Abstract: In the 1787 edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, the revised second edition of the text, Goethe added a brief episode that shows Lotte having a bird (a canary) kiss her on the mouth—something she has trained it to do with breadcrumbs. Werther is deeply affected by what he sees, and one can read the couch scene, Werther's assault on Lotte that causes the final breakup between the two of them, as linked to this scene. The canary episode touches on one of the central problems in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: the fact that Werther and Lotte are driven by desires and urges that we nowadays would call “sexual” (they are physical in nature, closely linked to their sense of self, and experienced as absolutely imperative), but for which they have no vocabulary—the term “sexuality” would not be invented until the second half of the nineteenth century. Read in the context of the history of sexuality, the significance of Goethe's novel consists in its production of a series of images (metaphors) as means of communication to help us understand this (sexual) dynamic as it develops between Lotte and Werther—in particular, the depiction of female desire in the text. I nterpreted from this perspective, the image of the bird kissing Lotte (and also Werther) turns out to be remarkably complex but may help us understand where on the fault line between biology and culture “sexuality,” in Goethe's view, is to be situated.

Keywords: Werther, history of sexuality, kissing, female desire, metaphor, gender studies

MANY OF THE ideas Western culture associates with “sexuality” are in fact cultural inventions and therefore bound to time and place, even if this feels counterintuitive. These include the notions that everyone has a sexual identity, that sexuality is an integral part of a person's history and present, and that sexuality is closely tied to one's sense of self and individuality and therefore important for others’ perceptions. But the introduction of the term “sexuality” is the logical end point and culmination of a much longer development. A ny attempt to discuss sexuality in Goethe's work needs to reflect on the fact that the concept of “sexuality,” including its derivatives, was not yet commonly used during Goethe's lifetime.

Mahler’s “lifelong romance with death” (Stuart Feder) was one of his central preoccupations, both in his creative work and in his day-to-day existence. Death is ubiquitous in Mahler’s music, from his first major work, Das klagende Lied, which concerns fratricide and its consequences, to the unfinished Tenth Symphony, in which the final movement reproduces the sound of funeral drums. Privately, it was not only something to be feared but an experience to be desired; the lines “sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben” (I will die, in order to live), the first line of the final strophe of Mahler’s Second Symphony, encapsulate a worldview that he renewed wholeheartedly in the Eighth. The various influences on this orientation are surveyed here, with special attention to poets (Goethe, Klopstock, Rückert) and philosophers (Fechner, Hartmann) who intensified what seems to have been a natural predilection.

IN THIS CHAPTER, I propose to interpret Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the Enlightenment in the context of the work of two of his contemporaries, Jürgen Habermas and Jonathan Israel, who likewise view Enlightenment thought as the key to our understanding of modern history and to the social and political dilemmas we face today. I am interested not only in their views of the Enlightenment as a cultural and historical phenomenon and the norms and values they associate with it but also in the specific genealogies they construct for their versions of the Enlightenment.

All three thinkers argue for the continued relevance of the Enlightenment for our time, after its legacy was put in doubt in particular by Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), first published in 1947 but not part of the intellectual canon until the 1960s. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Enlightenment had failed because rationality had turned into its own mythology and as a result had been usurped by the twentieth century’s major totalitarian ideologies. Their seminal text set the stage for a postwar discourse highly critical of the Enlightenment, a discourse represented by such texts as Jean-François Lyotard's La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) and Michel Foucault's famous essay “Qu’est-ce que les Lumieres?” (“What Is Enlightenment?,” 1983). Both texts seek to elaborate on the repressive and exclusionary dimensions of Enlightenment thought identified by Horkheimer and Adorno and paint a predominantly negative picture of Enlightenment thinking, its aims, and the way it functioned in practice.

But a counterdiscourse emerged as well. Against Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimism, Jürgen Habermas—initially in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962) and later in his two-volume Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action, 1981) and Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1985)— aimed to develop concepts of communicative reason and a public sphere that were based on central features of Enlightenment thought. Jonathan Israel entered the debate in the early 2000s with the volumes Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (200 6), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011), in which he attempts to demonstrate the existence of a radical political current within Enlightenment thinking.

“World literature”—a concept once reviled because of its canonical implications— has made an unexpected comeback, in part because of an (equally unpredictable) alliance with postcolonial theory. Venkat Mani's latest book is one of a series of attempts to explore the usefulness of the concept in a postcolonial context. Within this debate Venkat Mani positions himself by arguing for a material history of “world literature,” less however by tracing the (material) distribution of individual texts—although there are a few examples of that as well—, but rather by focusing on the institutions and technologies available to distribute books (or their contents) to readers. The study covers topics as diverse as libraries’ attempts to globalize their holdings, infrastructures and networks for the supply of “world literature,” the origins of the Reclam Universal-Bibliothek (for which a change in German copyright law was largely responsible), the importance of literary magazines for familiarizing their readers with texts outside of their linguistic and cultural community, and Mani's book, in its final chapter, also looks at the World Wide Web as a “library without walls.” Recoding World Literature is a book about what Mani calls bibliomigrancy—the movement and travel of books across linguistic, cultural, and national borders.

“World literature” is not by necessity a cosmopolitan, emancipatory notion, as Mani makes clear. The way the concept has been used is deeply Eurocentric, in an unholy alliance with Western imperialism, and it has often served to essentialize cultures by reducing them to a few canonical texts. This story has been told before, but never in such historical detail and using these specific data. Although the concept has often been understood to advocate for a cosmopolitan attitude towards other cultures—Ernst Moritz Arndt cautioned that it would seduce readers away from national literatures and the nation more generally (108)—it was not at all incompatible with the idea of a “national literature,” and at times both notions co-existed without problems (128). Without a doubt the term was appropriated for questionable, not exactly cosmopolitan purposes. The Nazis instrumentalized the concept for their cause, as can be seen for instance in the magazine Weltliteratur, launched in October 1935 by the Wiking Verlag in Berlin and edited by Hellmuth Langenbucher.

KURBAN SAID's NOVEL Ali and Nino, first published in German in 1937, is not the kind of text to which one typically finds references in books on literary history, not even in the most comprehensive volumes. The novel is hard to categorize. It is, for instance, not clear to which national literature or cultural tradition the text should be assigned. Although the novel was originally published in German and with a publishing house specializing in German-language texts, the E. P. Tal Verlag in Vienna, its author's decision to go by the alias “Kurban Said” suggests to readers that his own native language might not be German. The geographical setting of the book—Azerbaijan and Persia during the first two decades of the twentieth century—reinforced this impression that the text's author might not be from a German-speaking country. Rather, the author must be a newcomer on the literary scene. His chosen alias was perhaps meant to provide the text with a certain authenticity: most likely the book was written, one could stipulate, by someone with a personal history in Azerbaijan or Persia in the early twentieth century. Above all, the alias suggested a mystery: Why this novel in German? And why was it published in Vienna? Moreover, in hindsight, the date of publication, 1937, is intriguing: Europe at the time was, as we know now, at the brink of a new and exceptionally violent world war. Ali and Nino indeed takes up the themes of violence and destruction as well, but at the same time suggests an alternative to this world of violence. Above all, Ali and Nino is a love story about two people from divergent cultural and religious backgrounds who in spite of their many differences find each other and, at least for a while, are able to create a happy life together.

For a long time Ali and Nino was what the Germans call a Geheimtipp : only known to and appreciated by a small group of insiders with either a more than superficial interest in the literature of exile or exceptional knowledge of the region (i.e., Azerbaijan, Persia, and the Middle East more generally)—areas about which Kurban Said wrote in both Ali and Nino and his subsequent novel, The Girl from the Golden Horn (first published in German also by the Vienna Tal Verlag in 1938, one year after Ali and Nino).

ON THE COVER OF the most recent German edition of Kurban Said's 1937 novel Ali and Nino is a black-and-white picture of a woman who is identified on the book's copyright page as Elfriede von Ehrenfels von Bodmershof. The same edition contains the following statement about the text's author(s):

