Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Summer 8-27-2013 A Multiplicity of Masculinities: The orF mation of National Identity in Imperial Germany and its Influence on Notions of the Masculine Faruk Pasic Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Pasic, Faruk, "A Multiplicity of Masculinities: The orF mation of National Identity in Imperial Germany and its Influence on Notions of the Masculine" (2013). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1152. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1152 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Lynne Tatlock, Chair Matt Erlin Jennifer Kapczynski Paul Michael Lützeler Marvin Marcus Corinna Treitel A Multiplicity of Masculinities: The Formation of National Identity in Imperial Germany and its Influence on Notions of the Masculine by Faruk Pašić A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2013 St. Louis, Missouri © 2013 Faruk Pašić Table of Contents Acknowledgements …….………………………………………………………………………………..iii Introduction ………..………………………………………………………………………………..……1 Chapter One: Representations of Normative Masculinity in the Works of Louise von François, Paul Heyse, and E. Werner Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….……42 “Ein Volk in Waffen”: Pre-Unification Depictions of German Masculinity …………………….47 “Das Dichten ist ja nur thatenloses Träumen!”: German Masculinity in Wartime ………………73 “Weib und Heimat und Familie”: Post-Unification German Masculinity ……….………………91 Notes …………………………………………………………………………………….…….110 Chapter Two: Alternative Masculinities of the Gründerzeit in the Works of Fontane, Raabe, and Storm Introduction ……….……………………………………………………………………..…….115 No Country for Young Men: Theodor Fontane’s (Un-)Heroic Prussians ………………………118 History as a Genealogical Narrative: Wilhelm Raabe’s Collectors ……….………………..….135 Fleeing a Life of Social Restrictions: Theodor Storm’s Misfits ……….……………………….151 Notes …………………………………………………………………………………….…….167 Chapter Three: Regionally Defined Notions of Masculinity in Imperial Germany Introduction ……….………………………………………………………………….……….171 “To Huus! To Huus, Vatter!”: Expressions of Masculinity Through Regional Character …….179 Notes …………………………………………………………………………………….…….210 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………..213 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………………………218 ii Acknowledgements I wish to extend my sincerest thanks to the faculty of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis for their unhesitating help throughout my graduate career. I owe my deepest gratitude to Lynne Tatlock, who provided me with unwavering support and mentorship even before I began my dissertation and whose unfading belief in my abilities as a scholar motivated me to persevere in the critical stages of writing it. Brief yet insightful conversations on the volleyball court with Matt Erlin helped me organize my thoughts and structure my arguments more effectively, and the comments by Jennifer Kapczynski opened up perspectives I had not yet explored. Thank you also to Paul Michael Lützeler, Corinna Treitel, and Marvin Marcus for reading my dissertation and participating in the dissertation examination committee. This project would not have been possible without the generous dissertation fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I have also benefited greatly from the extensive collection of nineteenth-century German literature available at Washington University Libraries and from the expedient ways of ordering texts not available on site. Brian Vetruba deserves special credit for his maintenance of research tools and his general readiness to help. I also appreciated the quiet study rooms in Olin Library and their inspiring view of campus. Special thanks also to Empress Sanders and Jennifer Jodell for keeping an eye on administrative deadlines and for ensuring that all the necessary documents are in order. I am also indebted to my parents, who have always stressed the value of a strong education and planted the seeds for my academic career at an early age. Last but not least, I want to thank my wife, Vera Valakh, for her patience and encouragement over the last four years. This success is hers as much as it is mine. iii Introduction: The Intersection of National and Masculine Identity in Nineteenth-Century Germany This project studies the consolidation of German national identity upon the foundation of the Second German Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century and the manner in which this consolidation coincided with, or even brought about, particular notions about German masculinity. Benedict Anderson has compared one’s perception of the “nation” to the way in which one perceives the concepts of “kinship” or “religion,” insofar as both represent communities that “are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”1 If the nation is indeed an imagined community, then that community is styled by the values and ideals of its members and, in turn, imbues its members with characteristics and forms of behavior that symbolize their ideals. This idealization certainly extends to the performance of gender as well; for, gender represents a significant element of an individual’s understanding of the self and influences both one’s status within a community and one’s interaction with it. Such being the case, it also figures largely into the construction of national character. Hagemann sees the Prussian defeat by Napoleon as a turning point in the history of the Prussian monarchy that marks the beginning of a “Geschichte von Nation, Militär und Geschlecht”2; the history of Prussia is therefore intimately tied to that of Germany in the nineteenth century. The defeat initiated a series of military reforms that included, among other measures, the elimination of “foreigners” from the army, which meant increased reliance upon “national-Prussian” officers and soldiers.3 This move was not only meant to increase the army’s identification with the state that it needed to protect, but, as we shall see, it was also predicated upon the notion that the influence of the foreign had introduced a physical and mental weakening of the Prussians. The reforms thus intended to strengthen both the quality of the armed forces 1 and the masculinity of German men in general. The events of the Napoleonic Wars and their outcome proved to be fertile ground for German fiction of the nineteenth century. Yet, in spite of this literary linking of nationhood and gender, relatively few studies have focused on specific examples of this process in the literature of the late nineteenth century. Much of the existing scholarship on nationhood and literature in Imperial Germany focuses on the formation of German national identity in the first two decades of the existence of the empire. Kirsten Belgum’s Popularizing the Nation4 is a seminal work in this field. Brent Peterson’s History, Fiction and Germany,5 Alon Confino’s The Nation as a Local Metaphor,6 and Arne Koch’s Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities7 also constitute significant contributions to this scholarship. However, there is a dearth of scholarship examining the images of “German” masculinity emerging in the last third of the nineteenth century, parallel to the emergence of German nationalism. Some existing texts on gender in the German Empire, such as Gender and Germanness8 by Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller and “The National Family: Allegory and Femininity in a Festspiel from 1880”9 by Jennifer Askey, predominantly highlight the role of women and femininity in connection with national identity, but their discussion of the role that masculinity played in the empire is either sparse or altogether missing. Others, like Ute Frevert’s “Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann,”10 Walter Erhart’s Familienmänner,11 and David S. Johnson’s “The Ironies of Degeneration,”12 for example, do establish a relationship between masculinity, the nineteenth-century bourgeois value system, and German nationhood to varying degrees, but that relationship does not lie at the center of these studies. My project expands upon existing discussions of the role of masculinity in the German Empire and is distinguished in particular by its examination of both regional and social 2 differences between the male characters in the literature from the first two decades of the Second German Empire. Sociohistorical studies of nationalism in the Second German Empire as well as theories of gender and in particular of masculinities inform my approach. I shall undertake close readings both of primary literature depicting characters that embody desired masculine ideals and of primary literature describing men who do not live up to the prescribed behavioral models of late- nineteenth-century Germany. Although this project is not intended primarily as a historical study, I shall begin with a historical