WiG Book Reviews Online Fall 1997

Over the last ten years several literary and cultural studies on German female playwrights have corrected the persistent assumption that women have no place in the history of German drama. Ein Haus aus Sprache is the first survey study that systematically summarizes that scholarship in charting women’s drama history from Hrotsvith von Gandersheim to the young contemporary playwright Bettina Fless. Yet Helga Kraft’s study is more than a chronological and bibliographically well organized introduction to major German speaking women dramatists. By drawing on gender studies theories, Kraft also addresses the gender politics shaping the cultural production of theater and literary history and the manner in which these plays deal with gender ideologies and aesthetic traditions.

Divided into two thematic sections, Ein Haus aus Sprache first delineates the "anatomy of forgetting" of the history of female dramatists from the medieval period up to the 1960s. Chapter 1 traces the forgotten roots of the "mothers" of German drama–Hrotsvith von Gandersheim, Caroline Neuber, and Luise Adelgunde Gottsched–and their contributions to the emergence of new genres on the margins of the Aristotelian drama tradition and of a national theater. Chapter 2 examines the tensions between gender ideologies that positioned women primarily through a body politics based on the nature-culture dichotomy and the tenets of the enlightenment in plays by Charlotte von Stein, Karoline von Günderode, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Amalie Marie Prinzessin von Sachsen, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. After outlining the successful career of Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer as actor, playwright, and theater director, chapter 3 confronts the mechanisms of exclusion subjecting the work of this playwright to oblivion not only within the literary conventional establishment but also within feminist scholarship. The focus of chapter 4 are plays by Elsa Bernstein (Ernst Rosmer), Vicki Baum, Ilse Langner, Hilde Rubinstein, and Christa Winsloe, all of which project utopian ideals of the "new woman" against the backdrop of war and social and political tensions.

The second part of the book centers around the aesthetic interventions in the discourse on gender difference, German fascism, and xenophobia in 20th-century plays. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which plays by Else-Lasker Schüler, Marie Luise Fleißer, Friederike Roth, and Gerlind Reinshagen challenge normative gender ideology. Experimental, postmodern, and surrealist aspects of contemporary plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Gertrud Leutenegger, Ginka Steinwachs as well as dance performances by Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann are the topic of chapter 6. Finally, chapter 7 highlights Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Gerlind Reinshagen, Elfriede Jelinek, and Bettina Fless’s critical contributions to the discourse on National Socialism and otherness.

In addition to providing a rich and insightful panoply of plays by German speaking women playwrights, Ein Haus aus Sprache touches on crucial theoretical issues regarding the production of drama history and the restrictions of and opportunities for women rewriting genre and gender traditions. This twofold goal of the book is its strength as it historicizes the cultural context and social conditions under which female dramatists wrote. On the other hand, it can only skim the surface of the underlying complex theoretical issues and, as a result, sometimes presents unexplained comparisons that therefore seem arbitrary (e.g. between Frida Kahlo’s surrealist painting style and Gertrud Leutenegger’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s plays). Yet I find Ein Haus aus Sprache highly informative and inspiring. Reading it also made me aware of what is still to be explored in feminist scholarship–the history and critical assessment of women as theater critics and theoreticians.

Mariatte C. Denman, University of California, Davis

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"Teichoscopy," the skill of "wall-viewing", is a key term in one of the twelve collected essays in Beate Allert’s Languages of Visuality. The author, Jeffrey Garrett, analyses two "Wall novels" and employs the notion of teichoscopia as an original analytical paradigm to discuss the vantage point from which protagonists in novels by Peter Schneider and Uri Orlev overcome the oppressive conditions of enclosed spaces to develop "visual domination" of their environment (first the Berlin Wall, secondly the wall surrounding a Jewish Ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland). "Teichoscopy" is a trope that could also be employed to describe the strength of this fascinating collection of essays: the authors open up new interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex issue of text/image relationship and the analysis of images. They help establish an innovative vocabulary to capture the interdependence between visual and literary discourses. Allert asks in her introduction "to what extent are texts visual and images textual?" Her volume provides a multitude of answers.

