This book explores connections between the practices of reading and magic during the realist and modernist periods in German literature and thought, with a particular focus on divination. Divination, historically long associated with the reading of literature, engages an issue of critical importance to this cultural moment, that of futurity: both the different ways that the future figured in the reading of texts at this time, and the evident (or apparently evident) fading of its force as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith. In case studies of works by Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin, this study investigates divinatory readings not just of texts but of the world, its things, their forces, and their relations to the human. It approaches both the texts and the world that supports such readings against the background of the notion of “sympathy” that, in both ancient and pre-modern times, allowed for future reading and that, it argues, persists in the realist and modernist periods in the form of “Stimmung.” And it traces the significant transformations of “sympathy” and “Stimmung” that accompany the changing shape of reading, magic, and the future in German art and thought during this period.
Algol. Tragedy of Power (1920) as Futuristic Peplum and the “Rehearsal” of Metropolis