Liebe und Leid, Kampf und Grimm: Gefühlswelten in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters by Irmgard Rüsenberg (review)

The last few decades have seen a great surge of interest in the history of emotions and in their representation within medieval literature. Studies on the latter have generally been divided between approaches that seek a codification of emotions as signs within a specific historical and cultural context, and those that engage with represented emotions as indicative of more or less "real" psychological or physiological phenomena. In the Middle High German context, the former approach has, to a large extent, proved the dominant model: a case in point is the application of performative theory favoured by the Berlin-based "Emotionalität in der Literatur des Mittelalters," a subproject of the "Kulturen des Performativen" research field, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (1999-2010).

Irmgard Rüsenberg's Liebe und Leid, Kampf und Grimm breaks with this trend. Here, despite some reference to codification and the occasional gesture toward building a bridge between the respective methodological and theoretical poles, it is the latter approach that predominates.

The book is a collection of papers originally published between 2002 and 2015, here appearing in revised form and augmented by a brief introduction and a handful of previously unpublished contributions. The common thread linking the chapters is essentially methodological rather than thematic, manifesting above all in the application of psychoanalytic theory with particular emphasis on Sigmund Freud's theory of narcissism. The methodology employed here thus echoes Rüsenberg's discussion of the Nibelungenlied in her Habilitation, Der Zorn der Nibelungen: Rivalität und Rache im "Nibelungenlied," and places Rüsenberg in the minority among scholars of Middle High German literature.

Although the Nibelungenlied does make several notable appearances, the current work considerably widens Rüsenberg's focus, ambitiously covering a breadth of subjects, ranging broadly across not only literary genres but languages, media, and epochs. Rüsenberg's chapters examine works from the twelfth to the twentieth century and discuss Arthurian romance (Erec, Parzival, Titurel), verse novella (Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich), heroic epic (Nibelungenlied), Minnesang (e.g. Walther von der Vogelweide), short stories (Eingemauerte Frau, Halbe Birne), as well as performance and visual media including opera (Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring des Nibelungen), etching (Albrecht Dürer), and film (Die Nibelungen [1924], The Godfather). The author's engagement with biblical criticism, mysticism and philosophy carry her investigations outside the bounds of European culture to include works authored not only by Mechthild von Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, and Heinrich Seuse, but also Dōgen and Laozi. This impressive scope, in combination with Rüsenberg's unconventional approach and the diverse origins of the collected essays, does bring certain disadvantages: for example, Rüsenberg does not always maintain a productive engagement with existing scholarship, a fact particularly noticeable in her discussions of Richard Wagner, several of which derive from lectures and are here accompanied by minimal documentation.

This breadth and brevity account for many of the book's strengths and weaknesses. While the comparison, to cite but one example, of the writings of Meister Eckhart with those of his Zen Buddhist near-contemporary Dōgen illustrates points of intellectual convergence in mystic thought between writers divided in space and culture by the entirety of the Asian continent, scholars of either thinker may balk (and not without reason) at the cursory treatment accorded to each in a scant thirteen pages. Likewise, the connections that Rüsenberg draws between the morally ambiguous masculine violence of the Nibelungenlied and Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy offer new and intriguing shading to the fascinating, destructive masculinities that characterize these works. Yet, over a scant nine pages, the discussion remains more suggestive than illuminating. Without further exploration of the society of warrior aristocrats that gave shape to the Nibelungenlied, direct comparison of the films' and epic's narrative and imagery remains superficial. At the same time, the tenuous and speculative connection between the...