German Romanticism and its Institutions (review)

296 Book Reviews tablish the fragmentary presence of an epic/prophetic text surviving amidst the later transcriptions and revisions of the books ascribed to Moses. In his account of Friedrich Gentz's plan to write a history of the French Revolution, Günter Arnold discussed the response to Herder's political beliefs at the court of Duke Karl August of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. Herder's political beliefs are surveyed more extensively by Samson B. Knoll in the final essay of the Yearbook, "Evolution and Revolution in Herder's Concept of History." Because historical progression for Herder is organic, Knoll argues , its development is principally a matter of gradual evolution. But revolution occurs, modus peristalticus, as part of that natural movement. Whenever social or political factors retard the natural process of change, pressures and tensions gather to force a revolutionary disruption. Holding to his organic metaphor, Herder describes these negative and positive disruptions in terms of deformation and radical palingenesis. "Revolution and counterrevolution," Knoll declares in summarizing Herder's sense of the dialectic unfolding of history, "would ultimately be resolved in the continuum of historical evolution." Four of the seven essays in this volume address theoretical issues, three are concerned principally with textual problems. The essays written in German are accompanied by abstracts in English. The range and the quality of the essays in this inaugural issue of the Herder Yearbook make it a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century studies. The International Herder Society, founded in 1985, has endeavored "to stimulate and support a fresh critical inquiry into Herder's work." The Herder Yearbook is the obvious companion and complement to this effort and will serve a wide variety of scholarly interests. University of California, Los Angeles Frederick Burwick Ziolkowski, Theodore, German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton University Press, 1990. 440 pp. This book searches into the store of the romantic imagination from most unusual and innovative points of view. The author investigates the literature and thought of German romanticism in the context of "institutions" that shaped this literary period and were in turn affected by romanticism, even to the point of embodying central ideas of the romantic view of the world. The term institution, however, is not to be understood according to any Foucauldian kind of discourse analysis, of dismantling oppressive forms of anonymous power structures, and has just as little to do with cultural criticism in the sense of the new historicism. Ziolkowski understands institutions as established forms of social life that become prominent at certain times in history and express the character of the time. Looking at the romantic period, he distinguishes the institutions of the mine, the law, the madhouse, the university, and the museum. They represent the romantic Goethe Yearbook 297 way of thinking, in that mines reflect the attitude of that age toward science and technology, law expresses the romantic understanding of society and state, the madhouse represents the romantic understanding of insanity, the university incorporates the romantic notion of Bildung, and the museum manifests the romantic conception of art. There is obviously nothing coercive about these institutions in Ziolkowski's view. They supported and furthered the formation of German romanticism just as they in turn received impulses for new forms of expression from this movement. For a historian like Ziolkowski, however, these institutions provide a useful new approach to romanticism and its literature. Mining supplied new images, law provided intricate plots, the madhouse furthered a deeper understanding of mental illness, the university furnished new subject matter for literature, and the museum reflected a heightened view of art and the figure of the artist. There is also nothing definite about the number of these institutions, at least as I see it. They at first appear randomly selected, but are soon revealed as the result of a learned comparative analysis and seen in their prominence and representative character. These five institutions are not all on a par because mining, law, and the madhouse existed independenuy of romanticism and had a greater effect on the romantic imagination than romanticism on them, whereas the university and the museum were a product of the romantic view of the world. But this does not detract from the value of this...