(Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany) Todd Kontje - Imperial Fictions - German Literature Before and Beyond The Nation-State-University of Michigan Press (2018)

Imperial Fictions
Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany

Kathleen Canning, Series Editor
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Imperial Fictions
German Literature Before

and Beyond the Nation-State
Todd Kontje
University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2018 by Todd Kontje
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
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ISBN 978-0-472-13078-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

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Cover: “The Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation) at its greatest territorial extent.”
Artist: F.A. Brockhaus Geogr, in Brockhaus Kleines Konversations-Lexikon Fünfte Auflage,
1911. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
We cannot criticize the German nation because it is politically splintered
despite its representing a geographic unit. We do not wish for the political
turmoil that would pave the way for classical works in Germany.
Aber auch der deutschen Nation darf es nicht zum Vorwurfe gereichen, daβ
ihre geographische Lage sie eng zusammenhält, indem ihre politische sie
zerstückelt. Wir wollen die Umwälzungen nicht wünschen, die in Deutsch-
land klassische Werke vorbereiten könnten.
Goethe, “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser”

“Literarischer Sansculottismus” (1795)
It may be that without some foreign admixture, no higher German character

is possible; that precisely the exemplary Germans were Europeans who
would have regarded every limitation to the nothing-but-German as barbaric.
Ohne einen Zusatz von Fremdem [ist] vielleicht kein höheres Deutschtum
möglich; gerade die exemplarischen Deutschen [waren] Europäer und [hät-
ten] jede Einschränkung ins nichts als Deutsche als barbarisch empfunden.
Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918)
Since the mid-sixties, in speeches and articles, I have spoken out against
reunification and in favor of a confederation. . . . This understanding of cul-
tural nationhood . . . implies a modern, broader concept of culture, and em-
braces the multiplicity of German culture without needing to assert unity in
the sense of a nation-state.
In Reden und Aufsätzen habe ich mich seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre gegen
die Wiedervereinigung und für eine Konföderation ausgesprochen. . . . Die-
ses Verständnis von Nation . . . versteht sich als erweiterter Kulturbegriff
unserer Zeit und eint die Vielfalt deutscher Kultur, ohne nationalstaatliche
Einheit proklamieren zu müssen.
Günter Grass, “Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan”

“Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen” (1990)
Acknowledgments
Writing is a solitary affair, but even in the stillness of the study, one remains in
constant dialogue with authors and critics. Particularly rewarding are those
moments when a writer emerges from isolation to present ideas to others and
to receive their oral or written feedback. Over the course of the several years in
which I have been at work on this project, I have profited immensely from the
kindness and critical acumen of colleagues and the generosity of the institu-
tions that have invited me to speak about my work and participate in public
discussions. I thank, in particular, Tobias Boes, Adrian Daub, Matt Erlin, Mar-
grit Frölich, Richard T. Gray, Daniela Gretz, Randall Halle, Gail Hart, James
Hodkinson, Christine Maillard, Peter C. Pfeiffer, Hamid Tafazoli, Lynne Tat-
lock, John Walker, Sabine Wilke, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, and Charlotte
Woodford. I also thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Califor-
nia in Irvine, Stanford University, Georgetown University, Washington Univer-
sity in St. Louis, the University of Luxembourg, the University of Notre Dame,
and the University of British Columbia.
While it is good to go out into the world, there is still no place like home. I
have benefited greatly over the years from the support of my colleagues in the
Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. I am delighted
that the University of Michigan Press decided to publish the book, and I am par-
ticularly grateful to editor LeAnn Fields for her initial interest in this project and
to Christopher Dreyer for shepherding the manuscript through the evaluation and
production process. There is always an element of chance when a book manu-
script is sent out to anonymous readers, but I got lucky when the press picked two
exceptionally astute and sympathetic critics. Their comments while I was prepar-
ing the final version of the book served me greatly, and I hope to have a future
opportunity to thank them in person. My deepest gratitude, as always, is to my
family, without whose support I would never have been able to complete this
project. The book is dedicated to them and to the memory of my father.
Contents
1 Introduction1
Of Empires and the German Nation 2
From National to World Literature 6
Disclaimers and a Glance Ahead 11
2 National Origins and the Imperial Past15

Hermann: A German Hero? 19
The Janus-Faced Roman Empire 22
Imperial Germany and the Legacy of Rome 24
3 German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance33

The Song of Anno 35
Walther von der Vogelweide 40
Early Modern Nuremberg 48
Conclusion54
4 Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects55

Seventeenth-Century Silesia 59
Andreas Gryphius: Religious Faith and Imperial Politics 61
Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: The Trauerspiel as a Trojan Horse 69
Race and Resistance in Lohenstein’s Arminius 75
Conclusion78
5 Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire81

The End of an Empire 83
Goethe’s Early Experience of the Empire 85
x Contents
Young Goethe and the German Nation 89

Literary Politics in a Revolutionary Age 95
Hermann and Dorothea: Infinitely Limited 98
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:
Personal Bildung and National Theater 101
Faust II: Anachronistic Empire and the New Imperialism 107
Weltliteratur in Contemporary Context 113
6 Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia119

Friedrich Schlegel’s Political Theory 123
Eichendorff: Conservative Catholic and Prussian Civil Servant 126
Presentiment and Presence: Local Patriotism and
Philosophical Pessimism 128
Durande Castle: Elegiac Conservatism 135
7 Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany143

Gottfried Keller: A Swiss Liberal for the German Kulturnation 148
Between Germany and Switzerland 151
Swiss Federalism versus German Imperialism 157
Theodor Fontane: A Prussian Cosmopolitan 160
Effi Briest: Psychographic Realism 161
Conclusion174
8 Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations177

Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka: Antipodes and Affinities 178
Locating Franz Kafka 180
Minor Literatures and the Yiddish Language 185
The Chinese Wall and a Talking Ape 188
Continuity and Change in the Work of Thomas Mann 195
From the German Empire to the Weimar Republic 201
9 Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich215

Siegfried Lenz: The Joys of Duty and the Language of Silence 217
Günter Grass: A Rootless Cosmopolitan Resists Reunification 225
The Flounder: Local History in Global Context 228
Coda234
Contents xi
10 Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past237

Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World 239
Christian Kracht, Imperium 248
11 Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature255
Notes 265
Works Cited 293
Index 321
Chapter 1
Introduction
Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the
present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. As
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe, people have lived within empires
for so long that “the nation-state appears as a blip on the historical horizon, a
state form that emerged recently from under imperial skies and whose hold on
the world’s political imagination may well prove partial or transitory.” Assert-
ing that the “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is
natural, necessary, and inevitable,” they suggest that we explore “the wide
range of ways in which people over time, and for better or worse, have thought
about politics and organized their states.”1 As their sweeping survey of the
world’s empires reveals, there is no single model for a political organization
that has persisted from the ancient world to the present, but empires have in
common a structure of hierarchy and heterogeneity that contrasts with the egal-
itarian homogeneity of the nation-state: “Empires are large political units, ex-
pansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that main-
tain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new people. The nation-state,
in contrast, is based on the idea of a single people in a single territory constitut-
ing itself as a unique political community.”2
German history offers a prime example of a people that has been ruled by
empires far longer than they have been governed as a nation-state. Over the
course of the past millennium, Germany has existed as a discrete, united nation
only from 1871 to 1945 and from 1990 to the present. For more than a thou-
sand years, the German-speaking territories of Central Europe were part of the
Holy Roman Empire. Even when Bismarck led a successful drive toward na-
tional unification, the resulting state was known as the Second Empire, a con-
federation of semiautonomous entities governed by an emperor, or kaiser, who
was also the king of Prussia. Hitler and his minions latched onto this legacy
when they established Germany’s third empire, the Third Reich, which led to
defeat and the division of the country between the competing imperial powers
2 Imperial Fictions
of the Cold War: the Soviet Union and the United States. The current Federal
Republic of Germany, conceived in opposition to the Nazi intolerance for in-
ternal diversity and hostility toward external foes, granted considerable auton-
omy to its individual states, even as it deepened its ties to the European Union,
a decentralized confederation that has certain parallels with the old Holy Ro-
man Empire.
The recent influx of migrants into Western Europe and the threat of terror-
ist violence have shaken the European Union to its core. Borders lowered by
the Schengen Agreement may be raised again even as “Fortress Europe” seeks
to seal its external boundaries. Nationalist sentiments deemed taboo in the
wake of the Second World War have been on the rise, as parties to the far right
of the political spectrum gain popular support. Although falling birthrates and
an aging population would seem to make the immigration of a younger labor
force essential for the maintenance of social networks established in the post-
war period, some Germans look back nostalgically to what they imagine to be
a simpler, more homogeneous past (read: white and Christian), while even
those committed to a multiethnic, pluralistic European society realize that it
will not be easy to assimilate hundreds of thousands of recent refugees. Ger-
many hardly holds a monopoly on xenophobia in today’s Europe, but its
twentieth-century history of genocide in the name of ethnic purity gives de-
bates surrounding immigration a special urgency in Germany today.
This book cannot presume to solve pressing European problems, but it
does strive to place contemporary issues in historical perspective. In today’s
world, as peoples move and mix in ever-changing ways, appeals to cultural
homogeneity seem quaint at best; in the light of German history, they seem
dangerous. Cultural hybridity and cross-cultural exchange were always the
norm—a fact that nationalist histories have been keen to suppress. Imperial
Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural pres-
ent as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should instead consider
the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated
within local and imperial contexts from late antiquity to the present.
Of Empires and the German Nation
The broad distinction between empires and nation-states serves as a useful

starting point for this project, but it needs further elaboration when considering
the course of German history. The two concepts change over time, in relation
to one another and in response to developments elsewhere in Europe. As I ar-
Introduction 3
gue in more detail in chapter 2 of this study, empires are established by con-
quest but maintained as confederations; that is, empires expand by asserting
their dominance over other dominions, either by force or other means, but then
maintain control over disparate peoples by incorporating them into larger po-
litical structures. In the case of Germany, we are most likely to think of empire
or imperialism in terms of conquest, recalling, for example, the German Em-
pire’s effort to acquire overseas colonies in the late nineteenth century; the
Third Reich’s aggressive expansion into Austria, Poland, and France; or, for
those with a longer historical memory, Charlemagne’s incessant efforts to sub-
due enemy territories. Once Charlemagne had established the Holy Roman
Empire, however, it lived on for centuries with little interest in acquiring new
territories, either within Europe or beyond. While few scholars today would be
willing to overlook the suffering caused by German colonialism or the horrors
of the Third Reich, the federative structure of the Holy Roman Empire has
awakened new interest among historians who seek to understand a political
organization that differs so markedly from that of the modern nation-state and
that some regard as prefiguring aspects of the European Union.
The Polish-born political theorist Jan Zielonka, for instance, argues that
the enlarged European Union “increasingly resembles a neo-medieval empire
rather than a classical Westphalian type of (federal) state.” In his words, the
Westphalian state “is about concentration of power, hierarchy, sovereignty, and
clear-cut identity,” whereas the neo-medieval empire is characterized by “over-
lapping authorities, divided sovereignty, diversified institutional arrangements,
and multiple identities.” States have “fixed and relatively hard external border-
lines,” as opposed to the “soft-border zones that undergo regular adjustments”
in the neo-medieval empire of the European Union.3 One need not accept
Zielonka’s argument uncritically or view his distinctions as absolute: as recent
tensions surrounding immigration and the euro have revealed, nations and na-
tionalism have hardly disappeared from the European Union, while parallels
between the democratic nation-states allied in today’s European Union and the
feudal hierarchies of the Holy Roman Empire should not be exaggerated. Nev-
ertheless, the way in which he opens the view toward continuities and contrasts
across the centuries has proven productive for this present study of German
literature in imperial contexts.
The European Union was created to counter some of the worst excesses of
twentieth-century nationalism, pointing to a dialectical relationship between
empire and the German nation that extends back to the early modern period.
The rediscovery of Tacitus’s Germania and tales of Arminius or Hermann lead-
ing the Germanic tribes to victory against the Roman legions, in tandem with
4 Imperial Fictions
Luther’s break with Rome and translation of the Bible into the vernacular,
helped to inspire patriotic pride among Germans who were politically divided
but began to feel that they shared a common language, history, and religion.
Appeals to the cultural unity of the German-speaking territories of the Holy
Roman Empire flared up periodically in subsequent centuries as well: baroque
writers called for the purification of the German language, while Lessing,
Herder, and Goethe sought to cast off French influence and establish an au-
thentic national culture. Not until the coming of the French Revolution, how-
ever, were the Germans confronted with a movement that linked nationalist
sentiments to political revolution. While German cultural nationalism devel-
oped within the structure of the Holy Roman Empire, French revolutionaries
sought to annihilate the Old Regime in the name of an egalitarian democracy.
Within a few years, French armies began to march across Europe and into Ger-
man territory, ostensibly to spread the gospel of revolutionary reform, but they
proceeded in a way that was perceived as naked aggression by those on the
receiving end. The new French nation, conceived in opposition to the abuses of
the aristocracy, now called itself an empire as it sought to expand its influence
across the continent.
In the century between Napoleon’s defeat and the beginning of the First
World War, the German territories of Central Europe moved toward new forms
of political organization, in dialog with their past and in opposition to France
and other European powers. While some Germans embraced the ideals of the
revolution, particularly in its early phases, most were appalled by the chaos and
violence it soon unleashed. The architects of the Restoration in Germany did
their best to put the revolutionary genie back into the bottle, reaffirming their
commitment to traditional customs and local autonomy within an older form of
empire. Meanwhile, a younger generation of liberal Germans sought national
unification in the name of democratic reform. Their hopes were crushed by the
failed Revolution of 1848, however, and national unity was forged instead by
Bismarck, whose Prussian armies established an empire at home and soon ex-
tended their influence abroad. The subsequent pendulum swings of German
history are well known: from the attempt to establish a global empire on par
with the British, which led to the First World War, to the founding of the Wei-
mar Republic; from dreams of a “thousand-year Reich” to the federal republic;
from national reunification to European integration.
I expound these events in subsequent chapters, but the brief overview here
already suggests that this book will differ in at least three significant ways from
influential studies of European imperialism such as Edward Said’s Orientalism
or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. First, those authors focus on
Introduction 5
empire primarily in the sense of the European conquest and colonization of

non-European territories. That history plays a role in some of the later chapters
of the present study, but I am also interested in the intra-European tensions
within the Holy Roman Empire and between it and other European states, as
well as the impact of that empire’s federalist legacy on subsequent German
history. Second, Said, Hardt, and Negri focus on empire only as a modern phe-
nomenon. Hardt and Negri describe a contemporary form of transnational he-
gemony that they dub “Empire,” which they define in contrast to the overseas
conquests of individual European nations that began in the early modern pe-
riod. Said focuses even more narrowly on the present, defining orientalism as
a Western ideology cloaked in the guise of scientific objectivity that he dates to
the last decades of the eighteenth century. Imperial Fictions, in contrast, fol-
lows the history of German empires from their origins in the period between
late antiquity and the early Middle Ages to the present, placing modern impe-
rialism in the broader context of world history explored by such authors as
Burbank, Cooper, and Münkler. Third, my work focuses on the German-
language regions of Central Europe, rather than on the continent as a whole. In
this regard, Imperial Fictions builds on the pioneering studies of Susanne Zan-
top and Russell A. Berman, both of whom raised questions about national dif-
ferences within the legacy of European imperialism.
As Berman points out in Enlightenment or Empire, studies of nineteenth-
century imperialism often proceed under the tacit assumption that Britain
and France are the norm and that Germany played only a minor role, as a
“junior partner” that was “always lagging behind and increasingly obsessed
with a need to imitate.”4 Susanne Zantop argued along these lines when she
noted that while Britain and France already had colonies, Germans had only
precolonial fantasies of a future in which they would not only acquire an
empire but do it better—more kindly and gently—than their European ri-
vals.5 Berman contends that fantasies became reality in some cases: in his
view, German colonial discourse frequently displays a capacity, greater than
among more dominant imperial powers, “to recognize and appreciate—
appreciate even at the moment of colonial appropriation—the other culture.”6
The evidence of the Herero massacre alone cautions against an overly san-
guine assessment of German colonialism, but Berman’s larger purpose,
which he shares with Susanne Marchand, is to contest the claim that reason
is always the handmaiden of oppression and that colonial encounters pre-
clude the possibility of cross-cultural exchange.7
In my opinion, the incontestability of the latter point, that enlightenment
does not lead only and inevitably to imperial abuse, rivals the questionability
6 Imperial Fictions
of the former, that the Germans were predisposed to be better imperialists than
their European neighbors. By highlighting the specifically German history of
nineteenth-century imperialism, these scholars nevertheless break open the Eu-
ropean monolith to expose national differences and explore international rival-
ries. Imperial Fictions follows along this path but pushes the history of empire
in the “German lands” much further into the past and forward to the present.8
One of this book’s themes is the evolving relationship between the interrelated
concepts of empire and German nationalism, but I am also interested in ten-
sions between local territories and imperial authority, as well as the legacy of
German particularism within the modern nation-state. It is perhaps worth em-
phasizing at the outset that neither nations nor empires are intrinsically good or
evil. Democratic nation-states arose as progressive alternatives to imperial hi-
erarchies, but nation-states can produce ethnic nationalism and imperial ag-
gression in ways that make older empires and current federations seem appeal-
ing alternatives after all.
From National to World Literature
Imperial Fictions is a work of literary history. It is informed by historical fact

but insists on the imaginative potential of fiction. Of course, the boundaries
between those two forms of discourse are porous, and literary fictions would
have no purchase on reality if they did not engage in meaningful ways with
brute facts and ideological constructs. The relationship between the fields of
literature and history is dynamic: literature reflects historical reality, but it can
also change the way people view their world. In the course of the eighteenth
century, for instance, attitudes toward marriage and the family evolved along
with social and economic conditions, but the fiction of Richardson and Rous-
seau helped to codify those changes and disseminate new ideas. Understand-
ings of political organizations changed as well. Benedict Anderson famously
argues that the new concept of the nation that emerged around 1800 was a
product as much of cultural labor as of political revolution. The resulting
“imagined communities” were new, but they liked to claim that they were very
old, and if there were no ancient traditions to be discovered and preserved, they
could always be invented.9
One such invented tradition that gained special prominence in Germany
was the history of the national literature. The German-speaking peoples of
Central Europe had a long history of political fragmentation that continued
well after England and France had coalesced into modern nation-states. When
Introduction 7
nationalist sentiments spread across eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Eu-

rope, Germans could claim that they at least had a common language and a
common culture that compensated for their lack of political unity. Central to
the concept of the German Kulturnation was the belief in a national literature
that expressed the spirit of the German people.10 As writers from Gervinus to
Dilthey labored to construct the narrative of German literary history, they in-
evitably had to make choices, highlighting major writers, giving honorable
mention to others, and leaving the vast majority to languish in silence.11 Until
the recent advent of digital data mining, such omissions were inevitable; as
Franco Moretti reminds us, it is not humanly possible to read more than a frac-
tion of the fiction that was published in the course of a few decades, let alone
entire centuries.12 Nineteenth-century literary historians insisted, however, that
their selections were not random; they chose to focus on works that they
deemed central to the nation’s literary history, consigning to their rightful place
in oblivion those that may have been written in the German language but did
not express the essence of the German spirit.
The effort to trace the development of the nation through time as revealed
in the successive stages of its literary history went hand in hand with the proj-
ect of imagining a collective national space. Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s evo-
cation of a united Germany reaching “von der Maas bis an die Memel” (from
the Meuse to the Memel)—in the poem that eventually provided the lyrics for
the German national anthem (“Das Lied der Deutschen”)—is only one instance
of a sentiment that inspired reverent works about the Rhine and other sacred
spaces of the national imaginary. As the originally liberal nationalist move-
ment took on increasingly militant and racist overtones toward the end of the
nineteenth century, some spoke of the special ties of the people to their native
soil and extolled the bonds of common blood that joined together the German
Volk. Writers deemed artfremd, alien to the German race, had no place in the
history of the national literature and no foothold on the German soil. They
were rootless cosmopolitans, doomed, like Ahasuerus, to wander the earth.
In response to the increased circulation of people and ideas in the world
today, scholars in the humanities have shifted their focus from national sub-
jects to nomads, from the center to the margins, from homogeneity to hybrid-
ity, from essence to performance, from stasis to mobility.13 As a result, there is
new interest in the ways in which people might imagine a sense of community
outside or across the borders of the nation-state. Arjun Appadurai looks at “di-
asporic public spheres . . . that confound theories that depend on the continued
salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social issues.”14
Homi K. Bhabha coins the term “DissemiNation” to scatter the sense of unity
8 Imperial Fictions
located in the modern nation.15 Fatima El-Tayeb shows how the children and
grandchildren of recent immigrants to Europe have forged transnational alli-
ances that have little to do with either their parents’ country of origin or their
current place within a given European nation.16
These theorists write in the context of what has been called the “spatial
turn” or “topographical turn” in cultural and literary studies.17 In The Produc-
tion of Space, Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between geometrical and social
space: the former is a neutral category that can be described in terms of math-
ematics or geometry, whereas social space is produced by relations of power.
In contrast to those who seek a common space for a united people, Lefebvre
warns against the repressive potential of political authority. “The state is con-
solidating on a world scale,” he writes, noting, “It weighs down on society (on
all societies) in full force.” In response, he looks for moments of resistance to
the power of the homogeneous nation-state: “The violence of power is an-
swered by the violence of subversion.”18 He argues that the very process of
constructing a common social space produces the possibility of a subversive
counterspace: “I shall call that new space ‘differential space,’ because, inas-
much as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of
existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced)
unless it accentuates differences.”19 In a similar spirit of defiance, Michel Fou-
cault identifies the “heterotopia” as a space of difference set within and against
social norms.20 Michel de Certeau uses jaywalking as a metaphor for resistance
to the disciplined order of a city grid.21 Doreen Massey mocks the notion that
nations are like billiard balls, with identities carved in solid spheres of ivory,
and insists “that we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the
existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the
sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexist-
ing heterogeneity.”22
Alan Liu has traced these writers’ common aversion to uniformity back to
the spirit of protest against authority that swept over Europe and North Amer-
ica in the late 1960s.23 Resistance to power runs as a common thread through
the French poststructuralist thought of the subsequent two decades. Roland
Barthes and Michel Foucault challenged the notion of the author as a single
authority providing stable meaning to a given text.24 Jacques Derrida focused
on différance in the language of philosophy, as Jacques Lacan split the psycho-
logical subject. In the realm of politics, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-
Luc Nancy exposed the totalitarian ideology of “the Nazi myth,” while Jean-
François Lyotard exhorted his readers to “wage a war on totality.”25 Building
connections from the recent past to the present, Liu argues that the potential for
Introduction 9
critical dialogue opened by the new social media marks a further step toward
the decentralization of textual and institutional authority. These media enable
the formation of a “community of dissensus” of the sort that Bill Readings
envisioned in response to the “ruined university” that no longer centers the
subjects of the nation-state.26 Feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and
investigations of humans in relation to other animals and the environment have
all worked to dethrone the sovereign subject and to open the doors to an in-
creasingly diverse and mobile society.
As a result, scholarly attention has shifted, in recent years, from national
literatures to world literature. Histories of national literatures strive to reduce
multiplicity to unity, to distill drops of the national essence out of the flood of
fiction written in a given language; world literature celebrates diversity. Na-
tional literatures are rooted in the native soil; world literature circles the globe,
blurring boundaries and producing new hybrid forms through an ongoing pro-
cess of cultural cross-fertilization. Where patriots once sought the purification
of the national language, cosmopolitans explore creative transformations pro-
duced by translation between languages.27 The migrants once placed outside
the pale of national borders now provide paradigms for a postnational concept
of global citizenry and world culture.
Like my initial distinction between nation and empire, this contrast be-
tween national and world literatures oversimplifies: nations and their litera-
tures are still present in our globalized world; the global playing field is not
even, as dominant powers exert a disproportionate influence on subaltern
spaces and “minor” literatures; and new forms of global uniformity flatten the
peaks and fill the valleys of national and regional terrains that were once dis-
tinct. I explore some of these ideas in more detail later in this book and intro-
duce them here to give an indication of the impetus behind the individual chap-
ters to come. Imperial Fictions takes changes in today’s society as its starting
point but turns its gaze on the writers of previous centuries. While people and
ideas may move faster now, with the aid of new technologies, than they did in
the past, human mobility per se is not new, nor were ancient societies as homo-
geneous as modern nationalists have liked to imagine. Imperial Fictions is
written against the notion of a national literature as a streamlined narrative of
the collective artistic achievements of a spiritually united people. Herein, I
look, instead, at how literary works reflect moments of conflict between
smaller territorial units and larger imperial, national, or global contexts.
Contemporary “migrant literature” plays a crucial role in helping us re-
conceive the study of national literatures in the age of world literature. Not
only do works by such critics as Anil Bhatti, B. Venkat Mani, and Azade Sey-
10 Imperial Fictions
han help us think about today’s cosmopolitan writers with “multiple attach-
ments” whose works “defy easy categorization into a national, an ethnic, a
cultural, or even a transcultural literature,” but their criticisms also prompt re-
flection on the past.28 Azade Seyhan’s comments about contemporary exiles
who use their literary works to formulate responses to a sense of bifurcated
identity evoke memories of similarly displaced writers in earlier centuries.29
Walther von der Vogelweide was cut off from his Viennese patron near the be-
ginning of his promising career and spent a precarious life as an itinerant poet,
currying the favor of local lords and intervening on behalf of various would-be
emperors. Thomas Mann was a double exile, first leaving his native Germany
to become an American citizen and then fleeing the reactionary climate of
postwar America to end his life in Switzerland. Günter Grass spent his entire
career writing fiction that evokes the lost world of Danzig. Many of the authors
considered in this study who were not forced into some form of exile experi-
enced the oppressive force of a dominant power close to home. The Protestant
Silesians of the baroque era wrote under the shadow of the Catholic Counter-
Reformation; Eichendorff, a Catholic Silesian of the romantic period, ended up
as a civil servant in Protestant Prussia, while Kafka, who rarely left the narrow
confines of his home in Prague, was pushed to the margins of every conceiv-
able literary, linguistic, religious, national, and imperial community.
The process of globalization has sparked interest in writers whose fiction
takes us beyond national borders, but it also calls for renewed attention to sub-
national spaces. Celia Applegate and Alon Confino have written important
studies about the persistence of provincialism in the newly united nation.30
Mack Walker and Lionel Gossman focus on German hometowns and intellec-
tuals who resisted Prussian hegemony in the name of local traditions and re-
gional diversity.31 Birgit Tautz has published a series of articles that explore the
importance of eighteenth-century Hamburg’s links to global commerce and the
slave trade.32 Her work exemplifies a larger trend toward the study of “micro-
cultures within the larger apparent political and national movements of the
time” that reveal “the capacity of European culture to generate a variety of
successful internal models from its own wide range of national, regional, and
local models.”33 Cities will play an important role in the present study, as we
move from Nuremberg, a bustling center of the early modern German Empire,
to Breslau, the thriving capital of seventeenth-century Silesia; from the impe-
rial city of Frankfurt to the residential town of Weimar; from Keller’s Zurich to
Kafka’s Prague; from Fontane’s Berlin, an imperial Weltstadt of the late nine-
teenth century, to Yadé Kara’s Berlin, a national center and global crossroads
on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
Introduction 11
Accepting the fact that Germany has been politically fragmented for most
of its history, Imperial Fictions rejects the notion that the national literature
must compensate for this fragmentation by comprising an organic whole. Just
as writers today often balance local loyalties against national allegiances and
transnational influences, past writers have negotiated complex identities in re-
lation to multiple social spaces. This is not to say that writers who pledge their
allegiance to imperial or federative politics are necessarily on the side of liber-
alism. While appeals to diversity have become synonymous with progressive
politics today, they were not always so in the past. A significant portion of the
present study traces a German conservative tradition—from Goethe and the
romantics to Thomas Mann—in which appeals to the benefits of regional au-
tonomy and cultural diversity within older imperial frameworks went together
with hostility toward democracy and suspicion of the Western liberal tradition.
Disclaimers and a Glance Ahead
A few disclaimers are in order. A glance at the table of contents shows that the
present study is both wide-ranging, covering authors and texts from the Middle
Ages to the present, and narrow, neglecting far more well-known writers than
are discussed. This study considers Eichendorff but not Hölderlin; Keller but
not Raabe; a lot of Goethe, but less Schiller; and so on and so forth. “Had we
but world enough and time . . .”—so Erich Auerbach wistfully cites Andrew
Marvell at the beginning of Mimesis. But we know that all the time in the world
would not suffice to discuss every author in detail, nor could any reader hope
to read such a tome, assuming that he or she might want to do so. David E.
Wellbery and Judith Ryan recently enlisted a group of distinguished scholars
to write A New History of German Literature, and Wellbery points out in his
introduction that even such a volume can have no pretense of “coverage” in the
sense that earlier literary historians once sought.34 Instead, Wellbery and his
collaborators sought and have provided individual insights, flashes of illumina-
tion into a past that must remain largely in darkness.
As the work of a single author, my study must take an even more selective
approach to literary history. I have chosen canonical authors, which explains
the absence of women writers and minorities. Rather than seeking to shed new
light on those who were left in the shadows when the canon was formed, I here
seek to revisit the center from the perspective of the periphery, to show how
writers deemed essential to the history of the national literature were engaged
in struggles within the conflicted spaces of the empire, as well as between
Central Europe and the rest of the world. Once again, however, the broad his-
torical scope of this book makes systematic coverage of even the most canoni-
cal authors impossible. Those seeking a more conventional literary history
should look elsewhere.
I use the term German literature in a broad sense, meaning primarily
works that were written in some form of the German language, not works nec-
essarily written within the boundaries of the German nation-state (which, in
any case, did not exist before 1871) and certainly not works that express the
mysterious essence of German national identity. My purpose is not to practice
a kind of literary imperialism by grouping together all writers into a pan-
German unity but, rather, to trouble the very category of the nation by examin-
ing how particular writers in specific times and places negotiated between re-
gional loyalties and imperial politics.
The analyses in Imperial Fictions begin, in chapter 2, with a look at the
reunification of 1989–90 from the perspective of the Turkish-German writer
Yadé Kara. Her popular novel Selam Berlin (2003) shows how the presence of
minorities in modern Germany complicates the narrative of national unity. I
then turn to nineteenth-century efforts to locate heroes of the nascent German
nation within late antiquity, following Heinrich Heine on his sarcastic journey
through the symbols of national unity. Drawing on recent studies of late antiq-
uity by Peter Brown, Peter Heather, and Patrick J. Geary, I argue that the Ro-
man Empire, long conceived by nationalist historians as the enemy of such
heroes as Hermann or Arminius, actually provided a model for subsequent
centuries of European history under the Holy Roman Empire.
Chapters 3 and 4 pursue a threefold purpose. First, stated negatively, I
read against the grain of an older literary historiography that sought to assign
a place in the national literature to selected authors and works of the medieval,
early modern, and baroque periods (or, as has often been the case for German
baroque literature, to exclude them from that tradition). Second, stated posi-
tively, I situate authors in their historical context, to show how they balanced
tensions in their literary works between local concerns and larger political
settings. Third and finally, I seek to bring the work of premodern writers back
into our contemporary study of German literature, by suggesting that their
negotiations of multiple identities and conflicted loyalties are not entirely dis-
similar to those faced by more recent writers. Not pretending to be a specialist
in these areas, I draw on the work of previous scholars to build bridges be-
tween the study of modern and premodern literature. The very specialization
necessary for the detailed study of premodern literatures often walls scholars
off in self-contained capsules that are all too easily jettisoned entirely from
Introduction 13
academic departments seeking to pare down their offerings in perennially pre-

carious times.
Goethe plays a central role in this study, as he always has in the history of
German literature. In chapter 5, I work against the nineteenth-century literary
historians who saw him, usually together with Schiller, as the epitome of the
national culture and the precursor to political unity. Instead of viewing Goethe
through the retrospective lens of the Prussian-led process of national unifica-
tion, I see him emerging out of a long imperial tradition that faltered and died
in the course of his lifetime, even as a new concept of the modern nation-state
emerged. Goethe combines skepticism toward those who would prop up the
hollow shell of a defunct Holy Roman Empire with antipathy toward two fur-
ther developments: the French movement toward liberal reform and revolution-
ary imperialism, on the one hand, and the religiously infused nationalism of the
German romantics, on the other. Goethe directed his comments about world
literature against both tendencies. Critics of the postwar period were quick to
embrace the cosmopolitan concept of world literature as an antidote to the na-
tionalist poison that had led to Germany’s physical and moral destruction.
Again today, commentators on global culture have looked to Goethe for inspi-
ration. I discuss recent theories of world literature at the end of chapter 5 and
return to that topic in chapter 11.
Chapters 6 and 7, on nineteenth- century literature, explore German-
language responses to the rise of modern nationalism, the emergence of new
forms of overseas empire, and the persistence of an older imperial tradition’s
respect for local difference and regional autonomy. Joseph von Eichendorff
and his political mentor Friedrich Schlegel look to the past as they react against
the rise of centralized governments, casting organic localism and ancient social
hierarchies as salutary alternatives to the soulless uniformity of the modern
state apparatus. Eichendorff’s bitter antimodernism is infused with a melan-
choly awareness that the times are changing in ways he cannot prevent and to
which he can offer little in the way of a viable alternative. The Swiss liberal
Gottfried Keller, in contrast, embraces the secular humanism of his democratic
nation, while seeking to balance his loyalties to Zurich and Switzerland with a
sense of belonging to a larger German-language cultural realm. He lived out-
side the new German Empire, while Theodor Fontane dwelled in its center, but
the Berlin-based Fontane was more a product of Prussian regionalism than a
proponent of the newly unified nation-state. Fontane’s late novels respond to
the rise of Prussia as the center of the Second Empire and reflect on the local
impact of its global outreach, just as Keller’s fiction combines Swiss locales
with references to the wider world. When looking for the effect of imperialism
on Germany’s late nineteenth-century authors, we should consider not only

fiction set in overseas colonies but also works that combine awareness of the
nascent power’s expanding empire with a focus on national rivalries within
Europe and residual provincial loyalties within emerging nation-states.
Those international tensions soon led to global conflicts that changed the
map of Europe and left a lasting imprint on generations of German-language
writers. Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann both came from cities on the outskirts
of empires that collapsed in the wake of the First World War. In chapter 8, I
explore Kafka’s conflicted identities and his oblique response to them in his
literary works, before turning to a critical period in Mann’s career as he evolved
from a conservative nationalist to a liberal cosmopolitan. I argue that Mann’s
early experiences as a citizen of Lübeck in Germany’s Second Empire laid the
foundation for his critique of the Third Reich. He watched the nightmare of
Nazi Germany unfold from the distant shores of North America, but Siegfried
Lenz and Günter Grass, whose works I discuss in chapter 9, grew up in its
midst. They devoted their careers to the attempt (not always entirely success-
ful) to come to terms with the Nazi past and the long shadow it cast over the
postwar period. In The German Lesson, Siegfried Lenz depicts the “banality of
evil” that made the Third Reich possible, while remaining disturbingly silent
about the persecution of the Jews. Günter Grass notoriously obscured his mem-
bership in the Waffen-SS until late in life, but he produced a literary oeuvre
deemed worthy of the Nobel Prize. I focus on his depiction in The Flounder of
the Pomorshian-Kashubian minority in and around the city of Danzig, in the
context of European and world history.
My selective survey of German literary history ends, in chapter 10, with a
look at two best-selling novels of the early twenty-first century: Daniel Kehl-
mann’s Measuring the World and Christian Kracht’s Imperium. Both writers
participate in a widespread reconsideration of Germany’s imperial past from the
perspective of today’s global culture. In chapter 11, finally, I return to the rela-
tion between national literatures and world literature. I consider the work of
three influential theorists who have proposed models for the study of world lit-
erature (David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova), before I sug-
gest a complementary concept of national literature as aufgehoben, in the dou-
ble meaning of the German term: cancelled, in the sense that it no longer serves
as a repository of cultural unity amid political fragmentation, but also preserved,
as an internally diverse body of writings engaged in an ongoing dialog with
other national traditions and suspended in a web of transnational affiliations.
Chapter 2
National Origins and the Imperial Past
On the evening of November 9, 1989, a low-level East German official an-

nounced that travel restrictions for citizens of the German Democratic Repub-
lic were no longer in effect. Within hours, delirious Germans from both sides
of the Iron Curtain were celebrating atop the Berlin Wall. A few weeks later,
chants of protest in the name of the people and against the crumbling East Ger-
man government, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), yielded to expres-
sions of pan-German unity, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people). In less
than a year, the process of reunification was concluded. For the first time since
1945, Germany existed as a single, unified nation-state that promised to be-
come a tolerant, peaceful democracy, in welcome contrast to the totalitarian
regime that had ended in catastrophe.
History with a happy ending. Or at least so it would seem. The process of
German reunification looks rather different when viewed from the perspective
of someone outside the mainstream of German society, as the Turkish-German
author Yadé Kara does in her best-selling novel Selam Berlin (2003). Her first-
person narrative recounts Hasan Kazan’s adventures in Berlin between the mo-
mentous dates of November 9, 1989, and October 3, 1990. Born to Turkish
parents in 1970 in Kreuzberg, Hasan attended elementary school in Berlin and
has just completed his Abitur at a German Gymnasium in Istanbul when he sees
the news of the fall of the Wall on Turkish television. Hasan takes the first flight
back to Berlin, where he soon undergoes a series of life-changing experiences:
he gets a small part in a film in which he plays a Turkish drug dealer, falls in and
out of love with the director’s girlfriend, and discovers his father’s two-decade
affair with a woman in East Berlin, as well as a half brother, about Hasan’s age,
who has been living just on the other side of the Wall all these years. Hasan
Kazan is something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield, a troubled teen whose
slangy style captures the raw emotions of adolescence against the backdrop of a
city lurching, with bewildering speed, from its precarious position as a hot spot
in the Cold War to its future role as the capital of the Berlin Republic.
15
Selam Berlin challenges the sense of national unity expressed in those

chants of “Wir sind ein Volk,” by focusing on a figure who falls between estab-
lished categories. As Hasan Kazan moved back and forth between Istanbul and
Berlin as a child, he got used to being viewed as an outsider in both places—as
he puts it, an “Almanci” in Turkey, a “Kanacke” in Germany.1 When he returns
to Berlin in November 1989, Hasan continues to be the target of both open
prejudice (a woman in Spandau refuses to rent him a room as soon as she sees
that he looks foreign) and clandestine curiosity (three young women from
small towns in western Germany accept him into their Berlin Wohngemein-
schaft, a shared apartment, as an exotic outsider. Although Hasan spends a fair
amount of time projecting his own stereotypes onto other people—
surreptitiously studying subway riders to determine whether they are from East
or West Berlin and distinguishing between West German provincials and real
Berliners like himself—he actively resists being pigeonholed by others. When
Hasan’s West German film director condescendingly asks him to explain what
“the Turks” are like, Hasan reacts angrily: “How should I introduce Wolf to
sixty million Turks? I mean, there were all kinds: from the old shepherd on
Mount Ararat to the New York Yuppie with an office on the Bosporus” (244).
His three West German roommates regard him as “typically Turkish,” but
Hasan has his doubts: “I didn’t have a moustache and I didn’t carry a knife, but
I liked to drink black tea with cloves and eat pita bread, stuffed grape leaves,
and moussaka. That was all typical for me” (204).
In the end, Hasan insists defiantly that he is neither exclusively German
nor purely Turkish but, rather, a mixture of the two: “Actually I had everything
from both sides. From East and West, from German and Turkish, from here and
there” (223). Where others note a problem of being torn between two cultures,
Hasan sees the unproblematic state of forging a new identity from multiple
cultural traditions: “I was the way I was. The others tried to convince me that I
had problems that I didn’t have” (223).2 Hasan conceives of his identity both
transnationally and locally, that is, in terms of his solidarity with others who
share a similar diasporic background and the city of his birth, Berlin. “Where
are you from?” (Was sind Se für een Landsmann?), questions his potential
landlady in her thick Berlin accent. Hasan responds in kind: “‘Berlin!’ I said
proudly” (189; Berliner! sagte ick stolz).
Yadé Kara expands Hasan’s defiant sense of a hybrid identity into some-
thing of a manifesto in Café Cyprus (2008), her sequel to Selam Berlin. Hasan
has moved to London, where he struggles to learn English, works at a variety
of odd jobs, and experiences the emotional ups and downs of another tempes-
tuous romance. Most of his new friends have some sort of diasporic back-
National Origins and the Imperial Past 17
ground like his own, which Hasan insists is a source of pride: “We were the
new Bohemians that conquered the scene step by step. We created new images,
new languages, new customs, new subjects and called the old things into ques-
tion.” Emphatically rejecting the notion that he and his friends should be pitied
“as a generation ‘in between’” (eine Generation des “Dazwischen”), Hasan
proudly declares that they are building bridges toward the future: “We didn’t fit
into any patterns and were actually something completely new. A mixture like
us had never existed before on European soil.” Together, Hasan and his friends
stand in the vanguard of a newly mobile generation that is dragging the rest of
Europe willy-nilly in its wake: “We went our way and pulled Europe along
with us. Sometimes it limped, sometimes it dragged, sometimes it screamed
like a little child and threw itself down on the ground. So what!”3
The process of German reunification thus opens up two perspectives on
national identity in the post–Cold War era. On the one hand, it offers a tale of
intra-German reconciliation, in which the political boundaries of the state were
redrawn in accordance with the desires of the nation. The process was unusual
only in that it involved unification rather than division; more common in recent
decades have been movements toward the dissolution of former nations—
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—or toward partial or complete autonomy for
subnational regions, ranging from Catalonia to Scotland. While such separatist
movements may challenge the authority of existing nation-states, they do not
challenge the notion of the nation per se; in fact, it could be argued that they
actually reinforce the idea of a nation as representing people united by a com-
mon language, religion, or ethnicity. On the other hand, the sort of transna-
tional allegiances that Hasan Kazan describes pose a direct threat to national
sovereignty. As Arjun Appadurai suggests, the combined modern phenomena
of mass migration and new electronic media have created the possibility for
new kinds of “imagined communities” that cannot be contained within the pa-
rameters of the nation-state. Global movements of people and ideas render
national boundaries increasingly porous while, at the same time, “producing
locality in new, globalized ways.” Thus Appadurai concludes his book with “a
reminder that there is nothing mere about the local.”
Appadurai’s confident prediction that “the very epoch of the nation-state
is near its end” seems premature today.4 National sovereignty has certainly
been challenged by migration and the communications revolution, but nation-
states have hardly disappeared. They are not the only game in town, but they
never were. It is easy to forget that the modern nation-state is a relatively recent
invention, dating back to the late eighteenth-century, and that the sense of unity
it purports to represent is a figment of the collective imagination. The acceler-
ating process of globalization has highlighted tensions—between the local, the

national, and the global—that nation-states sought to suppress. Nation forma-
tion was always a cultural as well as a political project; while Bismarck pro-
voked three wars to speed the process of German unification, historians looked
to the past for the roots of the German language and the origins of the German
people, in a process that was repeated among other emerging European nation-
states. Yet the nineteenth-century intellectuals who sought the tribal roots of
their ethnic identity in the time of the Völkerwanderungen were laboring under
an illusion, as Patrick J. Geary has argued: “Europe’s peoples have always been
far more fluid, complex, and dynamic than the imaginings of modern national-
ists.”5 By the same token, today’s theorists of globalization tend to exaggerate
the novelty of the present. As Scott Spector points out in his study of Kafka’s
Prague, Appadurai imagines “a past where populations were or seemed to be
nonplural, where identities were or seemed to be stable, where centers were
centers and peripheries were peripheries. But as we have already seen in our
review of turn-of-the-century Prague and Bohemia, such is not the case.”6
Writers such as Yadé Kara emphasize the hybrid nature of national identi-
ties today, and novels like Selam Berlin complicate traditional understandings
of the national literature. As Leslie Adelson argues in an important intervention
into early debates about the status of Gastarbeiterliteratur (guest-worker lit-
erature) or Migrantenliteratur (migrant literature), we should not categorize
works by minorities as a mere “addendum” to an otherwise intact national
culture. Rather, we should use such works as a way to question the very notion
of a national literature conceived as the cultural expression of a homogeneous
people.7 More recently, Randall Halle has made a convincing case for consid-
ering today’s transnational film as the cultural imaginary of a globalized world,
in the way that print culture once “facilitated the emergence of the nation-
state.” Yet he reminds us that nostalgia for an allegedly uniform culture of the
past is misguided: “There has never been a pure, isolated, culture from which
a static-authentic individual could ever have emerged.”8
In this chapter, I explore conflicted identities and geopolitical tensions in
older—often much older—works of German literature. As David Blackbourn
and James Retallack observe in their introduction to Localism, Landscape, and
the Ambiguities of Place, “few people consider themselves to be wholly one
thing or another,” so it should not be surprising that “multiple or hybrid identi-
ties” were the norm in imperial Germany, just as they were before and have
been since.9 When we stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a
deviation from a culturally monolithic past, we can also start thinking about
different ways in which people imagine community—not solely in terms of

homogeneous nations, but also in terms of heterogeneous empires.
Hermann: A German Hero?
In the fall of 1843, Heinrich Heine traveled from Paris to Hamburg. He had
been living in exile since 1831, and there was some danger that the radical poet
might run into trouble with the Prussian authorities, but there were compelling
reasons for him to take the risk: he wanted to visit his aging mother, talk to his
German publisher, and make sure that his rich Uncle Salomon would remem-
ber him in his will.10 Heine left Paris in late October and traveled a northern
route, through Brussels and Bremen, to Hamburg; he returned in early Decem-
ber via Hanover, Cologne, and Aachen. A few months later, Heine commemo-
rated the journey with the semiautobiographical poem Deutschland: Ein Win-
termärchen (Germany: A Winter Tale, 1844). The poem retraces Heine’s actual
itinerary in reverse order, beginning with the border crossing into Prussian-
controlled western Germany and continuing, through Aachen and Cologne, to
Hamburg. The reader soon realizes that the physical journey described in the
jaunty rhythm of the German Volkslied is only a vehicle for Heine’s primary
purpose: to engage semiseriously with the symbols of German nationalism. He
pauses in Cologne to reflect on the patriotic project to complete the medieval
cathedral, contemplates the sacred waters of “Father Rhine,” and eulogizes the
Germanic hero Hermann, or Arminius, as he slogs his way through the muddy
Teutoburg Forest.
Das ist der Teutoburger Wald,

Den Tacitus beschrieben,
Das ist der klassische Morast,
Wo Varus steckengeblieben.
Hier schlug ihn der Cheruskerfürst,

Der Hermann, der edle Recke;
Die deutsche Nationalität,
Die siegte in diesem Drecke.
Wenn Hermann nicht die Schlacht gewann,

Mit seinen blonden Horden,
So gäb es deutsche Freiheit nicht mehr,

Wir wären römisch geworden!
Behold the wood of Teutoburg,

Described in Tacitus’ pages;
Behold the classical marsh, wherein
Stuck Varus, in past ages.
Here vanquish’d him the Cheruscian prince,

The noble giant, named Hermann;
’T was in this mire that triumph’d first
Our nationality German.
Had Hermann with his light-hair’d hordes

Not triumph’d here over the foeman,
Then German freedom had come to an end,
We had each been turn’d to a Roman!11
Heine refers to the leader of a Germanic tribe that defeated Roman legions
in a battle of 9 CE. The Roman historian Tacitus describes the aftermath of the
conflict in his Annals (the Romans seek revenge for their humiliating rout),
while his Germania provides an ethnographic account of the Germanic peoples.
Germania was preserved in a single manuscript and forgotten for centuries, but
when it was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it proved immensely influen-
tial to generations of German nationalists.12 They found there appealing images
of the Germans as a handsome, bellicose people, lacking somewhat in personal
hygiene perhaps and prone to drinking too much beer, but with a robust vitality
that made up for minor character flaws. From Tacitus, the Germans derived
three ideas of central importance to the national self-image. First, the Germans
were genetically “pure,” that is, an indigenous people uncontaminated by racial
mixtures with other peoples. Second, the Germans were in conflict with a
clearly defined enemy. In subsequent centuries, the ancient Romans could be
replaced by Turks, Italians, French, or Jews, but the paradigm in each case re-
mained the same: “us” versus “them.” Third, there was a direct line of descent
from the ancient Germanic warriors to the modern Germans, an untrammeled
legacy of the Germanic Volk leading from past to present.
For a modern nation anxious to cloak itself in ancient glory, such ideas
were immensely appealing. Yet none of them were true. The battle probably
did not take place where the monumental statue of Hermann looms over the
Teutoburg Forest today. Arminius was not the leader of a resistance movement
of the united Germanic people against Roman oppression but, instead, only the
chieftain of one small tribe, among many who were more likely to be fighting
one another than Roman legionnaires. In fact, many of the Germanic warriors
fought for the Romans rather than against them. There was not a concerted ef-
fort on the part of the Romans to conquer the sparsely populated and densely
forested lands to the east of the Rhine or the north of the Danube, as they were
simply not worth the effort: “It was not the military prowess of the Germani
that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty.”13 Nor was there any con-
tinuity from the Germanic tribes of the first century CE to those who sacked
Rome in the fifth, let alone from the ancient Goths to the modern Germans.14
Perhaps most important in light of subsequent history, there was nothing “pure”
about the Germanic peoples. Group identities were flexible, multiple, and in-
trinsically unstable, based on the need for strategic improvisation rather than
on any sort of deep-founded and long-lasting ethnic or racial identity.15
The modern German nationalists who looked to the Germanic past as a
source of present strength were, in a sense, simply inverting Roman imperial
prejudices into a positive stereotype. Only the Romans were given a sense of
historical development by ancient ethnographers. Barbarian tribes were de-
scribed as foreign peoples (gentes), defined negatively by the fact that they
were not Roman.16 As Christopher B. Krebs puts it, “The Germanen as one
people living in Germanien were invented by Caesar.”17 To the extent that Tac-
itus’s Germania goes into greater detail and constructs the Germans as an ad-
mirable alternative to Roman decadence rather than as the barbarian counter-
part to Roman civilization, it is an exception to the rule of Roman ethnography,
yet Tacitus, too, describes the Germans as if “they were homogeneous ethnic
peoples.”18 The early modern Germans were more than happy to follow Taci-
tus’s lead, beginning a tradition— of flattering self-portraiture and self-
righteous persecution of perceived enemies—that would culminate in the
atrocities of modern German history.
Postwar scholars have made a concerted effort to cut through the haze of
nationalist ideologies and expose the facts of ancient history. Armed with the
tools of modern research, including archaeological and genetic evidence in ad-
dition to written records, historians have constructed a more accurate record of
the Roman Empire and its barbarian others. In the process, Edward Gibbon’s
narrative of “decline and fall” has been replaced by the concept of late antiquity
as a period marked as much by continuities and creative transformation as cata-
strophic collapse.19 The “Dark Ages” once thought to mark the temporary end
to Western civilization have emerged as a period of cultural ferment that gave
birth to modern Europe.20 This new understanding of late antiquity and the early
Middle Ages provides a key to rethinking German national identity and, with it,
the history of the national literature. In the place of a single people united by an
unchanging ethnic identity, we find fluid groups engaged in an ongoing process
of strategic redefinition. Instead of opposition to a series of clearly defined en-
emies, we see porous boundaries and cross-cultural fertilizations. Finally, the
ancient Roman Empire that Tacitus and his modern admirers construed as the
antithesis of the Germanic people provides, instead, a model for the empire that
governed most of the Germanic peoples for the next millennium.
The Janus-Faced Roman Empire
The Roman Empire set the standard for the many European empires that fol-
lowed: it was vast, powerful, long-lasting, and exceedingly cruel.21 Nearly per-
petual warfare fed the expanding empire with a steady diet of newly conquered
territories; defeated peoples were exploited and enslaved. Enemies who tried to
resist or slaves who dared to revolt were crushed with ruthless brutality. When
they were not engaged in actual conflict, Romans staged mock gladiatorial
contests between man and beast for the entertainment of the masses. Subse-
quent empires followed suit. Charlemagne is said to have ordered the execution
of some forty-five hundred Saxons.22 Columbus’s discovery of the New World
touched off a scramble for territory that eventually brought vast areas of the
world under direct or indirect European control and caused untold misery for
millions of subjugated peoples. The curiosity that inspired the European En-
lightenment also motivated discoveries and inventions that helped to turn slav-
ery into big business on a global scale. Napoleon, who styled himself as the
enlightened heir to the French Revolution, conscripted the men of his many
captured territories and sent them marching off to conquer more. Hitler’s ma-
nia for more Lebensraum led to world war and systematic genocide. It is no
wonder, then, that the words evil and empire fit together in the popular imagi-
nation, inspiring blockbuster movies from Ben Hur (1959) and Spartacus
(1960) to the never-ending Star Wars franchise. As Stephen Howe puts it, the
“idea that empire is a Bad Thing suffuses almost all our imaginative worlds.”23
The Roman Empire nevertheless bequeathed another, less belligerent
legacy to subsequent generations. While it offered a model of imperial gran-
deur based on foreign conquest and centralized authority, it also provided a
blueprint for political organizations that allowed for considerable local auton-
omy and regional diversity under the aegis of imperial authority. The Roman
Empire covered a vast geographical area and included peoples with many dif-
ferent languages, religions, and cultural traditions, yet it “was ruled by an aris-
tocracy of amazingly uniform culture, taste and language.”24 A Roman senator
who traveled north to distant Trier was pleased to discover a city that was “Ro-
man to the core,”25 and the same would have been true if he had visited out-
posts in London or Carthage. Roman law extended across the realm, as did the
ultimate authority of the Roman emperor. The ruling elite shared a common
literary education, based on rigorous training in grammar, rhetoric, and the
style of selected classical authors. Students in the Latin-speaking Western Ro-
man Empire were expected to memorize long passages from Virgil, while those
in the Eastern Roman Empire did the same with Homer.26 Such training served
a practical purpose in a culture that placed a high value on public oratory and
written eloquence, but it also provided what Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady
would sneeringly refer to as “verbal class distinction,” making those who be-
longed to the social elite instantly recognizable. Roman literary education gave
cultural capital to the ruling class; thus, from today’s perspective, we can “see
Roman literary culture as an attribute of power, rather than virtue.”27
Entry into the ruling elite was not impossible. Although the Roman Em-
pire was established by violent conquest of foreign “barbarians,” it eventually
assimilated conquered peoples and allowed them to become an integral part of
the Empire that they or their parents had once resisted. Even if they did not
become Roman generals or senators, once-conquered peoples could continue
their lives much as before. Though governed by a uniformly educated cultural
elite, the Roman Empire hardly aspired to the sort of totalitarian social control
practiced by twentieth-century dictatorships. Distances were simply too great
(and transportation was too slow) to permit imperial intervention into the day-
to-day details of local governments. While the elegantly stylized Latin of the
aristocrats seemed frozen in the time of Virgil, the common people probably
spoke a form of the language that had already begun to evolve toward what
would eventually become Italian, Spanish, and French.28 Elsewhere in the em-
pire, one might encounter native speakers of anything from Celtic to Cappado-
cian, from Punic to Aramaic.29 Religious difference was tolerated as long as it
did not get in the way of imperial authority. Each region had its local gods,
each city had its own religious traditions, and this was considered good: “To be
a polytheist was to glory in the fact that the gods did not want unity. Rather,
they expressed themselves through the infinite diversity of human customs,
inherited from the distant past.”30 Local loyalties were not incompatible with
allegiance to the empire: “Whenever possible, local tradition was assimilated
into or equated with that of Rome. . . . From Syria to Gaul, North Africa to the
Danubian frontier, local landowners remained deeply rooted to the particulari-

ties of their region or patria.”31 Thus the “late Roman world always maintained
a double face, local and imperial.”32
While the Roman Empire had always tolerated a high degree of internal
diversity, its external boundaries became increasingly permeable in late antiq-
uity. According to recent estimates, “from the time of Augustus, at least half of
the total army—all its auxiliary formations—was always composed of non-
Romans, a substantial number of whom were recruited from the Germanic
world.”33 Germanic tribes living along the imperial borders engaged in com-
mercial exchange and began to adopt Roman customs. “It is the closeness of
Rome to central Europe that is surprising, not the notional chasm between
‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians,’” notes Peter Brown, who concludes that it is “pro-
foundly misleading” to “call the entry of the Goths into the Roman empire a
‘barbarian invasion,’” since “the Middle Ages begin, not with a dramatic ‘fall
of Rome,’ but with the barely perceived and irreversible absorption, by the
‘barbarians,’ of the ‘middle ground’ created in the Roman frontier zone.”34
Imperial Germany and the Legacy of Rome
As the name of the Third Reich suggests, the architects of that notorious re-
gime styled themselves as heirs to an imperial tradition that extended back,
through Bismarck and Charlemagne, to ancient Rome. Ever mindful of politi-
cal symbolism, Hitler chose Potsdam for the inauguration ceremonies of the
“new Germany” in the wake of the March elections of 1933, partly because the
Reichstag had burned down a few weeks earlier and was thus not available, but
also because Potsdam offered the opportunity to display continuity between
past and present. As Christopher Clark explains, “The ‘Day of Potsdam,’ as it
has come to be known, was a concentrated act of political communication. It
offered the image of a synthesis, even a mystical union, between the old Prus-
sia and the new Germany.”35 The political theater of the Third Reich extended
the sense of historical continuity still further into the past, summoning up na-
tional heroes out of the medieval mists and sending its soldiers to march about
with banners and stiff-armed salutes like a cohort of latter-day Romans. The
use of the word Reich, notes Richard J. Evans, “conjured up an image among
educated Germans that resonated far beyond the institutional structures Bis-
marck created: the successor to the Roman Empire; the vision of God’s Empire
here on earth; the universality of its claim to suzerainty; in a more prosaic but
no less powerful sense, the concept of a German state that would include all
German speakers in Central Europe—‘one People, one Reich, one Leader,’ as

the Nazi slogan was to put it.”36 As a result, any mention of the words Germany
and empire in the same sentence seems certain to awaken bad memories, and
the Federal Republic of Germany was indeed founded in deliberate opposition
to the evils of Germany’s imperial past.37 At the same time, however, the con-
stitution of the new German republic incorporated elements of federalism that
also have their roots in an imperial tradition of a more benevolent sort, as we
shall see when we return to the past.
Whether we speak of rigid walls that suddenly collapsed or permeable
border zones gradually infiltrated by half-civilized barbarians, the fact remains
that the Roman Empire came to an end, at least in the West; the Eastern Roman
Empire, or Byzantine Empire, would continue for another thousand years. As
the Roman Empire imploded in the West, the uniform web of Roman elite
culture that had stitched it together gradually disappeared; peoples who had
been both local and imperial became nothing but local. Far-flung trade net-
works collapsed in a process of “dramatic economic simplification.”38 Com-
munications broke down: “People simply did not have regular information
about what was going on outside their own local and regional circuits.”39 Poli-
tics, too, became increasingly local: “In the last two millennia the period 500–
800 was probably when aristocratic power in the West was least totalizing, and
local autonomies were greatest.”40 Religion was also affected by the fall of
Rome, as the universal Christian church devolved into multiple “micro-
Christendoms.”41 As a result, the elite literary culture that had distinguished
and united the Roman aristocrats seemed increasingly irrelevant: “To know
Virgil and the other secular classics by heart, to be able to write poetry and
complex prose, . . . ceased to be important; swordsmanship, or the Bible, were
far more relevant sources of cultural capital.”42
In the course of the Middle Ages, there were sporadic efforts to reestab-
lish something of the transregional sense of European unity that had once ex-
isted in the larger Roman Empire. In the eighth century, Charlemagne led a
relentless series of wars against Saxons, Lombards, Avars, and others, until he
controlled most of Western Europe, with the exception of the Iberian Peninsula
and the British Isles. He held this empire together with a combination of per-
sonal charisma, military force, and an “extensive and effective communica-
tions network.”43 As he grew older, the peripatetic monarch settled more and
more near the warm waters of Aachen, giving his empire a center of the sort
that had once existed in Rome. The ancient capital still retained its symbolic
power, however, and Charlemagne’s imperial crowning by Pope Leo III took
place in Rome, on Christmas Day 800. Leo sought to shore up the power of the
Western papacy against the Byzantine Empire by crowning a new heir to

Rome, but as far as the Franks were concerned, “Charlemagne was an emperor
but not a specifically Roman one; he owed his title not to papal coronation but
to an acknowledgement of his power by the peoples he ruled.”44 Aachen re-
mained the center of Charlemagne’s empire, and he spearheaded the Carolin-
gian Renaissance from there. He assembled a group of intellectuals from
around Europe at his court, in the effort to standardize the practice of Christi-
anity throughout the realm, promote correct Latin, and recover at least some of
the work by authors of classical antiquity.45 The goal of these efforts was to
improve present-day morality, knit together the members of a disparate realm,
and assert the continuity of a tradition that extended back into antiquity: “Latin
provided the means for the Franks to associate themselves with the Roman past
in the most fundamental way possible. It became their own past too.”46
One should not exaggerate the unity of Charlemagne’s realm. The dis-
tances and difficulties of travel that made day-to-day management of local
communities impossible in the Roman Empire had only grown worse in the
early Middle Ages and would not improve substantially until the end of the
eighteenth century. Although Charlemagne’s empire was larger than that of any
European ruler before Napoleon, it was far smaller than the Roman Empire.
Ancient Roman civilization lasted the better part of a millennium; Char-
lemagne’s empire disintegrated within decades after his death. The Carolingian
Renaissance was limited to a narrow circle of intellectuals centered at Char-
lemagne’s court and had little impact on the vast majority of his illiterate sub-
jects. Even at the height of his power, Charlemagne’s supreme authority did
not preclude allegiances of a more local sort,47 and when he died, regional
loyalties soon stepped in to fill the void.
Nevertheless, Charlemagne established an empire that would last, in one
form or another, for the next thousand years. As we have become accustomed
to thinking in terms of modern nation-states, it is important to remember that
the Holy Roman Empire was a political organization of an entirely different
sort. As James J. Sheehan explains, “The Reich came from a historical world
in which nationality had no political meaning and states did not command
total sovereignty. Unlike nations and states, the Reich did not insist upon pre-
eminent authority and unquestioning allegiance. Its goal was not to clarify and
dominate but rather to order and balance fragmented institutions and multiple
loyalties.”48 American and French revolutionaries pioneered the notion of an
egalitarian nation-state founded on lateral bonds between brothers, leading to
the formation of the Sons of Liberty in America and to the French rallying cry
“Liberté, egalité, fraternité.”49 The Holy Roman Empire, in contrast, was
based on vertical hierarchies among subjects who knew that they were not
created equal or endowed with certain inalienable rights. Modern nation-
states have clearly defined borders and, thus, immediately recognizable shapes
(Benedict Anderson speaks, in this context, of the “map-as-logo”),50 whereas
the Holy Roman Empire was an amorphous conglomerate of duchies, bishop-
rics, kingdoms, and imperial city-states. Nations delimit, whereas the Holy
Roman Empire was conceived in universal terms. As Anderson explains, “No
nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nation-
alists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join
their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Chris-
tians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.”51 The Holy Roman Empire did,
however, conceive of itself as at least potentially universal, the political center
of global Christendom.
In reality, no religion or empire has ever ruled the entire planet. As Mi-
chael Borgolte observes, Charlemagne briefly tried to establish a universal em-
pire, but his successors quickly realized that the effort could not be sustained.
While the Eastern Roman Empire clung to its universal aspirations, the West-
ern Roman Empire acknowledged the existence of other realms: “In the place
of the practically impossible universal empire there arose a multiplicity of
states in Western Europe, without a plan and without a governing idea.”52 Char-
lemagne was neither French nor German in today’s sense, although modern
nationalists in both countries have tried to claim him as one of their own.53 The
Treaty of Verdun (843) that split Charlemagne’s empire into three parts did not
mark the first stage in the development of discrete European nations but, rather,
reflected only “dynastic conflicts within the royal house” of Charlemagne’s
children and grandchildren.54 Only in the course of the later Middle Ages did
powerful monarchies with centralized administrations begin to emerge in Eng-
land and France—but not in Germany. It is true that the far-flung Roman Em-
pire of the first centuries became increasingly identified with the German na-
tion toward the end of the Middle Ages. As Georg Schmidt explains, “those
regions of Italy or France as well as the Netherlands or Switzerland that be-
longed to the medieval feudal Empire had practically nothing to do with that
Empire of the German Nation that operated as a political actor in internal and
foreign policy.” Schmidt goes on to observe that the early modern “rump Em-
pire” of the German nation “had become more akin to a state” and was recog-
nized as such by its contemporaries.55 But the Holy Roman Empire of the Ger-
man Nation “was never ruled centrally, let alone absolutely. The emperor did
not rule as a monarch, and the Empire was viable as a political actor only after
first consulting with the Estates. . . . Here, unlike other countries, harmony and
unity meant not exclusion, but inclusion, tolerance, and negotiated agreements
instead of hegemonic dictums.”56
For some twentieth-century historians, Germany’s deviance from the
“normal” course of national development followed by England and France had
fateful consequences. Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Origins of Modern Ger-
many tells a tale of missed opportunities that marked the beginning of Germa-
ny’s “territorial disunity, of the fantastic map of German particularism and of
the unlimited sovereignty of the princes, which were the curses of German
history from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and which, indurated
through long generations, have perhaps not been entirely obliterated even to-
day.” By “to-day,” Barraclough means 1944; as he notes in his preface, the
“greater part” of his book was “written under conditions of active service in the
Royal Air Force.” His still highly readable work tries to make sense of the pres-
ent in the light of Germany’s past, and he concludes that German particularism
is to blame, that German history is “a story of discontinuity, of development
cut short, of incompleteness and retardation,” resulting in an unfulfilled yearn-
ing for national unity, which the Nazis skillfully exploited.57
The German Sonderweg (distinct but deviant path) that Barraclough traces
found its most influential spokesman slightly earlier, in Helmuth Plessner, who
seems, in turn, to have been influenced by Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen
eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1918).58 In this view,
German particularism went hand in hand with an aversion to Western democ-
racy. Germans celebrated the ethnic unity of the German Volk rather than sign-
ing on to a social contract designed to protect universal human rights in the
modern nation-state. In Mann’s view, true Germans were “nonpolitical” crea-
tures happy to leave the business of government to others while they plunged
the depths of the German soul. According to Plessner, the unfortunate result of
the German tendency toward antidemocratic irrationalism was that it opened
the door to an authoritarian government eager to compensate for its belated
entrance onto the world stage with a recklessly aggressive militarism that was
either unchecked by a nation of otherworldly poets and thinkers or actively
supported by those seduced into unreason by the longing for myth made mani-
fest in the intoxicating atmosphere of fascist politics.59
The Sonderweg thesis of German history has been challenged on multiple
fronts. Richard J. Evans claims that “of all the myths of German history that
have been mobilized to account for the coming of the Third Reich in 1933,
none is less convincing than that of the ‘unpolitical German.’”60 David Black-
bourn and Geoff Eley argue that nineteenth-century Germany was not as devi-
ant from the European norm as claimed and that to argue otherwise is to ideal-
ize developments in Great Britain while bolstering “a morbid mystique about

Germany.”61 Rüdiger Safranski claims that Thomas Mann ran the risk of pre-
cisely this danger when he cast his poetic reckoning with German National
Socialism in the mold of the Faust myth, and Mann worried that he himself
might have been guilty of imposing a “lofty interpretation” onto “the sordid
facts of history” (höhere Interpretation des kruden Geschehens).62 Thus recent
historians such as Peter H. Wilson have begun to reevaluate the legacy of the
Holy Roman Empire. Instead of viewing it as an impediment to the “normal”
development of the centralized nation-state, they have seen it as a viable alter-
native to forms of belligerent nationalism and as the precursor to today’s Euro-
pean Union.63
Some historians nevertheless continue to seek the origins of modern Ger-
man nationalism in the early modern period. As Caspar Hirschi points out, the
Italian humanists gave a dramatic new impetus to the development of early
modern German nationalism. In a certain sense, one could even argue that the
Germans were “an Italian invention,” for Italians were the first “to label the
visitors from the north as one single language group by calling them Teu-
tonici.”64 The designation was neither neutral nor flattering, since the Italians
viewed the Germans as crude and violent barbarians.65 An opportunity to turn
this negative stereotype into a source of pride presented itself in 1425, when
Poggio Bracciolini confirmed that there was a copy of Tacitus’s long-lost Ger-
mania in a German monastery.66 The document was copied and returned to
Rome in 1455, where it soon inspired Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Account of
Germany, which combined a paraphrase of Tacitus with the future pope’s re-
flections about the German peoples he had observed in his travels to the north.67
In 1492, the German humanist Conrad Celtis held his famous inaugural ad-
dress at the University of Ingolstadt, in which he claimed that modern Germans
were the true heirs to ancient Rome. By the end of the decade, he had published
his new edition of Tacitus, together with the beginnings of a study of modern
Germany, designed to bring the ancient source material up to date. With the
republication of Tacitus’s Annals, Germans learned of the exploits of Armin-
ius, or Hermann, which inspired Ulrich von Hutten to compose his stridently
patriotic and dialogic Arminius (ca. 1520), just as Luther was beginning to
heap scorn on the pope and the corrupt Catholic Church in Italy. Aided by the
emergence of a newly vigorous German vernacular and abetted by the inven-
tion of the printing press, a bellicose sense of national pride swept over a re-
gion that had languished in obscurity for centuries.
Given the course of German history, it is not surprising that scholars such
as Simon Schama and Christopher B. Krebs have constructed compelling nar-
ratives that begin with Nazi storm troopers marching up to an Italian villa in
search of the oldest copy of Tacitus’s Germania, “the birth certificate of the
German race,”68 and that then loop back to a tale leading from Roman antiq-
uity, through the Renaissance recovery of the Latin text, to its ideological abuse
in the hands of increasingly rabid and racist nationalists. Yet, in seeking the
seeds of an evil German nationalism in the early modern period, both authors
create a sense of teleological progression that obscures the complexities of the
past. As Thomas A. Brady Jr. points out, the sense of German national identity
was still very much in flux in the early modern period: “By 1500 there were
‘the Empire,’ ‘the German Nation,’ and ‘Germany,’ no one of which was quite
identical with another, nor was any uncontested.” For the humanists, “Ger-
many” consisted of “a family of homelands whose shapes, character, and qual-
ities remained stable no matter who might be ruling them”; a “German was one
whom other Germans recognized to be German”; and “German” was thus a
“flexible, ambiguous notion [that] could be applied in a very wide sense.”69
While Schama and Krebs seek the origins of an exclusionary concept of na-
tional identity that limits membership to a single racial elite, Brady describes
an inclusive pattern of multiple identities in the early modern era that could
combine nascent nationalism with local loyalties and a sense of belonging to a
universal Christian empire.
Len Scales and Caspar Hirschi have come to similar conclusions about
the nature of early German nationalism, by shifting their focus from the early
modern period to the late Middle Ages. For Geoffrey Barraclough, this was the
period when the movement toward German unity was fatally derailed. During
his long reign, the Sicilian emperor Frederick II (1215–50) “made no attempt
to oppose the existing tendencies to decentralization or to reaffirm the rights of
the crown”70 (as he was preoccupied by events in Italy), and when he was gone,
the die was cast: “Without the unity provided by the crown, the principalities
of north and east Germany went their own way, fulfilling a destiny which was
provincial rather than national.”71 The Golden Bull of 1356 established a sys-
tem of seven electors who would henceforth choose the emperor, thus further
shifting power to the princes: “The monarchy was henceforward a nullity and
German unity a mere façade.” The Holy Roman Empire—the most powerful
empire in Europe on the eve of the Investiture Controversy and, again, under
the reign of Frederick Barbarossa—“faded into the background,” and “the Ger-
man territorial states advanced to the front of the stage.”72
Without denying that power devolved in the late Middle Ages from a rela-
tively potent emperor to multiple princes in discrete German territories, Scales
and Hirschi contest the conclusion that political fragmentation was necessarily
inimical to emerging nationalism. According to one point of view, there is a

simple choice: either a particular group of people moves toward political unity
under a strong monarch who inspires nationalist sentiments, or they do not, in
which case loyalties remain merely local. Hirschi argues that the Roman Em-
pire suggests an alternative possibility. Citing Cicero, Hirschi notes that each
imperial citizen who was not born in Rome had “two different fatherlands,” the
“patria naturae or patria propria, the place he came from and grew up in,” and
the “patria civitatis or patria communis, the common fatherland by law, which
covered the whole territory of the Roman republic.”73 Thus one could be both
local and imperial, and this additive concept of multiple identities served the
Roman Empire well, as it drew together diverse peoples across a vast geo-
graphical area into a single political entity. A similar sense of regional diversity
within a larger imperial unity obtained in the medieval successor to the ancient
imperium. Rather than viewing the decentralization of imperial power in the
late Middle Ages as something new and dangerous, Scales suggests that it only
highlighted a tendency that had been present from the start: “The sharing of
rule between the monarch and a plethora of established regional powers was
fundamental to the constitutional order of Germany from the first emergence
of a separate sphere of rule there out of the ruins of Charlemagne’s empire.”
Scales queries, “Might it even be that the very weakness of rulership supplied
its own stimuli to popular interest and identification?” Concluding that it
might, he therefore insists that the dual identities of the nation and the empire
were understood as complementary rather than contradictory: “The universal
found a focus in the German.”74
Thus the early modern period bequeathed a double legacy to the history of
German nationalism, which can be viewed as a modulation of tendencies al-
ready present in the Janus-faced Roman Empire of antiquity. On the one hand,
Tacitus provided the script for an understanding of the nation based on ethnic
purity and hostility toward external enemies, which plays into the hands of
modern historians constructing teleological narratives that march toward the
twentieth century like jackbooted Nazis in search of their tribal roots. On the
other hand, historians such as Brady, Scales, and Hirschi suggest that local,
national, and imperial identities were held in a delicate balance, in ways that
recall the complexities of ancient Rome’s mixture of local diversity within
imperial unity. As we shall see, this second notion, of a German nation united
in its multifariousness, had the greatest impact on the thought and practices of
generations of German writers, from the baroque dramatists’ effort to negotiate
a balance of power between Protestant Silesia and the Catholic Counter-
Reformation to Goethe’s belief that Germany’s political fragmentation was a
source of cultural strength; from Friedrich Schlegel and Joseph von Eichen-
dorff’s opposition to the homogeneous nation-state in the name of imperial
diversity to the persistence of regionalism in the literature of the Second Em-
pire; from Thomas Mann’s accusation that Nazi Germany had betrayed its
Goethean legacy of local cosmopolitanism to Kafka’s fascination with minor
literatures. From this perspective, Günter Grass’s resistance to national reuni-
fication in the name of Germany’s federalist tradition seems not a stubborn
attempt to swim against the stream of history but, rather, an effort to reaffirm a
long-standing tradition, while Yadé Kara’s claim that Europe has never before
seen the sort of multicultural mixtures she portrays in her fiction is both right,
in the sense that the particular configurations are new, and wrong, in that the
tradition of identities constituted in multiplicity is very old indeed.
Chapter 3
German Literary History and the

Medieval Renaissance
In the beginning, German studies were medieval studies. The amateur enthusi-
asts who had begun collecting manuscripts of medieval poets in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries yielded to academics with endowed
chairs who taught at leading universities. The new scholarly focus on the Mid-
dle Ages went hand in hand with popular enthusiasm for the period. While Karl
Lachmann was setting a new standard for scholarly precision in his editions of
medieval texts, popularizers such as San Marte (A. Schulz) and Karl Simrock
translated medieval literature into modern German for the general public.1
Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen soon began to inspire
the sort of medieval kitsch produced by Baron de la Motte Fouqué and his
imitators, while Richard Wagner’s operas glamorized a largely imaginary past.
Nationalism played a large role in what might paradoxically be termed the
“medieval Renaissance.” The first academic chair in German studies went to
Friedrich Hagen von der Hagen, who had prepared a popular edition of Das
Nibelungenlied designed to inspire German troops in the fight against Napo-
leon. Nationalists looked back wistfully to the splendors of the Stauferzeit,
when Germany was ruled by members of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, and for-
ward to the day when Emperor Frederick Barbarossa would awaken from his
centuries-long slumber to lead the Germans to even greater glory. Monuments
arose on the hallowed ground of the medieval past: a larger-than-life statue of
Barbarossa was placed atop the ruins of a medieval fortress; patriotic citizens
contributed to the completion of the Cologne Cathedral; and students celebrated
the rebirth of the German nation at the Wartburg, the castle where Luther once
translated the New Testament into German and where the Minnesänger (Ger-
man lyric poets and singers) were said to have held their fabled competition.2
The nineteenth-century fascination with medieval literature and art had
deep historical roots. The early modern rediscovery of Tacitus had shown that
33
a sense of national belonging could be inspired by a common past. As the

scales in the eighteenth-century “quarrel between the ancients and moderns”
began to tip away from those who defended the timeless standard of classical
antiquity and toward an appreciation of the relative beauty of subsequent his-
torical periods, the Middle Ages suddenly seemed invaluable precisely because
it had produced nationally specific works of art and architecture.3 A turning
point came when young Goethe, studying for his law degree in Strasbourg, had
a sudden flash of national pride while contemplating the city’s Gothic cathe-
dral: “That is German architecture, our architecture, whereas the Italians can-
not boast of their own architectural style, still less the French.”4 Although
Goethe would return to classical antiquity for poetic inspiration in later years
and scorn those younger Romantics who embraced the affected piety of a sen-
timentalized past, the vogue for medieval art continued unabated among artists
and members of the general public.
Scholars today continue to recognize the importance of the medieval art
and culture that was rejected by the Renaissance, but it has become increas-
ingly difficult and equally undesirable to force the medieval past into the pro-
crustean bed of distinct national cultures. The great achievements of German-
language literature around 1200 would have been inconceivable without the
overwhelming influence of French courtly culture.5 Arthurian legends circu-
lated in the literatures of Great Britain and across the continent, with little re-
gard for linguistic or political boundaries. Frederick Barbarossa aspired to be
emperor of the Western world (like Charlemagne before him), not the leader of
the German nation-state.6 While some of the authors and texts that were sin-
gled out as representative of the imagined community may use the word Ger-
man or mention “Germany,” the works are less about national unity than about
regional diversity and imperial politics. Throughout the Middle Ages and into
the early modern period, authors negotiated tenuous balances between local
lords and the emperor or between rival claimants to the imperial throne within
the context of an ongoing struggle for power between church and state, em-
peror and pope.
In this chapter, I examine texts that were claimed by later generations to
represent the German nation. The first is the anonymous Annolied (Song of
Anno), a poem that is thought to have been written in or around the city of
Cologne in the immediate wake of the Investiture Controversy. I turn next to
the political poetry of Walther von der Vogelweide, written a little more than a
century later, and conclude with a look at three works published around 1500
in praise of Nuremberg, the city that the German romantics, Richard Wagner,
and the National Socialists proclaimed as the nation’s “imaginary capital.”7 My
German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance 35
goal (to reiterate a disclaimer stated in the present study’s introduction) is not
to provide a comprehensive survey of older German literature but to pick a
place, an author, and an anonymous text that were appropriated for nationalist
purposes and to view them in their prenational, imperial contexts.
The Song of Anno
In the fourth chapter of Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977), Günter Grass stages a
conversation between Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius. The setting is the
city of Danzig (Gdansk) on September 2, 1636, nearly two decades into a war
that had devastating consequences for the German-speaking regions of Central
Europe. Although he is only in his late thirties, Opitz is already sick and tired,
ground down by the war, his exile from his native Silesia, and his precarious
position as a diplomat in the service of the Polish king. When the younger poet
and playwright asks him about his future writing plans, Opitz responds that he
no longer has the energy to complete a tragedy but that he still hopes to trans-
late some psalms: “He further harbored the intention of bringing certain Bre-
slau treasures to light and acquainting the world once more with the long-
forgotten Song of Anno, in order that it might endure.”8 Opitz died of the plague
only a few weeks after he published an edition of the poem in honor of Anno II
(ca. 1010—1075), archbishop of Cologne.9
Patriotism motivated Opitz to publish this hitherto obscure work of early
medieval German literature. Opitz is best known today for his Buch von der
deutschen Poeterey (Concerning German poetry; 1624), in which he encour-
aged his fellow Germans to write in their native tongue, rather than the Latin in
which he had composed his own early verses. Writing at a time when virtually
all European intellectuals were bilingual in Latin and their native tongue and
when most could read several more languages, it never occurs to Opitz to
champion monolingualism. He lards his treatise about the need for German
vernacular poetry with copious examples from Greek, Latin, French, and
Dutch poets, all cited in the original languages. What concerns Opitz is that
German has become flooded with a surfeit of foreign loanwords. Just as to-
day’s Académie française seeks to stem the tide of American influence into
French, Opitz and his fellow members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft
(Fruit-Bearing Society) encouraged purging foreign elements from the Ger-
man language.10 In editing the Song of Anno, Opitz sought to provide Germans
with an early example of their language’s original purity and expressive
strength. Germans could take pride in the achievements of the past, which
would inspire new literature in the present.11 But what image of “Germany”
does the Song of Anno convey? To answer this question, we need to look more
closely at the text in its historical context.
The future Bishop Anno II was born to undistinguished Swabian parents
but rose to positions of highest authority in the German Reich by dint of his
intelligence, diligence, and ruthlessness. He was probably educated in Bam-
berg and Paderborn, before serving as chaplain at the royal court.12 King Henry
III invested Anno as the archbishop of Cologne in the spring of 1056, but Henry
died unexpectedly later that year, plunging the empire into a period of pro-
tracted civil war. In 1062, Anno abducted the designated heir to the throne—
the future Henry IV was only twelve at the time—and thus established himself
as the de facto ruler or coruler of the Holy Roman Empire for the next two
years. Anno was a particularly effective secular and religious leader in Co-
logne, as he expanded the city’s territories and founded five new monasteries.
Yet there was little love lost between the bishop and his flock. King Henry III
had chosen the foreign Swabian as archbishop against the will of the Cologne
residents, and Anno’s harsh and arbitrary rule won him few friends in subse-
quent years. Matters came to a head in 1074, when he enraged local merchants
by confiscating one of their ships and its cargo. Anno had to flee for his life,
escaping through a hole in the old Roman city wall, known still today as the
Annoloch (Hole of Anno). Shortly thereafter, Anno returned to Cologne with a
small army to exact a terrible revenge: he ordered the soldiers to plunder the
city, fined those accused of participating in the revolt, and had the ringleaders
blinded. In the following year, Anno died of a painful illness. Somewhat im-
probably, the pitiless Machtpolitiker was declared a saint in 1183.
We do not know exactly when or by whom the Song of Anno was written,
though it seems most likely that the author was a monk in Siegburg (one of the
monasteries founded by Anno) who was understandably eager to defend the
reputation of his former master.13 Scholars have speculated that it could have
been written as early as 1077 and as late as 1126, but most opt for the last de-
cades of the eleventh century.14 The Song of Anno is somewhat unusual as a
work of hagiography, in that the ostensible hero does not appear until the last
third of the poem, where we receive only a skeletal outline of Anno’s career,
told from the perspective of a loyal supporter. We learn that Anno was a regent
for the young King Henry (although not that he had kidnapped the adolescent),
that he fought with the people of Cologne but eventually forgave them, that he
miraculously restored the eyesight of a blind man, and that he suffered terribly
before his death. Conceding that there was one stain on Anno’s otherwise spot-
less record (presumably a reference to his brutal reprisal against the civic upris-
ing in Cologne), the author notes that the archbishop atoned for his sins and
was, on the whole, very good.
Making the Song of Anno particularly interesting today is the author’s
embedding of the life of the archbishop in the larger context of Christian salva-
tion history and secular world history. The poem opens with a brief summary
of the biblical narrative of creation, man’s fall from grace, and the promise of
redemption through Jesus Christ. It is thus generally assumed that the poet was
familiar with the slightly earlier Ezzolied (Song of Ezzo, ca. 1060–64), which
also presents a German-language account of Christian salvation history.15 The
Song of Anno differs significantly from the Song of Ezzo, however, in that it
goes on to offer a fascinating (if fanciful) version of ancient history, beginning
when the Romans sent Caesar to fight the Germans. With great difficulty, Cae-
sar subdues the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Franks. The conquering
hero is nevertheless rejected by his own people when he tries to return to Rome,
so he goes back to Germany, where he is able to convince his former foes to be
his allies in the struggle against the Roman Empire. Together, they win a great
victory. Caesar is honored by his people, and he, in turn, honors his German
allies, who are said to have been the special friends of Rome from that time on.
According to the Song of Anno, the Franks and the Romans are both descended
from the Trojans and, thus, are more like long-lost cousins than mortal ene-
mies. After Caesar’s death, Christ is born, and the Romans send missionaries
to the Roman-German cities of the north. Anno can trace his position as arch-
bishop of Cologne back to the original Roman missionaries.
This brief overview of the Song of Anno allows us to make a few prelimi-
nary observations. The Song of Anno is first and foremost a work of local his-
tory, a flattering portrait of the recently deceased archbishop. Anno’s pivotal
role in imperial politics during a particularly unsettled time suggests that the
work also touches on matters that extend beyond the immediate region, al-
though the precise way it does so remains a matter of debate (discussed below).
Finally, the poem places Anno’s life in the still-larger context of world history,
both secular and sacred, adding a global dimension to the career of a local saint
and imperial politician. Of particular importance for the interpretation of the
Song of Anno is the gap between Anno’s death in 1075 and the composition of
the poem, which took place no earlier than 1077 and quite possibly much later.
Anno died when the Investiture Controversy was just beginning, and the poem
was written only after it was well underway.
In December 1075, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) excommunicated Henry
IV, the German king and Holy Roman Emperor whom Anno had once kid-
napped. The immediate source of the conflict between the emperor and the
pope turned on the question of lay investiture, that is, whether unconsecrated
laymen (kings rather than popes) had the power to invest new bishops with
sacred authority. The larger issue at stake was the question of who held su-
preme power in Western Europe, the church or the state, the pope or the em-
peror? As the leader of the Clunaic movement, which sought to reform the
Catholic Church and reassert papal power, Gregory insisted that only he had
the right to invest bishops. When Henry challenged the pope’s decision, Greg-
ory swiftly excommunicated him. In an effort to regain his power, Henry made
a treacherous journey in the dead of winter across the Alps, to seek an audience
with the pope at the fortress of Canossa in northern Italy. Gregory there re-
voked the excommunication, but only after Henry had prostrated himself bare-
foot in the snow.
For nineteenth- century German nationalists, Henry’s “Gang nach
Canossa” (journey to Canossa) marked a shameful low point in their history.
Bismarck famously vowed that he would never “return to Canossa,” never hu-
miliate himself and his nation before a foreign power.16 Here again, however,
we must resist the tendency to view medieval controversies through the prism
of modern international conflicts. The Investiture Controversy did not pit Ger-
many against Italy but, rather, set emperor against pope, in a battle that was as
much theological as it was political and that was further complicated by local
power struggles within the German territories. Henry’s public act of submis-
sion to the pope may actually have been a tactical ploy to regain power over his
potentially rebellious princes.17 The question that concerns us here is where the
author of the Song of Anno’s sympathies lay in regard to the controversy. Emi-
nent medievalist Helmut de Boor assumes that the anonymous author was loyal
to the pope, which seems plausible enough, given that the author was most
likely a monk in the service of the Catholic Church.18 As Ernst von Reusner
notes, however, the author of the Song of Anno seems curiously reluctant to
mention either pope or emperor in the poem. In Reusner’s view, the author
deliberately decided not to take sides on the burning political topic of the day
and focused instead on the figure of Anno as a harbinger of future salvation: the
Investiture Controversy is a sign of the end, when Christ will return and resolve
all earthly conflict in eternal heavenly peace; Anno is not yet the savior but a
sign of the savior soon to come. Reusner concludes his analysis on a critical
note, contending that the anonymous author’s resignation in the face of earthly
politics marks a fateful anticipation of a long and dangerous tendency of Ger-
man writers and intellectuals to seek metaphysical refuge when political tur-
moil rages on earth.19
Eberhard Nellmann offers a third possible interpretation: in his view, the
author does take sides, but with the empire, although perhaps not with the em-
peror himself, against the pope. Nellmann notes that in verse 18, the poet
seems particularly interested in the Roman Republic that preceded Caesar’s
role as the first Roman emperor.
On a tablet of gold
the Romans inscribed
the names of 300 senators,
who maintained order and respect
and who discussed day and night
how they might preserve their preeminence.
All the leaders followed them,
since they did not want to have a king.
Rômêre scrivin cisamine

in einir guldîne tavelin
driuhunterit altheirrin,
dî dir plêgin zuht unt êrin,
die dagis unti nahtis riedin,
wî si ir êrin behîldin.
den volgedin die herzogin al,
wanti si ni woldin kuning havin.20
Nellmann takes the poet’s interest in the Roman senators’ aversion to royalty,
coupled with the poet’s stress on the importance of the various Germanic tribes
joining together in the struggle to conquer Rome, as indicative that the poet
might have been more sympathetic with the princes allied against Henry IV
than with either the king or the pope: “Politically the Anno-poet stands on the
side of the German imperial nobility.”21
All of the interpretations of the Song of Anno suggested here have to be
taken with a rather large grain of salt. If the poet was really so hostile to the
idea of a strong emperor, why did he stress the Germans’ pivotal role in placing
Caesar on the throne?22 Maybe the poet was interested in the Roman Republic
only because it was a historical curiosity that differed so markedly from the
feudal structure of medieval Europe. In response to Reusner’s claim that the
anonymous poet was the first in a long line of German writers who deliberately
refused to engage in contemporary political debates, one might suggest that
generic constraints, rather than political quiescence, could have motivated his
decision; that is, the author of the Song of Anno may have considered it inap-
propriate to introduce political controversies into a hagiographic poem, but he

may have expressed his political opinions, whatever they may have been, in
other venues. Finally, we cannot be certain that the monk who wrote the
poem—if the author was indeed a monk—was necessarily sympathetic with
the pope in the Investiture Controversy. Could he not have muttered some an-
tipapal sentiments in his damp chambers along the banks of the Lower Rhine?
We simply do not know. We can be certain, however, that the Song of Anno
cannot be viewed adequately through the lens of modern nationalism, despite
the linguistic patriotism that motivated Opitz to preserve the poem. We have,
rather, a work about a local saint and an imperial politician caught up in a
struggle between rival factions within the German territories, told from the
perspective of an anonymous author writing at the time of heightened stress
between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church.
Walther von der Vogelweide
About a century after the probable composition of the Song of Anno, German lit-
erature experienced its first great age—and also its last until young Goethe burst
onto the literary scene five hundred years later. It is therefore not surprising that
German scholars writing in the wake of the “Age of Goethe” looked back proudly
to the achievements of the High Middle Ages when tracing the history of the na-
tional literature. Given the widespread circulation of literary forms and motifs
across Europe at the time, however, it was not always easy to claim authors and
works of medieval literature as representatives of Germany’s national culture. It
was relatively easy to scrape off the veneer of courtly culture that had been layered
over Das Nibelungenlied and find authentic heroes of the Germanic past: the char-
ismatically handsome and perpetually cheerful Siegfried was viewed as the em-
bodiment of Germanic valor, tragically cut down by Hagen’s treacherous stab in
the back.23 Viewing the cosmopolitan Wolfram von Eschenbach and his hero’s
quest for the Holy Grail as “typically German” was harder, but it could be done.24
It was nevertheless reassuring to find a figure like Walther von der Vogelweide (ca.
1170–1230), who seemed much easier to claim as a national hero. Here was a Ger-
man writer who hated the pope, loved the emperor, and even wrote a song in praise
of German women. Ludwig Uhland’s 1822 biography of Walther singles out this
medieval poet’s “Vaterlandsliebe” (love of the fatherland) as one of his most en-
dearing traits: “No one recognized and empathized with the unique character of his
people [die Eigenthümlichkeit seines Volkes] the way he did.”25
More recent scholars have challenged the romantic image of Walther’s

German patriotism.26 As a traveling singer moving from one court to the
next, Walther depended on the generosity of his patrons. Thus we often can-
not be sure whether his political stance at a given point in time reflects his
deep-seated personal convictions or should be viewed as part of a strategic
effort to keep a roof over his head and food on the table. In any case, the
political situation during the decades in which Walther wrote was far too
complicated to speak of “Germany” in any modern sense of the word. In the
present discussion, I focus only on a few pivotal moments in Walther’s ca-
reer, rather than trying to do justice to the entire oeuvre of this exceptionally
talented and multifaceted writer. As in the case of the Song of Anno, close
reading of even a few of Walther’s poems requires a certain amount of his-
torical detail, but such particulars are necessary if we are to understand the
political import of his work.
Walther’s political poetry distinguishes him from other German Min-
nesänger of the period. Poets typically specialized either in the Minnesang, a
highly stylized form of love poetry sung for a courtly audience, or the Sang-
spruch, didactic poems or commentaries on contemporary events sung by wan-
dering minstrels for noble patrons. Walther was the first to excel in both
genres.27 Both the Minnesang and the much longer romances or ritterliche
Epen (chivalric epics) of the sort written by Wolfram von Eschenbach and
Gottfried von Strasbourg depicted an idealized aristocratic society conceived
in deliberate opposition to the actual state of affairs.28 From Erich Auerbach’s
critical perspective, the refusal on the part of courtly poets to represent reality
was unfortunate: “Courtly culture gives rise to the idea, which long remained a
factor of considerable importance in Europe, that nobility, greatness, and in-
trinsic values have nothing in common with everyday reality.”29 Walther’s po-
etry offers an exception to this rule, as it suggests that such values do or at least
should have something in common with everyday reality, even if the actuality
of people and their rulers generally falls short of the ideal.
The iconic portrait of Walther von der Vogelweide in the Great Heidelberg
Song Manuscript (Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, or Codex Manesse)
creates the impression that he was an introspective writer of the sort that was
later considered typical of the German nation of poets and thinkers (Dichter
und Denker). Walther sits in a stylized landscape with his legs crossed. His
head rests on his left hand and is tilted toward the side as he gazes down at a
manuscript page that he holds in his right. The image seems to have been in-
spired by the opening lines of one of his most famous poems.
Ich saz ûf eime steine

und dahte bein mit beine,
dar ûf satzt ich den ellenbogen;
ich hete in mîne hant gesmogen
daz kinne und ein mîn wange.
I sat on a stone
and crossed my legs.
I placed my elbow on my leg.
I had cradled in my hand
My chin and one of my cheeks.30
The poet ponders how difficult it is to attain worldly possessions and yet
preserve one’s honor and find favor with God. The poem would thus seem to
be religious or philosophical in nature and almost romantic in its introspective
tone. Toward the end of the poem, however, Walther shifts from eternal ques-
tions about the human condition to a direct reference to his contemporary his-
torical situation.
Untriuwe ist in der sâze,

gewalt vert ûf der strâze,
fride unde reht sint sêre wunt.
Treachery lies in ambush,

violence travels on the street,
peace and justice are badly damaged.31
These lines refer to the political chaos and civil war that followed the sudden
death of King Henry VI in September 1197. At that time, Walther still enjoyed
the support of his patron in Vienna, Duke Frederick of Austria, but Frederick
died in April of the following year, and Walther then suddenly found himself
cast out of the Viennese court.32 Forced to seek support elsewhere, Walther
found refuge with the newly crowned King Philip, brother of Henry VI and son
of Frederick Barbarossa. But Philip had a rival in Otto von Poitou, who had
also been crowned king by opposing factions, thus precipitating the violence
that Walther describes in his poem.
Walther’s political commentary becomes more pointed in the second of
three poems that have been linked on the basis of metrical analysis and histori-
cal references to the period between 1198 and 1201.33 He begins with almost
Hobbesian reflections on the state of nature as a site of perpetual conflict. He

has observed everything that creeps on the earth or flies through the air and has
concluded that mutual antipathy is the norm: “Keinez lebet âne haz” (Nothing
lives without hatred). The animal species survive only by choosing a king and
distinguishing clearly between master and servants; even insects have kings
(“diu mugge [hât] ir künec”), but the Germans do not: “Sô wê dir, tiuschiu
zunge, / wie stêt dîn ordenunge!” (Woe to you who speak the German lan-
guage; / what is the state of your social order?) Walther concludes his poem
with a command.
Bekêrâ dich, bekêre,

die cirkel sint zu hêre,
die armen künege dringent dich.
Philippe setze den weisen ûf, und heiz sie treten hinder sich!
Change your ways!

