Kulturtransfer im Epochenumbruch Frankreich---Deutschland 1770 bis 1815

These volumes on French and German cultural history are the result both of fresh theoretical approaches and a model of collaborative academic work based on large data collections. While most edited books take a theme or subject and try to tie together single contributions from scholars working more or less in isolation with their own materials and methods, here we have the latest installment from one of several large and well-funded research projects which are reshaping comparative cultural studies. This publication is based on the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project titled Wissens-, Begriffs- und Symboltransfer von Frankreich nach Deutschland, 1770-1815.

To apply these new approaches, the project created a large set of source materials. Teams then worked on a coordinated research program to analyze these sources and produce many of the multi-authored essays in the volumes. Several of the lead articles to the major sections outline the broad methods and detailed research questions which obviously informed and directed the essays which follow. Coordinated goals, teamwork, collaboration, relatively consistent methodologies, funding to support a large source collection and empirical analysis--does this lab-science approach work for research projects in cultural history? It has certainly produced excellent results for this particular set of research issues.

Even regarding such close cultural spaces as Germany and France, the study of intercultural exchanges has often been neglected. The daily business of reading and writing, of translating and publishing, of exchanging culture with an audience with a different language, rarely finds a place in institutional disciplines which have been traditionally defined along national lines. Part of the Deutsch-französische Kulturbibliothek, a book series now numbering fourteen titles, this two-volume collection of essays focuses on a limited time period using a developed model of "culture transfer." This model was defined and explored by the French-based research group associated with the names of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in their essay collection, Transferts. Les Relations interculturelles dans l'espace Franco-Allemand, XVIIIe-XIXe Siècles. (Paris, 1988). The research method puts emphasis on the active creation of culture through a process of accepting, rejecting, or transforming key concepts through historical processes of exchange. Rather than using a model of reception history, the project focuses on multi-dimensional combinations starting from cultural phenomena in their original context. Shaped by the transfer process and by the conditions of arrival and reception, cultural values are reinterpreted and often resisted. This method goes beyond examining the final forms of historical concepts to include analysis of the processes of culture transfer. This study of the media and agents of transfer includes cross-national publishing and translation, the evolution of particular genres, and the role of specific writers, groups, and transmission agents within the study of historic semantics and discourse analysis.

The introduction to this collection of twenty-seven essays argues that the process of cultural transfer is central to understanding the history of this period, as the events of political and social history in France initiated and encompassed complex changes beyond its borders (9-10). The first goal and a major product of the research was to systematically and comprehensively catalog the almost 16,000 German translations of French monographs and articles from newspapers and periodicals. This extensive bibliography of a "library of translations" is the empirical basis for many of these essays, providing the statistical patterns, charts, and data analyses that are now familiar features of publishing and readership histories. This corpus also provided the materials for the second goal, which was to produce in-depth case studies on the popular translation authors, specific genres, and transfer agents which give meaning to the empirical overviews. A final goal of the research team was to use the corpus materials to look at questions of comparative historic semantics along with the transfer of symbols and images (20-3).

The lead article by Lüsebrink, René Nohr, and Reichardt in the section on "Theory and research perspectives" describes the data collection and discusses theoretical approaches and implications. With the titles in the library of translations sorted into categories, the analysis shows surprising trends: a large reader commitment to literary works throughout the period with a growing interest in theater and musical theater; an expected but numerically not overwhelming rise in the number of translations on politics during the revolutionary decade; and a large number of works devoted to French science and medicine. The increasing professionalization and commercialization of translators and publishers point to a larger market of German readers reforming the transfer process and diverging from the existing original-language reading market of the French-speaking upper classes. No publishing survey would be complete without bestseller lists, and this study shows that the expected figures like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Raynal were among the most translated authors, as were writers little discussed today: Louis Sébastien Mercier, the dramatist Michel Jean Sedaine, the medical doctor Simon André Tissot, the sentimental writer Madame de Genlis, and the chemist Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal. Other bestsellers include the Code Civil, the Code de commerce, and the speeches and proclamations of Napoleon (67-8).

Michael Werner's discussion of forming models for transfer studies research is based on terms that emphasize symmetrical/asymmetrical structures and reject as less advanced the perhaps unspoken model of an advanced culture flowing into the undeveloped backwaters of the German states. He notes that historical comparisons are necessarily more often asymmetrical and offers ways to apply symmetrical structural elements where cultural developments show common features. Werner types the basic asymmetrical areas into space and time, where reception processes are separated by a long time or where place comparisons seem lopsided (metropolitan areas with dissimilar populations or institutions) or mismatched (mixing local, regional, and national spaces). Werner points out the simple logic of this principle; cultural transfer from France to Saxony is not on the same level as the opposite movement returning from Saxony to France. Another complex of asymmetrical problems results from the dominance or flow of cultural transfer. Werner shows himself sensitive to the charge that his preferred use of neutral terms like "cultural divide" should still allow for examining the existing strategies of "cultural imperialism" (94). Lining up several of these asymmetrical categories, Werner shows their relevance by analyzing the reforms and structures of the university systems in Germany and France. Certainly national vs. regional control applies, the early 19th century German and the post 1870s French reforms are asymmetrical in time, and just a cursory look at institutional structures calls for a very complex model to be applied to the relatively narrow theme of "university comparison." Where the first essay lays out the extensive data sets of the project, this short article by Werner carefully arranges the methodology used to avoid the pitfalls of simple comparisons and defines the key concepts of culture transfer scholarship.

