siegfried Mews. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1970. 64-77. Baker, Geoff. «Realism and the Problem of Empiricism in Annette von Droste- Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» Lecture. Kansas City: German Studies Association Annual Meeting, September 21, 2014. Brown, Jane K. «The Real Mystery in Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 835-46. Chase, Jefferson S. «Part of the Story: The Significance of the Jews in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 71.1 (1997): 127-45. Chick, Edson. «Voices in Discord: Some Observations on Die Judenbuche.» German Quarterly 42.2 (1969): 147-57. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978. -. «Kleist’s ‹Marquise von O…›: The Problem of Knowledge.» Monatshefte 67.2 (1975): 129-44. Donahue, William. «‹Ist er kein Jude, so verdient er einer zu sein.› Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche and Religious Antisemitism.» German Quarterly 72.1 (1999): 44-73. Doerr, Karin. «The Specter of Anti-Semitism in and around Annette von Droste- Hülshoff’s Judenbuche.» German Studies Review 43.3 (1994): 447-71. Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. Winfried Woesler. 14 vols. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1970. -. Die Judenbuche. Ein Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgichten Westfalen. Ed. and intro. Peter Foulkes. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Gray, Richard T. «Red Herrings and Blue Smocks: Ecological Destruction, Commercialism, and Anti-Semitism in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» German Studies Review 26.3 (2003): 515-42. Heitmann, Felix. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff als Erzählerin: Realismus und Objektivität in der «Judenbuche.» Münster: Aschendorff, 1914. Helfer, Martha. «‹Wer wagt es, eitlen Blutes Drang zu messen? ›: Reading Blood in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» German Quarterly 71.3 (1998): 228-53. Immerwahr, Raymond. «The Peasant Wedding as Dramatic Climax of Die Judenbuche.» Momentum Dramaticum: Festschrift for Eckehard Catholy. Ed. Linda Dietrick and David G. John. Ontario: Waterloo UP, 1990. 321-36. Kraus, Karoline. «Das offene Geheimnis in Annette von Droste-Hülshoffs Judenbuche.» Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 114.4 (1995): 542-59. McClain, William H. «Annette Von Droste-Hülshoff's Judenbuche: A Study in Realism.» Modern Language Forum 36 (1951): 126-32. Mecklenburg, Norbert. Der Fall Judenbuche: Revision eines Fehlurteils. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008. Mellen, Philip A. «Ambiguity and Intent in Die Judenbuche.» Germanic Notes 8 (1977): 8-10. The Third Man in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Die Judenbuche 353 Silz, Walter. Realism and Reality: Studies in the German Novelle of Poetic Realism. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1954. Staiger, Emil. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Frauenfeld: Huber, 1962. Wells, Larry D. «Indeterminacy as Provocation: The Reader’s Role in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 475-92. Wiese, Benno von. «Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, ‹Die Judenbuche.›» Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka: Interpretationen. Düsseldorf: A. Bagel, 1956. 154-175. Whitinger, Raleigh. «From Confusion to Clarity: Further Reflections on the Revelatory Function of Narrative Technique and Symbolism in Annette von Droste- Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.» Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 54 (1980): 259-83. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. «Das Rätsel der Judenbuche und seine Lösung.» Sprachkunst: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 16 (1985): 175-92. A Bicentennial Trio: Reading the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Context of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen and Edition of Der arme Heinrich ANN SCHMIE SING Univ ersity of Color a do The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen have garnered widespread popular and scholarly fascination in the over two hundred years since the collection first appeared in two volumes in 1812 and 1815. The continuing interest in the collection was most recently on display in 2012, when the bicentennial of the first volume was celebrated in Germany and abroad. The Deutsche Post marked the occasion with a postage stamp that portrayed silhouettes of well-known characters from the Grimms’ fairy tales superimposed onto the title page of the 1812 volume. A commemorative 10 Euro silver coin was also issued, bearing the profiles of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and, on the coin’s edge, the inscription «Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind-…» Grimm scholars gathered in Kassel and Lisbon for academic conferences celebrating 200 years of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and Google greeted the bicentennial with a Little Red Riding Hood-themed doodle. These and other popular and academic tributes celebrated a work that enjoyed seven editions in the Grimms’ lifetimes, has been translated into approximately 170 languages, and in 2005 was designated a UNESCO «Memory of the World» heritage document. 1 While the Grimms’ fairy-tale collection has become an irreplaceable part of world cultural heritage, other works edited by the Grimms have had a much more limited impact. The Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen (1816/ 1818) is a case in point. Only one edition was published during the Grimms’ lifetimes, with the second appearing posthumously in 1865 and the third and fourth editions in 1891 and 1905, respectively. The Grimms’ plans to supplement their two volumes of legends with a third volume of scholarly commentary (similar to the third volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen) never came to fruition, although in some respects Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie has been seen as taking the place of the third volume (Röhrich, Sage und Märchen 44). Some legends in the Deutsche Sagen - for example those about William Tell, Lohengrin, Luther at the Wartburg, Frederick Barbarossa in A Bicentennial Trio 355 the Kyffhäuser, and the Pied Piper of Hamlin - are still reasonably wellknown, at least in Germany, yet they have not taken hold in the collective consciousness in the same way that many of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales have, and in some cases these legends are remembered today primarily because they have figured into other literary or musical works. Moreover, scholarly interest in the Deutsche Sagen has been rather narrower and more sporadic than that expressed in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Folklorists and Grimm scholars have examined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen from a variety of theoretical perspectives: for example, recent scholarship includes edited volumes on queer approaches to the Grimms’ fairy tales (Turner and Greenhill) and the international reception of the tales (Joosen and Lathey), as well a monograph that studies the Kinder- und Hausmärchen through the lens of disability studies (Schmiesing). By contrast, scholarship on the Deutsche Sagen remains largely limited to investigating the Grimms’ source material and models for the legends (Bluhm and Hölter; Uther, «Curiositäten»), interrogating their notion of the genre distinctions between Sage and Märchen (Röhrich; Seidenspinner), or probing the reception of the collection in the years immediately after its publication (Uther, «Die ‹Deutschen Sagen›»). Scholars have only infrequently given consideration to thematic congruities between the Deutsche Sagen and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Rölleke, «Johannes»; Zipes, «The Grimm German Legends» 166), or between the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and other works by the Grimms (Kamenetsky 81-91). The fact that Germanophone scholars have carried out almost all the scholarship on the Deutsche Sagen is further evidence of the more limited international appeal of the collection, and indeed the first translation of the collection into English did not appear until 1981, although it was translated into Danish, French, and Romanian in the nineteenth century. In view of these and other factors, it is inconceivable that the 2016 bicentennial of the first volume of the Deutsche Sagen will elicit a degree of celebration anywhere comparable to that of the 2012 Kinder- und Hausmärchen bicentennial. Other works on folklore or medieval literature by the Grimms have received still less scholarly attention and have had virtually no impact on popular culture. These include their journal Altdeutsche Wälder (1813-1816) and their selection of tales from Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (published as Irische Elfenmärchen in 1826), as well as editions of medieval works such as the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunner Gebet (published in one volume in 1812), Hartmann von Aue’s narrative poem Der arme Heinrich (1815), and the songs of the Elder Edda (1815). Jacob and Wilhelm published all of these works jointly, but each 356 Ann Schmiesing brother also published his own individual philological projects during the early decades of the nineteenth century. There is, to be sure, no case to be made that the Deutsche Sagen or other Grimm works should be given the same critical or popular attention as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Together with the fairy tales, however, the Deutsche Sagen and several of their other publications represented what the Grimms regarded as the fruits of their efforts to collect, research, edit, and preserve Volkspoesie. Reading the fairy tales in isolation from other Grimm works, as scholars have often done in the voluminous secondary literature on the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, obscures the breadth of the Grimms’ scholarly project and ignores the intertextuality of their various publications. In this essay, I draw attention to this intertextuality by considering the Kinder- und Hausmärchen alongside not only the Deutsche Sagen but also the Grimms’ edition of Hartmann von Aue’s medieval narrative poem Der arme Heinrich (1815), which included Wilhelm’s translation of Hartmann’s text and a lengthy afterword. Although the Grimms’ edition led to renewed interest in Hartmann’s story of the leprosy-stricken Heinrich in the nineteenth century, it has been virtually ignored by Grimm scholars. To the extent that it has been studied at all in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has mainly been looked at by medievalists interested in the reception of Hartmann’s work. Reading the three works together yields insights into the Grimms’ scholarly project in the second decade of the nineteenth century, particularly with regard to their editorial practices, their treatment of gender roles, their expression of nationalist sentiment, and - in light of their rebranding of Hartmann’s courtly poem as a Volksbuch - their conception of Volkspoesie. I will discuss each of these topics in brief and in so doing point to the rationale for exploring them further. The intertextuality among the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the edition of Der arme Heinrich, and the Deutsche Sagen is heightened by the fact that the Grimms conceived of and worked on all three projects at around the same time. In their correspondence with each other, Jacob and Wilhelm at times refer to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the same passage in which they mention either the edition of Der arme Heinrich or their plans for the Deutsche Sagen. In a letter of November 10, 1815, for example, Jacob seems to assign equal importance to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the edition of Der arme Heinrich when he asks Wilhelm whether Goethe has said anything to him about the fairy-tale collection and whether Wilhelm has given Goethe a copy of Der arme Heinrich (Briefwechsel 466). Whereas Jacob exudes confidence in both works, Wilhelm’s later admission that he did not discuss either work with Goethe suggests his awareness that Goethe regarded A Bicentennial Trio 357 medieval German literature as inferior to the literature of classical antiquity and preferred literary adaptations of folk motifs to the Naturpoesie that the Grimms had presented in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (cf. Kamenetsky 21). In any case, two weeks before Jacob’s inquiry regarding Goethe, Jacob had also written to Wilhelm concerning the idea of publishing a volume of legends, an idea that the Grimms had first formed in 1808 around the time that they were beginning to collect fairy tales. In a passage that points to his belief in the continuity and cognateness of various manifestations of Volkspoesie, Jacob emphasizes the frequent similarity of subject matter in legends and fairy tales. Observing that a depiction of a field of flax that is mistaken for a pool of water appears both in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Der Hahnenbalken» and in a legend from Lombardy, he sees even this trivial detail as evidence for his view that Volkspoesie is complete in itself and requires no supplementation: «Beweist aber nicht das merkwürdige, ungeahnte und durch die Wahrheit der Volkspoesie erfreuende Wiederfinden der kleinsten Züge für meinen alten Satz: daß man in den Volkssagen und Märchen von heute gar nichts zusetzen müsse? » (Briefwechsel 462). Jacob’s use of trivial details such as the field of flax to substantiate his often wide-reaching claims concerning Volkspoesie is a typical feature of his methodology, and one which has been criticized not only by contemporary figures such as August Wilhelm Schlegel but also in more recent scholarship. As a linguist and mythographer, Jacob believed that just as ancient languages could be reconstructed by studying their surviving modern descendants, so, too, could scholars reconstruct Germanic mythology by studying surviving manifestations of folk culture such as ballads, folktales, fairy tales, medieval Germanic literature, and legends. Summarizing some of the weaknesses in this belief and in the methodology Jacob used to support it, Tom Shippey notes «the eclecticism, the silent selection of what fits a theory and the even more silent rejection of what does not, as well as the silent editing of modern fairy-tales themselves» (24). Nevertheless, to view the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the context of the Grimms’ other scholarly works and editions is not to endorse the Grimms’ at times dilettantish assemblage of trivial details drawn from multiple sources as they seek to prove their views on Volkpoesie; instead, a contextual reading recognizes the influence that their views on Volkspoesie - and with this their work on specific folk and medieval texts - often exerted on their interpretations of particular motifs, symbols, or themes that appear in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. This influence is particularly significant in view of the origins and editorial history of the 201 tales and ten religious legends for children that appear in the standard seventh edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. An indi- 358 Ann Schmiesing vidual tale in the Grimms’ collection typically combined or was influenced by multiple oral and/ or written sources, and the bulk of the tales did not come directly from the Volk but from well-educated young women. 2 In mixing two or more variants of the same tale or in choosing one variant over another, the Grimms aspired to restore what they regarded as an organic wholeness to their tales. Nevertheless, in editing their tales the Grimms also imbued them with their own nineteenth-century bourgeois cultural values. Numerous scholars have traced the manner in which their emendations reveal their patriarchal view of women, their Christian worldview, and their desire to inculcate proper behavior in children (see for example Bottigheimer; Tatar; Zipes, The Brothers Grimm). These emendations can largely be attributed to Wilhelm, both because he was the main editor of the collection from the second volume of the first edition on and because he was more interested in enhancing the tales’ bourgeois appeal, whereas Jacob was more scientific in his approach to editing (Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 30- 32). In addition to changing many individual tales in their collection through editorial intervention, the Grimms also added and subtracted tales from the collection as a whole, such that a total of around 240 different tales appeared in the course of the seven large editions (Große Ausgaben) and ten abridged editions (Kleine Ausgaben) of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm 37). Because most of this editing took place in the compilation of the first edition and between the first and second editions, the intertextuality of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen with the Grimms’ other scholarly projects in the second decade of the nineteenth century becomes particularly noteworthy. In their preface to the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms draw attention to the affinity between the fairy tale, the legend, and history, noting that the three forms «nebeneinander stehen und uns nacheinander die Vorzeit als einen frischen und belebenden Geist nahezubringen streben» (Deutsche Sagen 7). 