Peter Schlemihl (review)

Goethe Yearbook 281 Käuser's Physiognomik und Roman im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1989), Liliane Weissberg's Geistersprache (Würzburg: Königshausen, 1990), and Scott Abbott's Fictions of Freemasonry (Detroit: Wayne State, 1991). Voges and Abbott focus on the "Geheimbund" theme and the aesthetic and narratological problems it poses. Both authors are concerned with social history, and both offer accounts of Freemasonry in Germany. Käuser's book is inspired by Foucault's reinterpretation of the history of science , and draws on the large body of research that now exists on eighteenth -century anthropology. Weissberg's interest is in the border-line between literary and philosophical writing; as a work which broke down under the conflict between its narrative requirements and the author's growing awareness of its philosophical implications, Der Geisterseher is a natural choice of text for Weissberg's study, and fits neatly between discussions of Kant's Träume eines Geistersehers and of Schiller's dispute with Fichte over the nature of philosophical language. This is not the place for a fuller discussion of these four innovative books. What is striking, however, is the fact that Der Geisterseher can assume such importance in books not primarily devoted to Schiller. This contrasts markedly with the exceedingly brief treatment accorded to the fragment in Lesley Sharpe's recent study of the author (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and is perhaps an indication that Schiller specialists have something to learn from the non-specialists. The readers of these four studies will no doubt be able to read Schiller's German. Who will read the translation? As Sammons informs us, Coleridge and Byron composed a drama and a ballad respectively that can be attributed to Schiller's impact, so the specialists in English Romanticism will be grateful to the publisher. But the recent interest in popular literature in eighteenth-century scholarship, especially in the "dark side" of the Enlightenment , should ensure even wider attention for The Ghost-Seer among readers who were previously unfamiliar with what is emerging as a text of central importance for the period. Queen's University David Pugh Chamisso, Adalbert von, Peter Schlemihl. Trans. Sir John Bowring. Intro. Wulf Koepke. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993. The appearance or, in this case, the reappearance of a valued German text in translation is a welcome event which provides the opportunity to introduce a fine Romantic work to a non-German-speaking audience, especially students. In the introduction, Wulf Koepke assures us that Sir John Bowring's 1861 translation "is considered reliable and good" (xix). A special virtue he finds in this translation is that "it is written in the language of Chamisso's age" (xxiii), and thus retains more of the texture and flavor of the original than a modern rendition. While an early translation will always 282 Book Reviews be interesting, I am not certain that the advantages of reissuing this work in this form outweigh the disadvantages. At the least, Bowring's venerable old translation might have benefitted from some editing and careful revision. A number of expressions, such as, "I felt as if I had been bastinadoed" (37), for "Ich war wie zerschlagen," "self-retired" (25), for "in mich gekehrt" (42), or "I leave much to your filling up" (60), for "Ich lasse dir hier vieles zu ergänzen" are recondite or unintelligible. Other instances, such as "moonshine" (38) for "mondhell," or he sat down "upon a bank" (81) for "auf eine Bank" (clearly here a bench rather than a rising ground or a financial institution) are stilted, misleading or unintentionally humorous and, at times, all of those things at once. More serious are those lapses which distort important features of the tale. At one point, Peter Schlemihl is reported to await "the visit of the mysterious unknown" (47). However, it is not an abstract "unknown" that he expects, but the arrival of the "rätselhaften Unbekannten," the sinister gray man who has taken possession of his shadow. In the passage, "I have often confessed, since I drove through the school of philosophy" (94), for "daß ich deutlich erkannt habe, seitdem ich den Philosophen durch die Schule gelaufen," Bowring fails to capture both Schlemihl...