1 - Staging Violence and Transcendence, Embracing Feminism: The Instantiation of Kleist and German Romanticism

Summary

This chapter is primarily devoted to an examination of the most canonic work of the subgenre that is the focus of Imagining the Age of Goethe: Christa Wolf's novel Kein Ort. Nirgends (No place on earth, 1979). In order to understand Wolf's fictional treatment of the Age-of-Goethe authors Heinrich von Kleist and Caroline von Günderrode, Wolf's essays on Kleist and Günderrode will be frequently cited. This will also be the case with Wolf's article on Bettine Brentano. This latter personage appears to be a minor figure in Wolf's novel, but plays a more significant, albeit tacit role, than previous critics have realized. While earlier engagements with the novel have examined Wolf and the Romantics primarily as a subject-object relationship, that is to say, with how the subject (author Christa Wolf) creates an object (the world of early nineteenth-century German Romanticism), I will reverse the terms of this agency. In other words, instead of explaining once again how Christa Wolf projects a Romantic world view, I will show how German Romanticism itself stages — which is to say, brings about — the writing of Christa Wolf. This is not as radical a process as it might sound and involves neither a genuine dialectical reversal nor a shift to the passive voice, as though Wolf were merely an inert object performed by the Romantic past. Although I will indeed draw on the discourse of performativity, as the constructed character of genre (elucidated by Judith Butler) is a key factor in the composition of Wolf's novel, my methodology is counterintuitive primarily through its inversion of the chronology governing other examinations of Wolf and German Romanticism.