INTRODUCTION: PRE-ROMANTIC AND POST-ROMANTIC GENIUS

Abstract

‘Genius’ is an eye-catching, resonant expression to include in any title, be it of a book, film or exhibition, whether factual or fiction, popular or scholarly. Its fascination persists in academia despite repeated announcements of its demise as a term in serious critical debate. Generations of influential thinkers have sought to discredit and deconstruct it, presenting it as an ahistorical means of obscuring the workings of culture or else as a reactionary fetish that lends itself all too readily to political appropriation.1 Nevertheless, it survives effortlessly, due in large part to its versatility or rather de facto opacity; genius defies definition, while maintaining a wide spectrum of highly evocative associations. Although it fell out of general use or else was considered unviable in aesthetics and literary criticism post-1945, it periodically returns as a term of justification and approbation, if not of analysis or explanation;2 in other disciplines, most notably psychology, it is currently thriving (again).3 There has also been a recent resurgence of interest in its history as a discursive phenomenon, interest which, understandably, has tended to examine its emergence as a modern concept in the eighteenth century, or else its refinement and universalisation during Romanticism.4 This special number focuses instead on the period which gave genius a bad name with critical theorists in the first place: the nineteenth century.5 We begin at the point most studies see its discursive power waning, around 1830,6 and carry our investigation through to the early twentieth century. And while acknowledging that intense international dialogue and exchange played a vital role in the crystallisation of genius as a modern concept, we also seek to implement the insight of Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon who note that ‘genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it has had a historical presence’.7 The appeal and survival of genius may be due to its seemingly universal applicability, potentially in all spheres of activity, transcending cultural boundaries.8 As literary and cultural historians, however, it is incumbent on us to relativise its fascination; our special number is therefore made up of localised studies, considering theories, uses and ‘manifestations’ of genius within their particular discursive contexts.9

The German term ‘Genie’ has a very particular history within the general history of genius. Over the course of the 1700s, genius – ‘génie’, ‘genio’, ‘Genie’ – was established throughout Europe, primarily as a designation for exceptional creative power, but increasingly also for individuals considered to possess such power. Stemming from the Latin genius and ingenium, the term itself was not, of course, new: its extraordinary proliferation and evolution during the classicist eighteenth century were due in no small part to this distinguished ancestry.10 Originally denoting a specifically male procreative force, in antiquity genius came to mean an individual tutelary spirit, but could also refer to the defining characteristics of someone or something. Ingenium could likewise refer to a person's character, or else to an inborn trait or aptitude which could take on the guise of a divine gift, akin to inspiration.11 Modern genius maintained the potential to reactivate aspects of all of these older meanings.12 It aggregated historical topoi from poetological traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance: Platonic mania, the link between creativity and melancholy, the writer as poeta vates and alter deus.13 New, however, was the association of modern genius with originality and innovation, also the urgency with which it was debated, in a dynamic that only intensified as the eighteenth century wore on.14 Not only within literature and philosophy but also in the broader context of Enlightenment ideals of the sovereign subject, genius became a central, if controversial notion.15

The urgency of these discussions was particularly marked in German-language culture. Having arrived comparatively late to German via French, ‘Genie’ and its derivatives were swiftly integrated into the language from the 1760s onwards,16 their prominence leading to the decades from 1770 to 1790 later being referred to as the ‘Geniezeit’ or ‘Genieperiode’.17 Genius became a key term in the emerging philosophical discipline of aesthetics, in which German-language culture was poised to take a leading role.18 It also played a vital role in the re-invention of art as an autonomous sphere,19 thereby fuelling parallel developments in copyright and celebrity culture.20 At the same time, ‘Genie’ or ‘genial’ could be applied not only to artists and their works but also to exceptional figures in other walks of life, as well as to certain character types, historical periods, places and languages.21 Its emergence in the volatile decades preceding the French Revolution has caused it to be linked in secondary literature to the self-emancipatory processes of the newly-forming middle classes;22 ‘Genie’ certainly became something of an obsession for those writing within the up-and-coming professions of critic or reviewer as well as for philosophers and poets. It spread rapidly from academic and literary discourse to popular culture,23 resulting in a complex, multiform ubiquity that precludes its retrospective definition except in specific case studies. From the beginning, its discursive history is characterised by paradoxes.24 Genius contributed to the growing secularisation of German society during the ‘Sattelzeit’, for example, while at the same time conserving and rejuvenating sacralising tropes from earlier traditions;25 it also served as a trope of individualist self-assertion while simultaneously informing the emergence of German cultural nationalism as a collective phenomenon.26

This last development was further complicated by the enduring suspicion which the mixed origins of ‘Genie’ inspired in some quarters. The irony of a French loan word with Latin roots helping to galvanise a culture that wished more than ever to be authentically German was not lost on commentators of the time.27 Alongside its rapid rise as a term of approbation and celebration, a parallel tradition emerged of condemning and lampooning its use, or rather overuse.28 As ‘Genie’ was co-opted to question or upset rules and conventions, it was inevitable that its popularity would attract criticism from those keen to maintain the status quo: no sooner had it made an appearance in German than it was depicted as a preposterous fad, rendered an easy target by its Frenchified etymology. It was also, however, attacked or boycotted by figures who were by no means adverse to innovation per se, but insisted it be brought about by autochthonous means.29 ‘Genie’ had no problems outliving such strenuous and explicit disapproval: its discursive history in German is a success story not only in terms of speedy integration but also of sheer volume of usage. Nonetheless, it has never been entirely naturalised, remaining marked as a loan word through its pronunciation.30 Its status is thus that of an ‘émigré’, to use Richard Scholar's term for French tags that, while remaining ineluctably French, have become part of other languages. Such émigrés, according to Scholar, point to ‘constitutive problems’ of the host language, ‘even as they create new possibilities of expression’; they are full of the ‘deviant power’ of the untranslated word. Their adoption and the way they are treated in the new language point to cultural fault-lines.31 ‘Genie’ may have arrived in German as a problematic migrant, but it was certainly never marginalised. Its prominence in a variety of discourses and registers from the very beginning confirms that it brought with it conceptual as well as emotional and rhetorical energies, despite continued attempts to argue that it was an expendable import.32 In this respect, it exemplifies yet another defining paradox of German-language culture in the late 1700s and beyond: the co-existence of a deep-seated anxiety of foreign influence alongside self-professed reliance on and active endeavours to seek or consolidate such influence. ‘Genie’ has unique status as it was borrowed to express precisely the phenomena in which this anxiety was rooted: authenticity, autonomy and the nature and forms of original creativity.

The broad range of genius's discursive functions and associations contributed to its growing ambivalence as the eighteenth century drew to a close. It reached new heights and depths in Romanticism. A. W. Schlegel, for example, writing in 1801, exalted it as superhuman and hailed its products as ‘wahre Offenbarungen’33 while insisting that it suffused – or should suffuse – the very stuff of daily life, every thought and action.34 Schlegel and other early Romantics developed their notions of genius partly in opposition to Kant's relativising account in Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). The philosopher had accorded genius a vital role in artistic innovation with his much-quoted dictum ‘Genie ist die angeborene Gemütslage (ingenium), durch welche die Natur der Kunst die Regel gibt’, only to insist that genius must always be regulated by ‘Geschmack’, a capacity that had to be learned and practised.35 In the same treatise, Kant limits genius to art and artists, not as a belittlement of other intellectual activities, but rather as a circumscription of the potential of genius itself. He sees it as instinctive and irrational, and therefore as irrelevant to progress in disciplines such as philosophy or the natural sciences. Schlegel indignantly rejects Kant's views, arguing that they amount to equating a sovereign, divine power with a ‘Bärin’ who is only able to bring ‘rohe Geburten’ into the world.36 In Schlegel's definition, by contrast, ‘Genie’ cannot be separated out from ‘Verstand’ or the power of aesthetic judgement; it is a synthetic force that subsumes everything required by art as well as everything required for a fulfilled existence. He calls for an ‘Erweiterung des Begriffes Genie, die aber keine Vervielfachung, sondern vielmehr eine Zurückführung auf höhere Einheit ist’, effectively rendering it coterminous with another Romantic ideal, that of ‘Universalpoesie’.37

While Romanticism was rendering genius both more extreme and more generally applicable than it had ever been before, the German-speaking territories were racked by warfare and social turmoil. The stakes in genius rose still further as a result of the growing political dimension of culture and cultural history, its latent political potential brought to the fore by the exigencies of invasion and the polarising figure of Napoleon.38 This politicisation manifests itself in what may initially seem to be two separate strands: imaginations of collective genius on the one hand, and the idealisation of individual leaders or politicians as geniuses on the other. The former strand drew on Herder's idea that each people or nation must have a uniquely authentic and creative ‘Volksgeist’, which he had conceived of under the influence of classicist genius when ‘Genie’ was first entering the German language.39 Taken up by the poets and linguists of Romanticism, this idea developed into an ultimately tautological justification for German nationalism and, eventually, political unity. True genius, so the argument goes, stems from and resides in the people or ‘Volk’, who are the source of originary vigour and potential; if art or literature is to have value, it must be an expression of the ‘Volk’. By definition, then, the works or achievements of those considered geniuses must necessarily be expressions of the ‘Volk’, and can therefore be co-opted to characterise and elevate the collective.40 A circular or symbiotic model emerges whereby genius itself, a particular collective and the genius individual can all be used to legitimise each other at will, or rather, as is politically and culturally expedient. At the same time, even as German-language literature enlisted in the fight against Napoleonic aggression and cultural expansion, German writers also began mapping the traditions and tropes of poetic genius onto Napoleon himself, creating an identificatory literary myth around him as a titanic embodiment of autonomous creativity.41

