The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century: More than a Bestseller ed. by Daniela Richter (review)

The belief of the contributors to this volume that the German historical novel has been neglected by scholars because it is a popular genre is modified by the fairly extensive bibliographies to the essays. The effect of innovation is reinforced by concentrating, among older works, with the exception of two essays, on novels that were once popular but are now less remembered, and in contemporary writing on texts that will not be known to everyone. From the eighteenth century, Julie Koser brings us Benedikte Naubert, who is said to be “solely responsible for twenty percent of the more than 128 historical novels” published from 1780 to 1799 and is thus “the founding mother of the German historical novel” (21). With her “preference for the average hero” (22) she anticipates Scott. Koser concentrates on a novel of the crusades, Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens (1786), which is well researched, full of historical detail and figures. There is no heroization of German knighthood but an “uncompromising critique targeting the abuse of power by Western secular and ecclesiastical institutions” (27). Despite the conflict there is mutual respect between Walter and the Sultan Saladin, suggesting a parallel to Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, published seven years earlier.

Skipping the Romantics, the realistic epoch is represented by Georg Ebers, the major author of the Professorenroman, half of whose novels were set in ancient Egypt. Ebers also built in much learning and preferred the focalization of the mediocre hero. Daniela Richter foregrounds the novel Uarda (1877), which reflects Wilhelmine idealism and democratic ideas rather implausibly supported by Pharaoh Ramses II, but in its treatment of the priesthood also Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. The protagonist meets Moses, who has learned from a priest the doctrine of the one God; thus the novel touches on the theme of Moses the Egyptian. Jason Doerre addresses Hermann Suder-mann’s novel Katzensteg (1889), which was brought to attention in Brent Peterson’s History, Fiction, and Germany (2006). It tells of a veteran returning home from the war against Napoleon to find that his father has been ostracized as a traitor. Sudermann is, of course, best known as a naturalistic playwright, while the term naturalism is not usually applied to novels, but Doerre finds naturalistic aspects in a critical view of the nationalism that he supposes characteristic of the realist novel; Katzensteg “exposes the fictionality of the German national narratives” (87). Carl Gelderloos addresses the treatment of character in Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein. The novel subverts the conventions of historical narrative and “does not rely on the coherence of the individual biography” (98). “Where life as biography provides form, life as biology destroys it” (105). Character is “portrayed as a larger collection of forces” (111). The blurring of the boundaries of selves is characteristic also of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which I had not noticed until I saw Fassbinder’s television version and confirmed by rereading the novel. But I should probably not say any more about Wallenstein, as I was never able to read it all the way through.

Vassilaki Papanicolaou treats Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945) as lyrical novels with epic ambitions seeking for spiritual equilibrium in the disorientation and decadence of the years after World War I. In modernism the “history-as-setting cliché was superseded by the history-as-process concept” (127). The novels “elevate history to spirituality through a form of transcendental idealism” (128). The authors “promoted a new integrated, holistic worldview suggesting solutions to the decay of values, political alienation and social dislocation” (130), “condemning and escaping from contemporary decadence” (128–129). Papanicolaou’s heavily theorized generic placement and detailed explication are eloquent and penetrating, but I cannot share his apparent view that these novels found convincing solutions to the tribulations of the times. They are unworldly and disdainful of material life, Romantic and...