Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970-2010 by John D. Pizer (review)

In his study Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970-2010, John D. Pizer provides us with the first expansive analysis of literature produced over the past forty years, in which Goethezeit intellectuals appear as fictionalized literary characters. Pizer's narrowing of the hermeneutic lens to these years is explained by the fact that it was not until the 1970s that a "significant body of works" emerges that fictionalizes this period in German cultural history (2). This study is made that much more intriguing by the fact that the years between 1970 and 2010 also encompass dialogues about German national identity that are second to none for the depths to which they probe.

Imagining the Age of Goethe is divided into five primary chapters, with the addition of an extensive introduction and brief conclusion. The structures of the chapters vary, as does Pizer's approach to the material, a fact necessitated by the wide variety of texts that Pizer addresses in this book. Throughout, it is Pizer's goal to present selected works as belonging to a "cohesive, coherent subgenre" that, when viewed as a whole, sheds light on conceptions of German culture and national identity held by some of the most influential German authors of the past four decades. (2-3).

Pizer's first chapter is dedicated almost exclusively to Christa Wolf 's Kein Ort. Nirgends, the most canonical of the pieces addressed in this book. As this is the only work to which Pizer dedicates almost an entire chapter, the analysis of Wolf 's novel is the most in-depth and thorough to be found in Imagining the Age of Goethe. While Pizer's argument that Kein Ort. Nirgends is written as much by the voices of its characters (Kleist, Günderrode, and Brentano) as it is by Wolf 's authorial direction is convincing, the greater function of this chapter within the contextual whole of the book is the introduction of what will become the two primary themes in the remaining pages.

The first dominant theme is the assault on the image of Goethe, at times vilification, by the majority of texts that fall into Pizer's subgenre. Pizer ties this to the cultural conflicts beginning in the 1960s that set a younger generation of authors at odds with the immediate postwar cultural establishment in both Germanies, which had sought to establish Goethe as the focal point of a new German Kulturnation. Inextricably tied to this attack on the image of Goethe is the second theme in the book: the valorization of the Romantics and other eighteenth and nineteenth-century authors who had been marginalized not only in their own time, but also in both the FRG and the GDR in the immediate postwar period. While Pizer's reading of any individual text is undertaken from a unique and novel perspective, the above themes constitute the common undercurrent that flows throughout his entire work.

Chapter Two offers a balanced look at the figure of Hölderlin in the literature of both East and West Germany by analyzing two texts from each country. The discussion of Peter Weiss's drama Hölderlin and of the play's historical distortion and politicization of the author into a figure appealing to leftist audiences of the 1970s is particularly well done. Chapter Three provides a detailed examination of Renate Feyl's writings and focuses both on issues of feminism and national identity in her texts. Worthy of mention is the treatment of cultural heritage in Feyl's writings, and of her search for a sense of common German identity both before unification and in light of modern globalization. Chapter Four is Pizer's necessary chapter on the figure of Goethe himself, and with few exceptions, the vilification of the sage of Weimar remains the common thread. To be sure, however, Pizer does point to more contemporary authors in whose works Goethe...