Monatshefte

Todd Kontje, a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, is very familiar through monographs on topics such as Thomas Mann, Orientalism, and Realism. Kontje's work is often distinguished by resisting too-simple national narratives about culture. In this vein, Imperial Fictions is an excellent contribution to Germanophone literary history because it addresses texts written "beyond the nation-state" as they relate to (non-existent) national or imperial cultures. Kontje takes up authors from two millennia (from the early Middle Ages to the present) to show how they represented "German" identities within varying contexts of empire, suggesting that "German culture" never existed monolithically. Kontje's "Germany" is part of multicultural Europe and intertwined with both local and imperial communication networks; it has since antiquity been marked by globalization, migration, and integration.

The project becomes feasible because, as the author admits, it is based on a selective literary history (11). As it turns out, he principally uses a thematic focus to "break down the notion of the nation-state as the primary means of organizing political space and to break open the sense of a single national identity" (255). Yet he does not seek the spaces created by David Damrosch or Franco Moretti for world literature, either, as he takes texts as reactions to contemporaneous political situations.

After an introduction, Kontje's second chapter shows how selective his literary history is. He juxtaposes the post-wall GDR situation with experiences represented in a 2003 novel by a German-Turkish writer, Yadé Kara, to argue the German state as a hybrid, and then to trace that hybridity to the confrontation of German culture [End Page 138] with the Roman Empire, as represented in Heine's A Winter's Tale (1844) about Arminius ("Hermann the German," in schoolboy parlance). 'German' culture is thus modeled as emerging in confrontations between cultures.

The third chapter outlines how the nineteenth century's nationalism 'created' the German middle ages—except that this creation was, as Günter Grass shows in Der Butt (1977), again a product of confrontation. Grass's Gdansk/Danzig becomes the mirror for Martin Opitz and Silesia, as multicultural meeting places that become nationalized. Seeking examples of language purity, Opitz edited the medieval "Song of Anno" (late 11^th century) to codify a particular kind of cultural authority that might substitute for political authority. Within this framework, Kontje also addresses how Walther von der Vogelweide engaged his era's imperial project in the Crusades (40), and how Schedel's Weltchronik (1493) in early modern Nuremburg documents the increasing provincialism and weak politics of that era's German Kaiser.

The fourth chapter addresses how German history becomes nationalist by ignoring the Baroque (and the Counter-Reformation pursued as part of the religious politics of the Holy Roman Empire [HRE]). Kontje sets Walter Benjamin's redefinition of Baroque literature (from Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) over and against German Classicism's rejection of the Baroque, which has rendered it somehow inessential to German cultural politics. As a corrective, Kontje takes up the case of the German civil servants Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, and Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669), to reclaim them as Reformation Protestants reacting to the HRE's Counter-Reformation (59ff.) and to show how art history has reclaimed the "anti-classical aesthetics" of Wilhelm Worringer and Alois Reigl (56).

Chapter Five expands this argument by focusing on Goethe as witness to the HRE's end. Kontje's Goethe is not that of 'German' literary hagiography. Kontje traces his evolution as a political writer, starting when he was influenced by Herder to espouse the art of the German Volk (thus his liking for Luther, Dürer, Sachs, and other Reformation figures [89]). However, Kontje's Goethe grew to equate monarchy with centralization, no matter how it fostered a common 'Classical' literature such as France's. When this Goethe turns to world literature, he seeks cosmopolitanism (not universal humanism), as a corrective to the provincialism of national literature, imperial or not (117).

The sixth chapter reframes this argument for the Napoleonic era, as Romantic nationalism found its roots in Heinrich von Kleist's dismay at Prussia's defeat and Fichte's Reden an die Deutsche Nation as codifying arguments about Prussia versus France. In Romanticism proper, Friedrich Schlegel's Vorlesungen über die neuere Geschichte (1810/11) and Eichendorff are seen as defining a national literature in terms of this conflict between Prussia and Austria. In this way, Kontje recovers Eichendorff as a Catholic author with family roots in a formerly Habsburg Silesia, who had to work for Prussia after ecclesiastical territories in the Rhineland had lost their independence and regional identities to Prussia (126ff.). Unfortunately, Kontje does not pursue detailed confessional politics, casting Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) as a weak morality fable situated in history but not intervening in it. His Schlegel and Eichendorff use the imperial model in service of conservatism, looking backwards.

The seventh chapter, starting with 1871, takes up Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane as reactions to the Prussian Empire, which, Kontje claims, had "to find a way [End Page 139] to forge a sense of collective national identity that transcended local loyalties" (144). Keller emerges in this framework as "[a] Swiss Liberal for the German Kulturnation" (148) juxtaposing provincial Switzerland with a potentially more cosmopolitan German Empire. Fontane becomes "[a] Prussian Cosmopolitan" (160) rejecting "a harshly punitive Prussian society that shows no pity for its most vulnerable members" (173). With Adalbert Stifter thrown briefly into the mix, Kontje takes all three as rejecting ethnic nationalism and provincialism. Yet, more historicist than historical, Kontje then overlooks Switzerland's ongoing religious civil wars, Fontane's careful differentiations between Prussians and Germans, and Austria-Hungary's growing nationalist divides—all nuanced reactions against moments of imperial politics.

The final three chapters move further down this road. Chapter Eight tracks "Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations" (177), using Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka as authors watching empires die. Kafka is interested in the "dynamics of power" (194), and Mann, in a unified German culture. Here, again, a certain historical blindness about empire manifests. Kontje discusses Kafka's speech on Yiddish as a rootless language (187), missing how he confronts existing anti-Semitic stereotypes (wherein the Jews are rootless, without a homeland). Mann's stress on his own "mixed" parentage (his mother was Portuguese) is not evaluated as a rhetorical ploy in the context of fascisms.

Chapter Nine starts with the obligatory Riefenstahl representation of racialized Nazi nationalism, then turns to "Local History in Global Context" (228). Kontje sets Günter Grass against Siegfried Lenz, with the former resisting German reunification and committing to regionalism (255ff.), and the latter using the periphery to mourn the Heimat. Neither analysis mentions Adenauer's Ostpolitik or the SPD, which would surely divide Lenz's project from Grass's in significant ways—Kontje prefers to discuss Lenz as (poorly) derivative from Grass. Finally, in Chapter Ten, Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World (239) and Christian Kracht's Imperium (248) are analyzed as post-unification German fictions. Kontje notes that they, like Goodbye Lenin!, evoke mythical German pasts and offer "a wistful image of the GDR that might have been" (237)—leaving out possible discussions of the EU or NATO as imperial structures.

Imperial Fictions is a very good, lively read in the sense of Stephen Greenblatt's 1990s New Historicism: its chapters rescue particular novels from the amorphous outopia (no-place) of the aesthetics-driven literary canon to resituate literature and nonfiction as part of the same world and same discourses—a great service to those who otherwise would not read them. However, in no case does Kontje really reread his texts as specific or programmatic interventions into "German" cultural or imperial history, which simply does none of them justice. Kontje has pried open a door important for the future of Germanophone literary studies (especially the problem of regionalisms), but much remains to be done.