The data of the study present the challenges of evaluating the methods, genres, and transfer processes and agents of these materials. The essays take up many of these challenges, and several essays from each section deserve review. The remaining four major sections deliver the riches of this project--the detailed case studies. Under "Information and perception processes" are grouped several newspaper and media studies and an essay on the use of French in German administrative documents. Starting with a short history of the information sources and their historical development (which alone provides a solid introduction to under-researched document types) these studies then focus on detailed themes and should bring about several re-evaluations of the nature of European print culture in this era.

The article on francophone newspapers by Karin Angelike, Matthias Beermann, and Nohr begins with a review of the long history and large quantity of French language newspapers and journals outside of France. An astounding number--about half of the almost 1300 titles--were published in the German regions, and most major German cities supported one and sometimes several papers. Often there was a greater latitude for politically controversial topics in the fractured German media landscape. As coverage of the diamond necklace affair of 1785 in three papers in the Rhine river region illustrates, these "gazettes européens" pushed critical and anti-royal publicity out to a larger European audience, and this news also reverberated back into French public opinion, bypassing the tighter control of domestic French news sources. Moving to German coverage of French revolutionary events in the states of Saxony and Thuringia, the contribution by Werner Greiling and Matthias Middell provides a detailed review of the journalistic practices and cultural reception of the French events in this local cultural space. Michael Wagner opens the range of sources to examine the "multimedia" response in Germany to the "regicide" of Louis XVI. Wolfgang Hans Stein's article on language transfer through administrative processes in the French-occupied states along the Rhine is a reminder that a broad variety of sources and practices contributed to the transfer of culture during this period. Anyone interested in the publishing history and media practices of this period will see these detailed studies as valuable contributions, while the thematic analysis of these studies demonstrates the broader value of the methods of culture transfer research used to produce them.

Espagne, one of the originators of the culture transfer methodology, defines the subset of issues and terms describing "mediators" for the section on "Agents and institutions of cultural transmission." Quickly contrasting the global categories of comparative studies with the microanalysis of transmission and reception mechanisms used by transfer studies, Espagne states that the difficulty lies in finding a fitting typology for the social groups (311). While there are some thoughtful examples of these social groups in this study, these limited cases, and these volumes as a whole, lack a delineation of the historical analysis of the changing concepts of culture and the theoretical implications of that development--a topic that Espagne and Werner have sketched elsewhere and which perhaps should have been further elaborated here.

Nohr's overview and statistical analysis of the publishers, their location, and the number of works in the translation database is followed by several case studies. Geneviéve Roche examines Ludwig Ferdinand Huber's translation practices along with his working relationships within a network of collaborators--a group which included Georg Forster and the writer whom Huber and Forster both married, Therese Forster Huber, as well as Isabelle de Charrière and the circle around Germaine de Staël. The study shows how the act of translation is the result of a complex social and political context which shaped how Huber's political reflections, which wavered between liberal and conservation causes, became embedded in the translation. The remaining three essays in this section look at the Leipzig book trade of Peter Philipp Wolf, the relations of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel with German booksellers, and the role of periodical reviews in the culture transfer process. These essays are all solid contributions to the publishing history of the time.

Moving from book history to genre studies, or rather the application of book history and culture transfer to genre development, the essay section on "Forms and media of translation processes" starts with the long-neglected but increasingly-studied history of encyclopedias published outside of France. Clorinda Donato details the complex story of several interrelated encyclopedia projects that developed prior to and alongside the famous Paris Encyclopédie and which bring into question its role as a central model. In fact, this research on the cross-cultural exchanges between the works of Chomel and De Felice in Switzerland and the Krünitz encyclopedia in Berlin is an alternative history to the encyclopedia genre--a history which may more closely reflect the dominant strand of subsequent products emphasizing specialized knowledge over philosophical theory. Donato covers questions of biography, publishing history, and sample content comparisons and generally concludes that the Krünitz project deserves a central place in encyclopedia history, a result that requires revision of several accepted notions of encyclopedia research. Further essays again make use of extensive data collections to discuss comedy reception, opera translations, picture and image publications, and the transfer of bestsellers. These detailed studies provide evidence of the intensive German involvement in working with a variety of French source types, and they challenge the assumptions of strictly German-language literary histories. For example, Michel Grimberg's study of comedy reception argues against the neat genre division where state affairs are the subject of tragedy and comedy is concerned with private life.

The final section on "Concept and symbol transfer" is familiar territory for Lüsebrink and Reichardt, who have long been associated with concept research and historical discourse analysis. Lüsebrink looks at the concept of "nation" at this time within the contrasting fields of French and German sources including dictionaries, German press reports on French festivals, and more than 150 texts from the translation database. A selective reception of these political texts prepares the way for the kind of specifically German rhetoric exemplified in an analysis of Ernst Moritz Arndt's stark use of ethnic polarities and his attention to the wide range of popular media forms. While this outline of the rhetoric is familiar--a "virulent rejection of a multicultural conception of German society and nation" (870)--it is interesting to follow the evidence for the "intercultural genesis" of this process, which is seen as another product of the intensive culture transfers of this period (874). While the case is compelling for such a figure as Arndt, one wonders if a more complex situation, such as that of Alexander von Humboldt, would fit into this pattern or prove the opposite. Here was a true German/French bilingual writer who radically globalized concepts of culture during this period and went on to play an important role in defining nineteenth-century German scientific and cultural ideals. Reichardt closes the collection with a long article on the conceptual definition and discourse on "revolution." Drawing on a wealth of sources from the translation library, he concludes that these translations, perhaps more than lexical borrowings and German newspapers, shaped the German "revolution" concepts (976).

The culture transfer model clearly eclipses traditional comparative studies based on literary influence and reception theories. The ability of this project to both generate a new body of source materials and to offer a spectrum of thoughtful approaches and in-depth studies is a tribute to the sound basis of culture transfer research and makes a meaningful contribution to the field of European cultural histories.