The authorship of Elfriede von Ehrenfels—the woman on the cover— is given as certain, while the adverb “presumably” (vermutlich) suggests that Lev (Leo) Nussimbaum's role in the text's genesis only can be assumed. The slightly pejorative term “coffee-house-litterateur” (Kaffeehausliterat) describes Nussimbaum, while “publicist” (Publizistin) in German evokes intellectual seriousness and professionalism. Something similar is going on in the afterword to the Englishlanguage paperback edition of Ali and Nino, published in 2000. The afterword was penned by Dr. Heinz Barazon, a lawyer for Leela Ehrenfels, Elfriede von Ehrenfels's niece and the current copyright holder of Ali and Nino. Barazon claims that Kurban Said is a pseudonym for two people, Elfriede von Ehrenfels and Lev Nussimbaum, that the original idea for the novel may have been Nussimbaum's, and that the book is “almost certainly” the product of cooperation between the two. He concludes, “Which sections of the novel are the work of which author remains an unsolved mystery” (282). The idea that Ali and Nino is the product of the work of two authors is a rather new one. Interestingly, the English-language edition of Ali and Nino published in 1970 mentions only one author: “A man who was, by nationality, a Tartar. He escaped from his own country to Vienna and was forced to flee again when the Nazis came.

TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF Nietzsche for Mahler and many of his contemporaries, it is crucial to realize that Nietzsche was seen not as just another figure in the history of Western philosophy but rather as someone who personified an endpoint and also the chance for a new beginning. Around 1900 Nietzsche's name was synonymous with a fundamental crisis that indicated the end of Western metaphysics. One did not read Nietzsche; one “experienced” his thought.1 Nietzsche had come to be associated with “the death of God,” a maxim he first put forward in his 1882 book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), the title of which Mahler would borrow for an early version of the program for his Third Symphony. While Nietzsche's thinking was certainly directed against the church as an institution, his atheism was more comprehensive, in that it questioned the validity of any kind of normative claim, be it ethical, aesthetic, or cognitive. Nietzsche was a nihilist who dared to question not only the “truths” of Christianity but also the materialist and positivist foundations of mid-nineteenth-century science and philosophy, along with their ideals of scientific “objectivity.” Many also saw Nietzsche as a rebel against the middle class's morals and lack of ingenuity2 who countered conventional bourgeois moralizing with a new vitalism.

Such radical ideas made Nietzsche into a cult figure for a new generation of artists and intellectuals, among them Siegfried Lipiner and his close friend Gustav Mahler. To understand Nietzsche's significance for Mahler, it is necessary to reconstruct the critical impulses underlying the former's works. But it is also important to realize that criticism represents a starting point for Nietzsche. While a critique of Western metaphysics underlies his philosophy, the fin-de-siècle generation of artists to which Mahler belonged was more interested in those aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy that articulated a new beginning, in his “sweeping visions of cultural and political redemption.” It is part of the paradoxical nature of Nietzsche's thinking that despite all of the criticism they contain, Nietzsche's works are “ideological” in the sense that they intend to prescribe a post-metaphysics way of life. It is important to take these critical and reconstructive impulses in Nietzsche seriously when looking at the texts in Mahler's Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies.

THIS IS NOT A BOOK LIKE OTHER BOOKS about Gustav Mahler. It is different in that it does not approach Mahler's oeuvre from a musicologist's perspective, but rather focuses on his interest in and use of literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Reading Mahler is meant as a companion to Mahler's music that helps its audiences understand its literary and cultural roots. Mahler's view of German cultural history is of great importance for understanding his music in the context of its time. Only if we reconstruct this history and Mahler's perspective on it will the true polemical points underlying Mahler's compositions become clear. The goal of this study is therefore not a comprehensive view of Mahler's entire oeuvre. Not all of Mahler's symphonies, for instance, contain literary, philosophical, or cultural references that can be reconstructed. While the ambitions of this book are modest, my claim is that the perspective offered in this book will challenge and perhaps even change our view of Mahler's music.

Much has been said from a musicological viewpoint about Mahler's use of musical forms and content in relation to musical history. The assumption, implicit or explicit, is often that Mahler's interest in literature and culture merely mirrors his musical preferences. Someone with traditionalist musical preferences will probably like a figurative painting more than an abstract one. But does music history simply mirror other parts of cultural history, or is it rather that one can make us see the other in a different light? Literature and the visual arts in Vienna around 1900 underwent an intriguing period of self-reflection and renewal that manifested itself, for instance, in a critical and highly eclectic attitude toward their own past. What if Mahler's strong interest in German cultural history does not simply affirm traditions but rather seeks to take traditions apart and to reassemble them according to different priorities? If that is the case, interpreting Mahler's work in its cultural contexts may shed some new light not only on its underlying intentions but also on our current ways of looking at his work and life. Or a cultural reading of Mahler can point to innovative or critical aspects of his music that have hitherto gone unnoticed.