“Spidsborgere i Blæst” – Henrik Ibsen’s De unges Forbund and the Crisis of the Radical Political Imaginary

Abstract

The comedy De unges Forbund (1869; The League of Youth) was one of Ibsen’s greatest successes on the Scandinavian and especially the Norwegian stages during his lifetime. It is the first prose-play by Ibsen in which he deals with problems of his present age. Moreover, he uses the depiction of actual political controversies and problematic economic transactions in a Norwegian provincial town in order to outline a general crisis of the modern age. These three observations alone make it quite astonishing that the existing research on the play is relatively small. In this article, I will read De unges Forbund in the light of current discussions in German literary studies that have been inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of the political imaginary. I think that the play deals with a crisis of the political sphere in the midst of the nineteenth century that can be traced back to a new form of hollow and populistic rhetoric and empty theatrical rituals. In order to reconstruct the corresponding political and historical-philosophical implications of the play, I will also discuss writings of Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard. I will combine this re-contextualization of the play with three central theses. As already mentioned, I think that Ibsen uses the comedy in order to outline a more general reflection on the historicity or “zeitgeist” of his own age. This attempt is characterized by striking contemporary observations on the effects of a populist vision of an imagined community and the corresponding power of media. Moreover, I think that the play deals more generally with the crisis of politics and history