Modern Language Review

1174 Reviews Gesammelte Werke. ByAlfred Schuler. Ed. by Baal Muller. Munich: Telesma. 2007. 644 pp. 62. ISBN 978-3-9810057-4-5. Kosmik: Prozefiontologie und temporale Poetik bei LudwigKlages und Alfred Schuler. Zur Philosophic und Dichtung der Schwabinger Kosmischen Runde. By Baal Muller. Munich: Telesma. 2007. 416pp. 49.80. ISBN978-3-9810057-3-8. In hisNachlass fragmentsNietzsche issued a call?'Uber "mich" und "dich" hinaus! Kosmisch empfinden!' (Kritische Studienausgabe, ix, 11 [7], 443)?that found par ticular resonance in the Schwabing district of turn-of-the-centuryMunich among themembers of the so-called Kosmische Runde, especially Ludwig Klages and Alfred Schuler. Although a small collection of Schuler's Dichtungen was privately published in 1930, the first edition of his writings did not appear until Fragmente und Vortrage, edited by Klages, in 1940. Thereafter, silence: and the Schuler texts languished, forgotten or ignored, in theDeutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, un tilGerhard Plumpe's investigation of theNachlass led to his studyAlfred Schuler: Chaos und Neubeginn (Berlin: Agora, 1978). Until recently,Klages's edition, long out of print, remained the only published collection, yet it was a highly problematic one, not least because more than half the book was taken up by Klages's introduc tion and commentary. (This introduction was itselfcompromised by a number of anti-Semitic remarks:whether these reflected Schuler's views, or expressed Klages's own, or had been introduced by Klages for strategic reasons, remains amatter for debate; whatever the case, after the 1940s itdid not much advance the cause of Schuler). But Baal Muller's recent edition is now themost complete and editori ally accurate of Schuler's writings to date. It goes beyond Cosmogonische Augen: Gesammelte Schriften (the first scholarly edition, edited byMuller and published by IgelVerlag in 1997), on whose editorial principles itdraws (cf. pp. 440-44), by including a fuller selection of Schuler's correspondence (which is to say,everything thathas been recovered to date), as well asmore of his early poems. In Schuler's cosm(ogon)ic world-view, telesma is 'die verklaerende/seligma chende Kraft', a vitalist force that Schuler describes as an 'astrale Leuchte' and, symbolically, situates in the blood (pp. 262-63). Borrowing its name from this Schulerian concept, Telesma-Verlag has also published what must surely count as one of the most comprehensive studies of Schuler and Klages ever to have appeared, again from the pen of Baal Muller: Kosmik. In contrast to its brief title, the lengthy, programmatic subtitle of this study?originally Muller's doc toral thesis?sets out exactly what its four hundred or so pages seek to do (and succeed in doing) by exploring the 'forcefield' between the theoretical sophistica tion of Klages's Lebensphilosophie and the emphatic modernity' (Moritz Bassler's phrase) of Schuler's poetic texts (p. 25). Within the history of the ontology of time (in particular Bergson and Melchior Palagyi), Muller describes Klages's own 'temporal ontology' as 'processual' (p. 83), privileging not 'being' but 'becom ing', not stasis but (Heraclitean) 'flux'.Muller's argument does much to clar ify the lengthy and complicated technical discussion?frequently ignored?with which Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele opens, and subsequent pages exa MLR, 104.4, 2009 1175 mine the distinctions made by Klages (for example, between 'idiopathic' and sympathetic', Bild and Urbild, rhythm (Rhythmus) and beat (Takt), Begriff and Bedeutung), explicate his chief signature concepts' (such as vitale Spiegelung, ele mentare Ahnlichkeit, Formniwo, theWirklichkeit der Bilder, Eros der Feme), and relate them to other aspects of his work (characterology, graphology, and linguis tics). With a degree ofdetail previously found only in thework ofHeinz-Peter Preusser ('Ein Neuromantiker als Asthetizist: Uber den Dichter Ludwig Klages', inRoman tik und Asthetizismus, ed. by Gerhard Plumpe and Bettina Gruber (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1999), pp. 125-63), Muller addresses himself toKlages's own work as an author of lyric texts and prose poems, collected in his auto-edited Nachlass, Rhythmen und Runen (1944). Judged against Klages's own standards, Muller considers these texts in various ways to be deficient, arguing that itwas really Schuler who implemented and radicalized Klages's poetic conceptions. In stark contrast toKlages's pronounced systematicity', Schuler's eruptive creativity' illustrates the truthofKlages's aphorism...