Scott Abbott

Experiments on Plant Hybrids by Gregor Mendel.

Here, translated into English, GENETICS republishes the original Mendel article. As discussed in the [Perspectives by Daniel J. Fairbanks and Scott Abbott][1] this translation differs from others in an attempt to be both more accurate than previous translations and also more accessible. GENETICS

Darwin’s Influence on Mendel: Evidence from a New Translation of Mendel’s Paper

Gregor Mendel’s classic paper, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybrids), was published in 1866, hence 2016 is its sesquicentennial. Mendel completed his experiments in 1863 and shortly thereafter began compiling the results and writing his paper, which he presented in meetings of the Natural Science Society in Brünn in February and March of 1865. Mendel owned a personal copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, a German translation published in 1863, and it contains his marginalia. Its publication date indicates that Mendel’s study of Darwin’s book could have had no influence while he was conducting his experiments but its publication date coincided with the period of time when he was preparing his paper, making it possible that Darwin’s writings influenced Mendel’s interpretations and theory. Based on this premise, we prepared a Darwinized English translation of Mendel’s paper by comparing German terms Mendel employed with the same terms in the German translation of Origin of Species in his possession, then using Darwin’s counterpart English words and phrases as much as possible in our translation. We found a substantially higher use of these terms in the final two (10th and 11th) sections of Mendel’s paper, particularly in one key paragraph, where Mendel reflects on evolutionary issues, providing strong evidence of Darwin’s influence on Mendel.

Peter Handke and the Language of War

Peter Handke’s Die Fahrt im Einbaum (Voyage by Dugout) premiered at Vienna’s Burgtheater on June 9, 1999, the day NATO representatives announced that their seventy-eight-day bombing of Yugoslavia would cease. Claus Peymann directed the play, his last production at the Burgtheater after thirteen high-profile years. Two months earlier, in protest of Vatican and German support for NATO intervention in the war, Handke had renounced his membership in the Catholic Church and had returned the ten thousand Marks awarded him in 1973 for Germany’s Büchner Prize. There had been rumors that Handke would withdraw his play in protest of the bombing and that protestors would disturb the premiere of a play they found “pro-Serbian.” The play opened as scheduled, to a packed house and largely appreciative audience. Many of Europe’s newspapers reviewed the play the next morning, including four in Berlin; three in Vienna; two each in Munich, Cologne, and Hamburg; and a front-page review in Le Monde. The reviews varied widely, but one German headline expressed the unanimous sentiment: “THERE WAS NO SCANDAL.”

The Wanderer in 19th-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism (review)

ing as a venue for an alternative, specifically feminine form of Bildung, while Tamara Zwick’s consideration of the letters of Magdalena Pauli and Johanna Sieveking posits letter-writing as always already subverting the public/private distinction (the “separate spheres” of the volume’s title) that subtend the standard nineteenth-century narrative of Bildung. Another such genre was the personal memoir, and accordingly, Wendy Arons’s article (which readers of the German Quarterly will already be familiar with), on the actress Karoline SchulzeKummerfeld’s two autobiographical texts from the last decades of the eighteenth century, charts how Schulze-Kummerfeld could locate herself as actress and woman in a discursive environment that valorized anti-theatrical authenticity and insistently gendered that authenticity male. If in eighteenthand nineteenth-century ideology a Bildung was complete only once it left the intramural confines of the home for the wider fields of university, military, and commerce, Bildung was in some sense always already allied with historical time and development. As Bonnie Smith’s magisterial study The Gender of History has showed, not just the experience of and attempt to make history, but even the prerogative of commenting on history was largely withheld from the domestic sphere and thus from women. Debbie Pinfold’s contribution to the volume deals with three women authors who attempted to come to terms with an epochal event (the revolution of 1848) within the limits allotted them by the ideology of domesticity. Another focus of the volume are women authors unjustly eclipsed by the men in their lives, reduced to muses, shrews, confidantes, rather than getting billing as authors in their own right. Elizabeth Krimmer’s fine contribution to the volume, for instance, deals with Charlotte von Stein’s Die zwey Emilien and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s Florentin. While in the case of Die zwey Emilien, the connection to Bildung remains rather tenuous (although the question of how Bildung and cross-dressing may be said to interact is an interesting one), Florentin, on the other hand, with its insistence on frustrated reproduction and its often-invoked status as “anti-Bildungsroman” (Martha Helfer) offers a fine example of how the ideology of gendered Bildung could be slyly subverted or frustrated. Christine Kanz’s contribution to the volume similarly draws on the analogy between Bildung and reproduction at the turn of the twentieth century. As an ensemble, the essays collected in this volume chart out an impressive history of women’s literary agency in the long nineteenth century. While the majority of the essays remain concerned with literary texts, there is a refreshing breadth of approaches, texts, and genres to the volume’s contributions. Given the volume’s combination of established authorities in the field and emerging voices, any scholar working on questions of gender in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Germany will ignore this book at his or her own risk.