North American Studies in Nineteenth-century German Literature and Culture – serie

Through an analysis of representations of Jewish artists in the works of German-Jewish writers, this book reveals that the issue of a Jewish creative identity was one of the most explosive aspects of a dual German-Jewish identity. In the shadow of both a widespread anti-Semitic stereotype which denied creativity to Jews and also of increasingly contentious debates in Jewish circles on the proper role of Jewish artists within German culture, German-Jewish writers who portrayed Jewish artists in their works were forced to grapple with some of the most contentious questions of their day: the relative importance of German and Jewish allegiance; the issue of Jewish distinctiveness or its opposite expressed in style, language, and theme; and the viability of a «Jewish» participation in German culture. Existing studies sometimes posit Jewish self-hatred or blind attachment to German culture and Enlightenment ideals as characteristic of a broad spectrum of German-Jewish writers. In contrast, this book demonstrates how many German-Jewish writers possessed a profound awareness of cultural conditions and a conscientious desire to integrate the complex demands of a dual identity.

During the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer pursued a fifty-year career as a playwright and theater manager in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at a time of the transformation of court theaters and itinerant troupes into commercial establishments staffed by middle-class professionals and subject to market forces. Although she has been undervalued by some critics past and present who considered her mainly as an adapter of contemporary novels, this study shows that with her thorough knowledge of the European dramatic tradition, her skill as a playwright, and above all her professionalism she overcame institutional and gender bias to develop a form of drama that integrated the social and economic changes of her time. The analysis focuses on her use of the subversive genre of comedy, the strategies she used to evade the censor, and her employment of assertive female and working-class characters. She revived commedia dell’arte techniques of the past while devising innovations that anticipated the subsequent course of drama as well as the film techniques of today.

As one of the most widely read German authors of the nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) continues to be associated with the middle class and the progress it enjoyed. Yet while his best-selling novel Soll und Haben (1855) and its lesser-known successor Die verlorene Handschrift (1864) owed their vast commercial success largely to their buoyant message of bourgeois advancement, they simultaneously devote significant attention to elements of traditional German society. In exploring Freytag’s dual roles as both a novelist of contemporary middle-class life and a cultural historian, this book uncovers the author’s divergent – and ostensibly conflicting – desire both to embrace progress and commemorate the past. Investigating his literary engagement with three central elements of Germany’s historical identity – the pervasiveness of folk beliefs, a strong identification with rural life, and the continued presence of the aristocracy – this study shows how Freytag attempts to locate these constituents of pre-industrial Germany in a modern, industrial nation, and in doing so contributes to a historically anchored national identity in which material and political progress coexist with a rich heritage and ancient traditions.

Spanning the worlds of literature and the history profession, the Prussian novelist and historian Gustav Freytag (1816-95) was influential in shaping opinion for his generation of liberals. Best known as the author of the popular novel Soll und Haben (1855), Freytag represented the views of a generation of National Liberals in the debate over Jewish assimilation, political reform in Prussia, and German unification. This new study places Freytag in his proper political and social context as a member of an elite of academic historians and liberal publicists who promoted German unification. Alongside colleagues like Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke, Freytag worked to create a progressive, Prussian historical myth for the new Germany. Although the author addresses Freytag’s well-earned reputation for anti-Jewish prejudice, the primary focus of the work is to explore the mental world of a significant, but often overlooked, German historian. Focusing upon Gustav Freytag as a representative figure, this book explores the contribution of the German history profession to German liberalism and political culture.

Much as Nietzsche has gained in popularity during the last century, his poetry still has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. On closer scrutiny, his aposiopetic style, along with the labyrinthine and self-referential nature of his writings, subtly hint toward the recurring and parallel presence of poetry in his writings. This fact cannot be ignored, and his poetry should therefore be included in any reading of Nietzsche. This study investigates Nietzsche’s poetic output while simultaneously regarding him as a poet-philosopher. This reading allows juxtaposing all Nietzschean key concepts while avoiding the temptation to simplify Nietzsche by centering his thought on any particular one. The author ends by highlighting a hitherto neglected term that allows a simultaneous reading of Nietzschean keywords while also including the essential notions of movement, flux, and play.

Despite its popularity during the nineteenth century, regional literature has often been overlooked with regard to its role in the development of German national consciousness. By exploring various illustrations of geographic-historical landscapes in texts written before the 1848 revolutions and after the 1871 unification, this book investigates the vital polyphony generated by unique regional voices throughout the age of nationalism. Close readings of texts by Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe, Fritz Reuter, Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach examine recognizable and unfamiliar regions. Although this study concentrates on provincial writings, literary regionalism’s fictionality and simultaneous referentiality raise broader questions for the programmatic aesthetics of Poetic Realism and for inquiries into identity formation.

This monograph details Gutzkow’s recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow’s transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Königsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow’s decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow’s plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.