Rhine Crossings: France and Germany in Love and War (review)

These essays deal with French-German interaction in artistic and critical discourse over the last 200 years, particularly since the late nineteenth century. There is a highly informative and thought-provoking introduction, and the pieces are predominantly of a high standard, and are generally clear. Recurring preoccupations include common female archetypes across French and German cultures, artistic responses to utilitarianism and industrialization, experiences of German and Austrian artists in Paris, the memory of war, the writing of history, and the manipulation of memory. Genres and media range from the epistolary novel to plays, pantomime, cabaret, sculpture, film, critical essays, photography, diaries, philosophy and historiography. An initial section entitled 'Pre-Romantic Currents' (the prefix seems unnecessary) looks at the influence of Mme de Staël on Sophie von la Roche, the playwright G. E. Lessing's portrayal of the French, and, in an interesting piece by Sarah Sasson, at the evolving French literary representation of Heinrich Heine, from his arrival in Paris as a Dionysian poet to his protracted death as a Christ-like figure or suffering Jewish intellectual. A further section, covering the fin de siècle up to the 1930s, explores cabaret dancing in the French and German capitals; preoccupations with disease, creative work, and 'style' in Baudelaire and Nietzsche, as individual reactions against industrial progress; the figure of Lulu as sexual acrobat and lustful woman in Félicien Champsaur's novel and Frank Wedekind's plays; Benjamin in Paris and Berlin (more discussion of Berlin would have been welcome in this piece); and Bataille's discourse of decay in relation to Karl Blossfeldt's flower photography (no illustrations, sadly). The next section examines the Second World War and its legacy, through sculpture by the 'collaborationist' Aristide Maillol, the Paris Occupation diaries of Ernst Jünger, and René Clément's 1946 and 1947 films about resistance by rail-workers and Fascist collaboration (the latter in a particularly well-written piece by Philip Watts). The insightful piece by Elliot Neaman on the French reception of Jünger presents the German war hero in all his ambiguity and draws some parallels with the French reception of Heidegger. A final, less cohesive section, entitled 'Postmodern Reflections', contains a dense piece on Romy Schneider's French connections, including recent censored television screenings of her films, and a perhaps overly weighty essay on theories of history by Weil, Kojeve, Benjamin and Arendt. The book is necessarily selective in its coverage, but the introduction fills some of the artistic and sociopolitical gaps, and the Jünger piece provides especially useful contextualization for the recent past. Particularly memorable is Terri Gordon's exceptionally clear and probing piece on 1920s cabaret dancers in Paris and Berlin (and on the automated doll in Man Ray and Hans Bellmer). For her, the kicking, uniformed rows of 'femmes-machine' expressed the growing dominance of factory machines while also therapeutically 're-membering' the lines of human cannon-fodder. The book contains some real pearls, and, all in all, is a valuable contribution to the understanding of French-German 'crossings' since Romanticism.