Languages of Visuality does not deal with the direct association of text/image relationships in mass media, film, electronic technologies or the Information Super Highway. This collection instead allows new and surprising points of views onto subjects dealing with art history, the politics of visual production, the visual in literary texts. Many of the theoretical frameworks employed are prevalent in comparative literature and cultural studies. "Teichoscopy" is only one of the re-articulated new concepts and approaches offered in Beate Allert’s sophisticated collection of essays that quite literally offers "crossings" and helps transcend disciplinary boundaries.

As the title indicates, the volume engages a wide array of scholarly treatments concerning science, art, politics and literature. The authors concentrate on cultural phenomena from the paintings of Paul Klee, "The Dialectic of Romantic Enlightenment and the Psychodynamics of the Hypervisual in Hölderlin’s Hyperion," or the "Opera in the Light of Technology." The essays are organized in six chapters that cover such diverse topics as "Visuality and Rhetoric: from the Greeks to the Present," "Colors and Music: Science and Media Technology," "The Universe and the Self: Monads, Eyeballs, and Individuals," "Poetry and Painting: the Empty Center, Gaps, and Hieroglyphs," "Power and Seeing: Control and Transgressions," and "Theories of Visuality: Closer Definitions."

The comparative analysis of Italian modernist poet Aldo Palazzeschi and Giorgio de Chirico, for example, develops an innovative analytical approach by drawing an analogy between the two artists concerning intentional voids in their texts. The author, Anthony Julian Tamburri, explains that blank spaces in the poetry and the canvas allow readers/viewers to pause in their reception. The "empty centers" force a distancing between object of contemplation and reader, a process that provokes reflection. "Both artists deprivilege narrative and coherent textuality in favor of liberating the signifier from an extrinsic signifying force," Tamburri concludes. "Scopophilia," a term used by feminist film critics to identify the joy (male) audiences develop in looking at (mostly female) objects in classic Hollywood narratives on the screen, only scratches the surface of the far more dynamic relationships explored in Languages of Visuality between observer and object, text and image. The interpretive strategies presented in this collection launch readers into a highly complex field of a "scopic regime" outside the canon of visual analysis. Beate Allert draws a diverse group of scholars together and insightfully presents their approaches in her introduction. Her scholarly interest in new analytical approaches is linked to her work in progress on Optics and Metaphor where she will address aspects from feminist and film criticism, two areas not yet prominently covered in the present text. This outstanding volume makes the reader look forward to her next contribution.

Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Central Connecticut State University

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The development of modern drama seems to contain a major paradox. On the hand, one of the defining themes of modern drama was "the woman question," as the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov, and others attest. On the other hand, women – who had been prolific and celebrated as dramatists during the Restoration and eighteenth century – all but disappeared as playwrights. Katherine E. Kelly, the editor of the new anthology, Modern Drama by Women 1880s –1930s resolves this paradox. In her introduction she shows that the paradox persists only as long as we believe in the traditional accounts of the development of modern drama. If, however, we look beyond the critics and historians who until now have monopolized the accounts of modern drama, we find that women continued to write drama and that their works continued to be performed and renowned.

Looking at handlists of plays, Kelly has found records of 4,700 female dramatists writing in England and the US during this period. With this information at hand, Kelly asks the obvious question: how can the work of 4,700 women disappear? Her answer is that "it took a sustained effort on the part of critics, historians and producers" (2) to obscure the works of these women. Kelly’s collection of modern drama by women disproves these "canon makers" with a vengeance.

The anthology contains twelve plays by women written between 1883 and 1937. They represent ten different countries, mostly from Western Europe: Anne Charlotte Leffler Edgren (Sweden), Amelia Rosselli (Italy), Elsa Bernstein (Germany), Elizabeth Robins (Britain), Marie Lenéru (France), Hella Wuolijoki (Finland), and Rachilde (France), but also Alfonsina Storni (Argentina), Hasegawa Shiguré (Japan), Zinaida Gippius (Russia), Djuna Barnes (USA), and Marita Bonner (USA). Each play is introduced either by the translator or another scholar, who presents the play from the standpoint of its national origin as well as in the context of the development of modern drama in general. This gives the anthology an extraordinary depth and makes it an invaluable resource for drama specialists, literary historians, women’s studies scholars and others interested in modern drama and women’s issues.

