NEW GREEKS, OR POLISH ROMANTICISM WITH A GERMAN ACCENT

This review discusses Maciej Junkiert's book Nowi Grecy. Historyzm polskich romantykow wobec narodzin Altertumswissenschaft (The New Greeks: Historicism of Polish Romantics in the Face of the Birth of Altertumswissenschaft, 2017) on Gotfryd Ernest Groddeck's, Joachim Lelewel's, and Adam Mickiewicz's reception of German classicism and philhellenism. Recent research into the reception of antiquity within Polish Romanticism has shown how the Roman paradigm-the symbolic system of latinitas-collapsed in the wake of the Partitions of Poland and how, from around 1800 onwards, a "Hellenistic turn" took place in Polish culture. Tracing this turn back to the original works of German Altertumswissenschaft, Junkiert argues, however, that Polish historicism was characterized by a deep ambivalence: the Greek myth had already been adopted by the Prussian colonizers and the Polish "new Greeks" had to struggle with the German origin of their new symbolic identity. This book compellingly shows the intertwinement of nationalism and historicism as exemplified by the case of the Polish "academic Romanticism." Because of careful readings in philological intertextuality-as Junkiert's outlook might be labelled-this study provides a methodologically innovative contribution to a practice of Polish studies between philology and intellectual history.