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11.07.2023
Eda SagarraThe Novel in Anglo-German Context
The Novel in Anglo-German Context contains thirty-one contributions from the conference held at Leeds, England in September 1997, and edited with a light but firm hand by Susanne Stark. The volume maintains a judicious balance in terms of period, author and work, and with regard to the nationality and gender of the contributors, who include both younger and well-established scholars. The period covered spans the last three centuries; the balance between early, mid- and late century is in each case maintained. If the numerical 'tally' of German and Austrian - as against British -authors, tips in favour of the former, we recall that a number of the former are now established in British German departments, an apt example of the effective 'cross currents' institutionalised by the German Academic Exchange Service's lectorate. There is a considerable variety of approach and content, with occasional disparity in length. Two contributions are twice the average size: Fred Bridgham's arresting piece on Kleist and 'Monk' Lewis and Harald Husemann's highly informative study of the long tradition of English fictional portrayal of German invasion, with its intriguing title, which does not disappoint, "If Hitler Had Come; if Helmut Were to Come". One wonders if J. M. Ritchie had been offered similar latitude, which he could well have used. The opening section of his "Writing in the Language of the Other: German and Austrian Novelists in Great Britain" bids fair to provide literary researchers with the equivalent of the standard articles on the history of Jewish immigration to Britain in Werner Mosse's edited volume: Second Chance. Two Centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom. (1991) but, perhaps for reasons of space, resorts in the latter half to summary selection. Bridgham more than justifies the space allotted and could not have made what is a significant contribution to reception history (mutual 'borrowings of 'Monk' Lewis and Kleist), and also to Kleist studies in terms of the sources for Die Familie Schroffenstein, without his rigorous close reading of texts of both authors in their treatment of the theme of mistrust. Mary Howard's observation in her analysis of the concept of the 'Novel' in British reception of post-Napoleonic fiction, namely that if we juxtapose texts from different cultures, we read them differently, could serve as a kind of sub-text for the whole volume. Moreover, as very many contributions attest with regard to specific periods, one of the signal achievements of The Novel in Anglo-German Context to the social history of literature lies in documenting developments in public taste in both countries over an extended timespan. The reader is a great deal of precise information, imaginatively contextualised, in terms of who was known in the other country when and through which channels. The result is often reception history at its very best, the more impressive since many of the contributors are dealing with major authors, yet manage to add significantly to the findings of illustrious predecessors. Examples include Hermann J. Real on the early history of Swift reception in Germany, the essays treating 'Monk' Lewis, Scott, Hoffmann and James Joyce (Hall, Bridgham, Steinecke, Hasubek, Howard, Bucher and, ex negativo, Andermatt). An attractive feature of the present volume is the propinquity of theory and practice, prompting and focusing historical imagination. Many scholars show themselves particularly well equipped to chart the role of translation, including mis-translation, and of translation strategies, in the past reception of fictional works on the basis of their own considerable experience in teaching the theory and practice of literary translation to advanced learners. Daniel Hall's examination of translations, plagiarised versions and re-adaptations of horror novels in Germany an England, is a case in point. Here he also explodes the myth that this sub-genre was a 'German affair', showing that, at least in 1790s, it was at least as much to the popular taste of British readers as to Germans. As Susanne Stark reminds us in her case study of Freytag, Dickens and the programmatic realists, there are a whole variety of factors to be taken into consideration: "translation interacts with literary criticism, is not transparent [...] not straightforward, but frequently manipulative and political". (S.171f) Inevitably, those contributions make the most lasting impression where a specific problem is addressed in terms of the relationship of works and/ or authors, or where the 'genetic profile' of an epoch is revealed, or, a third category, where the perspective of the Other prompts important re-interpretations of individual works. Among the most noteworthy examples of the first category are Patrick Bridgwater's "Who's afraid of Sidonia von Bork?" and Elmer Schenkel's fascinating exploration of "Paradoxical Affinities. Chesterton and Nietzsche". What could, in fact, be more different from Nietzsche than the lazy British schoolboy, nihilistic young man and lifelong harassed journalist, who never went to university - and possibly therefore was sometimes too prone to allow a Balliol First (Hilaire Belloc) undue influence over his politics? Yet