398 Besprechungen / Reviews and complex narratives. And in fact, readers will come away with a sense of Naubert’s loquacity and byzantine style, though many might prefer to read the originals over Martin’s equally complex and difficult retellings. In addition, a disequilibrium between the lengths of the retellings and the analyses sometimes makes the study feel imbalanced: a retelling may be twice as long as the analysis, half as long, or even of equal length, and the subject of the analysis may vary each time. Chapters 4-7 might have been better put at the end of the book as an appendix. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss stereotypical gender roles in fairy tales and Western literature; in these two chapters Martin discovers a surprising egalitarianism in Naubert’s fairytale world. Chapter 8 focuses on female curiosity - the context for the Grimms’ Marienkind and Naubert’s Ottilie - and other concomitant offenses such as disobedience, spying and betrayal, and failing a test of virtue. Martin concludes insightfully that women are not punished more frequently or harshly than men for these transgressions - Naubert demands hard work, honesty, modesty and restraint for both genders and across classes. The paradigmatic roles for men as heroes and adventurers are rarely heroic in Naubert’s world: characters discover that to be a hero means to hurt others, to steal from the poor or even one’s own father. Ultimately, her stories explode gender expectations and apply the same yardstick to men’s and women’s behavior. The final chapter summarizes Martin’s findings and asks overarching questions: why should we read Naubert, and how could a reading of Naubert and other female writers expand our knowledge of literary production around 1800 and contribute to our understanding of Märchen and the literary movements of Classicism and Romanticism? She suggests answers to some of these questions, and leaves others to future research. The main predicament to which Martin falls prey is to try to explain or understand the Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen in the context of Märchen generally and the Grimms specifically. The book’s title, Strukturen des Wandels, is richly enigmatic: what are the structures and what is the change - the loss of Naubert’s unique type of storytelling, or her exclusion from the canon when the Grimms dawned on the horizon? St. Cloud State University Shawn C. Jarvis S TEVEN D. M ARTINSON (E D .): A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. 333 pp. $ 90. The anniversary year 2005, which marked two hundred years since the death of the acclaimed playwright, poet, and theorist Friedrich Schiller, saw a number of tributes to the legendary German artist and intellectual. Among the scholarly contributions to this commemoration was the publication of this book of essays edited by Steven D. Martinson. The volume, which contains an introduction and another essay by Martinson, represents a gathering of a number of Germanistik’s most distinguished minds of the past quarter-century, including Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Guthke, Walter Hinderer, Wulf Koepke, Norbert Oellers, David Pugh, and Lesley Sharpe, among others. It is certainly an honor roll of scholars who contribute to this book, and with Besprechungen / Reviews 399 few exceptions the volume does not disappoint. As one would expect from a book advertised as a «Companion to the Works,» nearly all of the essays contained herein provide the reader with a general sense of the work being discussed and the history of the most important scholarship thereon. There is one notable exception, which I will note below, but in general this book will be of interest to scholars at all levels of familiarity with Schiller’s writings, including those encountering them for the first time. The contributions are divided into three primary sections: «Intellectual-Historical Settings,» «Major Writings,» and «Schiller’s Legacy.» Martinson opens the volume capably with an introduction entitled «Schiller and the New Century,» in which he includes a concise summary of Schiller’s biography, including his all-important friendship with Goethe, Schiller’s reception of the French Revolution, and a number of suggestions for new directions in scholarship on Schiller. The first primary section, dealing with «Intellectual-Historical Settings,» contains essays that treat in depth Schiller’s interests in philosophical aesthetics, classical antiquity, and history. For example, in his essay entitled, «Schiller’s Philosophical Aesthetics in Anthropological Perspective,» Walter Hinderer demonstrates the way in which Schiller brings his earliest anthropological thoughts to bear in their most mature form in later theoretical masterpieces, such as Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen and Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, a theme to which the authors of a number of subsequent contributions to this volume will later return. The second, and by far the largest, section of this book contains useful treatments of Schiller’s major works, including