The German Joyce by Robert K. Weninger (review)

Hoary Irish joke: What is the difference between a joist and a girder?

Answer: Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust.

The work of James Joyce, punster extraordinaire, places often-insuperable obstacles in the path of the translator. Yet despite German being a language in which wordplay of the punning kind has only become popular or widespread since the widespread infiltration of the English language, in few cultures has his literary influence been so profound as in the German-speaking lands. As Robert Weninger accurately remarks in this excellent and elegantly written study, “Without Joyce German literary history from the 1930s to the present would exhibit a very different trajectory” (82). German academics, too, have been prominent in international Joyce studies, so it is befitting that one of them, albeit long domiciled in England, here presents to an English-speaking audience a reception history of James Joyce in a German cultural context.

Weninger is acutely conscious of the issues raised by “literary history” for a critical guild too long dominated by the narrow dictates of theory—so much so that he devotes the entire introduction to justifying and explaining what he calls “this return, or resurgence, of philology” (1). The first chapter then traces the rocky reception of Joyce’s drama Exiles in the interwar German theater following the “debacle” (22) of its first performance at the Munich Schauspielhaus in August 1919. Less than a decade later, with the first, and less than satisfactory, German translation of Ulysses appearing in 1927, Bertolt Brecht was hailing a novel still proscribed in the UK and the USA as the best book published that year. For Brecht, it was quite simply an “indispensible reference work for writers” (24); for the brave publisher, the author was nothing less than the “Homer of Our Times” (32). Astonishingly, given the pivotal role of a Jew in a novel notorious for its “experimentalism” and “modernity,” Ulysses was not officially banned in the Third Reich until 1942 (54)—by which time it had made an indelible impression on the work of Hermann Broch, alongside Joseph Roth and Robert Musil the greatest Austro-German novelist of the interwar period.

As Weninger deftly demonstrates, up until 1945 it is still possible (just!) to follow in a more-or-less linear fashion the ways in which Joyce was appropriated, “whether in silence, exile, or cunning” (64), by writers as diverse and as great as Broch, Alfred Döblin and Thomas Mann. After 1945, with the increasing “institutionalization” of Joyce (65), it becomes more difficult “to trace and pinpoint the direct lineage of Joyce’s influence” (64). This difficulty is further compounded by the postwar carve-up of Hitler’s Reich into radically different and conflicting politico-economic and cultural systems. Weninger now surveys Joyce reception by creative writers in the West, keen to experience the work not just of Joyce but also of other seminal writers such as Kaf ka and Proust hitherto unavailable in Nazi Germany. He follows this study of “inf luence” (on which vexed topic he writes with wry humor and insight) with an examination of Joyce’s critical and academic reception not only in West Germany and Austria but also Switzerland, where Hitlerian censorship had never applied. Quoting Breon Mitchell, Weninger observes that “after 1945 it becomes difficult to name a major novelist who does not owe a literary debt to Joyce. He has, quite simply, become a part of the intellectual climate of our age” (71).

The second section of the book abandons attempts at linearity to present first of all “A Parallactic Reading of Goethe and Joyce,” a bravura review of the intertextual relationships between Ulysses and the Wilhelm Meister novel sequence of the writer called Gouty in Finnegans Wake. With Homer as the guiding spirit of the one and Shakespeare of the other, Weninger satisfyingly traces how “their plots and characters—fates and coincidences inclusive—have been creatively designed with the approval of the eminent poets” (121). With their love of rapports...