As this very brief summary has hopefully indicated, nineteenth-century German-language culture stood to inherit a notion of genius that was simultaneously under- and overdetermined – hugely influential but becoming increasingly unwieldy. By the 1820s, the excesses of Romanticism had ebbed, and the death of Goethe in 1832 marked the passing of German culture's single most significant embodiment of ‘Genie’. It has been suggested that the following period was characterised by a degree of genius fatigue; as already noted, a lessening of interest can certainly be discerned in the existing secondary literature. Politically engagé Young German authors were concerned that earlier exemplars of genius, in particular Goethe, could have a negative effect on the vital energies of their generation.42 Caught in imitation anxiety and a sense of their own cultural ‘lateness’, writers aiming to capture the spirit of the age in the 1830s and 1840s seized upon the idea of ‘Epigonentum’, the diametric opposite of original, spontaneous creativity.43 Genius by no means disappears at this point, however. The Young Germans themselves provide an intriguing account of it in their views on their predecessors, in particular Goethe. They not only continue to hail him as a genius while criticising him personally as an egotistical and reactionary figure but also continue to hold fast to the notion of genius itself as a decisive, if undefinable, factor in cultural renewal and political progress.44

The shifts in the emphases and applicability of genius around this time can be traced in reference works, a particularly characteristic medium of the nineteenth century. As literacy increased and the popular and daily press took off, lexica aimed at the general public were rapidly established, appearing in dozens of editions over decades and offering a revealing index to the usage and understanding of topical terms.45 A diachronic comparison of the entries on ‘Genie’ in the hugely popular Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon (published in fourteen editions over the course of the nineteenth century) shows a decisive change in definition from the eighth edition in 1834 to the ninth in 1844. The text has been reduced by a third – although the lexicon itself grows longer with every successive edition – and a striking opening sentence has been cut that had remained unchanged over the previous four editions: ‘Genie ist etwas so Geheimnißvolles in der menschlichen Natur, daß sich nur mit Schwierigkeit eine bestimmte Erklärung davon geben läßt’.46 Having first removed this deferential reference to genius's mysteriousness, the 1844 text goes on to include additions that insist on its usefulness rather than its originality: a genius is someone who ‘in seinen Leistungen nicht blos original sondern auch musterhaft ist. Denn Originalität ohne Musterhaftigkeit könnte auch Narrheit sein; etwas dem Ähnliches bezeichnet man bisweilen durch das Wort Originalgenie’.47 In the previous editions, ‘Originalgenie’ had been noted as a pleonasm, not as a pejorative term. While limiting genius in this respect, the 1844 edition opened it up in others: whereas the 1834 and previous editions had ended by remarking that ‘die Künste […] der eigentliche Wirkungskreis des Genies [sind]’,48 the 1844 entry tersely rejects this notion in its closing sentence: ‘Das Wort Genie ausschließend oder auch nur vorzugsweise von Künstlern zu gebrauchen, ist gar kein Grund vorhanden.’ And for the first time, the main text lists as possibilities not only military, political and mathematical, but also technical genius.49

Nevertheless, despite his disparagement of both Romanticism and the ‘Sturm und Drang’ as movements that featured genius as a key element of their aesthetic programme and habitus, Bouterwek himself holds fast to the same term. He is adamant that neither movement has any relevance to the progress of ‘true’ genius: ‘Weder die eine, noch die andre, konnte dem wahren Genie die Wege versperren, die es sich selbst bahnt.’52 No further details are given as to what constitutes ‘true’ genius or how it might work: the ostensible objectivity of this proto-academic genre does not stretch to resolving genius's ambivalence. Bouterwek seems to assume, like the Romantics he decries, that its effects and products will speak for themselves, blaze their own trail. The opacity of genius continues to ensure its efficacy here: Bouterwek's use of it confirms how indispensable it had become in accounting for and categorising cultural achievements, even as it continued to resist explanation or definition itself.