The diadems [literally, “circles”] are too exalted;
the lesser kings are putting pressure on you.
Philip, put on the orphan [a crown jewel] and order them to step back!34
In a landmark work of scholarship written more than a century ago, Kon-

rad Burdach decoded the meaning of these obscure lines by Walther, in the
spirit of dispelling romantic myths about the medieval poet. At the time when
Burdach wrote, it was commonly assumed that “die armen künege” referred to
the lesser German nobles who contested Philip’s authority, but Burdach argues
that the word “cirkel” refers to a diadem, a circular golden headband signifying
royal authority—something that none of the petty German princes would have
worn at the time. The “armen künege” must therefore refer to the foreign kings
who supported Philip, he concludes, and not to the lesser German nobility.
They are “poor” (arm) because they are mere kings, whereas Philip is an em-
peror; the crown with the special jewel signifies that he and he alone is the le-
gitimate heir to ancient Rome. Thus Burdach concludes that the poem is not a
protest against Germany’s territorial fragmentation but, rather, “the first monu-
mental literary evidence for the idea of the German nation; the polemic is di-
rected against foreign countries, against foreign tongues.”35
Burdach oversimplifies in ways that only become evident when we more
closely consider the competing claims of the rival factions. Philip was a mem-
ber of the Hohenstaufen dynasty; as the son of one emperor and the brother of
another, his claim to the throne seemed strong. But Henry VI’s infant son Fred-
erick (1194–1250) had been elected German king in 1196; thus, by proclaim-
ing himself king, Philip was technically usurping the legitimate line of succes-
sion.36 His rival, Otto, had the advantage of being “crowned in the right place,
Aachen, and by the right man, the archbishop of Cologne.”37 Otto had not only
the support of nobles along the Lower Rhine but also ties to powerful foreign
allies: he had been raised at the Anglo-Norman court in England and had the
support of King Richard I (the Lionheart); he also held lands in French Poitou
and Aquitaine. Philip, for his part, held lands in Italy and also had ties to
France. Thus the distinction that Burdach makes between factional fighting
within Germany and German conflicts with foreign powers makes little sense.
In a world governed by dynastic loyalties, family relations inevitably linked the
broader sphere of European politics to efforts to claim kingship over those who
spoke the “tiuschiu zunge.”
Two further considerations complicate Burdach’s effort to impose a na-
tional framework on medieval controversies. First, any conflict between Eu-
rope’s secular princes also became entangled with the sacred authority of the
pope. Innocent III was elected in January 1198. Like Gregory VII before him,
Innocent sought to assert the authority of the Catholic Church over worldly
rulers. As Otto seemed more willing than Philip to make concessions to papal
authority, the pope supported Otto and, in 1201, excommunicated Philip. In the
third of his three poems inspired by these events, Walther complains bitterly
about the pope’s decision.38 Second, Walther describes a conflict between
Philip and Otto that is not just a quarrel between intra-German factions and
their foreign allies but also a struggle between rivals who claim the universal
authority of the Holy Roman Empire against the limited powers of local kings,
the “armen künege.” The playing field is not level: the pope and the emperor
strive for supremacy within Western Christendom, which is conceived in uni-
versal, rather than national, terms; each traces a lineage of ancient authority
that leads back to either Caesar or Saint Peter. By encouraging Philip to put on
the imperial crown, Walther is telling him to claim his rightful role as universal
ruler of Western Christendom, against his petty secular rivals and over and
above the authority of the pope.
In sum, the local conflict between Otto and Philip for power within
German-speaking lands has wide-reaching repercussions for European dynas-
tic politics within the still broader context of the struggle between emperor and
pope for the leadership of the universal Christian church. As even Burdach
concedes, Walther’s “appeal to the patriotic conscience is an appeal in the spirit
of the Middle Ages, in the spirit of universalism, in which the state can only be
conceived as a world empire and national greatness only in terms of ruling the
entire world.”39 Universalism is not nationalism, at least not in the modern,

delimiting sense that pits one nation against others. Walther’s partisan support
of one rival to the throne against another takes place in the context of compli-
cated secular and religious rivalries that cannot be explained solely in terms of
national loyalty or international strife.
The historical situation in Germany changed considerably over the course
of the next decade. After initially supporting Otto as the German emperor,
Pope Innocent III changed course for political reasons and decided to back
Philip instead. But just as he had won papal blessing and was about to consoli-
date his power in Germany, Philip was murdered in June 1208.40 The recently
defeated Otto was suddenly back in the picture: he married one of Philip’s
daughters and won the pope’s blessing when he signaled that he was willing to
concede control of disputed lands in Italy. As soon as he was crowned by the
pope in Rome in October 1209, however, Otto went back on his word and oc-
cupied the Italian territories after all. Innocent promptly excommunicated him
in November 1210 and secretly encouraged the German princes to reject their
new emperor. The pope now backed Henry VI’s young son Frederick, who had
been duly elected emperor in 1196, when he was only two years old. Now ap-
proaching the age of majority, Frederick had become a more viable candidate
for the throne. Once again, Germany had two rival emperors and faced re-
newed civil war.41
In 1198, Walther had enthusiastically supported Philip, but in a series of
poems written in March 1212, he praises Philip’s former rival Otto, while re-
maining bitterly critical of the pope for intervening in imperial politics. Wal-
ther’s newfound loyalty to Otto is complicated by his relationship to other Ger-
man princes. A poem written in March 1212, on the occasion of Emperor
Otto’s return from Italy to Frankfurt, begins,
Hêr keiser, sît ir willekomen!

der küneges name ist iu benomen,
des schînet iuwer krône ob allen krônen.
Welcome, Lord Kaiser!

The title of king has been taken from you,
but your crown outshines all others.42
Pope Innocent’s excommunication has stripped Otto of his royal title, but pre-
cisely for that reason (“des” = gerade deswegen), Otto reigns supreme. The
logic of this paradoxical utterance would seem to be that he who is cursed by
an evil pope is blessed in the eyes of his subjects.43 After going on to praise
Otto’s power and goodness, Walther mentions “news” (as if pulling Otto closer
to get his attention) and comes to the point.
Dar zuo sag ich iu maere:

die fürsten sint iu undertân,
si habent mit zühten iuwer kunft erbeitet.
I have news for you:

The princes are subordinate to you.
They awaited your arrival with knightly virtue.
Given that at least some of the knights were well known to have been plotting
against the king, one can imagine sidelong glances and concealed smirks among
those in the audience and perhaps a raised eyebrow on the part of the king. Wal-
ther is not finished: he singles out one knight for his particular loyalty.
und ie der Mîssenaere:

derst iemer iuwer âne wân,
von gote wurde ein engel ê verleitet.
And the man from Meissen:

He has always been yours without fail.
An angel would be more likely to be led astray from God.
Despite Walther’s effusive praise, the knight mentioned, Dietrich von Meissen,
was probably already among the conspirators against Otto and would certainly
abandon him within a year.44
Walther’s own loyalty could shift just as quickly. In a poem probably writ-
ten in late 1212, he offers a considerably cooler defense of Dietrich. Walther
urges the emperor to show his now-fallen angel mercy for his “missetât” (mis-
deed), on the somewhat shaky grounds that Dietrich was at least Otto’s open
enemy (“sîn vîent offenbâre”), while other cowards conspired secretly (“die
zagen truogen stillen rât”).45 In poems that seem aimed directly at Dietrich,
Walther is harsher, complaining that his services have been hardly rewarded.
“Lob ich in, sô lobe er mich” (If I am to praise him, let him praise me), com-
plains Walther, who magnanimously claims that if properly compensated, he
would be kindly disposed to overlook previous insults (“des andern alles des
wil ich / in minneclîch erlâzen”).46 Walther simply brushes off complaints that
his intercessions on Dietrich’s behalf have not been as effective as they might
have been: “Het er mir dô gelônet baz, / ich dient im aber eteswaz” (If he had
rewarded me better, / I would have served him better).47 Even emperors were
not exempt from Walther’s wrath. By 1214, Walther had shifted loyalty from
Otto to Frederick II, a move that he justified by the former’s failure to reward
him properly for services rendered.
Ich hân hêrn Otten triuwe, er welle mich noch rîchen:

wie nam abe er mîn dienest ie sô trügelîchen?
I have Herr Otto’s promise that he will still grant me riches:

But how did he accept my services so deceitfully?
Walther goes on in this vein, begging Friedrich to give him appropriate reward
and viciously comparing his former patron to a stingy dwarf (“getwerc”).48
Looking back over Walther’s career, we find that he supports three differ-
ent emperors at various times: at the turn of the thirteenth century, he backs
Philipp over Otto; in 1212–13, he promotes Otto over Frederick; and in 1214,
he shifts course again and abandons Otto for Frederick. Sometimes Walther
champions the emperor directly, and sometimes he intervenes on behalf of one
of the emperor’s lieges. Here, too, the situation is unstable: Walther first defends
Dietrich of Meissen in public (possibly with the knowledge that he is not as
loyal to the emperor as he seems) and then rejects him bitterly because he fails
to reward his poet-propagandist. There are some constants in Walther’s world:
he consistently supports any given emperor over the pope. His piety seems gen-
uine, as does his increasing world-weariness toward the end of his life, when he
waxes enthusiastic about the idea of a crusade (though at a time when he must
have known that he was no longer capable of making the journey).
The scholarly debate over Walther von der Vogelweide has long centered
on the question of how we are to reconcile his consistent loyalty to the German
emperor against the pope with his inconsistent shifting of support from one
would-be emperor to another. Two answers have been suggested: either Wal-
ther does not waver in his support of the office of emperor even as he is prag-
matic about which particular individual is best suited to sit on the throne at any
given time, or Walther is only concerned about himself and will say anything
and support anyone who will pay for his supper.49 I suspect that the truth lies
somewhere between the two. Although it is always dangerous to impose an
anachronistic model of romantic confession onto his stylized and politically
strategic poetry, Walther does seem too deeply concerned about questions of
social order and religious salvation to be reduced to a purely cynical songster.

Yet he had no social security, no health insurance, no royalties from his publi-
cations; if he was to continue to compose songs or, indeed, to survive at all, he
had to take material considerations into account. His famous poem in praise of
German women was probably part of an unsuccessful attempt to regain support
at the Viennese court, but it may also have reflected his personal views. In any
case, nationalism, in the modern sense, would have been alien to Walther, be-
cause it did not yet exist. Like the poet of the Song of Anno, Walther worked in
a world of empire, balancing religious faith and imperial politics against papal
decrees and the shifting loyalties of local lords.
Early Modern Nuremberg
The decline of the German monarchy in the late Middle Ages coincided with
the consolidation of power in the individual territories and the growing wealth
of the imperial cities. The authors of the High Middle Ages tended to be either
members of the aristocracy or ministerials, who were technically bound in
service to a particular lord or court but were increasingly regarded as de facto
members of the nobility; their literature celebrated the aristocratic ideals of
court society.50 The Renaissance humanists, in contrast, were often educated
members of the middle class who found work in the growing cities and cen-
ters of territorial power. They had a sense of group solidarity based on educa-
tion, lifestyle, and achievement rather than birth.51 Many picked new Latin
names to obscure their humble origins: the man known to posterity as Conrad
Celtis was born Conrad Pickel, the son of a vine grower near Würzburg;52 his
fellow humanist, Crotus Rubeanus, was the son of peasants.53 Ulrich von Hut-
ten was unusual in that he came from a family of independent imperial knights
(Reichsritter) subordinate only to the emperor; he also never changed his
name.54 Yet Hutten followed a typical course of study that led him from one
university to the next, including at Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, and
Leipzig, just as Celtis studied or taught at Heidelberg, Krakow, Ingolstadt, and
Vienna. Both Celtis and Hutten spent time in Italy, and both were part of an
international community of humanists that extended from Rome to Oxford
and from Paris to Prague. They resurrected the Latin of classical antiquity
from its debased medieval form and distanced themselves from the uncouth
masses, who were often uncomfortable reminders of their own modest begin-
nings.55 In the oral tradition of the High Middle Ages, it was possible to be a
poet and not know how to read or write (much ink has been spilled on the
question of whether or not Wolfram von Eschenbach was illiterate, as an off-

hand comment in one of his works seems to imply56); it is certain that Wol-
fram, Walther, and their fellow poets composed works for a largely illiterate
audience.57 Humanists, in contrast, were defined by, above all, their love of
books and the written word.58
One of the new literary genres that emerged with the growth of Germany’s
imperial cities was the Städtelob (city praise). In the course of the fourteenth
century, wandering political poets (Spruchdichter) like Walther von der Vogel-
weide were gradually replaced by scribes who settled in one city, where they
maintained archives and kept chronicles of local history.59 Among the earliest
and most influential works in praise of a city was a poem written by Hans Ro-
senplüt in 1447. His Der Spruch von Nürnberg (In praise of Nuremberg) is a
poem of 396 lines written in German Knittelvers, the doggerel that would be
popularized by Hans Sachs and immortalized in the opening monolog of
Goethe’s Faust.60 Rosenplüt praises the city’s pious clerics, wise rulers, and
law-abiding subjects. He takes pride in the city’s charitable institutions for the
sick and poor, highlights its most significant relics, and insists that although the
city loves peace, it has sturdy defensive walls in case of an attack. Rosenplüt’s
Nuremberg is, above all, a city of commerce and the arts. Merchants come
from near and far, trading in valuable goods and speaking exotic languages,
while artisans produce works of exceptional utility and unsurpassed beauty.
The last decade of the century saw the publication of a far more ambitious
work in Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle of the World (Weltchronik). The mas-
sive volume was published in Nuremberg in 1493 in two editions, the first in
Latin and the second in German. To speak of Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514)
as the author of the Chronicle is somewhat misleading, in that the medical doc-
tor, humanist scholar, and book collector compiled most of the material from
other, previously published sources.61 One is tempted to describe the work
anachronistically as a coffee-table book, a lavishly illustrated and expensively
produced volume intended more for display and desultory browsing than sus-
tained cover-to-cover reading, yet while such volumes today often combine
high production values and correspondingly high prices with relatively trivial
subject matter, the Chronicle covers the momentous topic of world history
from the Creation to Judgment Day. Approximately twenty-one hundred cop-
ies of the book were printed, about two-thirds of them in Latin and the rest in
German. About seven hundred of these works still exist today, which suggests
that they were highly valued and carefully preserved for many generations.62
Between the alpha and omega of salvation history in the Chronicle are descrip-
tions of events ranging from the Trojan War to the founding of Rome, lists of
Greek gods and Christian saints, and miniature biographies of diverse figures
from Sappho to Mohammed.
The geographical scope of Schedel’s Chronicle is not quite global, as the
discoveries of Columbus in America and Bartolomeus Diaz in Africa, then
very recent, are not reflected in the text.63 But it does survey all of Western
Christendom from the Middle East to the British Isles. Noteworthy is the new
stress on the German nation within this broad historical and geographical
framework. The volume ends with a large-scale map of north-central Europe
that has been identified as “the first map of Germany ever printed in a book.”64
The page preceding the map consists of a dense paragraph that comments on
the “image of Germany or the German nation” (pildnus [Bildnis] Germanie
oder Teutscher nation) that follows, outlining its natural borders and physical
features, praising the ruggedly handsome inhabitants in terms reminiscent of
Tacitus, and concluding that there would be much more to say in praise of these
good Christian people if space permitted. The map has no clear national bor-
ders of the sort that one would find today, and the political organization of the
German territories is proudly imperial, not national. A large-scale illustration
elsewhere in the volume depicts the organization of the empire, with the em-
peror seated on a throne and surrounded by the seven electors; the Chronicle
also contains passages in praise of emperors, from Charlemagne to Frederick
III and Maximilian I.65 In keeping with the late medieval trend noted earlier,
the center of the empire is seen as having moved from Rome to Germany, as
the Chronicle explains in a section titled “On the Origin and Development of
the Emperorship and How It Came to the German Nation.”66 Nevertheless, the
Chronicle treats the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation as the legiti-
mate continuation of a tradition that extends back into antiquity and not as a
modern nation-state.
Schedel’s Chronicle of the World tends to focus primarily on individual
cities rather than territories or nations. Scattered throughout its sweeping nar-
rative of world history are descriptions of major capitals of the ancient world
(Jerusalem, Constantinople, Carthage, Troy) and modern metropolises (Flor-
ence, Paris, Venice, and Rome), together with illustrations, some of which are
based on accurate drawings of the time.67 As might be expected, German cities
are particularly well represented, with Nuremberg taking pride of place. A
large-scale cityscape drawn by Michael Wohlgemut covers two full pages, fol-
lowed by a narrative more than double the length afforded other German cit-
ies.68 Like Hans Rosenplüt before him, Schedel praises the city’s pious and
diligent people, while tracing its origins back to Charlemagne and ancient
Rome. The city is clearly identified as belonging to Germany: “Nuremberg is
a frequently visited city, well known throughout Germany [in gantzem

teutschen land] and among foreign peoples.” Indeed, Nuremberg stands di-
rectly in the geographical center of Germany (“schier in dem mittel teutschs-
lands gelegen”), just as the description of the city stands at the center of Sche-
del’s text.69 Yet the question of Nuremberg’s national identity is specified in
subnational tribal terms and placed in a supranational imperial context. Some
say that the city dwellers are Franks, and others say that they are Bavarian, but
“the Nurembergers prefer to think of themselves as neither Bavarians nor
Franks but, rather, as a third, distinct race.” Ever since they became part of the
Roman Empire, they have remained unswerving in their loyalty to it.70 Sche-
del’s Nuremberg is thus not Germany’s capital in the sense that it would be-
come in the imagination of modern German nationalists but, rather, “the de
facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation”;71 that is, rather
than being the capital of a nation-state in a delimiting sense that clearly distin-
guishes it from other European nations, it serves as the national center of a
universal empire. In the words of Len Scales that I cited already in chapter 2,
“the universal found a focus in the German.”72
The Chronicle must have seemed in need of revision almost immediately,
because even before the German edition appeared, Conrad Celtis had signed a
contract in which he agreed to revise the Latin text.73 We do not know exactly
what changes Celtis agreed to make, but it seems likely that the editors hoped
for a more precise description of Germany than was possible in Schedel’s
sprawling work.74 Celtis never fulfilled his contractual obligations, but the plan
may have inspired an independent project of his own. As his inaugural lecture
at the University of Ingolstadt had shown, Celtis was a fervent German patriot
and the first German professor to lecture on the importance of Tacitus’s re-
cently discovered Germania.75 Sometime between 1498 and 1500, Celtis pub-
lished a new edition of Tacitus, together with a new poem of his own, 293 lines
of Latin hexameters, known as the Germania generalis.76 The full title of Celt-
is’s poem, “De situ et moribus Germanie additiones” (Additional comments
concerning German geography and customs), indicates that it was intended as
a supplement to Tacitus that would continue his description of ancient Ger-
many up to the present. Celtis soon republished the poem as a fragment of a
new work in progress, to be known as Germania illustrata.77
Celtis never completed Germania illustrata, but he wrote a substantial
chapter on the city of Nuremberg, which he published together with a new edi-
tion of Germania generalis and other poems in 1502; already in 1495, Celtis
had submitted his description of Nuremberg to the city’s rulers.78 De origine,
situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergae libellus (Little book about Nuremberg’s
origin, site, customs, and institutions) is an unabashedly patriotic work con-

ceived as Celtis’s gift to his beloved Germany (“mein liebes Deutschland”).79
Although he introduces the text as something of a teaser for the larger work to
come, his claim that Nuremberg lies at the geographical center not only of
Germany but also of Europe lends the city a representative status that renders
the rest of Germania illustrata superfluous in a certain sense: to speak of
Nuremberg is to speak of Germany, and to speak of Germany is to speak of the
entire Holy Roman Empire.
Celtis’s high praise for the city’s hardworking, pious, and charitable in-
habitants is reminiscent of praise from previous authors, although his work is
far more detailed than that of either Rosenplüt or Schedel. Celtis was not a
permanent resident of Nuremberg, but he knew it well, and his Norimberga
offers a window onto the world of an early modern city. Initially claiming that
Nuremberg was settled by the “Noriker,” a Germanic tribe on the run from the
Huns (24), he later asserts that it was founded by the immortal gods and has
been preserved by divine mercy, “as a site in which all Germanic tribes and our
neighboring peoples flow together as if in a common homeland” (75). His de-
scription of the self-governing city bursts with a local pride that is augmented
by Nuremberg’s special role as the emperor’s primary residence. Celtis’s re-
peated stress on Nuremberg’s cosmopolitan atmosphere adds to the sense that
local patriotism not only coexists with but is even enhanced by a sense of be-
longing to a larger empire. Observing with astonishment how the citizens
switch to completely different dialects—Swabian, Frankish, Bavarian, and that
of the Upper Palatinate—to meet the needs of foreign visitors who come to the
city from its various surrounding regions, he notes that “the willingness and
ability to speak different languages is highly respected among them” (43).
“Nuremberg’s location at the crossroads of twelve trade routes . . . made it a
center of international commerce,” note Tracy Adams and Stephen G. Nich-
ols,80 and the flow of goods prompted a correspondingly high interest in the
latest news. Celtis reports, “Indeed, the city is informed about everything that
happens in Europe, keeps quiet about nothing, is keen for information”; it is
eager to know about foreign events and equally concerned for its reputation at
home and abroad (46). In a sense, Celtis’s Nuremberg anticipates the modern
phenomenon of the “global city,” a local crossroads of transnational exchange
under the universal rule of the Holy Roman Empire.81
Making Celtis’s Norimberga both fascinating and upsetting is the grim
reality that lurks behind the city’s golden facade. Celtis describes a famine in
1491 that drove starving citizens to boiling acorns and chewing bark, desperate
measures that only led to broken teeth, stomach cramps, and painful death.
Emaciated peasants then emerged from the forest to beg for food, “like starv-
ing cattle before an empty manger” (55). One man caught stealing was alleg-
edly happy to be hanged in hope of going to heaven rather than being forced to
live on in this wretched world. Celtis goes on to note that although the citizens
desire peace, the city is highly fortified and always on guard against foreign
attack. The authorities are equally concerned to prevent rebellions from within
the city, to which end no public assemblies of the lower classes are permitted.
Those who do disturb the civic order face swift and terrible punishment: for
example, women caught in adultery are exposed to public shame and forced to
stagger under the weight of a stone collar while surrounded by jeering crowds,
a penalty that Celtis characterizes as “indeed an amusing spectacle that pro-
vokes much laughter and a very effective way to counter women’s innate ten-
dency toward vice [die Lasterhaftigkeit der Weiber]” (66–67). Celtis devotes
an entire chapter to graphic descriptions of punishments, including torture,
flogging, blinding, mutilation, and execution by drowning, burning, hanging,
or being buried alive. The bodies of executed criminals are left dangling on the
gallows to be eaten by birds; when a breeze blows, the corpses bump into one
another like grotesque wind chimes.
Most disturbing is the special hatred reserved for Nuremberg’s Jews. An-
tisemitism already runs like a red thread through Schedel’s Chronicle of the
World, which includes the tale of a Christian boy allegedly murdered by Jews
who required Christian blood for their festival of unleavened bread. Stories of
Jews stealing Communion wafers are repeated several times, together with
vehement denunciations of the “odious, wretched, and desolate people”; a
woodcut of caricatured Jews being burned alive is reproduced no less than
twelve times in the course of the work.82 Conrad Celtis, for his part, notes that
the Jews had recently been expelled from Nuremberg because they poisoned
all the wells in the city. “This people must indeed be exterminated or eternally
banished to the Caucasus beyond the Ural Mountains,” he concludes, “be-
cause they have so often inspired the wrath of heaven and damaged and de-
stroyed human society” (37). Celtis goes on to note that Nuremberg’s remain-
ing Jews have been forced to live on the outskirts of the city, a fate that he
claims they richly deserve: “Happy indeed,” he writes, “are the cities and
countries that cleanse themselves of this human pestilence” (73). Nuremberg
expelled the city’s Jews in 1499, shortly after Celtis wrote Norimberga and
three years before it was published. Ironically, as Stephen Brockmann notes,
“the expulsion of the Jews” may have been one contributing factor toward
“Nuremberg’s ultimate economic decline.”83 When some Jews finally returned
to the city in the nineteenth century, it had long since been transformed from
the cosmopolitan center of the early modern empire to the imaginary capital
of the German nation.
Conclusion
Popular enthusiasm for the Middle Ages continues today, although, as Heinz
Schlaffer observes, most people are more interested in reading about the medi-
eval past than in delving into the original literature.84 Of course, scholars con-
tinue to study medieval and early modern texts, but the field tends toward spe-
cialization and is among the most vulnerable in times of budget cuts and
curricular streamlining. The exotic appeal of an era that poets evoke with im-
ages of “charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / of perilous seas”85
can also fuel the impression that it is alien, obscure, and ultimately irrelevant
to contemporary concerns. Recent work in colonial and global studies has
sought to correct this misperception by challenging “the fantasy that an earlier
Europe was the opposite of Europe today.”86 In the effort to “dislodge the lin-
gering Eurocentrism in our literary histories,” critics have begun to explore
interactions between empires around the globe, a geographical displacement
that simultaneously dismantles temporal “binaries of premodern and mod-
ern.”87 Complementary to these efforts to “provincialize Europe”88 by placing
its empires in global perspective are others that focus on the history of intra-
European colonial conquests. “Europe,” concludes Robert Bartlett, “the initia-
tor of one of the world’s major processes of conquest, colonization and cultural
transformation, was also the product of one.”89 He writes about the making of
a European identity between the years 950 and 1350, but the process of internal
colonization he describes anticipates the intra-European political dynamics of
much later periods as well. Recent suggestions that we might view today’s
European Union as a distant mirror of the prenational Middle Ages have fur-
ther sought to bridge the gap that has long divided modern from medieval stud-
ies. This chapter’s brief examinations of the Song of Anno, Walther’s political
poetry, and early modern depictions of Nuremberg were undertaken in the
spirit of those who seek to reframe literary studies in the longue durée, without,
however, making any pretense toward systematic coverage of the major works
of German medieval literature. I have here sought only to explore “the singu-
larity of the literary event”90 in ways that suggest how it might be possible to
open not-so-magic casements to a past that is perhaps not so distant after all.
Chapter 4
Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects
German baroque drama has always been difficult to incorporate into the nar-
rative of the national literature. As Walter Benjamin noted in his Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama), Goethe, Schiller,
and the other dramatists of the Sturm und Drang looked for inspiration to
Shakespeare and not the German-language writers of the seventeenth century.
With their paucity of action and long speeches in a German language that
seemed old-fashioned and stilted, the dramas were deemed bühnenfremd, un-
suitable for the stage.1 The prejudice against the baroque began with a revolu-
tion in eighteenth-century taste, when good art was equated with the authentic
expression of the rule-breaking genius. The rhetorically based literature of the
baroque seemed coldly calculated to achieve a particular effect, in contrast to
the purposeless pleasure afforded by autonomous works of art.2 For those in-
tent on rediscovering repositories of the national culture in Germanic sagas,
fairy tales, and folk songs, the works of highly educated civil servants such as
Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–83)
seemed little more than arcane rhetorical exercises. To be sure, the seventeenth-
century authors were not immune to patriotic sentiments. Martin Opitz en-
couraged German vernacular poetry and inspired Gryphius to write sonnets
about the physical and spiritual devastation of Germany during the Thirty
Years’ War. Learned societies campaigned for the purity of the German lan-
guage and speculated about its Adamic origins.3 Grimmelshausen wrote his
programmatically titled picaresque novel Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669) about
life in war-torn Germany, and Lohenstein wrote a massive courtly novel about
the ur-Germanic hero Hermann. Yet, for all their concern about the fate of the
fatherland and its language, the writers remained “totally non-popular” (dur-
chaus unvolkstümlich), thoroughly divorced from the language and interests
of the common people.4
Old prejudices die hard. Heinz Schlaffer’s Die kurze Geschichte der
deutschen Literatur (Short history of German literature, 2002) is particularly
55
noteworthy in this regard because it reached a wide audience of educated read-

ers both within and beyond the academy. Schlaffer begins his brief comments
on German literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by urging his
readers to acknowledge the unpleasant fact that it is not very good, particularly
when set against the works of writers like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tasso, and
Milton. To back up his argument, Schlaffer offers a series of reasons that would
be familiar to earlier generations of literary critics: German literature of the
period is belated, lagging behind the vanguard of other national literatures;
baroque literature fails to explore new imaginative worlds or express deep feel-
ings; the German language of the period is awkward and artificial; poets em-
bellish conventional truths with flowery language that becomes a mere “orna-
ment of an ornament” (Ornament eines Ornaments). As a result, the literature
remains “divorced from the everyday experience and speech of the common
people,” oversaturated with foreign influences, and thus not really German at
all—“not the result of an independent German development, but rather the
imitation of other national literatures.”5
Schlaffer does not cite Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel in his brief exposé
of German literary history, but if he had, he would have had to come to terms
with a very different understanding of the German baroque, as a period that did
express the national character. As Jane O. Newman has shown in her study of
the intellectual-historical context in which he wrote, Benjamin was deeply in-
fluenced by the anticlassical aesthetics of Wilhelm Worringer and Alois Riegl.6
In Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908), Worringer
pleads for a new appreciation of non-European art.7 If we measure all art
against the standard of Greek antiquity and the European Renaissance, he ar-
gues, we will fail to understand many of the world’s cultures, both past and
present. Europeans are used to a naturalistic aesthetic that elicits empathetic
identification on the part of the viewer, but “primitives” and “Orientals” are
driven toward abstract art. While the Greek and Renaissance artists reproduce
reality in a way that reflects their sense of being at home in the world, primi-
tives seek refuge in abstract forms from a hostile and incomprehensible world
of appearances. Worringer’s own taste in art was relatively conservative, and
his essay was written before the expressionists created their most famous
works, yet many of those who read Abstraction and Empathy understood it as
a manifesto of the new art movement.8 Impatient with the tired historicism of
conventional culture and anxious in their age of “transcendental homeless-
ness,” the expressionists were drawn to an art of abstraction and felt an affinity
toward the primitive art of ancient and distant cultures.
Worringer extended his discussion of anticlassical aesthetics into the
Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects 57
Middle Ages in his next influential book, Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in
Gothic, 1911), which he viewed as a “direct sequel” to his earlier work. In the
later work, he raises questions about “that complex of abstract art which is
closest to us, namely to the stylistic phenomenon of Gothic.”9 Worringer be-
gins by restating his fundamental belief that the artistic style of a particular
people expresses their mentality and has little or nothing to do with their tech-
nical ability. Societies create the art they want to produce, not the art they can
produce; “a history of ability” yields to “the history of the evolution of art as a
history of volition.”10 Worringer goes on to restate the basic difference between
primitive and classical art that he had developed in Abstraction and Empathy:
primitives employ abstract forms to seek shelter from a hostile world, whereas
the stylistic naturalism of classical art emanates from societies that are in peace
with their surroundings. Worringer adds a brief discussion of “Oriental man”
as a kindred spirit to the primitive and of Oriental art as reflecting a similar
antipathy toward the natural world of illusion or Maya, although on an infi-
nitely more sophisticated level. All three art forms—the primitive, classical,
and Oriental—reflect a worldview that is essentially static: the primitive and
the Oriental are unchanging in their antipathy toward the world, whereas the
classical is steady in its appreciation of the same. Gothic man is different: he
does not understand the world yet, but there is the sense that one day he will.
Gothic art is the product of this transitional period: it is provisional and, thus,
vital, expressive, youthful, and dynamic. Even more, it is almost crazed in its
wild energy. It radiates “a confused mania of ecstasy, a convulsive yearning to
be merged into a super-sensuous rapture”; it produces an “exalted hysteria
which is above all else the distinguishing mark of the Gothic phenomenon.”11
Walter Benjamin adds the German baroque to the catalog of anticlassical,
proto-expressionist literature and argues that the current intellectual climate
may have affinities with the seemingly alien seventeenth-century texts: “For
like expressionism, the baroque is not so much an age of genuine artistic
achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will [eines unab
lenkbaren Kunstwollens].”12 Benjamin goes on to describe the spirit of the
German baroque in terms that evoke the belief in a quintessentially German
sense of tragic-heroic pessimism, a belief that we also find in such contempo-
rary works as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and Thomas
Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). According to Benjamin,
German baroque drama has its historical roots in medieval mystery plays but
shifts the focus from heaven to earth: “the German Trauerspiel is taken up en-
tirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition.” Benjamin concedes that
the “rejection of the eschatology” is typical of other European dramas at the
time, and yet he insists that “the rash flight into a nature deprived of grace” is
“specifically German.”13 Benjamin traces the affinities of the German baroque
to Albrecht Dürer’s brooding image of Melancholy and to Shakespeare’s Ham-
let. He points out that its major authors were all Lutherans who rejected the
notion of salvation through good works in the spirit of “German paganism and
the grim belief in the subjection of man to fate” (germanischen Heidentums
und finsteren Glaubens an die Schicksalsverfallenheit).14 The romantics cham-
pioned a notion of the symbol as a vehicle that carries us directly from the
beautiful to the divine, Benjamin contends,15 whereas baroque allegory ex-
presses the anguish of a world in which the path to heaven has been blocked
and the earth lies in ruins, where history has become only a process of degen-
eration, classical harmonies have been replaced by dissonance, and mutilated
corpses litter a devastated landscape.
Benjamin wrote The Origins of German Tragedy when the memory of the
First World War was still fresh and when traumatized veterans were every-
where to be seen in German cities. Otto Dix and George Grosz were painting
horrific images of the war and its aftermath, Erich Maria Remarque was soon
to write his antiwar novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western
Front, 1929), and the pioneers of German film were producing their “shell
shock cinema.”16 It is easy to see how the graphic violence and dark pessimism
of German baroque drama could serve Benjamin as a distant mirror of his own
times.17 Given the widespread revulsion against the war and the fact that Ben-
jamin would take his own life in the course of a desperate attempt, just fifteen
years later, to escape a new and even more deadly outbreak of violence, it
seems difficult to believe that some of the ideas developed in his book on Ger-
man tragedy should have found their way into the work of scholars sympa-
thetic with the Nazi regime. Yet, as Newman has shown, such was the case.18
When Benjamin writes of the German baroque as the expression of an “unre-
mitting artistic will [Kunstwollen],” he plays into essentialist notions of na-
tional cultures in which the individual becomes subsumed within the collec-
tive. The writer becomes a medium through which is channeled the spirit of the
people. Ironically, precisely the same writers’ alleged failure to achieve this
collective mind meld serves as the basis for Heinz Schlaffer’s rejection of the
German baroque. When he argues that German baroque literature is “not the
result of an independent German development, but rather the imitation of other
national literatures,” he essentially claims that it is not authentically German,
because it is überfremdet and, thus, volksfremd—saturated with foreign influ-
ences and, thus, alien to the spirit of the German people. Such claims reflect a
residual romanticism that is, at best, surprising in the work of a self-professed
Marxist, as he draws on notions of the national essence and cultural purity that
have been thoroughly discredited by the events of modern German history.
To put it in another, less ideologically charged way, both Benjamin and
Schlaffer find ways not to talk about German baroque literature. That conclu-
sion is obvious in the case of Schlaffer, who broaches the subject only for dis-
missal according to the reasons cited above, but it is less obvious for Benjamin,
who, after all, devoted a book of about two hundred pages to the topic. Yet,
despite all his enthusiasm about the seventeenth-century Trauerspiel, Benja-
min never discusses any particular work in detail or delves deeply into the po-
litical situation confronting the writers at the time. His work remains a pastiche
of excerpted quotations and broad generalizations rather than close analysis of
specific authors or texts. If we look more closely at the works of the most
prominent dramatists of the period, Gryphius and Lohenstein, we discover that
they are “typically German” in a very different sense than those who would
measure their Germanness in terms of their alleged proximity to or distance
from the “spirit of the people.” Like German-language writings of earlier and
later periods, their work struck a balance between local loyalties and imperial
politics. Both men were Silesian Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire of
the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Seventeenth-Century Silesia
Seventeenth-century Silesia was a roughly rectangular strip of land running

along the border of today’s western Poland. Like sixteenth-century Nurem-
berg, the capital city of Breslau (today’s Wrocław) was a commercial center
located on trade routes that extended across Europe and into the Middle East.19
The booming economy fueled a cultural blossoming that produced such ba-
roque authors as Martin Opitz, Friedrich von Logau, Christian Hofmann von
Hofmannswaldau, and Johann Scheffler, in addition to Gryphius and Lohen-
stein.20 The region was predominantly Protestant, but it was subordinate to the
political authority of the Hapsburg emperors in Vienna and targeted by the in-
creasingly militant Counter-Reformation. The Silesian writers thus faced chal-
lenging circumstances that they met in various ways. Gryphius, Hof-
mannswaldau, and Lohenstein became Lutheran lawyers who represented the
interests of their Silesian constituents at the imperial court. Johann Scheffler
was born and raised Lutheran but converted to Catholicism, became a priest,
and changed his name to Angelus Silesius (the Silesian Messenger). The Lu-
theran Martin Opitz worked as a private secretary to one of the leaders of the
Counter-Reformation and even translated “one of the most militant of the anti-
Protestant tracts that were used for forced conversions,” but he later undertook
diplomatic missions on behalf of the Protestant aristocrats and served as a
Swedish spy.21
The strategies adopted by these Silesian writers when confronting impe-
rial authority point toward larger trends in post-Reformation Germany. The
wave of nationalist enthusiasm that swept over German humanists and reli-
gious reformers in the early sixteenth century did not bring about political
unity. Luther’s appeal to the Christian nobility of the German nation had the
unintended consequence of splitting the Christian church into Catholics and
Protestants, a fissure that soon splintered further into Protestant subdivisions
between Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and others.22 In the first decades
after Luther’s break with Rome, the Protestant movement spread rapidly
throughout the German-speaking lands. The Confession of Augsburg (1530)
imposed ideological unity on the nascent Protestant movement, while the Re-
ligious Peace of Augsburg (1555) guaranteed tolerance for regions loyal to the
new faith. Each ruler could now determine the religious denomination of his
domain according to the principle known as cuius regio, eius religio (whose the
rule, his the religion), a policy that further cemented territorial divisions within
the Holy Roman Empire.23
Peace lasted until the end of the century, but already in the 1570s and
1580s, the Catholic Church had begun to fight back against the growing Protes-
tant hegemony in Europe. In 1618, a local dispute between Vienna and Bohemia
triggered a series of events that soon engulfed much of Central Europe in a reli-
gious war that would last thirty years.24 To be sure, religious faith and dynastic
politics were combined in often confusing and contradictory ways in this
conflict— the Protestant Swedes were secretly allied with Catholic France
against Catholic Austria—but it had the clear effect of devastating the German
countryside and decimating the population.25 Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire
posed an imminent danger to the east. Turkish armies had besieged Vienna in
1526 and would do so again in 1683, the year of Lohenstein’s death. Silesia was
in a particularly precarious position because of its location on the eastern front
of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1663, Tatar allies of the Turks rampaged through
portions of Silesia. More than fifty villages were destroyed, and about eighty
thousand Silesians were sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire. Refugees
from all parts of Silesia sought shelter behind the fortified walls of Breslau.26
Unlike France, where political authority was concentrated in the person of
the king and centered in Paris, the German-speaking lands had multiple sites of
local power. In theory, the German princes were subject to the authority of the
Holy Roman Emperor; in reality, they enjoyed considerably more autonomy

than their French counterparts.27 As noted earlier, there is a long historiograph-
ical tradition that laments the German Sonderweg, pitting “(good) centraliz-
ing” against “(bad) particularist forces represented respectively by the monar-
chy and the princely territories.” Yet Thomas A. Brady Jr. contends that “this
dichotomy neither fits the actual story of how new governmental forms evolved
in the German lands nor helps to explain the new polity’s remarkable longevity
and stability” and that we should, rather, conceive “territorial dynasticism and
imperial universalism” as being “not opposed but complementary tendencies
and motives.” Brady explains, “The emperor’s rule had to be symbolic because
he had little power to coerce; the local and territorial rulers had to acknowledge
the emperor because, however powerful, their authority was partial and un-
even.” In France, King Louis XIV exerted absolute authority over his fellow
aristocrats and potential rivals. In Germany, things were different, as Brady
notes: “The ancient monarchy may have been sacral, but the new, corporate
German Nation certainly was not. It negotiated with its emperor; it did not
simply obey him.”28
Andreas Gryphius: Religious Faith and Imperial Politics
Andreas Gryphius was born in 1616 in the Silesian city of Glogau.29 His father,
a Lutheran minister, died when Andreas was only four, his mother when he was
eleven. The Thirty Years’ War began just two years after Gryphius was born,
and Glogau was often occupied and sometimes plundered by marauding sol-
diers.30 In 1628, Catholic troops broke into the city and forced many of the
local Lutherans to convert; those who refused, including Gryphius’s stepfather,
were forced to pay harsh fines and driven out of town. A few years later, Gry-
phius found a patron in Georg Schönborner, a Silesian aristocrat who suffered
physically from a bad heart and psychologically from the aftereffects of his
forced conversion to Catholicism. In addition to the depredations of war and
religious persecution, young Gryphius experienced personal illness, outbreaks
of the plague that killed thousands, and fires that destroyed entire cities. It is
not surprising, then, that his early poetry expresses an uncompromising insis-
tence on the vanity of earthly delights: “You see, wherever you look, only van-
ity on earth” (DV sihst / wohin du sihst nur Eitelkeit auff Erden).31 Gryphius’s
tragedies reinforce the message that the things of this world are never a source
of lasting pleasure: those in the highest places today are likely to fall to the
lowest depths tomorrow, and in a world characterized by Vergänglichkeit (tran-
sitoriness) and Unbeständigkeit (inconstancy), one should fix one’s gaze firmly
on the prize of eternal salvation and stoically endure even the worst torture as
a temporary test of religious faith. Thus Leo Armenius, the eponymous hero of
Gryphius’s first tragedy (1650), kisses the cross as he succumbs to his assas-
sin’s wounds; King Charles I of England prepares for his execution as a Christ-
like martyr in Gryphius’s Carolus Stuardus (1657); and the eponymous hero-
ine from Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien (Catharina of Georgia, 1655)
has the flesh ripped from her bones because she refuses to marry a Muslim and
abandon her Christian faith.
Without minimizing the hardships that Gryphius experienced in his life or
downplaying the significance of religious faith in his dramas, we should also
note that he was a highly educated intellectual and well-traveled cosmopolitan.
Gryphius enjoyed privileges granted to only a very few of his contemporaries.
Both his father and stepfather attended university, and Gryphius impressed his
teachers at an early age with his brilliance and diligence; his biographer esti-
mates that he may have spoken or read as many as eleven languages.32 While
much of Germany was convulsed in war, Gryphius was able to further his edu-
cation in the cosmopolitan city of Danzig. He then spent almost six years at the
Dutch University of Leiden, the “Harvard” of his time, before going on a grand
tour of Europe, “the elite track par excellence” (der Eliteweg schlechthin),
which took him to Paris, Florence, and Rome.33 When he finally returned to his
native Silesia after an absence of nearly a decade, he worked in Glogau as a
syndic (Syndikus), an eminently political position that required him to repre-
sent the rights and interests of Silesia’s Protestant nobility against the imperial
authority of Catholic Vienna.34
It should come as no surprise that Gryphius’s religious dramas are also
deeply concerned with questions of imperial politics.35 As a devout Lutheran,
Gryphius strongly supported royal authority. Just as Luther had condemned
peasants who mistook his willingness to challenge papal authority on certain
theological questions as a sign of sympathy for political rebellion, Gryphius
reacted violently against the Puritans’ decision to execute King Charles I of
England. He was in Strasbourg when he heard the electrifying news and im-
mediately began work on Carolus Stuardus, a tragedy that portrays the king as
the victim of injustice.36 In his final drama, Großmütiger Rechtsgelehrter oder
Sterbender Aemilius Paulus Papinianus (Magnanimous legal scholar; or, Dy-
ing Aemilius Paulus Papinianus, 1659), Gryphius shifts the focus from mar-
tyred royalty to the question of whether a loyal subject should obey a criminal
king. The play is set in the Roman Empire of the early third century CE and
centers on the figure of Papinianus, one of the most celebrated lawyers of clas-
sical antiquity.37 Emperor Severus has recently died, bequeathing his realm to
his two sons, Antoninus Bassianus Caracalla and Antoninus Geta. Anxious to
secure sole rule for himself, Bassianus has his brother murdered and then de-
mands that Papinianus provide legal justification for politically motivated frat-
ricide. The stage is thus set for the real drama in Papinianus, which turns not
on the naked struggle for power but on questions of legality and legitimacy.
Given that the deed has already been done, Papinianus could easily have
claimed that ordering Geta’s execution was an appropriate response to a chal-
lenge to Bassianus’s imperial authority.38 Or Papinianus could condemn the
emperor’s actions and accept the offer of a rebel faction that is eager to depose
the tyrant and put Papinianus on the throne. Papinianus rejects both possibili-
ties, refusing either to legitimate the emperor’s evil deed or to rebel against the
emperor’s authority. He chooses a third, far more difficult but highly principled
path: he allows himself to be executed. The emperor is wrong for what he has
done, but he is still the emperor and must be obeyed.
In refusing to rebel even against a clearly compromised authority, Papini-
anus thus follows a path that Luther would have approved. Unlike Luther, how-
ever, who directed some of his most vitriolic tirades against the revolting peas-
ants, Gryphius was a dramatist, whose medium required him to give voice to
dissenting opinions. As in the case of Milton’s Satan, some of the best lines go
to the devil’s advocate in Gryphius’s dramas. The rebel Hugo Peter in Carolus
Stuardus challenges the very basis of aristocratic rule when he rejects the idea
that he should obey someone simply because of the accident of birth. In Leo
Arminius, Gryphius allows the rival to the royal throne, Michael Balbus, to
express ideas that are even more radically egalitarian: “What is a prince? A
man! And I am as good as he!”39 Balbus led the armies that overthrew the pre-
vious emperor and agreed to place Leo Armenius on the throne only because
his coconspirator was of higher birth, but now he questions the logic behind his
decision and, thus, the entire feudal order: “What is a prince? Nothing more
than a crowned servant.”40
In the end, Michael Balbus is exposed as a man of ruthless ambition who
will stop at nothing in his quest for power. It seems highly unlikely and thor-
oughly anachronistic to view him as the spokesman for Gryphius’s clandestine
republican sentiments. This and other dramas by Gryphius do reveal, however,
an abiding fascination with the politics of empire. Leo Armenius, Catharina of
Georgia, and Papinian all take place in multinational empires of the sort that
would have been familiar to Gryphius through his role as a Silesian syndic
mediating between the demands of his local clients and the authority of the
Hapsburg Empire. Gryphius tends to set his dramas either in the distant past
(Leo Armenius takes place in the early ninth century, Papinian in the third) or
in distant locales (Carolus Stuardus is set in London, Catharina of Georgia in
Persia), but given the baroque sense of history as a reservoir of timeless exem-
pla rather than unique events,41 it seems reasonable to suggest that Gryphius
reflected on political issues close to home even when he was staging stories
that took place long ago or far away.
Leo Armenius is a drama about the difference between winning power
over a far-flung empire and maintaining that power, about the interrelation
between foreign conquest and domestic authority. Gryphius’s source makes
clear that Leo has ascended the throne because the previous emperor failed in
battle against the Bulgarians. As a result, his army became disloyal and gave its
support to General Michael Balbus, who defeated the Bulgarians and placed
fellow rebel Leo Armenius on the imperial throne. Balbus is a man of action
who has built a reputation by crushing foreign foes. As the drama begins, he is
bitter because he feels that sycophantic courtiers have reaped the benefits of his
hard labor on the battlefield. Exabolius, the emperor’s privy counselor, ex-
plains to Balbus that it is one thing to win an empire and quite another to keep
it. Every day, the emperor hears news about foreign threats from Persians,
Scythians, Goths, and Huns, while new heresies threaten to destabilize the
realm from within. Individual acts lead to collective suffering, and the emperor
must bear the burden for the entire Reich: “The prince can avoid nothing; he
feels the entire burden.”42
By beginning his drama after the military coup that put Leo Armenius on
the throne, Gryphius shifts the focus from the battlefield to the intricacies of
court society. Power is gained by brute force, but it is maintained by the clever
manipulation of appearances. Unleashed rage may win battles, but the courtier
must hold his tongue: “You have to be polite, no matter how much your heart
burns with rage and zeal.”43 Balbus prides himself on the fact that he refuses to
play that game. While courtiers flatter, he acts: “Do not think of my words.
Look at the deeds of my arms.”44 Balbus defends himself against accusations
of treason by claiming that while he may have said seditious things in anger, he
did not really mean them: “I never really wanted your throne, your death.”45
His defense is, at best, disingenuous (the play begins with Michael Balbus urg-
ing his co-conspirators to revolt, in no uncertain terms), yet the emperor is
willing to consider his argument, because Balbus “only sinned in words, not
with weapons.”46 As Leo’s judges point out, mere words cannot be trusted;
even torture may elicit only a false confession.
At base, the conflict in Leo Armenius is clear: Balbus wants to gain power,
and Leo wants to keep it. Making the work interesting is its portrayal of a brute
power struggle that unfolds as an exercise in interpreting ambiguity and ma-

nipulating public opinion. Once he is imprisoned on suspicion of treason, Bal-
bus shifts tactics away from pretending that he is the only man at court who is
not dissembling, to adopting subversive survival strategies. When Leo tiptoes
into prison to check on the accused traitor, he is astonished to find Balbus
sleeping peacefully, which is either a sign of a clear conscience or a clever ruse
designed to render the vacillating emperor even more uncertain about his deci-
sion to execute his rival. Balbus then rallies his co-conspirators with a message
encased in wax and smuggled out of prison by a priest who hides the capsule
in his mouth, in a scene that underscores the inherent duplicity of the written
as well as the spoken word. The plot succeeds: disguised as monks with swords
hidden in hollowed-out candles, the rebels assassinate the emperor in church
on Christmas Eve. As his enemies surround him by the altar, Leo grabs the
cross and pleas for mercy in the name of Jesus, but the mob cannot be stopped,
and he dies kissing the cross.
Ambiguities remain: if Gryphius intended Leo Armenius to represent
King Charles I, one could argue that Leo dies as a Christ-like martyr, embrac-
ing the cross. Yet we know that Leo grasped power through a military coup and
ruled as a vacillating tyrant. From the perspective of Michael Balbus and his
supporters, Leo simply got what he deserved. Does his embrace of the cross
signal a moment of divine grace that suddenly transforms the sinner into a
saint? Or could it be, like Balbus’s seemingly tranquil sleep in prison, merely
an act, a deliberate strategy, a final effort to manipulate public opinion by dying
like, rather than actually as, a martyr? Likewise, when Michael Balbus is pro-
claimed emperor in the final line of the play, are we to assume that justice has
finally prevailed and that the legitimate ruler now sits on the throne? Or is he
merely the next in a long series of pretenders who rise to power only to fall
prey to the next ambitious general? As many have argued, Leo Arminius re-
veals the ultimate folly of human ambition and implicitly encourages its audi-
ence to focus on the Christian faith and the eternal salvation to which it leads.
Yet the play itself reveals a fascination with a political world in which appear-
ances are deceptive and in which even sainthood can be staged.
Catharina of Georgia offers the purest example of a martyr drama, in
which the heroine steadfastly resists the advances of the Persian shah Abas and
suffers gruesome tortures as she awaits her heavenly reward.47 Lest we miss the
overt moral of this religious drama, Gryphius prefaces the play with an alle-
gorical prologue in which Eternity insists on the vanity of earthly delights, in
language borrowed directly from one of Gryphius’s most famous sonnets:
“What the one builds, the other will tear down tomorrow. Where palaces stand
now, there will be nothing but grass and meadow.” (Was diser baut: bricht jener
Morgen ein! / Wo itzt Paläste stehn / Wird künfftig nichts als Graß und Wiese
seyn.)48 The stage is strewn with corpses and decorated with images of heaven
above (“here above you is that which eternally laughs”) and hell below (“here
below you what eternally crackles and burns”).49 Gryphius further underscores
the religious message of his drama by giving Catherina an allegorical dream
that anticipates her future. In her dream, the queen, who is imprisoned in Per-
sia, finds herself back in her palace in Georgia, sitting on a throne in a room
splendidly decorated in gold. Suddenly, her crown turns into a crown of thorns;
as blood run down her cheeks, a strange man enters the room and tears at her
breasts. She swoons, awakens within the dream to find herself in a white dress
covered with diamonds and with Shah Abas trembling at her feet, and then
awakens in reality. The dream thus anticipates her martyrdom on earth and ul-
timate triumph, in heaven, over the shah and his evil henchmen.
Given the unmistakable religious thrust of Catharina of Georgia, critics
have been understandably bewildered by the political content of the play. In
acts 1 and 3, we are treated to very long and partially repetitive disquisitions on
the details of Georgian history. For a modern audience that expects dramas to
be full of action, such passages are tedious and confusing, which is one of the
reasons why Gryphius’s tragedies are rarely staged today. One influential but
clearly puzzled scholar concludes that the play’s extensive details about politi-
cal turmoil in Georgia only serve to reinforce its religious theme of vanitas, a
theme already stressed more than sufficiently by the allegorical prologue to the
play.50 Clearly, Gryphius found the political events important enough to re-
count at length, even at the risk of repeating certain details. As in the case of
Leo Armenius, Gryphius presents us with a drama that functions simultane-
ously on two different levels, the religious and the political.51 Precisely the
tension between the overt religious message of the Christian martyr drama and
the more ambiguous political tragedy constitutes the most compelling aspect
of Catharina of Georgia.
The political situation depicted in the drama is both local and imperial.
In the early seventeenth century, Georgia was a small, primarily Christian
country that lay on the crossroads of Europe and Asia. In our post-Soviet era,
it stands between the global superpowers of Russia and the United States; at
the time of the play, which is set in the 1620s, it was pulled between the impe-
rial powers of Turkey, Russia, and Persia.52 Georgia could only survive by
establishing strategic alliances with its dominant neighbors. Relations be-
tween Georgia and Persia are described in the drama as tumultuous, marked
by open conflict and treachery that has led to Catharina’s imprisonment in the
Persian capital. There is nevertheless reason to hope for her release, as two
messengers from Georgia report in act 1: Georgia has forged an alliance with
Russia, just as Russia has established a bond with Persia. Thus the Russian
ambassador is willing to intervene on Catharina’s behalf with the shah. He
agrees to the Russians’ request to set her free, but then—overcome by lust for
the beautiful queen—retracts his offer and presents her with an ultimatum:
she can either convert and marry him or die.
Catharina chooses death. At a time when Central Europe was beset by the
near and present danger of the Ottoman Empire, it is easy enough to see her
heroic resistance to the Muslim shah as a rallying cry to Gryphius’s contempo-
rary audience: just as a Christian queen had resisted the advances of a lustful
Oriental despot some thirty years before, the Holy Roman Empire should hold
fast against the threat of the Ottoman Turks. The neat parallel between past and
present is nevertheless complicated by the fact that the Georgians in Gryphi-
us’s drama are willing to ally themselves with the Ottoman Turks if their rela-
tions with Persia become too dangerous: “If Isfahan won’t help us, then Istan-
bul can protect us, despite treachery and power and weapons.”53 The Turks are
no less Muslim than the Persians, so the potential alliance with Istanbul clearly
places political expediency above religious conviction. A second parallel to
Gryphius’s contemporary situation suggests itself here: not the situation be-
tween a monolithically Christian West and an equally unified Islamic East, as
Bethany Wiggin suggests,54 but that between the predominantly Lutheran prin-
cipality of Silesia and the Catholic Austrian Empire. Heroic resistance against
a clearly defined enemy yields to delicate negotiations between uncomfortable
allies, just as Gryphius had to balance loyalty to his local constituents against
subordination to Hapsburg authority.55
From this perspective, the details of Georgian history in Catharina of
Georgia suddenly seem not a tedious distraction from the Christian martyr
drama but, rather, central to its examination of local and imperial politics.
Georgia, like Silesia, finds itself squeezed between imperial superpowers:
“The proximity of the Turks was certainly too threatening for us,” summarizes
Catharina, “but we were much more frightened by the Persian army.” The Rus-
sian ambassador sympathizes: “Georgia was indeed between a rock and a hard
place [zwischen Thür und Angel].”56 While the central focus in Catharina of
Georgia is on the unqualified heroism of the Georgian queen, its political sub-
plots feature far less admirable characters. Catharina’s brother-in-law, Prince
Constantine, is a traitor pure and simple, who converts to Islam and goes over
to the side of Persia. He then murders his own father and brother (Catharina’s
husband, David). He even has the audacity to enter Georgia at the head of a
Persian army and propose marriage to the recently widowed queen, but she
lulls him into a sense of false security that leads to an ambush, in which Con-
stantine and his armies are slaughtered.
The Georgian prince Meurab plays a more ambiguous role in Catharina
of Georgia. He also seems to convert to Islam and betray his people, but only
after being forced to watch the shah rape his wife. Meurab serves as Abas’s
general and leads a Persian army that enters Georgia and causes widespread
death and destruction, yet he insists that, deep down, he has remained loyal to
his own people: “My clothing looks Persian, but in my heart I am Christian.”57
Shah Abas must have had suspicions about Meurab, for although he appointed
him commander in chief of the Persian army ordered to invade Georgia, he also
sent along two assassins with orders to kill Meurab as soon as the latter com-
pleted his mission. Meurab outsmarts them and has them executed. He then
decorates his dinner table with their severed heads and screams that he has
avenged his wife and is no longer the slave of Persia, before offering a toast to
his native Georgia.
Thus, in the end, Meurab does prove loyal to his people, but only after he
commands armies that wreak havoc on his native land. Catharina dies as a
Christian martyr but, in different circumstances, was also willing to forge an
alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Even her martyrdom contains an element of
political calculation: she knows that Russia will be upset if its new ally (Persia)
refuses to grant its first official request (to set Catharina free). The play ends
not with Catharina’s execution but, rather, with the appearance of the Russian
ambassador, who is furious that the shah has broken his promise. The ghost of
Catharina predicts that Shah Abas will live long enough to see his empire col-
lapse into flaming chaos, proving that her martyrdom grants her both peace in
heaven and revenge on earth.
Looking back to Papinianus from the perspective of Catharina of Geor-
gia, we find that both works explore imperial politics from the perspective of
those peripheral to imperial power.58 To be sure, Papinianus takes place at the
center of the empire in Rome; its eponymous hero is a confidant of Emperor
Severus and the most respected legal authority in the realm. Yet when Papini-
anus dares to challenge the authority of the new emperor, Bassianus is quick to
accuse him of disloyalty and remind him that he is by birth not Roman but
Syrian: “Papinian is more loyal to his Syrian origins than to our supreme com-
mand” (emphasis in the original).59 Papinianus dismisses the accusation as ir-
relevant, which, in a sense, it is: he defends a legal principle, not a colonized
principality; he speaks as a Roman citizen, not as a Syrian freedom fighter. If
Bassianus is grasping at straws in this particular case (falsely accusing Papini-
anus of disloyalty because of the lawyer’s foreign birth), he is nevertheless

correct to assume that peoples under the control of the huge and diverse Roman
Empire always pose a potential threat to Rome’s central authority. Rulers have
to be appointed in Egypt; if the emperor commits a questionable action by ex-
ecuting his own brother, he must immediately consider how this deed will be
perceived in the provinces. Gryphius makes clear in his first drama that Leo
Armenius sits on the imperial throne only because Michael Balbus has led his
armies to victory, and the actions of the Georgians in Catharina of Georgia
show that a seemingly docile colony can strike, without warning, at the heart of
the occupying forces.
Daniel Casper von Lohenstein: The Trauerspiel

as a Trojan Horse
When we move from Gryphius to Lohenstein, we find an author who was in-
terested more in the psychology of Machiavellian politics than in religion and
whose work was later condemned for its combination of shocking violence,
lurid sex, and rhetorical bombast. Both writers faced similar challenges in the
realm of politics, however. Like Gryphius before him, Lohenstein was a Sile-
sian Lutheran living during an increasingly militant phase of the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. Daniel Casper was born in the Silesian town of Nimptsch
in 1635 but attended school and spent his adult life in the capital city of Bre-
slau.60 His father was granted a hereditary title of nobility in 1670, and the
writer thus became known to his contemporaries and posterity as Daniel Casper
(or Caspar) von Lohenstein.61 After studying law at the universities of Leipzig
and Tübingen, he went on an extended European tour that included travel to the
Netherlands, France, and northern Germany and up to the Turkish border in
Hungary. He then settled down as a lawyer and leading city administrator in
Breslau. There, he completed five tragedies, which, together with his first play
(written when he was a precocious fifteen-year-old student), established his
reputation as the second great German-language baroque dramatist, after Gry-
phius. He, too, mastered the art of the Trauerspiel as a Trojan horse, bursting
with praise for the Holy Roman Empire on the outside but packed with subver-
sive Silesians within.
The political situation of Breslau during Lohenstein’s lifetime was com-
plex. Silesia was ruled by multiple sovereign princes of the Piast dynasty who
were subordinate to the Kingdom of Bohemia, which, in turn, was under the
authority of the Holy Roman Empire under the Hapsburg dynasty in Vienna.
The city-state of Breslau enjoyed a certain autonomy due to its economic pros-
perity.62 It was ruled by elected officials drawn from the aristocracy and mem-
bers of the educated middle class. As one of Breslau’s leading political figures,
Lohenstein represented the city in negotiations with imperial Vienna. In the
crowning achievement of his diplomatic career, Lohenstein successfully pre-
served Breslau’s independence against plans to turn it into a garrison town
where soldiers would have been stationed to guard against the threat of en-
croaching Swedish troops. Exactly how loyal Lohenstein was to the emperor
and his policies has been a matter of much debate. Gerhard Spellerberg specu-
lates that he may have enjoyed the modicum of independence granted by his
position in Breslau, which insulated him from the direct authority of the local
Silesian princes and the central power of Vienna.63 Others have located him at
the opposite ends of a political spectrum that ranges from sycophantic subser-
vience, to Hapsburg rule, to clandestine resistance to imperial power. The dif-
ficulty of determining where Lohenstein’s personal allegiances lay may well
be the result of a deliberate strategy on his part. A lawyer and a diplomat living
at a time when writers did not tend to bare their souls in confessional autobiog-
raphies,64 he crafted literary works that strike a subtle balance between overt
glorification of the Hapsburg Empire and covert fascination with those on the
margins of imperial authority.
Whether heartfelt or not, Lohenstein’s work does contain unambiguous
celebrations of the Holy Roman Empire. Extending a tradition as old as the
Song of Anno, Lohenstein places world history in the eschatological frame-
work of the prophet Daniel. Both of his dramas set in Africa, Cleopatra (1661)
and Sophonisbe (1666), conclude with choruses that identify the Roman Em-
pire as the fourth and final stage of a sequence that had moved from Assyria to
Persia to Greece. Lohenstein also follows the traditional concept of the trans-
latio imperii that views the modern Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate con-
tinuation of its ancient predecessor.65 For the first time, however, the dream of
establishing universal Christendom seemed capable of being realized on a
global scale. In December 1666, the Austrian emperor Leopold I married Mar-
gareta Theresia of Spain, uniting the two branches of the Hapsburg dynasty.
Overnight, the formerly landlocked empire extended not only across Europe to
the shores of the Atlantic but also to Spain’s vast holdings in the Americas. The
allegorical representations of the Danube and Rhine in Cleopatra boast that
Leopold’s realm will soon outstrip the accomplishments of ancient Rome:
“The current world is too small for him. Another world will arise for him, in
which the sun will not set. Ultima Thule will no longer mark the limits of the
earth.”66 Visions of Hapsburg glory only grow stronger in Sophonisbe, where
Dido’s ghost predicts that although Rome will triumph in its battle against
Carthage, it will succumb, in the long run, to “the Gothic flood and the swarm
of Wends.”67 Looking to the future, the prophet foresees a time when “Ger-
many will be the seat of imperial power” and when “the modern Austrian dy-
nasty will occupy the Roman throne with even greater glory [than its ancient
predecessors].”68 The drumbeat of praise for the Austrian Empire reaches a
crescendo in Lohenstein’s final work, the courtly novel Großmüthiger Feldherr
Arminius oder Herrmann (Magnanimous General Arminius, or Hermann,
1689/90), a detailed portrait of Arminius, or Hermann, that Elida Maria Szarota
reads as a tribute to the Austrian emperor Leopold as the modern incarnation of
the ancient hero.69
Left at this level, Lohenstein’s work would seem to be little more than
political propaganda in service of the Hapsburg emperors. It clearly is political
propaganda; at the same time, however, the works contain subtexts that com-
plicate and even contradict their overt messages. One of the central premises of
court society is that things are not always what they seem, that people may say
one thing or act one way and mean something quite different. As Norbert Elias
points out, in a world in which people are always on stage, performing their
public identities, it is rarely in one’s best interest to bare one’s soul.70 When, a
century later, Goethe’s Mephistopheles chides the Baccalaureus for his imper-
tinence, the student snaps back in defense of honesty, even to the point of rude-
ness: “People lie in German when they are being polite” (Im Deutschen lügt
man, wenn man höflich ist [literally, “when they speak like they do at court”]).71
Goethe wrote at a time when forthrightness had become a virtue; Lohenstein
lived in a society of semblance and dissemblance. Trying to convince her son
Caesarion to disguise himself as a Moor, Lohenstein’s Cleopatra observes, “All
the world wears a mask these days, and virtue cannot go without a costume if
it is not to suffer shipwreck.”72
Lohenstein’s two plays about the Roman emperor Nero, Agrippina (1665)
and Epicharis (1665), present negative examples of how not to rule. The dra-
mas reveal Lohenstein at his most shocking: in Agrippina, Nero oscillates be-
tween incest and matricide as possible responses to his mother’s challenge to
his authority; Epicharis features protracted scenes of onstage torture so ghastly
that one of the characters exclaims that it is too horrible to watch. One could
easily argue that these dramas offer an implicit contrast between ancient tyr-
anny and modern justice: today’s Hapsburgs are not Nero. Pierre Béhar sug-
gests an alternate possibility, however. He contends that Epicharis was proba-
bly written after the death of Emperor Ferdinand III in April 1657 but before
his successor, Leopold, was elected in July 1658—at a time, in other words,
when the Silesians were hoping that the new emperor would be more lenient in
his treatment of his Protestant subjects.73 The two dramas thus function both as
a warning to Vienna not to choose another despot like Nero and as an expres-
sion of republican loyalties on the part of the Breslau dramatist and diplomat.
Agrippina casts the potential assassination of a tyrannical ruler in a sympa-
thetic light; Epicharis does the same for a republican revolt against despotic
rule. The very choice to portray Nero in both tragedies is potentially damning,
because according to the logic of the translatio imperii, the Roman Emperor,
however decadent, prefigures the modern rulers of the Hapsburg dynasty.74
Lohenstein’s two dramas set in the Ottoman Empire follow a similar
strategy. At face value, the early Ibrahim or Ibrahim Bassa (1653) features an
Oriental despot who serves as a negative contrast to the Austrian emperor.
Emperor Soliman lusts after the wife of his ambassador Ibrahim and has his
rival executed on the basis of a transparently specious argument. In the much
later Ibrahim Sultan (1673), Lohenstein depicts an Ottoman emperor who
rapes a fifteen-year-old girl and drives her to suicide. Both works contain
dedicatory prologues that explicitly condemn Asiatic corruption and praise
Austrian rule, which is hardly surprising in the case of Ibrahim Sultan, given
that it was written to celebrate the marriage of Emperor Leopold and Claudia
Felicitas.75 There again, however, it is possible to read between the lines to
discover a more critical subtext. Not all Turks are evil in Ibrahim Bassa, and
not all of the sultan’s servants are Muslim: the eponymous hero is an Italian
Christian who has risen to prominence in Soliman’s court and was on friendly
terms with the sovereign in the past. Even after his arrest on trumped-up
charges, Ibrahim is temporarily reconciled with Soliman and would have es-
caped execution if not for the influence of an evil advisor. Ibrahim Sultan also
presents the inner workings of an Ottoman court in which the sultan is utterly
evil while his subjects are not. As a result, both dramas are also about the kind
of intrigue that is common to all courts, both Ottoman and Austrian; the por-
trait of the depraved sultan as the negative counterpart to the glorified emperor
also brings the Turkish court into uneasy proximity to the Holy Roman Em-
pire.76 Lohenstein, in his role as the loyal subject of the Hapsburg emperor,
extols the virtues of his Catholic superior; in his role as Silesian Protestant,
however, he may sympathize with those members of the Ottoman court who
seek to curb royal authority. Even Lohenstein’s decision to write his first play
in German can be viewed as a Protestant protest against the officially sanc-
tioned Latin dramas of the Jesuits.77
Lohenstein’s African tragedies present the best case for the presence of an
anti-imperial countercurrent in the river of Roman-Hapsburg triumphalism.
Both works are framed by celebrations in praise of the new global scope of the
Hapsburg Empire (as noted earlier), and both depict victories of that empire’s
historical precursor over its foes. Destiny seems clear: Cleopatra’s Egypt must
succumb to the Roman juggernaut, just as Sophonisbe’s Carthage is also fated
to be defeated by the forces of Rome. In both cases, however, Lohenstein
chooses to focus primarily on female rulers who resist Roman authority, rather
than on leaders of the Roman legions. Cleopatra is already married to Mark
Anthony when Octavius Augustus invades her country. Augustus attempts to
play the lovers against one another, promising spoils of war to either Cleopatra
or Anthony if the one betrays the other, but Cleopatra outsmarts him: to prevent
Anthony from succumbing to temptation, she drives him to commit suicide by
pretending to commit suicide herself. Augustus plays the role of the magnani-
mous conqueror, assuring Cleopatra that the people of Egypt can keep their
religion and that their places of worship will be respected. In the next scene,
however, we learn that Egypt’s temples are being desecrated by Roman sol-
diers, and Cleopatra realizes that Augustus plans to stage her public humilia-
tion in Rome. Again Cleopatra thwarts his plans by committing suicide, this
time in earnest.
Like Cleopatra, Sophonisbe must choose between personal inclination
and patriotic duty. She is a Carthaginian princess who was once engaged to
Masinissa, a leader in the struggle against Rome. When Masinissa betrays his
people and begins to fight for the enemy, however, Sophonisbe marries Syphax,
another African partisan who has remained true to the cause. As the play be-
gins, Syphax has already been defeated and is threatened with execution. So-
phonisbe takes his place in prison, disguising herself as a man. She confronts
her former fiancé there and—in an unexpected twist—marries him. In the end,
Masinissa’s commanding general, Scipio, tells Masinissa that he cannot serve
Rome on the battlefield and share a marriage bed with Rome’s enemy. Mas-
inissa reluctantly obeys his commander, and Sophonisbe, like Cleopatra, com-
mits suicide rather than being paraded in Rome as a defeated enemy. In both
cases, Lohenstein explores the moral ambiguities of political exigency rather
than reveling in the steadfast faith of the religious martyr or celebrating the
success of imperial Rome. Is Cleopatra a fickle woman who betrays her lover
by tricking him to commit suicide, or is she a desperate patriot willing to do
whatever is necessary to save her country? Is Sophonisbe driven by lust into a
bigamous marriage with her enemy’s ally, or does she pursue a calculated strat-
egy in which she employs her sexual charms to the political end of winning a
Roman collaborator back to the Carthaginian side? The eventual triumph of the
Roman Empire is a foregone conclusion; what interests Lohenstein more are
the strategies adopted by the leaders of the colonized territories in their ulti-
mately futile attempts to avoid their fate.78
In keeping with his dual role as a celebrant of Hapsburg hegemony and a
defender of Silesian autonomy, Lohenstein both supports and subverts racial
categories in his work. As Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton note, references
to race pervade early modern literature, even though the concept of race had not
yet acquired the pseudoscientific specificity of the later nineteenth century. The
concept was fluid and often extended beyond physical appearance to include
religious difference, social class distinctions, and “‘abnormal’ sexualities—
intemperance, hermaphroditism, lesbianism, and ‘sodomy’ in its various
forms.”79 Thus Lohenstein’s Turkish despots display the sexual depravity to be
expected of Oriental tyrants. Ibrahim Sultan is said to have ascended the throne
“with his neck adorned with pearls, his body with diamonds, and his fingers
with golden nail polish; he tried eagerly in many ways to be a woman.”80 Skin
color plays a similarly distinguishing role in Cleopatra.81 An emissary of the
Roman forces chides Antonius for having married a Moor. Conceding that Ju-
lius Caesar also had a dalliance with the African queen, the emissary contends
that at least Caesar had the good sense to stop short of marriage.82 Another Ro-
man marvels at the idea that Antonius would refuse to surrender Cleopatra to
Emperor Augustus, noting that Antonius could have his pick of hundreds of
white women to replace his “brown wife” (sein braunes Eheweib).83 Cleopatra
seems to have internalized the same prejudices, for when she learns that Augus-
tus wants to marry her, she is flattered but also concerned, protesting, “But no!
Moors are beneath Caesar.”84 Sophonisbe and Syphax also refer to themselves
as Moors or Africans, and Syphax defends his impromptu marriage to Rome’s
enemy on the grounds that he cannot control his hot African blood.85
On closer inspection, however, racial distinctions prove less rigid than
might be expected in Lohenstein’s two African dramas. When Augustus finally
meets Cleopatra face to face, he praises her beauty in curiously ambivalent
terms: “Proud Rome does not believe that this brown land nurtures such white
Moors” (Daß dieses braune Land so weisse Mohren hege). Is he astonished
because her complexion is lighter than expected? Or is he surprised to find
such a “white” character in a person with dark skin, as suggested by the next
line, “Nor that here a noble spirit stirs a soul.”86 Sophonisbe insists that her
brown breast conceals a snow-white heart, when attempting to prove her new-
found loyalty to Rome.87 Sophonisbe is dissembling here, for whatever color
her heart may be, her loyalties to Carthage remain constant. The passage points
toward a larger tendency for characters in Lohenstein’s work to use racial and
sexual distinctions strategically. Disguised as a man, Sophonisbe takes Syph-
ax’s place in prison; she assures her African husband that he will be able to
escape undetected, despite his presumably dark skin, because he speaks good
Latin.88 Cleopatra encourages her son Caesarion (whose father was Caesar and
who is thus apparently of lighter complexion than other Egyptians) to disguise
himself as a Moor by blackening his face. Caesarion at first refuses to pose as
a member of an inferior race, arguing, “I want to die as a noble and not a servile
Moor.”89 His mother insists, however, that now is not the time for scruples; his
survival and the survival of the Egyptian cause depend on the use of strategic
subterfuge. This passage simultaneously supports and subverts racial distinc-
tions: while suggesting that Moors are, in fact, inferior to Romans, it uses the
performance of blackface as a clever ruse to undermine Roman authority.
Race and Resistance in Lohenstein’s Arminius
In the final decade of his life, Lohenstein poured his creative energies into his
courtly novel Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius oder Herrmann (Magnani-
mous General Arminius, or Hermann). He had completed all but the final chap-
ter when he died in 1683; his brother and a pastor from Leipzig finished the
work and published it a few years later.90 The novel is huge, stretching to over
three thousand double-columned pages. In a nutshell, it tells the story of the
Germanic struggle against the ancient Romans, beginning with the victory of
Hermann, or Arminius, over the Roman general Varus in 9 CE. As is typical for
the baroque genre of the heroic or courtly novel, the convoluted plot features
romance as well as war among the ruling elite, with episodes sprawling across
the ancient world, from Europe to the Middle East and on to northern Africa,
India, and China.91 Action scenes alternate with discussions in which charac-
ters digress, with encyclopedic thoroughness, on any topic that comes to mind.
At a time when the majority of the population was illiterate and living in abject
poverty, the potential readership for Lohenstein’s novel must have been very
limited indeed, yet the novel made a powerful impression on the first genera-
tion of those who did read the work.92 Only in the course of the eighteenth
century, as the aesthetics of genius began to replace the rhetorical flourishes
and ostentatious erudition of the baroque novel, did Lohenstein’s Arminius fall
into disfavor. Ironically, the author who had devoted himself to the most “Ger-
man” of themes—Hermann’s victory over the Romans—was denounced as the
practitioner of a style at odds with the German national character.
Ulrich von Hutten was the first to base a literary work on the Germanic
leader’s battles with Rome. Published posthumously in 1529, Hutten’s Her-
mann oder Arminius (Hermann, or Arminius) was probably written between

