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  • Blut und Feuer. Heldentum bei Lessing, Kleist, Fontane, Jünger und Heinrich Müller
  • Todd Cesaratto
Blut und Feuer. Heldentum bei Lessing, Kleist, Fontane, Jünger und Heinrich Müller Von Michael Gratzke. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. 200 Seiten. €29,80.

Gratzke takes a rare and daring approach to the topic of heroism: his study is sympathetic to masculine protagonists who have military experience. This book represents a needed intervention in German Studies’ discussion of heroism in that it does not rehash a pair of foregone conclusions that have been transmogrified into unquestioned premises (explicit or implicit): victims and anti-heroes are suitable figures for sympathetic depictions; robust, assertive heroes are not. Acknowledging the obstacles posed by “eine[m] sehr distanzierten Umgang mit Kriegshelden” (13), particularly in the West German tradition, Gratzke nevertheless starts with different premises: violence is never meaningless, and it always serves instrumental and symbolic functions (16). Over five chapters dedicated to his title figures, he examines constants in and variables to those functions.

The frame for his analysis consists of five oppositional pairs: courage and cowardice, obedience and revolt, expression and stoicism, duty and inclination, and state and individual. In discussing each author, he gives one pair the chief emphasis, while showing how the other pairs feature in the author’s larger poetics of heroism. Gratzke draws on theories of performativity, citing Michel Foucault and Judith Butler as influences, to illustrate how the evolution of the hero figure plays out through performance and reception, and variations in taste on both sides.

In Chapter One, Gratzke explains Lessing’s aesthetics of heroism. According to the latter, for depictions of the heroic to assume a wider sweep, expression (Ausdruck) must supplement the stoic endurance of pain. Lessing substantiates his argument with the biography of a lesser-known Kleist, Ewald, Heinrich von Kleist’s great uncle. Suffering a mortal wound in the Battle of Kunersdorf, Kleist’s dying gives Lessing a worthy example of heroic, stoic suffering that is well suited to poetic expression. [End Page 430]

In Chapter Two, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg figures as the centerpiece in a discussion of obedience and revolt as principles that are at times positive and at times negative. For Kleist, performance of the heroic happens in the tension between “der Genealogie des Adels und dem bürgerlichen Wunsch nach Selbstverwirklichung” (22). With reference to Kleist’s larger œuvre, Gratzke shows how grace of comportment plays a major role in attaining a desirable outcome (or at least a beautifully tragic end).

The scope of the third chapter encompasses Fontane’s entire literary production and Gratzke illuminatingly uses the pair obedience /disobedience to map shifts in Fontane’s notion of heroism. In his early work, Wanderungen durch die Mark Bran-denburg, Fontane idealizes the Prussian nobility and, consequently, obedience to the noble class. Next Gratzke explains how, in his middle phase (Oderland, Havelland), Fontane develops a more complex view of obedience and disobedience in which exemplary conduct can correlate with both. By the end of his career, Fontane opts for quiet disobedience in Der Stechlin, depicting it as withdrawal from court (state) life via a return to the land.

In Chapter Four, Gratzke follows the development of the concept of heroism into modernity proper when and where the horrors and (for Jünger) wonders of mechanized warfare emerge. In what is perhaps his most interesting argument, Gratzke demonstrates how Jünger imagines the military hero’s range of responses to this new era of combat via the opposition courage /cowardice. In his autobiographical narratives, most prominently in In Stahlgewittern, Jünger as hero breaks before the horrors of war, temporarily succumbs to his cowardly impulses, and only afterwards becomes an exemplary warrior, who is very clearly modeled after classical hero figures. Gratzke then examines how Jünger modifies the hero from his wartime texts for peacetime in Der Arbeiter. Peacetime, in Jünger’s treatment, is always humming with latent conflicts. According to Gratzke, Jünger is able to imagine new epic times (contra Lukács) in an “elementaren Raum” in the center of Europe in which new heroes may develop (142).

In the fifth...

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