To account for the richness and vitality of the Germanic world, the recent dictionary published by Bayard gives pride of place to cultural influences, human transfers, spaces of exchange, without forgetting the “ untranslatable These words that have been imported as they are from German to other languages.
Today we are experiencing the vogue of dictionaries. Because they understand knowledge, because they give readers the feeling of exhaustiveness, they constitute the ideal and reassuring tool of a library. But the dictionaries are also, as we have known since the Critical dictionary of the French Revolutionthat led in 1989 François Furet and Mona Ozouf, the places where readers are offered under an innocuous appearance the most sharp advances in a discipline. THE Dictionary of the Germanic worldvolume of more than a thousand pages which appears under the direction of E. Decultot, M. Spain and J. Le Rider, is no exception to the rule. It has indeed come to crown the development, for the past twenty years, from a historiographical current known as “ cultural transfers And that the very object of the study translates: the definition of intellectual contours of the Germanic world. If it does not display this critical dimension in its title, the work is in fact constituted from the start through the questioning of its own field of skills: Germany or rather the area of Germanic influence. Going beyond geographic boundaries – even if a set of very precious cards center The subject around the Germany, Austria, Swiss, Dutch -speaking perimeter to Alsace and the Moselle -, transgressing cultural borders, it is in terms of the influence of Germanic culture and elements of its reception that the course must be measured here. No pretension to cover the entire domain, but an assumed choice of its directors and a challenge taken up by the authors who reflects the maturity of a discipline. Thus each article reflects in its architecture the result of these long years of research. This is undoubtedly the best wire to find your way in a work which, adopting chronological order, can sometimes lead to its reader a little. It is therefore necessary, to judge its success, to try to uncover some of the entry keys.
In terms of the method first of all, the period envisaged-from the Holy Empire to the present day-seeks less to unroll a chronology than to highlight the way in which each new stage in its training, the Germanic world is formed against a backdrop of an assertive will compared to its immediate or more distant neighbors. Thus the place made in the Middle Ages not only due to the political importance of the period but at least as much to the role that it played in the representations of XIXe century when it comes to resuscitating the German nation, especially against the French brother and adversary. This desire to present successive fields and areas of influence explains the presence of articles that could have passed for incongruous. Among these, let us quote the one who deals with “ Victor Cousin And in which Mr. Spain indicates that in spite of a poor knowledge of the German the French philosopher and grand master of the university was a Franco-German passer of first importance. Even more surprising, that which U. Leben devotes to “ German cabinetmakers in France “, Show that cultural transfers go above all through men. Come to settle in France of XVIIIe A century, then homeland of good taste, they played as a group a role in the revolutionary events which took place in 1789 in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. If we now turn to geography, among all the cultural areas envisaged, there is obviously a privileged and for which the dictionary turns out to be a very precious instrument. This is the whole formed by the old Gouveprivileged space of contacts and conflicts at the same time, as the many articles devoted to it to hear. We will read with interest those who deal with the economy, from political history but even more those devoted to artistic developments which often embodied spaces of freedom, and therefore of reception, autonomous.
Through the evocation of historical events, mathematical notions, writers, artists and musicians, sociological or philosophical concepts, it is always the question of how a culture is defined which forms the spine of the book. Some articles do not hesitate to penetrate very detail in the cultural field ; Thus that devoted to the impulse, presents today the context of the Freudian reception, and that entitled “ Thermalism and water cities Who, while referring to the absence of a wine lobby, deals with the style Biedermeier to which is added a certain idea of perfection. The characteristic of this cultural approach is to want to be above all problematic, the authors favor concepts which weave a space for economic or intellectual political confrontation. We can cite the article “ Jewish assimilation That we owe to J. Ehrenfreund and in which he opens for example one of the most thorny files of the presence of Jews in contemporary Germany.
