The writer and historian Johannes Scherr (1817–1886) can be seen as a classic example of the “second-tier writer,” an author who is popular and prolific in his own day but whose works are largely ignored by subsequent generations. In the introduction to this book, the literary historian Andrew Cusack explains that he had originally intended to write a single chapter on Scherr as part of a broader study of Kulturgeschichte, which would have emphasized that genre's democratic and emancipatory potential. By focusing entirely on Scherr, Cusack ends up telling a more complex, contradictory, and interesting story about a historian whose works were read widely but who remained distant from the historians’ guild, who was an advocate of cosmopolitanism but at times stoked nationalist prejudices, who promoted female writers but wrote works laced with misogyny, and who was deeply engaged with German affairs but spent most of his life in Swiss exile.
For Cusack, Scherr's writerly career was defined by the experience of liminality, i.e., of living and working along and across the borders between regions, nations, reading publics, and professional identities. Scherr was born in 1817 in the village of Rechberg in Württemberg, the son of a schoolteacher and the youngest of ten siblings. Growing up, he experienced repeated bouts of bad health and was often confined to his bed. This led his parents to send him to Zurich to live with his older brother Thomas, a school teacher, educational reformer, and ardent liberal. Canton Zurich had adopted a republican constitution in 1831 and was a preferred destination for South German liberals and democrats fleeing the repressive measures implemented after the Hambach Festival. Although Scherr spent only a year in Zurich before returning to Württemberg, the experience was formative for his later democratic activism as well as a life spent on both sides of the Swiss-German border. Scherr would eventually complete a doctorate at Tübingen (with a dissertation on the Nibelungenlied). After teaching school for two years in Winterthur, he moved to Stuttgart and became active in democratic politics. During the 1848 revolution he was elected to the Württemberg parliament, and in May-June 1849 he participated in the campaign for the Reichsverfassung. When a warrant was issued for his arrest, Scherr fled across the border to Canton Zurich. There he would spend the rest of his days, first as a freelance writer in Winterthur and, after 1860, as professor of history at the new Zurich Polytechnic.
Although he eventually achieved the status of Ordinarius, Scherr's literary oeuvre was shaped by his decades writing for a broad, non-academic audience—readers who had a secondary-school education but nothing more. This can be seen in his best-known work, Deutsche Kultur- und Sittengeschichte (1852). Eschewing the university historians’ typical focus on high politics, Scherr presented a sort of history from below, stressing the role of the middle classes as the bearers of German culture and agents of a democratizing impulse that stretched from the late Middle Ages into the present. This was an argument designed to flatter its target audience—indeed, Cusack notes, Scherr rarely challenged the prejudices or assumptions of his readers. To hold their attention, Scherr emphasized narrative over analysis and adopted a voice that was alternately brash, jocular, inventive (a favorite neologism was Metternichtigkeit), and vulgar (he once referred to Napoleon III's subordinates as “fartcatchers”). This burschikos style (as one critic labeled it) played well with readers, as becomes evident when one considers the number of editions of Scherr's works and their omnipresence in late-nineteenth-century lending libraries. More than even Jacob Burckhardt, Cusack writes, “Scherr deserves to be regarded as the representative cultural historian of the German nineteenth century” (52).
Cusack repeatedly emphasizes Scherr's role as a mediator, not just between academic learning and a general readership, but also between cultures. An early example of this was Die Schweiz und die Schweizer (1845), which offered German readers an introduction to Swiss history, politics, and culture in the form of fifteen letters written by an imaginary German political refugee traveling through Switzerland. Two other works, Bildersaal der Weltliteratur (1848) and Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur (1851), provided accessible and wide-ranging (if largely Eurocentric) introductions to “world literature.” Scherr was also an enthusiastic advocate of George Sand, translating twenty-seven of her works between 1844 and 1851 (a project he shared with his wife Maria Susanne Kübler, who was also a writer) and endorsing Sand's vision of a socialism leavened by worldly spirituality. During the 1860s, however, Scherr would criticize Sand for what he now saw as her naïve idealism. That attack coincided with a brief (and rather opportunistic) turn to Nachmärz realism, which included bellicose support for Bismarck and his wars of unification.
In his final chapter, Cusack examines Scherr's embrace of philosophical pessimism in the 1870s. As a history professor at a technical university, Scherr had a sense of the precarious status of the humanities, particularly in an era of rapid industrialization and growing material prosperity. He rankled at the celebration of “winners” in history and the tendency to equate success with moral superiority, a trend that seemed especially prevalent in the new German Reich. These factors led Cusack to adopt the pessimistic philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann, who (like Schopenhauer) held that human existence inevitably contains more suffering than happiness. Hartmann's pessimism left Scherr skeptical of “optimistic” schemes to bring about a universal “state of happiness” (138), such as those of the anarchists who attended the university of Zurich and frequented his lectures at the Polytechnic. In particular, he rejected the means/ends calculations that would allow for the deaths of thousands if utopia could be achieved in the process. In his last years, Scherr called for an alleviation of suffering and care for those left behind by the engines of “progress.”
In a brief conclusion, Cusack ponders whether Scherr's works can be rescued for a twenty-first-century reading public, since so many of his views (e.g., his criticism of women's emancipation) no longer align with contemporary values. One question Cusack does not consider is the role Scherr might play in a revised intellectual history of German-speaking Europe, particularly one that reassesses the neglected years between 1850 and 1880, an era that produced relatively few canonical writers, in part because of the turn against philosophical idealism and an orientation to a more popular, accessible style of writing. There is unlikely to be a Scherr revival, but the world in which he lived and acted deserves further scrutiny. Cusack's original, insightful, and well-written study offers an initial path into that world. In this sense, it is itself a work of mediation, though without the burschikos wordplay.
