As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

ERICA WEITZMAN is an associate professor in the Department of German at Northwestern University. She is the author of Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition, also published by Northwestern University Press.

“A masterful study of the concept of obscenity in nineteenth-century German realist literature and its afterlife. Weitzman moves with enviable grace through the German intellectual tradition from Kant forwards. And her readings of the individual literary works are themselves major contributions to the scholarship on German realism.” —Eric Downing, author of The Chain of Things: Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850–1940

“Mandatory reading for all those interested in nineteenth-century German prose and, more generally, in questions of materialism and literature.” —Eva Geulen, author of The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel

“A masterful study of the concept of obscenity in nineteenth-century German realist literature and its afterlife. Weitzman moves with enviable grace through the German intellectual tradition from Kant forwards. And her readings of the individual literary works are themselves major contributions to the scholarship on German realism.” —Eric Downing, author of The Chain of Things: Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850–1940

“Mandatory reading for all those interested in nineteenth-century German prose and, more generally, in questions of materialism and literature.” —Eva Geulen, author of The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel