Herder und das 19. Jahrhundert / Herder and the Nineteenth Century. Herausgegeben von Liisa Steinby. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2020. 458 Seiten. €45,00.

Anthologies based on conference papers always pose problems of unity. To get to the heart of this case, let us begin with the title: Herder and the Nineteenth Century. Now, “and” is a most ambiguous conjunction, capacious in its imprecision, and no doubt that is why it was chosen, but it begs the question of unity. And “Nineteenth Century” turns out also to be quite open, geographically and even chronologically. The book is really about the German nineteenth century, with a final, gracious appendage of materials on the Scandinavian and Eastern-European reception of Herder to acknowledge the hosting locality of the conference, as well as with occasional sallies to France (Edgar Quinet, Henri Bergson) and to the twentieth century (Arnold Gehlen). In short, a more meaningful sense of the unifying element of the book would be “the reception of Herder in nineteenth-century Germany,” and that is what this review will address.

The editor cautions explicitly: “Die Beiträge im vorliegenden Band bieten kein Gesamtbild der Rezeption Herders im 19. Jahrhundert oder auch nur Bruchteile eines solchen, die reibungslos miteinander vereinigt werden könnten” (Steinby, 22). In short, unity is neither promised nor achieved. In fact, the volume (and the conference behind it), with its 23 contributions—most in German, half a dozen in English— preceded by the editor’s introduction, reflects an ongoing and serious problem in Herder scholarship, revolving around the concept of reception itself. Reception is not influence, that is, what is made of an earlier author has more to do with the use by a subsequent age than with any direct dependence. And even reception must be carefully interpreted in terms of explicit versus tacit invocation. Without explicit mention of an author, the inference to reception is always uncertain, no matter how clear the parallels in content may appear (though, of course, parallels can in themselves be interesting). The editor adds a third, crucial theoretical consideration: the discrimination between ideological (popular/political) and disciplinary (scholarly/scientific) reception (Steinby, 10). The problem of Herder reception in the nineteenth century was earmarked early and discerningly by his friend-turned-critic Goethe: that he was assimilated so generally into the cultural context that it no longer needed to mention his name. This “anonyme Präsenz” (Steinby, 12) entailed an actual absence—if not suppression—at least for the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, followed even more problematically by a sudden, enthusiastic, but violating misappropriation of Herder as the prophet of a narrow, chauvinistic nationalism. This marked the Reichsgründung era and the Second Empire, and led to even more harrowing misrepresentations in the twentieth century, with ideological hacks, pro or con, linking Herder with Hitler (Wolfgang Proß, 120). The goal of the conference and volume, as of the International Herder Society that sponsored both, is to explain and to correct this pattern.

What led to the “anonymity” of Herder over much of the nineteenth century in Germany, and was it as pervasive as the Goethe witticism proposed? One cause of the outright suppression of Herder’s name was the powerful animosity of Kantianism across the whole century. Herder’s conflict with Kant haunts the volume, from its opening essay by Marion Heinz (27–42) to a later essay by Beate Allert (345–58). But another factor, richly and fruitfully elaborated in the volume, is the character of the Vulgata or Gedenkausgabe, the first published collection of Herder’s writing, in some 45 volumes, with its arbitrary configuration of those writings into ostensible unities that both belied changes in Herder’s views over time and imposed conglomeration on widely disparate texts, published and unpublished, under rubrics that appealed to the editors more than they bespoke Herder’s own intentions. In addition, that edition suppressed some of Herder’s most important and provocative political engagements to suit both the epoch of Restoration and the preferences of his family. In addition to these elements, Proß points out crucially that key concepts Herder invoked in an eighteenth-century context shifted radically in meaning and use over the nineteenth century, in particular in the context of Social Darwinism, making possible stark misreadings of his most important ideas (Proß, 121). Not only at the popular-political, but even at the philosophical level, this created false associations, as Johannes Schmidt argues adamantly in the context of the ostensible lineage from Herder to Nietzsche (Schmidt, 323–44). On the question of religion, there were places Herder could still walk where, by Nietzsche’s time, the ice had grown too thin, to invoke one of the latter’s most potent images. Herder had a faith that Christianity could be re-envisioned to accommodate modernity. That faith, derisively termed Kulturprotestantismus as it lost its appeal over the course of the nineteenth century, made Herder seem obsolete (Markus Buntfuß, 283–96). Many contributions in the volume point to the theological elements, even in Herder’s historical and anthropological thought, that made him unwelcome among left-Hegelians and positivists alike (Ursula Reitemeyer, 169–78; John Noyes, 179–94; Martin Bollacher, 195–212). In political terms, Herder’s ideal of Humanität could not withstand the inroads of strident nationalism and social conflict that shaped the nineteenth century (Bollacher, 208). To invoke Herder, as the chauvinists did in the last third of the nineteenth century in Germany, meant complacently to misread him.

But explaining this Herder reception is only one goal of the volume. The other is to nuance it. There was in fact a powerful, explicit reception of Herder over the course of the nineteenth century that did make authentic use of his thought, to the degree that one could even invoke the idea of influence. This arose in fields not usually explored, such as pedagogy, where Herder played an overt and seminal role in curricular reforms, especially concerning Germanistik but also the incorporation of natural science and modern language in the Gymnasien (Rainer Wisbert, 59–82). Further, his ideas and exemplification of rhetoric became part of the Neohumanistic Bildung of the whole century, most explicitly through sermons, and the not-insignificant role of preaching in popular cultural and political formation (Björn Hambsch, 149–68). In that regard, reception and perhaps even influence of Herder in the political culture of the Vormärz turns out to be demonstrable (Proß, 119–48). And, not simply in a negative sense, Herder as a theologian had an influence in German Protestantism over much of the century that paralleled and even shaped that of Schleiermacher (Martin Keßler, 241–82; Buntfuß, 283–96).

Finally, of course, Herder played a role in the theoretical construction of the entire panoply of what Dilthey would call the Geisteswissenschaften (Michael Maurer, 297–310). Dilthey himself, via Schleiermacher, elaborated Herder’s hermeneutical historicism (Maja Soboleva, 311–22). A whole new, far more sophisticated scholarly engagement with Herder began around 1880, not only with Dilthey’s theoretical innovations but with direct Herder scholarship: the new Suphan edition of his works, beginning in 1877, and the great intellectual biography by Haym, beginning in 1880. To be sure, all three of these endeavors remained influenced by Herder’s nemesis, Kant, perpetuating allegations of metaphysical sloppiness and spilt religion well into the twentieth century. The case of Arnold Gehlen, with which the consideration of German reception in the volume ends (Mario Marino, 359–80), shows clearly all the tensions in Herder reception from which we are still trying to extricate ourselves. Freeing Herder from Kant’s oppressive shadow, and reconstructing a Herderian naturalism without the negative elements of Gehlen’s appropriation, have been ongoing themes in the Herder reception of the present.