Nick Martin
Reader in German (Associate Professor)
B.A., M.A., New College, University of Oxford
D.Phil., Jesus College, University of Oxford
With over 30 years of teaching and research experience in higher education, I am currently Reader (Associate Professor) in German at the University of Birmingham.
I did my BA - in German and Philosophy - at New College, Oxford (1985). After an interlude working in investment banking, I returned to Oxford to do a doctorate under the supervision of Prof. T. J. Reed, which I completed in 1993
I was a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford (1990-94) and Theodor Heuss Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1994-95).
I have published extensively on modern German intellectual history, especially Nietzsche and his legacies, as well as the cultural history of war and political violence in Germany.
I enjoy working with postgraduate students who share my research interests. I have supervised twelve PhD theses and fifteen Master’s dissertations to successful completion.
As Director of the Institute for German Studies at Birmingham (2013-20), I led an interdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners who engage with contemporary issues and debates in German and European politics, society and culture.
I was Editor-in-chief (2013-17) of the St Andrews-based academic journal *Forum for Modern Language Studies* and the founding Director of the Graduate Centre for Europe at Birmingham (2005-15).
I have held visiting professorships at California State University Long Beach and Loyola University Maryland.
Before joining the higher education sector, I worked in investment banking for S. G. Warburg & Co. in London and Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.
I am a qualified and active umpire in the Warwickshire County Cricket League.
Address: Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom
B.A., M.A., New College, University of Oxford
D.Phil., Jesus College, University of Oxford
With over 30 years of teaching and research experience in higher education, I am currently Reader (Associate Professor) in German at the University of Birmingham.
I did my BA - in German and Philosophy - at New College, Oxford (1985). After an interlude working in investment banking, I returned to Oxford to do a doctorate under the supervision of Prof. T. J. Reed, which I completed in 1993
I was a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford (1990-94) and Theodor Heuss Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1994-95).
I have published extensively on modern German intellectual history, especially Nietzsche and his legacies, as well as the cultural history of war and political violence in Germany.
I enjoy working with postgraduate students who share my research interests. I have supervised twelve PhD theses and fifteen Master’s dissertations to successful completion.
As Director of the Institute for German Studies at Birmingham (2013-20), I led an interdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners who engage with contemporary issues and debates in German and European politics, society and culture.
I was Editor-in-chief (2013-17) of the St Andrews-based academic journal *Forum for Modern Language Studies* and the founding Director of the Graduate Centre for Europe at Birmingham (2005-15).
I have held visiting professorships at California State University Long Beach and Loyola University Maryland.
Before joining the higher education sector, I worked in investment banking for S. G. Warburg & Co. in London and Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.
I am a qualified and active umpire in the Warwickshire County Cricket League.
Address: Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom
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Books by Nick Martin
Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel.
Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.
Reviews
[D]emands attention not least for the great variety of approaches chosen by its well-qualified contributors, all of whom share the common aim of liberating Schiller from his traditional role as the junior member of the Weimar partnership. . . . [T]he bulk of the constituent material gives us a Schiller still vibrantly alive -- now, and in the foreseeable future. --Osman Durrani, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
[A]n indispensable introduction to Schiller scholarship: it presents historicized research covering a broad range of Schiller's legacy, is extensively resourced, and demonstrates considerable self-reflexivity regarding international Germanistik. GOETHE YEARBOOK
[A] rich, varied, and rewarding volume of scholarship. . . . [B]oth specialists and more casual readers of Schiller's works, and indeed those readers with an interest in the history of ideas, stand to benefit from a sustained reading of the learned meditations contained within it. FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES
[T]he premise of the book's conception [is] fully to be accepted, and finds realization in a number of important contributions that broaden and deepen our knowledge about Schiller's illusionless realism, his understanding of politics, his philosophical position, his critique of religion, and his skeptical treatment of historical experience in his poetic and theoretical works. GERMANISTIK
Divided into five parts covering drama and poetry, aesthetics and philosophy, history and politics, reception and "Schiller Now", the essays reveal Schiller as a dramatist of melancholy, a "poet of Mourning", and an Enlightenment historian, to mention just three of the wide variety of perspectives offered . . . [a] useful contemporary collection. Recommended. CHOICE
[P]ositions itself - rightly - over and against the mid-century creation of a politically naïve, if not dangerous, Schiller, who cartoonishly embodied the backlash within Anglo-American circles against German politics and German idealism. . . . [T]his collection is a conscious effort not only to avoid reducing Schiller to any of his readily identifiable personae, but also to interrogate the twentieth-century scholarly trends that have made this reduction something that must be avoided. GERMAN QUARTERLY
Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, 2007, 1177-78
“…[ein] sehr lesenswerte[r] Tagungsband…”
literaturkritik.de , No.1, January 2007
“This is an important book.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol.43, 2007, 193-94
“The volume is beautifully edited and printed. [...] it is a welcome addition to other publications celebrating the Schiller bicentenary. It contains contributions that will be cited for years to come.”
