The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti Semitism in German Literature and Culture by Martha B. Helfer (review)
ular, it seemed that the book's intellectual historical method might well stand in more competition with certain psychoanalytically informed accounts of the period than the author let on (such as Friedrich Kittler's, who proposes the mother child dyad as the foundational circuit of romantic discourse) That said, it is clear that Daub's book will be at the heart of ongoing debates about marriage, kinship, and family relations emergent in German Studies in recent years. The book's strongest chapters include the chapter on Novalis, which features an original reading of Glaube und Liebe that situates this enigmatic text at the heart of idealist/romantic theories of love, marriage, and statehood. The chapter on Schleiermacher's early theory of free Geselligkeit is also excellent. Along with presenting an impressive range of philosophical writers on the topic of marriage, the author offers several compelling readings of novels central to debates about marriage, including Schlegel's Lucinde, Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Dorothea Schlegel's Florentin, and Sophie Mereau's Bluthenalter der Empfindung. Here Daub makes a worthwhile intervention in the scholarship on the early romantic novel. Another highlight is the Jean Paul chapter, which presents an extended reading of Siebenkas as a countermodel and satire of the Romantic metaphysics of marriage. In each of these mentioned readings, Daub weaves together philosophically informed interpretations of the novels with extended consideration of the novel form as such. This produces particularly interesting results in the case of Lucinde and of fairytale elements in Novalis. This reviewer would have liked to see this kind of formal reading applied to the discussion of Holderlin's Hyperion, but one can hardly fault such an expansive project for giving one or two authors short shrift. The book ends by considering the nineteenthand twentieth century fate of romantic concepts of marriage, surveying figures such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Bachofen, Nietzsche, and Weininger. The author traces a dual tendency, namely the trend away from metaphysics to more empirical, utilitarian conceptions of civil marriage on the one hand, and a concomitant mining of the Romantic tradition by certain key figures who continued to view marriage as a prime site of intersubjective interaction and autonomous self realization on the other. Ending with a vista onto the politics of gay marriage in the present day, Daub suggests that current debates about marriage and sexuality retrace many of the steps of thinkers around 1800, and that a closer reconsideration of the romantic/idealist heritage is warranted. This point seems especially well taken, and it is clear that Daub's book will take vigorous part in ongoing debates about the legacy of idealist/romantic thought for modern accounts of intersubjectivity, especially in so far as these accounts are and have always been tied to issues of gender, family, and marriage.