Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public by Benjamin W. Redekop (review)

240 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Other factors limit the usefulness of this edition. Granted that Henday=s journals cannot be used as reliable guides for the navigator, one might still have expected to find good modern maps of the area that his travels presumably covered. Instead we are given a single, small line map, which contains no bearings, and on which not a single geographical feature is identified. (BILL MOREAU) Benjamin W. Redekop. Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public McGill-Queen=s University Press 1999. x, 264. $70.00 I think I should admit right away to having been rather puzzled about the target audience for this book. While the author locates its contribution within the >field of intellectual history/history of ideas,= I personally feel that the social or political historian would find the detailed treatment of largely unfamiliar writers rather excessive in relation to the advance offered in terms of socio-historical insight. The literary critic or historian, on the other hand, could well feel that much familiar ground is covered at too great length. Another problem that arose for me, particularly in the introductory and concluding segments of the study, was the problem of language and style. Would it have helped not to understand German, I asked myself, so that the many English sentences broken up with German words inaccurately rendered within their blended syntactical units would not have proved troublesome? This question unfortunately raised its head in the early stages of my reading and never left me right through to the end, soon accompanied by another, related question, namely: without a full knowledge of German, could one possibly bear all those intrusive German words? Unfortunately, I think the author was not well served by his editor in this regard, for in my view he ought to have been encouraged to render his many hybrid sentences in straightforward English prose, with only very occasional recourse to German words or phrases where absolutely necessary. Admittedly some of the concepts being dealt with might well cause certain difficulties for any writer concerned with accuracy of nuance (e.g., Bürger, bürgerlich, öffentlich, Öffentlichkeit, Publikum, to name only a few), but such difficulties could and should have been dealt with in a way that would not have proved as disruptive for the forward progress of the willing reader as I found to be the case. While a bilingual author might perhaps be unaware of the potentially negative impact of blending two languages, no editor can be permitted the same level of lack of awareness, and so it is rather more at the editor=s door that I would place the blame for what amounts in my view to a serious misjudgment in terms of the writing style in many parts of this book. HUMANITIES 241 The whole central question of a gradually emerging German >public= in the eighteenth century is an interesting one, however, and Redekop handles the apparatus of scholarship quite skilfully, incorporating a considerable amount of fairly complex material into his study. Dealing sequentially with the work of G.E. Lessing, Thomas Abbt, and J.G. Herder, he first seeks to demonstrate the difficulties facing these public-spirited writers in finding or establishing an appropriate German readership, given the disunity and diversity of the as yet non-existent German nation in the eighteenth century. He then goes on to explore the contribution made by each writer in presenting expansive ideas whose aim was to create and foster that missing dedicated readership. What all three themselves had in common was a dedication to the notion of a like-minded community to be served by good writing that would elevate and enliven its members= participation in the life of the whole context in which they were placed. Unfortunately the structure of the study seems to me to make a difficult subject rather more difficult, resulting not only in much repetition throughout, but also in recurring explorations of prior influence in each of the three major sections. This is a problem that one often finds in any treatment of the work of various authors from one particular perspective, however, and as such it...