3 Of this trio of genres, the fairy tale and legend have the most in common, they declare, and the two genres are often intermixed. In an attempt to establish genre distinctions between the two, they call the fairy tale more poetic and the legend more historical; assert that the fairy tale is at home everywhere in Germany while the legend is more regional, especially since it is by nature bound to a particular place and/ or legendary figure; and point out that the legend is often intertwined with the folksong while the fairy tale has retained certain features or motifs from the Germanic heroic epic. The fairy tale gives us a child-like worldview, they further conclude, while the legend is more serious and reflective. Scholars have been skeptical of the distinctions that the Grimms draw between the fairy tale and the legend, with Lutz A Bicentennial Trio 359 Röhrich rightly claiming that these distinctions actually create more puzzles than they solve (Sage und Märchen 44-45) and Jack Zipes concluding that clear distinctions between the two genres remain difficult to articulate («The Grimm German Legends» 165). Zipes is among the few scholars who have looked beyond questions of genre to point to the characters and incidents common to both the Deutsche Sagen and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Indeed, characters such as Frau Holle, witches, elves, dwarfs, monstrous births, changelings, and giants populate both collections. But arguably the most striking point of similarity pertains not to the content of the two collections itself but to the manner in which this content was chosen and shaped by the Grimms. In suggesting a point of comparison between the legends and the fairy tales, for example, Zipes finds that the Grimms’ «distinctly patriarchal leanings influenced their choice of subject matter, and they often reshaped legends and tales to correspond to their male conservative notions of sexuality and middle-class morality» («The Grimm German Legends» 164). As several Grimm scholars have shown, the many editorial interventions the Grimms, and in particular Wilhelm, made in the fairy tales they collected had the effect of making women more passive and dependent on men. This is most notable in tales such as «Rumpelstilzchen,» «Aschenputtel,» and «Das Mädchen ohne Hände,» though there are many more examples (cf. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 49-59 and The Brothers Grimm 171-72; Bottigheimer 57-70). But despite Zipes’s suggestion, scholars have rarely, if at all, referred to the Deutsche Sagen in their exploration of gender roles in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen or attempted to ascertain the degree to which portrayals of women in the two collections dovetail or diverge. There are many ways in which a study of the Deutsche Sagen might yield insights into the portrayal of gender roles in the Grimms’ works; for example, there are numerous portrayals of «wild» women, women transformed into snakes by curses, and ghostlike women. Studying the representation of these figures may enhance our understanding of some of the allegedly «deviant» women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Other congruities emerge when we compare the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to Der arme Heinrich. Although Rüdiger Krohn does not discuss portrayals of women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, he has observed that the Grimms planned to donate money received from subscriptions to their edition of Der arme Heinrich to a women’s association in Kassel, and he concludes that this gesture was possibly meant «to assert the traditional concept of sex roles that assigns the role of subservience and pious sacrifice to women, and to see in the girl, who is occasionally called mín gemahel (my spouse) by Heinrich, the model of an unselfish wife» (228). The subservi- 360 Ann Schmiesing ence, piety, and self-sacrifice Krohn points to in Der arme Heinrich are of course also model traits of «good» women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, as tales such as «Die Sterntaler,» «Die sechs Schwäne,» and «Aschenputtel» show (and these traits also appear in the Deutsche Sagen in legends such as «Das Fräulein von Boyneburg» and «Die Spinnerin am Kreuz»). To what extent, then, was the Grimms’ patriarchal reshaping of gender roles in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales influenced by their study of and fascination with medieval texts such as Der arme Heinrich, and vice versa? Were they attracted to Der arme Heinrich in some part because it portrays the piety, altruism, and self-sacrificing qualities that they expected of women and emphasized in their selection and editing of Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales? The element of self-sacrifice in Der arme Heinrich is in any case pertinent not just to gender roles in the Grimms’ fairy tales and legends, but also to the nationalist sentiment voiced in all three works. Although the Grimms were not zealous nationalists, they appeal to the Volk in their foreword to Der arme Heinrich, where they describe their edition as a «Bearbeitung eines alten, in sich deutschen, Gedichts» and celebrate Der arme Heinrich as a work for patriotic Germans in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich n.p.). They further speak of Hessians who had held up their swords and proclaimed that Hessian blood would defend the fatherland against the French. Maintaining that seven years of suffering have now purified the German lands, they relate that they had initially conceived of their edition of Der arme Heinrich as «ein geringes Opfer»-- an allusion to the maiden’s willingness to sacrifice her life for Heinrich (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich n.p.). In a provocative extension of this analogy, they describe the French occupation as akin to the leprosy Heinrich suffers from and must be cured of: «Jetzt hat sich unser gesammtes Vaterland in seinem Blut von dem französischen Aussatz wieder geheilt und zu Jugend-Leben gestärkt» (ibid.). Although in somewhat milder form than in the foreword to Der arme Heinrich, the Grimms also convey their nationalist sentiments in the preface to the Deutsche Sagen. For example, they share their hope that the legends will be welcome to readers «schon als lautere deutsche Kost» and express their belief, «daß nichts mehr auferbaue und größere Freude bei sich habe als das Vaterländische. Ja, eine bedeutungslos sich anlassende Entdeckung und Bemühung in unserer einheimischen Wissenschaft kann leicht am Ende mehr Frucht bringen als die blendendste Bekanntwerdung und Anbauung des Fremden» (17). Compared with their comments regarding Der arme Heinrich and the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms’ preface to and packaging of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen are considerably less nationalistic. As has often been pointed out, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen are not titled A Bicentennial Trio 361 «Deutsche Kinder- und Hausmärchen,» in part because the Grimms recognized the potential foreign influence on some of their tales, such as those told by informants with Huguenot ancestry, as well as the existence of many European variants for the tales in their collection (see for example Ward 367). Nevertheless, the Grimms extol the virtues of the Hessian peasantry in their preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and it is significant in view of their nationalist outlook during and after the Napoleonic Wars that Jacob Grimm later observed that the first preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, dated October 18, 1812, was completed exactly one year before the Battle of Leipzig. 4 In the preface to the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, published in 1819, the Grimms also note that they omitted tales that were too foreign in origin. This expurgation of foreign content at times overlaps with their expurgation of the allegedly courtly influences on their texts. Jan Ziolkowski has insightfully shown that the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Das Eselein,» based on the Latin Asinarius poem, provides an example of «what they judged to be a fairy tale tainted by the highly literary form in which it had been preserved» (202). To bring the tale back to what the Grimms believed was its origins as Volkspoesie, they went about removing its erotic aspects, references to classical mythology and poets, and features that struck them as too highbrow or courtly (226-29). While the Grimms viewed Hartmann von Aue as a poet who preserved rather than adulterated the tradition behind Der arme Heinrich, their views on Asinarius and Der arme Heinrich are similar in that in both cases they rebrand what actually was courtly literature as Volkspoesie. The central feature of the Grimms’ edition of Der arme Heinrich was Wilhelm Grimm’s translation of the Middle High German poem into modern German prose. The Grimms claimed when they first announced their intent to publish an edition of Der arme Heinrich that «Eine Uebertragung in die heutige Sprache wird diese altdeutsche Sage zu einem allgemein lesbaren Volksbuch machen» (Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften 4: 504). The justification for this reconceptualization of Der arme Heinrich as folk literature lay in the Grimms’ theory that the work was based on older tales and folk beliefs that Hartmann had merely gently reshaped. They thus devote much of their afterword to demonstrating that aspects of Der arme Heinrich can be found in various fairy tales, legends, heroic epics, and folk beliefs. For example, they see in the title character’s name a connection with the many characters in fairy tales and folk literature named Heinrich, Hans, Hänsel, or Hanswurst. Since Der arme Heinrich portrays Heinrich as a leper who is told that only the blood of a virgin who willingly sacrifices her life for his can 362 Ann Schmiesing save him, it is not surprising that many of the Grimms’ references to fairy tales relate to depictions of disease and cure. Later in the story, such a virgin is willing to sacrifice herself, but Heinrich intervenes before her heart can be cut out and he is later miraculously cured by God and marries the maiden. Although no sacrifice actually takes place, the Grimms seek to ground Hartmann’s depiction of sacrificial blood as a cure for leprosy in folk beliefs pertaining to blood cures. Thus they point to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Fitchers Vogel» and the closely related «Blaubart,» asserting that Blaubart’s strangely-colored beard is meant to symbolize illness and claiming that his murdering of women, like the sorcerer’s murdering of women in «Fitchers Vogel,» is an attempt to cure his illness with their blood. The comparisons of «Fitchers Vogel» and «Blaubart» with Der arme Heinrich not only fit into the Grimms’ strategy of situating Hartmann’s work within an existing folk tradition, but also yield insights into their interpretations of these Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales. In the afterword to Der arme Heinrich, the Grimms also study blood brotherhood as a concept in the Middle Ages and in their own time, and here they give as examples the first-edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Die Brüder Wassersprung» and the tale «Die Goldkinder»; a handwritten comment in the margin of their personal copy of their edition of Der arme Heinrich also refers to the tale «Der treue Johannes» (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich 189). 5 These various comments, handwritten or printed, are direct testimony to the connections the Grimms see between particular Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales and Hartmann’s work. However, they also shed light on what the Grimms may have associated with other Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales not mentioned here. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, the study of blood brotherhood in their afterword yields insights into the tale «Bruder Lustig,» which first appeared in the second edition of the fairy tales, published in 1819. 6 The Grimms’ frequent references to fairy tales and folk beliefs in their afterword to Der arme Heinrich are thus integral to their efforts to read Der arme Heinrich as a Volksbuch instead of as a work of courtly literature. As Krohn notes with reference to the Grimms’ afterword to Der arme Heinrich, «[t]he diligently assembled and extensive data are meant to demonstrate that with all its courtly veneer Hartmann’s text merely represents a course of a specific tradition that can be traced back to ancient, autochthonous roots» (226; see also Rautenberg 122-28). Krohn further suggests that Wilhelm Grimm’s translation resulted in a nineteenth-century «stylistic assimilation» of Der arme Heinrich, insofar as the work became «combinable in various ways with other, genuine chapbooks, and its recasting as a primer of an unselfish spirit of sacrifice made Hartmann’s tale increasingly suitable A Bicentennial Trio 363 for education, especially - but not only - that of a youthful public» (227). By emphasizing the work’s Germanness, portraying it as originating in Volkspoesie, and transforming its themes of disease and cure into a metaphor for the rejuvenation of Germany after the Napoleonic Wars, the Grimms thus assimilated Hartmann von Aue’s medieval work into a nineteenth-century German cultural outlook. Just as the Grimms believed that Der arme Heinrich represented a careful editing and shaping of existing folk material by Hartmann von Aue, so, too, did they see their own editorial work as that of gently nurturing the Volkspoesie that they had collected. In the preface to the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Wilhelm explains that some shaping and reshaping must necessarily occur in the transmission of poetry, for without this even a loyal transmission of a story would be «etwas Unfruchtbares und Abgestorbenes» (Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Ausgabe letzter Hand 1: 23); indeed, this accounts for why each region and each storyteller tells the same tale somewhat differently. 7 He continues, however, to praise editors who gently enable their work to grow and unfold like a plant while denigrating editors who view editing as an exercise in tying and gluing pieces of a text together. The editor or author who unnecessarily polishes or reworks a tale becomes like Midas, insofar as every tale he touches turns to gold and cannot nourish us. For his part, Jacob was even harsher in his judgments concerning editors’ unrestrained interventions and authors’ literary adaptations of folk material. As we have seen, in the letter in which he tells Wilhelm of the legend and fairy tale that both revolve around a field of flax mistaken for water, Jacob concludes that Volkspoesie is complete in itself and need not be incorporated into literary adaptations. Because of his belief in the inner completeness of Volkspoesie as issuing from the collective voice of the people, he proceeds to pass harsh moral judgment in the letter on authors such as Clemens Brentano who have engaged in the reworking of folk motifs: «Die Lüge ist stets unrecht, selbst im Dichten,» he pronounces, and continues, «Die Erdichtung des Stoffes in Romanen und Liedern ist immer sündlich und führt zu nichts» (Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit 462). This passage is strikingly similar to the Grimms’ pronouncement in the preface to the Deutsche Sagen concerning the adulteration of Volkspoesie: «Die Lüge ist falsch und bös […]. In den Sagen und Liedern des Volks haben wir noch keine gefunden» (Deutsche Sagen 10). Moreover, as in the preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, they proceed to differentiate between interventions that falsify Volkspoesie and those that aid in its natural self-regeneration, stating of the latter, «dawider, daß manches abfalle in der Länge der Zeit, wie einzelne Zweige und Äste an sonst 364 Ann Schmiesing gesunden Bäumen vertrocknen, hat sich die Natur auch hier durch ewige und von selbst wirkende Erneuerungen sichergestellt» (Deutsche Sagen 10). Just as they regard editors who engage in the too radical polishing of fairy tales as Midas-like in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in the Deutsche Sagen they characterize the results of radical reworking of legends as «überfeine Speisen» that the «Volk» will reject (10). In light of such pronouncements, it is ironic that, in response to criticisms of the first edition of the fairy tales by Brentano and others, the Grimms subsequently modeled their editorial practice more on Brentano’s method of restoring and reconstructing texts, as Heinz Rölleke has shown (Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm 57-66). Moreover, Wilhelm in particular would substantially edit the tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen over the seven editions that appeared in their lifetimes, in particular between the first and second editions, and the results do not always correspond with the high ideals they set in their preface to the collection. As for the Deutsche Sagen, the main criticism regarding the Grimms’ editing of the legends they collected was the unevenness of their interventions. Some texts were substantially reworked from the source material, while others were left virtually untouched. 