1517 and 1520.93 Hutten adapts Lucian’s literary model of the Mortuorum
Dialogi (Dialogues of the dead), bringing famous generals of antiquity to-
gether in the underworld to draw up a list of the best military leaders of all
time.94 Insulted that he has been forgotten, Hermann calls in Tacitus to testify
about the general’s accomplishments. Together, they make the case that Her-
mann should be included because he defeated the world’s mightiest empire at
the height of its power. Hutten’s work is short and unambiguous in its patriotic
fervor; not only is Lohenstein’s Arminius infinitely longer than Hutten’s “dia-
logue in booklet form” (Gesprächsbüchlein), but Lohenstein’s novel is more
complex in relation to his contemporary society. Within the fictional world of
his novel, there is no question of Hermann’s heroism or of his people’s virtue;
in fact, Lohenstein stretches the limits of plausibility and historical accuracy by
having Germans participate in most of the major conflicts in world history. The
negative counterpart to the virtuous Germans in Arminius are the decadent
Romans, but in keeping with the multivalence of the novel, the ancient Romans
can also be understood as unflattering portraits of Lohenstein’s contemporary
French and the Ottoman Turks.95
Critical debate has centered on the question of how the idealized Germans
of antiquity should be understood in relation to Lohenstein’s world. As noted
earlier, Elida Maria Szarota reads the novel as an elaborate tribute to the Aus-
trian emperor Leopold as the modern incarnation of the ancient hero. Thomas
Borgstedt cautions against a one-to-one identification of Leopold with Her-
mann, however, suggesting that the novel might be understood better as the
representation of an idealized Germanic type than as the encoded glorification
of a particular regime.96 The novel is actually dedicated to the Prussian Kurfürst
Frederick III rather than the Austrian emperor Leopold I, but it is likely that
Lohenstein’s son added the dedication when he completed the fragmentary
novel.97 More ambivalent is the very choice of Hermann as the protagonist of
the novel: on the one hand, his heroism prefigures that of the modern Hapsburg
ruler; on the other, his resistance to Rome anticipates Luther and signals op-
position to the leaders of the Counter-Reformation.98
Although Lohenstein has switched genres from Trauerspiel to courtly
novel, he continues to combine unambiguous enthusiasm for the accomplish-
ments of Hermann and the Germanic people with an interest in the political
complexities of imperial border zones. Long episodes included in the first half
of the novel detail the adventures of Armenian aristocrats. As a nation threat-
ened by Roman power, Armenia serves as a parallel to ancient Germany as a
site of resistance to imperial authority, and both sites can be substituted for the
Holy Roman Empire’s struggles against its French or Ottoman enemies. Arme-
nia’s internal politics involve tensions between imperial collaborators and local
patriots, however, in ways that recall Cleopatra’s Egypt, Sophonisbe’s Car-
thage, and Lohenstein’s Silesia. Like his dramas, Lohenstein’s novel depicts
characters who work as spies or undercover agents, a motif that is again often
linked to gender or racial ambiguity. The Armenian subplots in Arminius in-
volve gender reversals of dizzying complexity, usually featuring virtuous
women who fight as men and decadent men who might as well be women.99
While Hermann leads a life of Germanic heroism, his brother Flavius—
whose real name is Ernst—spends most of his time passing for Roman. One
particularly gripping episode shows him tempted by but ultimately resisting
the sexual debauchery to which his companions succumb.100 In the process, he
falls in love with an African princess named Dido, even though he insisted
earlier that he could never be attracted to a black woman. The corrupt keeper
of a Roman seraglio provides African boys and girls for the sexual pleasure of
Rome’s future leaders, but Dido is not just another colonized subject trafficked
as a sex slave. She comes to Rome as an African princess whose inner nobility
outshines even that of Flavius, not to mention his debauched Roman friends.
Dido flees Rome to escape a particularly lascivious Roman, only to fall into the
hands of a pernicious sect where she is imprisoned and raped by its head priest.
Flavius forces the offending cult leader to castrate himself, but Flavius also
refuses to marry the deflowered woman. Even though she is an innocent vic-
tim, Dido remains loyal to the man who rejects her. She helps Flavius escape
Roman persecution in the wake of the Germanic victory over Varus and makes
him ashamed of what he has done: “I blushed at the kindness of the woman
whom I felt that I had insulted with my disdain.”101
Just as the character known as both Flavius and Ernst slides between his
Roman and German identities, Dido shifts from black to white: “She was, to be
sure, black, as people from Numidia are, but her eyes sparkled with grace, and
her mouth laughed with friendliness. Her lips did not protrude in a Moorish
way but were in perfect proportion, just like the rest of her body.”102 Dido’s
skin may be black, but her features are white in a way that recalls the epony-
mous hero of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), published just one year before
the first volume of Lohenstein’s novel. Oroonoko is an African prince with
very dark skin, but his nose is “Roman, instead of African,” and his mouth is
“far from those great turned lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Ne-
groes.”103 Dido’s father has sent her from the colonial periphery to the imperial
capital “to learn Roman customs and to win favor with the ruling family.”104
Oroonoko has been schooled by European slave traders in Africa, speaks mul-
tiple European languages, is well versed in ancient and modern European his-
tory, and bears himself with the civility of a gentleman. In the end, however,
both Dido and Oroonoko fall victim to the imperial power whose language and
culture they seek to acquire: Oroonoko is sold into slavery and tortured to
death for his role in a slave revolt, while Dido is violated by a corrupt priest and
cast aside by her former lover.
Lohenstein’s choice of the name Dido for his protagonist adds another
layer of significance to his novel. Already in Sophonisbe, Lohenstein places
the prediction of the Roman Empire’s collapse and Austria’s future grandeur in
the mouth of a character with the name Dido, which, as Jane O. Newman notes,
has an element of irony.105 Virgil’s Aeneas must tear himself away from the
African queen Dido, lest he fail to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. In
Lohenstein’s drama, the character whom Virgil’s epic sweeps aside so that the
Roman Empire may arise predicts the empire’s eventual collapse. Rome’s de-
mise paves the way for Vienna’s rise to power, but if the parallel between the
ancient and modern empires holds fast, Vienna, too, is fated to fall. In Lohen-
stein’s Arminius, a different character with the name Dido comes from the
colonies to the imperial capital in search of civilization but discovers only
decadence. Only her fellow outsider from the empire’s northern border seems
worthy of her love, and even if Flavius, or Ernst, betrays her trust, his remorse
distinguishes him favorably from his incorrigible Roman companions.
Conclusion
In his study of the Thirty Years’ War, Peter H. Wilson challenges the common
assumption that the Peace of Westphalia that brought an end to the war marked
the beginning of “the modern international order based on sovereign states.”106
As he explains, “the classic ‘Westphalian state’ rests on indivisible sover-
eignty . . . it possesses well-demarcated, non-porous borders, and a common
identity and culture among its inhabitants.” From today’s perspective, Wilson
contends, the year 1648 no longer seems a sharp turning point in European his-
tory, for two reasons. First, the movement toward the modern nation-state was a
slow process that began before and continued long after the Peace of Westphalia
was signed. It would be more than two centuries before Germany appeared on
the map of Europe. Second, “the nation state no longer appears the final destina-
tion of political development.” Citing Jan Zielonka’s study Europe as Empire,
Wilson agrees that today’s European Union can be viewed more as a “neo-
medieval empire” than as “a single, centralized Westphalian super-state.”107
With the exception of some early poetry, Andreas Gryphius’s career took
place in the years immediately after the Thirty Years’ War, as did that of Daniel
Casper von Lohenstein. Against both Walter Benjamin’s effort to identify an
essential German character in the baroque Trauerspiel and Heinz Schlaffer’s
dismissal of the same because of its allegedly derivative and, thus, non-
Germanic nature, more recent critics have rejected the nationalist paradigm as
inadequate for the understanding of Central Europe in the seventeenth-century.
Challenging notions of “a trajectory that posits a homogeneous culture as the
necessary expression of a unified national identity,” Newman finds in Lohen-
stein’s drama “heterogeneous relations of culture, loyalties, and power” of the
sort that have become familiar today.108 Thomas Borgstedt identifies in Lohen-
stein’s Arminius “a shift in focus from the center to the periphery,” as the work
once read as the unequivocal celebration of Hapsburg power now seems more
about the complexities of imperial politics viewed from the perspective of the
Silesian border zone: “Politically the novel does not point toward a centralized
nation-state. . . . It would be more accurate to think in terms of the modern
problems of German federalism.”109
One intriguing question remains: if it is true, as I have argued here, that
both Gryphius and Lohenstein write works that question Hapsburg hegemony
as much as they support it, how did the emperors and their Catholic courtiers
regard the work of these Silesian Protestants? Two possibilities come to mind:
either the rulers were so pleased with the main melody of praise that they
turned a deaf ear to the discordant notes, or they were aware of—and perhaps
even enjoyed—the hints of subversiveness beneath the works’ sycophantic sur-
faces. Given that both writers and royalty inhabited the same court society, in
which duplicity and disingenuousness were the norm, it seems more likely that
the latter possibility was the case. There were certainly limits to what could be
said, but neither Gryphius nor Lohenstein was a bloodthirsty rebel or political
radical of the sort that emerged in late eighteenth-century France, out to de-
throne the king and abolish the aristocracy. Lawyers and diplomats as well as
dramatists, Gryphius and Lohenstein were shrewd players in a system whose
complexities they explored and, when possible, sought to exploit, without chal-
lenging the existence of the Holy Roman Empire. The present study now turns
to the end of that thousand-year Reich and to Goethe’s reaction to its demise.
Chapter 5
Goethe and the End

of the Holy Roman Empire
With Goethe, we reach a pivotal figure in German literary historiography. Au-

thors and works of earlier periods were selected retrospectively as representa-
tives of the national literature—or not; baroque drama suffered both fates.
Goethe, in contrast, was widely acknowledged as the leading figure in German
letters already during his lifetime. As a young man, Goethe experienced a me-
teoric rise to fame, first within Germany, with his sensational play Götz von
Berlichingen mit der eisernen Faust (Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron
Hand, 1771), and then across Europe, with Die Leiden des jungen Werther
(The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774). He retreated from public view for the
better part of two decades, only to emerge, together with Schiller, as a prolific
author and dominant cultural force. In the last decades of his long life, Goethe
became something of a living monument, inspiring writers like the young
Heinrich Heine to make their pilgrimage to Weimar to pay homage to the great
man. Heine recounts his audience with Goethe with a mixture of self-
deprecation and sarcasm, but he respected Goethe’s genius too much to reject
him entirely as a political reactionary, as did Ludwig Börne and other radicals
of the German Vormärz.1
Goethe hagiography reached new heights soon after his death. The almost
simultaneous publication of Bettine von Arnim’s Goethes Briefwechsel mit ei-
nem Kinde (Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, 1835) and Johann Peter
Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe, 1836) popu-
larized the image of the Weimar Olympian, while Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s
pioneering Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen (His-
tory of the poetic national literature of the Germans, 1835–42) was the first in
a series of monumental works that traced the emergence of the national litera-
ture from its origins to the recent past. Gervinus was a liberal, like many Ger-
man nationalists prior to 1848; he hoped to replace the aristocratic rulers of
81
Germany’s many principalities with a constitutional government in a unified

state. Thus he argued that the Germans, having reached the zenith of their liter-
ary development in the works of Goethe and Schiller, would have to leave lit-
erature behind if they were to fulfill their political destiny.2 The supreme
achievement of Weimar classicism marked only a provisional step on the path
toward greater democracy. In the later nineteenth century, in contrast, Goethe
was increasingly appropriated for a conservative political agenda within the
Prussian-dominated Second Empire. In a two-step process, Goethe was first
depoliticized into an ahistorical Olympian expressing the spirit of the German
people and then transformed into a Faustian figure inspiring Germany in its
drive toward its national unity and imperial power.3
Almost immediately after Germany suffered a catastrophic defeat in the
Second World War, a new Goethe arose, the antinationalist prophet of world
literature. Fritz Strich’s study Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared already in
the fall of 1945, followed, in 1952, by a Festschrift honoring Strich, with arti-
cles on the concept of world literature by such luminaries as Erich Auerbach
and Emil Staiger.4 The new stress on Goethe’s cosmopolitanism was part of a
larger effort to salvage a positive cultural legacy from the ruins of the Third
Reich.5 More recently, Goethe’s comments on world literature have crossed the
Atlantic to inspire critical discourse and curricular reform in North America, as
scholars seek to expand their horizons to encompass global literary production
and as administrators replace Eurocentric surveys of “great books” with intro-
ductions to world literature.6 The author once appropriated by nineteenth-
century nationalists has become the patron saint of twenty-first-century cos-
mopolitanism.
The reception of an iconic writer by subsequent generations always runs
the risk of falsification or, at least, simplification. Nationalists had to over-
look Goethe’s aversion to the patriotic enthusiasm of those who joined the
struggle against the French invaders, as well as his provocative habit of refer-
ring to Napoleon as “my emperor.”7 Looking back on this period years later,
Goethe confessed to Eckermann that he had then found it impossible to write
angry poems against the French: “Just between us, I did not hate the French,
although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I have hated
a nation that belongs to the most cultivated on earth and to which I owe such
a large part of my own education!”8 Today’s cosmopolitans, for their part,
threaten to transform the archconservative opponent of democracy and lib-
eral reform into a fellow progressive who shares their commitment to human
rights and world peace.9
The last section of this chapter returns to the recent reception of Goethe’s
Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire 83
comments on world literature. I here take up the reaction among more recent
critics against those who were eager to enlist Goethe in the nationalist cause.
Georg Schmidt, for example, challenges the view, promulgated by Friedrich
Meinecke and others, that the artists and intellectuals in Weimar and Jena
founded a cultural nation (Kulturnation) that paved the way for political unifi-
cation under Prussian leadership many decades later. As Schmidt observes,
Meinecke imposes a Prusso-centric notion of national unity onto the past, in a
way that obscures the federative tradition of the Holy Roman Empire. He re-
minds us that a sense of German national identity arose already in the early
modern period, long before Goethe and Schiller. From Meinecke’s perspective,
the old Reich could only be viewed negatively, as the site of political particular-
ism that had to be overcome, but if we approach these writers from the opposite
direction, as emerging out of the early modern period rather than as anticipat-
ing subsequent eras, we find that notions of a common German national iden-
tity were formed not in opposition to but, rather, in the context of the Holy
Roman Empire: “The German national consciousness was federative, demand-
ing exclusive identity only in situations of extreme danger, but which other-
wise did not exclude provincial or civic loyalties.” Thus Schmidt concludes
that “federalism is not a German invention, not a German Sonderweg, and cer-
tainly not the German fate, but, rather, one of several paths toward modern
states and nations in Europe.”10
This chapter focuses on several pivotal moments in Goethe’s life and
works in which he engages with the idea of empire, ranging from his account
of the imperial coronation ceremony he witnessed as an adolescent in Frank-
furt to the some of the last lines he added to Faust II. My primary effort here is
to view Goethe and his works in the historical contexts in which they arose,
although the chapter concludes with more recent concerns. As we shall see,
Goethe’s early experience as a subject of the Holy Roman Empire had a lasting
effect on his worldview, simultaneously informing a conservatism that made
him equally hostile to the French Revolution and modern German nationalism
while laying the foundation for his cosmopolitan concept of world literature
and his critique of nineteenth-century imperialism.
The End of an Empire
On August 6, 1806, Emperor Francis II declared the end of the Holy Roman
Empire. His action was technically illegal: he had the personal right to abdicate
his throne, but he did not have the authority to dissolve the entire empire.11 No
one objected, however, for the emperor’s declaration marked the end of a chain
of events that stretched back to the early years of the French Revolution and
that made his decision seem inevitable and irrevocable. In 1792, French revo-
lutionary armies defeated the combined forces of Austria, Prussia, and their
imperial allies in the battle that Goethe subsequently declared a turning point
in world history. Three years later, Prussia showed that it was willing to place
its own interest above that of the empire, by signing the Treaty of Basel, ac-
knowledging the revolutionary government’s legitimacy, and withdrawing
from the conflict for the next decade; Austria followed suit in 1797, with the
Peace of Campoformio. In early 1803, a special committee known as the
Reichsdeputation submitted a proposal that led to the secularization of the em-
pire’s ecclesiastical territories, the incorporation of city-states into territorial
states, and the eventual end of the free imperial knights. Thus the patchwork
quilt of local sovereignties within the old empire yielded to division between
Austria, Prussia, and the Confederation of the Rhine, satellite states of the ex-
panding French Empire. By the summer of 1806, it had become clear that the
balance of power had shifted to France; when confronted by a French ultima-
tum, Francis had no choice but to proclaim the end of an empire that had lasted
more than a millennium.
At first, Goethe seemed sublimely indifferent to the empire’s collapse. He
was on his way from Karlsbad to Weimar when he got the news that the Con-
federation of the Rhine had declared its loyalty to France: “Quarrel between
coachman and a servant on the coach-box, which agitated us more than the
split of the Roman Empire.”12 Two months later, however, the situation changed
dramatically. After Napoleon’s forces had dealt a shattering defeat to the Prus-
sian army at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, fleeing
Prussian troops plundered the nearby city of Weimar. Goethe was awakened in
the middle of the night by soldiers pounding on the door and came downstairs
in his nightgown to confront men who threatened to assault him and loot his
house.13 The worst was averted, but the events left Goethe deeply shaken. His
immediate reaction was to marry his long-term mistress, Christiane Vulpius, on
October 19, backdating the wedding rings to October 14, the day of the trau-
matic events that he felt marked the end of an era. Goethe’s decision to marry
marked an effort to set his personal affairs in order and solidify his legal claim
to his house in Weimar at a time when radical changes in the city’s political
structure seemed inevitable. Questions of marriage and property rights loom
large in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), a novel that Pe-
ter Schwarz has convincingly argued represents Goethe’s initial artistic re-
sponse to the end of the Old Regime.14 From a broader perspective, Goethe
spent his entire career responding to the slow demise of the Holy Roman Em-
pire and the political, cultural, and economic upheavals of the modern age.
Goethe’s Early Experience of the Empire
The events that prompted Goethe to marry Christiane Vulpius and helped to
inspire Elective Affinities also sparked a sustained period of autobiographical
reflection. Between 1806 and 1808, Goethe oversaw the publication of his col-
lected works, a project that required him to look back over his career of nearly
four decades. In October 1809, less than two months after his sixtieth birthday,
Goethe began to gather material for his autobiography. The autobiographical
project would occupy Goethe, in one way or another, for the rest of his life. He
did not complete book 4 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) until
1831, adding it to a series of autobiographical works that included Italienische
Reise (Italian Journey, 1816–17), Campagne in Frankreich (Campaign in
France, 1822), and Die Belagerung von Mainz (The Siege of Mainz, 1822). His
initial burst of autobiographical writing took place over a much shorter period,
however. Goethe completed part 1 of Poetry and Truth in September 1811,
concluded part 2 in October of the following year, and finished work on part 3
in August 1813 (although part 3 was not published until the following May).15
Thus Goethe’s work on the first three volumes of Poetry and Truth coincided
with the period in which Germany recovered from its hour of “deep humilia-
tion” at the hands of France and waged the triumphant Wars of Liberation that
drove Napoleon into exile.16 Yet Goethe, one of the few German artists and
intellectuals who had not responded enthusiastically to the early stages of the
French Revolution, proved equally immune to the growing nationalist senti-
ment of the Napoleonic era. Poetry and Truth is a work of personal introspec-
tion that turns away from contemporary politics but, at the same time, evokes
the atmosphere of local cosmopolitanism in the Holy Roman Empire of
Goethe’s youth, a climate that stands in implicit contrast to the increasingly
militant nationalism of Goethe’s younger contemporaries.
In many ways, young Goethe was a provincial, a product of his local en-
vironment. He was born and raised in Frankfurt, a self-governing imperial city,
or Reichsstadt, within the Holy Roman Empire. Goethe spent his first sixteen
years in narrow Gothic streets that had changed little since early modern times.
The nostalgic fantasy of late medieval Nuremberg evoked forty years later by
Wackenroder and Tieck in their Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden
Klosterburders (Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk, 1797) was still a harsh real-
ity in the Frankfurt of Goethe’s youth.17 The weathered skulls of criminals

beheaded in 1616 still hung in public view, and Goethe witnessed new execu-
tions and a book burning. The gates of the Jewish ghetto would remain in place
until 1811.18 The fairy tales and Volksbücher that the romantics preserved from
extinction were still part of a living tradition in Goethe’s youth, as they were
printed and sold by peddlers in the city streets. Goethe’s provincial origins
were underscored when he went off to college in Leipzig (known as “Little
Paris”), a city of broad promenades and fine fashion, where Goethe was ini-
tially ridiculed for his unstylish wardrobe and uncouth dialect.19
Despite its city gates and crooked streets, Frankfurt was no isolated vil-
lage. Like sixteenth- century Nuremberg or seventeenth- century Breslau,
Frankfurt stood at the crossroads of multiple commercial networks: it “was at
once provincial and metropolitan, its character both radically German and un-
selfconsciously international.”20 Goethe’s father was something of an outsider
among the city’s ruling elite, but he was well educated, well traveled, and rich.
His grandfather, Johann Wolfgang Textor, was Frankfurt’s Schultheiß, the
city’s highest-ranking lawyer, chief administrator, and best-paid civil servant.
As a privileged member of this metropolitan milieu, Goethe enjoyed an educa-
tion that was as cosmopolitan as his experiences were local. As a boy, Goethe
absorbed languages with remarkable facility, including Latin, some Greek, a
little Hebrew, modern Italian, English, and even a little Yiddish, which he used
for comic effect in a multilingual novel, now lost. During the Seven Years’ War,
a French officer quartered in Goethe’s house gave him daily opportunities to
speak the language that he had already acquired by reading French neoclassical
dramas. His reading was eclectic but extensive, ranging from baroque compen-
dia of world history to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, from Luther’s
Bible to The Vicar of Wakefield, from Moliere to Tasso.21
Goethe was thus both a member of Frankfurt’s local elite and a polyglot
student of Western European culture. He was also a subject of the Holy Roman
Empire. In the first book of Poetry and Truth, Goethe recalls how he gradually
became aware of the political institutions of his native city and its place within
the larger empire. As a boy, he and his friends explored the “Römer,” Frank-
furt’s city hall, from its lower arched chambers to the room in which the local
government convened. The seating order there provided a visual overview of
the city’s social hierarchy. Frankfurt was also home to one of the seven electors
prescribed by the Golden Bull of 1356 and was the site of the election and
crowning ceremonies for future emperors. Goethe describes how he and his
friends persuaded a guard to unlock the door to the special stairway in the city
hall that led to the chamber reserved for the imperial elections. Amid its walls
decorated with portraits of the emperors going all the way back to Char-
lemagne, Goethe received history lessons in the form of anecdotes about the
various monarchs who had ruled in an unbroken tradition from the distant past
to the present day.
In the spring of 1764, fourteen-year-old Goethe was informed by his fa-
ther that Archbishop Joseph of Austria was to be elected and crowned as the
Roman-German king and future Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt. The elec-
tion was set for March 27, and the crowning took place on April 3. Emissaries
of the empire were quartered in Goethe’s house, taking the place of the French
officer who had departed after the recently concluded Seven Years’ War.
Goethe based his account of the event on historical sources that he studied in
the spring of 1811 and on his own vivid memories; the result is one of the nar-
rative highlights of his biography. Goethe evokes the tightly choreographed
pageantry surrounding the coronation: beginning when four trumpeters on
horseback proclaimed the impending event, it reached a first climax when the
king and his father, the reigning Holy Roman Emperor, arrived in their ceremo-
nial robes, cheered on by excited throngs. In the days before the modern media
that broadcast such spectacles to a global audience, one had to be there in
person to witness the events, and Goethe happened to live literally around the
corner. He was filled with civic pride that extended to a sense of belonging to
a greater whole: “As both Germans and Frankfurters, we felt not only highly
but doubly edified by this worthy day.”22
Goethe’s loyalties were at once local and imperial: “A Frankfurt citizen
could not fail to be especially gratified on this occasion . . . that the imperial
city of Frankfurt also appeared as a little sovereign,” he wrote, elevating Frank-
furt above the many other imperial cities and territories that comprised the
Holy Roman Empire.23 Goethe and his fellow citizens provide a good example
of James J. Sheehan’s comment (already cited in chapter 2 of the present study)
that the empire differed from the modern nation-state in that it “did not insist
upon preeminent authority and unquestioning allegiance. Its goal was not to
clarify and dominate but rather to order and balance fragmented institutions
and multiple loyalties.”24 As Goethe recalls, “We were delighted to share with
them in feeling this honor and to own a one hundred-thousandth part of the
sovereignty which was manifesting itself here in its full splendor.”25 The coro-
nation ceremonies infused the crowd, “which now included not only Frankfurt-
ers but Germans from all regions,”26 with a sense of collective harmony (“all
seemed to be a single mass moved by a single will and grandly harmonious”)
and a hope for a lasting peace after seven years of war (“and actually Germany
was blessed with peace for many years”).27
A critical subtext nevertheless runs through Goethe’s depiction of the

election and coronation ceremonies. From start to finish, Goethe signals
that the magnificent performance of pomp and circumstance was just that,
a performance that masked the grittier political reality of the Reich.28 The
Frankfurt authorities prepared for the event by expelling all foreigners
from the city and locking the gates of the Jewish ghetto, an artificial “sani-
tizing” of the city streets that has been repeated on the eve of modern
Olympic Games and other events for a global audience. The exotic cos-
tumes of those in the emperor’s entourage fired the imagination of Goethe
and his companions but left them with a lingering sense of incongruity as
well. Many details “did give . . . a genuinely antique look” to the costumes,
yet “so much was semi-new or completely modern that the character which
generally emerged was merely motley and unsatisfactory, and often even
tasteless.”29 Goethe was particularly annoyed by the modern trousers and
fashionable shoes that protruded beneath the ceremonial Spanish robes of
some participants. Even the star of the show looked ill-cast: the future
king’s father was adorned in purple robes and with crown, scepter, and orb,
in a tasteful imitation of antiquity, while the young king “dragged himself
along in these vast garments and Charlemagne’s jewels as though in a mas-
querade costume, and he himself could not repress a smile when he occa-
sionally glanced at his father.”30
The flawed performance both masked and revealed deeper fissures in the
Reich. The goal of the symbolic ceremony was to make “the German empire,
which was almost buried under a heap of parchment, papers, and books, seem
alive again for a moment.”31 As Goethe began to read about the actual state of
affairs in the empire, however, he realized that the only unity lay in the con-
certed effort on the part of the princes to limit imperial authority and to arro-
gate as much independence and as many privileges for themselves as possible.
A territorial dispute between Mainz and Frankfurt delayed the delivery of the
royal insignia, and all of the secular electors boycotted the ceremonies as a
result of the “unfriendly relations that had gradually developed through the
centuries between these lords and the supreme head of empire.”32 In one of the
eyewitness moments that make this episode of Poetry and Truth compelling
reading, Goethe recalls how he convinced one of the guards to let him into the
festival hall, where he saw the emperor and the king sitting in state and with all
the accoutrements of symbolic power, surrounded by the three electors of
Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. The tables were also set for their secular counter-
parts, but it was an empty display of imperial unity, for the other electors had
refused to attend.33
Young Goethe and the German Nation
Goethe’s emergence onto the literary scene in the following decade coincided
with his discovery of his German national identity. While the future emperor
was being crowned in Frankfurt, German writers sought to emancipate them-
selves from foreign tutelage. As Goethe recalled in his autobiography, “Ger-
many had for so long been inundated with foreigners, infiltrated by other na-
tions, and dependent on foreign languages in scholarly and governmental
proceedings that it could not possibly cultivate its own tongue.”34 Lessing
called for an authentically German drama in the style of Shakespeare rather
than the French neoclassicists, Klopstock began writing patriotic poetry, and
Herder urged the Germans and all nations to remain true to the spirit of their
indigenous cultures. Goethe and his fellow authors of the Sturm und Drang
movement heeded the call: “So it was that from many sides a literary revolu-
tion was also being prepared for Germany. We witnessed it and helped work
toward it, consciously and unconsciously, willingly and unwillingly.”35
Goethe’s year in Strasbourg proved decisive in his turn toward the na-
tional culture. His father sent him to complete his law degree there partly be-
cause it would give him the opportunity to improve his French.36 After his
studies, Goethe was supposed to embark on a grand tour of Europe that would
have led him to Paris, Vienna, and Rome, before returning to assume his right-
ful place among the upper crust of Frankfurt society. Instead, Goethe remained
in Strasbourg and met Herder, who preached the new gospel of national au-
thenticity. Goethe soon learned to appreciate the Gothic cathedral, whose ar-
chitecture suddenly seemed to him to express German genius and not the spirit
of the barbarous Middle Ages. In Strasbourg, too, Goethe discovered German
folk art in poetry and fairy tales, danced the German waltz instead of the French
minuet, and fell in love with a young woman from the surrounding countryside
who still dressed in the traditional German style, unlike the city girls who had
adopted French fashions. He also began to look to the German past for an ap-
propriately national subject matter for his poetry. Unlike the next generation of
German romantics, Goethe was not particularly interested in the literature of
the high Middle Ages: “The minnesingers were too remote from us. We would
have had to study their language first, and this did not appeal to us. We wanted
to live, not to learn.”37 In the early modern period, however, Goethe found what
he was looking for, inspiring figures from the not-too-distant German past that
could be mined for their contribution to German national identity, including
Martin Luther, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Sachs, Ulrich von Hutten, Goetz von
Berlichingen, and Faust.
As suggested earlier, Goethe’s cultural nationalism arose within the con-

text of the Holy Roman Empire and not as an anticipation of the centralized
nation-state. Just as the humanists and Protestants began to develop a sense of
loyalty to the German nation as only one of several allegiances that bound them
to feudal lords and the larger empire, Goethe combined his enthusiasm for the
German past with local patriotism and a continuing cosmopolitan taste in lit-
erature. Typical in this regard is an incident that occurred on his journey to It-
aly, when Goethe, pausing to make a sketch of a ruined fortress near Venice,
was accosted by authorities who accused him of being an Austrian spy. “Far
from being a subject of the Emperor,” Goethe exclaimed, “I can boast of being,
like yourselves, the citizen of a republic. . . . I am, that is to say, a native of
Frankfurt-am-Main.”38 Even during his Sturm und Drang period, Goethe never
rejected all foreign influences, only those that seemed artificial copies of alien
cultures. While he distanced himself from the slavish German admiration of
French neoclassicism, he continued to admire what he believed was Homer’s
artless grandeur, Pindar’s wild genius, and the noble simplicity of the Old Tes-
tament patriarchs. His study of sixteenth-century German authors did not pre-
clude his appreciation of their French contemporaries: “Just as in my adoles-
cent years I had been attracted to sixteenth-century German culture, so now my
affection spread to the Frenchmen of that splendid epoch.”39 His love for
Shakespeare remained unchanged.
By turning his attention to the early modern period, Goethe signaled not
only a sense of continuity between his own era and the imperial past but also
the change that had occurred as the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation had degenerated into the half-farcical crowning ceremony
he had witnessed in Frankfurt. Goethe’s choice of Gottfried “Goetz” von
Berlichingen (1480–1562) as the subject of his early drama reflects the drama-
tist’s elegiac attitude toward the empire and his critical stance toward his con-
temporary Germany. In Goethe’s play, Goetz is an imperial knight subordinate
only to the authority of the emperor, while his boyhood friend, Weislingen, has
gone into the service of a bishop in a local province. Thus the drama’s conflict
pits an independent knight against a territorial state, traditional Germanic feu-
dal law (Faustrecht) against the abstract principles of Roman law.40 Goetz is a
charismatic leader and upright character who inspires the loyalty of his men
and the love of his family, but he is also one of the last of his kind, a dying
breed of action heroes in a world of effete courtiers and petty bureaucrats. The
future lies with the cowardly Weislingen, who surrenders his knightly freedom
so that he can work for one of the growing state administrations. Goetz’s iron
fist is a symbol of both his heroic resolve and his crippling wound; the play
inspires both rebellious identification with the hero of earlier times and melan-
choly awareness that those times have passed.41 Goetz dies with a bleak proph-
ecy: “The time of betrayal is coming, it will have a free rein. The worthless
ones will rule with deceit, and the noble man will fall into their nets.” His last
words are “Freedom! Freedom!”42 But he knows that the freedom he seeks lies
only in the grave.
The play is set at the time of the Peasants’ War in the 1520s. Goetz’s
tragic downfall stems from his decision to join the rebels in their revolt against
the established order. He reluctantly agrees to lead the peasants for a limited
time in the hope that he can prevent further violence, but Goetz is no revolu-
tionary. As Karl Marx argued against the German Socialist Ferdinand Lassalle,
there was a clear difference between the revolutionary aspirations of the peas-
ants and the reactionary cause of the imperial knights.43 Goetz is fiercely loyal
to the German emperor and wants only to retain his ancestral rights as a feudal
lord. Despite its unbridled form and notoriously vulgar language, this signa-
ture work of the German literary revolution is deeply conservative in its
worldview. Thus Goethe recalls that his early work actually put him in good
standing with the upper classes, and even Werther’s fulminations against ar-
rogant aristocrats could be dismissed as the passionate outbursts of a suicidal
young man who was hardly capable of fomenting political revolution (“since
everyone sensed that no direct attack was intended here”). Goethe’s Goetz von
Berlichingen could also be accepted as formally innovative but traditional in
its vision of a social order based on “old German conditions with the invio-
lable emperor on top.”44
Shortly before moving to Weimar, Goethe began Egmont (1787), another
historical drama that opposed local rule to imperial authority. His interest in the
figure of Lamoral Graf von Egmond (1522–68) and the Netherlands’ revolt
against Spain arose from his early studies of the sixteenth century, but the final
version of Egmont was not completed until September 1787, in Rome. The
work thus brackets two major phases of Goethe’s career. His evolution from
the youthful writer of the Sturm und Drang to the mature poet of Weimar clas-
sicism is generally viewed in terms of contrast—from the rough and ready
style of Goetz to the chiseled iambic pentameters of Iphigenie, from the icono-
clastic wanderer to the overburdened administrator, from the burgher of an
imperial city-state to the ennobled subject of a petty principality. A glance at
Egmont nevertheless reveals continuity behind the change—a consistent loy-
alty to the local, a preference for regional diversity against centralized govern-
ment, and a conservative rejection of revolution.
Egmont is set in Brussels in 1568, at a time of increasingly harsh Spanish
rule of the Netherlands. Duke Egmont has been distinguished as a Knight of

the Golden Fleece for his service to Spain, but when he resists the tyrannical
rule of the Spanish Duke of Alba, he is tricked, trapped, and publicly beheaded.
Egmont thus dramatizes an episode in the history of intra-European imperial-
ism that marks the beginning of the Eighty Years’ (or Spanish-Dutch) War,
which eventually led to the independence of the Netherlands in 1648. Goethe
uses that specific historical setting to stage a conflict between two philosophies
of government. As the Dutch secretary Vansen explains in act 2, the Nether-
lands were originally governed by individual princes, “all according to tradi-
tional rights, privileges, and customs,” and “every Province, however small,
had its parliament and deputies.”45 Vansen’s sketch of Dutch history sets up the
central debate between Egmont and Alba in act 4. Alba seeks to impose Span-
ish rule on the Netherlands; Egmont does not challenge his authority directly
but demands that the Spanish allow more regional autonomy than Alba is will-
ing to grant. As Egmont explains, the Dutch are independent by nature, “each
one a world to himself, a little king, steadfast, active, capable, loyal, attached
to old customs.”46 Egmont argues that all they want is to retain their traditional
constitution and to be governed by their own people and that anything less,
such as what Alba seeks, would be tantamount to genocide: “His will is to
weaken, oppress, destroy the strength of his people—their self-confidence,
their own conception of themselves—so as to be able to rule them without ef-
fort. His will is to corrupt the very core of their individuality. . . . His will is to
annihilate them.”47
Goethe’s reference to the innate qualities of specific peoples reflects the
influence of Herder, but his defense of local rule against centralizing authority
is indebted to Justus Möser (1720–94). It is difficult to overestimate the sig-
nificance of Möser’s work on Goethe’s political thought.48 Herder introduced
Goethe to the local historian from Osnabrück when they were in Strasbourg.
Möser’s piece on feudal law informed Goethe’s Goetz, and Herder included
Möser’s essay on German history in the landmark anthology Von deutscher Art
und Kunst (Concerning German character and art, 1774). In the summer of
1774, Goethe encouraged Möser’s daughter to publish his collected works as
Patriotische Phantasien (Patriotic fantasies, 1775), and Goethe continued to
speak warmly of Möser in later life. Of particular importance for Egmont is
Möser’s essay “Der jetzige Hang zu allgemeinen Gesetzen und Verordnungen,
ist der gemeinen Freyheit gefährlich” (The current tendency toward general
laws and orders is dangerous to communal freedom). Möser argues against the
Enlightenment tendency to govern in the name of universal principles rather
than local traditions: “But in fact we distance ourselves thereby from the true
plan of nature, which reveals its wealth in diversity [Mannigfaltigkeit], and

pave the way toward despotism that would coerce everything in accordance
with a few rules and thus lose the wealth of diversity.”49 Möser bases his po-
litical theory on aesthetic principles. Noting that the ancient Greeks created
their art by observing specific objects in nature, not by obeying general rules,
he argues that the same should be true of government: “People speak every day
about how dangerous general rules and laws are to genius and how much the
modern [geniuses] are prevented from rising above mediocrity by a few limited
ideals; and yet the noblest artwork of all, the constitution [Staatsverfassung], is
supposed to be reduced to a few universal laws.”50
Möser was an admirer of the Sturm und Drang movement, and his stress
on individual genius and the innate qualities of a particular people is in keeping
with the ideas that inspired Herder, Goethe, and his fellow artists to rebel
against the tyranny of French neoclassicism. More surprising at first glance is
Goethe’s reference to Möser during his initial meeting with Carl August, the
Duke of Saxon-Weimar. In book 15 of Poetry and Truth, Goethe recalls how
Carl August and his brother, Prince Constantin, requested a meeting with the
famous author of Young Werther when they were passing through Frankfurt in
December 1774.51 Goethe was happy to oblige and soon found himself chat-
ting with the two young princes and their chaperones. A new copy of Möser’s
Patriotic Fantasies lay on the table, either by chance or, more likely, because
Goethe wanted to impress the visiting dignitaries with his knowledge of politi-
cal affairs. He took the opportunity to summarize ideas that he was certain
would “be highly interesting to every German,” noting that “whereas the Ger-
man Empire was usually reproached for lack of unity, anarchy, and impotence,
to Möser’s way of thinking this multitude of little states was a most desirable
means of disseminating culture according to the individual requirements of a
great variety of provinces, each with a different situation and constitution of
parts.”52 The princes were impressed by the young author and invited him to
travel with them to Mainz; within less than a year, Goethe would accept Carl
August’s offer to spend what turned out to be the rest of his life in Weimar.
Goethe had as many good reasons to leave Frankfurt as he did to go to
Weimar.53 He had been anxious to get out of town after an unpleasant brush
with authorities at the time of the imperial coronation: “I felt an increasingly
distinct aversion to my native town.”54 Having completed his studies in Leipzig
and Strasbourg and spent time in Wetzlar, Goethe found himself once again
living at home with an overbearing father. He was engaged to a respectable
young woman and had before him a secure but all-too-predictable future as a
lawyer and civic leader. Weimar offered the lure of the unknown, the promise
of a budding friendship with Duke Carl August, patronage (of the sort that had
already brought Christoph Martin Wieland to Weimar) for his career as a
writer, and the prospect of rising rapidly to a position of authority in the local
government. In Weimar, Goethe could and would become a big fish in a small
pond; in Frankfurt, he might have been just another lawyer in a large city. From
his father’s perspective, however, Goethe’s move to Weimar was a betrayal of
principle and a challenge to paternal authority. As a citizen of Frankfurt and
subject of the empire, Goethe’s father avoided and mistrusted the nobility. Re-
minding his son that Voltaire’s visit to Potsdam at the behest of Frederick the
Great had ended badly, Goethe’s father predicted the same was to be feared if
Goethe went to Weimar.
Möser’s defense of German particularism provides a clue to Goethe’s de-
cision to move and suggests, again, that there was more continuity than change
in Goethe’s political views. Goethe had paid a nostalgic tribute to the indepen-
dent imperial knights in Goetz von Berlichingen, but the Reichsritter were on
their way out already in the sixteenth century. At that time, imperial cities like
Nuremberg were in their prime, but in the late eighteenth century, their power
had begun to fade as well. In 1775, as Nicholas Boyle insists, “political
power . . . lay, not with the Empire and not with the burghers of Germany’s city
republics, but with the Enlightened autocracies ruled by Germany’s princes. In
the nineteenth century Germany was to be united, and to be given a national
culture, by Prussian absolutism, not by Imperial federalism.”55 True enough; in
the course of the eighteenth century, it was already becoming clear that in the
land of petty provinces, two territorial states, Prussia and Austria, were emerg-
ing as more powerful than others. But Goethe did not go to Berlin or Vienna;
he went to Weimar, signaling his allegiance to German particularism, to the
cultural potential of the province against the territorial state.
Thus the most significant opposition for Goethe’s subsequent career is not
between Frankfurt and Weimar, both semiautonomous entities under the aegis
of the Holy Roman Empire, but between the German federalism of the old
feudal tradition and the centralizing and expansionist tendencies of Prussia and
Austria. To make this argument is not to fall back into the deluded belief that
Weimar was an island of peace and justice in a land of German despotism or
that Goethe was a champion of human rights. As W. Daniel Wilson has shown
through careful archival research, “Saxon-Weimar was in many ways a quite
normal small German principality of the eighteenth century,”56 full of conflict
between feudal subjects and the ruling class, and Goethe was, if anything,
more conservative than many of his contemporary intellectuals in his role as a
government official.57 Underscoring the similarities between Frankfurt and
Weimar does highlight the consistency of Goethe’s political thought, however.

When revising Egmont in Rome, Goethe drew direct parallels between the
Spanish oppression of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and the Aus-
trian conflict with the Netherlands in the 1780s. Under Joseph and Frederick II,
Austria and Prussia were moving toward government based on abstract prin-
ciples rather than traditional customs; they were moving, in other words, to-
ward France.58 Goethe moved to Weimar in the name of the old imperial tradi-
tion of localism and against the sort of centralization and rationalization of
government that was taking place in Prussia and Austria. When Egmont pro-
claims that he is dying for the cause of freedom as he is led off to his execution,
he means the freedom of the Holy Roman Empire, not that of modern political
revolution.59 Like Goetz, his vision is directed backward, not forward; he is a
conservative in the name of local tradition, not a revolutionary prophet of the
nation-state.
Literary Politics in a Revolutionary Age
At three o’clock in the morning of September 3, 1786, Goethe slipped out of

Carlsbad to begin the journey to Italy that he was supposed to have undertaken
some fifteen years earlier. He traveled alone and incognito, pressing forward
impatiently until, at the end of October, he finally reached Rome. Goethe
would remain in Italy for the next year and a half, until he finally, reluctantly,
obeyed the request of his patron, Duke Carl August, to return to Weimar. There,
within a few years, he would form an alliance with Friedrich Schiller, and to-
gether they would embark on what is arguably the most famous decade in Ger-
man literary history.
If Goethe and his contemporaries had devoted themselves in the 1770s to
the “relative” beauty of nationally specific art, his Italian journey marked the
beginning of a return to the “absolute” standard of classical antiquity. As he
visited the sites of ancient Rome and admired Palladio’s neoclassical architec-
ture, Goethe also reworked themes and adopted forms in the classical style: he
completed Iphigenia in Italy, published the Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies,
1795) upon his return to Germany, and went on to write neoclassical poems
like “Alexis und Dora” (1797), while introducing Helen of Troy into the con-
tinuation of Faust. Schiller also moved toward classical themes and a more
elevated style. The turn toward the timeless beauty of the past involved a turn-
ing away from timely events in a revolutionary era. In his mission statement for
Die Horen (The Graces, 1794), an ambitious journal that sought to unite the
leading German artists and intellectuals, Schiller welcomed all worthy contri-
butions but expressly forbade writers to engage in political debates. In his epis-
tolary Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Educa-
tion of Man, 1795), Schiller developed, at length, the argument that art unites
and uplifts whereas politics divides and drags down.
Schiller’s programmatic prohibition of politics at a time when the French
were undertaking a radical experiment in democracy has always been the most
controversial feature of Weimar classicism. Liberals lament Goethe and Schil-
ler’s irresponsible flight from reality at a time when Germany was in dire need
of political reform, but Prussian literary historiographers of the late nineteenth
century saw things differently. In their view, Schiller’s plan “to reunite the po-
litically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty”60 marked a neces-
sary step away from partisan strife in the politically fragmented German terri-
tories, so that the united Kulturnation could eventually stride toward political
union under Prussian leadership.61 Both positions oversimplify the relationship
between politics and art in classical Weimar. Goethe’s fascination with neo-
classical themes and forms was never complete; in the two decades that began
with his Italian journey, he devoted much of his time to the completion or
continuation of projects begun during the “national” phase of the 1770s, in-
cluding Egmont, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice-
ship, 1795–96), and Faust. Despite his antipathy toward the French Revolu-
tion, Goethe realized that it was a political event of the first magnitude, a
historical turning point that could not be ignored. He witnessed firsthand some
of the major conflicts of the revolutionary era and engaged with the causes and
consequences of the events in his literary works to a greater degree than most
of his contemporaries.62 His first contribution to Schiller’s supposedly apoliti-
cal Die Horen was Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations
of German emigrés, 1795), which begins with an explicit discussion of the
plight of refugees from revolutionary France, a theme that he reprises in the
popular verse epic Hermann und Dorothea (Hermann and Dorothea, 1797).
From the beginning to the end of the revolutionary period, Goethe dealt di-
rectly or obliquely with the cataclysmic changes that shook the political world.
He did so, however, from the perspective of a man raised in the final decades
of the Holy Roman Empire, not as a prophet of Prussian hegemony.
Goethe’s most explicit discussion of German literary aspirations in the era
of the French Revolution came in the form of a short essay, “Literarischer
Sansculottismus” (“Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser”), published in the
May 1797 edition of Die Horen. The work reveals that Goethe’s belief in the
cultural benefits of German particularism had not changed. It offers a qualified

defense of German literature, against the impudent accusations of an upstart
critic, a certain Daniel Jenisch, who had dared to criticize Schiller’s journal and
German writers in general for their failure to produce “classical” works of
art.63 Adapting a term coined to characterize lower-class political revolutionar-
ies in France, Goethe refers to Jenisch and his ilk as literary sansculottes who
dared to raise their voices against Germany’s intellectual aristocracy. “Re-
sponse to a Literary Rabble-Rouser” would thus seem to be an antirevolution-
ary credo issued by the monarch of Germany’s national literature. However,
Goethe spends a considerable portion of the essay explaining why Germany
does not have a “classical national author” (ein klassicher Nationalautor).64 A
classical literature could only arise, Goethe contends, in a nation with a grand
and continuous history, noble national character, and high national culture, al-
lowing a gifted author to write a major work at the height of his powers. He
argues that none of these conditions obtain in his contemporary Germany: the
nation is geographically and politically fragmented, the upper classes have
been too focused on foreign influences to permit the development of an indig-
enous tradition, and the lower classes have no taste. Thus, writers are forced to
eke out a living through hackwork rather than able to develop their talents to
the full. Despite these obstacles, Goethe insists that a new dawn has broken for
German literature: almost everyone writes well, good novels and novellas are
easy to find, essays are written with style, and philosophers have enlightened
the public. A petty critic who dares to shine his pitiful lamp against this daz-
zling new dawn “should be excluded from literary society,” thunders Goethe,65
maintaining that such critical rabble-rousers can only sow the seeds of doubt
and mistrust at a time when German literature needs to reflect with pride on its
accomplishments and be encouraged to make further progress.
In a central passage in “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser,” Goethe
addresses the charge that German particularism is to blame for the shortcom-
ings of Germany’s national literature: “We cannot criticize the German nation
because it is politically splintered despite its representing a geographic unit.
We do not wish for the political turmoil [Umwälzungen] that would pave the
way for classical works in Germany.”66 Given the date and title of the essay, it
seems probable that Goethe is referring to the revolutionary “turmoil” in neigh-
boring France, but Dieter Borchmeyer has suggested that he may have been
thinking of Joseph II’s attempts to expand Austrian power in accordance with
the absolutist reforms of a strictly centralized government.67 Although the
goals of the two political movements were diametrically opposed—in Austria,
an effort to strengthen the monarchy; in France, the temporarily successful

decision to do away with the monarchy entirely—the process of centralization
was the same, and Goethe was its consistent enemy.68
Hermann and Dorothea: Infinitely Limited
How, then, did Goethe think that Germany should proceed? Going back to the
early modern model of the Holy Roman Empire was not possible. The anach-
ronistic crowning ceremony that Goethe had witnessed in his youth demon-
strated that the empire had already devolved into an empty show, and French
advances across the Rhine and over the Alps now made it clear that its days
were numbered. Goethe’s most direct literary response to the rapidly shifting
political terrain came in the form of a verse epic, Hermann and Dorothea. In
this work, Goethe embraced, as never before, his role as a poet of the German
people, and the people returned his embrace.69 Hermann and Dorothea was an
immediate popular and critical success and would remain one of Goethe’s most
beloved works throughout the nineteenth century. With the possible exception
of Faust, it did more than any single work to enshrine him as an icon of the
national culture.
Both the work’s content and its form contributed to its lasting popularity.
Set in the immediate historical present, Hermann and Dorothea tells the tale of
ethnic Germans driven, by French revolutionary armies, from their homes on
the left bank of the Rhine.70 Fellow Germans in an unnamed Rhineland town to
the east of the Rhine, who watch the pitiful train of refugees pass by, offer them
food and provisions. While delivering supplies, one of these good Samaritans,
Hermann, falls in love at first sight with Dorothea, a particularly attractive and
capable young woman. By the end of the day, the couple is engaged: the dis-
placed woman has found a husband and a new home, and Hermann has ma-
tured from a shy boy to a man of heroic stature who vows to defend the German
homeland against foreign invaders. Hermann’s name identifies him as a mod-
ern incarnation of the ancient hero who once defeated the Romans, now pre-
pared to stand firm against the French. The poem is written in hexameters in a
deliberate imitation of Homer, lending an aura of epic grandeur to the other-
wise average middle-class citizens of a small German town. It is no wonder,
then, that generations of German readers hailed Goethe’s modern epic as an
unambiguous celebration of middle-class morality and German patriotism.
At the thematic center of the poem lies a sharp contrast between French
revolutionary chaos and German stability and tradition. As a patriarchal figure
among the refugees explains, the French Revolution seemed benevolent at

first, promising freedom and equality to all in ways that inspired enthusiasm
even among some idealistic Germans. When war came, the occupying French
troops were friendly and promised self-rule to their new satellite states. But the
tide turned abruptly after the army suffered defeat. Liberators became oppres-
sors, plundering the locals’ possessions and threatening to violate their women.
What began as a good idea turned into a terrible reality.
Goethe here touches on a theme that would have a long afterlife: the dis-
tinction between French civilization and German culture. As Norbert Elias de-
scribes in the opening chapter of The Civilizing Process, cultures are specific
to particular peoples, whereas civilization is conceived as universal.71 It would
be futile to try to turn the French into Germans, but it would make sense to
export ideals conceived in the name of all humanity across the Rhine and
around the world. What looks like a civilizing mission according to one per-
spective, however, appears to be imperial aggression according to another.
Thus, more than a century later, Thomas Mann would couch his bitter diatribe
against the French in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man as a defense of in-
digenous German Kultur against the encroachment of French Zivilisation.
Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea offers an earlier formulation of the same
logic, and it was celebrated as such by generations of German patriots and
drummed into the heads of German schoolboys. Hermann, like his classical
counterpart, is ready to resist the enemy. He will not provoke war but will de-
fend hearth and home against any and all invaders. With this happy ending, the
work’s popularity among patriotic readers was assured. But for reasons that I
explore more closely in the following discussion, perhaps Hermann does not
speak for Goethe as directly as many assumed.
Hermann’s small unnamed city on the right bank of the Rhine resembles
a miniature version of Frankfurt (the imperial city-state where Goethe was
born and raised) or one of the many German self-governing hometowns that
Mack Walker describes in his landmark study.72 Hermann’s father boasts that
he has served on the city council six times and that he is largely responsible for
many of the improvements to the city since the devastating fire twenty years
ago: the buildings are in good repair, a new canal system will prevent future
fires, and a highway that will link the town to the wider world is being built.
The father is a local but not a yokel: as an innkeeper, he is presumably in regu-
lar contact with travelers; he urges his son to visit the nearby cities of Stras-
bourg, Frankfurt, and Mannheim to expand his horizons, and his favorite arti-
cle of clothing is a cotton robe that has made its way from East India into the
little German city. Literary convention suggests that we should identify with
youth against age, empathizing with the young couple against the tyrannical
father. Goethe sets us up to take the mother’s side with the son, who eventually
vindicates her faith in him by winning his bride and finding the courage to
defend the homeland. But caution is advised. The father may not be the most
diplomatic critic of his son, but he has a point: Hermann has never been good
at school and may not be too bright. He is happy at home with the horses,
showing no interest in the travel that his father urges. He rejects modern fash-
ion and remains ignorant of contemporary culture, missing the simplest allu-
sion to The Magic Flute. He is a milquetoast and a mama’s boy, too cowardly
to propose until circumstances force him to confess that he wanted to bring
home a wife rather than hire a maid—or perhaps, in the end, there is not much
difference. Dorothea, in any case, seems far beyond Hermann in terms of her
maturity and experience in the world.73 She has already been engaged once, to
a revolutionary (frequently said to be modeled on Georg Forster)74 whose po-
litical horizons extended far beyond the local Heimat (homeland). When first
seen, Dorothea is driving the oxen and interceding on behalf of a woman whom
she has just helped to give birth, and we soon learn that she has heroically cut
down several would-be rapists with a sword.
The plot of Hermann and Dorothea is not so much like a Shakespearean
romance that rejuvenates a moribund society as it is an exercise in constric-
tion, regression, devolution, and reaction. Dorothea’s worldly experiences
end, and the horizons that Hermann’s father seeks to expand close down.
Walls spring up everywhere—around the garden, around the city; even the
Rhine has become a protective barrier against the French.75 Dorothea is tamed,
domesticated, even symbolically castrated: the woman who once wielded the
sword will now be wielding a mop and using her French-style charm to mol-
lify the moods of her grouchy father-in-law.76 The expansiveness symbolized
by the Indian cotton has constricted to Hermann’s tight grasp on his newest
possession: “Now you are mine: and that makes what I have more mine now
than ever” (Du bist mein; und nun ist das Meine meiner als jemals).77 Her-
mann’s truculent insistence on making what he has more his than it was before
corresponds to a new belligerence on the part of the Germans hunkered down
in the homeland.
This reading of Hermann and Dorothea challenges the argument that
Goethe transforms the historically specific into the universally human, in a
way that was praised by Emil Staiger and lamented by subsequent scholars.78
Goethe does not depict the political events or the economic causes of the
French Revolution, but he does stage a conflict between two systems of gov-
ernment, a new imperialist nationalism versus an older form of empire. He
does not, however, take sides as clearly with the Germans as one might expect.
While he allows the old judge and the young fiancé to voice an enthusiasm,
shared by many, for the revolutionary ideals, he criticizes the imposition of
these ideals on others. If he presents a lovingly detailed image of small-town
German life, he also offers an implicit critique of an increasingly narrow-
minded German nationalism. What we see in Hermann and Dorothea is less
the emergence of a heroic willingness to defend the fatherland and more the
constriction of a vision that was once cosmopolitan to one that seems—to bor-
row an oxymoron from Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks79—“infinitely limited”
(grenzenlos borniert), so limited that its inhabitants do not realize how limited
they are. In contrast to Schiller’s attempt to forge a national venue for German
intellectuals in Die Horen and to Goethe’s praise elsewhere, in “Response to a
Literary Rabble-Rouser,” of the collective accomplishments of German writers
scattered throughout the politically fragmented landscape, the figures in Her-
mann und Dorothea seem merely local, a salutary alternative to French revolu-
tionary imperialism perhaps, but lacking the cosmopolitan perspective of
Goethe and Schiller.
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:

Personal Bildung and National Theater
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship offers a more comprehensive picture of

Goethe’s cultural politics in the 1790s. While Hermann and Dorothea focuses
exclusively on members of the middle class in a small city, Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship offers an expansive panorama of all social classes in Germany,
ranging from itinerant jugglers and acrobats to the landed aristocracy. The
novel’s portrayal of sexuality is correspondingly frank. In place of an innocent
young man beginning a monogamous marriage, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice-
ship begins with its protagonist already in the midst of a torrid affair with a
young actress; he goes on to become romantically involved with several other
women before being engaged to marry at the end of the novel. Goethe wrote
Hermann and Dorothea in a matter of months, whereas Wilhelm Meister’s Ap-
prenticeship, like Faust, was the project of a lifetime. He began the first draft
of the novel in the 1770s and concluded its continuation in the late 1820s.
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship also responds to the French Revolution, al-
though in a more oblique way than Hermann and Dorothea. In the novel,
Goethe revisits the idea of a German theater as a venue for the cultural unity of
the politically fragmented nation. He also posits personal Bildung (growth,
maturation, education) as an alternative to political revolution, while introduc-

ing ideas about land reform that would transform feudal properties into com-
modities that circulate in the public sphere. In each case, however, Goethe
qualifies his ideas in a way that exasperated Schiller, with whom he shared
large segments of the novel in manuscript form. Again and again in his corre-
spondence with Goethe, Schiller worries that the “main idea” (Idee des Gan-
zen) is not as clearly articulated as it might be.80 Goethe excuses his reticence
with a self-deprecating reference to the “realistic tic”81 that makes him reluc-
tant to proclaim openly the meaning of his work, yet the ambivalence is central
to his artistic strategy. Rather than providing unequivocal answers, Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship raises open-ended questions about the role of art in a
German society facing the challenges of economic change, political revolution,
and the imminent end of the Holy Roman Empire.
The irony surrounding Wilhelm Meister’s mission to establish a national
theater is symptomatic of Goethe’s refusal to write an openly didactic novel.
When his initial affair with an actress ends in disappointment, Wilhelm sets off
on a business trip, during which he encounters various forms of public perfor-
mance and soon decides to devote himself to his art. Wilhelm’s hopes for the
theater are soon dashed, however, as he and his companions experience the
difficulties confronting actors and the theater in eighteenth-century Germany.
Perennially short of money, subject to the whims of local aristocrats and the
questionable taste of uncouth audiences, riven by personal rivalries, and ex-
posed to marauding soldiers in Germany’s war-torn countryside, the acting
troupe has little hope of fulfilling Wilhelm’s lofty goals for national rejuvena-
tion. The very particularism that Goethe’s “Response to a Literary Rabble-
Rouser” admits is a potential impediment to the development of the national
literature and then dismisses as the lesser of two evils when compared with
revolutionary turmoil returns with a vengeance in Wilhelm Meister’s Appren-
ticeship. Early in the novel, Meister hears of a young man who goes by the
name Melina (his real name is Pfefferkuchen) and has run away to join the
theater because he has fallen in love with an actress. Meister sympathizes with
the young couple, but Melina, having experienced the vicissitudes of life on the
road, wants nothing more than to return to his middle-class life.
In the first draft of the novel, Wilhelm first encounters the couple after
they have been arrested by the local militia. They are being detained under a
large oak tree, which arouses patriotic sentiments in Wilhelm Meister, but the
tree turns out to be a border marker between two German provinces. The sym-
bol of national unity ironically underscores political divisions that enable the
arrest of the eloped couple. By the time that Wilhelm has thrown in his lot
with the actors, open warfare has broken out in the German provinces. Exactly
who is fighting whom and for what reason is left unclear, and we have no
sense of Wilhelm’s stance regarding the particulars of the conflict. Instead, he
views the war as an opportunity for a costume party. Jarno has just introduced
him to Shakespeare, so Wilhelm decides to dress up as Prince Hal as he and
his companions set off on a journey through a dangerous war zone. Wilhelm
imagines that he is the leader of a wandering community of actors who have
opened “new vistas for the national stage,”82 but the troupe soon stumbles into
an ambush that leaves Wilhelm badly wounded. Once again, Goethe under-
scores the gap between patriotic fantasies and real factional strife within pro-
vincial Germany.
Thus, if Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship expresses the hope that Ger-
many’s national theater will be the source of a cultural renaissance of the sort
that he describes in Poetry and Truth, it does so in a way that is ironically
qualified throughout. The same ambiguity haunts Wilhelm Meister’s personal
engagement with the theater. As he explains in his frequently cited letter to his
friend Werner, the theater offers him the opportunity to act with the grace of a
courtier on stage, even if he remains a mere burgher in real life.83 Yet Wilhelm
seeks more than ersatz nobility, for his performance of aristocratic comport-
ment will express his genuine personal development. Wilhelm’s journey out
into the world is also a journey within, a means to the end of self-discovery:
“Even as a youth I had the vague desire and intention to develop myself fully,
myself as I am.”84 Wilhelm appropriates the ideal of noble comportment to
express a new form of bourgeois subjectivity; acting is a means to the end of
performing himself, the outward expression of an inner harmony attained
through a process of self-cultivation and organic growth.
In this regard, Wilhelm Meister’s engagement with the theater parallels
the process of aesthetic education that Schiller proposed as the antidote to
modern alienation and the alternative to the French Revolution. Here again,
however, Goethe seems determined to question the extent to which Wilhelm
Meister’s Bildung succeeds. To be sure, Meister has some success in his brief
acting career and compares favorably to his friend Werner when they are re-
united. Werner’s poor posture, shrill voice, emaciated body, and prematurely
balding scalp provide a striking contrast to Wilhelm, who has become “taller,
stronger, more upright, more cultivated in manner and more pleasant in behav-
ior.”85 By the end of the novel, Wilhelm’s paternity of Felix has been con-
firmed, and his engagement has been concluded in a way that leaves him aston-
ished. The very force with which he is thrust into marriage nourishes the
nagging suspicion that he is still a pawn in the hands of the secret society that
has intervened repeatedly in his life. They have used him to distract Lydia,
prevented his marriage to Therese, and commanded him to travel around Ger-
many with an Italian marquis. This time, their decision coincides with his de-
sires, but we leave him more stunned than satisfied, the passive recipient of
good fortune rather than the self-determining shaper of his own destiny.
While Wilhelm seeks to pull himself up to a level of noble comportment
through his engagement with the theater, the real aristocrat, Lothario, conde-
scends to form an economic alliance with the middle class, in the person of
Wilhelm’s friend Werner. At the beginning of book 5, Werner sends Wilhelm
the sad news that Wilhelm’s father is dead. He goes on to explain that he plans
to marry Wilhelm’s sister. They will sell the father’s ostentatious house and
invest the money in business, just as Wilhelm’s father had once sold his father’s
art collection to purchase the home and expand the business. Both decisions
reflect the gradual move away from the patrician’s quasi-aristocratic display of
wealth and social status and toward the stripped-down functionalism of the
bourgeois capitalist.86 In the context of this financial restructuring, Werner sug-
gests that Wilhelm should invest his inheritance in land speculation. He could
purchase rural estates, improve the properties, and then resell them for a profit,
thus adding to the family fortune.
Wilhelm does not take his brother-in-law’s advice, but Lothario does.
When his uncle dies, Lothario inherits enough money to complete long-
standing plans to purchase nearby estates, with the “only matter of concern”
being “that another business house, not in this area, has designs on these estates
also.”87 That outside company is none other than Werner and Wilhelm’s family
business. Thus the reason that Werner suddenly appears among Wilhelm’s no-
ble companions is that he and Lothario have agreed to a joint purchase of the
lands in question. The business is soon complete, whereupon Lothario aston-
ishes Werner by declaring that he is willing to forgo his aristocratic privilege
and pay taxes on the land; he also plans to do away with “feudal hocus-pocus”
(Lehns-Hokus-Pokus)88 and liberate the serfs from their feudal obligations.
Lothario explains that the state will benefit from such reforms, which are par-
ticularly necessary “in modern times, when so many concepts are changing”89—a
veiled reference to the intellectual ferment that led to political revolution.
Lothario has just returned from America, where he fought with the
French armies against the British for American independence. Presumably, he
there picked up his progressive economic views that will put the aristocracy
on an equal footing with the bourgeoisie. Lothario claims that he had found
purposeful activity in America that was denied him at home, but he has since
decided that he should return to his own lands, where he hopes to implement
the economic ideals that he learned abroad. The reference to the recently con-
cluded American Revolution dates this section of the novel to the 1780s, but
Lothario’s ideas had taken on new urgency when the novel was published a
decade later. Revolution had broken out much closer to home, and one of the
main reasons that the French rebelled was to challenge the sort of aristocratic
privilege that Lothario voluntarily relinquishes. He does not intend to spark in
Germany a political revolution of the sort that he has just witnessed in Amer-
ica. To the contrary, his proposed land reforms are conceived to strengthen the
state in a way that will make such revolution unnecessary. Economic liberal-
ization will revitalize the existing social order in a program of conservative
reform in keeping with Goethe’s general belief that social evolution is prefer-
able to political revolution.
Lothario is ahead of his times in his economic views, anticipating the
Stein-Hardenberg land reforms of Prussia by more than a decade. But he is also
an old-fashioned “Lothario,” a philandering aristocrat (in the mold of Don
Giovanni) who has left a trail of broken hearts and is indirectly responsible for
the death of Aurelie, an actress who once shared Meister’s hope for the German
national theater.90 Lothario’s proposed economic reforms are nevertheless im-
portant in that they promise to set property ownership in motion in ways that
complement Werner’s praise of global trade in the opening book of the novel
and contrast with the static world of Hermann and Dorothea. Romantic con-
vention suggests that art and money have little in common, and Wilhelm ini-
tially chooses life in the theater as a poetic alternative to the dreary business
world. As Werner argues in an uncharacteristically passionate exchange with
his friend, however, commerce has a poetry of its own. He urges that one who
visits the cities and goes down to the harbors will see that even the most trivial
commodity circulates within a global trade network: “The mighty of this world
have seized the earth and live in luxury and splendor. Every small corner of this
earth is already taken possession of, every property firmly established.” Werner
questions why he and Wilhelm should not profit from this global commerce as
well, arguing, “And I can assure you that if you would but engage your poetic
imagination, you could establish my Goddess as the undoubted victor over
yours.”91 Hermann stands firm on the solid ground of the homeland; Lothario’s
proposed reforms, in contrast, will set land into motion. He opposes serfdom
that binds people to the land, and he rejects the Fideikommiss (fee tail or en-
tail), the idea that property must, by law, be kept in the family, passed on from
one generation of aristocrats to the next, rather than put up for sale to the gen-
eral public. Land becomes a commodity that circulates in the free market,
rather than the foundation of an ancestral estate.
The movement in goods finds a corresponding movement in people. The

Tower Society brings together German aristocrats tutored by a French abbé
with connections to a troubled Italian family. The assembly does not last long,
for the society’s members are soon to be scattered abroad: “From our ancient
Tower a Society shall emerge, which will extend into every corner of the globe,
and people from all over the world will be allowed to join it.”92 Jarno and his
bride, Lydia, are leaving for America and may be joined on their journey by
Friedrich and Philine. Wilhelm heads off to Italy, where we find him at the
beginning of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wander-
jahre, 1829). While the old duke also toys with the prospect of a trip to Amer-
ica for religious reasons, Jarno explains the economic logic behind the Tower
Society’s plans to leave home: “One does not have to know much about the
present state of the world to realize that great changes are impending and prop-
erty is no longer safe anywhere.“93 A diversified portfolio is the prudent way to
prevent economic disaster: “At the present moment it is highly inadvisable to
have all one’s property and all one’s money in one place.”94
Jarno does not specify what looming changes will endanger the Tower
Society’s possessions, but it is easy enough to assume that he anticipates the
French Revolution and its attendant European conflicts.95 From a broader his-
torical perspective, however, Jarno articulates a fundamental shift from a stable
land-based economy centered on European estates to a newly mobile global
economy in the age of imperialism and colonialism.96 “Modern industry has
established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the
way,” proclaim Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. “The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products,” they continue, “chases the bour-
geoisie over the whole face of the globe.”97 The original organization of the
Tower Society resembles the dynastic politics of prerevolutionary Europe, in
which ruling families made alliances without regard for national boundaries or
native languages. The aristocrats’ plans to travel abroad and shield their invest-
ments in anticipation of impending changes in the global economy represent,
in contrast, a creative response to a new world order in which people and prod-
ucts move like capital in a free market. In such a world, stable hierarchies of
feudal rank become meaningless, as do estates passed on by entail to future
generations. Thus Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship ends with a series of mar-
riages across class lines and an argument for the liberation of land and its ser-
vants from feudal restraints.
Taken together, the different thematic threads of Wilhelm Meister’s Ap-
prenticeship suggest ways in which the politically fragmented and socially
stratified Germans can adapt to revolutionary change by modifying the existing
system rather than replacing it with something entirely new. The burgher seeks
to ennoble himself on stage, the aristocrats adopt bourgeois business practices,
and a new social and physical mobility permits marriages across class lines and
uproots burghers and nobles alike from their ancestral homes, to wander across
Europe and even overseas. Goethe does not write a utopian novel: even the
most progressive noble indulges in sexual adventures with a reckless disregard
for the emotional consequences on his conquests, while the Tower Society ex-
hibits authoritarian tendencies that only grow more pronounced in Wilhelm
Meister’s Journeyman Years. In its own qualified way, however, Wilhelm Meis-
ter’s Apprenticeship formulates Goethe’s ambiguous alternative to revolution-
ary change in the waning days of the Holy Roman Empire and anticipates ideas
he pursued in its wake.
Faust II: Anachronistic Empire and the New Imperialism
Germany remained politically fragmented until the end of Goethe’s life, as he

was well aware: “We have no city: indeed, we do not even have a country
about which we could decisively say: Here is Germany!”98 “We are nothing
but Particuliers,” explained Goethe to Eckermann, employing a term used in
his native Frankfurt for an independent gentleman who had purchased a title
from the emperor.99 “Agreement is inconceivable,” Goethe continued, ex-
plaining, “Everyone has the opinions of his province, his city, even just him-
self, and we can still wait a long time until we reach a level of common devel-
opment.”100 More than three decades after declaring, in “Response to a
Literary Rabble-Rouser,” that Germany did not desire the sort of upheavals
that would be necessary for political unification, Goethe again asserted that it
would be wrong to think that the German people and German culture would
have fared better in a centralized state: “If you think that the unity of Germany
lies in the idea that the very large Empire should have a single large royal
residence, . . . then you are wrong. . . . Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lü-
beck are large and splendid, their contribution to the prosperity of Germany
incalculable. But would they remain what they are if they lost their sover-
eignty and were incorporated into some sort of large German Reich as provin-
cial cities? I have reason to doubt it.”101
Many younger liberals, some of whom had fought in the Wars of Libera-
tion, were already beginning to envision a nation-state with a constitutional
government that would remove or at least check the authority of provincial
aristocrats and that would guarantee civil liberties by ending censorship and
emancipating women and Jews. The Holy Roman Empire was gone, but ves-
tiges of feudalism remained; indeed, the reactionary governments of the Res-
toration era did their best to pretend that the French Revolution had never hap-
pened or, at least, to set back the clock to an earlier era of aristocratic rule.
Changes that would prove impossible to stop were nevertheless underway: the
nationalist movement inspired by the French Revolution would become the
dominant political force in Europe in the course of the nineteenth century. Al-
though the Industrial Revolution, which had begun in England already in the
last decades of the eighteenth century, would not begin to have a substantial
effect on Germany until the 1850s, Goethe already saw it coming, with a mix-
ture of fascination and fear. “The increasing dominance of machine production
torments and frightens me,” writes Lenardo in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years. “It is rolling on like a storm, slowly, slowly,” he observes, “but it is
headed this way, and it will arrive and strike.”102 The movement of ideas,
goods, and people across national borders and around the world accelerated in
the last years of Goethe’s life; the members of the association in the Journey-
man Years who plan to emigrate to America anticipate the millions that would
leave Germany for the New World in coming decades. The Europeans who had
explored the world in previous centuries now began to exploit its resources,
ushering in a new kind of global imperialism and colonialism that would bring
most of the world under European control by the end of the nineteenth century.
Despite his isolation in a small city in provincial Germany, Goethe kept
abreast of these changes through a combination of avid reading and conversa-
tions with the many travelers who came to visit him in Weimar or who sent him
their books. “Choose Weimar for your home,” Goethe advised Eckermann
when they first met, claiming, “Its gates and streets open to the ends of the
earth.”103 Goethe was an avid reader of Le Globe, a French newspaper that in-
formed him about publications and events in Europe, while he also kept up on
the increasingly global reach of European exploration and commerce.104 As
Karl S. Guthke has shown, Goethe was actively involved in acquiring books
from London about overseas travel during the final decade and a half of his
life; he also gained firsthand information from German explorers such as Alex-
ander von Humboldt and Georg Forster, as well as from the many English
tourists who made their way to Weimar.105 Goethe remained conservative in his
political views, scoffing at the notion that the masses could rule themselves and
rejecting calls for the freedom of the press. Yet Goethe was never a reactionary
who wanted to go back to earlier times. He rejected revolution but not histori-
cal change, and if revolutions did occur, he blamed those in charge who failed
to adapt to new circumstances, rather than those at the bottom of the social
ladder who felt compelled to take matters into their own hands.106 If he chose
not to champion the liberal causes that inspired some German patriots, he also
refused to share their militant national chauvinism.
Goethe’s continuation of Faust offers his most profound reflections on
modern times, from the final decades of his life. Faust I was, in a certain sense,
a historical drama, arising out of Goethe’s fascination with the early modern
period, although he used the sixteenth-century character of Faust to address
eighteenth-century themes, such as the poetics of genius and romantic love in
social context. Faust II is also a historical drama, but of a very different sort.
The scope of the historical references is vastly expanded, from the Homeric
world of ancient Greece to the final years of Goethe’s life. More radically,
Goethe sublates historical succession into a simultaneous present. “I live in
millennia,” Goethe once proclaimed to Eckermann.107 In his West-Eastern Di-
van, Goethe suggests that those who fail to share his sweeping vision are con-
demned to plod blinkered through life: “He who does not know how to account
for three thousand years remains in darkness, inexperienced, and lives merely
day to day.”108 Characters in Faust II exist both as realistic figures rooted in
specific historical periods and as self-conscious allegories that can be trans-
ported across time.109 For example, when Helen returns to Greece after the
Trojan War, she worries about how she will be received back into the home of
the husband she abandoned, even as she is aware of her legendary status and
uncertain if she is real or just a myth. In the course of a few hundred lines, she
is magically transformed from an ancient Greek character, to the lover of a
medieval lord, to the mother of boy modeled on Lord Byron.
The fluid nature of time in Faust II allows Goethe to address questions
of historical development that had long been central to the self-understanding
of the Holy Roman Empire and that assumed a new importance in the era of
modern nationalism. Generations of writers, from the time of the Song of
Anno to Lohenstein’s Sophonisbe, positioned the Holy Roman Empire as heir
to the Roman past. As that empire crumbled during the Napoleonic era and
as modern nationalism emerged out of the ruins, a new sense of history
emerged, as an open-ended process outside the biblical paradigm of salvation
history.110 This “mutation of Order into History” (as Michel Foucault de-
scribes the epistemic shift from the Enlightenment to romanticism)111 in-
spired nationalists to search the past for evidence of former glory that could
inspire modern grandeur. On the part of the German romantics, we thus find
a new fascination for medieval poetry and an effort to draw lines of continu-
ity from past to present. “But what was the romantic school in Germany?”
asked Heinrich Heine, writing just one year after Goethe’s death. For Heine,
the answer was simple: “It was nothing but the reawakening of the poetry of
the Middle Ages.”112
Goethe had no patience for the affectations of Catholic piety and the pseu-
domedieval style adopted by the German romantic artists known as the Naza-
renes.113 When, in act 4, Faust summons the supernatural aid of powerful fig-
ures dressed in medieval costume, Mephistopheles turns to the audience and
utters a sly dig at the current popularity of knights in shining armor in novels:
“Today you cannot find a child who doesn’t dote / on suits of armor or a uni-
form.”114 In this context, Mephistopheles restricts himself to a typically snide
aside, but Goethe stages a more sustained engagement with questions of his-
torical development in act 3, where Helen has returned from Troy to the palace
of Menelaus, who is not home. Mephistopheles, disguised as Phorkyas (a hid-
eous, hermaphroditic, witchlike creature), there informs Helen that while
Menelaus was away at the Trojan War, a bold race from the Cimmerian night
has built a mighty fortress in a nearby mountain valley. With some trepidation,
Helen agrees to Phorkyas’ suggestion that she should escape the threat of hu-
man sacrifice in Menelaus’ palace by fleeing to the impregnable castle. She is
magically transported, through darkness and fog, to a fortress where she is
greeted by Faust, magnificently clad as a medieval knight. North meets south,
the medieval lord marries the ancient heroine, and modern poetry is born in the
allegorical figure of Euphorion before the whole phantasmagoric scene dis-
solves back into primal chaos.
The meeting between Faust and Helen thus tells the story of European
origins in its most triumphant form. The decline and fall of the ancient world is
recast as modern Europe’s ascent to power, much as Lohenstein does in his
African dramas. Goethe’s Faust is no barbarian: “He’s lively, forthright, hand-
some, and, to a degree / even in Greece exceptional, intelligent.”115 The Gothic
architecture of his fortress far surpasses the “crude masonry” of the ancient
Greek edifices.116 According to Goethe’s outline that he sketched for the drama
in 1816, the owner of the fortress was supposed to have been waging war in
Palestine,117 which would date this scene to the time of the Crusades, although
specific references are absent in the completed drama, in keeping with its sov-
ereign indifference to normal time sequences. Thus Faust’s initial meeting with
Helen is interrupted by news that Menelaus is coming with his armies to as-
sault the medieval fortress. Faust confidently predicts that his armies will crush
the foe, which they do, and he goes on to conquer the entire Peloponnese pen-
insula. Faust then divides the spoils among his followers—Germans, Goths,
Normans, Franks, and Saxons.
Goethe here taps into two of the most powerful narratives that informed
European history from a German perspective. On the one hand, Faust appears
as an Arminius-like conqueror who smites an ancient foe, although the enemy
in this case is Greece rather than Rome. The rhetoric of “steel” and “storm”
used to describe Faust’s armies (“encased in steel, its armor flashing” [in Stahl
gehüllt, vom Strahl umwittert])118 might well remind today’s reader of Ernst
Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel, 1920), a notorious glorification of
the battlefield experience of the First World War. Shortly after the Second
World War ended, Gottfried Benn referred to the same lines as “S.S. lyrics.”119
On the other hand, Faust’s union with Helen suggests that the relationship
between modern Europe and classical antiquity is based on continuity and
creative appropriation rather than violent conquest, as their love affair gives
birth to modern poetry. Their peaceful union recalls earlier understandings of
the Holy Roman Empire as the legitimate heir to ancient Rome and thus de-
fuses the aggressive appropriation of the past for modern nationalist or impe-
rialist purposes.
Faust’s invention of paper money in act 1 revisits questions of modern
economic development broached by Lothario’s land reforms in Wilhelm Meis-
ter’s Apprenticeship. By voluntarily doing away with the “hocus-pocus” of the
fee entail, Lothario transforms property from a symbol of a static feudal hierar-
chy into a dynamic commodity in a capitalist economy. Faust encounters an-
other economic crisis at court: the emperor needs cash, and the new paper
money provides a temporary solution. Several recent critics have written inno-
vative analyses of this episode, which each views as central to Goethe’s depic-
tion of a feudal social structure undermined by the forces of modern capital-
ism.120 Money becomes dematerialized, an empty sign that moves with dizzying,
accelerating velocity in the world of global commerce, thus undermining the
solidity and stability of the former social hierarchy: “All that is solid melts into
air.”121 At the time when Goethe was writing, however, in the post-Napoleonic
Restoration of the 1820s, those hierarchies were back in place. The invention of
paper money in act 1 of Faust II is thus not so much about the coming of a
capitalist economy that levels social hierarchies as about the use of innovative
economic means to prop up an anachronistic, pseudo-feudal government. Most
of act 1 consists of an elaborate masque, a debauched and ruinously expensive
costume party designed to demonstrate imperial power and aristocratic legiti-
macy even as it bankrupts the social order that it would uphold. As an adoles-
cent, Goethe had witnessed a crowning ceremony of the Holy Roman Emperor
that already seemed awkwardly anachronistic; now, two decades after the em-
pire’s demise, restored monarchies in France, Austria, and Germany were once
again performing a charade of imperial grandeur.
Goethe’s implicit critique of the Restoration continues in act 4. The em-

peror is in financial trouble again: he has squandered his paper money and ne-
glected his kingdom, under the mistaken assumption that he could combine
personal pleasure with political power. The emperor’s realm has fallen into
anarchy, and the people have decided to elect a new leader. Motivated by the
desire to obtain land for himself, Faust agrees to serve as the old emperor’s
general and, with the help of Mephistopheles’s black magic, defeats the rival
kaiser and receives his reward. These are the last lines that Goethe added to his
lifelong project. He completed Faust II in the summer of 1831, one year after
the July Revolution in Paris. Goethe was well aware of these political develop-
ments and roundly criticized “the delusions of young people who want to take
part in the loftiest affairs of state.”122 Thus one might expect that Goethe would
use the political events depicted in act 4 to celebrate the triumph of legitimate
imperial rule over a new generation of rabble-rousers. However, the old em-
peror appears inept and corrupt. His plan to have his men engage in hand-to-
hand combat with the rival emperor’s men is rejected “as ridiculously old-
fashioned nonsense,” typical of his efforts to prop up “a rotten and deeply
questionable—indeed, anachronistic—form of government.”123 As was the
case with the French Revolution decades earlier, Goethe has no sympathy with
political rebels and even less with rulers who mismanaged their realm and,
thus, provoked violent protest. The act ends with the bishop scolding the em-
peror for having retained his throne with Satan’s help. The bishop suggests that
the emperor can atone for his guilt by funding a lavish new cathedral, a possi-
ble reference to the corrupt collusion between church and state under the Bour-
bon monarchy in Restoration France.124
Finally, in act 5 of Faust II, we witness a new sort of imperial power—not
the crumbling federal structure of the late Holy Roman Empire, but the rapa-
cious greed of nineteenth-century European imperialism.125 Faust has estab-
lished a global empire based on world trade of the sort that Werner glorifies in
his enthusiastic outburst to Wilhelm Meister. In this case, however, there is
nothing poetic about Faust’s economic conquests. His ships return to port laden
with ill-gotten gain, and Mephistopheles provides the usual cynical commen-
tary: “Since it’s a fact that might is right—not how but what will be the only
question asked. / Unless I’m all at sea about maritime matters, / war, trade, and
piracy together are / a trinity not to be severed.”126 Faust’s merchants have been
so successful that there is no room in the harbor for his ships: “We started out
with two ships only, / but now we’re back in port with twenty.”127 Faust has
received his reward of beachfront property for aiding the old emperor in his
struggle against his rival, but most of the land still lies under water. Thus Faust
sets about reclaiming land to build a palace and a harbor for the ships that bring
home booty from all over the world. In the process, however, his men burn
down a house and kill an innocent old couple and their guest. Faust’s delusions
of grandeur continue up to the moment when he collapses into his grave.
If Goethe casts a critical eye on attempts to restore outmoded forms of
imperial government in acts 1 and 4 of Faust II, act 5 looks forward even more
critically, to new kinds of European imperialism that will colonize and exploit
the goods and people of the non-European world, while crushing domestic dis-
sent with totalitarian force. Faust even strives to subject the sea itself, with the
aid of infernal machines that belch fire and smoke into the atmosphere. One
need not ascribe to Goethe clairvoyant powers that gave him the ability to fore-
see the evils of nineteenth-century European imperialism, twentieth-century
totalitarianism, and twenty-first-century climate change, although one senses
that he may not have been entirely astonished by these developments. By the
time he died in 1832, the writing was already on the wall: England, France, and
Spain were busy establishing the sort of global empires that Germany would
seek within a few decades; authoritarian governments were already in place;
and if the Industrial Revolution had not yet reached Germany, it was certainly
on its way, as Lenardo had predicted. Goethe leaves us with a double legacy:
his unflinching gaze exposes the anachronism of an old world order and an-
ticipates that there will be much worse to come in the new one, but he also
envisions a cosmopolitan world literature that expresses, in its diversity, our
common humanity.
Weltliteratur in Contemporary Context
In conclusion, I return to the topic of Goethe and world literature. As we have

seen, Goethe was always open to foreign literary influences, even during the
early years of his writing career, when he focused most closely on figures situ-
ated in the German present (Wilhelm Meister, Werther) or drawn from the
early modern past (Goetz, Faust). Specific to the concept of world literature
that Goethe embraced in the final years of his life, however, was the idea of a
living international community of writers who could read and learn from each
other’s works.128 In a world in which improved communication and global
commerce were accelerating the exchange of goods and ideas, it seemed obvi-
ous to Goethe that literature could not be contained within national borders.
Fritz Strich describes Goethe’s concept of world literature as “an intellectual
barter, a traffic in ideas between peoples, a literary market,” while David Dam-
rosch goes on to observe that Marx and Engels, when writing the Communist
Manifesto, “adopted Goethe’s term precisely in the context of newly global
trade relations.”129 As Goethe became increasingly convinced “that poetry is
the common property of humanity,” he became impatient with what he felt was
the German tendency to wall itself off from the world.130 Indeed, Goethe sug-
gests that national literatures will wither and die if they are not periodically
stimulated with foreign fertilizer.131 For this reason, he stresses the importance
of translation, not just because it makes works available to those outside the
country who cannot read the original language, but also because it refreshes a
language grown stale in its original context. Thus Goethe concludes “that the
translator is working not for his own nation alone but also for the nation from
whose language he takes the work.”132
While Goethe insists on the importance of international literary exchange,
he never abandons the belief that nations are fundamentally different from one
another: “We repeat however that there can be no question of the nations think-
ing alike, the aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, under-
stand each other, and, even where they may not be able to love, may at least
tolerate one another.”133 What is true in the present was true in the past. The
Persians, for instance, demonstrate that a nation possesses an ineradicable core
of a stable identity that will withstand even the worst vicissitudes: “No matter
how many times a country is conquered, subjugated, even annihilated by ene-
mies, it still preserves a certain kernel of the nation in its character, and before
you know it, an old familiar appearance of the people manifests itself again.”134
Thus assimilation of foreign influences can only go so far; when they violate
the national integrity, it is time to stop: “And once again, what is good for a
nation is only what comes out of its inner core and its own general needs, with-
out the imitation of another.”135
Goethe’s references to the inner integrity of national cultures reflects the
long-standing influence of Herder, which goes back to Goethe’s days in Stras-
bourg. At that time, Herder inspired Goethe to resist French cultural hegemony
and to cultivate authentically German literature. As John K. Noyes has shown,
Herder’s early advocacy of German national traditions was part of a lifelong
effort to respect and preserve the diversity of human cultures as they develop
in specific historical and geographical contexts. The concept of development,
or Bildung, is critical in this regard: while nations (conceived as linguistic and
cultural communities, not political nation-states) are distinct, they are not what
Leibniz would term “windowless monads.”136 They change over time, in part
by absorbing and adapting foreign influences. Goethe’s concept of world lit-
erature reflects this combination of respect for national difference with open-
ness to international exchange. The question that inevitably arises is, when
does cosmopolitan enrichment shade into cultural imperialism?
The answer is simple, at least in theory: it depends on historical context.
In the 1770s, for instance, Goethe, Herder, Lessing, and others resisted French
influence as invasively foreign, because they were trying to assert their na-
tional independence. What was formulated in terms of an international struggle
was equally rooted in class conflict: as Reinhart Koselleck observes, the mid-
dle class, excluded from political power, sought to establish itself as the voice
of common humanity against the Old Regime.137 French culture in Germany
was the mantle of aristocratic rule provoked into crisis by bourgeois critique.
In the 1790s, in contrast, Goethe reacts against what Gonthier-Louis Fink de-
scribes as the “revolutionary Messianism” of the French,138 that is, their at-
tempt to impose universal values, by force if necessary, on other European
nations. Here Goethe breaks with some of his contemporaries who were more
sympathetic to the Revolution (including Herder, Wieland, and Georg Forster),
to insist, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser,” that the German writers
are doing quite well under difficult circumstances and do not want the sort of
political upheavals necessary to bring about radical change. Resistance to revo-
lution is not the same as reaction; hence Goethe implicitly criticizes Hermann’s
insularity and supports Lothario’s reforms. In the 1810s and 1820s, Goethe’s
enemy shifts again, away from French revolutionary imperialism and toward
German nationalism, particularly when it reeked of sentimentalized religion. It
is important to remember, however, that Goethe’s literary cosmopolitanism
was not an expression of political liberalism. Goethe resisted German national
chauvinism not in the name of greater democracy and human equality but in
the spirit of an empire that allowed for local autonomy and traditional rights
within a larger feudal hierarchy. At the same time, his conservatism was not
reactionary. In his adolescence, he suspected that the empire was becoming an
empty display, and he used his final drama to expose the absurdity of a post-
revolutionary imperial anachronism.
If historical context determined the meaning of Goethe’s fluctuation be-
tween national and world literature during his lifetime, the same is true of
subsequent efforts to appropriate his work for contemporary contexts. I began
this chapter with a brief description of how Goethe was first hailed as the hero
of Germany’s national literature and then embraced as the antinational prophet
of world literature. In the wake of the Second World War, Goethe’s cosmo-
politanism had an obvious appeal for those seeking an alternative to the dis-
credited cultural nationalism of the recent past. Less obvious was the use of
Goethe as an ally against a new form of internationalism. In 1952, Erich Auer-
bach embraced Goethe’s insistence on national diversity within the larger order
of world literature, as an antidote to “the process of levelling” and “standard-
ization” in an increasingly interconnected world.139 National difference mat-
ters after all, if conceived in the Herderian sense of respect for cultural diver-
sity against the homogenizing tendencies of global culture.
We can push this tension between national specificity and cosmopolitan
exchange inherent in Goethe’s concept of world literature closer to present
debates with a look at the work of Emily Apter and Rebecca Walkowitz. In
Against World Literature, Apter voices her reservations about a newly emerg-
ing canon of world literature that moves all too easily across national and lin-
guistic borders. She endorses “World Literature’s deprovincialization of the
canon,” but she harbors “serious reservations about tendencies in World Litera-
ture toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability,
or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’
that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”140 If cultural
critics of the 1990s identified the emergence of a new, globalized “McWorld,”141
Apter might be said to be protesting against “McWorld Literature.” She there-
fore stresses the ineradicable uniqueness of individual literary works and tradi-
tions by highlighting the “Untranslatable” residue that resists cultural transfer.
In response, Rebecca Walkowitz focuses on contemporary literature that pres-
ents itself as “born translated,” by which she means works that are written for
a global audience and that appear nearly simultaneously in multiple languages.
While Apter highlights what she feels are untranslatable impediments to global
literary circulation, Walkowitz insists that precisely such terms and texts that
seem most resistant to translation provoke more efforts to send them out into a
multilingual world: “Untranslatable words . . . are those for which translation
is interminable. They express not the refusal of translation but the persistence
of it.”142 Walkowitz’s larger aim in discussing fiction that is “born translated”
is to identify contemporary literature that challenges “the national singularity
of the work” and moves away from the “possessive collectivism” of the na-
tion.143 The novels of J. M. Coetzee, for instance, are not “part of a distinct
national-language tradition that emerges from a coherent national community”
and are thus ill-suited to “a nation-based model of literary history.”144
In the last chapter of this book, I return to the role of national traditions in
an age of world literature. In the present context, I seek to underscore the extent
to which Goethe anticipates some of our contemporary debates about the
meaning of world literature, as they oscillate between an embrace of the ac-
celerated circulation of transnational texts and an appeal to the integrity of in-
digenous traditions. As we have seen, Goethe already alternates between proc-
lamations that national literature is an outmoded provincialism and an

insistence on the essential, ineradicable differences between national cultures.
This balancing act will be familiar to readers of Herder, Goethe’s early mentor,
who also asserts our common Humanität even as he defends cultural diversity.
As Noyes argues in convincing detail, Herder thereby articulates a tension,
between the universal and culturally specific, that continues to trouble postco-
lonial theorists today.145 In the case of Goethe, I argue that the apparent contra-
diction between national essentialism and universal humanism might be better
understood as a strategy that positions him between two different opponents.
On the one hand, Goethe directs his advocacy of world literature against those
who insist too vehemently on the purity of the national culture, in keeping with
his general refusal to participate in the patriotic enthusiasm of his fellow Ger-
mans. On the other hand, Goethe emphasizes his belief in national difference,
in keeping with his consistent aversion toward all forms of imperialist univer-
salism, from the territorial state that crushes the independent imperial knight
Goetz, through the French revolutionary armies that drive refugees across the
Rhine, to the colonial violence that kills Baucis and Philemon in the final act
of Faust II. A world literature that effaced all forms of cultural diversity would
be no more acceptable than a national literature that resisted all incursions of
foreign influence. The world literature that Goethe describes has room for na-
tional differences, even as the national literature he defends opens its doors to
alien imports.
Chapter 6
Romantic Nationalism
and Imperial Nostalgia
The defeat of the Prussian army near Weimar that precipitated Goethe’s deci-
sion to marry his long-term mistress also marked a new phase in the history of
German nationalism. Foreign troops were on German soil; a French emperor
dictated the terms of surrender. Now it was time to fight back. In the ideologi-
cal haze of nationalist retrospection, the Wars of Liberation became a tale of
national triumph: the Germans arose as one to cast off the Corsican tyrant. In
fact, however, patriotic sentiment was limited to a relatively small segment of
the general population,1 and life under French rule was not necessarily worse
than it had been in the old German provinces. Jews particularly benefited, by
being granted full political rights in the French satellite states along the Rhine,
which in turn inspired the emancipation of Jews in Prussia (sadly, the edict was
suspended only three years after Napoleon’s defeat).2 Nevertheless, precisely
because it loomed so large in the collective memory of the German people, the
nationalism of the romantic era deserves a closer look.
The new nationalism developed in two interrelated directions: one looked
outward at an external foe, while the other looked within, searching the depths
of the German soul. In both cases, members of the recently defunct Holy Ro-
man Empire sought to identify a common sense of national identity that tran-
scended local loyalties. Christoph Martin Wieland recalled, in 1793, that no one
spoke about German patriotism when he was a boy. Children were taught to
obey the local magistrates and acknowledge the emperor’s supreme authority,
but the concept of a collective German identity (Teutschheit) did not yet exist.3
Even Jacob Grimm, born two generations after Wieland, remembered his child-
hood “love of the fatherland” in terms of local pride rather than national enthu-
siasm.4 That changed in the work of Heinrich von Kleist, the most militant of
the new nationalists, who sought to expand the horizons of German self-
understanding from the province to the nation. His Katechismus der Deutschen
119
(German catechism, 1809), which appropriates the dialogic structure of Lu-

ther’s Catechism for patriotic purposes, begins with a programmatic distinction
between Germany’s political divisions and its sense of collective unity.
Question: Tell me, child, who are you?