Affirming immediately the reflexive construction of the company, it is undoubtedly the importance conferred on the language which constitutes one of the most relevant entry doors of the dictionary. The Germanic world indeed designates first of all in the eyes of its designers an area of cultural influence, insofar as it is the language which traces its outlines in the first place. So we should not be surprised to see the areas that touch it to cut the part of the lion overall. Once again, the subject of the authors is above all to weave a network of relationships, to resonate the different sectors of a company, even, if necessary, to pass borders. The dictionary designers give as such a large place to all the vectors of language transmission, the printing (“ Sachs (Hans) ), The book professions (“ publishers “,” critical edition ») Or journalism. The article “ Bible “, Entrusted to D. Bourel, is not content to present theological developments since the XIXe A century but recalls both the importance of the Bible for the constitution of the German language and therefore for its influence, but also the appearance, alongside the Critical Protestant School, of a Catholic current and a current of Jewish studies which, from Mr. Mendelssohn to Mr. Buber and F. Rosenzweig, put the translations of the Bible at the center of its theological concerns. Popular literature intervenes in the construction of a national conscience not only through the tales (see the articles devoted to the tales of the Grimm brothers but also to their dictionary), fables and stories, but also in more unexpected forms such as the celebration of the German forest, whose theme travels the songs of gesture to find itself later in the German ideology of nature. The whole literary domain declines its genres (the idylles, the drama, the “ bourgeois realism “) And his disciplines,” Imperial publicistics Which, of XVIe At XIXe century, treated questions of public law according to the Aristotelian theory of forms, until the “ mythology “And closer to us” soap », Passing through the encyclopedic or fantastic genre. Linguistics is widely studied, whether it is the history of the German language or its meeting points with other national linguistics. Comparisons provide matter to confrontation with unrelated worlds that other, English literatures (“ Shakespeare in Germany “), French (“ The French tragedy at XVIIIe century in Germany “), Even Russian (“ Dostoevski ), Way of showing that influences are far from developing one -way. Finally the importance of the number of authors cited, since the philologist Fa Wolf or the Schlegel cadet, August Wilhelm, founder of the review Athenäumuntil the most contemporary like Christa Wolf or Arno Schmidt, traces one of the most explicit conductive sons which runs throughout the volume.
A second key, no less relevant, to understand the purpose of the work refers to the intercultural dimension implemented by its designers. She explains for example that what B. Cassin called in a previous work the “ untranslatable », Let, be in small numbers in the dictionary. The authors focus on the contrary to multiply the bridges between concepts or national representations. There are nevertheless some like this Auslandsdeutschtum which designates the Germanic populations established in non-German-speaking countries and returns to the essence of the Deutschtums that F. Schiller defined as “ a moral size »Based on the culture and character of the nation. Gesamtkunstwerk Or “ total work “Relates to the singular context of the first romanticism first, of Wagnerian art then to translate Nazism as an amplification and perversion of this notion. As for Heimat, it is available in Heimatfilm,, Heimatliteratur And Heimatvertriebenewhich designates a specific category of refugees, forced after the war by the occupying forces of expatriating in Germany and which make up in 1950 nearly a fifth of the population of the Gouve. Others are more expected, among which we find theAufklärung and his SchwärmereiTHE Vormärz preceding the revolutionary movements of the 1840s, but also theOberhausenfrom the name of the city where the short film festival has been held since 1954 and which, by extension, came to designate the young German cinema which has rebelled against the wave of commercial films.
Last entry proposed among multiple possible, although more discreet, the questioning which relates to the discipline itself and the historiographical approach which leads the company and constitutes almost the dictionary as its own object of study, giving it its unity. Thus we must understand the number of articles whose titles evoke controversies: the opposition understanding/reason around which will develop from critical idealism most of the great philosophical visions, or the opposition “ explain/understand », At Dilthey then Weber and finally K. Popper and CG Hempel, which defines the model specific to the sciences of the spirit. It is his own intellectual landscape that the dictionary tends to draw at times.
Finally, we would sin by omission if we ignored the form of the work. If he satisfies the properties of the genre, we can nevertheless regret the absence of references at the end of each article which would make this large mapping explicit that the dictionary strives to weave. Nevertheless, it is a safe bet that this dictionary, which constitutes the prototype of a new kind of history, will remain the only one of its species for a few years.