Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europaischen Seele von der schwarzen Pest biszum Ersten Weltkrieg. by Egon FriedellReview by: James V. MehlThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), p. 78Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544389 .

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78 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 1 (1998)

Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europaischen Seele von der schwarzen Pest bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Egon Friedell. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989; rpt., 1996. 1,571 pp. n.p.

As the title indicates, Egon Friedell's opus is a cultural history of modernity, treated as a spiritual crisis of Europe from the Black Death to World War I. This work was originally published in three volumes between 1927 and 1931. In 1989 these volumes were repub- lished as an unabridged single volume, of which this edition is a copy. The first 408 pages of the present text, originally volume 1 of the three-volume set, include a long introduction and the section on the Renaissance and Reformation and are of possible interest to readers of this journal. I say "possible" because the text has not been updated to take into account the many new studies on the Renaissance and Reformation. Furthermore, Friedell has writ- ten a narrative history that does not include a scholarly apparatus, such as footnotes and bib- liography, which one commonly finds in other histories of his time. So the question emerges: Why is this long, thematically constructed history being reprinted in 1996? The publisher must have in mind a German-reading audience for marketing the book.

Friedell's book is mainly of historiographical interest. His approach to history was in reaction to Leopold von Ranke and the German positivists who thought that they could reconstruct the past by placing all of the known facts together in a grand narrative. Friedell explains in his introduction that rather he treats history as myth and legend and the historian as a storyteller and poet. He considers humanity and human history as an organism, an organism that experiences both good health and sickness. In cultural history, he places highly the role of the individual, the genius (der grofle Mann) who leads and guides the human organism through history. His models of good historical writing include Herder, Winckelmann, Buckle, Burckhardt,Taine, Lamprecht, Breysig, and Spengler.

For Friedell the emergence of modernity was a painful and difficult experience. There was an "incubation period" that suffered with the disease of the Black Death and other neg- ative cultural features that characterized the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Italian Renaissance continued the period of spiritual sickness, with its secular and material con- cerns. The geniuses of the Renaissance included Petrarch, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Niccolo Machiavelli. More promise for the future of the modern world could be seen in the use of the printing press, the new astronomy of Nicolaus Copernicus, and the discoveries of Christopher Columbus. Indeed, some of the most interesting sections in Friedell are his discussions of New World cultures and religions. For Friedell, the good health of Europe was restored primarily by Martin Luther, who reinvigorated the German soul and contributed powerfully to the development of modernity. John Calvin and other reformers are also given credit for this cultural transformation. However, the hopes of the reformers were soon seriously threatened by the political and religious powers of Catholic Europe. The Wars of Religion and the events of the Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesu- its, resulted in the trauma of Saint Bartholomew's Night.

For those readers who are inclined towards older, but still interesting, readings of early modern Europe, this thick volume may be for you. The availability of this reprinted edition may also allow graduate students to read one more of the curious historiographical examples in our field. James V. Mehl ............................................ Missouri Western State College

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