Johannes Scherr

Traces the career of the widely read cultural historian Johannes Scherr and his development of a new kind of historical writing for the increasingly globalized 19th-century world.

Cusack Andrew :

ANDREW CUSACK is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. He worked previously as an Assistant Professor in Dublin before taking a postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2012, he joined the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Wanderer in Nineteenth-Century German Literature: Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism (2008). Together with Barry Murnane he co-edited the volume Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800-2000 (2012) and has recently co-edited (with Michael White) a volume entitled Der Fontane-Ton: Stil im Werk Theodor Fontanes (2021). He has published widely on a range of topics in the "long nineteenth century" including articles on Büchner, Fontane, Heine, Mörike, Schiller, and on Karl Philipp Moritz. His second monograph: Johannes Scherr: Mediating Culture in the German Nineteenth Century was published by Camden House in 2021.

Olaf Briese:
This is a convincing study that - without any transfiguration - treats Scherr's accomplishments and weaknesses and also asks about his relevance for the present. It reads the cultural historian Scherr in terms of cultural history, for Cusack rejects a literary and scholarly writing that only follows the high crest of canonical authors and concepts and thereby passes over one-time bestselling authors like Scherr. It represents therefore, commendably, a scholarly-political concern, and positions itself against scholarship, as a form of high culture, itself only dealing with what was and is defined by it as high culture.