Angela Steidele’s novel “Enlightenment”. – Culture

A book title like a bang: “Enlightenment”. One could assume behind it a non-fiction book that once again sheds new light on the epoch to which, depending on your perspective, we attribute the splendor or the misery of modernity. But this book is “A Novel”, explicitly with an indefinite article, and it is even a light novel. It is also a work of feminist literature, and rarely has feminism been so entertaining.

We are also dealing with a musical novel that willfully takes into account that its imaginative exuberance is bound to annoy purist musicologists. A historical novel? At least no one who pretends that it could have been the same: This fallacy is prevented by ironic breaks, anachronisms and blatant swindles that are reminiscent of the usances of literary postmodernism. Their last hour supposedly came in 2010, but that should be Angela Steidele care little.

Time travel of a different kind is the specialty of the author, who established her scientific and literary basic topic almost twenty years ago with her dissertation on “Love and desire between women in German-language literature 1750-1850” and has since published several books on the subject. She edited it twice, in the form of a novel and a biographical report Fate of Catharina Linck aka Anastasius Rosenstengel, who lived a life in men’s clothes shortly after 1700, fought as a musketeer, became notorious as a womanizer, married a mistress and finally died by execution. The motif of eroticism between women also appears in Steidele’s new work, of course, but here it is woven more casually into a web of intellectual relationships between women and men that is projected into 18th-century Protestant Leipzig as a kind of backward-looking utopia.

Bach is respectfully portrayed as a wisely silent observer and a delicately choleric genius

The narrating voice belongs to Catharina Dorothea Bach, the composer’s eldest daughter from his first marriage. Curiously, she seems particularly suitable as a projection figure, although (or because) nothing is known about her, apart from Johann Sebastian’s note that says that the girl “doesn’t make a bad impact” in the family ensemble. In Bach Year 2000, she appeared as a fictional diarist in the much less enlightening, but not entirely trivial novel “My Father, the Cantor Bach” by Andreas Liebert, a musicologist and author in the popular historical genre. Overlaps could hardly be avoided: the image of the unmanned daughter, who takes care of the younger siblings, gets along well with her highly musical stepmother Anna Magdalena and hides her own talent under a bushel, is lovingly painted here and there.

But of course Angela Steidele is not interested in Father Bach, whom she portrays with a lot of respect and empathy as a cleverly silent observer and slightly choleric genius. Her focus is on the boldly invented friendship between Dorothea Bach and Luise Adelgunde Gottsched, the famous “Gottschedin” who, as a writer and translator, and as a figurehead of female erudition and intellectual autonomy, was one of the outstanding personalities of the epoch. The proven fact that her godly husband, the linguist and literary theorist Johann Christoph Gottsched, not only exploited her as a colleague and collaborator, but also tried to downplay her part in his work, is the initial spark for Steidele’s Dorothea Bach report.

After Luise’s early death in 1762, she wanted to write down her memories and at the same time was outraged by the widower’s maudlin, condescending obituary of his “helper”. He, in turn, entrusted her with reading Luise’s correspondence, which her dear friend Dorothee von Runckel wants to publish – surprises included. In this situation, Steidele lets the first-person narrator, now in her mid-fifties, look back on a panorama spanning three decades of meticulously researched facts and daring fiction, staged as a polyphonic conversation about the promises and challenges of the new era that is about to begin.

Here they compete in changing constellations for the competition of ideas, the clever minds who gathered in the intellectual hotspot of Saxony at the time, but the extent to which they interacted with one another has only been handed down in fragmentary form. People meet in the coffee house, in the “Golden Bear”, in the theater or in one of the earliest salons, in the Thomas School, in the university, in the houses of the Bachs or the “Gelehrtentandem” Gottsched: the music theorist Lorenz Mizler, the composer Johann Adolf Scheibe, Bach’s librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici alias Picander, the book printers Breitkopf senior and junior, the doctor Gottlieb Ludwig, the theologian Johann August Ernesti and, as a mild-mannered nuisance, the hypochondriac writer Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. They are joined by strong women like poet, musician and salon founder Christiana Mariana Ziegler and rebellious theater principal Caroline Neuber. Later, Countess Bentinck, who loves to travel and enjoy life, stops by, the young Lessing spreads his critical spirit around, Klopstock and Goethe give their student guest performances and bring new colors into the conversation, but also an unabashedly disparaging image of women. Gossip and intrigue, malice and resentment are always present in the dawning light of reason and increase the amusement.

Despite the decidedly female perspective, the novel has no agitational sound

The arts and sciences, theater and language, philosophy and religion are debated, but hardly any politics. The feudal rulers of Europe are still firmly in the saddle; the enlightened Prussian King Frederick II not only gave Bach a fugue theme, but in 1756 he invaded Saxony out of greed and plundered Leipzig. Angela Steidele also focuses on the shadows of war and the hardships of everyday life, and as a kind of counterweight, she gives Bach’s music, its genesis and performance ample space, sometimes knowledgeable, sometimes carelessly speculative, and makes it the subject of enlightening debates.

Despite her decidedly female perspective and despite the assertiveness that she ascribes to the female figures of the early Enlightenment, Steidele did not give the novel an agitational sound. Rather, she creates a kind of equality in her dispute tableau, which allows each individual character to have both its strengths and its deficits. She succeeds in small, pointed character sketches without coming embarrassingly close to the historical staff. She has also found a language that is pleasantly devoid of mannerisms, neither pandering to the 18th century nor to the present. However, when a Mr. Laurentius Gugl pleads for free knowledge and a Mr. Stephan Jobst prophesies the substitution of books by machines, one can find these forward-looking allusions a bit silly. But they fit into the light, easy-going tone and concern to bring a contemporary audience into conversation with a past that has left us plenty of unfulfilled promises and unfinished projects.