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Carl Niekerk, Ed. the Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective. Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2018. 422 Pp., 2 Illustrations.
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, Birgit Tautz
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 27
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 October 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2020, pp 376-377
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Summary
Over the last two decades, the historian Jonathan Israel has undertaken an ambitious multivolume project to change how we understand the Enlightenment. Where previous scholarship emphasized the diversity of separate national Enlightenment traditions, Israel regards it as an integrated, pan-European phenomenon with two prominent strands: a radical camp, populated by principled atheists and freethinking rebels who brooked no compromise with established monarchical and clerical power, and a moderate wing, which shared many values with the radicals but did not hesitate to accommodate the status quo. Israel argues we have given too much credit to moderates like Voltaire and Kant, while the real intellectual core of the Enlightenment—as well as its ongoing normative legacy—lies with radicals such as Diderot, and above all Spinoza.
The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective takes Israel's project as an occasion to bring late eighteenth-century German literature and culture into this debate. “This collection seeks to demonstrate,” writes editor Carl Niekerk, “not only how a more explicit articulation of a cultural perspective can enrich our understanding of both the Radical and Moderate Enlightenment, but also how literature and culture have their own roles to play in the debates about these movements.” This perspective addresses areas overlooked by Israel, who tends to subordinate the heterogeneity of cultural history to canonical thinkers and big ideas. For Israel, the essence of true Enlightenment is Spinozist philosophy, adherence to which distinguishes the movement's subsequent radical and moderate representatives. The essays in The Radical Enlightenment in Germany demonstrate that this is not so simple, though the volume is not expressly polemical in nature. The case against Israel has already been made vigorously by Anthony La Vopa, Keith Baker, and Samuel Moyn, among others. Instead, the contributions in this collection lend necessary complexity to Israel's categories and narrative, while granting that his theory may likewise have something of value for German literary and cultural studies.
One cue the volume takes from Israel is to broaden the range of figures typically considered representative of the Enlightenment. Chunjie Zhang's essay on Matthias Christian Sprengel argues that this relatively obscure historian pioneered a form of “historical realist” writing that communicated radical Enlightenment ideas in a sober, nonincendiary style. Similarly, Peter Höyng takes Israel's work as an opportunity to present the biography of monk-turned-Jacobin Eulogius Schneider as emblematic of Enlightenment's often violent dialectic.
Strategic Indecision: Gender and Bureaucracy in Schiller's Maria Stuart
- from Special Section on Goethe's Narrative Events edited by Fritz Breithaupt
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- By Samuel Heidepriem, Tsinghua University
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, Birgit Tautz
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 26
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 26 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2019, pp 123-140
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Summary
AT THE OPENING of Schiller's Maria Stuart (1800; Mary Stuart), the captive Queen of Scots has already been sentenced to death by the English House of Lords. The only question remaining is whether Queen Elizabeth, Mary's cousin and rival, will sign the death warrant. Mary lives as long as Elizabeth does not sign, and unless she is somehow freed, Mary's only hope is the mercy of the English queen. Meanwhile Elizabeth must choose between two unattractive alternatives: order the execution of not only a family member but a fellow monarch, thus exposing herself to the threat of regicide while giving discontented English Catholics a martyr in Mary; or let Mary live and continue to challenge the legitimacy of Elizabeth's reign, presenting herself as the rightful sovereign. Mary's refusal to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh and renounce her claim to the English throne make her an existential threat to Elizabeth's government—such, at least, is the argument for execution, a move that nonetheless carries unpredictable political and moral consequences. George Steiner calls Maria Stuart a “perfect” tragedy because neither queen escapes the desolation wrought by their shared circumstance: Mary dies a prisoner, a death determined by political necessity, while Elizabeth's decision leaves her politically secure but alone, abandoned by her allies, “charred and cold” when the final curtain falls.
Literature on the play has overwhelmingly focused on Mary, relegating Elizabeth to the fallen political world her rival seems to transcend. But the institutional and discursive conflicts driving Maria Stuart are most pronounced in Elizabeth's situation, not Mary's. While the heroine may suffer in a more obvious or philosophically enticing way, Elizabeth plays the crucial role of deciding the nature and circumstances of Mary's fate. This position puts her, rather than Mary, in line with Franco Moretti's criterion of tragic literature: “everything has its origin in the decision of the king … In the world of tragedy the monarch is truly absolute.” Maria Stuart both confirms and challenges this formula: the play revolves around a sovereign decision, but its monarch is not a king, and the conditions under which Elizabeth must decide are inseparable from the way she and her leadership are gendered.