In the Spring of 2011, a group of twelve scholars, whose interests cover a broad range of literary, philosophical, cultural-historical, and scientific areas, gathered at the University of Toronto to discuss a topic that lies at the very heart of academia: the divergent relationship between the knowledge production and organization systems of the humanities and the sciences. Their work is presented in this volume, under the editorship of Christine Lehleiter, who has produced a cohesive, unified, and timely collection of diverse essays. At a historical moment in the United States and elsewhere when political leaders debate the very nature of “fact” and “truth” and the future of the humanities appears to face significant challenges, an informed, public conversation on the essential value of our disciplines as knowledge-producing institutions seems essential. As a point of departure, Fact and Fiction provides an important perspective on the origins and development of the separation between the liberal arts and the sciences, from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century.

Lehleiter organizes the collection of essays into five sections, and announces the general theme of each with a binary sectional title that includes some sensual aspect or activity associated with the humanities in combination with specific sciences. I will identify each individually below. The associations are explained in Lehleiter's “Introduction,” which traces the history of the division between disciplines and identifies significant attempts to bridge the gaps between them in an intelligent and provocative fashion. As one discovers from the outset, a notion of what constitutes “factual knowledge” necessarily takes on various subjective contexts and structures, which are defined historically through disciplinary-specific processes of epistemology engaged through critical reading, limited relatively by the reader's interpretation of the objects of study.

The first section on “Reading: Electricity, Medicine” begins with an essay by Jocelyn Holland. Holland examines historical definitions of terms for various nuances of “fact,” including “Faktum,” “Tatsache,” “Tathandlung,” and what Fichte referred to as a “Leiter,” a term derived from the contemporary language around discoveries in physics, specifically regarding electricity. Implicit is the great potential for the “fact” to serve as “conductor” of thought, a notion that the Romantics explore broadly in their fiction while elaborating on its possibilities in their philosophical essays and fragments.

IN GRAMMOPHON. FILM. TYPEWRITER (1986), Friedrich Kittler cites in its entirety a fantastical tale by Maurice Renard, originally entitled “La mort et le coquillage” (Death and the Shell, 1907), in which an accomplished composer, Nerval, attempts one night to transcribe the sounds he hears from a seashell. Despite being “among the most famous” of composers, Nerval is unable to transcribe the mysterious sounds “dictated” to him, and later that night—perhaps after recognizing the impossibility of his task—he dies. The entire story of Nerval's death is narrated by one of his friends, left unnamed, who throughout the short story describes the night's events to Nerval's doctor. The friend wants to convince the doctor that his diagnosis for Nerval's death, a stroke, was incorrect. What killed Nerval, according to his friend, was putting his ear to the seashell, a fate that the friend thinks he will soon share himself:

Laughter is the only indication of the doctor's response to the story as a whole, to which Kittler responds that “als Schlußsatz einer phantastischen Erzä hlung gab es schon bessere Fragen” (Kittler 87; “there have been better questions to conclude fantastic tales,” 55). Not unreasonably, Kittler aligns Renard's fantastical tale with contemporaneous technical manuals that describe phonographs, graphophones and other early sound recording instruments as being able to bring back the dead, going so far as to propose that “[die] Muschel, der Renards fiktiver Komponist lauscht, … nicht am Strand einer Natur gefunden [ist]; sie vertritt die Muschel eines Telephons oder Fernsprechers, der Zeitenfernen ü berbrü cken kann, um ihn an eine Antike vor jedem Diskurs anzuschließen” (Kittler 88; “The shell that Renard's fictitious composer listens to was not found on a natural beach; it takes the place of the mouthpieces of a telephone or a loudspeaker capable of bridging temporal distances in order to connect him with an antiquity preceding all discourse,” 55).