8 Although it is the least known of the three texts examined here, the edition of Der arme Heinrich is perhaps the most interesting with regard to the question of which editorial interventions were felt to nurture the text and which to adulterate it or, put differently, which editorial interventions were seen as necessary to keep a text from dying out and which were believed to do the opposite by killing off its original essence. The Grimms (rather naively) saw in Hartmann von Aue not a courtly poet, but an author who faithfully transmitted folk material with a minimum of intervention; similarly, they wished to see in their own editorial enterprise a continuation and recapturing of what they believed to be the essence of German Volkspoesie. Wilhelm’s translation was meant to effect a rejuvenation of Der arme Heinrich, a work that had sunk into obscurity not only because of its medieval language but also because of what was regarded as its repellant subject matter and its outdated spiritual worldview (Krohn 224). Similarly, in the prefaces to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms highlight their aim of preserving fairy tales and legends at a time when the transmission of Volkspoesie is dying out. The preface to the fairy tales begins with the image of a storm that has destroyed an entire planting of crops except for a few stalks protected by a hedge; similarly, only a small corpus of fairy tales has survived into modernity, they suggest, and this corpus must be preserved before the few storytellers who retain the tales in their memory A Bicentennial Trio 365 die out. In the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms describe the impact of factors such as war and migration on Volkspoesie, noting that their collection represents only the meager remains of a once great hoard of ancient German folk literature. To what extent, then, did the Grimms effect the preservation and rejuvenation of fairy tales, legends, and medieval works to which they aspired? Although of far less impact than the fairy tales, the Grimms’ legends spawned numerous literary and artistic adaptations, as Taylor Starck showed almost one hundred years ago in his study of the Grimms’ legends as a source for nineteenth-century German ballads and as Donald Ward has shown more recently in the epilogue to his translation of the Deutsche Sagen (2: 379). More importantly, the legend collection had a profound impact on the field of folklore studies, with Ward counting over 500 collections of legends published in German between 1850 and 1950 (2: 380). As for Der arme Heinrich, although the work had been translated into modern German already in the eighteenth century, it was the Grimms’ translation and edition in 1815 that made the story popular in the nineteenth century. Among the various editions and adaptations that appeared in the decades after the publication of the Grimms’ edition is Adelbert von Chamisso’s ballad «Der arme Heinrich» (1838), which Chamisso dedicated to the Grimms. In the first of the five opening stanzas that form this dedication, Chamisso sentimentally describes Jacob and Wilhelm as masters, «die den Garten mir erschlossen,/ Den Hort der Sagen mir enthüllt,/ Mein trunk’nes Ohr mit Zauberklängen/ Aus jener Märchenwelt erfüllt» (Sämtliche Werke 1: 586). Here, the Grimms are in effect substituted for Hartmann von Aue (who goes unmentioned) as the creative spirit behind Chamisso’s rendering. Moreover, Chamisso interweaves the Grimms’ work on the fairy tale, legend, and Der arme Heinrich in thanking them for uncovering the «Hort der Sagen» for him, for filling his ears with the sounds of the «Märchenwelt,» and of course for acquainting him with Hartmann’s work. Whereas Chamisso implicitly considers the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Deutsche Sagen, and edition of Der arme Heinrich together in this stanza, it is only the first of these that has continued to garner widespread acclaim in the twenty-first century, as demonstrated most recently in the bicentennial celebrations of 2012. Although the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appear in splendid isolation today, at the time of the collection’s first publication it was one of several projects to which the Grimms devoted themselves in their pioneering work on comparative mythology and folklore. An intertextual reading of the fairy tales, legends, and Der arme Heinrich sheds light on the Grimms’ preoccupation with attempting to reconstruct Germanic mythology and folk belief 366 Ann Schmiesing through the study of existing manifestations of Volkspoesie, as well as on their desire to edit in a manner that would distill rather than corrupt the essence of their texts. The trio of works examined here, however, also offers evidence of the inevitable mark the Grimms left on their texts as they decided which fairy tales or legends to include in a collection; intermixed different variants of the same fairy tale or legend; or imbued the texts with their own notions of gender roles or of cultural nationalism. As the bicentennial anniversaries of lesser-studied Grimm works such as Der arme Heinrich and the Deutsche Sagen approach in the coming years, it is worth pausing to consider the roles that these works played, together with the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in the Grimms’ scholarly project in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Notes 1 In addition to the seven editions of the «Große Ausgabe» of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Grimms published ten editions of the «Kleine Ausgabe,» which contains a selection of 50 tales from the large edition. 2 For an overview of the manner in which the Grimms collected and edited their tales, see Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 25-64. 3 The Grimms also mention Der arme Heinrich in their preface to the Deutsche Sagen, including it in a list of German legends that do not appear in their collection, «weil sie in dem eigenen und lebendigeren Umfang ihrer Dichtung auf unsere Zeit gekommen sind» (Deutsche Sagen 23). 4 See Friedrich Panzer’s foreword to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe in der Urfassung 51. 5 See the Grimms’ personal copy of their edition of Der arme Heinrich in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Nachlass Grimm No. 105). 6 In Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, I argue that the concept of blood brotherhood could explain why it is only after eating a lamb’s heart that Bruder Lustig starts to call his companion «Bruderherz» (a companion who, unbeknownst to him, is actually St. Peter in disguise; see 71-72). In this essay, my analysis of the Grimms’ references to Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales in their afterword to Der arme Heinrich extends the analysis I present there. 7 Wilhelm refers to his authorship of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen preface in a letter to Savigny (Briefe der Brüder Grimm an Savigny 188). In a further nod to his authorship, the prefaces to the first and second editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appear in the edition of Wilhelm’s Kleinere Schriften that was published posthumously between 1881 and 1887. 8 For overviews of the principal criticisms of the Grimms’ editing of the Deutsche Sagen, see Uther, «Curiositäten» 125, and Uther, «Die ‹Deutschen Sagen›.» A Bicentennial Trio 367 Works Cited Bluhm, Lothar, and Achim Hölter. «Die ‹Quedlinburger Sammlung›: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung zu Grimms Deutschen Sagen.» Fabula 30.3-4 (1989): 257-70. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Chamisso, Adelbert von. Sämtliche Werke. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Briefe der Brüder Grimm an Savigny. Ed. Wilhelm Schoof. Berlin: Schmidt, 1953. -. Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit. 2 nd ed. Ed. Herman Grimm and Gustav Hinrichs. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1953. -. Deutsche Sagen. Munich: Winkler, 1956. -. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm. Ed. and trans. Donald Ward. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981. -, eds. Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich; Aus der Straßburgischen und vatikanischen Handschrift herausgegeben und erklärt durch die Brüder Grimm. Berlin: Realschulbuch, 1815. Nachlass Grimm 105, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. -. Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Ausgabe letzter Hand mit den Originalanmerkungen der Brüder Grimm. Ed. Heinz Rölleke. 7 th ed. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001. -. Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe in der Urfassung. Ed. Friedrich Panzer. 2 vols. in 1. Wiesbaden: Vollmer, 1956. Grimm, Wilhelm. Kleinere Schriften. Ed. Gustav Hinrichs. Vol. 4. Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1882. Joosen, Vanessa, and Gillian Lathey, eds. Grimms’ Tales around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2014. Kamenetsky, Christa. The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992. Krohn, Rüdiger. «A Tale of Sacrifice and Love: Literary Way Stations of the Arme Heinrich from the Brothers Grimm to Tankred Dorst.» A Companion to the Works of Hartmann von Aue. Ed. Francis G. Gentry. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. 223-53. Rautenberg, Ursula. Das «Volksbuch vom armen Heinrich»: Studien zur Rezeption Hartmanns von Aue im 19. Jahrhundert und zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Übersetzung Wilhelm Grimms. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1985. Röhrich, Lutz. Sage und Märchen: Erzählforschung heute. Freiburg: Herder, 1976. Rölleke, Heinz. Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Quellen und Studien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004. -. «‹Johannes war leblos herabgefallen und war ein Stein›: Versteinerung und Wiederbelebung in der Volksliteratur.» Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 517-30. Schmiesing, Ann. Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2014. Seidenspinner, Wolfgang. «Sage und Geschichte: Zur Problematik Grimmscher Konzeptionen und was wir daraus lernen können.» Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung 33.1-2 (1992): 14-38. 368 Ann Schmiesing Shippey, Tom. «A Revolution Reconsidered: Mythography and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century.» The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous. Ed. Tom Shippey. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. 1-28. Starck, Taylor. «Die Deutschen Sagen der Brüder Grimm als Balladenquelle.» Modern Language Notes 31.8 (1916): 449-65. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. Turner, Kay, and Pauline Greenhill, eds. Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012. Uther, Hans-Jörg. «Die ‹Deutschen Sagen› der Brüder Grimm im Spiegel ihrer Kritiker: Ein Beitrag zur frühen Sagenrezeption.» Hören - Sagen - Lesen - Lernen: Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der kommunikativen Kultur. Ed. Ursula Brunold- Bigler and Hermann Bausinger. Bern: Peter Lang, 1995. 721-39. -. «Johann Jacob Bräuners ‹Curiositäten› als Vorlage der ‹Deutschen Sagen› der Brüder Grimm, II: Zum Bedeutungswandel von Geschichten durch Nacherzählen. Narodna Umjetnost: Hrvatski Casopis za Etnologiju i Folkloristiku/ Croation Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 30 (1993): 103-32. Ziolkowski, Jan M. Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2007. Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. -. Fairy Tale as Myth/ Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1994. -. «The Grimm German Legends in English.» Review of The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm, ed. and trans. Donald Ward. Children’s Literature 12 (1984): 162-66. Convergent Realisms: Aras Ören, Nazım Hikmet, and Bertolt Brecht ELA GEZEN Univ ersity of M a s s achusetts , A m herst Aras Ören (b. 1939) is one of the earliest and most significant contributors to the emergence of Turkish-German literature. In his literary work, Ören writes not only about Turkish workers and their experience, but also about solidarity among the working class more generally, reflecting on the conditions of production in West Berlin and the exploitation of labor. When asked why he wrote, he replied: «Alles was ich je geschrieben habe, ist ein Zeugnis der Zeiten, die ich mitgestaltete und der Zeitlichkeiten, deren Zeuge ich war» («Die Metropole» 186). Identifying himself as a «Zeitzeuge,» a kind of literary archivist, Ören pointed to his work’s evocation of multiple and changing temporalities and highlighted his role in shaping them. Specifically, Ören perceives literature written in Turkish in Germany «als einen integrierten und eigenständigen Bestandteil der deutschen Literatur in der Bundesrepublik und in West-Berlin […]. [Sie] setzt sich sowohl mit der eigenen türkischen, als auch mit der deutschen Tradition auseinander» («Eine Metropole» 52). In this way, multiple literary-historical temporalities - the sweep of both Turkish and German cultural history and the countries’ intertwined economic and political histories after the Second World War - come into view as constituting the chronological backdrop of his literary interventions. In this essay, I am interested in exploring Ören’s understanding of the social responsibility of the artist and the politics of aesthetics, particularly as they manifest themselves in the first part of his Berlin trilogy. I will argue that Ören’s approach converges with Bertolt Brecht’s and Nazım Hikmet’s respective conceptualization of realist aesthetics and of art as a political tool, which suggests that the theoretical provenance of Ören’s project is as transnational as its thematic material. Realism, I will demonstrate, manifests itself in Ören’s writing in a manner similar to Brecht’s and Hikmet’s. It is a political aesthetic, rather than a single determinate literary style or genre; as such it seeks to unmask social conditions from the standpoint of the working class, considered the agent of societal change. I will finally show how Ören employs a kind of «didactic realism,» drawing on and representing Turkish as well German Zeitlichkeiten, both with regard to literary debates as em- 370 Ela Gezen bodied by the writings of Brecht and Hikmet, as well as the sociopolitical contexts in which they emerged. As transnational practices are not unidirectional, it is important to reconstruct the significance of Hikmet and Brecht in Turkey during the 1960s, the last decade Ören spent in the country prior to emigrating to Germany. Following the military coup in 1960, parliamentary democracy was established in Turkey and a new progressive constitution guaranteed freedom of thought and expression, political activity, organization, and demonstration. Immediately thereafter, one of the questions intensely debated in the mainstream press, in many academic journals, and in the lecture halls of universities concerned the function of literature. Hikmet, a world-renowned Turkish communist poet and writer, emerged as key figure in these debates, which generally pitted social realism against aesthetic autonomy. According to the Turkish cultural historian Talat Sait Halman, «[t]he most remarkable development in Turkish culture in the 1960s was the explosion of theatrical activity» («Turkish Literature» 90). For his part, Ören describes the 1960s as a time in which «ich sowohl in politischen Theorien wie auf den Theaterbühnen nach einer Heimat gesucht habe» («Vorstellungskraft und Zeit» 20). Albert Nekimken observes that in addition to Hikmet, who (as Halman notes) «dominated much of the decade’s literary excitement» («Turkish Literature» 85), Brecht also had a «profound and pervasive influence on Turkish society» (Nekimken 7). Theater was therefore an important influence on Ören’s own intellectual development, as also becomes clear in his own biography and productivity. Prior to permanently settling in West Berlin, Ören worked as actor and dramaturg with different Istanbul theaters influenced by Brecht’s consciousness-raising theatrical practices; he was also involved with theaters in Frankfurt am Main and West Berlin. Moreover, during the 1960s, Ören adapted Brecht plays such as Der gute Mensch von Sezuan for the Turkish stage, and himself wrote several plays in Turkish, as for example Kör Oidipus (Blind Oedipus, 1980). 