Answer: I am a German.
Question: A German? You are joking. You were born in Meissen, and the
land that Meissen belongs to is called Saxony!
Answer: I was born in Meissen, and the land that Meissen belongs to is
called Saxony; but my fatherland, the land that Saxony belongs to, is
Germany, and your son, my father, is a German!5
The dialog goes on to explain, in the simplest terms, that the Germans have
been victims of French aggression; Napoleon is a dog who deserves to die, and
it is the duty of all Germans to join in the struggle to liberate the fatherland.
Kleist’s poetry of the period adopts a savage tone, exhorting the Germans to
cover the fields with French bones and to fill the Rhine with French corpses,
while his drama Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Teutoburg Forest, 1808),
reworks the familiar tale of Germanic resistance to the Romans into a thinly
disguised work of political propaganda against the French.6
Other writers suggested that the German defeats were only a symptom of
their self-estrangement. Already in the eighteenth century, Lessing, Klopstock,
Herder, and Goethe had lamented the German tendency to be seduced by
French fashion; now more than ever, it seemed imperative to lift the fog of
foreign influence. Thus, in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the
German Nation, 1807–8), Johann Gottlieb Fichte invokes the old Tacitean
story about the Germans being an indigenous people rooted, since time imme-
morial, in the German countryside, but he also places a new stress on language
as the expression of the collective soul of the German people, or Volk. Conced-
ing that the language has changed over time, he insists that the changes have
sprung from the living stock of the national tree. Foreign words and concepts
grafted onto the national culture, such as “humanity,” “popularity,” and “lib-
erty,” cannot thrive. National renewal can only come if the Germans cut off the
alien implants and reconnect to the vital roots of their own traditions.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many German artists and
intellectuals heeded the call to preserve what remained of the national culture.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected fairy tales and sagas, Joseph Görres resur-
rected chapbooks in Die Teutschen Volksbücher (The German chapbooks,
1807), and Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim assembled an influential
Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia 121
anthology of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (The
boy’s magic horn: Old German songs, 1806–8). Enthusiasts began to collect
and edit German literature of the High Middle Ages. What began in the spirit
of romantic amateurism soon developed into serious scholarship, which led, in
turn, to the establishment of university chairs for the study of German medieval
literature and the beginnings of the academic discipline of Germanistik (Ger-
man studies). Still others expanded Fichte’s interest in the history of the Ger-
man language into a search for its Indo-Germanic source.
Given Fichte’s appeals to the organically united German Volk and the vio-
lence of Kleist’s warmongering rhetoric, it is not surprising that modern histo-
rians in search of the ideological sources of National Socialism have looked to
the work of the German romantics,7 where scholars have found a fateful will-
ingness to cast off the shackles of mere reason and to plunge into the darkness
of chthonic desires, a search for the mythic foundations of the national culture,
and the beginnings of a newly virulent strain of antisemitism.8 In German ro-
manticism, Thomas Mann located the prototype of the otherworldly dreamer
who was all too willing to leave politics to others—others who sought to com-
pensate for German “belatedness” with a Faustian recklessness that provoked
two world wars and encouraged the masses to fight to the last man for a lost
and utterly corrupt cause.9 As tempting as it may be to trace the origins of Na-
tional Socialism back to the romantic era, one should be cautious not to over-
look significant differences between the two movements. As Rüdiger Safranski
observes, there were certainly elements of antisemitism among some roman-
tics, but their völkisch beliefs had not yet been buttressed by the pseudoscien-
tific race theories of the later nineteenth century, nor were they guilty of sys-
tematic genocide.10 The romantics may have glorified artistic genius, but they
did not subscribe to a political führer cult. Many of the Germans who volun-
teered to fight against Napoleon were liberals who hoped for a more demo-
cratic form of government in Germany, although those hopes were repeatedly
dashed over the coming decades. Only after the failed Revolution of 1848 did
German nationalism swerve from its initial liberal impulses.11 Despite their
rhetoric of a return to wholesome traditions and their rejection of modernist art,
the Nazis, in their quest for political power, embraced modern technology in a
way that the romantics did not.12 Finally, National Socialism was a totalitarian
movement that sought to stamp out regional diversity and intellectual dissent.
As Celia Applegate observes, the Heimat (homeland) movement that once
thrived in the early years of national unification withered under the Nazi pen-
chant “for the gigantic and national in place of the small and local.” Kleinsta-
aterei (particularism) became the negative counterpart to the new Reichsidee
(concept of empire) as “the Nazi historians condemned the last centuries of

localized rule and with it the whole idea of federalism.”13
Just such a stress on the benefits of regional diversity played a central role
in the political thought of conservative romantics in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. In this chapter, I focus primarily on the work of Joseph von Eichendorff
(1788–1857), with an excursus on Friedrich Schlegel’s political theory. Eichen-
dorff has often been viewed as the quintessential German romantic, the poet of
spiritual wanderlust, and the patriot who volunteered for the legendary Lützow
Freikorps in the battle against Napoleon. Often forgotten is the fact that this
seemingly “nonpolitical” poet spent his career as a Prussian civil servant and
wrote bitterly sarcastic send-ups of the liberal movement. Auch ich in Arkadien
(I too was in Arcadia, probably 1832) takes aim at the Hambach Festival, a
gathering in late May 1832 of some twenty or thirty thousand liberals who
sought freedom of the press, free trade, and popular sovereignty in a unified
Germany.14 Libertas und ihre Freier (Liberty and her lovers, 1849) mocks the
revolutionaries of 1848. Eichendorff’s son published these satirical works long
after his father’s death and excised some of the more direct references to con-
temporary events, so their impact on Eichendorff’s image was delayed by
many years. From the beginning of his career, however, Eichendorff’s works
reflect on the difficult choices confronting a Catholic conservative in an era of
revolutionary change.
Like so many of the major baroque writers of the seventeenth century,
Eichendorff was from Silesia, a province in today’s southeast Poland. In Gry-
phius and Lohenstein’s day, Silesia was subordinate to the authority of the
Austrian-based Hapsburg monarchy, but in 1740, the Prussian king Frederick
II (“the Great”) launched a surprise attack on the neighboring province and
brought it under Prussian control. Eichendorff’s family was of ancient German
aristocracy whose origins can be traced back to tenth-century Bavaria.15 Over
the centuries, the family wandered north to Brandenburg and then southeast to
Silesia, where Eichendorff was born on a family estate outside the town of
Ratibor, today’s Racibórz, just north of the Czech border. At the time, Ratibor
was near the southern tip of Prussian Silesia, immediately above the Austrian
border. Joseph and his older brother Wilhelm “did not consider themselves to
be Prussian, but rather Silesians with loyalties to Austria.”16 Technically, how-
ever, they were Prussian, which posed a problem in that the Eichendorffs were
devout Catholics in a predominantly Protestant land. Although members of the
highest social status by birth, the Eichendorffs faced increasingly dire financial
circumstances, as their father speculated unsuccessfully in land and managed
to squander the family fortune. The Eichendorffs were forced to sell their es-
tates, one by one, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, presenting the
young brothers with difficult career choices. Wilhelm was able to find work in
the Austrian government, but after Joseph rejected an arranged marriage that
would have stabilized his disastrous family finances, he had no choice but to
pursue a career in Prussia.
Friedrich Schlegel’s Political Theory
In November 1810, the inseparable Eichendorff brothers moved to Vienna to

study law. One of the main attractions there was Friedrich Schlegel, who was
to have a decisive impact on Joseph von Eichendorff’s political views.17 Schle-
gel’s career confirms the common stereotype that German romanticism began
radical and became reactionary. The young Schlegel was a central figure in the
group of romantics in Jena that included his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel,
as well as Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Carolina
Schlegel-Schelling, and Sophie Mereau. Young Schlegel is best known for his
programmatic Athenäum fragments, in which he defined romantic poetry as a
“progressive universal poetry,” and for his scandalously salacious novel Lu-
cinde (1799). The turning point for Schlegel came in 1802, when he moved
from Jena to Paris. His account of the journey reveals a new reverence for
symbols of German nationalism such as the Wartburg castle and the river
Rhine, together with a growing critical distance from the French national char-
acter. In Paris, Schlegel studied Persian and Sanskrit before returning to Co-
logne to write his seminal Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the
Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808). The once impertinent Protestant,
who had sympathized with the French Revolution in his youth, converted to
Catholicism and moved to Vienna, where he worked for Metternich’s conser-
vative government. As his critics maliciously observed, the older Schlegel was
a gourmand and became morbidly obese before dying at the age of fifty-six.
In addition to his interest in literature, aesthetics, Eastern languages, and
politics, Friedrich Schlegel was increasingly fascinated by history. In 1809, he
requested and received permission to hold a series of lectures on history at the
University of Vienna, which he delivered between February and May 1810,
just months before the arrival of the Eichendorff brothers. The lightly revised
essays were published in 1811.18 Schlegel makes no pretense of neutrality in
his lectures, which are narrated from the perspective of a German patriot loyal
to the social structure of medieval Europe and the recently defunct Holy Ro-
man Empire. He welcomes the end of antiquity, because it gave birth to mod-
ern Europe, and he celebrates Hermann as a great Germanic hero who liber-
ated his people from the tyranny of Rome. Charlemagne gets high marks as
the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, while Luther is scolded for his arro-
gance and inflexibility. One of Schlegel’s particular favorites is Luther’s arch-
enemy, the Catholic emperor Charles V, and Schlegel laments the division of
the Christian church by the Reformation and expresses reservations about the
Enlightenment.
In its broad outlines, Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte
(Lectures concerning modern history) follows the course charted in Friedrich
von Hardenberg’s famous and notorious essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa”
(Christianity or Europe, 1799).19 The essay by Hardenberg, or Novalis, is fa-
mous to some because it offers an early and particularly poignant example of
the romantic veneration of the Middle Ages, and it is notorious to others for
precisely the same reason, because it seems to turn its back on the present
revolutionary age and seek refuge in idyllic days of yore.20 For generations of
left-leaning critics, Novalis’s essay marks the fateful moment when early Ger-
man romanticism swerves from its progressive beginnings toward a reaction-
ary Christian nationalism. More recent readers have exposed a radical agenda
beneath the cloak of medieval nostalgia, as Novalis advocates, toward the end
of his essay, for a new European future in the language of Fichtean philosophy.
His vision of a postrevolutionary European unity cannot obscure the rhetori-
cally powerful evocation of the High Middle Ages that begins the essay, how-
ever, and this veneration of the past was to have an immediate impact on the
first generation of German romantics.
Friedrich Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte continue
the fascination with Germany’s medieval past that Novalis began, but with
significant differences in personal politics and historical context. Hardenberg
wrote as a Protestant Pietist steeped in the language of philosophical idealism.
In 1799, he and Schlegel formed part of a radical group of young intellectuals
at the University of Jena, but by 1810, Schlegel had made his right-hand turn
toward conservative Catholicism at the court of Vienna. The Jena romantics
flourished in a period of peace granted by the Treaty of Basel; Friedrich
Schlegel delivered his essays in the wake of Austrian and Prussian defeats at
the hands of Napoleon’s armies. Although Schlegel’s earliest plans for the
lectures date back to his days in Cologne, they became, in the context of their
delivery, a contribution to the literature of the German resistance against Na-
poleonic rule. When published, early in 1811, they were hailed as the “voice
of the uprising, as a nationalist manifesto.”21 Rather than writing a political
treatise about the specific ills of the Napoleonic occupation, however, Schle-
gel delivers a sweeping account that offers a partisan view of nearly two mil-
lennia of European history and a political alternative to revolutionary democ-
racy for the present.
Like Hardenberg’s “Europa,” Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über die neuere Ge-
schichte looks back fondly to the Middle Ages as a time when church and state
were one, in implicit opposition to the principles of modern secular democra-
cies. Rejecting the revolutionary notion that “all men are created equal,” Schle-
gel advocates a society based on the social hierarchy of a “corporative constitu-
tion” (der ständischen Verfassung).22 He prefers religious faith to enlightened
reason, the living body of an organic community to the sterile machinery of the
modern state. Perhaps most important for the development of Eichendorff’s
views, Schlegel envisions a modern Europe that would allow for local diversity
within a universal framework, rather than one torn by sharp divisions between
modern nation-states. If Rome had been able to conquer northern Europe,
Schlegel contends, it would have imposed a bland homogeneity on the region’s
rich cultural diversity: “The freedom and peculiar characteristics of the nations
[would be] eradicated, and everything [would be] transformed into the same
provincial uniformity. . . . And yet it is precisely this richness, this variety
[Mannigfaltigkeit], that makes Europe what it is” (131). One of Charlemagne’s
major achievements was to create “the ideal of a legal bond, a free association
that would embrace all nations and states of the educated and cultivated world,
without sacrificing the free and characteristic national development [eigentüm-
liche Nationalentwicklung] of each individual nation” (208). By “nation,”
Schlegel means an organic community of like-minded individuals, not the po-
litical machinery of the modern nation-state. In fact, he explicitly rejects the
development of modern nationalism as an unfortunate consequence that re-
sulted from the Reformation and destroyed European unity: “After the Refor-
mation, the countries and nations become very isolated; the general coherence
of Europe almost completely ceased” (337). Schlegel’s ideal is not nationalism
but federalism, “a federative, corporatively free state” (ein föderativer, stän-
disch freier Staat) of the sort that once existed under Emperor Charles V, “a
state that is itself a system of allied nations and states” (301).
In a major political essay written a decade later, “Signatur des Zeitalters”
(Characteristics of the age, 1820–23), Schlegel again took stock of the state of
Europe. The historical situation had changed, as the conservative forces of the
Restoration had triumphed, but Schlegel’s principles remained the same. At the
outset of the essay, he notes that there is a new unity in Europe, not a good sort
of unity, but one based on the “tendency toward centralization and the system-
atic amalgamation and eradication of everything local and independently cor-
porative [Verschmelzung und Vertilgung alles Lokalen und selbständig Korpo-

rativen].”23 He looks back disapprovingly at the revolutionary period, as a time
of political chaos caused by modern nationalists whose desire for “a mathemat-
ical equivalency in the treatment of the entire state” resulted in “the annihila-
tion of the personal, local, and all independent corporations” (513). Schlegel
bases his social ideal on what he terms “the living positive” (522; das lebendig
Positive), by which he means an organic community based on the family and
the church, as opposed to “that purely mathematical and mechanical view of
the state” typical of revolutionary governments and modern state administra-
tions (524). Schlegel vigorously rejects the notion of a centralized state with a
single national capital, in favor of “a federative alliance [föderative Verbind-
ung] of medium-sized, larger, and smaller states,” in which “the new . . . affili-
ates itself everywhere with the historically grounded and specifically local [ei-
gentümlich Lokale], with the still-remaining stronghold” of past tradition (535;
emphasis in original). In sum, Schlegel seeks to preserve the virtues of the old
system of rule by Herrschaft, based on loyalty to individual rulers in a hierar-
chical society, against what he feels are the pernicious effects of Verwaltung,
the soulless bureaucracy of the modern nation-state.24
Eichendorff: Conservative Catholic

and Prussian Civil Servant
The home of Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel soon became the Eichendorff
brothers’ intellectual and social focal point in Vienna.25 Joseph passed his first
set of examinations between September 1811 and September 1812, with high
marks, but then interrupted his career to fight against Napoleon. After the war,
the family’s worsening financial situation and the fact that his fiancée was preg-
nant forced Eichendorff to abandon his hope for a career in Austria.26 He ac-
cepted an unpaid internship for the Prussian government in Breslau and swore
an oath of loyalty to King Frederick William III.27 After various failed attempts
to secure positions as a professor of history or Silesian administrator, Eichen-
dorff applied for permission to take the examination that would qualify him for
a career as a Prussian civil servant. For this “second state examination” (zweites
Staatsexamen), Eichendorff was required to write an essay in response to a
question posed by the Prussian authorities. Competition for the limited number
of positions in the Prussian civil service was fierce, and Catholics like Eichen-
dorff stood at a disadvantage in predominantly Protestant Prussia.28 To make
matters worse, Eichendorff was assigned a question that required him to address
directly the politics of religion in Restoration Germany: “What disadvantages

and advantages should the Catholic regions of Germany in all probability expect
from the dissolution of the sovereignty of the bishoprics and abbeys as well as
the confiscation of property from the monasteries and cloisters?”
On the eve of the French Revolution, many of the small ecclesiastical ter-
ritories within the Holy Roman Empire were in direct control of the Catholic
Church. As the Revolution proceeded and the empire collapsed, the number of
German territories was dramatically reduced. Already in 1792, German aristo-
crats were stripped of their seigneurial rights in Alsace, as the French govern-
ment took over lands that had previously belonged to the empire. In compensa-
tion for lost territory in the west, the German territories near the Rhine were
allowed to annex smaller, formerly independent regions: “Once it had begun,
this interlocking process of annexation and compensation became a standing
invitation to aggression by encouraging states to expand, sweep aside estab-
lished boundaries, and absorb smaller polities.”29 By 1803, almost all of the
ecclesiastical territories “were gone forever. On the right bank of the Rhine,
three electorates, nineteen bishoprics, and forty-four abbeys, totaling some ten
thousand square kilometers with about three million subjects disappeared.”30
Among the results of this dramatic simplification of the German territorial
boundaries were an increase in the size and power of Prussia, an end to the
policy (existing since the Reformation) by which confessional and political
boundaries coincided, and a corresponding erosion of Catholic authority.
Thus it is not surprising that Eichendorff felt he had been handed a trick
question when he was asked to assess the repercussions of the annexation of
ecclesiastical territories. The easiest path for the aspiring civil servant would
have been to praise the process that had strengthened Prussia. To his credit,
however, Eichendorff stuck to his convictions and insisted that the seculariza-
tion and consolidation of those territories into larger states was detrimental to
Germany. Fortunately, the examining official who evaluated Eichendorff’s es-
say was also Catholic and was open-minded enough to appreciate the intellec-
tual quality of an essay that refused to toe the party line.31 The Prussian govern-
ment also deserves credit, for Eichendorff was allowed to pass the examination
and become a Prussian civil servant. He was never completely comfortable in
the role and was probably underpaid and underpromoted because of his dis-
senting views,32 but the possibility of his career testifies to a degree of toler-
ance within the Prussian government that would have been inconceivable dur-
ing the Third Reich.
Eichendorff’s examination essay formulates the political beliefs that re-
mained consistent throughout his career. Strongly influenced by Friedrich
Schlegel’s lectures on German history, Eichendorff defends the benefits of

German particularism against the centralizing tendencies of the modern bu-
reaucratic state. He begins by claiming that, at a time when Christians were
still a persecuted minority in Europe, the Germans were the first to integrate
the new church into the state: “The Church became the soul of the state.”33 At
that time, distance made it impossible for kings to maintain direct control over
their scattered territories, so individual lords were granted local autonomy un-
der the authority of the emperor alone (Reichsunmittelbarkeit) (458). Thus the
empire flourished until religious faith began to fade and the healthy body of the
Christian state sickened under the corrupting influence of statistics, commerce,
and the military. The beautiful German forest was sacrificed to finance new
standing armies, and the living diversity of the organic state was covered up by
“the shroud of uniformity” (474; die Leichendecke der Einerleiheit).
At this point, Eichendorff lays his cards on the table and declares that he
considers “the secularization of the ecclesiastical states and properties . . . a
misfortune for Germany” (477). Two forms of government have developed in
Europe, he argues, the French and the German. The former functions “like a
conqueror in its own land” and seeks to maximize wealth through mechanized
uniformity; the latter respects tradition and evolves in a “quietly powerful pro-
cess of development” (477–78; stillkräftiges Werden). By dramatically reduc-
ing the number of its traditional territories and severing the bond between
church and state, the Prussians have adopted a French form of government that
is alien to its nature. Like a healthy ecosystem, the German state needs its di-
versity; harmony and equilibrium only develop in small states through the “in-
tertwining of multifarious peculiarities” (486; Ineinanderverschlingen der
mannigfaltigen Eigentümlichkeit). Eichendorff implores God to forbid that the
Germans should be subject to the tyranny of a single capital like Paris. True
unity lies in heterogeneity, not enforced homogeneity: “Monotony is not only
not unity [Einerleiheit ist nicht nur keine Einheit] but an active obstacle to the
same” (488). Thus Eichendorff can only conclude that the incorporation of
formerly independent ecclesiastical territories into larger German provinces
was a mistake that impoverishes the nation and destroys its organic unity.
Presentiment and Presence: Local Patriotism and

Philosophical Pessimism
Eichendorff was understandably proud of his principled stand in his examina-

tion essay, but he won something of a Pyrrhic victory with it, for the changes it
denounces had already taken place. A sense of contemporary crisis as a symp-

tom of irrevocable decline already pervades Eichendorff’s first novel, Presenti-
ment and Presence (Ahnung und Gegenwart, 1815). He wrote the novel while
studying in Vienna and during vacations in Silesia. It was finished already in
the fall of 1812 but did not appear until the spring of 1815, partly because of
the turmoil of the war years, but also because the unknown writer had some
difficulty finding a publisher. Unlike Friedrich von Hardenberg’s prototypi-
cally romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801), Presentiment and Pres-
ence is set not in the distant past of an idealized Middle Ages but in the imme-
diate historical present of the Napoleonic Wars. In part 1 of Presentiment and
Presence, we meet the protagonist, Graf Friedrich, just after he has completed
his university studies. We follow him as he makes friends and meets potential
lovers in a landscape reminiscent of rural Silesia. Part 2 takes Friedrich to an
unnamed city, where he observes the social life of decadent aristocrats and
would-be poets. In the third and final section of the novel, Friedrich joins the
partisan resistance against Napoleonic forces, before deciding to renounce the
world and become a monk.
Eichendorff borrowed liberally from the work of other romantic writers
when composing his first novel, but the primary model for his and every other
romantic bildungsroman was Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.34 Eichendorff
modified Goethe’s model in several significant ways. Wilhelm Meister, a mem-
ber of the urban middle class, is guided by and eventually granted access to a
circle of landed aristocrats; Graf Friedrich, a member of an old noble family,
undergoes no change in social rank. Goethe depicts Meister, a character he
once described as a “poor dog,” with a certain ironic detachment. Meister is
often bewildered about his role in life and becomes increasingly angry as he
discovers the extent to which he has been manipulated by the members of the
Tower Society. Graf Friedrich, in contrast, is the unquestioned hero of Eichen-
dorff’s novel; he is always in control of himself and generally superior to those
he encounters. Like Goethe’s other works, from the Roman Elegies to Elective
Affinities, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship deals frankly with matters of sex-
uality. Presentiment and Presence appears prurient and prudish in contrast:
attractive women always seem to be on the verge of exposing their ample
charms, while Friedrich sternly chastises them for their unseemly behavior.
Even young Erwin, an androgynous character directly modeled on Goethe’s
Mignon, turns out to have been concealing a voluptuous female body beneath
men’s clothing. Friedrich discovers her secret when he rips open her shirt in an
effort to revive her after she collapses: “How shocked and astonished he was
when the most beautiful bosom swelled up toward him, still warm, but no lon-
ger beating.”35 Erwin—or, rather, Erwine—is dead, but still-living temptresses

continue to provoke Friedrich into outbursts of self-righteous indignation.
From the opening page of the novel, Friedrich is characterized not just as
another particularly noble—if somewhat humorless—nobleman but also as a
paragon of German virtue. Surrounded by fellow students engaged in sopho-
moric high jinks, Friedrich stands aloof and alone: “He was taller than the
others and distinguished by a simple, unfettered appearance, almost like a me-
dieval knight” (2:57). His friend Leontin appears at one point with companions
in fantastic, foreign-looking outfits, but “Friedrich looked completely Ger-
man” (2:91). Graf Friedrich is patriotic, pious, and poetic. He moves with his
aristocratic companions through a patriarchal landscape where peasants know
their place and are happy with their lot: “As they passed through the village,
they were greeted from all sides, not only with tipped hats, but also with
friendly words and looks, which always indicates a benevolent and natural re-
lationship between the lords and their peasants” (2:125). Not the least of Fried-
rich’s virtues is his manliness. “But you must be harder,” says Friedrich to his
fellow students, “for the world is hard and will crush you otherwise” (2:214).
Thus he scornfully rejects a man who has “no manly muscles” (2:217), just as
he disapproves of a woman’s “mad genius that has blundered its way into mas-
culinity” (2:115; tollgewordene Genialität, die in die Männlichkeit hinein
pfuscht). In Graf Friedrich’s world, men are men, women are women, and woe
betides anyone who forgets the difference.
Toward the end of the novel, Graf Friedrich’s timeless German virtues are
enlisted in the timely cause of national defense against a foreign aggressor. In
a scene redolent with national symbolism, Friedrich and Leontin consecrate
themselves for the struggle ahead by making a pilgrimage to the “river of past
times and immortal enthusiasm, the royal Rhine” (2:245). As the sun rises, the
two young men plunge into the river. They then climb to a castle overlooking
the landscape of oaken forests and ruined fortresses. A comely maiden serves
them goblets of Rhine wine and gives them each a kiss, after which they stroll
through the ancient site rejuvenated by new growth: “Young green twigs and
colorful wildflowers inclined everywhere over the dark castle ruins; the cool
forest rustled; . . . countless birds sang” (2:246–47). Eichendorff deploys stock
images of his own romantic poetry for a political agenda cloaked in quasi-
religious symbolism. The two German heroes baptize themselves in the sacred
river before setting off to battle. The green twigs and wildflowers peeking
through the castle ruins suggest that a national renaissance has begun, linking
ancient tradition to a modern sense of purpose in a process of organic growth,
not violent revolution. Nature and Germanic civilization, past and present, are
joined in mutual harmony: “It was as if memory made nature stronger and
more vital in the presence of the Rhine and bygone times” (2:247).
Thus fortified with their “consecration of strength” (Weihe der Kraft)
along the Rhine (2:246), Leontin and Friedrich return to Austria. At the begin-
ning of book 3, we find Friedrich approaching “the last curtain wall of Ger-
many, . . . where one looks down into Italy,” that is, in the Tyrolean Alps
(2:278). As contemporary readers would have known, Austria was defeated by
the French at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in the fall of 1805. According to
the provisions of the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on December 26, 1805, Aus-
tria lost substantial territory, including Bavaria, to France and its allies. The
Alpine province of Tirol became part of the newly minted Kingdom of Bavaria.
The Tyrolese resented their subordination to French-Bavarian rule and began a
rebellion in April 1809. The fortunes of the rebels fluctuated over the course of
the summer and into the fall, as Innsbruck was taken and lost more than once.
In the end, the rebellion was crushed, and its leader, Andreas Hofer, was cap-
tured and executed in February 1810. Thus the events depicted in part 3 of
Presentiment and Presence take place in 1809 in Tirol. Graf Friedrich is not
Tyrolese; toward the end of the novel, we learn that he and his long-lost brother,
Rudolf, were born along the Rhine. He does own estates in the area, at least
until they are confiscated after the uprising, and he fights honorably for the lost
cause. We last see him about to retreat from the world into a monastery, as his
friends depart for Egypt and America.
In the broadest terms, the war depicted in Presentiment and Presence is
between France and “Germany,” represented politically by the Austrian gov-
ernment, as a remnant of Holy Roman Empire, and symbolically by the Rhine,
its surrounding castles and forest, and the knightly virtues of Graf Friedrich.
The specific conflict, however, is more of an intra-German affair, between
those who ally themselves with France and those who resist. Among the former
are the French-dominated Bavarians and the Tyrolese collaborators. The most
notorious of the latter is Gräfin Romane, who entertains the enemy with wild
parties while the partisan village is razed and burned. As Hans Kohn notes, the
Tyrolese fought “in the defense of their ancient traditions and their inherited
religion.” They were “motivated neither by German nationalism nor by revolu-
tionary ideas.” They rejected the administrative reforms of the secular regime
in Bavaria and fought for local autonomy, not national liberation: “Their loy-
alty was not to a German nation which did not exist for them, . . . nor to an
Austrian monarchy with the peoples of which they had hardly any contact, but
to God, Emperor, and their land Tyrol.”36
Although the specific historical details differ, the basic structure of the
conflict in Presentiment and Presence recalls that of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell,

Goethe’s Goetz and Egmont, Lohenstein’s Cleopatra and Sophonisbe, and
Gryphius’s Catharina of Georgia. In each case, communities seek to preserve
local autonomy and a traditional way of life against the encroaching power of
an enemy empire.37 That empire is often a foreign power: the Dutch defy the
Spanish, the Egyptians and Carthaginians resist Rome, and the Georgians ne-
gotiate with the Russians, Turks, and Persians. Elsewhere, however, the en-
emy lies closer to home, between the submissive courtier Weislingen and the
stubbornly independent Goetz, the authoritarian Austrian Empire and the
Swiss cantons seeking independence in Wilhelm Tell, or collaborators and par-
tisans in Eichendorff’s novel. At stake is a conflict less between two nations
than between two principles of government that can be described in terms of
the Janus-faced nature of empire discussed in chapter 1 of the present study.
On the one hand, empires are aggressive powers that seek to draw ever more
satellites into their orbit; on the other, empires function as loose governing
structures that can assimilate a diverse range of once-alien peoples and allow
for a considerable degree of local independence. Eichendorff celebrates the
benevolent federalism of the old Holy Roman Empire and decries the aggres-
sive imperialism of the new French nationalists. As he views it, modern na-
tionalism has inherited the rapacious tendencies of ancient empires toward
foreign enemies, while forgetting the tradition of tolerance toward its own
people. He fights with the Tyrolese for God, emperor, and the local traditions
of a people united in its diversity against the homogenizing tendencies of the
modern nation-state.
That Eichendorff finished Presentiment and Presence at all is itself un-
usual: many of the most famous German romantic novels remained fragments.
The more important question is why Eichendorff chose to conclude the novel
as he did. To this end, it is useful to consider the chronology of events sur-
rounding the composition and publication of Presentiment and Presence. As
noted, the Tyrolean uprising was put down in the fall of 1809, and Andreas
Hofer was executed in early 1810, so the conclusion of Presentiment and Pres-
ence must be set at about this time. Eichendorff probably completed the novel
while on vacation in Lubowitz between July and September 1812, as Napo-
leon’s armies were advancing on Russia. Napoleon successfully occupied
Moscow, but his ill-equipped troops suffered horrendous losses as they re-
treated across the frozen plains of Eastern Europe. By the summer of 1813,
Austria had joined an alliance with Russia, Prussia, and England against Napo-
leon; by April of the following year, the allies occupied Paris, and Napoleon
was in exile. During this two-year period, Eichendorff served in the army, and
his novel remained unpublished. Finally, in October 1814, his friend and for-
mer mentor Graf Loeben sent the manuscript of Presentiment and Presence to
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. The popular Prussian novelist liked Eichen-
dorff’s work and recommended it to his publisher. It appeared in late March
1815, just as Napoleon escaped from exile and rallied his troops for what
would be his final one hundred days in power. Eichendorff reenlisted on April
22, 1815, in what he sardonically described as “a paroxysm of patriotism”
(einen Paroxismus von Patriotismus), just two weeks after he had married his
pregnant bride;38 he spent months garrisoned outside Paris and did not return
to Silesia until the following winter.
As the chronology suggests, Eichendorff had ample time to craft a more
upbeat ending to Presentiment and Presence. When he finally sent off the man-
uscript, Napoleon had been defeated for several months, and there was no rea-
son to suspect that the French emperor would ever leave the island of Elba. In
fact, both Loeben and Fouqué suggested that Eichendorff should find a way to
bridge the gap between the uncertain times in which the novel is set and the
happier present. “If I were you, I would add an indication of when you com-
posed and completed it,” wrote Loeben.39 Fouqué suggested that a preface to
the novel might do the job, and Eichendorff obliged him with a letter that Fou-
qué copied verbatim into his own introduction to Presentiment and Presence.40
“I had completed the novel before the French entered Russia in the last war,”
begins Eichendorff, incidentally creating a minor problem regarding the his-
tory of the novel’s composition: the French began their advance in late June
1812, but in a letter to Fouqué, Eichendorff claims that he did not finish writing
Presentiment and Presence until September or October of that year.41 Either
way, the novel was completed more than two years before it went to press. “Of
course, I could have artificially spun the threads of this story into the present,”
continues Eichendorff, but he notes that the present times were too unsettled
and that, in any case, a forced connection between past and present would vio-
late the spirit of the work, which was intended as “an accurate representation
of that ominous time of expectation, longing, and confusion.”42
Eichendorff argues that we should read Presentiment and Presence as a
historical novel, of the recent past, that captures the unsettled mood of a very
specific period in European history, after Napoleon’s major victories and be-
fore his ultimate defeat. Evidence in the novel and elsewhere suggests, how-
ever, that Eichendorff chose this moment to express a deeper sense of malaise
that went far beyond the events of that moment in time. When Leontin an-
nounces his plan to emigrate to America, Graf Friedrich approves, “for he
knew well that only a fresh new life abroad could save his friend; the wide-
spread misery here would have destroyed him with pointless restlessness and
busywork” (2:367). Friedrich defends his decision to enter a monastery as a
justified flight from the times that mix “poetry, reverence, Germanness, virtue,
and patriotism” into a Babylonian confusion: “It seems to me that in these
miserable times, as always, the only help is in religion.” The time may come
for future action, but Friedrich “chooses the cross as his sword” for now
(2:375). The image of the cross harkens back to the opening scene in the novel.
As Friedrich sails down the Danube with his friends, they come to dangerous
rapids known as “the maelstrom”: “Not one person is here; no bird sings; only
the forest from the mountains and the terrible vortex that pulls all life down
into its unfathomable abyss have been roaring here ceaselessly for centuries”
(2:58). A cross stands on a mighty boulder high above the turbulent stream. As
Egon Schwarz observes in his insightful reading of this passage, Eichendorff
conceals an allegory behind the realistic description of the river: Friedrich sails
on the ship of life, with heaven above and death below. Only the cross promises
eternal salvation from the roiling waters. Just then, as Friedrich contemplates
the churning rapids, beautiful Rosa floats by on another boat. Friedrich forgets
all about the river’s dangers, as he is entranced by something far more perilous,
a woman and the sexual desire she awakens. “One is tempted to apply Goethe’s
famous saying to Eichendorff, but in reverse,” writes Schwarz: “The Eternal
Feminine draws us downward” (Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinab).43
Eichendorff’s allegory anticipates Schopenhauer’s image of the will as an
erotic force that underlies and undermines human consciousness; it also looks
back to the baroque view of the world as a place of Unbeständigkeit (imperma-
nence) and Vergänglichkeit (transience). Although Schopenhauer lacks the re-
ligious faith of baroque Christianity, he shares with the earlier era a fundamen-
tal hostility to notions of historical progress.44 The baroque wheel of fortune
spins around and around but goes nowhere: a momentary rise in one’s earthly
fortunes should not be confused with lasting progress. What matters in the end
is one’s place in the eternity of heaven or hell, not the temporary upswings or
downswings of life on earth. In Schopenhauer’s bleaker view, only art can
provide temporary distraction from life’s vicissitudes as the all-consuming will
mocks the pretensions of human rationality and delusional faith in progress.45
Such faith gave rise to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as ideal-
istic citizens sought to advance society to a new and better form. Although the
Revolution proved a mixed blessing, inspiring needed reforms but also spark-
ing years of violent conflict, it certainly created the sense that the world was
involved in a process of irrevocable historical change. Eichendorff sets his
novel in the midst of this tumultuous age and against it. He chooses a histori-
cally specific moment to drive home a timeless truth: religious faith is the only
certainty in an uncertain world. This is why he refused to add an upbeat ending
to Presentiment and Presence. What Loeben and Fouqué hail as an unmiti-
gated success appears only as further confusion to Eichendorff; to write a tri-
umphant novel about Germany’s victory over Napoleon would be to confuse a
“paroxysm of patriotism” for lasting progress.
Durande Castle: Elegiac Conservatism
As Eichendorff sensed already in 1815, the Revolution was more of an ongo-

ing process than a limited event with a clearly defined beginning and end.
Napoleon was defeated in 1814 but came back in 1815; the Congress of Vi-
enna did its best to repress revolutionary aspirations, but they burst out again
in 1830 and again in 1848. As might be expected, Eichendorff viewed the
events critically, which prompted his antiliberal satires noted earlier. The
events of the Revolution also inspired a more substantial work, Das Schloß
Dürande (Durande Castle, 1837).46 Eichendorff sets his novella in France on
the eve of the Revolution, but given the ongoing outbreaks of revolutionary
violence in subsequent decades, the novella also engages issues of more im-
mediate concern. It begins with a description of the hunter Renald’s idyllic
cottage on the grounds of the ancestral estates of the Durande family outside
Marseilles. The cottage is so covered in flowers and vines that it is almost
impossible to distinguish from the surrounding forests, and when the moon
shines full, wild animals graze peacefully just outside the door. The image
introduces the Durande estate as an example of Schlegel’s “living positive”
(cited earlier in the present chapter), an organic community based on local
tradition and accepted social hierarchies. But the cottage is now gone, the
castle lies in ruins, and the hunter and the duke he served are dead. With their
passing, the community has been destroyed as well. Durande Castle is about
the end of the idyll, or at least it might seem so at the outset—about the incur-
sion of revolutionary ideas hatched in Paris into the sleepy province of south-
ern France. As we shall see, however, the novella is considerably more com-
plex than its antirevolutionary “message” suggests.47
The events that led to the castle’s destruction are told in a long flashback.
Renald lives with his younger sister, Gabriele, in the little cottage on the Du-
rande estate. Their parents are dead, and Renald is determined to guard his
sister’s virtue. To his dismay, he hears rumors that she has been meeting with a
man, which turns out to be true. Although Gabriele insists that her evening
rendezvous with the mysterious stranger have been completely innocent, Re-
nald immediately sends her off to a monastery. She learns there that the charm-
ing gentleman was none other than Graf Hippolyt, who is the son of the old
Graf Durande and is thus the future lord of the manor. Hippolyt heads off to
Paris for the winter, and Gabriele disappears from the cloister at about the same
time, so Renald can only assume that the young duke has abducted his beloved
sister. Renald pursues Hippolyt to Paris and confronts him, but the duke denies
any knowledge of Gabriele’s whereabouts. When Renald tries to bring his case
to the king, Hippolyt has him arrested and cast into prison. Renald escapes and
returns home just as the Revolution begins. The old duke dies, and Hippolyt
also returns to the estate, as a revolutionary mob is about to storm the castle.
Events quickly get out of hand, and identities are confused. In the end, all of
the principal actors are dead, and the castle is a smoking ruin.
The narrator of this tragic tale has little sympathy for the revolutionary
rabble, who are motivated solely by greed in their desire to plunder the castle,
and the representatives of the Old Regime are also portrayed in a thoroughly
critical light. In a late essay titled “Der Adel und die Revolution” (The aristoc-
racy and the revolution, 1857), Eichendorff begins by mocking those very old
people who still claim to remember the so-called good old days: “They were
actually neither good nor old but, rather, only a caricature of the good old
days.”48 In a sketch intended as part of an uncompleted autobiography, Eichen-
dorff develops a typology of the prerevolutionary aristocracy. Some of the
landed aristocrats were little more than farmers, living on isolated rural estates
together with their subjects and livestock. A second group of pretentious no-
bles tried to keep abreast of the latest fashion, living in their Rococo palaces
surrounded by formal French gardens, while a young generation of cavaliers
bankrupted themselves pursing decadent pleasures in Paris. None of these
groups had anything to do with bygone days of knights in shining armor: “The
sword had become merely ceremonial, the helmet a powdered wig. In a word,
it was the powdered age of chivalry grown frail and tired.”49 True to form, the
old Graf Durande sits in his castle surrounded by servants, who powder his hair
while he yawns with boredom. His servants are forbidden to tell him about the
Revolution. The sick old man sits in his marble palace, surrounded by candela-
bras and portraits of his ancestors, “in ceremonial dress, with his hair styled,
like a corpse in its Sunday best.” The mechanism of the old castle clock still
functions, but the rusted hands no longer move, “as if time had fallen asleep at
the old palace.”50
Neither the old aristocracy nor the revolutionary mob offers a viable alter-
native for the future in Durande Castle. The latter brings only greed and de-
struction, while members of the former are like zombies, still walking but al-
ready dead. Perhaps the younger generation can show the path toward a better
way? Such would seem to be the case when Graf Hippolyt is reunited with
Gabriele in the besieged castle. He swears that he loves her and will remain
faithful to her forever. Eternity does not last long, for both die within hours, but
the nobleman’s willingness to marry one of his subjects transcends class
boundaries in a way that would have been unthinkable to his father’s genera-
tion. Hippolyt’s slightly earlier announcement that he is willing to challenge
Renald to a duel also breaks the rules of court society: “He, the duke, was will-
ing to give him satisfaction like a cavalier and fight a duel with him, man
against man—the proud man could ask no more” (3:455–56). In both cases,
Graf Hippolyt suggests a third path—between revolutionary violence and reac-
tionary recalcitrance—that might be termed “progressive conservatism.”51 He
makes his proclamations under extreme duress, however, and has no time to
make good on his promises, so his newfound commitment to egalitarian love
and his readiness to engage in mortal combat with his social inferior come too
late to effect any lasting change.
Graf Hippolyt’s prior actions have been marked only by duplicity and
maliciousness. Gabriele has no idea who her mysterious visitor is or what he
might want, but her older brother is not wrong to suspect that the young duke
might be interested in more than a pleasant chat with the pretty young woman.
Seducing their subjects is something of a Durande family tradition, as readers
discover when Renald confronts Hippolyt’s father with the (mistaken) accusa-
tion that his son has run off with Gabriele. The old man simply chuckles,
commends his son’s good taste in women, and assures his outraged subject
that he will provide appropriate compensation for the girl and her family:
“The Durandes always behave splendidly in such affairs” (3:438). If Hip-
polyt’s intentions were indeed honorable, he could have revealed his identity
and proposed marriage when first confronted by Renald, or he could have at
least returned under calmer circumstances and assured Renald of his genuine
affection for Gabriele. But Hippolyt apparently makes no effort to talk to Re-
nald or to find out where Renald has hidden Gabriele; instead, Hippolyt heads
off “to spend the winter at parties” in Paris (3:437). Renald finds him there,
looking rather worse for wear: “Wasted and exhausted, he [Graf Hippolyt]
threw himself down on the couch. ‘I am so tired,’ he said, ‘so tired of pleasure,
always pleasure, boring pleasure! I wish there were a war!’” (3:441). A revo-
lutionary gang leader in Paris hints that venereal disease may be the source of
Hippolyt’s malaise and the corruption of his entire lineage: “It is an old dy-
nasty, but the worm of death is already gnawing at it, completely corroded by
love affairs” (3:439). Hippolyt not only refuses to provide honest answers to
Renald’s questions about his sister’s whereabouts—he really does not know
but defiantly tells Renald that he would not tell him even if he did know—and
has Renald arrested on false charges of insanity. Later, when both have re-
turned to the estate in Provence, Renald again beseeches Hippolyt to marry
his sister, and again the duke refuses. Thus, while Hippolyt’s eleventh-hour
profession of love for Gabriele seems sincere, it marks, at the very least, an
abrupt change in the pattern of avoidance and denial that has characterized his
behavior up to this point.
If Graf Hippolyt exhibits less-than-admirable character traits that are typ-
ical of the decadent aristocracy, Renald takes bourgeois virtue to a destructive
extreme. In the opening scene, Renald fires his rifle at his own sister and her
unknown companion before taking the time to ask questions, initiating a pat-
tern of violent behavior that continues until he burns down the castle and blows
himself up. He sends his sister off to a nunnery immediately after he learns of
her potential love affair, and soon after she is safely tucked away, he stops go-
ing to visit her. Renald’s obsessive pursuit of Hippolyt from Provence to Paris
only provokes the duke’s defiance and does nothing to further Renald’s cause.
Most curiously, Renald refuses to see a connection between the duke’s per-
sonal behavior and the systemic corruption of power in the Old Regime. As
both the old duke and the revolutionary leader in Paris remind him, aristocrats
have been preying on the wild game on their property, both animal and human,
for a long time: “Are they not the lords in the forest, and does the game not
belong to them, both high and low? Are we not damned dogs who lick their
boots when they kick us?” (3:439). Renald, who is convinced, at this point, that
Graf Hippolyt has seduced his sister and abducted her to Paris, has every rea-
son to join the revolutionary battle against aristocratic tyranny. Instead, he de-
fiantly defends the duke: “The young Duke Durande is a generous lord, I only
want justice from him, and nothing more” (3:439). Although divided by their
social class, Renald and Hippolyt are united in their stubborn insistence on
their rights. Renald is as tyrannical in his defense of his sister’s virtue as is Hip-
polyt in his pursuit of aristocratic power.
Against these egotistical men, Gabriele stands out for her selfless and
steadfast virtue. She obeys her brother and yet remains loyal to her lover to the
point of sacrificing her life for his: she is shot when she dons Hippolyt’s cloak
to distract the mob and allow him to escape, even though she is sure that Hip-
polyt left her for another woman in Paris. In her willingness to stand by her
man, no matter what he has done or how she will suffer, Gabriele is, in her own
way, as extreme as her brother. Like him, Gabriele is unwilling or unable to see
the connection between the personal and the political, which lends a certain
irony to the novella’s conclusion. Renald explicitly and repeatedly distances
himself from the revolutionaries, insisting that he wants only private revenge
for personal injustice. He burns down the palace not because he wants to do
away with the French aristocracy but because he has been unable to protect his
sister from a man who turns out not to have abducted her after all. His final
desperate actions are motivated by grief and the realization that his quest for
justice has been inspired by a mistake. Ironically, however, he achieves what
the revolutionaries desired, by killing the duke and razing his palace. Moments
earlier, the mob had shot a person who they thought was the evil aristocrat but
who turns out to have been his potential victim, Gabriele. In seeking political
justice, the mob kills one of its own; in seeking personal vengeance, Renald
kills the aristocrat.
Far from writing a story with a clear-cut message that simply condemns
the revolutionaries and exonerates the aristocrats, Eichendorff creates an am-
biguous tale in which both aristocrats and their subjects are caught up in per-
sonal conflicts with political implications that they refuse to acknowledge or
cannot understand. Hence it is fitting that Eichendorff should use the metaphor
of a coming storm to characterize both the Revolution and Renald’s rage. The
recurring image of lightning on the horizon creates an aura of impending disas-
ter that eventually erupts into revolutionary violence. At first, the storms seem
distant and unthreatening: Gabriele sits looking out the window of the cloister
with a young nun in the evening as the crickets chirp in the meadows and light-
ning flashes far away. The image becomes more ominous when thunderstorms
hang over the forest as Renald returns home after his imprisonment in Paris,
and it is more threatening still when lightning bolts strike outside the room
where the old duke sits dreaming of the past and oblivious to the present. Here
already, the light from the sky is mixed with the glow of burning houses set
afire by the revolutionary mobs, and soon the natural lightning (“Wetter-
leuchten”) above the Durande palace becomes one with the flashing light of the
torches (“Wetterleuchten der Fackeln”) swung by the marauding crowd as they
loot the castle cellar (3:455–56). Renald enters the story in a rage that makes
his body tremble and his brow twitch “as if there were lightning in the dis-
tance” (3:425), and he leaves it like a lightning bolt that explodes the palace
with blinding force. Such moments make for good storytelling but poor politi-
cal analysis. Revolutions are the product of human society; violent storms oc-
cur in nature. One can argue about whether a revolution is warranted at a given
time but not about a natural calamity. By equating the Revolution with a vio-
lent storm, Durande Castle obscures the material causes that motivated the
mob to grab their torches and burn down the palaces, however rightly or
wrongly. The Revolution “just happened,” like an act of God or, more pre-
cisely, like an intervention of the devil, who employed his blood-drinking
henchmen to wreak havoc on earth.
“But you should be careful not to awaken the wild animal in your breast,
so that it does not break out suddenly and destroy you” (3:465), concludes
Durande Castle, with a clear warning: control your temper, or else you will
become a self-destructive wild beast like Renald. By extension, the narrator
rejects the revolutionary violence of 1789 in France and urges the German
readers of 1837 to keep cool and stay at home. At the same time, the depiction
of the older generation of ossified aristocrats suggests that some sort of change
was inevitable. The old order had to go. Graf Hippolyt offers a glimmer of
hope for peaceful reform, when he decides to return to the ancestral estate and
marry for love beneath his social standing, but that promise is cut short by the
revolting masses and Renald’s blind rage. The unmitigated disaster neverthe-
less comes with a silver lining: the magazine explodes, and the palace col-
lapses, but the chaos ends: “Then all became quiet! Like a sacrificial flame,
slender, mild, and splendid, the fire rose to the starry sky, illuminating the
fields and forests all around—and Renald was never seen again” (3:465). Al-
most miraculously, Renald’s self-destructive despair and the mob’s unchecked
madness have been transformed into a sacrificial flame that atones the heavens
and brings peace and the promise of rebirth on earth. The rubble of the old
palace is covered with new growth, just as Renald’s cottage was once hidden
by vines and flowers: “Those are the ruins of the old Durande Castle, covered
in grapevines, which look out into beautiful spring days from the forested
mountains” (3:465).
The image of new growth reflects boundless faith in the rejuvenative pow-
ers of nature but little or none in the human ability to effect meaningful social
reform. In “Der Adel und die Revolution,” Eichendorff insists that if positive
change is to come in the postrevolutionary era, it must arise out of local tradi-
tions and be guided from above: “But only complete barbarism can survive
without the nobility.” The social elite of the future may differ from the nobility
of the past, but “the aristocracy (to call it by the name that has become tradi-
tional) is, in accordance with its immutable nature, the ideal element of soci-
ety.” Its task is to mediate between past traditions and present needs, “to medi-
ate between the eternally changing new with the eternally existing and thus
make it truly capable of life for the first time.”52 New life cannot be exported
from elsewhere and grafted onto ancient roots, a method Eichendorff con-
demns as the “barbaric practice of making everything equal [barbarische
Gleichmacherei], this trimming of the fresh tree of life according to a single

presumptuous measurement.”53 To the end, Eichendorff staunchly opposes a
government based on universal principles and led by rootless cosmopolitans
(“that strange ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ who is at home in all the world and
thus not really anywhere”), while strongly supporting a model based on local
diversity within a larger unity, “a living federal state of the most distinct indi-
vidual peoples (ein lebendiger Föderativstaat der verschiedensten Völker-
Individuen).54 This vision is based on the past, however, and Eichendorff ar-
gues that the aristocracy in the eighteenth century had already either degenerated
into decadence or walled itself off in anachronistic isolation. New growth
sprouts from the rubble, but the palace has not been rebuilt. Hence the final line
of Durande Castle is cautionary: “But you beware” (Du aber hüte dich). Just
because tentative signs of natural regeneration have arisen out of past destruc-
tion does not mean that now is the time for a new revolution. Repress the wild
beast within and wait for guidance from above, Eichendorff advises. At the
same time, he leaves readers with a sense that there is no new aristocracy to
lead progressive reform and that the people’s violent impulses cannot be
checked indefinitely. As a result, there is an elegiac cast to Eichendorff’s con-
servatism. The time was out of joint, but, like Hamlet, Eichendorff came too
late to set it right.
Chapter 7
Worldly Provincialism
in Imperial Germany
On January 18, 1871, King William I of Prussia was crowned German Emperor
in the Gallery of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Prayers were said, psalms
recited, and a military band and chorus greeted the proclamation of the em-
peror with a rousing rendition of “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.”1 Germany’s long-
sought goal of political unification had finally been attained, although the pro-
cess had not followed the course that many on the left would have liked. Early
nineteenth-century nationalism had natural affinities with liberalism, as it was
conceived in opposition to the entrenched authority of the Old Regime.2 De-
spite later efforts to vilify the French and cast a heroic glow over the German
participation in the Wars of Liberation, many Germans in areas occupied by
France had experienced liberal reforms that made them want more of the same
after Napoleon was defeated.3 From the Wartburg Festival of 1817 to the Ham-
bach Festival of 1832, liberals combined nationalist enthusiasm with demands
for freedom of the press and popular sovereignty.4 In the spring of 1848, those
demands seemed about to be realized, as crowds took to the streets of Berlin
and won Frederick William’s approval to establish a democratic government in
a unified Germany. Elections were held, and the delegates assembled in Frank-
furt, where, after much bickering, they agreed on a constitution and presented
it to the king. He promptly rejected the parliament’s proposal to crown him as
king of a constitutional monarchy, however, and the forces of reaction tri-
umphed again. Not the least of Otto von Bismarck’s achievements after his
appointment as the Prussian minister-president in 1861 lay in his ability to
harness growing nationalist sentiment for unification while uncoupling Ger-
man nationalism from its liberal agenda.5 He did this by initiating a series of
three wars that resulted in quick and decisive victories—over Denmark in
1864, against Austria in 1866, and against France in 1870. The crowning cer-
emony of the German Emperor in the symbolic center of French power was a
143
calculated insult designed to add maximum public humiliation to France’s

military defeat.
The long history of German particularism did not end with political unifi-
cation. The boundaries of the new state were not coterminous with those of the
peoples who felt that they were part of the German nation. By adopting the
kleindeutsch solution to the problem of German unity, Bismarck excluded Aus-
tria from the German Empire, thus marking an end to a centuries-long pan-
German tradition that had seen the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation
centered in Vienna. The balance of power had now shifted decisively toward
Prussia, and Austria would rejoin the Reich only when Hitler declared the An-
schluss of 1938. Regional differences remained strong even within the smaller
German state that Bismarck forged in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War.
The imperial constitution of April 1871 “was emphatically devolved in charac-
ter,” explains Christopher Clark, who continues, “Indeed, it was not so much a
constitution in the traditional sense as a treaty among the sovereign territories
that had agreed to form the German Empire.”6 In David Blackbourn’s words,
“The federal Empire resembled more closely the present-day European Union
than it did contemporary federal (but republican) states such as the USA or
Switzerland. None of this was magically transformed after 1871: the Empire
remained distinctively federal down to its disappearance in 1918.”7
The cultural task confronting the new state was to find a way to forge a
sense of collective national identity that transcended local loyalties. In the pro-
cess, interest in national unity had to be expanded from the cultural elite to the
common people, in a process that George Mosse dubbed the “nationalization
of the masses.”8 As in previous periods of nationalist enthusiasm, Germans
looked to the past for inspiration. This time, however, the monuments erected
to national glory were truly monumental in size: the statue of Hermann in the
Teutoburg Forest rises more than fifty meters above the surrounding trees; the
Monument to the Battle of Nations (Völkerschlachtdenkmal) outside Leipzig
soars to nearly one hundred meters; the Kyffhäuser Monument, with its larger-
than-life statue of Barbarossa, is carved into the sandstone of a Thuringian
mountain.9 Other symptoms of this trend toward what Jost Hermand calls “a
national maximalism” include a series of Germanic superheroes, such as Wag-
ner’s Siegfried, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Karl May’s Old Shatterhand, and the
Gothic knights of Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (A battle for Rome, 1876),
an immensely popular novel that pitted tragically heroic Germans against dec-
adent Romans and duplicitous Greeks at the time of the Völkerwanderungen.10
As Dahn’s novel suggests, the glorification of Germany’s national heroes was
accompanied by the denigration of its alleged enemies. Gustav Freytag’s best-
Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany 145
selling Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) centers on the conflict be-
tween upstanding German businessmen and slovenly Poles; it also includes
disturbing elements of antisemitism.11 Suspicion of peoples considered alien to
German culture combined with hostility toward internal foes. Hans-Ulrich
Wehler notes that Bismarck “developed a technique of political rule which has
been described as one of ‘negative integration.’ . . . Thus political Catholicism,
parliamentary liberalism, Social Democracy and liberal Judaism were built up
as the true ‘enemies of the Empire.’”12
According to one view, local loyalties and nationalist sentiments could
coexist and even reinforce one another. The thriving Heimat movement of late
nineteenth-century Germany encouraged local patriotism, not in opposition to
the recently unified nation-state, but as a way of establishing a collective unity
rooted in local diversity. “Germans imagined nationhood as a form of local-
ness,” writes Alon Confino, who explains, “While fatherland and nation repre-
sented Germany as the one and only, Heimat represented Germany as the one
and many.”13 In this spirit, Lynne Tatlock reads Gustav Freytag’s multivolume
historical novel Die Ahnen (The ancestors, 1872–80) as a work that uses the
provincial setting of Thuringia as a model for German identity rooted in the
local and yet, for precisely that reason, part of a larger national unity.14 Others,
however, took a less sanguine view of the relation between the new Prusso-
centric empire and its peripheral regions. Lionel Gossman argues, in his mag-
isterial study Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, that the intellectuals who gath-
ered at the University of Basel—including Johann Jacob Bachofen, Jacob
Burckhardt, and Friedrich Nietzsche—preferred the decentralized structure of
the old regime to the new drive for unity emanating from Berlin.15 Nietzsche’s
“untimely” lack of enthusiasm for the Prussian victory over France continues
the Goethean tradition of skepticism toward nationalist saber rattling and pref-
erence for regional autonomy against central authority.
Late nineteenth-century German literature or “poetic realism” is often as-
sociated with the merely local, with a minimalist focus on the small and hum-
ble rather than the grandiose and bombastic. In his preface to Bunte Steine
(Colorful stones, 1853), Adalbert Stifter contends that true greatness lies in
lives devoted to the virtues of simplicity and moderation. Violent passions are
like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in nature—spectacular, to be sure, but
exceptions to “the gentle law” (das sanfte Gesetz) that governs everyday life.16
Stifter’s comments capture not only the deliberate repression of strong emo-
tions in his own fiction but also the muted quality of many works of German
poetic realism. One thinks of the slightly cloying melancholy that pervades
Theodor Storm’s Immensee (1849; rev. ed., 1851), the programmatic provin-
cialism of Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (A Village Romeo
and Juliet, 1856; rev. ed., 1875), and Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s insistence
that the nineteenth-century novelist should strive to rescue fleeting moments of
residual poetry—“grüne Stellen”—from the increasingly prosaic landscape of
modern times.17 Toward the end of the century, this concentration on the local
inspired a reactionary nostalgia for the old-fashioned Heimat still untouched
by modern times. Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl worried that industrialization and
urbanization would erode healthy rural traditions in Germany’s richly diverse
regions; Friedrich Tönnies lamented the erosion of traditional communities
united in a feeling of Gemeinschaft by the impersonal forces of modern Gesell-
schaft. Ludwig Ganghofer specialized in sentimental stories about robust vil-
lages in southern Bavaria that were threatened by encroaching modernization;
his Gewitter im Mai (Thunderstorms in May, 1904), for instance, combines
romantic entanglements with a tragic accident caused by the introduction of
electricity into an Alpine village.
Such works have long been used to argue for the relative insignificance of
German literature of the period that produced such towering figures as Tolstoy,
Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. In frequently cited comments, Erich
Auerbach brushes German realism aside, with a disdainful flick of the wrist, to
focus on the more substantial achievements of other European novelists, par-
ticularly the French.18 Such assessments are often based on the tacit assump-
tion that German literature of the later nineteenth century is a national litera-
ture manqué, defined by its lack of a single national capital and its stubborn
provincialism—in short, by its failure to be French. As David Blackbourn and
James Retallack argue in the introduction to their previously cited volume Lo-
calism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place in German-Speaking Central
Europe, 1860–1930, we need not focus “on the ‘aberrant’ character of Imperial
Germany, as though strained or divided loyalties arise only where ‘normal’
patterns of modern social and political development have been derailed.” To-
day’s historians—including literary historians—are “more likely to start from
the assumption that multiple or hybrid identities are the norm.” Blackbourn
and Retallack urge both an expansive perspective that places German national
history “in a European or even global frame” and a narrower focus that allows
us to “zoom in on German history at the subnational level.”19 Their lens reveals
people experiencing the tension between stasis and mobility: they note, on the
one hand, “the slowness of change, the feeling of embeddedness, the prefer-
ence for one’s homeland” among German speakers of the period and, on the
other, a new sense of motion “by people who felt unmoored, adrift, at sea” and
“movement by people whose principal identity did not remain constant from
birth to death but grafted with others to create something new—which in turn
was reseeded, cultivated, and uprooted all over again.”20
Recent scholarship on imperial Germany has focused on its “worldly pro-
vincialism,” to borrow H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl’s felicitous phrase.21
In addition to negotiating between the pull of old loyalties to their local prov-
inces and a new allegiance to the nation-state, nineteenth-century Germans
were becoming increasingly aware of Germany’s imbrication in European and
world affairs. New industries drew millions to Germany’s rapidly expanding
cities, while population growth, political and economic crises, and the lure of
new land sent millions more to North America. Near-universal literacy and bet-
ter postal services meant that even those who stayed at home could correspond
regularly with friends or relatives who had left for the New World; they could
also read articles about foreign cultures that were a regular feature of new fam-
ily periodicals such as Daheim (At home) and Die Gartenlaube (The garden
bower).22 New products from overseas colonies (Kolonialwaren) were now
available at local stores, and exotic peoples were on display at Völkerschauen.
World commerce expanded as sailing ships gave way to steamships, and the
newly united German Empire soon scrambled to strengthen its navy and ac-
quire new territories abroad.
As a result of these developments, the allegedly provincial literature of
imperial Germany is shot through with references to the larger world. Susanne
Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies helped spark widespread interest in literary repre-
sentations of Germany’s desire for overseas colonies in the century that pre-
ceded national unification, and critics have since explored the increasingly
global scope of the German literary imagination during the imperial period.23
In turn, real and imaginative journeys to far-flung places transformed the pro-
vincial landscape: the sites that reactionary writers sought out as stable refuges
from a world in motion were increasingly drawn into the maelstrom, “produc-
ing locality in new, globalized ways.”24 Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of our con-
temporary process of globalization, in other words, is equally suggestive for
the understanding of imperial Germany. There, too, it was becoming increas-
ingly “unlikely that there [was] anything mere about the local.”25
The persistence of regionalism in the unified nation-state, in tandem with
the expanding interaction between the European nation and the non-European
world, suggests that the Janus-faced nature of the ancient Roman Empire re-
surfaced in a new guise in imperial Germany. For many years, historians of
nineteenth-century Germany focused on Prussia’s inexorable rise to power and
the founding of the nation-state.26 As Mack Walker points out in his innovative
study of German hometowns and as Lionel Gossman confirms in his previ-
ously mentioned account of the Basel intellectuals, there was also another Ger-
many in the nineteenth century, an “individualized country” of semiautono-
mous principalities and thinkers who carried the legacy of German particularism
into the modern era.27 The term empire takes on two different meanings as a
result of these developments. On the one hand, it becomes synonymous with
the “new imperialism” emerging from European nation-states that sought, in
competition with one another, to establish colonies in the non- European
world.28 Studies of nineteenth-century culture and imperialism focus on the
European conquest of colonies for political power and economic gain, along
with the attendant ideologies of cultural superiority and racial difference. On
the other hand, the long-lasting legacy of German particularism continued the
tradition of empire in the sense of a nonexpansionist federalism into the twen-
tieth century, as evident in the persistence of regionalism within imperial Ger-
many, a tendency that was even stronger in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as
we shall see in the discussion of Kafka in the next chapter.
In this chapter, I focus on only two of the many nineteenth-century Ger-
man realists, although arguably two of the best, Gottfried Keller (1819–90) and
Theodor Fontane (1819–98). Although exact contemporaries in terms of their
age, they stand at opposite poles of imperial Germany: Fontane was Prussian to
the core and, thus, at the center of the new Reich, whereas Keller was Swiss and,
thus, outside the Reich’s political boundaries. Yet the opposition is not as simple
as it might seem. Fontane, a local product of preunification Prussia and a cos-
mopolitan, worked for a substantial period as a foreign correspondent in Lon-
don, while Keller spent many of his formative years in Germany and considered
himself part of the German Kulturnation. Their literary works, often viewed as
typically “Swiss” or “German,” were more often about peripheries and hybrid-
ity than centers and homogeneity. They reflect tensions between local traditions
and modern nationalism at a time marked by both accelerating global commerce
and Germany’s nascent participation in European imperialism.
Gottfried Keller: A Swiss Liberal

for the German Kulturnation
Both versions of Keller’s semiautobiographical novel Green Henry (Der grüne

