Epigonen or Progonen? Short Prose and Young Germans

In his introduction to the 1959 edition of Die verspätete Nation, the sociologist Helmuth Plessner famously suggested that modern Germany is defined as a nation-state by its ‘belatedness’. Yet this belatedness, Plessner remarks, is not only to be understood in purely negative terms: it may be ‘eine Ungunst des Geschicks’, but it is also ‘eine schöpferische Möglichkeit’. Much the same ambiguity could be said to apply to German literature of the 1830s, where the sense of arriving too late, of arriving after the golden age of Goethe and Schiller, can be understood as both contingent and conceptual. This essay reflects on this tension by considering two main modes of shorter prose in the 1830s: critique, and the novella. Surveying the Young German critics on the one hand, and Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg's paradigmatic novella Die Zerrissenen on the other, it considers short prose not only as an aesthetic vehicle of this tension, but also as its generic expression, in as much as it reacts against Romantic and Goethean models of genre with a conscious insistence on ‘Selbstverkleinerung’. Is Hegel's ‘age of prose’ in the 1830s more specifically an age of short prose?