The German Genius
Page 34
After that, his book surveyed what was by then a lot of histological evidence to support the thesis: he discussed cells attached to each other (the epithelium, nails, feathers, and the crystalline lens); cells where the walls are amalgamated with the intercellular substance (cartilage, bone, and teeth); and cells giving rise to fibers (connective and tendinous tissue). Not everything he had to say was accurate but his main purpose was more polemical, an attempt to establish a general principle underlying all cell development, in plants as well as in animals. As he said in the foreword: “The aim of the present treatise is to establish the intimate connection between the two kingdoms of the organic world by demonstrating the identity of the laws governing the development of the elementary subunits of animals and plants. The main outcome of the investigation is that a common principle underlies the development of all the individual elementary subunits of all organisms, much as the same laws govern the formation of crystals despite their differences in shape.” The reference to crystals was of course much the same as what Schleiden had said and was, again, wrong. This error—an important one—was compounded, in the eyes of many, because Schwann hardly referred in his own work to others who had made contributions in the same field. Purkyne
Whoever was first, Schwann’s book provoked more research. One profitable line of enquiry was followed by Franz Unger (1800–70), professor of plant anatomy and physiology at Vienna (who numbered Gregor Mendel among his pupils).39 Unger collaborated with Professor Andreas von Ettingshausen (1796–1878), a physicist in Vienna, who had an excellent Plössl miscroscope, and they observed cell behavior that would eventually lead to the recognition of the importance of cell division. This was also a preoccupation of Carl Nägeli (1817–91) at the University of Zurich.40 Nägeli thought that his early studies of cell division, published in 1844 and 1846, showed two types of cell formation: free cell formation and the division of pre-existing cells. Two years later he changed his view in an important way, now making a simple distinction between reproductive tissues, where free cell formation was the rule, and vegetative tissue, where cell division was the norm.
In 1845 Nägeli turned to the study of vegetable growth, his investigations culminating in the late 1850s when he traced the lineage of cells to a single apical cell. It was Nägeli who showed the regular way in which the original cell cuts off daughter cells—in either one, two, or three rows—which gave him laws that could be represented mathematically. In his later studies, Nägeli conceived the important distinction between formative tissue (Bildungsgewebe) and structural tissue (Dauergewebe) which is no longer actively multiplying. He observed that in the stems and roots of plants there was a certain type of cell that remained unaffected by differentiation and whose origin could be traced back all the way to the original “foundation cell” or zygote. This distinction between formative and structural tissue was an early sighting of the idea of heredity.41
To the end of his life, Nägeli continued to believe in the spontaneous generation of cells. And so, when Gregor Mendel sent Nägeli his Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden in 1866, Nägeli took Mendel’s work seriously enough to repeat it. Unfortunately for him, he used Hieracium, a plant that reproduced asexually, and he therefore thought that Mendel’s hybrid ratios and demonstrations of complete reversion, though of mathematical interest, were irrelevant to genuine species. Although Nägeli failed to recognize Mendel’s genius, his pupil Karl Correns was less blind. Correns was one of the three rediscoverers of Mendel’s laws.42
Observations on the formation of the embryo within a fertilized hen’s egg were made more than 2,000 years ago, before Aristotle. But the link between cells and embryos was not really made until 1827, when Karl Ernst von Baer reported his observations about the mammalian ovum in a (Latin) letter written from Leipzig. For obvious reasons, study of the development of a single mammalian egg was virtually impossible, let alone a single human egg. The first description of segmentation in the egg was not made until 1824, by the Frenchmen Jean-Louis Prévost and Jean Baptiste Dumas. They recognized that the furrows they observed deepening on the surface of the developing egg were the first signs of its division, and that this process was repeated until the structure came to look “like a raspberry.”43 Difficult as it is for us to understand now, it never crossed their minds that what they were describing was cell multiplication.
Only in 1834 did von Baer publish his more detailed description of segmentation. He had just moved from a chair at Königsberg to St. Petersburg, where he made the important inference that what he had observed removed any idea of “preformation” of the embryo (that it existed as a fully formed miniature in the unfertilized egg). Von Baer’s paper was regarded as a sensation among German scientists and from then on the biological significance of furrow formation, and subsequent segmentation, was accepted.44 This advance was soon followed by that of the Englishman Martin Barry (1802–55) and Carl Bergmann, then an assistant to Rudolf Wagner in Göttingen, and himself later a professor of anatomy at Rostock. Using experiments with frogs and newts, Barry and Bergmann confirmed that the furrows that divided the egg gave rise to the cells that went on to form the embryo. The insight of Harald Bagge, at Erlangen, was no less important: he observed that the nuclei in the embryonic cells divided before the cells divided. The observation of this continuity of the nucleus, together with the demonstration that the egg was itself a cell and that it “begat” daughter cells by binary fission, marked a decisive step in the growth of what later became the science of genetics.45 The investigation of this set of phenomena culminated in 1855, when Robert Remak published his great work on the embryology of vertebrates, in which he discovered and named the three layers of the embryo: ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm and, no less important, observed that cell division always begins with the nucleus. It was just four years before Darwin was to publish the Origin of Species.
