Ballade und Romanze. Poetik und Geschichte Von Ulrich Gaier (review)

"Balladen" have enjoyed a unique status among literary genres, especially since the highly productive collaboration of Schiller and Goethe in the "Balladenjahr" of 1797. In every era since, ballads have been produced copiously, combining lyric, dramatic, and epic elements and evincing aesthetic qualities that audiences have long found highly entertaining. Famed composers have long been attracted to ballad texts, and have set them, as Lieder, to beautiful and ever-popular melodies (e.g., Schubert's settings of Goethe's "Erlkönig" and Schiller's "Der Taucher").

There is little doubt that the ballad has also received more than its fair share of critical attention among literary scholars, perhaps due to its generic status as poem, drama, and story, as well as among musicologists. The minefield that 'new' critical approaches must navigate, then, is one where the critic must avoid the reiteration of what has been previously deliberated and offer her or his audience compellingly new perspectives, perhaps with new works from a diversity of authors that engage contemporary topics.

Ulrich Gaier's new volume, Ballade und Romanze. Poetik und Geschichte, attempts to add another layer to the critical discourse of the ballad and medieval "Romanzendichtung," focusing on the concept of social and political "boundaries" ("wie man eine Grenze setzt, verteidigt oder überschreitet," 11) as a quality that unifies the genre. Of course, many critics have explored the way in which specific ballads have dealt with certain kinds of boundaries, especially those dealing with crime, the supernatural, relationships among the sexes and genders, among races and ethnicities, etc. And of course the "et cetera" here is huge.

Gaier attempts to delimit the boundaries on nothing less than an anthropological level, but in small segments. In only 214 pages of text (plus thirty more pages of useful bibliography and a brief index, conveniently separated into sections bearing the headings "Sachen," "Topographie," and "Personen"), Gaier deals with twentyseven ballads, packing a great deal of information into numerous succinct presentations. The two-part introduction explains how the proximity to borders and the transgression of them inform the political and social tensions inherent in the ballad genre. Next, Gaier presents the selected ballads in short chapters, the ordering of which follows an essentially thematic sequence; thus, the "Erlkönig-Balladen" by Herder and Goethe form the first group, followed by a selection of poems about "Knaben" in nature, then by a group of poems concerning the Lorelei figure, and so forth. The ballads are contextualized, for the most part, in their political, sociological, cultural, and historical environments. Insofar as the volume intends to lay bare the boundaries that the author discovers in the genre, the attempt strikes me as successful—Gaier accomplishes what he sets out to do within the parameters he defines.

Yet, there is more to it than just this. As the volume's cover summary suggests, these poetic texts are thoroughly canonical, and I am of two minds regarding Gaier's selection. On the one hand, the recycling of the "same old" poems is one of the volume's drawbacks, as the choice of authors does little to reflect social diversity (twenty-two of the ballads represented were composed by men, four by women [Droste-Hülshoff accounts for two of these], and there is one "Volksdichtung" entry by an anonymous author, presumably of the sixteenth century). One might also ask: why is the contemporary period not represented (indeed, the most recent of the ballads discussed dates from 1981)?

On the other hand, the canonical nature of these poems may lend itself to another possible employment of this volume. The difficulty of finding the right textbook(s) for maximum benefit in literary survey courses has long challenged German instructors of third-year students. Most would agree, I think, that many of the major issues of German language learning present themselves at precisely this level. Thirdyear textbook selection must address factors such as students' preparedness in language skills and their experience in literary analysis, while instructors...