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/4.0/121
2010
434
DIETER STRAUSS: Oh Mann, oh Manns. Exilerfahrungen einer berühmten deutschen Schriftstellerfamilie.
121
2010
cg4340348
The fifth chapter examines Mahler as a critical reader of Goethe ’ s Faust, which occupied a central position in debates surrounding the instrumentalization of art for German nationalism. While conservatives championed Goethe as a national poet and Faust as a quintessentially German figure, cultural critics such as Heine and Nietzsche construed Goethe ’ s writing as a cosmopolitan project against nationalism; Niekerk situates Mahler ’ s reception of Goethe closer to Nietzsche ’ s and Heine ’ s readings. In the Eighth Symphony, Mahler ’ s setting of Faust II ’ s final scene adopts a «postmetaphysical» philosophy, which posits the existence of a global community, a «transcultural» tradition inclusive of difference (164, 176). The book ’ s final chapter explores Mahler ’ s Orientalism in Das Lied von der Erde, the Kindertotenlieder, and his settings of German Oriental-style poems. Placing Mahler ’ s reception of Orientalism in the context of the German cultural imagination, Niekerk illustrates how Mahler ’ s works ruminate on the construction of the Orient as «Other» by Western culture. Orientalism allows Mahler to rethink his aesthetic project and to assert a non-Western philosophy of life. In turn, the cultural otherness invoked by Mahler ’ s music and texts suggest the notion of «Weltliteratur,» in Goethe ’ s sense; Mahler ’ s compositions demonstrate that a dialogue between cultures can reveal something universally shared by even the most diverse cultural traditions. Although Nierkerk ’ s arguments are sufficiently nuanced and complex, his writing remains clear and engaging throughout: a laudable feat. The study has one minor but significant weakness: the texts appearing in Mahler ’ s works might have been printed in full to make the analysis more easily to follow (Niekerk only supplies Mahler ’ s program notes for Chapter 1). Overall, though, Reading Mahler is an exemplary work in cultural studies scholarship, a thoroughly interdisciplinary and highly accessible book that will appeal to scholars and students in many fields, as well as to Mahler enthusiasts. University of Virginia Gabriel Cooper S ABINE G RO ß (Ed.): Herausforderung Herder - Herder as Challenge. Ausgewählte Beiträge zur Konferenz der Internationalen Herder-Gesellschaft, Madison 2006. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2010. 350 pp. € 38,00. Herausforderung Herder - Herder as Challenge presents a collection of nineteen essays in German and English from the 2006 conference of the Herder Society hosted by the University of Wisconsin in Madison. As the volume ’ s title indicates, the articles are not tied together by a particular theme but rather by the assumption that Herder ’ s legacy still poses an overall challenge to us that calls for further critical investment. Reviewing major critical sources of the past years, Sabine Groß introduces that challenge as a twofold one: Moving him out of the shadow of towering figures such as Kant or Goethe, scholars have put much effort into foregrounding the value and relevance of Herder ’ s fragmentary and often highly provocative style of writing. At another, more general level, such reevaluations of the complex nature of his works have demonstrated that we fail to understand the role of this perhaps most important «Querdenker der deutschen 345 Besprechungen/ Reviews Aufklärung» (9) if we approach him as a counter-Enlightenment thinker. Rather, we need to engage with Herder as someone who compels us to discard any one-sidedly rationalist understandings of the age and reexamine its many facets through the lens of his multi-dimensional thinking across disciplines. Groß sets up these insights as the point of departure for Herausforderung Herder. Taking the research desiderata that Hans Adler laid out in the special issue Johann Gottfried Herder 1744 — 1803 of the Monatshefte in 2003 as a general point of orientation, she discusses in the introduction how each article ’ s individual focal point adds to the existing body of scholarship. Given the large number of articles, it is impossible to fit a discussion of each one into the limits of this review format. I therefore have had to make selections from each of the seven rubrics in which the articles are organized, hoping that my brief introductions will animate the reader to explore the volume in its entirety. The first section, «Challenges of Herder ’ s Legacy,» examines the history of Herder ’ s reception cross-culturally and advances thereby into fields that have hardly been explored. Ernst A. Menze provides textual evidence that leaves no doubt about the important