German Quarterly, Vol.80, 2007, 254-56
To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death, leading scholars from Germany, Canada, the UK and the USA have contributed to this volume of commemorative essays. These were first presented at a symposium held at the University of Birmingham in June 2005. The essays collected here shed important new light on Schiller’s standing as a national and transnational figure , both in his own lifetime and in the two hundred years since his death. Issues explored include: aspects of Schiller’s life and work which contributed to the creation of heroic and nationalist myths of the poet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his activities as man of the theatre and publisher in his own, pre-national context; the (trans-)national dimensions of Schiller’s poetic and dramatic achievement in their contemporary context and with reference to later appropriations of national(ist) elements in his work. The contributions to this volume illuminate Schiller’s achievements as poet, playwright, thinker and historian, and bring acute insights to bear on both the history of his impact in a variety of contexts and his enduring importance as a point of cultural reference.
Inhalt/Contents
Nicholas MARTIN: Introduction: Schiller After Two Centuries
T. J. REED: Wie hat Schiller überlebt?
Lesley SHARPE: A National Repertoire: Schiller and the Theatre of his Day
Norbert OELLERS: Schiller, der “Heros”. Mit ergänzenden Bemerkungen zu einigen seiner Dramen-Helden
Jochen GOLZ: Monumente zu Lebzeiten? – Schiller als Herausgeber seiner Werke
K. F. HILLIARD: “Nicht in Person sondern durch einen Repräsentanten”: Problematik der Repräsentation bei Schiller
David HILL: Lenz and Schiller: All’s well that ends well
Steffan DAVIES: Schiller’s Egmont and the Beginnings of Weimar Classicism
John GUTHRIE: Language and Gesture in Schiller’s Later Plays
Francis LAMPORT: Virgins, Bastards and Saviours of the Nation: Reflections on Schiller’s Historical Drama
Ritchie ROBERTSON: Schiller and the Jesuits
Alexander KOŠENINA: Schiller’s Poetics of Crime
Jeffrey L. HIGH: Schiller, “merely political Revolutions”, the personal Drama of Occupation, and Wars of Liberation
Maike OERGEL: The German Identity, the German Querelle and the Ideal State: A Fresh Look at Schiller’s Fragment “Deutsche Größe”
David PUGH: Schiller and the Crisis of German Liberalism
Nicholas MARTIN: Images of Schiller in National Socialist Germany
Paul BISHOP: The “Schillerbild” of Werner Deubel: Schiller as “Poet of the Nation”?
Anhang/Appendix: Schillerjahr 2005. Selected Events and Publications
Personenregister/Index of Names
Register der Werke Schillers/Index of Schiller’s Works
Contents:
Daniel W. Conway: Nietzsche’s Germano-mania
Thomas H. Brobjer: Nietzsche as German Philosopher: His Reading of the Classical German Philosophers
Christa Davis Acampora: ‘The Contest Between Nietzsche and Homer’: Revaluing the Homeric Question
Duncan Large: ‘Der Bauernaufstand des Geistes’: Nietzsche, Luther and the Reformation
Ben Morgan: Fear and Self-Control in The Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Prussian Past
Christopher Janaway: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator
Hans-Gerd von Seggern: Nietzsches (anti-)naturalistische Ästhetik in der Geburt der Tragödie
Paul J. M. van Tongeren: Nietzsche’s Naturalism
Jim Urpeth: Nietzsche and the Rapture of Aesthetic Disinterestedness: A Response to Heidegger
Gerd Schank: Race and Breeding in Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Malcolm Humble: Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig: Left-Wing Nietzscheans?
Nicholas Martin: Nietzsche in the GDR: History of a Taboo.
Dr Martin counters the widespread belief that Nietzsche and Schiller represent a black-and-white contrast, showing the wide extent of the early Nietzsche's debt to Schiller's aesthetics, and drawing a convincing picture of the common aesthetic ground shared by the two writers. The four key aspects of their aesthetic theories are compared: the brilliant diagnoses of cultural crisis; the historical framework of each theory; the catalytic function of the Greek experience in both theories; and the metaphysical and psychological underpinnings by which the theories stand or fall. At the heart of the study lie the claims of both Nietzsche and Schiller for the `untimeliness' of their texts. Dr Martin concludes that, whatever the shortcomings of the texts, they remain outstanding and enduringly relevant contributions both to aesthetic theory and to our understanding of what it is to be human.
