Dante in Deutschland: An Itinerary of Romantic Myth

Dante in Deutschland is an eloquently written study of the "itinerary," as the author labels it, of the myth of Dante's personage and his works in Germany from the Romantic period to the Second World War. The latest book in Bucknell University Press's series New Studies in the Age of Goethe, edited by John B. Lyon, the book's central argument is that "to the Romantics, the Commedia was more than a touchstone—it was a lodestar, its author no less vital to them than Shakespeare had been to the Sturm und Drang" (3). This premise lays the foundation for a reception study that is a model of Comparative Literature research. As Daniel DiMassa explains, his approach does not just examine "the Romantics' attempt at a mythology, but their attempt at a Dantean mythology" (5). Combining philology, hermeneutics, and history, he promises to "open new interpretations of Romantic works" and to "trace an itinerary of Romantic myth, highlighting the waystations of a path that has remained in obscurity" (5–6). Indeed, the book succeeds in this endeavor.In terms of utopian studies, this is not a consoling literary story, for as DiMassa demonstrates, this study turns our "attention to a familiar yet puzzling trajectory of Romanticism—its move from radicality and revolution to Catholicism and conservatism" (9) in Germany. But, in contrast to Lukács's "straight line from Schelling to Hitler," DiMassa proposes a Romanticism inflected by the myth of Dante and "culminating in a trio of figures who embodied one form of fascism or another—Hauptmann, Borchardt, and George" (9). In highlighting this trajectory, DiMassa provokes thought about the dangers of utopian ideologies as well as how to confront them.Following an introduction that succinctly lays out the argument and the methodology, DiMassa historically situates, in six thoughtful and thoroughly researched chapters, pivotal figures in German Romanticism and the neo-Romanticism of the twentieth century. He then provides close readings of their major texts to show how Dante and his Commedia are "recovered, repurposed, revered, and reduplicated" to shape "the origins of German Romanticism and the attempts at its rehabilitation" in the twentieth century (177). This review of the book cannot do justice to such a complex and fascinating argument, so this cursory overview of some of the chapters is intended as a recommendation to read the study in its entirety.Chapter 1, "Discovering Dante and Theorizing Myth," examines the "Schlegel Brothers and the Origins of the Romantic Project." The eighteenth century was the nadir of Dante's reception, even in Italy, but the "myth of Dante" burst onto the stage of cultural and political history in the nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, according to DiMassa, writers such as Bodmer, Herder, and Goethe had prepared the way for a new reception of long neglected "barbarians" like Dante. Signaling this imminent change in taste, framed in nationalistic terms, in a 1772 essay, "On German Architecture," having recently revisited Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe exclaimed, "This is German architecture! Our architecture!"1 He insists, "what unexpected emotions seized me when I finally stood before the edifice! My soul was suffused with a feeling of immense grandeur."2 Earlier, Goethe had labeled medieval buildings "barbaric," he admits in the same essay,3 but his experience of the cathedral awakened a nationalist intensity suggestive of utopian emotion. A. W. Schlegel's projection of Dante "as a man of action who, in an age devoid of political leadership, had drafted a poetry teeming with manliness and vitality" (25) smacks of the same Romantic enthusiasm, but A. W. Schlegel was eager to celebrate the once "barbaric" Dante as the apogee of an emerging "Weimar Classicism and Jena Romanticism" (25), an idyll of the contemporary romantic enthusiasm. In a decade, the work of early German Romantics, including A. W. Schlegel's translations, Schelling's lectures, and Friedrich Schlegel's advocacy, buried Dante's so-called barbarism and "fixed him in the firmament of the European canon" (48).Close readings of several texts in the following chapter, "Schelling, Novalis, and the Legitimation of a Dantean Mythology," examine how Dante's major work supported the search by Schelling and Novalis for what DiMassa labels "a utopian new mythology" (15) that would express the spirit of the age. In that search, it was Dante and his iconography that "supplied a new lexicon to the mythic poetics of (Romantic) German idealism" (53). DiMassa argues that this new mythology of Romanticism emanated from "disillusionment" with the Enlightenment's belief that reason could undergird utopia (4). Thus "utopia" is understood here as the Enlightenment project, that through reason a new world would be born. But the "Romantics' new mythology" (65), emerging from this discontent and disillusion with the present, possessed its own utopian aspects.Chapter 3, "Goethe's Dantean Mythologies of the Self and of the World," is one of DiMassa's most