1 During this time, he also regularly collaborated with his friend and colleague Vasıf Öngören, one of the main dramatists to introduce Brechtian theater to the Turkish context. In 1962, Ören accompanied Öngören to Berlin to meet with Erwin Piscator in order to research political theater. Piscator referred them to Helene Weigel at the Berliner Ensemble, where Öngören studied Brechtian theater from 1962 to 1963 and 1965 to 1967 with the goal of forming a theater group for workers in West Berlin (Göktaş 16). Hence, Ören’s engagement with Brechtian theater in a variety of contexts spanned a decade, and it therefore comes as no surprise that this theater aesthetic manifests itself in Ören’s literary poetics. Indeed, as I will show Convergent Realisms 371 below, his «didactic realism» draws on dramatic elements such as montage techniques, monologues, and reports. Ören, originally from Istanbul, moved permanently to Berlin in the tumultuous year 1969. Looking back, he recalls his impressions as follows: «Der junge Schriftsteller, der seine Wohnung 1969 nach West-Berlin verlegte, fühlte sich eigentlich von der Euphorie der Studentenmasse sehr angezogen» («Selbstbild mit Stadt» 29). His literary breakthrough came in 1973 with the publication of the first part of his Berlin trilogy, which is comprised of Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße (1973), Der kurze Traum aus Kağıthane (1974), and Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus (1980). As is the case with all of his works, the three texts were originally written in Turkish and subsequently published sequentially in German translation by the left-wing Rotbuch Verlag. In 1980, all three parts were published in Turkish as a trilogy, entitled Berlin Üçlemesi (Berlin Trilogy). From the moment of the trilogy’s first publication, reviewers, writers, and scholars pointed to the influence of both Nazım Hikmet and Bertolt Brecht. 2 Introducing the Turkish edition, for example, Fakir Baykurt refers to the trilogy as «destan,» an epic poem, influenced by Brecht and Hikmet (8). Like Baykurt, Gino Chiellino classifies it as an «episches Gedicht,» and situates the trilogy in close proximity to the Brechtian «Lehrgedicht» (314). In a review of the first section, Ingeborg Drewitz compares Ören’s writing to the style introduced and made popular in Turkey by Hikmet: the «reimlose[s] Poem» (43). Similarly, a reviewer for Die Weltwoche characterized Hikmet as Ören’s precursor in the use of the narrative poem (Heise 38). Before taking a closer look at the first part of Ören’s trilogy, I will briefly discuss points of convergence between Hikmet’s and Brecht’s poetics of realism and their understanding of the social responsibility of art and the artist. According to Brecht, realist artists represent reality «vom Standpunkt der werktätigen Bevölkerung und der mit ihr verbündeten Intellektuellen» («Über sozialistischen Realismus» 166). Realist art is thus aimed at uncovering «den gesellschaftlichen Kausalkomplex» («Volkstümlichkeit und Realismus» 70). Brecht’s understanding of realism points to the dynamic relationship between the work of art, the artist, and reality by foregrounding that a work of art is influenced by and, at the same time, consciously influences reality («Notizen über realistische Schreibweise» 112). Furthermore, reality, as Brecht conceives of it, must be presented as constructed by people, and is thus changeable by them. Art is therefore «menschliche Praxis» («Notizen» 127) emphasizing that people are both subjects of change, «verändernd,» and subject to change, «veränderlich» («Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater? » 192). For Brecht, literary realism is an aesthetic tool in the class struggle. 372 Ela Gezen Realist writing is therefore «kämpferisch,» fighting against the «Verschleierungen der Wahrheit» in the representation of capitalist exploitation and production conditions («Thesen über die Organisation der Parole» 129). Like Brecht, Hikmet also considers art to be in service of the class struggle and therefore emphasizes socioeconomic realities and sociohistoric tendencies in his work. Hikmet referred to himself as «an ordinary proletarian poet with a Marxist-Leninist conscience» (qtd. in Halman, Review 173) and a «realistic-dialectical-materialist optimist» for whom realism was applied dialectical materialism (41, 60). 3 According to Hikmet, art «should serve people and call them for a better future. That it should be a voice for people’s suffering, their anger, hope, joy and longing» (88-89). Hikmet, like Brecht, emphasizes the ability of literature not merely to represent but also to change and to incite change (19, 57). From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, Hikmet sees the relationship between writer and his object as a dynamic one, giving rise to an understanding of realism, which, like Brecht’s, is characterized by didacticism, as well as the capacity to effect change. As Hikmet points out, through realism in representation we «learn about yesterday, understand today, and anticipate tomorrow» (60). Similarly, for Brecht the future depends on the «Erledigung der Vergangenheit» («Kulturpolitik und Akademie der Künste» 162). In both cases, the past is considered a mutable model, based on which, and to which, future changes will be made. For Ören, writing several decades later but in keeping with Brecht’s and Hikmet’s approaches, the writer always intervenes in reality, thereby taking «Rache an der Geschichte» («Vorstellungskraft» 6). What Ören refers to as revenge here amounts to the literary intervention into official German historical narratives, especially those concerning the Turkish presence in Germany. As Ören states: «Damit das Bild vollständig wird, müssen wir an dieser Stelle eine neue soziale Schicht im demographischen Panorama der halben Stadt einordnen, eine Schicht, die trotz ihres Daseins nicht als existent betrachtet wurde. Eine, die produzierte ohne zu konsumieren («Selbstbild» 30). Ören’s literary precursors Hikmet and Brecht had emphasized that the relation between poet and surroundings is never passive, foregrounding the effect of the poet’s oeuvre on society and conceiving of poetry as a catalyst for change. Ören understands the relationship between the poet and the surroundings he presents in similarly dynamic terms. On his own relationship to Berlin, for example, he writes: Berlin: eine Stadt deren Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart gelebt wird, während ihre Zukunft mit einem Fragezeichen behaftet ist. Ein Übergang zwischen zwei Grenzen. Eine Wartestelle. Die Ankunft der Türken. Eine Völkerwanderung, die Convergent Realisms 373 in Europas Geschichte unvergessliche Folgen haben wird; meine Teilnahme an dieser Wanderung und zugleich mein Auftreten als ihr Zeuge. («Bindung an Berlin» 81) Here we see that for Ören, the recording of events is central to the process of writing. Writing documents the process of migration and the Turkish immigrants’ participation in Berlin’s past, present, and future. With Hikmet and Brecht, Ören underlines the interaction of the poet (himself), with his surroundings (Berlin), while inscribing himself into the city’s traditions, particularly into the organized traditions by which the oppressed classes conduct their fight against hegemonic forces. Thus he presents himself as collective autobiographer, archivist of Berlin’s broader history, and intellectual activist, constantly reflecting on how the course of that history might be changed. The «Berlin-Poetik» («Eine Metropole» 48), as Ören refers to the trilogy, was, in addition to completing Berlin’s «demographisches Panorama» («Selbstbild» 30), aimed at bringing Berlin residents together with immigrants. By focusing on the Turkish workers, solidarity among the working class, and production conditions in Berlin that exploit labor, Ören’s writings are in line with the literature of leftist artists’ associations prominent at the time, such as the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt and Die Rote Nelke, which he joined in the early 1970s. Die Rote Nelke was founded in 1968 and set as its goal active participation in the class struggle. The aim of its members was to continue the legacy of the Assoziation revolutionärer Künstler (ASSO), a group founded in 1928 by artists who were members of the Communist Party, to support and promote the class struggle through art (Budde, «Manifest»). The Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt, which was founded in 1970, similarly connects back to the revolutionary tradition of the Weimar Republic embodied in the Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller. The Werkkreis in particular emphasized the need to return to and revivify past cultural traditions of the workers’ movement while adapting them to present circumstances. Special emphasis was put on the realism debate: «Als wichtige Anknüpfungspunkte dienen hierbei die Ergebnisse der Realismus- Diskussionen aus den 20er und 30er Jahren, besonders die von Bertolt Brecht formulierten» (Partei ergreifen 1). The various workshops organized by the Werkkreis, and the publications that emerged from them, attest to the significance of realist aesthetics for the Werkkreis. Brecht’s writing was of particular importance for the Werkkreis on the question of the relationship between content, form, and functionality in art. 4 More generally, in early 1970s West Germany, realism continued to anchor discussions about «literarische Verantwortung und gesellschaftliche Wirkung» (Reinhold, Tendenzen 13) 374 Ela Gezen insofar as the patent relationship of the writer to reality made theorizing the role and function of realist writing in the context of socio-political conflicts a logical next step (Reinhold, Klassenkampf 201). Aras Ören was a central figure in these debates. Not only are his early works characterized by «didactic realism,» he also promoted this aesthetic in cultural-political activities within Die Rote Nelke itself, particularly in collaboration with the Gruppe schreibender Arbeiter. Indeed, when Ören assumed chairship of this group in 1972, didacticism was linked explicitly to agitation and writing was seen as a tool for understanding «unsere kapitalistische Umwelt […] und die Widersprüche, die sie hervorbringt; zugleich aber auch, um das Entstehende, das bereits Zukünftige im Gegenwärtigen, aufzuzeigen und um einen aktiven Beitrag zu leisten im Kampf für die Veränderung der bestehenden gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse» (Budde, «Notwendigkeit» 1-2). This also manifested itself in the various events that were organized by this working group: readings, exhibits, and meetings in which members discussed questions surrounding workers’ literature, the writing process, and finding relevant topics. Events were practice-oriented, interactive, and focused on aesthetic questions echoing and actively engaging in larger cultural-political debates, reflected in the event titles and meeting themes: «Neuer Realismus,» «Probleme des Realismus,» «Der kämpfende Mensch in der Literatur der Arbeiterklasse,» «Arbeiter schreiben für Arbeiter,» and «Realistische Kunst und Literatur in Westberlin.» For Hikmet, Brecht and Ören, literature (and art more broadly) provided social analysis and criticism, as well as the means to reflect on social reality through realist didacticism with the intention to agitate. The artist’s approach to history is dialectical materialism, which does not reflect reality as fixed and permanent, but as a changing process produced by people and therefore transformable by them. This approach sees the literary text as a tool that turns authors and readers into collaborators, «Mitwirkende,» as put forth by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of Brecht’s epic theatre (110). But the promotion of realist representation was not confined to the pages of obscure journals or local gatherings and discussions within Die Rote Nelke. Ören puts the insights of these discussions to work in his literary writing as well, modeling a praxis of realism and of artistic social responsibility which - if read closely - displays the marked influence of both Brecht’s and Hikmet’s shared theoretical approaches and aesthetic practices. Ören’s trilogy, specifically the first part, thus pays special attention to the representation of workers’ solidarity and Turkish participation in the German workers’ movement, presenting Turkish workers as subjects, not objects, of German labor history. In Ören’s writing, as the following analysis shows, Turkish Convergent Realisms 375 guestworkers integrated themselves into Germany’s labor movement by consulting its legacies and actively adapting them to the socioeconomic and political circumstances of West Germany in the 1970s. Emphasizing the workers’ standpoint and the proletarian experience, Ören inscribes into the text Turkish and German debates concerning the social role of art and modes of representation, debates that he himself helped to shape. Foregrounding the perspective of Turkish workers as well as their ability to improve upon and overcome inequalities, Ören encourages them to become agents of change. Although each part of Ören’s Berlin trilogy is formally self-contained, the three sections are interlinked by the reappearance of various characters, identical settings, and formal characteristics. In the following, I will focus exclusively on the first part - though the themes discussed resonate throughout the cycle - in which Ören describes the lives of the (mainly Turkish) inhabitants of Naunynstraße: Niyazi Gümüskılıç, 5 Atifet, Sabri San, Halime, Frau Elisabeth Kutzer, Klaus Feck and Nermin, among others. 6 Even though the title character of the first part is Niyazi, there is neither a clear protagonist nor omniscient narrator, but rather a variety of characters (and perspectives) with changing focus throughout the narrative. Through nonlinear and non-chronological structuring, inclusion of subheadings, interior monologues, and analepses, Ören abstains from providing any sense of totality, completeness, or coherence with regard to the Zeitlichkeiten he represents. This refusal of seamless description, which works to disrupt uncritical reception, is supported by his use of montage, a structuring principle also prevalent in Brecht’s and Hikmet’s work. The use of montage is most noticeable in the character portraits: each character is briefly introduced by a short paragraph by a third-person narrator, which is then followed by an introduction in the first person told by the characters themselves. The passages narrated in the third person are often brief factual reports covering biographical aspects of the character, such as place of origin, marital status, and occupation. These sequences stand in contrast to the passages narrated in the first person, which are a mix of retrospection and introspection, alternating between monologues, dream sequences, memory snippets, and flashbacks. They provide the reader with insights into the past of the characters, for example, their reasons for emigrating to Berlin, but also into such matters as consumer status, for example, by citing income figures (Chiellino 317). In this way, as Carmine Chiellino notes, Turkish workers «sind stets als Teil der entfremdeten Verhältnisse zwischen Arbeit und Lohn definiert» (317). Their personal perspectives and official, external details about their lives mediate one another. 376 Ela Gezen It is in the second part of the trilogy that Ören, through the character of Niyazi, reveals the poem’s overall aim: «I tried to draw attention to the importance of rewriting history from a class standpoint. This is a beginning, it has to continue; we will certainly write our own class history» (Berlin Üçlemesi 167). Divided into seven cantos, the first part of the Berlin trilogy traces a genealogy of workers in Kreuzberg. Although the cantos do not follow a chronological order, the characters are interlinked through their location, profession, and their relationship to Niyazi, coalescing to «landscapes» («manzaralar,» 214) of Naunynstraße inhabitants in Berlin. In referring to his text as «landscapes,» Ören establishes a transtextual connection to Hikmet’s multivolume epic Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Human Landscapes from my Home Country), written between 1941 and 1951 and published in 1966/ 67, which Hikmet conceived of as a «poetic history of the present» (qtd. in Blasing 131). Ören’s focus on the social panorama of Kreuzberg’s inhabitants, specifically its workers, present and past, his use of montage techniques and his willingness to experiment with form - all these bespeak associations with Brecht’s and Hikmet’s poetics. Furthermore, by employing montage as a structuring principle for the trilogy, Ören, like Brecht and Hikmet, draws attention to the evolving nature of social, historical, and political processes. The first character introduced to the reader is Frau Kutzer with her family history. Hailing from East Prussia, Frau Kutzer’s family, at that point the Brummel family, moved to Berlin when Franz Christian Naunyn (1799- 1860) became its mayor in 1848, during a time when «capital was exploiting labor unscrupulously» (23). Having moved to Naunynstraße in the midnineteenth century, which was «just any street back then» (24), the Brummel family - later Kutzer family - occupies the place of a constant in the history of the street, surviving different regimes with differing ideologies. In the aftermath of World War I, the Brummels’ income decreases because the father’s locksmith shop goes out of business. In 1924, with economic conditions worsening, Elisabeth Brummel, then nineteen years old, marries Gustav Kutzer. Gustav, an assembly worker at Borsig, is politically active and a member of the Communist Party (KPD). While his wife struggles to accept her status as a member of the working class, for her husband, being a proletarian is «nothing to be ashamed of» (29). He believes that «tomorrow proletarians will take over power» (29), and while his wife longs for material wealth and comfort, daydreaming of things they cannot afford, Gustav’s political beliefs lend him support and a sense of