Besprechungen / Reviews 401 N ICHOLAS M ARTIN (E D .): Schiller: National Poet - Poet of Nations. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 61. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006. 341 pp. $ 104. The cover of this volume shows a close-up of an 1805 bust of Schiller. In case anyone doesn’t remember that the poet died that same year, the 200 th anniversary of the event produced, among other things, a dozen new biographies, enough to remind all but the most sheltered reader. According to the volume under review, there were also three Schiller books for children; and the book also contains ten closely printed pages of «selected events» (321-31). The face on the cover, although suffering from a fairly large nick on the nose, appears to be in remarkably good shape. There are, to be sure, a number of small X’s that probably indicate other places needing repair, but since the subtitle of this collection stakes a claim that could be contradictory, an image of Schiller that requires reworking is an appropriate metaphor, for the project this book undertakes is to decide whether Schiller was more a national, presumably German, poet or - as the author of the European Union’s anthem - more a poet of nations. Just as important, the implicit question about Schiller’s legacy is the perfect hook for an otherwise nearly impossible task: finding a publisher for a collection of essays, even essays devoted to Schiller. Nicholas Martin opens the volume with a useful survey of Schillerjahren during the past two centuries. As he points out, estimations of Schiller have risen and fallen as he became more a mythic figure and less a complicated human being, but «still more harm has been done over the years by the periodic emphasis on alleged political and national(ist) messages in Schiller’s writings to the near exclusion of reflections on his achievement as a dramatist and poet» (7). Even the Nazis, as Martin demonstrates in another essay, claimed Schiller as one of their own. The 1934 celebration of Schiller’s 175 th birthday, which was awkwardly shoehorned into the normal cycle of fifty or hundred-year commemorations of his birth and death, was not only nationalistic in content; it was also national rather than local in its organization. Thus, 15,000 members of the Hitlerjugend converged on Marbach by running relays from various corners of the Reich, and they honored the man whose superhuman struggle against disease and oppression supposedly mirrored the Nazis’ early tribulations. Goebbels then took possession of the rest of the legend by proclaiming, «er [Schiller] wäre zweifellos der große dichterische Vorkämpfer unserer Revolution geworden» (282). Martin also shows the contradictions, noting both that Hitler was critical of Wilhelm Tell («diesen Schweizer Heckenschützen,» 286) and that opponents of the Nazi regime found their own Schillers. However, as fascinating as these two essays are, they seem to heighten contradictions that were already present in the volume’s title. Any account of the misuse of Schiller as a «national poet» overlooks the implicit demand in Martin’s opening essay that scholars ought to pay more attention to the literary accomplishments in Schiller’s works. Surprisingly, Jeffrey L. High’s contribution, which takes a close look at the structure of Schiller’s plays, manages to square this circle. High pays particular attention to Schiller’s first acts and notes that «Schiller formulaically invokes foreign occupation (often combined with native oppression) and nascent liberation movements, to 402 Besprechungen / Reviews establish the compelling initial moral high ground of the general will of the occupied population and its representatives» (220). From here, the leap to Schiller as the anticipator of Germany’s Wars of Liberation seems entirely reasonable, but High is rightly more interested in the structure of Schiller’s plays than in scoring political points. His fellow authors follow suit. For example, Lesley Sharpe examines the tensions inherent in Goethe’s and Schiller’s joint aim of creating «a German theater repertoire that was both German and international» (48). Unlike Lessing, whose experience in Hamburg convinced him that Germans could not have a national theater until they had become a nation, Schiller believed «wenn wir es erlebten eine Nationalbühne zu haben, so würden wir auch eine Nation» (38). In other words, Sharpe convincingly shows the national stakes involved in Schiller’s work for the theater. Maike Oergel performs a similarly interesting investigation of Schiller’s fragmentary poem «Deutsche Grösse.» Despite Schiller’s belief «that the German language possesses superior qualities, which predestine the German speakers for their world-historical role as intellectual, cultural and moral leaders» (250), Oergel argues that «Schiller’s vision of a German-led social and political re-organisation was anything but old-fashioned. It aimed at a post-national (rather than pre-national) and post-modern (in the literal sense, i.e. overcoming debilitating modernity) historical situation» (254). These are precisely the sorts of analyses that assure Schiller’s continued relevance. Reviews of this sort can never deal adequately with the richness of essay collections, and it is probably unfair to insist that all the essays contribute equally and coherently to the expectations aroused by the volume’s title. Just because an essay on «Schiller’s Poetics of Crime» does not appear to fit into the larger scheme of things, it remains an interesting account of the topic. An editor’s only option would be to insist at the outset that all contributors pull in the same direction and exclude contributions that do not fit. While it might be easier to sell the result to publishers, readers would be deprived of the miscellaneous gems that invariably lurk in conference proceedings, including this one. Lawrence University Brent O. Peterson H ILDA M ELDRUM B ROWN : E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. 224 pp. $ 75. The purpose of Hilda Meldrum Brown’s E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle is «to clarify Hoffmann’s theory and to show its relevance to a large portion of his creative output» (1). There are several strands to Brown’s argument. She aims to show that a coherent aesthetic program underlies all of Hoffmann’s works; she seeks to establish his contribution to Romantic thought by drawing attention to his relationship to idealist philosophy; and she argues that the serapiontic principle represents a thoroughgoing theoretical exploration of the creative process, applicable to music and visual art as well as to literature, and that it can and should be applied as an exegetic tool to Hoffmann’s tales, in particular but not exclusively to Die Serapionsbrüder. Brown occasionally overstates her case for the need and novelty of her