This talk investigates a strangely dominant, yet up to now largely unexamined style in mid- to late nineteenth-century German letters: a paradoxical combination of bombast, avuncularity, belligerence, and petulance that I, taking a cue from the first of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, designate with the name of “Gepolter”—or, in English, “bluster.” Proceeding from this text of Nietzsche’s—a scathing review of the last book of the renegade theologian and recent convert to scientific materialism David Friedrich Strauss—and moving to the larger scope of nineteenth-century German intellectual and popular culture (in particular, the critical polemics of the young Karl Marx and the humorous novellas of Wilhelm Raabe), my project considers the ideological and affective implications of this style—as well as the accusation of practicing it—as at once a form of self-legitimation and a response to a legitimation crisis. Bluster, as I hypothesize, is the rhetoric of male bourgeois fragility in the age of the bourgeoisie’s apparent triumph, an unconscious defensive strategy in the face of the feared loss of cultural and political power at that power’s tenuous height.

My project analyzes the elements and effects of this strategy in light of the conflicted complacency of much of nineteenth-century German culture already diagnosed by Nietzsche: the mixture of anxious epigonism and preemptive defensiveness of the supposed victors of the end of history, which only barely hides both the precariousness and the violence that such a victory implies. In this way, my project aims to excavate the cultural, psychological, and political valences of a tone nearly ubiquitous at the time, but rarely considered in and of itself, with clear consequences for the understanding of public rhetoric up to and including the present day.