The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge - Softcover

Matthew D. Miller (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810137321 ISBN 13: 9780810137325

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany.

Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew D. Miller is an associate professor of German at Colgate University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The German Epic in the Cold War

Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge

By Matthew D. Miller

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3732-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
List of Abbreviations, 
Introduction: A Genre for Cold Times, 
Chapter 1 Modern Epic Possibilities: Tasks and Techniques of a Genre, 
Chapter 2 Epic's Impossible Return: Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 
Chapter 3 Time-Spaces of Epic Narration: Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage, 
Chapter 4 Epic Storytelling and Human Survival: Alexander Kluge's Chronik der Gefühle, 
Epilogue: Epic for the Twenty-First Century, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Modern Epic Possibilities

Tasks and Techniques of a Genre

From Blitzkriegen and flights no epic can emerge ... What genre could capture the collapse of our experience of time?

— Karl Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt ostwärts

Thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such.

— Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic

See Gesine Lisbeth? In telling a story one has to think of everything.

— Uwe Johnson, Jahrestage

Conceptualizing an Unlikely Genre

Novel, chronicle, encyclopedia, constellation, monument, counterstories, network: of the generic categories that might capture the innovations in narrative form advanced in Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge's prose works, this study adopts "modern epic" as the organizing principle of its comparative investigation. The name of the genre itself has been regarded as something of a self-contradiction. Whether in Schlögel's remark cited above regarding epic's inability to capture the collapse of our experience of time in the twentieth century or in Lindner's warning, cited in the introduction, regarding postcatastrophic returns to "the power of epic memory" operative in the nineteenth-century novel, our association of epic with ancient or otherwise past and no longer viable modes of narration remains firm. Yet "modern epic" is not meant to beg any questions here. While literary criticism and scholarship have periodically been beset by works outstripping conventional taxonomies and the expectations ingrained by them, generic categories must be derived from actual artistic products. A long-standing central tenet of German aesthetic theory holds that the form and content (including, as "material," previously developed aesthetic forms, AT 35/59) of any artistic production unfold in dialectical interrelation. In lockstep with this precept, Weiss's Ästhetik, Johnson's Jahrestage, and Kluge's Chronik remobilize characteristic features of the epic and advance formal innovations of the genre to generate creative and realistic forms of narration appropriate to historically specific contexts and suggestive of the epic imagination's future purchase. Modern epic constitutes a common denominator for the comparative evaluation of their accomplishments not simply due to the general resonance which "epic" (usually as the adjective episch) still holds in German as an attribute of all literary prose (in contrast to dramatic or lyrical genres). That would do little to limit the field. Rather, the reconstruction of the literary-aesthetic and theoretical discourse on the concept of modern epic and what such a genre can entail enables us to distinguish it from other narrative modes. The following pages thus lay the theoretical groundwork for the analyses elaborated in the study's main chapters by reviewing and intervening in this discourse, highlighting interconnected features of Weiss, Johnson, and Kluge's projects as instantiations of the modern epic, and outlining an arch of the genre's possibilities that the synoptic treatment of their works suggests.

Modern epic is a literary-historical category developed by the comparatist Franco Moretti. In his 1996 study named after the genre, originally published in Italian as Opere Mondo, Moretti focuses on challenges pertaining to the literary narration of increasingly complex modern social conditions from Goethe's Faust through modernism to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Tracing the evolution of the modern epic while accounting for the emergence and different uses of specific literary techniques, Moretti delivers a testament to the undiminished power of prose's formally innovative possibilities against claims regarding the medium's obsolescence. His study operates against the backdrop of foregoing theorizations of literary forms vis-à-vis their historical moments and themes. While Moretti's reliance on a Darwinian model of evolution only loosely parallels the emphasis in German aesthetics on form and content's dialectical relationship, his advocacy of the modern epic returns us to a conceptual point of departure in Hegel's Aesthetics, parts of which Moretti cites at the outset of his study:

The epic [Hegel lectured] ... acquires as its object the occurrence of an action which in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations must gain access to our contemplation as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch [in sich totalen Welt einer Nation und Zeit]. ... This whole [Totalität] comprises both the religious consciousness, springing from all the depths of the human spirit, and also concrete existence, political and domestic life right down to the details of external existence, human needs and means for their satisfaction; and epic animates this whole by developing it in close contact with individuals, because what is universal and substantive enters poetry only as the living presence of the spirit.

