Verkleidungen der Aufklärung: Narrenspiele und Weltanschauung in der Goethezeit (review)

Galil Shahar’s well-researched study Verkleidungen der Aufklärung: Narrenspiele und Weltanschauung in der Goethezeit investigates the interrelation between the trope of foolishness, the figure of the “Narr,” and Enlightenment thought. Delineating her own version of the dialectic of enlightenment, Shahar seeks to demonstrate that reason and the carnivalesque do not contradict but rather complement and complete each other. Tracing a line from Goethe’s Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt via Gottsched’s banishment of the fool from the theater to his reappearance as “lustige Person” in the prologue to Faust, Shahar claims that the fool never really disappeared from the German stage. Rather, the bourgeois theater integrated elements of the carnivalesque, which, as Shahar argues, did not detract from but rather facilitated its emerging function as a matrix of enlightenment thought.

Shahar’s study draws on a wide variety of primary sources. Her analysis of cultural and social history is interlaced with interpretations of literary texts, ranging from Goethe’s Faust, Wilhelm Meister, Schiller’s “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen,” Kant’s concept of the sublime, and Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater” to various actors’ memoirs, including those of Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld and Caroline Neuber.

The first section of Shahar’s study summarizes the historical developments that account for the transition from traveling theater companies to the professionalized and institutionalized bourgeois theater, from the actor as outcast to the upwardly mobile thespian. In this process, the theater, although it retained elements of the carnivalesque, was “civilized” and re-defined as the arena of “homo ludens,” in which the bourgeois subject is free to confront the internal contradictions of Enlightenment thought in a safe environment. In the theater, the dangers and problem zones of enlightened thought assume innocuous shapes. Theatrical illusion does not countermand truth, but gives rise to a higher truth. Similarly, the actor’s ability to let go of his own identity does not signal alienation from the self but rather allows for processes of self-discovery and identification. Thus, the theater emerges as an institution that mediates between the anarchy of the carnivalesque, its investment in pleasure, spontaneity, and the body, and the rigidity and homogeneity of enlightenment thinking. As the theater becomes an instrument of the Enlightenment, paradoxes, mistakes, and illusions can be recovered as possible tools of progress. Foolishness emerges as a different form of wisdom, and the theater functions as an institution, in which the enlightenment interrogates its own premises.

Shahar shows that the theater facilitated critical inquiry into questions of personal, societal, and national importance and participated in the Bildung of its audience. She establishes parallels between Lessing’s rules for actors in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and Goethe’s Regeln für Schauspieler, on the one hand, and bourgeois models of education and identity formation, on the other. To Shahar, Goethe’s recommendation that actors study their gestures and comportment in front of a mirror locates the origin of the ideal subject in a moment of alienation. Shahar then contrasts this model to Kleist’s Marionettentheater, in which the mirror heralds the loss of innocence. In addition to identity formation, Shahar also explores the connections between the theatrical creation of an imaginary community and contemporary processes of nation formation. A final section seeks to shed light on Kant’s notion of the sublime by linking it with the realm of the theater and the concept of catharsis.

Shahar’s study is grounded in an impressive and thorough knowledge of literary and historical sources. It reads well, contains many intriguing insights, and deftly juggles literary, historical, philosophical, and political discourses. And yet, readers might have benefited from some conceptual clarifications and a more stringent presentation of the overarching arguments. In particular, in addition to the introductory notes on the definition and evolution of the figure of the “Narr,” one might have a liked a clearer conceptualization of the relation between the “Narr,” the carnivalesque, and the theater. In...