At the end of the thirteenth century and a little beyond a number of Middle High German romance authors launched a series of significant romances in which their protagonists operate in new narrative frameworks, thinly distanced from historical reality, and in which the themes of travel and the exploration of the East gain in preponderance. King Arthur and his court, and so the Grail no longer play any role. These romances are Ulrich von Etzenbach's Alexanderroman and his Wilhelm von Wenden, Heinrich von Neustadt's Apollonius von Tyrlant, Johann von Würzburg's Wilhelm von Österreich , the anonymous Reinfried von Braunschweig, and Lohengrin. Germanist scholars have turned their attention to this corpus for quite some time now, as reflected by a considerable body of critical studies. For his habilitation, submitted to the University of Würzburg in 2007, Mathias Herweg, now teaching at the University of Karlsruhe, investigated all of these texts once again in light of a fundamental reorientation in the attitude toward the historical and political context. Most importantly, he wants to find out what their status might be in terms of fictionality versus factuality. He does not venture into a critical debate with the arguments by Hayden White and other theoreticians or historians, although he is certainly aware of the former's important studies. Instead, Herweg limits himself to a mostly Germanist approach, reviewing, debating, and digesting opinions voiced by German scholars over the last several decades regarding these texts. This vetting process is somewhat limited, however, since he pays virtually no attention to non-German scholarship, whether written in German or in any other language. The other problem seems to be that he mentions a number of closely related texts, such as Friedrich von Schwaben, but opts against including them into his specific text corpus. Similarly, he mostly passes over the various romances by Konrad von Würzburg (121-25), and also excludes a number of other contemporary romances with a strongly emotional slant, such as Mai und Beaflor and Konrad Fleck's Floire und Blanscheflur. Certainly, he adduces a number of reasons for his decision, but these do not fully convince me, as valid as they might be all by themselves.
Herweg identifies a number of specific narrative features and motifs that justify his selection of texts. They all focus on the development of a princely leaderthat is, however, also the case in Mai und Beaflorand they are all characterized by a tendency to hybridize the generic framework, allowing a variety of external elements, often historical in nature, to enter the narrative plot. Moreover, all the authors pursue a universal historical perspective, favor references to encyclopedic knowledge, and place great emphasis on the performance of a ruler in his early years. These three aspects are subsequently discussed in extensive details, with a number of excursions and digressions to neighboring genres, not to forget the modern theoretical aspects underlying the debate concerning fictionality and factuality. The author brings to light many elements in this universal debate, and successfully problematizes the generic categories that characterize the romances under discussion. This is not a new debate at all, however, considering that medieval historians and literary historians in many neighboring disciplines have investigated those issues before. One dramatic case might illustrate how much the author simply revisits the same old questions and texts, reviews some of the critical research literature, and then claims to have reached new insights, not realizing the true complexity and depth of the scholarly discourse. He refers, for instance, to Jans Enikel's world chronicle in which a number of literary texts plays a significant role, although we as readers do not find any narrative markers alerting us to the change in genre. Graeme Dunphy has covered this field already at great length more than eight years ago, but Herweg does not seem to have noticed his research. [1] Herweg refers quite extensively to Fritz Peter Knapp's work (e.g., Historie und Fiktion in der mittelalterlichen Gattungspoetik, 1997), and yet then there is no clear sense to what extent he might differ from his approach or what he himself might contribute to the topic beyond Knapp's findings.
In the lengthy second chapter the author once again traces the development of historicizing fiction in Middle High German literature from the eleventh through the thirteenth century, which Walter Haug (Literaturtheorie im deutschen Mittelalter, 1985) had already covered quite extensively (see also Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance, 1992, for French literature; here not consulted). We can, however, clearly support Herweg's conclusion that the absence of the historiographical references to an ancient King Arthur, as in French literature, led to different developments in Middle High German romances. In order to cover all his bases, Herweg touches on most major narrative text composed during the thirteenth century in order to examine the relationship between fact and fiction. In this process he demonstrates an impressive level of close familiarity even with many of the more obscure romances, although I find his constant digressions rather cumbersome and distracting. It might also have been important to consider representatives of shorter genres, such as the verse novella Mauritius von Craûn because there the anonymous author discusses the protagonist's personal development closely in correlation with the history of knighthood both in antiquity and in the early Middle Ages.
Insofar as Herweg posits that Rudolf von Ems's works with their strong historiographical interest proved to be an important source for the authors from the late thirteenth century, it seems difficult to comprehend where the unique character of their romances then might be found. If there was such a strong line of tradition, which Herweg convincingly outlines, then it seems problematic to claim that such a unique and innovative attitude or worldview had suddenly entered Wilhelm von Österreich or Reinfried von Braunschweig. However, we could mostly agree with the author that his text corpus is determined by a particular interest in working with specific names, literary sources, and a reference to an external chronology extending from Genesis to the present. But a careful reading might also undermine this claim to some degree because the narrative interest in Apollonius von Tyrus, for instance, does not lend itself quite to this kind of reading, which Herweg recognizes himself when he admits that the reference to the city of Troy is not automatically associated with the classical narrative allusions to the mythical account (163).