14.
Out from “The Wretchedness of German Backwardness”
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815 to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. The main aim of the Congress was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about re-creating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented and powerless. Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were disturbed by the so-called Germanophiles, determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, wrote to Louis XVIII: “They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority…The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan…they are ardent to the point of fanaticism…Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive?”1
The principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Sweden—northern and western Europe. The German-speaking lands and Italy were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order—look at the map to see why. “From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.” No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become “mistress of the entire continent.”
The period from 1815, the Treaty of Vienna, to 1848, the year of revolutions, provides a neat time frame politically, but it is meaningful intellectually and culturally, too, certainly so far as Ge
rmany is concerned. During this period, and in fact beyond it, across the various bourgeois revolutions of 1848–49, in Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, all of which failed, literature fragmented in two. There were those authors who simply ignored the social changes that were occurring in Germany (albeit later there than in Britain or France), who turned their backs on urban and bourgeois life and located their stories in the countryside, or in villages and small towns, withdrawing into a timeless—almost feudal—world, people like Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter, and Joseph von Eichendorff, the latter in Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Diary of a Ne’er-do-well). There was also a raft of writers who responded to the new circumstances—Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner in particular, and the “agitatory” poets Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh. But this division, and the “cultural lag” in Germany, the fact that industrialization and urbanization occurred later there than elsewhere, and the fact that these writers lived in the shadow of Goethe and Schiller, meant that though their genius was well (if belatedly) recognized, nevertheless they are simply not international household names as are Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, or Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Charles Dickens, all of whom were contemporaries. These German authors are classic examples of a culture that needs to be made more familiar to us all.2
THE SUPERIORITY OF POETRY
Friedrich Hölderlin, born in Württemberg, studied theology at Tübingen, where he formed a triumvirate of friends and roommates with Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. They were a big influence on each other, and many scholars believe it must have been Hölderlin who brought Hegel’s attention to the ideas of Heraclitus, whose theory about the “union of opposites” finds such an echo in Hegel’s concept of dialectics. Hölderlin’s stature as one of Germany’s greatest poets has been acknowledged since the beginning of the twentieth century but he has only recently been recognized as a philosopher. This perhaps reflects his belief that poetry provided the best access to the truth (another view predominant in the age between doubt and Darwin).3
Hölderlin’s life was compromised by the fact that he fell hopelessly in love with Susette, the wife in the family where he was working as a tutor, and by the fact that, early on, he showed signs of what was then termed “hypochondria.” He made Susette the heroine of his novel Hyperion, which, in the form of letters, tells the story of one man’s “eccentric path” in life. The novel reflects Hölderlin’s view that too much self-consciousness (à la Hegel) is potentially dangerous, that an individual’s exploration of life risks his losing the original unity with nature into which he is born and which it is the purpose of poetry to describe. Hölderlin thought that Kant’s noumenal world was ultimately (as Kant himself had insisted) unknowable but that poetry could, from time to time, capture glimpses of it, and this was another of its primary functions. In Hyperion, the central idea is that beauty cannot be so much created as uncovered. It is always there, in the world, and it is the poet’s task to reveal it. This view would be echoed by Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.4
In early 1802 Hölderlin again found employment, again as a tutor, this time to the children of the Hamburg consul in Bordeaux. This necessitated his traveling there on foot. The time for observation and reflection that this provided gave rise to one of his greatest poems, “Andenken” (Remembrance):
The northeast blows,
My favourite among winds,
Since it promises fiery spirit
And a good voyage to mariners…
I remember well
how the crowns of the elm trees
lean over the mill,
and a fig tree grows in the courtyard.
Hölderlin returned to Germany a few months later but was now showing frank signs of mental disorder, which got worse when he heard that Susette had died. He was, fortunately, saved when in 1807 a Tübingen carpenter and literary enthusiast, Ernst Zimmer, who had admired Hyperion, took him in, and gave him a room overlooking the Neckar valley. Zimmer cared for Hölderlin until his death in 1843.