Kelly has chosen to divide the plays into two categories, "realisms" and "departures." By so doing she wants to document "the variety of realisms in the emerging modern drama and simultaneously [demonstrate] the non–realist (or "modernist" or "avant–garde") dramatic writing that flourished in small, coterie theaters" (7). This division indeed serves the purpose of showing the wide range of voices that expressed the female perspective of modern life, from the political struggle for equality in society (the right to vote, to own property, to higher education, etc.) to the problems of combining women’s different roles as professionals, mothers, wives, and lovers. But apart from these "real" problems of "real" life, the category of "departures" also makes it possible to hear the voices of women who claim that there is no particular "female" experience, for instance Grippius and Rachilde. Both wrote symbolist plays and "carefully distanced themselves from the movement for women’s rights, seeking personal freedom and gender flexibility under the auspices of avant–garde defiance" (12). Despite this rejection of the women’s movement, or perhaps because of it, these female writers add to the understanding of modern drama and show that modern drama by women is as diverse, individual, and complex as that of their male counterparts.

As productive as this division of the plays into "realisms" and "departures" is, it also brings with it some problems, since many of the plays include both realistic and non–realistic elements. Hella Wuolijoki’s eminently funny comedy Hulda Juuradko, for instance, has been placed in the "departures" category even though its main themes are decidedly "realistic," namely women’s struggle for education and political and economic equality.

For the German scholar, the play Maria Arndt by Elsa Bernstein (Ernst Rosmer) is of particular interest. Susanne Kord’s introduction illustrates the point made by Kelly for the Anglo–American situation, i.e., how modern drama by women has been suppressed by later historians and critics. Reading standard German Literaturgeschichten, one is led to believe that Gerhart Hauptmann is the only German playwright of any stature during the Naturalist period. But Kord shows that Bernstein was "considered one of the most promising dramatists of her time" (81), and that her plays, including Maria Arndt, were successfully performed. In 1911 one literary historian called Bernstein "one of the few outstanding female dramatists of German as well as world literature" (81). However, after 1915 the critics changed their assessment, either ignoring her or considering her a "dramatic dilettante" (81).

Maria Arndt depicts a powerful woman who is caught between the demands of society and family and her own yearning for love and personal freedom. In contrast to Ibsen’s Nora, whose repression stems only from outside forces (e.g., societal norms, husband, and family), Maria Arndt illustrates that women are also subject to an internal repression. Unable to rid herself of the perceived reactions from society and family, in particular her daughter, she chooses suicide rather than challenging these crippling standards when she realizes that she is carrying an illegitimate child. Maria Arndt’s struggle with her own internalized repression shows the struggle for female emancipation from the vantage point of the insights to female psychology that can come only from personal experience. The play thus adds a new dimension to modern German drama as well as to modern drama in general.

The female characters in the other dramas included in this volume play similar roles as Maria Arndt, i.e., they express the female perspective of modern life in their own individual ways. This makes this anthology not only an invaluable resource for scholars of modern drama but also exciting and fun to read.

Kerstin Gaddy, Georgetown University

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Rigby’s ambitious enterprise, which encompasses dramatic texts from Sophocles to Goethe, and from Racine to Hebbel, as well as theoretical analyses from Bacon to Freud, and from Nietzsche to Luk‡cs, while discussing Plato, Hegel, Darwin and Ibsen on the side, at times leaves her reader wishing for a smaller, more concentrated scope of argumentation. Aiming to disprove Luk‡cs’ thesis that the world–view of the enlightenment is incompatible with tragic necessity, and therefore with tragic form, Rigby falls back upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Their theory that the conquest of nature entails self–alienation serves as a basis for Rigby’s redefinition of tragic necessity. Rigby claims that an understanding of this downside of progress is already visible in German classicist drama, and that, not surprisingly, the figure of "Woman transgressed against—and in turn transgressing" (3)—is typically employed to enact this dynamic. Thus, the relationship between the sexes—with the metaphor of Woman standing for both a nature that needs to be controlled and an archaic past that needs to be overcome—becomes a symbol for the process of modernization and its costs.