The thesis is not an 'influence study', although the issue is addressed. By examining his hitherto neglected attitude to Schiller, this study sheds light on Nietzsche's tactics when dealing with men and their ideas in his writings. This, however, is not the main point of the thesis, which is to analyse the connections between the two texts. The essential point of comparison is that Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Ästhetische Briefe both set out aesthetic prescriptions for a diseased culture. Certain kinds of art are deemed capable, by virtue of their timeless and incorruptible properties, of reforming the human psyche, and by extension of promoting cultural integrity and vitality.
After analysing Nietzsche's attitude to Schiller, particularly in connection with the argument of Die Geburt der Tragödie, the thesis compares the strategies adopted in the two texts: both present triadic schemes of historical development, in which the Greek experience is regarded as crucial; their aesthetic 'reform programmes' are predicated on psycho-metaphysical pictures of human nature; and both texts reject attempts to cure human ills by political means. The thesis is an attempt to articulate, compare, and criticise the respective projects and to see in what sense(s) they were untimely. Both projects were untimely, in the sense that they were deliberately out of step with their times. In each case, the alleged remedial properties of art themselves are characterised as untimely. They are borrowed from another time, or are said to be out of time altogether.
The thesis concludes that the two texts, although outstanding contributions to aesthetic theory, were inappropriate (untimely) attempts to tackle larger problems.
Articles by Nick Martin
Nietzsche's voice had been effectively silenced in the GDR and his manuscripts carefully guarded. While it was not impossible to gain access to Nietzsche's manuscripts, scholars had to tackle a bureaucratic assault course in order to reach them. Reception of Nietzsche in the GDR tended to be limited and negative. There was nothing even resembling an open discussion in the GDR of Nietzsche and his legacies before 1986, and the first Nietzsche monograph to be published there did not appear until 1989. Discussions of Nietzsche in the GDR were rare, and they tended to focus only on his alleged role in paving the way for National Socialism and/or bourgeois imperialism.
The depth and intensity of official hostility to Nietzsche in the GDR can be traced, in part, to the founding ideas and self-understanding of that state. Its claims to legitimacy were based on two closely related ideas. The first was a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of historical development, according to which the GDR was the culmination of progressive ('zukunftsweisend') developments in German history. The second was the antifascist struggle of 1933-1945, which provided the GDR with its immediate raison d’être. The presence of the victorious Red Army on German soil, the sacrifices of the Soviet people in repelling the fascist invader, and the martyrdom of German antifascists in the Third Reich appeared to provide compelling evidence for both these claims to legitimacy. There was no room for Nietzsche in the ‘first antifascist state on German soil’, as his writings were perceived (and not only by communists) to have been an important underpinning of National Socialism.
A debate in 1986-87 in the GDR journal *Sinn und Form* on opening up Nietzsche's work to public debate seemed to be part of a cultural thaw in East Germany. This debate in the GDR was a curiously muted and oblique version of a process which, by 1987, was already well underway in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union: glasnost. In the event, in the GDR context it was too little, too late.
While Nietzsche rejects certain elements of Enlightenment thought, particularly those which found expression in the practice of the French Revolution, his philosophical diagnoses are informed to an extent by the critical principles of Enlightenment. Nietzsche admires the critical spirit of certain figures associated with eighteenth-century Enlightenment, notably Voltaire and Lessing, as well as representatives of earlier 'Enlightenments', such as Epicurus, Petrarch and Erasmus. He is also impressed by the audacity of the Enlightenment project, however flawed parts of it may be, and by the scale of its philosophical legacy.
However, Nietzsche's approach to Enlightenment remains ambivalent and selective. His sceptical diagnoses of the phenomenon anticipate Horkheimer and Adorno's critique in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944). The article concludes that it is, paradoxically, Nietzsche's attempts to suggest ways forward for humanity that present the most significant obstacles to viewing him as an enlightened thinker.
The research for this article was made possible by a generous grant from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
Thanks in no small measure to the determined efforts of, among others, Walter Kaufmann to rehabilitate or even tame Nietzsche after the Second World War (after the squalid treatment his work had suffered at the hands of his sister and from the likes of Baeumler, Rosenberg and other Nazis), Nietzsche would now appear to be one of us, "jenseits von Verteufelung und Verharmlosung".
This essay looks beyond and behind this rather complacent contemporary image of Nietzsche to re-examine some of his less palatable remarks – on the nature and, to Nietzsche, the desirability of "barbarism" as a counterweight and corrective to "civilisation".
It is argued here that Nietzsche presents a grand aesthetic vision of the future, and that violence, both figurative and literal, is an integral part of that vision.