His poetry was admired enough in his lifetime for Hölderlin’s friends to club together and publish the work. After his death, however, he sank into oblivion, partly because of his madness and partly because he was dismissed as a “melancholy imitator” of Schiller. He was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century, by the circle around Stefan George but also by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Hölderlin’s work is now regarded as one of the high points of German literature.5 In his late madness, he would write poems of childlike beauty which he would sign with fantastic names such as “Scardanelli”:
where shall I
When it is winter, find the flowers,
And the sunshine
And shadows of earth?
The walls persist
He influenced a raft of mainly German writers from Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse to Theodor Adorno, and his works were set to music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Paul Hindemith, and Benjamin Britten.
“NEITHER ANIMALS NOR GODS”
If Hölderlin was a “melancholy Schiller,” Heinrich von Kleist supplanted him as the model for all dramatists. Born in Frankfurt an der Oder, he was a restless wanderer who lived in Paris, Switzerland, and Prague before finally settling in Berlin in 1810 as editor of the Berliner Abendblätter. There he had a short, tragic love affair with Henriette Vogel, an unstable Bohemian would-be artist, who persuaded him to join her in a bizarre suicide pact. He shot her first, then turned the gun on himself, on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee near Potsdam. He was just thirty-four.6
Despite this, he has come to be regarded as the most important north German dramatist of the Romantic movement. His best work is probably the play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, followed closely by the novella Michael Kohlhaas, set in Luther’s day, in which the main character is a horse dealer.7 Kleist’s plays are above all psychological dramas, the denouement often less important than the exactitude of the language, which explores the psychology so explicitly that the audience cannot avoid the pain or embarrassment or shame which is the playwright’s subject. Kleist is more popular than ever these days, looked upon by scholars as a postmodern author, though others choose to see him as a precursor of Henrik Ibsen—even, in some quarters, as a proto-Nazi because of his “rampant” nationalism. A good example here is Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Teutoburg Forest), where the interests of the individual protagonist are subordinated to the service of the Volk. Kleist is even better known for Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), a comedy in which a judge “gradually and inadvertently” reveals that he has committed the crime under investigation (though when Der zerbrochene Krug was staged in Weimar, directed by Goethe, it was a disaster). Kleist was very modern, tackling such subjects as race relations in the colonial era. But his dramas are chiefly known now for their depiction of unfulfillable longing, the barbarity of the Junkers, in particular “the wretchedness of German backwardness.” He is also seen as a precursor of Richard Wagner.
Like Kleist, Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) varied between “inner stories” and political dramas, and this produced its own problems when he released two historical tragedies that presented German-speaking monarchs in a less than favorable light, concentrating on the dilemmas that can face a prince when his duty conflicts with self-interest—both plays fell foul of the censor.8 Born in Vienna, the son of a lawyer, he became famous after publication of his tragedy Die Ahnfrau (The Ancestress, 1817), which features brother-sister incest and parricide. This was followed by Sappho(1818), in which he tells the story of a poet’s renunciation of earthly happiness in pursuit of her higher mission.9
Grillparzer suffered setbacks in his personal life too, for at much the same time he met Katharina Fröhlich, with whom he fell in love. She entirely reciprocated his feelings, and they became engaged, but Grillparzer’s complicated psychology meant he could never bring himself to ma
rry, a predicament that plunged him into despair. This so obsessed him that he poured his feelings into a diary, later composing an impressive cycle of poems, Tristia ex Ponto (1835), and two of his greatest dramas, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love; 1831) and Der Traum, ein Leben (The Dream, a Life; 1834). In The Dream, a Life, Grillparzer is at his best.10 The hunter Rustan is no longer content with a quiet life with his wife and daughter and is incited to the vita activa by the black slave Zanga.11 However, his dream (which takes up most of the play) is so terrifying that in the morning Rustan wants only to go back and find happiness in the quiet life.
For in greatness there is danger
And renown’s an empty game
Bringing with it idle shadows,
Far too high the price of fame.
Toward the end of his life, honors were heaped on Grillparzer, and his eightieth birthday was declared a national holiday (his own comment was: “Far too late”). At his death three completed tragedies were found among his papers and one of them, Die Jüdin von Toledo, an adaptation from the Spanish, is now accepted as a German classic. After his death he sank into obscurity and not until the centenary of 1891 did the German-speaking world acknowledge his genius.12 The “inner” stories have worn better than the political dramas.
THE LAWS OF GENTLENESS AND THE AVOIDANCE OF LOCOMOTIVES AND FACTORIES
Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), as well as being a writer and a poet, was an accomplished painter (his works sold well enough) and a pedagogue. He studied law at the University of Vienna, but had an unhappy family life, being prevented by his parents from marrying the woman he loved, then contracting an unhappy union with another woman who was unable to conceive. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and in deep depression, he slashed his throat with a razor.