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Modernism/Modernity 8.2 (2001) 359-360



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Book Review

Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing


Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing. Michael André Bernstein. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 150. $24.95.

One readily agrees with Michael André Bernstein that we now look back upon "modernism" as a historical era that came to an end sometime around the time of World War II. But whether its demise was due solely to "the Nazi genocide and the decades-long horror of the Gulag" or whether democratization, globalization, and the mass media also had something to do with the declining popularity of an essentially Western elitist undertaking might well be open to discussion (9).

The "three imperatives" of universality, difficulty, and redemptive quality by which Bernstein distinguishes the literary masterpieces of the era can hardly be said, however, to have begun with Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Friedrich Schlegel defined romantic poesy in his most famous fragment as "eine progressive Universalpoesie"; Fichte said of Schlegel's novel Lucinde that "such products must first shape [bilden] their own public"; and Schleiermacher in his Reden über die Religion put religion and art on the same level--all in 1799. In any case, Bernstein's introductory definition is so generous that it can encompass not only the poetry of Rilke and Celan (whose "Death Fugue" is cited as "the last luminous example of a modernist masterpiece") and the prose of Musil, but even Heidegger's Being and Time, which "embodies all the defining characteristics of a modernist masterpiece," and, negatively, Benjamin's vast mausoleum of fragments, which "were never integrated into the great modernist masterpiece about which Benjamin dreamed" (105, 68, 98).

Bernstein's goal is commendable: to present five complex German-language writers and thinkers to a general audience in a jargon-free language and, in doing so, to resurrect the "genre of the literary-intellectual portrait" (10). His essays, commissioned originally as reviews for the New Republic, address precisely the literate and intellectually predisposed readers of that journal. Though linked by no transitions and summarized by no conclusion, they are written with a lucidity, liveliness, and gracefulness that occasionally rises to flashes of aphoristic insight: Rilke's "unity of inwardness and contented solitude" finds its only peers in Vermeer and Emily Dickinson; an "eerie parallelism" can be perceived between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazism; Benjamin courted his disaster with the "surefooted instinct of a somnabulist" (23, 73, 90).

Bernstein undertakes his task with a becomingly modest awareness that a different combination of authors might perhaps have "highlighted other lines of affiliations and shared motifs" (10). It would be unrealistic to expect any critic to achieve originality, within the scope of twenty-page essays, about five modern writers around whose oeuvre such a mountain of criticism and scholarship has accumulated. Nor does Bernstein boast that ambition. His essays reveal instead a pronounced pattern. Each begins with an introductory passage in which Bernstein establishes his theme by challenging some aspect of the "standard accounts" (usually without specifying them--the notes are highly selective): the basic outline that has turned Rilke's life into a "potent parable" of inwardness; the delayed recognition of Musil's achievement that lies in the failure to understand the combination of math and mysticism underlying his work; the "philistinism" that believes that Heidegger's politics have no bearing on his philosophy); the "orthodox hagiography" that Benjamin was unsuccessful and neglected during his lifetime; the "banal image" of Celan as an unrecognized genius who had survived the death camps (23, 36, 58, 90, 103).

The essays continue with a life-and-works survey in which Bernstein refutes the "accepted" parable or myth. Thus Rilke's poetry reveals a profound continuity in which the naïve metaphors of his earliest works, rather than being subsequently rejected, become more complex and [End Page 359] richer. The irony stemming from Musil's awareness of the conflict between reason and irrationality precluded any definitive conclusion to his enormous essayistic fiction. Heidegger's...

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