stimulating chapters, perhaps because it brings two of Europe's greatest writers together. DiMassa argues that critics' view that Goethe had a limited engagement with Dante compared to his engagement with Shakespeare ignores the extent to which Dante as author and as poet became a presence in Goethe's work. In his early works, DiMassa argues, Goethe "exploits Dantean tropes in order to wrest aesthetic form from the tedium and disappointment of his maturity. Here in Goethe's Neues Leben is maturity, not the new life of Dante's Vita Nuova" (95). As a Dante and comparative literature scholar, I find DiMassa's interpretation of Faust II to be the most brilliant section in the book. Goethe's encounter with a minor German translator (Karl Adolph Streckfuβ) who had sent him his translation of the Inferno during the last decade of his work on Faust, DiMassa maintains, spurred "ethical and epistemic questions of concern to Goethe" (97). On a number of occasions while teaching Faust II, I have been struck by the echoes of Dante. But DiMassa is the first critic to have systematically demonstrated just how much Goethe, who unmasks the utopian aspirations of modernism, makes his views of the terrors of industrialization and modern capitalism coincide with how he interpreted Dante. As he opines, "Both poets strike at the unnatural means by which capital expands and corrupts" (100). Again, Faust II, in its Dantean moments, "illuminates how the subordination of nature to human striving constitutes acts of transgression" (101). DiMassa highlights Goethe's prescient understanding of the "grand forces of Western modernity," which Dante, in the key of medieval Aristotelian ethics, also presciently understood. In demonstrating Dante's presence in Goethe, DiMassa advances his argument that "Dantean myth is a persistent phenomenon of German romanticism" (106), in the case of Faust II exposing utopian fantasies, like building harbors, tearing down established habitats, and displacing people for commercial expansion, as raw exploitation of nature and people.Part II of the study takes up the "neo-Romanticism" among writers who entertained "the siren song of myth" (110) between 1890 and 1945. In "Trespassing the Sign," Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rudolf Borchardt take up the call of Romanticism, which is profoundly linked to the "fate of the German state" (113). The following chapter, "Abolishing History," turns to human darkness in its argument for "new Dantean Germanies in Rudolf Borchardt and Stefan George," George driving "preoccupation with Dantean form to new heights" (134). From Dante as the "barbarous Catholic of the dark ages," redeemed by the Schlegels, Romanticism emerges as "the golden age of the German spirit" and Dante as the "guarantor of its sanctity" (138), two aspects of the same false utopian dream. DiMassa concludes that it is time to recognize that the myth-building of the George-Kreis was born "of the encounter with Kronberger, sealed in the poetry of the Bund," and climaxed in "the idea of the new Reich," with "the circle's mythology" representing a new manifestation of Dante's Weltmythos" (157). The final chapter, "Thomas Mann and the Demythologization of Dante," argues that Mann understood Dante in a totally different register from the Romantics' view: "Dante had once helped the Romantics to visualize a poetics of mythic utopianism; by the time of its cooptation by George, Mann saw such a poetics as fated to infernal damnation" (176).Dante's Commedia has had, despite that eighteenth-century hiatus, a continuous reception—not just in Europe but across the globe, and in multiple genres. Its importance continues to this day, DiMassa argues, and in concluding he raises important questions for literary scholars to contemplate, especially given the neo-Romantic "co-optation" of Dantean myth. The problem of literary works that support and even promote social and political regression is not an idle concern, but the answer does not lie in banning books and condemning ideas. Rather, the answer emerges in critical studies like this one that look at literary history with clarity and honesty and expose false utopian ideologies.Besides being a close reader of texts, DiMassa is clearly fluent in Dante, Dante scholarship, literary theory, German Romanticism, and German history. Scholars of European literature, reception theorists, German history and literature scholars, political theorists, and Dante scholars will all find this book stimulating, informative, and concisely written. In examining Dante's reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, the book goes beyond just showing how German authors remade Dante for their own cultural, literary, and artistic purposes. Provoking further thought about modern German history, it effectively demonstrates how a literary mythology paralleled and facilitated the emergence of a fascist mentality.On the production of the book itself, Bucknell University Press deserves accolades for an excellently edited book that is elegantly produced with illustrations to support a very erudite and stimulating study.