True, some people vacillated between admiration (perhaps rivalry) and disdain for Napoleon, yet whatever their thoughts on the intense German-national chauvinism that sprang up in reaction to French imperialism, or their loyalties or antipathy toward the old monarchies, everyone in Napoleon’s path felt the military threat and economic burdens of foreign occupation; commodity and food shortages, troop quartering, plunder of artworks and other property, and heavy taxation were common complaints. During this chaotic period the restless Körner, a native of Dresden, bounced from university to university, first expelled for his involvement in political-gang skirmishes while a student of the law in Leipzig, next a student of history and philosophy in Berlin, until his record began to catch up with him.
In August 1811 Körner moved to Vienna, where he sought out the Prussian ambassador Alexander von Humboldt (brother of the linguist, Wilhelm) and Friedrich Schlegel, and swiftly gained a position as a court poet following a number of successes as a playwright and librettist. He received competing offers from Count Pálffy at the Theater an der Wien and Prince Lobkowitz at the Burgtheater. Josef von Spaun introduced him to Schubert at a performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, after which the teenaged composer and the poet, six years older, bonded over their mutual admiration for the singers Johann Michael Vogl and Anna Milder. Körner seemed to be putting down roots in Vienna—he became engaged to the local actress Antonie Adamberger; yet in March 1813 he enthusiastically answered Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia’s call for volunteers to free his homeland from Napoleonic occupation.3 (Austria, with its dynastic ties to the French Emperor, would enter the coalition against Napoleon only in August.) Körner joined the elite Lützow Freikorps also known as the Lützower Jäger (hunters), a specially skilled unit that drew into its ranks a number of academics and writers as well as workers, tradesmen, and even women. Among his cohorts was the soldier Eleonore Prochaska, who successfully maintained her disguise as a man until she fell in battle in early October, 1813. Her story, a variation on “don’t ask don’t tell,” was celebrated in an 1815 play titled Leonore Prohaska, written by Friedrich Duncker, a Prussian delegate at the Congress of Vienna; Beethoven supplied incidental music for it. Hopes ran high among many of the young volunteers, Kriegsfreiwillige, that their patriotic sacrifices would bring about a genuine citizenry, the foundation for a German nation based on constitutional principles. So long as military enrollees were still needed, the authorities did little to dispel their enthusiasm, and martyrdom of writers such as Körner, who was killed in battle in mid-August, only aided in recruitment.
The war had galvanized the German nationalist movement and for a short time patriotic sentiment was directed against a common foe. This unity masked the dissatisfactions and widening political rifts within and between the German states and the Austrian Empire (its diverging emphases owing to the intricacy of the Empire’s ties to Rome and, like the Catholic Rhineland, to France). At stake were the role of monarchy, demands for constitutionalism, and basic questions of national identity and unity: who was the “we” mobilizing against “them”?
Those cracks in Austro-German political unity were not about to close with Napoleon’s defeat. And so, in the decade after 1815, authorities in the Austrian Empire, the kingdom of Prussia, and in other German monarchies broke the links to the nationalist movement that they had cultivated in the last years of the Napoleonic era.4 Hopes of the German nationalists and of all in Europe who aspired to independent nationhood were betrayed when the Congress of Vienna met after Napoleon’s defeat to reapportion Europe among the major powers—the old empires and monarchies. Under the auspices of Prince Clemens von Metternich the Restoration government ruled with an iron hand, aggressively suppressing all nation-oriented patriotic sentiment in central Europe: Vaterland was to mean only “land of the Father, the Habsburg emperor.” This effort to turn back the hands of time to a pre-revolutionary—even pre-Josephinian—world order notably included “the reenactment of Jewish disabilities that had been somewhat relieved in Napoleonic times,” as Jeffrey L. Sammons gingerly puts it, and a drastic tightening of the restrictions on free speech.5 Joseph II had loosened these in the early 1780s and also promoted religious tolerance for practitioners of minority faiths and for the growing community of Freemasons. After the March 1819 murder in