The Fabrication of Leisure: A Comparative Study of Cultural Sublimation in Nineteenth-century Germany

• In Event: 408 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Culture, Language, and Nation

Abstract

This paper examines the social trajectories of two historical revolutionaries as cases in the emergence of original cultural forms. Theodor Fontane and Richard Wagner each took part in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1848-9, pursuing rival programs for reconciling their stunted utopian aspirations with hard-nosed political reality. This paper argues that the relative “success” of each of these trajectories—as reflected in the lifetime audience sizes for their works and their breadth of social contacts—is a function of their works’ ability to regulate the leisure time of Germany’s post-revolutionary social classes. Fontane initially suppressed his radicalism and adopted a bourgeois lifestyle, but later embraced the literary genre of social realism to communicate the realities of socioeconomic suffering in Bismarck’s Germany, ultimately failing to reach a wide reading audience. Wagner, after fleeing to Zurich in 1849 to escape arrest, attempted to transform opera into a social space for the artistic ritualization of stunted human desires. His mature works represented a mecca for the new German bourgeoisie, as association with Wagner became a major marker of cultural distinction. This disparity in charisma between Fontane and Wagner is inseparable from the process of state and class formation in Germany during the 1860s and 70s. In closing, this paper sketches a theory of cultural sublimation as the coagulation of symbolic forms following social upheaval, combining Bourdieu’s depiction of modern cultural fields as “institutionalized anomie” with Elias’s portrayal of sublimation as the rechanneling of psychic drives into acceptable forms of public comportment.

Author

• Thomas Krendl Gilbert, University of California, Berkeley