German Poetic Realism by Clifford Albrecht Bernd (review)

306ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW the 1950s: Die erleuchteten Fenster oder Menschwerdung des Amtsrates Julius Zihal, Die Strudelhofstiege, and Die Dämonen, some of which had their genesis in the period after the Anschluss, and all of which, directly or indirectly, refer to the Nazi period. While Bachern and the critics he reviews agree on the larger significance of these works, Bachern fails to make manifest the particularly Austrian tradition at work. He cites but does not comment here on Doderer's statement on the narrative poet as "someone who wants neither to work on the world nor on himself; truly a person without aims." The themes of the acceptance of reality as it is, hic et nunc, and facta loquuntur, the facts speaking for themselves, are, as Bachern emphasizes, central to Doderer's contemporaries in Germany. Are these really of the same cloth? Is there not a fundamental contrast between the German and Austrian view of the relation of art to life to be made? Bachem's bibliography comments on both English and German language books and articles in a useful way. Given Doderer's exquisite style, it would have perhaps been better with the quotations in the text than to hide the German original inconveniently in the notes at the back of the book. PENNY SCHOONOVER Boise State University Clifford Albrecht Bernd. German Poetic Realism. Boston: Twayne, G.K. Hall, 1981. Twayne's World Authors Series, 605. 15Op. The last decade has seen an explosion in the debate on literary theory in the nineteenth century from every fashionable perspective. Bernd's calm, concise effort to define and interpret German Poetic Realism balances the discussion of its theory and its art. Departing from more traditional dating conventions, Bernd sets the beginning of German Poetic Realism with the trauma of 1848. Between 1848 and 1850 Julian Schmidt (1818-1886), editor of the Grenzboten, laid down the basic program: realism instead of fantastic, Gothic romances; poetry instead of topical politics in literary disguise. The most popular genre was the novella, which Storm made into a "poetic pulpit," capable of "expressing the most profound problems of human life." Bernd focuses on Storm, Keller, and Meyer. All three examine the ultimate rather than the immediate questions in life. Storm contrasts memory and the deceptiveness of memory; Keller, an idyllic world with the real one; and Meyer, man's temporal with external values. Meyer's novellas with historically remote themes rej uvehated and broadened Poetic Realism. It is astonishing how someone thirty years late to a movement traumatically born of a failed and bloody revolution escaped epigonism; Bernd touches on this question only by looking at Schmidt's favorable reception of Meyer. The best and most popular representatives of the lyric in the main anthologies of the period are Storm, the Low German poet Klaus Groth, Keller, and Meyer. Bernd selects for interpretation a representative poem for the major phase of each poet. Their themes treat life aware of death, death's finality, the joy and affirmation of life, and, in Meyer's "Römische Brunnen," the transience of life. The most "zealous disciple" of Schmidt was the novelist Otto Ludwig, who gave the movement its name. Ludwig, like Raabe and Keller, explores the relationship of fact and fiction (fiction as remembered fact, imagination, or poetic reflection). The conclusion of the chapter with an account of the Prussian official Wilhelm Petersen, who corresponded with Keller, exemplifies the problem of defining one's real world: a life of duty, conventional and sterile, or a life of poetry, imagined and vital. BOOK REVIEWS307 "God forbid that the novel should attempt to solve social questions," Julian Schmidt decreed. Fontane's realistic novels, however, focus on social relationships and thus mark the beginning of social realism in Germany and the end of Bernd's charting of a movement. It is a movement rooted in a Scandanavian tradition most of us do not know and separate from the English, French, and Russian traditions most of us do. It is a movement and not a period in Bernd's view: Poetic Realism has a beginning (Schmidt's literary program), a middle (the countermovement of the aesthetic idealists) and an end (Fontane). Bernd...