Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany by Matt Erlin

Author:Matt Erlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNC Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The View from Berlin

The progressive potential of the urban experience in Minna von Barnhelm derives from its function as a catalyst of emancipation, both from one’s own past and, in the best case scenario, from the prejudices that are associated with it. In itself, however, this emancipation represents only half of the model of an urban enlightenment that takes shape in the play. The learning process for which it prepares the individual depends on exposure to new ideas that can replace those abandoned as obsolete. In the play, these new ideas are not acquired through access to some fixed body of knowledge with allegedly timeless validity; they are generated through spontaneous social intercourse. The numerous moments of insight that are depicted in Minna von Barnhelm result from an immediate encounter with new perspectives, in which characters come face to face with the limitations of their own subject positions and progress to a higher level of understanding. The centrality of such confrontations suggests another connection between the play and eighteenth-century conceptions of the metropolis. Eighteenth-century texts on city life repeatedly stress the salutary impact of the exposure to new and opposing perspectives as a means of achieving truth. Because of its multiperspectivity, in other words, the city comes to be viewed as a privileged site for the intersubjective generation of truth through a productive confrontation of ideas. To the extent that an identical epistemological ideal is operative in Minna von Barnhelm, it raises the possibility that the play’s urban roots extend even more deeply than the discussion of the plot has suggested.

Scholars have repeatedly adduced the perspectivism of Minna von Barnhelm as a key component of the play’s break with the young Lessing’s more formulaic comedies of type. Walter Hinck, for example, has remarked on the “differentiated social structure” reflected in the dramatis personae, seeing in the complex representation of social reality a distinguishing characteristic that separates the play from an earlier comedic tradition.40 Others have called attention to the diversity of moral perspectives presented by these socially diverse characters, each of whom occupies the position of authority at some point in the drama without ever becoming the unquestioned representative of a morally superior point of view. So, for example, Minna’s reflections in act 4, scene 3, reveal the callousness of Franziska’s treatment of Riccaut, but, by the same token, Franziska correctly calls Minna’s own moral credibility into question when she points out the “self-love” at the root of her plot to deceive Tellheim. Hans Georg Werner writes in this regard: “Every character, to the extent that he or she is proven right, relativizes the others’ claims to authority: Minna Tellheim just as much as Tellheim Minna. This also holds for the remaining characters: Just-Tellheim, Just-Werner, Just-Franziska, Franziska-Minna, Franziska-Just, Franziska-Werner, Tellheim-Werner.”41 One could adduce numerous specific examples to support this claim. In a similar vein, Georg Lukàcs describes the “up and down of moral right and wrong” as the play’s compositional principle, seeing in its non-hierarchical, contrapuntal structure a parallel to the music of Mozart.

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