362 Besprechungen / Reviews It goes without saying that there is a broad spectrum of persons, events, and developments that writers felt called upon to respond to or to take issue with; in general, Parkes provides both a sufficiently detailed account and circumspect assessment that steers clear of excessive claims about the political significance of intellectuals. Nevertheless, he regards their role as by no means negligible and credits them with contributing to the establishment of «the democracy of the [pre-unification] Federal Republic» (196) - no mean feat in view of the sometimes open hostility towards and contempt of writers on the part of prominent CDU/ CSU politicians such as Ludwig Erhard and Franz Josef Strauß, the «bête noir of intellectuals» (89). In the election campaign of 1965 Erhard condescendingly characterized intellectual critics as «ganz kleine Pinscher,» and in the 1978 campaign Strauß disdainfully dismissed writers and their ilk as «Ratten und Schmeißfliegen.» Ultimately, the numerous controversies attracted considerable public notice and contributed to a change in the perception about the function of writers and their role in the democratic process. As to the GDR, perhaps Parkes’s cautiously expressed opinion that writers were seeking to improve «the political system» (196) of their state tends to understate the hurdles they faced; the notorious Biermann affair of 1976 is a case in point; the administrative obstacles imposed upon writers by Hermann Kant, long-time president of the GDR Schriftstellerverband, among others, severely restricted reform efforts and ultimately impeded writers’ creative process. The Literaturstreit concerning the (belated) publication of Christa Wolf’s Was bleibt (1990) offers a prime example of the consequences of a writer’s acquiescing in restrictive cultural policies. As is to be expected of a detailed, analytical survey such as the volume under discussion, a useful apparatus consisting of a fairly comprehensive section of Works Cited and an Index facilitates readers’ orientation. Yet there are also a number of mostly minor errata such as misspellings and mistranslations; specifically, it appears odd that in a work presumably intended for English-speaking readers in general and literary scholars at the beginning of their careers in particular the translation of titles of literary works is handled inconsistently in that only in rare instances information about extant English renderings is provided (see, e.g., Martin Walser’s Eiche und Angora; 168). Ultimately, however, such minor blemishes cannot significantly detract from the general usefulness of the volume. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Siegfried Mews R UTH B. B OTTIGHEIMER : Fairy Tales: A New History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. 152 pp. $ 14.95. How old are fairy tales? Were they part of the oral tradition of our distant ancestors, or are they a more recent invention, a product of the new print culture of the Renaissance? Exactly when, where, and why did they first appear? And - a question upon which all the others turn - how should «fairy tale» be defined? These are issues Ruth B. Bottigheimer has worked with for years, and in this deftly written book she draws her conclusions together into a history of the fairy tale from Straparola to Grimm. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 362 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 362 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 363 We need a new history of the fairy tale, she argues, because of widespread misconceptions about this genre embraced not only by the general public, but also some of the critics. Chief among these misconceptions is the belief that the fairy tales we tell today were devised by country folk and transmitted by word of mouth for centuries until people like Perrault and Grimm took the initiative to write them down. She is of course not the first to maintain that there never was an oral fairy tale, or oral wonder tale, that possessed the same quality and aesthetic force as our popular fairy tales do today, or that in general the storytellers of old were not very good at preserving complex narratives by word of mouth over generations. This critical line stretches from Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer’s skepticism about the creative limits of the oral tradition («The folk does not produce; it reproduces.») through Albert Wesselski, Detlev Fehling and Rudolf Schenda, to Hans-Jörg Uther, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, and an increasing number of critics today. And even many who conclude that there must have been an old oral wonder tale tradition (Jack Zipes, for example) see its pre-literate manifestations as much less sophisticated than the literary tales of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. But Bottigheimer draws an especially sharp line between what Straparola was doing and what came before. Thus this book, which sets out to replace the romantic, «oralist» view of this tradition with a new «book-based history of fairy tales.» No time is wasted marveling at the genre’s mystical aura, or the fascinating vagueness of its origins. Her subject is something specific: «fairy tales as we know them in the modern world» (115), wonder tales in the style of Straparola, Perrault and Grimm, and more specifically «the tales of magic that end in weddings» and «the beginning of life lived happily ever after.» «Common usage,» she says, «and scholarly terminology both recognize these tales as fairy tales» (6). As she presents her case and explains what a fairy tale is and what it is not, she proceeds systematically, drawing several sorts of distinctions: urban versus rural; fairy tales versus «tales of fairyland»; secular magic versus religious magic; rise tales versus restoration tales; and fairy tales versus «genuine folk tales.» «Folk tales,» she says, «differ from fairy tales in their structure, their cast of characters, their plot trajectories, and their age» (4). It is here, in the plot structure, that she finds her core definition of the genre. The real center of this storytelling, she argues, is not the restoration tale (where protagonists are driven from home and later return to their original social position and wealth) but the rise tale, and specifically the well-known rise tale plot in which poor protagonists are the beneficiaries of magical intervention that enable them to marry royalty and become wealthy. «Rise fairy tales,» she explains, «begin with a dirt-poor girl or boy who suffers the effects of grinding poverty and whose story continues with tests, tasks, and trials until magic brings about a marriage to royalty and a happy ascension to great wealth» (11-12). Is the rise tale she describes in fact at the center of the whole genre, and is this plot structure the key to understanding the fairy tale’s distinct qualities and lasting popularity? If so, then some of our best-known stories, at least in their most popular variants, are slightly off-center, since they are restoration tales, for example: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Goose Girl, and Cinderella. On this issue she does address Cinderella, and in defense of her argument she points out that it is «generally understood to be a rise fairy tale» (13). As in her earlier work, Bottigheimer puts the origin of the rise tale she describes in the Italian Renaissance city, where the new prosperity inspired people to dream CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 