Realism and Romanticism in German Literature. Realismus und Romantik in der deutschsprachigen Literatur ed. by Dirk Göttsche and Nicholas Saul (review)

This collection of essays stands in a long tradition. The questions of the meaning of romanticism, its relations to its “before” and “after,” and thus the possibility of its periodization, were contested in Germany already throughout the nineteenth century and more strongly than perhaps in any other European literary or critical tradition. Likewise, the question of what, possibly, may set German literature apart from other European traditions is one that came to the fore already in romanticism’s aftermath, troubling critics from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Georg Gottfried Gervinus alike. Yet this volume also clearly transcends that tradition. As Dirk Göttsche and Nicholas Saul state in their introduction, both terms—romanticism and realism—are “embedded in longer-term cultural developments in the process of modernity and modernization which transcend literary periodization, while writers and critics from both periods respond to and engage with them” (17). The third element in this book’s title, its emphasis on Germany and German literature, signals more than just disciplinary restraint. There are certain parameters that do set the critical reception of romanticism in Germany apart from other traditions. For example, the alignment of romanticism with political reaction (rather than revolution) or, alternatively, retrograde mysticism, never materialized in England, France, or Italy to the same degree that it did in Germany. It is no accident that various contributors to this volume refer to Heine’s critical ambivalence oscillating between poetic affinity (artistic sympathy) and political critique (intellectual opposition) as well as to Hegel’s resolute emphasis on Wirklichkeit, and that all of the major critics and literary historians of the German nineteenth century concerned with these questions (Arnold Ruge, Gervinus, Hermann Hettner, Julian Schmidt, Rudolf Haym, Ricarda Huch) make repeated appearances in this volume, along with a classic study like Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s Building a National Literature (1989). Historically, both Hegel’s and Heine’s critical reactions were more influential and instrumental in leading to critical schools of thought than the writers later twentieth-century critics would identify as the major theoretical revisionists of romanticism in the nineteenth century who do not feature in this volume: Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche—all outsiders of their age. In the argument of Karl Heinz Bohrer (Die Kritik der Romantik, 1989), the politically motivated critique of romanticism as it emerged in “young” or left Hegelianism remains of enduring theoretical interest precisely because it anticipates, structurally, later criticisms of literary modernism’s aesthetic negativity.

The volume places its primary emphasis not on romanticism’s critical but literary mediations in later German writers’ engagements with the aesthetic, philosophical, and political legacies of romanticism, and the manifold contributions to this volume will be a refreshing read even for non-Germanists who are not intimately familiar with the novelistic work of, say, Wilhelm Raabe, or Otto Roquette. Each investigation adds critical as much as imaginative texture to the meaning, or potential meanings, of the connective announced in the title: realism and romanticism. The contributors find common ground in their tendency to sharpen, and thicken, a distrust present in much recent scholarship on poetic realism, that is, a distrust of realist authors’ programmatically antiromantic self-descriptions. As a whole, the essays do not project any single progressive or evolutionary scheme (leading from romanticism to realism) but something closer to dialectic coexistence. Reading the essays in sequence, I was struck by the wide range of metaphors used to describe the relations between realism and romanticism. Metaphors like confluence, supersession, containment, domestication, shrinking, haunting, hybridization, or even exorcism recur in more than one essay, and the term that Dirk Göttsche resorts to in his own contribution—pastiche as an intertextual way of writing that oscillates between homage and parody—could apply to many other case studies here, inasmuch as the intensity and import of such oscillation differs in each case.

In his essay on...