Rigby enlists four dramatic works as exemplifications of four different variations on the dialectic of Enlightenment. She interprets Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris as the "enlightenment of tragedy" because the play circumvents the dire consequences of progress, and thus also a tragic ending, through its "verteufelte Humanität," embodied in the figure of the redemptive woman. In contrast to Goethe’s harmonizing drama, Kleist’s Penthesilea illustrates "the return of the repressed." Rigby reads Kleist’s work as an illustration of how emotions and desires that enlightened rationality excludes as Other return with a vengeance. Grillparzer’s Das goldene Vließ provides yet another perspective. Here, the Other is depicted as ethnic other, so that the violent colonization of that which is considered primitive is shown as an integral part of modernization. Hebbel’s Der Ring des Gyges, finally, demonstrates the "tragedy of Enlightenment." It deflates the myth of the hero as an agent of change by portraying progress as a process that unfolds independently and ineluctably.

Although Rigby’s juggling of such a large amount of material attests to the breadth and thoroughness of her knowledge, several problems arise from it. Her theory that the dialectic of Enlightenment is already visible in the drama of Greek antiquity blurs her strained differentiation of Enlightenment as historical era and enlightenment as concept, leveling off historical differences, and transforming the dialectic of Enlightenment into an "eternally human" condition. This proximity to the concept of "Allgemeinmenschliches" is also manifest in Rigby’s interpretation of Iphigenie. Rigby reads Goethe’s text as an example for a successful integration of non–Europeans and women into the humanistic ideal without eradicating their difference (cf. 107). Here, Rigby forgets what she herself stated before, namely that the humanization of the gods in Iphigenie is tied to the deification/demonization of woman, which in turn is inseparable from the social marginalization of women. While Rigby acknowledges that Goethe’s idealization of Woman represses Iphigenie’s sexuality, she ignores that "human" progress is yet again achieved by Woman (and women) being forever doomed to salvage what Man has just wrecked, thus reduplicating the equation of women and peaceableness. A similar one–sidedness occurs in Rigby’s interpretation of Das goldene Vließ. In stating that Grillparzer deconstructs the myth of the "noble savage," she fails to see that he reinforces the stereotype of barbaric greed and power through sexuality.

However, in spite of those shortcomings and inconsistencies, Rigby’s interesting and provocative redefinition of that which is tragic in German tragedy makes for a valuable reading experience.

Elisabeth Krimmer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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Die aus dem Niederländischen von Annette Löffelhohlz übersetzte und von May Ayim überarbeitete 2. Auflage von Lida van den Broeks Handbuch orientiert sich an den Erfahrungen der Autorin als Ombudsfrau und Direktorin von Kantharos, ein Büro für Ausbildung und Beratung zum Thema multikultureller Politik in den Niederlanden. In einer verständlichen Sprachweise und anhand pragmatischer Beispiele aus dem Alltag hat van den Broek Anweisungen entworfen, womit LeserInnen das Problem Rassismus in seiner Wechselwirkung mit anderen Vorurteilsstrukturen erkennen, verstehen und überwinden können. Das Buch beginnt mit einem kurzen Rückblick auf die historische Entwicklung des Rassismus (bzw. Sklaverei und Kolonialismus), nimmt eine theoretische Untersuchung der Mechanismen und Strukturen verschiedener Formen der gesellschaftlichen Unterdrückung (wie Sexismus und Klassenherrschaft) vor, und untersucht dann die Wurzeln des Rassismus in der Sozialisierung. Das letzte Drittel des Buches widmet sich praxisorientierten Möglichkeiten, Rassismus durch Gruppenübungen, situative Rollenspiele und Aufforderungen zum eigenen Handeln zu überwinden. Diese praktischen Anweisungen versteht van den Broek als eines der effektivsten Mittel der antirassistischen Bewegung, die von den Selbsterfahrungsgruppen bzw. Gesprächs– und Therapiegruppen der Frauenbewegung viel gelernt und übernommen hat. Es geht ihr darum, die "menschliche" bzw. psychologische und soziologische Logik des Rassismus vor allem bei Weißen zu erläutern. Etwas heikel sind allerdings ihre Behauptungen, "hinter jeder rassistischen Äußerung steckt eine gute Absicht" und "Rassisten sind, so mächtig und gewalttätig sie auch sein mögen, Opfer, und in dieser Rolle müssen wir sie sehen" (100). Diese Behauptungen sind angesichts vieler brutaler Gewaltakte zunächst schwer nachzuvollziehen, gelten aber durchaus als nötiger Ansatz, um eine defensive und abwehrende Haltung unter TeilnehmerInnen an Antirassismus–Workshops zu vermeiden. Denn nur indem man sich in die Logik des Rassismus hineindenkt und ihn als eine von manchen angewendete "†berlebensstrategie" (100) erkennt, werden Anknüpfungspunkte für Veränderungen möglich. Wichtig bei der Erkenntnis der internalisierten Vorurteile ist es, mit persönlichen Reaktionen, Widerständen und Verleugnungen verständnisvoll umzugehen und dabei zwischen Kritik und Projektion unterscheiden zu lernen.

