Adrian Daub's fluidly written study of the ballad genre in German culture is both impressively erudite and entertaining. The tremendous amount of contextual information that the book conveys never feels ponderous, and its many interpretations of individual ballads never feel myopic. Daub has a wonderful ability to treat a serious literary-historical topic – the ballad form in the nation-building era – with great elegance and ease. What the Ballad Knows presents the product of years of scholarship with amazing facility.
The success of the ballad genre in the nineteenth century is not hard to understand. Ballads have simple rhyme schemes, conform to everyday speech, and the “memorable meter and “intuitive cadence” serve to transport riveting narratives (158). German ballads can often be characterized as compressed mini epics that include melodramatic events or alluring encounters with the supernatural.
These traits could make the ballads look deceptively simple, transparent, and self-explicating. They are not dissimilar to the fairy tales that were also collected, adapted, and circulated in the era of nation-building. And like the folk tales, the ballads attracted audiences who, after repeated exposure, would become the vehicles of further balladic transmission. The ballad genre was associated with public performance and communal sharing; the poems were deliberately addressed to collectives of readers and listeners in an age in which lyrical poetry was increasingly associated with subjective experience and interiority.
As Daub shows, the ballad's great popularity in the nineteenth century made it an itinerant genre: it appeared in several venues and contexts. Ballads were an important form in the rising culture of public declamation (chapter 2). They were frequently used in memorization pedagogy in elementary education (chapter 4), coupled with music through settings by male and female composers (chapter 6), and even served as the preferred form in literary competitions among ambitious authors in (all-male) coteries (chapter 7). As a result, one could encounter the ballad in magazines and literary almanacs, in schools and on the stage, at the opera and the musical soirée. What the Ballad Knows also presents a long parade of figures – scholars, editors, poets, actors, pedagogues, composers – who were involved in the circulation of the genre. They were all agents in a modern literary and musical public sphere, with a large market for printed books and journals, a growing civil society with societies and choirs, and new venues such as lavish opera houses.
Yet for all its evident modernity, the ballad genre with its folksy features simulated a connection to premodern communities. The very form of the ballad evoked an ancient past, when songs would travel from person to person, mouth to mouth. Literary ballads, Daub argues, may have appeared in schoolbooks and anthologies, but they frequently mimicked an oral mode of transmission that was irretrievably lost. Ballads were recent literary creations, commodities in the literary market, and homework assignments, but they were often implicitly presented as if they could be relics of a shared ancestral culture.
As Daub emphasizes, German ballads were not hoaxes. They were not deceptively introduced as authentic bardic documents, as in the case of the epic poems of Ossian. The German-language ballad instead exhibited a stylized antiquarianism. The texts were meant to look historic without being designed “to fool anyone” (54). They had a suitably “distressed” quality (55), just as new clothes can sometimes be sold with a nicely worn look. In a series of nimble interpretive readings of well-known ballads, Daub demonstrates that the poems sustained the overarching cultural fiction of the genre's rootedness in an ancient past, but also ironized and punctured it.
In this context, Daub repeatedly considers the genre's entanglement with ideas of nationhood. The book's subtitle spells out the connection between the popular literary genre and the consequential political ideology. On the one hand, it was apparent that ballads were creative authorial products. On the other hand, the genre's patina of historicity could nonetheless suggest that ballads were the shared possession of the German Volk. With its rustic aesthetic, Daub writes, the ballad was “cannily constructed as a found object” or a “fabricated memory” (18) that embodied a fantasy of an ancient “commonality” (6) or collective “Germanic spirit” (101). This evocation of a deeply rooted communal culture, in turn, served to validate the historical character of the modern nation. In this way, the ballad genre reinforced a shared sense of nationhood and served as a literary prop for a new mass politics.
The paradoxes of the ballad seem to encapsulate some problems with the ideology of the nation. Like the ballad, the national community is an ambiguous, even dubious product: it is a decidedly modern phenomenon that presents itself as if it were sprung from ancient sources, a construct that successfully engages the imagination of a mass public. Yet it is not fully clear what we can learn from this parallel. The book shows that the unmasking of the ballad as an invented tradition does not diminish its potent charm; the ballad remains effective, eminently transmissible, even enchanting. The book also shows that the literary form of the ballad is enmeshed with the political form of the nation. But does the nation, like the ballad, also remain seductive after its demystification?
Attempts to expose the supposedly natural national community as a recent invention rarely succeed in corroding popular attachment to it. National identity may be debunked as fictitious, contingent, engineered, but the revelation of its artificiality tends to become yet another contribution to an ongoing debate about the character of nationhood, a debate that augments collective identity rather than destroys it. Adrian Daub shows how complex individual ballads slyly subverted a putative national identity, and yet the book itself is recognizably a work on German literary and cultural history featuring Herder and Goethe, Heine and Fontane. In an indirect way, it ends up sustaining some version of the national culture that it handles with such expert skepticism.
