Sublime Surrender

When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1