Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2006
393-4
HILDA MELDRUM BROWN: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. 224 pp. $ 75.
91
2006
Paola Mayer
cg393-40402
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 Besprechungen / Reviews 403 study: in her preface, she claims that in the Anglo-Saxon world Hoffmann is «regarded mainly as a quaint eccentric with a penchant for paranoid ‹gothic› characters and spooky sensationalist scenarios,» while in Germany he is presented mainly as «a leading practitioner of postmodernist theory.» This assessment fails to do justice to the substantial corpus of serious Hoffmann scholarship in both languages, to which Brown’s own (extremely selective) bibliography bears witness. Likewise, her assertions that scholars have been «dismissive» or «blind» about Hoffmann’s theorizing on poetics and that the serapiontic principle has been largely neglected, ignore the extent to which earlier studies have paved the way for her findings, with respect to both the meaning of this principle and the continuity of Hoffmann’s theoretical utterances. Nevertheless, Brown does have a case. Her exposition of Hoffmann’s poetics is the most comprehensive and systematic this reviewer has seen, and this study has the further merit of being laid out in lucid and readable prose. The book consists of two parts, the first devoted to the exposition of Hoffmann’s poetics, the second to its operation in conjunction with the tales. Each chapter in Part I examines a different text, deriving from it one constitutive element of Hoffmann’s theory. The chapter on Jacques Callot focuses on the polarity and complementarity of enthusiasm and critical distance («Besonnenheit»). The discussion of the hermit Serapion elucidates Hoffmann’s «Duplizität des Seins» in terms of the idealist dualism of spirit and nature. To this dualism, Brown relates the polarity of the serapiontic principle - the intensity and communicability of the inner vision - then goes on to outline the stages in the creative process: internalization of sense impression, shaping of inner vision, externalization. According to Brown, Serapion represents a Fichtean position (denial of the dualism of real and inner) whereas the club members argue for a Schellingean recognition of the duplicity necessary for the artist, since flights into the fantastic realm must be anchored in an aspect of the real, ordinary world. Hoffmann’s debt to romantic and idealist thought is not a new discovery. His reception of Schelling, Schubert, and Novalis (the latter features surprisingly little in Brown’s study) has been long recognized and much discussed in scholarship. Yet this particular conception of the serapiontic principle is indeed new and does make for a precise and effective exposition of it. Two chapters focus on the relationship of text to music, from which additional criteria are derived: the combination of «Ernst und Scherz,» the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the supernatural so as to cause willing suspension of disbelief (Der Dichter und Der Komponist), and the workings of imagination as that faculty which alone can reach the sublime (Alte und neue Kirchenmusik). Still, while Brown’s exposition of the criteria is convincing, her attempt to link these particular texts to the serapiontic principle is somewhat problematic, the arguments occasionally straining credibility (e.g. the claim that the words of the mass, or alternatively the notes representing the musical sounds, are the starting point in reality on which the imagination sets to work to achieve inner vision). Rounding out Part I, a chapter on Prinzessin Brambilla contributes a discussion of irony and allegory (together with a welcome comparison of Hoffmann to Friedrich Schlegel), and a final chapter on Des Vetters Eckfenster examines the faculty of «Schauen.» Part II applies the theory outlined in Part I to a selection of tales. These are grouped under three headings: first, the transformation of the visual into the verbal (three tales inspired by a painting); and then two «supernatural» categories, «evil principle» and 404 Besprechungen / Reviews «benign force» (the latter on the Märchen). The discussion of the individual tales is quite brief and cursory, engaging minimally with the scholarly literature on these, and hence the harvest of new insights does not live up to the promise in the introduction. In Brown’s defense, it should be said that her intention was not to provide a close reading of the individual tales, but rather to highlight their connection to the serapiontic principle. Through this perspective, two chapters do achieve new insights. The exploration of the transposition from the visual to the verbal sheds light on the nature of poetic truth as it emerges from the interplay between historical source and poetic imagination. The chapter on Märchen adds a further dimension to the duplicity of being: the child’s naive and spontaneous relationship to the world of magic is reproduced, yet also filtered through the necessarily exegetic and ironic perspective of an adult narrator. Brown’s investigation of the dark side of the supernatural (based on only two tales) is weaker than the rest of Part II and does not materially advance discussion on the subject. The links Brown forges between individual texts and the serapiontic principle are occasionally strained, and the case for the novelty of her findings is somewhat overstated. However, these shortcomings only slightly mar the merits of the book. Brown succeeds in showing the presence of a consistent poetics underlying all of Hoffmann’s works, and she does provide a lucid and convincing account of this poetics. By her choice and grouping of the tales, Brown intended to show that Hoffmann, to be properly appreciated, must be read «in the round,» that a «reductive canon» (200) of four or five tales fails to do him justice - a view which should be hailed as an essential corrective to long-standing tendencies in Hoffmann scholarship. University of Guelph Paola Mayer U LRIKE G LEIXNER AND M ARION W. G RAY (E DS .): Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe 1750-1830. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. x + 391 pp. $ 75.00 (cloth); $ 29.95 (paper) This collection of 14 essays (plus an introduction) grew out of a conference held in 1998, after which the contributors collaborated to ensure a reasonable amount of cross-referencing between the pieces. The long preparation time does not seem to have led to any great loss of topicality: this is an anthology which anyone interested in the field will want to read. The essays range from ones addressing the big questions of the Sattelzeit to specific case studies which analyse a particular marriage, or compare two individuals’ journals, for example, thus bringing very concrete evidence to bear on generalized conclusions. In this way, the volume goes far to redressing sometimes simplistic assumptions about this important era in German (and European) history - either that it represents a great leap forward in human «progress» or conversely that it was a time when women (as well as other «others») were repressed absolutely. To take an example: one essay (R. Habermas) analyses a single marriage of the early nineteenth century to show that while the wife was very much confined to the increasingly re-
