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UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnaticn Company 300 NorthZeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 DIE FÀHJGE HAUSFRAÜ ERHÂLT DEN STAATi FAMILY, NATION AND STATE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Ester Riehl, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1997 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Dagmar Lorenz, Adviser Professor Bernd Fischer Adviser Professor Leslie Adelson Graduate Program in German UMI Number: 9731699 Copyright 1997 by Riehl, Ester All rights reserved. mvn Microform 9731699 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Ester Riehl 1997 ABSTRACT Philosophers from Aristotle to Adorno have noted that the organization of the state has a strong relationship to the organization of the family. Beginning with this assumption^ my dissertation explores how that relationship functions in literary texts. The recognition of such a relationship inherently questions the nineteenth-century notion that society is divided into separate public and private sphere. If the state depends on functions the family performs, then the two alleged spheres are not at all separate. By focusing on two German and two Austrian texts, this dissertation puts the question of family, state and nation into contrasting national contexts. Two of the authors are men and two are women, offering separate gender perspectives. Nationalism in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century focused on creating a German identity that could be identified with the Prussian-German state founded in 1871. The "national question" in the Austrian Empire during the same period focused on how the relationships among the different nationalities within the empire. ii The two German texts, Gustav Freytag's Soli und Haben (1855) and Gabriele Reuter's Aus outer Famille (1890), link German identity to the patriarchal feimily, in which the men are solidly bourgeois, the women appropriately domestic, and the entire family respects the strength and superiority of the German nation. Freytag's novel glorifies those forms of family and nation, while Reuter's novel criticizes them. The two Austrian texts, on the other hand, explore the possibilities of non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical families. Set in Moravia, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's BoZena (1870) crosses class and national boundaries while envisioning a matriarchal family. A marriage based on equal partnership stands at the center of Adalbert Stifter's novella Briaitta (1844), and the protagonists, Hungarian landowners and their German guest, engage in a form of nation-building that does not lead to the subjugation of other nations. Ill ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Professor Dagmar Lorenz, for her advice and support, as well as her prompt reading of numerous drafts. Her friendly and witty encouragement during the final stages of the dissertation helped alleviate some of the stress resulting from impending deadlines. I thank Professor Leslie Adelson for her thoughtful comments on all of the chapters. She and Professor Bernd Fischer provided questions and suggestions during the entire writing process, for which I am grateful. Jim Jones and Margarets Landwehr, both of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, gave me continual encouragement. I am thankful for their advice as they helped spur me toward completion. IV VITA September 2, 1966 ..... Born - Annapolis, Maryland 1990 .................... B.A. German and English, University of Delaware 1990-1992 .............. Graduate Teaching Assistant University of Delaware 1992 .................... M.A. German, University of Delaware 1993-1994 .............. Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University 1995 .................... Part-Time Instructor University of Delaware 1996 .................... Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: German TABLE OF CONTENTS A b s t r a c t .................................................... il Acknowledgements ........................................... iv Vita ......................................................... Chapters: 1. Introduction: Domestic Nationalism.................... 1 2. The Spheres that Are Not: Nation and Family.......... 10 3. Soil und Haben: The Plan for a Nation ................57 4. Aus outer Familie as Criticism of Domestic Nationalism .......................................... 101 5. Of Maids and Mothers; BoZena ........................ 150 6. Unconventional Families, Unconventional Nations; Briaitta and the Concept of Home ................... 187 7. Conclusion: Nations and Families .................... 221 Bibliography............................................... 232 VI CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: DOMESTIC NATIONALISM AND GERMAN LITERATURE Bourgeois German literature in the second half of the nineteenth century showed great concern for the guestion of what was German. With the growth of the nationalist movement at the middle of the century, and the birth of the German national state in 1871, this concern is not surprising. Proponents of the national state had to create and define a category that had not existed before: German. The rise of German nationalism coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the two became inextricably linked. The notion of respectability, argues George Mosse, at first helped define the bourgeoisie by contrasting it against the perceived immorality of the aristocracy and the crudeness of the uneducated lower classes. The bourgeoisie also sought a stabilizing identity as a defense against the dramatic changes brought on by industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century. Nationalism "absorbed and sanctioned middle-class manners and morals and played a crucial part in spreading respectability to all classes of the population, no matter how much these classes hated and despised one another" (Nationalism 9). Strictly defined gender roles played a central role in the notion of respectability, since the relatively new form of the nuclear family defined male and female roles more rigidly than kinship bonds had done in the past, it controlled individuals more. "The triumph of the nuclear family . coincided with the rise of nationalism" (Mosse, Nationalism 18) . Nineteenth-century nationalism used the image of chaste bourgeois women as ideals, instead of the image of bare-breasted warrior Germania (Nationalism 90). By redefining respectability as a German trait, proponents of nationalism sought to teach this trait to all classes and therefore spread a nationalist feeling.’ Joan Landes notes a similar change in the tone of nationalism in France. Following the political activity of women in the Revolution, women were increasingly relegated to the domestic sphere. This change occurred, argues Landes, as post-revolutionary France needed new symbols to replace the monarchy. The figure of Liberty, for example, a symbol of the revolution and the republic, had always been a woman. ’ Nationalism did not, of course, belong only to the bourgeoisie. But as the size and relative strength of the bourgeoisie grew in the nineteenth century, it had to be convinced of the importance of nation. Landes points to a change in the depiction of Liberty from the revolutionary period, where Liberty heroically led battles, to the Napoleonic era, where artists depicted Liberty as a domestic and maternal figure (159-60). Landes argues that under the old regime, French society was ordered by class distinction. When class distinction no longer existed, a new order was needed. That new order was based on gender: "In their preferred vision of the classical universe, bourgeois men discovered a flattering reflection of themselves— one that imaged men as properly political and women as naturally domestic" (4) This emphasis on "natural" domesticity for women, however, was no less contrived than earlier arguments that defended "natural" class distinction.