The German Joyce by Robert K. Weninger (review)

As a professor of German, a comparatist by avocation, and a Joycean of long standing, Robert K. Weninger has impeccable credentials for the author of a study on Joyce’s German connections. His introduction describes The German Joyce–the adjective is understood throughout as a linguistic, rather than a political, concept–as the fruit of research conducted over a twenty-year period and situates it as essentially a broadly traditional exercise in literary history and reception studies but with a theoretical inflection that takes into consideration the structuralist and poststructuralist debates of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath. The study is divided into two parts, the first devoted to “The Nacheinander: The German Reception of Joyce” and the second to “The Nebeneinander: Intertextual Echoes.”

Part I consists of three chapters. The first briefly chronicles the inauspicious beginnings of Joyce’s German reputation with the overwhelmingly negative reception of Exiles, first performed in translation in Munich in August 1919, when Joyce was still almost completely unknown in the German-speaking world. Weninger notes that part of the reason for the play’s failure was the highly unstable political situation in Bavaria and Germany in the aftermath of World War I; the play, however, fared little better in its second German airing more than a decade later. It was revived in Berlin in March 1930, by which time its author was already a (largely notorious) household name, at least in intellectual circles, Georg Goyert’s German translation of Ulysses having appeared with great fanfare in 1927.¹

The most widely influential of Joyce’s works in Germany, unsurprisingly, has always been Ulysses. Chapter 2, on the German reception of the novel up to 1945, recounts the critical and scholarly reactions to Ulysses both before and after Goyert’s first version. The immediate and very evident impact of Joyce’s novel on the output of three major German authors, Hans Henny Jahnn, Alfred Döblin, and, especially, Hermann Broch–once dubbed “the ‘Austrian Joyce’” (44)²—is analyzed in detail, before turning to Joyce’s reception and eventual suppression under the Nazis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of convergences of content, mood, and style between Joyce and Thomas Mann, who made no secret of his admiration for the author of Ulysses. Chapter 3, in dealing with the German-language reception of Joyce after 1945, considers the productive reception of his work by a number of important postwar German writers, especially Arno Schmidt, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, and Hans Wollschläger (all three of them fascinated by Finnegans Wake), before turning to the institutionalization of Joyce in critical and academic circles. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of how Joyce’s oeuvre fared in German translation after 1945, a central text being Wollschläger’s new and magnificent 1975 translation of Ulysses.³

The three chapters of Part I, dealing with questions of reception and influence, are followed by three very different ones examining questions of literary affinity—questions, that is to say, of what Weninger usefully calls “confluence” rather than influence, matters of Nebeneinander rather than Nacheinander (62). The first of these develops the discussion of William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in “Scylla and Charybdis” and explores the “intricate interrelationship” between Ulysses and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels,⁴ focusing on a comparison of the authors’ treatments of two central themes, coincidence and paternity (105). Chapter 5 reminds readers of the simultaneous presence in Zurich in 1915 of Joyce and Tristan Tzara (not to mention Vladimir Lenin) and explores a further set of confluential relationships: those between Joyce and the Dadaists. Significant similarities are analyzed, but ultimately Joyce’s art, “with its patient deliberateness, carefully crafted structures and resonances, and elaborate formalism,” is declared to be “less a complement to than the very antithesis of Dadaism’s intentionally rebellious but ultimately self-defeating venture” (155, 157). Chapter 6 is a particularly insightful comparative study of the theory and practice of epiphany as explored in the works...