Over the two centuries prior to World War I in the German-speaking lands, honor developed as an emotional practice, civil society was enacted in face-to-face interactions within physical spaces, and the concept of honor intertwined with emerging civil society, becoming the social and emotional glue binding civil society together. Heikki Lempa advances this complex argument, engaging several rich currents of recent scholarship and contributing case studies of honor being instantiated in spaces of civil society: from ducal lunch and dinner tables, the theater, and the salon, to spas, working-class organizations, strikes, and labor demonstrations. Honor evolved over time in these physical spaces, Lempa argues, from an ambition to be recognized for one's legitimately-earned merit, to the desire for and creation of a culture of emotional belonging. “Civil Society,” Lempa states, “was clearly a space of coexisting emotional communities . . . shaped by a sense of honor” (12).
This important book emerges out of Lempa's prior research into the history of emotions, of gender, and of physical education in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It also directly takes on two major recent debates in German history: one regarding the meaning and role of honor practices in German society, and the other over the development of German civil society. In the introductory and concluding chapters, Lempa lays the theoretical bricks of his argument that the 1700–1914 timespan in German history was “the classical era of honor and civil society” (156). He first challenges arguments that the Wilhelmine-era flourishing of honor practices such as dueling and honor-related lawsuits (Privatklage) serves as a measure either “of the modernity or nonmodernity of German society.” Though he is indebted here to Ute Frevert and Ann Goldberg, who have shown that honor practices were not holdover traditions sustained by an illiberal, feudalized bourgeoisie, Lempa sees them as more comprehensive than Frevert and Goldberg do, and “more fundamentally embedded in the type of society that Germany had become by the end of the nineteenth century” (2). Likewise, he challenges interpretations of civil society that posit it as a conscious intellectual project of the enlightened bourgeoise. Again, he sees it as more comprehensive. For Lempa, civil society is an “unselfconscious” space of free association that, in the nineteenth century, was “increasingly embraced by individuals from all classes and walks of life” (9). And Lempa agrees with Nicholas Terpstra and others that the eighteenth century was an important transition point in civil society but not its originating point. That, he argues, lies in medieval corporate, mostly urban spaces such as confraternities, marketplaces, and guilds.
Lempa grounds his understanding of honor in the sociological theories of Georg Simmel, arguing that it is a form of cohesion within social groups and, at the same time, a “motivation for individual agency.” Since every individual holds membership in multiple groups, “his or her individuality and honor are defined by and as the intersection of these memberships” (5). Simmel articulated the philosophical culminating point in the historical process of intertwining honor and civil society. Christian Thomasius and Georg Friedrich Hegel represent its beginning and midpoints, respectively. Lempa credits Thomasius with decoupling honor from virtue, articulating it as morally neutral (adiaphora), an emotional desire for recognition through one's actions, achievable only through social interactions that were, in the early eighteenth century, still effected within a hierarchically structured society. Hegel addressed industrial capitalist society, whose master/slave relations disintegrated social bonds and atomized individuals. Hegel's remedy, says Lempa, was the resuscitation of precapitalist craft and political corporate spaces within which honor—the social emotion of “being-recognized” in one's individuality and vulnerability—could be restored (89).
For Lempa, civil society and honor are both intermediary phenomena. Honor operated separately from personal morality on the one hand and legal norms on the other. Civil society emerged “between the state and its institutions on the one hand, and individual lives on the other” (157). Honor practices diversified over time as spaces of civil society multiplied; they varied by class as well as the physical conditions of the spaces where these practices were enacted. Middle-class honor was affirmed at Bad Pyrmont in the early 1800s through joining with several other people to partake in a card game or country excursion. Working-class honor in late-nineteenth century industrial Leipzig was asserted through participation in an unsanctioned May Day demonstration, occupying a space near the city center in full view of the local bourgeoise.
One thing honor was not was gendered. And though civil society could “launch heteronormative and male-dominated sexual practices” (9), its spaces were not exclusively heterosocial. These interpretations are implied in Spaces of Honor, but they are not fully supported with evidence. Women are present in some of Lempa's five brief case studies of spatially instantiated honor practices. However, he acknowledges that restrictions minimized female participation in male-dominated voluntary associations and labor organizations until right before World War I. And in the one female-constructed space examined, Johanna Schopenhauer's salon in Weimar, Lempa avers “it was obvious that [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe had assumed the role of gatekeeper whose recognition was needed for [salon] membership, for one's honor” (78). Most tellingly, Lempa does not address the chasm between male and female sexual honor present in German society over the timespan examined, even though it is a central topic in recent scholarship on honor, notably by Ute Frevert and Elisabeth Hull.
What was “the type of society” Germany became between 1700 and 1914? In less than two hundred pages, Heikki Lempa offers us many insights into the institutions of honor and civil society that made them vigorous and possibly enduring. His case studies point to rich avenues of further research.