fulfillment. Narrating the Kutzers’ past, Ören alludes to Hitler’s rise to power and the dictatorship of the Third Reich. As can be expected, a key year is 1933, when husband Gustav arrives home in shock, stating, «we are being followed» (29). Convergent Realisms 377 Thereafter he burns his communist flyers printed with the KPD campaign slogan for the elections in 1932 and 1933: «Suicide is no solution, fight with the KPD» (30). In fear of persecution by Hitler’s regime, he turns his back on politics, a circumstance that Rita Chin describes as a «silence that […] amounts to nothing less than psychological suicide» (67). Gustav’s forced silence is emblematic of the «backlash against growing political power of the working class in Germany» by the Nazi regime (Markovits and Gorski 3). In addition to Gustav’s political and ideological immobilization, his family’s financial situation continues to deteriorate until, finally, they are forced to sell all of their valuable belongings in the aftermath of World War II. In a sequence exemplifying Ören’s realist didacticism, Frau Kutzer is shown comprehending neither her husband’s ideology and political beliefs nor the consequences of his losing them, until long after his death. Aging, alone and impoverished, she reveals: «Now I understand him, left like a hollow tree needing something to lean on - in order not to fall over» (21-22). Frau Kutzer’s story is marked by the experiences of both World Wars: confrontations with death and the victims of war, especially the loss of her loved ones. In 1924, she loses her father; in 1946, she loses her twelve-year old son Fridolin to scarlet fever; and in 1959, her husband dies of a heart attack. The year 1959 is also crucial in another way and not randomly chosen by Ören: it symbolizes the end of workers’ representation by a political party in the Federal Republic of Germany. After the Federal Constitutional Court sanctioned the dissolution of the Communist Party (KPD) in 1956, in 1959 the Social Democratic Party (SPD) ratified the Bad Godesberg program, «in which the SPD shed its traditional status of a class or workers’ party for that of a mass or people’s party» (Markovits and Gorski 34). Through the biography of the figure Gustav Kutzer, Ören subtly weaves in historic events which remind the reader of major setbacks experienced by the working class in Germany: Hitler’s rise to power, the persecution by the Nazi regime, the dissolution of the Communist Party after World War II, and the repositioning of the Social Democratic Party in 1959. Analogies to the Nazis appear in the poem’s discussion of racism and xenophobia during the early stages of labor migration, which is addressed in connection with Ali and Nermin, a Turkish couple living in Naunynstraße. Ali, now a refrigerator repair technician, left their village Acıbayram in 1970. Once he moves from the workers’ dormitory to his own apartment on Naunynstraße, his wife Nermin follows him to Berlin. Ali experiences discrimination twice. He is insulted first by his coworkers while leaving work, and then by the factory worker Klaus Feck later that same day on his way home. They call him «dirty foreigner» (for them, Ali epitomizes all guestworkers) 378 Ela Gezen and blame him for low wages, the increase of work hours, and their general dissatisfaction (51). Both instances elicit the following comment: «In their hands no machine guns, no automatics. On their heads no steel helmets, on their feet no boots, they did not wear brown uniforms and swastikas» (67). The analogy drawn between the verbal attackers and the Nazis, as well as the repetition of these sentences in unaltered form, emphasizes the persistence of racist ideology beyond the Third Reich. As Rita Chin notes, Ören takes the «conventional German New Left linkage between capitalism and fascism in new directions» showing that, «in spite of similar work experiences, mutual economic complaints,» workers are «unable to recognize their common plight» (76-77). Furthermore, this passage serves as a reminder of the principal impediment to the solidarization of a single, cohesive workers’ movement: racism and fascism. Throughout Europe, workers’ movements and their parties have been shattered by fascist regimes, therefore, the fight of the workers must take aim at both material exploitation as well as ideological oppression. All references to the Holocaust and the Third Reich take the form of brief and seemingly neutral statements, like the passages narrated in the third person, which introduce the political contexts in which the characters live: the terror of the Nazi regime for the Kutzers, and the tumult of the student revolts in Turkey for Atifet. Ören does not assign them any specific significance, nor does he emphasize one over the other. Historical and political events appear in factual enumerations that read like reports. We see this in the metafictional comments provided by the third-person narrator, who, while summarizing Frau Kutzer’s family history, notes that there is «nothing else worthy to report» (25). 7 Similarly to Brecht and Hikmet, Ören’s allusions to and use of reportage emphasize the factual over the empathic. In addition to his use of montage techniques and non-chronological structuring, Ören inserts bracketed sentences. These provide supplementary information on Niyazi’s apartment, on Halime’s earnings and expenses, and on Ali’s whereabouts, thus slowing down the narrative flow and creating a sense of extemporaneity, reinforcing the distance between reader and text (34, 44, 69). By means of such montage techniques, Ören, like Brecht and Hikmet, places equal emphasis on the alterability of the present and an understanding of history as work in progress. As the title already indicates, Naunynstraße is central to the Berlin trilogy. As a physical space, it links the protagonists through their experiences as members of the working class beyond ethnic or national differentiation. The fictional (and factual) Naunynstraße is a street located in the center of the district of Kreuzberg - a district that, at the time Ören was Convergent Realisms 379 writing, was located in West Berlin bordering the East. After World War-II, Kreuzberg was in ruins, with half of its living space and two thirds of its businesses destroyed (cf. Kaak). During the early stages of labor migration to Germany, one of the few alternatives to living in austere barracks was to move into condemned tenements slated for renovation or demolition. These were often located in traditionally working-class districts such as Kreuzberg, Schöneberg, and Wedding and were temporarily rented to migrant laborers, who could not afford to live in prosperous neighborhoods like Zehlendorf, Wilmersdorf, Steglitz, and Charlottenburg (cf. Häussermann and Kapphahn). With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Kreuzberg was transformed from a central Berlin district to an isolated area at the margins of West Berlin, bordered by the GDR on three sides. Because of standing plans to refurbish vast areas of Kreuzberg in the future, many houses and buildings were neither renovated nor adequately maintained (Lang 230). Kreuzberg’s architecture, its backyards framed by the Hinterhäuser, constitutes a building design that goes back to the turn of the century when Kreuzberg was the prime location for small industrial shops and factories. The buildings housed small businesses in the front parts and accommodated their workers in the rear, the Hinterhäuser. Buildings were structured in this way in order to meet working as well as living needs. In contrast to the buildings facing the street, the rear buildings were plain, constructed without stucco or other decorative elements. They did not have direct access to the street, lacked direct sunlight, and provided less comfort, as they were equipped only with shared bathrooms (Mandel 149). Kreuzberg’s backyards recur in Ören’s works, as both a motif and a setting. For example in his collection Anlatılar 1970-1982 (Stories, 1991), he dedicated an entire short story to these spaces, giving it the title «Arka Avlu» («Backyard»). Here, the narrator describes Kreuzberg from the bird’s eye view: its countless roofs and chimneys, which appear stacked upon one another; its gray-black coloring; its accumulation of TV satellite antennas - all features that distinguish Kreuzberg from other parts of the city («Arka Avlu» 14). By emphasizing these visual, superficial features, Ören evokes the overcrowdedness and poverty of the industrial inner city. But in the first part of the trilogy he offers a closer look at its inhabitants: «Only if you step into the backyards, you will feel, taste, and smell what is in the air. Then you will notice […] that here the class is living that will breach and change societal norms and reconstitute them» (Berlin Üçlemesi 83). Counterposing what is seen from a distance to that which is apprehended viscerally, by a combination of the senses, Ören locates the potential for change and its agents in the Hinterhäuser of Kreuzberg, the home of the workers. 380 Ela Gezen The first part of the trilogy documents the specific transformation of Naunynstraße through Turkish labor migration. It is a positive transformation, such that «without Turks, Naunynstraße, while not losing anything of its characteristics as a street,- would today, in its old days, still be in its nascent beginnings» (34). The interaction of Turkish labor migrants with Naunynstraße remains central throughout the trilogy. Here the physiognomy of Naunynstraße and its buildings is likened to that of the exploited workers: «The houses that look at you in Naunynstraße turn their facade away and their backside to you, like dull transport workers who do not pay attention to the weight they carry» (82-83). The fatigue and exhaustion of its working-class inhabitants is transferred to the street, which is «dozy, sluggish» having «sleepy windows that stare at the water pumps on the curbside» (20, 82). Anthropomorphizing Naunynstraße strengthens the linkage between the street and its inhabitants, lending body imagery to a city sector’s longstanding class association (Frederking 66). The connection between the street and its inhabitants is further extended when the narrator personifies Naunynstraße as a mother putting «the lost people from the foreign countries to sleep at its damp bosom» (34). Not only is Naunynstraße a welcoming place for its new inhabitants, it also comforts them. The language of the German translation is somewhat different: «Und die Naunynstraße dämmrigfeucht nahm sie auf aus den Orten der Wildnis» (21). Here, Naunynstraße merely accommodates its new inhabitants. There is a fundamental difference between allegorizing a street as mother on the one hand and as host on the other. By conceiving of the street as mother, as in the Turkish text, Ören establishes a familial relationship between the street and its inhabitants. The German translation, in contrast, suggests a more distanced, host/ guest relation. Kreuzberg, and especially Naunynstraße, remain significant throughout Ören’s oeuvre, reappearing in other poems and novels. In his poetry collection Mitten in der Odyssee (1980), the poem «Die Straßen von Kreuzberg» acknowledges: «In diesen Straßen leben die Leute mit einem Kapital gleich null» (15). In Deutschland, ein türkisches Märchen (1978), he included a poem entitled «Was ist los in der Naunynstraße? ». In this fragment, as the poet himself labels it, the plural lyrical subject - the workers - proclaims: «Diese Straße ist unsere Straße, wenn auch keine Pappeln hier wachsen in langer Reihe. Diese Wohnungen sind unsere Wohnungen, wir sind die Architekten, wir sind die Bauleute, wir sind die Besitzer, wir sind die Mieter […]» (97). Here, Ören represents the workers as a united collective, emphasized through the use of «wir,» claiming Naunynstraße as its own - not exclusive to Germans, nor to Turks, but rather a possession of all workers. Convergent Realisms 381 Throughout the first part of the trilogy, Ören adds the experiences of Turkish guestworkers to the proletarian history of this street and emphasizes the interaction of Turkish workers with fellow German workers. He also narrates their participation in (and continuation of) traditions in the places they immigrated to. Although the arrival of the first Turkish guestworkers, which is mentioned in the first part of the trilogy, passes without further detail or commentary, Ören provides specific information on the Turkish labor migrants who subsequently join them - Niyazi, Atifet, Halime, Kazım, and Sabri, among others. All of these characters come to embody different forms of immigration, which cover a wide variety of economic motivations (Frederking 76). Atifet, Niyazi’s close friend, came to Berlin in 1967 to work at Siemens. She is politically active and participates in demonstrations organized by the workers’ union. Halime also came to Germany for work and, because her husband is in prison in Turkey, she has to support her two children herself through occasional work at Telefunken and by working as a prostitute. Kazım lost his transportation business in Turkey, and came to Berlin in 1971, where he works as a carpenter. Sabri, an unskilled laborer employed as a transport worker, came to Germany after an earthquake hit his village in Turkey. The interaction between workers and their new environment is central to Ören’s writing, because, as he puts it: «Die Menschen aus der Türkei, egal woher und aus welcher Schicht sie kamen, waren hier Teil eines historischen Prozesses, sie waren jetzt neue Mitglieder der Arbeiterklasse in Deutschland […]. Ich hatte die Erwartung, dass sie das Erbe der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung antraten. Dass sie sich dieses Erbe aneigneten und es in die Zukunft trugen» («Die Metropole» 182). In Ören’s view, Turkish guestworkers immigrated and - despite their differing backgrounds - integrated themselves into Germany’s labor movement by continuing its existing legacies as participants, not outsiders, in the shaping of German history. Pivotal to this process is the character of Niyazi, who connects characters through his various relationships to them as friend, neighbor, and colleague (Frederking 62). Originally from Bebek, a prosperous district in Istanbul, Niyazi lives above Frau Kutzer and works as pressman at Preussag. Since he lived in poor conditions in Bebek, he came to Berlin for better prospects: «When this thing with Germany came up, I told myself, like anyone else, me too: Germany is a little America. Go there, Niyazi, and live like the rich in Bebek» (37-38). Just as Frau Kutzer dreams of being the rich woman in the Neukölln villa she cleans, Niyazi seeks a better life in Germany. The connection between these two characters is made early in the story, when both of them are briefly mentioned in juxtaposition, Niyazi going to his night 382 Ela Gezen shift, while Frau Kutzer is unable to fall asleep. Not only are they located next to each other in narrative sequence, they live above/ below each other, in a spatial relation which is also mirrored by their appearances in textual sequence. Moreover, the Kutzers and Niyazi are interlinked through their immigrant status. While the Brummel family, later the Kutzers, moved to Berlin in the nineteenth century, the Turkish guestworkers (Niyazi, Sabri, and Halime) arrive a century later, continuing the line of labor migration. To quote Harald Weinrich, Ören thus creates «eine poetische Ahnengalerie, der sich nun ohne Bruch eine türkische Proletariergeneration anschließt» (233). After his move, Niyazi begins to shed his illusions about Germany as a land of better opportunity; he admits to having realized where his place is in society - not with the wealthy whom he had aspired to join, but with the working class of which he is already a member (39). Seven years in Berlin have changed Niyazi and made him aware of the necessity of fighting for his rights instead of quietly accepting his fate, because all «those giving their labor have the same share in the world» (40). He further notes, «I have learned that my right is a right too. Never again will I abdicate my right, even if it costs my life» (40). He is ambitious in enlightening other workers regarding their rights, and works with his comrade Horst Schmidt, a chimney repairman 8 and regular at the Marxist night school, to recruit neighbors and friends into showing solidarity in their fight against exploitation and capitalism. Towards the end of the trilogy, Naunynstraße becomes a symbol for political change, as its inhabitants realize that they should cooperate and help each other to improve labor conditions (Frederking 65). In conversation Horst and Niyazi realize: «We live here, and here, in this street, in this neighborhood we are many, many, who every day are being pushed against the wall anew. We have to join forces» (85-86). The «system,» which denies workers the products of their work, deserves the blame for their situation. Those who benefit from Niyazi’s labors as he melts scrap metal in the oven are those living in villas in Southwest Berlin; those «who receive the cream are not those milking the cow» (15, 56). It is through this focus on the perspective of Kreuzberg’s workers as well as their ability to improve upon and overcome inequalities by becoming actors of change, and the employment of formal techniques which include critical stances in the reader and disrupt passive, unquestioning absorption of the narrative material, that the convergences between Brecht’s, Hikmet’s, and Ören’s realist aesthetics reaches its highest point. The only way to overcome oppression, as suggested by Horst in the first part of the trilogy, is to join forces: «[Y]es, only when people show solidarity can they make themselves aware of the fact that they can be together in an organiza- Convergent Realisms 383 tion and change something» (87). In the end, Naunynstraße again becomes a street «in which something is stirring […] workers, Naunynstraße inhabitants, together drinking beer, having political disputes, shoulder to shoulder under the same flag» (87). Like Hikmet and Brecht before him, Ören equally establishes the need for workers to show solidarity in their fight against capitalist exploitation and become actors for change, independent from ethnicity, race, class, and gender. Moreover, Turkish immigrants, as represented by Ören, function as actors - rather than passive bystanders - in the continuation, revival, and transformation of German traditions of labor protest in the postwar period. The aesthetic tool with which Ören represents this historical process is realism, which he, while drawing on and synthesizing Brecht’s and Hikmet’s conceptualizations of realist didacticism, transforms, adapting it to the historical context of Turkish migration to Germany. Notes I would like to thank Seth Howes for being an invaluable interlocutor, a critical reader, a supportive colleague, and a true friend. I am also indebted to the guest co-editors, Alexander Sager and Martin Kagel, for their helpful feedback and insightful comments. 