Heinrich), begin with a strong sense of place and tradition. The original novel,
first published in 1854–55, opens with a loving evocation of Keller’s native
Zurich. Keller stages the scene much as a photojournalist might today. Inviting
the reader to step aboard a boat in the town of Rapperswil on the shores of Lake
Zurich and to drift slowly down to the city, where the lake narrows into the
Limmat River, the narrator evokes a sense of stasis and harmony between the
landscape and its inhabitants, lingering on the image of a monastery and castle
reflected in the still waters. The first people who swing into view are elected
representatives. The men are not particularly stylish nor exceptionally eloquent
or erudite, “but a certain radiance from their lively eyes expresses prudence,
experience, and the fortunate ability to make the right decision without fuss or
bother.”29 The opening paragraphs thus introduce Zurich as a city steeped in
the living tradition of Swiss democracy, characterized by the beauty of its sur-
roundings, the antiquity of its customs, and the wisdom of its leaders.
The revised version of Green Henry (1879–80) begins with a description
of the cemetery in the ancient village where the father of Heinrich Lee, the
novel’s protagonist, was born. So many generations have been buried there that
every molecule of soil was once part of a human body that tilled the land in
centuries past. Even the disintegrating boards of the coffins come from trees
that once grew on nearby hills, just as the linen shrouds were spun from flax
grown in local fields. A family once gave the village its name, countless gen-
erations ago, but the last heir to the line of self-appointed nobles is long since
dead and forgotten. “The children of yesterday’s beggars are the rich men of
today in the village, and tomorrow their descendants will be toiling in the mid-
dle classes, eventually either to sink back into beggary or to rise to prosperity
again.”30 The wheel of fortune turns as generations come and go, but the village
and its cemetery remain the same.
The seemingly idyllic worlds of both Zurich and the village are soon ex-
posed as deceptively fragile.31 Heinrich, already stigmatized as a boy by his
strange green clothing and lack of a father, is permanently expelled from school
in Zurich for a relatively mild infraction. He seeks refuge in his father’s village,
only to discover that the natural beauty that makes it seem like paradise to him
cloaks a harsh reality for the local residents. Women who married and moved
only a few miles away see their closest childhood friends only on rare occa-
sions; men intent on business do not take time to stop and visit with half-
forgotten relatives. The narrator notes that recent improvements in roads and
transportation have since revitalized social life in the region, but Heinrich’s
visit takes place during an earlier time, when the old ways condemned country
women to lives of bitter resignation and sentenced men to toil in grim self-
absorption. Heinrich’s personal experience in the country is by no means en-
tirely negative. He is accepted into his uncle’s family, has time to develop his
interest in painting, and falls in love with a chaste schoolgirl (Anna) and a se-
ductive young widow (Judith). Yet we are never given the impression that life
in the country offers a thoroughly positive alternative to life in the city, and the
opposition between the two is not as clear-cut as it first appears. Heinrich’s
uncle is from the city but has decided to retire to the country village. Anna’s
father, of peasant stock and with little in the way of education, would like to
rise above his humble origins and pushes his fragile daughter into a French
finishing school, which transforms the lively teenager into a pretentious and
slightly prudish young woman. Judith lived in the city when she was married
and is tolerated as an outsider in the village; she will eventually emigrate to
America. Even the traditional village rituals have begun to seem out of place.
When Heinrich’s grandmother dies, her otherwise abusive second husband de-
cides to host an old-fashioned wake complete with dancing, a decision that
astonishes Anna’s father: “So we have to dance, too? I thought this custom had
finally been done away with, and we are certainly the only village far and wide
that still practices it now and then!” (2:289). A once-honored tradition has be-
come an embarrassing anachronism in the rapidly changing rural landscape.
People are on the move in Keller’s works, not just between village and
town or from one country to the next within Europe, but also to the far corners
of the earth.32 In addition to his autobiographical novel, Keller is best known
for his anthology of novellas, Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla,
1856, 1873–75). His tales of life in a fictitious Swiss village follow in the foot-
steps of Berthold Auerbach’s popular Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Village
Tales from the Black Forest, 1843–54) and Jeremias Gotthelf’s similar stories
about life in rural Switzerland. Such stories typically set the stasis of tradi-
tional village life against the mobility of the modern world, but that is not the
case in The People of Seldwyla. In the preface to the first volume of Keller’s
work, the narrator informs us that Seldwyla’s townspeople can be found all
over the world today, “in Australia, in California, in Texas, as in Paris or Con-
stantinople.”33 The eponymous hero of Pankraz der Schmoller (Pankraz the
Pouter) leaves town as a young man and passes through New York on his way
to work for the British in India. He later spends time in the French Foreign
Legion in Northern Africa before returning home, only to move away from the
village with his mother and sister, to the Swiss canton’s capital city. There he
pursues a successful career, much like Wenzel Strapinski, the poor Silesian
mistaken for a Polish aristocrat in Kleider machen Leute (Clothes Make the
Man), who remains in Seldwyla just long enough to make his fortune and then
leaves town, taking every penny with him. Far from offering a refuge against a
hostile world, Seldwyla is the place people go when they have nowhere else to
turn. In A Village Romeo and Juliet, the bankrupt farmer Manz and his wife
move into town and try to eke out a marginal existence in a pathetically shabby
bar; when not behind the counter in the largely deserted inn, Manz joins dozens
of other bankrupt denizens of Seldwyla to fish for his dinner in the local stream.
Even the mysterious black fiddler (“der schwarze Geiger”) would like nothing
better than to leave home, but he has been tricked out of his rightful inheritance
and is thus condemned to stay: “I lost the miserable pittance I could have emi-
grated with.”34
The forces of global capitalism push their way into the most isolated
Swiss villages, as Das verlorene Lachen (The lost laughter) reveals.35 In the
mid-nineteenth century, the canton of Zurich was a center of the silk industry,
and Keller devotes the final novella of The People of Seldwyla to the story of
Justine Glor von Schwanau. The narrator describes the Glor family business, a
silk-weaving firm, as a typical cottage industry, in which women in the Swiss
countryside work to better their financial lot by weaving silk into cloth. Couri-
ers bear bundles of the finished product back into town and deliver new raw
materials to the countryside. Meanwhile, men in the cities’ textile factories
work at machines that produce heavier fabric of higher quality. The constant
movement of raw materials and finished goods between city and country within
Switzerland is linked, in turn, to a global network of agents “offering silk
thread from various parts of the world” and of others “who handled the export
of finished fabric to other parts of the world.”36 The Swiss weavers have to
modify their locally produced goods in accordance with the changing taste of
foreign consumers. If all goes well, fortunes can be made, but if one link in the
global chain of supply and demand snaps, the entire system can fall apart. Just
such a calamity befalls the company in question: “For one of those grim crises
from overseas broke upon the whole business world and in the process shook
the House of Glor to its apparently solid foundations, with such sudden fury
that it was nearly destroyed and survived only with great difficulty.”37 Both the
Swiss village and the Swiss city are thus entwined in a global network that
undermines any pretense toward idyllic self-sufficiency.
Between Germany and Switzerland
To the relations between the city of Zurich and the surrounding countryside and
between Switzerland and the rest of the world comes a third tension of central
importance to Heinrich Lee and his author: that between Switzerland and Ger-
many. As noted earlier, Keller was Swiss, not German. This fact nevertheless
fails to account for the complexities of his relationship with the larger German-
speaking world. Keller spent nearly a decade of his most formative years in
Germany. In April 1840, when he was only twenty, Keller moved to Munich to
become an artist; by the time he returned two and a half years later, he had real-
ized that he was not destined to become a great painter.38 In October 1848, he
again left for Germany, this time supported by a stipend from the city of Zurich.
He attended classes sporadically at the University of Tübingen until April 1850
and then moved to Berlin, where he remained until November 1855.39 There
was never a question of Keller becoming German in any legal sense of the term;
he was proud to be Swiss and always sought out the company of his fellow ex-
patriates when he moved to a new German city. He did develop lasting friend-
ships with German artists and intellectuals, however, and felt that he was part of
the larger Germanic cultural realm. For this reason, he refused to write in his
local Swiss dialect, opting for standard High German instead.40
There was a critical political difference between Germany and Switzer-
land during the mid-nineteenth century: while Switzerland moved toward na-
tional unity and a representative democracy, Germany remained politically
fragmented and hostile to liberal reform. During the 1840s, many liberal
democrats—such as Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and August Hein-
rich Hoffmann von Fallersleben—sought refuge from repressive German gov-
ernments in Zurich. There they made a lasting impact on the political views of
young Gottfried Keller, who first gained notoriety as a poet and left-wing fire-
brand.41 If we return to the opening pages of the first version of Green Henry,
we find images of both pan-German unity amid the Swiss landscape and con-
temporary political differences between the two nations. We pass by a colossal
statue of Charlemagne, who is said to have founded the church and former
monastery where it is displayed, reminding us that Switzerland, together with
Germany, was part of his European empire. Slightly earlier, however, the boat
that we have been invited to board in our imagination floats by the island where
Ulrich von Hutten is buried; the German humanist and patriot was forced to
flee to Switzerland in 1523 to escape persecution by the Catholic Church.
When we reach the city of Zurich, we find Hutten’s contemporary counterpart
in a pensive German professor making his way to class: “His heart is not here;
it remains in the north, where his learned brothers—reading tattered parch-
ments and conjuring dark demons—seek to found a fatherland and its law”
(2:12). This image captures both the scholarly activities of German intellectu-
als intent on reclaiming their medieval heritage and the political aspirations of
liberals banished to Switzerland because they dared to dream of a united coun-
try ruled by common law.
Heinrich has occasion to ponder his personal feelings about the relation-
ship between the two countries when he is about to leave Switzerland for the
first time and cross over into German territory. The Rhine serves simultane-
ously as the political border that divides Switzerland from Baden and as a
symbol of the common culture that unites them. In keeping with this double
role, the river appears both magically beautiful and potentially threatening.
After the coach has stopped for the night on the Swiss side of the border, Hein-
rich goes down to the moonlit river. A young fisherman who sits singing in his
boat agrees to take Heinrich out onto the water: “The night was beautiful; the
dark forests of the German riverbank stood out against the bright sky” (2:37).
They approach the opposite shore, and Heinrich notes that there is little physi-
cal difference between Baden and Switzerland, yet the political difference is
significant: “A guard from the German customs union had been stalking the
boat for some time with a cocked gun to see where it might come ashore”
(2:39). The guard’s rifle barrel glints in the same moonlight that illuminates the
river Rhine. As Heinrich notes in the second version of the novel, recent his-
torical developments have made him forget that in crossing the Rhine, he sim-
ply passes “from one region of the old Alemannic country to another, out of the
old Swabia into the old Swabia” (401; 3:494).
Heinrich approaches the Rhine as an ardent enthusiast for all things Ger-
man: “He loved his Helvetian fatherland. . . . But everything that he associated
with Germany was cloaked in a romantic fragrance” (2:37–38). The Switzer-
land that he knows seems cold and prosaic; the Germany that he imagines has
retained “the original passion and depth of Germanic life” (2:38). His favorite
writers are all German, and here he hopes to hear and speak the accent-free
High German that he knows only from literature. Reality inevitably disap-
points: as soon as Heinrich sets foot on German soil, he is accosted by armed
border guards. When he stops at an inn on his way to Munich, Bavarian offi-
cials in the service of the king rudely knock Heinrich’s hat from his head in an
effort to teach the Swiss republican proper respect for royal authority; the in-
cognito king himself repeats the gesture when Heinrich arrives in the city. In a
letter to his publisher, Keller admitted that the episode with the king was some-
what fanciful but poetically necessary, “to sum up the first prosaic impression
that authoritarian Germany made on the young idealist, who had come looking
for the land of intellect and poetry.”42 It is thus doubly ironic that Heinrich
should think of Germany as the “land of the future” (2:39; Land der Zukunft).
As the novel’s editors note, “The land in which he seeks to realize his hopes for
the future is mired politically and intellectually deep in the past, and he will
find no personal future there either.”43
A largely critical portrait of the Bavarian kingdom emerges in the course
of Heinrich’s stay “in the great capital city” (2:52). Munich, the unnamed city
to which Heinrich refers, is, of course, not the political capital of Germany as
a whole, but King Ludwig I (1825–48) did hope to make it a leading center for
the arts, and it aspired to be the unofficial cultural capital of the German lands.44
Artists come to the city from the farthest reaches of the German-speaking re-
gions, to hone their skills and—perhaps—make their fortunes. Soon after ar-
riving from Switzerland, Heinrich makes friends with Ferdinand Lys, who has
come from Amsterdam, and with Erikson, “a child of the northern waters, a
true giant, who did not know himself whether he was really a Dane or a pure
German” (2:546). Ironically, these three artists from the periphery of the
German-speaking regions in Europe seem more typically German than those at
its center: “Each of them came from a home where, in distinctive and ancient
festivals, the German character still lived in customs, linguistic usage, and a
personal sense of independence” (2:561). All three are alienated by daily en-
counters in Bavaria with the hypocritical combination of superficial politeness
and deep-seated hostility.
The growing sense of dissatisfaction with life in the German capital cul-
minates in the Mardi Gras parade that is supposed to unite everyone in an
elaborate patriotic celebration. Keller based his description of the festival on an
actual event that took place in Munich in early 1840, shortly before his arrival
in the city. He depicts an early example of the sort of patriotic historicism that
finds its most famous expression in Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger von
Nuremberg (1868). The parade glorifies Germany’s imperial past at the time of
Kaiser Maximilian I and features modern Bavarians dressed up as local and
national heroes such as Hans Rosenplüt, Hans Sachs, and Albrecht Dürer. Its
glorification of the Holy Roman Empire would have delighted romantic con-
servatives, but Keller responds less enthusiastically. Anticipating Nietzsche’s
critique of stale historicism in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das
Leben (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873), Keller questions the
premise behind the veneration of the past: “Strange time in which people who
want to uplift themselves in joy put on the cloak of the past, just to seem re-
spectable! . . . When will a time come again, when we turn on our own axis and
are satisfied with our own present?” (2:577). The critical depiction of the festi-
val parallels Heinrich’s personal misfortune, in which a misunderstanding fu-
eled by jealousy and alcohol leads to a duel that leaves his friend Ferdinand
Lys mortally wounded and Heinrich deeply depressed.
The Swiss staging of Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell offers a positive
alternative to the German parade. Amateur performances of Wilhelm Tell by
local Swiss villagers had become popular in the 1830s and 1840s, so Keller
once again bases his fiction on historical events.45 As in the case of the Mardi
Gras celebration in Munich, the Swiss villagers look to the past in their patri-
otic festival, but with a diametrically opposed political purpose: the Bavarians
glorify an emperor and king who ruled over a feudal social order, whereas the
Swiss celebrate the band of brothers who joined together to resist Austrian
tyranny and thus become the founding fathers of Swiss democracy. In Keller’s
view, it is not at all ironic that the script for this uniquely Swiss event was writ-
ten by a Swabian whose knowledge of Switzerland was based only on books
and postcards. In the essay Am Mythenstein (At the Mythenstein, 1861), writ-
ten to commemorate the dedication of a monument to Schiller in Switzerland,
Keller notes that though the German author had never seen Switzerland with
his own eyes, “it is all the more certain that his spirit strolled on its sunny
slopes and rode with the storm through its rocky chasms.”46 Convinced that
Schiller was present in mind if not in body, Keller and his fellow Swiss citizens
are more than happy to accept the gift of their own founding myth in the words
of the German genius: “A great poet shakes a play out of his cornucopia, and
an old federal state that has a noble prehistory and a history . . . but is lacking
a transfiguring work of national literature is given just this in the most beautiful
classical form.”47
Far from stressing the opposition between Switzerland and Germany,
Keller’s narrator describes the relationship in terms of mutual enhancement.
Switzerland provides the raw material of history that Schiller refines into art of
the highest quality. When the native Swiss receive their local history trans-
formed into a finished product, there is no sense of alienation but, rather, a
sense of recognition of their own past purified, literally aufgehoben (lifted up)
into a new and better artistic form. The amateur performance of the play, in
turn, is presented not as an imaginative flight to a foreign realm but as living
history, a poetic transfiguration of everyday life: “Particularly the character of
Tell corresponds completely to truth and to life” (2:393). The performance is
staged in the very villages and landscapes where the historical events took
place, “as if it were part of reality,” (2:400) and “the roles were not spoken
theatrically and with gesticulations but, rather, more like speeches in an assem-
bly of the people” (2:403). Some scenes are even repeated without disturbing
the sense of reality, and the man who plays Wilhelm Tell trembles in earnest
when he takes aim at the apple.
Keller joined with many nineteenth- century liberals who embraced
Schiller as a champion of their cause, although he did not share the corre-
sponding disdain with which some regarded Goethe as a sycophantic servant
of princely authority (Fürstenknecht). Heinrich’s father, who spent his for-

mative years in Germany, returns to Zurich imbued with liberal ideas and
carrying a copy of Schiller’s works, which he shares with his fellow citizens.
Long before Heinrich spends a month immersed in the works of Goethe, he
has read and reread Schiller’s works in his father’s edition. The liberals seem
to have forgotten or perhaps did not know that Schiller was hardly an unam-
biguous ally in their cause. Although he greeted the initial phase of the
French Revolution more sympathetically than Goethe, Schiller made an
abrupt about-face when he learned of King Louis XVI’s arrest. He even toyed
with the idea of traveling to Paris and speaking on behalf of the French king
when the ruler was put on trial in December 1792.48 After the king was exe-
cuted, Schiller was literally sickened with disgust. “For the past two weeks,
I have been unable to read any French newspapers,” he wrote to his friend
Christian Gottfried Körner on February 8, 1793, adding, “That’s how dis-
gusted I am with these miserable knackers” (so ekeln diese elenden Schin-
dersknechte mich an).49 It might seem curious that Schiller chose to write a
drama about Wilhelm Tell ten years later, as the Swiss patriot was a favorite
of the revolutionary French. As Dieter Borchmeyer has shown, however,
Schiller appropriated the story of Wilhelm Tell for his own political pur-
poses. Borchmeyer distinguishes between two concepts of revolution around
1800: one, with which we are most familiar, involved the radical overthrow
of the existing order, but the other, older concept conceived of revolution as
a turning back to an original state of affairs.50 This conservative view in-
spired Egmont’s effort to restore old traditions and local autonomy against
the encroaching Spanish Empire, just as Goethe’s Goetz defends his tradi-
tional independence as an imperial knight against the rising power of the new
territorial states.
At first glance, it appears that Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell follows Goethe’s
lead in using a revolutionary theme for conservative ends. Like the Dutch, the
Swiss seek to restore their local autonomy against imperial aggression, al-
though the enemy in this case is the Hapsburgs of Austria rather than those of
Spain. In the end, however, Schiller’s aristocrats signal their willingness to give
up their privileges of birth in the name of a new egalitarian future: “The old
order falls, the times change, / and new life blossoms from the ruins. . . . the
aristocracy steps down from its old castles / and swears the citizen’s oath to the
cities, . . . the nobility’s glory falls, / and freedom raises its flag in victory.”51
Thus Schiller preserves the revolutionary ideals while avoiding revolutionary
violence, transforming Swiss society from within rather than casting it aside in
the name of a radically new order.
Swiss Federalism versus German Imperialism
Schiller’s model of evolutionary movement toward greater democracy fits in

well with developments in nineteenth-century Switzerland. In Keller’s youth,
the various cantons of Switzerland had been allied in a loose federation, or
Staatenbund. In the mid-1840s, a number of the Catholic cantons sought to
break away from the alliance by forming their own federation, or Sonderbund,
which provoked the brief Sonderbundskrieg of 1847.52 Keller fought on the
side of the secular liberals against the separatist movement. They favored con-
stitutional reforms that would guarantee the “political equality of all or almost
all citizens, separation of powers, the right to petition, freedom of the press,
commerce, and industry.”53 Conservatives, who were closely allied with the
Jesuits, sought to retain the class privileges and guild rights of the old system.
At the heart of the conflict in the relatively small world of Swiss politics lay the
dispute “between the political philosophies that divided all of Europe into two
camps in the run-up to the Revolution of 1848.”54 Eichendorff and Friedrich
Schlegel, as we have seen, stood firmly on the side of the Restoration, whereas
Keller’s allegiances were with the liberals, who won in Switzerland: the consti-
tution of 1848 transformed the Staatenbund into a Bundesstaat, and Switzer-
land became a bastion of republican democracy at a time when the rest of Eu-
rope was ruled by the leaders of the conservative Restoration.55
When advocating for their view of the future, both liberals and conserva-
tives appealed to the imperial past, although in very different ways. In their
opposition to what they believe are the homogenizing and centralizing tenden-
cies of the modern nation-state, Eichendorff and Schlegel invoke the federated
structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Keller also favors a federalist political
model. Approving of the Swiss struggle for local autonomy against Hapsburg
Austria that Schiller stages in Wilhelm Tell, Keller has the protagonist of the
novella Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten (The banner of the seven righteous
men, 1877) spell out his vision of the Swiss nation as a confederation based on
the principle of “diversity in unity” (Mannigfaltigkeit in der Einheit): “How
pleasant it is that there is no single monotonous Swiss type but, rather, that
there are people from Zurich and Bern, from Unterwald and Neuenburg,
Graubund and Basel—and even two kinds of Baseler!”56 The difference be-
tween the romantic conservatives and Keller is that whereas the former use the
past to support the neo-feudal Restoration, he favors democratic reform within
the various Swiss cantons.
Although Keller disapproves of the antidemocratic tendencies of particu-
lar German governments, he embraces and participates in a common German
culture. In an early poem, he even celebrates his sense of dual Swiss and Ger-
man identity, inspired by a pensive moment on the banks of the Rhine.
Wohl mir, daß ich dich endlich fand,

Du stiller Ort am alten Rhein,
Wo, ungestört und ungekannt,
Ich Schweizer darf und Deutscher sein!
(I am glad that I finally found you,

You quiet place on the old Rhine,
Where, undisturbed and unrecognized,
I can be Swiss and German!)57
A still earlier essay more clearly spells out Keller’s understanding of the rela-
tionship between Switzerland and Germany. He begins by rejecting ethnic na-
tionalism: some claim that the German speakers of Switzerland are descended
from the same peoples who became modern Germans and that the Swiss Ger-
mans therefore have no distinct national identity; the same could be said of the
French and Italian regions in Switzerland. Although Keller makes use of a
similar argument in the previously cited passage from Green Henry in which
he cites the common Alemannic ancestors of his contemporary Swabians and
Swiss as evidence of their close affinities, he here ridicules the claim that na-
tional identity rests on a people’s common genealogy. If you trace any people’s
origins back to the beginning, he claims, you will find that they all descend
from Adam. Keller goes on to insist that the Swiss have a distinct national
identity, but not because of their common forefathers: “The Swiss national
character does not lie in the oldest ancestors, nor in the legends of the land, nor
in any other material thing but, rather, in the love of freedom, of independence;
it lies in the exceptional attachment to the small but beautiful and precious fa-
therland.”58 Keller concludes his essay by insisting that it does no harm to
Switzerland’s political independence when its artists and writers follow the
lead of their more culturally advanced neighbors; hence the Swiss can embrace
Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in a spirit of gratitude, and Keller’s protagonist can ex-
press his reverence for Goethe without reservation.
In Keller’s view, pride in Switzerland’s liberal traditions does not or at least
should not foster national chauvinism. “The suggestions and actions of the
narrow-minded and one-sided patriot will never be really useful to his father-
land,” writes Keller in a series of fragments on patriotism and cosmopolitanism
that were originally intended for the description of Heinrich Lee’s homecoming.
But Keller also rejects “the one-sided cosmopolitan whose heart belongs to no
particular fatherland.”59 Just as getting to know new people helps us better un-
derstand ourselves, we develop a new appreciation of our home when we travel
abroad: “Thus you should mistrust anyone who boasts of knowing and loving
no fatherland, but you should also mistrust anyone for whom the world is sealed
off by the borders of his country.”60 To love one’s own country is well and good,
but “this admirable quality must be purified by love and respect for the foreign,
and without the grand and profound foundation and the clear vision of the cos-
mopolitan, patriotism (I intentionally do not say love of the fatherland this time)
is a barren [and] unfruitful and dead thing.”61
Gottfried Keller balanced his Swiss patriotism with respect for foreign
cultures. In this context, we can understand his otherwise perplexing com-
ments in a public toast of 1872 in which he suggested that, at some point in the
future, Switzerland might become part of Germany, just as the German Empire
had recently annexed Alsace. Keller was immediately attacked as a traitor by
those who mistakenly believed that he favored the violent conquest of Switzer-
land by the new German Empire. He quickly responded with an open letter in
which he sought to clarify his position.62 Keller insists that he by no means
advocated the immediate annexation of Switzerland by Germany. If such a
union were to occur—it might happen in a few years or in five hundred years
or never at all—it would be during a time in which “the German Empire could
tolerate forms of government that were necessary for the Swiss”—that is, an
empire that had room for Swiss democracy.63
Keller’s vision of a potential union of Germany and Switzerland is based
on a model of Swiss federalism writ large, not advocacy of German imperial-
ism. His comments recall Heinrich Heine’s preface to Germany: A Winter Tale,
in which he says that he would welcome a German conquest of the world if it
were done in the name of finishing the liberal reforms that started during the
French Revolution. “If we complete what the French have begun, if we surpass
them in deed as we have already done in thought; . . . if we quash servitude . . . ;
if we rescue the god that dwells on earth, within us, from his abasement; . . . if
we restore dignity to the impoverished people,” then Heine would be more than
willing to accept “universal dominion on the part of Germany” over “the whole
of Europe, the whole world,” and “the whole world will become German!”64 In
Keller’s vision, the whole world (or at least the German-speaking regions of
Central Europe) will become Swiss, in the same sense of extending the prin-
ciples of liberal democracy to a pan-German federation. Together with Heine,
Keller enlists the universal structure of the old Holy Roman Empire in envi-
sioning a liberal-democratic utopia, just as Schlegel and Eichendorff used the
imperial model to voice conservative ideals. By the time Keller was writing,
however, German imperialism had entered a new phase, as the Prussian victo-
ries over Denmark, Austria, and France that set the stage for national unifica-
tion also sparked a desire for overseas colonies. For reflections on the new
German Empire, both within Europe and beyond, we turn to the work of The-
odor Fontane.
Theodor Fontane: A Prussian Cosmopolitan
When Theodor Fontane published the first volume of his Wanderungen durch
die Mark Brandenburg (Ramblings in Brandenburg) in November 1861, critics
welcomed it as a worthy contribution to the growing genre of German Hei-
matliteratur. “The love of the homeland finds the richest nourishment in these
depictions, which, inspired by the love of the homeland, must warm the heart
of anyone whose heart can still be touched by a patriotic appeal,” wrote one
enthusiastic critic.65 Such praise must have pleased the author, who had been
inspired to begin the project by a “growing desire to give artistic form to life in
the fatherland, . . . in the smallest possible format, of course.”66 The region
along the Rhine has been the primary focus of patriotic attention until now,
Fontane continues, but “every speck of the German soil” deserves its due, “for
every speck of soil is home to many thousands.”67 Comparing himself to a
prince who breaks the spell of a sleeping beauty, Fontane sallies forth to save
the sandy soil of Brandenburg-Prussia, “to redeem ‘locality’ like the princess
in the fairy tale.”68
Over a period of nearly three decades, Fontane went on to publish five
thick volumes about the Prussian landscape and its people, yet he was adamant
in his insistence that he was not merely a provincial writer. He distanced him-
self from Theodor Storm by claiming that the characteristic setting of Storm’s
fiction in the Schleswig-Holstein landscape around his native city of Husum
was too local, nothing but local, “Husumerei” or “provincial inanity” (Provinzi-
alsimpelei).69 Fontane felt, fairly or not, that he had a broader, more cosmo-
politan perspective on the world than his fellow German writer. He frequently
played up the significance of his French Huguenot heritage, though his ances-
tors had moved to Prussia generations earlier and though he spoke only imper-
fect French.70 If Fontane’s ancestral ties to France were imaginatively embel-
lished, his experiences in England were real: he lived and worked as a foreign
correspondent in London for extended periods during the 1850s. It has been
argued, plausibly, that England was to Fontane what Italy was to Goethe (and
what Germany was to Gottfried Keller), a place that enabled him to expand his
cultural horizons and gain critical distance from his native land.71 For the ma-
jority of his adult life, however, Fontane lived in Berlin at a time when its
population was expanding as rapidly as its economic and political power. In the
last decades of Fontane’s life, imperial Germany sought to assert its strength
against European rivals and to expand its reach beyond European shores, even
as Prussia consolidated its position of authority among the formerly indepen-
dent German provinces. Characters in three different Fontane novels observe,
“Berlin is becoming a cosmopolitan city” (Berlin wird Weltstadt).72
The global and the local stand in a reciprocal relationship in Fontane’s
fiction. Fontane’s final novel, Der Stechlin (The Stechlin, 1897), takes its title
from the name of a small lake in the Brandenburg countryside that is seemingly
no different from the hundreds of lakes and ponds that dot the district. Accord-
ing to local lore, however, the little lake is mysteriously in tune with events
occurring halfway around the world: when there is seismic activity in Iceland,
Java, or Hawaii, the Prussian pond bubbles up, just as it is said to have regis-
tered the famous earthquake in Lisbon more than one hundred years ago. Lake
Stechlin serves as a metaphor for the human interactions in the novel, which
combine locally rooted individuals with more cosmopolitan characters. It cen-
ters on the figure of an old Prussian aristocrat, Dubslav von Stechlin, who has
spent most of his life within the narrow compass of his ancestral lands, but
whose son marries a woman born in England to a Swiss mother whose sister
was briefly married to an Italian aristocrat. Other characters in Fontane’s ear-
lier fiction have similar international connections: Gordon Leslie in Cécile
(1887) is a German-speaking, world-traveling Scottish engineer who served in
the Prussian army.73 In Quitt (1891), Lehnert Menz flees to America after
shooting his rival, only to die in a hunting accident in the Ozark Mountains.
After divorcing his wife and killing his former friend in a duel, Baron Geert
von Innstetten in Effi Briest (1895) flirts briefly with the idea of running away
to Africa.
Effi Briest: Psychographic Realism
Fontane remarked in a letter, “It was as if I wrote the book—Effi Briest, that
is—with a psychograph. Later on, when I made corrections, it was hard work,
but the first draft was effortless.”74 A psychograph was a device that supposedly
enabled a medium to receive communications from the spirit world, usually
featuring either a suspended weight or an indicator that would spell out mes-
sages by pointing to letters of the alphabet. In an earlier letter, Fontane stated

that his entire poetic production was “psychography and criticism, creations of
darkness adjusted in the light.”75 The image of the artist as a spiritual medium
evokes what has become a romantic cliché: Goethe, for example, claimed that
he wrote Werther in four weeks, “without an outline,” and “quite unconsciously,
like a somnambulist.”76 But Fontane goes on to explain that the initial inspira-
tion must be subjected to a conscious critique; the “creation of darkness” (Dun-
kelschöpfung) must be drawn into light, or—to describe the creative process in
literary-historical terms—romanticism must yield to realism.
Fontane’s comments help us to place his work in general and Effi Briest
in particular in a broader cultural context. As Gerhart von Graevenitz ob-
serves, Fontane’s work is deeply rooted in the culture of nineteenth-century
Prussia and, thus, in the age of literary realism.77 When viewed, as Erich Au-
erbach does in Mimesis, as a positive achievement, nineteenth-century realism
marked a major advance toward the “representation of reality in Western lit-
erature.” From Robert Alter’s perspective, however, nineteenth-century real-
ism is better understood as a deviation from a tradition of the self-conscious
novel, which extends from Cervantes to Sterne and Diderot and resumes in the
modern era. As he argues, realism arose in response to the sense of historical
change sparked by the French Revolution. The move from history “as an un-
broken continuum, fundamentally unchanging from age to age” to a “sense of
history as continuous, perilous change” was perceived as a threat against
which realism was constructed as a bulwark: “Novel-writing was seized as a
means of containing the mounting chaos of the contemporary world, recasting
it in the molds of the imagination and thus transforming it, even as the deadly
weight of its real menace was still felt in the finished fiction.”78 In this spirit,
Russell A. Berman describes German realism “as the repression of the roman-
tic past,” noting further, “Realism in German literature had, in effect, always
represented an effort to control, to bridle, and to dismiss the romantic leg-
acy . . . with its capacity for imagination in art, as well as in politics.”79 In Effi
Briest, however, we witness the return of the repressed, as the realistic novel
is haunted by an entire catalog of things and people that seem strange, super-
natural, or exotic from the perspective of provincial Prussia, including, of
course, the Chinese ghost.
The novel that Berman aptly describes as marking “the end of realism”
thus stands on a threshold that could also be characterized as the advent of
modernism. In philosophical terms, modernism marks the moment when in-
exorable historical progress, of either the spirit (Hegel) or matter (Marx),
yields to the stasis of the will as explained by Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche’s
“eternal recurrence,” or to Freud’s “repetition compulsion.” There is the grow-

ing sense that individuals are in the thrall of desires they do not understand and
cannot control, that civilization is shadowed by atavistic impulses, that a re-
gressive “death drive” checks the progress of the “pleasure principle.” In psy-
chological terms, as Graevenitz describes it, modernism signals the replace-
ment of the coziness (Behaglichkeit) valued by Germany’s poetic realists with
a pervasive feeling of dread or anxiety (Ängstlichkeit).80 In the rapidly chang-
ing world of nineteenth-century Germany, there was much to fear: political
revolution, financial chaos, the rise of the proletariat and the collapse of patri-
archy. These philosophical and psychological threats, in turn, were mapped
onto landscapes that were both real and symbolic, the objective correlatives of
psychological states. The quest for power that drove Prussia to preeminence
among the German provinces also sent it chasing around the globe in search of
new colonies, but the outward movement could collapse back on itself, and the
sense of progress could be transformed into dialectical stasis, as the ghosts of
the romantic past that were projected onto the new “dark continents”81 could
return to haunt the imperial homeland. Effi Briest sets the anxieties of modern
Germany against a global backdrop, even as it explores tensions within the
Prussian aristocracy in a more narrowly circumscribed provincial setting.
The central conflicts in Effi Briest turn on questions of social class and
gender roles. The teenage Effi Briest blithely agrees to an arranged marriage
with a man twice her age, because she is an obedient child, because marriage
is inevitable, and because the specific individual matters less than the type. “Of
course he’s the right one,” she explains to her friend Hertha, who has her doubts
about this sudden engagement. “Provided,” Effi continues, “he is an aristocrat
and has a position and good looks, naturally.”82 Effi is a proud member of an
aristocratic family that is not only very old but also historically significant, as
one of her ancestors had played a prominent role in a military engagement
leading up to the Prussian victory at the battle of Fehrbellin in 1675. That her
future husband had once been in love with her mother does not particularly
trouble Effi, although perhaps it should: Baron von Innstetten marries Effi as a
kind of consolation prize for the love match he was denied because he was
considered too young to marry Effi’s mother. Now approaching middle age,
Innstetten is more interested in advancing his career than wooing his young
wife. Soon bored in the provincial town where her husband is stationed, Effi is
lured, by an experienced seducer, into an affair, for which she is punished
harshly by her husband and parents when the truth is discovered years later.
Although Innstetten is to blame for his failure to love and forgive his wife, he
is also something of a victim of the system in which he lives. Social consider-
ations made it impossible for him to marry his first love and compel him to
divorce his wife when he discovers evidence of her infidelity, though he still
loves her, and to fight a duel with her seducer, a friend with whom the baron is
not particularly angry. In the end, Effi dies young, and Innstetten is left a sad
and lonely man.
Effi Briest is a tragic variant of the social novel, just as Green Henry is a
tragic bildungsroman, particularly in its first version. The bildungsroman fo-
cuses on the development of one individual; the social novel explores group
dynamics. Effi Briest is a novel not only about what can and cannot be done in
late nineteenth-century Prussian society but about what can and cannot be
said.83 When Effi makes the obligatory social rounds among the aristocratic
families in Kessin, the women talk about the weather while casting a critical
eye on Effi’s outfits. That which is left unsaid matters more than the content of
their desultory conversations. The ultimate verbal taboo concerns anything to
do with sex, yet that is precisely what the novel is about. Effi Briest marries
Geert von Innstetten on October 3. Nine months later to the day, on July 3, Effi
gives birth to a baby girl, but we hear nothing about the wedding night. Effi is
even unable to tell her mother, in so many words, that she is pregnant: her state-
ment “What I recently hinted at is now a certainty” is as close as she comes
(71; 15:114). Those who make even the most oblique reference to the unspeak-
able realm of the body and its desires are quickly censured. Early on, Effi
makes reference to rhubarb leaves that are bigger than fig leaves, eliciting an
immediate “Shame on you!” from her proper girlfriend, who is shocked that
Effi would allude to the plant that Adam and Eve used to hide their nakedness
(12; 15:16). Effi’s mother is similarly indignant at her husband’s repeated dou-
ble entendres on the wedding night: “This is a wedding, not a shooting party,”
she splutters. “Whereupon,” notes the narrator, “Briest replied he couldn’t see
much difference; and anyway he was feeling happy” (26; 15:39). More often,
however, Effi’s father invokes his standard formula for a topic that cannot be
openly discussed: “Ah Luise, that’s enough . . . that’s too vast a subject [das ist
ein zu weites Feld]” (217; 15:350).
Given the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, one can hardly ex-
pect graphic depictions of sexual intercourse or of Effi’s adulterous rendezvous
with Major von Crampas. In comparison with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or
Goethe’s Elective Affinities, however, Fontane’s reticence to depict any sort of
erotic encounter in Effi Briest is striking. On a first reading of the novel, it is
quite possible to miss the point where Effi begins her affair with Crampas, just
as readers of Heinrich von Kleist’s Marquise von O have to go back to discover
the dash that marks the rape that leads to the protagonist’s mysterious preg-
nancy. One suspects that Fontane avoids open discussion of sexual acts and
desires not as a matter of Victorian prudishness but, rather, as a deliberate strat-
egy to make us read between the lines, just as the members of Prussian society
glean insights by inference about each other rather than direct disclosure. Tell-
ing, in this regard, is Fontane’s revision of the climactic duel between Innstetten
and Crampas. In an earlier, more extensive version of the scene, Crampas was
to have extended his hand to Innstetten in a gesture of reconciliation. In the
completed novel, however, he is only permitted a futile effort to speak: “‘Would
you . . .’ These were his last words” (178; 15:286).84
Fontane maps the interpersonal relations in Effi Briest onto a symbolic
landscape. The novel’s plot revolves around three different places in Prussia:
Hohen-Cremmen, the ancestral home of the von Briest family; Kessin, a small
town in East Prussia on the shores of the Baltic Sea; and Berlin. The distances
between these locations is not vast, even by nineteenth-century standards. One
night when Effi and Innstetten go out to dinner near Kessin, their host takes
them outside to watch the Danzig express train rush by on its way to Berlin:
“‘At six-fifty it gets into Berlin,’ said Innstetten, ‘and an hour later, if the wind
is in the right direction, the folk at Hohen-Cremmen will hear it rattling past in
the distance. Would you like to be on it, Effi?’” (64; 15:103). Effi says nothing,
but he notices tears in her eyes, for indeed she wants nothing more than to re-
turn home. For Effi Briest, Hohen-Cremmen signifies family tradition and
safety, the place where she grew up as a beloved only child, and the place to
which she longs to return after she has lost everything—her husband, daughter,
reputation, and health. In a conversation with Crampas, Effi recalls a poem that
she memorized as a child, about an old woman who is surrounded by enemy
troops with her granddaughter and prays that God might build a wall around
them for protection. That very night, it snows so hard that the house is hidden,
and the enemy passes by, leaving them in safety (110; 15:177).85 Crampas is
visibly shaken, recognizing in Effi’s anecdote an indirect or perhaps even sub-
conscious reference to her fear of his seduction. More than a response to a
specific threat, however, Effi’s childhood memory reflects her constant wish to
return to the safety of her home and family. Yet the safety she seeks is an illu-
sion: her parents expel her from the garden of her youth when they arrange her
marriage with Innstetten, and they bolt the gate when they learn of her affair,
putting fears for their own reputation above the needs of their daughter. She
finally returns only to die, buried beneath her simple gravestone, as the old
woman’s home was buried in the snow.
If Hohen-Cremmen represents the deceptive idyll of private security, Ber-
lin stands for public success. Innstetten’s promotion from the province to Ber-
lin marks a major step forward in his career. Effi Briest is set in the years 1878–
86, the period in which Berlin was undergoing its transformation from a
provincial Prussian capital to the center of the new German Empire.86 Events
in the novel are punctuated by the memory of Prussian victories now celebrated
as national holidays—Sedan Day on September 2, marking the capture of Na-
poleon III in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, and Königgrätz on July 3,
commemorating the Prussian defeat of the allied Austrians and Saxons in 1866.
As noted earlier, Effi’s daughter happens to be born on July 3, prompting the
doctor’s tactless comment that it is a shame that she did not give birth to a boy
on the anniversary of the famous battle. “But there’s enough time for the other,”
he proffers, “and the Prussians have plenty of victory anniversaries” (84;
15:135). Rumors that Innstetten might be appointed as the new ambassador to
Morocco remind us that German imperial power also extends abroad. For Effi,
Innstetten’s promotion to Berlin means a rise in social status as well, which she
celebrates by indulging in fashionable clothing, an apartment in an appropri-
ately upscale part of town, and appearances at gala performances of the opera.
As in the case of Hohen-Cremmen, however, the promise of Berlin is not ful-
filled. When the old affair is revealed, Effi is banished to a lonely apartment
and condemned to a life of enforced idleness, while Innstetten can only smile
bitterly when he receives news of a further promotion he once ardently desired.
Berlin thus represents the pinnacle of society for Effi, the top of the career
ladder for Innstetten, and the geographical and political center of Prussia and
the German Empire. Kessin, in contrast, lies on the margins, in multiple senses.
It marks a stepping stone on the path to Berlin for Innstetten and lies halfway
on the route from Hohen-Cremmen to Siberia, at least in Effi’s vivid imagina-
tion. Kessin is located on the east-west border between Germany and Poland
and on the north-south line between Central Europe and the Baltic Sea. Kes-
sin’s liminal geographical position also marks a cultural dividing line between
those who live on the coast and those who live inland. “If you go inland, what
you find are so-called Kashubians, whom you may have heard of,” explains
Innstetten to Effi, “a Slav people who have been here for a thousand years and
maybe much longer” (32–33; 15:50). The coastal inhabitants, in contrast, look
out toward new lands opened up by European explorations: “What concerns
them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are
in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all
corners of the globe” (33; 15:50–51).
On one side of Kessin is an ancient people deeply rooted in the local ter-
ritory; on the other are cosmopolitans linked, by modern commerce, to the far
ends of the earth. Both peoples are united in their strangeness, in their differ-
ence from the Prussian norm. Poles are not to be trusted, Innstetten explains to
his young wife. The people of her native Brandenburg say what they mean and
mean what they say: “When they say yes they mean yes and when they say no
they mean no, and you can rely on them. Here nothing is clear-cut” (32; 15:50).
The inscrutable Poles live in a landscape that bears traces of ancient pagan
rituals: rumor has it that a Wendic temple once stood not far from Kessin, and
Effi shudders at the sight of stones that Germanic tribes once used for human
sacrifice. Ancient primitivism finds its modern equivalent in foreign exoticism.
Effi is thrilled to hear that the provincial seaport boasts a decidedly interna-
tional population: “But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwa-
ter, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new
world. All sorts of exotic things.” She wonders what sort of people she might
find there, “perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.” The very
thought of a Chinese man is enough to make Effi shiver: “A Chinaman, I think,
is always a bit sinister” (33; 15:51–52).
With the mention of the Chinese man, we encounter the most prominent
and widely discussed instance of the exotic in Effi Briest.87 The story of the
Chinese ghost that allegedly haunts the attic of the couple’s house in Kessin is
told only in bits and pieces, with significant gaps. The former owner of the
house was a certain Captain Thomsen, who retired to Kessin after plying the
seas between Shanghai and Singapore. He brought with him the stuffed croco-
dile, shark, and ship model that decorate the house, as well as a younger
woman, who was either his granddaughter or niece, and a Chinese servant,
who was also a personal friend. The young woman was later married to another
sea captain, but she disappeared on the wedding night. Two weeks later, the
Chinese servant died and was buried near the local cemetery but not in it (be-
cause he was not a Christian). People in town speculate that he might have been
in love with the young woman and possibly died of a broken heart when she
married another man, but no one is entirely sure. His ghost is said to haunt the
house where Effi and Innstetten live.
Because crucial aspects of the story remain shrouded in mystery, attention
shifts from the irresolvable enigmas to the way in which individual characters
respond to the tale. There is a perfectly logical explanation for the ghost in the
attic: the curtains are too long and rub against the floor when there is a draft.
Why, then, does Innstetten persist in spreading the rumor that the house is
haunted? According to Major von Crampas, there are two reasons (neither of
which puts Innstetten in a particularly good light): to further the baron’s career
and to frighten his wife. Innstetten believes that if he is to advance to the high-
est ranks of the Prussian government, he needs something to distinguish him
from his fellow administrators. He tells the story of a prominent Prussian fam-
ily haunted by a mysterious “white lady” and decides that his own Chinese
ghost might provide just the touch of eccentricity necessary to impress his su-
periors. The second reason, as Crampas speculates to Effi, is to “educate” the
baron’s new wife. “Improve me by exposing me to a ghost?” (Erziehen durch
Spuk?), Effi queries, to which Crampas responds that the baron’s goal would
be to keep his pretty, young, lonely, and bored wife frightened so that she is not
tempted to get out of line during his frequent absences: “a ghost is like a cherub
with a sword” (97; 15:156). The plan works wonderfully at first, at least from
Innstetten’s point of view, but soon backfires. Effi spends her first night alone
in the house in a state of abject terror as she listens to the mysterious sounds
emanating from the attic, but her discussion with Crampas about the matter
soon changes her fear of the ghost into resentment of her husband. The plan
provides Crampas with a lever that enables him to pry Effi away from Innstetten
and toward himself, as Crampas’s plausible speculations about Innstetten’s
motives establish the former’s clandestine solidarity with Effi. Before long, the
practiced seducer has accomplished his goal, despite the story of the Chinese
ghost—or, actually, partly because of Effi’s anger about it.
The episode raises larger issues about the way in which characters ap-
proach the irrational and the exotic. Reason reassures us that there are no such
things as ghosts, yet we suspect, as Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, that
“There are more things in heaven and earth . . . Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.”88 Kessin is rife with mystery; the Chinese ghost is only one con-
tributing factor to an uncanny atmosphere that permeates the coastal town. For
the sake of convenience, we can organize the mysterious or irrational elements
into four broad categories. The first are associated with ancient peoples and
their religious rituals, including the Wends, the Kashubians, the early Germans,
and the Aztecs featured in the Heine poem “Vitzliputzli” cited by Major von
Crampas. To these elements, we can add a second subcategory of superstitions,
weird behavior, or religious faith among the lower classes or stigmatized social
groups, such as Frau Kruse’s fixation on her black hen or Roswitha’s venera-
tion of the saints and familiarity with Catholic rituals; Crampas also mentions
a gypsy prophecy about his death. Third, references to romantic or neo-
romantic art recur regularly in this otherwise realistic novel—to the dream se-
quence in Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, the underwater city in Heine’s
Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), and Goethe’s Faust. Marietta Tripelli’s rep-
ertoire consists almost exclusively of romantic Lieder; Innstetten sometimes
asks Effi to play excerpts from Wagner’s Lohengrin or Die Walküre on the pi-
ano. On the eve of her marriage, Effi’s cousin Dagobart takes her to see Arnold
Böcklin’s painting Die Insel der Seligen (Isle of the dead), with its erotically
charged images of nymphs and centaurs. Fourth and finally, Effi meets the
half-Spanish druggist Alonzo Gieshübler and his servant Mirambo, named af-
ter an African bandit, adding to the list of exotic people and places from around
the world that begins with Effi’s offhand reference to unfaithful Turkish women
punished by drowning in Constantinople and with her purchase of a Japanese
screen on the eve of her wedding and continues through her subsequent allu-
sions to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Taken together, its various exotic references give Effi Briest a worldly air
that belies the provincialism of its Prussian location. Its allusions to places
brought into public consciousness by European imperialism are in keeping
with the novel’s setting in the 1880s, but they are also slotted into preexisting
structural categories for the irrational or mythic. Yesterday’s Germanic ritual is
repeated in Africa today—and Fontane drew many of his references to Africa
from Henry Morton Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent.89 In a sense, how-
ever, there is only a single binary opposition in Effi Briest, although it is one
that takes multiple forms: the primary distinction between realism and roman-
ticism encompasses a wide spectrum of distinctions that are at once geograph-
ical (between Europe and the rest of the world), religious (between Protestants
and Catholics, Christians and heathens, Christians and Jews), cultural (between
civilization and primitivism, the educated upper classes and the superstitious
commoners), racial (white Europeans versus Asians, Africans, and Aztecs),
psychological (conscious versus unconscious), sexual (male versus female),
and moral (discipline versus debauchery). This is not to say that each of the
categories can be reduced to the other, but they are interrelated, forming part of
a complex pattern of ideas and associations that are mutually implicated and,
thus, can quickly jump from one to the other. In Anne McClintock’s words, the
evolving categories of race, class, and gender in nineteenth-century European
thought “come into existence in and through relation to each other—in if con-
tradictory and conflictual ways. . . . the formative categories of imperial mo-
dernity are articulated categories in the sense that they come into being in his-
torical relation to each other and emerge only in dynamic, shifting and intimate
interdependence.”90
For those who establish such distinctions, everything depends on main-
taining clear boundaries and keeping oneself on the right side of the fence. At
one point, Innstetten disingenuously ridicules Effi’s fear of the ghost by saying
that the germs in the air are more dangerous than any spook in the house (58;
15:92). He alludes to Robert Koch’s recent discovery that marked a major ad-
vance in the history of medicine. Yet the same scientific discovery also pro-
vided a new vocabulary for cultural prejudices: doctors in Africa sought to

control foreign bacteria as a defense against the danger of being infected by the
“sick continent,” just as bacteriology provided a new pseudoscientific vocabu-
lary for racists worried about the infectious effects of miscegenation on white
Europeans.91 In Effi Briest, modern science wields a double-edged sword, cut-
ting through old prejudices even as it buttresses the new. Thus it is fitting that
the local chemist Gieshübler is jokingly referred to as an alchemist on more
than one occasion. Inevitably, carefully drawn distinctions begin to blur;
dreams and desires disrupt the controlled facade of waking reason. The key
question for Effi Briest lies not in the various binary oppositions themselves but
in how specific individuals in a particular social setting come to terms with the
alien within. In exploring individual psyches, Fontane also exposes collective
cultural fears and prejudices, most significantly in his portrait of the Prussian
Baron von Innstetten.
Innstetten’s entire existence is based on a deadly combination of ambi-
tion, renunciation, and repression. He gets up early and disapproves of those,
such as his young wife, who sleep in late; he obeys the law and frowns on
those, such as Crampas, who are willing to break it. His erect posture and im-
peccable grooming reveal him as a man who places self-discipline above all
else, as do his fellow Prussian officers. Innstetten’s friend and second, Wül-
lersdorf, reports that terrible scenes he witnessed with Crampas’s widow in the
wake of the duel between Crampas and Innstetten reinforce his belief that con-
stant vigilance against wayward passions is essential for Prussian society:
“One more lesson in the importance of being careful” (180; 15:289). Innstetten’s
discipline extends to his sexual desires, to the point that they barely seem to
exist. As far as we know, he has not been involved with any other women in the
nearly two decades that pass between his renunciation of Effi’s mother and his
marriage to her daughter. The birth of a child precisely nine months to the day
after their wedding night suggests that Innstetten performed his marital duty as
punctiliously as he fulfills his social obligations and professional responsibili-
ties, but the fact that the couple still has only one child seven years later gives
the impression that he may not repeat very often the tired caresses that Effi
finds so dissatisfying. Even after their divorce, there is no indication that the
baron visits prostitutes or seeks a second wife.
Innstetten’s remorseless self-discipline extends to his penchant for disci-
plining others. It may be self-serving of Crampas to point it out, but there is no
reason to doubt his contention that Innstetten carefully cultivates the mystery
shrouding the Chinese ghost to keep his wife in a state of nervous tension.
When it suits his purposes, Innstetten indulges in exoticism, but he mostly
strives to domesticate the foreign. As Effi’s polite but exhausted letters to her
parents reveal, her honeymoon to Italy with the baron has been carefully
scripted in advance, as Innstetten plays the role of teacher to his ignorant bride.
“They must be passing Regensburg by now,” smirks Effi’s father soon after the
newlyweds leave on their journey, “and I think we can take it he’ll run through
the principal art treasures of the Valhalla collection for her, without getting off
the train of course” (27; 15:41). Innstetten and his young bride return to Prussia
after they have checked off all the required churches and artworks of Italy, but
as Innstetten insists, the journey is not complete until it has been organized into
a retrospective album that can be studied for further edification. “Such a reca-
pitulation was really essential, for it was only then that one made everything
lastingly one’s own,” explains Innstetten to Effi, who finds his plan deadly dull
and eagerly agrees with Crampas’s suggestion that they put on a play instead
(104; 15:167).
In Effi Briest, if the foreign cannot be repressed, domesticated, or used to
manipulate others, it can be ridiculed as an object of prejudice. Innstetten con-
descendingly agrees with Effi’s claim that there is always something frighten-
ing and horrible about a Chinaman, but he also instructs her about dangers that
lie closer to home, the unreliable Poles and half-Poles that populate his district
around Kessin and threaten to seduce his wife. The disparaging comments
about Slavic peoples go hand in hand with the antisemitism that crops up from
time to time in the novel. Innstetten is a Wagner fan, which seems out of char-
acter for the otherwise so tightly controlled man and prompts speculation about
what draws him to the romantic artist and his passionate music: “Some said it
was his nerves, for down to earth as he might seem, he was actually of a ner-
vous disposition, others put it down to Wagner’s stand on the Jewish question.
Probably both were right” (75; 15:120). We cannot be certain that the narrator’s
suggestion that Innstetten shares Wagner’s antisemitism is correct, but if he
does, he is not alone. Effi’s father makes the snide comment that his grand-
daughter might grow up to marry a wealthy banker, adding, “a Christian one I
hope, if there are still any left” (163; 15:263). The old Baron von Güldenklee
makes a point of mentioning that he is not going to mention that Louis Napo-
leon’s Catholic wife, “or let’s say rather his Jesuit wife,” was having an affair
with a Jewish banker (49; 15:76). He then proceeds to offer an elaborate toast
in which he rejects Lessing’s famous parable of religious tolerance in Nathan
der Weise (Nathan the Wise) as “a Jewish story, which, like all that liberal
fiddle-faddle, has caused and continues to cause nothing but confusion and
disaster” (113; 15:181). Güldenklee advocates exclusive loyalty to Prussia as
the alternative to religious diversity.
Scandinavia stands in Effi Briest as the positive counterpart to such deni-

grated peoples as the Jews, Poles, and Chinese. Shortly after their move to
Berlin, Innstetten and Effi decide to take a vacation on the north German island
of Rügen, after they realize it is too late to attend the Passion Play in Oberam-
mergau as they had originally planned. When Effi discovers, by coincidence,
that a nearby village is named Crampas, she becomes unhappy, as she is con-
fronted with the memory of the affair that she is trying to repress. Without un-
derstanding the source of Effi’s discomfort, Innstetten suggests that they con-
tinue further north to Copenhagen, where they encounter a family of the Danish
nobility, whose daughter, Thora von Penz, transfixes Effi with her Nordic
beauty: “Effi could not stop looking at her big blue eyes and flaxen hair” (155;
15:250). When she returns to Germany to spend an additional week’s vacation
with her family, she waxes rhapsodic about Thora’s “typically Scandinavian”
beauty, to which the assistant schoolmaster Jahnke enthusiastically agrees:
“Yes, that’s what they’re like; Germanic through and through, far more Ger-
man than the Germans” (159; 15:411–12). Jahnke, whose sole interests lie in
the Hanseatic League and Scandinavia, has given his twin redheaded daugh-
ters, Bertha and Hertha, names rooted in Germanic mythology, just as the local
Lutheran pastor names his lymphatic blonde daughter after the Nordic goddess
Hulda. Geert von Innstetten’s unusual first name also has hints of Germanic
heroism, as it is a Low German nickname for Gerhard, meaning “he who is
bold with a spear,” which goes back to the Middle Ages.92
Some of the sentiments expressed by the characters in Effi Briest reflect
the opinion of its author. In a positive review of Gustav Freytag’s best-selling
novel Debit and Credit, Fontane approvingly noted Freytag’s denigration of
the Poles: “The Polish mismanagement of their affairs [Polenwirtschaft] dooms
them to failure; Prussia is the state of the future.”93 Toward the end of his life,
Fontane was increasingly prone to antisemitic outbursts. “Despite all their
gifts,” he wrote about the Jews in a letter of May 12, 1898, just a few months
before his death, “they are a terrible people, . . . to whom from the very begin-
ning clung a kind of base arrogance that is now incompatible with the Aryan
world. What a difference between the criminal worlds of the Christians and the
Jews! And it is all ineradicable.”94
Fontane’s comments about Prussian or “Aryan” superiority over slovenly
Poles and the fundamentally flawed Jewish people are troubling, to say the
least. Fortunately, however, his fiction proves subtler than some of his un-
guarded comments. In his novels and novellas, one finds a repeated interest in
those pushed to the margins of Prussian society, particularly women of uncon-
ventional origins. The eponymous heroine of Grete Minde (1879) is regarded
suspiciously by the local townspeople because her mother was a Spanish Cath-
olic. The same is true of the orphan Hilde, the daughter of gypsies, in the his-
torical novella Ellernklipp (1881) and of the converted Catholic wife of Abel
Hradscheck in Unterm Birnbaum (Beneath the Pear Tree, 1885). Frau von Ca-
rayon and her daughter Victoire are French emigrés and, thus, outsiders in
Prussian society in Schach von Wuthenow (1882), and Cécile in the novel of
that name is a Polish-Catholic woman driven to an early death. In L’Adultera
(1880), Melanie von der Straaten, who has parents from the French-speaking
part of Switzerland, is shunned by Berlin society when she divorces her hus-
band to marry a Jew, and Die Poggenpuhls (The Poggenpuhl Family, 1896)
deals openly with antisemitic prejudice.
Fontane’s sympathetic portrait of the social outcast Effi Briest thus fits a
pattern found elsewhere in his works. As Effi is the first to admit, she is guilty
of marital infidelity, yet Fontane allows us to understand and even sympathize
with the forces that drove her to have an affair. She feels remorse for what she
has done, jumps at the chance to end the relationship, and—unlike Madame
Bovary—never has another. Thus her punishment seems excessively harsh: not
only is she divorced immediately and without being given the chance to speak
on her own behalf for an affair that lies nearly seven years in the past, but she
is also denied custody of and even the right to visit her only child. Her parents,
who, after all, arranged her marriage in the first place, reject her out of hand
when they receive the news of her divorce. Effi is not only cut off from all
contact with her former social circle in Berlin but even forbidden to perform
charitable actions for the poor.
Effi Briest is thus, in the first instance, a novel about a harshly punitive
Prussian society that shows no pity for its most vulnerable members. It is also,
however, about the emptiness of the social conventions that motivate Innstetten
to divorce his wife and fight a duel with her former lover. As he admits to his
confidant Wüllersdorf, the baron would gladly forgo the duel and forgive his
wife if propriety did not demand satisfaction. He feels that he must subordinate
his personal feelings to “that, let’s call it that social something which tyran-
nizes us, takes no account of charm, or love, or time limits. I’ve no choice. I
must” (173; 15:278). We are here far removed from the smug celebration of
Prussian superiority voiced in Güldenklee’s toast. According to official ideol-
ogy, Prussia leads the newly formed German Empire, establishing its recent
victories as national holidays, and confident that more victories will soon fol-
low. By the end of Effi Briest, in contrast, we are left with an image of Prussia
united only in prejudice; it crushes its victims without remorse and leaves its
would-be victors with a sense of emptiness and despair.
Fontane hints at a positive alternative in the figure of Effi Briest. While

Innstetten and his ilk repress themselves and oppress others, Effi is open to
romance and romanticism. She has a vibrant imagination and is thus as sensi-
tive to poetry as she is susceptible to ghosts. Crampas appeals to her sense of
adventure, her willingness to break the rules and explore the repressed desires
beneath Prussian discipline. Her passions lead to her downfall, but they are
also the source of her redeeming compassion for others. While Innstetten is
driven by ambition and a fatalistic adherence to a social code that he knows is
bankrupt, Effi expresses spontaneous sympathy with the weak and persecuted,
the abused woman Roswitha and the dog Rollo. Her slow decline lends an aura
of deep sadness to a novel that might otherwise have drifted toward satire. She
blames herself and exonerates Innstetten on her deathbed, but her marble
gravestone stands as a silent reproach to the gloating power of Prussian society
and the new German Empire.
Conclusion
Taken together, Keller and Fontane offer two ways of responding in literature
to the political changes of imperial Germany. Keller, looking north to the newly
founded German Empire, takes pride in the tradition of Swiss democracy even
as he envisions a hypothetical pan-German federation of the future that might
permit cooperation in the realm of politics to match the productive collabora-
tion between German and Swiss writers in the realm of culture. Fontane, writ-
ing his novels in the center of the German Empire, tempers triumphalism with
caution, depicting the Prussian leaders as slaves of prejudice or stale conven-
tion and characterizing their subordinates as victims of arbitrary and merciless
power. He sets Effi Briest in a cold Prussian landscape that shimmers with the
heat of repressed passion, and his fictional “psychograph” thus exposes the
collective fears and fantasies of the German Empire, registering disturbances
on the colonial periphery and among the socially stigmatized. Fontane’s self-
appointed role as the seismographic sensor of the Prussian psyche makes him
the direct precursor to Thomas Mann, who made a literary career out of char-
acters who struggle, often in vain, to control unruly desires associated with
dark depths of the soul and places far down on the map. Mann admired Fontane
greatly and often reread his work with enthusiasm in later years; thus we must
take with a grain of salt Mann’s contention, in a 1910 essay, that Fontane’s fic-
tion lacks chthonic passion, “the foreboding musicality, the fertile metaphysi-
cality, the murky depths” (das ahndevoll Musikalische, das brünstig Metaphy-
sische, die trübe Tiefe).95 Given the previously noted array of precisely such
elements bubbling up from the Prussian swamps and surfacing from distant
shores in Fontane’s fiction, it may well be that the young Thomas Mann was
suffering from the “anxiety of influence,” stressing the superficiality of Fon-
tane’s prose in order to underscore the profundity of his own. Fontane’s famous
Plauderton (conversational tone) casts a thin veil of decorum over a world of
deadly desire, while still retaining a place for compassion and peace.
Chapter 8
Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations
The Prussian victory at Königgratz on July 3, 1866, marked a major step on the
path toward national unification, but it simultaneously excluded Austria from
the new German state. In the following year, the old Austrian Empire became
a dual monarchy that combined “the Kingdom of Hungary and a territory cen-
tred on the Austrian lands and often called Cisleithania.”1 The multiethnic,
multilingual, and multiconfessional lands grouped together in the western half
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the antithesis of a modern nation-state,
for which reason some say that the empire skipped the “normal” path toward
political modernity, even as its subjects produced strikingly modernist works
of art.2 The empire established in 1867 survived until 1918, when it was torn
apart by war and a rising tide of ethnic nationalism. Thereafter, German-
language Austrian authors looked either back nostalgically to “the world of
yesterday,” giving rise to what Claudio Magris describes as “the Hapsburg
myth,” or forward to the time when Austria would finally attain what it had
been denied in 1871, incorporation into a pan-German nation-state.3 The Nazi
Anschluss of 1938 fulfilled that dream, which would explain the notorious ju-
bilation on the part of many Austrians when German troops marched into Vi-
enna, although the consequences for others, particularly the Austrian Jews,
were disastrous.
Thus described, it would seem that German-language modernists fall
neatly into two categories: those who lived in a state that was home to at least
part of the modern German nation and those who dwelled in an old-fashioned
empire. In one category would be Thomas Mann, the self-appointed voice of
the German nation, and in the other would be Kafka, the multiply marginalized
outsider. In this chapter, I argue that the actual situation was rather different.
The contrast between imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
was not as sharp as it might seem, as the German state formed in 1871 was also
a federation of semiautonomous regions, although there was a move toward
greater centralization under Prussian hegemony. Recall Lionel Gossman’s ob-
177
servation (already cited in chapter 7) that German intellectuals were divided by

those who welcomed the new Reich and those who did not, including Bach
ofen, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche.4 Mann belongs to the next generation of what
might be called “Prusso-skeptics,” defending a vision of Germany rooted in his
childhood memories of Lübeck and his residence in Munich, the countercul-
tural antithesis of Berlin.5 For this reason, Mann undertakes the paradoxical
strategy of claiming his centrality within German culture by emphasizing his
marginality; that is, he plays up his birth in Lübeck, his mother’s Brazilian ori-
gins, his wife’s Jewishness, and his children’s racial mixture, to argue for a
more inclusive sense of German identity rooted in an older concept of empire,
against what he feels are the homogenizing, centralizing, imperialist tenden-
cies of the modern state (by which he meant Britain, France, and Prussia up to
1918 and the Nazis and Joseph McCarthy’s America later).6
Thus there are more affinities than differences between Mann and his
Austrian counterparts. His explorations of “deviant” individuals (artists, homo-
sexuals, Jews) who are nevertheless in touch with the national community,
broadly defined, are related to Kafka’s explorations of alternative forms of
collective identity—among authors of “minor literatures,” for instance, or
speakers of Yiddish; among those who band together to form alternative com-
munities (The Great Wall of China) or those who survive in the mainstream by
subversive mimicry (A Report to an Academy). When Mann was speculating,
in his 1918–19 diaries and in published essays, about the possibility of a post-
war, pan-German federation that would include German-speaking Austria,
Robert Musil was doing the same.7 In this spirit, Mann claimed, in a 1926 es-
say, that the “heir and continuation of the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation . . . was actually not Prussia-Germany but, rather, Austria.”8
Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka: Antipodes and Affinities
On August 1, 1921, Thomas Mann noted in his diary that he had had tea with
the recitation artist Ludwig Hardt, “who read me the prose of a man from
Prague, Kafka, strange and noteworthy [merkwürdig] enough. Otherwise quite
boring.”9 A few weeks later, Mann notes that he is “very interested in the work
of Franz Kafka,”10 marking the beginning of Mann’s lifelong fascination with
the writer from Prague. When asked in 1930 to identify an unjustly forgotten
author, Mann singled out Franz Kafka, “the German-Bohemian, whose works
I love greatly,” and noted that his friend Hermann Hesse had once dubbed “this
lonely man the secret king of German prose.”11 In 1935, we find Mann reading
Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915) with great enthusiasm: “I would
Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations 179
say that K’s literary remains constitute the most brilliant German prose in de-
cades. What is there in German that wouldn’t be Philistinism in comparison?”12
Kafka, for his part, was an ardent admirer of Mann’s work, from the time that
he read Tonio Kröger in 1903 until the end of his life: “Mann belongs to those
for whose writings I hunger.”13 Only in 1952, as he read Gustav Janouch’s no-
toriously unreliable Conversations with Kafka, did Mann distance himself
from Kafka, calling him a “pious Jew, very alien after all.”14
Despite their admiration for each other’s works, it is difficult to imagine
two authors more different in their creative process, attitude toward the reading
public, and sense of self-importance than Thomas Mann (1875–1955) and
Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka worked for an insurance company by day
and wrote in sporadic bursts of midnight inspiration; Mann was able, from an
early age, to devote his full energies to his own work, dedicating each morning
to the production of another page of measured prose. Mann prided himself on
his ability to complete long works under the most difficult circumstances;
Kafka rarely finished anything. Kafka seldom read in public; Mann entertained
large audiences. Mann’s novels were featured by the Book of the Month Club;
Kafka requested that his manuscripts be burned. When the First World War
broke out, Mann felt compelled to write a five-hundred-page political essay
about why he was a “nonpolitical man”; Kafka went swimming.15 Mann, a
Protestant, believed that he represented the entire German nation; Kafka felt
alienated even from his fellow Jews: “What have I in common with Jews? I
have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in
a corner, content that I can breathe.”16 Kafka and Mann nevertheless shared
common origins in cities on the edges of empires.
Mann was born four years after the founding of the German Empire, the
privileged son of a patrician family in the Hanseatic city-state of Lübeck, at a
time when political power was increasingly concentrated in Berlin. He grew up
in the decades when the German Empire was flexing its muscles, expanding its
power within Europe and seeking overseas colonies commensurate with its
new status. According to Fritz Fischer, just such imperial ambitions inspired
Germany to provoke the First World War.17 As he argues, Germany sought not
only to secure its hegemony in Central Europe but also to extend its reach from
Berlin to Baghdad and possibly even Bombay, while establishing a contiguous
swath of colonies across Africa. In the end, of course, Germany lost the war
and all of its colonies, stoking resentment that Hitler and the Nazis skillfully
exploited, as they founded a frightening new empire, the Third Reich. Thomas
Mann, who had indulged in a vehement outburst of patriotic sentiment in the
fall of 1914, soon distanced himself from the more aggressive sort of imperial-
ism that he witnessed among the major combatants during the First World
War—including Prussia-led Germany—and went on to lend his support to the

Weimar Republic and his fervent opposition to Nazi Germany, in the name of
an older imperial tradition that he had experienced in Lübeck and found con-
firmed in the work of Goethe.
Kafka grew up as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the city of
Prague, as far removed from the capital of Vienna as was Mann from the city
of Berlin. While the “nation of provincials” worked to create a sense of unity
among the native German speakers of its various regions, the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was so diverse that any sort of collective nationalism was out of the
question. Thus the nationalist sentiments that imperial Germany hoped to en-
list in the quest for a sense of transregional loyalty to the new Reich worked as
a threat to the fragile unity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When Serbian
nationalists assassinated the heir to the imperial throne, they started the chain
of events that led to the First World War, and Kafka ended his life as a citizen
of the newly independent Czech Republic.
Mann and Kafka adopted contrasting strategies to respond, in their liter-
ary works, to their changing political contexts. Even as a beginning writer,
Mann sought to establish himself as the voice of the German nation, and he
clung to this identity even when—particularly when—he found himself in ex-
ile.18 Despite strategic shifts in his political alliances in a career that stretched
from imperial Germany to the Cold War, Mann remained consistent in his vi-
sion of German identity based on respect for regional diversity and in his op-
position to a form of imperialism that sought to conquer foreign countries and
to stifle internal dissent. In this regard, he was correct to view himself as
Goethe’s heir: Goethe enlisted the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire in his cri-
tique of modern French nationalism; Mann followed suit, deploying the
Goethean model against twentieth-century imperialism and totalitarianism.
While Mann sought to place himself at the moral center of the nation even
while physically absent, Kafka dwelt in the margins, responding obliquely to
local tensions in Prague and within a larger European context. Three factors are
of particular importance for the work of Franz Kafka: his place within the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, his relation to the German-language literary tradi-
tion, and his role as a Jew at a time of rising antisemitic nationalism.
Locating Franz Kafka
Thomas Mann traveled; Franz Kafka remained largely at home. Mann left his
native city in his late teens, moving to Munich and living for extended periods
with his brother, Heinrich, in Italy; he later toured widely within Europe, giv-
ing lectures and on vacation. In 1934, he sailed to the United States for the first
of four times before accepting a yearlong position at Princeton University; he
then moved to California and became an American citizen.19 Kafka shared
Mann’s wanderlust, but his travel was limited to a few short trips within Eu-
rope.20 Many of Kafka’s close relatives had access to mobility that Kafka
lacked, as he was acutely aware. His father had moved from a Bohemian vil-
lage to Prague a few years before Kafka was born. His father’s oldest brother
emigrated to South America; another brother moved to New York. Relatives on
his mother’s side of the family joined in the Jewish diaspora: one of her broth-
ers directed the railroad in Spain; another worked in the Belgian Congo and
later lived in China, Paris, and Canada.21 But Kafka stayed put, living and
working in the city of his birth for the majority of his life. “Kafka was ‘local’
like Yeats,” writes his early biographer Klaus Wagenbach, who cites an anec-
dote by Kafka’s Hebrew teacher Friedrich Thieberger that underscores this
point: “One day we were looking out of the windows onto the Ringplatz. Kafka
said to me: ‘Here was my Gymnasium, over there, facing us, my university,
and just a bit further to the left, my office. This small space,’ he said, drawing
a few small circles with his finger, ‘encloses my entire life.’”22
Like Lübeck, Prague was an old city with a proud history. Lübeck was
one of the wealthiest cities in northern Europe during the heyday of the late
medieval Hanseatic League, and Prague blossomed during the same period. It
was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the largest city in Central Europe,
and the site of the oldest university north of the Alps.23 In modern times, the
history of the two cities diverged: although Lübeck maintained slow but steady
development in the course of the nineteenth century, it was eclipsed in signifi-
cance by the rapid rise of Hamburg as imperial Germany’s major port. Prague,
in contrast, enjoyed explosive growth in the late nineteenth century, as the cen-
ter of new manufacturing and textile industries.24 New laws passed to protect
factory workers soon gave rise to insurance agencies of the sort that counted
Kafka among their employees.25
The Industrial Revolution set into motion the political and cultural con-
flicts that would play a central role in Kafka’s life. At the time of his birth, the
Kingdom of Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Native Ger-
man speakers, many of whom were Jewish, played leading roles in industry,
finance, culture, and politics. As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum,
however, more and more Czech workers moved to Prague, settling in the sub-
urbs that sprang up around the German-dominated old city.26 In the decades
leading up to the First World War, the overall population of the city grew, while
the percentage of German speakers shrank: in 1846, Germans made up 38 per-

cent of the population; by 1880, that percentage had dropped by more than
half, and by 1910, German-speakers comprised only 7.4 percent of the total
population.27 The Germans were subjects of the multinational Austro-
Hungarian Empire but were also members of a transnational intellectual com-
munity that extended across political boundaries, linking the German-speaking
writers in Prague to their peers in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.28 The Czechs,
in contrast, were fervently nationalist, seeking and eventually succeeding in
setting up a modern nation-state carved out of the imperial ruins. The Jews,
who had enjoyed a relatively high degree of emancipation and integration into
late nineteenth-century Austro-German society, found themselves increasingly
caught between antisemitic and anti-German Czechs, on the one side, and a
rising tide of equally antisemitic German nationalism, on the other.
As a result of the complex and volatile cultural, ethnic, and political situ-
ation in turn-of-the-century Prague, it is impossible to delimit Kafka’s identity
to a single category. He was not Czech, although he spoke the language, which
eventually enabled him to keep his job in the postwar Czech Republic.29 He
was Jewish but was alienated from the religious tradition of his ancestors. His
father was what was known as a “four-day Jew,” meaning that he attended
synagogue only on the four High Holy Days and did not understand most of the
Hebrew liturgy.30 Kafka was bored by his infrequent trips to temple as a boy,
and only later in life did he seek to reconnect to his Jewish roots. He was a na-
tive speaker of German and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for most
of his life, but he felt no particular loyalty to that empire, which he once de-
rided as “this gigantic dying village” (dieses absterbende Riesendorf).31 Kafka
respected such Austrian authors as Grillparzer, Stifter, and Hofmannsthal, but
he also admired such German authors as Goethe, Kleist, and Thomas Mann,
not to mention Dickens and Flaubert. Stated negatively, therefore, one could
agree with Scott Spector that Kafka and his fellow writers of the Prague circle
did not have one particular identity but, rather, that they dwelt “in the uniquely
charged spaces between identities—social identities, but also national, spiri-
tual, and political identities.”32 Julian Preece makes much the same point from
a positive perspective: “Kafka is the most cosmopolitan of all German-language
writers, . . . Jewish, German, Czech, . . . a speaker of French and Italian in ad-
dition to his native German, Czech, and Yiddish, which he learnt as an adult;
steeped in both Jewish lore and German literature and surrounded by the sound
of Czech for most of his life, Franz Kafka was first and foremost an interna-
tionalist and a European.”33
Kafka did not tend to look on the bright side of life. Thus he viewed his
relationship to Judaism and German literature in largely negative terms. “I

have never lived among German people,” he once wrote,34 expressing a feeling
of isolation that carried over to his belief that he stood on the periphery of Ger-
man literature as well. Kafka’s sense of distance from the German literary tra-
dition is nowhere more evident than in his relation to Goethe. Like Thomas
Mann, Kafka was a lifelong reader and admirer of Goethe, but the similarity
ends there. Mann wanted to assume Goethe’s role as the conscience of the na-
tion and its most important writer. Kafka’s feelings toward Goethe were more
ambivalent, mixing boundless love with bitter resentment. Goethe’s oeuvre
was not just a personal favorite for Kafka but was also required reading at
school, which gave Goethe a nimbus of official culture and thus made him
something of a dreaded father figure.35 Veneration of Goethe played a particu-
larly important role in German-Jewish culture. Berlin-based Jews, including
Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel Varnhagen, and Henriette Herz,
helped to found the nineteenth-century Goethe cult, and Goethe idolatry be-
came a matter of faith for generations of Jews aspiring toward assimilation into
German society.36 From the beginning, however, German Jews also sounded
notes of skepticism regarding Goethe: Heine’s irreverent depiction of the living
monument in The Romantic School is topped by Ludwig Börne’s open hatred,
and even Richard Friedenthal’s great Goethe biography of the early 1960s—
written in England after he was forced to flee Germany as a Jew in 1938—adopts
a deliberately anti-hagiographic tone, while noting that Goethe was no friend
of the Jews.37 Kafka, too, resented the overbearing presence of Goethe in Ger-
man literature, noting that “Goethe probably retards the development of the
German language by the force of his writing.”38 Goethe’s seemingly effortless
creativity taunted Kafka, who, as Goethe’s tormented reader, soon came to
view Goethe as a personal adversary: “This week I think I have been com-
pletely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influ-
ence and have therefore become useless.”39 Kafka even contemplated avenging
himself by writing an essay about “Goethe’s Frightening Nature” (Goethes
entsetzliches Wesen).40
Kafka’s relationship to Judaism was no less fraught. One might say that
he spent his entire adult life trying to come to terms with the sense of alienation
from Jewish tradition that he experienced as a boy.41 In this regard, his struggle
was shared by many Jews of his generation who grappled with the “Jewish
question” (Judenfrage): where and how should Jews fit into mainstream
Christian-German culture, if at all? As Kafka put it, many Jews of his genera-
tion sought to escape their Jewishness by writing in German, “but they still
clung to the Jewishness of their fathers with their little rear legs and found no
new ground with their little forelegs.”42 In an effort to bridge the gap, Kafka
looked to some of the ideas circulating in his contemporary society. When Max
Nordau, who claimed that Western European Jews had degenerated into sickly
city dwellers, proposed a program of physical fitness to toughen up the Jewish
body, Kafka responded by doing daily calisthenics, shunning alcohol and meat,
and extolling the virtues of nudism and simple nature.43 When Martin Buber
praised Eastern European Jews for having retained their religious traditions
and organic communities, while lamenting Western Jews who had lost their
faith and their extended families in the effort to assimilate into modern Chris-
tian society, Kafka responded by learning Hebrew and developing an interest
in the Yiddish theater and the Hasidic communities of Eastern Europe. When
Theodor Herzl suggested that the Jews needed to move to a new Zionist home-
land, Kafka expressed interest. Although he was never as ardently committed
to Zionism as his friend, Max Brod, he explored Zionist thought and even
toyed with the idea of emigrating to Palestine.44
Kafka thus rests on the margins or between identities in multiple ways—as
a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire far from the capital of Vienna and
surrounded by a growing number of increasingly militant Czech nationalists,
as a German-language writer who “never lived among German people” and felt
compelled to write within a literary tradition occupied by the domineering fig-
ure of Goethe, and as a Jew who was alienated from the religion of his parents
and struggled to overcome his perceived bodily weakness or to explore alterna-
tive forms of Jewish community. The critical shift toward viewing Kafka in his
historical context challenges those who once regarded him as the disembodied
voice of existential angst, the writer who seems to come from nowhere in par-
ticular and speak to everyone in general.45 “Kafka comes home” is David Dam-
rosch’s convenient phrase to sum up efforts to locate Kafka’s work within a
particular place and time.46 Such efforts do not imply that a simple key will
unlock the meaning of Kafka’s mysterious prose, to reveal that the nameless
castle is “really” the Hradschin (Prague’s Castle) or that Joseph K. is Franz
Kafka in disguise. Nor do they deny the unique circumstances of Kafka’s fam-
ily life or, conversely, his ability to create enigmatic works of literature that
resonate with readers far removed in place and time from the circumstances in
which he wrote. These readings do suggest, however, that Kafka’s deliberately
deracinated prose exists in an indirect relation to the reality it negates. As Mark
Anderson puts it, “Negativity does not mean nothing; it exists in relation to
something.”47 That something is the city of Prague at a time of changing demo-
graphics, crumbling empires, and the rise of antisemitic nationalism.
Minor Literatures and the Yiddish Language
Some of Kafka’s most direct comments about literature in social context come
in his long, often cryptic, and frequently cited diary entry of December 25,
1911. Kafka opposes “major” literatures such as German to “small” or “minor”
literatures (“kleine Literaturen”) such as Czech or “Jewish” (Kafka had re-
cently been introduced to a Yiddish theater troupe by his friend Jitzak Löwy).48
Minor literatures forge a sense of unity in a nation otherwise distracted and
divided, Kafka contends; they instill a sense of pride that “a nation gains from
a literature of its own . . . in the face of a hostile surrounding world.”49 Minor
literature thus becomes a means to the end of raising national consciousness,
of establishing an imagined community. Minor literatures can create this sense
of solidarity because the body of writing in them is relatively small and has no
dominating individual talents (Kafka is clearly thinking about Goethe). A na-
tional literature soon emerges, sustained by a lively publishing industry. Fi-
nally, Kafka adds a note about the political status of a minor literature: because
“the inner independence of the literature makes the external connection with
politics harmless,” the literature “can be disseminated throughout the land by
clinging tightly to political slogans.”50 This diary passage seems to suggest that
minor literature is so intrinsically autonomous, so neatly divorced from poli-
tics, that it can appropriate overtly political language from another context into
literature that is immediately comprehensible to the community and yet no
longer part of a directly political message. As Ritchie Robertson puts it, Kafka
“thinks that literature has an inner autonomy which cannot be affected by the
external link between literature and politics. . . . He certainly does not mean
that literature should be transformed into propaganda.”51
In many ways, Kafka’s comments on minor literature bear a striking re-
semblance to the arguments that Goethe sets forth in his “Response to a Liter-
ary Rabble-Rouser.” Goethe there describes German literature as a kind of mi-
nor literature in implicit opposition to the French, citing all the factors that
have prohibited its development: political fragmentation, difficult circum-
stances for writers, and the absence of a towering genius (modestly not de-
scribing himself). Yet Goethe insists that what others perceive as weakness is,
in fact, a source of strength; he cites the collective talents of German writers at
work on the project of the national literature, similar to Kafka’s description of
a community of writers forging a new minor literature. But times have changed:
the minor German literature that was just beginning to emerge from the shadow
of French cultural hegemony around 1800 has been transformed into a major
literary canon in Kafka’s time, and the band of more or less equal brothers who
worked together to build the national literature have been elevated into a new
nobility, with Goethe as king. As a result, the tables have turned: Goethe can
make positive contributions to Germany’s nascent national literature, whereas
Kafka is condemned to write in a literary tradition that has become fraught
with cultural authority and in the shadow of a giant who inspires emulation yet
cripples creativity. Hence Kafka’s often-cited statement of the predicament he
shares with his fellow Jewish authors in Prague: “They lived between three
impossibilities: . . . the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing
in German, and the impossibility to write any other way.”52
The passage in Kafka’s diary inspired Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s
influential book about Kafka’s minor literature. According to them, “a minor
literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minor-
ity constructs within a major language.”53 Kafka, they contend, writes in some-
thing called “Prague German,” a language infused with a fluid mix of Czech
and Yiddish, which allows him to undermine the dominant literary language
from within. His German is thus “deterritorialized” and politically subversive,
the devious revenge of an oppressed minority against the authorities. The
French critics thus articulate a literary strategy that many have found pertinent
to the situation of colonial or postcolonial writers working within and against
the language of an imperial power. In the case of Kafka, however, they are
simply wrong. As Stanley Corngold summarizes, minor literatures for Kafka
are Yiddish and Czech, not German; aside from a few minor local inflections,
Kafka wrote classical High German, not some sort of Prague pidgin; and Kafka
was not a political rebel but a writer of “gnostic ecstasy.”54
Kafka may not have been a political activist, but he was certainly aware
of political events and concerned about contemporary problems, such as con-
ditions in the factories he visited for his job with the Workers’ Accident Insur-
ance Institute.55 The main question in this context centers on the question of
Kafka’s alleged use of Prague German. Like any other part of the German-
speaking world, Prague had its regional idioms and accents. Klaus Wagen-
bach notes that Kafka had recognizable Prague-German speech patterns,
which are reflected, from time to time, in his early work.56 This is hardly
surprising and no different than the traces of Plattdeutsch in Thomas Mann’s
prose, occasional Swiss idioms in Keller’s work, or echoes of Berlin’s patois
in Fontane’s novels. Yet no one fluent in German would argue that Fontane,
Keller, or Mann wrote in dialect, and the same is true for Kafka. The differ-
ence between the High German spoken in Prague and the regionally inflected
High German spoken in Lübeck, Zurich, or Berlin lay in its social context
rather than in its linguistic content, that is, in the fact that the German speakers
of Prague were a shrinking minority in a predominantly Czech population. As
a result, according to philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner, Prague’s Ger-
man speakers overcompensated for their isolation by cultivating a form of
“paper German” so carefully purged of local inflection that it seemed artificial
and sterile.57 In this sense, written Prague German was diametrically opposed
to the sort of Creole described by Deleuze and Guattari, as it was character-
ized by an extreme purity rather than being “a fluid language intermixed with
Czech and Yiddish.”58
In the same year that Kafka wrote his diary entry about minor literatures,
he also gave a lecture on the Yiddish language. For generations of Jews seeking
to assimilate to German culture, Yiddish, or German inflected with Yiddish
idioms and speech patterns known by the derogatory term mauscheln, was a
language to be avoided at all costs, because it identified the speaker as a mem-
ber of a stigmatized minority, an uncouth Eastern European Jew (Ostjude).59
Kafka begins his talk by acknowledging this prejudice directly: “Many of you
are so frightened of Yiddish that one can almost see it in your faces. . . . Our
Western European conditions, if we glance at them only in a deliberately su-
perficial way, appear so well ordered. . . . From within such an order of things
who could possibly understand the tangle of Yiddish—indeed, who would even
care to do so?”60 Yet there is no need for fear, he reassures his listeners, or to
worry that poems written in Yiddish will sound like gibberish to the German
speakers of Prague. Anyone who knows German can understand Yiddish, he
contends, although Yiddish cannot be translated into German. The reason lies
in the peculiar nature of Yiddish, which Kafka characterizes not as a discrete
language that can be neatly isolated from all others but, rather, as a language
that “consists solely of foreign words. But these words are not firmly rooted in
it, they retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adopted. Great
migrations move through Yiddish.”61 There is, as yet, no Yiddish grammar,
because the language is in a state of constant flux, continually borrowing words
from other languages and combining them in original ways.
Kafka thus describes Yiddish in terms that contrast sharply with Mauth-
ner’s concept of Prague German: the “paper language” anxiously strives for
purity at the risk of sterility, while Yiddish revels in its impurities.62 To use,
once again, the medical metaphor that was adapted into racial discourse at the
time, Prague German works to defend itself against the infection of foreign
bacteria, whereas Yiddish functions like a virus, drawing strength from the
multiple languages on which it feeds.63 And here we do find in Kafka’s work
an anticipation of today’s postcolonial celebrations of linguistic impurities
within a standardized language. Feridun Zaimoğlu writes of the expressive po-

tential of an otherwise denigrated “Kanak Sprak,” for instance, while Zafer
Şenocak dreams of a “bastard” language that would combine elements of Ger-
man and Turkish into a new hybrid mixture.64 Thus Deleuze and Guattari might
have been better served by using Kafka’s “Introductory Talk on the Yiddish
Language” in support of their understanding of minor literature as a subversive
presence within a dominant culture. What Yiddish and minor literatures have in
common, however, is their ability to create and sustain a sense of belonging
that contrasts with the alienation Kafka feels in relation to the literary tradition
of Goethe and the religious tradition of the Jews. Both offer fantasies of total-
ity, of nurturing community, of universal understanding— precisely those
things that Kafka’s liminal status denies him.
The Chinese Wall and a Talking Ape
Two contrasting yet interrelated models emerge from Kafka’s reflections on

minor literature and the Yiddish language. The first envisions a small, support-
ive, homogeneous community defined by its opposition to its overbearing
neighbors. The second outlines an alternative vision of a language that thrives
in the shadows, feeding on linguistic bits and pieces of other languages to cre-
ate a new, malleable idiom that is neither exactly the same as any of the lan-
guages on which it draws nor independent enough to have an identity of its
own. Before turning to Thomas Mann, I here look briefly at the way these ideas
inform Kafka’s literary works, focusing on two short stories: Beim Bau der
Chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China) and Ein Bericht für eine Akad-
emie (A Report to an Academy).
Kafka wrote The Great Wall of China in the spring of 1917, during a pe-
riod when his interest in Zionism was on the rise, the war was at its peak, and
the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in decline. One fragment of the story was
published separately as Eine kaiserliche Botschaft (An Imperial Message) on
Rosh Hashanah, September 14, 1919, in a Prague weekly for Jewish national-
ists, Selbstwehr (Self-defense); the same fragment was included shortly there-
after in the anthology Ein Landartz (A Country Doctor).65 An Imperial Mes-
sage is a parable about a dying emperor who has a message intended “just for
you.” He whispers the message to a messenger from his deathbed, but the man
can barely force his way through the throng in the room, let alone make his
way out of the vast palace. Even if he could, he would find himself within an-
other palace and yet another, so that thousands of years would pass before he
could escape even the capital city, and he would never, ever reach you. The
messenger’s efforts would seem to be unnecessary as well as futile, because the
message is conveyed magically, as if by mental telepathy, to its intended re-
cipient, who receives it in a dream vision: “But you sit at your window when
evening falls and dream it to yourself.”66 Still, there is no guarantee that the
dream corresponds to the emperor’s message; it might, but it might also be a
figment of your imagination that has nothing to do with what the emperor
wanted to tell you.
This one-page parable captures an uncertainty surrounding relations be-
tween the emperor and his subjects that carries over to the fragmentary story as
well. The narrator of the tale, who comes from the farthest reaches of southern
China, “almost on the borders of the Tibetan Highlands,” repeatedly insists on
his people’s utter loyalty to the emperor.67 At the same time, they remain in
complete ignorance about the current state of affairs: “They do not know what
Emperor is reigning, and there exist doubts regarding even the name of the
dynasty.”68 The veneration for the emperor—whoever he may be—is absolute,
but “the Emperor derives no advantage from our fidelity.”69 It is not even clear
if the emperor is actually in charge: the decision to build the Great Wall was
made by the high command, we are told, even though the “honest, unwitting
Emperor . . . imagined he decreed it!”70 Nor is it even certain whether the em-
peror they revere is still alive or has long since been replaced by a successor.
On one level, at least, it would therefore seem plausible, as Robert Lemon has
argued, that Kafka’s The Great Wall of China is about “the faltering Habsburg
dynasty, invoking not only Franz Josef’s death the previous year but also the
rumors about the monarch that circulated before his actual demise.”71
The Great Wall of China, we are told in Kafka’s story, is designed to pro-
tect the empire from the people of the north, who are depicted as hideous ogres.
The narrator admits that he and his people have never actually seen one of
these northerners and never will see them as long as they remain at home in the
south, for the land is simply too vast for them to traverse. Nevertheless, the
people of the south journey to join people from other parts of China to work on
the wall, though the project is undertaken in a way that renders it useless as a
bulwark against invading enemies. Groups work for periods of five years to
build five-hundred-yard segments of the wall. The groups work in pairs, so that
the walls built by two groups join into a single unit. But these longer stretches
of the wall do not connect at either end with any other segments; instead, large
gaps are left, through which enemy armies could easily ride. What is the reason
for constructing the wall in this piecemeal fashion? Pragmatic considerations
offer one answer: the workers are far from home and cannot be expected to
work indefinitely, but they can complete the limited portions of the wall in the
allotted five-year period. Work on the project, moreover, fosters a sense of
group solidarity: “Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a cur-
rent of blood [ein Reigen des Volkes, Blut] no longer confined within the nar-
row circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning through-
out the endless leagues of China.”72 The work of these individual groups,
however satisfying, does nothing to further the ostensible larger goal of keep-
ing out the northern barbarians—if they indeed pose a threat at all.
Building the noncontiguous wall segments creates a sense of collective
identity that is described in the language of ethnic nationalism. Although the
laborers ostensibly work to draw a perimeter around the threatened empire,
they actually create islands of solidarity that do nothing to firm up the imperial
border. In fact, if we continue the parallel with the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
individual teams of workers have the effect, if not the intent, of establishing the
sort of regional or national loyalties that were tearing apart the empire from
within. To be sure, the workers come from different regions of China and form
temporary alliances for the good of the entire empire, whereas nationalist
movements tend to be formed among people from a single area who have or
imagine they have ancient origins. The work is organized, however, in a way
that results in the fragmentation of the collective project and that thus opens the
door to foreign invaders, even as individual groups of workers revel in their
common identity and the delusional belief that they are contributing to the de-
fense of the empire.73
The publication of An Imperial Message on Rosh Hashanah in a journal
intended largely for Jewish readers would suggest that it may also be address-
ing questions raised by the Zionist movement. For instance, in the collabora-
tion between workers from both the east and west of China, Ritchie Robertson
finds “a clear reference to the Eastern and Western Jews,” invoking Martin
Buber’s call for a revitalization of diasporic Western Jews through an alliance
with communities of Eastern European Jews still in touch with religious tradi-
tion.74 The ecstatic references to the blood brotherhood of the worker teams in
their beloved Chinese landscape is likely to give today’s reader pause, as it in-
evitably recalls the rhetoric of “Blut und Boden” central to Nazi ideology.75 At
the time, however, it was not unusual for Zionists to deploy the language of
ethnic or völkisch nationalism that would, in the future, be used against the
Jews.76 Thus one need not limit the possible referent of The Great Wall of
China to either hopes for the revival of a Jewish community or the forging of a
national identity among the Czechs or other such groups in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, for the model is distant enough and abstract enough to be
applied to both. In fact, Kafka explicitly refers to writing within both Czech
and Jewish communities as examples of “minor literatures” that express and
consolidate national identities.
Nevertheless, ironies and qualifications result from the juxtaposition of
Czech and Zionist nationalism, which were already incompatible in 1917. The
Czechs could reasonably hope to establish a sovereign nation-state after the col-
lapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which they did between the time Kafka
drafted The Great Wall of China and his publication of An Imperial Message.
The Jews, in contrast, could hardly expect to build their new homeland within
Europe; their segment of the wall, to use the metaphor of the story, would have
to be set up elsewhere, and even that would have to wait until long after Kafka’s
death. As Clement Greenberg suggests, the building of the wall could refer to
traditional Jewish communities in Eastern Europe who sought to fence them-
selves off from surrounding Gentile societies.77 In the long run, such attempts to
isolate the Jews from historical developments in Europe proved futile; in the
short run, it is difficult to imagine that Kafka, the cosmopolitan European,
would have anything less than ambiguous feelings about the prospect of return-
ing to the sort of Eastern European village that his father had fled.
In sum, The Great Wall of China addresses obliquely both the fragile con-
dition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near the end of the First World War and
the possibilities and pitfalls of the new ethnic nationalism for groups like the
Czechs and Jews. While the work reflects Kafka’s engagement with Zionist
thought, it suggests that his interest stopped short of an unqualified endorse-
ment. An intact, homogeneous community of the sort that he describes in his
comments on minor literatures and that he envisions among the workers on the
Great Wall of China remains appealing, but it has the status of a utopian ideal
that contains within it the seeds of the possible destruction, rather than the
salvation, of the Jews. The portrait of groups that can plausibly be associated
with the Jews in Kafka’s other works is not necessarily positive: Josefine, die
Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse (Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk,
1924) employs the language of ethnic nationalism to describe the Mausvolk in
ways that correspond closely to antisemitic stereotypes,78 and the (Jewish)
jackals who so despise the Arabs for their unclean habits in Jackals and Arabs
are driven like dogs to the stinking flesh of a dead camel, in a story that seems
an unmitigated exercise in Jewish self-hatred.79
For this reason, Kafka’s fiction also explores the alternative possibility of
partial assimilation suggested by his short essay on the Yiddish language.
There, as we recall, Kafka envisions not a “pure” language but, rather, a lan-
guage that exists on the margins of others, borrowing freely to create a fluid
dialect that lives like a virus, being both distinct from and yet dependent on
multiple host languages. Minor literatures forge discrete national communi-
ties; Yiddish adapts elements from other languages to survive and thrive as an
impure idiom. If we think in terms of responses to the “Jewish question,” minor
literatures express the Zionist desire for a separate homeland for the Jews,
whereas Yiddish swings toward the opposite pole of assimilation into Christian-
European culture. The process of assimilation is never complete, however: Yid-
dish is not German, but it needs German and other languages for its existence;
the Jew can ape Christian culture, but he remains a Jew—though not entirely a
Jew, in the sense of someone who is unself-consciously part of an uninter-
rupted tradition, a member of an intact community. In other words, he is like
Red Peter, the talking ape of A Report to an Academy.
Kafka wrote A Report to an Academy in April 1917, just a few weeks after
putting aside “The Great Wall of China.”80 It tells of an ape who is captured in
the African jungle by members of the Hagenbeck Zoo and shipped to Europe
under appalling conditions, a sad but not unusual story in the long history of
animal abuse. In fact, J. M. Coetzee has his fictional alter ego, animal rights
activist Elizabeth Costello, cite Kafka’s work as a prime example of man’s in-
humanity to animals: “When Kafka writes about an ape, I take him to be talk-
ing in the first place about an ape.”81 But this ape is different: by careful obser-
vation and skillful mimicry, he overcomes his animal instincts and learns to
talk. He is therefore able to escape the normal fate of life behind bars destined
to animals captured for the zoo; he becomes, instead, the star of a variety the-
ater. Red Peter narrates his life history in a self-satisfied monolog as he slouches
in an armchair after a show, a glass of red wine at his side, anticipating the
ministrations of his chimpanzee call girl.
When Kafka published “A Report to an Academy” in the fall of 1917 in
Der Jude (The Jew), a monthly journal edited by Martin Buber,82 readers rec-
ognized it as a coded reference to the process of Jewish assimilation. Max Brod
probably spoke for many when he called it “the most brilliant satire of assimi-
lation ever written.”83 As in the case of The Great Wall of China, however, the
exotic setting of A Report to an Academy allows for other, complementary in-
terpretations. The reference to Red Peter’s capture on the Gold Coast of Africa
recalls slaving missions to the same area, and there is a close connection be-
tween the traffic in human beings that resulted from the process of European
imperialism and the capture of exotic animals to be displayed as trophies of
foreign conquests. Such displays could also feature foreign peoples; spectators
paid admission to view Völkerschauen featuring Africans, American Indians,
and “Eskimos” in their native garb and facsimiles of their native habitats.84
A Report to an Academy thus establishes an implicit link between the intra-