363 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 363 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 364 Besprechungen / Reviews dreams of fabulous personal success, even in places where the economy was experiencing a temporary slump. Venice in Straparola’s day offered particularly fertile ground for the development of this plot structure, she concludes, in part because it was illegal there for noblemen and commoners to intermarry, so that a story about successful marriage into the nobility required a far-away setting. For these reasons, therefore, it was Venice that gave birth to «the world’s first perfected rise fairy tale» (95), Straparola’s «Costantino Fortunato,» one of several new narratives of this type that struck a chord with people at the threshold of the world we live in now. «Rise fairy tales were new stories for a new age. They were stories about people like us» (115). Although Straparola borrowed freely from other authors, he managed, unlike his predecessors, to hit on this rags-through-secular-magicto-marriage-to-riches plot structure that Bottigheimer says is both new and at the center of the tradition. Earlier stories that might seem to fit, she says, actually do not. For example, «Lionbruno,» a fairy tale-like narrative published in the late fifteenth century, does not qualify because its hero marries out of the rise tale sequence she describes. The plot also turns on religious rather than secular magic - another of the measuring sticks by which she judges the genre. If we were to apply her criteria to even older material, for example the Latin medieval story «The Turnip Tale» («Rapularius»), it too would fail to meet these criteria, since the hero of that story likewise does things out of order, skipping over marriage on his way to wealth. The book relates its new history in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Grimms, and here the focus is on how the brothers stumbled at first and did not draw a very clear line between recent literary culture and age-old oral tradition. The Grimms have probably already taken enough heat for their early fuzziness about the status of the stories they were collecting, but revisiting this episode does help Bottigheimer write her new history, since it may be the best example of the wishful thinking that she wrote this book to help stamp out. From the Grimms she moves on - that is, to say, back - to the French fairy tale tradition, where she marshals evidence showing how deeply d’Aulnoy, L’Héritier, Perrault and the others were indebted to the stories of Straparola and Basile. Bottigheimer argues that Perrault «found in Straparola’s stripped-down style a perfect textual model for his project of creating contemporary French tales in a modern mode» (69), suggesting furthermore that it was Perrault’s acquaintance with Straparola’s style that led him to put aside the more sophisticated language of his early stories «Griselidis,» «Peau d’Ane,» and «The Ridiculous Wishes» and, beginning with «The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,» to start writing in a style that would give his prose the look of a simple folk tale. This section contains several nice comparative readings. Perrault is given credit for being a «skilled reformulator» and for other contributions, like creating, with his story «The Fairies,» «the reigning model for modern morality tales, in which magic rewards good behavior» (65). From France we move to Italy, where Bottigheimer places the birth of the fairy tale, and where she gives credit not just to Straparola but also to Basile. She admits that Basile wrote very few rise tales, but given the extraordinary richness of Lo cunto de li cunti and its huge influence, her assignment of co-authorship of the new genre to Basile is unavoidable. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 364 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 364 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Besprechungen / Reviews 365 For readers already familiar with Bottigheimer’s work, this book is an opportunity to see how her ideas play out as the basis for a short history of the fairy tale. Some will find her definition of the genre to be limited, though the plot structure she sees at its center is a well-worn route to the fairy tale’s «happily ever after,» and she is not the first critic to recognize its importance. There may be a few snags in her argument’s overall historical thread, for example in Basile’s neglect of the rise tale and popular tradition’s embrace of the restoration tale. But she does address these seeming inconsistencies, and in doing so she brings up issues that are thought-provoking in and of themselves. Whatever your opinion about the way this book ropes off its subject, there are flashes of insight here that would not exist if the author had lacked the tenacity to lay hold of this slippery genre, wherever she decided to grab it, and set about trying to pin down its origin and write a brief account of its history. University of Louisville Alan Leidner D EREK H ILLARD : Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2010. 181 pp. $ 47. For those familiar with the biography of the German-language poet Paul Celan, it comes as no surprise that the motif of melancholy, or images of mental illness, surface in his poems. From the winter of 1962-63 on, Celan was hospitalized repeatedly in psychiatric clinics. It is also no coincidence that connections between the poet’s battles with depression and paranoia and his premature death in 1970 have been drawn. In his book Poetry as Individuality: The Language of Observation in the Poetry of Paul Celan, Derek Hillard cautions against viewing the references in the poems to madness, or other psychiatric phenomena, as a simple expression of the poet’s struggles with mental illness - with much justification. The title of Hillard’s book does not betray this, but it presents an extensive study of the motif of madness and the themes related to it. In many fastidious individual discussions of poems, as well as of the famous Georg Büchner Prize address, «Der Meridian,» the author aims to show the interpretive and poetic significance of this «language of madness» in Celan’s work beyond biographical considerations. Using Celan’s statement that «poetry is the language of an individual that has become form» from his Büchner Prize address as starting point, Hillard examines the «efforts at individuation that [Celan’s] poems pursue» (22). With madness as the dominant theme, he focuses on three main motifs that he considers connected to «discourses of self-observation»: Schein (semblance, illusion, appearance), Wahn (madness, delusion), and Wunde (wound, trauma). Hillard divides his study into five main chapters. Chapter One, «The Phenomenology of Illusion,» contains in its first part an investigation of the notion of Schein in an early poem by Celan, «Die letzte Fahne.» In order to demonstrate how poems «conceive of themselves as agents that ward off attacks» (27), Hillard turns to Nietzsche. He is able to apply the opposition between the Dionysian threat to individuality and the shelter against it that Apollonian semblance and appearance provide in The Birth of Tragedy to the poem. He then looks at the notion of Wahn in two additional poems, «Ich kenne dich» and «Kleine Silbe.» Among other details, Hillard CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 365 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 365 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38