German literature scholar Peter Burgard focuses on artists who transcend boundaries

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Peter Burgard remembers his first year of law school at the University of Chicago as a critical turning point in his life.

Embarking on a law career had been a responsible choice but not a joyful one. Burgard's real passion, as he had discovered during his undergraduate years at The Johns Hopkins University, was German literature.

The attraction was in part family-based. Burgard's grandfather, a physician, left Germany in the 1930s and settled in Maryland with his wife and son, and Burgard grew up hearing his father speak German with his grandmother. In addition, the arts had always held a prominent place in Burgard's family. His mother is a writer, and his father went to art school and took up painting after retiring from a career in the pharmaceutical industry. Three of Burgard's four sisters are practicing artists.

Still, the prospect of finding a job as a literary scholar seemed dauntingly uncertain. Burgard struggled for a while, then made up his mind to go with what he loved, regardless of the consequences.

"I quit law school and decided to study what I really cared about -- literature and art -- even if I didn't think I could earn a living at it."

Taking that chance paid off. After receiving his master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia, Burgard took a job teaching at Harvard in 1989. This past July, he was promoted to a tenured position as professor of German in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Burgard's wife, Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, whose fields are 18th century and post-World War II German literature as well as feminist theory, is also teaching at Harvard as a lecturer, after having served as a professor in the German department at Princeton for the past six years.

Department Chairman Eckehard Simon, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, described Burgard as "a distinguished teacher and academic leader, a gifted scholar who builds bridges between new and traditional theoretical approaches to German literature and culture, and a congenial and generous colleague who is deeply devoted to strengthening German studies at Harvard and nationally."

Simon went on to praise Burgard's groundbreaking work on the 17th century and the Age of Goethe as well as his significant contributions to Nietzsche studies, turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the interrelationship between literature and art. He added that through his seminars at the Center for European Studies, Burgard is helping to create interdisciplinary links with scholars working in German history, art history, philosophy, psychology, and women's studies.

"Peter is a true intellectual, brimming with ideas and eager to debate them. Students praise him for teaching new and challenging courses and for encouraging critical thinking without insisting that they convert to his approach," Simon said.

Christie McDonald, professor of Romance languages and Literatures, agreed that Burgard is "a superb colleague who reaches out in dialogue to intellectuals near and far. He animates the profession by speaking across disciplines and by continually questioning established categories, set patterns, and set ways of thinking."

In an age of scholarly specialization, Burgard has allowed his interests to range widely, publishing books and articles on a broad spectrum of topics that include Freud, Nietzsche, Goethe, the Baroque writers of the 17th century, Caravaggio, and Andy Warhol.

What ties together these seemingly disparate figures? Not surprisingly for someone who turned down the precise architecture of the law for the more ambiguous landscape of art and literature, Burgard defines the unifying characteristic of the writers he studies as a driving need to challenge the basic forms and structures that their contemporaries took for granted.

"I'm interested in those periods and figures whose literary and theoretical work draws into question systematic principles of composition," Burgard said.

Such systematic principles, he explained, typically include closure, coherence, completion, consistency, and centered structures, among others. The writers Burgard is interested in are the ones whose work questions such systems, who transgress boundaries and categories.

Burgard pursued this interest in his first book, Idioms of Uncertainty: Goethe and the Essay (1992), in which he showed that Goethe's ess;ays on art, as well as his literary work, considered by many to epitomize a neoclassical approach to aesthetics, actually have a quite different aim.

"I argue that in Goethe's work, especially his work of the 1790s, which is considered his high classical period, he was more concerned with the disruption of systems of representation than the consolidation of such systems, which one might associate with classicism."

Burgard's current work-in-progress, Baroque Identity and the Art of Excess: German Literature and European Art in the Seventeenth Century, seeks to revise scholarly opinion of an earlier period of German literature, the Baroque.

Central to this project is a radical reexamination of the work of German poet and critic Martin Opitz (1597-1639), whose Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (German Poetics) is considered the theoretical groundwork of German Baroque literature.

Earlier critics have seen Opitz as the German disciple of Pierre de Ronsard and the Pléiade group, poets who sought to base French verse on classical and Italian models. But Burgard interprets Opitz quite differently.

"I argue that Opitz has been misread all along. Critics have been too concerned with reading his work as a rule book rather than as the complex rhetorical and discursive exercise it is."

Based on a close reading of Opitz's work, Burgard has concluded that this seminal text actually parodys the very principles it has been assumed to embody.

"The text, for example, sets up rules only to undermine them by the examples it employs to demonstrate them. It is emphatically inconsistent. It advocates a poetics of transgression which calls boundaries essential to systematic poetics into question."

Taking this reinterpretation of Opitz as a starting point, Burgard goes on to discuss major figures of German Baroque literature such as the poet and playwright Andreas Gryphius and the novelist Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen.

He further reflects on the nature of the Baroque through the lens of the visual arts by analyzing individual works by European artists like Rubens, Velasquez, and Caravaggio, the better to understand the aesthetic and philosophical currents that were sweeping Europe during this century of tumultuous religious wars.

"What I try to do is embed German literature of the 17th century within the larger context of European Baroque art, so the book crosses national boundaries as well as disciplinary ones," Burgard said.

Burgard's teaching, like his scholarship, is extremely wide-ranging. He teaches a Core course called Forging a Nation: German Culture from Luther to Kant and Beyond, as well as departmental courses on the Baroque age, the literature and art of turn-of-the-century Germany and Austria, the writings of Sigmund Freud, and a seminar on Goethe.

One might assume that the course on the Baroque is an outgrowth of Burgard's current scholarly interests, but in actuality, the scholarship grew out of the teaching, which has been a common pattern in Burgard's career.

"More often than not the teaching comes first, and then that leads to research projects, rather than the other way around. My first concern is for the curriculum, so my teaching isn't just based on what I'm working on, but on curricular needs."

What's next? Burgard is thinking about adding a course on modern European and American drama, beginning with the Scandinavian pioneers Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and proceeding through Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Antonin Artaud, all the way to the contemporary American avant-garde playwright and director Robert Wilson.

Undertaking such a project means mastering a whole new universe of texts and scholarship, but Burgard does not flinch from the task.

"That's why I went into the study of literature, so I could do what I want. That freedom of range also means a lot of work, but that's what I thrive on."