The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Contrary to a widespread view of Romanticism as a narrowly nationalistic movement, the generation of thinkers who came of age during the Napoleonic wars did not wholly abandon their predecessors’ cosmopolitan ideals. However, since they saw humanistic training as a medium of national identity formation, they emphasized the significance of the national language for the individual and national Bildung. The scholarly breakthrough which prompted the emergence of the new field of Germanic Philology was accomplished by Friedrich Schlegel. Upon the dissolution of the Jena circle in 1801 Schlegel went to Paris, where he studied art history and Sanskrit. His philological research yielded a hypothesis about the Indo-European origin of Germanic languages.56 Following in Schlegel’s footsteps, Franz Bopp (1791–1867) and Friedrich’s older brother August Wilhelm continued to explore the connections between Indian and Germanic languages and civilizations. Bopp, who was able to prove that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and German shared not only common roots, but also a number of grammatical forms, was recommended by Wilhelm von Humboldt to a Chair in Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar at the University of Berlin. He occupied this chair from 1821 until his death in 1867 and is still recognized as the creator of Indo-Germanistik.57

  Unlike Bopp, who kept himself aloof from literature and devoted his life to the linguistic side of philology, August Wilhelm Schlegel, who served as a Professor of Sanskrit and Literature at the University of Bonn (1818–45) maintained a very cosmopolitan scholarly profile by publishing and lecturing widely on topics ranging from old Germanic literary texts to Renaissance Italian literature and to Provançale language and poetry. An active translator and theorist of translation, Schlegel also left a mark as one of the first German specialists on Shakespeare. Finally, he was one of the first literary historians whose lectures on ancient and modern literature enjoyed great popularity and influence throughout Europe. Schlegel was successful not only at bringing a number of foreign authors and traditions to the attention of the German public, but also at reaching out to a broader European audience and thereby raising German culture’s international profile. Looking at the entire arc of A. W. Schlegel’s career from his early days in Jena and Weimar to his friendship and collaboration with Madame de Staël and her Coppet circle58 and to his subsequent University career in Bonn, he appears to embody an ideal philologist in the Romantic sense as well as an ideal practitioner of Weltliteratur in Goethe’s sense of the term.

  A story about the rise of modern philology would be incomplete without mentioning the Heidelberg Romantic circle. Like the members of the Jena circle, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph Görres, and the Brothers Grimm were great enthusiasts of German history and language. They began to collect and publish old fairy tales, sagas, and Volkslieder. While the philological soundness of these publications was sometimes called into question, the Heidelberg Romantics certainly deserve credit for making early German literature available to the broader reading public. An enthusiasm for the study of medieval Germanic texts and folklore quickly made its way into the academy. The first chairs in Germanistik were created in Göttingen (1805) and Berlin (1810).59 These positions went to Georg Friedrich Benecke and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, respectively. And although in the first quarter of the nineteenth-century most universities still did not have chairs in Germanic Philology, a growing number of scholars throughout Germany began to offer lectures on different topics in Germanistik.60

  Soon the growing popularity and academic prestige of medieval literature gave rise to increasingly urgent demands to refine methods of scholarly analysis. In response to these demands there emerged a methodology, which came to be known as “historical grammar of the German language.” A new, more “scientific” attitude vis-à-vis the study of medieval works and folklore began to permeate German academy in the late 1820s, producing a new breed of scholars who tried to distance themselves from the men of letters writing for the broader public. These scholars consciously sacrificed the eighteenth-century ideal of encyclopedic erudition for the sake of achieving more precise scholarly knowledge. One of the most prominent representatives of this new generation of Germanic philologists was Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) who earned great esteem for his meticulous commentary to Das Nibelungenlied.61

  While confining their research to relatively narrow fields, the best among the humanistic scholars who came of age during the heyday of Romanticism were still polyglots with broad cultural horizons and cosmopolitan sensibilities. The life and career of the founder of Romance Philology Friedrich Diez (1794–1876) offers a perfect example of how Romanticism-inspired patriotic sensibility can go hand-in-hand with the open-mindedness of a genuine humanist.62 Having studied classics and archeology in his native Giessen, in 1814 Diez signed up as a volunteer and took part—if only for a few months—in the last phase of the Napoleonic wars. Upon his return to Germany Diez continued his studies in Giessen. In 1821 we find him in Bonn where he begins his career as a lecturer in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese at the recently founded university (1818). In 1823 Diez became an extraordinary, and in 1830 an ordinary, professor of medieval and new literature at Bonn.

