Origin and Antitype: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 1806-1914 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Heelan, Carla Melanie. 2016. Origin and Antitype: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 1806-1914. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493307 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Origin and Antitype: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 1806-1914 A dissertation presented by Carla Melanie Heelan to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 28, 2016 © 2016 Carla Heelan Dissertation Advisor: David Blackbourn Carla Melanie Heelan Origin and Antitype: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 1806-1914 Abstract This dissertation examines how the nineteenth-century engagement with medieval Europe changed modern Germany. Drawing from archival and printed primary material, I reconstruct how the Middle Ages gained new explanatory relevance as the origins of nineteenth- century German institutions and phenomena. I consider the historical interpretation of the medieval world at its broadest, not limited to scholarly debate, but also as it encompassed fiction, art, architecture, music, social science, law, and politics. Each chapter examines a figure drawn from these fields and each also moves chronologically through the century. I begin with the historian and statesman Barthold Niebuhr, who invoked the German Middle Ages as a source of patriotism and as an alternative to the Roman legal tradition. I next discuss the politician and architectural theorist August Reichensperger, who used the perceived regionalism of the medieval past as a means to resist Prussian centralization. My third chapter focuses on the intersection of historical research and fiction in the work of Victor von Scheffel, before I then turn to the role of the Medieval in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The final chapter of my dissertation treats how assumptions about the medieval world affected the frameworks that early sociologists used. I argue that nineteenth-century conceptions and uses of the Middle Ages retained mythical or profoundly transhistorical elements, even as historians and philologists made the period more historically legible. Furthermore, the protagonists of my dissertation read nineteenth-century categories and concerns onto the Middle Ages. Their agendas shaped iii perceptions of the past, and, more importantly, influenced the structures and norms of the nineteenth century. These five figures fundamentally believed, however, that their distortions accurately depicted the historical record. I attend to this belief, that their portrayals of the past were true, rather than purely opportunistic bids to shape the present. I conclude by exploring how only in the mid twentieth century did medieval historians – specifically, Ernst Kantorowicz – begin to examine the influence of nineteenth-century vocabularies and frameworks on the formation of their field. iv Contents List of Illustrations vii! Acknowledgments viii! Introduction 1! Chapter 1. Patriotism, Propaganda, and Reform: Barthold Niebuhr and the Search for Legal Origins 24! 1. Introduction 24! 2. Niebuhr and Napoleonic-Era Prussia 26! 3. Patriotic Reform in Eighth- and Nineteenth-Century Germanies 33! 4. Medieval Masculinity as a Modern Model 44! 5. Texts and Transmission: The Legal Origins of Germany 52! 6. Conclusion 62! Chapter 2. The Gothic State: August Reichensperger and the Aesthetics of Particularism 67! 1. Introduction 67! 2. Medieval Architecture and Regional Autonomy 74! 3. ‘Catacombs of Science’: Neoclassicism and Architectural Training in Prussia 86! 4. Museums at the Center and at the Periphery 99! 5. Conclusion 104! Chapter 3. ‘History in the garb of a novel’: Fact and Fiction in J. Victor von Scheffel’s Ekkehard 109! 1. Introduction 109! 2. ‘Persons and dates have sometimes been dealt with a little freely’: Sources and Methodology in Ekkehard 123! 3. Historicizing the Landscape 131! 4. Emotional Communities 138! 5. Conclusion 144! Chapter 4. Setting the Stage: Convention and Resistance in Early and Late Richard Wagner 149! 1. Introduction 149! 2. The Discovery and Reception of the Nibelungenlied 157! 3. History and Myth in Wagner’s Writing from 1848/49 162! 4. Artistic Precedents: The Nibelungenlied in Nazarene Painting 175! 5. ‘Against all pomp’: Scenery and Costumes for the Ring’s Premiere 184! 6. Conclusion 190! Chapter 5. Middle Ages as Antitype: Organicism and Alienation in Early Sociology 194! 1. Introduction 194! v 2. “Many Paths to the Future:” Sociology in Context 197! 3. The Influence and Effects of the Historical School of Law 206! 4. Ambivalence and Progress in the Money Economy 215! 5. Modern Style and Simmel’s Rejection of Historical Reproduction 233! 6. Conclusion 239! Conclusion 242! Bibliography 255! vi List of Illustrations Figure 1. Title page for the score of Johann Joseph Abert’s opera, Ekkehard: Oper in fünf Acten (Stuttgart, 1878). 118! Figure 2. Map depicting the main locations cited in Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s novel, Ekkehard. Map by C. Scott Walker. 136! Figure 3. Joseph Hoffmann’s initial sketch for the scenery for Act II of Götterdämmerung in Hoffmann, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Vienna: V. Angerer, [1878?]), plate 10. 151! Figure 4. Georg Unger in his “Siegfried” costume for the premiere of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth, 1876. Photograph courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archive. 190! vii Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to thank the people and institutions that supported my research at all stages. I am extremely grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service and to The Krupp Foundation. A dissertation research fellowship from the former brought me to Germany for ten months and the generosity of the latter enabled me to extend this trip. Short-term grants allowed me to continue my research during many summers and I would like to thank especially the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The History Project, funded by The Institute for New Economic Thinking, as well as the Harvard History Department and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The German Historical Institute in Washington, DC organized two very productive seminars at the beginning and at the end of this project, both of which shaped its direction. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of these generous fellowships. My readers and interlocutors at Harvard not only improved this project; they also made a lengthy degree program both enjoyable and productive. My first thanks goes to my supervisor, David Blackbourn, whose advice and thoughtful suggestions have modeled the kinds of historical questions that first drew me to the subject. I am also incredibly grateful to the three other members of my dissertation committee, Ann Blair, Peter Gordon, and Daniel Smail, for their guidance, support, and engagement, these several years. During my research, librarians and archivists at Harvard and across Germany gave me invaluable assistance and recommended material that I would not have found on my own. Among my peers, the graduate students in the History Department provided a wider intellectual community that has been consistently supportive, and also intellectually challenging. I owe a great debt to the participants of the graduate workshops at the Center for European Studies and at the Center for History and viii Economics. Lastly, I want to offer special thanks to Jon, whose belief in this project, and in me, was my best encouragement. And to my loving parents, who supported me throughout this process, my deepest thanks of all. ix Introduction During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Middle Ages seemed a distant, even disturbing, period of Europe’s past. Classical ideals predominated in art, literature, and political theory. Antiquarians such as Johann Winckelmann and Richard Lepsius retrieved ancient artifacts from Greece and Egypt for exhibition in the German states.1 Winckelmann’s panegyrics to the beauty of Greek sculpture popularized an understanding of the classical world that associated it with artistic genius.2 He interpreted Greek art in context, as the product of a culture that had developed certain political rights not enjoyed in eighteenth-century Central Europe. For his educated readers, ancient Greece represented a reformist cultural ideal.3 The Roman Empire had a more contested legacy given the collapse of the Republic into dictatorship, and also the territorial ambitions of its leaders in ancient Germania. Yet French and German scholars alike 1 Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750- 1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48-49. Marchand’s book is a particularly insightful contribution to a sizable historiography about the relations between modern Germany and ancient Greece, first discussed in Eliza May Butler’s, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: The University Press, 1935). This “antiquarian reverie” was a European and British phenomenon, as well as a colonial American one. Nor was Greece the only model.