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  • Angst in den Zeiten der Cholera. 4 vols. Vol. 1, Über kulturelle Ursprünge des Bakteriums; vol. 2, Panik-Kurve. Berlins Cholerajahr, 1831/32; vol. 3, Auf Leben und Tod. Briefwelt als Gegenwelt; vol. 4, Das schlechte Gedicht. Strategien literarischer Immunisierung
  • George S. Rousseau
Olaf Briese . Angst in den Zeiten der Cholera. 4 vols. Vol. 1, Über kulturelle Ursprünge des Bakteriums; vol. 2, Panik-Kurve. Berlins Cholerajahr, 1831/32; vol. 3, Auf Leben und Tod. Briefwelt als Gegenwelt; vol. 4, Das schlechte Gedicht. Strategien literarischer Immunisierung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003. Vol. 1: 454 pp.; vol. 2: 399 pp.; vol. 3: 329 pp.; vol. 4: 169 pp. €74.80 (3-05-003779-2).

Olaf Briese has compiled the biography of a pair of years—1831-32—in the format of a four-volume German source book. It is the most extensive species of its type in the recent history of medicine: almost a thousand pages of richly packed material dealing with cholera that should be consulted by scholars who work on the history of epidemics and nineteenth-century medicine, as well as those more generally interested in the cultural imprint of disease. One can imagine similar productions for all swift-killing maladies, especially ebola and AIDS.

Briese's title, "Fear in the Time of Cholera," obliquely refers to Gabriel García Márquez's novel about love in the time of cholera, but Briese's time span is much narrower. He searches for a totalizing discourse capable of capturing the protagonist—fear—in all its variety. Yet if fear was the dominant effect of the new Asiatic cholera, due to the speed and virulence with which it felled its victims, the disease also created a new emotional mindset about the onset of death. Little wonder, then, that while the German word Angst translates as "fear," in the context of cholera the word's heightened emotional intensity far exceeded any ordinary fear.

Volume 1 is the most important, treating the following topics (in this order): cholera's historiography; the mysteries embedded in the word "cholera"; the [End Page 128] types of language the malady has attracted to itself; some of its gender implications; aspects of the moral and political dimensions; its relation to, and implications for, animals; contagion theories in relation to cholera's origins; reasons why it was sometimes known as the "sparrow passion"; the role that monsters occupied in the popular imagination among those coping with the new malady in 1831-32; the history of a few of its therapies involving astrology, magnetism, electricity, and mesmerism; its status as the purveyor of a special type of disaster; its implications for political anarchy; remedies such as "Saakrales water" (a herbal cure); and, not least, its vast relation to blood in the post-Gothic epoch of vampires and other demons thought to suck blood from cholera's victims and pump it into those not yet afflicted. The relation of cholera to politics is briefly noted, both governmental regimes in Europe and personal body politics. A few medical models are discussed that were generated to explain to nineteenth-century audiences what type of unprecedented miasma this cholera was. Volume 1 also contains an intriguing section on cholera's relation to religion, and another on its role in the apocalyptic imagination. Here it was deemed of vital concern to visual artists from Blake and the late Romantics to the symbolists at the other end of the century.

Volume 2 is subtitled "The panic curve: Berlin's cholera-year 1831-32," and compiles the record of this span in life and letters, punctuated by Hegel's early death from cholera at the end of 1831. Volume 3 contains 770 brief documents—extracts of letters, diaries, journals—from the same period, except for the last twenty entries by Adalbert Stifter, a lifelong hypochondriac writer who eventually committed suicide after having lived in the shadow of cholera without contracting it, and who wrote in 1866 a "mountain play" discussing cholera. Each entry is identified, but volume 3 is marred by the lack of an index that would have permitted the user to locate swiftly the authors of this large archive. For example, if you...

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