ABSTRACT
The title of this essay is adapted from Adelbert von Chamisso’s 1814 novella Peter Schlemihl, one of the most fascinating commentaries on Romantic nationalism. The story of Schlemihl, a man who has no shadow, is in part a parable about Chamisso’s own condition as a French aristocrat who had ed revolutionary France and changed his name. In the story Schlemihl meets a sinister old grey man and exchanges his shadow for a bottomless purse full of gold. ‘The earth was sunbright all around me’, he reects, ‘my senses were wholly confused’.1 The man without a shadow is an incomplete subject and, like a man who has no nation, is both repulsive and threatening. Shadowless, or state-less, and shunned by society, Schlemihl takes to roaming the world, at rst disorientated and bewildered, feverishly reeling between night and day, the heat of the tropics and the polar cold. He collapses, grows a beard and is taken for a (stateless) Jew.2 But by the end, although homeless and rootless, indeed because of these conditions, he realises he can dedicate himself to knowing the world and contributing to its betterment. For Chamisso, an exile and a Romantic, to lack a nation seemed to mean lacking something inherent in humanity, but also a certain liberation, a cosmopolitan enlargement of knowledge.3
