Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006
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Williamson,
George S., The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from
Romanticism to Nietzsche, Chicago and London, U of Chicago P, 2004. 376 pp.,
ISBN 0-226-89946-2, $24.00/£17.00, paper.
Reviewed by
Humboldt University, Berlin
Possession and longing: these two
tropes are the main threads that both run through and define Williamson’s
dense study on the role of myth in German religion and culture. The book’s
central argument addresses an often overlooked fact in German cultural studies,
namely “the persistence of religious modes of thinking and perception within
the allegedly secular institutions of art, architecture and scholarship” in
nineteenth-century Germany (295).
As
the reviews on the dust sleeve imply, this is indeed an ambitious work. Although
he presents the material chronologically, Williamson avoids any simplified,
teleological analysis of the issues at hand. In seven chapters and an epilogue,
Williamson outlines the understanding, reception, and instrumentalisation of
myth in Germany from Romanticism to the Wilhelmine Empire. Williamson’s
background in religious studies lends richness to his analyses of German
canonical figures and their works. These range from Herder to Hölderlin,
Schiller to the Schlegels and the Grimm Brothers to Heine.
In
“Theophany and Religion: The Romantics turn to Myth”, Williamson takes Wörlitz
and its English garden, designed by Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of
Anhalt-Dessau and largely completed by 1800, as his topographical and symbolic
point of departure for his discussion of Hellenism in Germany. The garden’s
design was based squarely on Winkelmann’s reception of and enthusiasm for
Greek culture. Schelling’s 1796 visit to Wörlitz served as a catalyst for his
Ideen
zu einer Naturphilosophie
(1797) and his ideal of a “new mythology” for modern times. Thus, the
chapter “[. . .] focuses on how the Romantic notion of a “new mythology”
addressed long-standing problems in Aufklärung
theology concerning biblical revelation, religious liturgy, and the nature of
God” (24).
The
second and third chapters deal with myth in pre- and post-1848 revolutionary
Germany, respectively. In “The Construction of a National Mythology: The
Romantic and Vormärz Eras”,
Williamson illustrates that the reception of the Niebelungenlied and folk myth was indelibly tied to a longing for a
unique, national, unifying German myth. Citing Hegel, who wrote that
“Christianity has emptied Wallhalla” (qtd. on 72), the pre-Revolutionary (Vormärz)
era was a period that witnessed a struggle among scholars such as August Wilhelm
Schlegel and Jacob Grimm with regard to Germanic myth. While Grimm argued that
Germanic myth was “bound up with the language, customs, and peculiar history
of the Germanic peoples” (82), Schlegel’s Rittermythologie
(“knightly mythology”) was steeped in Roman Catholicism and knightly culture
(92). Williamson explains that in the end, the Niebelungenlied
would be “[. . . ] embraced by nationalists of all political stripes,
including restorationist conservatives, moderate liberals, and radical
republicans, even when the correspondence between epic and ideology was
ill-fitting at best” (92). Despite Heine’s mistrust of the fascination with
a German pre-history, the Niebelungenlied
featured prominently in his work for the French on German mythology (114), and
in Deutschland: Ein
Wintermärchen (1844), Heine
gives an ironic portrayal of sleeping German “demigods” such as Friedrich Barbarossa.
Williamson interprets the narrator’s rejection of these heroes as Heine’s
ambivalent stance to the monarchy and German myth (118).
George
Friedrich Creuzer, his Symbolik
und Mythologie der alten Völker
(1810-12), and the subsequent criticism it unleashed are the foci of
chapter 3, “Olympus under Siege: Creuzer’s Symbolik
and the Politics of Restoration”. Williamson reminds the reader that
“Creuzer argued that an esoteric symbolism (Symbolik)
had provided the basis for religious life throughout the ancient world” (127).
Creuzer’s argumentation stood in direct contrast to Herder, who had insisted
that in contrast to the public, lively celebrations of the Greeks, the Christian
church represented esoteric, private knowledge. What really inflamed Creuzer’s
contemporaries was his suggestion that Hellenistic culture had been largely
influenced by the “Oriental” cultures of both Egypt and India. Creuzer also
believed that paganism’s fundamental doctrine was in essence “the opposition
between male and female polarities in nature” (132). The god Dionysus, Creuzer
posited, had served to bridge the gap between the male and female. In accordance
with its “doctrine of incarnation, suffering and redemption,” the cult of
Dionysus was a forerunner to “the central teaching of Christianity” (133).
Because he challenged the notion of a Greek autochthony, Creuzer was criticised
by the Leipzig philologist Gottfried Hermann, Johann Heinrich Voss, Jacob Grimm,
Karl Otfried Müller and even Goethe. Williamson proposes that the theological
conflicts of the Restoration era “offer a context in which to understand the
transition from the theory that Greece was dependant on Egypt for its myths to
the view that Greek culture was more or less autochthonous” (149-50).
The
anti-Christian sentiments of Philhellenism would also effect the reception of
both the Bible and the life of Jesus as myths. “From Scriptural Revelation to
Messianic Myth: The Bible in Vormärz”
focuses on the Tübingen
theologian David Friedrich Strauss and his work Das
Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet
(1835). Williamson stresses
that Strauss’s concept of myth was a negative one: for Strauss, myth was “an
error or illusion that should be replaced with a philosophical concept” (151).
