SOURCE: Berman, Russell A. “How to Think about Germany: Nationality, Gender, and Obsession in Heine's ‘Night Thoughts.’” In Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, pp. 66-81. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997.

In the following essay, Berman discusses how Heine's innovative “Night Thoughts” pushes the reader to abandon antiquated notions of self and society in favor of “a focus on the possibility of human action and innovation.”

I he conceptual redefinition of literary studies as “Cultural Studies,” of which “German Studies” has come to represent one particular variant, appears to have induced a preference for the study of novels or other prose genres and a relative reluctance to engage in lyric poetry. The contemporary thematization of material culture certainly points a critic toward the stuff of everyday life, which is typically displayed to a much greater degree in prose fiction, while the sparse abstractions of...