role that Herder ’ s anthropological and historical understanding of religion played during the formative years of American Transcendentalism. Broadening the perspective of earlier publications, Menze zeroes in on the presence of Herder ’ s thinking in Emerson ’ s major essays. He suggests using his findings as a starting point to go beyond the level of textual influences by asking in what ways such cross-cultural affinities may cast new light on the «critical potency» (34) of both Emerson ’ s and Herder ’ s works. Like Menze, David L. Simmons uncovers Herder ’ s understudied significance for the direction of American thinking in the field of religion but with a focus on the present. Drawing on a number of unexamined sources, Simmons calls attention to the assessments of Herder ’ s thinking by members of the «Marburg School» with the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer as leading figures. According to Simmons, we should consult their works so as to gain a full picture of the significance of Herder for the contemporary comparative study of religion. He contrasts the «Marburg School» with what he calls the «Romantic School» as originated by Wilhelm Dilthey, dismissing the latter. While Simmons ’ depiction of the «Romantic» critical tradition is reductive and problematic, his demonstration of how the works of the Marburg circle promote a more comprehensive understanding of Herder ’ s contributions to the study of the Bible internationally is compelling. Section two, «(Re-)situating Herder,» continues the study of Herder ’ s reception, and the nature and impact of his religious thinking. Silvio Vietta ’ s and Alexej Ponomarev ’ s essays resonate with the latest body of criticism on Herder and religion; both critics suggest that Herder ’ s historical treatment of the Bible cannot be accommodated by a linear history of secularization where poetry and aesthetics simply replace the idea of divine revelation in the scriptures. Vietta points to Herder ’ s investigations of the capacities of human senses as authentic vehicles for spiritual revelation. Ponomarev demonstrates how Herder forged a new understanding of religion through his engagement with Spinoza. Ponomarev ’ s way of bringing Herder and Spinoza ’ s doctrine of substance into conversation is illuminating. His conclusion, however, that Herder ’ s understanding of religion prepares a nihilistic world view is unconvincing in light of Herder ’ s complex negotiations between natural and revealed 346 Besprechungen/ Reviews religion as they have been worked out, for instance, in Christoph Bultmann ’ s monograph on Herder ’ s Genesis interpretation. The contributions assembled under «Imagining the Other» provide captivating new perspectives on how Herder imagines the relationships between different peoples and cultures. With his article on how Herder integrates and evaluates accounts of travels to Pacific regions in the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Helmut Peitsch contributes to the field of postcolonial studies. He argues that Herder ’ s privileging of European cultures over Pacific ones rests on a highly dynamic understanding of what constitutes cultural advancement. According to Peitsch, Herder ’ s model envisions unequal stages between cultures to gradually approximate one another. Sonia Sikka, by contrast, brings into view a very different facet of Herder ’ s ideas regarding the status of foreign cultures. Consciously changing the paradigm of her previous work, Sikka suggests that Herder ’ s exclusively negative and disparaging descriptions of China in the Ideen complicate our image of him as the Enlightenment philosopher most perceptive toward cultural differences. With her investigations of the status of «gypsies» in works such as the Ideen, Iulia-Karin Patrut concentrates on yet another dimension of Herder ’ s representation of the «other.» She works out the contradictory status that «gypsies» have in Herder ’ s oeuvre: on the one hand, he associates them with nature and an authentic German cultural past with which he and his fellow Romantics sought to align themselves; on the other, «gypsies» figure as «anti-Bürger» whose attributes run counter to bourgeois norms. «Gender, Society, Politics, Language» continues the theme of otherness in the domain of Gender Studies. Michael Maurer contests common assumptions regarding the conservative division of labor between Herder and his wife Caroline Flachsland by arguing that we have to refrain from applying modern feminist criteria. He argues that they ran their household together like a family business that bespeaks a political program aimed at bourgeois autonomy. Anke Gilleir approaches the theme of Herder and gender not biographically but against the backdrop of his philosophy of