Trostgrunde : Cultural Nationalism and Historical Legitimation in Nineteenth-Century German Literary Histories

In Germany, where chauvinist nationalism turned into guilt-ridden antinationalism after 1945, the writing of the history of national literature could not be more different from that of, say, Great Britain. If historical narrative is central to the formation of national identity, then the dramatic shift in German attitudes, as the former president of the German Association of Historians, Christian Meier, pointed out in 1985, is best encapsulated in the use of the first-person plural: while the grandfathers of the war generation had no problem saying, indeed said with pride, that "we" had defeated the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D.9, their grandchildren, who generally speak of "the Germans" only in the third person, can identify only with twenty-two legs, when "we" beat the English soccer team. ¹ A long-range sense of identity, it seems, has given way to short-lived identification, and the mythologized origins of "our people," as they were imagined at the beginning of national literature, have disappeared into the Dark Ages of Hermann, Siegfried, and Barbarossa. ²

German studies, as it emerged in the United States as an interdisciplinary cultural studies in the last twenty years, would trace German historiography of national literature with similar misgivings about master narratives, literary or otherwise. The "culturalist" approach, which I was asked to represent at the conference from which this issue of MLQarose, may be said to show a commitment to literature as a social practice, to history as a discourse of continuity, and to the nation as a mental construct—in the historical context of ever-changing ideological agendas and practices, especially the continuous rewriting of literary history, that have appropriated history for the purpose of legitimating political objectives. German studies would be interested mainly in two questions: How does the concept of cultural continuity, with its moral claims, respond to the numerous political breaking points in German history? And how does the aesthetic construction of development reflect the often abrupt cultural changes in the never-ending quest for German identity? ³ More specifically, the culturalist approach would look for the purposes that histories of national literature have served in different cultural paradigms. Rather than retrace the development of literary themes, forms, and genres and outline the possible impact of one author or one generation of authors on another, the culturalist approach would concentrate on the practice of periodization. To give one striking example: Which cultural conditions elucidate why the time between Romanticism and realism, usually delimited by political events—the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 and the bourgeois revolution of 1848—is accounted for by competing, diametrically opposed concepts, the "conservative" notion of Biedermeier (favored during the Third Reich) and the "progressive" notion of Vormärz (favored in the German Democratic Republic and eventually by the West German Left of the 1970s)? In the contest between a nostalgic view of private bliss and an oppositional blueprint for public change, the largest project of recent literary historiography in Germany, Friedrich Sengle's Biedermeierzeit (1971-80), was conceived, and widely perceived, as a politically charged statement against the politicization of German literary studies. Dealing with what was traditionally considered merely a transitional period, Sengle's three volumes, containing more than three thousand pages, constitute the most obvious historiographical reminder of a divided memory, torn between romanticized past and anticipated future, between conservative and progressive penchants, and, most of all, between West and East. ⁴ Such ideological divisions in cultural representation are a favorite subject when German studies turns to the history of national literature.

It is an obvious historical fact that for centuries Germany has lacked a unified state as a kind of constitutional framework for developing an undisputed national identity. The medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was already dissolving into its myriad principalities before Napoleon dealt the final blow in 1806...