Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (review)

Although historians such as James Sheehan, Celia Applegate, and Alon Confino have, by now, undermined the Prusso-centric view of German history that unfortunately still dominates popular thinking about the rise of German nationalism, scholars of German literature have lagged behind their example. Regional authors, generally defined as those writers whose works concentrate on a particular German locality and who often write in that region's dialect, are almost universally regarded as not worthy of serious analysis. Most of us believe that real German literature was written in the language of Luther, Goethe, and Schiller, and that it concentrates themes of national or universal importance, while regional authors are, by definition, provincial both in the sense that their writings are stylistically of dubious quality and that they are concerned with trivial events and characters. Explaining how and why such dichotomies are false is only one of the achievements in Arne Koch's new volume.

Using a somewhat surprising set of authors, Koch's aim is to offer a "[r]eading of regional literature's fictionality and simultaneous referentiality in order to determine these connections between sociocultural foundations of the narrative and geographically, as well as historically, true localities [which] becomes a crucial step in determining how and for what purpose these narratives may have been written and received" (8, emphasis original). In essence, the book argues that regional literature, for all its specificity, made a major contribution to the articulation of a larger German identity; among other things, regional literature helped writers and readers confront the monolithic and monovocal narratives of the nation favored by Prussia's partisans. Koch thereby locates himself firmly on the side of Celia Applegate, whose work on the German idea of Heimat shows how the lived experience of hometowns and home provinces bridged the gap between a largely mythical nation and the specific reality of ordinary people's lives. As Applegate puts it in her title, Germany, as it was established in 1871, was A Nation of Provincials (1990). Koch regards the other side of this argument, represented by Alon Confino's The Nation as a Local Metaphor (1997), as fundamentally flawed because its emphasis on the function of regionalism within the national project "implicitly suggests the eradication of regional differences" (12). As Koch's title suggests, for him the regional is real rather than metaphorical, and he looks to literature in order to find and analyze the expression of that reality.

Of course, regional literature is far too broad a category for any one book or person to cover, and Koch had to make some choices. Fritz Reuter, the author of several novels set in Mecklenburg during the first half of the nineteenth century and written in the area's Low German dialect, is an easily understandable selection. The other authors he deals with do not immediately come to mind when constructing a list of regional writers, but the book makes a plausible case for their inclusion. Indeed, Koch constructs a careful argument in which each author becomes an essential link in his chain of evidence. Beginning with the idea of "topochronicity," which is an inversion of Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, Koch places locality before time while still linking the two. He uses Berthold Auerbach and Theodor Storm to discuss how important it was for regional authors to represent specific places, and he adds works by Wilhelm Raabe to some additional material from Storm to expand from location to history, i.e., to time. Significantly, all three authors wrote at the edges of Germany, and Koch stresses the manner in which regional liminality both contests and contributes to identity formation. He then shifts to Theodor Fontane, the quintessential Prussian, and to Reuter and his dialect novels to consider regionalism that was set within the boundaries of what became the German Empire.

The third step in Koch's conception leads him...