Inspiration Bonaparte?
Title Details

354 Pages

22.8 x 15.2 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Series Vol. Number: 225

Imprint: Camden House

Inspiration Bonaparte?

German Culture and Napoleonic Occupation

Edited by Seán Allan and Jeffrey L. High

  • Description
  • Contents
  • Author
"In the Beginning was Napoleon"--"Napoleon and no end": Inspiration Bonaparte explores German responses to Bonaparte in literature, philosophy, painting, science, education, music, and film from his rise to the present.

Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) continues to resonate as a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. Differences of opinion as to whether Bonaparte should be viewed as the executor of the principles of the French Revolution or as the figure who was principally responsible for their corruption are as pronounced today as they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Contributing to what had been an uneasy German relationship with the French Revolution, the rise of Bonaparte was accompanied by a pattern of Franco-German hostilities that inspired both enthusiastic support and outraged dissent in the German-speaking states.
The fourteen essays that comprise Inspiration Bonaparte examine the mythologization of Napoleon in German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the significant impact of Napoleonic occupation on a broad range of fields including philosophy, painting, politics, the sciences, education, and film. As the contributions from leading scholars emphasize, the contradictory attitudes toward Bonaparte held by so many prominent German thinkers are a reflection of his enduring status as a figure through whom the trauma of shattered late-Enlightenment expectations of sociopolitical progress and evolving concepts of identity politics is mediated.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Seán Allan and Jeffrey L. High
Part I. Napoleon: Art, Literature, and Occupation
1: Prelude-Pre-Occupation Bonaparte:
Historical and Literary Conquerors in Schiller's Life, Thought, and Works
Jeffrey L. High
2: Schiller's Johanna and Collin's Bianca as Women('s)-Liberators in Anti-Napoleonic Drama
Rebecca Stewart
3: Friedrich Hölderlin, the French Revolution, and Napoleon: Politics, Poetry, Philosophy
Laura Anna Macor
4: The Anecdote on the Battlefield: Napoleon-Kleist-Kluge
Christian Moser
5: "Der große Schauspieler, Napoleon Buonaparte": August von Kotzebue's Antitheatrical Politics
Elystan Griffiths
6: An Ingenious Tyrant: The Representation of Napoleon Bonaparte by German Women Writers
Elisabeth Krimmer
7: Icons of Resistance: Kleist, Le Musée Napoléon, and Queen Luise of Prussia
Seán Allan
Part II. Napoleon: Political Science and Natural Science
8: The European Machine God: The Image of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Political Writings of Jean Paul
Helmut J. Schneider
9: Saul Ascher's Napoleon
Bernd Fischer
10: Napoleon's Campaigns: Models for "French" Revolutionary Science Abroad and at Home?
Mary Orr
11: Napoleonic Occupation and the Militarization of the Sciences:
The Case of Johannes Scherr and the Zurich Polytechnic
Andrew Cusack

Part III. Inspiration Bonaparte: German Receptions from Vormärz to the Present
12: "We are all possessed!" Napoleon and Inspiration in German Naturalist Drama
Michael White
13: Arnold Schoenberg's Setting of Byron's Ode to Napoleon: Fighting Hitler's Regime in Byron's and Beethoven's Wake
Wolf Kittler
14: The Emperor's Clothes: Napoleon as a Screen Icon
Susanne Kord
Notes on the Contributors
Index

SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema.

JEFFREY L. HIGH is Professor of German Studies at California State University, Long Beach

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Title Details

354 Pages

2.28 x 1.52 cm

8 b/w illus.

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

Series Vol. Number: 225

Imprint: Camden House