Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State by Todd Kontje (review)

Literary history is indispensable to German studies. Graduate students still take German literary history survey courses, still compile chronological lists of works for exams, and still prepare to teach German literary history themselves before going on the (shrinking) job market. While literary history is not a core academic genre like the scholarly monograph or the peer-reviewed research article, it functions as a discipline-defining pedagogical tool, a genre that outlines a common ground for the members of the field; there needs to be some consensus around what authors, works, and periods constitute primary material. German literary histories help delineate an area of disciplinary responsibility.

From its emergence in the early nineteenth century, however, (German) literary history has also had a more political purpose, namely to substantiate the idea of contoured and autonomous German nationhood. The scholars who produced the first literary histories, chief among them the liberal historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus with his five-volume Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen, published between 1835 and 1842, were often committed to a teleology of political forms according to which the self-contained nation-state represents the most mature kind of human organization. In this vision, the nation-state allows for a coincidence of political authority, territorial integrity, and cultural uniformity that ensures collective autonomy and stable, fraternal solidarity. The specific political contribution of German literary history as a genre consisted in presenting the long record of cultural creation (literature) in a shared language (German) as proof of an indisputable unity that demanded political expression.

In an age in which many view the nation-state as rigidly exclusionary, the built-in methodological nationalism of traditional German literary histories has become a major problem. But how do we write literary history with a focus on German-language literature without reconfirming the idea of the nation-state? In his erudite book Imperial Fictions, Todd Kontje addresses precisely this problem. Highly aware of the two-hundred-year history of modern narrative German literary history, Kontje sets out to write "against the notion of a national literature as a streamlined narrative of the collective artistic achievements of a spiritually united people" (9). Drawing on the vast literature on the recent invention, non-naturalness, and discriminatory character of the European nation-state, Kontje sketches out a literary history that no longer treats this particular unit as self-evident, as the most desirable, or most fitting, kind of political organization.

To undo the dominance of the nation-state, Kontje first proposes a different politico-historical frame for the study of German-language literature, namely the empire. Germany, he points out, has existed as a bounded nation-state only during two relatively short periods, from 1871 to 1945 and from 1990 to the present. In contrast, the complex conglomerate of the Holy Roman Empire lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. This fact about German-speaking lands mirrors a more general historical condition; the nation-state appears as a "blip on the historical horizon" (Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, qtd. in Kontje 1), whereas the form of the empire, established by conquest but often maintained as a multiregional confederation, has had a much longer life. While not denying the violence of imperial conquest and domination, Kontje nonetheless finds a counter-model to the nation-state in more loosely organized empires with overlapping and interacting centres of authority over multiple and entwined cultural communities. And the major example in the "German" case is, again, the varied cultural texture of the Holy Roman Empire.

Within this non-national frame, Kontje then presents a long sequence of case studies, chapters or segments on German-language authors from the Middle Ages to the present who have not viewed themselves as or desired to become citizens of a German nation-state, but have instead related to or supported various other kinds of communities. Kontje's selected authors were proud inhabitants of towns and cities...