Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany.

Davis, Eric

Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914, by Harold Mah. Ithaca, New York, and London, Cornell University Press, 2003. xii, 227 pp. $41.95 US (cloth), $19.95 US (paper).

Harold Mah argues that German and French thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and historians, since have used an oversimplified and untenable model of "identity." In an unusually clear and subtle manner, Mah uses poststructuralist notions of the unstable nature of identity to throw new light on central works of German and French intellectual history. This results in a profound revision of long-established historiographical tenets about the culture of the Enlightenment, the romantics, and beyond.

The principal target of Mah's revisionism is Peter Gay's claim (The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 1966 and 1969) for a uniformly liberal Enlightenment produced by independent, self-assured, liberal philosophes. Recent historiography, asserts Mah, has undermined that picture of uniformity, while post-structuralist theory encourages us to re-read the philosophes' sense of self as conflicted and multiple. Moreover, Mah believes that because their senses of self "always involved ... an idealization of character," they were "always to some extent phantasies" (p. 3). As such, they were subject to internal contradictions and external challenges from a changing historical reality. French and German artists and intellectuals became increasingly aware of these problems and wrestled with the implications for the Enlightenment notion of French culture as universal and the late eighteenth-century idea of German culture as singular and specific to the linguistic and cultural history of the German people. Hence, beneath the surface stereotypes--the civility of French language and culture, the "spiritual depth" (p. 4) of German identity--lay profound anxieties about the limitations and inappropriateness of these concepts. Though often forcefully asserted, French and German cultural identity was "uncertain or unstable" (p. 11).

The standard account of modern German-French relations is that German nationalism and cultural identity emerged in reaction to the dominance of French culture in the late eighteenth century and during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Mah complicates that picture by showing, first, that German thinkers and artists borrowed from long-standing French critiques of their own culture and language and, second, that rather than being based on consistent hostility, the relationship was a love-hate one with a fair amount of (national) self-doubt involved. Hence, Mah reveals that the founder of German cultural nationalism, J. G. Herder, was plagued with doubts about both German and his own identity and actually went through a pro-French phase, temporarily adopting a persona of the refined, cosmopolitan, French philosophe. Later, Karl Marx inverted the tradition of asserting German cultural superiority by claiming that, since the French Revolution, the Germans' culture was hopelessly anachronistic and doomed for extinction in the face of modernity's progress. Rebelling against his earlier German romanticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, in 1872, took what were supposedly distinct French and German character traits--ultra-rational artificiality in the former case, complex profundity in the latter and universalized them as the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies inherent in all humanity, thus undoing the identity constructions and oppositions so central to German cultural nationalism.

Underlying all of these changes, argues Mah, were fundamental uncertainties and instabilities that inevitably were built into the discourses of identity constructed in the eighteenth century. Classicism, for example, was meant to express a moral, rational, and autonomous self, but it also articulated the different gender and social anxieties of Jacobin republicanism, Goethe, and Germaine de Stael. Finally, Thomas Mann used it in Death in Venice (1912) to demonstrate the ambivalent, even doomed nature of the classical self.

Mah does not present a comprehensive narrative history of cultural identity in France and Germany from 1750 to 1914. He is concerned with selected, representative texts and themes. This has obvious advantages; he is able, for example, to situate Death in Venice in the context of a discursive tradition of classicism in Germany and, as a result, make more sense of some of the complexities of that text than much traditional literary criticism. At the same time, his selectivity leaves gaps in the narrative and raises unanswered questions. (How was Marx able to move beyond his early "phantasy" of capitalism as a force for the elimination of cultural illusions to his later critique of capitalism as the necessary generator of fetishisms/phantasies?)

Mah might also be faulted for privileging the post-modern concept of instability of identity as much as earlier scholars assumed the coherence of identity. That individuals go through changes of identity is, perhaps, obvious: that this implies that identity is always unstable is not. As a corrective to the tendency to elide the inconsistencies in an individual's thought and work, however, Mah's focus on instability is valuable and yields important insights. His intelligent and provocative analysis and his close and careful reading of texts deepen our understanding of the nature of, and connections between, a variety of intellectual movements from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the modernism of the twentieth.

Eric Davis

University College of the Fraser Valley