European “Jewish question” and overseas empire; the process of Jewish as-
similation finds a direct parallel in colonial mimicry. Common to both processes
is the sense of living on the threshold between identities. Red Peter knows that
prior to his capture, he lived like any other animal in the African jungle. But at
the outset of his monologue, he confesses that he is unfortunately unable to
describe his former life, because his “memory of the past has closed the door
against [him] more and more” in the five years since his capture.85 His personal
development parodies the process of Darwinian evolution but also harkens back
to a quandary confronting many in the romantic era. When Rousseau sets out, in
his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, to describe “man in the state of na-
ture,” he laments that “the whole progress of the human species removes man
constantly farther and farther away from his primitive state.” The very faculty of
reason that allows us to pose the question of what man was like before he was
corrupted by civilization makes it impossible to provide an answer: “Through
studying man we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him.” Thus the
great champion of natural man concedes that it is virtually impossible to “attain
a solid knowledge of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never ex-
isted, and which will probably never exist, yet of which it is necessary to have
sound ideas if we are to judge our present state satisfactorily.”86
Like so many romantics, Red Peter realizes that he can’t go home again.
As Schiller observes, young Werther’s carefully staged performance of Ho-
meric simplicity was nothing like the original: “They felt naturally; we feel the
natural. . . . Our feeling for nature is like the feeling of an invalid for health.”87
Red Peter also can never pass for human. He speaks in a flawless parody of
academic discourse, but he is still a talking ape; he sips wine like a sophisti-
cated connoisseur, but he urges his interlocutor to sniff his fur and is eager to
drop his drawers in public to display his scars. Read as a metaphor for Jewish
assimilation, Red Peter’s performance has an element of self-mockery, even
self-hatred, suggesting that the Jew who tries to blend into Christian society
will inevitably betray himself in a most embarrassing way. The same is true if
we view Kafka’s work as a commentary on colonial mimicry: like the imperial
subject, Red Peter is “almost the same” as his human captors, “but not quite”—
“almost the same,” that is, “but not white.”88 For the most part, Red Peter seems
quite content with his new life on stage, but the sight by day of the “half-
trained little chimpanzee” who comforts him at night reminds him all too pain-
fully of the emotional cost demanded by the process of civilization: “She has
the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else
sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it.”89
At the same time, the act of mimicry can have a “profound and disturb-
ing” effect on “the authority of colonial discourse,” as Homi Bhabha argues:
“The reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its
disciplinary double.” As a result, “mimicry is at once resemblance and men-
ace.”90 Red Peter’s account of his early achievements among the sailors ridi-
cules them as much as his own actions make him the object of unintentional
humor. “With an effort,” Red Peter recalls, “I managed to reach the cultural
level of an average European,”91 but his major accomplishments consist of
learning how to spit, smoke, and swill schnapps. True, he later progresses from
rotgut to red wine and expands his vocabulary considerably beyond his initial
spontaneous cry of “Hallo!” Yet we are left with the sense that the average
European’s level of culture is not exactly exalted.
The references to Africa in A Report to an Academy and to China in The
Great Wall reflect Kafka’s interest (noted earlier in this chapter) in a distant
world that he was unable to visit but that serves as the setting for many of his
works. These stories are more than the imaginary journeys of a tourist manqué,
for he uses them to explore the dynamics of power in an age of global capital-
ism and empire. In Kafka’s incomplete first novel, Karl Rossmann’s banish-
ment to America lands him in a world of ruthless capitalism, where captains of
industry such as his uncle exploit workers living in abject poverty. The threat-
ening sword that Karl sees in the hand of the Statue of Liberty when he enters
New York Harbor anticipates the series of misadventures that will send this
voyager to the “land of unlimited opportunity” on a nightmarish journey that
leads to his debasement as “Negro” in the Theater of Oklahoma. Kafka’s In der
Strafkolonie (The Penal Colony, 1919) offers an unflinching gaze at the mech-
anism of a public torture device in an unnamed francophone colony some-
where in the tropics.
If reduced to a single common denominator, Kafka’s work can be consid-
ered a sustained exploration of the dynamics of power, depicting those who
wield it, sometimes with sadistic glee; those who submit to it, sometimes with
masochistic pleasure; and those who find a way around it and manage to sur-
vive. In early works such as Das Urteil (The Judgment, 1913) and The Meta-
morphosis, conflicts are staged in the family, between fathers and sons; later
works expand the inquiry into areas explored in this chapter, including national-
ism and imperialism, Zionism and the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Although Kafka imagines the possibility of minor literatures within nurturing
communities and champions Yiddish as a medium of universal understanding,
his fiction tends to enact dilemmas rather than envision harmony. In Kleine Fa-
bel (A Little Fable), the cat explains that the mouse only has to run in a different
direction to escape, but the cat eats the mouse before it has a chance. In Der
Process (The Trial), the man from the country waits a lifetime before the Law,
only to be told, as he is dying, that the gate he has never entered was made only
for him. Joseph K. learns of the theoretical possibility of an acquittal but is told
that no one knows if such an acquittal has ever been granted. He can hope for a
temporary reprieve from his trial, but with the near certainty that he will be rear-
rested and the process will begin again. The artist in Ein Hungerkünstler (A
Hunger Artist) explains, just before he dies of starvation, that he was not op-
posed to eating per se, just that he never found a food that he wanted to eat.
“Where is the master going?” asks the servant in Der Aufbruch (The Depar-
ture). “‘I don’t know,’” he responds; “‘just out of here, just out of here [nur weg
von hier, nur weg von hier]. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can
reach my goal.’”92 Red Peter is another character who seeks survival through
lowered expectations. As he explains, he has long since given up any hope for
freedom: “No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; . . . To get out
somewhere, to get out!”93 Kafka was not able to escape that small space that
circumscribed his life in the city of Prague. Yet, from his limited perspective, he
was able to use his writings to explore the forces at work in a much wider world.
Continuity and Change in the Work of Thomas Mann
During the last decade of Kafka’s life, Thomas Mann—who was known until
that time as the author of a remarkably successful first novel, a disappointing
second novel, and a series of short stories—emerged as a prolific political es-
sayist. Mann’s views also underwent a dramatic change in the course of those
years, as the patriot who welcomed Germany’s entry into the First World War
and denounced Western democracy reversed course to defend the Weimar Re-
public and oppose National Socialism. The stages of Mann’s political develop-
ment are well known: in the fall of 1914, he wrote and published “Gedanken
im Krieg” (Thoughts in war), a short essay in which he greeted the war as a
source of purification, liberation, and hope. The tone turned somber in his Re-
flections of a Nonpolitical Man, as Mann fought to defend a conservative vi-
sion of Germany that he knew was doomed. The turning point came four years
later, when Mann confounded friend and foe alike by voicing his public sup-
port for the Weimar Republic. Then, in the fall of 1924, Mann published Der
Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), reclaiming his place as one of Germany’s
leading writers. In a sad irony, that novel set in a tuberculosis sanatorium ap-
peared just months after Kafka died of the same disease.
Mann’s political evolution between the years 1914 and 1924 and his sub-
sequent role as one of the most outspoken German opponents of the Third
Reich have been justly hailed as a bright light in the darkest period of German
history. As Philipp Gut puts it, “Mann owes his elevated place in the cultural
memory of the Germans to the fact that during those years [of Nazi rule] he
stood decisively on the right side.”94 To be sure, Mann’s moral authority has
not gone unchallenged. Many Germans who suffered through the war years in
Germany resented what they felt were his high-handed denunciations of their
complicity with the Nazi regime, uttered under the balmy skies of Southern
California. Others have claimed that Mann was, at best, a reluctant participant
in political discussions, saving his real passion for fiction steeped in Schopen-
hauerian pessimism.95 Still others have pointed out moments of racial preju-
dice in his diaries and antisemitic stereotypes in his fiction that tarnish his
otherwise admirable political development and unquestioned literary genius.96
When reading and rereading Mann’s major political essays of the 1920s
through the 1940s, however, it is difficult not to admire their eloquent and pas-
sionate defense of a cosmopolitan humanism against one of the most barbarous
regimes the world has known.
Did Mann really change his political point of view? Curiously, the very
work that would seem to mark his most dramatic shift from a denunciation of
the West to an embrace of its values contains a preface in which Mann insists
that he has not changed, at least not in any fundamental way: “I am not aware
of any change of mind [Sinnesänderung]. I may have changed my thoughts
[Gedanken], but not my mind [Sinn].”97 The distinction may seem sophistical,
but Mann insists that what can, on one level, be called change—from rejection
to acceptance of democracy—is consistent, on another level, with his deeper
principles. As I will argue in the following pages, Mann’s political evolution
between 1914 and 1924 cannot be reduced to a simple shift from East to West
in his alliances, from loyalty to the second German Empire to an embrace of
the modern nation-state. What Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper have ar-
gued for the course of world history in general—that a linear narrative does not
do justice to the complexity of political forms and the persistence of empire
into modern times98—is true in the particular case of Thomas Mann. Always
the dialectical thinker, Mann’s political thought shows how the liberal nation-
state can be inverted into a model of imperialist totalitarianism, on the one
hand, while the local cosmopolitanism of an older, federalist model of empire
contains the seeds of racist nationalism, on the other.
Thomas Mann liked to claim that he was descended from Nuremberg ar-
tisans of the sort immortalized in Wagner’s Meistersinger, which, if not liter-
ally true, was figuratively the case, for it signaled his place as a burgher from
Lübeck within a German tradition of self-ruled city-states.99 As he explains in
an autobiographical essay of 1926, he was indelibly imprinted by his child-
hood experiences as a member of the patrician class in the Hanseatic city-state:
“My art, my entire productivity, as important or unimportant as it may be, is
not the product of some sort of bohemian, deracinated virtuosity but, rather, a
form of life, Lübeck as a form of intellectual life [geistige Lebensform].”100
Mann writes in this essay of his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in which he draws
on his family history to narrate a multigenerational saga set in what is clearly
Lübeck, although the city is never explicitly named. For this reason, Mann
explains, some readers mistook the novel for another work of Heimatkunst, art
that focused narrowly on local history. In fact, Mann contends, his major artis-
tic influences were international; the setting is local, but the spirit is cosmo-
politan. Yet, Mann concludes, precisely this combination makes his work typi-
cally German in the best sense: it is not nationalistic in a narrow-minded,
exclusionary sort of way. His burghers are Weltbürger, citizens of the world.
The city-state’s cosmopolitan spirit is threatened, however, by the en-
croaching power of imperial Prussia. Buddenbrooks is set in the years between
1835 and the late 1870s; it depicts the decline of a patrician family in a Hanse-
atic city-state against the rise to power of the Prussian-dominated German Em-
pire. Already in the opening scene, some of the burghers gathered together in
the Buddenbrook home voice concerns that the new German trade federation
will infringe on the city-state’s local autonomy; by the end of the novel, the
Prussians have marched into the city like an invading army. The last of the
Buddenbrooks, the effeminate, sickly, and artistically inclined Hanno, can nei-
ther abide nor withstand the new Prussian authorities, who instill an atmo-
sphere of malodorous masculinity and harsh discipline into a school that once
exuded a gentler spirit of classical humanism.
The opposition between Lübeck and Berlin continues to play an impor-
tant role in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.101 On the surface, this work pits
Germany against France and its allies, condemning the arrogance of a Western
democratic tradition that assumes universality (rather than local specificity) for
its values and criticizing the hypocrisy of governments that preach world peace
and practice world conquest. If we read more closely, however, we discover the
same intra-German tension that informs Buddenbrooks. Writing Reflections
during the First World War, Mann recalls, looking back at his formative years,
that he grew up “in a politically independent, oligarchical city democracy of
the northwest . . . of strongly conservative stamp.”102 He later settled in Mu-
nich, the city of Germany’s cultural avant-garde, which was also sheltered
from “the sharp air of the Prussian-American metropolis.”103 As a result, Mann

maintains that he “slept a little through” (ein wenig verschlafen) the fateful
“metamorphosis of the German burgher into the bourgeois” in the decades af-
ter 1871.104 He regards Bismarck’s drive to unify Germany as a “perversion,
hardening and falsification of a stateless culture into a cultureless state,”105 and
he views the subsequent “Americanization of the German lifestyle”106 as a fur-
ther sign of the corruption that has tainted the atmosphere of imperial Ger-
many. Thus the essay that begins as a strident defense of Germany’s national
character turns into a lament about the corruption of that character under perni-
cious Prussian influence.
Mann’s political thought develops within the broader context of ideas that
go back to the eighteenth century and beyond. As we have seen, empires can
show two faces to the world, the one relatively benign, the other malignant.
The Holy Roman Empire and its Austro-Hungarian counterpart were diverse
confederations of semiautonomous political units—city-states, duchies, bish-
oprics, kingdoms—under the aegis of a supreme but often distant imperial au-
thority. Critics could justly accuse these political organizations of being dys-
functional, hierarchical, antidemocratic, and deeply conservative, but their
apologists could praise their respect for local traditions in a decentralized gov-
ernment that had little or no interest in foreign conquest. Then again, less for-
giving observers can rightly point out that empires are established by the take-
over of other peoples’ territory and maintained by the threat of violent reprisals.
One need only recall the precarious position of seventeenth-century Silesia
during the Counter- Reformation, and postcolonial critics of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire have also argued that we can speak of “internal coloniza-
tion” within that realm.107 Proponents of the modern nation-state sought demo-
cratic reforms that would sweep away the arbitrary injustice of the old regimes.
Lateral bonds between equal citizens replaced unwieldy imperial hierarchies;
universal human rights trumped hoary local traditions. Very soon, however, the
new European nation-states started to act suspiciously like empires of old. A
little more than a decade after French citizens stormed the Bastille and exe-
cuted their king, they watched Napoleon crown himself as their new emperor.
He embarked on wars of conquest that sent French troops marching from Paris
to Prussia, Russia, and Spain. By the late nineteenth century, the “new imperi-
alism” drove European nation-states, in fierce competition with one another, to
colonize vast areas on foreign continents and to cause untold misery to count-
less millions.
By opposing Lübeck’s local cosmopolitanism to Prussian imperialism,
Mann places himself within a venerable tradition of German thought. Goethe,
who also came from a semiautonomous city-state (Frankfurt), consistently de-

fended the virtues of German particularism. His Egmont, we recall, resists the
imperial power of Spain in the name of preserving the Netherlands’ ancient
traditions; Egmont is thus a kindred spirit of the Buddenbrooks and their fel-
low Lübeckers, who resent the Prussian infringement on their rights. Mann
enlists Eichendorff as an ally in the later portions of Reflections, resurrecting
the romantic nostalgia for the Holy Roman Empire as a bastion of organic lo-
calism, against the soulless machinery of the modern state. Mann’s major in-
fluences also include Nietzsche and Wagner, both associated with the resis-
tance to Prussian centralism that Lionel Gossman identifies among intellectuals
and artists at the University of Basel.108 We could add to these the previously
mentioned Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who worried that industrialization and ur-
banization would erode healthy rural traditions in Germany’s richly diverse
regions, and Friedrich Tönnies, who lamented the loss of traditional communi-
ties united in a feeling of Gemeinschaft by the impersonal forces of modern
Gesellschaft. Finally, Julius Langbehn, the author of the immensely popular
book Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as educator, 1890), also rejected the
growing power of Berlin and the centralization of the new Reich, while stress-
ing the importance of indigenous German cultures bound by common blood
and rooted in their native soil. “The true artist cannot be local enough,” he
proclaims in that book, adding, “Art needs localism and provincialism.”109
The mention of Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher in this context should
give us pause, for his antimodern tirade is saturated with antisemitism, in the
spirit of a new, racially charged, völkisch nationalism. Some of the earlier indi-
viduals I have cited are more respectable but have their troubling aspects as
well. Goethe opposed democratic reforms and Jewish emancipation. Eichen-
dorff’s political mentor, Friedrich Schlegel, quickly abandoned his youthful
radicalism and supported Metternich’s reactionary regime, even as Eichendorff
mocked the democratic aspirations of German liberals. Nietzsche did not share
Wagner’s antisemitism, but his glorification of the “blonde beast” and its “will
to power” played into the hands of those who did. In Langbehn, however, the
dangerous potential of the German conservative tradition comes to full
flower.110 Langbehn espouses an essentially biological understanding of the
German people, united by ties of blood and sustained by their bond with the
land. His stress on the importance of tribal homelands in the German provinces
goes together with his hatred of Berlin and rejection of the trend toward cen-
tralization in the German Reich. Langbehn’s belief in the purity of the German
racial lineage inspires his disdain for those, such as the Poles and other Slavic
peoples, who do not enjoy the same bloodlines. Healthy peasants in touch with
the German soil and the German soul provide a positive counterweight to ur-
ban intellectuals who either are or might as well be Jews. Fulminating against
democracy’s tendency to reduce society to the lowest common denominator,
Langbehn envisions a new German aristocracy under a charismatic führer fig-
ure who will guide his people to their tragic-heroic destiny. It was a short step
from here to Stefan George’s vision in his 1928 poetry collection, Das neue
Reich (The new Reich). Looking back to a vaguely defined imperial past and
toward a future that seems suspiciously like the Third Reich, George displayed
a fascination with the irrational, war, and violence; a fear and loathing of
women and the feminized masses; an aversion to miscegenation (Blutschmach)
and a yearning for racial purity; and a vision of a future “secret Germany”
modeled on his coterie of disciples joined in rapturous devotion to their charis-
matic leader.111
Common to both the appealing and disturbing aspects of the German in-
tellectual tradition on which Mann draws is a resistance to the universal in the
name of the particular, a defense of the locally specific against the homogeniz-
ing and centralizing tendencies of the modern nation-state, and a rejection of
foreign aggression in the name of national integrity. As noted earlier, the very
notion of Kultur that Mann so ardently defends is nationally specific by defini-
tion and is therefore unsuitable for export, in a way that contrasts sharply with
the universal claims of Zivilisation. Pride in Germany’s indigenous culture thus
provides Mann with a convenient vantage point from which he can expose the
hypocrisy of an ideology that legitimates violent conquest in the name of uni-
versal human rights. By the same token, however, the concept of culture as
nationally specific lends itself to ethnic essentialism and racist nationalism of
the sort that would soon be utilized to justify the suppression of minorities and
even genocide. Perversely, in other words, the ideology that begins with re-
spect for difference among discrete national traditions—we do not impose our
culture on you, so do not impose your civilization on us—leads to utter intoler-
ance for domestic dissent. The Nazi era began with a program of Gleichschal-
tung, designed to crush its political enemies, and ended with the effort to solve
the Jewish problem, once and for all, by eliminating the allegedly alien people
from the German Volk.
A parallel and equally perverse dialectic informs the attitude toward ex-
ternal foes that dominates this body of German thought. Langbehn and his
fellow conservative Paul de Lagarde explicitly reject German efforts to acquire
overseas colonies, insisting instead on the pressing need for more Lebensraum
for the German people within Europe.112 Such arguments could be said simply
to move the target of imperial aggression closer to home, yet the motivation
Lagarde describes is quite different. The German quest for an overseas empire
merely mimics the expansionist tendencies of Western European nations and is
thus out of character with German culture. The acquisition of more Leben-
sraum within Europe, in contrast, would extend Germany’s agricultural base
and therefore enable its economic self-sufficiency, or “autarky,” as the Nazis
would call it.113 Imperialist nations press forward in the name of global capital-
ism; Lagarde looks back to a preindustrial age of agrarian self-sufficiency. The
conquest of contiguous lands to the east is a means to the end of restoring a
pan-Germanic state in Mitteleuropa, not world conquest. In fact, however,
intra-European aggression soon served as the starting point for further expan-
sion. Whether or not we accept Fritz Fischer’s thesis that the German generals
deliberately provoked the First World War, he nevertheless demonstrates that
German designs on Central European territories were not opposed to but,
rather, went together with plans for a global empire.114 In Mein Kampf, Adolf
Hitler rejects the need to reclaim the colonies that Germany lost in the war, but
within little more than a decade, the desire to bring ethnic Germans “Heim ins
Reich” turned into a struggle for world domination. The German imperial tra-
dition of tolerating internal diversity and opposing external aggression had mu-
tated into its opposite.
From the German Empire to the Weimar Republic
Mann had begun to write Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in the fall of 1915.
He finished the essay in December 1917 and added a preface the following
spring.115 In that preface, Mann already strikes an elegiac chord, conceding
that he has been devoting his energies to a lost cause, the defense of an old
German tradition that would soon be swept away. The diaries that we have for
Mann pick up in September 1918. He is awaiting the publication of Reflections
with some trepidation, as he fears that the work will seem outdated by the time
it reaches the bookstores. He consoles himself with the idea that the book, al-
though an immediate anachronism at the time of its publication, will at least
provide a faithful record of the period in which it was written: “The book is
historic at the time of its appearance, but it will also remain historic.”116 A few
days later, however, Mann sounded a less defiant note: “In any case, the book
will be devoured by coming events.”117
Mann was certainly correct about the political turmoil to come. Within a
matter of weeks, the First World War came to an end. The Austrian and German
Kaisers abdicated, and a new German republic struggled to survive challenges
from Spartacists on the left and disgruntled members of the military on the
right. In Munich, Kurt Eisner proclaimed a socialist republic in early Novem-
ber; his party was defeated at the polls in January and February, and he was
assassinated on his way to deliver his resignation speech. A radical group of
anarchists and communists led by Ernst Toller, Gustav Landauer, and Erich
Mühsam proclaimed the Socialist Republic of Bavaria in April, only to be
crushed by the paramilitary troops of Ritter von Epp’s Freikorps, who then
indulged in an orgy of brutal reprisals in which hundreds died.118
The political upheavals in Munich took place almost literally on Thomas
Mann’s doorstep. His diaries of the period offer an eyewitness account of the
events, even as they record his plans to resume work on The Magic Mountain
and more mundane details about his regular haircuts and painful trips to the
dentist. Throughout these months, Mann maintained a consistent sense of out-
rage against the Entente Powers, confusion about the state of affairs in Ger-
many, and uncertainty about the future. “What will happen with Germany,” he
wonders in September 1918, further specifying, “What will happen in Ger-
many?”119 In retrospect, we know that the Weimar Republic would be formed
in the following year and that Mann would come to its support in 1922. But
how did he move from the antidemocratic diatribe of Reflections to the
prodemocratic speech of that year? Had Mann undergone a political conver-
sion that turned him from a reactionary Saul to a prodemocratic Paul? Or had
his political views retained—as he insisted—a deeper consistency beneath the
superficial change?
For an answer, we turn to the aforementioned diaries. Mann destroyed
almost all of his diaries written prior to 1933, but he saved those of the years
1918–21, presumably because he needed them for the portions of Doctor Faus-
tus that were set during those years. Mann’s biographer, Hermann Kurzke,
concludes that because Mann’s political opinions shift rapidly in his postwar
diaries, they should not be taken seriously; they are, in his opinion, mere ex-
periments in political thought, trial balloons that float far above political real-
ity.120 However, Mann’s comments on the events of 1918–19 reveal an inner
consistency: they pick up ideas from his prewar period and anticipate his po-
litical positions of the years to come. Mann’s anger at the Entente Powers and
their allies, including the United States, remains white hot in these diaries. That
anger would cool when, decades later, he became an American citizen, but
Mann never altered his belief in the fundamental consistency of the German
character. Thus, in the much later Doctor Faustus, his reckoning with National
Socialism, he collapses historical progression into a timeless present in which
medieval demons continue to haunt modern Germany. In the immediate wake
of the First World War, however, Mann was preoccupied with the question of
finding a new form of government commensurate with the unchanging essence
of the national character.
A return of the emperor is not what Mann had in mind. Already in his
second novel, Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness, 1909), Mann had portrayed
German royalty, with gentle irony, as a benevolent anachronism, and his post-
war diaries make it clear that he does not want to turn back the clock. The Ba-
varian Socialist Republic declared in November 1918 was certainly not an op-
tion that Mann endorsed. In a notorious outburst of antisemitism, Mann reacts
in anger at the idea of “Munich, like Bavaria, ruled by Jewish intellectuals.”
“That is the revolution!” he notes with disgust in his diary, claiming, “They are
practically all Jews!”121 Readers might therefore be surprised when, in a diary
entry a few months later, Mann seems to welcome the far more radical Soviet-
style government of the Räterepublik: “I’m ready to run out into the street and
scream ‘Down with the Western democracy of lies! Long live Germany and
Russia! Three cheers for communism!’” As the context makes clear, however,
Mann’s hypothetical willingness to embrace communism is really an expres-
sion of his heartfelt hatred of the Western allies’ “Entente-Imperialism.”122 In
any case, it seems highly unlikely that the meticulously tailored and tightly
wrapped Mann would really soil his spats in the street; he finds the very thought
of a government in control of a debauched and drunken mob repulsive—for
which reason he regards the thugs who began to swarm toward the Nazi Party
with equal disdain.
Thus Mann does not consider socialists, communists, or fascists to be vi-
able options for government in the immediate postwar years. What consistently
interests him is the restoration of a German state in Central Europe that would
include lands that belonged to imperial Germany and the German-speaking por-
tions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “Very significant and pleasing the found-
ing of a German-Austrian state!” he wrote in early October 1918, predicting,
“They will be a future component of the German Reich.”123 On November 10,
the day before the war ended, Mann confided to his diary that he had “nothing
against an independent German state that included Austro-Germany and noth-
ing against the collapse of the dynasties and the empire.”124 Later that month, he
noted again that he “would be satisfied if the German Empire dissolved and was
replaced by something like an unpolitical-powerless federation of republics [ein
unpolitisch-machtloses Nebeneinander von Republiken] with Bavaria plus
Germany-Austria (or these two as distinct units).”125
Mann was not alone in his dream of a new pan-German union: “From
both the Austrian and the German sides it was taken for granted that what was
impossible in 1848–1849 would now become realized, and an Austria consist-

ing now exclusively of Germans would take its place with the other German
Stämme in one unified democratic state.” Members of the provisional Austrian
government signaled their willingness to join in a greater German Reich in the
immediate wake of the war, but the measure was never adopted by the German
government and was officially forbidden by the victorious allies on September
2, 1919.126 Months later, in the midst of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920,
Mann’s imagination once again ran wild. “I strongly disapprove of Kapp,” he
noted in his diary,127 but he also confessed that he would not mind if the current
regime collapsed, because its fall would be the necessary precondition for the
rise of a new pan-German empire: “Annexation of German-Austria [Anschluß
Deutsch-Österreichs] and the Tyrol to southern Germany. Independent devel-
opment of Prussia in accordance with its character and taste. The ‘Reich’ once
again an idea, dream, hope [Das ‘Reich’ wieder Idee, Traum, Hoffnung].”128
Mann did not keep these ideas to the privacy of his diaries; as late as December
1920, he published a one-paragraph essay titled “Heim, ins Reich!” in which
he proclaimed that he was “convinced that the annexation of Austria to Ger-
many was just a matter of time.” “I confess from the bottom of my heart,” he
continued, “the desire that it should happen soon.” The phrase “Heim ins
Reich” was subsequently discredited, as Hitler used it as an excuse for the
forced annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland and to justify naked aggres-
sion against Poland in the name of bringing Danzig back into the fold of the
German nation. But in 1920, Mann envisioned a peaceful coalition, not a vio-
lent conquest: “The unified Germany that will include Austria as one of its
provinces will be federalist.”129
Mann’s dream of a peaceful, pan-German federation in Central Europe
was not fulfilled. Meanwhile, the reality of life in the Weimar Republic was
becoming more troubling. Communist insurgents tried, on multiple occasions,
to overthrow the government from the left, while right-wing militants attacked
the republic with a series of violent acts that culminated in the assassination of
minister of foreign affairs Walther Rathenau on June 22, 1922. The murder
provoked widespread outrage and triggered an “outpouring of grief and count-
less demonstrations all over Germany in which millions affirmed their support
for the republic.”130 Thomas Mann joined the chorus, to the surprise and con-
sternation of his fellow conservatives. Over the course of the summer, he trans-
formed an essay originally conceived as a tribute to Gerhardt Hauptmann on
the occasion of his sixtieth birthday into a pledge of allegiance to the Weimar
Republic; he delivered the speech in Berlin on October 13, 1922. “When sen-
timental obscurantism organizes itself into terror and violates the land with
repulsive and idiotically murderous deeds, then the state of emergency can no
longer be denied,” proclaimed Mann in “The German Republic.” “My goal,” he
continued, “is to win you over to the republic and for what is called democracy
and what I call humanity.”131
That Mann made the move to support the Weimar Republic against right-
wing acts of terror is laudable; how he justified the decision in light of his previ-
ous publications is more ambiguous. When the war began, Mann defended the
depth of German culture against the superficial rationality of French civiliza-
tion. Structuring his argument along the lines of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,
Mann viewed the German entry into the war as a manifestation of Dionysian
madness controlled by iron discipline: “But civilization is reason, enlighten-
ment, . . . intellect, . . . the sworn enemy of drives, passions; it is anti-demonic,
anti-heroic, . . . anti-genial.”132 To win over his skeptical audience of conserva-
tive students and to convince the broader reading public of the consistency of
his Weltanschauung, Mann has to argue that the sort of democracy he now ad-
vocates in 1922 has the same passion that motivated the German mobilization
for war in 1914. He also wants to convince his audience that the democracy he
supports is specifically German and not an expression of the allegedly universal
values that he excoriated in his earlier essays. To do so, he enlists an unusual
pair of poets: the German romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and the
American Walt Whitman. Uniting the two, Mann insists, “is love—not some
sort of pale, anemic, ascetically empathetic reason but, rather, in the sense of the
obscene root symbol [Calamus] that Whitman chooses for the title of his wildly
pious series of songs” in celebration of an “erotic, all-embracing democracy.”133
So much for the passion. That Novalis, the quintessentially German romantic,
should share the American’s enthusiasm for democracy is surprising but true,
Mann insists, and his audience can thus rest assured that the republic he defends
is appropriate for the German nation and not just “something for clever Jewish
boys” (eine Angelegenheit scharfer Judenjungen).134
Mann’s seemingly gratuitous antisemitic aside—which he repeats later in
his essay—might be explained, if not excused, as a sop that he casts to the rabid
reactionaries in his audience, a cheap rhetorical trick designed to win the skep-
tical over to his side. In fact, however, the disparaging references to the Jews
are part of a larger plan designed to underscore the national specificity of the
Weimar Republic. The Jews fill the slot occupied by the French in “Thoughts
in War” and Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, and within the logic of this sort
of ethnic nationalism, there is little difference between the two: in antisemitic
parlance, the Jews were “rootless cosmopolitans,” cut off from the vital energy
of a people bound to a particular place and joined by common blood, just as the
French saw their values as universal, rather than nationally specific. Both share
the gift of gab that betrays a lack of true German profundity. Thus “civiliza-
tion’s literary man” (der Zivilisationsliterat)135 is just another name for a clever
Jewish boy.
Mann’s use of Novalis in defense of the Weimar Republic bears scrutiny
as well. As I noted in chapter 6 of the present study, Novalis’s essay “Christian-
ity or Europe” seems, at first glance, to glorify the medieval monarchy rather
than to support modern democracy. Mann challenges received opinions by
adopting the thesis of Ricarda Huch, whose Die Blütezeit der Romantik (The
heyday of romanticism, 1900) and Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik (The
spread and decline of romanticism, 1902) distinguish between the politically
progressive early romantics and the conservatives who followed. “Harden-
berg’s ‘Europe or Christianity’ was not reactionary,” insists Mann in a short
essay written in 1924 on the occasion of Huch’s sixtieth birthday.136 Novalis
begins his essay with a nostalgic evocation of the past but ends it with a call for
a postrevolutionary future, in which international strife will cease in a newly
unified Europe. Novalis nevertheless laments that the Reformation divided
Christianity into two factions and divorced the letter from the spirit of religion;
he praises the mystical unity of medieval Europe and denounces the Enlighten-
ment in ways that anticipate Mann’s distinction, in Reflections, “between the
people [Volk] as a mystical character and the individualistic mass,”137 between
German culture and French civilization. Behind Mann’s open citation of Whit-
man lie the ideas of Hans Blüher, whose Die Rolle der Erotik in der männli-
chen Gesellschaft (The role of eroticism in male society, 1917–19) argues that
strong societies are founded on passionate bonds between men, while it insists
that Jews lack the masculine strength necessary for a powerful state.
As a result, “The German Republic” is as ambivalent, in its own way, as
“Christianity or Europe”: Mann embraces democracy in no uncertain terms,
ending his essay with a resounding cheer for the Weimar Republic: “Es lebe
die Republik!” He does so, however, in a way that seeks to make the universal
principles of democracy compatible with nationally specific German culture,
particularly stressing the passions it inspires, in a way that opens him to charges
of irrationalism and antisemitism. About the latter accusation, he seems uncon-
cerned in this context (although he was elsewhere at pains to insist that he was
a friend of the Jews), but he does signal discomfort with the former charge. In
the previously cited passage in which Mann condemns the acts of terror that
have arisen out of the spirit of “sentimental obscurantism,” he goes on to won-
der if he might be partially to blame: “I . . . must fear that, out of a need for
intellectual freedom, I provided weapons for obscurantism.”138 “The German
Republic” is intended to exorcise the irrational demons from his political

thought by voicing a clear-cut commitment to democracy, but the shades of his
recent past continue to haunt this essay and his subsequent work.
Two years after he delivered his controversial defense of the Weimar Re-
public, Thomas Mann finally published The Magic Mountain. More than a de-
cade had passed since he first conceived of the novel as a brief comic counter-
part to Death in Venice, years that had been devoted primarily to political essays,
in addition to two minor works, an autobiographical poem, and a story about his
dog. Now Mann reclaimed his place in the public eye with a monumental novel
that won widespread critical acclaim. From this point on in his career, there
would be a symbiotic relationship between his fictional and nonfictional works.
Thus The Magic Mountain marked not an abrupt end to the concerns of the
previous decade but, rather, a continuation of politics by other means.
In The Magic Mountain, Mann splits apart the precarious fusion between
Western reason and Germanic profundity that he describes in “The German
Republic,” to return, from a different point of view, to the dichotomy that had
once informed his wartime journalism. Settembrini dominates the first half of
the novel, as a representative of Enlightenment thought and liberal politics,
civilization’s literary man, this time portrayed with gentle irony rather than the
dripping scorn of Reflections. That negativity has now been shifted to Naphta,
who opposes Settembrini at every turn. The Dionysian passions that Mann
embraces as an expression of German culture in 1914 and tries to enlist in de-
fense of the Weimar Republic break out again in Naphta’s reckless embrace of
totalitarian terror, while Settembrini’s Western-oriented liberalism appears in a
milder light. Yet Settembrini’s all-too-reasonable liberalism cannot do justice
to the dark and dangerous forces that Naphta perceives. The two ideologues
thus stake out irreconcilable positions, neither of which can be unequivocally
embraced. Instead, Mann offers tantalizing glimpses of a third path, a
synthesis—appropriate to Germany as the “land of the center”—that is most
clearly formulated in the italicized insight that Hans Castorp derives from his
vision in the snow: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death
no dominion over his thoughts.”139 In other words, one must acknowledge the
force of irrationality and death in a way that Settembrini does not, but refuse to
surrender to its power, as Naphta does. Castorp quickly forgets what he had
learned, however, and the novel ends on a note of tenuous hope, set against the
near-certainty of Castorp’s death on the battlefields of the First World War.
Mann derived many of the ideas that inform Naphta’s political opinions
from Heinrich von Eicken’s Geschichte und System der Mittelalterlichen Welt-
anschauung (History and system of the medieval worldview).140 Mann read the
book with great intensity in April 1919, just as he was about to resume work on
The Magic Mountain and during the days in which the political turmoil in Mu-
nich was at its height. Mann’s fascination with a book about the Middle Ages
might seem odd under such circumstances, but it provided him with informa-
tion about a prenational era at a time when he was intensely interested in what
sort of government would replace Germany’s Second Empire. At this point,
Mann favored the establishment of a pan-German federation while fiercely
rejecting the democratic nation-states of the West. As noted earlier, he also
toyed, briefly and half seriously, with sympathy for the communists, largely
because he felt that anything would be preferable to the imposition of the En-
tente’s hegemony over defeated Germany, but also because they advocated a
postnational political organization that seemed another potential alternative to
Western democracy. Mann notes in his diary that reading Eicken’s history “is
stimulating mainly because I find the ascetic state of God [Gottesstaat] analo-
gous to the communist world culture [Weltkultur] of the future,” although
Mann predicts that “its demand for absolute power would also fail due to hu-
man nature.”141
The debates between Naphta and Settembrini turn on the question of find-
ing an appropriate political form for the states of modern Europe. They take
place on the eve of the First World War within the context of the novel, but they
raise issues that preoccupied Mann and his contemporaries in its immediate
aftermath. Settembrini is an Italian patriot and supporter of the French Revolu-
tion, who champions the virtues of the modern nation-state; Naphta prefers
forms of government that preceded and might eventually supersede the nation.
Thus he defends the otherwise contradictory combination of medieval Catholi-
cism and modern communism, as both are based on a world order that tran-
scends the boundaries of discrete nations. Settembrini looks back approvingly
to the time when “a sense of national honor began to solidify against hierarchi-
cal pretension”; Naphta rejects his “nationalist mania” for “the world-
conquering cosmopolitanism of the Church.”142 Settembrini attacks the Austro-
Hungarian Empire as “a mummified version of the Holy Roman Empire”143
and an enemy of Italy; Naphta derides the capitalist economy of the nation-
state. He shares the medieval rejection of usury and welcomes the idea that
“these economic principles and standards have been resurrected in the modern
movement of communism.”144 Settembrini insists on the supremacy of civiliza-
tion over barbarism, the West over the East, enlightenment over obscurantism,
and democracy over tyranny; Naphta argues for the primacy of the community
over the individual, faith over reason, “discipline and sacrifice, renunciation of
the ego and coercion of the personality.” As Settembrini becomes increasingly
agitated, Naphta drives home his point: “What our age needs, what it demands,
what it will create for itself, is—terror.”145
Naphta commits suicide before he can do any harm to others, but his ideas
cast an ominous shadow over the future course of German history. Mann will
return to some of his ideas, in caricatured form, in the intellectual debates
among the members of the Kridwiss circle in Doctor Faustus, which are set
during the same period of the early 1920s in which Mann was completing The
Magic Mountain. They dabble in the sort of irrationalism that Mann found in-
creasingly alarming as the National Socialist movement gathered steam and
that, from the perspective of the 1940s, seemed more than a little “politically
suspicious,” as Settembrini might have said.146 Germany’s Third Reich com-
bined the worst aspects of the different forms of governments that Mann had
pondered over the course of the previous decades. In Reflections of a Nonpo-
litical Man, Mann rejects the centralizing tendencies of the imperialist nation-
state “that is leveling all national culture into a homogeneous civilization.”147
Nazi Germany took the “leveling” tendencies that Mann had perceived in
Western democracies to an extreme, as it sought to eradicate all forms of inter-
nal difference, beginning with the persecution of political dissidents and end-
ing with the annihilation of all those deemed unworthy of living among the
“master race.” The idea of a nationally specific culture, an idea that Mann
found rooted in a venerable German tradition extending back to Goethe and
Herder, now lent ideological support for genocidal racism. The imperialist ag-
gression that Mann had mocked among the purveyors of Western civilization’s
universal values was child’s play in comparison with the blitzkrieg that Hitler
unleashed in the opening months of the war.
Mann hated totalitarianism above all things, and he remarked more than
once that Hitler had taught him how to hate.148 “I earnestly think that there has
never been such a threat to freedom in the world as at present,” Mann stated in
a radio interview recorded in English in the late spring of 1940.149 “I still have
a profound faith in freedom,” he insisted, recalling that he had “once expressed
this faith in a little book called ‘The Coming Victory of Democracy.’” Linking
democracy to “the highest human attributes, . . . the dignity of mankind,
. . . truth and justice,” Mann claims that it must confront the unprecedented evil
that has arisen in Europe: “Democracy’s task is to defend civilization against
barbarism.”150 Here we find a clear statement of the shift in values that Philipp
Gut identifies as central to Mann’s political evolution, from a defense of Ger-
man culture against Western civilization to an embrace of the allied forces of
Western culture and civilization against Nazi barbarism.151
Even in this short statement for an American audience, however, we find
evidence of core beliefs that long antedate Mann’s support for American de-
mocracy. When Mann expresses his “utmost faith that in America the absorp-
tion and assimilation of immigrants is nearly inexhaustible,”152 he touches on
a theme that resurfaces regularly in his essays of the 1930s and 1940s, in
which America’s diversity and cosmopolitanism serve as a model of the way
Germany ought to be. As Mann argues in “Deutschland und die Deutschen”
(Germany and the Germans, 1945), Germany has made the mistake of em-
bracing an “arrogant provincialism,”153 in which being German means being
“only German, and nothing else and nothing beyond that,” a “racial and anti-
European” understanding of national identity that “is always very near the
barbaric.”154 Mann contends that Germany ought to be more like Goethe,
who rejected militant nationalism in favor of “the super-national world Ger-
manism, world literature” (das Übernationale, das Weltdeutschtum, die
Weltliteratur).155 Instead, the “Germans yielded to the temptation of basing
upon their innate cosmopolitanism a claim to European hegemony, even to
world domination, whereby this trait became its exact opposite, namely the
most presumptive and menacing nationalism and imperialism.”156 As Mann
put it in one of his radio addresses to the German people, they were going
about things backwards: “Instead of making Germany European, they wanted
Europe to become German.”157 Thus Mann ends “I Am an American” with a
vision of postwar Europe as “a Democracy of free peoples who are respon-
sible each one to the other—a European Federation in fact.”158 Even Europe
seems provincial today, Mann notes when addressing the Germans in another
wartime radio broadcast.159 “Germany and the Germans” ends, therefore,
with a vision of a German diaspora, in which German national identity will
become aufgehoben, canceled and preserved within the greater unity of a
“world state” (Weltstaat).160
In “Germany and the Germans,” Mann, seeking the source of Germany’s
Sonderweg, identifies two culprits, Luther and Bismarck. Luther’s insistence
on the “priesthood of all believers” encouraged European democracy, but his
rigid distinction between religious freedom and political subservience crushed
any potential for liberal reform. Bismarck took advantage of the Lutheran tra-
dition of obedience to authority, when he used the desire for national unifica-
tion to forge a Reich that had nothing in common with the liberal nation-state
of the French Revolution: “It was purely a power structure aiming toward the
hegemony of Europe.” Mann’s harsh assessment of “the Unholy German Em-
pire of the Prussian Nation” (das unheilige Deutsche Reich preußischer Na-
tion)161 in 1945 echoes his anti-Prussian polemic in Reflections of a Nonpoliti-
cal Man, which, in turn, gives theoretical expression to ideas already implicit
in Buddenbrooks. His idea of a European or even global federation of nations,
which Mann floats in his polemics against Nazi Germany, recycles ideas voiced
in his diaries of 1918–19 and looks back to a long tradition of German cosmo-
politan thought that includes Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche.
There is nothing new, in other words, in the fundamental principles that
govern Mann’s thought in the struggle against Hitler and Nazi Germany, al-
though there is a pragmatic shift toward support of Western democracy in gen-
eral and the United States in particular as the best way to defend the values that
he holds dear. Mann’s bold declaration “I am an American” is another way of
saying “I am a German” (of the proper sort): “As an American I am a citizen of
the world (Weltbürger)—and that is in keeping with the original nature of the
German.”162 Once again, Mann is simply adapting ideas expressed long before
his alleged conversion to democracy. In Reflections, Mann already insists that
he is a proper German in the best sense precisely because he is an improper
German, a Hanseatic senator’s son with a little drop of his mother’s Latin
blood. Thus Mann speculates “that perhaps, without some foreign admixture,
no higher German character is possible; that precisely the exemplary Germans
were Europeans who would have regarded every limitation to the nothing-but-
German as barbaric.”163 In Reflections, one also finds the anti-Prussian polemic
that Mann adapts to his critique of Nazi Germany and will adapt, again, to his
critique of the totalitarian tendencies in the postwar German Democratic Re-
public and McCarthy’s America.
Mann’s repeated references to his mother’s Portuguese “blood” leads me
to a final comment here on the inner consistency of his thought. Mann’s proud
insistence on his mixed ethnic background flies in the face of the racist ortho-
doxy of late nineteenth-century thought. Arthur de Gobineau insists, “In all
countries there is a secret revulsion against the crossing of blood”; Langbehn
decries “blood mixtures” and condemns “mulattos”; Houston Stewart Cham-
berlain links the fall of Rome to racial chaos and ascribes the rise of the Ger-
mans to their racial purity.164 By foregrounding his racial impurity, Mann
turns the language of racial degeneration into its opposite. Rather than saying
he is a German artist despite the fact that he is not rassenrein (racially pure),
he claims, in Reflections, that he is German in a higher sense because of his
racial blood mixture, just as he links Tonio Kröger’s artistic sensitivity to a
heritage that combines the sober German respectability of his father with his
mother’s fiery Latin blood. Such arguments seem almost calculated to please
no one: rather than rejecting as hogwash the very notion of “hot Latin blood”
or embracing then-popular notions of racial purity, Mann uses the language of

racial essentialism to formulate his argument for a better, more ethnically di-
verse Germany.
Through racially charged statements about himself, Mann turns potential
stigma into a sign of distinction.165 Matters become more complicated when
he writes about the Jews. Here again, Mann employs the language of racial
difference. As he notes in a diary entry of October 27, 1945, the Jews are dif-
ferent, a breed apart from ethnic Germans: the Jews are “after all a single,
distinct race” (doch ein Geblüt).166 We recall his final comment about Kafka:
“Pious Jew; very alien after all.” As many other remarks in his diaries and let-
ters make clear, Mann did not define that difference in a particularly appealing
way: he presents Jews as having an acid wit that has a corrosive effect on the
more sentimentally inclined Germans; as such, they serve a useful purpose,
bringing balance to an otherwise lachrymose lot, but they are a bitter medicine
best taken in small drafts.167 Characters identified as Jews or coded in ways
that make their Jewishness highly probable abound in Mann’s fiction, includ-
ing the rival Hagenström family in Buddenbrooks, the radical reactionary
Naphta in The Magic Mountain, and the garrulous impresario Saul Fitelberg
and the abrasive intellectual Chaim Breisacher in Doctor Faustus. Fitelberg is
slightly ridiculous, jabbering on in a mix of German and French, but the other
characters are described as threatening, physically repellant, and ideologi-
cally dangerous.
If we remain within the paradigm of a conversion narrative, such antise-
mitic caricatures seem out of place, as do Mann’s repeated references to his
own racial mixture and that of his children and grandchildren, not to mention
his seemingly unmotivated jabs at “clever Jewish boys” in the midst of his
otherwise loving embrace of Weimar democracy. But if we consider the
deeper consistency of Mann’s thought—as he urged us to do—such slips are
part and parcel of a larger worldview. Mann remained convinced that there are
fundamental differences between nations and peoples; he also believed that
those differences should be incorporated into a political order based on the
principles of cosmopolitan federalism rather than totalitarian imperialism.
Coupling these core values with a pragmatic flexibility regarding which par-
ticular government was best suited, at any given time, to defend them enabled
Mann to become an admirable opponent to evil and defender of democracy. At
other times, those same principles led him to oppose democracy, in the name
of Germany’s unique cultural traditions, and to defend ethnic diversity, in the
language of racial difference. In “Germany and the Germans,” Mann argued
against the facile distinction between a “good” and “bad” Germany. The ten-
dencies are rather inextricably mixed together, he insisted, and—as Germa-

ny’s most representative writer—the same is true of himself. Mann claimed,
“It is all within me, I have been through it all”—or, literally, “I experienced it
in my own [racially mixed] body” (ich habe es alles am eigenen Leibe er-
fahren).168 Gustav von Aschenbach already cautions those who would en-
shrine the works of a troubled writer in the national culture, and Mann does
the same. In one of his best moments, he reminds readers of the impulses that
inform some of his worst.
Chapter 9
Revisiting the Heimat

after the Third Reich
Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) opens
with shots of Hitler descending godlike from the clouds into the city of Nurem-
berg to attend the Nazi Party rally of 1934. Viewers follow along as Hitler’s
motorcade makes its way through ecstatic crowds, watch the city awaken as the
camera lingers on picturesque buildings draped in swastika flags, and have a
front-row seat as Hitler greets flustered women dressed in traditional folk cos-
tumes. The party congress proper opens with a speech in which Rudolf Hess
expresses his deep gratitude to Adolf Hitler for what he has already achieved
and what is sure to follow: “Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its
goal: to be a Heimat [homeland]. To be a Heimat for all Germans in the world!”
What sort of Heimat does Hess have in mind? One of the tightly choreographed
scenes that follows suggests an answer. A speaker, shot from a low angle to
emphasize his visionary leadership, calls out, “Comrade! Where are you
from?” “From Friesland!” answers a young man. The identifications continue:
“And you, comrade?” “From Bavaria!” “And you?” “From Kaiserstuhl!” The
individual responses eventually end, and a thundering chorus of united voices
chants, “One folk! One führer! One Reich! Germany!” (Ein Volk! Ein Führer!
Ein Reich! Deutschland!).
The stress on the collective German Heimat in Hess’s speech, followed by
the identification of specific locales within the German landscape, encourages
us to reflect on the relation between the local and the national in the Third
Reich. As Celia Applegate observes, the Heimat movement, which was instru-
mental in cultivating, in the nineteenth century, a sense of national identity in
and through the local, did not thrive during the Nazi era. Heimat celebrated
local differences, whereas the Nazis sought what has been aptly termed, in
another context, “the obliteration of localism.”1 “If ever a state merited being
called totalitarian,” summarizes Richard J. Evans, “then it was the Third
215
Reich.”2 In a political system that favored “the gigantic and national” over “the
small and local,” the Heimat movement was doomed: “Against the claims of
locality, . . . the Nazis insisted on the absolute priority of the nation, which they
defined from a fictive center—the Führer—on outward and downward. In the
face of such a world view there remained little point to the cultivation of Hei-
mat at all.”3
What, then, are we to make of the emphatic insistence on local origins by
those individuals singled out in Leni Riefenstahl’s slick piece of political pro-
paganda masquerading as a documentary?4 Triumph of the Will suggests that
regional diversity was not only tolerated but actively celebrated, albeit within
strictly conceived limits. The brief scene in Riefenstahl’s film finds its ex-
tended counterpart in Josef Nadler’s Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme
und Landschaften (Literary history of the German tribes and landscapes, 1912–
18). Although that multivolume work was completed before the advent of the
Third Reich, it anticipates the belief in the formative influence of “Blut und
Boden” on the national culture and was thus easily adopted by the new re-
gime.5 As a curious footnote to history, Nadler studied with one of Kafka’s
professors at the University of Prague;6 more ominously, Thomas Mann cites
Nadler’s work with approval in 1926 when discussing the decisive influence of
Lübeck on his view of the world.7 Nadler begins his work with a section on
Germanic “tribes and landscapes” (Stämme und Landschaften). “In the first
century BCE, the Germans were still homeless [heimatlos]” (emphasis in origi-
nal), he explains, but five hundred years later, everything had changed: “Every-
one now had a homeland. The landscape, so essential to everyone and created
almost solely for a very particular tribe (or biological type, Stammesart), had
now received its people, who would grow ever more firmly rooted through the
centuries with its soul to this soil (Scholle).”8 The characters in Triumph of the
Will thus proclaim their tribal origins as members of the Germanic people
grown one with their native land. Equally important, however, are those indi-
viduals, groups, and places that are conspicuous by their absence in this scene
and the film as a whole—Socialist Berlin, political dissidents of any stripe, the
physically or mentally disabled, Jews. The collective rapture captured in Rief-
enstahl’s film occludes its dark negative, the spirit of hatred and violence di-
rected at those whose deviance is deemed dangerous to the forced homogene-
ity of the Nazi nation.
In this chapter, I consider the theme of Heimat in the work of Siegfried
Lenz (1926–2014) and Günter Grass (1927–2015). As almost exact contempo-
raries, both men underscored the significance of their date of birth in shaping
their view of the world. “I was thirteen when the war began,” recalls Lenz.9
Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich 217
“My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war
broke out in several places at once,” echoes Grass.10 In Kopfgeburten (Head-
births, 1980), Grass spins out a fantasy about what might have happened if he
had been born ten years earlier: “In 1933 I’d have been sixteen and not six; at
the outbreak of the war twenty-two and not twelve. Subject to immediate call-
up, I would probably, like most of my age group, have been killed in the war.”11
As it was, both men spent their formative years in the Third Reich and were
just old enough to have served in the German military. Lenz was drafted into
the Germany navy near the end of the war and deserted when his ship ran
aground in Denmark. According to documents released in 2007, he was a
member of the Nazi Party, but Lenz insisted that he had been enlisted, together
with many others, without his knowledge or consent.12 Grass made a notori-
ously belated confession, in his 2006 autobiography, that he had served as a
member of the Waffen-SS in the final months of the war; he had always been
open about his experience as a teenage soldier who believed, to the bitter end,
in Germany’s ultimate victory (Endsieg). Both men atoned for their sins in the
1960s, campaigning together for Willi Brandt and the SPD (Social Democratic
Party) and urging their fellow Germans to come to terms with the Nazi past.
As important as the timing of their births for their subsequent careers
were the places in which these writers were born. Lenz and Grass grew up in
regions of Germany that were no longer part of the divided nation after the war:
Lenz was born and raised in the town of Lyck in East Prussia (today’s Ełk,
Poland), and Grass came from Danzig (today’s Gdansk, also in Poland). Both
writers used their fiction to summon up the homelands of their childhood, by-
gone worlds whose memories were tainted by associations with the Nazi past.
These writers’ works are thus infused with nostalgia for a homeland that no
longer exists and with warnings against those who would use that nostalgia for
nefarious political purposes.
Siegfried Lenz: The Joys of Duty and the Language of Silence
“World literature depends on a circumscribed space, presupposes proximity, an

easily surveyed topography,” writes Siegfried Lenz in a review of a book about
Danish literary history. He continues, “The centers lie on the periphery. One
can probably say that, in the broadest sense, provinciality is a decisive require-
ment for world literature.”13 Lenz practiced what he preached. He scored his
first literary success with the publication of So zärtlich war Suleyken (So ten-
der was Suleyken, 1955). That slim collection of short stories is a homage to
his lost Heimat, evoking the landscape and the people of his native Masuria. In
its accessible style and often jocular tone, it could be seen as the literary equiv-
alent of the Heimatfilme beginning to be popular in the German cinema of the
time.14 More than two decades later, in the far more voluminous and ambitious
Heimatmuseum (Heimat Museum, 1978), Lenz returned to the site of his East
Prussian homeland. In a review of that novel, Horst Bienek groups it with
Grass’s Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977) as example of a new kind of Heimatlit-
eratur, one that was less sentimental about the past and more critical about the
potential for ideological abuse inherent in the concept and the genre.15
In the briefest of outlines, Lenz’s very long Heimatmuseum tells the story
of Zygmunt Rogalla from the town of Lucknow in East Prussia (the autobio-
graphical echoes of the protagonist’s name and place of birth are unmistakable,
although Zygmunt, born in 1905, is a generation older than his author).16 After
the First World War, Zygmunt’s great uncle Adam collects artifacts from the
surrounding region for a local Heimat museum. Zygmunt serves as his assis-
tant and then takes over the museum’s directorship after his great uncle dies in
a hunting accident. As Russian troops advance on the region toward the end of
the Second World War, Zygmunt and the other ethnic Germans must flee to the
West. After the war, Zygmunt reopens the museum in Schleswig-Holstein with
the aid of his fellow refugees. When he learns that an unreconstructed Nazi
from his former village is destined to be named director of the new Heimatver-
ein (homeland association), Zygmunt decides to destroy the museum. He is
badly burned in the process, and as he recovers in the hospital, he tells his story
to Martin Witt, a friend of his daughter.
Heimatmuseum pits a healthy concept of the homeland, as the site of pop-
ular tradition and local lore, against Nazi efforts to enlist the museum for their
cause. As Zygmunt repeatedly insists, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with
the idea that one might feel a certain fondness for one’s place of birth, and such
affection does not necessarily preclude an interest in the wider world. He ad-
mits to his patient listener “that this word [Heimat] has gotten a bad reputation,
that it was misused, so seriously misused that you can hardly pronounce it
without risk today.” But to Zygmunt, Heimat is a place where he feels a sense
of protection (“Geborgenheit”): “It is the place where you feel safe, in lan-
guage, in feeling—yes, even when you are silent.” Against those who “would
make Heimat responsible for a certain kind of arrogant narrow-mindedness,
who accuse it of xenophobia,”17 Zygmunt insists that knowledge of the world,
“Weltkunde,” always begins with knowledge of the homeland, “Heimatkunde”
(15). In keeping with his belief that the homeland belongs to everyone, Zyg-
munt puts the original relics on display when he takes over the museum (his
uncle had exhibited only facsimiles of the more valuable pieces), and he even
allows visitors to touch the objects, in a tactile act of reverence for items that
are rooted in communal experience and, thus, part of the collective memory.
Things take a bad turn as the Second World War approaches and as the
Nazis come to power. Lucknow lies in a German-Polish border zone, and the
museum originally displayed artifacts from both Germanic and Slavic peoples.
Such tolerance is no longer desirable in the newly nationalist atmosphere. Al-
ready in a plebiscite of 1920, the Masurian townspeople voted overwhelmingly
to be part of Germany rather than Poland, and the pressure to toe the new ideo-
logical line has only grown greater. A visiting Nazi official inspects the Heimat
museum and concludes that although it contains interesting materials, its
“touchingly random” collection, with its “lack of an appropriate political per-
spective” on historical developments (“Tendenzlosigkeit”), makes the museum
unworthy of official support (368). The Nazis would like to transform the mu-
seum into a “heroic display,” “an ideological temple” in service of a new spirit
of “militancy and ethnic pride,” or “Wesensstolz” (369). In the place of the
eclectic mixture of Germanic and Slavic artifacts, the Nazis prefer an image of
Masuria as a “purely German outpost in the East since time immemorial,” un-
der whose hills can be discovered ancient “buried proofs of the German people,
of the German race [deutschen Volkstums, deutscher Eigenart]” (370).
Although one must sympathize with the anti-Nazi sentiments of Lenz’s
Heimatmuseum, that novel leaves much to be desired. The narrative frame is
undeveloped, and Martin Witt remains little more than a name, a bottomless
receptacle into which Zygmunt Rogalla pours his ceaseless narrative flood.
Clumsy efforts to create a sense of immediacy—“What was I saying?” “Where
was I?”—soon grow tediously repetitive. Siegfried Lenz could do better, had
done better, as Horst Bienek notes, with a sense of polite exasperation, at the
end of his review. Thus I now turn from the heartfelt but hapless Heimatmu-
seum to the work that justly established Lenz’s international fame, Deutsch
stunde (The German Lesson, 1968).
Lenz’s The German Lesson also employs a narrative frame, although with
considerably more skill than the later Heimatmuseum. The protagonist of The
German Lesson, Siggi Jepsen, is an inmate in a correctional facility for juve-
nile delinquents. It is 1954; the prison is in Hamburg. Siggi’s German teacher
assigns him and his fellow prisoners an essay on the topic of “the joys of duty.”
Siggi decides to write about his father, a policeman in the little town of Rugbüll
near the German-Danish border, who was ordered by the Nazi authorities dur-
ing the Second World War to enforce a decree that forbad a local artist, Max
Ludwig Nansen, to paint. The father fulfills his duty punctiliously, even obses-
sively, without giving a thought to whether or not the ban is justified, and the
son devotes himself with equal ardor to the writing of his essay. One class pe-
riod is not enough to complete the assignment, nor is a second day, a week, or
even a month. In the end, Siggi Jepsen spends the better part of a year, in soli-
tary confinement, completing the essay, which grows into a novel. He finally
submits his work to the authorities and is released to an uncertain future.
The German Lesson was a huge popular success in Germany and was
translated into more than twenty foreign languages, making Lenz one of the
best-known German authors of his generation.18 On rereading the novel today,
it is easy to understand why: Lenz tells a compelling story, with sharply drawn
characters set against the hauntingly beautiful landscape of a northern German
coastal village. The German Lesson delights but also instructs, reminding its
readers that the “banality of evil” among little men like Siggi’s father made the
Nazi atrocities possible. By continuing his narrative into the postwar period,
Lenz underscores how quickly all but the worst perpetrators were rehabilitated,
while leaving innocent victims like Siggi Jepsen with lasting psychological
trauma. The German Lesson also benefited from good timing, as its release in
late 1968 coincided with the protest movements that demanded a belated reck-
oning with the repressed iniquities of an older generation. It is no wonder, then,
that the book became a runaway best seller in Germany, as it delivers the joy of
a good, old-fashioned Schmöker (entertaining novel) even as it reassures read-
ers that they are fulfilling their civic duty.
Hard-bitten critics may be accused of cynicism when they wonder if a
novel that pleased such a broad audience might not be lacking in aesthetic
quality or in the depth of its engagement with the German past, but such suspi-
cion is warranted in this case. A comparison with Grass’s The Tin Drum is in-
structive: Lenz began work on his novel in 1964, just five years after the publi-
cation of Grass’s novel, and Lenz’s indebtedness to the earlier work is clear.19
Both novels feature a 1950s narrative frame in which an incarcerated narrator
recalls the war years. Both relate history from the bottom up, focusing on the
family, as perceived by a child or adolescent, in locations far removed from the
center of power or the major theaters of the war. Both narrators celebrate a
significant birthday in the course of telling their stories: Oskar Matzerath turns
thirty, and Siggi Jepsen turns twenty-one. Yet the reader is likely to note the
two works’ differences more than their superficial similarities. Lenz’s novel
lacks the stylistic brio of The Tin Drum, its irrepressible linguistic inventive-
ness as well as its scabrous sense of humor. Lenz’s story also lacks the moral
ambiguity that features so prominently in Grass’s novel. On the one hand, Os-
kar Matzerath, who barely escapes his father’s decision to commit him to an
institution because of his physical deformity, is a potential victim of the Nazis;

he also takes a turn as a resistance fighter, when he disrupts the Nazi rally in
Danzig with his drumming, a scene memorably captured in Völker Schlön-
dorff’s filming of the novel. On the other hand, Oskar entertains the Nazi
troops in France and tries to stab his pregnant lover with scissors in an effort to
abort her child, in one of several incidents that make it impossible to sympa-
thize with him in any unqualified way. In contrast, The German Lesson divides
characters neatly between good and evil: we sympathize with Siggi Jepsen
from start to finish and shake our heads at his stubborn father’s insistence on
obeying the letter of the law. Both parents are harshly insensitive to the emo-
tional needs of their children, and Siggi’s mother, Gudrun Jepsen, is little more
than a caricature of a Nazi ideologue, with her aversion to “gypsy” music, fear
of physical illness, and rejection of Nansen’s “degenerate” art.20 Finally, the
central conflict in The German Lesson centers on a romantic cliché, pitting the
visionary artist-genius against the duty-bound Philistine who only feels com-
fortable when he is wearing his uniform.
The ambivalence in The German Lesson is mainly found in the theme of
the Heimat. As previously noted, one of the novel’s strengths lies in its ability
to summon up the local landscape of the German-Danish border region, with
its grass-covered dikes, muddy tidal basins, and ever-changing skies. Even if
readers from other parts of Germany were not familiar with the region from
vacation excursions, they had almost certainly read Theodor Storm’s classic
novella set in that landscape, Der Schimmelreiter (The rider of the white horse,
1888).21 Siggi feels a sense of fierce pride in his local origins: “I am not writing
about any old place, but about my place; I am not searching for any old misfor-
tune, but for my misfortune; in short, I am not telling just somebody’s story,
some story that doesn’t commit me personally.”22 In this novel as in Heimatmu-
seum, however, loyalty to the homeland can easily be channeled into Nazi ide-
ology. Siggi’s maternal grandfather, Per Arne Schessel, studies local lore as his
personal hobbyhorse and occasionally treats his fellow villagers to an evening
slide show—projected onto the back of a map of Schleswig-Holstein—about
the region’s history, culture, and landscape. He is joined in his enthusiasm by
Asmus Asmussen, an honorary member of a neighboring Heimat association
who is currently serving on coastal patrol in the German navy. While on shore
leave, he is invited by Schessel to deliver a guest lecture on “sea and home-
land,” for, as he insists, they are defending not an arbitrary ocean but, rather,
“one’s own, one’s homeland sea [ein heimatliches Meer]” (125; 149). Even the
ship must be kept in tip-top condition, for it is a bit of the homeland floating on
the ocean. Having no patience for the “damned folkloristic stuff” (68; 84) that
his grandfather inflicts on his audience, Siggi mocks the “narrow-mindedness

into which people are lured by local patriotism [Heimatsinn],” which he de-
rides as an “arrogance born of narrowness” (134; 163). For his grandfather and
Asmussen, pride in one’s local roots serves as a convenient justification for
condemning the rootlessness of others. These include Americans—“Because
they’re at home everywhere, they’re at home nowhere” (130; 158)—and the
painter Max Ludwig Nansen, who is said to be under the evil influence of his
friend Dr. Theodor Busbeck. “Nobody knows the slightest thing about him,”
complains Siggi’s mother, who continues, “He doesn’t belong anywhere.
Rootless—that’s what he is, a slightly superior sort of gypsy” (181; 218).
In fact, however, Nansen is as much a product of the Heimat as any of the
older generation. He was born and raised in the area and has known Siggi’s
father since childhood, even once rescuing him from drowning. Although the
Nazi authorities forbid him to paint, on the charge “that he’s become alienated
from the healthy instinct of the people [dem Volkstum entfremdet]” and thus
“a danger to the State and undesirable, simply degenerate” (104–5; 127–28),
his art is and always has been deeply rooted in the local landscape. As a begin-
ning artist, he traveled to major centers in Germany and Europe, but he never
felt at home, and his art did not find acceptance. He eventually returned to his
native village of Glüserup, where he completed “a number of woodcuts enti-
tled ‘Grotesque and Legendary Motifs of the North Country,’” which were
published in 1914 in the tellingly titled journal Wir (We) (164; 197). Rejected,
on medical grounds, from military service, he continued to paint and live in
the isolated North Friesian countryside, remaining allergic to urban centers
even after his work began to receive critical acclaim. He and his wife joined a
“nationalist movement” (Völkische Bewegung) early on, and Nansen became
a Nazi Party member “only two years later than Adolf Hitler” (164–65; 199).
Although Nansen “at first welcomed the events of the year 1933” (165; 198–
99), he soon declined an offer to direct the Prussian Academy of Arts, on the
grounds that he had become allergic to the color brown. When the regime
confiscated some eight hundred of his paintings, Nansen canceled his mem-
bership in the Nazi Party.
Lenz thus casts his artist-hero as an antiurban Heimatkünstler of the sort
that Julius Langbehn would have welcomed; Nansen’s political sympathies lie
dangerously close to the Nazi movement in its early phases. Nansen redeems
himself, however, by spurning the Nazi invitation to serve as Prussian art direc-
tor, quitting the party, and serving as a kindly father figure to Siggi Jepsen
when Siggi’s own father becomes an ogre. The Nazi rejection of Nansen’s art
further serves to mobilize our sympathy, for we know that what the Nazis re-
jected as “degenerate” counts today as the work of modern genius, and we as-
sume that anyone rejected by the Nazis must also have rejected them. Yet mat-
ters are considerably more complicated and less exculpatory in this case. From
the time of the novel’s publication, it was obvious that Lenz had based his
portrait of Max Ludwig Nansen on the north German painter Emil Nolde, and
Lenz’s account of Nansen’s early involvement in and later rejection of the Nazi
movement corresponds to the account that Nolde published in his postwar au-
tobiography. Recent scholarship has shown, though, that Nolde’s engagement
with the Nazi Party lasted far longer and went much deeper than he cared to
recall after the war. In a document dated December 1938, Nolde complained
about the “excessive foreign influence” (Überfremdung) on German art, sin-
gled out the Jews for particular scorn and concluded with expressions of fer-
vent loyalty to the führer, folk, and fatherland.23 Far from resisting the Nazi
regime, Nolde supported it enthusiastically and was bitterly disappointed that
the Nazis failed to enshrine his art as the authentic expression of the Nordic
race. Only after the war did he remove blatantly antisemitic comments from his
autobiography, in an act of self-censorship that went unnoticed for decades.
In light of these revelations, argued Jochen Hieber in the Frankfurt Allge
meine Zeitung, we must revise our understanding of Nolde/Nansen as an artist-
hero, an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, as Nolde intimated in his revised autobiog-
raphy and as Lenz portrayed him in his best-selling novel.24 In fact, Nolde never
left the party, and he resented the fact that he was passed over, in favor of his rival
Max Pechstein, for the directorship of the Berlin art academy. When asked in
April 2014 (a few months before Lenz’s death) about the recent revelations about
Nolde, Lenz conceded that Nolde was a problematic individual whose portrait
played an ambivalent role in The German Lesson and whose politics were
“slightly catastrophic” (ein bisschen katastrophal). Above all, Lenz lamented the
fact that Nolde never apologized for his support of the Nazi Party.25
Lenz can hardly be blamed if his portrait of the artist in The German Les-
son does not reflect damning revelations that came to light more than four de-
cades after the novel was published, and we should not reduce the fictional
character to his real-life model. As Ulrich Greiner points out in a sharp rejoin-
der to Hieber’s accusations, Lenz’s primary goal in The German Lesson was to
expose the consequences of blind obedience to corrupt authorities. For artistic
purposes, therefore, he needed the figure of Nansen as a positive counterpart to
Siggi’s father. Nansen’s character was, to be sure, inspired by Nolde, but it
would be a crude misunderstanding of the nature of literature to assume a one-
to-one correspondence between life and art.26 Let us restrict ourselves to the
evidence in the text. As noted, Lenz makes no secret of Nansen’s initial sym-
pathy for the Nazi movement or of his party membership. In spirit, Nansen’s
art is infused with the same reverence for the Heimat that Schessel and Asmus-
sen express more crudely during the meetings of the local homeland associa-
tion; the Nazis reject Nansen’s art on the basis of its expressionist style, not its
Germanic content. The bohemian friends of Siggi’s older brother see this
clearly. When Nansen’s art is rehabilitated after the war, causing him to be-
come an international celebrity, the young rebels mock his “quest for man’s
primal condition, all very Germanic” (435; 520). Siggi tries to defend his hero,
but the rebels scornfully reject the art that transforms the local landscape into
a Germanic myth, replete with waves slapping in “stave rhymes” (435; 520;
Stabreime, translation modified) on the north German beaches. One of them
comments, “Your friend Nansen is the very type I regard as a disaster: back-to-
the-land [heimatbewußt] and all that, visionary, and political” (438; 524).
This is doubtless the sort of comment that Lenz had in mind when, de-
cades later, he referred to Nansen as an ambivalent figure in The German Les-
son: the artist is admirable as an individual and in his dedication to his craft, yet
compromised by his past and the content of his art. Still, our close identifica-
tion with Siggi’s perspective makes it easy to rally with him to Nansen’s de-
fense against the disaffected youths, and Nansen’s defiantly sarcastic rejection
of the Nazis seems calculated to excuse his early sympathy for the movement
as a mistake that he quickly corrected when they showed their true colors
(brown). The only explicit reason given for his earlier decision to leave the
Völkische Bewegung is that he discovered “that the innermost circle of the
movement had homosexual affiliations” (164; 198). There is no mention, here
or anywhere else in the novel, about the Nazis’ antisemitism, nor is there a
single Jewish character, with the possible exception of “the vaguely Jewish and
conspicuously cosmopolitan art dealer Teo Busbeck.”27
The absence or perhaps deliberate avoidance of Jewish characters and
antisemitism in a novel often hailed as one of the most important postwar ef-
forts to come to terms with the Nazi past is striking and not a little disturbing.
Siggi’s mother, the most two-dimensional representative of Nazi ideology in
the novel, harbors prejudice against physical and mental illness, modern art,
and “Gypsy” music, but the word Jew never crosses her lips. Perhaps there
were no Jews in the little town of Rugbüll, one might argue, but how many
gypsies were there? Schleswig-Holstein in general and the north Frisian area in
particular were strongholds of Nazi support;28 thus it is inconceivable that a
family like the Jepsens or their neighbors would have been unaware of the mas-
sive antisemitic propaganda in the Third Reich. Why, then, does Lenz’s The
German Lesson remain stubbornly silent about the persecution of the Jews?
One can only speculate about Lenz’s motivations, but the effect is to contribute
to what Ernestine Schlant has termed “the language of silence” in postwar Ger-
man literature that tries but fails to come to terms with the Holocaust.29 The
German Lesson leaves us with an ambivalent feeling of an unpleasant sort: we
are manipulated into sympathy for a former Nazi Party member who shares the
movement’s reverence for the sea and soil of the local homeland, we join with
the narrator in righteous indignation against a local policeman’s obsessive
sense of duty, and we close the novel feeling that we have engaged in a serious
fashion with evils of the Nazi past—all without even a passing reference to the
persecution and murder of millions of Jews.
Günter Grass: A Rootless Cosmopolitan Resists Reunification
On February 2, 1990, Günter Grass delivered his “Kurze Rede eines vaterlands
losen Gesellen” (“Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan”), at a conference
devoted to finding “new answers to the German question.”30 Less than three
months earlier, Germans and the rest of the world had been astonished by the
opening of the Berlin Wall; at the time of the conference, momentum was al-
ready building toward the national reunification that would take place in Octo-
ber. The train had already left the station, as Rudolf Augstein insisted a few
weeks later, but Günter Grass refused to get on board.31 As Grass insisted in his
short speech, he much preferred that the solution to the current crisis would
preserve the sovereignty of the German Democratic Republic within a larger
German confederation, rather than merge the two Germanys into a single
nation-state. He spelled out his reasons in five main points: first, the two Ger-
manys could be allies rather than enemies, in a partnership that might seem less
threatening to Germany’s neighbors than a single powerful state in the heart of
Europe; second, such a confederation would respect the historical differences
that had developed in the two Germanys over the past forty years of political
division; third and fourth, a German confederation could be more easily inte-
grated into a larger confederation of European nations, while preserving the
cultural diversity of its own distinct regions; fifth, a confederation of East and
West Germany could serve as a model for similarly divided nations such as
Korea, Ireland, and Cyprus. Grass went on to remind his listeners that a single
German nation-state was historically the exception rather than the rule and that
terrible crimes had been committed in the name of Germany when it had been
unified. Auschwitz serves Grass as the one-word refutation for any effort to
reestablish a single German nation.32
As we know, the German majority rejected Grass’s arguments, and those

in East Germany who voted overwhelmingly for reunification could be ex-
cused for considering it presumptuous of Grass to speak on their behalf. Grass
soon saw the writing on the wall: his since-published diaries of 1990 offer an
increasingly lugubrious commentary on a political process that many experi-
enced with joy. Yet if Grass seems a cantankerous outsider in his immediate
historical context, he is in the mainstream of the German tradition that has been
the focus of this book. Grass’s calls for a pan-German confederation after the
fall of the Berlin Wall echo similar comments by Thomas Mann in the wake of
the First World War, while his plea for the vitality of the German Kulturnation
within a framework more reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire than the
modern nation-state recalls arguments made by Goethe and the German ro-
mantics.33 Grass’s vision of a cosmopolitan German state whose borders open
freely to the rest of Europe and the world beyond is in sympathy with ideas
voiced by Heine and the older Thomas Mann, while Grass’s corresponding
stress on the importance of local autonomy links him to the Silesian authors of
the seventeenth century, with whom he felt a strong affinity. In his short speech,
Grass styles himself as a “rootless cosmopolitan,” proudly adopting an epithet
hurled by the Nazis at Jews and others who failed to share their fervent and
exclusive devotion to the German nation. In doing so, Grass adapted to a par-
ticular historical moment the sense of displacement that informed his entire
adult life. Like Lenz, Grass grew up in a place that had since ceased to exist, at
least in the way that he experienced it in childhood: the Langfuhr suburb of the
independent city-state of Danzig.
Langfuhr was “so big and so little that whatever happens or could happen
in this world, also happened or could have happened in Langfuhr.”34 As Grass
stressed in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature and stated
many times in his career, he could be considered a Heimatdichter: “My lost
Danzig was for me . . . both resource and refuse pit, point of departure and
navel of the world.”35 In a speech delivered in Princeton in 1966, Grass already
declared, “I cling completely provincially to German circumstances” (ich
[klammere] mich ganz und gar provinziell an deutsche Verhältnisse).36 The city
of Danzig and the suburb of Langfuhr that Grass knew as a child and adoles-
cent are forever lost, not due to a general process of modernization or the in-
evitable process of aging, but because of the defeat that led to the forced expul-
sion of ethnic Germans from the now-Polish city of Gdansk. The lost city could
not serve Grass as a source of nostalgia, for he grew up in an overcrowded
apartment with a picture of Hitler on the wall, a father in the Nazi Party, and a
childhood that ended when the war began. The city of his childhood that Grass
evoked in his fiction was anything but the site of a homogeneous, sustaining
community; rather, it was a place of constant strife between Poles and Ger-
mans, Protestants and Catholics, and the various minorities in and around the
city—Roma, Sinti, Kashubians, and Jews. Late nineteenth-century authors
such as Ludwig Ganghofer and the directors of the 1950s Heimatfilme imag-
ined the homeland as a place apart from modern times, a refuge, albeit a threat-
ened one, from political strife. Danzig, in contrast, stood at the center of the
international conflict that left its indelible mark on Günter Grass.
The lost world of Langfuhr that Grass re-creates in his fiction serves as a
microcosm of the conflicts that would soon engulf Europe and extend around
the world. The Nazi pretense for provoking open conflict with Poland was that
they wanted to bring Danzig “Heim ins Reich,” as if the city’s citizens yearned
as one to return to the fold of the totalitarian state. Grass’s Danzig trilogy ex-
poses this lie, showing the price that individuals paid if they failed to conform.
The Jewish shopkeeper Sigismund Markus dreams of escaping to England but
is driven instead to commit suicide during the pogrom of “Kristallnacht.” The
Polish sympathizer and reluctant partisan Jan Bronski is summarily executed
for his effort to defend the Polish Post Office. Oswald Bruneis, a teacher who
fails to display the required enthusiasm for the new Nazi Reich, finds an early
death in a nearby concentration camp. His adopted gypsy daughter, Jenny, is
the target of vicious attacks by her fellow schoolmates, as is Eddie Amsel, a
boy of partial Jewish descent who is violently assaulted by a gang of vindictive
youths. Even those who rally to the Nazi cause come to regret it, sooner or
later: in Dog Years, Walter Matern bitterly rues his brief membership in the SA;
in Cat and Mouse, Joachim Mahlke deserts the army after he finds that his
heroic exploits on the battlefield are not enough to make him a hometown hero;
and in The Tin Drum, Alfred Matzerath rejects Hitler in a drunken stupor and
chokes to death on his own Nazi insignia.
Like Thomas Mann, Grass resisted Nazi totalitarianism and imperialist
aggression, although Grass does not focus on the artists and intellectuals of the
decadent upper crust but shows how ideologies infiltrate the narrow worlds of
little people.37 In Doctor Faustus, Mann’s characters dabble in politically irre-
sponsible speculations about the demonic nature of the German soul. Grass’s
figures experience history on the local level, as a series of disjointed events.
Thus Grass repeatedly distanced himself from grand Hegelian narratives about
the course of history writ large, preferring, like his mentor Alfred Döblin, “to
smash coherence to pieces, so that reality can emerge.”38 Throughout his ca-
reer, Danzig remained at the center of Grass’s literary imagination, just as his
moral compass continued to point at the events of Germany’s Nazi past. In an
interview with Die Zeit just a few days before his death, Grass once again re-
called that he had “lost his Heimat Danzig due to the terrible war that the Ger-
mans unleashed” on the world. It took him some time as a young author, he
continued, before he discovered “that I concentrate best and write to the best of
my ability when I conjure up what I have absolutely lost.”39
The Flounder: Local History in Global Context
In the mid-1970s, Grass decided to mark his fiftieth birthday with the publica-
tion of a major new novel. He had thrown himself into politics for the past
decade, and many believed that his literary works had suffered as a result.
Some critics felt that his third novel, Örtlich betäubt (Local Anaesthetic,
1969), did not measure up to the high standards of The Tin Drum and Dog
Years, while Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail,
1972) was more an autobiographical essay than a work of fiction. The Floun-
der appeared in August 1977, after an aggressive advertising campaign that
included sending some four thousand complimentary copies to potential re-
viewers, as well as a series of public readings by Grass. The effort paid off: the
novel “dominated the bestseller charts for months” in Germany and scored
great popular success in its various translations.40 From the beginning, how-
ever, the critical reception of The Flounder was mixed, ranging from those
who declared it the “book of the century” to those who cast it aside as either
shocking or boring. Some marveled at the novel’s exquisite narrative com-
plexity, while others declared it an overly ambitious, baggy monster. Feminist
critics sharply condemned The Flounder.41 The novel presents itself as a sym-
pathetic response to the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, claim-
ing that men have made a mess of world history and suggesting that it is time
for women to take the lead. Unfortunately, though, Grass’s novel is based on
a misogynist fairy tale, portrays modern feminists in an unsympathetic light,
and resurrects a series of pseudohistorical female characters who do more to
support than to subvert negative stereotypes.
If you disregard its narrative pyrotechnics and bracket out its efforts to
intervene in contemporary feminist debates or to invent a matriarchal theory of
history à la Bachofen,42 The Flounder is a historical novel focused on a specific
local area—“It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary”43—and on a
particular clan or tribe, the Pormorshians, or, as they are later known, the
Kashubians. The genre is as old as the Song of Anno, which, as we recall, traces
the origins of the Germanic tribes out of the legacy of classical antiquity. It
reached a monumental scale in the nineteenth century—in such works as Gus-