Against the background of Hegel's criteria, which were oriented to the epic of antiquity, Moretti unravels modern epic responses to the genre's putatively impossible task: the narration of totality under the conditions of modernity. Because what Hegel called the "living presence of the spirit" no longer encompassed universality, substance, and individuals' lives in any straightforward relation, the prospects for encapsulating modernity in some totalizing poetic form seemed bleak (ME 12ff.). On Hegel's account, the epic of yore had benefited from the allegedly poetic content of a bygone age (poetischer Weltzustand) in which individual heroic actions — most curiously in the context of war — could be holistically and concretely narrated in connection with the spiritual unity of a people (Volksgeist). The genre of the novel, by contrast, which Hegel treated derivatively as the "modern bourgeois epic" (moderne bürgerliche Epopöe), takes shape against the background of a whole world (totalen Welt) that is "already prosaically ordered" in a way "diametrically opposed to the requirements which we found irremissible for genuine epic." Although Hegel would not have put it this way, such "prosaic ordering" would include the abstraction and reification in modern social relations deemed resistant to mediation in and by artistic semblance, at least as Hegel imagined it: "Art," he had famously pronounced in the introduction to his lectures, "considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." The encyclopedic comprehension of art Hegel delivered in his Aesthetics situated its object of study within a larger system in which the task of modernity's fullest self-comprehension fell to philosophy. Whereas the relegations of absolute wisdom suggested that "modern epic" was an oxymoron in terms, the claim that such a genre was constitutively flawed was driven by a philosophy of history that could be challenged.

The young György Lukács set himself to precisely such a task. His Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, written at the beginning of World War I and published in German in 1920, revisited Hegel's discussion to prolong, in part, its differentiation of epic and novel as well as challenge the larger implications thereof. Confirming the obsolescence of epic time diagnosed in Hegel's Aesthetics, Lukács focused on the modern novel as the "expression of transcendental homelessness" (TN 41/32). In contrast to the symmetry of sense and the senses, the world and the self, art's models and copies (Vorbild and Abbild) in an epic age in which the "starry sky" supplied orientation to individuals as "the map of all possible paths," the modern novel and its individual characters are fundamentally disoriented — and searching (TN 29, 37, 60/21, 29, 51). "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality" (TN 56/47; und das dennoch die Gesinnung zur Totalität hat). Where such a Gesinnung to totality remains, it must somehow create (erschaffen) a totality that is no longer apprehensible concretely (TN 37/29). Extensive totality, in short, gives way to a totality that is expressive or genetic. Lukács's investigation thus turns to a consideration of novelistic form: "All the fissures and rents (Risse und Abgründe) which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means" (TN60/51). The modern novel's (philosophical) history can be read as a search for forms for narrating life in the contingent world in which modernity's problematical individuals find themselves (TN 78/67). In contrast to the spatial orientation evinced by the ancient epic's topographical tendencies, time serves as the plane of development for the transcendentally homeless in the modern novel, hope and remembrance the only dimensions of meaning's constitution (TN 124/110). Thus, in his evaluation of Gustave Flaubert's novel of disillusionment L'Éducation sentimentale, Lukács claimed that the desolation in the estrangement between self and world depicted there is overcome by time: "The unrestricted, uninterrupted flow [Strömen] of time is the unifying principle of the homogeneity that rubs the sharp edges off each heterogeneous fragment and establishes a relationship ... between them. Time brings order into the chaos of men's lives and gives it the semblance of a spontaneously flowering, organic entity" (TN 125/111). While Lukács also attributed to Flaubert the attainment of "truly epic objectivity," L'Éducation sentimentale stands out as an exemplary illustration of a specifically novelistic achievement of totality via the temporal integration of the story (TN 128–129/114–115). Having grasped time as the very plane on which the novel grapples with modernity, Lukács identified a principle of great consequence for the modern epic as well as for the subsequent development of his own thought, which proceeded to theorize both the historical emergence (in revolutionary praxis) of "a new complete totality [that] could be built out of all [modernity's] substances and relationships" (TN 152/137) and the narration thereof in realist literature.

Retrospective of Hegel and Lukács's approaches, the contemporary literary scholar Massimo Fusillo has described both accounts of the novel's derivation from the epic genre of a bygone age as a "critical myth." Fusillo observes the historical trajectory of the generic distinction in question to be thornier than they presented it: he grasps epic and novel as "bundles of transcultural constants" that intermix and appear in different variations at different times. While the distinctions The Theory of the Novel generates between epic and novel are thus bound to demarcate tendencies, rather than absolute differences, the following initial extraction from Lukács's study remains of heuristic value for ascertaining modern epic emphases and possibilities:

As we will see, modern epic works oscillate between these poles and in some cases surpass them, a development Lukács anticipated in his outgoing sketch of Russian literature, in which he ascertained a reconstitution of the epic out of the modern novel.

This final step of The Theory of the Novel relates to a larger contribution to be gleaned from Lukács's book, namely its implicit contestation of the restrictions Hegel had placed on modern literature's relation to social totality. At the end of Aesthetics's discussion of art's romantic form (understood there in its systematic place as Hegel's umbrella term for modern art), Hegel had granted art a freedom to be enjoyed once the relationship between form and content no longer stood under the sign of dialectical necessitation. Hegel was claiming, in other words, that in the wake of any pressing need to find specific artistic expression for social content, the artist's experiments in form were set free, yet at the price of their larger social significance. This stands at considerable odds with The Theory of the Novel, which demonstrated how much the development of literary forms was motivated by the inner dynamics of modern social life, the trappings of which literature could powerfully reveal. The pronouncements of a social philosophy — the triumphant streaks of Hegel's larger theory of modernity being conspicuously absent from The Theory of the Novel's pages — must have proven of little consolation to Lukács, for whom philosophical discourse could not reach into and touch human life at the concrete levels at which it was lived. As Fredric Jameson underscored in his essay on Lukács in Marxism and Form, "Pure thought never has absolute value as a privileged means of access to reality. On the contrary, it is narration which is for [Lukács] the absolute" and which qualifies literature not simply as a competitor of social theory, but also as a means for contesting the very ground of the latter's diagnoses. In short, Lukács's focus on literary aesthetics was wresting the self-comprehension of modernity away from of its confinement to philosophical discourse.

This is not to say that Lukács was under any illusions regarding art's social power. His musings on Russian epic novels emphasized that art would never by itself be able to bring about lost substance (TN 152/137). And his later work on realism would pin the tenability of narrative to "those moments of history in which human life can be apprehended in terms of concrete, individual confrontations and dramas, in which some basic general truth of life can be told through the vehicle of the individual story, the individual plot." Yet as the author of The Theory of the Novel was clearly still grappling with literature's relation to the social totality, the question remained as to whether Lukács's "will to reestablish epic narration" granted literature any anticipatory social role. This relates to a further distinction between epic and novelistic form that has shifted back and forth over the course of the genres' histories, namely the question of open versus closed narrative structure, which is also a question of integration and endings. Fusillo observes the oscillating application of the open/closed distinction to the two genres from Homer's (epically open) Iliad and (novelistically closed) Odyssey onward, whereas Moretti touts the reversion of "centripetal epic and centrifugal novel ... pace Bakhtin" into its opposite, whereby the epic appears as "the polyphonic form" specializing "in the heterogeneous space of the world-system." Lukács's handling of the question in The Theory of the Novel derived from his tendency to treat totality generally as a closed structure there. On his approach, the question of beginnings and endings only became problematic under modern conditions. This is because the ancient epic putatively enjoyed an unbroken relationship to the social totality as an organic whole of which it was part (TN 66/57): epic tales could begin in medias res and end at will as the narrative receded into a known and shared world of myth. While "we [moderns] cannot breathe in a closed world" (TN 33/25), Lukács modeled even the modern novel's temporal totality on the integrated enclosure of the unified story, not its fragmentation, not, in other words, any open deferral to social developments that literature could by itself not bring about. Yet in concluding his essay with an eye toward future epics of the "new world," Lukács himself opted for a form open to history (TN 152/137). History's force pierces the totality of yore and is the reason for which no modern totality could possibly be grasped in terms of organic closure. What remains in and for the modern epic is thus a Gesinnung zur Totalität and the value of "thinking in terms of totality" that I elaborate below. For a book emphasizing the shattering punctuation of totality in modernity, Lukács's ending is a consistent one.

Literary Evolution

Against such sweeping historico-philosophical exercises, Franco Moretti's study frames the "basic components of the modern epic" not "as desirable innovations, but as problems to be solved" (ME 94, emphasis there). The author of Modern Epic thereby supplants the dialectical necessitation inherent to any motivated artistic approach to modern reality with an evolutionary model for understanding literary morphology. On Moretti's model, experimentation in literary devices offers up virtually random variations of form that are then socially selected in the process of literature's evolutionary history (ME 6, 181). Moretti demonstrates the explanatory purchase of such an approach by focusing mostly on chapters of the genre's evolution prior to World War II. As a result of his methodology, the course he charts for the genre differs from the modern epic's subsequent development in the Cold War context. Modern Epic nonetheless proves valuable to an assessment of Weiss, Johnson, and Kluge's postcatastrophic works in multiple ways: whereas Moretti's conception of the genre establishes the modern epic as a viable category of world literature, his survey of its devices suggests what Weiss, Johnson, and Kluge could inherit and reshape in their own experiments with the genre. Moreover, Moretti's construal of literary evolution in terms of problems and their solutions can be utilized within the dialectical elaboration of the modern epic's postwar trajectory.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810137321
• ISBN 13: 9780810137325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272