As Franz-Josef Deiters's title signals, his book offers a sophisticated reading of theater carefully located between theater history, media theory, Michel Foucault's “classical episteme,” and Walter Benjamin's “Entweltlichung.” Not clear from the title, but equally important, are its exceptionally thoughtful readings of five representative dramatic texts of the first half of the Goethezeit. Both the theory and the readings are presented with a clarity and concreteness that belie the abstraction of the title, yet also precisely illuminate the insights to be gained from the major epistemological shifts delineated by media theory and intellectual history of the last several decades. This structure already emerges in the table of contents, where all the chapter titles are quotations from the work at hand, and, in the crucial historical second chapter, most of the sub-section titles as well.

Die Entweltlichung der Bühne makes a double argument: first, theater is a medium in the sense of media theory, and not exclusively performance, and second, as such, it is an important symptom of the shift identified in Foucault's Order of Things from an analogical world-view to the “classical” regime of signs. Deiters lays out the general argument in his “Medienkritische Vorrede,” more accessibly than its title might suggest. Here he politely debunks Erika Fischer- Lichte's influential view that performativity is the essence of theater, using Foucault to relocate the theater into the context of media theory and identifying the shift from analogy to the primacy of signs as “Entweltlichung,” a process of abstraction whose formulation owes, I suspect, something to Deiters's previous engagement with Benjamin on allegory in drama (Drama im Augenblick seines Sturzes: Zur Allegorisierung des Dramas in der Moderne. Versuche zu einer Konstitutionstheorie, 1999).

The second chapter reviews pronouncements about the theater from Gottsched to Schiller and the Romantics. Thankfully, Deiters does not proceed chronologically by summarizing the usual suspects. Instead, he surveys categories that demonstrate exactly how leading thinkers wrote about Entweltlichung and semiotics. Deiters considers here changes in the meaning of truth in philosophy; the new priority of the printed text over performance; the shifts in the triad of communication between author, actors, and audience (the depersonalization of the actor, the silencing of the spectator, the withdrawal of the author behind the curtain);

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE'S formative influence on the Bildungsroman is well known. There is a broad critical consensus that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is not only the first, but the paradigmatic example of the genre. Yet in this essay I propose a closer look at the literary paradigm itself, which yields a different evaluation of the commitment of Goethe's novel to the idea of Bildung. Seemingly endorsing a rigid teleology—the successful maturation, self-fulfillment, acculturation, and socialization of the protagonist— the Bildungsroman is an intrinsically dialectical literary form. While manifesting a deep interest in childhood, the prerequisite of any formation narrative is a depiction of childhood as a phase to be outgrown. The genre shuns prolonged childhood; it portrays mature socialization and the consolidation of a unified bourgeois subject as its sole desirable fulfillment. Yet the importance of childhood for this process, and for the genre, suggests an inherent contradiction. As Franco Moretti has observed, the Bildungsroman, since its appearance in the late eighteenth century but more conspicuously in later works, exhibits some tension between the fascination with youth as an energetic emblem of modernity and constant change, and the striving toward adulthood, which signifies stoppage, stasis and finality. Goethe's novel is indeed torn between a longing for childhood and an ambition to obtain stable adulthood, but in a way that requires some rethinking of its generic paradigm.

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre demonstrates how the concept of Bildung is fraught with inconsistencies from its inception. Although considered the model Bildungsroman, it depicts growth and development not as linearly progressive but as an uncertain and equivocal dynamic. Moretti, Jeffrey Sammons, David Miles and other critics suggest that modern works render explicit what was kept vague or altogether denied at the time of Goethe. Yet, while late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels increasingly collapse classical Bildung assumptions, I trace the ambiguity as strongly at work already in the earliest example of the genre. The critical paradigm of childhood- as-search vs. adulthood-as-stasis gets complicated when childhood itself is represented as static. Fascinated as it is with the topos of the child who lingers in an eternal childhood, even the first paradigmatic Bildungsroman challenges the telos of progress by a partly concealed alternative route, whose guiding principle is the refusal to grow up.