1 Among the various manuscripts at the Akademie der Künste archive are several unpublished dramatic sketches (taşlak) which further attest to the significance of drama for Ören’s work. Examples include Bozkır (1966-67), Alı ştırma (1965), and Halim oğlu Yusuf (1965). 2 My reading consults and further develops the work of-Monika Frederking and Carmine Chiellino on these questions. Though both scholars point to Brechtian and Hikmetian traces in the trilogy, and Chiellino briefly mentions the significance of Ören’s «symbiotische[m] Kontakt […] zu der neuesten deutschsprachigen Literatur der sechziger und siebziger Jahre» (313), the particular institutional details of that contact, along with the aesthetic relationships, are not explored in further detail. See Frederking as well as Chiellino for details. 3 Translations are all mine, unless noted otherwise. 4 For example «Realistisch schreiben» (1973) and «Partei ergreifen» (1974). 5 Typographical error in the German translation: Gümüscilic. 6 My analysis will be based on the Turkish original. I will incorporate the German translation whenever it deviates from the Turkish original. 7 In the Turkish original, the writer uses the verb «kayıt etmek» (25), which translates into «to record,» extenuated in the German translation as «erwähnen» (14). 8 In the German version, «baca tamircisi» (83) (chimney repairman) is mistakenly translated as «Töpfer» (64). 384 Ela Gezen Works Cited Baykurt, Fakir. «Hoşgeldin Aras Ören.» Introduction. Berlin Üçlemesi: Poem. By Aras Ören. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1980. 5-10. Benjamin, Walter. «Der Autor als Produzent.» Versuche über Brecht. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1966. 95-116. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Nazım Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet. New York: Persea Books, 2013. Brecht, Bertolt. «Kulturpolitik und Akademie der Künste.» Bertolt Brecht. Über Realismus. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971. 160-63. -. «Notizen über realistische Schreibweise.» Bertolt Brecht. Über Realismus. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971. 106-27. -. «Thesen über die Organisation der Parole ‹Kämpferischer Realismus›.» Bertolt Brecht. Über Realismus. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp, 1971. 129-30. -. «Über sozialistischen Realismus.» Bertolt Brecht. Über Realismus. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971. 165-66. -. «Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater? » Bertolt Brecht: Ausgewählte Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 6. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2005. 188-98. -. «Volkstümlichkeit und Realismus.» Bertolt Brecht. Über Realismus. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971. 67-74. Budde, Harald. «Manifest Nr. 4.» Asphalt 3 (1970): n. pag. -. «Von der Notwendigkeit des Schreibens.» Asphalt 4 (1971): 1-2. Chiellino, Carmine. Am Ufer der Fremde: Literatur und Arbeitsemigration, 1870 - 1991. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. Chin, Rita C. K. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Drewitz, Ingeborg. «Poem von den Kreuzberger Türken.» Der Tagesspiegel 16 Dec. 1973: 43. Frederking, Monika. Schreiben gegen Vorurteile: Literatur türkischer Migranten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Berlin: Express, 1985. Göktaş, Erbil. Vasıf Öngören’ in Tiyatro Dünyası. Istanbul: Mitos-Boyut Yayınları, 2004. Halman, Talat S. Rev. of Things I Didn’t Know I Loved: Selected Poems by Nazım Hikmet. Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. World Literature Today 52.1 (1978): 173. -.«Turkish Literature in the 1960s.» Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature by Talat S. Halman. Ed. Jayne L. Warner. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007. 82-95. Häussermann, Hartmut, and Andreas Kapphan. Berlin: Von der geteilten zur gespaltenen Stadt? Sozialräumlicher Wandel seit 1990. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000. Heise, Hans Jürgen. «Orientale in Kreuzberg.» Die Weltwoche 22 Nov. 1978: 38. Hikmet, Nazım. Sanat ve Edebiyat Üstüne. Nazım Hikmet. Ed. Aziz Çalışlar. Istanbul: Evrensel Basım Yayın, 1996. Kaak, Heinrich. Kreuzberg. Berlin: Colloquium, 1988. Lang, Barbara. Mythos Kreuzberg: Ethnographie eines Stadtteils (1961-1995). Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1998. Convergent Realisms 385 Mandel, Ruth. «A Place of Their Own: Contesting Spaces and Defining Places in Berlin’s Migrant Community.» Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe. Ed. Barbara Metcalf. Berkeley: California UP, 1996. 147-66. Markovits, Andrei S., and Philip S. Gorski. The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Nekimken, Albert. Brecht in Turkey, 1955-1977: The Impact of Bertold Brecht on Society and the Development of Revolutionary Theatre in Turkey. Istanbul: Isis, 1998. Ören, Aras. «Arka Avlu.» Anlatılar 1970 -1982. Berlin: Babel, 1991. 11-16. -. Berlin Üçlemesi: Poem. Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 1980. -. «Was ist los in der Naunynstraße? » Deutschland, ein türkisches Märchen: Gedichte. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1982. 95-98. -. «Die Metropole ist kein Völkerkundemuseum.» Literatur und Identität. Deutschdeutsche Befindlichkeiten und die multikulturelle Gesellschaft. Ed. Ursula E. Beitter. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 175-93. -. «Die Straßen von Kreuzberg.» Mitten in der Odyssee. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1980. 14-15. -. «Eine Metropole ist kein Völkerkundemuseum.» Privatexil: Ein Programm? Drei Vorlesungen. Trans. Cem Dalaman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1999. 43-60. -. Kör Oidipus. Ankara: Tiyatro Yayınları, 1980. -. «Meine Bindung an Berlin.» Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 1 (1985): 80-81. -. «Selbstbild mit Stadt.» Privatexil: Ein Programm? Drei Vorlesungen. Trans. Cem Dalaman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1999. 23-41. -. «Vorstellungskraft und Zeit.» Privatexil: Ein Programm? Drei Vorlesungen. Trans. Cem Dalaman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1999. 5-21. -. Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße. Trans. H. Achmed Schmiede and Johannes Schenk. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973. Reinhold, Ursula. Literatur und Klassenkampf: Entwicklungsprobleme der demokratischen und sozialistischen Literatur in der BRD (1965-1974). Berlin: Dietz, 1976. -. Tendenzen und Autoren. Zur Literatur der siebziger Jahre in der BRD. Berlin: Dietz, 1982. Weinrich, Harald. «Deutschland - ein türkisches Märchen. Zu Hause in der Fremde - Gastarbeiterliteratur.» Deutsche Literatur 1983. Ein Jahresüberblick. Ed. Volker Hage and Adolf Fink. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. 230-37. Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt. Partei ergreifen: Für die Einheit der Werktätigen mit einer antikapitalistischen Literatur und Kunst. Berlin: Verlag der Arbeitswelt, 1974. Presenting a Moment of the Past: Third Positions in Uwe Timm’s Works AN T J E K RUEGER Goucher College In Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht voices the concern that literary scholarship is suffering an intellectual and theoretical deadlock that has been brought about by two dominant schools of thought. «Today, after manifold departures, reorganizations, and metamorphoses […], we find ourselves facing marked - indeed, seemingly irreconcilable, mutually exclusive - differences between two basic assumptions concerning the ontology of literature» (2). On the one hand there is Deconstruction, which has, in Gumbrecht’s view, always belonged to the «linguistic turn of philosophy.» «This has meant - and, for its adherents, it continues to mean - that contact between language and reality outside of language cannot occur» (2). On the other hand there is Cultural Studies, which Gumbrecht understands as an approach that has not been sufficiently skeptical about literature’s connection with extralinguistic realities. He emphasizes that researchers in this field often do not challenge the validity of empirical research and treat its results with a «certain carefree attitude toward epistemology» (3). Gumbrecht does not support one or the other position; rather, he advocates for a third position, one that can overcome these contrasts and tensions. He writes that the German concept of Stimmung can give form to this third position. Thus, he suggests that interpreters and historians of literature should read with «Stimmung in mind» (3). Gumbrecht’s reading for Stimmung struck me in a very particular way. When reading the first few pages, I found myself excited and drawn to his arguments. Spontaneously, I wrote down some notes that expressed my feelings. For instance, I wrote that I loved his central thesis. The reader encounters this claim in the introduction. There he states «that concentrating on atmospheres and moods offers literary studies a possibility for reclaiming vitality and aesthetic immediacy that have, for the most part, gone missing» (12). Also, I found myself fascinated by his ideas regarding the effects of a reading for Stimmung. He describes that a reader’s concentration on Stimmung could bring about a «presentification of past atmospheres and moods» that «convey a historical immediacy» (15). Presenting a Moment of the Past 387 His arguments reminded me of my own struggle to find a way to do analytical justice to texts written by Uwe Timm, in particular the use of what Timm calls sprechende Situationen, scenes based on forms of Vergegenwärtigung. Reading Gumbrecht’s introduction left me excited and inspired, since it seemed to offer a refreshing and unorthodox model for approaching literary texts. Gumbrecht calls for a new way of engaging with literary texts and their historical contexts that entails a different way of writing about them. He distances himself from the typical scholarly writing style and discussion by refusing to engage with «ponderous footnotes and apparatuses» (18). In his book, he chooses David Wellberry’s rich analysis of the term Stimmung for the Historisches Wörterbuch ästhetischer Grundbegriffe as his point of departure. He explains that he is not interested in the question of «how literary texts relate to realities outside of works, but rather in the ontology of literature» (Gumbrecht 2). Looking more closely at Gumbrecht’s new way of writing, I found that his essay creates its own Stimmung. He employs a particular writing style that could be positioned between scholarly article and biographical narrative. He repeatedly poses pertinent and exciting questions with regard to Stimmung in specific literary texts. Yet, in contrast to the typical scholarly essay, he appears to prefer to describe these texts over reflecting further on his approach. For instance, in his chapter on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, he takes the following question as point of departure: «What is it of the sonnet’s beauty and power that touched me so deeply - when I was sixteen or seventeen - that it stayed with me, like the small scar on my left hand that I got in a bicycle accident? » (39). Even though the question points to a productive link between Stimmung, body, and mind, Gumbrecht chose not to discuss this connection. Rather, he explains that Shakespeare «charges» the text with «energy» by allowing his writing a certain literalness and concreteness (42). Yet, besides mentioning this narrative strategy, Gumbrecht omits to explain why a reader might be engaged or react in the way he did when he was sixteen or seventeen. However, Gumbrecht does not only comment on literary texts, he also adds some biographical reminiscences and personal observations to his essay. For instance, he describes in detail a former English teacher named Emil Reuter. «With Emil Reuter, we read and discussed Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghosts word by word - so slowly that today, almost fifty years later, I can still recite lengthy passages from memory» (38). Gumbrecht’s pronounced use of an I that describes, and sometimes expresses feelings, invites the reader’s reaction or empathetic reading. He generally steers clear of the 388 Antje Krueger references and abstract terminology of a scholarly idiom, instead seeking a certain concreteness, his own rhythm and structure. Moreover, Gumbrecht places a strong emphasis on the actual performance of a text that could bring about a «presentification» of past moods and atmospheres. Gumbrecht claims that some texts are able to touch us on the «inside.» With regard to Shakespeare’s sonnet, he describes the phenomenon as follows: Whoever recites Shakespeare’s sonnets - or stages his plays - lends physical presence to the words, phrases, and rhythms of his day, calling forth a vanished world. This is not a matter of «remembering» - as one says all too readily - but of «making-present.» When they are called forth to new life, the words strike the bodies of listeners from without; at the same time, they - and the images and meanings they convey - affect us «like a touch from inside.» (39-40) This strikes me as an excellent description of how any kind of vocal performance can create an intimate connection between the listener and the text. Gumbrecht hints here at the physical and psychological dimension of the listening and reading process that can bring about a certain Stimmung. When engaging with his book, I realized that Gumbrecht’s advocacy for an experiment that entails new ways of thinking and speaking about literary texts triggered my initial, enthusiastic reaction to his proposed ideas. Simply put, he found a way to speak to me, while I, for my part, listened and reacted with body and mind. Thus, Gumbrecht not only gained my scholarly interest with questions pertinent to my own research, he also managed to affect me emotionally. However, although Gumbrecht lays claim to a form of vitality when responding to and writing about literary texts, I did not find his essay productive in the sense that it provided an answer to the question of why some texts are able to affect us «like a touch from the inside.» But I found that Gumbrecht’s use of Stimmung in his essay and literary texts by Uwe Timm produce similar effects that would strike a chord with me. Thus, I asked myself if Timm’s work could offer insights into Gumbrecht’s initial question why certain literary texts create a specific Stimmung and affect us. Timm’s literary work is accompanied by many essays in which he reflects on his writing. In these essays, he also emphasizes tonal qualities of the language. In Die Stimme beim Schreiben, he stresses the ability to hear and listen to his own voice while writing: Ich gehöre zu denjenigen, die sich beim Schreiben selbst hören, höre mich sprechen, deutlich, auch jetzt, wenn ich dieses schreibe, ich höre meine Stimme, die recht unterschiedlich spricht, unterschiedlich im Tempo, in der Modulation, im Presenting a Moment of the Past 389 dialektalen Anklang, oft im Hamburger Tonfall. Es ist ein akustischer Raum, der mich begleitet und der mich stets an das Hamburg meiner Kindheit denken lässt. (401) Furthermore, Timm seeks to musically reanimate his texts: «Es geht darum, in einer aus der Erfahrungswelt kommenden, durch den reflektierenden Schreibprozess ihrer selbst bewusst gewordenen Sprache die Gedankenwelt zum Klingen zu bringen» (404). Even though Stimmung and Stimme are etymologically connected, Gumbrecht is not interested in this relationship. However, Timm’s notion of charging the narrative voice for conveying immediacy in literary texts can be found at the core of his writing. In particular, he embedded