Mannheim of August von Kotzebue by the radicalized student Karl Ludwig Sand, who believed the former liberal, then emissary to Russia, was spying on nationalist groups, the Carlsbad Decrees were issued. Among the new measures were restrictions on student travel from or into Austria to stifle contact with the German, Bohemian—and soon after, Italian—nationhood movements that threatened absolutist Imperial rule; the 1821 Greek war of independence from the Ottoman Empire sparked similar fears.6 Reactionary government officials were quick to label extremist any opposition whatsoever and sought to rehabilitate and oversee all those they could not expel (sometimes by enlisting them as censors).7 In James J. Sheehan’s spirited formulation, “Metternich saw Sand’s murder of Kotzebue as a godsend. In July 1819 he rushed to Teplitz where Frederick William was on holiday and repeated his insistence that a representative constitution was merely the first step on the road to revolution.”8 The following year the Vienna Schlussakte would affirm the principle of Imperial autocracy. Spies infiltrated daily life, books were confiscated, and an army of bureaucratic censors, some reluctant, went to work crossing out whatever hints they could find of seditious sentiment. Within a few years’ time Vienna’s chief of police Josef Sedlnitzky could dismiss as fanatical Hirngespinste—“phantoms of the mind”—those dangerous visions of “citizenry and a system of representation”9 promulgated by the poet Johann Senn (1795–1857), one of Schubert’s friends from his Stadtkonvikt days. The police chief’s language echoes the preamble to the 1810 censorship code, thought to have been written by Friedrich von Gentz (later Metternich’s trusted advisor):
No ray of light, from wherever it may emanate, shall in future remain unrecognized or unacknowledged in the Monarchy or shall be hindered from realizing its potential usefulness; but with a careful hand the hearts and minds of minors shall be protected from the corrupting misbirths of hideous fantasy, from the poisoned breath of self-serving seducers/ corrupters [Verführer], and from the dangerous mental webs [Hirngespinsten] spun by twisted minds.10
The talent in all social classes was to be channeled to serve the interests of the state, and by the 1820s language crafted to denounce the sexual exploitation of youth was just as easily turned against anyone who opposed absolute monarchy. Metternich’s government discovered dangerous new enemies of the state on the flip side of the Napoleonic coin and panicked that local nationhood supporters might follow Sand’s lead. Instead of dying on the battlefield as Körner had, Senn would endure a different form of sacrifice, finding himself imprisoned without due process for fourteen months in the city he called home before being expelled permanently from Vienna in the spring of 1821.11
The political leanings of Schubert and his friends may be construed as an Austrian version of what Christian Jansen calls “oppositional nationalism”: in the wake of the victory against Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European heads of state buttressed the monarchies and redrew the map of Europe, creating institutions of “the German nation,” including the German Confederation and its bodies. “However, the liberal and democratic opposition perceived these organizations merely as a new foreign rule, which had its center in Vienna instead of Paris. Compared with the cases of western or northern Europe, oppositional nationalists in the German lands scarcely identified themselves with the institutions of the state, particularly after the Prussian Reforms and Carlsbad Decrees of 1819.”12 Jansen highlights three peaks in the “waves” of what he terms “organized nationalism” that rose to public (open) expression in Germany, spreading from the academic elite into the wider cultured bourgeoisie: 1812–19, 1830–32, and 1848–49.13 The first two periods essentially bookend Schubert’s compositional career. These peaks
are bounded on one side by the crackdown on free speech, travel restrictions, and other measures enacted in Carlsbad, and on the other side by the 1830 July Revolution in France (which placed Louis-Philippe I on the throne, whose father, the Duke of Orléans, had actively supported the 1789 Revolution before he became a casualty of the Terror) and the 1832 Hambach Festival in the Rhineland. More localized energies form a counterpoint of smaller peaks and troughs. During the mid-1820s, for example, the Mühlviertel in Upper Austria was believed to be “on the eve of a revolution.”14 In Linz and Vienna during 1825 and 1826 the authorities also feared trouble.15 Moreover, limitations on free speech were publicly tested with increasing frequency, even in the theaters, if only to shame the enforcers.16
