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.

In 1899, the literary critic Eduard Höber favorably reviewed Ernst Brausewetter's two-volume anthology Meisternovellen Deutscher Frauen (Master Novellas by German Women, 1897–89), noting its special merit in these times, “wo an dem deutschen Dichterhimmel neben den Sternen männlichen Geschlechts plötzlich eine so erstaunliche Zahl weiblicher Leuchten aufgetaucht ist” (when such an astonishing number of female lights have suddenly popped up alongside the male stars in the German firmament of [male] poets). The collection, that is, offered contemporary readers new clarity and insight into a field that had become differently configured as bright female novae popped up among the fixed male stars that had hitherto determined the contours of the German literary heavens. Brausewetter's Meisternovellen and its broader literary context merit a closer look in connection with the aims of the present anthology. As this essay will show, while its title may appear simply to signal a national project when it asserts women's literature as national literature, this publication, fueled by both global social changes and international competition, in effect reorders the field of cultural production. Indeed, Höber's imagined German “Dichterhimmel” with its female novae was conjoined with an international star map.

Brausewetter (1863–1904) had worked with a wide lens before he focused his literary telescope on German women writers. As a premiere translator of Scandinavian literature, including works by August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Hermann Bang, Knut Hamsun, Karl Gjellerup, and Selma Lagerlöf, among others, for multiple German publishers, he mediated international literature for German-language readers from the late 1880s until his death in 1904 as part of the late-century Scandinavian vogue. In 1896, the freelancer took on new roles as editor and amateur scholar with the belletristic Berlin publisher Schuster & Loeffler to produce first the anthology Nordische Meisternovellen (Nordic Master Novellas, 1896), featuring his own translations, and thereafter the twovolume Meisternovellen Deutscher Frauen. This second undertaking introduced a German-language readership not to foreign literature per se but to fiction by women writing in German, work that was alien to that readership in a different sense.

Meisternovellen Deutscher Frauen comprises two volumes of fiction by thirty-two women writers. An author portrait and a literary-critical essay by Brausewetter himself introduce each selection. Formulating the work's intention, an advertisement for the volume declares that it follows the Nordische Meisternovellen in its arrangement and configuration. Yet Brausewetter and his publisher frame the second project differently.

UPON THE PUBLICATION of Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig (From Twenty to Thirty) on June 22, 1898, a raft of male pundits seized the opportunity to weigh in on their beloved Theodor Fontane. The seventyeight- year-old Fontane was “eternally young and eternally modern,” they effused, and had remained “lively, productive, and young”; he belonged to the “eternally young ones.” Yet he also possessed the “wisdom that comes with age.” They evoked, furthermore, his “proud and serene independence” and “the true nobility of his character and disposition.” Their fulsome praise on this occasion expressed the growing sense that, as Luise Berg-Ehlers observes of late Fontane-reception, the author had achieved indisputable greatness. In that vein Cosmopolis deemed the book important because Fontane was beloved and important: “But whoever loves the old Fontane—and who wouldn't?—Everyone who knows what he means for the literature of our times will have to read the book.” Fontane's demise three months later and the publication of the book edition of Der Stechlin in October prompted male contemporaries to praise their “dear master” yet again. Later, in 1905, likewise in an adulatory register, Fritz Mauthner recalled the master's embitterment over the social position of writers and his feeling that he had never quite received the reliable remuneration or the recognition due to him. Sympathizing here with Fontane's disgruntlement, Mauthner emphatically affirms his literary standing.

This effusive investment of the male literary world in Fontane the author and public figure prompts my examination of Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig, an autobiographical account organized around the writer's twenties, when he had yet to publish anything of note. As I will show, Fontane, the autobiographical narrator, here immerses Fontane, the historical figure, in a primarily male-populated social world, one in which he operates largely within male networks critical to his image and self-understanding as an emergent writer in the first full decade of his adult life and also to his self-presentation at the time he was writing Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig. Otherwise famous for his literary treatment of the Prussian nobility and the middling and upper classes at their leisure, fiction in which both genders matter, fiction that, as Manuela Günter maintains, he wrote for women, Fontane here presents a view of German letters, both amateur and professional, as self-absorbed, homosocial, and nearly devoid of women and female influence.

