Von Kraftmenschen und Schwächlingen. Literarische Männlichkeitsentwürfe bei Lessing, Goethe, Schiller und Mozart (review)

In this study, a revised version of the author’s dissertation under the same title, Martin Blawid examines a unique collection of eighteenth-century German and Italian texts. Blawid approaches these texts from a gender (masculinity) studies perspective, which he argues is new and neglected in readings of eighteenth-century German and Italian dramatic literature. Many gender-related studies of the long eighteenth century have sought to illuminate women’s contributions to the period’s literature. The bulk of German (Studies) scholarship on masculinity focuses on German literature and culture in and after the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Already in his title (Entwürfe), Blawid points to the manifold and dynamic nature of masculinity. He argues that the texts and characters he examines in the book make clear “dass sich ‘Männlichkeit’ einer eng an der Erfüllung von Normen orientierten Erwartungshaltung zunehmend entzieht” (399).

Unfortunately, however, Blawid’s study still mostly reads like a dissertation. It spends a sizable amount of space working its way through a literature review, for example, documenting changes in gender and masculinity theory since the early 1970s (Chapter One). The first three chapters (of five, excluding the final Zusam-menfassung) chart theoretical and historical developments in Männerforschung and conceptions of Männlichkeit, both historically (Chapter Two) and in literary criticism (Chapter Three). In his survey, Blawid has neglected a great deal of Anglophone scholarship on this topic. The primary works (i.e., the texts by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Mozart /Da Ponte mentioned in the book’s title) are too infrequently drawn into the investigation in these opening chapters. One of the more interesting aspects of Blawid’s analyses, however, is his attention to Konstellationen of relationships of friendship and family in these works. The gender dynamics of these latter omnipresent categories deserve more scholarly examination, especially in studies of pre-twentieth-century society and culture. Blawid gives due attention, sometimes painstakingly so, to ways in which contemporary gender expectations can inflect these interwoven ties.

Parts of these preliminary chapters contain discussions of fascinating topics. While they are not exactly new, Chapter Two, for example, tracks semantic developments behind Geschlecht and Mann, making use of Conversationslexika and Ute Frevert’s study Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann. One can see further evidence of the theoretical discoveries Blawid examined in the book’s first chapter, like the dynamic relational quality of hegemonic masculinity, dependent as it is on negative associations with femininity or “woman.” Also in this second chapter, Blawid offers brief examples of Männlichkeit’s appearances in public discussion in the eighteenth century. Thus, we hear from figures like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Joachim Heinrich Campe.

In Chapter Three, Blawid introduces some aspects of secondary literary interpretation and criticism. The author surprisingly uses much of this chapter’s space to present suggested theoretical concepts from the contributors to one volume edited by Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies, 2004), thus overlooking a wide variety of potentially useful sources. Blawid provides examples from his selected texts (by Goethe, et al.) that illustrate ways in which the critical approaches apply: e.g., reading uses of time as gendered in Mozart /Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni.

Blawid’s dedicated textual analysis begins in Chapter Four, an examination of Männlichkeitsentwürfe in German dramatic texts. The author’s methods in this study are, as he describes them, “textzentriert, aufgrund des Einbezugs der Ergebnisse aus den vorangegangenen Kapiteln jedoch nicht ausschließlich textimmanent” (112). The analysis is, however, largely textimmanent. The works are Lessing’s Minna von Barn-helm oder das Soldatenglück (1767), Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781). In methodically enumerated sections, the chapter presents in turn an overview, descriptions of the most important male characters in the action, and analysis...