The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany
2022; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00267929-9791068
ISSN1527-1943
Autores ResumoThe Dynastic Imagination is a pathbreaking, polyphonic intellectual history of modern dynastic and antidynastic thought. Ranging from the French Revolution to the aftermath of World War I (with an epilogue on the aftermath of World War II), this broad yet highly focused study shows how questions of inheritance and legitimacy underwrite many major intellectual movements, from Romanticism to naturalism to feminism and psychoanalysis.In the nineteenth century bourgeois writers in Germany were imagining and reimagining broad structures of kinship. But menacingly, they saw the imagination itself, among other aspects of human experience, as something impersonal and deeply informed—if not formed outright—by one’s ancestors. There is a brooding ambivalence to “the dynastic imagination” that Adrian Daub deftly negotiates: namely, individuals’ imagination of the ancestral and the imagination that is itself ancestral, or transindividual. While this book dwells primarily in and around the nuclear family, already the opening essay, “Mediate Family,” plumbs the inhuman depths of the dynastic imagination—which “geologizes the family” (4)—insofar as it constitutes “that part of our familial past that not only is inaccessible to us but also makes us realize how inaccessible even our immediate familial environs can be” (5). Anachrony and anachronism are constant companions in the fictions, philosophies, and case studies that follow.Dynastic is almost a misnomer for us moderns, who associate the term with the aristocracy and who have had the dynastic imagination in this sense bred out of us. Against an outmoded opposition between the nuclear and the dynastic, however, Daub’s concept of “the dynastic family” accounts for a wide variety of familial forms invoked by bourgeois writers to account for the intergenerational transmission of things besides financial assets and political power. More than a monarchical concept, then, the dynasty emerges in these pages as “an epistemic order,” or “a way of conceptualizing temporality and historical causality” (10–11). And The Dynastic Imagination is at its most exciting when it explores nonlinear and nonbiological modes of causality and transmission “beyond paternity, beyond primogeniture, beyond heredity,” which, admittedly, is most of the time (204). The book is a study of the logical family more than of the biological family, or rather, the logical family that extends throughout and augments every biological family. Accordingly, the dynastic emerges as a key figure of queer kinship in modernity. While the final chapter, “Georg, or The Queer Dynasty,” is the only one to focus on an avowedly homosocial community, the entire study exemplifies, and indeed facilitates, a queer orientation toward family. As Daub concludes in a reading of Heinrich Böll’s story “Die schwarzen Schafe” (“Black Sheep,” 1951), “There’s no heteronormative family without its queer shadow” (210).These readings of the queerness of dynastic transmission—in and around Hegel, Goethe, Wagner, and Freud, to name just a few of Daub’s illustrious subjects—are as astonishing as they are compelling. The shortcomings of the nuclear family and nuclearity in nineteenth-century German literature have rarely been rendered as engrossingly as they are in this study. The same could be said of the dynastic imagination. Nineteenth-century German literature has rarely seemed this consequential for modern intellectual history, which I particularly appreciate as someone professionally and personally invested in the German literature of this period. This study’s achievement is in part due to the breadth of material that Daub has at his command. Chapter 1 is something of an outlier in that it traverses the entire nineteenth century as it tracks shifting attitudes toward dynasty in the trope of the paterfamilias brooding in a family gallery. However, the number of figures in the ancestral gallery of German studies that Daub summons in this chapter—Ludwig Uhland, Franz Grillparzer, Goethe, Annette von Droste-Hühlshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Gustav Freytag—is typical of the other chapters. Just as the writers in Daub’s study explore how the immediate family is constituted by what seems peripheral to it, so the individual chapters situate their single authors within wider relations. For example, chapter 3, “Abortive Romanticism,” the longest chapter, brings together Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Shelling, Goethe, and Mary Shelley as they contend with the limits of vitalism and organicism and hence with the limits of Romanticism. As much as this is a study of family and modernity in nineteenth-century Germany, and as much as these questions are peculiarly German, the disruption of genealogical structures introduced by the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 have methodological implications that Daub, as a comparatist, is well poised to pursue. Chapter 6, “Naturalism, or The Dynastic Romance,” for example, focuses largely on Émile Zola but in ways that lead to novel readings in this and later chapters of Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Mann.No study of family and modernity in Germany could entirely bypass Freud, and the chapter devoted to Freud, Carl Jung, and Léopold Szondi shows how psychoanalysis developed in tandem with concerns over its own transmission and transmissibility as an institution. In exploring these dynamics, Daub offers perhaps as illuminating an overview of the tension between familial and ancestral accounts of psychic life as is possible in twenty pages. I found that most chapters, this one included, can stand alone as absorbing intellectual histories of major moments in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European thought. But just as an insistence on intergenerational perspectives and formations crops up even in those authors most adamant about the primacy of the immediate family, so too are these chapters best read in concert, from opening to close, even as the anachronisms of the ancestral imagination complicate any straightforward chronology.While The Dynastic Imagination traces the resurgence of the renegade intergenerational perspectives of the nineteenth century as far forward as 1968, the dilemma of a disavowed past that is not past is still with us. The recent reopening of the reconstructed Berlin Palace (a former residence of the House of Hohenzollern) and the overwhelmingly critical response to the colonial collections it houses in the Humboldt Forum demonstrate the persistence of the dynastic imagination and the timeliness of The Dynastic Imagination. The moving words that close the book—a reflection in the acknowledgments on “the great spectral dynasty of the dead that clusters around the small, precious nucleus of the living” (219)—are also a fitting description of the contemporary return of repressed colonial histories, whether in Germany or in North America. Contemporary debates over matters of legacy and inheritance for colonial crimes extend well beyond direct familial beneficiaries, and in this they go to the heart of the issues raised by this important book.
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