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

David James Prickett

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 Kulturkampfis 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.