Tuska Benes's rich and erudite new work covers more territory than the title might suggest. But then, that is her prime goal, to show the centrality of the academic study of language and languages to the broader cultural projects of nineteenth-century Germany, and indeed beyond. The book's most important contribution is therefore in applying insights from the history of linguistics to wider questions of German intellectual and cultural history, and in bringing some important but neglected names from the various subdisciplines of nineteenth-century German philology back into the historical mainstream. Some of the details of sound shifts and linguistic systems will appeal primarily to specialists, but there is much here for German historians at large; scholars interested in the origins and development of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the linguistic turns might find the argument stimulating as well.
The book explores two main topics. The first portrays the ways in which language “became a powerful and enduring metaphor for the representation of national culture in Germany,” with Germany claimed as “the quintessential case of language study contributing to the rise of modern nationalism” (p. 4). Second, the work makes the case that scholars need to trace the roots of the mid twentieth-century linguistic turns not just to Nietzsche and Saussure, but to their immediate predecessors and in fact all the way back to ideas of the linguistic construction of culture and of individual subjectivity associated with the rise of comparative and historical philology in Germany in the decades before and around 1800. For broader context, Benes was particularly good about engaging the Biblical and theological dimension of German cultural history and the history of anti-Semitism, drawing above all on the work of Jonathan Hess and George Williamson.
Benes's book is organized into six principal chapters. Chapter one offers an account of the origins of comparative philology amid the religious and epistemological debates of late eighteenth-century Germany. Chapters two through four then explore three different directions within the historical study of language as they relate to German national identity, with the search for German origins having led to three potential homelands and to the establishment of three distinct philological fields. Chapter two looks at the rise of comparative historical philology among Orientalists, as various figures traced the German (and sometimes Christian) heritage back to a home in Asia, from the early proponent of Indo-European Sanskritist Indomania Friedrich Schlegel to the real founder of comparative linguistics Franz Bopp. This chapter also details the connections of German Orientalists to the colonialist projects of the growing Russian Empire in Asia and the Caucasus. Chapter three, although entitled “Urvolk Germania,” for the most part concentrates on the linguistic researches of the north-German Protestant nationalist Jacob Grimm (who accepted the notion of Germans' Asian origins as part of the Indo-European or “Indo-Germanic” migrations expounded by Orientalists), and of Grimm's counterpoint, the Bavarian Catholic dialectologist Johann Andreas Schmeller. Chapter four sets out probably the most familiar of the possible historical loci for German identity, classical Greece, but adds an interesting account of classicists' early avoidance, and later partial adoption, of the techniques of comparative philology. A common theme running through these three chapters is the extent to which the increasing acceptance of historical linguistics, and of its tale of Indo-European affinity, helped to widen the distance between “Aryan” Germans and “Semitic” Jews, and diminish the perceived Hebrew contribution to the history of Christianity, and hence to German national identity.
This observation helps to set up the discussion in chapter five of the direct relationship between linguistic and racial thought in the decades from about 1830 to 1880. Benes finds that while philologists did tend to reject the physical basis of racist theory—as in the classic case of August Friedrich Pott's book-length refutation of Gobineau—they often replaced it with a linguistic determinism that was nearly as capable as its biological counterpart of supporting notions of ethnic hierarchy. Finally, chapter six presents the material on Nietzsche, Saussure, and the linguistic turn, arguing that linguistic historians have it right when they emphasize continuities and backgrounds for their thought rather than the sharp break with the past that more general intellectual history tends to assume, while the conclusion covers the reception of Nietzsche, Saussure, and German comparative philology from World War I through the structuralist and poststructuralist eras. Putting the latter schools' rejection of human subjectivity and agency into the context of earlier arguments about the Bible, the Word of God, or the centrality of ethnicity might alter the ways in which we think about these movements.
Though generally solid, the work is not immune to potential criticism. Benes, for example, focuses almost exclusively on linguists, and on the specifically linguistic works of those who were also productive in other areas. This restriction helps to explain her continued support for the view of German national identity as being ethnocultural in its fixation on language, as opposed to at least partly political and civic-voluntarist. Benes occasionally notes instances where philologists also included spheres of life such as religion, customs, history, or politics in their conceptions of the nation, and at other points evidence of such views appears in quotes unremarked, thus leaving one to wonder if further figures examined here would on closer inspection reveal more multifaceted views of nationhood. In a related vein, Benes overemphasizes the degree to which German philologists' quest for linguistic origins and ethnic identities committed them to an understanding of the autonomy of language that shut down the possibility of individual human agency or of a liberal-democratic notion of the nation as discursive community (another of her main theses, that for them language determined consciousness rather than consciousness language). She notes, for example, that despite his Romantic credentials, Jacob Grimm was no promoter of folk dialects, precisely because he believed in the necessity of a monolingual sphere of national communication to support nation-building, but this does not lead to reassessment of the basic claim. The author may also elide some distinctions between the various linguistic turns circa 1800, 1900, and 1970 that would bear further investigation.
Still, despite some potential caveats, Benes's work represents a significant intervention in the literature not just on German philology but on the development of German nationhood and of European humanistic culture writ large.
