National Literary History and Its Discontents

By the time Rudolf Gottschall died in 1909 at age eighty-five, his Deutsche Nationalliteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (German National Literature of the Nineteenth Century) had appeared in its seventh edition; whereas the first edition had covered only the first fifty years, the seventh, significantly expanded edition spanned the entire century. As a published dramatist, poet, novelist, book reviewer, editor of the middlebrow literary journal Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (1864–88), and frequent contributor to the family magazine Die Gartenlaube, Gottschall had an exceptional and personal grasp of the field of production in which he and his contemporaries operated, namely, German-language literary production in Europe. He devoted his ever-expanding German national literary history to the modern era, that is, to literary production from Klopstock forward, advancing a “modern” aesthetic ideal while taking account of a broad range of authors writing in German. He also had a national liberal point of view, and in each edition he asserted that literary histories can and should play a crucial role in shaping (national) literary production: the literary history of the present, he writes in the third edition, “strebt eine in die Entwickelung der Litteratur selbst eingreifende Bedeutung an” (strives to intervene in a significant way in the development of literature itself).

In his Nationalliteratur, Gottschall programmatically restricts his focus to the last century of “national literature,” rather than attempting a thousand-year history in the manner of Gervinus's controversial Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (History of the Germans’ Poetic National Literature, 1835–42). For all its claims to originality and distinction, and its progressive and sometimes cranky position-takings, Deutsche Nationalliteratur still in many respects resembles the many other proliferating and expanding literary histories that were published in Imperial Germany, fueled by the burgeoning German book trade in the wake of the founding of the empire in 1871. It seeks to preserve the “große[n] Nationalschatz” (great national treasury) in a comprehensive, inevitably reductive account, subdivided according to genre. Largely male-centered and focused almost solely on German-language production by virtue of its explicit “national” orientation, it features the literature produced within the regions constituting Imperial Germany, even if it also includes authors who were citizens of Switzerland (very few) or subjects of Austria-Hungary.