Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time of Greatness" in Germany by Wolfgang G. Natter (review)

basing her views on the arguments of Susan Griffin, Susanne Kappeler, Lynn Hunt, and Andrea Dworkin. Charnon-Deutsch proposes to use the watercolors to reveal "a fuller, more accurate vision ofthe artists who imagined her [Isabel Hs] sexual excesses." Recognizing that pornography and obscenity have been used for centuries (or millennia) to satirize political regimes, Charnon-Deutsch maintains that the frequent use ofobscene imagery in political satire does not preclude an analysis ofits misogynist nature. Her evident disgust with the poet ofthe elusive and ephemeral, embodied in the diaphanous woman, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and her delight that he be unmasked as a misogynist, weaken her arguments, however. Charnon-Deutsch's analyses ofthe images make assumptions about their "power to arouse" that are most surprising, and her denunciation of the "sexual hypocrisy ofSpanish society" tends to forget the humor and historical-political referents of the watercolors. Indeed, one ofthe most surprising aspects ofCharnon-Deutsch's text, for me, is her assumption that the images depicted in the illustrations ofthe nineteenthcentury journals were for male consumption. In her conclusion, however, she brings up the issue ofreception, and risky nature ofassuming that the images were directed to a male audience. Again, it would be difficult to disagreewith her overall conclusions, but one might wish that she had taken this problematic question into account from the beginning. In as exhaustive a study as that which Lou Charnon-Deutsch has carried out, it would be difficult not to have some disagreements with interpretation. In general , Charnon-Deutsch has foreseen possible alternative explanations, even as she may have rejected them. Her book is a useful tool that helps us to examine the beginnings ofthe media culture in which we now find ourselves immersed. % Wolfgang G. Natter. Literature at War, 1914-1940: Representing the "Time ofGreatness"in Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 280p. Judy Suh University of Phtsburgh The breadth ofLiterature at Warwill strike the reader as exceptional. In order to contemplate the bureaucratization ofGerman culture from World War I to World War II, Natter investigates materials usually peripheral to literary criticism such as state and military edicts, publishets' letters, and library statistics, as well as more standard fare like novels and journals. Natter moves between analyzing writers' formal strategies to investigating official state orders controlling the writing and 116 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2000 circulation ofliterature. Book distribution, state censorship, publishing processes, and editorial histories sometimes become central here to "reformulate the aim of literary analysis as a social process" (175). Throughout, Natter articulates how textual production inflects and creates the memory ofwar. He argues convincingly that conservative values in Germany at the time were systematically deployed through the supposedly "value-free" publishing and reading customs ofliterary culture. Institutions and those in positions ofpower eventually appear to have very conscious intentions ofpropaganda. As a result, the book draws a relatively simple hierarchical relationship between the state and the reading public. At some points, however, a much subtler description of the relationships between power and literature is at work. At its best, Natter's representation ofmemory construction contributes to an understandingofhegemony as a complex relationship between power and culture, and as a complicated fusion of consent and domination. Natter's talents lie in reinterpreting seemingly opaque material, and making it simultaneously lucid and undeniably tied to a network ofculture. His particular and more finely tuned talent lies in the formal analysis offiction. In the context of aesthetic and political discussions, Natter elegantly discusses how literature, through differing modes ofnarrative style, produces or resists statist constructions such as the pretension to an authorial, "authentic" voice ofthe war. The briefbut sharp concentrations on literary style render a use ofliterature that is inseparable from politics. The book takes care, at the same time, not to collapse the distinctions . In particular, as a challenge to presumptions about identity and authenticity , his focus on memory draws on similar critiques made by Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, and Freud. For instance, a Freudian understanding ofmemory in which meaning and history depend heavily upon belatedness and censorship, informs the analysis. Natter discusses how power is deployed in literary distribution, and Freud's work on displacement in dream work becomes an analogy for...