Die Räuber, Kabale und Liebe, Don Carlos, Schiller’s powerful theoretical work Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, his lyric poetry, Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and Wilhelm Tell. One of the highlights in this section is J.M. van der Laan’s essay «Kabale und Liebe Reconsidered,» in which the author gives us precisely, and beautifully, what a companion volume should - namely, an overview of the plot, characters, and central themes of the play; a summary of the play’s dominant interpretations; a review of the challenges to understanding and interpretation of the drama; and van der Laan’s own particular reading of this often read and performed play. Other highlights include Rolf-Peter Janz’s treatment of Don Carlos and Lesley Sharpe’s cogent contribution, «Concerning Aesthetic Education,» in which she aids the reader by pointing out especially tricky aspects and discusses ambiguous concepts in Schiller’s Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen. Norbert Oellers (General Editor of the Nationalausgabe of Schiller’s works) weighs in with a reading of Schiller’s lyric poetry written during the summer of 1795, with a view to the philosophical qualities of these poems and their commitments to history. It is not by any means an overview of Schiller’s considerable poetic oevre, but it nonetheless works well in this volume. It is thematically well linked to the content of a number of other essays in the book that place emphasis on Schiller’s philosophy, and it also treats in some depth, and with careful readings, some of the author’s most important and well-known poems. Among them are «Die Macht der Poesie,» «Das Ideal und das Leben,» «Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais,» «Natur und Schule,» and «Elegie.» 400 Besprechungen / Reviews Steven Martinson’s own contribution on Maria Stuart is also excellent and worthy of note. As the author notes, it represents an expansion of his earlier thesis of «harmonious tension» between rationality and sensuous being in humankind, and he applies this aspect of Schiller’s theory (among other things) to the drama in order to yield a new reading of the play. He argues quite persuasively that the real tragedy in the drama is not a political one, but is located instead in the rupture of the tension between these two aspects of human nature. Martinson’s explication of the drama, and his new reading, are both useful and interesting, and he references prior dominant readings of the play throughout (including feminist perspectives). The only disappointing aspect of this part of the book is the essay dealing with Schiller’s enigmatic first drama Die Räuber, and unfortunately this is the initial piece in this section. Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels presents here a truncated version of his dissertation, in which he claims to have discovered new source material (both historical and geographic) that informed Schiller’s writing of this early play. He argues that Schiller likely based his plot and main characters in Die Räuber on principal actors in the Hussite Wars of the early fifteenth century and that Karl, in particular, was based upon the radical leader Jan Ziska. These are indeed speculative claims, based upon similar acts of violence in the lives of Ziska and Karl, and the fact that books containing the history of the Hussite Wars were held in the Ducal library to which Schiller had access as a schoolboy. The essay takes a strange turn, however, when the author attempts to derive a sort of «message» from the play by connecting geographic locations referenced in the drama to the author’s birthplace. Perhaps more helpful than mapping an isosceles trapezium onto Schiller’s drama would have been an essay that acquainted the reader better with the characters and structural features of the play itself, and with scholarship’s long history of fascinating engagement with it. The book closes with a useful essay by Wulf Koepke on the history of Schiller reception in the twentieth century in which he focuses on the anniversary years of 1905, 1909, 1955, and 1959. Koepke summarizes the cultural and political discourse that characterized each occasion and gives examples of the cultural and political forces that flavored the reception of Schiller in each of these different eras (e.g., Marxist, National Socialist). Koepke also describes the various editions of Schiller that appeared during the last century, including the Nationalausgabe. Also helpful and interesting are his brief assessments of the lives of Schiller’s works in school curricula and on stage in the two Germanys during the twentieth century. Overall, Martinson has put together a strong contribution to the scholarship on this important author. As both Martinson and Koepke ably point out in the introductory and concluding pieces to the volume, despite the fine work by the august assembly of scholars that make up the contributors to this book, there is much yet to learn about and from the work of Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller. Kalamazoo College Michael J. Sosulski