Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens 1750-1945. Band 1: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus. Band 2: Von der Romantik bis zum Ende des Dritten Reichs (review)

Michael W. Jennings 367 Schmidt, Jochen, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens 1750-1945. Band 1: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Idealismus. Band 2: Von der Romantik bis zum Ende des Dritten Reichs. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985. Jochen Schmidt clearly wanted to make his Geschichte des Geniegedankens both a reference work—a comprehensive history of the theme in all its manifestations —and an original contribution to the scholarship on many of the authors treated in the study. That he fully succeeds at neidier enterprise is due in part to the very splitness of his ambition, in part to his reliance upon received knowledge and traditional methodology. Schmidt's reliance upon previous scholarship is to a large extent understandable in a reference work, and the two volumes indeed include many useful summaries of the traditional position on a given topic. But even here, the claim to comprehensiveness is undercut repeatedly. This is a study of the concept of genius which omits Klinger, Lenz, and Goethe's Strasbourg cftcle, an examination of the autonomy of art which ignores early Romanticism in general and Friedrich Schlegel in particular. Precisely those moments in the course of German literary history when the notion of the genius is most interestingly problematized seem to be systematically excluded from Schmidt's consideration. The question of Schmidt's contribution to our understanding of his topic is more difficult. Schmidt claims diat his approach ("ein hermeneutisches Verfahren," p. xiv) supersedes the positivism which characterizes previous accounts of the fate of the Genie concept, and die story he tells is indeed more than die "Aussondern von Belegen" which he castigates. But this sort of methodological claim would seem to call for something more than Schmidt's combination of close reading, influence study, and history of ideas. The area which would promise to yield the richest result—the Geniezeit itseff—is of course some of the most exhaustively worked terrain Ui German literature. Schmidt's traditional metiiodology ensures that he can make at best incremental advances here. Particularly disturbing in this regard is his resolute failure to acknowledge counter-currents—ironizations, subversions, antitheses—in the texts he discusses. And despite the occasional nod to the Frankfurt School, die recurrent attempt in these volumes to relate the history of the Genie idea to die socio-historical context seems forced and unconvincing: the unmediated movement from an account of Pindaric influences in Hölderlin to a reading of Wallenstein as Zeitkritik produces a certain cognitive dissonance. The first 200 pages of the book serve as an introduction to what is clearly the centerpiece of the first volume, an extended treatment of Goethe's thinking and writing on the problem of genius. Much of diis introductory material is organized around an argument for the artist's progressive movement away from mimesis and toward a form of creation grounded in subjectivity. Schmidt thus traces the interrelation of the ideas of imitation and creation from Aristotle through the Renaissance, and finally to die "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes." Turning next to the specificaüy German background to the Geniezeit, Schmidt presents Gottsched, Bodmer, Breitinger and Lessing on rules versus freedom, Klopstock on 368 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA die apotheosis of art (die autonomy of art figures as a frequent coroUary to the Genie concept), and Shakespeare as die eighteenth-century paradigm of the genius. Chapters on Hamann and Herder complete the examination of the eighteenth century before Goethe. Schmidt's major contribution here is an extensive and useful presentation of the reception of Pindar in the late eighteenth century. Much of the remaining material is quite sound, but almost all of it is familiar and can be found in other places, notably in Kaiser's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. A parenthetical note: Schmidt's biases, which are Ui some ways typical of the "Tübingen School," with its emphasis on Geistesgeschichte, are nowhere clearer than in this first section. He teUs a story of the eighteenth century as an inexorable historical procession toward Goethe, the summa of this development. Even the stages on the way are strictly codified: in stabUizing Hamann's subjective musings, for example, Herder prepares for the transmission of...