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  • Zwischen Mignon und Lulu: Das Phantasma der Kindsbraut in Biedermeier und Realismus ed. by Malte Stein, Regina Fasold, and Heinrich Detering
  • Ann Taylor Allen
Zwischen Mignon und Lulu: Das Phantasma der Kindsbraut in Biedermeier und Realismus. Edited by Malte Stein, Regina Fasold, and Heinrich Detering. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2010. Pp. 330. Cloth €48.90. ISBN 978-3503122196.

The child-bride (Kindsbraut), defined here as a prepubertal girl or as an adult woman who remained childlike, recurred as an object of male erotic desire throughout the German fiction of the nineteenth century. How should we interpret this fantasy—as romantic idyll, as charming fairytale, as tragic story of love and loss? Or, as Harald Weilnbock insists in the article that introduces this volume, as a harmful, potentially violent or incestuous sexual obsession with children? Weilnbock sets a new agenda for the humanities, and particularly for literary studies, which he claims have too often been dismissed as irrelevant to “real-world” concerns. By looking at literature through the lens of modern psychology, he hopes, literary critics can shed light on some of the most intractable of social problems—in this case, the sexual abuse of children—and thus contribute to such important goals as the resolution of conflicts and the reduction of violence.

The essays contained in this volume, all of which are by scholars of Germanistik at European universities, center on a few authors in whose works the child-bride figured prominently. Curiously enough, none of these essays touches on Goethe’s Mignon or Wedekind’s Lulu, the characters invoked in the volume’s title. Rather, they focus on the literary realism of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Theodor Storm, whose sexual obsession with very young girls seems to have haunted both his life and his work, is by far the most prominent subject, but Heinrich Heine, Adalbert Stifter, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Theodor Fontane are also discussed—the latter in a very thorough and well-argued essay by Irmgard Roebling. Many works of these well-known literary figures hinged on the attraction of an older man to a much younger girl or woman. Sometimes this romance began when the girl was a child, and sometimes when she was a teenager. Whatever the girl’s actual age, however, she appealed to her lover specifically because of her childish appearance and personality—a personality that made her vulnerable to seduction and manipulation.

Using concepts taken from modern—often Freudian—psychology, most of the authors see the male protagonist of these stories as an insecure man who somehow could not deal with adult women and sexuality and sought refuge in the innocence and ignorance of the childlike woman or girl. In an era when direct depictions of [End Page 189] sexuality were taboo in respectable literature, these stories used a coded imagery in which, for example, a search for wild strawberries symbolized a sexual encounter or a girl’s flushed face suggested sexual arousal. The plots of the stories can also be understood as a kind of coded language that signified the psychological consequences of sexual abuse: for the victim, physical or psychological trauma; for the perpetrator, guilt and renunciation. The child-bride usually ended up dead, alone, or in an unhappy marriage; the male protagonist too was condemned to a life-long sadness and nostalgia that often expressed as much self-pity as remorse.

I come to this subject as a historian, not as a literary critic. In literary studies as in history, one fortunate result of the interest in women’s and gender studies over the past thirty years has been the frank discussion of topics that had traditionally been covered by a veil of misty sentimentality or of reverence for great works of literature. Some of the contributors to this volume could have strengthened their analyses by more thoroughly considering characters other than the child-bride, including still more vulnerable young girls who encountered the protagonist as beggars, street children, or (as in Storm’s Immensee) gypsy performers with “sinful eyes.” In a society where child prostitution was widely available, the man who lost his child-bride had many other opportunities.

The mixture of denial, guilt...

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