IN EARLY 1769, at the age of twenty-five, Johann Gottfried Herder composed the last of his so-called ‘kritische Wälder’ (critical forests), a series of essays responding to the aesthetic theories of contemporaries such as Christian Adolf Klotz, Friedrich Just Riedel and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Drawing most extensively on Lessing's foundational media-theoretical work, Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laokoon, or the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1766), the series examined the coevolution of the human sensorium and the historical differentiation of the arts. In contrast to his contemporaries, Herder ascribed particular importance to the sense of hearing and dedicated large sections of his critical forests to explaining the uniqueness of aesthetic experiences mediated by the ear. In order to make his case for hearing, Herder looked beyond the fields of philosophy and art history to the recent work in physiology he had encountered during his brief tenure as a medical student at the University of Königsberg.

Nowhere was this attempt to fuse art history with medical science clearer than in his Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen (Fourth Critical Forest) from 1769, which, according to Herder, aimed at making sense of “[die] innere Physik des Geistes” ([the] inner physics of the mind) or “die Physiologie der Menschlichen Seele” (the physiology of the human soul). Specifically, the essay discussed the nature of sound and aesthetic pleasure with numerous references to the anatomical structure of the ear. In support of the essay's central distinction between ‘sound’ (Schall) and ‘tone’ (Ton), Herder drew readers’ attention to the ear's “Tympanum” (102; tympanum), “Trommelfell” (138; tympanic membrane), “Nervenäste” (105; nerve branches), and “Fasern” (108; fibers).

This foregrounding of the ear's corporeality and its incorporation into a theory of musical aesthetics and poetics was consistent with Herder's broader intellectual project, which aimed to rehabilitate auditory experience against the backdrop of Enlightenment ocularcentrism. While his Viertes Kritisches Wäldchen offered a theory of aesthetic pleasure and the sonic sublime grounded in the physiology of auditory perception, his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (Essay on the Origin of Language, 1772) elevated the ear to the status of “erste Lehrmeister der Sprache” (the first language teacher), and characterized the process of language acquisition as an acoustic exchange.

Als ein “Gegengewicht im Zeitgeist” bezeichnete der junge Arthur Schopenhauer Goethes Rolle in einem Zeitalter, das auf der anderen Seite maßgeblich durch die Philosophie Immanuel Kants geprägt war. Goethe gehörte auch zu den wenigen Gesprächspartnern Schopenhauers, der sich lebenslang “schrecklich einsam gefühlt” habe. Zwischen November 1813 und Mai 1814 kam es zu persönlichen Begegnungen, wohl auch gemeinsamen Farbexperimenten, zwischen dem um 39 Jahre älteren Goethe und dem 25-jährigen Philosophen, der kurz zuvor in Jena mit einer Arbeit Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (1813) zum Doktor der Philosophie avanciert war.

Goethe erhoffte sich, seinen Gesprächspartner für seine Theorie der Farben (1810) zu gewinnen und die Zustimmung zu erhalten, welche sein Zeitalter ihm bisher versagt hatte. Schopenhauer hingegen wollte keineswegs die Adeptenrolle übernehmen, sondern trug seine differierenden Ansichten Goethe gegenüber selbstbewusst vor. Resultat dieser Unterhaltungen bildete Schopenhauers Schrift Über das Sehn und die Farben (1816), in der er seine eigene Theorie der Farben präsentierte, die in wesentlichen Punkten—wie der Herstellung des Weißen und der Entstehung des Violetten—von Goethes Farbenlehre abwich.

Für Schopenhauer war Goethes Theorie der Farben eine “systematische Darstellung der Tatsachen,” ermangelte jedoch einer “Theorie” im eigentlichen Sinne. Sein Ziel war daher kein Geringeres, als Goethes Forschungen zur Optik theoretisch zu fundieren und damit in den Rang echter Wissenschaftlichkeit zu erheben—ein Anliegen, das Goethes eigenem Projekt diametral entgegen stehen musste. Die Entzweiung in philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Fragen war unausweichlich, wenn auch Goethe aus der Distanz späterer Jahre eine konziliante Haltung Schopenhauer gegenüber bewahrte und Schopenhauer auf der anderen Seite seine Bewunderung dem großen Vorbild gegenüber nie aufgab.

