Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin

by John Edward Toews

• ISBN13: 9780521836487
• ISBN10: 0521836484
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book focuses on a remarkable group of nineteenth century Berlin artists and thinkers to examine the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and experienced as components of historical identity. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Felix Mendelssohn, Jacob Grimm, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke became associated in 1840 with the cultural agenda of a regime that hoped to forge solidarity among its subjects by encouraging identification with a constructed public memory.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Preface	xv
Acknowledgments	xxiii
Philosophical Prologue: Historical Ontology and Cultural Reformation: Schelling in Berlin, 1841--1845	1	(18)
Part I Historicism in Power: 1840 and the Historical Turn in Prussian Cultural Politics
Nation, Church, and the Politics of Historical Identity: Frederick William IV's Vision of Cultural Reformation	19	(48)
Becoming German: Actualizing the Spirit of 1813	26	(16)
Ethnic Fraternity and the Patriarchal Ethos	42	(11)
Earthly Communities and the Transcendent Father: The Religious Dimension in Historicizing Identity	53	(14)
``Redeemed Nationality'': Christian Bunsen and the Transformation of Ethnic Peoples into Ethical Communities Under the Guidance of the Historical Principle	67	(50)
The Original Project: Universal History, German Identity, and the Prussian Mission	69	(7)
The Project Revised: Transcendent Intervention and the Protestant Mission	76	(5)
The Project in Exile: The Seductions of Power and the Fragmentation of Vision	81	(16)
Triumph and Disillusionment: Collective Memory and the Church of the Future	97	(20)
Part II Architectural and Musical Historicism: Aesthetic Education and Cultural Reformation
Building Historical Identities in Space and Stone: Schinkel's Search for the Shape of Ethical Community	117	(90)
Collective Emancipation and Self-Recognition: The Cathedral of National Liberation and the Gothic Shape of Germanic Identity	120	(21)
The Temple of Aesthetic Education: The Tutelary State and the Discipline of Civic Culture	141	(20)
A Community of Historical Meaning for Commerce and Labor: The Bauakademie as a Hymn to Historical Self-Making	161	(18)
Constructed Identities and Transcendent Authority: Building Churches and Building the Nation	179	(18)
Schinkel's Heritage in the 1840s: Fragments of a New Historicism	197	(10)
The Generation of Ethical Community from the Spirit of Music: Mendelssohn's Musical Constructions of Historical Identity	207	(74)
Mendelssohn's Call to Berlin and the Contextual Frame of His Musical Mission	207	(8)
Remembering the Past as the Essence of the Present: The Reformation Symphony as an Experiment in Instrumental Sacred Music	215	(21)
The Spirit in the World and Against the World: Paulus and the Historical Actualization of the Idea	236	(8)
Revelation and Enlightenment: Identifying with the Father's Voice	244	(14)
Public Memory, Personal Memory, and the Autonomy of Art: Mendelssohn After 1840	258	(23)
Part III Law, Language, and History: Cultural Identity and the Self-Constituting Subject in the Historical School
The Tension Between Immanent and Transcendent Subjectivity in the Historical School of Law: From Savigny to Stahl	281	(37)
From Volksgemeinschaft to State and Religion: Transformations of Savigny's Legal Historicism, 1815--1840	283	(9)
Theory and Practice: Historical Contexts of Savigny's Transformations of Historicism	292	(14)
The Turn to Transcendent Authority: Stahl's Subordination of Jurisprudence to Theology	306	(12)
The Past as a Foreign Home: Jacob Grimm and the Relation Between Language and Historical Identity	318	(54)
Past and Present: Jacob Grimm in Berlin 1841	318	(8)
Recovering the Archaic Origins of Native Culture: Reading the Poesie of the People	326	(15)
Excavating the Structures of Mediation: Language and Law in the Building of Historical Community	341	(10)
Ethical Community and Transcendent Meaning: In Search of Germanic Religion in the 1830s	351	(10)
Historicism as Linguistic Archaeology: Language as the Site of Historical Identity	361	(11)
Ranke and the Christian--German State: Contested Historical Identities and the Transcendent Foundations of the Historical Subject	372	(47)
The Personal Dimension: Motherland and Fatherland	374	(6)
The Political Dimension: Volk and State	380	(13)
The Religious Dimension: Pantheism, Personalism, and Historical Freedom	393	(11)
History as the ``Unveiling of Existence'': Historical Subjectivity and Transcendent Authority	404	(15)
Antiphilosophical Epilogue: Historicizing Identity in Kierkegaard and Marx, 1841--1846	419	(22)
The Question of Historical Existence in Early Marx and Kierkegaard	419	(2)
The Origins of Historical Selfhood: Human Existence as Desire and Labor	421	(3)
The Reflective Ego as a Constituted Self and a Denial of Historical Selfhood	424	(8)
Becoming Historical: The ``Leap'' and the ``Revolution'' as Transitions from Constituted to Constituting Selfhood	432	(9)
Index	441