Zu vereinfachend fand ich das erste Kapitel, "Die versunkene Geschichte," in dem die Autorin der Entwicklung des Rassismus aus der Kolonialgeschichte der letzten 500 Jahre nachgeht. Solche Verallgemeinerungen wie " die Hinterhältigkeit und Raublust der Menschen aus dem Norden" oder "die Europäer waren auf Siegen und Beherrschen aus" stehen armselig da im Vergleich mit der viel differenzierteren Diskursanalyse, die Tzvetan Todorov schon vor zehn Jahren veröffentlichte. Hier argumentierte er, die Eroberung der Azteken und Mayas basierte auf der Fähigkeit der Spanier, die symbolische Weltanschauung der Einheimischen zu durchschauen und für sich einzusetzen (indem sie sich als Götter ausgaben, zum Beispiel). Die Eroberer hatten auch Gewehre, die den Waffen der Indianer überlegen waren. Nicht besonders hilfreich ist die Tendenz van den Broeks, die Kultur der Ureinwohner Afrikas oder des südamerikanischen Kontinents als Urparadies oder Utopie zu idealisieren, denn diese xenophilische Haltung reduziert diese Menschen auf das Naive, beinah Kindliche. Dabei waren Krieg, Kämpfe um Landeroberung, und Versklavung unter den Stämmen selbst auch sehr verbreitet.

Abgesehen von diesen Einwänden eignet sich das Handbuch gut für die Praxis. Für WissenschaftlerInnen und LehrerInnen im Bereich der Germanistik oder der deutschen Kulturwissenschaften bieten die ausführlich beschriebenen Gruppenübungen lehrreiches Material, um eigene Workshops im Unterricht oder bei der Ausbildung von Graduate Assistants zu gestalten. Besonders hilfreich ist die Bibliographie zu deutschsprachigen Texten im Bereich der Rassismusforschung—ein Verdienst, den wir vermutlich der kürzlich verstorbenen May Ayim zu verdanken haben.

Angelica Fenner, University of Minnesota/Humboldt Universität

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Silke Mertins, die als freie Journalistin in Frankfurt/Main lebt, hat eine faszinierende Komposition zusammengestellt. Eine wohltönende, harmonische Symphonie ist es nicht, eher eine Polyphonie. Der Titel für ihre Sammlung von Interviews ist also bestens gewählt: (Zwischen)töne. Das "Zwischen" bezieht sich einerseits auf den Text selbst; wir werden eingeladen, zwischen den Tönen zu lesen, so wie wir "zwischen den Zeilen" lesen, obwohl diese Töne klar und nüchtern scheinen. Andererseits deutet das "Zwischen" auf die Situation hin, in der die Sprecherinnen sich befinden: im "Nicht mehr und Noch nicht". Auf der Rückseite des Paperbacks heißt es: "Einige kamen aus zionistischer †berzeugung, die meisten waren auf der Flucht. In ihren Herkunftsländern waren Sie Jüdinnen. In Israel wurden sie zu Jemenitinnen, Russinnen, Marokkanerinnen, Polinnen, Irakerinnen, US-Amerikanerinnen oderÄthiopierinnen." Was für eine ironische Wiederholung ihrer Lage! Zwar gehören sie in der alten, neuen Heimat als Jüdinnen zur Mehrheit, aber als Mitglieder einer nationalen Gruppe abermals zu einer Minderheit. Das Fazit: zu Hause sind sie immer noch nicht.

