Theodor Storm and Disenchantment

This essay examines Theodor Storm as a practitioner of the novella in the context of ideas about ‘disenchantment’ – a concept given prominence by Max Weber and later taken up by Adorno and Horkheimer. The comparison proceeds from Storm's recognised relation to currents of nineteenth‐century thought from which the philosophical discourse of disenchantment emerged. In the perspectival complexity of Der Schimmelreiter Storm gives expression to problems of narrative legitimation which Weber sees as characteristic of rationalisation; for Adorno and Horkheimer such problems underlie the self‐alienation of the ‘enlightened’ world view, which they understand as becoming mythic. Storm anticipates these tensions in his spectrally infused treatment of nature, which allows him to grasp the crisis of myth and enlightenment as continuous with a discursive primacy of the aesthetic. His text throws such primacy into critical relief as inadequate to the claim of realist narrative art.