The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

260 Pages·2021·2.983 MB·English

by  Adrian Daub

The Dynastic Imagination

The Dynastic
Imagination
Family and Modernity in
Nineteenth- Century Germany
adrian daub
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
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Published 2021
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isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 73773- 7 (cloth)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 73787-4 (paper)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 73790- 4 (e- book)
doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226737904.001.0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of
Stanford University toward the publication of this book.
Names: Daub, Adrian, author.
Title: The dynastic imagination : family and modernity in nineteenth-century
Germany / Adrian Daub.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2020027475 | isbn 9780226737737 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226737874 (paperback) | isbn 9780226737904 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Families—Germany—Philosophy—History—19th century. |
Germany—Civilization—19th century. | Germany—Intellectual life—19th century.
Classification: lcc dd66 .d38 2020 | ddc 306.850943/09034—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027475
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction: An Essay on Mediate Family 1
1 Into the Family Gallery 24
2 Nuclearity and Its Discontents 46
3 Abortive Romanticism 65
4 Feminism, or The Hegelian Dynasty 91
5 Wagner, or The Bourgeois Dynasty 114
6 Naturalism, or The Dynastic Romance 134
7 Freud, or The Reluctant Patriarch 155
8 George, or The Queer Dynasty 176
Epilogue: Black Sheep 207
Acknowledgments 217
Notes 221
Index 249