Der Einfluss Goethes auf Schopenhauers Philosophie wurde bislang in der Schopenhauer-Forschung wenig berücksichtigt. Ein von Daniel Schubbe und Søren R. Fauth herausgegebener Sammelband, der auf eine Tagung im Goethe- Nationalmuseum in Weimar (September 2014) zurückgeht, möchte dieses Forschungsdesiderat erfüllen. Insgesamt sechzehn Beiträge widmen sich dem Thema “Goethe und Schopenhauer” aus literatur- und sprachwissenschaftlicher sowie philosophischer Perspektive.

Die Artikel sind in sechs Themengruppen unterteilt: 1. Biographische und kulturhistorische Aspekte; 2. Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie, Sprachphilosophie; 3. Naturphilosophische und evolutionstheoretische Fragen; 4. Ästhetik, Dichtung und Musik; 5. Farbenlehre sowie 6. Ethik und Moral.

WITHIN THE HISTORY of European philosophy and literature, the discourse of the human has been closely tied to discourses on forms of governance. The constitution of the city, the republic, the nation, the military apparatus has been linked to that of the human by means of analogies that greatly impact how both the political and the individual are thought of. In Plato's Republic, for example, a group of discussants agrees that the soul is a tripartite entity composed of an appetitive, a spirited, and a rational part. The same structure, Socrates adds, comprises the city. In Book Four, the constituents of the city and the human soul are set side by side in pairs: the city's craftsmen and the appetites; the guardians of the city and the forcefulness of the spirit; the philosophers ruling the city and the rational capacities thought ideally to govern within a person.

Plato describes a harmonious relationship between the three parts of both city and individual as justice. The definition of such harmonious co-existence or justice comprises the main pursuit of the dialogues in the Republic (see 368d-e, 434d). Two explicitly stated prerequisites for its emergence are: that each part exclusively minds its own business and, secondly, that a topdown order of command is accepted, that is, the philosopher queens and kings’ position on top of the hierarchy must remain uncontested.

During the eighteenth century, the human-state analogy reappears in a variety of forms. The events leading up to and following the French Revolution necessitate new, secular societal founding narratives. Both political philosophies and anthropologies—two genres frequently amalgamated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—meet this demand in alternately explanatory, descriptive, and prescriptive pamphlets that consider the nature of a just society and the “humanity” of the individual intricately intertwined.

Structural analogies between the political and the human entail significant consequences. Segregated into distinct elements and reliant on voluntary obedience, both the city and the human perform a precarious balance, one where harmonious co-existence easily drifts into conflict, and war appears as an integral component of the conceptual framework. Indeed, the text of the Republic implicitly acknowledges “civil war” as the norm in both city and individual.

SOON AFTER THE Storming of the Bastille in Paris shocked all of Europe on July 14, 1789, the Bavarian prince-elector Karl Theodor expedited the project of an English Garden and hastily opened this people's park (Volkspark) with a prominent Chinese tower (chinesischer Turm). The tower in Munich resembles the one in the royal gardens at Kew near London, which was designed and built by the royal architect to George III, Sir William Chambers, in 1762 (fig. 1). A prominent landmark in the metropolitan area of Munich, the English Garden, like Kew Gardens, is one of the earliest public parks in Europe and is meant to express Karl Theodor's gesture of generously sharing his property and governance with his people. Indeed, before and after Karl Theodor, German princes had a series of “Chinese” structures erected in their gardens and parks: the Chinese village Mulang in Kassel Wilhelmshöhe (built in 1781), the China House in Sanssouci, Potsdam (1764), the Chinese palais in the Steinfurter Bagno near Münster (1787), and, most conspicuously, the Chinese garden kingdom (Gartenreich) in Dessau/Wörlitz (1795–97) built by Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau after his visit to England.

