(Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain and France ed. by Maike Oergel (review)

This is an engaging collection of essays, not only because the volume’s contributions are of an unusually high scholarly quality, but also because the mode of scholarship offered here is an innovative, intelligent, and exciting one. The 17 essays have three things in common: the texts analyzed are all written in the last decade of the eighteenth century; the essays deal with the idea of the “radical” and, more broadly, the domain of the political; and, finally, the essays thematize cultural transfer, generally understood here as the appropriation of cultural material from one national tradition by another. It is in particular this last component that sets this project apart from many other publications in comparative literature. The essays collected never just document how one text borrows material from another but embed this process in questions about the images that national cultural traditions develop of each other, and conceive of this image building as a political process that was of course greatly shaped by the revolutionary events in continental Europe at the time.

(Re-)Writing the Radical starts out with the observation that new and radical ideas frequently are stigmatized as “foreign” (5). While Germans in the 1790s understandably tended to look at French ideas as radical, that was true also for the British view of the German cultural tradition, in particular, but by no means exclusively, the Sturm und Drang. As Imke Heuer shows—in a reading of, among other texts, Harriet Lee’s “Kruitzner, or The German’s Tale” (1801)—Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), very popular in Britain in the 1790s when German literature broke through with the reading public, was crucial in shaping the British image of German literature as stamped by the foreign passions of Jacobinism and immorality. Werther, with its idealization of sentiment and sexual passion, was a particularly productive example of the pernicious influence of foreign literature (Susanne Kord). Its many English adaptations often took advantage of the text to discredit the Germans or even the French. In William James’s Letters to Charlotte (1797) “Werter” enlightens us with the observation that “if heaven was suddenly to endue baboons and monkies with the power of articulation, they would instantly jabber French” (34). Generally, these texts move away from social problems by seeking to redefine them as the results of individual failure. That German literature had come to be perceived as “a poison destroying the British national character” (45) had dire consequences for transnationally working translators and other cosmopolitan networks, as Barry Murnane argues in an original and well-researched piece. Translation is a radical conspiratorial force; cosmopolitans are a threat to healthy patriotism (49). Germany is targeted in particular. Judging by its literature, supposedly “healthy family life is not a priority in Germany” (55).

When looked at in a transnational and cultural context, the narrative of German aesthetic exceptionalism supposedly underlying Weimar Classicism does not make a lot of sense. W. Daniel Wilson, in an essay on German responses to the French Revolution, makes the point that Goethe, against existing stereotypes, actually wielded considerable political power in his duchy. Highly original is also Wilson’s observation that Schiller’s anti-political Ästhetische Briefe may very well have been modeled after the appointments of two politically active professors who received their posts at the University of Jena only under the condition that they would refrain from politics (68). Farmers and students, in contrast, were politically active in Weimar, even though their relationship to the French was ambivalent already well before the execution of Louis XVI. Wilson’s ideas, building on his own earlier, unusually well-documented research, deserve a broader reception than they have received thus far and should be an integral part of any discussion about Weimar Classicism.

In her well-written and original contribution Birgit Tautz, among other things, looks at the...