Susan Bernofsky
What Did Don Quixote Have For Supper? Translation and Cultural Mediation in Eighteenth Century Germany
Translation theory as it developed in Germany during the late eighteenth century was largely concerned with the questions of national identity and linguistic and cultural difference first raised by Hamann and Herder and taken further by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Friedrich Schleiermacher argued for an attentiveness to the nationally specific details of a text, which he saw as a crucial means for promoting mutual understanding between nations. That these ideas—which anticipate Benjamin’s work—were put into practice by translators of the time can be observed by considering multiple translations of a single influential text over the course of the eighteenth century. These five translations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote—by an anonymous translator (1734), Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1775 and 1780), Ludwig Tieck (1799), and Dietrich Wilhelm Soltau (1880)—display an increasing degree of attention to cultural specificity which finally helps explain why Tieck’s Quixote became a key work of German Romanticism. (SB)
Gabreille Bersier
Visualizing Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s Organic Forces: Goethe’s Morphology on the Threshold of Evolution
The article demonstrates the importance of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s 1793 speech on the balance of organic forces as a turning point in Goethe’s scientific development. Showing that Kielmeyer, whom Goethe met in Tübingen on September 10, 1797, played a critical role in guiding his attention toward organic processes common to all species, it argues that it was the need to find visible manifestations of Kielmeyer’s laws of physiological organization that gave rise to Goethe’s comparative morphology in the nineties. While the most straighforward expression of Kielmeyer’s balance of forces can be found in Goethe’s law of compensation, echoes of Kielmeyer’s physiogenetic model of evolution are also perceptible in his essays on comparative anatomy. Reading Goethe with Kielmeyer thus helps elucidate the problematic relationship in Goethe’s science between his search for a typological norm and his transformative morphology in its connection to the burgeoning evolutionary thought of the age. (GB)
Laurie Johnson
Dorothea Veit’s Florentin and the Early Romantic Model of Alterity
The article’s central argument is that Dorothea Veit’s novel Florentin (1801) presents a reinterpretation of Early Romantic thinking about alterity and about intersubjective relationships. Specifically, Florentin represents a particular and progressive understanding of the “Wechselerweis,” or reciprocity principle, so important to Friedrich Schlegel’s critique of Fichte’s subject philosophy—a gesture crucial to understanding the progressive nature of the earliest Romanticism. The article draws on previous scholarship on Florentin, but also examines the intersection between Romantic philosophy and Veit-Schlegel’s novel. Rather than presenting arguments in the context of a philosophical approach to literature, however, the article works with both philosophy and fiction simultaneously, in a manner that reflects the interconnection of philosophy and literature in the Early Romantic movement itself. Thus the article attempts to illuminate crucial aspects of the relationship between philosophy and literature in Romanticism as well as to offer a reinterpretation of Florentin. (LJ)
Kathrin Maurer
Close-Ups of History: Photographic Description in the Works of Jacob Burckhardt and Adalbert Stifter
This article shows how photography provided new modes of representing cultural history in scholarly historicism and historical realist literature in nineteenth-century German-speaking countries. By comparing Jacob Burckhardt’s Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (1855) with Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer (1857), the article demonstrates how both authors employed photographic description in their respective representations of cultural history. Both utilize the perspective of a photographic close-up in their descriptions of cultural artifacts and thus foreground the materiality, texture, and surface of cultural objects. However, their dissecting photographic gaze suggests different models of cultural history. Whereas Burckhardt’s descriptions attempt to convey elements of life such as change, movement, and presence, Stifter’s novel freezes history into a stasis in a timeless vacuum. These different representations of cultural history show not only how photography inspired new modes of perceiving cultural history, but also that scholarly historicism and literature were deeply intertwined and exchanged rhetorical strategies for representing history. (KM)
Hans Feger
Die Moral des nächsten Schritts. Von der Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn bei Robert Musil
If there is no truth in itself, or just differing and competing perspectives of what we call truth, the lie poses a problem, especially in politics and in questions of legitimacy. Under a pragmatic perspective we call truth only that which enables us to act and live. But does this perspective gives us the permission to lie? Robert Musil was convinced that only literature would be able to suspend this dilemma. Telling a lie by telling the truth is not a kind of pragmatic behavior but a poetic achievement. Literary fictions can form the truth inside the lie. In this way they are even able to grasp transcendent truth. (HF)
Bernhard Dotzler
Medienliteraturwissenschaft