Um die Vielfalt der Kulturen in Israel recht deutlich widerzuspiegeln, hat Silke Mertins sich ihre Gesprächspartnerinnen sorgfältig ausgewählt. Unterschiedlich sind die Frauen in jeder Hinsicht: Herkunft (Sabra oder Einwanderer), Kultur und Ethnizität, oder gar Nationalität, Politik, Beruf, Alter. Zum Aufzeigen der Bandbreite einige Beispiele: die Jüngste ist 21 und die Älteste 80; eine ist Hausfrau und Arbeiterin, eine andere Rechtsanwältin; eine ist aus Äthiopien eingewandert, eine andere kommt aus Rußland, eine dritte wuchs im Kibbutz auf; eine ist religiös orthodox, eine andereüberhaupt nicht religiös.

Als gemeinsamer Nenner bleibt nur die weibliche und die jüdische Komponente. Da sich das jüdische Selbstverständnis aber für viele sehr unterschiedlich darstellt, bleibt nur eine Gemeinsamkeit: Frau sein. Und tatsächlich ist man sich bei der Diskussion ‘typisch weiblicher’ Probleme einig, wobei allerdings die positiven Aspekte der Weiblichkeit zu kurz kommen. Zum Beispiel ist es auch im sozialistischen Land sehr schwierig, Beruf und Familie miteinander zu verbinden. Faire Arbeitsteilung scheint es kaum zu geben. Auchüber Diskriminierung im Beruf, besonders beim Militär, beklagen sich fast alle.

Es schockieren–auch wenn man weiß, wie problematisch sich die gesellschaftspolitischen Beziehungen in der israelischen Gesellschaft gestalten–die rassistischen Äußerungen dieser Frauen. Ihre Vorurteile oder gar ihr Haß gegenüber den orientalischen Juden kommen deutlich zum Vorschein. Auch in ihrer Ablehnung der Ultraorthodoxen sind sich die meisten Frauen einig.

In formaler Hinsicht hat Silke Mertens ihre Interviews nicht im Original belassen; sie hat ihre Fragen ausgelassen und aus den Antworten einen Prosatext konstruiert. Diese Form erinnert an das Genre der "Protokolliteratur", das auch in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren bei Schriftstellerinnen in der DDR beliebt war (z.B. Sarah Kirschs Pantherfrau ). Zwar wird so der Text geglättet, Wiederholungen und Unebenheiten werden ausgelassen, doch wird er nicht in eine vorgefertigte Form gepreßt. Die individuellen Stimmen kommen noch immer deutlich zur Geltung.

Auch die ursprünglich gestellten Fragen und die Themen und Themenkreise lassen sich leicht aus dem Text herausschälen. Zum Beispiel fallen unter die Rubrik "Identität" folgende Fragen:

• Repräsiert das Judentum für die interviewten Frauen Religion oder Tradition? Welche Rolle spielt es im Alltag?
• Wie geht man mit den enormen kulturellen Unterschieden in Israel um, die bei ihnen existieren?
• Wie lassen sich Beruf und Familie miteinander vereinbaren?
• Zum Thema Militärdienst ergeben sich diese Fragen:
• Was für eine Rolle sollen Frauen beim Militär spielen?
• Wie haben sie auf den Golfkrieg reagiert?
• Was halten sie von der Gaslieferung deutscher Firmen an den Irak vor dem Golfkrieg?

Man kann den Interviews entnehmen, daß sie Fragen aufwerfen, die allen unter den Nägeln brennen und interessante und vielfältige Antworten hervorrufen, aber nicht unbedingt ermutigende.

So ist das Buch insgesamt spannend, für Fachleute und Laien gleichermaßen empfehlenswert und lohnend.

Monika Totten, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The texts of Friedrich Wilhelm Carové’s (1789-1852) 22-page Kinderleben (1830) and Sarah Austin’s English translation (1834), together with one of its five original illustration vignettes by Philipp Otto Runge and Schweitzer’s commentary comprise the small book reviewed here. Kinderleben exemplifies Rousseauian pedagogical thought Romanticized and refigured: a childhood spent within Nature culminates in the child’s ultimate rejection of human community.

Carové’s sugary prose is hard for a late twentieth-century-reader to digest:

... sobald der erste Sonnenstrahl leise durch die runden Scheiben [des Hüttchens] schlüpfte und des Kindes Augenlieder küßte, und draußen das Finklein und Zeiserlein ihr Morgenlied anstimmten, und das Kind freundlich aufweckten, ging es hinaus auf die Wiese, und forderte von der Schlüsselblume Kehl, und Zucker von dem Veilchen, und von der Butterblume Butter, schöpfte in einem blauem Blumenkelche Thautropfen von den Maßlieben, breitete ein großes Lindenblatt aus, setzte seine kleinen Näschereien darauf und labte sich daran. Zuweilen lud es eine summende Biene,öfter doch die bunten Schmetterlinge, am liebsten die blauen Libellen zu Gast.

The book’s narrative is simple. The ungendered child wanders from place to place, gazes upon natural beauty, overhears spiritually pointed conversations among nature’s creatures, and converses with a drop of water, all of which leads to a defining realization:

Und das Kind war wieder recht fröhlich geworden, und athmete wieder frei, und dachte nicht mehr daran, in sein Hüttchen zurückzukehren. Ging doch nichts von Allem, was es sah, zurück; vielmehr zog und strebte Alles hinaus, oder hinauf–in’s Freie; die rosigen Apfelblüthen aus dem engen Brüstlein. Die Keime sprengten die Flügelthüren des Saamens, und durchbrachen die Dämme der Erde, um an’s Licht zu kommen; die Gräser zerrissen ihre Bande und eilten als Halme in die Höhe. Selbst die Felsen waren weich geworden, und ließen kleine Flechten und Möslein ausgehen, zum Zeichen, daß auch sie nicht ewig verschloßen bleiben wollten.

Carové relies heavily on diminuitives (Finklein, Zeiserlein), rhyming pairs ("wellte und quellte," section 2; "wegsam und regsam", section 8), as well as fairytale formulas like "es war einmal" and conjunctions typical for fairytales like "und" and "da." Schweitzer points out the extent to which Carové’s text, parts of which were initially composed in 1818, is indebted to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das fremde Kind (1817). Above all, Kinderleben, in unabashedly depicting a childlike existence in discord-free harmony with nature, embodies and expresses a Biedermeier vision and version of Kunstmärchen attributes.

The single illustration that Schweitzer includes communicates a literalized divinity (a tetragrammaton in glory). Heavenly rays illuminate a small angel, who stands on a blossom held by a reverentially inclined child whom it blesses, while purity appears emblematically in lily bloom, buds, and stalks, one of which supports the child’s body. The vignette’s all-encompassing allegorical intention is clearly signaled by the fact that the child’s foot rests not on a flat plane, but on the curve of the earth. It is an illustration to be read, in every sense of the word.

However alien the book’s sentiments and imagery are to contemporary readers, they claim our attention for the simple reason that they so evidently claimed hearts and purses in the nineteenth century, witness the thirty-one English-language printings of Kinderleben that Schweitzer has identified. In America the book’s first edition was prefaced with an address by the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, who understood the book’s fourteen sections as a series of emblems: appetite, passion, fancy, sentiment, love, dislike, thought, imagination, genius, reason, doubt, religion, faith, and aspiration (65).

Schweitzer’s very brief discussion of the work of eight different illustrators is chiefly concerned with the sex each attributes to the grammatically neuter German "Kind." His little study contributes to the much larger concept of cultural lag and translation. Born of early nineteenth-century German Romantic sentiment, this curious cultural artifact achieved its greatest commercial success two generations later and in another language. The upper and middle-class English culturing of childhood which flowered in the later nineteenth century would undoubtedly have evolved as it did without Carové’s Kinderleben, but his prose contributed a specific language and imagery so persistent that one repeatedly encounters it and its descendants in Victorian children’s books.

Ruth B. Bottigheimer, SUNY, Stony Brook

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