both Nietzsche and GKC could be singularly uninfluenced by the climate of contemporary opinion, both in their different ways detesting imperialism, both (allowing for the different levels of sophistication) unsystematic and excelling in the aphoristic mode (Chesterton was surely glossing Nietzsche when he penned his best known aperçu: "When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing, but in anything"). Initially, Schenkel challenges the reader's confidence in him by the absurd generalisation about "smug Christianity and the culture of compromise that had dominated the country" in the Victorian era, thus airily dismissing the extraordinary dynamic of religious scepticism and moral searching which informed the mid- and late Victorians and which is still capable of making an impact in British public life at the opening of the twenty-first century. But he then goes on in his exuberantly written but rigorously argued piece to produce a marvellous example of imaginative intercultural criticism. He plausibly demonstrates how Nietzsche and Chesterton articulated in their "metaphor-ridden language" a common experience, how both, suffering from the death of God, translated ideas into arresting visual and spatial images. No longer will we be able to take The Man who was Thursday for light reading on some journey. Nietzsche will be present as we read, reminding us how acutely Chesterton "suffered from an eternal recurrence of Nietzschean figures, concepts and ideas". (S. 244) Bridgwater's canvas is even larger, indeed larger than most represented here, illustrating one of his many obiter dicta, pronounced like some throwaway line of a consummate actor, namely that "in literary history it is axiomatic that things always go back further than one thinks" (S. 225), that in fact the femme fatale of the 1890s is, so to speak, as old as her literary grandmother. Broadly speaking, this provocatively witty piece with its sure sense of time and place, is about the British reception of Wilhelm Meinhold's Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847/8), translated by the indefatigable femme non-fatale, Lady Wilde. Not least thanks to Meinhold's uncanny visual sense, Sidonia acquired iconic status in the Medusa figures created by Swinburne, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, a type, Bridgwater suggests, of the boyhood reading they had never outgrown. Sidonia's influence is evident even in Wilde's Salome. Bridgwater's brief was Britain, not Germany, but what he has to say will be fascinating to Fontane scholars, not least in illuminating the Prussian novelist's fascination with the pre-Raphaelites, as the Berlin Nationalgalerie's 1998 exhibition attempted visually. A further important group offers a critical re-assessment of established positions. One such is Andreas Kramer's finely written and argued piece on Tarr (1918), by the "Modernist some love to hate", Wyndham Lewis. In a compass of barely ten pages, it brings us a critique of the readings of this avant-garde novel by Jameson and others, along with profound reflections on the way in which Lewis's subversion of that "stable and unique self that is at the heart of the tradition of the European novel" (S. 261) and his deconstruction of notions of nationality become exempla of the fallibility of human communication. Another re-interpretation is Michael Andermatt's revisionist reading of Hans der Engelländer in Meyer's Der Heilige. Why is it that Meyer, whose Der Heilige was so long part of the stable diet of British students of German up to a generation ago, is now virtually an unknown name among them? A number of British scholars have recently observed that the time has come for a re-assessment of Meyer: in Michael Andermatt they have found their pacemaker. In the briefest possible compass, Andermatt offers a complex but wholly convincing reading of the novelle in which Hans' 'craft' becomes a metaphor for the craft of narration itself. Through this no-longer-naïve figure of the 'simple' Englishman, he plots the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, and its guilt-inducing properties, providing an arresting analysis of the extraordinary complexity of Meyer's metaphorical practice and its self-revelatory potential. Study problems, not periods, demanded a famous Anglo-German in a memorable address in Cambridge in the 1890s, namely Lord Acton in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History. The complex process of the reception of an author of one country by the other is explored with consummate authority in terms of the history of taste as part of a major research project, the cataloguing of the princely library at Corvey. In terms of the social history of literature, Hartmut Steinecke's "British-deutsche Romanlektüren im frühen neunzehnten Jahrhundert - Hoffmann und Scott zum Beispiel" exemplifies the dividend to be gained from the Goethean principle of proceeding from the particular, in terms of insight into reading cultures and habits, writing styles, genre theory. With regard to his two principal authors, Scott and Hoffmann, his parting line offers food for thought, which others exemplify in their contributions: "die nationale Zugehörigkeit eines Autors wird um so unwichtiger, je mehr es um Literatur als Kunst geht". (S. 116) Taking a single year in this period, 1826, which