ONE OF THE MOST influential academic hypotheses regarding the relationship between Germany and the world is put forth in the introduction of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). There, Said draws a distinction between nineteenth-century German scholarship of the Orient on the one hand, and French and British attitudes towards the region on the other. Whereas France and Britain pursued active imperial interests in the Middle East—playing a “great game” of sorts that culminated in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916—Germany, lacking similar investments, took a much more abstract view of the region: “There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual.”

Said's distinction was carefully delimited both temporally and geographically: he never meant it to apply outside of the nineteenth century or to areas other than the Middle East. But because Orientalism became the de facto founding text of postcolonial studies, and postcolonial studies, in turn, was for several decades the dominant humanistic paradigm for discussing relations between Europe and the rest of the world, the idea that Germany's interest in the world was primarily academic or belletristic rather than strategic or power-political took unexpected roots. Only over the last fifteen years or so have scholars begun a concerted pushback, focusing both on the destructive consequences of German colonialism (such as the brutal suppression of the Boxer uprising in 1900–1901, or the Herero and Nama genocides of 1904–1907), and on the inadequacies of Said's hypothesis itself. These efforts have, in turn, led to more vigorous discussions of Germany's colonial past within the public sphere.

This chapter is inspired by such corrective measures, but nevertheless departs in a different direction. For, as it turns out, the thesis that Germans relate to the world in a fundamentally different way than the Western European powers (i.e., through cultural rather than military means) is by no means original to Said. It can be found in many canonical German literary and academic texts from the period between 1800 and 1945 as well.

FROM THE FIRST FRAME ONWARD, the directors of A German Life never really leave much doubt that they regard the case of Brunhilde Pomsel as a moral allegory, and that they intend for us to judge their subject harshly. The promotional website for the film claims that it “forces viewers to ask themselves what they would have done and whether they would have sacrificed any possible moral principles in order to advance their careers.” But it is not clear that Pomsel made many choices to begin with, nor does the film convey much of a sense of personal moral sacrifice. As A German Life opens, we are instead treated to a silent study of a 103-year-old woman, shot in high contrast black and white. There is something reptilian about her craggy skin, and before we ever hear her utter a single word, we see her face in profile and watch her swallow in an attempt to clear her throat. At that moment, the camera lends her a profound resemblance to a turtle. The overall impression is one of coldblooded moral sluggishness.

These opening shots should give us pause. The desire to deduce moral character from external appearances is entirely human, but, needless to say, also exceptionally dangerous. Whatever else she may be, Pomsel is also a centenarian and her external appearance should be treated as nothing more than a symptom of her advanced age. To the extent that aging can be defined as a slow-acting terminal disease, the filmmakers’ attempts to fill it with metaphysical meaning illustrate Susan Sontag's famous warning not to treat illness as a metaphor. It was Sontag also who pointed out how the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl used strategically deployed images of her own “imperishable beauty” in old age to distract from a meaningful engagement with fascist aesthetics. The current film's heavily aestheticized and moralized depiction of Pomsel has a very similar effect, and it would be interesting to compare A German Life to Ray Müller's 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, which also puts great emphasis on the external appearance of its nonagenarian subject.

Moral judgment rather than the attempt to invite critical reflection also seems to motivate the film's use of numerous inset propaganda clips.

Within the field of German studies as it has come to being in the United States, narrative prose fiction of the period from 1848 to 1914 has always presented a special disciplinary challenge. Unlike Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, writers like Gottfried Keller and Berthold Auerbach, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and even Theodor Fontane have never become household names in America, and their works are now rarely taught outside of survey courses. Nevertheless, academic critics long ago recognized that narrative prose plays an important role in shaping the collective consciousness of a nation, and over the last thirty years they have developed increasingly sophisticated models to describe the process by which this happens. The early stages of this new period of theoretical sophistication, furthermore, coincided exactly with the “historians' quarrel” of the 1980s, a frequently acrimonious debate about whether the social and political circumstances in Germany during the late nineteenth century had resulted in a so-called Sonderweg, or “separate path into modernity,” that ultimately led to two world wars and the Holocaust. It only made sense, then, to cast particular scrutiny on the narrative fiction produced during the years separating the failed liberal revolution of 1848 from the catastrophic autumn of 1914, when German students marched into Flanders full of conviction that they were fighting to protect a culturally superior national community from the aggression of Western materialism.

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.

The popular perception of German modernism in the English-speaking world is defined by an almost exclusive preoccupation with the Weimar period, those fertile fifteen years stretching from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. That such a thing as a popular perception of German modernism exists at all has largely to do with the allegorical subtext that we now invariably read into the period: the frenzied dance around the volcano by brilliant yet morally louche artists, and the eventual eruption of that volcano in the greatest political catastrophe of the twentieth century. Yet such a reading is deeply flawed, and not just because German modernism, like all of its European counterparts, had roots that reached back into earlier decades and an afterlife that continued long after Weimar had perished. More importantly still, it suggests that German modernism was a self-contained phenomenon, an exceptional case that went exceptionally wrong. The political development of the Weimar Republic was indeed without parallels, but the culture that accompanied it was enmeshed in transnational networks that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Oslo to Milan. The fabulous diversity of German modernism, along with all the characteristics that make it so distinctive, would not have come into being without these multifold exchanges.