  Unlike his colleague A. W. Schlegel who was able to carry out linguistic research while simultaneously translating and writing about literature, Diez wrote comparatively little on literary topics (focusing mainly on recent and contemporary German literature), whereas the bulk of his research was dedicated to the historical and comparative study of Romance languages. As Ernst Robert Curtius points out, Diez’ shyness and lack of social and political ambitions gave him the appearance of a dispassionate, even somewhat dull scholar.63 However, if we take into account the breadth, meticulousness, and methodological rigor of Diez’ work we begin to realize that the creator of Romanistik must have been a great enthusiast passionately devoted to philology. His major contribution consisted in building a theory of language as a system whose synchronic coherence as well as diachronic development depends on a set of phonetic laws, which lend themselves to observation and description. Diez’ methodological innovations not only revolutionized Romance philology throughout Europe, but also stimulated the emergence of other philological schools, such as, notably, Slavic philology.

  In conclusion, I want to say a few words about the legacy of the German philological tradition in the twentieth century. The historical calamities that befell Germany and the rest of Europe during this period prompted a profound crisis that involved a reevaluation of all traditional values and methodological assumptions. In the end, however, these trials proved extremely fruitful, propelling the development of new theoretical ideas, methodologies, and even new scholarly fields. Thus both critical theory and comparative literature emerged in response to the widely felt dissatisfaction with the traditional approaches to literary studies. Forced emigration or self-chosen exile of many German scholars in the 1930s and 1940s provided an additional impetus for the development of these new disciplines, which came into their own through a confrontation with the non-European cultures and academic traditions. For example, the co-founders of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University, Erich Auerbach and René Wellek, used their emigration to the United States as an occasion for rethinking the West European and Central European traditions, in which they had been reared or which they had studied, ultimately arriving at a new vision of comparative literary study, one that no longer rested on the idealistic belief in Humanity as a universal ideal and was free itself from the tacit assumption of Europe’s spiritual and cultural superiority, which underlay much of previous European scholarship.

  In his well-known article “Philology and Weltliteratur,” originally intended as a contribution to the Festschrift in honor of the Goethe scholar Fritz Strich, Auerbach reveals his post-Goethean understanding of “world literature.”64 Thus he admits that a modern scholar can no longer believe in the ideal of a world peace based on a synthesis of Western and non-Western civilizations. Nor can he or she naïvely believe that such an elite and relatively labor-intensive d
iscipline as comparative philology can successfully counter consumer-oriented mass culture or help shield the masses from sheer propaganda. And yet, abandoning the idealistic beliefs in universal values and high culture should not amount to abandoning all trust in human beings. Rather than succumbing to utter pessimism, Auerbach suggests that we should shift our emphasis to a careful study of human life in the most diverse forms and contexts, a study that will shed light on the “diverse backgrounds of a common fate.”65 A methodological testament of a scholar with a remarkable personal fate, “Philology and Weltliteratur” suggests that modern (and especially postmodern) skepticism about values and ideals may be overcome with the help of a crypto-Stoic commitment to a relentless and painstaking hermeneutic analysis of unfamiliar works and distant cultures.

  Co-translated and introduced to the Anglophone public by Edward Said, Auebach’s essay helped reignite the debates about world literature in the American academy and throughout the world. In recent years these debates have acquired a special relevance in connection with the growing tendency towards and a resistance to globalization. Will globalization make the traditional philological approach obsolete, replacing it with a “distant reading” of translated texts or some other time-saving approach? Will comparative literature, or “world literature” as it is called in some countries and universities, eventually transform into a monolingual discipline that requires no knowledge of foreign languages and no philological erudition? These questions remain open, and as long as they remain open and provoke new debates the discipline of comparative literature will continue to develop.

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  * * *

  1 The Athenaeum Fragments, No. 216. The Athenaeum which appeared twice a year between 1798 and 1800, was the theoretical organ of the early Romantic movement in Germany. It was coedited by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

  2 Dietrich Benner, Wilhelm von Humboldts Bildungstheorie. Eine problemgeschichtliche Studie zum Begründungszusammenhang neuzeitlicher Bildungsreform; and Christina M. Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufklärung.