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  • Spaces for Happiness in the Twentieth-Century German Novel: Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Jünger by Alan Corkhill
  • Hansjakob Werlen
Spaces for Happiness in the Twentieth-Century German Novel: Mann, Kafka, Hesse, Jünger. By Alan Corkhill. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. viii + 203 pages. $53.95.

Not including the countless titles on bestseller lists promising successful paths to wellbeing, the innumerable contributions to the “World Database of Happiness” and the profusion of empirical studies of the hedonic experience are clear indications that the scientific examination of happiness is a burgeoning field. In the field of literature, Alan Corkhill, in his second book-length study on representations of happiness in fiction, explores ever-shifting localizations of happiness in famous German novels of the early and mid-twentieth century. These spaces are not restricted to physical localities but include a wide range of psychic and imaginary topographies, from reveries and aesthetic spaces to cosmic projections and immersion into Flow. The study puts the various narratives into the context of Western and Eastern theories of happiness, contemporary happiness discourses, and the novelists’ personal pronouncements on the theme of happiness. Corkhill is not interested in a critique of these novelistic endeavors for spaces of happiness but wants to delineate the participation of the narratives in the history of ideas about happiness. The happiness conceptions in occidental philosophy since Greek antiquity and the teachings of various Eastern philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) serve as important reference points of the study, but Corkhill also employs Gaston Bachelard’s “topoanalysis” (from La poétique de l’espace) and Michel Foucault’s “heterotopoanalysis” to identify the various Glücksräume encountered in the novels.

While Hesse’s novels explicitly deal with the theme of finding happiness, the other works analyzed in the study (with the partial exception of Jünger’s Heliopolis) are not primarily concerned with the felicity of their protagonists. What they all share are sophisticated aesthetic means to express “subtle variations in experienced and reflective happiness and misfortune” (4). The increasingly irrelevant eudaemonist traditions and the hollowness of the promesse de bonheur compel the authors to seek alternative possibilities of happiness. The degradation of the eudaemonist model is evident in Thomas Mann’s notions of “Glück” and its representation in Der Zauberberg. The privileging of bliss as a state of torment and suffering over a perceived fatuous state of contentment, the type of hard-won happiness advocated by Nietzsche, find expression in the almost silent enduring and resigned laughter of the sanatorium inhabitants. Lodovico Settembrini’s utopian belief that progressive state forms can further general happiness is discredited and the debunking of his idea des allgemeinen Glückes represents a central tenet common to all texts of the study, namely that there can be no prescriptive rules for happiness, no valid imposed general model. Rather, attaining fleeting moments of happiness through individualistic seeking is the best possible outcome. Acquiescing to Schopenhauer’s and Freud’s dismissal of happiness as telos of our existence, happiness remains for Mann, as Corkhill shows, a “struggle, the exertion of the will, the will to endure and to overcome” (23). In Zauberberg, such a will to endure manifests itself in a fearful distancing from sensual experiences, a renunciation of physical pleasure, as exemplified by Castorp’s soldier cousin Joachim Ziemßen. Aestheticized passions find expression in music, the medium that provides Castorp a refugium from the baseness of his surroundings, or—in Corkhill’s [End Page 142] frequent references to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory—“immerses him in an optimal Flow experience” (36).

The second chapter of the study analyzes Kafka’s novels as “Sites of Happiness and Unhappiness.” As with Mann, Corkhill begins his investigation with Kafka’s own frequent pronouncements on happiness (and its more frequent corollary, unhappiness). The act of writing provides Kafka a state of greatest felicity but also, true to the laws of Kafka dialectics, a state of utter misery. Similar to Mann, Kafka sees in unhappiness the potential for personal growth and shares Dostoyevsky’s suspicions of literature as the site of happiness. While Corkhill’s accounting of Kafka’s views on happiness uses well-worn psychoanalytical categories, his presentation of Josef K’s...

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