Translating the World: Toward a New History of German Literature around 1800 by Birgit Tautz (review)

Translating the World is an ambitious attempt to relocate German literary historiography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries away from notions of nation and even "German" sensibilities and position it within the context of wider, international scholarly currents. Although Germany did not have an empire as such, it was not unaffected by imperial enterprises, not least the conjunction between slave trade, free trade, and Enlightenment ideals of the "human." The title of Birgit Tautz's study telegraphs the influence of Emily Apter's The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2005), and its merit is to bring recent scholarship in this area, both German and non-German, to her revision and to introduce recent ideas about the scope of comparative and world literature. While in the European case, it was once felt that the specific vernaculars transmitted what might be called a cultural history of a specific "people," present-day globalization and the accompanying erosion of national languages requires a new kind of transcultural "translation," which Tautz portrays as already in nuce in her case studies of discrete, smaller literary locales. Another recent study, by Todd Kontje, Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State (2018), indicates this trend toward organizing literary history away from the national.

Four chapters relate "alternate stories of late eighteenth-century German literature" (201). I will focus on the first of these, Hamburg, as it strikes me as the chapter making the best contribution to Tautz's project. Hamburg was already a "Weltstadt" (31) in the eighteenth century, indeed perhaps a "global city" (quoting Saskia Sassen), what with its banks, its independent credit and financial system, and its export of goods to landlocked German regions, especially goods of occasionally warring European colonial powers. It was what we would now call an ethnically diverse city, even including "Haussklaven." Hamburg also generated "world knowledge," for instance, through its trade academy, but also in mediating for its citizens Britain's role in "the transfer of cultural ideas, texts, and knowledge among European powers in the late eighteenth century" (37). This included the staging of plays devoted to the West Indies and the slave trade that thereby transported "colonial identification into Hamburg's domestic sphere" (47). Set in Hamburg, Lorenz Michael Rathlef's Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (1775) shows "English" characters "embroiled in colonial activities, especially in the slave trade, steering it, registering it" (48). Although the play points to "the imperial structures of trade, exchange, and 'value fusion' at work in the sentimental discourses of empire" (52), it was never performed. More palatable was Richard Cumberland's English play The West Indian, transported into German by Johann Christoph Bode in 1771. Bode also anchored the text in Hamburg, but he introduced a "different affective agenda," invoking "family" and "friendship" in the final scene; communal values trump middle-class individuality (66).

As Tautz writes in the following chapter, "Bode's play illustrates how emotive structures of imperial feeling were transposed onto the German city" (emphasis in original, 69). She focuses on Lessing, casting doubt "on the predominant reading of the Hamburg Dramaturgie as a foundational moment of modern German national literature" (90), and instead situates it "in relation to comparative or world literature and German cultural studies" (89). Chapter 3 offers another "alternate story" of German literature, portraying the writings of Moravian communities in the New World as well the performance culture of German-speaking salons of northern Germany and Denmark (106). Both of these communities were also implicated in various ways with slave trading. New affective dimensions that would come to characterize modernity are illustrated by Ernst von Schimmelmann, both slave trader and social reformer, and Friederike Brun. The following chapter, "Classical Weimar Reconsidered," extends the notion of spiritual friendships and emerging cosmopolitanism arising in such communities to Weimar, as the high-ranking Schimmelmann and Prince Friedrich...