Unlike the French renaissance garden's strict geometrical regularity, the irregular style is often considered to be the English garden style. Yet Chambers forcefully claims in his A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) that the irregularity is actually Chinese. Indeed, garden design was a politically contentious issue between the royalist Tory party, to which Chambers belonged, and the liberalist Whig party in England. Stephen Bending explains: “The English landscape garden, then, is a reflection both of Britain's cultural disposition and of correct—natural—government, for if regular gardens represent despotic interests, the ‘rational’ landscape garden is a reflection of a variegated—constitutional—regime.” This conjuncture of style and politics reminds me of John Dixon Hunt's argument that a garden is designed to represent, not to imitate, in a specific iconographical context. Hunt calls the garden a fiction or “third nature” because of its complex relationship with nature and culture. In this fiction of Europe's “Chinese” gardens, as I will show in the ensuing pages, the particular style of Chinese structures of William Chambers's design, which I call the Chinese-Gothic style, reveals a royal representation of empire and an accompanying aesthetics of sublimity in the eighteenth century.

Among the many contributions of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) was to question the dogmatic belief in providence: Kant argued that the human mind represents both organic nature and human history as if (als ob) both were teleological, although we can never verify this claim. Despite the fact that Kant limited teleology to regulative use, Karl Löwith claimed in his influential study Meaning in History (1949) that the nineteenth-century philosophy of history is nothing but secularized eschatology. Although Löwith's argument is a simplification, his criticism of master narratives had enormous influence on the development of postmodernism. Since Hayden White's Metahistory (1973), historians have debated to what extent historical events themselves have order and to what extent it is only the historian's narration that gives them meaning.

Alexander Jakovljević's Schillers Geschichtsdenken: Die Unbegreiflichkeit der Weltgeschichte (2015) shows how complex Friedrich Schiller's historical thought was, and provides some new insights into how he theorized the relationship between teleology and contingency in history. Schiller's place is very interesting among the post-Kantian philosophers, because he published his major works before the rise of German idealism: his position seems to be somewhere between Kant's regulative approach to teleology and Hegel's belief that the telos of history is the accumulation of freedom.

Jakovljević convincingly shows that Schiller's position is based on the tension between two almost opposite views of history. In 1789, Schiller was appointed professor of history at the university of Jena on Goethe's recommendation. His famous inaugural lecture Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? (1789) appears to be firmly anchored in the belief that human history is a teleological process. It was published one year before Kant's criticism of teleological judgments in the third critique. In contrast, Ueber das Erhabene (1801) provides a very different understanding of history. Schiller argued there that history is incomprehensible and seems to be ruled more by coincidence (Zufall) than teleology. The previous scholarship has often assumed that Schiller moved from earlier providentialism to a more pessimist understanding of history because of his disappointment with the horrors of the French Revolution. According to Jakovljević, Schiller's hovering between providentialism and coincidentalism should not be seen as a linear development from the former to the latter.

In this ambitious new monograph, Dorothea von Mücke argues that Enlightenment ideas about authorship and the public sphere were profoundly shaped by both religious thought and the natural sciences. Her volume thus seeks to trace their evolution within a broader network of intellectual and cultural influences. “The discourse of philosophy alone,” she argues, “does not suffice to understand the trajectory of these concepts.” Von Mücke is interested in describing the kind of “cultural work” through which an autonomous domain of aesthetic perception and creativity was developed and populated by its own newly stylized audiences, critics, and practitioners (123–24)—a domain that, in turn, shaped the Enlightenment more broadly.

For this, von Mücke understands the Enlightenment not so much as an array of concepts, but as a set of habituated practices: of contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, and public deliberation. The goal of her volume is to reveal “where such practices [were] articulated, maintained, and promoted” (xiv). She works to trace how practices of observation, confession, and public debate migrated between different discursive contexts and took on new meaning. One is struck, on the one hand, by how highly portable and adaptable such practices could be—the way that they could be transplanted, repurposed, and transformed in different contexts. On the other hand, in von Mücke's view, these practices retain a trace of their origin. They are often borrowed precisely for their aura (72). If practices of confession, for example, were secularized through this process of migration, they served at the same time to provide secular discourses with new meaning and with greater stature (123). This shift of habituated practices from one context to another could, von Mücke notes, even come about unintentionally, almost in spite of itself. Von Mücke cites the work of Martin Gierl, who has shown that theological debates around the beginning of the eighteenth century helped to establish a set of secular norms of public deliberation and fairness—a set of neutral criteria according to which one might evaluate doctrinal claims (xxiv).

In Part I of her book, von Mücke focuses on how practices of contemplation, developed through both spiritual exercises and the natural sciences, provided the basis for a new conception of aesthetics centered around the idea of a disinterested observer.

This book provides a deeply researched introduction to Hans Blumenberg's theory of myth, largely by highlighting the influence of well-known and forgotten thinkers on Blumenberg's thought. In its historiographical detail, it reads almost like a work of Blumenberg's own hand—a self-reflexivity the author acknowledges in the prologue's title, “A Story about the Telling of Stories” (1). Chapters 1–4 are the most historical-documentary. They are a wonderful resource for readers unfamiliar with Blumenberg since much of this material summarizes current Blumenberg scholarship. Experienced Blumenberg readers will also find new insights from these chapters. Chapter 4, for instance, discusses Blumenberg's admiration for anthropologist Paul Alsberg's imaginative visions in his theory of Köperausschaltung, humanity's ever growing ability to engage its surroundings across physical distances, first with long-range weapons, later with concepts (111–16).

Chapter 5, on the reception history of Prometheus myths, prepares the ground for the ambitious argumentation of Chapter 6, on Blumenberg's theory of mythic reception events through the example of Goethe's self-fashioning as a Promethean writer. Chapter 7 and 8 are equally ambitious. They respond to Götz Müller's criticism that Work on Myth does not discuss “the dangerous proliferation of modern myths.” Nicholls presents “political polytheism” as Blumenberg's answer to Schmitt's political theology (200, 210–15). Nicholls then explicates Blumenberg's unpublished diagnosis of Hitler's narcissistic mythology (238, also see Präfiguration). Hitler's delusions negate Blumenberg's ideal by denying the checks and balances found in the polytheistic division of powers.

Blumenberg is challenging to read because he conducts theory through examples, implicitly reducing the theory to a description of the examples. For instance, Höhlenausgänge (Cave Exits), the last major work Blumenberg published during his lifetime, enlists “leaving the cave” as a myth of emerging human civilization, but gives little theorization of myth or metaphor. Instead we learn about the pathos of intellectual history and about the pathos of caves. If analysis does not drive the last nail into the coffin of myth, as jokes can be explained to death, Blumenberg uses narrative to persuade us that cavernous spaces affect us emotionally because they are, always already, an effective metaphor for human emergence.

Introduction: Business and Bureaucracy

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES Friedrich Christian Delius's representation of corporate rhetoric and bureaucracy in his pioneering work of post-1968 documentary fiction. Whereas Hermann Kant writes from within the GDR establishment, Delius (b. 1943) was, until 1971, a doctoral student and an activist associated with the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). While Kant writes in a realist mode, Delius's early work belongs to the genre of Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature) developed in the 1960s and 1970s by East and West German authors, including Rolf Hochhuth, Maxie Wander, Peter Weiss, Heinar Kipphardt, Günter Wallraff, Irina Liebmann, and Erika Runge. Practitioners of the genre called for the politicization of literature and for writers to engage with the facts of the modern industrial world. Although Kant and Delius are writing from opposite sides of the Cold War divide and using different literary forms, to a certain extent they have a shared preoccupation: the inevitably bureaucratic nature of modern life. For some West German writers in the 1970s, the growth of the capitalist corporation was a major concern. This preoccupation was reflected in Wallraff's polemics against industry and big business; in Mathias Scheben's science-fiction novel Konzern 2003 (1977; Corporation 2003) most of Western Europe is ruled in 2003 by the giant Zannen Corporation. Seen from this perspective, there seemed to be a number of parallels between the bureaucracy of the Soviet states and what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” of the US in his farewell address of January 17, 1961.

Unsere Siemens-Welt (Our Siemens World) seems to invite such parallels. For example, considering Siemens in the late nineteenth century, the narrator notes approvingly that “das Betriebsklima entsprach dem einer staatlichen Behörde, es herrschten alle Vorzüge eines ‘kalten militärischen Tons’” (the atmosphere of the firm was equivalent to that of a government agency; it had all the advantages of a “cold military tone”). Even the notorious Stasi has a counterpart in Delius's corporate world, in which there is a confidential personnel file on every employee. At one point the narrator regrets that the new employment law allows employees to apply to view their files, but he adds that the corporation will find ways to ensure that certain data remain confidential.

Introduction: Training the Corporate Communicator

DAS SCHIFF das singend zieht auf seiner Bahn (The Ship That Goes Singing on Its Way), by Philipp Schönthaler (b. 1976), focuses on consultants who “develop” personnel, and employees who “develop” themselves, in line with company selection procedures. Like Delius's Unsere Siemens-Welt, Schönthaler's novel is a documentary satire. It is set in a fictional cosmetics company, “Pfeiffer Beauty Kosmetik,” in Stuttgart. This is appropriate because the novel depicts a world in which employees are expected to be “attractive” to employers. The plot hinges on a series of job interviews, mentoring sessions, staff meetings, and corporate presentations. The third-person narrator recedes behind the characters and their discourse. This is significant, given that Schönthaler wrote his doctoral thesis on the figure of the narrator in the works of Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, and Imre Kertész. Perhaps Schönthaler's decision in Das Schiff to avoid using a narrator who says “I” is an attempt to distance himself from these authors. Nevertheless, Bernhard's influence is evident when moments of physical lapse bring the characters’ professional facade crashing down, e.g., when Rike Njlhouz starts farting uncontrollably during a job interview (DS 6), or when List, a fraud investigator making a sales pitch, accidentally swings his briefcase into the human resources director's private parts (DS 83).

Das Schiff is saturated with the discourse of “continuing professional development” (CPD). Schönthaler's interest in Bildung (education) and berufliche Weiterbildung (professional development) signals an intellectual affinity with Thomas Mann, which is confirmed by Schönthaler's short story “Nach oben ist das Leben offen” (2012; Life Opens Up toward the Top), set in a “Sportheim” (sports facility) in the Swiss Alps that offers motivational sports training for high fliers. One member of the staff is Dr. Behrens, an allusion to Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain), which is set in a Swiss sanatorium run by a Dr. Behrens. This connection takes the present monograph full circle, suggesting that there are long-term continuities in depictions of the business world by German authors.

Introduction: A Sociopolitical Approach to Malina

MALINA, BY INGEBORG BACHMANN (1926–73), centers upon the enigma of a split personality: the female narrator (Ich), who is gradually supplanted by her male alter ego, Malina. Most interpretations of the novel have focused on the gendered aspect of this dislocation in the self, and indeed, the novel thematizes the imbalances of power as enshrined in normative binary models of gender relations. Georgina Paul, for example, reads Malina's appropriation of the narrative subject as a work of mourning for the lost “feminine” aspect within himself and takes the novel's absence of closure (i.e., the enigma of its final words, “Es war Mord” [“It was murder”]1) as an affirmation of a “feminine” plurality. Anyone studying Malina today must take account of the exponential growth in Bachmann scholarship if one-sided interpretations are to be avoided. As early as 1992, Sara Lennox and Leslie Morris asked feminist readers to abandon “wishful thinking” about Bachmann's politics, and to stop trying “to make her conform to our ideas.” More recently, Dirk Göttsche suggests that “it is time to move beyond the notion that there could be one single privileged approach or key to the meaning of Bachmann's work.” Like Kafka's, Bachmann's work is fundamentally open. But the fact that Bachmann's work resists interpretive closure does not mean that anything goes. Politicizing Bachmann may be a risky business, but to focus solely on aesthetics, without reference to the political and historical contexts in which they are embedded, is also questionable. In 1995 when Susanne Baackmann proposed a political approach to Bachmann's work, Albrecht Holschuh called for a “purely literary” reading. The tension in Bachmann scholarship between political and “apolitical” readings resembles an exchange between Ich and Ivan in the novel. Ich tells Ivan: “Gerade habe ich erfunden, wie ich die Welt doch noch verändern kann!” (M 105; “I've just invented a way to change the world after all!” Ma 64). Ivan replies scornfully: “Was? du auch? die Gesellschaft, die Verhältnisse? das muß ja heutzutage der reinste Wettbewerb sein” (M 105; “What? you too? society, relationships? these days that has got to be the biggest game around,” Ma 64).

Introduction: No More Rest Periods

IN AN INTERVIEW published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 14, 2015, Janina Kugel, personnel director of Siemens, explained that employment law needs to be changed in response to digitalization, adding that she often debates this issue with government representatives. Kugel argued that “die vorgeschriebenen Ruhezeiten” (mandatory rest periods) are “Unsinn” (nonsense) because of flextime. According to Kugel, it is not efficient to calculate whether or not the employee was offline long enough to comply with the rest periods— quite an ironic statement, given that Siemens specializes in data processing. Therefore, she says, rest periods should be abolished: “Das passt nicht mehr in die Zeit” (It is no longer appropriate today). This genre of managerial discourse is echoed and examined by Kathrin Röggla (b. 1971) in wir schlafen nicht (2004; We Never Sleep), which derives from a series of interviews she conducted with German-speaking finance experts based in New York. Her first interviewee was an investment banker for Morgan Stanley, whom she visited in his office in midtown Manhattan. Although wir schlafen nicht is ostensibly set at a trade fair in Germany (the location is most reminiscent of Düsseldorf), Röggla's use of US-based source material is justified by the global interconnectedness of the German economy. Like Delius's Unsere Siemens-Welt in the previous chapter, wir schlafen nicht is documentary fiction and represents an investigation into a particular genre of corporate rhetoric. The economic environment changed considerably, however, in the three decades between Delius's text and Röggla's, particularly in terms of deregulation.

From the 1980s onward there have been successive waves of deregulation and privatization in Western economies. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–90 and the reunification of Germany intensified this process. Since the 1980s, “deregulation” is often promoted as a way to make industries more competitive, although, as David Graeber has noted, it usually meant the opposite, marking a shift from “managed competition between midsized firms” to a situation where “a handful of financial conglomerates …

Introduction: The Critical Apologist

THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS the use of business rhetoric in Hermann Kant's Das Impressum (1972; The Imprint). It might be objected that the word business is out of place here. Can the term be applied to the centrally planned economy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)? Yes, it can. Even in the planned economy there was room to maneuver. Admittedly, most industrial enterprises were Volkseigene Betriebe (Publicly Owned Operations), or VEBs, under the control of the state. The VEBs were, however, given considerable autonomy in the 1960s as part of Walter Ulbricht's economic reforms aimed at making the economy more competitive. Furthermore, many independent private businesses existed, as historians such as Agnès Arp and Peter Karl Becker have shown. Even in the GDR, there were certain economic freedoms. The historical record shows that lines of questioning that contrast “free” and “unfree” markets risk reducing complex phenomena to ideological oppositions. No market has ever been entirely “free”; every economy is, to a certain extent, planned and regulated by the state. Indeed, UK and US governments have very often championed protectionist policies.

Obviously, the GDR socialist economy was much more tightly controlled than a capitalist economy. Crucially, price mechanisms were determined by the state, not by supply and demand. Decades before, Max Weber warned that workers in a socialist system, far from being emancipated, would be “faced with an all-embracing state bureaucracy, incomparably more powerful than private entrepreneurs.” Weber also predicted that ideology would impede the operation of such an economy, leading to “a decrease in the formal, calculating rationality” characteristic of capitalist economies. Any discussion of economics and business in the GDR needs to acknowledge its complex, multilayered administrative structures. Although the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), or SED, determined state policy, officially the party and the state were separate, and this meant that citizens could deal with state officials without dealing directly with the SED itself. This was a state that Mary Fulbrook describes as a “participatory dictatorship,” in which citizens were, to a certain extent, allowed to participate actively in power structures.