saw an abundance of German fiction of more mixed aesthetic provenance in translation launched on the British market, Mary Howard charts the correlation between contemporary efforts to create a new British identity in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the creation of new image of Germany to overlay the much more open attitudes of a previous generation towards German literature; this, she argues, would inhibit the reception of German fiction in the years to follow. Remembering and forgetting of a different sort is explored by Peter Skrine in accounting for the oblivion, suffered by the last novel of his Manx fellow countrymen, Hall Caine's The Woman of Knockaloe about the 25,000 internees on the Isle of Man in the 1914-8 war. Once associated in America as in Europe with Tolstoj and Zola, dedicatee of Dracula, Caine's expressionist parable, which Skrine shows to be a major historic document, fell victim to the 1927 film version's recourse to popularist national stereotyping. There are a number of workmanlike pieces, which some might dismiss as neo-positivistic, but which the reader clearly recognises as resting on the kind of self-denying solid primary research which will allow later scholars to make informed pronouncements about literary relations between the two countries. One such is that of the spiritus rector of the project, Norbert Bachleitner on the German reception of English women novelists, with particular reference to Charlotte Brontë. Several contributors favour genre comparison in the two literatures, such as Holger Klein on "The Little Man in the Big City" or Ute Dapprich-Barrett on magical realism, others the 'straight' comparison, among them David Horrocks, David A. Green, Gundula Sharmann on John Banville's The Newton Letter and Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (but not, alas, Ford Madox Ford), and Sabine Hotho. Both Hotho, writing on the re-writing of literary history by Byatt, Ackroyd, Damm and Wolf, as well as Joachim Schwend on David Lodge and Osman Durrani have important things to say about the history of our times, about the Federal (and Democratic) Republics and British perceptions. In associating Schwanitz less with the campus novel per se (to which he owed his popular success) and rather with Tom Woolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1987, Durrani shows Schwanitz to have engaged with the central debate of German historiography. It was an excellent idea on the part of the symposium's organisers to include two contribution by educationalists, on the role of German literature at A-level and English in the Abitur. The contrast between the approaches is as divergent as the situation in which each country finds itself. Gary Cooper focuses on strategies designed to arrest the sharp decline in numbers taking German (and modern languages) in his lucid report, but it makes depressing reading, both in terms of the cultural opportunities lost and as an example of England's relations with her European neighbours. (It was a pity not to include something on the Scottish or Irish experience). From the secure position of English in the German curriculum, Elisabeth Petruschke-Abrahamovici can afford to address herself to a current literary debate, which has lost little of its ideological thrust in recent times: the issue of canon. Basing her article on an extended research project conducted in Baden-Württemberg, she is thoroughly un-ideological in her discussion of real and possible curricula. Her pedagogical understanding of what literature can actually do for the socialisation of adolescents makes for arresting reading of a piece that deserves a wide audience. In conclusion, then, a most successful enterprise, but with one significant lacuna. After all, a major issue of the volume is that of perceptions of the Other, of national stereotypes, the elements shaping them, their role often as determinants of taste (or the reverse) . Each of the contributors engages in some way with this central topic, some such as Mary Howard, Diane Milburn (in her study of Dracula reception) and Peter Skrine more specifically. The volume needs to have drawn together in an afterword the findings of the symposium in this regard and the reader to be offered an assessment in terms of the current theoretical debates among historians as well as literary historians. If nothing else, it would have greatly increased the volume's interest for scholars in related disciplines. Ending, as is appropriate to the British tradition, on a positive note, the reviewer records her appreciation of a remarkable feature of this excellently produced 466-page volume, and a considerable tribute to the publishers Rodopi: it can be read in comfort, its strong and flexible binding allowing the reviewer to hold it in one hand while taking notes with the other.
Prof. Dr. Eda Sagarra Ins Netz gestellt am 11.12.2000 Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. Diese Rezension wurde betreut von unserem Fachreferenten Prof. Dr. Norbert Bachleitner. Sie finden den Text auch angezeigt im Portal LR - Literaturwissenschaftliche Rezensionen. Weitere Rezensionen stehen auf der Liste neuer Rezensionen und geordnet nach zur Verfügung. Möchten Sie zu dieser Rezension Stellung nehmen? Oder selbst für IASLonline rezensieren? Bitte informieren Sie sich hier! |