Almost in the middle of his study Herweg suddenly turns away from the original texts and embarks on a lengthy critical debate with contemporary literary scholarship and theory on fictionality. Hegel arises once again as a major authority figure in this debate, whereas non-German research seems to fall simply by the wayside. We have to plow through a number of sub-chapters in which these issues are all re-digested and examined over and over again, while there is no real interest to look beyond the disciplinary boundaries and to consider what historians, for example, might have to contribute to the issue. However, we would have to attest to the author an impressive knowledge of primary German texts to which he regularly refers throughout his certainly sophisticated and comprehensive study.
The third chapter focuses on the broad genre of encyclopedic writing in the Middle Ages in order to underscore the interstices between fictional literature and factual accounts. It might have been quite useful to include also the huge corpus of travel literature (Marco Polo, John Mandeville, etc.), even if this might have increased the danger of digression. Nevertheless, considering the emphasis on traveling in these German romances, the parallels are quite striking, and a comparative analysis might have helped to clarify a number of aspects in quite a meaningful manner. Herweg emphasizes how much the authors demonstrated a strong interest in including factual information in their romances. However, what would be the difference between, say Reinfried and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival or The Stricker's Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal? There is no doubt that the poets revealed a great fascination with new exotic spaces in the Orient, but again we would have to ask what the difference might be to much earlier goliardic epics, such as Herzog Ernst. After all, both here and there the motif of the loadstone mountain (magnetic mountain) plays a major role, and it even figures in the heroic epic poem Kudrun.
In subsequent chapters Herweg examines the noteworthy emphasis on the exotic world in the east, the miracles and wonders of the east, the monster peoples, the experience of getting to the end of the world (this already of great importance in Priest Lamprecht's Alexander from ca. 1170), and on the encounter with creatures and people in India. Undoubtedly, there is also an ongoing effort to include encyclopedic knowledge, such as in Apollonius von Tyrlant, but the most important feature of all these romances proves to be the protagonist's growth into a leader figure responsible for his people. Herweg also observes the importance of critical reflections on the role which the royal councils play, and how advisors function at court (the important study by Joseph M. Sullivan, Counsel in Middle High German Arthurian Romance, 2001, is not even mentioned here!). Subsequently he uncovers the emphasis on dynastic genealogy, but this was of great interest already to Wolfram von Eschenbach. Nevertheless, these two aspects might truly constitute the most remarkable features differentiating those romances composed at the late thirteen century from those composed at the turn of the twelfth to the thirteenth century. There are also critical comments about the failings of the male protagonists to live up to the expectations of a leader figure in the political arena, which should be viewed also in light of contemporary political theory, a task for future research, especially because several of these romances imply an imminent or potential collapse of the kingdom left behind because of the absent ruler. (Again, however, I would have to ask what the difference might be to the same debate implied in Hartmann von Aue's Arthurian romances).
Many of these aspects have already been discussed at great length in previous research, to which Herweg explicitly refers, although he favors to be selective, deliberately ignoring specific approaches to his topics without giving us any explanation for his decisions (e.g., p. 392, review of Cramer's study from 1974, to the disadvantage of Kohlmayer's study, also from 1974). Granted, Herweg is dealing with very extensive romances with vast narrative material, which is difficult to digest in all the necessary brevity, especially in a comparative analysis. Nevertheless, his goal is to establish a synthesis which requires a discussion on a fairly abstract level, which can be rather frustrating for the readers who are familiar with individual texts.
As becomes clear only at the end of his voluminous monograph, for Herweg the entire corpus indicates the termination of a cultural period in which the verse romance could still operate as a reference work for historical information. By contrast, in the fourteenth century the verse chronicles take off and leave the romances far behind, a thesis which Herweg supports with a few data about the manuscript tradition. There is a clear indication that this observation might hold true, but the present study does not answer many of the critical questions raised at the very end. This is actually a positive sign because we can attest Herweg that he successfully crystallized (once again) a literary-historical phenomenon from the time around 1300 in German literature and challenges us (as others have done already) to probe further whether his hypothesis of a significant paradigm shift can be maintained.
As the author admits himself, he does not cover much new territory; instead he is trying to reach a more abstract plateau in order to comprehend social-political changes occurring at that time. However, this study does not include any significant examination of the historical background, and it also opens itself up to much criticism regarding the claim of the uniqueness of many of the themes contained in the texts. Could we not raise the same issue as to dynastic problems in Wolfram von Eschenbach's works as in Reinfried, for instance? What are the differences between Herzog Ernst and Wilhelm von Wenden? Then we also would have to question why the female figures are not considered in any particular fashion?
The scope and depth of this study are impressive, even though much of the ground covered here has been dealt with at length in numerous previous studies, including literary histories, such as those by Gervinus (!) and Helmut de Boor. The structure of the book could have been organized differently, putting the theoretical discussions more at the front and building the case for his arguments more centrally. The numerous digressions confuse the reader and water down the major thrust. The wealth of specific observations is impressive, but at closer analysis Herweg does not really reach new shores. Nevertheless, the ultimate comparison with fourteenth-century world chronicles as the new genre that superseded those courtly romances promises to yield new insight. That, however, will be the topic of another study.
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Notes:
1. Graeme Dunphy, History as Literature: German World Chronicles of the Thirteenth Century in Verse 2003. See also Albrecht Classen, "Literarische Diskurs-Bricolage als literarische Strategie (Textallianz) in spätmittelalterlicher Chronistik: der Fall von Jans Enikels Weltchronik," Strukturen und Funktionen in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Festschrift Franz Simmler zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Claudia Wich-Reif, 2007, 425-44)