Die Genese der idealen Gesellschaft: Studien zum literarischen Werk von Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) (review)

Johann Jakob Bodmer and his literary partner Johann Jakob Breitinger—yoked with their Leipzig antagonist, Gottsched—have been accorded a prominent place in traditional histories of eighteenth-century German literature, even if nowadays one is unsure what their contribution was. This study by Jesko Reiling of Bodmer’s post-1740s Biblical epics and political dramas (that is, works produced after the major critical writings) is part of an ongoing reevaluation that seeks to make that contribution more precise. For instance, the recent collection by Anett Lütteken and Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer, Johann Jakob Bodmer und Johann Jakob Breitinger im Netzwerk der europäischen Aufklärung (Göttingen, 2009), has as its focus the connection of the Swiss with the larger eighteenth-century Europe-wide literary transformation, as the title indicates. It is a good place to start, with thirty-two articles (including a chapter by Reiling on Bodmer’s “third Klopstock,” Gottlob David Hartmann).

In the present study, Reiling proposes a “value-free assessment” of Bodmer’s epics and dramas, beginning with the Noah epic in the 1740s and concluding with the historically-based political dramas (published 1768–69). Fully the first third of the book, however, consists of poorly organized background, which, absent some prior acquaintance, one may have difficulty navigating. Moreover, the book lacks a chronology, not simply of Bodmer’s œuvre but even of the works under consideration. One can keep straight Julius Cäsar and Nero, even Marcus Brutus, but Die Tegeaten, Italus, Pelopidas, Tarquinius Superbus, Thrasea Pätus? The book also has the irritating convention of indicating on first mention of a work an abbreviated reference to it in a footnote. After a while, one loses track of which work is meant when consulting a note. Nevertheless, awaiting more research, this study too is a good start.

In his introduction Reiling addresses the uniformly negative “canonical judgment” of Bodmer’s literary works. No less than Friedrich Sengle concluded of the dramas that they are “nicht allein durch die Schwäche des Poeten Bodmer, sondern . . . gewissermassen grundsätzlich undramatisch, undichterisch . . .” (238). The contemporary reaction was no better. Of Noah, for instance, it was noted that “[d]ie erste Welt wird . . . zum Spiegel oder Abbild der zweiten Welt,” with clearly recognizable modern events “verpflanzt” in the antediluvian era (143). Thus, before the Flood, Noah in a dream travels for fifty days around the earth with the angel Raphael, who reveals to him the perversions of mankind, all strikingly modern. Of the political dramas Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg wrote that it was useless to judge “diese Schauspiele nach den bekannten Regeln des Dramas.” He noted that they were “durchwürzt” “mit Staatsbetrachtungen aus dem Montesquieu und Rousseau” (239).

Such objections, according to Reiling, miss the core of what Bodmer was attempting: namely, not to be entertaining but, instead, to be instructive. He places Bodmer’s literary output within the rise of Empfindsamkeit, following, among others, Gerhard Sauder, according to whom this movement was influenced by English moral sense theory, and Friedrich Vollhardt, who has noted the influence of natural rights discourse (3). Reiling’s intention is to provide a “gesellschaftstheoretische Lesart” (8), drawing on what Heidemarie Kesselmann has called the “gesellschaftskritische Tendenz” of Bodmer’s works (8). Agreeing with Peter Hohendahl and others, Reiling finds that the conceptions of virtue, equality, and morality in sentimental literature were a critique of class-based or absolutist politics, not (as per Sauder) a “Fluchtphänomen” (9).

The first part of this study examines “Character,” Bodmer’s analysis of moral types. Bodmer, like other early eighteenth-century writers, was fumbling toward a psychology of affect, but his transitional status is indicated by the models on which his analysis of human action—and thus literary portrayal—is grounded: Theophrastus, La Bruyère, Charles de Saint-Evremond, even Sebastian Brandt. Nature, as Bodmer wrote in Critische Betrachtungen (1741), generally produces only moderate (“mittelmässig”) things, including...