Attributing genius had therefore become a way of lifting individuals or phenomena above argument, of conveying their timeless significance as well as the self-evident importance of any writing or research on them. In this way, genius could be used to accrue institutional as well as discursive capital. It became a crucial factor in a series of practices which, while harking back to the political dimension that genius had acquired during Romanticism, were specific, not only to nineteenth-century academia but also to urban development and nation-building, including monumentalisation and commercialisation. Figures acknowledged as geniuses were welcome points of collective identification: associations were founded in their name, subscriptions launched, statues erected, and – as industrialisation gathered momentum – genius merchandising of various kinds became ever more widely available.53 Individual genius was indubitably often the object of sincere and well-informed admiration both by individuals and groups; however, public and commercial acknowledgement of genius was expressed through increasingly generic means as the century wore on. Werner Michler opens this special number with an investigation of such phenomena in their earliest days, using the example of the emerging Mozart cult in Salzburg in the late 1830s and 1840s. Franz Grillparzer was involved in the process of unveiling a statue of Mozart in the town in 1842, alongside Mozart's son, Franz Xaver, with whom the writer was personally acquainted. The article discusses points of contact and contrast between the civic rhetoric and celebrations of genius and Grillparzer's literary meditations on it, including not only his texts on Mozart father and son but also the idiosyncratic title figure of his novella, Der arme Spielmann (1848).

At the same time as genius was being cast in bronze for public veneration in Salzburg, Johann Nestroy was using it to ironic effect on the stage in Vienna. In his bakhtinian analysis of Nestroy's farces, Arno Dusini further underscores the importance of medium and genre when researching genius discourse; he also argues for more differentiation in the cultural history of ‘Genie’ according to linguistic variation, given the particularly high incidence of French loan words in Viennese German. In doing so, he uncovers the socio-political implications of ‘Genie’ in Nestroy, the ways in which puns on the word and the fate of characters who present themselves as geniuses reveal the increasingly profit-driven nature of ‘Vormärz’-society. Jan Niklas Howe continues the discussion of genius's politicisation in his article on portrayals of Napoleon by Goethe, Heine and Tolstoy. Howe shows how Heine replaces Goethe with Napoleon as the embodiment of genius in his writings and how this process is motivated in terms of Franco-German cultural dynamics. The shift away from literature in genius discourse is not, however, irreversible; Howe argues that, in systematically dismantling the nimbus of Napoleon's political and military prowess in War and Peace, Tolstoy reinstates the literary author as the arbiter of genius while acknowledging the role of mass phenomena in history.

The question of whether and how individual geniuses can or should relate to ‘ordinary people’ had already occupied Romantic writers such as Ludwig Tieck or E. T. A. Hoffmann in whose works genius figures find themselves at odds with the expectations of their times and surroundings, sometimes with tragic results.54 In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819 / 1844 / 1859), Arthur Schopenhauer takes up the notion of a divide between genius and the general mass of humanity, but gives it a new twist with his unrelievedly negative conception of the latter. He imagines the individual genius – for Schopenhauer, always a male artist – as the polar opposite of the contemptibly self-interested masses, who are all the same and all at the mercy of their ‘Wille’. Yet Schopenhauer's genius is not a consistent embodiment of superiority; he is only intermittently capable of fulfilling his potential for absolute objectivity and turning his insights (‘Erkenntnis’) into works of art. Between times, he is subject to melancholy, doubt, physical and mental weaknesses. Schopenhauer therefore simultaneously idealises and problematises genius, physiologically and psychologically. His notion of unstable genius with its misanthropic, anti-democratic foil – the masses as ‘Fabrikware der Natur’ – gained traction as the nineteenth century progressed, not least in his influence on Friedrich Nietzsche.55 In the present volume, Sebastian Kaufmann considers the many ways in which Nietzsche became a point of confluence for genius discourse, both in his writings and as a historical figure. His unconventional career and mental instability fed into and were interpreted according to the paradigm of genius and madness that was definitively established as an object of sustained scientific and medical enquiry in the later nineteenth century.56 Drawing on Nietzsche's ‘Nachlass’ as well as his published texts, Kaufmann notes that he remained preoccupied with genius throughout his career. Nietzsche starts out with a Schopenhauerian conception of genius in opposition to the masses as an isolated, often suffering figure, only to subject this position to ironic revision in his middle period. He does not reject genius at this point, as Kaufmann shows, but rather seeks to dynamise it and to criticise unquestioning genius adulation, in which Nietzsche himself is implicated due to his earlier stance vis-à-vis Richard Wagner. In an age in which genius cults had themselves become mass phenomena, the question of how the exceptional individual can or should relate to society has become even more pressing.

