History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation

The imagining of a sense of national identity and its evolution from constructed myth to widely shared conviction has become a prominent topic of cultural and literary analysis. It is particularly significant in the case of Germany in view of its rapid development from a congeries of loyalties to principalities large and small along with unclear geographical and linguistic definitions at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a widely shared kleindeutsch patriotism under Prussian auspices after unification in 1871. Brent Peterson sees this change of consciousness as having been imaged in literature: "When consensus about a German identity finally arrived, if it ever did, it was almost certainly mediated in fictional form" (75). This is not, however, primarily a matter of the canonical tradition; except for Kleist and agitators like Arndt and Körner, "national literature" was not "synonymous with the literature of nationalism," which sought "a level of literary quality on a par with France and England" (74). The project of imagining the nation is more to be found in popular literature, in the historical novels that large numbers of people read. There are some well-known names here, such as Fontane and Fanny Lewald, in addition to authors on the periphery of the cultural memory like Fouqué or Alexis, and a number of others most of us are unlikely to have read or even heard of. A central figure is Luise Mühlbach, whose cause Peterson has been championing for some time, though not on qualitative grounds. He admits that "most of what ordinary people read was produced by writers of middling ability"; "some texts may be dreadful" (25). The historical novel competed with the rise of narrative history by imagining personal characteristics and private sensibilities, especially of ordinary people normally not within the purview of academic history.

Peterson has examined a large corpus of texts, finding in his extremely detailed observations not a linear evolution but a wide variety of opinions and insecurities of attitude about the definition and boundaries of "Germany," the identification of and the relationship to legitimate authority, and the prospects for the future. Much of his discussion is concentrated on several historical nodes and the ways in which their understanding was rewritten in fiction. One of these is the evolution of Friedrich II to "Old Fritz," from the dour, misanthropic, French-speaking, ruthless military aggressor to "Germany's favorite uncle," who "becomes a commoner," "wise and approachable, feared yet benevolent, just, and most important, prototypically German" (101, 96, 98), for whom love interests, preferably heterosexual, had to be devised. There are many varied examples in the texts, but Mühlbach's fifteen-volume portrait is crucial. If Fritz was made into Germany's uncle, Queen Luise was imaged as Germany's mother; the much-vaunted virtuous domesticity of the Prussian royal couple is a symptom of the embourgeoisement of the national discourse. However, her husband, Friedrich Wilhelm III, did not, to put it mildly, do much for the national cause, and a particularly sensitive node of the discourse was the Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806. Here the major examples are Fanny Lewald's Prinz Louis Ferdinand, which was embarrassing to the court and in which "Prussian society is rotten and about to collapse" (157), and Alexis's Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht, an angry novel impelled by the author's discovery that his Prussian patriotism was not welcomed by the ruling powers and concerning which Peterson is more thoughtful and perceptive than many other observers. The rise from the ignominy of 1806 was supposed to have occurred in the Wars of Liberation, but even here the discourse is varied and sometimes uncertain. Peterson points out that the Brockhaus of 1836, presumably to avoid the implications of "Freiheit," enters "Freiheitskriege" under "Russisch-deutscher Krieg von 1812–1815," still the case in my Brockhaus of 1864. Peterson includes Fritz Reuter's Ut de Franzosentid (cited not from the original but from a standard German version of 1976), Louise von François's Die letzte Reckenburgerin, and, unexpectedly, Karl May's Die Liebe des Ulanen, but the main focus is on Fontane's Vor dem Sturm and the final segment of Freytag's Die Ahnen. As authors gained experience with the Wilhelminian Reich, the national cause occasionally began to lose some of its luster, as in Spielhagen's bitterly despairing Noblesse oblige and, to me a rather surprising discovery, Sudermann's Der Katzensteg.

Peterson's vast overview of the literary record is set firmly in a historical context. Since in places he seems to wonder about the bourgeois attachment to royalty, something more might have been said about the persistent liberal project of forming an alliance with monarchy against the aristocracy and the uneducated classes, which climaxed but did not end with the Frankfurt Parliament's absurd offer of the imperial crown to Friedrich Wilhelm IV. While Peterson is not doctrinaire about denying the boundary between fiction and history, I am still more inclined to maintain it; as I used to say to students in resistance to Hayden White, there is no historiography in which Napoleon defeated Russia, while a novel based on such a premise is easy to imagine. Peterson asserts: "Both Mühlbach and Ranke must let Frederick die in 1786; they can neither change the outcome of his battles nor invent visits to his palace by aliens from outer space" (46), but I do not see why not unless the authors suppose themselves to be supplementary historians. We have fictions in which the South won the Civil War, the Nazis occupied England, and a para-fascist Lindbergh became president of the United States. The problem is illustrated by Mühlbach, who, judging from the one novel of hers I managed to read to the end, Königin Hortense, writes not historical novels but what we might call non-fiction novels. She does create scenes of private life, personal relations, and emotional states, but her novel has no literary dimension and plods along like an extended encyclopedia article.

Peterson's style is sprightly with flashes of wit, a pleasure to read. Everything is put implacably into English, including sometimes proper names, not only of royal figures: Queen Luise, Luise Mühlbach, and Louise von François all appear as "Louisa," Mühlbach even in the bibliography. The German originals of the cited texts are relegated to the notes; once again it would serve the convenience of the reader if academic book designers could be persuaded to put notes at the bottom of the page instead of in the back. These are just nit-picks, however; the book illuminates the convoluted generation of the nationalistic discourse in Germany, effectively countering still-circulating simplistic notions about "the Germans." We must be grateful to Peterson for devoting himself to so much of what we, in all probability, would prefer not to read, and we will not envy him his long hours with Luise Mühlbach.