introduction
An Essay on Mediate Family
We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we
can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligation.
giuseppe di lampedusa, The Leopard1
In “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (“On the Advan-
tage and Disadvantage of History for Life”), the second of his 1874 Untimely
Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche distinguishes three modes of looking at the
past: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. The last one is per-
haps the most complicated from Nietzsche’s point of view, since its logic of
retrieval and self- reflection seems to put the lie to the essay’s central thesis:
that there can be such a thing as too much past, or learning too much from
the past. And so Nietzsche is careful to introduce this critical approach as
another way in which history can be pressed into “the service of life.” The
critical approach to history, he says, must be inquisitorial, antagonistic. “It
isn’t justice who sits in judgment here, let alone clemency who renders the
verdict: it is life alone, this dark, driving, insatiable, self-d esiring power.”2 Any
verdict it renders is by necessity unkind, merciless, unjust.
Nevertheless, even this kind of unfair judgment requires a productive myo-
pia. “It requires much force [Kraft] to live and at the same time to forget to what
extent living and being unjust are one and the same.”3 Nietzsche frames the kind
of critical remembrance in which he is interested as the destruction of mem-
ory: nothing is being preserved in it; healthy, prophylactic amnesia is itself mo-
mentarily destroyed. “At times the same life that requires forgetfulness requires
the temporary destruction of that forgetfulness: when we are trying to show how
unjust the existence of a certain thing, a certain privilege or a certain dynasty, how
much that thing deserves its destruction.”4 Not for nothing does Nietzsche here
echo a line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, spoken by Mephistopheles:
For all that which is wrought
Deserves that I should come to naught.5
2 introduction
This sadistic return to the past is a process “dangerous to life itself”: as
freeing as it is fraught. Historical moments and people who turn to the past in
this way are at once “dangerous and endangered.” In articulating the risks of
this forgetting, Nietzsche turns to the family—o r rather, to a specific kind of
family. “For since we are after all the results of earlier families [Geschlechter],
we are also fully the results of their delusions, passions and errors, yes even
crimes. It is impossible to fully disentangle oneself from that chain.”6 Clearly,
Nietzsche is thinking not of an earlier family that we ourselves have encoun-
tered during our lifetime but of one whose influence reaches into our very
lives. This more distant, more alien family does double work in passages like
this one: it’s an index of a tradition from which critique should aim to sever
the present, and it’s a reminder of the extent to which that present moment is
nevertheless determined by “earlier families,” their “delusions, passions and
errors.” Nietzsche is as sympathetic to breaking this seemingly endless famil-
ial “chain” as he is skeptical of the success of ever doing so.
Most important, however, this study takes seriously the suggestion that
underpins Nietzsche’s invocation of the extended family: that its categories
frame an approach to life. Nietzsche doesn’t seem to regard the dynasty as
primarily historical factum. He seems interested in the dynasty as a way of
imposing meaning on family structures, on history, on temporality— one that
has great advantages and disadvantages for life. In the preface to Der Unter-
gang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918), one of Nietzsche’s great
admirers, Oswald Spengler, seems to suggest that it isn’t so much the dynasty
that disappears but the sense of continuity required in order to look for it in
the first place. In the great “world city” of modernity, Spengler says, we find
“not a people [Volk], but a mass. Its incomprehension for anything tradi-
tioned [Überlieferte], by which it fights culture [die Kultur]— the nobility, the
privileges, the dynasty, the conventions in the arts, God-g iven limits in the
sciences— . . . all that signifies . . . an opposition to the province, a totally new,
late, futureless yet inevitable form of human existence.”7
When the dynasty appears in Spengler’s list, it’s essentially as a stand-i n
for a whole sense of existential embeddedness— “anything traditioned.” Nei-
ther Nietzsche nor Spengler seems primarily interested in whether there
are dynasties in modernity. They wonder how moderns think about them.
And they suggest that how moderns think about them has consequences for
everyday life. This book likewise deals with ideas about the family, not the
shape actual families take. Those appear, at least when it comes to the dynasty,
strangely independent of actual lived practice. The Dynastic Imagination is
not a book about different ways of organizing families, even though some of
the texts considered here will be about that. It is a book about different ways
an essay on mediate family 3
of making sense of family structures, and about how these ways inform our
broader sense of history.
Nietzsche calls this larger familial “chain” a Geschlecht. Throughout the
nineteenth century, there were in fact several terms in circulation that desig-
nated an expanded sense of family— Dynastie, though not unheard of, was
among the rarer ones and inconsistently applied. The Damen- Conversations
Lexikon of 1835, for instance, defines Dynastie as a “row of rulers from one
and the same family,” but then glosses the Wasas as a “dynasty” and the surely
equally dynastic Bourbons as a “family.”8 Stamm, Geschlecht, Haus, and Sippe
all designate something between a tribe and a family. The Ahnenreihe or the
Väter imply a more patrilinear (and simply more linear) construal of ancestry.
Most of the dictionaries and encyclopedias around the turn of the nineteenth
century define these terms by reference to one another. Whenever these works
attempt to subsume one under the other (e.g., saying that Stamm could desig-
nate a branch of a Geschlecht, as several do),9 they almost immediately relativ-
ize this subsumption. Together, these terms tell of a keenly felt desire to make
distinctions, to give shape to broader structures of kinship, but also tell of
serious trouble in agreeing how to do so.
Perhaps the most philosophically ambitious reflections on these different
familial monikers are provided by Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatisch-
kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Grammatical-c ritical dic-
tionary of high German speech, 1796). For family, Adelung provides two
definitions: on the one hand, “persons making up a domestic society [eine
häusliche Gesellschaft], marital partners and their children”— in other words,
what we would today call the nuclear family. On the other, “in a second mean-
ing, an entire Geschlecht with all in- laws and side- relatives” (2:201). Family
was thus both what we would today call the nuclear family and something
more far-r eaching, which I will call the “dynastic family” for the simple rea-
son that it is the designation least native to the nineteenth century.
But more far-r eaching in what way? Here, too, the encyclopedias and dic-
tionaries written in Germany roughly around the year 1800 register several
ambiguities: does a Geschlecht, Haus, or Sippe expand the scope of the family
synchronically or diachronically? Implied in that question is a related ambi-
guity in how a family was formed: there were designations suggesting it was
constituted genetically, set by one’s ancestry. And there were others suggest-
ing it was constituted by a process of accretion and selection— individuals
married, hired help, allowed relatives to move in. The latter could also be des-
ignated a Haus, but here, too, the usage was inconsistent. As Adelung points
out, “Only those persons demonstrably descended from a common founder
of the family [Stammvater] are authentically part of the Geschlecht, even