IT BEGAN WITH HUNGER for what I was not, hunger stoked by such mundane things as European peasant paper dolls, by whispered mentions of war brides, by appetites whetted by Midwestern 1950s educational practices in a time and place where international connections remained few and difficult for ordinary people to make. Less than two decades after the end of the Second World War, well-intentioned grade school teachers in Terre Haute, Indiana, made clumsy attempts to recognize and celebrate alien cultures—mainly European ones, that is, until Hawaii became a state and we grade-schoolers were taught to dance the hula. In third grade at the Laboratory School of Indiana State Teachers College, I was assigned to Denmark for a school pageant. My mother fashioned a costume from one of her old skirts. We danced and sang in Danish—unbeknownst to me at the time, it was a little love poem by Hans Christian Andersen. Much later on—I couldn't help myself—I learned Danish. Two years later, in another Indiana town, in the shadow of another university but not as part of it, we celebrated European cultures yet again. This time, my fifth-grade class was assigned Germany. Mother hauled out the Danish costume.

I have no idea what we sang in German, but I do remember my dance partner. He was tall and teased me as we rehearsed by stretching his right hand up as high as he could so I couldn't reach it for our dance, a folkdance, which, as I recall, required arm pumping. As soon as he would relent and lower his hand, I seized it and off we went. Later—I couldn't help myself—I learned German. This tussle with my flirtatious and slightly mean dance partner presaged things to come in my professional life. Fortunately, I learned strategies of stretching, and either the profession, on both sides of the Atlantic, became more welcoming to intruders or I became less intrusive.

The Public University as a Foreign Outpost

In my freshman year at Indiana University, I lived through a panty raid and a student strike as one era smashed against another.

IN 2001, WITH ENCOURAGEMENT from administrators in the College of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in St. Louis, the support of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the then chairs of History and Romance Languages and Literatures, I founded the Freshman Focus program “Focus on Nationalism and Identity: The Making of Modern Europe.” In so doing, I acted on my belief that beginning college students could benefit from a program of coordinated courses that engaged them on multiple channels. I meant to address young students broadly while pushing them to begin language study in their first semester at a university without a language requirement. I wanted to interest them in intellectual inquiry in the humanities; to pique their curiosity about a geographic area, a historical period, and a particular history; and to excite them about learning foreign languages while there was still time for them to specialize and accomplish something significant in these areas if they wished to do so. I especially hoped to help students see the connection between foreign language learning and the acquisition of cultural knowledge and historical understanding. I aimed not so much to produce foreign language majors—though, as I outline below, that turned out to be a welcome outcome— as to produce foreign language learners and advocates who would use this skill and this knowledge in whatever their primary area of interest turned out to be. I also wanted to cultivate students who would be prepared to take on the challenge of study abroad that requires translingual and transcultural competence. Finally, I meant to provide a hedge against the marginalization of the national language and literature departments at the university.

Due especially to the collaboration of Steven C. Hause, Department of History, and Warren J. Davis, assistant dean, College of Arts and Sciences, “The Making of Modern Europe” lasted ten years at Washington University (fall 2001–summer 2011), ultimately “graduating” 189 students and ending with the retirement of Hause in 2011. Over the course of the decade, the program relied on colleagues in French, German, history, and art history.

In 1901, Edith Wyatt's short story “A Matter of Taste” offered a snapshot of American reading predilections by means of the book that stands at the center of my investigation in this chapter. Here, an Anglo-American brother and sister view one another's reading with incomprehension. The pretentious Henry reads foreign literature about the Italian Renaissance to his bored sister, Elsie. Elsie, who, the narrator notes with a thrust at the snobbish Henry, has no “Standard,” longs instead for the pleasures of reading E. Marlitt's The Old Mam'selle's Secret. In her preference for Marlitt, Elsie shares the taste of her friend Ottilie Bhaer, a German immigrant, who is reading Marlitt's novel in the original German; Ottilie too has no “Standard.” In the end, the siblings resign themselves to their differences recognizing that “in a various world every one has need of a great deal of patience.”

To paint this gentle portrait of the divergence between American women's and men's reading, on the one hand, and the affinity between American and German women's taste, on the other, Wyatt presciently invoked what was to be the longest-enduring example of nineteenth-century popular German domestic fiction in American translation. First rendered in America in 1868, The Old Mam'selle's Secret (hereafter referred to as OMS) helped to open the American book market to a raft of translations of German domestic fiction in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s—translated fiction that, in the absence of international copyright, proliferated and circulated in multiple editions and reprint editions over the following forty years.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.