Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (review)

A thematically organized volume often generates a centrifugal proliferation of senses of its topic; thus in the case of this book, violence is sometimes taken literally, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes physically, sometimes psychologically, sometimes overtly, sometimes needing to be teased out by theory. A long, learned introduction on the relationship of violence to social formations and dynamics, reviewing theories from Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant through Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Daniel Goldhagen, and several other contemporaries, proposes “interrogating notions of culture, community, and agency as constitutive for theories of violence” (13). But as there is no central thesis about the history of German violence, there is nothing for the reviewer to do but to touch upon the twelve contributions separately. In a section concerned with the French Revolution and its aftermath, Stephanie M. Hilger finds in Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf “an allegory for search of a new viable body politic” (38), which turns out to be illusory and without closure; along the way Hilger defends Huber’s right not to be a feminist of our time. In a difficult study of Heinrich von Kleist, inflected by deconstruction, the editor Stefani Engelstein finds a linkage among fatherland, patriotism, filial duty, and violence “as the only alternative to a vacuum of signification” (65); the severe treatment of Die Hermannsschlacht is oddly indifferent to the political context or Kleist’s purpose. More persuasive is Jeffrey Grossman’s elucidation of the “complex and subtle mechanisms” (67) violence can take in Heinrich Heine’s early poetry and reportage from Paris. Heine perceived the violence both in the aristocratic order and in revolution.

A second section on imagining the primitive opens with Laurie Johnson’s ascription of the escalating violence of Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell to male hysteria and the psychology of “living through the tensions of Enlightenment, and of a violent period” (101). In a fine analysis of Wilhelm Raabe’s Zum wilden Mann, Lynne Tatlock shows that the central image refers to “the relationship of the violence [Agonista] embodies to human community and social order” in general (120); Kristeller is not the saintly figure he is often taken to be, but an evader of his little fortune’s origin in violence. The editor Carl Niekerk looks thoughtfully at Ödon von Horváth’s novel of fascism, Jugend ohne Gott, through the prism of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung.

A third section on the modern period begins with a pessimistic interpretation of the course of Jewish emancipation by Barbara Fischer (mourned for her death in an accident), stressing how the Jewish enthusiasm for Goethe and Lessing was turned against them with a charge of an alien occupation of German culture. Another deconstructionist, Mark Christian Thompson, tackles the enigma in Franz Kafka’s Der Verschollene of Karl Rossmann’s identification of himself as “negro” when applying to “Das Naturtheater von Oklahama,” with an assumption that Karl is on the way to becoming an artist; perhaps “artiste,” or performer, would be a better term. Drawing from Kafka’s source text, Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika heute und morgen (which Thompson seems to think no one else has considered), he argues for an identification of Jew and black. I am a little skeptical about this, but am not an expert, though doubtless it is true that Kafka commands “an aesthetic system of indeterminacy” (197).

I am even less competent to comment on Claudia Berger’s elucidation of Joe May’s 1921 film, Das indische Grabmal, or, in the fourth section on modernism and representation, on Lutz Koepnick’s distinction of the construction versus the instrumentalization of violence in photography and cinema, though his essay is interesting even for an unversed reader. In this section Patrizia McBride applies the violence of Kurt Schwitters’s cut-and-paste montages to his prose texts. In a different genre, Peter M. McIsaac describes the evolution and present layout...