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Featured Review
| Wolf Lepenies. The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 260. $24.95.
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| About two thirds of the way through this meditation on what is wrong with the Germans, Wolf Lepenies declares that "culture is about interpretation and making sense" (p. 173). Such potentially practical virtues were not, however, foremost in his mind when he put "culture" in the title of this volume of essays. The culture that seduces, or is seduced, over the course of German history tends more toward the highest of artistic and intellectual creations, a point that Lepenies underlines in thick black pen at the outset by telling the story of how his father heard the strains of Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier as a fighter pilot, flying high over Germany the night that Dresden burned, and tried in vain to use the clue this radio broadcast provided to intercept the Allied bombers heading toward their target. Culture in this guise proved a poor guide to the conduct of practical life, and its instrumentalization at the hands of the German high commanders was no protection at all against the destruction they had brought down upon Germany. For Lepenies, the story symbolizes "the close connection that war and culture, education and destruction, politics and poetry, and spirit and violence had entered into in Germany" (p. 2). With it, he introduces his theme of a distinctively German problem—a "national attitude"—of "regarding culture as a substitute for politics and of vilifying politics" (p. 5). But was it the culture signified by opera broadcasts that seduced Germans away from a more healthy interest in parliamentary coalition building (if indeed it did)? Or was it a much broader kind of culture, in the anthropological sense of a German way of "interpretation and making sense" of things, the culture that includes pretty much everything? Lepenies wants all meanings of culture to resonate in both his title and his book: his topic is, in other words, the culture of overrating culture. The question for the reader then becomes whether a word that signifies everything can explain anything. |
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Lepenies thinks it can. With Thomas Mann as his opinionated and not always reliable Virgil, he sets off on his investigation of the conceits and self-deceptions endemic, it seems, to Germany's development as a national political entity since at least the days of Johann Gottfried Herder. In a series of loosely thematic chapters, he explores, with the elegance of a method that relies more on affinities and juxtapositions than on causal analysis, the compensatory role that great literature and learnedness (and music, though after his opening salvo, Lepenies has surprisingly little to say about it) played for a number of, well, writers, and other writers who read those writers—and perhaps for educated Germans tout court, although one must take that extension largely on faith. Lepenies asserts that this national attitude toward culture made Germans impatient with the unlovely, unmusical, tedious, banal, in short unaesthetic mess of actual politics. When political life proved unsatisfactory, as it always did, intellectuals and those influenced by them chose to wash their hands of it, consoling themselves with the freedom they retained to conduct their spiritual exercises. |
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