The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge by Matthew D. Miller (review)

Nicole Thesz

German Studies Review, Volume 43, Number 1, February 2020, pp. 208-210 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2020.0030

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749917

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 208 German Studies Review 43 /1 • 2020 initiatives and organizations, but never losing sight of personal stories and concerns: for these became increasingly important as bottom-up environmentalism came to shape discussions. Not surprisingly, the rise of the Green Party plays a key role here, with Milder illustrating how national politics soon overshadowed the role of grassroots antinuclear actions. More protests materialized in the 1980s, of course, but Milder spends much less time discussing these. He concludes by commenting on more recent events—Germany’s Atomausstieg or phasing out of nuclear energy, for example, as compared to the expansion of nuclear power in neighboring France. He also assesses “the significance of these new democratic subjectivities” (242), emphasizing the unifying character of the movement as it stitched together “individuals from a wide range of backgrounds who previously had little in common” (245). In the end, Greening Democracy is an important read for those interested in social movements, democratization, antinuclear protests, and the rise of the Green Party. Milder effectively highlights connections between environmentalism and democracy by focusing on the voices of “ordinary people” (13), meaning citizens and their personal transformations. Their voices are found throughout the book, which helps readers sketch out daily routines, nuances, and complexities that characterized the organized campaign against nuclear power plants. Along the way, we get a sense of how “transnational routes and seeming detours must be conceived as essential stages” of the movement (11). Though this study fits with existing postwar narratives and other scholarship, there are many more complexities worth thinking about. Pronuclear local voices did exist at the time, and there was an array of diverse political motivations, as well as very different understandings of nature and economic futures. Moreover, a student movement was lingering in the background with its own concerns and questions. Those forces muddle discussions even more and make it at times difficult for historians to untangle a workable narrative—though all the more fascinating. Martin Kalb, Bridgewater College

The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge. By Matthew D. Miller. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 237. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810137325.

In his study on the modern epic in postwar German literature, Matthew Miller undertakes a comparative analysis of the narrative reactions of three major postwar German authors to twentieth-century catastrophe. Peter Weiss (1916–1982) wrote his three-volume Ästhetik des Widerstands (published 1975–1981) over the space of a decade, chronicling antifascist resistance. The tetralogy by Uwe Johnson (1934–1984), Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl, appeared between 1970 and 1983, featuring daily commentary from mid-1967 to 1968 on the subject of German division, Reviews 209 current world events, and the experience of exile. Finally, Alexander Kluge, born in 1932, assembled his writings from four decades on a multitude of social and political topics in Chronik der Gefühle (2000). In an introductory meditation on the changing perception of reading in the accel- erated, globalized present, Miller clarifies the stakes in writing modern epics, which “unfold in and address themselves to vaster, longer, slower—that is, epic—swaths of time” (14). While literature’s postwar reemergence appears counterintuitive, in Mill- er’s view, he draws on critics as varied as Theodor Adorno, Franco Moretti, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, as well as Kluge and Oskar Negt to argue persuasively for the potential of modern epics, which may contribute substantively to readers’ skill at differentiating (Kluge’s Unterscheidungsvermögen), questioning, and observing. These writers, and, I would argue, Miller, seek to foster a “social emancipation” (180) that is grounded in such critical abilities. Miller’s study features an introduction, a chapter on critical theory, and chap- ters on Weiss, Johnson, and Kluge, respectively, which address the interconnected temporal and spatial motifs involved in these epics’ unwinding of history. These narratives are not simply about history or geopolitics, as this study demonstrates, but about “orientation” in a violent and volatile world. Despite the dizzyingly detailed and complex prose of these three works, Miller deftly explores their layers without succumbing to the temptation to simplify their complexities. As he leads readers through key scenes (e.g., the young antifascist resistance fighters of Ästhetik des Widerstands who seek to educate themselves by discussing the altar at the Berlin Pergamon Museum) and spatiotemporal juxtapositions (e.g., Weiss’s comparisons with Greek myth and the contemporary political struggles), we see paths emerging from these modern epics that evoke Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping.” Miller ultimately detects hopes for humanization and self-emancipation arising from the “cultural labor” (57) depicted by Weiss. In the chapter on Johnson, Miller discusses central questions relating to the continued significance of Jahrestage: How do we read Gesine Cresspahl’s hopes for democratic socialism given that we, like Johnson, are aware of the Prague Spring’s outcome? What messages might Johnson offer today? Convincingly, Miller asks us to consider that Jahrestage’s protagonist-narrator is not in fact blind to Soviet threat of suppression (Johnson did, after all, finish this work after the Prague Spring had ended violently), but that the narrative nevertheless points toward “progressive social possibilities” (124). Cresspahl’s careful scrutiny of the New York Times and her self-reflective juxtaposition of historical moments—Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, the repressive socialist realities of the GDR, the Vietnam War, and the racism witnessed in New York—are part of a strategy of critical documentation of collective experience, found in the “modern epics” Miller explores. Whereas Weiss and Johnson engage in “literary remediation,” Kluge integrates 210 German Studies Review 43 /1 • 2020 different media in such a way that shows a “newfound openness to visual media” (150). His assemblage of narratives is, as Miller notes, a radically different kind of modern German epic. While Weiss and Johnson provide cohesive narratives conveyed by autodiegetic narrators, Chronik der Gefühle challenges readers: “Kluge’s literary mediation of destruction orchestrates destructive literary forms to prevent the neu- tralizations or transfigurations of history” (155). His choice of form is not simply an attempt to dismantle a novelistic harmonization of reality, but is also, as Miller and other critics argue, rooted in his experience of the Halberstadt bombing in April 1945. Kluge’s project is ultimately aimed at readers’ “emancipation” through his ambitious scope and by means of counternarratives that undercut the glossy media images that smooth over the destructive edges of capitalist society. Whereas studies on twentieth-century German novels also offer insights into the ramifications of catastrophe, they frequently focus on trauma in the private realm of family, love, and memory. By contrast, Miller is intrigued by epic works because they address human experience on a broader level. In essence, Miller is arguing for the epics’ social and aesthetic role in reestablishing the value of prose in fraught times. As “living archives” (113), Weiss’s, Johnson’s, and Kluge’s texts offer glimpses of what Miller terms “emancipation,” and what one could also call education, maturation, or development of individual and community. In this way, The German Epic in the Cold War makes readers aware of paths or possibilities in addressing a hyperstimulated and accelerated world. As Miller argues, what connects these very different authors is that each provides a profound way of reinventing writing in the face of historical caesuras and failures, modes of constructing literary spaces—virtual worlds anchored in prose—that sharpen readers’ critical sensibilities. The German Epic is an intellectually rewarding study that will appeal to scholars in German literary and film studies, both those examining the interrelations of narrative and media and those specifically interested in Weiss’s, Johnson’s, or Kluge’s writing. Despite publishers’ understandable desire to streamline book lengths, it would have been helpful to include a separate bibliography. Overall, Miller’s monograph offers a thought-provoking approach to postwar literature that is engaging not least because of the author’s nuanced writing. Nicole Thesz, Miami University

Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema. By Olivia Landry. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2019. Pp. viii + 215. Paper $32.00. ISBN 978-0253038036.

Olivia Landry’s first book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Germany’s most important filmmaking movement of the postunification era. Following on the