Before examining Strauss, Williamson offers his analysis of myth in biblical
theology in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Among the many
names mentioned, Williamson focuses on Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, who
“concluded that the Pentateuch was not history but rather an ‘epic of Hebrew
theocracy’” (154). Myth would become “a means of resolving the
long-standing conflict between rationalist and supernaturalist approaches to the
Bible” (160). In his discussion of Strauss and his work, Williamson notes that
many studies have ignored how Das
Leben Jesu undermined “the referentiality of the historical text. Once the concept
of myth was introduced, it tended to gobble up author and event and replace them
with a vaguely defined ‘spirit of the Volk’”
(164). Williamson expands his discussion of Strauss with a discussion of
Strauss’s most sophisticated critic, Christian Hermann Weisse, who, in his
Die evangelische
Geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet (1838),
tried to reassert the primacy of written scripture over oral tradition in the
formation of the New Testament (168).
After
his minutely precise discussion of Messianic myth, Williamson makes an abrupt
shift back to Germanic myth and the Niebelungenlied
in “Richard Wagner and Revolutionary Humanism”. With this shift of topic,
Williamson also shifts his analysis back to the “longing” for a new myth for
Germany: “Wagner drew on the language of Feuerbachian humanism to describe a
‘new myth’ that would be ‘justified by history’ and grounded in an
anthropology of ‘longing’” (181). Williamson explains that “[i]n
[Ludwig] Feuerbach’s view, Jesus Christ was the goal of all religious
‘longing’ (Sehnsucht)
since he combined masculine and feminine principles in a single person” (193).
Because he felt that “[. . .] the sensual self was sacrificed to an immaterial
idol”, Feuerbach saw Christianity as “[. . .] an obvious decline from the
polytheism of ancient Greece” (193).
It
was perhaps this longing and completion represented by Jesus that had moved
Wagner to consider an opera based on Jesus’s life. Instead, Wagner turned to
the Niebelungen myth. In addition, he
elevated the Greeks and their works to an aesthetic ideal. Williamson explains
that “[i]n Wagner’s eyes, the Greek festival tragedy was a complete and
perfect social experience [. . .]” (197). This experience would serve as a
model for the Gesamtkunstwerk,
in which, like the personage of Christ, there would be “[. . .] a joining of
male ‘understanding’ and female ‘feeling’” (201). This would also
raise contemporary drama out of its commercial trappings, which Wagner ascribed
to “Jewish” influences (202-03).
The
final two chapters, “Myth and Monotheism in the Unification Era, 1850-1880”
and “Nietzsche’s Kulturkampf”, place myth in the context of national and imperial German identity
of that time. In this era of the formation of disciplines in the academy, as
Williamson elucidates, there was a shift from philological or philosophical to
empirical studies of myth. It was also at this time that “hopes for final
synthesis [of a “total” mythology] were quietly abandoned” (212). With a
“comparative mythology”, Adalbert Kuhn and Friedrich Max Müller attempted
“to ground the study of myth in the new discipline of comparative philology”
(212). Both scholars “[. . .] emphasized
the Indo-Germanic (‘Aryan’) roots of both Germanic and Greek mythology,
challenging the philological partisans of Greek autochthony
[. . .]” (212). Williamson points out that parallel to this comparative
mythology, Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal founded a Völkerpsychologie
(“folk psychology”) that “attempted to explain the life of nations
according to epistemological principles derived from the psychologist Johann
Friedrich Herbart” (212). With his discussion of Steinthal, Williamson shifts
the focus back to the Christian-Judaic tradition and the debate over the
existence of Jewish myth, i.e., if the fact that the Jews were monotheistic had
prevented them from developing their own myth that transcended a Hebraic
nationalism.
In
his discussion of Nietzsche, Williamson takes the reader back to where his
discussion of Wagner had left off. Reminding the reader that Wagner had turned
to the Niebelungen in 1851 and that
Wagner had met Nietzsche in 1869, Williamson links Nietzsche to Wagner’s
initial preoccupation with Greek myth as a union of male and female dualities.
Thus follows a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche’s The
Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). What is new about
Williamson’s account is how he connects Nietzsche’s work with contemporary
German religious history, specifically, the Kulturkampf
between the Prussian-based, Protestant empire and the Catholic church.
Therefore, what the chapter’s title hints at—Nietzsche’s role as an
interlocutor in discourses on Greek and German myth in the Kulturkampf—is
discussed and tied into Williamson’s larger examination of German history,
myth and Christianity. Like Wagner, Nietzsche was convinced that “[. . .]
German music, born from the spirit of Protestantism, would be the new basis for
a new German ‘myth’ (Mythus)”
(249).
The
points raised in this review are merely highlights of the extensive material
that Williamson has woven together in his interesting text. However, like his
famous predecessors in German philosophy, Williamson’s attempt to found an
all-inclusive study of (the longing for) myth in Germany ultimately fails. While
the individual chapters are interesting and well-developed, they would have
functioned better as separate essays rather than as one book. Although
Williamson does explain the connection between the longing for myth and “Germanness”,
the tension between Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany, and the polarities
of Orient/Occident and Hellenism/“Orientalism” and their meanings in German
culture, the reader is subjected to major breaks in his narrative (e.g., his
discussion of Wagner). These breaks diffuse his overarching and otherwise
compelling argument that
[t]he longing for myth was not an expression of political impotence or compensation for something not achieved in the realm of government or legislation. Instead, it reflected a concrete experience of a Germany society fragmented along confessional, social, and territorial lines, lacking a common national or religious tradition, and facing dislocation and disorientation brought on my the experience of political upheaval, economic transformation, and the rapid expansion of a market-driven culture. (298).
Despite its weaknesses as one single work, Williamson’s study will enrich Germanists’ and historians’ understanding of myth in Germany. If the decision of Berlin’s Komische Oper to show Fritz Lang’s 1924 version of Die Niebelungen in July 2005 is any indication, the Germans’ longing for myth is still strong in this contemporary period of social and economic uncertainty. The Longing for Myth in Germany is certain to spark further discussion about myth in German culture in the fields of Germanics, history and religious studies.