Besprechungen / Reviews 101 K ATHRIN M AURER : Discursive Interaction: Literary Realism and Academic Historiography in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2006. 178 pp. € 29,80. «What is the relationship between history and literature? » asks Kathrin Maurer, as it occurred in German culture in the nineteenth century. The question is never fully answered, even as her acute eye offers solid evidence of the reciprocal influences between the two. A sound answer to her question requires the «why» of the relationship, not solely a descriptive account of the «what,» or even «how» the narratives mutually enforce one another. One of the authorities in nineteenth century historiography Maurer initially cites to connect the reciprocity of literature and historical writing, and who could have helped her towards the «why,» is Leopold von Ranke. The artistry of the historian requires, according to Ranke, a poetic discourse of human intention, an eye and ear for the rhythm of human praxis. Ranke was a historical writer in the line of German historiographical thinkers whose thinking created «historicism,» which is always aware of the «why» of historical periodicity in its expressions. As Georg Iggers has pointed out, Ranke stressed that the historian find in the particulars of an event «its course and spirit.» Ranke, like other German historians, thought always of «periods» of historical temporality, the Zeitgeists that cohered the coexisting expressions of a culture’s spirit. Maurer is familiar with both contemporary historiographical and literary-critical perspectives, and in her introduction she orients the reader to the cultural-historical issues which the correspondence of literature and historical writing in nineteenthcentury Germany bring to the surface. Her bias is postmodern and post-structural, preferring F.R. Ankersmit to Hayden White, who in their separate ways examine the coexistence of literary and historiographical narratives in periods of cultural-historical life. However, Maurer’s antipathy towards a cultural-historical connection between disciplines weakens the full argument of her text, leading to an absence of «why» the many facts she exhibits for the reader are expressions of a time. Again and again, Maurer’s knowledge of the many contemporary thinkers who treat literature and the other arts and sciences of a time in their effort to comprehend shared cultural causation leads the reader to the threshold of the «why,» but she retreats. For example, Stephen Greenblatt is discussed in regard to «social energy.» Yet Maurer dismisses Greenblatt as someone who «conflates» the literary with the non-literary. «Conflation» is a misguided term for dismissing Greenblatt in that it enables Maurer to avoid the critical perspective Greenblatt represents. Why bring him into the discussion simply to dismiss the relevance of «social energy» as a helpful concept? The «social energy» or energeia of a cultural time, of a Zeitgeist, is a commonplace with all German historians after Herder. The stylistics of inquiry into the art of literature, history, as well as the plastic arts, from Humboldt through Leo Weisgerber took up the undergirding structure of social meaning among the cultural expressions of a period. Maurer is on more comfortable and effective ground in her several intensive analyses of the correspondence of historiography and literature where her descriptive findings will be of lasting value. The «what» and the «how» of the historiographical and creative literary narratives that she analyzes are incisively delineated. She dis- 102 Besprechungen / Reviews cusses the rhetorical functions of the narrative prose of the historians and authors with convincing clarity as she shows the possible influences of one upon another. Her first chapter establishes the historiographical focus of the mid-nineteenth century in an examination of Leopold von Ranke’s narrative technique of creating «objectivity» through a «catalogue» of archival facts or narrated images. This method, and other tropic rhetorical ploys which create the appearance of an in-common objective world that subsumes persons and actions to a larger, determining reality are then brought to the second chapter, which studies two writers contemporary to Ranke, Joseph Victor von Scheffel and Adalbert Stifter. Scheffel’s historical novel Ekkehard: Eine Geschichte aus dem zehnten Jahrhundert is discussed as relying upon the «archival effect» for generating the appearance of reality «as it really was» (Ranke). It is Scheffel’s use of footnotes, with reference to Latin sources, and her expansion of the factual details of persons and events of that time, that help her generate this mid-nineteenth-century purview. Maurer illustrates how Adalbert Stifter’s collection of stories Bunte Steine (1853), especially the tale Granit, correspond in its rhetorical strategies to Scheffel’s. Stifter’s narrative technique for generating a literary realism include «collecting, naming, cataloguing, and archive effects, which are used in the discourse of scholarly historiography.» Yet it is in her treatment of Stifter that the weakness of her critical analyses is ironically highlighted. Maurer dismisses the critical view of Martin Selge that Stifter sought to show the structural correspondence between the narratives that were each titled according to a geological form of rock and the human events of the story. One sees in this dismissal Maurer’s aversion to any structural underpinning of lines of thought or collections of evidence that require inquiry into the complex intention of a historian or author, and to going beyond an accounting of the grammatical and rhetorical facts at hand. It is in this probing of intention that one can find through the Germanic heuristic of Verstehen the thought-processes that enable one to articulate the social energy of a period. Stifter was a schooled geologist who won the «Golden Medal for Art and Science» in 1850 in his pursuit of physics, astronomy, botany, and geology, as well as painting and literature. The stories in Bunte Steine, such as Granit, illustrate the correspondence between human nature and physical nature for the discerning reader. Stifter’s intention was not hidden. In his foreword to Bunte Steine, where he spoke of the «soft law,» he saw that human and physical nature are linked. The subsuming of the person to a determined nature was the «why» of the deeper strata of thought that linked Ranke, Scheffel, and Stifter, as well as other thinkers in the middle third of the nineteenth century. Maurer moves in her study to the final third of the nineteenth century, indicating narrative characteristics shared between the historiography of that time and novels. Wilhelm Raabe’s novel Stopfkuchen (1890) and Heinrich Schliemann’s archaeological writings on Troy (1881) are examined in the mutual narrative techniques of their time. These are people linked by their time. As Maurer points out, Schliemann brought a passion and liveliness to his prose that reflected the demand Nietzsche made to philologists, writers, musicians, and historians. Raabe joins Schliemann in bringing the passion of his narrative protagonists into the foreground, using first-person narrative while eschewing the «archival effect» of a neutral, in-common objectivity of the Besprechungen / Reviews 103 previous age. Their respective interests in archaeology contain a new orientation to the past, as well as to older academic archaeology. This was an age of the individual changing the culture, rather than an age that determined the individual by its laws of nature. Maurer might have reflected upon the change in rhetorical strategies as the hallmark of a change in Zeitgeist. Her insight that Schliemann and Raabe were concerned with the «how» of inquiry into the past, rather than just «what,» was discovered, in itself, is an idea to be pursued in a Kuhnian manner to indicate a change of age by a change in methods of inquiry and explanatory paradigms. Maurer refers to Thomas Kuhn in passing, but does not take up his ideas. To comprehend the mutual reinforcement of disciplinary paradigms is to comprehend the metaparadigm of an age as well. In her Introduction, Maurer has provided not only the reader, but also herself with a program for future thought. The «why» of the periodicity of rhetorical correspondences between disciplines can be addressed with more attention to Stephen Greenblatt’s «social energy,» but even more finely with Hayden White’s theory of tropes. White’s Metahistory, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe examines three periods of the century in its language of ideas, bringing with it the sensitive, stylistic analysis that Wilhelm Dilthey would applaud, the «why» of each period in its Zeitgeist. White offers a historicist comprehension of how and why one period gave way to another, a necessity in cultural-historical understanding that Maurer must bring to the incisive accuracy of her stylistic descriptions. University of Louisville Mark E. Blum