Maike Oergel

Germania and Great(er) Britain: German Scholarship and the Legitimization of the British Empire

This essay argues that German ideas, especially in the areas of philology, Altertumswissenschaft and the philosophy of history, crucially supported mid-19-century formulations of English superiority, which were employed to justify and sustain British imperial ambition. The relevant advances in the above fields all occurred within the framework of historical contextualization. That German historicism had a lasting impact on the British (and European) intellectual landscape is a commonplace. Equally accepted is the view that German ideas generally influenced 19-century British thinkers. Two things, however, have largely escaped notice: that German philological scholarship, through its contribution to English Anglo-Saxon studies, contributed to the legitimization of the Empire, and that the historical telos explicit in German Idealist philosophy of history had an earlier and more direct reception than previously thought, which further strengthened this legitimization. The support which the British imperial endeavour gained from German thinking occurred in a specific intellectual context, against a specific background of British, and generally European, intellectual history, and in a specific intellectual, historical and political situation. The context is the mid-19-century Germanophilia among British liberal intellectuals in the wake of the increasing German intellectual and cultural dominance in Europe following the ÐclassicalÏ period of German literature, i. e. German Romanticism, the related unfolding of German Idealist philosophy, and the upsurge in Germany in comparative philological and historical scholarship. The background to this readiness to engage with German ideas is the later 18-century pre-Romantic (for want of a better term) and Romantic interest in Northern culture and indigenous cultural origins, which includes the ballad revival, medievalism (in its broadest sense), and the search for national epics and cultural foundation myths, which British intellectuals and writers initially spearheaded and then continued to share. The readiness to engage with intellectual frameworks

The Amazon State in Kleist's Penthesilea: Revolutionary Republic of Female Liberation or Anti-individualistic Totalitarianism?

Abstract Relating the Amazon state to the contemporary political and intellectual contexts, this essay argues that Kleists presentation of this state suggests he saw it as a model turning into a warning. The essay investigates firstly whether this deterioration is presented as occurring necessarily, i.e. due to laws of human nature, or avoidably, i.e. due to (corrigible) human ineptitude, and secondly how the presentation of the dialectic between the states liberating and revolutionary origin and the rule-ridden anti-individualism of its conservative phase is presented within the text. By examining the relationship between freedom and moral coercion the analysis investigates the continuities and discontinuities between the Amazon state and the regime it topples, and the relationship between the sexual and political discourses of the play. In conclusion the essay argues that Kleists text suggests that human attempts at social and cultural progress are inevitably foiled by anarchic or illiberal desires. But the text refuses to confirm whether (human) nature or culture is to blame for this, because notions of progress, solution and synthesis are repeatedly, and in equal measure, proposed and denied. This plasticity of the possibility and value of progress is achieved through the choice of vehicle, sexual relations, in which the political discourse is embedded and which in contemporary intellectual discourse are dominated by notions of immutable natural laws.