language. In an analysis whose individual steps are not always easy to follow, Gilleir works out a compelling claim regarding the link between Herder ’ s notion of womanhood and his representation of the characteristics of poetic language. Reminiscent of the attributes ascribed to women, poetic language figures as natural and authentic in Herder ’ s discourse; at the same time, however, that same language also appears arbitrary and rhetorically constructed. So, interestingly, while Herder adheres to a rather nonprogressive understanding of the relationship between men and women, the highly gendered nature of poetic language bespeaks the arbitrariness of such categories. Section five, «Herder on Language, Herder as Editor: Positions, Transitions, Subversion,» concentrates primarily on Herder ’ s language philosophy. Angelica Nuzzo suggests that he formulates an alternative to the existing tensions between logic and history in Hegel ’ s and Kant ’ s works by transforming «philosophy into a historical science of the human being» (199). His understanding of the linguistic nature of thinking provides a link between Hegel ’ s dialectic logic and Kant ’ s logic of a priori forms. With her comparative reading of the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache and the Metakritik, Marion Heinz contributes to the long overdue reevaluation of Herder ’ s later works. She demonstrates how Herder fundamentally 347 Besprechungen/ Reviews revises his philosophy of language in the Metakritik by replacing his early anthropological approach by a philosophy of life that takes its cue from Spinoza. The articles assembled under «Herder and Current Challenges» ask in what ways his legacy contributes to our understanding of contemporary concerns and questions. For Stefan Greif, Herder ’ s philosophical thinking figures as an example that «radically modern philosophy has its beginning in the eighteenth century» (243), heralding the works of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, among others. What makes their philosophies radical is the departure from universal categories and the turn toward aesthetics as the realm for the subject to unfold itself. Ulrike Zeuch argues that Herder ’ s concept of the imagination helps to elucidate the «crisis of representation» as it has been debated since the 1960s. Herder ’ s contribution to the problem of representation lies in his observations regarding the truth status of authentic human emotions. The volume concludes with a section titled «Reading Textual Form» to accommodate Staffan Bengtsson ’ s extended investigation of the role of textual form for our understanding of Herder ’ s works. Given its length and detail, this essay poses a challenge to the reader. Bengtsson claims that the editions of the Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts are all based on a version that was never authorized by Herder, and he then turns to a different one that he takes to be the original. According to Bengtsson, this version reveals the importance of typography and layout for our understanding of Herder; the edition shows that we have to approach him «as an author of works in which thought and argument find their necessary and significant complement in material form» (326 — 27). Herausforderung Herder is a testimony to how considerably scholarship on Herder has advanced over the past years, especially due to the promotion of such scholarly efforts through regular conferences sponsored by the Herder Society. This collection contains a number of high-quality contributions that bring to bear fresh, multidisciplinary perspectives on the major fields of Herder research. Any eighteenthcentury scholar should consult this book to gain an overview of where Herder scholarship currently stands and pick up on the contributors ’ gesturing at where the future challenges of the field lie. Columbia University Ulrike Wagner D IETER S TRAUSS : Oh Mann, oh Manns. Exilerfahrungen einer berühmten deutschen Schriftstellerfamilie. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011. 157 pp. € 18,50. Spätestens seit Heinrich Breloers Fernsehtrilogie Die Manns - Ein Jahrhundertroman (2001) hat sich diese Familie im Bewusstsein der Deutschen als die wohl repräsentativste der modernen deutschen Kultur etabliert. Der Literaturkritiker Marcel Reich- Ranicki meint sogar, dass sie dem deutschen Bildungsbürger so wichtig sei wie den Briten die Windsors. Unzählige Essays, literaturwissenschaftliche Aufsätze und Bücher, sowie zahlreiche Bildbände sind über Leben und Werk einzelner Familienmitglieder veröffentlicht worden, begleitet von mehreren Verfilmungen und Neuverfilmungen ihrer wichtigsten Novellen und Romane. Und nun also eine weitere Monografie zum Thema ihrer Exilerfahrungen. 348 Besprechungen/ Reviews
