This book argues that Bonaventura's Nachtwachen presents us with richly complex and profound satirical treatment of eighteenth-century German society, of that society's censorial response to satirical works of art and, finally, of the artist who doggedly refuses to abandon the satirical mode of expression despite repeated persecution. As such, Bonaventura's work is anything but a testimony to a romantic sense of nihilistic despair. Indeed, as the text closes, the enlightenment principles professed by the nightwatchman/satirist endure, while the oppressive and censorial social order of the period finds its just end in the graveyard.
First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume “Bonaventura,” TheNightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is not Bonaventura but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his reactions, Kreuzgang is cynical and pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force. Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust. Organized into sixteen separate nightwatches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and the romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy. Translated by Gerald Gillespie, who supplies a fresh introduction, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans eager to sample the night’s dark offerings.
The book series Studies in the History of German Literature covers the whole spectrum of research into German literary history and comprises monographs and collected volumes on individual epochs from the close of the Middle Ages up to the present day. It presents contributions explicating central concepts from literary history and on individual authors and works.
Bonaventura's Nachtwachen (1804/05) has puzzled and troubled critics through its scepticism, nihilism, and scathing irony. By focussing on these aspects, critics have tended to overlook the role of music as a positive value and counterbalance to Bonaventura's mad topsy-turvy world. It is precisely this fascinating and multilayered use of music in the Nachtwachen that is explored in this book from a variety of different angles and perspectives. The book establishes the central importance of music as a literary metaphor as well as an absolute positive value in the world of the Nachtwachen. At the same time the book invites us to reconsider Bonaventura's novel in the light of the contemporary Romantic reception of music in German literature.
Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institutions--mining, law, madhouses, universities, and museums--that provide the socio-historical context for German Romantic culture. He shows how German writers and thinkers helped to shape these five institutions, all of which assumed their modern form during the Romantic period, and how these social structures in turn contributed to major literary works through image, plot, character, and theme. "Ziolkowski cannot fail to impress the reader with a breadth of erudition that reveals fascinating intersections in the life and works of an artist.... He conveys the sense of energy and idealism that fueled Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, Hoffmann and Novalis...."--Emily Grosholz, The Hudson Review "[This book] should be put in the hands of every student who is seriously interested in the subject, and I cannot imagine a scholar in the field who will not learn from it and be delighted with it."--Hans Eichner, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Ziolkowski is among those who go beyond lip-service to the historical and are able to show concretely the ways in which generic and thematic intentions are inextricably enmeshed with local and specific institutional circumstances."--Virgil Nemoianu, MLN
Nihilism – the belief that life is meaningless – is frequently associated with twentieth-century movements such as existentialism, postmodernism and Dadaism, and thought to result from the shocking experiences of the two World Wars and the Holocaust. In his rich and expansive new book, Jon Stewart shows that nihilism's beginnings in fact go back much further to the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the true origin of modern nihilism was the rapid development of Enlightenment science, which established a secular worldview. This radically diminished the importance of human beings so that, in the vastness of space and time, individuals now seemed completely insignificant within the universe. The author's panoramic exploration of how nihilism developed – not only in philosophy, but also in religion, poetry and literature – shows what an urgent topic it was for thinkers of all kinds, and how it has continued powerfully to shape intellectual debates ever since.
