Suchergebnisse

The German fascination with the American Indian is legion, enduring, and much more than a current, post-modern enchantment with 'the primitive.' Indeed, the special and continuing relationship between Germans and Indians is well known, and in recent years it has received considerable scholarly attention. One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on 'Indianness' in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of 'the authentic Indian.' Their ongoing efforts to harness concepts of authenticity while policing this discourse are hardly surprising; indeed they have become predictable. But the lack of self-reflection with which most people participate in this process is remarkable. Few laymen or scholars seem to notice that they are the latest participants in a repetitive process that has been going on in German-speaking lands for close to 200 years, and even fewer seem to notice the ironic turn it has recently taken.

This is a fascinating book, partly because of the excellent contributions, and partly because of the ways in which the editors have chosen to engage the topic and organize their volume. Marchand and Lindenfeld open the collection with a loaded question: Was there a German fin de siècle? Did Germans, in other words, share the kinds of reactions to modernity that have so fascinated historians of Austria and France? Their answer is yes and no. Many German intellectuals embraced the modernist currents Carl Schorske identified more than forty years ago in his work on fin de siècle Vienna, reacting to the depressing problems of modernization in ways similar to their Austrian counterparts. And yet much of the German population was largely unbowed by their putatively perplexing condition. As the editors argue, despite the worries of many an intellectual, "the later Wilhelmine world was characterized by enormous ambition and optimism, booming industries and bustling new urban spaces, cultural and political activism on a new scale, and the promise, if not the immediate realization, of a 'place in the sun' on the world stage" (p. 1). That optimism is the perplexing bit, because many of us, schooled in the dark side of Weimar culture and its intellectual antecedents, have learned to imagine Germans at the end of the nineteenth century (or at least our favorite representatives) as people caught up in a pessimistic, existential, Nietzschean funk. Indeed, the editors themselves have not avoided that position entirely.