From Teutomania to Songs of Sunrise
One eloquent witness deserves to be heard here, although the scenes Heinrich Heine recalls happened at some distance from Vienna. What emerges with such clarity in Heine’s 1840 recollections is that a broad-spectrum shift in the trajectory of conversations around German nationhood took place precisely over the span of Schubert’s compositional career. Heine opens book four of Ludwig Börne: A Memorial with some impressions contrasting the political temper that prevailed at the October 1817 Wartburg Festival in Thuringia—where several hundred fraternity students, Burschenschafter, commemorated the decisive 1813 Battle of Leipzig,17 assembling at the castle where Martin Luther had translated the Bible—and the “fundamentally different spirit articulated in Hambach” fifteen years later. Whereas “the specter that spooked around on the Wartburg” was a “narrow Teutomania,” at the Hambach celebrations in May 1832 “the modern age jubilated in songs of sunrise and drank the pledge of eternal friendship with all mankind…. French liberalism delivered its most intoxicated Sermons on the Mount, and even if many irrational things were said, still reason itself was recognized as the highest authority.” A vivid memory of the earlier time follows: “In the beer cellar at Göttingen I used to have to admire the thoroughness with which my Old German friends created their proscription lists for the day when they would come to power. Whoever descended in the seventh generation from a Frenchman, Jew, or Slav was to be condemned to exile. Whoever had written the least thing against, say, Jahn or any Old German absurdities could prepare himself for death.”18 As disagreeable as the blinkered colluding of these “Old Germans” had been, Heine found it more disquieting that in the heat of the July Revolution “many of these Teutomaniacs, in order to take part in the general movement and the triumphs of the spirit of the times, forced themselves into our ranks, the ranks of the fighters for the principles of the revolution.”19
Heine’s reference to “the general movement and the triumphs of the spirit of the times” describes a majority, with the extremists safely bracketed. All the various factions opposing the state would have fought side by side for nationhood, this much Heine granted, but he brooded that the old opposition, fixated on German Nazionalität (national identity), still outnumbered the cosmopolitans in the new liberal opposition. The Deutschthümler—easy to identify in the aftermath of the wars of liberation because back then they paraded their Germanness in the cut and color of their clothes, their mannerisms and speech—underwent political conversions or, more troubling, merely masqueraded as liberal revolutionaries.20 We can add to these considerations that because the Prussian regime had cultivated ties to nationalist groups during the war their rhetoric was able to spread throughout the coalition, exerting an influence on official forms of patriotism within the Austro-German confederation as well as on the opposition. After all, visitors affiliated with the Congress of Vienna had increased the city’s population by nearly a third, and ideological arguments, reading matter, and local talk traveled with them (some 100,000 visitors flooded into the city for the Congress).
Heinrich Heine’s is only one voice, yet the unsettling mutability of political allegiances he observed is something we can also expect to see signs of elsewhere. It certainly surprised him to find that in Berlin in 1822 the songs of Theodor Körner, once taken up by patriotic choral and gymnastic societies, still could be heard (many of the poems were designed to be sung to familiar chorale melodies). In the third of the Letters from Berlin he tells of an anniversary party at which Körner’s “Schwertlied” was performed by twelve young women. “As you can see, Theodor Körner’s poems are still sung here. Naturally, not in circles of good taste: in these it is already said openly how fortunate it was that in 1814 the French could not understand German, and so could not read these bland, shallow, flat verses devoid of poetry that made us good Germans wax so enthusiastic.”21 Regrettably, Heine left no dispatches from Vienna to help us gauge the rise and fall of political temperatures in the diverse strata of society there. He did, however, compose an estimation of Austrian official politics in a preface to the 1832 Letters from Paris:
Austria was ever an open and honest enemy, which never denied, nor did it for a moment suspend its attack on Liberalism. Metternich never ogled with loving eyes the Goddess of Liberty; he never played the demagogue with troubled anxious heart; he never sang the songs of Arndt while drinking white beer; he never played at gymnastic exercises on the Hasenheide; he never played the pietist, nor did he ever weep with the prisoners of the fortresses while he kept them chained…. He acted magnanimously in the spirit of a system to which Austria had been true for three centuries.22
1815: The Lyre of a Patriot
Theodor Körner’s poetry appeared in two significant collections in the years immediately following his death: Leyer und Schwert (Lyre and Sword) was published in 1814 and a two-volume Nachlass edition appeared in 1815. Schubert set over a dozen poems of Körner that year along with a one-act opera, Der vierjährige Posten (The Four-Year Sentry Duty), about a military deserter who escaped prosecution for treason by claiming it was he who had been abandoned four years earlier; he’d never left his post. Körner’s poetry attracted many composers at this time, but Ilija Dürhammer speculates that Schubert was inspired to make his settings only after meeting Johann Mayrhofer (1787–1836), an ardent admirer of Körner.23 This would be interesting, if true, because both Mayrhofer’s and Senn’s names appear on a watch list of a dozen Burschenschafter in Vienna, as Ruth Melkis-Bihler reports in her admirable overview of Schubert’s political times. She notes that this was a very small cohort compared with fraternity membership lists from German university towns, suggesting that they were closely overseen. In fact, more of Schubert’s friends and acquaintances appear on this list than Melkis-Bihler conveys.24 Mayrhofer was a decade older than Senn or Schubert and by 1815 he had accepted the censor’s post that would become a source of inner conflict for the rest of his life, which ended dramatically in 1836 when he leapt to his death from the censorship building. Notably, his position did not prevent his 1817 Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge from being banned after two issues. (See the selections from this collection of poems, essays, and aphorisms devoted to the civic education of youths, introduced by David Gramit, in this volume.) From the fall of 1818 to the end of 1820 Mayrhofer and Schubert shared the same rooms on the Wipplingerstrasse formerly occupied by Körner.
Interspersed throughout the Körner collections are poems of youthful passion for a girl, and ones extolling battle and the yearning for an ideal. The ideal, like the girl, is named only indirectly: “Die Liebe”—words that can mean simply “love,” the emotion, or can be treated as a name, pointing to a particular beloved “die Liebe,” “the beloved one,” or even to a personification of love. Telling apart the intended referents can be challenging because both kinds of poems speak of Sehnsucht (yearning), of “sweet lights,” of hope, and elevated strivings. Sometimes the ideal Liebe is figured as a bright star in the heavens whose appearance signals a rosy dawn, the spring of a new age. If that symbolism seems an obvious political cipher, it is useful to consider the cognate in Goethe’s memorable epithet “ein rosenfarbnes Frühlingswetter” (a rosy-colored spring weather) for the dewy flush that forms on the satisfied
lover’s face.25 Far less skillfully than Goethe but striving for a similar tone of mystery, Körner worked images of glowing heavenly brides into both his political canvases and his poems forecasting domestic bliss. (Heine disliked his simple rhymes on technical as well as ideological grounds.) Indeed, the deeper we read into Körner’s collection the harder it is to separate confidently the two categories of poems: a pervasive religiosity colors any sensual or political reading. Compare the opening lines of Der Morgenstern (D172, D203, in seven stanzas), a hymn to Venus, the morning star—
Stern der Liebe, Glanzgebilde,
Star of love, radiant image,
Glühend wie die Himmelsbraut
glowing like the bride of heaven,
Wanderst durch die Lichtgefilde
you wander through the realm of lights
Kündend, daß der Morgen graut.
heralding the morning gray.
—with the opening stanzas of Sängers Morgenlied (D163, D165, six stanzas), in which a sweet light breaks triumphantly through the night and love’s gentle wafting in the breezes, as translated below, though it could just as well be the Beloved (Freedom) swaying in the breeze, swells the poet’s heart as he greets the roseate splendor of the dawn. Speaking in either metaphor, the language is secretive, whether we hear private intimacies expressed or whisperings of political hope.
Süßes Licht! Aus goldnen Pforten
Sweet light! Through golden portals
Brichst du siegend durch die Nacht.
you break victoriously through the night.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 27