so-called sprechende Situationen in his narratives. In my view these scenes could offer potential answers for Gumbrecht’s questions. A closer investigation of Timm’s development of sprechende Situationen leads to events that happened at the beginning of his career as a writer. Timm himself addresses these events in the autobiographical narrative Der Freund und der Fremde (2005). In this story, he reveals that he was a close friend of Benno Ohnesorg in the early 1960s. In addition, he also narrates the circumstances that led to Ohnesorg’s death during a student protest aimed against the visit of the Shah of Iran in West Berlin in 1967. Timm and Ohnesorg met and became friends at the Braunschweig Kolleg, a school that allowed older students to obtain the Abitur outside of the Gymnasium. As described in Der Freund und der Fremde, Timm and Ohnesorg shared a deep passion for reading and writing, and both of them returned to school with the goal of becoming writers. In the course of their studies at the Braunschweig Kolleg, Ohnesorg became Timm’s first reader and vice versa. They also planned to move to Berlin together after having passed their Abitur. Yet, after their graduation from the Braunschweig Kolleg, they lost touch, since Timm decided to study in Munich while Ohnesorg went to Berlin. In his memoir, Timm mentions that he was deeply shocked and troubled when he found out about Ohnesorg’s death. He was in Paris at the time, working on his dissertation. He remarks that he was not sure if he understood the name of the victim correctly when he first heard the news on the radio. He describes how he felt after calling friends in Germany to find out more about what happened: Nach einem Anruf in Deutschland gab es keinen Zweifel mehr, er war es, der Freund. Ich war wie durch einen Schnitt getrennt von all meinen Formulierungen, Überlegungen, starrte auf die beschriebenen Seiten, auf meine Handschrift, und sie erschien mir plötzlich merkwürdig fremd. Ich ging hinunter, lief durch den 390 Antje Krueger Park […], im Kopf ein Gemenge von Bildern, Situationen, Sätzen - Erinnerungsfetzen, in denen er auftauchte […]. Nachdem ich einige Zeit durch die Straßen gelaufen war, ging ich zurück in mein Zimmer, setzte mich an den Schreibtisch, stapelte die handgeschriebenen Seiten des Kapitels, an dem ich arbeitete, aufeinander, schob sie zusammen und legte sie in das Regal. Ich wusste, in den nächsten Tagen würde ich daran nicht mehr weiterschreiben können. (10) Timm uses the autobiographical narrative to work through his friend’s biography and their friendship more than thirty-five years after his death. His approach to recounting parts of his friend’s life and the structure of the narrative resemble strategies that he had also used in Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003). Der Freund und der Fremde deploys a wide array of different texts: scenes from their shared time in Braunschweig, recollections about their interest in literature and writing, conversations with friends and family about his life in Berlin, quotes from Ohnesorg’s own writings, reflections on Timm’s time as a student in Munich and Paris, and excerpts from documents from the official investigation of Ohnesorg’s death. Furthermore, Timm dedicates parts of his memoir to describing how Ohnesorg’s death disturbed and alienated him. Along with many other students, he turned his anger and frustration about the flawed police investigation of Ohnesorg’s death, which covered up more than it disclosed, and the biased media coverage into political activism. The students understood the shooting as a willful act, which contributed to the radicalization of the German student movement. The image of the dying Ohnesorg, taken shortly after his assassination, quickly turned into an iconographic expression of the students’ view of a biased judicial system. Upon his return to Germany in the fall of 1967, Timm suspended work on his dissertation and became involved with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund. This involvement consisted not only in the creation and distribution of political flyers, or in leading teach-ins, but also in working out a different tone and language in writing as well as finding different subjects. Up to this point, Timm, who had published his first texts as a student in Munich in the mid-1960s, had mainly written experimental poetry, and he was strongly influenced by French existentialism, in particular the concept of indifférence. In the course of the student movement, he became much more interested in expressing his subjective feelings and started writing about contemporary events such as the student movement. He worked with fictional characters, imagined scenes, and emphasized sensual perceptions and emotions in his texts. Timm stated in Der Freund und der Fremde that he had promised to himself to write about Benno Ohnesorg. Yet, he struggled to find an adequate Presenting a Moment of the Past 391 language and failed, at the time, to find a way to express the shock and the trauma of his friend’s death and, concurrently, to represent the complexity of his personality and life. He found that his highly politicized view of Ohnesorg’s death interfered with writing about him as a friend: Wäre er infolge einer Krankheit oder eines Unfalls gestorben, wäre Trauer um ihn möglich gewesen, so aber war sein Tod ein Skandal, der in Kommentaren, Erklärungen und Gegenerklärungen abgehandelt wurde, und ich selbst musste bei jedem Bericht […], immer wieder dazu Stellung nehmen. […] Ich fand keine Sprache für ihn, jeder Satz bekam einen aggressiven, abstrakt politischen Ton - einen Ton, der nie der seine gewesen war. (12) Timm stated in Der Freund und der Fremde that he gave up writing about Benno Ohnesorg in the early stages of his career. But I would argue that parts of Timm’s work have been shaped by questions that concerned him while trying to write about Ohnesorg and the specific circumstances of his death. All of his writings address the question of how to get closer to another’s personality and how to bring that person to life in a text. His novels recount biographies of historical figures, or of people Timm was related to or acquainted with (e.g., Heißer Sommer, 1974; Morenga, 1978; Kerbels Flucht, 1980; Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, 1984; Kopfjäger, 1991; Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, 1993; Johannisnacht, 1996; Am Beispiel meines Bruders, 2003; Halbschatten, 2008). His stories and novels show an author searching for a way to write about past lives that allows for closeness with his protagonists’ personalities. Yet, they also demonstrate that Timm does not simply pretend to imagine scenes from his figures’ lives. The fact that historical events are always seen from a certain distance and re-narrated with a subjective bias is an explicit part of Timm’s narrative stance. In an interview with Christof Hamann, he outlines this position as follows: «Ich halte es für fürchterlich naiv, ein vergangenes Ereignis so zu erzählen, als hätte man unter dem Tisch oder unter dem Bett gelegen und mitstenographiert. Wer sich einem historischen Gegenstand annähert, muss eben immer auch diese Annäherung thematisieren und damit die Distanz zum Geschehen festhalten» (Hamann 452). In this passage, Timm refers to his early novel Morenga. Looking more closely at this text, one finds that he creates distance to the narrated events by exploring the historical background that shaped his protagonists’ lives. He re-narrates scenes from his protagonists’ lives, but he also adds passages in which a narrator comments on historical events, asks questions, and analyses their impact. Timm’s early novels like Morenga and Der Mann auf dem Hochrad already show that he had developed a particular literary mode to address these different aspects. This mode is particular in the sense that it contrib- 392 Antje Krueger utes to «making past lives present» without ignoring the irreconcilable fact of historical distance. Thus, Timm’s narratives appear as two-fold as they allow for closeness and distance at the same time. Timm combines two different narrative modes to create these effects. On the one hand, he uses a writing style that is shaped by elements one would find in oral storytelling: it utilizes vivid depictions, references to dialogues, and an emphasis on emotions and other sensual perceptions. This narrative mode allows Timm to narrate scenes from a person’s life. At the core of these scenes, one finds Timm’s sprechende Situationen. These are scenes that carry condensed, allegoric meaning. On the other hand, he adds scholarly passages in which he quotes from documents and comments on events. Timm’s novels include many examples of sprechende Situationen. For instance, in Schlangenbaum (1986) we read about an engineer who is commissioned to build a factory in a country in Latin America governed by a military junta. In the end, the whole factory disappears into a swamp. This imagery suggests the chaotic, despotic conditions of life the engineer faces during the time he works on the project. In Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, the main character, Franz Schröter, dedicates himself to the introduction of the high-wheeler in his hometown Coburg around 1885. Because he is initially opposed to female participation in the sport, his wife Anna teaches herself in secret the art of keeping balance on the high-wheeler, and one day he finds her bicycling in the streets of Coburg: [A]uf dem Hochrad saß eine Frau, seine Frau, die Anna, von ihm auch zärtlich Wöddel genannt. Sie fuhr eine große Linkskurve und danach eine Rechtskurve, und sie fuhr keineswegs verkrampft, im Gegenteil, sie fuhr gelöst, und sie lächelte […]. Sie sah sehr adrett und ordentlich aus, hatte das dichte braune Haar hochgesteckt […], trug die eng geschnittene Kostümjacke, die er an ihr mochte, und darunter einen braunen langen Rock, oder waren das zwei Röcke, oder eine Hose, eine Hose mit extrem weit geschnittenen Hosenbeinen, eine Mischung von beidem, ein Hosenrock. (92) The scene not only beautifully describes Anna Schröter’s first public ride on the high-wheeler, it can also be read as an allegory of women’s emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century. The scene shows how Anna literally distances herself from traditional gender roles by getting on the bicycle and dispensing with typical women’s clothing. Moreover, the narrator emphasizes the fact that something unheard of had just happened: masses of people are watching the lady cyclist, and some are even trying to keep up with her pace by running next to the high-wheeler: «Die Menge tobte aus Empörung und vor Begeisterung über diese so ganz und gar ungehörige Frau, meine Tante, sie, die erstmals das Hochrad bestieg, Presenting a Moment of the Past 393 nicht als Mann verkleidet, und so in aller Öffentlichkeit zeigte, dass auch eine Frau diese Maschine fahren kann und, mehr noch, dass es auch Spass macht» (93). We also find an early example for a sprechende Situation with regard to Benno Ohnesorg’s death. Timm included a description of the photographs that showed the dying Ohnesorg on 3 June 1967 in his first novel Heißer Sommer. He describes how his protagonist, Ullrich, sees the pictures while reading a newspaper: Ullrich sah die Fotos in der Zeitung. Der Student am Boden liegend. Über ihn gebeugt eine junge Frau in einem weiten schwarzen Abendkleid. Sie hält seinen Kopf. Am Hinterkopf und auf dem Boden: Blut. Daneben ein anderes Foto, drei Polizisten schlagen und treten auf einen am Boden liegenden Demonstranten ein, der sein Gesicht mit den Händen zu schützen versucht. (53) Timm’s use of the photographs takes on a central role, as Ullrich - similar to many other students during that time - becomes much more politically active after he learns about the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. This description could be understood as an early, somewhat limited example of a sprechende Situation. Timm uses visual cues to comment on and illustrate the context of Ohnesorg’s death. He describes what Ullrich notices, but Timm’s depictions transcend the actual content. He describes how the first image shows the last minutes of Ohnesorg’s life while an unknown woman holds his head. The description resembles the image of a pietà. Thus, it conveys grief, and it also speaks to the fact that Ohnesorg was later turned into an icon for the student movement. Moreover, the description of the second photograph captures violent actions committed by the police during the demonstration. Similarly, it refers to the fact that the police abused their status and power during the protest. Thus, Timm’s depiction of the two photographs comments on different aspects of Ohnesorg’s death. Yet, it is not a fully developed example of a sprechende Situation. This passage is the only description of Ohnesorg in Heißer Sommer, and Timm does not explore any other aspect of his life in the novel. In Erzählen und kein Ende (1993), an essay collection in which Timm reflects about his own writing, he defines sprechende Situationen further. He understands them as unusual incidents that are based on very detailed descriptions. However, they are not just empirically oriented depictions of events, but are composed in a way that transcends the actual content. Timm describes them as follows: «Die Situationen sind aufgebaut aus Detailbeschreibungen, aber ebenso, dass diese Situationen über sich hinausweisen, also das sind, was ich sprechende Situationen nenne, um sie nicht mit dem gewichtigen Wort Symbol zu belasten» (68). 394 Antje Krueger In a way, Timm’s sprechende Situationen are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century notion of the unerhörte Begebenheit, though there are differences. For example, nineteenth-century authors described the unerhörte Begebenheit as an event marked by its original, unique or simply new quality. Timm, in contrast, is interested in events that are «unheard of» in a more literal sense. All of his stories are based on actual historical events that are neither new nor invented, but rather forgotten. Timm functions as collector of these stories and re-narrates them in a unique, unheard-of way. Timm does, however, use another feature of the nineteenth-century novella that goes along with the unerhörte Begebenheit. Similarly to the novella, his stories employ a fictitious narrator who rediscovers and presents the main story. These narrators are themselves frequently authors or professional orators (e.g., in Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, Kopfjäger, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, Johannisnacht, Rot). Timm uses these storytellers to bring events to life. In particular, he presents their accounts by using a blend of indirect and free indirect speech. This particular mode of narration recreates and plays with typical elements of authentic, spontaneous oral storytelling. In Erzählen und kein Ende, Timm includes an example of such a sprechende Situation: Als Lehrling habe ich einmal den Persianermantel von der Frau des ehemaligen Reichsaußenministers von Ribbentrop ausgebessert, den Mantel wiederum hatte, Mitte der dreißiger Jahre, der Meister angefertigt, der mich ausbildete, ein Sozialist […]. Der erzählte mir also, dass er, als er an dem Persianermantel arbeitete, eine Stelle, eine Lockenbildung in Form eines Sowjetsterns, auf dem Rücken gelassen habe […]. Das war kein großer Widerstandsakt, aber doch ein kurioses Detail […], vielleicht hatte die Locke ja tatsächlich einmal so sternhaft geglänzt, dass sie einem scharfen Beobachter aufgefallen sein musste. Vielleicht konnte man sich gegenseitig darauf aufmerksam machen. Vielleicht - oder wahrscheinlich - reichte es aber auch schon aus, dass man in der Werkstatt glaubte, das sei möglich. Was zu dieser Geschichte gehört, ist, dass jemand noch davon erzählen konnte, sie noch kannte, und so dem Detail erst seine Bedeutung geben konnte. Ein ganz winziges Detail, aber gerade solche Details interessieren in der Alltagsästhetik. (93-94) In this example, Timm recounts a story that has been handed down as an anecdote in a furrier’s workshop, an oral narrative not based on any type of written documentation. The central detail - the hardly noticeable Soviet star - functions as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi regime in the realm of everyday life. Timm, who appears to be the first-person narrator of the text, gives an account of this short anecdote. In addition, he retells not only the story, but also reproduces its mode of narration by using the blend of indirect and free indirect speech described above. Presenting a Moment of the Past 395 Timm’s recreation of his own rhythm of speech - characterized by a sequence of short, sometimes fragmented sentences - along with his particular choice of words, suggest the voice of an oral storyteller. Markus Lorenz calls Timm’s playful use of these elements Als-ob-Mündlichkeit (Lorenz 70-71), which creates for the reader the effect as if he or she were listening to a recited text. These effects call forth the figures’ past lives and contribute to «making them present.» As mentioned above, Gumbrecht describes such effects in terms of a «presentification» in the imagination of the reader. However, considering that Timm emphasizes tonal qualities of the language such as rhythm, sound, and tone, perhaps the closest analogy