The range of possibilities which genius discourse offers towards the end of the nineteenth century is nicely demonstrated by the juxtaposition of Kaufmann's analysis of Nietzsche with the article by Paul Keckeis on the social democrat reception of the ‘Naturgenie’ Robert Burns. Keckeis focuses on Austrian Social Democracy, which from its beginnings in the 1870s was characterised both by the particular importance it accorded the arts and by conflicts as to their role within the movement: should the party seek to broaden access to the bourgeois cultural canon – in a redistribution of existing ‘Kulturgüter’, considered relevant and valuable to all – or should bourgeois cultural production be resigned to history, and the party concentrate on supporting the emergence of a specifically working-class culture? Often predicated on genius, these debates reveal deep ambivalence in the party press as well as in its educational and cultural programming.57 The more radical elements within Austrian Social Democracy criticised individualist, ahistorical genius in the Schopenhauerian mode, but did not reject the notion of genius itself. Instead they harked back to Pre-Romantic concepts (Herder's ‘Volksgeist’), for example, in their depiction of Burns as a self-educated author of and for the people. His genius could therefore be presented as a class phenomenon, a legitimising instance for proletarian culture. Annika Hildebrandt's article on synergies between Expressionism and social democratic ideals of workers’ poetry in early twentieth-century Germany traces the further development of genius as an expression of collective, class-specific creative power. As the existing secondary literature on fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany has tended to focus on elitist or reactionary manifestations of genius, these contributions by Hildebrandt and Keckeis add much needed nuance as regards the cultural politics of genius and the canon of texts and authors referred to in genius research.58

Much also remains to be done as far as opening genius up to considerations of gender is concerned. Its repeated historical categorisation as a term that is mostly only applicable to men seems to have blinded much retrospective research as to its de facto ambiguity in gender terms. The initial priority of feminist scholarship as regards genius was, understandably, to debunk and/or discard it as an instrument of the patriarchy;59 only recently – in German Studies at least – has this approach given way to more varied research on the ways in which women authors influenced or participated in genius discourses.60 Given the loaded nature of the term, it is no surprise that women writing within genius traditions in the nineteenth century often did so implicitly or tacitly, as is the case with Lou Andreas-Salomé, investigated here by Marlen Mairhofer. Andreas-Salomé explicitly excludes women from the category of ‘Genie’ in her theoretical works while granting them a natural creative wholeness that is redolent of eighteenth-century definitions of genius. At the same time, as Mairhofer shows, the female protagonists in Andreas-Salomé’s fiction are invariably exceptionally gifted, whereby the portrayal of their gifts is often intriguingly combined with indications of gender fluidity. The central importance of gender to genius becomes particularly clear in discussions of women's emancipation at the fin de siècle. One of the most revealing texts in this regard in the German language is Otto Weininger's monumental and controversial 1903 study Geschlecht und Charakter, which Jacques Le Rider revisits for us in the final article of the present volume. Weininger sets out to address the ‘Frauenfrage’ and ends up writing mostly about ‘Genie’; he works so hard to exclude women from genius that his twenty-first-century reader needs must become suspicious. As Le Rider argues, it is impossible to separate Weininger's theory of genius from his misogyny and antisemitism, and however unpalatable they may be to us now, it is the mesh of these three aspects that render Geschlecht und Charakter a key work of Viennese Modernism.

In combination, the concluding articles in this special number reveal that Arthur Hübscher's summary of the state of genius at the end of the eighteenth century is just as applicable at the end of the nineteenth: ‘Man stand in den Jahren um die Jahrhundertwende vor einer Fülle auseinandergehender und widersprüchlicher Deutungen des Wesens der Genialität’.61 As we aim to show, this variety is what gives genius its discursive power throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, keeping it at the centre of discussions about how cultural innovation takes place or should take place – whether it be through the genius individual, the genius collective or the collective inspired by the individual genius. The contributions published here were first presented as papers at a conference (Humboldt-Kolleg) held at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg (PLUS) in September 2019. We would like to thank the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung, the PLUS Fachbereich Germanistik, the inter-university research platform Wissenschaft & Kunst at PLUS and the University Mozarteum as well as the Salzburg Stefan Zweig Zentrum for supporting the event. Our gratitude also goes to all participants for the discussions which ensued. The volume is dedicated to Barbara Ventarola, who took part in the conference with characteristic verve and insight mere weeks before her untimely death. She is sadly missed.