tav Freytag’s multivolume novel cycle The Ancestors, which traces the history
of a Thuringian clan from the late Roman Empire to the Revolution of 1848—
and continues to inform the stress on tribal origins in the racist nationalism of
Josef Nadler and Leni Riefenstahl. The Flounder works within but mainly
against this tradition, in a number of important ways. Grass’s novel does not
present history in a triumphalist mode, tracing the roots of a Germanic tribe
back to legendary exploits that anticipate modern heroics. His Pomorshians are
a malleable lot, easily mixed with “vestiges of peoples that had passed through”
the region: “Gepidic Goths, who had been pretty well stirred together with us
Pomorshians, and Saxons who had fled from the missionary zeal of the Franks.
Slavic Poles trickled in from the south. And the Norse Varangians raided us
whenever they felt like it” (107; 139). An ethnic group identified as the ancient
Pomorshians or modern Kashubians remains identifiable despite the admix-
tures of peoples from prehistoric times to the present—“After all, we Kashu-
bians are all related by way of a country lane or two” (500; 640)—but they are
not the ancestors of a modern nation-state. Instead, they remain the perennial
victims of foreign aggression. The Varangian Vikings are only an early exam-
ple of a marauding people that wreaks havoc on the local residents in and
around the city known variously as “Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danc-
zik, Dantzig, Danzig, Gdańsk” (109; 140), depending on which group con-
quered it last. In chapter after chapter, Grass portrays Danzig as the site of in-
ternal strife between different social classes and as a pawn in the conflicts of
larger European powers.
I here briefly outline the history of the city and its peoples that emerges in
The Flounder. In the beginning, the Pomorshians lived outside of history, pur-
suing their traditional way of life for centuries as civilizations rose and fell to
the south: “Hordes and clans join to form nations. Hero-kings rule. Empire
borders on empire” (32; 44). When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Goths
began their wanderings, but the Pomorshians stayed put, still cut off from the
course of history. Finally, in 997 AD, a subsequently sainted Bohemian mis-
sionary to the region, Bishop Adalbert of Prague, was murdered by his Pomor-
shian lover, the heathen priestess Mestwina. Adalbert had been acting under
the aegis of the Polish king Wladislaw, who sought to extend his power into the
Vistula region. The Poles avenged Adalbert’s death by executing Mestwina and
forcibly baptizing the Pomorshians. Even though the narrator notes that the
Poles mistakenly blamed the ancient Prussians for Adalbert’s murder, the event
had lasting repercussions for the actual perpetrators: “For the first time you
lazy, unconscious Pomorshians, who have never done anything to prove you
existed, have really taken action; with a political murder you enter history”
(104; 132).
The antiheroic characterization of the Pomorshians as the unwitting vic-
tims of larger conflicts sets a pattern for the subsequent centuries of their his-
tory. The second chapter of The Flounder takes place in the fourteenth century,
as the Teutonic Knights move into Danzig from the west and battle against al-
lied Lithuanians and Poles to the east. We jump next to the time of the Refor-
mation, when struggles between the Hanseatic League and the Polish Crown
get mixed up in confessional conflicts between Lutherans and Catholics and in
civic strife between patricians and guildsmen. The fourth chapter centers on
the previously mentioned meeting between Martin Opitz and Andreas Gry-
phius in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. Opitz plays a dangerous diplomatic
game, working for both Protestants and Catholics in an effort to promote peace
and secure the safety of his ravaged Silesia. In the late eighteenth century,
Prussia assumed control over Danzig as Poland was partitioned between its
neighboring powers; a few decades later, the French marched in under Napo-
leon’s leadership. And so it continued: the Prussians regained the city after
Napoleon’s ill-fated march into Russia, only to lose it again after the German
defeat in the First World War; Hitler brought Danzig back into the German
Reich to begin the Second World War, but Russians drove out the Germans
when it ended. Grass devotes a chapter to each of these episodes in his fictional
history of Danzig and the Kashubians, concluding with the murder of a refugee
driven from Danzig to Berlin and with the death of a dockworker shot by the
Polish police during the Solidarity protests of 1970.
The Flounder presents history in the tradition established by Walter Scott,
placing fictional characters in the foreground of events that have since entered
the history books. “Come to think of it, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler
had been in the same place” (112; 144), notes the narrator, but aside from a
cameo appearance by Frederick the Great, these genuinely historical figures
remain in the background. In keeping with Grass’s long-standing convictions,
the narrative is anti-Hegelian as well as antiheroic, undermining any notion of
historical progress or continuity. Grass repeatedly interrupts the chronological
sequence of events, jumping back and forth across centuries to anticipate the
future and recall the past: “We are contemporary only for the time being. No
date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place
simultaneously” (123; 158). This narrative technique allows Grass to juxtapose
events from different historical eras to reveal continuity in the midst of change.
Thus, in his second chapter, Grass cuts between the Teutonic Knights, whose
“first contribution to the history of the city of Danzig” was to execute sixteen
Pomeranian knights (the narrator suspects that they may also have butchered
“over ten thousand urban Pomorshians” [114; 146]), and the Polish police,
who shot the protesting shipyard workers. The more things change, the more
they stay the same: medieval guild workers rose up against the patricians, only
to be swatted back down, and modern dockworkers suffered the same fate. “All
the same,” claims Grass’s narrator, “one thing has changed in Danzig or Gdańsk
since 1378; today the patricians have a different name” (120; 154).
Although Grass was well known for his advocacy of small steps toward
incremental change rather than political revolution or quiescence to the status
quo, a generally pessimistic tone pervades The Flounder. The fifth chapter fo-
cuses on Amanda Woyke, who is said to have introduced the potato to Kashu-
bia. Although her efforts save thousands from malnutrition and starvation, she
never gains her freedom: “born a serf in 1734 in Zuckau-the-Cloisters when it
was still Polish,” she “died in Preussisch-Zuckau, a serf of the state farm, in
1806” (291; 371). A similar fate befalls Fritz Bartholdy in the following chap-
ter. The young would-be revolutionary is inspired by the French to found a
Jacobin club and proclaim the Republic of Danzig, but he is arrested for his
efforts and condemned to life in prison. His beloved, Sophie Rotzoll, works
tirelessly for his release, and hopes rise when the French occupy the city in
1807, but the nation that had once inspired Bartholdy’s quest for freedom
leaves him to languish in jail: “And when Graudenz fell into Prussian hands, a
royal decree lost no time in confirming his status as prisoner. The systems
changed without a hitch. Petition after petition . . . failed to set the poor fellow
free” (376; 478). Looking back at the guild workers’ failed revolt in the Middle
Ages, one modern observer concludes that “the time wasn’t ripe yet,” but an-
other looks to the much more recent “uprising of the Polish shipyard workers
in December 1970 against bureaucratic Communism” and concludes “that then
as now the time is always unripe” (144; 183). Catholics oppressed their fellow
Catholics back then, and Communists oppress their fellow Communists today:
the names and dates change, but the pattern remains the same.
In The Flounder, the Nazis play a peripheral role (as opposed to their
dominant presence in what Katharina Hall refers to as the “Danzig quintet”),44
yet they are not entirely absent. Nazi archaeologists unearth prehistoric terra-
cotta figurines and conclude that they present “early Slavic testimony to the
existence of an inferior, degenerate, worthless race” (99; 125). A teacher in the
1930s is persecuted as “a tacit opponent of National Socialism” because he
prefers to focus his energies on a medieval saint rather than on recent battles in
Tobruk or Stalingrad (164; 208). Lena Stubbe, the socialist heroine of the sev-
enth chapter, is beaten to death in the Stutthof concentration camp while trying
to save food for other starving inmates. There is even a passing reference to “a
certain three-year-old boy, pounding furiously on his tin drum,” amid the ca-
cophony of the Nazi rallies (451; 571). Within the larger context of The Floun-
der, however, Grass suggests that the Nazis present only a particularly egre-
gious example of a typically male tendency to “think things to the end,” to
“resolve with masculine realism on / the final solution [Endlösung]” (95; 121).
In this regard, Grass’s novel bears comparison with Klaus Theweleit’s Male
Fantasies, the first volume of which appeared in the same year as The Floun-
der. Ostensibly an analysis of the misogynist mentality of the protofascist Frei-
korps officers of the 1920s and 1930s, Theweleit’s work expands to an indict-
ment of men under all forms of patriarchal rule: “Is it useful to apply the term
‘fascist’ to ardent party members and functionaries, and to regard the remain-
der as deluded, opportunistic, or forced into compliance? Or is it true, as many
feminists claim, that fascism is simply the norm for males living under
capitalist-patriarchal conditions?”45 Many of the same feminists have justly
claimed that the underlying misogyny of The Flounder vitiates its open indict-
ment of the male cause, but the novel shares with Male Fantasies a “universal-
izing” understanding of fascism as a particular manifestation of a general
trend, rather than as the perversion of a deviant minority.46
The focus in The Flounder remains resolutely local (more precisely, on a
particular region that lies in the crossroads of intra-European conflicts), but it
also expands to a global perspective. Seemingly random lists of contemporary
events “on the Golan Heights, in the Mekong Delta, and now, too, in Chile”
(93; 118) establish a bridge between the present and the past, between histori-
cally and geographically remote events and the Vistula estuary. Then as now,
there as here, men seek to dominate the world: “The affairs and achievements
of today: Calcutta. The Aswan Dam. The pill. Watergate. These are men’s er-
satz babies” (396–97; 503). To make history is to be on the move: the Ger-
manic Völkerwanderungen started a process that continues across the centu-
ries, crushing the Kashubians under successive waves of foreign invaders. By
the time of the Reformation, those movements extend beyond Europe’s bor-
ders, to other parts of the world. Just as Grass displays a sovereign indifference
to chronological sequence in the narration of events in The Flounder, he also
feels free to move across geographical space. He mixes his account of Danzig
during the Reformation with references to Vasco de Gama’s discovery of a
route around Africa to India. Margarete Rusch, the protagonist of chapter 3, is
born in 1498, the same year in which de Gama makes his journey; she later
marries her daughter to a man with trade connections to the Indian subconti-
nent, so that she has access to a steady supply of pepper for her cooking. Two
centuries later, Amanda Woyke encouraged the cultivation of potatoes in her

native Kashubia, continuing the spread of the tuber that “Raleigh or Drake is
supposed to have brought . . . to Europe” (303; 386). She carries on a corre-
spondence with Benjamin Thompson, a man born in Massachusetts but later
known as Count Rumford of Bavaria. More typical are the Kashubians who
move in the other direction: from time to time, The Flounder mentions those
who leave Danzig to seek their fortune in the New World, just as Oskar Matzer-
ath in The Tin Drum speculates that his grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, may
have made his way from the waters of the Vistula to banks of the Niagara River
in Buffalo, New York.
As European influence expands throughout the world, global inequity in-
creases. One of the running subthemes of The Flounder is the shocking degree
of poverty in India. The narrator speaks in the voice of all the men in the novel,
and the historical Vasco de Gama is thus shadowed by the modern Vasco,
whose trip to India draws directly on Grass’s experiences in the early 1970s. In
the slums of Calcutta, the narrator finds a level of abject misery that defies
imagination and inspires a sense of shame: “All you can do is walk through,
step across, look away” (186; 237). “More than half of mankind [is] under-
nourished” there, while the babies of the “First World” grow fat (333; 423):
“European infants, with their specially prepared food, consume nine times as
much protein, carbohydrates, and calories (or barely peck at them and let the
rest spoil) as is left for the infants of India” (273; 347). The companies that
produce powdered milk actively discourage breast-feeding in Africa, in order
to increase their profits, a practice that “can only be termed criminal” (275;
350). Indian boutiques in Hamburg sell clothing at prices so low that “there’s
got to be exploitation” in the sweatshops where they are produced, “that cheap
labor in Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, and so on” (343; 438). Grass would go on
to chronicle Third World poverty in the words and images of Headbirths and
Zunge Zeigen (Show Your Tongue, 1988), while noting elements of intra-Indian
exploitation of the poor by the rich in Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad, 1992).
As a result, the centuries-long oppression of the downtrodden Kashubians that
Grass chronicles in The Flounder stands both for the process of European im-
perialism that starts at home and expands overseas and for local inequities that
can arise anywhere around the globe: “This book deals with the history of hu-
man nutrition. It all happens in the region of the Vistula estuary, though actu-
ally it might just as well take place at the mouth of the Ganges or here on the
banks of the Hooghly River” (183; 234).
The relentless history of conflict between different peoples and political
factions that Grass chronicles in The Flounder extends ultimately to the human
conquest of nature. The popular version of “The Fisherman and His Wife”
slanders women as insatiable harpies, but in Grass’s suppressed version of the
fairy tale, the male penchant for violent conquest takes center stage: “He wants
to be unconquerable in war. . . . He wants to attain goals, to rule the world, to
subjugate nature, to rise above the earth” (349; 445). The result of this Faustian
striving has been as devastating to the environment as it has to its human vic-
tims. In subsequent works, such as Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986), Totes Holz
(Dead wood, 1990), and The Call of the Toad, Grass returns to the theme of
impending ecological catastrophe that he sounds for the first time in The
Flounder. Shortly before he is about to be dropped back into the polluted wa-
ters of the Baltic Sea, the flounder imagines a world without humans: “Nature
would owe you a debt of thanks. Our planet would have a chance to regener-
ate. . . . Once again the oceans would breathe easy” (401; 509). In the view
expressed here, the precondition for the healing of the planet is the eradication
of human life. It is thus unsurprising that Grass’s late work takes on an increas-
ingly apocalyptic tone.
Coda
Günter Grass’s sudden death on April 13, 2015, after a brief illness, prompted
a predictable outpouring of grief and lengthy obituaries about his long career.
No one questioned that Grass had been a defining figure in the history of Ger-
many’s postwar literature. No one doubted his commitment to democracy, al-
though some wondered if his fiction had suffered as his focus shifted to con-
temporary events. Thus many remembered him as an author whose best book
was his first book. Alongside the many accolades of his work and fond memo-
ries of private moments, there was a sense, among some, that Grass had out-
lived his time. In an editorial published in the New York Times on the day after
Grass died, Jochen Bittner, an opinion writer and political editor for Die Zeit,
confessed that he “didn’t much like the work of Günter Grass,” and went on to
make it clear that he didn’t much like the man either.47 Bittner portrays Grass
as a self-righteous hypocrite, who condemned others loudly for their complic-
ity in the Nazi past while he remained silent about his own membership in the
Waffen-SS until very late in life. Even more outrageous than his ham-fisted
critique of Israel in the poem “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be
Said,” 2012), argues Bittner, was Grass’s delusional belief that “he spoke for
all of Germany” when he voiced his personal opinion. Self-appointed spokes-
men for the German nation such as Thomas Mann and Günter Grass may have
served a useful purpose in times when “the country needed intellectual leaders
who epitomized certainty, however vain they came across,” Bittner concludes,
but in our ambiguous and rapidly changing world, that time is past.
While it may seem tasteless to rush into print with a denunciation of a
man who had literally died the day before, Bittner broaches topics that seem
sure to recur in future discussions of Grass’s life and work. His long conceal-
ment of his SS membership did leave a lasting stain on his legacy. His public
insistence that Israel posed a threat to world peace went far beyond the sort of
polite criticism of particular Israeli policies that have gradually become per-
missible in German political discussions. Grass thus inevitably raised suspi-
cions that deep-seated prejudices of the former SS soldier had risen to the
surface in his final years and were now being recorded with the author’s “last
ink” (mit letzter Tinte).48
Nevertheless, acknowledging Grass’s shortcomings should not obscure
his substantial contributions to the political discourse and literary scene of
postwar and postreunification Germany, which can be stressed by four con-
cluding points. First, while Grass was wrong to be less than entirely forthcom-
ing about his own involvement in the Nazi past, he was right to challenge his
fellow Germans to confront that past, at a time when many who had done far
worse were being far less open than he was. Second, Grass was a refugee who
refused to succumb to revanchism. He devoted his literary career to the re-
creation of a lost homeland that was caught in the crosshairs of history, reject-
ing the sentimental yearning for a safe haven he had never known. He then
used his own experience of displacement to argue, early and often, for a new
understanding of Germany as a land of immigration (“Einwanderungsland”)
and ethnic diversity, in a way that was diametrically opposed to the ideology he
had absorbed in his youth.49 Third, Grass spoke as a prophet of doom and an
advocate of change. He foresaw the catastrophic potential of nuclear war and
global warming and did his best—like his patron saint Sisyphus—to fight
against the force of gravity. Fourth and finally, Grass remained a creative writer
as well as a political polemicist, believing, to the end, in the liberating potential
of the literary imagination.
Chapter 10
Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past
In the years after German reunification, readers and critics awaited the defini-
tive Wenderoman, the novel that would immortalize the events of 1989–90 in
the way that The Tin Drum had done for the Second World War.1 In this case, the
story to be told was a happy one—not Germany’s descent into madness, its
provocation of war and perpetration of unspeakable crimes against humanity,
but the peaceful reunion of a people that had been divided by unnatural political
boundaries. “What belongs together will grow together” (Es wächst zusammen,
was zusammen gehört), proclaimed former German chancellor Willi Brandt in
November 1989, and his prophecy has proven correct in subsequent years: al-
though disparities between the former East and West remain, a single, sovereign
German state has been in place since the celebrations of October 3, 1990.
Novels have been written and films directed about the process of reunifi-
cation, although frequently not in a triumphant mode. The film Good Bye
Lenin (2003) evokes a wistful image of the GDR that might have been, while
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) casts a harsh light on the
police surveillance state that actually existed. Günter Grass’s novel Ein Weites
Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995) portrays the process of reunification as a hostile
takeover of the East by the West, while Ingo Schulz’s Simple Stories (1998)
offers an East German perspective on the often-traumatic effects of reunifica-
tion. Despite these and many other critical commentaries on the German
Wende, or turn toward national unity, there have been moments of unmitigated
ecstasy. “Wir sind Papst!” screamed the tabloid press when Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger was named pope in 2005, initiating a decade of good news that in-
cluded the successful hosting of the World Cup soccer tournament in 2006, the
pop singer Lena’s victory in the 2011 Eurovision song contest, and the German
soccer team’s triumph in the 2014 World Cup. Such events seemed sources of
legitimate pride and harmless patriotism for a nation that has long labored be-
neath the burden of the Nazi past, resuscitating the hope that Germany might
someday be a “normal” nation.
237
The process of German national reunification is part of the story of the

past few decades, but only part. Germany has become an integral member of
the European Union, giving up its national currency and opening its borders to
other cosigners of the Schengen Agreement. To some, nationalism is on its way
to becoming a thing of the past, as Europeans join together in a cosmopolitan
community that transcends national borders; others observe that the European
Union has raised new fences even as it opens up the old, establishing a perim-
eter around Fortress Europe designed to keep new immigrants out and existing
minorities down.2 While the appeal of anti-immigration movements fueled by
barely concealed racist sentiments has grown among certain segments of to-
day’s Europe, other Europeans have long since accepted the inevitability and
desirability of a more mobile and diverse society. Now as in the past, people
move and mix; notions of national identity based on ethnic “purity” are as de-
lusionary today as they were in previous centuries. The novels of Yadé Kara
(cited in chapter 2) combine the story of German unification with that of Euro-
pean diversification, countering the centripetal pull of the nation with the cen-
trifugal forces of a global diaspora. Fatih Akin’s acclaimed films and Emine
Sevgi Özdamar’s prizewinning fiction portray characters of mixed heritage
who move across national borders, destabilizing notions of a natural or normal
national identity.
In this chapter, I discuss two best-selling novels of the early twenty-first
century: Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World,
2005) and Christian Kracht’s Imperium (2012). As has frequently been the
case among writers of previous generations, both contemporary authors write
about Germany from the perspective of its periphery: Kehlmann, “the son of
a prominent German-Jewish theater director,”3 was born in Munich but raised
in Austria; Kracht is Swiss but “grew up in the south of France, the United
States and Canada and has since resided all over the world.”4 Kracht’s ac-
claimed first novel, Faserland (1995), follows its perpetually inebriated pro-
tagonist on a southward journey from Germany’s northernmost fish kiosk on
the island of Sylt to Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Munich, before he
eventually crosses the border into Switzerland. The word Faser means “fiber”
or “thread”; thus the title Faserland suggests a land that is coming apart at the
seams, a nation in tatters, a problematic fatherland pronounced with a thick
German accent. In the more recent Imperium, Kracht shifts the focus from
Germany’s present to its imperial past, telling the tale of a Wilhelmine oddball
who sails to Germany’s colonies in the Pacific around 1900. Kehlmann also
writes a work of historical fiction, although his is set in Germany’s precolo-
nial era, combining an account of Alexander von Humboldt’s explorations in
Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past 239
South America with episodes from the life of the mathematician Carl Fried-
rich Gauss.
The success of Measuring the World and Imperium is symptomatic of a
widespread recent interest in German imperialism, for which I can suggest
several reasons. Historians want to set the record straight: although Germany
began to acquire overseas colonies later than other major European powers and
lost them sooner, there was a period of several decades in which Germany was
a major player on the global stage.5 Investigations of German colonialism in-
evitably raise questions about possible links between Germany’s Second Em-
pire and its third: did imperial Germany’s participation in the scramble for
Africa prefigure its quest for Eastern European Lebensraum? Did the Herero
massacre set the stage for the Holocaust?6 The increasingly diverse societies in
today’s Germany, Austria, and Switzerland also prompt investigations of the
past. Although minorities in German-speaking countries are more likely to be
the descendants of postwar Gastarbeiter or more recent economic or political
refugees than to be former colonial subjects, they raise issues of religious dif-
ference and ethnic diversity common to other postcolonial European countries.
Specific to Germany is the still-recent history of reunification in 1989–90,
which, as noted, was perceived by some as the West German colonization of
the East. Global tensions in the post-9/11 world add to the renewed interest in
imperial politics. Germany has sometimes been a reluctant participant in the
“coalition of the willing” assembled to combat the threat of global terrorism,
while revelations of wiretapping by the US National Security Agency is one of
many instances that have left embittered German officials feeling like abused
subjects of an imperial power. The recent scholarly interest in the literature of
travel, colonialism, and cross-cultural encounters is matched by ongoing popu-
lar interest in the same. Thus it is not astonishing that together with films and
novels about national unification, we find popular fiction about Germany’s im-
perial past.7
Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World
“What a wonderful country Germany must be,” exclaimed Tom LeClair in his
review of Measuring the World for the New York Times, where a novel on the
intellectual level of a work by Thomas Pynchon can displace Harry Potter and
the potboilers of Dan Brown from the top of the German best-seller lists.8 Mea-
suring the World was one of the great publishing success stories of early
twenty-first-century Germany.9 For thirty-five consecutive weeks, it remained
at the top of Der Spiegel’s list of best-selling novels; more than a million copies
were sold in Germany even before the paperback edition appeared, and it was
quickly translated into over forty languages. The work garnered critical praise
as well as popular success, winning Kehlmann several literary prizes and soon
inspiring a burgeoning critical industry. Despite positive reviews and some
success abroad, Measuring the World was not an international blockbuster on
the scale of previous postwar best sellers such as Patrick Süskind’s Perfume
(1985) or Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995), perhaps be-
cause foreign readers were less likely to be familiar with Humboldt and Gauss
or because it does not deal directly with the Nazi past.10 Reviewers marveled at
the phenomenon of a German writer with a sense of humor, perhaps revealing
their own prejudices more than insight into contemporary German fiction.
Measuring the World does have a light touch and a marvelous sense of humor,
but it also broaches questions of a more serious philosophical and political
nature, concerning the effort to map the world and to determine Germany’s
place within it.
Measuring the World begins with a border crossing. Professor Gauss has
reluctantly agreed to leave his home in Göttingen to attend a conference in
Berlin. Accompanied by his son, Eugen, Gauss arrives at the Prussian border,
where a gendarme demands to see their passports. Eugen can only produce a
letter from the Prussian court that grants him permission to travel with his fa-
ther to Berlin. Gauss has nothing: “No passport, asked the gendarme, aston-
ished, no piece of paper, no official stamp, nothing?”11 Gauss impatiently ob-
serves that the last time he had crossed the border, twenty years ago, there had
been no need for a passport, while Eugen tries to explain that his father has
been invited by the Royal Society and, thus, could almost be considered a per-
sonal guest of the king. The gendarme is unimpressed and demands again to
see Gauss’s nonexistent passport. At this point, a stranger at a neighboring ta-
ble shouts that Germany will soon be free and that scraps of paper will no
longer be necessary when traveling from one part of the nation to the next. He
runs out the door, pursued by the outraged gendarme, and Eugen takes the op-
portunity to lift the barrier that marks the border crossing. “Then they drove
onto Prussian soil” (8; 12).
In a few deft strokes, Kehlmann sketches the characters and fills in the
political setting. We meet the self-absorbed Gauss, his long-suffering son, and
a humorless policeman who sets off in pursuit of a political dissident in a slap-
stick scene worthy of the Keystone Cops. The year is 1828, during the reaction-
ary Restoration that followed on the heels of the revolutionary era. As a univer-
sity student, Eugen is immediately suspected of political radicalism, a suspicion
that his favorite book, Friedrich Jahn’s Deutsche Turnkunst (German gymnas-
tics, 1816), would have confirmed had his father not tossed it out of the car-
riage window. In Berlin, Eugen will drift into a clandestine meeting of revolu-
tionary patriots, only to be arrested and barely escape a long prison sentence by
being banished to America. Thus Kehlmann evokes the period of Prussian as-
cendency, in which the authoritarian government of an increasingly dominant
German province works to suppress the aspirations of liberal nationalists.
Gauss remains oblivious to the political situation, just as, as a young man,
he had been unaware of Napoleon’s existence until long after the French gen-
eral had begun his conquests. Now, years later, Gauss proudly tells the gen-
darme that Napoleon had decided not to bombard Göttingen because he wanted
to spare the life of the mathematical genius, blithely unaware that the mere
mention of Prussia’s former archenemy would further provoke the Prussian
official. Gauss has no sympathy with the anti-Prussian patriots; he declares
Jahn’s book worthless, after a cursory examination, and remains unmoved by
the disturbance provoked by the political dissident, calmly finishing his soup
while Eugen engineers his escape. Gauss will later do little or nothing to free
his son from the clutches of the Prussian police, accepting Eugen’s banishment
as inevitable, apparently without deep regret.
Gauss would therefore seem to be the proverbial nonpolitical German,
keeping his head in the clouds (with his mathematical speculations) while ig-
noring injustice on the ground. Yet Gauss, as portrayed in Kehlmann’s novel, is
not quite as naive as he seems at first glance. As the child of a lower-class fam-
ily, he experienced injustice at an early age, being beaten at school by a tyran-
nical teacher for no good reason and expected to perform mathematical tricks
like a trained monkey for an arrogant and ignorant aristocrat. Later, Gauss will
drive a hard bargain with a count who receives him with the condescension of
a mighty lord, even though Gauss can see through his pretensions, and Gauss
understands that his son’s corrupt prison guard in Berlin wants to be bribed,
even though Humboldt refuses to believe it. Gauss’s seeming political indiffer-
ence is actually a reflection of a deeper pessimism. He knows that princes will
soon be as obsolete as the barber who yanks out the wrong tooth with filthy
pliers, but he also knows that he is doomed to live now, not later.
The sense of pessimism that informs Gauss’s view of his life and times
carries over into his scientific work. Gauss is aware that he is smarter than his
contemporaries, and he knows that his maps and measurements are more pre-
cise than anything that has been done before. But he is also aware that the
world is in a state of constant flux and that any attempt to pin it down will in-
evitably fail. Early on, he realizes the limitations of Euclidean geometry: paral-
lel lines eventually meet; “space was folded, bent, and extremely strange” (80;
96). Anticipating the insights of Einstein, Gauss senses that there is no firm
ground in the physical universe: “Space was certainly empty, but it was curved”
(211; 246). What is true of space is also true of time: “Space curved and time
was malleable” (187; 220). When Daguerre fails to capture, in an early photo-
graph, the moment when Humboldt and Gauss first meet, the photographer
exclaims, “Now the moment had been lost forever!” But Gauss refuses to share
his exasperation: “Just like all the others, said Gauss calmly. Like all the oth-
ers” (11; 16).
In Gauss’s view, our attempts to comprehend the world are largely futile:
“Reason shaped absolutely nothing and understood very little” (187; 220).
Gauss does understand that time keeps moving and that even the best that his
unfortunate era had to offer in this “curiously second-class universe” (242;
282) would not last. In comparison with Humboldt, Gauss has a relatively un-
complicated attitude toward sexuality, enjoying the pleasures of a Russian
prostitute and those of his first wife. But his wife dies in childbirth, the prosti-
tute ages and eventually returns to Russia, and even his beloved mother grows
old before his very eyes. Gauss thus combines a baroque awareness of the
transitory nature of life with a modernist sense of the limitations of human
reason when confronted with a vast and malleable universe. No religious faith
relieves his deep sense of melancholy, and he has no hope for political progress
in a world that is fundamentally flawed: “The world seemed so disappointing
as soon as you realized how thinly it was woven, how crudely the illusion was
knitted together, how amateurish the stitches were when you turned it over to
the back” (47; 59).
Against such a worldview, Humboldt’s boundless reverence for nature
and his tireless faith in the human ability to comprehend and quantify it seem
naive. Humboldt is a child of the Enlightenment, infused with romantic sensi-
bilities. He marvels at nature’s wonders, particularly as they are revealed in the
South American wilderness, even as he seeks to measure the world with ever-
greater precision. He takes pride in having “forcibly imposed a web of num-
bers over reluctant nature” (97; 116), and he proclaims late in life that “the end
of the road was in sight, the measuring of the world almost complete” (204;
238). While delivering his famous lectures on the cosmos, Humboldt works
himself into a state of prophetic rapture: “The cosmos would be understood, all
difficulties pertaining to man’s beginnings, such as fear, war, and exploitation,
would sink into the past, . . . Science would bring about an era of the general
good, and who could know if one day it might not even solve the problem of
death” (204; 238–39).
Clearly, sadly, Gauss was right: the Kantian vision of perpetual peace was
not realized then and has not been realized yet, just as Einstein’s theory of
relativity has rendered efforts to fix the world onto a static grid futile. In the
first instance, Kehlmann uses Humboldt’s optimism as a boundless source of
comedy. His Humboldt is a master of denial as well as self-discipline, insisting
that he is not seasick even as he vomits, gagging on ant paste as he proclaims
it a potential solution to the problem of providing food for the expedition, in-
sisting that the pieces of meat with fingers and toes roasting over the fire could
not possibly be human flesh. Humboldt moves through a world of magic, en-
countering sea monsters and hearing tales of talking fish, hallucinating at high
altitude and under the influence of powerful drugs, haunted by encounters with
a sentient jaguar and the ghost of a beloved dog, all while insisting on the sov-
ereignty of human reason and conveniently omitting episodes that would dis-
pute this claim from his written records.
If Gauss appears as the nonpolitical German, too full of Weltschmerz to
present an active challenge to a society that he knows is rampant with injustice,
Humboldt is cast as the prototypical Prussian, the humorless German in pursuit
of precision at the cost of human emotion, a man who uses the brain as a means
of repressing the body. “Did one always have to be so German?” queries Hum-
boldt’s exasperated French traveling companion Bonpland (66; 80). The im-
plicit answer seems to be yes. Bonpland teases Humboldt about the German
lack of humor, to which Humboldt provides an indignant and humorless re-
sponse. One of Humboldt’s first teachers tells him that “anyone innocent of
metaphysical anxiety would never achieve German manhood” (15; 21); one of
the last people to address him on his journey to Central Asia encourages him to
lie about having found a diamond that he did not find: “There was a superficial
truth, and then there was a deeper one . . . Germans in particular understood
this.” (239; 270). Yet, despite the sarcastic barbs hurled at Humboldt and the
Germans, Kehlmann repeatedly reveals the emotional depth that Humboldt is
at pains to deny, lending a certain poignancy to the comedy that surrounds this
figure. Humboldt’s prudish efforts to prevent Bonpland’s sexual pleasure and
Humboldt’s own panic when presented with a complementary prostitute are
the negative counterpart to the homosexual desires that Humboldt is forced to
repress but confesses in his old age to his brother. In his own way, Kehlmann’s
Humboldt is no less a tragic figure than his Gauss: the mathematician knows
that the world is incalculable and that death is inevitable; the naturalist pro-
claims in public that we can measure the world and perhaps even attain im-
mortality, even as his strength ebbs and his sadness grows.
But is Humboldt “typically German”? Not a typical individual in any
sense of the term, the actual Humboldt exuded a boundless physical energy and
intellectual curiosity that made him one of a kind, a unique genius on par with
Goethe and Gauss.12 He was also not a flag-waving German patriot of the sort
that emerged in the course of his lifetime. Humboldt’s deepest desire was to
leave home and travel the world. When he returned to Europe after a five-year
sojourn in the Americas, he moved to Paris, returning to Germany only decades
later, when he had run out of money due to the cost of publishing his books
and, thus, felt compelled to accept the offer to serve at the court of the Prussian
king Frederick Wilhelm III.13 Contemporary witnesses report that Humboldt
spoke in a rapid mixture of German, French, Spanish, and English;14 he wrote
many of his works in French, and although he never returned to the United
States, he maintained, throughout his life, that he considered himself “half an
American.”15 As Laura Dassow Walls puts it in her award-winning study of
Alexander von Humboldt, “he abandoned national loyalties to become the
paradigmatic cosmopolitan, at home everywhere and nowhere, always passing
through, a merchant of knowledge with a bag full of notions.”16
Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos is a thoroughgoing refutation of Mary
Louise Pratt’s relatively brief but influential comments about Humboldt in Im-
perial Eyes, Pratt’s pioneering work of postcolonial studies. In Pratt’s view,
Humboldt crafted an image of South America as a wilderness that evoked a
sense of the sublime in the European traveler, an earthly paradise that was de-
void of significant human civilization and, thus, ripe for conquest. Although
Pratt acknowledges “Humboldt’s liberalism, his support for the French and
American Revolutions, his vehement, lifelong opposition to slavery,” she con-
cludes that “the Personal Narrative naturalizes colonial relations and racial
hierarchy, representing Americans, above all, in terms of the quintessential co-
lonial relationship of disponibilité.”17 To these charges, Walls responds that
Pratt has pressed Humboldt into a rigid dichotomy that pits European villains
against Amerindian victims. “The effect has been to silence Humboldt all over
again,” denying “him the agency to recognize, protest, and on occasion even
subvert those networks [of colonial power].”18 The Humboldt who emerges
from Walls’s study is a thoroughly positive figure, “the ‘enlightened’ discov-
erer, the anticonquistador,”19 the champion of human rights and enemy of hu-
man bondage, a man without a racist bone in his body, who stood at the center
of what Walls terms “‘the Culture of Truth,’ a cosmopolitan, high-minded,
reform-centered clerisy that sought to rise above divisive sectional and national
interests to create a worldwide network of progressive intellectual leaders, au-
thors, and teachers.”20
Walls writes within the context of American studies. Her aggressive effort
to rehabilitate Humboldt’s image (a largely successful effort, to my mind)

serves to highlight the perpetrators of and ideological apologists for nineteenth-
century American imperialism. Humboldt writes at a time before the fatal di-
vorce of science from the humanities; he thus provides scientific support for
his liberal humanism. Once the “two cultures” had taken their separate courses,
Walls contends, any protest against American slavery, the eradication of indig-
enous populations, and the triumphalist rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and
American exceptionalism was delegated to a literature that had lost “its foun-
dational grounding in natural knowledge.” Meanwhile, “under the banner of
‘science,’ forms of racism proliferated and gathered strength.” The promise
that Jefferson and Humboldt had seen in America was betrayed: “Instead of
transforming the globe, the United States would racialize, nationalize, and
militarize its sense of territorial destiny. Instead of catalyzing the world revolu-
tion that would recognize the freedom and independence of all peoples, it
worked to contain and eliminate the threats posed by those peoples.”21
Kehlmann is neither a postcolonial theorist nor an Americanist but, rather,
a German novelist, and his image of Humboldt thus serves different purposes.
In the first instance, his Humboldt is a literary character, and Kehlmann has
insisted on the primacy of the artistic imagination over slavish adherence to
verifiable fact.22 Although his portrait of Humboldt is not devoid of sympathy
and is certainly a source of humor, it is, in the final analysis, far more critical
than that of Walls. Humboldt’s willful blindness to his own weaknesses and
often-hilarious denial of the obvious go hand in hand with his effort to fashion
a public image for himself. Under the most adverse circumstances in the South
American jungles, Humboldt writes eloquent, self-congratulatory letters to his
brother and other prominent European intellectuals. He edits signs of doubt or
personal weakness out of his diaries and is not above lying if it serves his pur-
poses, as when he is willing to maintain that he and Bonpland successfully
climbed to the top of Mount Chimborazo, although they had stopped well short
of the summit. Kehlmann’s Humboldt is fiercely opposed to slavery, denounc-
ing it as “the second greatest insult to Man,” after “the idea that he was de-
scended from the apes!” (203; 238). Yet his efforts to do anything to stop the
“peculiar institution” are at once comically and tragically ineffectual. When
Humboldt witnesses a slave auction in Trinidad, he buys three men and sets
them free. They seem bewildered by his liberal gesture, and the bystanders are
openly amused. Thus Humboldt’s abolitionist interventions come to an abrupt
halt: “When the next auction took place, Humboldt and Bonpland stayed at
home, working behind closed shutters, and only went outside after it was over”
(58; 71). Something similar happens during his conversations with Thomas
Jefferson. At a gala dinner in Washington, Humboldt waxes eloquent about

“the burden of despotism” and “the nightmare of slavery” (181; 212), until
Bonpland kicks him under the table and James Madison discretely whispers
that Jefferson is a slave-owning plantation owner. Humboldt abruptly changes
the subject and does not bring it up again.
If Humboldt avoids open conflict for diplomatic reasons in this instance,
he elsewhere seems oblivious to the political use that can be made of his sci-
entific research. When Humboldt returns to the White House on the following
day, nursing a slight hangover from the previous night’s dinner party, he finds
Jefferson in front of “a map of Central America” that “was lying as if by
chance on the table.” Jefferson pumps him for information about the nature of
the Spanish colonial administration, the size of its army, and the location of its
garrisons. Humboldt eagerly answers all questions, even though, as Jefferson
points out, “he had been traveling under the auspices of the Spanish crown”
and, thus, “might well be bound to silence.” “Oh why, said Humboldt. Who
could it hurt?” He takes at face value Jefferson’s self-deprecating remarks
about the United States as “a tiny Protestant community on the edge of the
world” and “unimaginably far from everything,” even though the American
president is clearly gathering intelligence that could be used for future con-
flicts: “If one had a great power for a neighbor, one could never have enough
information” (182; 213–14). Earlier, Humboldt adamantly denies the possi-
bility that the Aztec Empire once sacrificed twenty thousand people to dedi-
cate a temple. “If such a thing ever happened,” he protests, “the universe
would come to an end,” to which a worker responds that the universe “didn’t
give a shit” (172; 202). “So much civilization and so much horror,” said Hum-
boldt. “What a combination! The exact opposite of everything that Germany
stood for” (177; 208).
Humboldt’s comment is again sadly ironic in light of subsequent histori-
cal developments. Measuring the World brings us only into the early decades
of the nineteenth century, but the trends are already disturbing. The novel be-
gins in the late eighteenth century, when Germany is described as a politically
fragmented nation of farmers ruled by a few obtuse aristocrats. By the time that
Gauss sets off for Berlin in 1828, Prussia has risen, from its humiliating defeat
at the hands of Napoleon, to become a dominant power, though one that rules
through repression inspired by paranoia. The student movement that would
seem to be the liberal alternative to Prussia despotism is represented by a few
caricatured figures who spout patriotic bombast before being hauled off to
prison. The main intellectual inspiration for the movement is not Thomas Jef-
ferson or the leading liberals of the French Revolution but, rather, “Turnvater
Jahn,” an early proponent of romantic nationalism and the cult of the body,
who was also a notorious antisemite and inspired the public book burning dur-
ing the 1817 Wartburg Festival.23 The intellectual and artistic leaders of Wei-
mar classicism might offer a third path between the rabid nationalism of the
student radicals and the Prussian police state, but they, too, are the object of
ridicule in Measuring the World: Goethe grants his oracular blessing to the two
Humboldt boys, but no one can understand it, and Gauss later identifies Goethe
as “the ass who considered himself fit to correct Newton’s theory of light”
(134; 158). Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did his best to do away with his little
brother as a boy, grows up to become a self-important Prussian bureaucrat who
writes sonnets in his spare time with the regularity of a metronome.
Alexander von Humboldt, the liberal cosmopolitan, opponent of slavery,
and enemy of empire, ends up as the Prussian king’s cowed servant, whose fi-
nal expedition is a miserable caricature of his youthful exploits. The man who
had once explored the world fearlessly at his own expense with a sole compan-
ion now marches into Russia guarded by Cossack troops and accompanied by
a growing delegation of academics and journalists. Instead of scaling moun-
tains or pushing into unchartered territory, Humboldt is entrapped by an end-
less series of social events. Old, sick, and exhausted, Humboldt makes incoher-
ent speeches and no significant discoveries. In the end, he becomes something
like Aguirre, the Spanish conquistador turned megalomaniac, whose search for
fabulous riches and infinite power ended in disaster. As a boy, Humboldt and
his brother had “stumbled on a story about Aguirre the Mad, who had re-
nounced his king and declared himself emperor. He and his men traveled the
length of the Orinoco in a journey that was the stuff of nightmares” (15; 21–
22). No one in the past two hundred years had dared to repeat Aguirre’s ill-
fated expedition, but the younger brother said that he “would make the jour-
ney” (16; 22). Humboldt does so, passing, on his way toward great scientific
discoveries and lasting fame, by the places where Aguirre had gone mad. In the
end, when Wilhelm asks his brother if he remembers the time when they had
first read about Aguirre, Alexander says that he does but fears that his efforts
have been in vain: “He no longer believed the future world would care, he also
had doubts about the significance of the journey upriver itself. The channel
didn’t produce any benefit for the continent, it was as abandoned and mosquito-
ridden as ever” (225–26; 264). We last see Humboldt as he returns home from
Russia to Berlin, wondering if, in the end, Gauss had journeyed further in spirit
than Humboldt had done in fact: while Humboldt pushed to the ends of the
earth, Gauss stayed home and made mathematical calculations based on his
quiet observations of the heavens. In retrospect, Humboldt’s seemingly heroic
exploits in the Amazonian jungles appear to him as ultimately futile as those of

his crazed role model Aguirre. We leave Humboldt little better off than Werner
Herzog’s final image of the would-be world conquistador in Aguirre, the Wrath
of God (1972), where Aguirre stands on a sinking raft that spins around and
around, going nowhere.
Christian Kracht, Imperium
Christian Kracht published Imperium in early 2012, to critical acclaim and

public controversy.24 The novel is loosely based on an actual individual, Au-
gust Engelhardt (1875–1919), who turned his back on imperial Germany to
seek a new life in the Pacific islands of New Pomerania, in the Bismarck Ar-
chipelago to the east of Papua New Guinea. In Kracht’s version of the story,
Engelhardt buys a small island and sets about cultivating coconuts, convinced
that modern problems might be solved if only people ate more of the tropical
fruit—in fact, nothing but coconuts. Never having possessed the firmest grasp
on reality, Engelhardt grows stranger on his remote island. At first, he dreams
of drawing fellow enthusiasts to his refuge and then sending his disciples out
into the world to establish a global network of “coconut colonies.”25 Some in-
trepid travelers start to arrive in the German colony, where they worship Engel-
hardt as their savior, but he quickly decides that this sort of adulation is not
what he had in mind, and he gladly pays their way back to Germany. As he
becomes increasingly delusional, the once peace-loving seeker becomes a par-
anoid antisemite. Clearly deranged, the man who used to bite his fingernails
cuts off his own thumb and eats it; he also develops leprous sores on his shins.
Engelhardt’s island idyll is interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.
Australian forces capture the colony and suggest that he might return to Ger-
many, but he spits at their offer and stalks into the jungle. American soldiers
discover him there at the end of the Second World War. He is old, emaciated,
and now missing both thumbs, but he is miraculously cured of his leprosy. The
soldiers pep him up with Coca-Cola, let him listen to music on their transistor
radios, give him a white cotton T-shirt, and offer the former vegetarian a hot
dog while they marvel at his fantastic tale: “Sweet bejesus, that’s one heck of a
story . . . Just wait ’til Hollywood gets wind of this . . . You, sir, will be in pic-
tures” (178–79; 241 [English in the original]).
As the title suggests, Imperium is a novel about empire—three different
empires, to be precise. Most of the novel is set in Germany’s Second Empire,
“at the very beginning of the twentieth century, which until just before the
midpoint of its duration looked as if it would become the Century of the Ger-
mans, the century in which Germany would take its rightful place of honor and
precedence at the table of nations” (8; 18). Such delusions of grandeur lead
from the Second Empire to the Third Reich, “that Great German Death Sym-
phony,” which “might be comical to watch, were unimaginable cruelty not to
ensue; bones, excreta, smoke” (55; 79). During the heyday of German imperi-
alism, entrepreneurs set off “around the globe to create a new Germany” in the
Pacific colonies (57; 82). These colonies at the outer reaches of Germany’s
Second Empire prefigure the death camps on the periphery of the Third Reich.
The narrator evokes the image of his grandparents striding past the Dammtor
train station in Hamburg, “as if they hadn’t noticed those men, women, and
children laden with suitcases loaded onto trains . . . and sent eastward, out to
the edge of the imperium, as if they were already shadows now, already cindery
smoke” (171–72; 231). The American soldiers, finally, slap Engelhardt cheer-
fully on the back as they proclaim that “this is now the imperium” (178; 240).
The narrator then ends the novel by describing the opening scene of a
planned movie about Engelhardt’s life, in words that echo the opening para-
graph of the book. History thus appears in the book as both repetition and
change: one empire has passed away, and another has taken its place. Before
commenting on the nature of the new imperialism, however, let us return to the
elaborately structured sentence that begins the novel.
Beneath long white clouds, beneath the resplendent sun, beneath the pale
firmament could be heard, first, a prolonged tooting; then the ship’s bell
emphatically sounded the midday hour, and a Malaysian boy strode,
gentle-footed and quiet, the length of the upper deck so as to wake with a
circumspect squeeze of the shoulder those passengers who had drifted off
to sleep again just after their lavish breakfast. (3; 11)
More than one critic has noted elements of a Thomas Mann parody in the voice
of the leisurely narrator, who summons up a scene in vivid detail with slightly
affected fussiness, although the threefold repetition of phrases also recalls the
rhythm of the opening lines of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.26 The reference
to a Malaysian servant as a “boy” in the opening sentence is the first instance
of a racist mentality that has been said to permeate Kracht’s novel.27 If one
reads nothing more than the first paragraph, though, it becomes clear that the
narrator is only giving voice to the prejudices of the smugly self-satisfied colo-
nial masters, who are simultaneously skewered with unmistakable sarcasm.
Like Hans Castorp, the first-class passengers doze under the influence of Por-
ter beer, their half-unbuttoned suits stained with yellow curry as they sprawl in
the tropical sun: “Sallow, bristly, vulgar Germans, resembling aardvarks, were
lying there and waking slowly from their digestive naps: Germans at the global
zenith of their influence” (4; 12).
At first glance, the novel’s protagonist, August Engelhardt, would seem to
have nothing in common with the would-be masters of the universe. He is de-
scribed as a harmless eccentric, a shy, bearded, skinny sun worshipper in a
shapeless smock. A militant vegetarian and enthusiastic nudist, he regards his
overstuffed shipmates with disdain and their pork chops with disgust. Yet the
narrator suggests that we would not be amiss to note certain parallels “with a
later German romantic and vegetarian who perhaps ought to have remained at
his easel” (9; 18–19), Adolf Hitler. What could August Engelhardt possibly
have in common with the future German führer? The real August Engelhardt
died in 1919 on a remote Pacific island, just as the discharged Austrian corpo-
ral was beginning to ponder greater things. Engelhardt survives the Second
World War in Kracht’s version of the story, but in utter isolation and ignorance
of historical events. The narrator insists, however, that the parallel between the
two figures “is entirely intentional and naturally, pardon the pun, consistent in
nuce” (9; 19 [translation modified]).
Like Hitler, Engelhardt is a vegetarian and becomes an antisemite; he also
has a vision of the world and a messianic desire to extend it to others. But Hit-
ler started a world war and committed genocide; Engelhardt goes insane on a
desert island. It would therefore be more accurate to speak of a Hitler parody
than a Hitler parallel in Imperium. Like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, Engel-
hardt lords over an imaginary empire, and the German tabloids mockingly por-
tray him in this role: “The Berliner Illustrirte even published a caricature under
the headline Der Kokonuβapostel that showed a very muscular Engelhardt
clothed only in a palm frond, a scepter in one hand, in the other an orb in the
shape of a coconut, black people dressed in the European manner worshipping
at his feet” (116; 161). On another level, however, Engelhardt is a “typically
German” neo-romantic, as Thomas Mann might have described him, a blue-
eyed dreamer from Nuremberg with a Siegfried-like shock of blonde hair, a
nonpolitical visionary, a twentieth-century Taugenichts. For this reason, per-
haps, Kracht stages a series of cameo appearances of well-known artists who
are, in some sense, kindred spirits of August Engelhardt: Kafka, who also dab-
bled in nudism and vegetarianism; Hermann Hesse, who had close ties to the
countercultural community of Ascona;28 and Thomas Mann, an outwardly re-
spectable citizen full of creative impulses and forbidden desires. Hitler makes
no direct appearance in the novel, yet he shadows the work like the embarrass-
ing relative that Mann describes in his essay “Brother Hitler”—the would-be
artist as criminal, charlatan, demagogue, madman. Like Adrian Leverkühn,
Engelhardt wants nothing to do with Germany’s imperial masters, yet he, too,
makes a Faustian bargain that brings him into uncanny proximity to the de-
monic soul of the German people. Mann took his allegory seriously, even
though he admitted that he risked elevating Nazi barbarism to mythic grandeur
in the process. Although Kracht has been accused of doing the same, of using
the ultimate outsider as an inverted image of the mystical inside of the German
soul, he does so with a sense of the grotesque and the absurd that contrast
markedly with Mann’s pathos and profundity. Imperium is a satire of German
imperialism and a send-up of the German soul, not another journey into the
heart of Teutonic darkness.29
America is the last word of Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, and Amer-
ican soldiers announce the dawn of a new empire at the end of Kracht’s Impe-
rium. Despite the sadness and sense of futility that engulf Humboldt and
Gauss near the end of Kehlmann’s novel, the final scene offers a glimpse of
hope, as Gauss’s much-maligned son steps out of his father’s shadow and is
about to set foot in the New World. Kracht’s novel morphs into a Hollywood
movie, as the neo-romantic German visionary is co-opted by the American
culture industry. Kracht continues his quarrel with American culture in his
next novel, Die Toten (The dead, 2016). In a similarly fantastic mixture of fact
and fiction, Kracht envisions the leaders of fascist Germany and imperial Ja-
pan forging a “celluloid axis between Tokyo and Berlin” to counter the “seem-
ingly omnipotent US-American cultural imperialism.”30 The novel, which has
elements of both tragedy and farce, ends when an aspiring German actress
falls to her death from the Hollywood sign, landing hideously disfigured
among the cactus below.
If we strip away the historical garb and dispense with the somewhat tenu-
ous link to Hitler in Imperium, we find in Engelhardt a modern hippie of the
sort that Kracht describes with gleeful venom in Der gelbe Bleistift (The yel-
low pencil, 2000). Kracht wrote this collection of short essays about various
Asian countries while he was working as a correspondent for Die Welt am
Sonntag, a weekly German newspaper.31 The book consists of a series of vi-
gnettes based on the author’s experiences; they tend to be anecdotal in nature
and often stop short of providing what would seem to be crucial information
about the places he visits. As Anke Biendarra observes, Kracht cultivates a nar-
rative persona reminiscent of the nineteenth-century dandy, who adopts a
“light, conversational, and ironic” writing style. “When it comes to global
spaces ruled by hyper-capitalism,” however, “his dislike is scathing.”32
If there are certain parallels between Klaus Theweleit and Günter Grass’s
indictment of patriarchy in the 1970s, the same could be said about Kracht’s
critique of global capitalism and the concept of Empire in the work of Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors of this influential work distinguish be-
tween nineteenth-century imperialism, which they view as an extension of the
nation-state, and Empire, “a new global form of sovereignty” that is “a decen-
tered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates
the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.” Empire had its
origins in Europe and might currently seem to be centered in the United States,
yet Hardt and Negri insist that it is not coterminous with that nation or any
other discrete nation-state. Empire is everywhere: “The concept of Empire is
characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no
limits.” Yet Empire does not go uncontested: against the evil Empire stands the
“multitude,” an inchoate mass united in the struggle against oppression and
from which “new democratic forms and a new constituent power” will emerge
“that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.”33
Faith in the multitude’s revolutionary potential is probably the last thing
one should expect of Christian Kracht, who gained notoriety in the 1990s as
one of several wealthy young writers who had as much sympathy for the op-
pressed masses as his nineteenth-century counterpart might have had with the
slum dwellers of London or Paris.34 His lack of overt sympathy for the “mul-
titude,” however, does not preclude a critical attitude toward “Empire.” While
some readers criticized Kracht for advocating a happy-go-lucky hedonism in
his first novel, a closer look at Faserland reveals a deeply troubled protagonist
who drowns the unresolved traumas of his childhood in rivers of alcohol and
outbursts of misogyny and homophobia.35 He is an outsider within a dissi-
pated crowd of jet-setting pleasure seekers who drift from one party to the
next in the empty pursuit of stylish brands that confer social status and drugs
that procure oblivion.
The same crowd resurfaces in a particularly noteworthy contribution to
The Yellow Pencil, “Après nous le déluge.”36 In this vignette, Kracht mocks a
motley crew of modern freeloaders who have taken up semi-permanent resi-
dence in Goa, India. As he explains, a few beatniks discovered the coastal
province in the early 1960s as they came in search of enlightenment. Hippies
soon followed, looking for peace and love as they trekked the land route over
Turkey and Afghanistan to India. Now a third generation has flown in from
around the globe for fun in the sun and sex on the beach: it includes Jesus
freaks, Scots on ecstasy, a few naked Swiss living with a few naked Japanese
beneath a sacred banyan tree, a Finnish family that flies back to Helsinki once
a year to collect their welfare check, a few fat Russian pedophiles, and a half-
naked Hessian panhandling for a few rupees. Kracht scornfully describes Goa
as an anachronistic Disneyland, a virtual paradise, an anti-Mallorca, where the
privileged dropouts of Western civilization live with callous disregard for the
customs of the local residents. In addition to being the antipode of imperial
Germany’s carnivorous colonialists and a peculiar brother of Hitler in his quest
to conquer the world in the name of the coconut, August Engelhardt also an-
ticipates the countercultural dropouts that Kracht encounters on the beaches of
today’s India. He, too, is a self-absorbed, would-be prophet who sinks into
obscurity on his own desert island, only to resurface with a hot dog in his hand
and a bottle of Coca-Cola at his lips. Kracht’s Engelhardt thus not only offers
a satirical look at Germany’s imperial past but also prefigures a new kind of
imperial subject, the parasitic dregs of Western welfare societies living in self-
indulgent pseudo-poverty on the margins of the modern Empire.
Chapter 11
Conclusion: National Literature in an

Era of World Literature
This book consists of a series of thematically related close readings focused on

questions of identity in relation to socially constructed space. I noted at the
outset that in terms of authors discussed, this study makes no pretense to sys-
tematic coverage of the field of German-language literature. In retrospect, the
same is true regarding the study’s thematic focus. Questions of religion, phi-
losophy, the supernatural, and the paranormal get short shrift. Love, sex, mar-
riage, and the family fall largely by the wayside. This book is silent on the topic
of language and language crisis. Only passing reference is made to literature
and the environment. The history of the book in relation to technological in-
novation and the advent of other media remain outside the purview of this
study, and one could doubtless almost indefinitely extend the list of topics that
this book does not explore. German literary critics sometimes speak of filling
a gap in one’s knowledge of a field (Bildungslücke), as if there were a finite
number of themes to consider, so that the edifice of our erudition would one
day be complete. In fact, however, the field is more like the Internet, infinitely
capable of absorbing more data and facilitating endless discussion.
Imperial Fictions is an effort to break down the notion of the nation-state
as the primary means of organizing political space and to break open the sense
of a single national identity. I have used the term empire as a way to describe
heterogeneously organized political space and to explore identities constituted
in multiplicity, as various authors reflect in their works on the tensions between
local loyalties and larger political affiliations. The nation-state does not disap-
pear entirely from the picture, but it plays a relatively minor role in German
history. In the Middle Ages, individual courts served as cultural centers against
the backdrop of rival claims to the imperial throne and tensions between church
and state. Power shifted to the imperial cities during the early modern era and
from the cities to the territories in the eighteenth century. The French Revolu-
255
tion disseminated the idea of the modern nation throughout Europe and in-
spired German patriots to explore their cultural heritage and dream of political
unity. When that unity came, however, it was in the form of a federated struc-
ture of semiautonomous regions under Prussian hegemony, each with their lo-
cal traditions and dialects. In this regard, imperial Germany looked back to the
Holy Roman Empire; in other ways, it anticipated the Third Reich, repressing
internal dissent and presenting an increasingly belligerent face to the rest of the
world. Today’s Federal Republic of Germany was founded in opposition to
Nazi Germany’s totalitarian state, supporting human rights and shunning mili-
tary conflict. It continues to negotiate intra-German tensions in the wake of
reunification, even as it seeks to strike a balance between national interests and
its European allies and to assimilate recent immigrants into an increasingly
diverse population.
Despite all its attempts to problematize and pluralize questions of na-
tional identity, Imperial Fictions focuses on writers who mostly would have
considered themselves German (among other things) and who wrote in some
form of the German language, as it evolved over the centuries. In other words,
I am still contributing to the history of the national literature, broadly con-
ceived, even if I am challenging the norm of the nation-state as the political
organization in which that literature was written. In this conclusion, I thus
reflect on the relationship between the study of national literatures and world
literature today. I do so from the perspective of someone who studies German
literature but is not a German citizen and does not live in Germany—from the
perspective, that is, of an Auslandsgermanist. In the past, such figures have
sometimes been treated as a curiosity by those within the fold of the father-
land, but literary criticism by non-German writers is more often simply ig-
nored, particularly if it is not written in German.1 That situation has begun to
change in recent decades, however, as literary theory has become a lingua
franca for the international community of scholars, essentialist notions of the
nation have been challenged, and new academic organizations have arisen for
the study of German culture outside the boundaries of the nation-state (e.g.,
the German Studies Association and the Internationale Vereinigung für Ger-
manistik). The study of German literature has gone global, but where does it
stand in relation to the concept of world literature?
World literature is cool today, or, to vary the metaphor, a hot topic in the
American academy. As our student bodies have grown more diverse and as the
mood (among left-leaning academics, in any case) has shifted from self-
congratulatory celebrations of American exceptionalism to painful reflections
on the legacy of slavery, the eradication of indigenous peoples, the destruction
Conclusion 257
of the environment, and the ongoing inequities in the world economy, Eurocen-
tric “great books” classes have yielded to surveys of world literature. Those
who design such courses are acutely aware that “coverage” is even less possi-
ble than it was for the study of single national literatures, but they attempt, in
various ways, to give voice to previously silenced peoples and traditions, while
challenging the assumption of Western cultural supremacy.2 Goethe’s procla-
mation that national literature meant little already in the 1820s seems more apt
than ever today: “now is the time for world literature” (die Epoche der Weltlit-
eratur ist an der Zeit).3
Indeed it is. Yet the study of world literature need not preclude the study
of national literatures. As I noted earlier, Goethe’s understanding of world lit-
erature depends on the notion of discrete national literatures, and there is no
need to force a choice today; there is or should be room for both. Before mak-
ing the case for the continued study of national literatures, however, I turn
briefly to the work of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova.
For those who might assume that the study of national literature seems limiting
in today’s globalized world, it is interesting to discover elements of residual
parochialism in the innovative work of these writers. The study of world litera-
ture can expand our horizons, but it can also contract them in new and unex-
pected ways.
Generations of scholars have marveled at the breadth of Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis, as it takes us on a journey from Odysseus’s scar and Abraham’s sac-
rifice to the work of Virginia Woolf. But Damrosch’s What Is World Literature
makes Auerbach look like a Eurocentric provincial. Damrosch’s book jumps
all over the place, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to a Guatemalan testimonial,
from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages, from the Aztecs to Kafka. As a pub-
lisher might boast, Damrosch covers twice as much in half the length of Auer-
bach’s tome. The historical scope, geographical reach, and linguistic breadth of
Damrosch’s work are dazzling, and his readings are consistently thought-
provoking. The curmudgeon might argue that Damrosch offers us something
of a scattershot approach to literary history, as opposed to Auerbach’s carefully
chronological investigation of “the representation of reality in Western litera-
ture,” and that Auerbach could at least read the languages of the works that he
cites in long passages from the original at the beginning of each chapter,
whereas it seems unlikely that Damrosch has mastered Babylonian cuneiform,
Egyptian hieroglyphs, and ancient Aztec. One might counter that Damrosch’s
study gains a broader, if admittedly partial, scope, even if some textual details
are inevitably lost in translation. To his credit, Damrosch urges the importance
of language learning and acknowledges the limitations of textual analysis by
those without access to the original language. In the hands of a less conscien-
tious critic or—perhaps more to the point—a cost-cutting administrator, how-
ever, the oxymoronic notion of an Anglophone world literature can be used to
justify slashing the budgets for literatures other than English while taking
credit for extending the global reach of the local curriculum.4
Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” was an early salvo in
his assault on the priestly cult of close reading practiced in the ivory towers of
elite institutions.5 Moretti seeks the broad vistas granted by distant reading. He
rejects the arcane analysis of individual texts and innovatively uses digital
technology to trace the global flows of literary forms. National literatures grow
like trees, he contends, branching out from a single trunk into multiple vari-
ants, much as modern European languages evolved out of an Indo-European
source. World literature, in contrast, moves like waves, sweeping aside local
difference the way Starbucks and McDonald’s have conquered world cultures:
“Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what markets
do.”6 Moretti goes on to explore the “Darwinian morphospace” of world litera-
ture,7 in which literary forms and genres engage in a ruthless struggle for sur-
vival. Unlike Damrosch, who welcomes the cultural enrichment that results
from literatures “that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in transla-
tion or in the original language,”8 Moretti laments the cultural impoverishment
that results from the global hegemony of relatively few major players: “‘From
the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature,’
reads the Communist Manifesto, but that’s not how it is,” insists Moretti:
“rather, there arises a planetary reproduction of a couple of national literatures
that find themselves in a particularly lucky position.”9
In a sense, Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel reproduces the narra-
tive of the German Sonderweg, although it focuses on the lucky winners in the
literary marketplace, who emerge, not coincidentally, from centralized nation-
states. Jane Austen’s fiction gravitates toward the national capital; Walter
Scott patrols the border. Balzac and Dickens place their stamp on Paris and
London, and in due course, “two cities, London and Paris, rule the entire con-
tinent for over a century, publishing half (if not more) of all European novels”
and exerting an irresistible influence over writers elsewhere: “French and
English novels become models to be imitated.”10 “In the novels taking place in
France, Britain, Russia, and Spain (that is, in long-established nation-states),
the hero’s trajectory towards the capital city is usually very direct; in the Ger-
man, Swiss, and Italian texts, the lack of a national center produces by con-
trast a sort of irresolute wandering (which is however also a way of ‘unifying’
a nation that does not exist yet).”11 In this view, the timid souls of the German
Conclusion 259
Kulturnation wander irresolutely through the wilderness of a politically frag-

mented landscape, and the British and French masters of the universe stride
like Rodin’s Balzac across a continent constrained to follow in their
footsteps—“which is not a nice image, of course. But when you study the
market, that is what you find.”12
Moretti tells a tale of two cities, but for Pascale Casanova, there is only
one: Paris. Her decidedly Franco-centric view in The World Republic of Letters
once again consigns Germany to a place on the periphery of European culture.
Casanova outlines what amounts to a two-phase theory of literary history. In
phase 1, national literatures in the vernacular take shape during the early mod-
ern period. This development is directly linked to the rise of nation-states cen-
tered on royal courts, thus placing “belated” nations, such as Germany and It-
aly, at a distinct disadvantage. By the eighteenth century, the “triumph of
French was . . . so complete, both in France and in the rest of Europe, and its
prestige so unchallengeable, that its claim to superiority came to be true as a
matter of fact no less than of opinion.”13 Having attained hegemony in the
competition between national literatures in the eighteenth century, Paris be-
came the center of world literature in the nineteenth: “It was through this very
process of emancipation from national politics that Paris became the world
capital of literature.”14 Casanova’s phase 2 of literary history begins when au-
thors not fortunate enough to have been born in France realize that the only
way to escape the purgatory of provincialism is to move to Paris, where they
can ascend to the celestial realm of world literature. “Consecration in Paris is
indispensable for authors from all dominated literary spaces,” Casanova as-
serts, because “Paris has become the place where books—submitted to critical
judgment and transmuted—can be denationalized and their authors made uni-
versal.”15 Thus James Joyce and Samuel Beckett made the pilgrimage from
Ireland to Paris in the quest for universality, Kafka escaped the clutches of
Prague only when he was posthumously lifted up into world literature by
French existentialists, and the Latin American Boom became audible only
when it reverberated in French.
Casanova’s World Republic of Letters continues a tradition that extends
back at least as far as King Frederick II’s De la littérature allemande (On Ger-
man literature, 1780). In a passage cited by Casanova, the Prussian king frankly
acknowledges the supremacy of French literature and urges the Germans to
concede defeat: “We are ashamed that in certain genres we cannot equal our
neighbors . . . Let us therefore not imitate the poor who wish to pass for the
rich, let us acknowledge our destitution in good faith.”16 In a sense, Casanova
simply repeats Goethe’s admission, in “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser,”
that a nation without a central capital cannot produce a classical literature, but
she ignores both his contention that the Germans do not want the sort of up-
heavals that might produce such national unity and his consistent stress on the
cultural benefits of regional diversity. To those not living in Paris, Casanova’s
World Republic of Letters recalls the famous map of the world on the cover of
the New Yorker magazine, in which everything to the west of the Hudson River
fades to a blur. Global cities have their own provincialism. Moretti’s distant
readings are so distant that close attention to particular texts is lost: the modern
novel substitutes for the entirety of literary history, and he, too, reproduces the
narrative of Anglo-Franco hegemony, if with an apologetic shrug of the shoul-
ders. Damrosch, finally, opens a window to world literature in translation that
should encourage in-depth study of other languages and cultures but can result
in the new parochialism of an Anglophone globalism.
My point here is not to reject these theorists out of hand or to dismiss the
various pedagogical models for the teaching of world literature today but,
rather, to suggest that in covering more, they also cover less. There is still a
place for the study of national languages and literatures in our era of world
literature, particularly if the two are conceived as being in a reciprocal relation
of mutual benefit. The contributors to David E. Wellbery and Judith Ryan’s
New History of German Literature, for instance, offer an admirable example of
an approach to literary history that is nationally specific, historically deep, in-
formed by knowledge of the original language, open to a wide range of literary
genres, and able to place individual writers and texts into literary-historical
context. Heinz Schlaffer’s Short History of German Literature, in contrast, re-
produces, in abbreviated form, the prejudices of earlier generations, casting
aside entire centuries as unworthy of detailed discussion, to focus on a limited
number of the usual suspects. Women writers and minorities have no place in
his vision of the national literature.
Schlaffer is nevertheless adamant in his insistence that the history of
German literature reveals not the essence of the national character but, rather,
only the educational history of a cultural elite.17 “The continuity of a German
literature from the eighth century to the present suggested by literary histories
is an invented tradition.”18 In this regard, Schlaffer is in the mainstream of
literary critics and cultural historians today, for whom antipathy toward na-
tional essentialism has become an article of faith—for good reasons. Invent-
ing traditions can help to forge a sense of common community, but what keeps
some in can shut others out, like the landlady in Selam Berlin who slams the
door in Hasan Kazan’s face when he appears to rent a room or like the Jews
sent to their deaths on the edges of the empire in Kracht’s Imperium. For this
Conclusion 261
reason, cultural critics today have turned their attention to the centrifugal
forces that scatter nationalist myths of historical continuity and rigid identi-
ties, looking to groups that are more hybrid than homogeneous and to indi-
viduals who forge new alliances by drawing on transnational cultural flows
rather than seeking to center themselves in a single national tradition. Identi-
ties constituted in multiplicity across various geographical and virtual spaces
are most obviously exemplified by migrants and minorities in today’s Europe,
but they do not have a monopoly on overlapping and conflicted allegiances.
Hasan Kazan’s reflections on the ways in which he is and is not “typically
Turkish” could be reproduced in the mind of an imaginary Bavarian, who
might feel a sense of belonging in a variety of ways to his local province, the
German nation, the European Union, and the Catholic Church; who might like
Leberkäse but loathe Bayern München—typical for him, as Hasan would say,
but perhaps not for his fellow Bavarians.
Essentialism can cut both ways. The neo-national, anti-immigration par-
ties in today’s Europe can direct hostility toward those who do not look or
worship like “real” Europeans, while marginalized minorities, such as those
portrayed in Kara’s Café Cyprus, can boast that they are producing new cul-
tural mixtures of a sort that has never been seen before, tacitly setting their
cultural hybridity against an oversimplified model of national subjects locked
in their homogeneous identities. As Monika Albrecht has argued, the rhetorical
move deployed by characters in Kara’s fiction mirrors that of much recent
cultural criticism: “Critics first construct a belief in a ‘homogenous German
culture’ and then accuse the Germans of not seeing its fictitiousness. They
likewise construct the idea of German cultural essentialism and then blame the
Germans for this conviction.” Albrecht hastens to add that she “does not sug-
gest that the entire native German public happily embraces people with mi-
grant backgrounds,”19 which points toward a crucial difference between minor-
ity and mainstream discourses. Both arguments rely on essentialist notions of
the nation, although one group embraces the myth in order to reject newcom-
ers, while the other rejects the myth’s believers in order to assert their innova-
tive, transnational identities.
Access to power is not equal between the two camps: those ensconced
within the walls of Fortress Europe enjoy comforts denied to those seeking to
cross the Mediterranean in leaking boats or living in the poverty-stricken sub-
urbs of European capitals. Hasan’s statement is an act of defiance, claiming
pride in what has been used to stigmatize himself and others like him. By as-
serting a sense of solidarity with his fellow minorities in London and by setting
his group against an allegedly monolithic British majority, Hasan practices
what Gayatri Spivak calls a “strategic essentialism,”20 aware of the socially

constructed character of supposedly natural distinctions and yet willing to use
certain myths for the furtherance of social justice. Unlike people in the past
who invented traditions to place themselves within the imagined community of
the nation, however, Hasan distances himself from the nation to declare his al-
legiance to a transnational community.
If essentialism is the enemy, what is the alternative if we are to continue
to speak of national literatures today? Here, it is useful to recall Goethe’s
comments on world literature. I noted earlier that they oscillate between as-
sertions of absolute difference between nations and their literatures and en-
couragement of international exchange. Goethe’s own long literary career
pays eloquent testimony to his receptivity to foreign influence and his ability
to assimilate the most varied traditions into his work. What is true for Goethe
is equally true for the history of German literature. From the decisive impact
of courtly French romance on the work of Gottfried von Strasbourg and Wol-
fram von Eschenbach to Thomas Mann’s productive assimilation of Russian
and Scandinavian influences into Buddenbrooks, German literature has al-
ways been world literature.21
In the context of my discussion of Goethe, I contrasted Emily Apter’s
Against World Literature with Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated. While
Apter waves a yellow flag to slow down the circulation of national traditions
robbed of their local specificity and linguistic difference in the whirlwind of
the world literature curriculum, Walkowitz encourages the acceleration of liter-
ary particles that circle the globe and shred national singularities. We find a
similar tension within Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s often cryptic but sugges-
tive comments in Death of a Discipline. Like Apter, Spivak defines globaliza-
tion as “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” and de-
cries “the efforts of the world literaturists, the Encyclopedists,” who are
complicit in this process of leveling.22 In response, Spivak reiterates her “con-
cern for the literary specificity of the autochthone” (15), meaning, in Haun
Saussy’s gloss on the term, “literally the person ‘sprung from the very earth,’
the person with an absolutely prior claim to home.” Saussy goes on to note that
Spivak is playing “a risky game” with this appeal to intact indigeneity, one that
is “apt to find itself described as Luddite, anti-intellectual, nostalgic, essential-
ist (‘strategically’ or not), hypocritical—the critique is by now routine.”23 Spi-
vak’s argument is more complicated than it seems, however, which Saussy
underscores by noting her advocacy for “the kind of language training that
would disclose the irreducible hybridity of all languages.”24 “That gives one
pause,” Saussy comments, asking, “How but in a very subtle dialectic does
Conclusion 263
hybridity, of all things, become irreducible? Isn’t it the property, so to speak, of

hybridity to wear its conflicted origin on its sleeve, to exist as a dialogue of
things to which it might be historically reduced (‘led back’)?”25
We are, in other words, once again moving within the orbit of Goethe’s
utterances about world literature, as they circle between assertions of national
autochthony and insistence on transnational hybridity, between notions of na-
tional literatures as discrete expressions of deeply rooted identities and as per-
meable sites of ongoing transformation. We could call his comments contradic-
tory or, as I have suggested, strategic, deployed—first one way and then
another—to counter the opposing excesses of national chauvinism and global
homogeneity. Spivak’s paradoxical reference to “the irreducible hybridity of
all languages” could be applied with equal profit to the irreducible hybridity of
all national literatures. To return to an idea that I broached in the introduction
to this study, national literature, thus conceived, is aufgehoben within world
literature; that is, it is there both canceled and preserved. Azade Seyhan pro-
vides one example of what I have in mind, when she reveals that the fiction of
Emine Sevgi Özdamar contains a palimpsest of Turkish idioms beneath the
German surface of her prose.26 Tobias Boes offers a second, when he shows
how the quintessentially national genre of the bildungsroman is shot through
with cosmopolitan elements.27 Randall Halle, finally, has pursued this argu-
ment in his insightful comments about contemporary German cinema, in which
he underscores the transnational nature of today’s film production and yet in-
sists that national communities and national cinemas persist—not as reposito-
ries of organic authenticity, which they never were, but as sites of irreducible
hybridity, which they have always been.28
I began this study by arguing that Hasan Kazan’s postnational identity in
Yadé Kara’s contemporary fiction is not as new as it seems, that it can serve
as a model for the ways in which identities have been construed in the past.
For this reason, I turned to late antiquity, which has been mined by modern
nationalists as the mother lode of ethnic origins, but which more recent schol-
arship suggests was a period in which, as now, identities were mobile, multi-
ple, and strategic. Much of this study has been devoted to the debunking of
nationalist myths by examining the contested identities and conflicted land-
scapes of writers who were subsequently shoehorned into their place in the
national canon. By framing a discussion of Germany’s national literature in
terms of empires, confederations, and localities rather than the nation-state,
we arrive at a more accurate image of authors who negotiated identities within
overlapping and permeable social spaces during different historical periods.
The nation remains a central category of literary analysis, but one that has
existed largely as a figment of the collective imagination in the past and that,
as now, was shot through with often conflicting pulls of local patriotism and
larger loyalties. Various forms of empire and multiregional confederations de-
scribe most of German political history more accurately than does the modern
nation-state; movement of peoples and mixtures of cultures have been the
norm, not a recent development.
German national literature has played a vital role in expressing the multi-
ple and mobile identities of those within the German lands. At different times,
it has served as a reservoir of cultural unity amid political fragmentation, in-
sisted on regional autonomy or voiced civic loyalties, or looked beyond the na-
tion to forge transnational alliances or declare cosmopolitan allegiances.
German-language authors have absorbed and adapted diverse influences from
the many literatures of the world, while occasionally defining their difference
by resisting foreign influence. Often couched in the language of national essen-
tialism, such calls for the centering of tradition or the expulsion of alien imports
are no less rhetorical strategies than appeals to local, regional, or global citi-
zenry. If we understand national literatures as the expression of cultures consti-
tuted in multiplicity, the site of fluid and ongoing mixtures rather than the source
of rigid identities rooted in an immutable past, they have no need of untram-
meled origins as they move toward an inclusively multifarious future.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History.

2. Ibid., 8. Other works in the burgeoning field of empire studies include Hardt and
Negri, Empire; Howe, Empire; Münkler, Imperien; Parsons, The Rule of Empires; and
Reinhard, Empires and Encounters.
3. Zielonka, Europe as Empire, 1, 15. On the European Union as a kind of empire,
see also Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 414, 439, 456; Münkler, Im-
perien, 253–54.
4. R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 10.
5. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 29–30.
6. R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 235.
7. Ibid., 6–8; Marchand, German Orientalism, xxv–xxvi.
8. “German lands” refers to the German-speaking regions of the Holy Roman Em-
pire (T. Brady, German Histories, 4).
9. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Inven-
tion of Tradition.
10. On the concept of the German Kulturnation and its continuing relevance in
postreunification Germany, see Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, 1–
21.
11. On the process of the formation of the German canon, see Hohendahl, Building
a National Literature.
12. Moretti, Distant Reading, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” and “Style Inc.”
13. Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History.”
14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 4.
15. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 139.
16. El-Tayeb, European Others.
17. Weigel, “On the ‘Topographical Turn’”; Fisher and Mennel, eds., Spatial Turns.
18. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 23. For a discussion of Lefebvre’s life and
works, see Soja, Thirdspace, 26–52.
19. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 52.
20. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
21. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
22. Massey, For Space.
265
266 Notes to Pages 8–21
23. Liu, “From Reading to Social Computing.”

24. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
25. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi Myth”; Lyotard, The Postmodern Con-
dition, 82.
26. Liu, “From Reading to Social Computing”; Readings, The University in Ruins.
On the impact of the digital revolution on scholarly practice, see also Fitzpatrick,
Planned Obsolescence.
27. See, for example, the essays in Wiggin and MacLeod, eds., Un/Translatables, as
well as those in Beebee, ed., German Literature as World Literature.
28. Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims, 6. See also Bhatti, “Some Reflections.”
29. Seyhan, Writing outside the Nation.
30. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials; Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor.
31. M. Walker, German Home Towns; Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt.
32. Tautz, “Revolution, Abolition, Aesthetic Sublimation”; “Die Welt als Intertext.”
33. Shaffer, foreword, ix. See also the essays in Oergel, ed., (Re-)Writing the Radi-
cal.
34. Wellbery, introduction.
CHAPTER 2
1. Kara, Selam Berlin, 5 (hereafter cited in text).

2. On Hasan’s rejection of nationalist stereotypes and the view that he is suspended
between two cultures, see Fachinger, “A New Kind of Creative Energy,” 253; Vlasta,
“Das Ende des ‘Dazwischen,’” 109.
3. Kara, Café Cyprus, 317–18.
4. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 9, 18, 19.
5. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 13.
6. Spector, Prague Territories, 32.
7. Adelson, “Migrants’ Literature or German Literature?” 218. See also Adelson,
“Against Between.”
8. Halle, German Film after Germany, 6, 20.
9. Blackbourn and Retallack, introduction, 6–7.
10. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 265–68.
11. Heine, Germany, 44–45 (Caput [chapter] 11, lines 1–12).
12. On the history of Tacitus’s reception in Germany, see Schama, Landscape and
Memory, 75–134; Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, 141–80; Krebs, A Most
Dangerous Book.
13. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 58.
14. Wolfram, The Roman Empire, 1–13.
15. Geary, The Myth of Nations; Heather, Empires and Barbarians.
16. Geary, The Myth of Nations, 41–62.
17. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 44.
19. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity; Bowersock et al., eds., Late Antiquity;
Katz, The Decline of Rome.
Notes to Pages 22–28 267
20. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome.

21. Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 24.
22. Chamberlin, Charlemagne, 135.
23. Howe, Empire, 10.
24. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 14.
25. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 33.
26. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 29–30; Heather, The Fall of the Roman
Empire, 17–20.
27. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 30; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Chris-
tendom, 233–34.
28. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 107, 18.
29. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, 14.
30. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 58. See also duBois, A Million and
One Gods, 50–85.
32. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 41.
33. Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 74.
34. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 46, 48, 51.
35. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 655.
36. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 7.
37. Parkes, Understanding Contemporary Germany, xxiv; Fulbrook, A History of
Germany, 145.
38. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 95.
39. Ibid., 174.
40. Ibid., 216.
41. P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 355–79.
42. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 106. See also Heather, The Fall of the Ro-
man Empire, 441; P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 233–34.
43. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 175.
44. Nelson, “Kingship and Empire,” 70.
45. G. Brown, “Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance.”
46. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 320; see also McKitterick, Perceptions of the Past.
47. McKitterick, Charlemagne, 267–68.
48. Sheehan, German History, 14. See also P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 7, 251, 284.
49. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution.
50. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175.
51. Ibid., 7.
52. Borgolte, “Das Reich im mittelalterlichen Europa,” 468.
53. Williams, Emperor of the West, xviii–xix.
54. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 13.
55. G. Schmidt, “The Old Reich,” 47–48.
56. Ibid., 45, 54. See also P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 44, 171–72, 179–84.
57. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, 147, x, 456.
58. Plessner published Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes in 1935; a revised edition,
titled Die verspätete Nation, appeared in 1959. For a succinct overview of the Sonder-
weg thesis and its opponents, see Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 100–120.
59. See Williamson, The Longing for Myth; Lincoln, Theorizing Myth; Wolin, The
Seduction of Unreason.
60. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, xxv.
61. Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 291. See also P. Wilson,
Heart of Europe, 3.
62. Mann is cited from Safranski, Romantik, 370.
63. P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 1–15.
64. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism, 106.
65. Scales, The Shaping, 353–82.
66. Schama, Landscape, 77. For a lively account of Poggio’s life, see Greenblatt,
The Swerve.
67. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 81.
68. Schama, Landscape, 76; see also Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 15–17.
69. T. Brady, German Histories, 19–20; see also Scales, Shaping, 504.
71. Ibid., 246.
72. Ibid., 319.
73. Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism, 57.
74. Scales, The Shaping, 70, 97, 269.
CHAPTER 3
1. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, 202.

2. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 37–68, 301–27.
3. On the “querelle des anciens and des modernes,” see Jauss, Literaturgeschichte
als Provokation, 67–106.
4. Goethe, Von deutscher Baukunst (1772), in Sämtliche Werke, 18:115.
5. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 26, 83–136.
6. Hampe, Germany, 154.
7. Brockmann, Nuremberg.
8. Grass, The Flounder, 247; Der Butt, 314–15.
9. Gellinek, “Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 200. See also Whitesell, “Martin
Opitz’ Edition”; Hellgardt, “Die Rezeption des Annoliedes.”
10. Breuer, “Literarische Sozietäten,” 202–4; Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 129–52.
11. Hellgardt, “Die Rezeption des Annoliedes,” 65–67.
12. Gellinek, “Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 197–200; Liebertz-Grün, “Zum An-
nolied,” 238–39.
13. Liebertz-Grün, “Zum Annolied,” 231–32. Gellinek (“Die erste Geschichtsdich-
tung,” 205–8) suggests that it might have been written in Cologne.
14. Liebertz-Grün (“Zum Annolied,” 231) suggests 1077–81 as probable composi-
tion dates. Gellinek (“Die erste Geschichtsdichtung,” 205), proposes 1080–85. James
Schultz (introduction, 4) gives a possible range of 1077–1101. Haverkamp (Typik und
Politik, 79–102) discusses, at some length, the pros and cons for various dates between
1077 and 1126.
15. Reusner, “Das Annolied,” 218; Arnold, “From Warfare on Earth,” 105.
16. Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, 204.

18. De Boor is cited in Reusner, “Das Annolied,” 216.
19. Ibid., 228–30, 235–36.
20. Das Annolied, verse 18, lines 1–8, 70–71.
21. Nellmann, Die Reichsidee, 80.
22. Batts, review of Nellmann, Die Reichsidee, 554.
23. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 69–107.
24. Kontje, German Orientalisms, 111–18.
25. Uhland, Walther von der Vogelweide, 32. See also Richter, Wie Walther von der
Vogelweide ein “Sänger des Reiches” wurde.
26. Rühmkorf, Walther; Hahn, Walther; Jones, Walther.
27. De Boor, Die höfische Literatur, 297; Rühmkorf, Walther, 22–23; Hahn, Wal-
ther, 14–15.
28. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 12.
29. Auerbach, Mimesis, 139.
30. Walther, Werke, 222. Walther’s poems are generally referred to by the numbers
assigned to them in Carl von Kraus’s 1959 revision of Karl Lachmann’s 1827 edition (in
this case, 8,4). These poem numbers are included parenthetically at the end of subse-
quent cites of Werke herein. Schaefer provides translations of Walther’s Middle High
German texts into modern German in the cited edition of Walther’s Werke; Jones trans-
lates many of the poems into modern English in Walther von der Vogelweide. The trans-
lations here are my own, in consultation with both Schaefer and Jones.
31. Walther, Werke, 222.
32. Hahn, Walther, 24–25.
33. On the grouping of Walther’s political poetry in terms of thematic and formal
elements, see F. Maurer, Die politischen Lieder Walthers.
34. Walther, Werke, 224 (8,28).
35. Burdach, “Der mythische und der geschichtliche Walther,” 51.
36. Hampe, Germany, 232–50.
37. Ibid., 239.
38. Walther, Werke, 224–26 (9,16).
39. Burdach, “Der mythische,” 51.
40. Hampe, Germany, 243.
41. Ibid., 246–47.
42. Walther, Werke, 278 (11,30).
43. Hahn, Walther, 121.
44. Jones, Walther, 103; Hahn, Walther, 121.
45. Walther, Werke, 288 (105,13).
46. Ibid., 286 (105,27).
47. Ibid., 286 (106,3).
48. Ibid., 314 (26,33). On these poems, see Jones, Walther, 111; Hahn, Walther,
123.
49. The most prominent supporter of the first view is Burdach (“Der mythische und
der geschichtliche Walther,” 62); Rühmkorf (Walther) inclines toward the latter. On this
debate, see Hahn, Walther, 120–21.
50. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 48–51, 81.

51. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 98.
52. Forster, introduction, 4.
53. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 103.
54. Holborn, Ulrich von Hutten.
55. Bernstein, “Humanistische Standeskultur,” 100–102.
56. Bumke, Höfische Kultur, 684.
57. Ibid., 582.
58. Greenblatt, The Swerve, 14–50.
59. Kugler, “Literatur und spätmittelalterliche Stadt.”
60. Rosenplüt, Der Spruch von Nürnberg. See also Simon, “Circa 1450”; Kugler,
“Literatur und spätmittelalterliche Stadt,” 404; Brockmann, Nuremberg, 14. The title of
Rosenplüt’s poem is often cited as Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg.
61. Füssel, appendix, 634. See also Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400.”
62. Füssel, introduction, 31.
63. Füssel, appendix, 637.
64. Ibid., 666.
65. Schedel, Chronicle, CLXXIII; Füssel, appendix, 653, 661.
66. Schedel, Chronicle, CLXXVIII.
68. Schedel, Chronicle, XCIX; Füssel, appendix, 649.
69. Schedel, Chronicle, CI. See Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 163.
70. Schedel, Chronicle, CI.
71. Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 159.
72. Scales, The Shaping, 269. On the retrospective appropriation of Nuremberg as
the national capital, see Brockmann, Nuremberg.
74. G. Müller, Die “Germania generalis,” 286–89.
75. Forster, introduction, 11.
76. G. Müller, Die “Germania generalis,” 11.
77. Ibid., 41–43.
78. Gerhard Fink, introduction.
79. Celtis, Norimberga, 20 (hereafter cited in text). I cite the modern German trans-
lation of the Latin original; English translations are my own.
80. Adams and Nichols, “Circa 1400,” 158.
81. Sassen, The Global City.
82. Füssel, appendix, 663.
83. Brockmann, Nuremberg, 27.
84. Schlaffer, Die kurze Geschichte, 30.
85. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.”
86. Heng, “Reinventing Race,” 363.
87. Doyle, “Inter-imperiality,” 345, 336.
88. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
89. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 314.
90. Wellbery, introduction, xxii.
CHAPTER 4
1. Benjamin, Origin, 51; Ursprung, 33.

2. Barner, Barockrhetorik, 12.
3. Martus, “Sprachtheorien”; Breuer, “Literarische Sozietäten”; Krebs, A Most
Dangerous Book, 129–52.
5. Schlaffer, Die kurze Geschichte, 41–44.
6. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 44–76, 131–37. For lucid introductions to Benja-
min’s notoriously difficult text, see Steiner, introduction; Wolin, Walter Benjamin, 29–
77.
7. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. For a multifaceted anthology of essays
about Worringer, see Donahue, ed., Invisible Cathedrals.
8. Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik, 18–52. In her essay “Changing Times,” Bushart
expands on her earlier work. See also Jennings, “Against Expressionism,” 88.
9. Worringer, Form in Gothic, xv.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. Ibid., 78–79.
16. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema.
17. Steiner, introduction, 24.
18. Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 186–203.
19. Oestreich, “Lohensteins Zeit und Umwelt,” 20.
20. Szyrocki, “Ein barocker ‘Literaturboom.’”
21. Becker-Cantarino, “Martin Opitz,” 263, 265.
22. T. Brady, German Histories, 259–90.
23. Ibid., 231.
24. P. Wilson, The Thirty Years War.
25. M. Maurer, “Geschichte und gesellschaftliche Strukturen,” 60–63; T. Brady,
German Histories, 375–403.
26. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 281–82.
27. M. Maurer, “Geschichte und gesellschaftliche Strukturen,” 18–26.
28. T. Brady, German Histories, 128–29.
29. For detailed accounts of Gryphius’s life, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius; Flem-
ming, Andreas Gryphius; Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius”; Mannack, Andreas Gry-
phius; Spahr, “Andreas Gryphius.”
30. Flemming, Andreas Gryphius, 21.
31. Gryphius, Gedichte, 5.
32. Flemming, Andreas Gryphius, 43.
33. Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 441.
34. Spahr, “Andreas Gryphius,” 139.
35. During the postwar heyday of formalist literary interpretation, critics tended to
downplay or deny the political aspects of Gryphius’s dramas. Particularly influential in

this regard were the essays published in Kaiser, ed., Die Dramen des Andreas Gryphius.
More recent scholars who have reversed the trend are cited herein, in due course.
36. Mannack, commentary, 1072. The work was probably complete in 1650 but not
published until 1657 (ibid., 1074).
37. Schings, “Großmüttiger Rechts-Gelehrter,” 182.
38. Behrends, “Papinians Verweigerung,” 260.
39. Gryphius, Dramen, 17, act 1, line 41.
40. Ibid., 21, act 1, line 153.
41. Vosskamp, Untersuchungen zur Zeit-und Geschichtsauffassung.
42. Gryphius, Dramen, 30, act 1, lines 379–81.
43. Ibid., 22, act 1, lines 165–66.
44. Ibid., 40, act 2, line 112.
45. Ibid., 42, act 2, lines 156–57.
46. Ibid., 45, act 2, lines 238–39.
47. Heselhaus, “Gryphius”; Schings, “Catharina von Georgien.”
49. Ibid., 127, act 1, lines 71–72.
50. Schings, “Catharina von Georgien,” 45. For similar views, see Heselhaus, “Gry-
phius,” 46; Borgstedt, “Andreas Gryphius,” 52–54; Borgstedt, “Angst,” 594.
51. For a stress on the political aspects of the play, see Spellerberg, “Narratio”;
Leine, “Das Martyrium als Politikum.”
52. On the political setting at the time, see Heselhaus, “Catharina,” 38; Spellerberg,
“Narratio,” 450; Leine, “Das Martyrium als Politikum.”
54. Wiggin, “Staging Shi’ites.”
55. On the parallel between Silesia and Georgia, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius,
88.
57. Ibid., 145, act 1, line 604.
58. On the implicit link between contemporary Silesia and the drama set in ancient
Rome, see Szyrocki, Andreas Gryphius, 94; Wiedemann, “Andreas Gryphius,” 464.
59. Gryphius, Dramen, 388, act 4, lines 155–56. Barner notes that Papinianus’s ac-
tual place of birth may have been either Syria or Africa (“Der Jurist als Märtyrer,” 230),
but Gryphius makes him a Syrian in his play.
60. For an overview of Lohenstein’s life and work, see Asmuth, Daniel Casper von
Lohenstein; Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein”; Browning, “Daniel Casper
von Lohenstein.” I am particularly indebted to Newman’s subtle analyses, in The Inter-
vention of Philology, of Lohenstein’s drama in sociohistorical context. See also the ex-
cellent anthology of essays in Kleinschmidt et al., eds., Die Welt des Daniel Casper von
Lohenstein.
61. Casper was the German family name that was Latinized to Caspari; the patent
of nobility was granted to Lohenstein’s father just weeks after his son was elected to a
high administrative post in the government of Breslau, so the ennoblement of the Casper
family may well have been in recognition more of the son’s accomplishments as a law-
yer, administrator, and writer than of the accomplishments of his father (Asmuth, Dan-
iel Casper von Lohenstein, 2, 12).
62. Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von Lohenstein,” 642.
63. Ibid., 647–48.
64. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 1.
65. On this history of the concept, see Goez, Translatio Imperii.
66. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 178, act 5, lines 839–42.
67. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 105, act 5, line 145.
68. Ibid., 122, act 5, lines 675–79.
69. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman.
70. Elias, The Court Society, 78–116.
71. Goethe, Faust I & II, Sämtliche Werke, 7.1:275, part 2, act 2, line 6771.
73. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 277–79.
74. Ibid., 275.
75. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 40.
76. Newman, “Disorientations,” 349.
77. Béhar, “Der Widerstand gegen die Habsburger,” 274.
78. Newman stresses the “more balanced, ‘off-center’ view of Rome’s ‘Other’ as an
equal opponent” that “distinguishes Lohenstein’s play from other versions of Cleopa-
tra’s story” (The Intervention of Philology, 152), and she notes similar sympathy with
Rome’s enemies in Sophonisbe. See also Breger, “Die Rhetorik kultureller Differenz,”
271.
79. Loomba and Burton, introduction, 18.
80. Lohenstein, Ibrahim Sultan, act 4, lines 29–31 (cited from Türkische Trauer-
spiele, 177).
81. On the role of race in Cleopatra, see Newman, The Intervention of Philology,
128–58.
82. Lohenstein, Cleopatra, 49, act 1, line 759.
83. Ibid., 83, act 2, line 531.
84. Ibid., 66, act 2, line 82.
85. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 89, act 4, lines 309–10.
87. Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 71, act 3, line 337.
88. Ibid., 50, act 2, lines 282–83.
90. For a brief overview of the novel’s composition and content, see Asmuth, Daniel
Casper von Lohenstein, 62–68.
91. In “Der Roman des Barock,” Alewyn offers a useful overview of the two major
forms of the baroque novel: the picaresque and the heroic, or courtly, novel.
92. Borgstedt, “Nationaler Roman als universal Topik,” 154–55.
93. Roloff, “Der Arminius des Ulrich von Hutten”; R. Walker, Ulrich von Hutten’s
Arminius.
94. Ibid., 48.
95. Szarota, Lohensteins Arminius als Zeitroman, 91.
96. Borgstedt, Reichsidee und Liebesethik, 207. Borgstedt stresses Lohenstein’s po-
sition as a leading representative of Protestant Breslau and views his praise of Leopold
more as political strategy than as heartfelt enthusiasm.
97. Asmuth, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, 16; Spellerberg, “Daniel Casper von
Lohenstein,” 649–50.
98. Borgstedt, Reichsidee und Liebesethik, 21–28.
99. Kontje, German Orientalisms, 50–54.
100. Borgstedt (Reichsidee, 223) calls this episode “eine der erzählerisch reizvollsten
Geschichten des Arminiusromans” (one of the most charmingly narrated stories of the
Arminius novel). He devotes several pages (223–31) to the episode, and Szarota (Lohen-
steins Arminius als Zeitroman, 217–22) also summarizes the story in some detail.
101. Lohenstein, Arminius, 495.
102. Ibid., 465.
103. Behn, Oroonoko, 12. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe also emphasizes Friday’s thin
lips and European nose to distinguish him from the negroid cannibals on his island.
104. Lohenstein, Arminius, 465.
105. Newman, The Intervention of Philology, 59–66.
106. P. Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 751.
107. Ibid., 754.
108. Newman, The Intervention of Philology, 177–78.
109. Borgstedt, “Nationaler Roman als universal Topik,” 161–62.
CHAPTER 5
1. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 98–104, 218, 239.

2. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, 151–59.
3. Ibid., 187. See also Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische; Berghahn, “Von Wei-
mar nach Versailles”; Nutz, “Das Beispiel Goethe,” 625; Kruckis, “Goethe-Philologie,”
466; Wiedemann, “Deutsche Klassik,” 205.
4. Muschg and Staiger, eds., Weltliteratur. Strich’s book was translated into Eng-
lish as Goethe and World Literature in 1949.
5. Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, 2:135.
6. Damrosch, ed., Teaching World Literature.
7. Friedenthal, Goethe, 527.
8. Goethe, Gespräche, in Sämtliche Werke, 39:710.
9. On the tendency toward ahistorical appropriation of Goethe’s comments on
world literature, see Beebee, introduction, 19.
10. G. Schmidt, “Friedrich Meinecke’s Kulturnation,” 610, 620.
11. P. Wilson, Heart of Europe, 656–57. On the sequence of events leading to the
final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, see Epstein, The Genesis of German Conser-
vatism, 595–676; Sheehan, German History, 207–50.
12. Quoted from Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism, 669.
13. Friedenthal, Goethe, 506–9.
14. Schwartz, After Jena; on Goethe’s immediate reaction to the events of October
1806, see Schwartz’s second chapter, “Why Did Goethe Marry When He Did?” (40–
51).
15. On the origins of the first three books of Poetry and Truth, see Trunz, “An-
merkungen des Herausgebers,” 599–607; K.-D. Müller, commentary, 995–1005.
16. The bookseller Johann Philipp Palm was executed in 1806 for publishing the
anti-Napoleonic pamphlet Deutschland in seiner tiefen Erniederung (see Pinson, Mod-
ern Germany, 32).
17. Friedenthal, Goethe, 9; on Wackenroder and Tieck’s depiction of early modern
Nuremberg and its influence on subsequent artists, see Brockmann, Nuremberg, 32–76.
18. Trunz, “Anmerkungen des Herausgebers,” 9:667.
19. Friedenthal, Goethe, 41–42.
20. Boyle, Goethe, 1:43. See also Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century,
145.
21. Friedenthal, Goethe, 33–34; Boyle, Goethe, 1:53–55.
22. Goethe, From My Life, 4:150; Sämtliche Werke, 14:212 (this Deutscher Klas-
siker Verlag edition of Goethe’s works is subsequently cited in the notes as DKV). The
English translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit is divided into two volumes, with parts
1–3 in volume 4 of Goethe’s Collected Works and with part 4 in volume 5.
23. Goethe, From My Life, 4:148; DKV 14:209.
24. Sheehan, German History, 14.
27. Goethe, From My Life, 4:156–57; DKV 14:221–22.
28. See Stollberg-Rilinger, “On the Function of Rituals.” Goethe’s description of
the coronation ceremony provides a good example of a late phase in the history of the
empire, in which “the investiture ritual changed from a staging of imperial power into a
site of imperial impotence” (368).
29. Goethe, From My Life, 4:143–44; DKV 14:202.
32. Goethe, From My Life, 4:160 (translation modified); DKV 14:227.
33. Plate 12 of Peter Wilson’s Heart of Europe depicts the banquet hall with “place
settings for the princes who failed to attend in person.” Plate 13 shows “the three eccle-
siastical electors officiating at Joseph II’s coronation in 1764.”
36. Boyle, Goethe, 1:77.
38. Goethe, Italian Journey, 46; DKV 15.1:37.
40. Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 21–39.
41. Nägele, “Götz von Berlichingen.”
42. Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen, 82; DKV 4:388.
43. For a summary of this debate, see Borchmeyer, commentary, 788–90.
45. Goethe, Egmont, 100; DKV 5:483.

48. For useful overviews of Möser’s life and works, see Epstein, The Genesis of
German Conservatism, 297–338; M. Walker, German Home Towns, 170–84. On the
influence of Möser’s thought on Goethe, see Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 95–
98; Fell, “Justus Möser’s Social Ideas”; Lange, “The Nation-State”; Reiss, “Goethe,
Möser, and the Aufklärung”; Woesler, “Möser und Goethe.”
49. Möser, “Der jetzige Hang,” 15.
50. Ibid., 16.
51. Boyle, Goethe, 1:194–95.
53. On the pros and cons behind Goethe’s move to Weimar, see Boyle, Goethe,
1:239–51.
56. W. Wilson, Das Goethe-Tabu, 292.
57. W. Wilson, “Goethe and the Political World,” 213.
58. On the centralizing tendencies in Prussia and France, see Boyle, Goethe, 2:51.
59. Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, 95–105.
60. Schiller, “Ankündigung,” in Sämtliche Werke, 5:870.
61. Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles”; see also Fohrmann, Das Projekt der
deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 1.
62. David, “Goethe und die Französische Revolution,” 65. See also Müller-Seidel,
“Deutsche Klassik und Französische Revolution.”
64. Goethe, “Response,” 190 (translation modified); DKV 18:320.
65. Goethe, “Response,” 192; DKV 18:324.
66. Goethe, “Response,” 190; DKV 18:321.
67. Borchmeyer, Der Zeitbürger, 98.
68. G. Schmidt, “Staat, Nation und Universalismus,” 51–54.
69. On Hermann und Dorothea’s popularity as a calculated publishing strategy, see
Weisinger, The Classical Façade, 175–78.
70. For detailed discussion of the work’s genesis in historical context, see Boyle,
Goethe, 2:300–302, 349–52, 392–97, 437–50, 466–68, 517–32.
71. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 3–28.
72. M. Walker, German Home Towns.
73. On the discrepancy between the homebody Hermann and his more experienced
and worldly bride, see Elsaghe, “Herrmann und Dorothea,” 526.
74. Saine (“Charlotte Corday”) argues that the figure resembles Adam Lux more
closely than it does Forster.
75. Elsaghe, “Herrmann und Dorothea,” 527.
76. Boa, “Hermann und Dorothea,” 30–31.
77. Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, 307; DKV 8:883.
78. Staiger, Goethe, 251. For critical assessments of Goethe’s alleged avoidance of
history in his verse epic, see K.-D. Müller, “Den Krieg wegschreiben”; Elsaghe, “Herr
mann und Dorothea,” 529–31.
79. Mann, Buddenbrooks, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 1.1:72.
80. Schiller to Goethe, June 15, 1795, in Goethe, Briefwechsel Schiller Goethe, 113.
81. Schiller to Goethe, July 9, 1796, in Goethe, Briefwechsel Schiller Goethe, 242
(aus einem gewissen realistischen Tic).
82. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 127; DKV 9:577.
83. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 12–14; Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesell-
schaft, 9–53.
86. Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft, 164–70; Janz, “Zum Sozialen Gehalt der
Lehrjahre.”
89. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 311 (translation modified); DKV
9:886.
90. For a scathingly critical assessment of Lothario and the other members of the
Tower Society, see Schlechta, Goethes Wilhelm Meister.
91. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 19; DKV 9:390–91.
92. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 345; DKV 9:944–45.
95. Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft, 180–83.
96. On the economic transformation of nineteenth-century Europe and its impact on
literature, see Gray, Money Matters. Noyes (“Goethe on Cosmopolitanism,” “Com-
merce, Colonialism”) has written about the effect of European colonialism on Goethe
despite his isolation in landlocked Weimar.
97. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 14, 16.
98. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:679.
99. As reported by Friedenthal (Goethe, 12), Goethe’s father paid the kaiser 313
gulden for the title Rat to assure his status as a Particulier. Friedenthal (177) thus refers
to Goethe as “der wohlhabende Sohn des Particuliers” (the wealthy son of the Particu-
lier).
101. Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:681–82.
102. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 396; DKV 10:713.
104. Hamm, Goethe und die französische Zeitschrift “Le Globe.”
105. Guthke, Goethes Weimar; see also Noyes, “Commerce, Colonialism.”
106. See Goethe, Gespräche, DKV 39:531–21; Müller-Seidel, “Deutsche Klassik.”
108. DKV 3:59; see also the commentary to this passage, at 3:1124–25.
109. On the allegorical nature of characters in Faust II, see Schlaffer, Faust Zweiter
Teil.
110. Koselleck, Futures Past, 5, 17, 35–38.

111. Foucault, The Order of Things, 220.
112. Heine, Die romantische Schule, 10.
113. See, for instance, Goethe’s withering assessment of the Nazarenes in “Neu-
Deutsche Religios-Patriotische Kunst” (Modern German religious-patriotic art), DKV
20:105–29.
114. Goethe, Faust I & II, 260; DKV 7.1:400. See Schöne, commentary, 668. At the
end of act 4, Mephistopheles sarcastically comments, “You hear the sound of knightly
cudgels” (Faust I & II, 271)—in the original, “Schon schallts von ritterlichen Prügeln”
(DKV 7.1:416).
115. Goethe, Faust I & II, 228; DKV 7.1:353.
116. Goethe, Faust I & II, 228 (translation modified); DKV 7.1:353.
117. DKV 7.1:595.
118. Goethe, Faust I & II, 238; DKV 7.1:367.
119. Schöne, commentary, 614.
120. Gray, Money Matters, 346–400; Hörisch, Heads or Tails, 11–12; Schlaffer,
Faust Zweiter Teil. See also the earlier criticism in M. Berman, All That Is Solid, 37–86.
121. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 16.
123. Schöne, commentary, 681, 675.
124. Schöne, commentary, 692.
125. Jaeger, Fausts Kolonie.
126. Goethe, Faust I and II, 282; DKV 7.1:432.
127. Goethe, Faust I and II, 282; DKV 7.1:432.
128. Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 11; G.- L. Fink, “Weltbürgertum und
Weltliteratur,” 221.
129. Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 5; Damrosch, What Is World Literature?,
3–4.
131. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 7.
132. Quoted from Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 22.
133. Quoted from Strich, Goethe and World Literature, 350.
134. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, DKV 3:148.
136. Noyes, Herder, 80.
137. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, 1–2.
138. G.-L. Fink, “Weltbürgertum und Weltliteratur,” 185.
139. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 2; see also Noyes, “Writing the Dia-
lectical Structure.”
140. Apter, Against World Literature, 2.
141. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld.
142. Walkowitz, Born Translated, 34.
143. Ibid., 25.
144. Ibid., 54, 61.
145. Noyes, Herder, 297–311.
CHAPTER 6
1. On the “historical myth of liberation,” see Sheehan, German History, 385–89;

Blackbourn, History of Germany, 66–68.
2. Elon, The Pity of It All, 91–95.
3. Wieland, Über teutschen Patriotismus, 745.
4. Grimm, Selbstbiographie, 2. By “fatherland,” Grimm means Hessia, not Ger-
many.
5. Kleist, Katechismus der Deutschen, 389.
6. On Kleist’s political poetry, see Maass, Kleist, 173–91; Kittler, Die Geburt des
Partisanen.
7. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology; Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.
8. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth; Williamson, The Longing for Myth; Lincoln, Theo-
rizing Myth.
9. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische.
10. Safranski, Romantik, 348–69.
11. Wehler, The German Empire, 102–3.
12. Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
13. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 221.
14. Sheehan, German History, 610–12.
15. Schiwy, Eichendorff, 27.
16. Ibid., 279.
17. Ibid., 152.
18. Behler, introduction, lxxviii–xciii.
19. The essay was written in 1799 but not published until the publication of the
fourth edition of Hardenburg’s works, in 1826. That edition’s editors, Friedrich Schle-
gel and Ludwig Tieck, changed Hardenberg’s title from “Europa” to “Christenheit oder
Europa: Ein Fragment.” See O’Brien, Novalis, 227–45.
20. For incisive readings of “Europa” and its reception, see O’Brien, Novalis, 227–
45; Kurzke, Romantik und Konservatismus, 224–55; Uerlings, Friedrich von Harden-
berg, 569–78.
21. Behler, introduction, lxxix–lxxxvi.
22. Schlegel, “Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte,” in Studien zur Geschichte,
190 (hereafter cited in text; all translations are my own).
23. Schlegel, “Signatur des Zeitalters,” in Studien zur Geschichte, 495 (hereafter
cited in text).
24. On the distinction between Herrschaft and Verwaltung, see Sheehan, German
History, 24–41.
26. Ibid., 362.
27. Ibid., 392.
28. Ibid., 396.
29. Sheehan, German History, 235–50 (quoted from 240). See also Epstein, The
Genesis of German Conservatism, 595–676.
30. Sheehan, German History, 243.
31. H. Schultz, commentary, 1105.

32. Schwiy, Eichendorff, 483.
33. Eichendorff, Werke, 5:456 (hereafter cited in text).
34. The novels that influenced Eichendorff include Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Stern-
balds Wanderungen (1798), Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin (1801), Clemens Brentano’s
Godwi (1801), and Achim von Arnim’s Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin
Dolores (1810); see Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 636–37. On this cluster of
romantic novels, see also Jacobs, Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder.
35. Eichendorff, Ahnung und Gegenwart, in Werke, 2:314 (hereafter cited in text).
36. Kohn, Prelude to Nation States, 165.
37. On the political conflict in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, see Borchmeyer, “‘Altes
Recht’ und Revolution.”
39. Letter of October 20, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 620.
40. Letter of November 26, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary,
626.
41. Letter of October 1, 1814, cited in Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 617;
see also 656.
42. Frühwald and Schillbach, commentary, 633.
43. Schwarz, “Joseph von Eichendorff,” 356.
44. Safranski, Schopenhauer, 207, 232.
45. Ibid., 217–18.
46. Eichendorff wrote Das Schloß Dürande in the winter of 1835–36. The novella
was published in the fall of 1836 but predated to 1837. See Schillbach and Schultz,
commentary, 821–22.
47. On Eichendorff’s novella as an antirevolutionary tract, see Koopmann, “Eichen-
dorff, das Schloß Dürande und die Revolution.”
48. Eichendorff, “Der Adel und die Revolution,” in Werke, 5:391.
49. Ibid., 5:391.
50. Eichendorff, Das Schloß Dürande, in Werke, 3:449 (hereafter cited in text).
51. Schillbach and Schultz, commentary, 829–30.
52. Eichendorff, “Der Adel und die Revolution,” in Werke, 5:414.
53. Ibid., 5:411.
54. Ibid., 5:410–11.
CHAPTER 7
1. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945, 50.

2. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 97; Clark, Iron Kingdom, 487–88.
3. Sheehan, German History, 253–74; Blackbourn, History of Germany, 54–68.
4. Sheehan, German History, 610–11.
5. Wehler, The German Empire, 27, 102–3.
6. Clark, Iron Kingdom, 556–57.
7. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 200.
8. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses.

9. On these and other monuments, see ibid.; Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre
Mythen.
10. Hermand, “Zur Literatur der Gründerzeit,” 214 (“ein nationaler Maximalis-
mus”). See also Kontje, “Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom.”
11. On antisemitism in Soll und Haben, see Holub, Reflections of Realism, 176–85;
on the novel as an example of intra-European imperialism, see Kopp, Germany’s Wild
East, 29–56.
12. Wehler, The German Empire, 91.
13. Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor, 188, 184–85; see also Applegate, A
Nation of Provincials, 13.
14. Tatlock, “‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.’”
15. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt.
16. Stifter, Bunte Steine, 10.
17. Vischer, Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, 259–60.
18. Auerbach, Mimesis, 516–17.
19. Blackbourn and Retallack, introduction, 7–8.
20. Ibid., 14.
21. Penny and Bunzl, eds., Worldly Provincialism.
22. On the representation of the colonies in German family journals, see Belgum,
Popularizing the Nation, 142–82; on migration within and beyond German borders, see
Blackbourn, History of Germany, 145–57.
23. In addition to Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies, see Friedrichsmeyer et al., eds., The
Imperialist Imagination; R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire.
24. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 9.
25. Ibid., 199.
26. Sheehan, foreword, xiii.
27. Ibid., xiv.
28. On “new imperialism,” see Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 296. In Empire (93–
136), Hardt and Negri discuss the link between the rise of the modern nation-state and
European imperialism.
29. Keller, Der grüne Heinrich I (first version), in Sämtliche Werke, 2:11 (hereafter
cited in text; all translations are my own).
30. Keller, Green Henry, 4 (translation slightly modernized); Der grüne Heinrich II
(second, revised version), in Sämtliche Werke, 3:15. In subsequent references to this
version, pages in the English translation are first, followed by volume and page num-
bers for the German edition.
31. Major studies of the 1970s and 1980s debunked the popular image of Keller as
a harmless humorist of rural Switzlerland. See A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller; Kaiser,
Gottfried Keller; Locher, Gottfried Keller.
32. E. Binder, “Heimatträumen.”
33. Keller, Die Leute von Seldwyla, in Sämtliche Werke, 4:12.
34. Keller, A Village Romeo and Juliet, in Stories, 81; Sämtliche Werke, 4:103. See
Martini, “Auswanderer, Rückkehrer, Heimkehrer.”
35. A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 182; see also Stingelin, “Es brach eine jener
grimmigen Krisen.” Das verlorene Lachen is mistranslated “The Lost Smile” in

Stories.
36. Keller, Stories, 219; Sämtliche Werke, 4:534.
37. Keller, Stories, 244; Sämtliche Werke, 4:563.
38. Ermatinger, Gottfried Kellers Leben, 62–94.
39. Ibid., 188–250.
40. Böning, “Gottfried Keller und die Mundart,” 669.
41. Ermatinger, Gottfried Kellers Leben, 117–52; A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller,
254–59.
42. Cited from Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1064.
43. Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1059.
44. Ibid., 1063.
45. Ibid., 1172–74.
46. Keller, Am Mythenstein, in Sämtliche Werke, 7:175.
47. Ibid., 7:164.
48. Alt, Schiller, 2:120.
49. Quoted from Alt, Schiller, 2:122.
50. Borchmeyer, “Altes Recht,” 72.
51. Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, in Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, 2:998–99, act 4, scene 2.
52. Böning and Kaiser, commentary, 1361–85.
53. Ibid., 1366.
54. Ibid., 1384.
55. A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 254.
56. Keller, Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten, in Sämtliche Werke, 5:287.
57. Keller, “Einkehr unterhalb des Rheinfalls,” in Sämtliche Werke, 1:150; emphasis
in original.
58. Keller, “Vermischte Gedanken über die Schweiz,” in Samtliche Werke, 7:617.
59. “Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus,” quoted from Böning and Kaiser, com-
mentary, 926. On these fragments, see Steinecke, “Kellers Romane.”
60. “Patriotismus und Kosmopolitismus,” quoted from Böning and Kaiser, com-
mentary, 926.
61. Ibid., 927.
62. Keller, open letter to the Basler Nachrichten, April 4, 1872, in Sämtliche Werke,
7:287–89. On the public controversy caused by Keller’s comments, see, in addition to
the detailed commentary in the critical edition (Sämtliche Werke, 7:924– 31), Er-
matinger, Gottfried Keller, 435–37; A. Muschg, Gottfried Keller, 276–77.
63. Keller, Sämtliche Werke, 7:288.
64. Heine, Germany, v.
65. Quoted from Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 375. In the conclusion to Iron King-
dom (681–83), Clark also invokes Fontane’s love for the local, provincial Prussia.
66. Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 347.
67. Ibid., 347–48.
68. Ibid., 358.
69. Ibid., 402.
70. Fontane, Meine Kinderjahre, 17–20; Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 25–26, 45, 68–69.
71. Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 227.

72. Fontane, Cécile, in Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Das Erzählerische Werk,
9:36 (hereafter cited in notes as GBA); Der Stechlin, GBA 17:367; Die Poggenpuhls,
GBA 17:319.
73. See Baker, Realism’s Empire, 155–74.
74. Letter to Paul Schlenther, November 11, 1895, cited from Graevenitz, Theodor
Fontane, 606.
75. Letter to Emilie Fontane, May 14, 1884, in Fontane, Große Brandenburger Aus-
gabe: Der Ehebriefwechsel, 1873–1898, 3:382.
76. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sämtliche Werke, 14:639.
77. Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane, 9.
78. Alter, Partial Magic, 91, 93.
79. R. Berman, “Effi Briest,” 339; see also Baker, Realism’s Empire, 175–203.
80. Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane, 33.
81. On Freud’s use of this term, see R. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, 168–69,
194–95.
82. Fontane, Effi Briest, 14; GBA 15:21. Subsequent references to Effi Briest are
cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by volume and page
numbers of the German edition.
83. Ryan, “The Chinese Ghost,” 378; R. Berman, “Effi Briest,” 342.
84. See Hehle, commentary, 15:501.
85. The poem is “Die Gottesmauer,” by Clemens Brentano (Hehle, commentary,
15:471).
86. Ryan, “The Chinese Ghost,” 371–72; see also Hehle, commentary, 15:498.
87. For important studies of the Chinese ghost in Effi Briest, see Rainer, “Effi Briest
und das Motiv des Chinesen”; Schuster, “Exotik als Chiffre”; Utz, “Effi Briest”; Ryan,
“The Chinese Ghost”; Baker, Realism’s Empire, 175–203.
88. Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 166–67.
89. Hehle, commentary, 15:441.
90. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 5, 61.
91. Besser, “Die hygienische Eroberung Afrikas.”
92. Hehle, commentary, 15:411–12.
93. Cited from Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt, 329.
94. Ibid., 737. While Nürnberger notes the intensification of Fontane’s antisemitic
outbursts in later years, Graevenitz (Theodor Fontane, 69–82) stresses the consistency
of Fontane’s denigration of the Jews and Fontane’s corresponding veneration of the
Prussian Junker.
95. Mann, Der alte Fontane, in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, 14.1:265.
CHAPTER 8
1. Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 65; see also Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 348.
2. Spencer, In the Shadow of Empire, 6.
3. Stefan Zweig’s nostalgic memoire Die Welt von Gestern was first published in
1944, two years after he had committed suicide while in exile from Nazi Germany. See
also Magris, Der Habsburgische Mythos.
5. On this distinction and its importance for the history of German modernism, see
R. Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel, 1–30.
6. Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World.
7. See “Buridans Österreicher” (February 14, 1919) and “Der Anschluβ an
Deutschland” (March 1919), as well as discussion, in Spencer, In the Shadow of Em-
pire, 75–83.
8. Mann, “Verhältnis zu Wien,” in Gesammelte Werke, 12:399.
9. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, 542 (August 1, 1921).
10. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, 547 (August 22, 1921).
11. Mann, “Die Vernachlässigten,” in Essays, 3:176.
12. Mann, Tagebücher 1935–36, 72 (April 4, 1935).
13. Cited from Alt, Franz Kafka, 141.
14. Mann, Tagebücher 1951–1952, 162 (January 8, 1952).
15. Kafka’s diary entry of August 2, 1914, reads, “Deutschland hat Rußland den
Krieg erklärt.—Nachmittag Schwimmschule” (Tagebücher, 299)—in translation, “Ger-
many has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon” (Diaries, 301).
16. Kafka, Diaries, 252 (January 8, 1914); Tagebücher, 250.
17. Fischer, Germany’s Aims.
18. Boes, “Thomas Mann, World Author.”
19. On Mann’s long lecture tours across America, see Vaget, Thomas Mann, 219–
66.
20. Zilcosky argues persuasively that Kafka’s interest in physical travel in his early
years soon turned to a kind of metaphorical travel in his writing (Kafka’s Travels).
21. Alt, Franz Kafka, 22–29.
22. Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 26.
23. Stölzl, “Prag,” 45–46.
24. Ibid., 54–55.
25. Hilsch, “Böhmen,” 7–8.
26. Stölzl, “Prag,” 54.
27. Alt, Franz Kafka, 33–42; Robertson, Kafka, 2–4. See also Hilsch, “Böhmen”;
Spector, Prague Territories.
28. Spector, Prague Territories, 12–13.
29. Alt, Franz Kafka, 474.
30. Stölzl, “Prag,” 67; see also Robertson, Kafka, 5–6.
31. Cited from Robertson, Kafka, 137; see also Alt, Franz Kafka, 474.
32. Spector, Prague Territories, 5.
33. Preece, “Introduction: Kafka’s Europe,” 1.
34. Cited from Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 47.
35. Robertson, Kafka, 26.
36. Barner, “Jüdische Goethe-Verehrung vor 1933.”
37. W. Wilson, “Humanitätssalbader,” 157–58. In Goethe and Judaism, Schutjer
offers a nuanced assessment of Goethe’s lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and
individual Jews. See also Berghahn, “Ein klassischer Chiasmus.”
38. Kafka, Diaries, 152 (December 25, 1911); Tagebücher, 152.

39. Kafka, Diaries, 172 (January 7, 1912); Tagebücher, 172. See also Diaries, 179
(February 8, 1912); Tagebücher, 177.
40. Kafka, Diaries, 176 (January 31, 1912); Tagebücher, 174.
41. For a comprehensive study of Kafka’s relation to Judaism, see Robertson,
Kafka; see also Stölzl, “Kafka.”
42. Quoted from Alt, Franz Kafka, 69.
43. Presner, Muscular Judaism; Gilman, Franz Kafka, 101–68; M. Anderson, Kaf-
ka’s Clothes, 50–97.
45. On the existential trend in Kafka scholarship, see Casanova, The World Repub-
lic, 155–56.
46. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 187–205. See also Spector, Prague Ter-
ritories; Alt, Franz Kafka.
47. M. Anderson, introduction, 21.
48. Robertson, Kafka, 14–17; Alt, Franz Kafka, 227–36.
49. Kafka, Diaries, 148; Tagebücher, 147.
50. Kafka, Diaries, 150; Tagebücher, 149.
52. Cited from Alt, Franz Kafka, 131. For a particularly insightful analysis of lan-
guage politics in turn of the century Prague, see Spector, Prague Territories, 68–92.
53. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16.
54. Corngold, Lambent Traces, 142–57.
55. Wagenbach, Kafka, 58–77. See also Corngold et al., eds., Franz Kafka: The Of-
fice Writings.
56. Wagenbach, “Prague at the Turn of the Century,” 39–40.
57. Wagenbach, Kafka, 55; see also Spector, Prague Territories, 75–79.
58. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 20.
59. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers.
60. Kafka, “An Introductory Talk,” 263–64.
61. Ibid., 264.
62. Spector, Prague Territories, 85–92.
63. Besser, “Die hygienische Eroberung Afrikas.”
64. Zaimoğlu, Kanak Sprak; Şenocak, “Bastardisierte Sprache,” in War Hitler Ara-
ber?, 32.
66. Kafka, “An Imperial Message,” in The Complete Stories, 5; Sämtliche Erzählun-
gen, 139.
67. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” in The Complete Stories, 243; Sämtliche
Erzählungen, 295.
68. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 244–45; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 296.
69. Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” 246; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 298.
71. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 134.
73. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 137; Alt, Franz Kafka, 581.
74. Robertson, Kafka, 174. See also Alt, Franz Kafka, 580–81.
75. Lemon, Imperial Messages, 129.
76. Stölzl, “Kafka,” 70, 75; Robertson, Kafka, 173; Plapp, Zionism, 15–17.
77. Greenberg, “At the Building of the Great Wall of China.”
78. M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 194–216.
79. Kafka, “Schakale und Araber,” in Sämtliche Erzählungen, 132–35; “Jackals and
Arabs,” in The Complete Stories, 407–11.
80. H. Binder, ed., Kafka Handbuch, 2:332.
81. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 32.
83. Quoted from Alt, Franz Kafka, 521.
84. On the display of both animals and people, see Ames, Carl Hagenbeck’s Em-
pire.
85. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Complete Stories, 250; Sämtliche
Erzählungen, 147.
86. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 67–68.
87. Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 105.
88. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture, 86, 89.
Erzählungen, 154.
90. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86; see also Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels, 118.
Erzählungen, 154.
92. Kafka, “The Departure,” in Complete Stories, 449; Sämtliche Erzählungen, 321.
93. Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Complete Stories, 253–54; Sämtliche Er-
zählungen, 150.
94. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee, 19. For similarly positive assessments of Mann’s po-
litical evolution, see Hamilton, The Brothers Mann; Reed, Thomas Mann; Sontheimer,
Thomas Mann und die Deutschen,
95. Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche, Werk, Wirkung, 31. See also Fest, Die unwis-
senden Magier; Görtemaker, Thomas Mann und die Politik.
96. Angress, “Jewish Figures in Thomas Mann’s Fiction”; Darmaun, Thomas
Mann; Detering, “Juden, Frauen und Litteraten”; Elsaghe, Die imaginäre Nation;
Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World.
97. Mann, foreword to “Von deutscher Republik,” in Große kommentierte Frank-
furter Ausgabe, 15.1:583 (hereafter cited in notes as GKFA).
98. Burbank and Cooper, Empires, 7.
99. Mann, “Lübeck als geistige Lebensform,” in Essays, 3:26.
100. Ibid., 3:25; emphasis in original.
101. I have presented this argument about Buddenbrooks and the Reflections more
fully in Thomas Mann’s World, 26–44, 65–84.
102. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 98; GKFA 13.1:152.
103. Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 100; GKFA 13.1:154–55.

107. See Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism”; Ruthner, “Central Europe Goes Post-
Colonial”; Feichtinger, Prutsch, and Csáky, eds., Habsburg postcolonial.
109. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 67–68.
110. On Langbehn and his fellow conservatives, Paul de Lagarde and Arthur Moeller
van den Bruck, see Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.
111. Norton, Secret Germany.
112. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 46; Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften, 25–29,
109–11, 390, 414.
113. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 345.
114. Fischer, Germany’s Aims. In response to Fischer, see Blackbourn, History of
Germany, 362–63; Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 560–61; Münkler, Der Große Krieg, 12,
26–27; Wehler, The German Empire, 192–94, 210.
115. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee, 77.
116. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–21, 26 (October 6, 1918).
117. Ibid., 28 (October 9, 1918).
118. Pinson, Modern Germany, 350–91; Craig, Germany, 396–433.
119. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–21, 17 (September 28, 1918).
120. Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben, 273–74.
121. Tagebücher 1918–21, 63 (November 8, 1918).
122. Ibid., 177–78 (March 24, 1919).
123. Ibid., 27 (October 7, 1918). See also 42–43 (October 22, 1918).
124. Ibid., 66 (October 10, 1918).
125. Ibid., 86 (November 19, 1918).
126. Pinson, Modern Germany, 401. See also GKFA 15.2:213; Münkler, Der große
Krieg, 745.
127. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, 397 (March 13, 1920).
128. Ibid., 400 (March 16, 1920).
129. Mann, “[Heim, ins Reich],” GKFA 15.1:326.
130. Weitz, Weimar Germany, 100.
131. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:522.
132. Mann, “Gedanken im Kriege,” GKFA 15.1:27.
133. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:550–51.
134. Ibid., 530; repeated at 544.
136. Mann, “Zum 60. Geburtstag Ricarda Huchs,” GKFA 15.1:776. See also Kurzke,
commentary, GKFA 15.2:472–78.
138. Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” GKFA 15.1:522.
139. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 487; Der Zauberberg, GKFA 5.1:748.
140. Neumann, commentary, 27–28, 92, 269–72, 286, 362.
141. Mann, Tagebücher 1918–21, 211 (April 24, 1919).
142. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 377; Der Zauberberg, GKFA 5.1:579.
143. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 374; GKFA 5.1:575.

148. See, for instance, Mann, The Story of a Novel, 163; Die Entstehung des Doktor
Faustus, GKFA 19.1:529. See also Lehnert, “Hitler mit der Seele hassen”; Kurzke,
Thomas Mann: Das Leben, 443–87 (“Haß auf Hitler”).
149. Mann, “I Am an American,” in Essays, 5:135.
150. Ibid., 5:132–33.
151. Gut, Thomas Manns Idee.
153. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 305; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in Es-
says, 5:262.
154. Mann, Germany and the Germans, 310–11; Deutschland und die Deutschen, in
Essays, 5:270–71.
says, 5:271.
says, 5:274–75.
157. Mann, Deutsche Hörer, 73 (August 1942).
159. Mann, Deutsche Hörer, 83 (October 24, 1942); Essays, 5:205.
says, 5:281.
says, 5:277.
says, 5:261.
164. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, 29; Langbehn, Rembrandt als Er
zieher, 101; Chamberlain, Grundlagen, 279–81.
165. Detering, “Juden, Frauen, und Litteraten.”
166. Mann, Tagebücher 1944–1946, 269.
167. Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World, 13.
says, 5:278.
CHAPTER 9
1. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, 221.

2. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 708.
3. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 205, 212.
4. On the pro-Nazi political agenda that informs Riefenstahl’s film, see Sontag,
“Fascinating Fascism”; Brockmann, Nuremberg, 190–200.
5. Kurzke and Stachorski, commentary, 368. On Nadler in the context of like-

minded critics in the Nazi era, see Gilman, ed., NS-Literaturtheorie. Nadler republished
his work, revised in conformance with Nazi ideology, as Literaturgeschichte des
Deutschen Volkes (1938–41).
6. Alt, Franz Kafka, 100–101.
7. Mann, “Lübeck als geistige Lebensform,” in Essays, 3:18.
8. Nadler, Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes, 1:13.
9. Lenz, “Ich zum Beispiel,” in Gelegenheit zum Staunen, 115.
10. Grass, Peeling the Onion, 1; Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 7.
11. Grass, Headbirths, 18; Kopfgeburten, 24. See also Preece, “Biography as Poli-
tics.”
12. Garde and Schlusen, “Siegfried Lenz.”
13. Lenz, “Enge als Vorzug,” in Beziehungen, 91.
14. On these films, see Moltke, No Place Like Home.
15. Bienek, “Besuch im Heimatmuseum.”
16. Merchiers, “‘Wie sie uns mit Heimatsinn düngten!’”
17. Lenz, Heimatmuseum, 120 (hereafter cited in text; all translations are my own).
18. Ayren, “Siegfried Lenz,” 356.
19. On parallels between the two novels, see Russell, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutsch
stunde,” 409–17.
20. On the tendency toward caricature in The German Lesson, see Ayren, “Siegfried
Lenz,” 360, 367; Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 152.
21. On the novel’s setting, see Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 149–56; on the link to The-
odor Storm, Russell, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutschstunde,” 406.
22. Lenz, The German Lesson, 199–200 (translation modified); Deutschstunde,
241. Subsequent references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the
English translation followed by page numbers of the German edition.
23. Koldehoff, “Noldes Bekenntnis.”
24. Hieber, “Wir haben das Falsche gelernt.”
25. Kegel, “So jagt der Dorsch.”
26. Greiner, “Emil Nolde und Siegfried Lenz.”
27. Gurganus, “Siegfried Lenz’s Deutschstunde,” 64. On the glaring absence of
Jews and the theme of antisemitism in The German Lesson, see Hieber, “Wir haben das
Falsche gelernt.”
28. Boa and Palfrey, Heimat, 151.
29. Schlant, The Language of Silence.
30. Grass, “Kurze Rede,” in Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR, 7–14; “Short Speech
by a Rootless Cosmopolitan,” in Two States—One Nation?, 1–7.
31. In a televised debate in February 1990, Grass argued against Rudolf Augstein’s
assertion that unification was already a foregone conclusion. Augstein was the editor of
the news weekly Der Spiegel. See Leinemann, “Gelebte Geschichte”; Jürgs, Bürger
Grass, 374–78.
32. See Grass, “Schreiben nach Auschwitz,” in Der Autor als fragwürdiger Zeuge,
195–222; “Writing after Auschwitz,” in Two States—One Nation? 94–123. Grass re-
peatedly voices his desire for a German confederation instead of national unification in
his diaries of 1990 (From Germany to Germany, 27, 126, 159, 219). See also Brock-
mann, “Günter Grass and German Unification.”
33. Braun, “Günter Grass’ Rückkehr.”
34. Grass, Dog Years, 309; Hundejahre, 407.
35. Grass, “To Be Continued,” 298.
36. Grass, “Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen,” in Der Schriftsteller als Zeitge
nosse, 31; see also Cepl-Kaufmann, “Verlust oder poetische Rettung?”
37. Kontje, “The Tin Drum as Historical Fiction.”
38. Grass, “Über meinen Lehrer Döblin,” in Die Deutschen und ihre Dichter, 76.
39. Grass, “Man muss ins Herz treffen!”
40. Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics, 137–68. See also O’Neill, “A Different
Drummer.”
41. Angress (“Der Butt—a Feminist Perspective”) led the charge with a harsh de-
nunciation of the novel. See also Brady, McFarland, and White, eds., Günter Grass’s
Der Butt; Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics, 163–68; Finch, “Günter Grass and
Gender.”
42. Koopmann, “Between Stone Age and Present.”
43. Grass, The Flounder, 183; Der Butt, 234. Subsequent references to this novel
are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page num-
bers of the German edition.
44. Hall, “Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet.’” Hall adds Local Anesthetic and Crab-
walk to the earlier trilogy of Grass’s works about Danzig (The Tin Drum, Cat and
Mouse, and Dog Years) but, curiously, excludes The Flounder.
45. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1:27.
46. Sedgwick (Epistemology of the Closet, 1) distinguishes between “minoritizing”
and “universalizing” understandings of homosexuality.
47. Bittner, “Günter Grass’s Germany.”
48. Grass, “Was gesagt werden muss.”
49. In “Was an die Substanz geht” (in Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen, 329), Grass
wrote, “Die Bundesrepublik ist ein Einwanderungsland!” See also his essays on behalf
of Europe’s Roma and Sinti, Ohne Stimme (Without a Voice, 2000), and his speech “In
Praise of Yaşar Kemal” (1997).
CHAPTER 10
1. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 59–65. See also Brockmann, Literature and
German Reunification.
2. El-Tayeb, European Others. See also Hassan and Dadi, eds., Unpacking Eu-
rope; Gökturk, Gramling, and Kaes, eds., Germany in Transit (an invaluable collection
of historical documents on the topic of migration to and minorities within postwar Ger-
many).
3. M. Anderson, “Humboldt’s Gift.”
4. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 164.
5. See, for instance, Graichen and Gründer, Deutsche Kolonien; Honold and
Scherpe, eds., Mit Deutschland um die Welt.
6. For a particularly nuanced study of links between Germany’s colonial policies

and continental wars, see Hull, Absolute Destruction.
7. Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978), a work of historical fiction set in Southwest Af-
rica at the time of the Herero massacre, was an early example of the growing body of
German colonial fiction. See the Goethe Institute’s research project Schreiben über Af-
rika for a comprehensive list of contemporary German-language fiction set in Africa
(http://www.goethe.de/ins/za/prj/sua/deindex.htm).
8. LeClair, “Geniuses at Work.”
9. Nickel, foreword, 7; Meller, “Die Krawatte im Geiste,” 127.
10. Stein, “‘Germans and Humor in the Same Book.’”
11. Kehlmann, Measuring the World, 6; Die Vermessung der Welt, 11. Subsequent
references to this novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation
followed by page numbers of the German edition.
12. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 115.
13. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 108.
14. Ibid., 103.
15. Ibid., 107.
16. Ibid., 49. Walls won the 2009 Modern Language Association’s James Russell
Lowell Prize.
17. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 130.
18. Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, 19–20.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. Ibid., 116–17.
21. Ibid., 170–71.
22. Kehlmann, “Wo ist Carlos Montúfar?”
23. Lenz, “Vorturner der Nation,” in Gelegenheit zum Staunen, 27–37.
24. Kracht won the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Literaturpreis for the novel but was
accused, in a review by Georg Diez (“Die Methode Kracht”), of dabbling in right-wing,
antidemocratic ideas. Kracht’s publisher and a number of prominent authors, including
Daniel Kehlmann, rushed to Kracht’s defense. Diez responded, and a literary tempest
raged for the first few months of 2012. The most important contributions to this literary
controversy are collected in Winkels, ed., Christian Kracht trifft Wilhelm Raabe.
25. Kracht, Imperium, 55 (English); 80 (German). Subsequent references to this
novel are cited in text, with page numbers of the English translation followed by page
numbers of the German.
26. See, for example, Schütz, “Kunst,” 42; C. Schmidt, “Der Ritter der Kokosnus,”
50. I thank Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia) for suggesting
the Siddhartha parallel.
27. Diez, “Die Methode Kracht,” 32.
28. On this community and Hesse’s ties to it, see Green, Mountain of Truth.
29. Finlay, “Surface Is an Illusion, but So Is Depth.”
30. Kracht, Die Toten, 28–30.
31. Biendarra, Germans Going Global, 164.
32. Ibid., 168, 170.
33. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii–xv.
34. Liesegang, “New German Pop Literature.”
35. Clarke, “Dandyism”; Knight, “Close the Border.”

36. Kracht, Der gelbe Bleistift, 87–96.
CHAPTER 11
1. Kontje, “Eulen nach Athen?”

2. Damrosch, ed., Teaching World Literature.
3. Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, January 31, 1827, cited from Goethes
Werke, 12:361.
4. Apter, Against World Literature, 8.
5. The essay is now reprinted in Moretti, Distant Reading, 43–62. Moretti’s sarcas-
tic comment about the “secularized theology” radiating from “the cheerful town of New
Haven” is from “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” in Distant Reading, 67.
6. Moretti, Distant Reading, 60.
7. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 74.
8. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 4.
9. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 187.
10. Ibid., 186–87.
11. Ibid., 66.
12. Ibid., 191.
13. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 67.
14. Ibid., 87.
15. Ibid., 127.
16. Ibid., 9.
17. Schlaffer, Kurze Geschichte, 15.
18. Ibid., 19.
19. Albrecht, “On the Invention,” 397–98.
20. Spivac, In Other Worlds, 205.
21. The essays in German Literature as World Literature, edited by Beebee, explore
various ways in which the national literature has opened in its development to other
literatures of the world.
22. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72, 87.
23. Saussy, “Chiasmus,” 237.
24. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 9.
25. Saussy, “Chiasmus,” 237.
26. Seyhan, Writing outside the Nation, 109, 118–24.
27. Boes, Formative Fictions, 3.
28. Halle, “German Film, aufgehoben,” in German Film after Germany, 30–59.
Works Cited
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Index
Adams, Tracy, 52 Benjamin, Walter

Adelson, Leslie, 18 Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ur-
Akin, Fatih, 238 sprung des deutschen Trauerspiels),
Albrecht, Monika, 261 55–59, 79
Alter, Robert, 162 Benn, Gottfried, 111
Ames, Eric, 286n84 Berghahn, Klaus L., 284n37
Anderson, Benedict, 6, 27 Berman, Russell A., 5, 162, 284n5
Anderson, Mark, 184 Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 193–94
Angress (Kluger), Ruth, 290n41 Bhatti, Anil, 9
Anno II, archbishop of Cologne, 35–37 Biendarra, Anke, 251
Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 17–18, 147 Bienek, Horst, 218, 219
Applegate, Celia, 10, 121, 215 Bismarck, Otto von, 1, 4, 18, 24, 38, 143,
Apter, Emily, 116, 262 144, 145, 210
Arminius (Hermann), 3, 12, 19–22, 29, 55, Bittner, Jochen, 234–35
76, 98, 111, 124, 144 Blackbourn, David, 18, 28, 144, 146, 281n22
Arnim, Achim von, 120, 280n34 Blüher, Hans, 206
Arnim, Bettine von, 81 Böcklin, Arnold, 168–69
Auerbach, Berthold, 150 Boes, Tobias, 263
Auerbach, Erich, 11, 41, 82, 115–16, 146, Boor, Helmut de, 38
162, 257 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 97, 156
Augstein, Rudolf, 225, 289n31 Borgolte, Michael, 27
Austen, Jane, 258 Borgstedt, Thomas, 76, 79, 274n96
Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918), 148, Börne, Ludwig, 81, 183
177–78, 180–84, 188–91, 194, 198, 203, Boyle, Nicholas, 94
208 Bracciolini, Poggio, 29
Brady Jr., Thomas A., 30, 31, 61, 265n8
Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 145, 178, 228 Brandt, Willi, 217, 237
Balzac, Honoré de, 146, 258 Brentano, Clemens, 120, 280n34
Barraclough, Geoffrey, 28, 30 Brockmann, Stephen, 53, 265n10, 270n72,
Barthes, Roland, 8 275n17, 288n4, 290n32
Bartlett, Robert, 54 Brod, Max, 184, 192
Beckett, Samuel, 259 Brown, Dan, 239
Beebee, Thomas O., 274n9, 292n21 Brown, Peter, 12, 24
Béhar, Pierre, 71 Buber, Martin, 184, 190, 192
Behn, Aphra Bunzl, Matti, 147
Oroonoko, 77–78 Burbank, Jane, 1, 5, 196, 265n3
Belgum, Kirsten, 281n22 Burckhardt, Jacob, 145, 178
321
322 Index
Burdach, Konrad, 43–44 Durande Castle (Das Schloβ Dürande),

Burton, Jonathan, 74 135–41
Byron, Lord George Gordon, 109 I too was in Arcadia (Auch ich in Arka-
dien), 122
Caesar, 21, 44 Liberty and her lovers (Libertas und ihre
Carl August, duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Freier), 122
93–94, 95 Presentiment and Presence (Ahnung und
Casanova, Pascale, 14, 257, 259–60, 285n45 Gegenwart), 128–35
Celtis, Conrad, 29, 48, 51–53 Eicken, Heinrich von, 207–08
Germania generalis, 51 Einstein, Albert, 242
Germania illustrate, 51–52 Eisner, Kurt, 202
Norimberga, 52–53 Eley, Geoff, 28
Certeau, Michel de, 8 Elias, Norbert, 71, 99
Cervantes, Miguel de, 56, 162 El-Tayeb, Fatima, 8
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 211 Empire
Charlemagne, 3, 22, 24, 25–27, 31, 34, 50, as confederation, 3, 5, 64, 132, 198
87, 124, 125, 152 and conquest, 3, 5, 64, 132, 198
Charles V (1500–1558), Holy Roman “Empire” (Hardt/Negri), 5, 252–53
Emperor, 124, 125 and nineteenth-century imperialism, 4–6,
Cicero, 31 13, 83, 106, 108, 111–13, 132,
Clark, Christopher, 24, 144, 282n65 233
Coetzee, John Maxwell, 116, 192 Engelhardt, August, 248
Columbus, Christopher, 22, 50 Engels, Friedrich, 106, 114
Confino, Alon, 10, 145 Epp, Ritter von, 202
Cooper, Frederick, 1, 5, 196, 265n3 Epstein, Klaus, 274n11
Corngold, Stanley, 186 European Union, 2, 3–4, 29, 78, 144
Counter Reformation, 10, 59–60, 69, 7 Evans, Richard J., 24, 28, 215
Dahn, Felix, 144 Fachinger, Petra, 266n2

Damrosch, David, 14, 113–14, 184, 257–58, Fallersleben, August Heinrich Hoffmann von,
260 7, 152
Deleuze, Gilles, 186–88 Ferdinand III (1608–57), Holy Roman
Derrida, Jacques, 8 Emperor, 71
Diaz, Bartolomeus, 50 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 121, 124
Dickens, Charles, 146, 182, 258 Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an
Diderot, Denis, 162 die deutsche Nation), 120
Dietrich von Meissen, 46–47 Fink, Gonthier-Louis, 115
Diez, Georg, 291n24 First World War, 4, 58, 111, 179, 191, 195,
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7 197, 201, 203, 207–8, 218, 226, 248
Dix, Otto, 58 Fischer, Fritz, 179, 201
Döblin, Alfred, 227 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 266n26
Dürer, Albrecht, 58, 89, 154 Flaubert, Gustav, 146, 164, 182
Fontane, Theodor, 10, 13, 148, 160–75, 186
Eckermann, Johann Peter, 81, 82, 107, 108, L’Adultera, 173
109 Beneath the Pear Tree (Unterm Birnbaum),
Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 10, 11, 13, 173
32, 122, 126–41, 157, 159, 199 Cécile, 161
“The aristocracy and the revolution” (“Der Effi Briest, 161–75
Adel und die Revolution”), 136, Ellernklipp, 173
140 Grete Minde, 172
Index 323
The Poggenpuhl Family (Die Poggen- end of, 83–85, 98, 102, 107, 113, 127
puhls), 173 federative tradition of, 83, 94, 132, 141,
Quitt, 161 148, 157
Ramblings in Brandenburg (Wanderungen multiple identities/loyalties within, 26–27,
durch die Mark Brandenburg), 160 30–31, 50, 59, 61, 66–67, 69–70, 79,
Schach von Wuthenow, 173 83, 87
The Stechlin (Der Stechlin), 161 and racial difference, 74–75, 77
Forster, Georg, 100, 108, 115 —Imperial Germany (Second Empire,
Foucault, Michel, 8, 109 1871–1918), 1, 3, 13, 32, 82, 143–48,
Fouqué, Baron de la Motte, 33, 133, 135 159, 166, 173–74, 177–79, 196–201,
Francis II (1768–1835), Holy Roman Em- 203, 208, 239, 248–49, 256
peror, 83–84 Unification (1871), 18, 143–44, 160,
Franz Josef (1830–1916), emperor of Austria, 177
189 —Third Reich (1933–45), 1, 3, 4, 14, 24–
Frederick I (1175–98), duke of Austria, 42 25, 29, 32, 58, 82, 180, 195–96, 200–
Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ (1122–90), Holy 201, 209, 215–17, 239, 249, 256
Roman Emperor, 30, 33, 34, 42, 144 German identities
Frederick II (1194–1250), Holy Roman multiple and overlapping, 18–19, 146–47,
Emperor, 30, 43–45, 47 255, 261, 263–64
Frederick II ‘the Great’ (1712–86), king of as poets and thinkers (Dichter und
Prussia, 94, 95, 122, 230, 259 Denker), 38, 41, 96, 121, 241, 243,
Frederick III (1415–93), Holy Roman 250
Emperor, 50 in relation to Switzerland, 151–56, 158–59,
Frederick III (1657–1713), elector of Bran- 174
denburg, 76 tragic-heroic, Faustian, 57–58, 121
Frederick William III (1770–1840), king of German nationalism
Prussia, 126, 143, 244 anti-French, 82, 98–101, 114–15, 119–20,
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 152 123–24, 129–32, 197, 205
French Revolution, 4, 22, 83, 84, 85, 96–97, and antisemitism, 14, 53, 121, 145, 171–
98–101, 103, 105–6, 108, 112, 117, 127, 73, 180, 182, 191, 196, 199, 203,
134, 135–37, 139–40, 156, 162, 208, 205–6, 212, 223–25, 247, 248, 250,
255–56 260 (see also Jews)
Freud, Sigmund, 163 and cosmopolitanism, 9, 14, 32, 40, 52, 53,
Freytag, Gustav, 144 62, 82, 85, 86, 90, 101, 113, 115–16,
The Ancestors (Die Ahnen), 145, 229 159, 160–61, 169, 178, 182, 191, 196,
Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben), 145, 197, 210–12, 226, 234–35, 244,
172 247
Friedenthal, Richard, 183, 277n99 cultural, 7, 13, 33–35, 83, 89–90, 96, 103,
148, 152–53, 157–58, 259
Ganghofer, Ludwig, 146, 227 ethnic, racist, völkisch, 6, 7, 18, 20–22, 28,
Gaus, Carl Friedrich, 239, 240, 244 30–31, 100–101, 120–21, 170, 190–
Geary, Patrick J., 12, 18 91, 196, 199–201, 205, 209, 211–12,
George, Stefan, 200 216, 222–23, 229, 238, 260
German conservatism, 11, 94–95, 115, 122, liberal, democratic 4, 7, 13, 81–82, 107,
124, 141, 156, 157, 160 121, 143, 152, 155–59, 241, 246
German empires and overseas imperialism/colonialism, 6, 7,
—Holy Roman Empire (800–1806), 1–2, 3, 13–14, 82, 147–48, 156, 160, 161,
4, 12, 13, 25–27, 29–30, 50, 60–61, 67, 163, 166, 179–80, 192, 196–201, 209,
96, 108, 119, 123–24, 131, 144, 154, 239, 248–53
178, 180, 198, 199, 208, 226, 256 symbols of, 19, 33–34, 123, 130, 144
324 Index
German national literature. See also world Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 11, 13, 31,
literature 34, 40, 55, 79, 115, 119, 120, 134, 145,
history of, 6–7, 9, 11–14, 18, 33–35, 40, 155, 156, 158, 160, 180, 182–86, 188,
54, 55–59, 81–83, 96, 115, 121, 256 198–99, 209–11, 226, 244, 257, 262–63
and migrant literature, 9, 18 “Alexis und Dora,” 95
and ‘minor’ literature, 9, 178, 185–88, Campaign in France (Campagne in Frank-
191–92 reich), 85
and world literature, 9, 13–14, 82–83, 113– Conversations of German emigrés (Unter-
17, 256–64 haltungen deutscher Ausgewander-
German particularism, provincialism, and lo- ten), 96
calism, 6, 10–11, 13–14, 16, 18, 28–31, Egmont, 91–92, 95, 132, 156, 199
83, 90–95, 101–2, 107, 144–48, 228, Elective Affinities (Die Wahlver-
232 wandtschaften), 84, 85, 129, 164
against centralized states, 90, 92, 94–95, Faust, 49, 71, 83, 95, 96, 98, 101, 107–13,
107, 122, 125–26, 128, 145–48, 178, 168
180, 209 Götz von Berlichingen, 81, 90–91, 92, 94,
against imperial authority, 60–61, 66–69, 95, 113, 132, 156
72–75, 91, 132, 197–201, 227 Iphigenie, 91, 95
against universal principles, 92, 95, 99, Italian Journey, 85
115–17, 132, 141, 200, 206, 209 Hermann und Dorothea, 96, 98–101, 105,
cities as cultural centers, 10, 48–49, 50, 94, 115
101, 255 Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit),
Berlin, 10, 16, 161, 165–66, 179 85, 86–88, 89, 93, 103
Breslau, 59–60, 69–70, 86 “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser”
Danzig (Gdansk), 35, 62, 217, 226–28, (“Literarischer Sansculottismus”),
230–32 96–98, 101, 102, 107, 115, 185, 259–
Frankfurt, 10, 85–87, 90, 199 60
Lübeck, 14, 178–81, 197 Roman Elegies (Römische Elegien), 95,
Munich, 153–54, 178, 197–98 129
Nuremberg, 10, 34, 48–53, 85, 86, 196, The Siege of Mainz (Die Belagerung von
215 Mainz), 85
Prague, 180–82, 184, 186–87, 195 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden
Weimar, 95, 108 des jungen Werthers), 81, 91, 93, 113,
Zurich, 10, 148–49, 151 162
courts as cultural centers, 48, 255 West-Eastern Divan (West-östlicher Di-
and the German Sonderweg, 28–29, 83, van), 109
258 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Lehr
and Heimat, 100, 121–22, 145–46, 160, jahre), 96, 101–07, 111, 112, 113,
215–16, 218–19, 221–22, 227, 235 115, 129
German republics Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years
—Federal Republic of Germany (1949–), 4, (Wanderjahre), 106, 107, 108
15, 25, 256 Gökturk, Deniz, 290n2
Reunification (1989–90), 12, 15–17, 32, Good Bye Lenin, 237
225–26, 237–39, 256 Görres, Joseph, 120
—Weimar Republic (1919–33), 4, 180, 195, Gossman, Lionel, 10, 145, 147–48, 177,
202, 204–7 199
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 7, 81 Gottfried von Strasbourg, 41, 262
Gibbon, Edward, 21 Gotthelf, Jeremias, 150
Gilman, Sander, 289n5 Graevenitz, Gerhart von, 162, 163, 283n94
Gobineau, Arthur de, 211 Gramling, David, 290n2
Index 325
Grass, Günter, 10, 14, 32, 216–17, 225–35, Hardt, Michael, 4, 252, 281n28
252 Heather, Peter, 12
The Call of the Toad (Unkenrufe), 233, 234 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 162, 227,
Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), 227 230
Dead Wood (Totes Holz), 234 Heine, Heinrich, 12, 19–20, 81, 109–10, 211,
Dog Years (Hundejahre), 227, 228 226
The Flounder (Der Butt), 14, 35, 218, 228– Book of Songs (Buch der Lieder), 168
34 Germany: A Winter Tale (Deutschland, ein
From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tage- Wintermärchen), 19–20, 159
buch einer Schnecke), 228 The Romantic School (Die romantische
Headbirths (Kopfgeburten), 217, 233 Schule), 183
Local Anaesthetic (Örtlich betäubt), 228 “Vitzliputzli,” 168
The Rat (Die Rättin), 234 Henry III (1017–56), Holy Roman Emperor,
Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan 36
(Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Henry IV (1050–1106), Holy Roman Em-
Gesellen), 225 peror, 36–39
Show your tongue (Zunge Zeigen), 233 Henry VI (1165–97), Holy Roman Emperor,
The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), 220– 42–43, 45
21, 227, 228, 232, 233, 237 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 89, 92, 93, 114–
“What must be said” (“Was gesagt werden 17, 120, 209
muss”), 234 Hermand, Jost, 144
Gray, Richard T., 277n96 Herwegh, Georg, 152
Greenberg, Clement, 191 Herz, Henriette, 183
Gregory VII (1020–85), pope, 37–38, 44 Herzl, Theodor, 184
Greiner, Ulrich, 223 Herzog, Werner
Grillparzer, Franz, 182 Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 248
Grimm, Jacob, 119, 120 Hess, Rudolf, 215
Grimm, Wilhelm, 120 Hesse, Hermann, 178, 250
Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel, 55 Siddhartha, 249
Grosz, George, 58 Hieber, Jochen, 223, 289n27
Gryphius, Andreas, 35, 55, 59, 61–69, 79, Hirschi, Caspar, 29–31
122, 230 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 22, 24, 144, 179, 201, 204,
Carolus Stuardus, 62, 63 209, 215, 222, 226, 230, 250, 251
Catharina von Georgien, 62, 63, 64, 65– Hofer, Andreas, 131, 132
69, 132 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 182
Leo Armenius, 62, 63, 64–65, 66 Hofmannswaldau, Christian Hofmann von,
Papinianus, 62–63, 64, 68 59
Guattari, Felix, 186–88 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 11
Gut, Philipp, 196, 209 Holub, Robert C., 281n11
Guthke, Karl S., 108 Homer, 23, 90, 98
Howe, Stephen, 22
Hagen von der Hagen, Friedrich, 33 Huch, Ricarda, 206
Hall, Katharina, 231 Hull, Isabel V., 291n6
Halle, Randall, 18, 263 Humboldt, Alexander von, 108, 238, 240,
Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis), 123, 244–45
205–06 Hutten, Ulrich von, 48, 89, 152
“Christianity or Europe” (“Die Christen- Hermann, oder Arminius, 29, 75–76
heit oder Europa”), 124–25
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 33, 129 Innocent III (1160–1216), pope, 44–45
Hardt, Ludwig, 178 Investiture controversy, 30, 34, 37–40
326 Index
Jahn, Friedrich ‘Turnvater,’ 241, 246–47 (Das Fähnlein der Sieben Aufrechten),
Janouch, Gustav, 179 157
Jefferson, Thomas, 245–46 Clothes Make the Man (Kleider machen
Jenisch, Daniel, 97 Leute), 150
Jews in German-speaking Europe, 88, 119, Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich), 148–
181–84, 187–88, 190–93. See also Ger- 50, 151–56
man nationalism, and antisemitism The Lost Laughter (Das verlorene Lachen),
Joseph, archbishop of Austria, 87 151
Joseph II (1741–90), Holy Roman Emperor, At the Mythenstein (Am Mythenstein),
95, 97 155
Joyce, James, 259 Pankraz the Pouter (Pankraz der
Jünger, Ernst, 111 Schmoller), 150
The People of Seldwyla (Die Leute von
Kaes, Anton, 290n2 Seldwyla), 150, 151
Kafka, Franz, 10, 14, 32, 148, 177–95, 212, A Village Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und
216, 250, 257, 259 Julia auf dem Dorfe), 146, 150–51
America, 194 Kleist, Heinrich von, 121, 182
A Country Doctor (Ein Landartz), 188 The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (Die Her-
The Departure (Der Aufbruch), 195 mannsschlacht), 120
The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der German Catechism (Katechismus der
Chinesischen Mauer), 178, 188–91, Deutschen), 119–20
194 Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, 168
A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler), 1 Die Marquise von O, 164
95 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 89, 120
An Imperial Message (Eine kaiserliche Koch, Robert, 169
Botschaft), 188–91 Kohn, Hans, 131
“Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Lan- Kopp, Kristin, 281n11
guage,” 187–88, 191–92 Körner, Christian Gottfried, 156
Jackals and Arabs (Schakale und Araber), Koselleck, Reinhart, 115
191 Kracht, Christian
Josephine the Singer (Josefine, die Sän- The Dead (Die Toten), 251
gerin), 191 Faserland, 238, 252
The Judgment (Das Urteil), 194 Imperium, 14, 238–39, 248–53, 260
A Little Fable (Kleine Fabel), 194–95 The Yellow Pencil (Der gelbe Bleistift),
The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), 251–52
178, 194 Krebs, Christopher B., 21, 29–30, 266n12
The Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie), Kurzke, Hermann, 202, 288n148
194
A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für Lacan, Jacques, 8
eine Akademie), 178, 192–94 Lachmann, Karl, 33
The Trial (Der Process), 195 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 8
Kara, Yadé, 10, 32, 238, 263 Lagarde, Paul de, 200–01
Café Cyprus, 16–17, 261–62 Landauer, Gustav, 202
Selam Berlin, 12, 15–16, 18, 260–61 Langbehn, Julius, 199–200, 211, 222
Kehlmann, Daniel, 291n24 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 91
Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Lefebvre, Henri, 8
Welt), 14, 238–48 Lehnert, Herbert, 288n148
Keller, Gottfried, 10, 11, 13, 148–60, 161, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 114
174, 186 Lemon, Robert, 189
The banner of the seven righteous men Lenz, Siegfried, 14, 216–25, 226
Index 327
The German Lesson (Deutschstunde), 14, “I am an American,” 210

219–25 “Lübeck as a form of intellectual life”
Heimatmuseum, 218–19, 221 (“Lübeck als geistige Lebensform”),
So tender was Suleyken (So zärtlich war 197
Suleyken), 217–18 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg),
Leo III (750–816), pope, 25 195, 202, 207–09, 212, 249
Leopold I (1640–1705), emperor of Austria, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Be-
70–72, 76 trachtungen eines Unpolitischen), 28,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 4, 89, 115, 120 57, 99, 179, 195, 197–98, 199, 201,
Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), 171 202, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210–11
Liu, Alan, 8 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit), 201
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der An- “Thoughts in War” (“Gedanken im
deren), 237 Krieg”), 195, 205
Loeben, Graf Otto Heinrich, 133, 135 Tonio Kröger, 179, 211
Logau, Friedrich von, 59 Marchand, Susanne, 5
Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von, 55, 59, 60, Marvell, Andrew, 11
69–78, 79, 110, 122 Marx, Karl, 91, 106, 114, 162
Agrippina, 71–72 Massey, Doreen, 8
Arminius oder Herrmann, 71, 75–78 Mauthner, Fritz, 187
Cleopatra, 70, 73–75, 77, 132 Maximilian I (1459–1519), Holy Roman
Epicharis, 71–72 Emperor, 50, 154
Ibrahim Bassa, 72 May, Karl, 144
Ibrahim Sultan, 72, 74 McCarthy, Joseph, 178, 211
Sophonisbe, 70, 73–75, 77, 78, 109, 132 McClintock, Anne, 169
Loomba, Ania, 74 Meinecke, Friedrich, 83
Louis XIV (1638–1715), king of France, 61 Mereau, Sophie, 123
Louis XVI (1754–1793), king of France, 156 Metternich, Klemens von, 123, 199
Löwy, Jitzak, 185 Milton, John, 56, 63
Ludwig I (1825–48), king of Bavaria, 154 Moliere, 86
Luther, Martin, 4, 29, 33, 60, 62, 63, 76, 86, Moretti, Franco, 7, 14, 257, 258–59, 260,
89, 124, 210 292n5
Lyotard, François, 8 Möser, Justus, 92–94
Mosse, George, 144
Magris, Claudio, 177 Mühsam, Erich, 202
Maier, Charles S., 267n58 Münkler, Herfried, 5, 265n3, 266n12
Mani, B. Venkat, 9 Musil, Robert, 178
Mann, Thomas, 10, 11, 14, 29, 32, 121, 174–
75, 177–80, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, Nadler, Josef, 216, 229, 289n5
195–213, 216, 226, 227, 234, 250 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 8
“Brother Hitler” (“Bruder Hitler”), 251 Napoleon Bonaparte, 4, 22, 26, 33, 82, 84,
Buddenbrooks, 101, 197, 211, 212, 262 85, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132,
“The Coming Victory of Democracy,” 209 133, 135, 143, 198, 230, 241, 246
Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), 207 Nation-State (modern), 1, 17, 78–79, 196,
Doctor Faustus, 202, 209, 212, 213, 227, 208, 226
251 characteristics of, 2–3, 8, 13, 26–27, 31, 45
“The German Republic” (“Von deutscher Negri, Antonio, 4–5, 252, 281n28
Republik”), 202, 204–07 Nellmann, Eberhard, 38–39
“Germany and the Germans” (“Deutsch- Newman, Jane O., 56, 58, 78, 79, 272n60,
land und die Deutschen”), 210, 212– 273n78
13 Das Nibelungenlied, 33, 40
328 Index
Nichols, Stephen G., 52 late antiquity (‘Dark Ages’), 21–22, 24–

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144, 145, 154, 162, 178, 25
199, 205, 211 multiple identities/loyalties within, 23–24,
Nolde, Emil, 223 30–31
Nordau, Max, 184 Rosenplüt, Hans, 50, 52, 154
Noyes, John K., 114, 117, 277n96 In praise of Nuremberg (Der Spruch von
Nürnberger, Helmuth, 283n94 Nürnberg), 49
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 193
O’Brien, William Arctander, 279n19 Rubeanus, Crotus, 48
Opitz, Martin, 35, 40, 55, 59, 230 Ryan, Judith, 11, 260
Concerning German poetry (Buch von der
deutschen Poeterey), 35 Sachs, Hans, 49, 89, 154
Ottoman Empire, 60, 67, 68, 72 Said, Edward, 4–5
Otto von Poitou, 42, 44–47 Safranski, Rüdiger, 29, 121
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi, 238, 263 San Marte (A. Schulz), 33
Saussy, Haun, 262
Parsons, Timothy H., 281n28 Scales, Len, 30–31, 51
Pechstein, Max, 223 Schama, Simon, 29–30, 266n12
Penny, H. Glenn, 147 Schedel, Hartmann, 52
Peter the Great (1672–1725), czar of Russia, Chronicle of the World (Weltchronik), 49–
230 51, 53
Philip (1177–1208), German king, 42–45, 47 Scheffler, Johann (Angelus Silesius), 59
Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 29 Schiller, Friedrich, 11, 13, 55, 81, 82, 83, 95,
Pindar, 90 102, 103, 157, 193
Plessner, Helmuth, 28, 267n58 Die Horen, 95–97, 101
Pratt, Mary Louise, 244 Wilhelm Tell, 132, 154–56
Preece, Julian, 182 Schlaffer, Heinz, 54, 55–56, 58, 79, 260
Pynchon, Thomas, 239 Schlant, Ernestine, 225
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 123
Raabe, Wilhelm, 11 Schlegel, Dorothea, 126, 280n34
Rathenau, Walther, 204 Schlegel, Friedrich, 13, 32, 122, 123–26, 135,
Ratzinger, Joseph, 237 157, 159, 199
Readings, Bill, 9 Athenäum fragments, 123
Remarque, Erich Maria, 58 “Characteristics of the age” (“Signatur des
Restoration (1815–48), 4, 108, 111–12, 157, Zeitalters”), 125–26
240 Lectures concerning modern history (Vor-
Retallack, James, 18, 146 lesungen über die neuere Geschichte),
Reusner, Ernst von, 38, 39 124–25, 127–28
Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ (1157–99), king of Lucinde, 123
England, 44 On the language and wisdom of the Indi-
Richardson, Samuel, 6 ans (Über die Sprache und Weisheit
Riefenstahl, Leni, 229 der Indier), 123
Triumph of the Will, 215–16 Schlegel-Schelling, Carolina, 123
Riegl, Alois, 56 Schlink, Bernhard
Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 146, 199 The Reader (Der Vorleser), 240
Robertson, Ritchie, 185, 190, 285n41 Schlöndorff, Völker, 221
Rodan, Auguste, 259 Schmidt, Georg, 27, 83
Roman Empire, 12, 20–25, 26, 31, 69, 70, 72, Schönborner, Georg, 61
75, 78, 109–12, 147, 229 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 134, 162, 196
as confederation, 22–24 Schulz, Ingo
and conquest, 22 Simple Stories, 237
Index 329
Schutjer, Karin, 284n37 Tönnies, Friedrich, 146, 199

Schwarz, Egon, 134
Schwarz, Peter, 84, 274n14 Uhland, Ludwig, 40
Scott, Walter, 230, 258
Second World War, 82, 111, 119, 219, 230, Vaget, Hans Rudolf, 284n19
248, 250 Varnhagen, Rahel, 183
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 290n46 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 183
Şenocak, Zafer, 188 Virgil, 23, 25, 78
Seyhan, Azade, 9–10, 263 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 146
Shakespeare, William, 55, 56, 58–59, 89, 90, Vlasta, Sandra, 266n2
103, 168 Voltaire, 94
Sheehan, James J., 26, 87 Vulpius, Christiane, 84, 85
Simrock, Karl, 33
Soja, Edward W., 265n18 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 85
Song of Anno (Das Annolied), 34, 35–40, 41, Wagenbach, Klaus, 181, 186
48, 54, 70, 109, 228 Wagner, Richard, 33, 34, 144, 171, 199
Song of Ezzo (Das Ezzolied), 37 Lohengrin, 168
Sontag, Susan, 288n4 Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg, 154,
Spector, Scott, 18, 182, 285n52 196
Spellerberg, Gerhard, 70 Die Walküre, 168
Spengler, Oswald, 57 Walker, Mack, 10, 99, 147
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 262–63 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 116, 262
Staiger, Emil, 82, 100 Walls, Laura Dassow, 244–45
Stanley, Henry Morton, 169 Walther von der Vogelweide, 10, 34, 40–48,
Steinecke, Hartmut, 282n59 49, 54
Stern, Fritz, 287n110 Wars of Liberation, 85, 107, 143
Sterne, Laurence, 162 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 145
Stifter, Adalbert, 145, 182 Wellbery, David E., 11, 260
Stölzl, Christoph, 285n41 Whitmann, Walt, 205
Storm, Theodor, 160 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 94, 115, 119
Immensee, 145 Wiggin, Bethany, 67
The rider of the white horse (Der William I (1797–1888), king of Prussia, Ger-
Schimmelreiter), 221 man emperor, 143
Strich, Fritz, 82, 113 Wilson, Peter H., 29, 78
Süskind, Patrick Wilson, W. Daniel, 94
Perfume, 240 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, 291n26
Szarota, Elida Maria, 71, 76 Wohlgemut, Michael, 50
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 40, 41, 49, 262
Tacitus, 20–22, 31, 33, 50, 120 Woolf, Virginia, 257
Annals, 20, 29 World literature, 9, 13–14, 82–83, 113–17,
Germania, 3, 20–21, 29–30 256–64
Tasso, Torquato, 56, 86 Worringer, Wilhelm, 56–57
Tatlock, Lynne, 145
Tautz, Birgit, 10 Yeats, William Butler, 181
Theweleit, Klaus, 232, 252
Thieberger, Friedrich, 181 Zaimoğlu, Feridun, 188
Thirty Years War, 55, 61, 78–79, 230 Zantop, Susanne, 5, 147
Tieck, Ludwig, 85, 123, 280n34 Zielonka, Jan, 3, 78
Timm, Uwe, 291n7 Zilcosky, John, 284n20
Toller, Ernst, 202 Zola, Émile, 146
Tolstoy, Leo, 146 Zweig, Stefan, 283n3

(Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany) Todd Kontje - Imperial Fictions - German Literature Before and Beyond The Nation-State-University of Michigan Press (2018)

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(Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany) Todd Kontje - Imperial Fictions - German Literature Before and Beyond The Nation-State-University of Michigan Press (2018)

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Imperial Fictions

Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany

For a complete list of titles, please see www.press.umich.edu

German Literature Before

University of Michigan Press

Published in the United States of America by the

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for.

LCCN 2017054256 (print)

ISBN 978-­0-­472-­13078-­8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Goethe, “Response to a Literary Rabble-­Rouser”

It may be that without some foreign admixture, no higher German character

Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

Günter Grass, “Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan”

2 National Origins and the Imperial Past15

3 German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance33

4 Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects55

5 Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire81

Young Goethe and the German Nation 89

6 Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia119

7 Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany143

8 Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations177

9 Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich215

10 Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past237

11 Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature255

Works Cited 293

Of Empires and the German Nation

The broad distinction between empires and nation-­states serves as a useful

empire primarily in the sense of the European conquest and colonization of

From National to World Literature

Imperial Fictions is a work of literary history. It is informed by historical fact

nationalist sentiments spread across eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Eu-

Disclaimers and a Glance Ahead

academic departments seeking to pare down their offerings in perennially pre-

on Germany’s late nineteenth-­century authors, we should consider not only

National Origins and the Imperial Past

On the evening of November 9, 1989, a low-­level East German official an-

Selam Berlin challenges the sense of national unity expressed in those

ating process of globalization has highlighted tensions—­between the local, the

different ways in which people imagine community—­not solely in terms of

Hermann: A German Hero?

Das ist der Teutoburger Wald,

Hier schlug ihn der Cheruskerfürst,

Wenn Hermann nicht die Schlacht gewann,

So gäb es deutsche Freiheit nicht mehr,

Behold the wood of Teutoburg,

Here vanquish’d him the Cheruscian prince,

Had Hermann with his light-­hair’d hordes

The Janus-­Faced Roman Empire

Danubian frontier, local landowners remained deeply rooted to the particulari-

Imperial Germany and the Legacy of Rome

German speakers in Central Europe—­‘one People, one Reich, one Leader,’ as

Western papacy against the Byzantine Empire by crowning a new heir to

ize developments in Great Britain while bolstering “a morbid mystique about

inimical to emerging nationalism. According to one point of view, there is a

German Literary History and the

a sense of national belonging could be inspired by a common past. As the

The Song of Anno

Rômêre scrivin cisamine

propriate to introduce political controversies into a hagiographic poem, but he

Walther von der Vogelweide

More recent scholars have challenged the romantic image of Walther’s

Ich saz ûf eime steine

Untriuwe ist in der sâze,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-472-13078-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Goethe, “Response to a Literary Rabble-Rouser”

2 National Origins and the Imperial Past15

3 German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance33

4 Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects55

5 Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire81

Young Goethe and the German Nation 89

6 Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia119

7 Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany143

8 Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations177

9 Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich215

10 Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past237

11 Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature255

Works Cited 293

The broad distinction between empires and nation-states serves as a useful

nationalist sentiments spread across eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Eu-

on Germany’s late nineteenth-century authors, we should consider not only

On the evening of November 9, 1989, a low-level East German official an-

ating process of globalization has highlighted tensions—between the local, the

different ways in which people imagine community—not solely in terms of

Had Hermann with his light-hair’d hordes

The Janus-Faced Roman Empire

German speakers in Central Europe—‘one People, one Reich, one Leader,’ as

Seventeenth-century Silesia was a roughly rectangular strip of land running

ger beating.”35 Erwin—or, rather, Erwine—is dead, but still-living temptresses