to what Timm is doing is in the medium of music. For instance, the music critic Paul Ellie describes similar effects when listening to recordings by Bach pieces. He writes that «in the age of recordings, the past isn’t wholly past and the present isn’t wholly present, and our suspension in time, our intimacy with the most sublime expressions of people distant and dead, is a central fact of our experiences. This is at once a benefit and a quandary» (7). Furthermore, he understands the experience as «direct, real,» defying «the argument that experience mediated by technology is a diminished thing» (10). While Elie’s observations are informed by ideas of Deconstruction, he argues - to speak with Gumbrecht - for a third position. He points to the fact that the music is distant in the sense that it has been performed for a recording in the past; yet the act of listening to the recording still allows for intimacy with the past performance. Timm’s sprechende Situationen create a similar experience. They are written as text, yet - in the Als-ob-Mündlichkeit of the narrator’s voice - they «speak» to their readers/ listeners when being recited or read. Moreover, Timm’s stories offer the reader the opportunity to engage emotionally with the figures and their experiences. Very often, narrators retreat into the background of the stories, and just recount the figures’ speeches, emotions, and sensual perceptions. These scenes, by comparison, allow for an empathic reading that seems to bring the narrated events to life. For instance, a scene from Der Mann auf dem Hochrad illustrates how a seemingly static imagery evokes liveliness and motion. As mentioned above, the narrator of Der Mann auf dem Hochrad recounts the biography of the Coburg bicycle pioneer Franz Schröter. While passionately riding the highwheeler in his free time, he also works full-time as a taxidermist, a field in which he is a real innovator. Here is the description of his masterpiece: Er betrachtete den Gorilla, der jetzt fertig im Licht der Petroleumlampe stand. Er steht auf dem linken Bein neben dem Baum, dessen Ast die erhobene rechte Hand hält, der rechte Fuß, ebenfalls leicht erhoben, umgreift mit seinem Klammerzeh 396 Antje Krueger die entrindete thüringische Esche, der linke Arm schwingt aus, als wolle er gerade nachgreifen - oder hat er den Stamm losgelassen, steigt das Tier hoch oder runter, greift es an oder flieht es? So steht es, still und bewegt. Das Tier war schon jetzt, in diesem glatten Ton, bedrohlich lebendig. Das Glockenzeichen erklang, ein melodisches Ding-Dong, da glaubte Schröder [sic] plötzlich, der Gorilla habe sich bewegt. Entsetzt starrte er das Tier an, hörte auf zu treten. Es war still, bis auf das Surren des auslaufenden Rades. Schröder sagte sich, dass er einer Sinnestäuschung erlegen war, die Folge der schlaflosen Nächte, Resultat seiner Müdigkeit […]. Doch dann sah er, wie sich langsam der ausgestreckte Arm vom Stamm löste, wie sich Hand und Arm auf den großen furchtbaren Kopf legten, der sich unter dieser Last nach vorn neigte, langsam, nachdenklich, als suche er etwas auf dem Boden, und dann, von einem unheimlichen Schrei begleitet, zu Boden fiel. (183) 1 Timm recounts here a scene that «speaks» to readers by appealing to their imagination, sensual perceptions, and empathy. We - as the readers - know that the anecdote is rather implausible. However, in the end, we have to decide for ourselves whether we would like to believe that Schröder heard an uncanny sound or doubt that story. Timm uses another narrative strategy that creates closeness to the historical figures and events. He includes many references and quotes from secondary sources that connect his story to the world outside of the text. Often, Timm’s narrators cite such sources or comment on them. Furthermore, the author himself seems to vouch for the authenticity of the stories, such as when he uses elements of his own biography for his narrators. The main characters in Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, for example, are far from being purely fictional. In several essays, Timm mentions his uncle and aunt, Franz and Anna Schröder, who lived in Coburg until the 1950s. He also noted in one of his essays that his father apprenticed with his uncle and worked for some time as a taxidermist. Furthermore, the narrator in Der Mann auf dem Hochrad quotes from Fahrrad und Radfahrer, an early history of bicycles and bicycling in Germany. The author mentions a Franz Schröder as the inventor of the «sich selbstthätig auslösende Lenkstange» (Wolf 182). The purpose of his invention was to protect the rider from accidents. Fahrrad und Radfahrer includes an illustration of Schröder’s invention along with a description. Here, the narrator/ Timm acts and speaks like a historian who presents sources and unknown facts about the characters. Nevertheless, while Timm calls forth the past lives of his figures, he also creates distance and undercuts the effects of making them present. For instance, in the above-mentioned example about the Soviet star on the fur coat, he points out that the listeners - or the readers - do not need to believe in the story, since there is some doubt about its basis in fact. Timm might have Presenting a Moment of the Past 397 heard the story himself, or he might have imagined it. Similarly, we cannot be sure if all facts and events in Der Mann auf dem Hochrad are really true. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator summarizes the sources he used in researching and presenting the story. The summary makes it clear that they vary highly in their degree of reliability: «Meine Recherchen gehören zu dieser Geschichte und die Erinnerung an eigene Kindheitsvorstellungen und neuerdings auch ein Traum» (10). In Erzählen und kein Ende, Timm coined the expression wunderbarer Konjunktiv for this narrative strategy. He understands this mode of narration as follows: «Eine Geschichte, die nicht versucht, uns weiszumachen: So ist es gewesen, sondern: So könnte es gewesen sein. Das ist der wunderbare Konjunktiv. Wunderbar, weil er uns die Freiheit gibt, eine andere Wirklichkeit zu schaffen, und weil er das Diktat der Chronologie durchbricht» (122). Timm’s wunderbarer Konjunktiv resembles in its wording Aristotle’s definition of a poet’s writings. Aristotle outlines his characteristics in chapter nine of his Poetics. There, he explains that the poet should not mimic the historical events, but instead should tell what might have happened. Conversely, the historian should document and refer only to the facts of given incidents (29). However, Timm’s twofold narrative creates a third position that blurs Aristotle’s clear distinction between a poet and a historian. His stories speak to both sides of the term Geschichte, producing effects that create the intimacy of a literary narrative, but also the distance that goes with a historical account. By the same token, they frequently call into question clear distinctions between fact and fiction. His narratives remind the reader of multistabile Kippfiguren. These are reversible figures embodying seemingly incompatible perspectives. Thus, they seem to be true and invented at the same time. All of Timm’s stories are shaped by a similar approach. They demonstrate that the categories fact and fiction do not exclude each other in the sense of opposites, but that they rather work together interdependently. In his collection of texts and essays Vogel, friss die Feige nicht: Römische Aufzeichnungen (1989), Timm describes an Italian sculpture that exemplifies this interdependence: Der eine, ein bärtiger, muskulöser Mann, hat seinen Gegner, einen jüngeren Mann, gepackt und in einer Drehung hochgehoben, um ihn mit einem einzigen kraftvollen Schwung, kopfüber, zu Boden zu schleudern, wenn der nicht seinen Hodensack ergriffen hätte und umklammert hielte. So kann der eine wie der andere nicht loslassen, und sie stehen buchstäblich versteinert da. Nahm mir vor, diese Statue zu kaufen […] als allegorische Darstellung des Realismus. Man kann sich aussuchen, welcher Ringer die Wirklichkeit und welcher die Literatur darstellt. (13) 398 Antje Krueger Timm’s portrayals of historical events and biographies are clearly shaped by this conflicted relation. They bring about something third - something that Paul Elie would call «direct» or «real» - that the reader encounters while immersed in the stories. Timm employs this narrative mode in all of his texts whether or not he understood them as novels, autobiographical narratives, or simply essays. In Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, Timm used a narrator who also acts as a biographer. The narrator tells Franz and Anna Schröder’s stories, but also includes parts of Timm’s own biography. Thus, the narrative mode he developed for that novel allowed him to talk about people who were close to him such as family members and friends. He would make use of the same approach in every novel that followed, most notably in Kopfjäger, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, Johannisnacht, and Rot. We find similar writing strategies in the texts that can be understood as autobiographical writings, such as Vogel, friss die Feige nicht; Am Beispiel meines Bruders; and Der Freund und der Fremde. In these texts, Timm talks about his own biography, but also about people who were close to him. For instance, Vogel, friss die Feige nicht includes a short biographical narrative about his close friend Heinar Kipphardt, in Am Beispiel meines Bruders he recounts scenes from his older brother’s life, and in Der Freund und der Fremde he finally writes about Benno Ohnesorg. In these texts, he does not simply remember his friends and brother; he finds a narrative strategy that makes their past come to life, while also working through problematic aspects of their lives. He acts as biographer who gives voice to deceased friends and relatives, but also comments on their lives. In hindsight, he describes his approach as follows: Der Beerdigungsredner ist einem literarischen Erzähler vergleichbar. Er erzählt von der Vergangenheit, die er im Erzählen wieder in die Gegenwart holt. Auf eine eigentümliche Weise deutet er die Einzelschicksale aus, versucht im Leben der Verstorbenen einen Sinn zu finden, ohne einen göttlichen Sinn zu bemühen. Es gibt keine Transzendenz, nur dieses gelebte Leben. In Rot hat Thomas Linde alle Freiheit der Deutung über das gelebte Leben, er kann sogar retuschieren, schönen oder lügen - was er sich vorgenommen hat, nicht zu tun. Es ist eine Form der Hermeneutik, die da stattfindet. (Williams 13) When, in 2003, Timm published Am Beispiel meines Bruders, he adopted the persona of the funeral orator. The narrator’s approach consists of quotes from his brother’s diary, descriptions of family pictures, excerpts from historical documents, personalized comments and reflections, and imagined scenes from the brother’s life. In addition, he realizes how his brother’s life and early death impacted his parents, his older sister and himself. Thus, he Presenting a Moment of the Past 399 provides biographies of each family member, turning the text into a family history. The role of funeral narrator also enabled him to write about Benno Ohnesorg. His use of sprechende Situationen allowed him to revitalize his own private memories of Benno Ohnesorg, but he also recounts and comments on a wider array of scenes from his friend’s life. For instance, we see Ohnesorg as follows: Unsere Freundschaft begann als Gespräch über Literatur. […] Neben ihm stehend und über die Oker blickend, dehnte sich das Schweigen und gab dem Gefühl, ihn gestört zu haben, immer mehr Raum, und so fragte ich ihn, um überhaupt etwas zu sagen, was er denn da mache. Nach einem kurzen Zögern zeigte er mir das kleine Notizbuch. Ich schreibe. Und was? Für mich. (8-9) In Der Freund und der Fremde, we encounter Ohnesorg not as icon - in the sense of the dying student we remember from the photograph - but rather as somebody being passionate about reading and writing. We even hear his voice, since Timm inserted some of his friend’s letters and one of his poems in Der Freund und der Fremde. Similarly to his earlier novels, Timm creates in Der Freund und der Fremde closeness and distance at the same time. As a poet, he brings backs moments from Ohnesorg’s life in the sense of «presentification,» yet he also shares unknown stories and information about Ohnesorg. He recounts conversations with friends and family about his life in Berlin, and he quotes from official documents. Thus, while Timm’s biographical narrative is certainly constructed through the historical lens, it is a story that engages the reader and brings us closer to Benno Ohnesorg as a person. Timm’s narratives, and in particular Der Freund und der Fremde demonstrate how a story can create a certain Stimmung that speaks to their readers. Timm’s sprechende Situationen bring about the effects Gumbrecht describes in Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. They show the potential of literature to evoke the past, but also to shape and impact experiences in the present. Notes 1 Timm uses the original spelling Schröder in the first edition of Der Mann auf dem Hochrad, yet he changed the spelling to Schröter in later editions. 400 Antje Krueger Works Cited Aristoteles. Poetik: Griechisch/ Deutsch. Ed. Manfred Fuhrmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982. Elie, Paul. Reinventing Bach. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Gumbrecht, Hans U. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature. Trans. Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Hamann, Christof. «Einfühlungsästhetik wäre ein kolonialer Akt. Ein Gespräch mit Uwe Timm.» Sprache im technischen Zeitalter 168 (2003): 450-62. Lorenz, Markus. Subversiver Meistersang: Eine Studie zum Werk Uwe Timms. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. Timm, Uwe. Erzählen und kein Ende. Versuche zu einer Ästhetik des Alltags. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993. -. «Die Stimme beim Schreiben.» Uwe Timm Lesebuch: Die Stimme beim Schreiben. Ed. Martin Hielscher. Munich: dtv, 2005. 399-405. -. Der Freund und der Fremde: Eine Erzählung. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005. -. Der Mann auf dem Hochrad: Legende. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1984. -. Heisser Sommer: Roman. Munich/ Gütersloh: Autorenedition, 1974. -. Vogel, friss die Feige nicht. Römische Aufzeichnungen. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989. Wellberry, David. «Stimmung.» Historisches Wörterbuch ästhetischer Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. Vol. 5. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2003. 703-33. Williams, Rhys W. «Selbstdeutung und Selbstfindung. Gespräch mit Uwe Timm.» Uwe Timm II. Ed. David Basker and Rhys Williams. Cardiff: Wales UP, 2007. 12-26. Wolf, Wilhelm. Fahrrad und Radfahrer. Leipzig: Otto Spamer, 1890. . Joseph P. Strelka Begegnungen mit geistigen Größen, an denen ich innerlich wuchs. Ein Buch des Dankes Edition Patmos, Vol. 20 A. Francke Verlag 2015, XIV, 182 Seiten €[D] 39,90 ISBN 978-3-7720-8573-4 „Begegnungen“ ist eine sehr persönliche Biographie von Joseph P. Strelka über Begegnungen mit großen, zum Teil noch lebenden Wissenschaftlern und Gelehrten aus den Bereichen Literaturwissenschaft und Philosophie. Die „Begegnungen“ beginnen in seiner Studienzeit, wozu auch die Schrecken des Zweiten Weltkrieges gehören, zeichnen seine Zeit als Professor in den USA nach, führen aber immer wieder auch zurück in seine österreichische Heimat. Nicht zuletzt ist dieses spannende Erinnerungsbuch auch ein Dankesbuch für viele kostbare Augenblicke mit tiefen Einblicken und Perspektiven in die Weltliteratur. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Stand: August 2015 · Änderungen und Irrtümer vorbehalten! JETZT BESTELLEN! Karl S. Guthke Geistiger Handelsverkehr Streifzüge im Zeitalter der Weltliteratur Mit Erinnerungen von Karl S. Guthke an die „Goldenen Jahre“ der akademischen Migration EDITION PATMOS, Vol. 19 2015, X/ 295 Seiten, €[D] 39,90 ISBN 978-3-7720-8572-7 Den Ausdruck „geistiger Handelsverkehr“ hat Goethe 1830 im Zusammenhang seines Nachdenkens über „Weltliteratur“ geprägt. Gemeint ist damit der in erster Linie literarische Austausch über die Grenzen der Länder, Sprachen, Kulturen und Denkweisen hinweg. Einem solchen Grenzüberschreiten ist auch dieser Band verpflichtet. Von mehr oder weniger unscheinbaren Details her wird der Blick frei auf übergreifende Zusammenhänge im geistigen Leben der europäischen Länder seit dem späten 18. Jahrhundert. Die Rede ist von der goethezeitlichen Verbreitung deutscher Sprache und Kultur in Großbritannien, von Goethes Interesse an Reiseberichten über Afrika, Lessings und Mendelssohns „Gespräch“ über den Selbstmord, Ernst Schönwieses Literaturverständnis im Hinblick auf Schiller und Eliot, von der Lösung des Rätsels um den Deutsch-Mexikaner B. Traven und von Michael Krügers Roman Himmelfarb, ein Buch über den interkontinentalen „Schwarzhandel“ mit geistigem Eigentum. Der Band schließt mit nicht nur akademischen Erinnerungen des Germanisten, Anglisten und Komparatisten Karl S. Guthke an den „geistigen Handelsverkehr“ in den „Goldenen Jahren“ der Migration deutscher Wissenschaftler nach Nordamerika. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Stand: August 2015 · Änderungen und Irrtümer vorbehalten! JETZT BESTELLEN!