Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750–1850 ed. by Laura Deiulio and John B. Lyon (review)

Laura Deiulio and John B. Lyon’s Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture offers a fascinating examination of collaborative practices from the Enlightenment to the years just after the March Revolution of 1848. Grounding their arguments in close readings and historical context, the contributors to this volume show that authorship does not exist in isolation, but rather that collaborative relationships were essential to the German literary scene. By centering the discussion on male-female collaborations, the volume explores the creative and innovative strategies that brought authors together in the writing, publication, and dissemination of their works.

Although the volume acknowledges the economic and social conditions that disadvantaged women writers of this period, it challenges representations of successful male and struggling female authors and the bifurcation of authorial production by gender. Instead, many chapters seek to demystify the notion of the genius author in isolation through analyses of interpersonal exchanges, collaborations, and social networks such as the salon. Collaborative works are examined in broad terms, including personal correspondences, unpublished works, and a shared diary, and include collaborations between brother and sister Ludwig Robert and Rahel Levin Varnhagen; storytellers and story collectors, such as Dorothea Viehmann and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; and husbands and wives, including Johann Christoph and Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Caroline and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and Robert and Clara Schumann.

Examining well-known authors of this period, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sophie von La Roche, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, side by side with lesser-known writers such as Elisa von der Recke, Sophie Mereau, Marianne von Willemer, and Therese Robinson, the volume resists the elevation of the more commercially successful author at the expense of the unpublished or unacknowledged writer and serves to further increase our understanding of creativity and literary exchanges from 1750 to 1850.

These collaborations, as Monika Nenon observes in her study of La Roche’s collaborative relationships with Wieland and Goethe, are not one-sided, but rather complex and dynamic as the authors support each other in their entrance to the literary market. Together, they developed literary networks and assisted in the publication, promotion, and distribution of each other’s books.

Fascinating to the modern reader is just how influential these collaborations were at shaping the German literary scene. Authors encouraged one another to write in German instead of French and worked together to elevate German literature. Varnhagen and her brother crafted an identity for the German Jewish intellectual at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Recke’s account of her experiences with the spiritualist Count Cagliostro inspired works by Catherine the Great, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, which in turn provided the groundwork for Sigmund Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” (1919; “The Uncanny,” 1925). In Recke’s influence on later writers, we see that collaborations exist not only between authors but also between authors and texts. Therefore, an author might collaborate with another author posthumously through their writings, such as the collaboration Judith E. Martin reads between Robinson’s Die Auswanderer (1852; The Exiles, 1853) and a book review by Goethe, in which Robinson adapts suggestions Goethe made in the review even as she critiques Goethe himself.

While highlighting many fruitful collaborations, the volume also examines imbalances in collaborative efforts. For example, despite the significant joint work of the Fouqués, Friedrich’s contributions were received positively while Caroline’s were often critiqued negatively. Willemer, who contributed poems to the Buch Suleika (Book of Suleika) in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan (1819; West-Easterly Divan, 1877), was never publicly acknowledged by Goethe as a coauthor. Julie L. J. Koehler’s study of the Märchenoma (fairy-tale grandmother) reveals that while women authors, such as Benedikte Naubert and Adele Schopenhauer, viewed Märchenomas as story...